by Owen Thomas
He had saved the best for last: As succinctly as possible, describe the tragic truth of Colonel Ivanova and Lieutenant Miller.
I stood up from the table and drank my wine. I paced my home in slow circles staring at my bare feet as they emerged in turn from my nightgown and covered fresh carpet. I imagined Angus at his typewriter, arms crossed now, waiting for an answer.
I walked out into the cool predawn stillness that had settled over the world and finished my wine. The grass was damp beneath my feet and it gave me a wet chill that I felt rising up each leg and then slowly up my spine. I gazed up at the silent storming of stars that burned down through not only the blackness of space, but also through the dome of electric luminescence that, even in the far end of night, encased the city. I thought about Colonel Ivanova and Lieutenant Miller, alone together on one of those far away points of light, under a translucent shield like two pills beneath a wad of cotton at the bottom of a medicine bottle. I thought of Blair Gaines, miles away in his bed, dreaming in fits, and of how I had once loved him and how now, like a star winking out, I no longer did. I thought of my father and of never having pet fish and of betrayal.
And I thought of Angus waiting for me on an African savannah, between the hole in the earth and the lion tree.
I returned to the papers on the table, my feet wet on the wood floor of the kitchen. Without even sitting, I found the pen, bent over and wrote out my answer: Love will not be banished, nor longing consumed; fates reserved for the heart and the will.
CHAPTER 25 – David
GEORGIA! GO GEORGIA! GET ‘EM BULLDOGS!
The walls are shouting at me from every direction. Principal Robert B. Robertson, III is not here. The coffee leather chair behind the desk is empty and turned to the window and the parking lot beyond. Gloria, the high school duty clerk cum executive secretary tells me from behind a pair of very large glasses that he will be right with me.
“He’s in the little boys’ room,” she says, wrinkling her nose like it’s just the cutest thing ever when the big boss-man has to go winkle.
I continue in, sitting in the chair that is quickly becoming my chair and I wait at the visiting end of the large polished desk. Bully bobbles and stares and I instantly want to backhand his plastic spring-loaded ass across the room.
But I resist.
It will be enough to have Principal Bob end the charade. I understand that he could not tell me on the phone that I can return to work. He needs to surround the basic message with a humiliating lecture about the rules. He needs to condescend to tell me how he will not tolerate his teachers fraternizing with students. He will pause uncomfortably before uttering the word fraternizing and he will gesticulate in a vague but grotesque way with his meaty fingers to somehow carry extra meaning. He needs to tell me that just because the law cannot prove any crime has been committed – please, God, let it be so – he, Robert B. Robertson III, is ‘the law’ at Wilson High and he, Robert B. Robertson III, will be watching and listening for any signs of my moral depravity. He needs to shame me, and he needs to do it in person so he can deliver the message with some topspin. He needs to piss all over me.
But only because he knows that I am coming back.
He knows that when this all blows over, and when Brittany Kline reappears with her head still attached to her shoulders, and when the criminal investigation is closed – assuming it has not happened already – then I will be back in his school teaching his kids.
Technically, of course, he could fire me. But the last time the School District fired a teacher amid allegations of improper conduct involving a student, the District and the Principal in question were sued for defamation and ended up paying out a very large settlement. So, if they were going to fire me, they would have already done so. This is all about having to take me back. This meeting will hurt him more than it will hurt me.
So I can afford some extra restraint with Bully. He will live to bob another day.
I can hear the classrooms suddenly emptying their contents into the building around me, spilling students into the hallways where they coalesce into a carbonated, ringing, shrieking, yammering river that surges and froths in a boiling hormonal tide of perfume and sweat as I listen and wait. The few days I have been gone feel like weeks. I am already an alien in this place. “This place” meaning, not the principal’s office, but the entire school, starting with the parking lot and continuing up the walk, past the flag garden (American, Ohio, Columbus and Bertrand J. Wilson High School, hanging like limp rags atop staggered fork tines poking out of a mound of hickory wood chips), in through the double doors, through the arched legacy of Columbine, blaring at my presence in this place, me and my keys, and then into the main office. People regard me either as a threat or with an air of disinterest reserved for strangers of no consequence. I tell myself that I am imagining things; that I am projecting my own sensitivities onto those around me. And I know I am right about this. Only, it doesn’t feel right.
“Ah, Mr. Johns!”
His voice is booming and jovial and is so sudden from the general space behind me that I jolt in the chair and have no control over my reaction. The steely detachment I had rehearsed in the car is nowhere to be found. As I whip around, half rising from the chair, I am beaming, my hand out-stretched as though I am applying for a job and trying too hard to make a good first impression.
“Principal Robertson…”
“Please, please, call me Bob. Have a seat. Sit. Sit. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Oh, no problem. Really. I just got here.”
“Nature calls, I answer.” He laughs in mock self-deprecation. He is aiming for folksy affability for reasons that I cannot imagine since we clearly hate each other. The accent is thicker, more affected. My urge to ingratiate myself, to adopt the beta to his alpha, is equally baffling, but I cannot help but follow his lead.
