"Four times," Coach Quatrini said, holding up four fingers. "You do that route four times. At tempo. Top seven will be varsity—that'll be all eighth graders, I expect. The rest of you will be junior varsity—if you're good enough to make that, you dang slugs."
And with that encouragement, Coach Quatrini blew his whistle and we began.
The sky had not improved during the day. The green and brown had swirled together, and the clouds had lowered themselves further and further, and they had dropped a kind of vapor from them that made it seem that we were running through the jungles of Vietnam, and breathing more water than air. I leaned forward, and I kept my arms low and my hands loose. I didn't rush it. But even so, by the time I passed Sycorax and Caliban—who hissed and threw themselves against the bars toward me when I kicked their cage to say goodbye—I was already feeling the wet air welling inside me. By the time I came around for the second time, things were slowing down considerably, and every eighth grader—and a whole lot of the seventh graders—were far ahead of me.
It's hard to run like Jesse Owens when you're feeling like you're drowning.
The third lap was better. Meryl Lee was standing by the main lobby, and when I ran past, she held up a dried rose with a ribbon on it.
When a girl holds a rose up to you, you run better, let me tell you.
By the time I came around for the fourth lap, I was up to Danny. I had even passed some of the eighth graders, and I could see the leaders in front of me again. I ran past the gym doors—"Can't you go any faster?" from Coach Quatrini—and out into the parking lot, where the exterminator truck had pulled up to unload Sycorax and Caliban into their new cage.
The sky had lowered itself even more, and everything looked like we were seeing it from underwater in a greenish haze. Even sounds were muffled, so that my footsteps seemed to come from far away.
But what wasn't muffled was the cry that came from the exterminator behind me, the sound of a large cage dropping, a scream, and the clicking of clacking teeth. I looked back, and there were the demon rats, racing with their scabby paws toward me, their eyes filled with the Big M—Murder!—and their pointy heads bobbing up and down with each leap. I couldn't scream; I couldn't get enough air into my lungs for screaming. I could only run. But the faster I ran, the more their yellow hatred grew, and every time I looked back—which was a lot—they were flat out after me, their scabby whiskers swept back by their speed, their yellow teeth clacking. I could imagine those teeth sinking into my heels like the assassins' daggers sinking into Caesar, and I ran faster.
I'd be running still if the tennis courts hadn't been there. Since they were, I sprinted into the courts and kicked the wire gate closed behind me. Sycorax and Caliban smashed into the gate and poked their yellow scabby snouts through.
Then they started to climb the fence. Really. They started to climb up the fence, never taking their red eyes off me.
Fear can bring out the Big M. I ran across the courts, and I was up and over the far-side fence before they were up and over the near-side one.
By that time, Mr. Guareschi, who had heard all the screaming, was trying to get the exterminator to go inside the tennis courts to catch the rats. But the exterminator wouldn't go near them. "Did you see those teeth?" he said. He got into his truck and drove a safe distance away.
Meanwhile, Sycorax and Caliban were climbing up the far-side fence after me. Before they reached the ground outside, the entire schoolyard had emptied—me last, when Danny Hupfer grabbed me from where I'd been standing in paralyzed horror.
So what happened after that is all a guess.
At the same time that Sycorax and Caliban hit the bottom of the fence and ran into the parking lot looking for me, a school bus was coming back in for the late-afternoon run. The driver later said that she saw the rats and tried to swerve but that they leaped onto their hind legs and jumped in front of her. She slammed down on her brakes, but the rats stood their ground, their paws up, their snouts pulled back, their yellow teeth clacking, their demon eyes flashing—none of which you'd have been able to recognize among the squashed bits when the bus, after skidding on the suddenly slick asphalt, finally came to a stop.
And as the exterminator drove away, since there was nothing more for him to do, the green and brown sky finally opened, and the rain came down in torrents, so fast it blew sideways, and when it had raged for about the time it takes to run two laps around Camillo Junior High, it stopped, and the green sky evaporated, and it was the ides of March ... a beautiful spring day.
