The Body Human (6 page)

A girl in the back row sat down at her desk.

Another followed.

Pretty soon they were all sitting down, quiet, not exactly intimidated but interested. This was different, and different was cool. Only the two girls were left, and Jeff Connors leaning on the window, and a small Chinese kid whose chair was probably the one hurled at the chalkboard. I saw that the crack ran right through words printed neatly in green marker:

Ms.
K|elly

Engli|sh
8E

After a minute, the Chinese kid without a chair sat on his desk.

Still I said nothing. Another minute dragged past. The kids were uneasy now.
Lateesha
said helpfully, “Them girls supposed to go to the nurse, Mr.
Shaunessy
. Each one by
they
own self.”

I kept my grip on the girl with the torn blouse. The other girl, her nose gushing blood, suddenly started to cry. She jammed her fist against her mouth and ran out of the room.

I looked at each face, one at a time.

Eventually I released my grip on the second girl and nodded at
Lateesha
. “You go with her to the nurse.”

Lateesha
jumped up eagerly, a girl with a mission, the only one I’d spoken to. “You come on, honey,” she said, and led away the second girl, clucking at her under her breath.

Now they were all eager for the limelight. Rosaria said
quickly, “They fighting over Jeff, Mr.
Shaunessy
.”

“No they
ain’t
,” said a big, muscled boy in the second row. He was scowling. “They fighting cause
Jonelle
, she dissed Lisa.”

“No, they—”

Everybody had a version. They all jumped in, intelle
c
tuals with theories, arguing with each other until they saw I wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t trying to sort through it, wasn’t going to participate. One by one, they fell silent again, curious.

Finally Jeff himself spoke. He looked at me with his absolutely open, earnest, guileless expression and said, “It was them suicides, Mr.
Shaunessy
.”

The rest of the class looked slightly confused, but willing to go along with this. They knew Jeff. But now Ms. Kelly, excluded for five full minutes from her own clas
s
room, jumped in. She was angry. “
What
suicides? What are you talking about, uh…
”

Jeff didn’t deign to supply his name. She was supposed to know it. He spoke directly to me. “
Them
old people.
The ones who killed
theirselves
in that hospital this morning.
And last week.
In the newspaper.”

I didn’t react.
Just waited.

“You know, Mr.
Shaunessy
,” Jeff went on, in that same open, confiding tone. “
Them
old people shooting and hanging and pushing
theirselves
out of windows.
At their age.
In their sixties and seventies and eighties.”
He shook his head regretfully.

The other kids were nodding now, although I’d bet my pension none of them ever read anything in any newspaper.

“It just
ain’t
no
example to us,” Jeff said regretfully. “If even the people who are getting three good meals a day and got people waiting on them and don’t have to work or struggle no more with the man—if
they
give up, how we supposed to think there’s anything in this here life for us?”

He leaned back against the window and grinned at me: triumphant, regretful, pleading, an inheritor of a world he hadn’t made. His classmates glanced at each other sid
e
ways, glanced at me, and stopped grinning.

“A tragedy, that’s what it is,” Jeff said, shaking his head.
‘ ‘A
tragedy. All
them
old people, deciding a whole life just don’t make it worth it to stick to the rules. How
we
su
p
posed to learn to behave?”

“You have to get control of Jeff Connors,” I told Jenny Kelly at lunch in the faculty room. This was an
e
x
posed-pipes
, flaking-plaster oasis in the basement of Be
n
jamin Franklin Junior High. Teachers sat jammed together on folding metal chairs around brown
formica
tables, drinking coffee and eating out of paper bags. Ms. Kelly had plopped down next to me and practically demanded advice. “That’s actually not as hard as it might look. Jeff’s a hu
s
tler, an operator, and the others follow him. But he’s not uncontrollable.”

“Easy for you to say,” she retorted, surprising me. They look at you and see the macho ex-cop who weighs what?
Two-thirty?
Who took out three criminals before you got shot, and has stro
ng juice at Juvenile Hall. They
look a
t me and see a five-foot-three,
one-hundred-twenty-pound n
o
body they can all push around.
Including Jeff.”

“So don’t let him,” I said, wondering how she’d heard all the stories about me so fast. She’d only moved into the district four days ago.

She took a healthy bite of her cheese sandwich. Al
t
hough she’d spent the first half of the lunch period in the ladies’ room, I didn’t see any tear marks. Maybe she fixed her makeup to cover tear stains. Margie used to do that. Up close Jenny Kelly looked older than I’d thought at first: twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Her looks weren’t going to make it any easier to control a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys. She pushed her short blond hair off her face and looked directly at me.

“Do you really carry a gun?”

“Of course not.
Board of Education
regs
forbid any weapons by anybody on school property. You know that.”

“The kids think you carry.”

I shrugged.

“And you don’t tell them otherwise.”

I shrugged again.

“Okay, I can’t do that either,” she said. “But I’m not going to fail at this, Gene. I’m just not. You’re a big success here, everybody says so. So tell me what I
can
do to keep enough control of my classes that I have a remote chance of actually teaching anybody anything.”

