Citrus County

by John Brandon

  She hung the flag, three staples across the top and three across the bottom, then dug a marker out of one of her pockets. On an open space on the flag, she wrote:

  I, Shelby Register, hung this flag. I did it in the early evening, April 4. The prints in the paint will match my boots. I purchased the flag at the shop in the Sunray Shopping Plaza. I do not have a receipt, but the owner liked me and will remember me.

  The opening game of the season was a breeze. After the final buzzer, the other coach approached Mr. Hibma affably. He was encouraged by how good Mr. Hibma’s team was, optimistic that they could beat his rival, the coach at Springstead Middle.

  “Hell,” Mr. Hibma said. “We’re going to whip Pasco.”

  “I can’t beat him myself,” said the other coach. “I’m writing this year off. I’m starting a lawn service.”

  “How does one go about starting a lawn service?”

  “You need a big truck and an open trailer. Then you need the mowers and shit. You need a couple guys to work in the sun.”

  “And this will enable you to quit teaching?”

  “That’s the fantasy. Yesterday I picked up the magnet for the truck door: Sunrise Lawn Management.”

  Mr. Hibma stepped over to his team’s cooler and filled two cups with iced tea. He handed one to the other coach. Mr. Hibma knew there were ways out of teaching, but he’d never pursue any of them. That was part of what he had to admit to himself, that he wasn’t the kind of person who started his own business or went to night school. He didn’t hustle.

  “Let me ask you something,” Mr. Hibma said. “You don’t seem interested enough in girls’ middle school basketball to have a rival.”

  The guy swished some tea around in his mouth. “Has nothing to do with basketball,” he said. “The coach at Springstead is an old friend of my wife’s, and he told her about some of us going to a strip club on teacher planning day.”

  “What a dick,” Mr. Hibma said.

  The guy nodded, downing the rest of his tea, getting slightly worked up. “He’s the one who invited me. You know? He invited me.”

  “We’ll shut them out,” Mr. Hibma assured him. “We won’t let them score a point.”

  He held his cup aloft, though it was empty, and the other coach matched the gesture.

  Mr. Hibma went to the locker room to address his team. Not much needed to be said. He told them not to get tendonitis patting themselves on the back, that their fitness still wasn’t up to snuff. He explained to them, because something had to be said about Rosa and Sherrie’s disregard for his rules concerning personal appearance, that he was instituting a double-standard: Rosa and Sherrie could look however they chose. Life was full of double standards, he told the girls. They should get used to it.

  On the way home, Mr. Hibma stopped at the video store. He wanted a porn movie. He’d been unable, lately, to masturbate, and he’d decided to leave all subtlety by the wayside, to stare at slick bodies as they slapped together, to listen to heavily eye-shadowed women shriek. He’d crank the volume on his TV until the shrieking drowned out the barking of any dogs.

  Mr. Hibma proceeded to the back of the video store. He nudged through a pair of saloon doors and into the adult room. He’d never been in it before. There was no one else in the room, so Mr. Hibma took his time, skimming synopsis after synopsis. The saloon doors weren’t tall, so people that walked by could look in and see Mr. Hibma. He didn’t believe he should be ashamed, didn’t believe anyone had the right to judge him, but still, he was a teacher. He was in a strip mall with a toy store and an arts-and-crafts shop in it. It was about a hundred degrees in the adult room. Despite its rattling, the fan built into the wall did nothing. Mr. Hibma could feel the blood in his cheeks. An older man came through the saloon doors, whistling to himself. He didn’t acknowledge Mr. Hibma, simply went to the movie he wanted, plucked it off the shelf, and was gone. A lady with a gaggle of kids tottered by outside. She paused and gave Mr. Hibma a look. He had to get out of there. He picked a movie, one about a women’s football league. He steeled himself and emerged into the main room, breathing the fresh air, walking with his movie pressed against his leg. He turned up an aisle and stopped in his tracks. A girl from his first period—Karen was her name—was behind the register. What was she, fourteen? Maybe her parents owned the place. Mr. Hibma ducked into the war section and stalled for a minute, wondering if he should wait for Karen to go to the restroom or take a break, but he knew he couldn’t get his porn movie. He rested it on the shelf behind a Vietnam documentary and slipped outside.

