Grouper's Laws

by D. Philip Miller

  After a can of tomato soup for lunch, Blondie retreated to his room to read. He reached under his bed and pulled out his mom’s copy of Lolita. Blondie knew there was no reason to hide it from his mom — she didn’t care what he read — but his dad had called it “trash.”

  Blondie thought it was pretty good, even though he found its premise a little screwy. He could almost understand why a twisted old fart like Humbert Humbert might be attracted to a teenaged nymphet like Lolita. After all, he was attracted to teenaged nymphets. But he couldn’t see it the other way. Why would an attractive girl want to hang around with a middle-aged man? That was sick.

  Blondie wondered what it would be like to be a well-known author like Earnest Hemingway or Mickey Spillane. He imagined he could write whenever he wanted and travel to exotic places to find scenes for his stories. That would be the life. Then again, Hemingway had shot himself to death that summer. Blondie promised himself he’d never get that intense.

  The important thing was to become famous — and to attract beautiful women. He bet Tammy would be impressed. Girls were like that — attracted to guys who accomplished things. On the other hand, girls could get by on good looks alone. It didn’t seem fair.

  It seemed forever until it was time to watch the Buddy Parker Show. Couples were whirling and bopping to the song “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” when he turned on the set. Blondie hated the tune. It was a dumb song by a dumb Englishman. What could you expect? The English had never had any good rock-and-roll bands and they never would. They talked too funny.

  He loved the next song, though — “Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee. It made him think of Tammy. He wondered if she had a boyfriend and how he could find out without her knowing it. Maybe she’d had her heart broken recently. That could be an opportunity for a sensitive guy like him.

  Blondie turned his attention back to the screen. Jesus, now that old fart Parker was cozying up to one of the girls. Gross! Parker had to be as old as his dad. The girl — her named was Tina — gave Vee’s song an “8.” Blondie thought it was worth at least a “9.” With all the makeup she wore around her eyes, she looked like a vampire. She kept glancing at the camera and smiling like a chimpanzee. Baltimore girls sure were goofy.

  All girls were goofy. On the one hand, they acted so innocent with their teddy bears and frilly Sunday clothes. On the other, they wore bikinis and lipstick and teased as if they wanted to be fucked. How was a guy supposed to know how to act around them?

  Blondie knew what he wanted. He wanted his girl to be a virgin. That was important. Blondie couldn’t imagine being romantic over a girl some other guy already had put his thing into. Yuck!

  CHAPTER SIX

  Monday morning, a new kid was waiting at Blondie’s stop. He looked to be about Blondie’s age — medium height, small-boned and narrow-hipped, with square shoulders and short-cut hair. He had an earnest face with an upturned nose and freckles. Howdy Doody in a crew cut. When Blondie drew near, he held out his hand.

  “Hi, I’m Rudy Tilly,” he said. “I live in the house behind you.”

  Blondie was too surprised to speak. The guy was treating him like a real person.

  “My dad took me to school last week,” he said. “That’s why I wasn’t on the bus.”

  “I’m Blondie Reimer. I’m a senior.”

  Boy, that was an intelligent thing to say.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Blondie gave him a questioning look.

  “Mr. Clapper told me,” Tilly said, blushing. “I’m supposed to know these things. I’m president of the senior class.”

  Blondie couldn’t help being impressed. The president of the FHS senior class — and he was talking to him. Blondie noted how nattily he was dressed — in a Madras shirt, navy sweater, and khaki pants, all crisp and wrinkle free. Was that what made him presidential?

  “My folks moved to Fenton two years ago,” Rudy said. “It takes a while to make friends here.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Rudy laughed.

  “I saw you’re in the academic program,” he said. “Have you thought about college yet?”

  “Only a little,” Blondie replied. “You?”

  “I want to go. To be honest, my grades aren’t real sharp.”

  “Maybe I could help you. I do pretty well in school.”

  Blondie wondered if that was too arrogant.

  “Would you? I stink at trig.”

  “Sure.”

