Adam Canfield of the Slash

by Michael Winerip

  Adam and Jennifer were quiet. They were trying to envision a slower future. It didn’t seem possible and Adam gave up. He couldn’t envision dinner, let alone how the world would look when he was in college.

  “Was life better back then?” asked Jennifer.

  Danny shrugged. “Every time has its good and bad,” he said. “I think maybe it was a little less cut-throat; people might have been a little nicer to each other, more people stopping to smell the roses.”

  “That’s nice,” said Jennifer. “What’s bad about that?”

  Danny got quiet. “Some of the drug stuff,” he said. “A lot of good people got deep into drugs in the ’70s and never made it back.”

  Adam felt uncomfortable that the conversation was turning so serious, and Danny must have sensed it, because he leaned over and tried to bite Adam’s nose. “Hey, you know who I am?” said Danny. “Mr. Number-One Expert on Nothing. I look back at photos from the ’70s — the bell-bottoms, the flower shirts. We looked like idiots.”

  “Hair was pretty weird, too,” said Adam, perking up. “You ever see old film clips of NBA players in their Afro puffs? And the white guys with sideburns to their shoulders? I can’t believe how tiny the basketball shorts used to be.”

  “Someday,” said Danny, “you won’t believe how long and baggy they are now.”

  Danny ate a cracker and swigged his iced tea.

  “We need information,” said Adam. They told Danny about the article they were working on for the Slash, about the old woman who died and left the school money. They explained they didn’t know much about her and figured Danny might since she’d left money to the animal shelter, too.

  “Her name was Miss Bloch, Miss Minnie Bloch,” said Adam. “Mrs. Marris told us she was a big animal lover. Figured you had to know her.”

  “Ruth Ellen Marris told you that old woman loved animals?” asked Danny. “I have known your principal since she was a mouthy twerp one thousand years ago in third grade, and I can tell you, she was a wealth of misinformation back then, too. That is a lie. Poor old Miss Bloch, she hated animals. Or at least was scared to death of them.”

  The young reporters look puzzled. “Then why would she leave money to the animal shelter?” asked Jennifer.

  “I guess because we were nice when she called; we’d always go out to see what her problem was,” said Danny. “Usually she’d be reporting some stray dog running around the neighborhood. Some poor mutt looked dangerous to her, and she’d want us to pick it up. And mostly we did.”

  Adam asked what Danny knew about her. “Not much,” he said. “Never met her. She never came to the shelter. Just talked to her on the phone.”

  “But she was rich?” said Jennifer.

  “Well, I gather she left the shelter a nice chunk of change,” said Danny. “I understand we’re going to use it to build a volunteers’ lounge, for people who donate their time here. But you know what’s funny? If she was rich, she didn’t have a fancy address. She lived in the Willows. I sent shelter workers there so often, I’ll never forget — 48 Grand Street in the Willows. You know the Willows?”

  They didn’t.

  “Now there’s something that’s wrong with schools today,” said Danny. “They don’t teach you guys any local history.”

  “Not true,” said Jennifer. “We studied all about the five Iroquois nations and how they controlled the whole eastern part of North America and —”

  “Right, right,” said Danny. “But let me ask you this, and I don’t mean any offense to Indians. You got a lot of Iroquois buddies? No? You got any idea how Tremble got to be the way it is today? Where the rich people came from and the poor people and why they brought the railroad out here — you know any of that stuff?”

  They didn’t.

  “You’re going to write a story about someone from the Willows, you ought to know these things,” said Danny. “I think I still have the special issue of the newspaper from Tremble’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. You know, we actually had a decent local paper back then — that was something good about the ’70s. My memory is, there was a whole article on the Willows. You guys ride right by it all the time — you just never notice. It’s the neighborhood behind SuperX Mega Drugs. A bunch of small rundown houses, by the marsh, not far from the sewage plant. Mostly shotgun houses. You could stand at the front door, fire a shotgun, and the bullet would go straight down the hallway and out the back door. Definitely not mansions.”