  He drove two miles up the road, to a restaurant with a separate bar that was usually empty. He would salvage the night. He would drink a series of gin drinks and eat something fried and go home and collapse. In the morning, if he still desired straightforward porn, he’d drive to another town. This bar made strong drinks. It had a jukebox full of forgotten music. It smelled like smoke, but nobody was ever there to smoke in it.

  When Mr. Hibma pulled into the lot, he saw a fleet of cars adorned with Citrus Middle School parking stickers. He stepped around a bush and peeked in a window. Librarians. They’d bunched the tables together. Assistants. Even volunteers. There were maybe nine of them, sipping determinedly at pink wine. Mr. Hibma knew when he was beat. He leaned against his car, face upturned toward to the sky, racking his brain for something else to do, some other way to salvage the night.

  He had to change himself. The world wasn’t going to change to suit him. He tried to see himself as he would be after he murdered Mrs. Conner, but all he saw were faint, unclustered stars. He could see the act, the smothering, Mrs. Conner’s flailing limbs, but he couldn’t be sure what it would mean for him. He didn’t want to kill anyone. He didn’t hope for it to come to that. And neither did anyone else. Dale wasn’t going to answer his letter. No one was going to help Mr. Hibma. He was flying uncharted skies.

  Shelby had her father’s checkbook out and a book of stamps and a pile of statements and envelopes. She had electric bills, water bills, trash pickup, cable, phone. Half of them were late. Shelby went through and stamped all the envelopes. You didn’t have to lick stamps anymore. She remembered always wanting to lick stamps for her parents when she was little. Now they were stickers. She picked up a pen to date one of the checks and it wouldn’t write. It scratched against the soft surface of the checkbook. Shelby shook the pen and licked the point and still it wouldn’t perform its function. She didn’t have another one handy. It felt like a colossal chore to get up and find another pen. She ran her fingers against the fine grain of the table.

  Shelby imagined walking around in the summertime and seeing her breath, the billboards in an unimaginable language she would never try to learn, every meal centered on fresh fish, every cabinet full of vodka. The sun setting at eleven at night. She imagined flying in a jet, and acting like she did it all the time. Shelby would point at menus. She would have the best guide. She would stay in the best part of the city, in an apartment whose balcony probably looked out over the morning bustling of shopkeepers.

  Aunt Dale had finally answered Shelby’s e-mail, and in a sincere tone that wasn’t stiff in the least. Shelby and her aunt already had a rapport, as much as was possible over a computer. They weren’t estranged relatives, they were Shelby and Aunt Dale. Shelby wasn’t going to come out and write what she wanted, but it ought to be obvious. She wanted to be invited for a visit. She wanted to go to Iceland for the summer, or for a week, a long weekend—a chance to be far from the shadows of her real life. Breathing foreign air for even an hour, she knew, would help her. She was going to hint and hint. She was going to win Aunt Dale over. Aunt Dale knew what she was doing in the world and she would share that with Shelby. Shelby would return from her trip tough and levelheaded. Shelby had already e-mailed back and forth four or five times with her aunt. Now it wasn’t taking longer than a day to get Aunt Dale’s responses. Aunt Dale had already quit asking Shelby how she was doing, had already dispensed with pleasantries. And f
or Shelby’s part, she posed question after question about Iceland, about the people and the TV shows and the government. It wouldn’t be long before Shelby would see it all herself.

  Toby made the walk to Wal-Mart. He found the Home & Garden section and within that, past stacks of hoses and fertilizers, found the pest control aisle, the ant killer. Every time he went to the bunker, Kaley had more bites. She had no concept of using the trash bucket and keeping the lid on it. She did as she pleased and hummed in Toby’s face and got skinny. And ever since that girl had been found out by Buccaneer Bay, Toby felt he had no chance of getting caught. The cops and the FBI thought it might be the same assailant. There was no end to this in sight. The authorities had made nothing but wrong assumptions the whole way through, and they were only getting wronger.

  Toby got the attention of an employee, a guy with lots of stuff on his forearms—spiked leather bracelets, a watch, a key on a rubber coil, wristbands.