  Blondie felt his spirits expand. He was having an intelligent conversation with somebody who was somebody. And he could even give him some help!

  “Boy, I didn’t think anyone was ever going to buy your house,” Rudy said. “I guess your folks just aren’t bothered by all that talk.”

  What talk? Blondie looked at Rudy, perplexed.

  “You mean you haven’t heard about Potter? They say he killed a man.”

  An ice-cold centipede ran up and down Blondie’s spinal cord. The beast next door was a murderer.

  “How?” he heard his voice squeak.

  Not an axe. Don’t let it be an axe.

  “My dad said he beat a guy to death in a fight over some girl.”

  Blondie’s Adam’s apple clenched. He wanted to ask Rudy more, but his thoughts were disrupted by the rattle of gravel as the bus slid to a halt in front of him. Maybe Rudy would sit by him.

  “Well, catch you later,” Rudy said as he got on the bus.

  Blondie’s spirits slipped back a notch. Rudy took one of the bus’s unoccupied bench seats. Blondie wondered if he should take a chance and sit beside him. He decided that would be too presumptuous. Don’t push it, he advised himself.

  Blondie was surprised when the ungainly pigtailed girl — Phyllis something Jerry had called her — got on the bus and sat down by Rudy. He was even more surprised that Rudy didn’t seem to mind. He even talked to her. That was probably how he got to be class president … being nice to everyone, even scags.

  All through first period, Blondie found himself dwelling on Rudy’s revelation about Potter. No wonder they’d gotten such a good deal on their house. They might as well have bought next door to the Bates Motel. Blondie flashed on nutso Norman Bates sticking the knife to Janet Leigh in Psycho. He shivered.

  “B-boy, you’re sure t-talkative t-today,” Caldane said to him. Blondie had forgotten he was there.

  “Sorry,” he muttered. He didn’t want to talk to Jerry right then. Life and death were on his mind. Death mostly.

  His mood picked up in civics class. Miss Darlington was his favorite teacher, and not just because of her tomboy face and athletic body. She tried to make what she was teaching relevant to them. At the start of each class, she led a discussion about some event from the morning headlines. Blondie could tell she cared about what she was telling them. He liked that about her, too.

  “Why do you think Dr. King and his followers are risking injury to sit at all-white lunch counters in the South?” she asked, placing her index finger against her nose and staring intently out at the class.

  “Because they don’t have good food at nigger restaurants,” a wiseacre called out.

  Miss Darlington recoiled. It took her a minute to regain her composure.

  “We don’t refer to Negroes that way,” she scolded the respondent. “Let me ask it another way. Why does Dr. King believe that Negroes have a right to eat at white lunch counters?”

  This time, she looked at Blondie and smiled.

  “It’s the law,” Blondie said. “The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution guarantees blacks the same rights as whites.”

  Miss Darlington beamed at him and he felt his face start to glow.

  “Exactly, it’s the law. But isn’t there an even more compelling reason?”

  This time no one said anything. Blondie knew what she was getting at but answering twice in a row would look like he was “kissing ass.”<
br />
  “Because it’s right!” she declared.

  Blondie was proud of her for saying that. But he wondered why there were no black kids in school. There were plenty of black people in Fenton — high- school age too. Where did they go to school? Why weren’t there any at Fenton High? Wasn’t integration the law of the land? He decided to ask Caldane when he saw him again.

  Blondie’s third-period chemistry teacher, Mr. Farber, was short and wiry, with butch-cut reddish hair and a raptor’s features and intensity. His movements were so precise Blondie imagined he practiced them before each class. Today, he walked the class through the chart of the elements, from hydrogen all the way up through uranium and plutonium and all the other man-made atoms adults had created to blow the world up with. He talked as if chemistry was the most important thing in the world — like one of those kooky scientists from a sci-fi flick, the kind who’d create a giant spider without a second thought.

  Just before class ended, Farber told them that they would soon begin doing experiments, and that he wanted them to work in pairs. He passed around a sheet of paper with the assigned teams. Blondie was surprised to see he’d been paired with Paul Feller. He turned around. Feller was leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, grinning. What did that mean? Had Feller set it up for them to be partners? How? And why?

