The Grounding of Group 6

by Julian F. Thompson

  one small, square puzzle in which you moved the numbers 1 to 15 around and tried to get them to come out in order. Who-ever’d been playing with it was either having a whole lot of trouble or had just rejumbled the numbers so someone else could try.

  a three-pound box of Fanny Farmer assorted chocolates, about five-sixths eaten and with crescent-shaped indentations in the bottoms of all the remaining pieces.

  a Nixon-Agnew button.

  a deck of playing cards from a child’s magic set.

  various manufacturers’ coupons.

  a cartoon book titled “So Much More Mary Worth.”

  twelve unused legal-sized yellow pads and a box of really sharp wooden pencils.

  a framed photograph of two middle-aged women standing outside the Luray Caverns in Virginia.

  The filing cabinets were next. They actually contained a number of folders, some of which had to do with Doctor’s job as Director of the Coldbrook Country School.

  There were, for instance, carbons of letters he’d dispatched to various foundations, trusts, and corporations (“…I’m sure we can agree that private schools are no less vital to our nation’s interests than whales are to our oceans …”), along with their replies (“… directors cannot quite convince themselves that Coldville’s mission, worthy as it is, is quite in tune with that of Runcible and Co.’s. As you must know, we manufacture only bayonets these days…”).

  There were also letters sent by applicants for teaching jobs, which ran the gamut of formality from standard Xeroxed resumes to handwritten notes on cheap lined paper (“Hey, I’m a free-and-easy guy, who’s mostly into leathercraft, just now …”) and Doctor’s standardized reply to all of them, which was…exactly no reply at all. It was still a buyer’s market, Doctor knew, and stamps were twenty cents and climbing.

  Above and beyond those, there were folders full of catalogues for Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean and Moor and Mountain, mixed in with those from Denison and Hobart and Tulane. It also appeared that Doctor took the PSAT’s every year and kept the question books, if not his answer sheets, on file. On the outside of each booklet he’d scribbled his reactions to the test, like “tricky little bastard,” “math a pisser,” and “what the hell’s a ‘paradigm,’ anyway?”

  But, in spite of all the interesting reading in those files, there wasn’t a thing that had to do with the members of Group 6, individually or collectively. Where else could they look?

  Nat and Coke went into the lavatory, opened up the tank behind the toilet, and the medicine cabinet. Marigold swung wide the doors below the dry sink, and peered inside among the bottles buried there, while Sully took out all the drawers in Doctor’s desk, to see if there were papers taped or tacked across their undersides. Sara and Ludi tried the closet, going through the pockets of the jackets first, and then the little dresser in the back.

  The letters from their families, and all the other things that they were looking for, were right where they belonged: under the sweaters in the bottom bureau drawer. That’s where Doctor had always hidden stuff all his life—and no one’d ever caught him. But there was always a first time for everything, as Mr. Cone could have told him, if he could have told him anything at all.

  “I’ve got them,” Sara said, and held the folder up. On the outside, it said: “Wide-Row Planting—6th Edition,” but Sara had peeked inside and seen Coke’s father’s letterhead and one or two key sentences. And, deeper down, an application to the school, typed on her old portable.

  “God, let me see,” said Marigold, and rushed across the room to her.

  They should have left at once, of course. They should have just made sure they had the letters (five of them, plus Doctor’s deeply moving answers) and then got out of there. But no, they had to read them right away—or, all of them but Ludi did. Sara passed them out and everyone sat down around the table and began to read. Ludi didn’t. She just sat and watched the others, her father’s letter placed facedown in front of her.

  And so she was the first to see the door swing open, admitting Doctor Simms and Mrs. Ripple, Levi Welch and Luke Lemaster.

  Just as the word “freeze” fit as naturally in the mouth of Arn-the-Barn Emfatico as Wednesday night’s spaghetti dinner, so did the expression “My, my, what have we here?” feel exactly right in Doctor’s. What he had “here” he quickly pointed at them: a Smith and Wesson .38 automatic, an executive model called “The Hilton Head.”