A new record was set for the three-mile run for a Long Island school that afternoon—and I'm including high schools here. People said afterward that they had never seen anything like it—that kind of speed from a seventh grader.
So I made the varsity team, and had the Big M to keep running, especially since it stayed beautiful for the rest of March as the days grew longer—so long that it was still light when my father and sister came home from Hoodhood and Associates at suppertime. I practiced every afternoon after school with the other varsity runners—me, the only seventh grader—while the sun was yellow and warm, and the sky blue and white. I ran leaning forward, my arms and legs like pistons, head straight and still, hands loose, breathing controlled.
I ran like Jesse Owens with the Big M.
***
Meanwhile, the story of the rats grew larger. People went to visit the spot where they had met the bus. Doug Swieteck's brother had two teeth that he claimed were from Caliban, and he would show them to you for a quarter.
Mrs. Sidman was the most heroic figure of the story, and even first graders were drawing pictures of her carrying Caliban and Sycorax through the halls of Camillo Junior High. In all of those pictures, she looked like the warrior that Ariel had wanted to be—stern and serious and powerful. A third grader drew a coat of arms for her with two dead rats beneath her feet. Charles, the Fifth Grader of the Lovely Handwriting, inscribed the motto beneath: "To the Death!" The D had a whole lot of swirling loops inside it.
The only one who came out badly in the stories was Mai Thi, and honestly, I couldn't figure it out. No one but Mai Thi had stood her ground beside Mrs. Sidman while all the rest of us scrammed across the room. But instead of her getting a coat of arms and being made into a warrior, people started to talk about her, and not just behind her back, but so that she could hear them. About how people in Vietnam ate rats. How she was just hoping for a good meal. How she thought they were ratburgers on the run. Stuff like that.
Until one day, when outside the yellow forsythia branches were weaving themselves together, and the daffodils were playing their trumpets, and the lilacs were starting to bud and getting all giddy, we were going through the lunch line and Mrs. Bigio handed Mai Thi her Tuna Casserole Surprise, and one of the penitentiary-bound eighth graders said loudly to Mrs. Bigio, "Don't you have any Rat Surprise for her?" and then he turned to Mai Thi and said, "Why don't you go back home where you can find some?" and then Mai Thi started to cry, just stood there crying, and Danny took his entire tray—which was filled with Tuna Casserole Surprise and two glasses of chocolate milk and red jello with peaches—and dumped it over the penitentiary-bound eighth grader's stupid head, and then, before the eighth grader could open his stupid eyes to see who had done it, Danny punched him as hard as he could and broke his stupid nose.
Which got Danny a four-day suspension.
Which Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer used to take him to Washington, D.C., because they were so proud of him.
At lunch recess on the day he came back, he told us about climbing the Washington Monument, touring the White House, seeing Hubert Humphrey waving from a limousine, sprinting up the Capitol steps three at a time, running at tempo through the maze of fences the police were putting up to control the demonstration that Martin Luther King, Jr., was bringing to Washington next month, and walking up to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and shaking his hand—all of which we believed except for the last part.
But this next pa
rt is no lie: When we got back in from recess, Mrs. Bigio and Mrs. Baker were holding two trays filled with fried bananas. Really. Fried bananas rolled in crushed nuts, dipped in coconut, and topped with caramel sauce. Warm caramel sauce. Can you imagine what all four of those together smelled like? Sweet, and fruity, and spicy, and warm, and creamy, and chewy, all at the same time—that's about as close as I can get. It's the kind of smell that makes you hungry just thinking about it.
Mrs. Baker held the tray like she was carrying gold and frankincense and myrrh. "It's a recipe from Vietnam," she said. "Mrs. Bigio has made them for our class." We cheered. "The caramel sauce is called nuoc mau. Did I say that correctly, Mai Thi Huong?"