  “Which is the strongest ant killer?” Toby asked.

  “They’re for different situations.”

  “What about for, like, a cabin way out in the woods?”

  “A cabin?”

  “Well, say a barn.”

  “A barn with what in it?” The guy’s hair all laid one way. It went the same direction from one ear to the other.

  “Do you have anything that’s not harmful to humans?”

  “None of them are harmful to be around. You can’t ingest them, though.”

  “What do you recommend? I can’t make another trip out here.”

  The guy put his hand through his hair, sweeping across with the grain. “They’re all good quality. If you don’t like something you buy here, you can always bring it back. Return it to customer service. That’s our policy.”

  “I don’t want to return it to customer service,” Toby said. “I want to kill ants with it.”

  Another presentation. Toby’s topic was pole vault. Shelby watched him as he handed out headbands and stuttered through a brief physics lesson he’d found in that library book of his. He capped his talk with a biographical sketch of the man considered the greatest pole-vault talent of all time, a man who’d quit the sport at age twenty-four to become a sculptor. For political reasons, he’d sat out the Olympics. At his funeral, eight women, all claiming to be the love of the pole-vaulter’s life, showed up stunned and weeping.

  “Just the eight women?” Mr. Hibma asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s better if it’s the eight women and no one else. It should be the women and a priest, and then you find out the priest is in love with him too.”

  Toby shrugged. His involvement with the story of the great pole-vaulter was over.

  Mr. Hibma released him back to his desk. The following two presentations chewed up most of the period—one about iguanas, one about glass-blowing. Mr. Hibma craned his neck to see the clock and decided there was time for one more. Shelby raised her hand. She went to the back of the classroom and removed a stack of quiz maps from the seat of a stool, then dragged the stool to the front of the room. She pulled a small bottle of ginger ale from one pocket and a highball glass from another, opened the soda and poured it. She dove into the informational portion of her presentation, rushing through the various styles and shticks. She named the great comics, mentioned the hallowed clubs. She wanted to make sure she had time for the demonstration, during which she would concentrate on a particular genre: insult comedy.

  “The comedian comes out and chooses people at random to make fun of,” she said. “The fear of being singled out is what makes this type of comedy thrilling.”

  Shelby took a sip of her ginger ale. She glanced at Mr. Hibma, who was looking at the floor, his mind somewhere else. She gestured toward a big kid named Luke. For a moment, it seemed, he thought he’d won something.

  “Holy hell,” Shelby said. “A cowboy.”

  Luke’s wardrobe consisted of boots, jeans, T-shirts from country music concerts, and a beat-up ball cap with a fishing hook on the brim. Between classes, he dipped snuff.

  “Boy, the closest you been to a steer is burger day in the cafeteria.”

  A chuckle or two.

  “You may be a butt-ranger, but you sure as hell ain’t a cowboy.”

  Shelby was winning the class over. She moved on quickly, hoping to get a couple more shots fired before Mr. Hibma stepped in. Maybe he’d let the bell stop her.

  “Grady, my man.” Shelby hopped up from the stool. “Pussy-whipped by a seventh-grader. Ain’t that something?“

  Shelby felt Mr. Hibma’s grip on her shoulder, not firm but cold.

  “We get the idea,” he said.

  Shelby took a last sip of her soda and set it on the stool. Grady was smarting, relieved Shelby had been reigned in, his face mired in mirth. Shelby did not feel shaky. She felt sturdy.

  Mr. Hibma looked at her. “Stay after class, please.”

  The bell sounded and the kids formed a scuffling procession. Toby grinned dumbly at Shelby as he left, a look she couldn’t interpret. When it was only Shelby and Mr. Hibma, he came and sat next to her, in a student desk.

  “I think you said some stuff that needed to be said.”

  “Am I getting another detention?”

  Mr. Hibma shifted in the smallish desk, making room to straighten his legs. “You’re not in trouble, but I had to keep up appearances. If anyone asks, I was frightfully angry.”

  “Should I apologize to those kids?”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  Shelby nodded.

  “You didn’t go for the easy targets. You didn’t go for the kiss-asses or the fat kid or Vince.”