“Oh, I can understand that. Yep. Yep.”
Closing the door behind him, Bob thunders past me and around his desk, sitting so heavily in his chair that there is a popping sound of air, following by a dying wheeze. His Ken-doll hair is a helmet the color of fresh oil catching the gleam of the fluorescent lights like the moon on an ocean slick.
“Little warm today, huh.” He is looking around in this drawer and that, opening and closing, swiveling left and right, paying no direct attention to me.
“Yeah. Little warm for this time of year. Won’t be too long though.”
“Nope. Nope. Won’t be too long. That is for sure the God’s honest truth. Ah, here it is.” He pulls a file folder from someplace beneath the desk. “Damned if I wouldn’t lose my own nose if it weren’t attached to my face. Okay, Mr. Johns…” He centers his full attention on my presence, folding his hands on top of the file in front of him.
“Dave. You can call me Dave.”
“Thanks for coming in this morning. I really appreciate you being here.”
“No problem.”
“How have things been going?”
“Uh…in what way, exactly?”
“Any word from Brittany Kline?”
“I…I…me? No. I mean I have no idea. I figured you had some news.”
He smiles a little half-smirk, like I have told him the moon is made of cheese.
“Not me. Police don’t tell me a thing, Mr. Johns. I’ll know eventually, but you’re a little closer to the action than I am, if you know what I mean.” The smirk is still there, hardening into a kind of scar. I feel the malice. “You got yourself a good lawyer, son?”
I stare at him trying to get my bearings. “Yeah. I guess so. Why am I here, Bob?”
“Well, Mr. Johns, I’ve been getting a lot of complaints.”
“What kind of complaints?”
“The disturbing kind, Mr. Johns. The kind that find their way to my home telephone. The kind that interrupt my dinner. That kind. I’ll bet I’ve gotten a dozen.”
“A dozen…a dozen what? I don’t have the slightest idea…”
“O
h, I think you do Mr. Johns.”
“No. Bob. Really. I don’t.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, then let me ask you a couple of questions.” Bob opens the file folder in front of him and leafs through a sheaf of hand-written notes. “Did you, uh…no, wait, wait, there’s a better one. Hold on.” He holds up a finger as though I might just get up and leave. His lips move over the shape of words he does not speak and every now and then his tongue darts out to slick them down. “Okay,” he says finally, withdrawing his finger but then re-extending it again to poke Bully in the back of the head. “Did you tell your students that their textbooks were a collection of lies?”
“My students?”
“Yes, Mr. Johns. Your students.”
“No, I was just … I was just challenging them to think for themselves. To think critically about what they read.”
“Hmm. And is that what you were doing when you explained the possibility that Abraham Lincoln faked his own death?”
“I didn’t say that. One of the kids suggested that and I assumed it to be true as part of a greater conversation.”
“Oh, it definitely sounds like a great conversation to me, Mr. Johns. Especially the part where…wait, where was that…oh, here, Jesus was a Jewish Black man and George Bush threw up all over the Emperor of Japan.”
“Prime Minister.”
“Excuse me?”
“He threw up on the Prime Minister of Japan.” Bob is not amused.
“What makes you think you can teach religion in my school, Mr. Johns?”
“I wasn’t teaching religion.”
“You’re right about that. Apparently you were denigrating religion.”
“No, I...”
“You referred to the Pope as an 11th Century Osama Bin Laden.”
“Not the Pope. A Pope. Pope Urban II.”
“You do not think that is denigrating?”
“I was not denigrating religion.”
“What do you call it?”
“Questioning historical dogma. The Bible came up in a historical context.”
“Well, the way I hear it, sir, is that in questioning historical dogma, as you put it, you told these children that Christians are terrorists who slaughter Muslims.”
“The Crusades, Bob, we were talking about the …”
“I know all about the Crusades. You do not need to indict an entire religion.”
“I wasn’t. I was trying to keep an entire religion from being indicted.”
“And which religion is that?”
“Islam.”
“Yes, you seem to have made your sympathies for bloodthirsty religious fanatics and communists abundantly clear.”
I have no words left and can only stare incomprehensibly. Bob is back to flipping through his notes, although now he is angry and the pages are making a snapping sound.
“Oh, I love this one,” he says, finger back in the air as he reads. “Christopher Columbus rapes children, mutilates Indians, traffics in slavery and practices genocide.”
“Didn’t he?” I can feel my face flush with anger.
“Genocide?!”
“Yes, sir. Genocide, or something awfully close to it.”
“Mr. Johns, we are talking about Christopher Columbus! Christopher Col…”
“I know who he is.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Do you?”
“Yes! Everybody does. Including the authors of our history books and the parents of these children, and the members of the School Board, Mr. Johns. The Columbus County School Board! Everybody knows Christopher Columbus. Just like they all know Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, men whom you apparently believe have the singular historical distinction of having sex with slaves. Just like they know Woodrow Wilson, that famous member of the KKK.”
“That wasn’t the point.”
