The Obstacle Course (5 page)

“Who gave you permission to talk in the hall?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him. The first thing you learn in this school, like the first week of seventh grade, is not to answer questions like that. You answer a question like that and they’ll eat your lunch.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, Poole?” he went on, smiling at me. He’s got these huge teeth, they look like horse teeth. He looks like this huge horse and he’s about as smart.

He was dangling me in the air. Some of the kids were watching and snickering. My neck hurt like hell.

“You want a fight?”

“No, sir,” I answered. My teeth were clenched, I was squirming around. This was pissing me off royally, not only because it really did hurt, but also because this shithead was making a laughingstock out of me. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s people laughing at me. I’ll kill some fucker he laughs at me the wrong way.

Boyle slammed me into a locker.

“I’m getting tired of your shenanigans, Poole, you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” My voice came out like a squeak. I hate it when that happens, when some teacher pulls that kind of shit on you.

He released his grip. I slumped down onto the floor. Goddamn, my neck ached. The bastard might’ve broken it. I’ll sue him for a million dollars if he did.

“Get your ass in homeroom,” he commanded me. “Now.”

I grabbed my books and slammed my locker shut. Sarkind was watching with this stupid smirk on his face.

“You’ll get yours later,” I warned him. You ask some wet-shit for a simple favor, you’re willing to be his friend, and look what happens to you.

Mrs. Fletcher, our homeroom teacher, took the roll. She’s got a seating chart and if you’re not in your assigned seat when the bell rings you get a tardy slip and have to go to the principal’s office and get a note signed by your parents and all that bullshit. I learned to forge my mother’s name one month after I started seventh grade.

I had the hots for Mrs. Fletcher. I know that’s weird ’cause she’s flat as a board, what you’d call a carpenter’s dream, but she’s got good legs she likes to show off—she’s always crossing them and showing some thigh. This is her first year teaching, she just got out of teachers’ college up at Towson State and her husband’s in the army in Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. She hasn’t seen him since Christmas. She’s complained to some of the girls, her little brown-noser favorites, about her lack of nookie. I mean she didn’t say it like that, not to a bunch of ninth-grade girls, but that’s what she meant. What she didn’t know was that news gets broadcast all over the school in about ten seconds flat, you tell one of these girls a secret you might as well put it on “Ed Sullivan.”

She’s a horny lady schoolteacher, no question, sitting up there crossing and uncrossing her legs, dangling her shoes off her toes. I could see a couple of fresh pimples on her chin, even though she’d tried to cover them with makeup. She must’ve been on the rag. Between my mother and sister there’s always used Kotex in the bathroom wastebasket. I hate living in a house with only one bathroom. Someday I’ll have my own private bathroom and I won’t have to put up with that gross shit.

Vernice Oglethorpe was sitting in front of me. She’s this tall, skinny girl, plain as cardboard.

“Vernice, you do the math?” I whispered. I had to have that math homework.

She tried to ignore me, which was pretty difficult, since my lips were about two inches from her ear.

“I know you did. Lend it to me.”

“No,” she said, her back all rigid.

“Come on, Vernice,” I practically begged, “Swindel’ll murdelize me if I don’t have it today.”

“You should’ve thought about that before now,” Vernice whispered back.

I leaned closer to her, so Mrs. Fletcher wouldn’t hear us. Vernice’s hair smelled nice. She must’ve washed it last night. It wasn’t her fault she was a skag.

“Vernice,” I coaxed, singing her name softly.

“Roy, leave me alone,” she pleaded, her voice kind of shaking. She’s never had a date in her life, she’s scared to death of boys.

I reached under her arm and started tickling her. She jerked like a puppet, trying to squirm away.

“Don’t!”

“C’mon, Vernice.” I kept tickling her. She was biting her wrist to keep from laughing out loud.

“Goddamn you, Roy,” she hissed, as she angrily handed her notebook back to me.

“Admit it, Vernice, you love me.” I smiled at her as I started copying her work into my book as fast as I could.

The morning announcements came over the P.A. You’re supposed to stop what you’re doing and listen up, but I kept copying her math into my book. I managed to finish just before we had to stand for the Lord’s Prayer and Pledge of Allegiance.

“Thanks, my dear,” I told her as I passed the work back.