  Danny stood, ready to get back to adoptions. “I think you’re on to something,” he said, tossing the plastic tea bottle into a recycling bin, then making the signal for a two-point field goal. “It didn’t figure, how a woman in the Willows had all that money to leave to good causes.”

  That night for dinner, Adam’s mother made his favorite — herb-spiced chicken cutlets with mashed potatoes and peas. It softened the bad feeling Sunday nights had for Adam. Five straight days of school staring him in the face. And a ton of homework, which he’d left to the last minute, of course.

  After dinner he leaped up to clear the plates, spurring his mother to make several sarcastic comments about all the things she never thought she’d see in her lifetime. In the kitchen, alone, Adam grabbed a mound of leftover mashed potatoes and stuffed it into a Ziploc bag for Sammy.

  By the time his schoolwork was done, it was past eleven. The New Adam was too tired to write a To Do list, and the moment his head hit the pillow, he was gone. It was not a restful sleep; he did not have pleasant dreams.

  Adam is winning his running club race, moving effortlessly into the wind. The track is straight, flat, and clear, but suddenly he takes a crazy turn and is running through a field behind houses and through a vegetable garden. Why did he do that? Some old woman is moaning, “Get out of my garden, honey,” and Adam runs faster, but his feet are like lead, and when he looks down, there’s a tiny dog locked on his ankle. The faster he runs, the more he gets tangled in the garden’s strongly scented, green bushy plants, which, come to think of it, smell a lot like his mother’s herb-spiced chicken.

  Herbs! Adam woke Monday morning and immediately thought, Herbs! It was early, but he rushed to get dressed, then put his backpack and baritone by the front door. He had ten minutes until the bus. Even his father noticed. “What do we have here?” he asked. “A reconfigured, punctual version of the standard-issue Adam?”

  “Yeah, right, Dad,” said Adam. “Very funny, Dad.” He hurried to the family room and dialed Code Enforcement. It was his fourth try in a week. Adam had decided he would keep calling until he got a Herb on the phone to ask about the hoops. It was a little before eight.

  The phone rang three times, then a man’s voice said, “Yeah?”

  Adam was excited and scared. A Herb! “Is this Code Enforcement?” Adam asked.

  “Might be,” said the man.

  “I’d like to speak to one of the Herbs,” said Adam.

  “Which one?” asked the man.

  “I don’t think it matters,” said Adam.

  “Oh, let me guess,” said the man. “I bet they told you the Herbs are interchangeable. Right? Well, I’m going to let you in on something, buddy. Those Herbs may seem like cold-hearted robots to you, Herb and Herb, the evil Code Enforcement twins, but I know for a fact, each Herb has his own feelings, his own worries, and his own dreams, too.”

  “I didn’t mean . . .” Adam stammered. “I just wanted —”

  “The Herbs aren’t available,” said the man. “Call back at nine, when the receptionist is in.” There was a loud click and the line went dead.

  Mr. Brooks was a mythic figure at Harris, old-fashioned and proud of it. He wore a bow tie and suit every day and kept his coat buttoned. He was adamant about his disdain for TV, MTV, DVDs, electric toothbrushes, and — more than all his other adamant disdains — cell phones, which he called the rudest development civilization has known since the whoopee cushion.

  He so fascinated his students, they devoured any personal fact that he d
ropped in conversation. Adam knew his favorite teacher was a lifelong bachelor, loved the black-and-white pastries at Blotnick’s Bakery, and drove only Chevrolets.

  The man kept a jar of hard candies on his desk, and when students answered a tough question, he’d shout, “Gigantic conceptual leap,” then toss them a sweet. He had a great arm, and Adam had heard kids say he used to play minor league baseball.

  Adding to this aura was his mastery of a dead language, Latin. He told Adam’s class that they were on a quest for veritas. Truth. When explaining where Virgil ranked among poets, he said “Virgil est Deus.” Virgil is God. At the end of the period, he did not say, “See you tomorrow”; he said, “Ave atque vale.” Hail and farewell.