“I think it very much was the point, Mr. Johns. I have you pegged, sir, and I believe that is exactly your point. You are a rabble-rouser. You live to tear down our sacred institutions. I believe you have a radical political axe to grind.”
“Oh come on!” I do not mean to yell. I feel like I am falling. I am suddenly conscious of Bully and of all of the faces of the people framed behind glass on the wall, Bob’s family, the Robertsons, grimacing at me as I start to lose control of my volume.
“No. No. Don’t you raise your voice to me in this office or I will call security so fast it will make your head spin.” His voice is calm, but like a sound made from iron black schist. I lean back in my chair and we stare at each other for an eternity of seconds.
“How could you not appreciate, Mr. Johns, how upsetting it is for parents to sit with their children around the dinner table after the first day of school and learn that you have been teaching them that the United States government was responsible for Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of chemical weapons.”
“But…”
“How do you think it makes them feel to hear that you have been teaching their kids that the Bible is a bunch of bunk and that Christopher Columbus was a psychopath?”
“Christ…”
“Mr. Johns, I understand now the depth of your Atheism. In fact, there are now a lot of people who understand that about you. But you will NOT take the Lord’s name in vain again, as long as you are in this office. Is that clear?”
I close my eyes and try to retreat to a place in my brain that is too removed to register the sound of his voice, or anything about this conversation.
“You can hate this country, sir. You can hate George Bush. You can hate the freedom that our brave troops in uniform are dying to spread around the world. You can hate Jesus and Christians. You can hate our founding fathers. You can hate Christopher Columbus and think he is a perfectly rotten person. You can even think it is funny or historically important that President Bush choked on a pretzel, that his father once had a bout of the intestinal flu and that President Clinton had used an intern for his humidor. I really don’t care what you choose to think, Mr. Johns. But you will not be sharing any of those thoughts with my students. As of this very moment, you are fired.”
“You’re firing me?”
“I’m firing you.”
“You’re serious.”
“Deadly.”
“Not because of Brittany Kline.”
“Can’t. Official investigation is still pending.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Guess we’ll have to see about that.”
Principal Robertson stretches out a beefy finger and taps the bulldog on the top of the head. The eyes light up. It bobbles at me mockingly.
“So you’re firing me because…because I don’t like the stupid text books? Because I want these kids to think for themselves? Because Woodrow Wilson was a racist? Because all of the whiskey and cocaine has short-circuited George Bush into confusing Jesus Christ with Julius Caesar? Because I won’t drink the Kool-Aid?!”
“President Bush is not Jim Jones, and civil society is not a cult, Mr. Johns.”
“Education is not a cluster-fuck, Mr. Robertson.”
“Call me Bob.” I can hear in his voice the little half-smirk that looks like a scar.
“Fuck you, Bob.”
I am barely conscious of standing as I say this. It is something more akin to reflex than conscious thought that drives my arm to swat Bobblehead Bully eight feet through the air into the window. His head and body part company and Robert B. Robertson III starts yelling for Gloria to call security.
* * *
It is only the thought that I am probably already being followed by the police that keeps me from taking my rage out on the gas pedal. I want to do a hundred fucking miles per fucking hour all the way to Cleveland. I want the axles on my piece of shit Civic to start smoking. I want the windshield to craze with fissures of spider lightning and I want the engine to whine like a mosquito until it pops into tiny pieces all over the I-71.
But the rape-mobile doesn’t top seventy-five on the best of days so even
if I had the guts, my car could never deliver on my anger. And even if my car could deliver on my anger, I wouldn’t have the guts.
But now I lie to myself in the fervent wish that I had a car that could set fire to the asphalt in two flaming seams, because by God I would show every last person on the road just how pissed off I am at the world. Not having such a car, I set my jaw and clench the wheel instead, glowering at other drivers as they pass and look over at me – with an annoying lack of interest from the left and a prurient curiosity from the right.
All I can think as I drive is that I want to punish Principal Bob in precisely the way that I punished Bobblehead Bully. I work my way through a series of increasingly explicit piñata fantasies until they cease to hold my attention. I rummage through a pocket box for my cell phone, reaching for the biggest fucking stick at my disposal.
“Chaney, Baker, Smith & Lyons.”
“Yes, David Johns for Glenda Laveau, please.”
A mustachioed son-of-bitch is passing on the right in a black SUV. He reads my door and pans the interior of my car looking for Charles Manson or O.J. Simpson. Our eyes meet. He grins. I glower. He shrugs and moves on like I am standing still.
“Sweet cheeks!”
“Glenda.”
“You paint that piece of shit yet?”
“I’m on my way now.”
“Gotta tail?’
“Hard to say. Everyone seems very interested in this car right now.”
“I bet.” Glenda is laughing now with that voice of hers and I picture her holding a broken glass of rum with a gun on the desk. “What can I do ya’ for DJ?”
“I just got fired.”
“No shit?”
“Half-hour ago.”
“Should’a figured those bastards would make a rush to judgment on something like this. Sanctimonious chicken-shit pricks. They could at least wait until …”
“He said its got nothing to do with Brittany.”
“Ya lost me.”