Mai Thi shrugged and smiled, and Mrs. Baker laughed, and then she and Mrs. Bigio walked up and down the aisles, and we each took a plate with a fried banana smothered in caramel sauce on it.
And when Mrs. Bigio got to Mai Thi, she stopped, and lifted a plate down onto her desk, and said, "I am so sorry, Mai Thi. I am so sorry."
That night, Walter Cronkite reported that in Khesanh, some of the tunnels the Vietcong were digging now reached to within fifty yards of the marine fences. There were more mortar shells lobbed in. There were more pictures of the marines deep in their bunkers with their hands over their ears. Casualties were light, the White House announced.
In Camillo Junior High, we ate fried bananas with warm nuoc mau. We sang a song that Mai Thi taught us about bananas—though it could have been about elephants and we wouldn't have known it, since we only knew two words of Vietnamese. And when we were done, Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi held each other tightly, and it seemed to all of us that they did not want to let go.
April
The next week, Mrs. Sidman read the names of the seven members of the Camillo Junior High School varsity cross-country team during Morning Announcements. "We are very glad to have these seven students represent our school," said Mrs. Sidman, "most especially Holling Hoodhood, who will represent the seventh grade. Holling came in with the fastest time during tryouts—almost a minute faster than any of the eighth graders on the team. We wish you all luck, boys!"
This was frightening. It was the kind of stuff that makes you hope that you are never alone in the locker room with the other guys on your team.
And there wasn't much help from anyone in Mrs. Baker's class.
"I wonder why Holling had the fastest time," said Danny after the announcements—a whole lot louder than he had to. "Could it be because he was running away from two rats who were trying to eat him?"
"That might have had a little to do with it," I said.
"A little!" said Danny.
"A little!" said Meryl Lee.
"A little!" said Mai Thi.
"A very little," I said, and everyone in the class ripped out a piece of paper from their notebooks, scrunched it up, and threw it at me—which was unfair, since you can't stop twenty-two pieces of scrunched-up paper at the same time.
You pretty much know from what I just told you that Mrs. Baker wasn't in the room. She'd been called down to the office for a phone call before Morning Announcements, and she'd had Mr. Vendleri stay with us while she was gone.
Which was why balls of scrunched-up paper surrounded my desk by the time Mrs. Baker came back, and since generally the person who is surrounded by balls of scrunched-up paper will be the person blamed for all the balls of scrunched-up paper, I figured I would be the one who had to pick them all up. That's how it is in the world.
But not this time.
Because the phone call in the office was from the United States Army. The Vietcong had abandoned Khesanh, and 20,000 American troops were marching to relieve the marines—and to find missing American soldiers. Like Lieutenant Baker. "It will be called," Mrs. Baker told us, "Operation Pegasus. Now, someone tell me the meaning of the classical allusion."
She never did say anything about all the balls of scrunched-up paper around my desk.
You may have noticed, too, that it was Mrs. Sidman who read the Morning Announcements over the P.A. instead of Mr. Guareschi. That was because Mr. Guareschi was gone. Mrs. Baker had told us he had "received an administrative reassignment," but that only meant that he was gone. And Mrs. Sidman was our new principal. Really. I suppose the school board figured that if Mrs. Sidman could pick up two huge rats by the scruff of their necks and carry them through the halls, she could certainly handle middle schoolers. Which was probably true.
No one saw Mr. Guareschi leave, still looking for a small country to be dictator of.
But everyone saw Mrs. Sidman on the first day she was principal. She stood in the main lobby and watched us come in. She already knew almost all of our names, and she must have said "Good morning" three hundred times. She stood straight, with her arms folded across her chest—which, as any teacher coach will tell you, isn't good for teachers but probably isn't bad for principals.
I heard that she even stared down Doug Swieteck's brother.
