Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (6 page)

But let me briefly pause. Let me take a moment before starting on what happened that night with the foot, the candles, and the book, to reflect on the many things that had brought me to this point, this nocturnal action. As, in fact, I did that very night, standing at the dark entrance to the impenetrable-seeming public glade—I paused a moment, there at the stone gate marking the park’s western perimeter, to let my eyes adjust to the primordial dark beneath the hammock canopy; but also to consider the meanings of things, and to experience, if I could, wrapped in gloom, a few realizations about the consciousness of personality. It was something I’d been thinking about ever since the night of the ex-mayor’s death. Now, standing outside Turtle Pond Park, getting ready to go in and carry out the promise hastily made to the doomed man, I discovered inside my heart a radiant sensation of connectedness: to Jim Kunkel, and to his, and my, and all our ancestors going back to the first voyagers in the realm of the psyche: the pre-Christian fertility cults of the Nile, of the Danube Basin, of Asia and Africa. It was subtle at first, a tingling kind of mild appreciation of my relationship to others, of ambitions and acts determining not only my own destiny but the destinies of people requiring care and compassion from me: Meredith, the kids of the third grade, the townspeople who might one day cast their ballots in support of Pete Robinson for mayor. The foot—which was thawing, incidentally, at a rapid rate, leaking onto my fig bars, though I didn’t know this until later—the foot seemed suddenly symbolically freighted with all our aspirations and dreams, the collective dreams of a community. Indeed, it was as if it were not Jim Kunkel’s foot being buried, not Jim’s foot at all, but a flesh-and-blood vessel containing the Hopes of Men—Jim, me, anybody and everybody—for a better, wiser world that might spring from soil made fertile by blood and bone. Such were my thoughts. Imagine my chagrin when, immediately upon stepping past the stone threshold to the dark and misty park, I heard the husky voice of my former star pupil, Ben Webster himself, calling out to me in a stage whisper, “Hey, Mr. Robinson, is that you? What are you doing here? Get away from there. You’re going to step on a mine.”

“Hello?”

“Over here,” from behind the bushes.

I stepped lightly. “Ben, it’s late. What are you doing up at this time of night?”

“Give me a break, Mr. Robinson. I’m not a kid anymore.” He wore jungle fatigues and combat boots and a dark beret; his face was smeared with charcoal. He wore a holster. He said, “Stay low, be quiet, follow me,” then proceeded to duck-walk into deeper recesses of forest. I hunkered down. Clearly Ben was intimate with this marshy topography trimmed in elephant-ear ferns and hanging mosses; he led an easy path beneath silhouetted black limbs hanging low; his steps generated no sound. Mine, of course, reverberated. I said, “Sorry, I’m not very good at this kind of thing,” and Ben whispered back, “Concentrate on step placement, Mr. Robinson. You’ll get the hang of it. There’s a big root up here, watch out.”

“Ben, did you say mines?”

“Claymores. That jerk Mr. Benson planted them. We’ve located some but we don’t have the technology to disarm or remove them.”

“We?”

“Me and my dad.”

“How is your dad?” I knew Chuck Webster from PTA meetings. Years before, when Ben was little and attending grade school, Chuck Webster had been a friendly and supportive presence at our bimonthly open-house conferences concerning core curriculum and dress codes. His input was always appreciated by the teaching staff, who felt from him a sensitivity unusual in the lay community, to the diverse and often contradictory objectives—the whole “socialization versus individuation: which to encourage?” problem, with its attendant classroom dilemmas around issues of fair grading for “fast” and “slow” learners, how to reward effort, whether to encourage interdisciplinarianism, etc.—of primary education. Ben said, “Dad’s okay, I guess. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“Friend or foe?” a man’s voice called from the shadows.

“It’s me, Dad,” Ben whispered back.

Chuck Webster stepped out. He wore a drab and dark military night-ordnance ensemble exactly like his son’s. Additionally, the elder Webster carried a semiautomatic assault weapon slung over his shoulder. He looked intimidating behind his rakish, thin mustache, but he sounded hospitable, neighborly, when he said, “Well, if it isn’t Pete Robinson. What brings you to the park, Pete?”

“Oh, nothing.” Right away I was aware that this was a stupid thing to declare, even to apparently nonhostile types, within an arena, as this clearly was, of suspicion. I said, “So, what’s up?”

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose a leg or your foot, Pete. You’re lucky Ben was nearby.”

We were standing in a clearing. An owl hooted. The night felt unseasonably warm.

“Pete, we’ve got surplus protective gear back at the house, I’m sure we could fit you up. It would be a shame for anything to happen to you. You’re a valuable asset to this community. You have to teach our youngsters to make a better world than the one we’ve made. Am I right?”