  Not to be outdone, Mrs. Ripple, Levi Welch, and Luke Lemaster also showed that they were armed. Lemaster’s gun was very much like Doctor’s, lacking just a bit of scrollwork on the monogram; Levi Welch wore a revolver, which he quick-drew from a low-slung leather holster, while Mrs. Ripple had, of course, a lady’s gun, “Enchantress,” by Marlin.

  It might, perhaps, be thought—considering that large display of ordnance—that Doctor had expected that he’d find the Group exactly where he did: that somehow he had lured and trapped them there. Nothing could be further from the truth. The facts were that the night before, in a burst of boozy good fellowship, Doctor had invited his associates to join him in a “Hunt Breakfast” on the following morning: “Bloody Marys, biscuits, coddled eggs and bacon, bran flakes for the so-inclined. We’ll get the main show on the road and then slip back to my house, do it up in style!” Running into Group 6 was just dumb luck. They all had handguns with them because that’s the kind of people they were.

  But Doctor was smart enough to try to make it appear otherwise. “My friends,” said he, “our guests of honor are on time.” He cocked his wrist to check it out with Seiko. “Ahead of time, in fact.” He turned toward his colleagues, little ham. “Last night I told you where they were and why they had to be there; today”—he snapped his fingers, magically—“I hab their corpuses.” He made a sweeping, courtly gesture with his gun toward the other empty chairs set around the table. “Let us join our company, dear colleagues.” He frowned to see the folder and the letters on the table.

  “My word, how rude of them,” he said in mock dismay. “It looks as if they’ve started in without… ‘a song,’ ” sang Doctor, and he chuckled.

  Everyone sat down. At first the members of Group 6 looked closely at the guns the other people carried. They were the sorts of guns they’d seen before, a lot of times, in movies, on TV, but somehow they looked different. Marigold, who’d been in half a dozen plays, could tell that these guns weren’t acting. Stage guns had a kind of lightness to them: prop men twirled them by their trigger guards around a finger and made jokes; these guns only pointed and looked heavy. Marigold’s parents had a “Ban Handguns” bumper sticker on the Audi, and here was their daughter maybe about to get shot and killed by one. That was ironic, Marigold guessed; her getting shot by this bunch of fucks while her parents gave money for gun control. A minus times a plus equals a minus: one less daughter. She was about to be killed by some people who didn’t even look as if they’d be good at it. What she felt was pissed, and also scared to death. This wasn’t the way it was meant to turn out, the way O.D. and she had talked about their future lives and happiness.

  Luke Lemaster cleared his throat. As far as he was concerned, there was no such thing as a comfortable silence when you were sitting around with a group of teenagers. When kids were silent, they were being surly, sulky, stubborn.

  “Well,” he said, smiling at the members of Group 6, “you certainly have led us quite the merry chase. Where on earth have you been all this time?” Ask them questions, get them “rapping,” that’s the ticket.

  People looked at Nat.

  “Oh, here and there,” he said. “Um, up in the hills. You know. Different places.” He didn’t know why, but he was absolutely determined not to tell them about Spring Lake Lodge. Fuck them. But he also felt that he should keep talking. Part of it was the old where-there’s-life-there’s-hope business, and as long as there was talking, it meant that everyone was living still. But another part of it was, like, a responsibility—almost as if it were a social duty of hi
s to hold up their end of the conversation, not have any awkward silences. “I saw you up at North Egg Mountain,” he said to Levi Welch and Mrs. Ripple. “You and the other gentleman.”

  “Hey,” said Levi Welch. “Maybe you can tell us. What the hell’s ever happened to Cone? That feller that you saw us with? When we wasn’t lookin’ for you, we been lookin’ all to hell and gone for him. That’s where all the students are right now,” Levi babbled on.

  Mrs. Ripple had found she didn’t enjoy looking at the members of Group 6, beyond the first quick glance she’d taken. She’d told a friend once that, quite frankly, she didn’t think she could enjoy a nice roast chicken dinner if she’d gotten to know the chicken first. “Stupid as they are, one forms attachments,” she had said. So, because she was looking at Luke Lemaster (quite a hunk, a Duke Wayne sort of stud, she’d always felt; she bet he had a big old one), her sharp eyes didn’t register the way that Levi’s question hit the Group: the little shifts of weight and looking down—the way that Sully’s freckles seemed to darken.