  “I won’t ask anything of you I don’t ask of myself,” Mr. Brooks told them. Unfortunately, he asked everything of himself. He explained that history came from many sources, and one source they would use for the founding of Roman civilization was the Aeneid, a two-thousand-year-old poem by Virgil. Then he added, “I, of course, have memorized all ninety-eight hundred lines in Latin but won’t expect you to — not this year.” Mr. Brooks had a gift for making even an ancient figure like Archimedes seem like someone Adam had met.

  Mr. Brooks did not have discipline problems; he actually bragged about never giving detentions. By now, Adam would have had a thick stack from anyone else for all his tardies. But Mr. Brooks treated them like grownups. After their talk, Adam felt too embarrassed to be late — at least for Mr. Brooks. On some level, they sensed that Mr. Brooks worshiped knowledge and any disruption would unfairly delay the quest.

  It made a big impression on Adam that even hip high-school kids like Franky Cutty idolized Mr. Brooks. A few years before, near the end of school, Franky and some buddies had sneaked into Mr. Brooks’s room early one morning and hung a banner across the chalkboard that read Brooks est Deus! Brooks is God! When Mr. Brooks saw it, he said that they all should be expelled for “impinging upon my terra firma.” He stepped outside, closed the door, and they could hear him blow his nose. When he returned, he said, “Obviously, I’m quite moved,” then got on with the lesson.

  One of the things that made Mr. Brooks’s class so beloved was the board game World Domination, which he played the second half of the year. It normally went on for a month, and one year it lasted six weeks.

  Adam had been hearing about it for so long, he already knew the rules. Each student picked the name of a country out of a hat. Each country was worth a certain amount of points depending on how rich and powerful that country is in real life. So the kid who picked the United States had lots of points assigned for food, manufactured goods, military power, and a large, well-educated population. The kid who picked a poor, weak country like Bangladesh got very few points because food was scarce, there were few natural resources, and little military power.

  The idea was for each student to improve his country’s situation in the world — to raise its point total. What made the game surprising was that the student who got Bangladesh could win if he raised his total by a higher percentage than any other player.

  Kids earned extra points by joining with another country to plant more food or build factories. They also could get extra points by going to war, conquering a country, and taking over its points.

  Some years Mr. Brooks’s class spent the entire month fighting wars. A few years students scored points by forming alliances and forging world peace. Once — the year Mr. Brooks let the game go six weeks — they founded a world government.

  Most years were a chaotic mix of war and peace.

  The idea was for students to understand what motivates a country to behave the way it does on the global stage.

  At each step Mr. Brooks taught real-life world-history tales that mirrored decisions being made in the game.

  When Franky Cutty, who was Iraq his year, got tired of slowly building his manufacturing points, he eyeballed his neighbor, Kuwait. Franky realized Kuwait had a ton of wealth points for oil and few military points. Since it was right next door, Franky saw he could attack and use almost no transportation points. It looked like easy pickings. But then Mr. Brooks had them read about the 1991 Gulf War. Suddenly, the girl who was Kuwait realized she could ally herself with the United States, which would be glad to offer a few of its military points to defend Kuwait in exchange for some of Kuwait’s oil points. Within days, Franky Cutty was crushed.

  So legendary was World Domination that Adam’s class began pestering Mr. Brooks on the first day of school. “When do we start?” they asked. “If we get a bad country, can we trade?” Like any great teacher, Mr. Brooks milked it. He said the game was a reward for working hard. He warned that if they did not meet his standards, they could be his first class not to play.

  But as the weeks passed, Adam sensed something was wrong. Mr. Brooks’s answers were vague, curt. On this gray Monday, when Adam again prodded him, all Mr. Brooks said was, “Let’s not discuss it now.” No jokes. No Latin quotations. No peeks at the eight-foot-long game board, the way he’d done for other classes. It gave Adam a bad feeling.

