In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

“In school? I didn’t see anything posted for tonight. No plays, no paper, no games.” I waited for the don’t laugh part.

  “Never told anyone before, but I have this fantasy. Had it since junior high, which is a difficult time for a growin’ boy. Made more difficult in my case by the existence of Mrs. Taubman. She was quite a voluptuous woman, teachin’ basic biology, and I spent all class weaving ornate reproductive fantasies about her and me. Alone in the lab.” He pulled back a bit and looked at me. “I still have the fantasy.”

  “I hope you’ve noticed that I’m not Mrs. Taubman.”

  “I hope you’ve noticed I’m not in junior high anymore.”

  “I don’t have a lab, and you do have a broken leg and a cast up to yay.”

  “I also have a fantasy about makin’ it with my teacher in her classroom, test tubes and periodic chart of the elements or not.”

  I loved the idea. My classroom! Shakespeare and Hawthorne and Virginia herself on the walls! Havermeyer got upset by uneven window shades in a schoolroom, so think how he’d be if… And Helga, the office witch with her rules and regulations.

  I knew it was more than a little sick to stoke sexual fires with the image of my principal and his secretary. I hoped that someday we grew up enough so that we were beyond being thrilled like adolescents by daring the forbidden, by breaking out of assigned roles.

  But not quite yet.

  I opened my bag, extracted the school key, and handed it over. “Consider yourself Taubmanned,” I said.

  Mackenzie retrieved his crutches, hobbled to the back door with me, turned the key in the lock, then pressed the latch.

  Nothing happened.

  He frowned, then turned it back, to where it had been. And the door opened. We looked at each other with some dismay, then in unarticulated unison decided to think about Mrs. Taubman, not the issue of the unlocked door. “Good thing we happened by,” Mackenzie murmured.

  Inside, we stood at the base of the steep back staircase. Mackenzie took a deep breath and put his crutch on the first riser.

  “There’s an elevator,” I whispered. “How important is climbing three flights of stairs to your fantasy?”

  “Why are you whispering?” he whispered back. “Where is it?”

  I pointed toward the other end of the hallway. The brewer had designed this floor for out-of-sight, out-of-mind activities. Some were still housed here—the janitorial staff had its office, and most out-of-season equipment was stored down here. But my journalists also had a basement room during the school year, the summer kitchen now housed home ec and child-care classes, pantries and storage rooms had become science labs, and a great warren of rooms for washing and polishing and ironing and preserving had been pulled apart and reshaped into a large basketball-court-sized gymnasium and locker rooms. And at the very end of the hall, a small, slow elevator had been installed a few years earlier, to meet the rules for handicapped access. The brewer would have had a fit had he seen what became of his palace.

  We tiptoed toward the elevator, or rather, I did. Mackenzie click-shuffled on the hardwood flooring. I turned to see if he was following me and to check how he was doing with his lopsided shuffle.

  Something registered as not right, but too quickly to be translated into words. Simply…something. I stopped all motion and tilted my head, my breath immediately catching and growing rapid. But the hall was empty, its only occupants the two of us.

  “What?” he asked as he approached.

  I slowly swiveled back, so that I was facing the way I’d been before. Facing the elevator. And in the swing I saw what was wrong and laughed out loud with relief. “It’s nothing,” I said. “The light’s on in the gym, that’s all.”

  It was difficult to tell, because the glass squares in the doors were heavily covered with mesh on the inside, making them useless as windows. But they were able to let a thin wash of light through.

  “Aldis would be infuriated,” Mackenzie said with a grin. “Better turn it off before she sues the school.” He reached up with a crutch so as to push one of the double doors open. I moved to hold the door so that he could walk through.

  So I was in position to hear his immediate reaction. It was nothing so mild as a gasp. It was a combination groan, swallow, and choke. “Jesus,” he said. “Oh, my God!”

  By then I was into the gym, too, and I understood.

  Woody was at the far end. Up high. Suspended. Woody, in ripped jeans and no shoes or shirt, arms up and tied with solid-looking ropes to the two sides of the basketball backboard, both bloody palms nailed into the backboard, body hanging limply, head lolling, eyes closed.