I studied her, and revised my first opinion, which was that she’d be gone by the end of September. No tear stains, not fresh out of college, able to keep eating under stress. The verbal determination I discounted; I’d heard a lot of verbal determination from rookies when I was on the Force, and most of it melted away three months out of P
o
lice Academy. Even sooner in the City School District.

“You need to do two things,” I said. “First, recognize that these kids can’t do without connection to other human beings. Not for five minutes, not for one minute. They’re starved for it. And to most of them, ‘connection’ means arguing, fighting, struggling, even abuse. It’s what they’re used to, and it’s what they’ll naturally create, because it feels better to them than existing alone in a social vacuum for even a minute. To compete with that, to get them to disengage from each other long enough to listen to you, you have to give them an equally strong connection to
you
. It doesn’t have to be intimidation, or some bullshit fantasy about going up against the law. You can find your own way. But unless you’re a strong presence—very strong, very distinctive—of one kind or another, they’re going to ignore you and go back to connecting with each other.”

“Connection,” she said, thinking about it. “What about connecting to the material? English literature has some pretty exciting stuff in it, you know.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But no books are exciting to most of these kids. Not initially. They can only connect to the material through a person. They’re that starved.”

She took another bite of sandwich.
“And the second thing?”

“I already told you. Get control of Jeff Connors.
I
m
mediately.”

“Who is he? And what was all that bullshit about old people killing themselves?”

I said, “Didn’t you see it on the news?”

“Of course I did. The police are investigating, aren’t
they? But what did it have to do with my classroom?”

“Nothing.
It was a diversionary tactic.
A cover-up.”

“Of what?”

“Could be a lot of things.
Jeff will use whatever he hears
to confuse and mislead
, and he hears everything. He’s
bright,
unmotivated, a natural leader,
and
—
unbeliev
ably — not a gang member. You saw
him
—
no big gold, no beeper.
His police record is clean.
So
far, anyway.”

Jenny said, “You worked with him a little last year.”

“No, I didn’t work with him. I controlled him in class, was
all.
” She’d been asking about me.

“So if
you
didn’t really connect with him, how do I?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t feel strained. She looked thoughtful, turning over what I’d told her. I wondered suddenly whether she’d have made a good cop. Her ears were small, I noticed, and pink, with tiny gold earrings in the shape of little shells.

She caught me looking, and smiled, and glanced at my left hand.

So whoever she’d asked about me hadn’t told her ev
e
rything. I gulped my last bite of sandwich, nodded, and went back to my room before 7H came thundering up the stairs, their day almost over, one more crazy period where Mr.
Shaunessy
actually expected them to pay attention to some weird math instead of their natural, intense, conte
n
tious absorption in each other.

Two more elderly people committed suicide, at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home on Amsterdam Avenue.

I caught it on the news, while correcting 7H’s first-day quiz to find out how much math they remembered from last year. They didn’t remember squat. My shattered knee was propped up on the hassock beside the bones and burial tray of a Hungry Man Extra-Crispy Fried Chicken.

“…identified as Giacomo
della
Francesca, seve
n
ty-eight, and Lydia Smith, eighty. The two occupied rooms on the same floor, according to nursing home staff, and both had been in fairly good spirits. Mrs. Smith, a widow, threw herself from the roof of the eight-story building. Mr.
della
Francesca, who was found dead in his room, had apparently stabbed himself. The suicides follow very closely on similar deaths this morning at the Beth Israel Retirement Home on West End Avenue. However, Captain Michael Doyle, NYPD, warned against premature spec
u
lation about—”

I shifted my knee. This Captain Doyle must be getting nervous; this was the third pair of self-inflicted fatalities in nursing homes within ten days. Old people weren’t usually susceptible to copy-cat suicides. Pretty soon the
Daily News
or the
Post
would decide that there was actually some nut running around Manhattan knocking off the elderly. Or that there was a medical conspiracy backed by Middle East terrorists and extraterrestrials. Whatever the tabloids chose, the
NYPD
would end up taking the blame.

Suddenly I knew, out of nowhere, that Margie was worse.

I get these flashes like that, out of nowhere, and I hate it. I never used to. I used to know things the way normal people know things, by seeing them or reading them or
hearing them or reasoning them through. Ways that made sense. Now, for the last year, I get these flashes of knowing things some other way, thoughts just turning up in my mind, and the intuitions are mostly right.
Mostly right, and nearly always bad.

This wasn’t one of my nights to go to the hospital. But I flicked off the TV, limped to the trash to throw away my dinner tray, and picked up the cane I use when my leg has been under too much physical stress. The phone rang. I paused to listen to the answering machine, just in case it was Libby calling from Cornell to tell me about her first week of classes.

“Gene, this is Vince Romano.” Pause. “Bucky.” Pause. “I know it’s been a long time.”

I sat down slowly on the hassock.

“Listen, I was sorry to hear about Margie. I was going to…you
were…
it wasn’t.…” Despite myself, I had to grin. People didn’t change. Bucky Romano never could locate a complete verb.