  Sara stared at Mrs. Ripple and felt better. She’d been saying to herself “This isn’t happening,” and looking at Mrs. Ripple in her neat white blouse with a gold circle pin on the collar and her lavender monogrammed Shetland sweater…well, she knew this was a dream, or somehow not the thing it seemed to be. She couldn’t begin to imagine what was going to happen next, or how it would turn out, but there was no possibility that this nice-looking older woman would ever let her get killed. She wondered if Mrs. Ripple would like to know that her mother was a member of the Junior League.

  Nat answered Levi with a shrug and shake of head. “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you where he is, exactly, now.” It wasn’t hard to say a truthful thing like that. “The last we saw of him, he was heading away from those people’s house up at the end of that long private road. You probably know the place, the one with all the sundecks? He was going down the road from there, actually, but he might have taken off into the woods for all we know.” He paused. “But that was a couple of days ago, or three. How do you know he didn’t keep on going down that road and…well, just split? Maybe he got sick of teaching school, and decided that he—”

  Doctor rapped his pistol on the table, interrupting. “Mr. Cone would not do that,” he threw at Nat. “Mr. Cone was under contract. Not a written one—we’ve never had to use them here. But we had our agreement. Unlike some other people I could name,” said Doctor, “Mr. Cone would always do what he’d agreed to do.”

  Ludi wasn’t really listening to what was being said. She felt peculiar: very nearly numb, as if she couldn’t move, but also she was full of… not quite sound, a sort of warm vibration. She kept her eyes on Nat, which made her happy. He was there, and he was her beloved, come what may. They’d always be together. Maybe this was the life she was meant to have: a short one, with such sweetness at the end. She didn’t feel as if she was just about to die, but she didn’t feel that things were going to go on from there, either. She would have liked to say something to Nat, but she didn’t think her mouth would move.

  “Look,” said Coke loudly. “I’ve got something important to say.”

  Sully’s head jerked up. He’d been sitting looking down at his folded hands in his lap. His hands were greasy with sweat, and his mind had been saying “Oh, no” over and over again. Being startled by Coke’s loud voice made him want to jump up and start punching someone, maybe Coke. But no, it’d make better sense to just launch himself across the table, right at Doctor, yelling, “Run for it, Sara,” or something like that. He almost did, too. But then he picked up on what Coke was saying.

  “…this uncle of mine, Jeffrey Milliken”—Coke was speaking at Doctor, and at Luke Lemaster—“my Uncle Jeff. He’s my mother’s brother, and he’s really, really rich. He’s got a town house just off Sutton Place, and a summer home on Shelter Island, and another big old place down in Palm Beach. And he’s always liked me a lot. If you’ll let me call him up on the phone, I promise you he’ll give you double what my parents paid you…wait, no, make that five times as much, if you’ll just let us all go. He really will; I know he will,” said Coke. “And we’ll put anything down on paper you want, that’ll say you’re innocent of doing anything bad to us, or planning to, or whatever you want us to say.” He looked over at Levi Welch then. The guy was obviously a hired man, a townie, but he had the biggest gun, and a pinched and greedy look about him. “You’ll get to keep all the money that our parents gave you, and have all this extra, too. Do you realize what your share of that would be?” he said to Levi Welch.

  Levi turned partway around, toward Doctor. That didn’t sound like too bad of an idea to him. Maybe it was about time he got a share of whatever it was, which’d probably be more than his straight hundred and fifty a week, cash, plus room and board, he’d bet. Why, Judas Priest, if he got his hands on a couple of thousand dollars, he could put something down on an old skidder, and get to drawin’ logs someplace, an’…

  But Doctor was just sitting there, with about half of a little smile on his face, shaking his head back and forth.

  “I’m very sorry, Coleman,” Doctor said. Marigold blinked and looked at Coke. Coleman? Him? “But we don’t run our business that-a-way. Which is why we stay in business, my young friend. Like Mr. Cone, I honor my agreements. Even if you had an Uncle Jeff who values you that much—and from everything I’ve heard, that isn’t very likely—it’s now a little late for any other players in our game. Les jeux sont fait—that’s what they say in Monte Carlo, Coleman. Rien ne va plus,” said Doctor, petit prince of Coldbrook Country School.