“You’re not welcome,” she said, trying to act like she was real pissed off.

“Don’t forget, Vernice, you love me,” I teased her. The sad thing is, deep down that’s true. Even skags have feelings, that’s why I knew she wasn’t as pissed off as she wanted me to believe. If I ever actually liked her it would be the greatest thrill of her young life.

I got through the first part of the morning easily enough. Most teachers, if you keep your mouth shut and lay low, they’ll leave you alone. They don’t want a hassle any more than you do—life’s tough enough being a junior-high teacher in a shitty school like Ravensburg Junior High without going out looking for trouble.

The last class before lunch was math. I was sweating bullets, praying that Swindel wouldn’t call on me to put a problem up on the board. I just wanted to turn in the homework and get out alive. Usually she starts with the A’s and goes alphabetically and I can finesse it, since my name starts with a P, but this time she pulled a fast one and started with the last name, Bonnie Yates, and went backwards.

“Roy Poole,” she called.

“Present and accounted for, Miz Swindel, ma’am,” I sang out. Sometimes that’ll get a laugh and she’ll pass me by.

“I can see that, Roy,” she answered. “Now if it wouldn’t tax your energy too much would you please go to the board and put up number nine.” She looked around the room like she was an actress in a play and we were the audience, which is how she often does shit like that. “That is, if you did number nine. Or any of the assignment.”

She expected me to come up empty, as usual, so she could embarrass me for about two minutes.

“Yes, ma’am, I did the assignment,” I answered, fighting real hard to keep a shit-eating grin off my face. I could see from her look at me that I’d hoisted her by her own petard, as the Three Musketeers would say. “I did all of ’em, took me half the night but I got ’em all done. Didn’t make my mom too happy,” I embellished, “me staying up that late, what with my dad being sick with double pneumonia like he’s been.”

Sometimes this shit’ll come out of my mouth when I least expect it. It’s a part of me I can’t control, like an evil twin. I glanced across the room. Vernice was staring like she wanted to kill me, she was so pissed. I smiled at her real sweet, like we were boyfriend-girlfriend. In her dreams.

Miss Swindel, forgetting that I’m one of the world’s greatest bullshit artists, turned white as a ghost.

“I didn’t know there was an illness in your family,” she told me. “I’m sorry.”

“He’ll recover,” I answered. I should be so lucky my old man would ever be laid up seriously. Be the only time we’d ever have any peace and quiet around our house.

“I am glad you did the assignment for once,” she said.

I walked to the front of the room with my math homework and joined the other kids who were beavering away at the board. I took my time, making sure I had the right piece of chalk, that I had a good area on the board to put the problem on. I looked at it for a while, squinting like I was puzzled, the way these contestants do on “The $64,000 Question” on TV, they’ll go into all these stupid contortions when everybody knows they have the answer right on the tip of their tongue.

Finally, when I’d delayed as long as I could, I copied the problem out of my book onto the board, alongside the others. Then I walked back to my seat in the rear and slid down, real low. I’d showed her—now she wouldn’t call on me for the rest of the month.

When everyone was finished Swindel checked the work. If it wasn’t right she had the student come up and work with her so they’d see where they had fucked up. The few that got them right she just checked off. I was praying Vernice had gotten this problem right. She’s pretty smart in math.

Swindel came to my problem last. She looked at it for a long time, double-checking the equation—she was having a hard time believing what she was seeing.

“Very good, Roy,” she said, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.

I let out a big sigh of relief, silent of course. Thank God for Vernice, I had to do something nice for her to make up for helping me, even though she hadn’t wanted to.

“Thank you, Miz Swindel. That one was pretty hard.”

Why the hell couldn’t I have kept my goddamn mouth shut? That’s all I had to do, shut the fuck up. She would’ve gone on to something else and I’d’ve been home free. But I didn’t. Story of my life.

“You’re finally getting a grasp of the work.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m trying to.” Now we were in a damn conversation.

“I’ve always felt you had it in you, if you’d only try.”

Like I said, they’ve been singing that tune my whole life.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She started to move on—then she turned back to me.

“Would you mind explaining it to the class, step by step?” she asked, extending her hand out to me. “Come up here to the board so we can all see you.”

Shit on a goddamn stick.