  “Writing jokes is difficult.”

  A car with a loud stereo passed outside the window. Its thumping faded but didn’t go away completely.

  “What kind of graffiti is this?” Mr. Hibma was tracing something on the desktop with his finger. “It’s a lost art, rebellion.”

  Shelby felt closed in. She stood up and went to the window.

  “I don’t want those Bellow books,” she said. “I can’t read them right now.” She tipped her head toward her desk. The books were stacked sloppily underneath it.

  “Leave them right there when you go. If you tried, you tried.”

  “I didn’t, really.”

  “You carried them around for weeks, and they’re very heavy.”

  Shelby, once again, was not in any real trouble. Maybe Mr. Hibma was onto something. Maybe discipline did not suit Shelby and everyone knew this but her. Maybe getting in trouble was a poor goal for her. The cops and the church people knew it, and that’s why Shelby had heard nothing about her flag. The incident had been covered up.

  Mr. Hibma sometimes stopped off at the cluttered drug store down the street from where he lived for no other reason than it was the last chance to delay his arrival at Sun Heron Villas. Sometimes he just wasn’t ready to drive into that weedy parking lot of long, low cars and walk past his neighbors’ little statues and put that heavy key in that flimsy front door. Today, though, he had purpose in the drug store. A greeting card for Mrs. Conner. He had decided he was no longer going to indulge in fantasies of killing this woman. Mr. Hibma felt ashamed for sending that letter to Shelby’s Aunt Dale. He wished he’d never driven to Clermont, wished he’d never stood in line at the post office for ten minutes behind that Mexican man who was wearing slippers and a robe. Dale had likely never even seen the letter. She probably had screeners for her mail. She probably had a dozen stalkers. Mr. Hibma didn’t like having that letter out in the world, having it sitting in some foreign stack on a foreign desk in a foreign nation.

  Mr. Hibma was going to put it out of his mind—the letter, the feud, all of it. He was going to start being friendly to Mrs. Conner. Becoming a regular teacher was the only thing that could save Mr. Hibma. He had to stop faking everything. After he faked something, even if he was successful, as with coaching the scrimmage against the high school, he always crashed and ended up f
eeling lower than ever. Perhaps he had never given himself a serious chance to be a real teacher. He’d been setting himself up to fail. He had to, first off, comply with Mrs. Conner’s latest memo and host the next wing meeting in his classroom. That would be a start. He’d never hosted a meeting and, in fact, most of the other teachers had only glimpsed his classroom from the hallway. He would provide refreshments and hang a map or two. Maybe he could start smiling and gossiping. Maybe he could begin taking his lunches in the teachers’ lounge.

  He approached the automatic doors of the drug store and they lurched open, scraping the ground. Mr. Hibma deserved a farmers’ market—products hand-carved, hand-blown, hand-sewn, shade-grown espresso and fireweed honey and artisan cheeses—but what he had was Thomason Drug. He entered and was slapped from all sides by chatter, voices refusing to blend, shrill calls jumping up into the light, competing. The place was packed with fifty-year-old women. The other times Mr. Hibma had stopped at the drug store, he’d been the only customer, but today it was lousy with not-old, far-from-young women, ten to an aisle, all turning item after item upside-down, looking for price tags. There was a sale taking place. Maybe the store was going under. Mr. Hibma was not going to be chased off. He was going to get his card.

  He waded into the morass, no idea which direction to go, and drifted toward a rack of sunglasses. He tried on a pair, made of electric blue plastic, like for water sports. They looked comical on Mr. Hibma. He didn’t return them to the rack. They helped with the low fluorescent haze. Mr. Hibma located a central cross-aisle and read the hanging signs. Perfume and T-shirts, almost given away. Candy. Baseball mitts. Mr. Hibma felt safe behind his sunglasses. They somehow put a buffer between himself and the fragmented warbling. These women were deciding which snack foods could be frozen, whether a certain blouse was purple or more of an eggplant, whose ex-husband was the most despicable, which purses matched which jackets, whether Bailey’s Irish Cream went bad. It was liquor, Bailey’s Irish Cream, but it was also dairy.