  When the bell rang, Blondie headed for him to ask, but Feller managed to break through the throng and speed off down the hall toward the cafeteria before Blondie could catch up. By the time Blondie arrived at the lunchroom, Feller had already passed through the serving line and was heading toward a table with the rest of his group. Blondie wasn’t about to crash their scene.

  He saw Caldane sitting alone. After loading his tray, he joined him. He asked him where Fenton’s black kids went to school.

  “They g-go t-to the Negro h-high school,” Jerry answered matter-of-factly.

  “Why don’t they go here?”

  “I d-don’t know. I n-never thought about it. B-but who’d w-want them?”

  His attitude annoyed Blondie, but he chose not to rebuke him. Caldane was his only source of information about what went on in school.

  Over time, Blondie confirmed what Jerry was telling him. Fenton High life revolved around its cliques. The “jocks,” not all of them, but the real stars, tended to congregate outside the homeroom of Bobby Clements, the school’s top athlete, doubly blessed with the looks of a Roman god. The “pols” hung around the school office first thing each morning where Martha Magister, the big-boned, open-faced student body president, announced the day’s activities over the intercom. Blondie often saw Rudy there and he was always pleased when Rudy acknowledged him. That had to give him some status.

  The “brains” collected around Mary Cherry, a senior with an alleged astronomical I.Q. who shared Mrs. Buckley’s English class with him. The cheer-leaders, or “chops” as Brick reportedly termed them (after “lamb chops”), sometimes gathered around Bobby Clements and his group, although more often they remained aloof. (“It doesn’t matter,” Caldane reported Feller had said, “because they’re all fucking the jocks anyway.”) They often could be found in the gym before classes started, practicing their routines in blue gym shorts and white turtlenecks. Blondie had been surprised and pleased to see Tammy among them. There were plenty of kids who didn’t fit any of these categories, Blondie realized, and not all of them appeared to be “billies” according to Grouper’s definition. He supposed they were too unremarkable to merit any classification at all.

  Blondie realized he was extremely curious about this Grouper character. Caldane spoke of him as if he were a legend in his own time. Whenever Blondie asked Jerry a question that was the least bit philosophical, he’d say, “Th-that’s one for the Grouper.” But so far as Blondie could tell, judging from the classes he shared with him, Grouper never did anything. He just sat in his chair and breathed heavily and looked bored.

  Somehow, though, his presence in her English class seemed to infuriate Mrs. Buckley. She continually tried to catch him short by wheeling on him with difficult questions about literary figures, characters or quotations from their readings. Blondie was impressed when Grouper unfailingly wheezed out the correct answer. Invariably, after each of her defeats, Bucky would tighten her lips around her teeth and emit a faint whinnying sound.

  It wasn’t Grouper, though, but Caldane who caused the first big scene in Bucky’s class. On Wednesday, she began to wax eloquent about the symbolism of various features of Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables. As she rambled on, she unearthed ever-deeper meanings in the shape of the house, the number of gables, even the furnishings in the rooms. Cheering on her every excess was her chief sycophant, Mary Cherry. Blondie was briefly sorry Mary was such a suck-up. She wasn’t bad looking, with Dutch-girl features and golden hair cut pageboy style. However, as she continued egging Bucky on, in her mincing, supercilious way, murderous thoughts pre-vailed.

  Brick ripped a piece of paper from his ring binder, scribbled something on it, folded it over, and wrote something more. He passed it to Grouper, who read it and gave a faint nod of approval. Grouper passed the paper on to Feller, who passed it on to Dispatch, who passed it on to Jerry, who doubled up when he read it. After a few spasms, Jerry passed the note to Blondie.

  It was addressed “To Mary Cherry.” Inside it read “I bet you’d suck Nathaniel Hawthorne’s you-know-what.” It was signed “An admirer.” Blondie was impressed by Brick’s creativity. He’d been assuming he was a complete zero.