  “Well, speaking of that kind of thing,” said Luke Lemaster, heartily, “maybe we should …” His head jerked quickly toward the door; his eyes rolled upward to the hills just past the school.

  “Tut, tut, no—nonsense,” Doctor said. “There’s no big rush, good Dean. We came back to enjoy ourselves and have a nice Hunt Breakfast. Now we have a cause for celebration. You know, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Homer Cone shows up today, as well.” In great good humor, Doctor cocked his head and cupped a pink and shell-like ear. “I thought I heard a…yes! This does call for a drink. Bloody Marys all around, I guess?”

  Levi Welch thought of asking for another Miller, at that hour, but what the hell (he also thought). If they were going to have some sissy drink, then so could he. So would he, by Glory. The other two just licked their lips and nodded. Knowing Doctor Simms, when he was in a mood like this …

  Doctor pocketed his gun and rubbed his palms together. Then he toddled over to the dry sink, got out a pitcher and ice, and a large can of tomato juice, then lined up Worcestershire, Tabasco, lemon juice, and vodka. He was singing under his breath: “’… is the girl I love, now ain’t that too damn bad…“’

  Nat was trying to make his mind work right and get a plan together. Levi Welch was probably his own age, more or less; lean and wiry, he’d be, physically, the strongest of their captors and the hardest to disarm, but he also might be the weak link, the one that might be worked on, somehow. The way he’d talked to Cone and Mrs. Ripple up on North Egg Mountain (and they to him) had made it pretty clear that he was just a stooge, the one they teachered around and snotted on—and he obviously wasn’t getting properly cut in on the profits. The problem was that he couldn’t invite Levi to his house for the weekend, or to play a little racquetball, or to drive on down to Florida over Easter break—in other words, make friends, like you would with another guy at school or somewhere. This had to be done fast and publicly. Oh, hell, he thought, maybe he’d better just try to jump Doctor or Mrs. Ripple and “grapple for their guns,” like it always said in the newspaper. The trouble was it usually also said that “the gun apparently went off in the struggle, killing…“ Who? Nat decided that the moment wasn’t now, in any case. Let them mellow out a little, relax; no telling what a drink or two might do. He was pretty sure that they’d want to make them all walk out of there, just to cut down on the lugging and draggin
g part. If they had any sense at all, they wouldn’t kill them until they had them all the way up at the grounding place. That’d make the most sense. There were tinkling and gurgling sounds to Nat’s rear, from the direction of the dry sink.

  And then a gasp from Mrs. Ripple.

  “Oh, dear. Darling,” she said.

  She was looking out the window. And there, sure enough, was Mr. Darling, dressed in country tweeds. Having crossed the lawn from Foote, he was just about to enter Doctor’s house and join them.

  Doctor scuttled back across the room, his pistol in his hand again. He sat at the far end of the table and slid the Hilton Head beneath it.

  “Don’t anyone get foolish.” Doctor said this softly, but quite clearly, too. “The smallest peep, and we will start to…send you little disapproving messages from underneath the table. Think about how much you’d like…some bullets in your lap.” Doctor smiled, as if he’d said Angora cats or puppy dogs.

  “Doctor Simms?” Mr. Darling’s voice from down the hall.

  “Yes, right in here. Keep coming, Mr. Darling,” Doctor caroled out. Then, in a stage whisper, “Remember, mum’s the word, or you’ll… ‘never walk alone,’ ” sang Doctor softly, pointedly.

  The door swung open. “Doctor Simms …, “ said Mr. Darling. “Oh, excuse me, sir. I didn’t realize you were in a meeting….”

  Doctor showed him one flat, guileless palm. “That’s quite all right, sir, quite all right. Just—er—my Student Council. With their faculty advisors, yes. Important, to be sure, but interruptible. How may I help you?”

  Luke Lemaster, Levi Welch, and Mrs. Ripple all glanced up at Mr. Darling, the first and last of them with smiles, one hearty, one demure. Levi Welch didn’t know if a faculty advisor did a lot of smiling, so he just tried to look smart. Sully was wondering if he should make his move right then, while they were looking at Mr. Darling. But by then they’d stopped doing that. Oh, Lord, he didn’t want to get shot where Doctor had said; he crossed his legs the other way.