  Woody, crucified.

  Woody, who had told me he was going to make everything all right himself. That he was handling things. Today he’d told me that. And tonight, tonight… “His chest,” I said. “The blood.”

  “Superficial cuts, I think,” Mackenzie said. “But the hands, the arms…”

  We gaped and gasped. Time ground to an absolute halt. Epochs passed before either Mackenzie or I moved. Millennia before my brain began to process what it was seeing, let alone recover from the incomprehensibility of it and think of what to do.

  But finally we both inhaled long, jagged breaths and spoke at the same time, neither one of us completing a thought. “Nine-one-one—gotta get him—do you think he’s still—is he breathing?—need a ladder, something—cut those ropes—but can’t let him fall—a phone is where…?”

  And all of that interrupted by frequent, stupefied reality checks back to the dangling figure on the backboard. And yes, each time it was still, incredibly, horribly there.

  “There must be a phone in the coach’s office. I’ll—”

  “Wait a minute—what if whoever did this is still here? I’ll go,” Mackenzie said. “Just in case—”

  “What kind of deluded—you’re on crutches—”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?” He glared at me, then clomped across the gym.

  I looked wildly around. How to get up to Woody—and then what? If I could find something to cut the ropes, he’d crash to the ground—what about after only one rope was cut?—and hurt whatever might still be intact. If he was alive. Should I check that first? But how?

  I needed a basketball player—a pro—one of those slam-dunkers who could levitate to Woody’s shoulders and cut away the bindings. And I needed a linebacker to catch the falling body. And I was neither. I hoped that Mackenzie was telling the dispatcher what, precisely, we needed.

  But meantime I couldn’t let Woody hang there, life dripping out of his palms. He could die in the few minutes’ difference.

  There was nothing in the gym except ropes and basketballs and risers along one wall. I had no time to find tools to pull the banks of risers apart, so with great screeches and groans of the wood, I pushed and pulled and dragged a long section that felt like a freight train. I was barely able to breathe as I did it, crying in short dry sobs until my cargo reached the end zone—was it called that?—and provided a makeshift series of steps up to where I could be almost eye-level with Woody.

  When that was done, I dragged mats beneath him, stacking them until they nearly reached him and would cushion his eventual fall.

  And then what? I looked around frantically, but a gym is not a place one is likely to find sharp objects. And what was Mackenzie doing? Wasn’t calling 911 a quick business? Wasn’t that the point of it? Or, dear God, had the maniac who’d done this to Woody—the maniacs, it must have taken more than one person—been in the office and hurt Mackenzie, too? Had I heard him call?

  No, because I’d been too busy and too noisy with the risers. “C.K.!” I shouted, and nearly wept with relief when I heard his “Can’t find a thing that’d cut—”

  “I’ll be back.” I raced down the hall, into the model kitchen—the nutrition center—amidst the sinks and ovens and scrubbed pots. I pulled open one bank of drawers then realized with fury that knives must be in a locked cabinet. Because of midnight raids such
as mine, or suicidal teens. Whatever—I couldn’t get to the knives.

  Upstairs to the office? Surely there would be scissors—but Helga was impossible about locking things away. Everything. Even nonlethal items like pencils and hall passes.

  My thoughts ran in hysterical circles. I could not think clearly, wanted only to protest—to have a screaming, fist-banging tantrum. Don’t let this be happening!

  But I had to find something that cut. Up in my room? I had scissors. No—damn it! Mine had been borrowed and not returned, a memory of recent frustration prompted. Then what?

  I could feel Woody’s time tick out with each beat of my own heart—if, indeed, he was still alive. He’d looked waxy and unreal. What did having your arms up in that violent position do for your heart, even without the spikes? I gagged at the memory of his hands and side and had to shake my head to clear it of the crippling image.

  In desperation I grabbed a food processor, twisted off the top, and pulled out the blade. It was not handy, nor meant to be held, and it’d do a better job of chopping onions than slicing rope. It had a center post with two curved blades, smooth on one edge, serrated and dangerous on the other. But it would have to do, because it was in my hand, and it would cut, and Woody was hanging from the basketball backboard.