“Right, Chuck.”

“Actually, Dad, Mr. Robinson always spent a lot of class time lecturing about war and killing and torture and things,” Ben Webster said.

“I’m sure your teacher was merely highlighting the tragic and beautiful history of human conflict. Isn’t that the case, Pete?”

“Something like that.”

Chuck pointed through the trees. “There’s plenty of struggle tonight in Turtle Pond Park, Pete.”

Sure enough, I could detect distant shadowy forms of people moving. I felt remorse—it was momentary, a swift and transitory psychic experience containing awareness of various realities: the reality of the foot; of my growing guilt and shame around the issue of my failure, the night of Jim’s death, to intervene and turn the tide of vengeance, to administer beneficent justice; the sad fact of Meredith’s coelacanth dreams, her drum-accompanied departure for mental seas where our life together was beside the point. And the school situation. Ben’s presence brought up all the feelings of contrition I’d been repressing, concerning my clear willingness to sit around in my comfortable kitchen and formulate “home school” plans, then do nothing in the way of follow-up. Chuck Webster was right, I had a job to do. And if I got it together now, the home school that is—if I got it together now, we could be looking at practically a complete school year ahead.

I knelt beside Ben, who was observing, through infrared goggles, a mini-battalion of allegedly invidious neighbors snaking along a narrow footpath that traversed the southern sector of the park.

“Hey Ben, how’d you like to be a big player in the future of this town?”

“Me?”

“Your science fair essay on rising sea levels lives in my memory as one of the finest examples of third-grade student research I’ve encountered in my career. You’re a dedicated thinker who understands intellectual thoroughness and the value of knowledge. I’d be proud to have your help recruiting students for the school I plan to open.”

“School?”

“Admittedly your credentials are thin. You’re not a high school graduate yet. What grade would you be now, anyway?”

“Tenth.”

“That’s pretty far along. Plus you have real-world experience. That’s worth a lot. Let’s say you have graduate equivalency.”

“Okay.”

“Now you’re eligible for employment within the educational system.”

“Great.”

“I’ll need your Social Security number. I’ll have to see a birth certificate. We’ll start you out at a reasonable hourly rate to be negotiated later.”

We shook hands, and Ben whispered across the clearing, “Dad, guess what, I got a job!” But his father was nowhere to be seen.

Ben scampered across the clearing. He scanned the perimeter with the night-vision goggles. He called out in earnest, hushed tones, “Dad, Dad.”

Nighttime shadows dappled the forest’s undergrowth and ground; the whole world challenged perception. I could distinguish, with certainty, only Ben, some nearby branches, and the nickel shimmer on the barrel of the unholstered handgun in his hand, when Ben came close and whispered, “Thanks for the career opportunity, Mr. Robinson, but Dad and I made a vow. If he’s harmed, I must hunt down and discharge a bullet into the heart of the person responsible.”

The dark shapes previously roving the southern trail were no longer in evidence. I tried to make light of the situation. “Look, your father probably just went off to conduct some reconnaissance.”

Fear was in the boy’s voice when he said, “Dad wouldn’t go on maneuvers without telling me.”

He stepped into the woods. “Can’t hang around. Dad’s in trouble. Check you later.”

“Hey, wait a minute, Ben. What’s going on with you guys and the Bensons?”

But it was too late, he was gone, vanished into the shrubs, leaving me alone and without insight into the apparent disharmony between the two families.

I stood beneath the spooky trees. The night was quiet. I took off the knapsack, reached in and fished out the trowel. Clouds parted overhead to reveal a few stars. The clearing was, actually, an ideal burial setting—it had all the right qualities. Could I reasonably risk shoveling earth, lighting candles, and reciting incantations in a vicinity likely to be overrun by kin groups brandishing private arsenals? Yes. There was something fitting about it. It was my purpose: to render a symbolic narrative of regeneration, using pieces of Jim as literal embodiments of life transformed—in this case the Foot, which walks over land, alerting us to textures, temperatures, feelings. The burial of Jim’s foot would underscore the pain of physical existence, while attesting to the mortality of the middle-to-high-income households currently vying for control of Turtle Pond Park.

Down I knelt. Twigs and leaves and rocks were everywhere. I heaped them into a pile. The cleared tract was level and hard against the rounded blade of the trowel plunging in, scraping noisily; I crouched low and bent over, using my body as a baffle against the grainy rasp of steel on dirt. Cautiously I dug. Pebbles bit into my knees. It wasn’t long before I had a sore back and neck. There was a lot of tension that night in the park, all the tension that naturally accompanies proximity to armed strife. Sweat ran into my eyes, and I leaned back and raised a hand to wipe away the salt sting; and I reflected on Chuck Webster’s eerie disappearance. He’d been standing no more than twenty feet from where Ben and I had convened to talk business. Suddenly, he was gone. It wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to have happening in a civic recreational space.