“I’d rather not, ma’am,” I said, thinking as fast as I could, “I’m not real good at talking in front of people.”

That got a good laugh. I got a mouth on me like a goddamn preacher, that’s how come I get in trouble so much.

“Front and center, Roy. Now.”

I walked to the front of the room like a man on his way to the gallows and stood at the board.

“Go ahead, Roy,” she decreed.

I looked at the problem carefully. I’m pretty good at math, actually, if I’d studied up on this stuff I might’ve been able to bullshit my way through, but I didn’t know dick about this, not word one. But I had to say something.

“Okay,” I said, real slow, “you’ve got your denominator …”

“That’s fractions, Roy,” she interrupted, “this is algebra.”

“Right, right. I mean your sine …”

“Geometry. Stick to algebra, Roy. Geometry was last semester.”

“Right, that’s right, Miz Swindel, what I meant was …”

I stared at the problem again, wrinkling my brow like those brains on TV do, like if I wrinkled it hard enough the answer would just pop into my head.

“I’m having a hard time explaining it this morning,” I told her, “on account of how I didn’t get much sleep last night staying up so late and all.”

“That’s a pretty feeble excuse, Roy,” she told me. Her voice was getting shrill. “I don’t see how you managed to do this problem if you can’t explain it now.”

She’d caught me. Big fucking deal.

“Maybe you had some help. Is that possible?” She was laying the sarcasm on pretty thick.

“Anything’s possible.”

Some titters and laughs slipped out from the class. She quieted them with a blistering look. Fucking with her was not a cool thing to do, I knew that from experience.

“Who did this work?”

“A friend of mine helped me. I admit it.”

“A friend. What is this friend’s name, pray tell?”

Out of the corner of my eye I caught Vernice smirking. She stuck her tongue out at me. For a second I got this brilliant idea—I’d say it was her, that I’d gone over to her house last night and spent the time with her in her room, just the two of us alone, while she helped me. She’d crawl under her desk and die if I did that.

I couldn’t do it. It would’ve been like taking candy from a baby. There’s no point in hurting somebody just ’cause you’ve fucked up.

“Your friend, Roy,” Miss Swindel commanded.

“Albert Einstein,” I told her.

The class erupted in laughter. Swindel glared at me for a moment, then turned her back. I was going to pay for this, that I knew. Not the lying and messing up, everyone expected that from me. For showing her up, she hated that more than anything.

“Return to your seat, Roy.” Her voice was flat. I was definitely going to pay for this.

As I walked back to my desk I caught Vernice and Sarkind smiling at me in triumph. I didn’t even think about plotting revenge on them—I deserved it, for being such a wiseass and not keeping my dumb mouth shut.

“So Earl and Lloyd, they had this one-truck garbage business, you know,” Burt was saying, telling this joke, me and Joe and Clarence and a couple other boys huddled around him, “just this old stake-bed, and they’re hauling trash and garbage, all kinds of shit, rotten eggs and coffee grinds and rubbers …”

“Kotex,” Clarence chimed in.

“The bloodier the better,” Burt assured us, “all kinds of good shit, of course they don’t handle that shit their own selves, they got a couple of niggers doing the heavy lifting for ’em …”

“Leroy and Rastas,” Clarence kicked in again.

“Who the fuck’s telling this joke, me or you?” Burt complained.

“All right, already.”

“So anyway,” Burt continued, “as a matter of fact those were the niggers’ names, so one day they’re driving down the road and it’s windier than shit and the tarp blows off that’s covering the load? So all this garbage starts blowing around, all over the road and shit, so Lloyd tells Leroy, ‘Boy, climb on up the back of the truck and lie down on top of that pile so’s it won’t blow away.’ So ol’ Leroy climbs up on the pile of garbage, I mean it was all kinds of ugly shit, you couldn’t pay a white man a million dollars to lie down on that shit, but ol’ Leroy he’s a good worker so he gets on top of it and it’s blowing like a motherfucker so he’s got to spread-eagle on it to keep it down, you know?, so they’re driving on down to the dump and they drive under this bridge and there’s these two little kids standing on the bridge, just hanging around, and one of them sees the truck driving by and he turns to the other kid and says, ‘Will you look at that, somebody’s throwed away a perfectly good nigger.’”