  Of course, Mackenzie and I squabbled about who should saw and who should catch, even though my arrangement was the only logical one. I would cut and Mackenzie, able to sit on the high bleachers so that his leg wasn’t a major impediment, would brace Woody’s fall, gentle him onto the mat. And while I worked he propped the body so that there was less tension in Woody’s shoulders. This made slicing more difficult, but that was the trade-off.

  “Can’t you go faster?” Mackenzie called up to me. I was standing on tiptoe on the top riser, trying not to sever my own hands as I sawed back and forth. “This is supposed to process food,” I shouted. “Not ropes. Why don’t you carry a Swiss Army knife like men are supposed to?”

  “Don’ cut the knot, okay? It might be relevant.”

  As if I would aim my untrusty nonknife at the thickest part. “Where are the police? The ambulance?” I asked. “Did you tell them he was tied up here? That he had those—”

  “Mandy,” he said quietly.

  It was the tenth or eleventh time I’d asked the same question. I couldn’t stop myself. It was like having chattering teeth in the cold. It just happened. My mouth muscles took over and those words came out. “Okay, look,” I said, “both sides are nearly through.” We’d been panicked about having Woody dangle by one arm. “I’m going to do the right side now. You’ll brace him, and then real quickly, I’ll—”

  “Yes,” Mackenzie said wearily. We’d also gone over the logistics of this rather primitive drill a dozen times, but repeating it like a mantra almost reduced my fear.

  I cut through the last filaments of rope holding up Woody’s right arm, and his hand flopped lifelessly, a dead weight, down onto my head. I screamed as the palm and its spike cut the side of my face. Mackenzie half stood and nearly let go of Woody.

  “No!” I shouted, “I’m okay—hold him!” I braced myself and moved sideways to cut away the last of the rope on his left arm.

  This time I ducked, then grabbed his waist to help Mackenzie with the weight of him. And as we settled him as best as we could onto the mats, he moaned and his eyes opened.

  “He’s alive,” I whispered. “Thank God.” He blurred as my eyes filmed over with tears of relief. “Woody?” I asked softly. “Say something. Tell me you’ll be all right. Oh, poor Woody, what happened? Who did this to you?”

  The eyes stared blankly. His breath was shallow, the skin pasty. His whole body suddenly and uncontrollably trembled.

  “He’s in shock,” Mackenzie said.

  We heard the siren, and then the back door opened. “Here!” we shouted. “In here! Hurry!”

  Paramedics and police entered almost simultaneously.

  “Mother of God,” the first paramedic said. His skin was the color of rich coffee, but it nonetheless seemed to blanch. He looked up at the backboard, then at Woody, quickly crossed himself, and then became all efficiency. He took out a blanket.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “Hell, hell.” All the while, with speed-of-light efficiency, he was attaching monitors and tubes to Woody.

  “You found him when?” a uniformed cop whose name tag said RAMIREZ asked Mackenzie after they’d shaken hands and established professional kinship. His voice had none of the suspicious hostility I was willing to bet he’d have shown a citizen.

  “Ten minutes ago, max,” Mackenzie said. I could barely believe that what had seemed endless had really been so brief.

  “And why did you enter the building?” Ramirez asked.

  It was hard to tell in the gym—the lighting wasn’t all that brilliant, my eyes were bald and tired and shielded by dark glass, and Mackenzie was suntanned and always had ruddy cheeks. All the same, I thought he blushed.

  “I teach here,” I said quickly. “We’d been out, and I realized I’d forgotten something I needed upstairs. The key I have is for the back door, and Mackenzie needed an elevator, so we didn’t use the stairs, and—” What was I going to say I needed? I had to think of something—anything—but I couldn’t even think of what courses I taught, what subject, let alone what equipment or texts they might require.

  Saved by the paramedic, who motioned to Ramirez. “Better look. There’s carving on this boy.”

  Carving. As if Woody were…what? A block of wood, an artifact, not a human being? The cuts—the carvings—had shapes, zigs and zags, and a rounded segment. Blood, now dry, dripped from them like the runoff of spray paint. I had a sick sense of familiarity, but since they weren’t eights or swastikas, even half swastikas, I kept quiet.