While Mrs. Sidman was starting up her new job at Camillo Junior High, President Lyndon B. Johnson was giving up his old one at the White House. Walter Cronkite carried the announcement the last day of March: President Johnson said that he did not want to be distracted by partisan politics "with America's sons in the fields far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home." He had decided that he would not run for the presidency again. His whole face seemed to sag down as he said this.
"He doesn't want to be humiliated," said my sister at the first commercial that night. "He knows he can't win against Bobby Kennedy."
"He knows he can't win against Richard Nixon," said my father. "Not with the whole war on his back."
"Either way, he's getting out because he doesn't want to lose, not because he cares about America's future."
My father sighed a loud sigh. "So is that how all flower children make their judgments—so quick and easy?"
"When they're quick and easy to make," said my sister.
Only the end of the commercial stopped what could have gotten a whole lot louder.
I seemed to see President Johnson's sagging face through the rest of the news. Banquo's face probably looked a whole lot like that just before Macbeth had him killed, when he suddenly realized that everything that he had hoped for was crashing down.
And then, on top of that, we found out after the CBS Evening News that President Johnson wasn't the only one giving up his job.
"Kowalski's finished, too," said my father.
We all looked at him.
"What do you mean?" said my mother.
"Finished," said my father. "Done. Over. Washed up. Kaput. I told you he couldn't play for keeps. They'll announce it in a couple of weeks or so. No more Kowalski and Associates. We'll be the only architectural firm in town that matters." He looked at me. "I told you we'd be going places if we got the junior high job, didn't I?"
I nodded. He had told me.
"What about the Kowalskis?" I asked.
My father shrugged. "Architecture is a blood sport," he said.
So at lunch recess the next day, Meryl Lee and I spent a lot of time not saying anything—until Meryl Lee said it for us.
"I might be moving," she said.
I looked at her.
"I'll probably be moving."
"Where?" I said.
"To my grandmother's house. In Kingston."
I nodded.
Another minute or so of not saying anything went by.
I knew I should say something. I guess after reading all that Shakespeare I should know what to say. But I didn't have a single word.
So Meryl Lee said it for us again.
"Toads, beetles, bats," she said. And that was exactly right.
Meryl Lee didn't know how long she had left. Maybe just two or three weeks. So we decided to pretend that it was forever, and we didn't talk about it, and we tried not to think about it. But there were those moments when one of us would look at the other, and we knew what we were thinking, even though w
e wouldn't say it. Probably sort of how it was between Romeo and Juliet.
It helped to run hard, so hard that you can't think about much of anything else because your arteries are all opened out as far as they can be, looking for some oxygen, any oxygen, because you can't pull enough air into your lungs and there's this coach who has invented an entirely new vocabulary to wrap around the word "faster," a vocabulary that even Caliban would have blushed at. We ran for more miles a day than most commuters drive. We ran through neighborhoods that I don't think are even in Nassau County. We ran past other junior high schools and got jeered at by baseball players who warmed up with a couple of sprints and then shagged balls the rest of the afternoon. We ran past the red tulips in front of Saint Adelbert's and the white lilacs in front of Temple Beth-El. We ran past Goldman's Best Bakery and smelled the latest batch of cream puffs sending their scent through the open windows. One day we ran all the way to Jones Beach, and if Mrs. Sidman hadn't sent a bus after us, I think we would have collapsed on the boardwalk and died.
But I was getting faster. Really. Even though I stayed at the back of the pack of eighth graders.
Let me tell you, when you're in the seventh grade, it isn't healthy to run at the front of a pack of eighth graders. I did it once, and they pulled my shorts down to my ankles in midstride.
You don't let something like that happen twice.
You stay at the back of the pack. And you learn the telltale signs of someone ahead of you who is about to spit off to the side.
Danny understood this, too, since he ran behind the eighth graders on the junior varsity team, and they were angry eighth graders. Angry eighth graders with plenty of spit.
The Wednesday Wars Page 16