I set aside the trowel and rummaged in the pack, took out
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
and placed it beside the burial site. The plastic-wrapped foot was soggy. Holding it up, now, up above the shallow hole in the ground (fingers caressing instep, thumb pressing ankle), I experienced, for the second time that night, a thrill of attachment to the man it had belonged to, and I knew I was doing the right thing, bringing Jim’s foot to the embattled park. This little clearing, like Jim’s own neatly clipped lawn that dark night of his passing, was sacred space.

I laid the foot beside the grave. Salty ocean breezes bent limbs of trees into arabesques, making the world a church. I lit a candle, opened the book at random, and read aloud:

“‘I am a shining being, and a dweller in light, who hath been created and hath come into existence from the limbs of the god.’”

Not bad. But what did it mean, really? There was no way for me to know, only to speculate. I’m not an Egyptologist. My previous studies of comparative religion have been confined to medieval Christian variants prominent in the Germanic and Mediterranean regions during assorted state-sanctioned periods of witch and heretic hunting, when ecclesiastical nuance determined the destiny of illiterate, cowed populations. The Inquisition is an archetypal instance of nonsecular terrorism—it’s a template for institutionalized cruelties that have abided throughout modern history. Back when Jim was still alive, back before the ex-mayor, without warning or explanation, launched those shoulder-fired Stinger missiles—and where did a guy like Kunkel get that kind of firepower, anyway? Clearly, high office has its perks—into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, thus bringing down all manner of pain—a week or so before this happened I gave my standard talk, at a Rotary luncheon, on this very topic: “The Barbarity of the Past: How Ancient Fears Inform the Organizing Principles and Moral Values of Modern Life.”

That lecture, I realized now, holding the sputtering birthday candle in one hand and the archaic burial manual in the other—that lecture was a kind of starting point in the chain of circumstance that had brought me to this dangerous glade to perform esoteric nocturnal rites.

Could I ever have seen any of this coming, that late-summer Friday at the Holiday Inn?

It was a capacity crowd. Jerry and Rita Henderson sat up front. Bill and Barbara Nixon lounged at a neighboring table. I noticed Abraham de Leon picking crumbs from his beard. Tom Thompson chugged cups of coffee. And there was Jim Kunkel himself, looking patriarchal and well tanned but also a bit feeble in yellow pants and golf shirt and shiny white shoes. At that time the old ex-mayor had only a few days to live, but who could know this? Everybody seemed slightly stunned from the volumes of delicately poached blowfish they’d tucked away. It was a tough house. I sipped from my water glass, cleared my throat, leaned close to the microphone and said, “So you see, these dread ministers, the Inquisitors, inflicted every extreme of ruthlessness on reputed heretics, many mere petty criminals or political agitators, not religious activists at all. Ruthlessness on behalf of orthodoxy. It’s the old story. What’s interesting in the case of the Inquisition, and it is a phenomenon that has been demonstrated time and again, in diverse theaters, even right up into the modern era, is the ready accessibility of holy text as a tool of repression.”

Meredith at the back of the big banquet room smiled encouragement. I went to the portable blackboard behind the podium, picked up a piece of chalk, and began sketching diagrams. “Okay, the rack, an unpretentious stretching device, mechanically rudimentary, employed in the regular daily work of coercion and castigation. The rack’s primary social impact was arguably psychological as well as physical. As long as the authorities had recourse to such an instrument, with liberty to use it at their discretion, which is to say at the slightest provocation, the lay community, understandably, inhabited a condition of low-grade panic.” I raised the chalk to fill in picturesque details: “crank,” “berth,” “leather thongs,” and so on. People shifted in their chairs, leaned forward to get a better view. Jerry Henderson was engrossed, peering at the board. Bill Nixon perked right up. It’s difficult to overestimate the value, as a teaching aid, of pictures. When I used to give this almost identical though considerably more elementary “Inquisition talk” to my third-graders—always a hard-to-please bunch—they, like these grown-ups assembled at the Holiday Inn for Friday luncheon, became enthralled, absolutely, as though on cue, when I marched to the board and picked up the chalk and made fine white renderings of dungeon environments. Suddenly the old classroom would fall silent. No gum popping, no spitballs sailing, no notes being passed. The kids’ eager questions reflected a deep concern for history’s artifacts.