  “Superficial, but they look like letters, not wild cuts,” the paramedic said. “Thought they might mean something.”

  “W-A-P-A,” the officer read.

  “That’s what I read, too.”

  The zigzag—a W, not lightning. Those initials—hadn’t they been on Flora’s door? The front of her building? Or on those graves, the photo in the paper? Small hammers beat against my temples, and with each drum, a letter. W.A.P.A.

  “Damn it all to hell!” Ramirez said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t agree, that it was my own—so it’s those damn fascist—”

  “Who?” The paramedic’s motions never stopped. He and his partner had Woody hooked up and insulated in a blanket and they were about to wheel him out. His spiked hands were hidden inside the blanket. He looked almost normal, if a clay adolescent could be considered normal.

  “WAPA. White Alliance to Preserve America.” Ramirez spat out the words. “Vicious lunatic white supremacists. But what in God’s name they want with him? This boy looks to be or to have been, at least, precisely what they so horribly want to preserve.”

  And from Woody’s silent, waxy mouth, I heard echoes of him telling me I didn’t understand, that I was seeing only part of the elephant. I could see his eyes begging me to leave him alone, his fear that others would find out about his involvement with April.

  Would he? Woody. I hadn’t left him alone.

  NO MORE WARNINGS my hate mail had said.

  Would he? Woody. I had asked Miles, asked Woody himself. The only thing I hadn’t done was leave Woody alone.

  This had to do with April, with Flora’s mud message.

  I hadn’t seen the elephant, I still didn’t. But I hadn’t left Woody alone.

  Had I put him in jeopardy? Pushed him toward this?

  I felt faint as I watched Woody wheeled out.

  Eighteen

  I COULDN’T STOP CRYING. WOODY, THE PARAMEDICS, and the police were gone. The school was locked up, and Mackenzie and I were in the VW, ready to go back to my house.

  Except that he couldn’t drive with his leg, and I couldn’t stop crying.

  One reason for remaining optimistic about our personal future was that he didn’t try to
make me stop crying and didn’t act as if there weren’t good solid reasons for the tears, useless though they might be.

  I felt overwhelming sorrow, and not only about my own unwitting role. There’d been so many minor and major indignities in the past few weeks, all of them motivated by somebody’s inability to see somebody else as fully human. I felt as if I couldn’t bear it.

  The haters polluted the world more effectively than toxic spills because they spread their filth with no sirens and no warnings and precious little outcry. Ordinary poisonous by-products don’t think. The people who splashed paint and trashed Flora’s room and defaced cemeteries and churches and snatched April and sent me threatening notes and sprayed my eyes and crucified Woody and carved their initials in his side were supposed to be able to think and make moral choices. That’s what made us human.

  I cried still more because Woody’s life had been saved—if indeed it had been, if indeed he’d ever completely recuperate—by chance. A whim based on an urge based on a junior high fantasy.

  Mackenzie said he understood—not only about happenstance and sexual fantasies, but about the uncommon accumulation of perversity, here and everywhere, which made me even more sorrowful because I knew he really did understand. Consider his work, look at what portion of mankind and mankind’s passions he saw every day.

  Then I cried because despite what Mackenzie knew, he was good, so different from the haters. Such a decent person that he didn’t even mention that I was something less than coherent as I snuffled and bawled and blew my swollen nose and wiped my termite eyes and blubbered about things he’d known for too long.

  The crying ran its course. “I’m okay now, I think,” I said.

  “You always were okay.” His voice was calm and semidetached. “Just less painfully aware of reality, maybe.”

  “I liked it better that way.”

  “Who wouldn’t? An’ if we’d been born eggplants instead of people, we could have it that way forever. But we weren’t and can’t, so now the big question is—What do you do with the knowing? Wallow in self-pity or terminal bitterness? Go catatonic? Become a survivalist and hide in the hills? Arm yourself? Preach fire and brimstone? Pick a crazy theory to explain everything? Climb up to a bell tower and take out half the city?”