  At lunch Adam remembered he had the mashed potatoes in his backpack. They were squished, but not too bad, and after brushing off the pistachio shells, he handed over the samples to Sammy.

  He needed to speak to Phoebe — he’d promised Jennifer — but everyone was kept so busy, it was hard getting hold of kids in other grades. Of course, Adam hadn’t planned ahead, but Jennifer did. She gave each of her twin sisters an identical note telling Phoebe that the Slash coeditors needed to talk to her. Jennifer hoped if she gave it to both twins, one might actually remember to hand it to Phoebe. The note said to be in 306 at 4 P.M.

  That afternoon every grade at Harris had its first before-school/after-school voluntary/mandatory class of the year. This was a new prep course for the state tests that the Tremble County School Board had approved the past spring.

  Adam naturally had misplaced the room number for his class. He thought it was 224, but when he rushed in, he realized he’d messed up. It was a voluntary/mandatory for second graders.

  “May I help you?” asked the teacher. Adam explained he’d confused the rooms.

  “What’s your last name start with?” asked the teacher. She checked her computer printout. “C? And you’re a middle schooler? Room 242.”

  Adam started to leave, but the teacher said, “Wait. You’re supposed to be in 242 and you came to 224? You’ve transposed your numbers. This is exactly what Mrs. Marris has us on the lookout for. You may be suffering a severe learning disability. This is wonderful. Number transposition is classic. I need your name for a screening referral —”

  “I really don’t think that’s necessary,” said Adam. “I’m just a little disorganized.” Why hadn’t he made his To Do list?

  “Learning disabilities can be subtle,” said the teacher. “Mrs. Marris is going to be thrilled with me for finding you. With the right help, you could learn to overcome your disability by the time the state test is given in the spring. Or if you’re too bad, you might qualify for a special education waiver, a 504 accommodation. You get extra time to take the test. If you’re messed up enough, they might give you a week, maybe two weeks to answer each question. An aide could read you the reading comprehension section out loud. Wouldn’t that be grand? Who needs a low score? Not you, not Harris, and certainly not the district. I need your name and home-base teacher.”

  Adam hated himself for what he was about to do. It embarrassed him for people to know. But this teacher was backing him into a corner. He had a feeling if he didn’t stop her now, if somehow this woman got his name on that paper she was waving at him, it could take weeks, maybe months, to undo the damage. There was no way out.

  Adam whispered, “I’m a four-pluser.”

  The teacher immediately stopped writing and actually looked at him. “A four-pluser?” she said. “Really? Good for you. Good for us! What’s your name again?”

  “Canfield,” Adam said.


  “Canfield?” she said. “Now I remember seeing it.” Each year the Citizen-Gazette-Herald-Advertiser printed results of the state competency tests for every school in the Tri-River Region. The paper listed the percentage of students in each grade at Harris who passed, scoring three or four. And the percent who failed, the incompetents, who scored one or two. But then, in a special box headlined “Tremble’s Best and Brightest,” the paper printed names of students who had tallied a perfect score, a four-plus. In all Tremble there were just four four-plusers.

  “This won’t be necessary,” said the teacher, ripping up the referral. “But we can’t be too careful, can we?”

  Adam thanked her profusely and sprinted to 242. Heaven knows what they would do to him for being late. Or whether they could do anything. According to a note school officials sent home, these sessions weren’t technically mandatory. In fact, they couldn’t be mandatory; state law limited the mandatory school day to six hours. Rather, the note said, since “everyone’s property values depended on the highest score possible,” officials suggested that “responsible” parents should consider the sessions “all-but-mandatory” classes that are “highly encouraged” and “not really optional in reality.”

  Adam wondered if this meant he’d get a detention for tardiness.

  He slipped into 242 and sat in the back.

  The voluntary/mandatory teacher was explaining the art of educated guesses. She handed out a reading passage entitled “America Builds a Transcontinental Railroad.” Below the passage were several questions with multiple-choice answers.