  The note passed through several more hands before it reached Mary. She took it in the same secretive way it was offered and opened it, beaming as if she were about to receive a sonnet from a lover. Her eyes widened as she read the words and an anguished wail broke from her lips, causing Mrs. Buckley to break off her singsong literary analysis. She gaped at Mary, who sat before her with one hand raised and the other over her mouth.

  “Yes, Mary dear, what is it?” Mrs. Buckley asked her sweetly.

  Grouper groaned.

  Mary handed Mrs. Buckley the note. Bucky blanched and then peered out at the class, as if expecting the guilty party to betray himself by cringing before her glare. No one moved or changed expres-sion.

  “Someone in this class has very little respect for literature,” she finally said.

  She maintained her sour look for several seconds, then a smile began to advance upon her battle-zone face. Blondie flinched because he knew she was warming up to one of her impromptu literary quizzes. Her smile reached a toothy maturity as she said, “Today, we’re going to learn about an English writer of the 18th Century. He’s someone who’s bequeathed us many famous quotations, but they’re usually attributed to another, better known English writer. Now, who would like to take the first question?”

  No one but Mary ever volunteered. When, as usual, no one raised a hand, Bucky looked her way. Mary was staring at the ceiling, a pout on her face. Her arms remained crossed.

  Rebounding from this reverse, Bucky scanned the room for a suitable victim. There was a massive shifting of heads as the class members looked here and there to avoid making eye contact.

  Brick placed his lips against his forearm and blew on it, making a loud, farting sound. Bucky jerked her head in his direction, but by the time her eyes reached him, Brick’s face was a mask of calm. Beneath the table, he pinched Jerry’s thigh. He cried out in pain.

  Bucky shifted her gaze to Caldane. He squirmed and lowered himself in his seat, as if trying to slide under the desk. He hated to be called on in class because of his stuttering.

  “Jerry Caldane,” Bucky called. “You seem to have lots of energy today. Let’s hope that some of it has reached your cranial region.”

  He stared at her apprehensively, his eyes barely above the desktop. “Jerry, please, you must learn to sit up straight. Posture like that can lead to curvature of the spine.”

  He maneuvered his weasel-like body upright.
r />   “That’s better. Now here’s my first question: What famous 18th century writer said, ‘To err is human, to forgive, divine?’”

  Caldane looked around in panic, as if he’d never heard the expression before. Brick put his hand in front of his mouth as if he were about to cough and whispered: “Shakespeare.”

  “Sh-shakes…” Jerry began.

  “No, not Shakespeare,” Buckley interrupted. “Many people attribute that quote to Shakespeare, but it was another who said it. Does anyone know who that was?”

  Giving into the temptation to display her knowledge, Mary Cherry’s hand shot up.

  “Who said it?” Brick called over to the Grouper.

  “That most pernicious purveyor of Enlight-enment pap — Alexander Pope — from his Essay on Criticism.”

  Mary overheard Grouper and shot him a nasty look.

  “Yes, Mary?” Bucky said.

  “Alexander Pope, from his Essay on Criticism.”

  “Very good, Mary,” Bucky gushed. “Yes, that’s quite correct. Alexander Pope. Quite often, his aphorisms are confused with those of Shakespeare.”

  She turned back toward Caldane and gave him the look of a forgiving mistress about to toss her dog a bone.

  “Now, with that in mind, Jerry, if I were to ask you who said, ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’ what would you answer?”

  Jerry, who’d been berating Brick for giving him the wrong answer, missed not only Mary Cherry’s response, but Bucky’s latest question. He looked at her with a vacant expression.

  “Well?”

  “Shakespeare,” Brick whispered again.

  “Sh-sh-shakes … Shakes … Shakes ….”

  Several students snickered. Jerry’s face turned crimson.

  Bucky stared at him in amazement.

  “No, no, no. Don’t you get the gist of my questions? Now, let’s try another one. Who said, ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’?”

  Jerry’s face was aflame. He was breathless with self-consciousness. Blondie feared he was going to suffocate.