Things as They Are (19 page)

His mother worked at the dry-cleaner’s until six. “Nobody’s home,” he would confide, seeing this as an irresistible attraction. “Nobody’ll bother us. We can just give’r.”

He did not understand I did not want to give’r with him.

Christmas that year meant an escape. An escape from Mrs. Dollen and an escape from Wayne. It meant two weeks without stomach cramps or sweating hands, two weeks free of being hounded by one or the other.

You have all seen the movie. The one in which the long-term con is keeping his nose clean while he serves the last days of his sentence. Hours before he is granted parole there is a prison riot, destroying his hope for release. From that point on you know it is inevitable that when the cell block is stormed by state troopers, he will be killed.

All December I sniffed the air for riots.

On the afternoon of December 23, the last day of school, we had our class Christmas party, a tobogganing outing. Shortly after one o’clock Mrs. Dollen trooped us out of R.J. Hewitt Elementary and marched us across a mile of dazzling snow to the golf course where the ninth hole provided a perfect run. From the elevated tee we could go whizzing down three hundred yards of steeply sloping coulee. Three-quarters of the way down, where maximum speeds would be reached, a ramp of packed snow had been shovelled up by older boys from the junior high school and provided, by the generous
contributions of their bladders, with an incredibly slippery glaze of yellow ice. The grade-eight boys had named it Piss-Ice Death Jump and only the most crazed kamikaze tobogganers, legendary nutters like Ernie Kunkel and Morris Fellows, ever took it at full speed, putting eight feet of air between them and the earth when they shot off it with blood-curdling screams of “Banzai!” Teacher needed only one glance at old Piss-Ice to declare it out of bounds and expropriate it as an elevated traffic island from which she could supervise our fun. No sooner had she unsteadily clambered up on it than she began to wave her arms, blare warnings and threats.

“What did I say, Donald? What? Down coming keeps to the right side of the hill. People pulling toboggans up the hill stay to the left. I don’t want to speak to you again. Is that clear?” From where I stood on the tee box, at a distance of two hundred yards, her jerky gestures, her thin screechy voice made her seem like a cranky puppet. “No walking up the hill abreast! How many times do I have to tell you? Get in single file before one of you gets hit and killed! That’s my last warning. If you people don’t decide to start listening, I’ll pack us up right this minute and we can go back to school and get started on next term’s work right this minute. Am I making myself clear? Am I?”

Everybody but me went flying down the hill with abandon, red-faced and whooping. The sun burned with the intensity of a camera flash. Scars on the white bark of the naked poplars in the coulee were black as ink. The glare of the snow stunned aching eyes and made the landscape bobble. Skidding, tumbling bodies chipped sparks of snow from the slope, and runaway sleighs ran smooth and empty to the bottom of the hill.

I tried to negotiate this bedlam as inconspicuously as possible. By now creeping and slinking had become second nature to me. I eased down the slope with all due care, stuttering the toes of my boots in the snow to brake my descent. I cautiously and conscientiously ascended the left side of the hill, as per teacher’s instructions.

Wayne didn’t own a toboggan. All he had to scoot down the hill on was a piece of cardboard, but teacher wouldn’t let him use it.

“What if you were to hit a rock riding on that?” I heard her demand, as I plodded past Piss-Ice. “You’d be killed and who’d get blamed? Me. Not on your life, Mr. Leszinski.”

I avoided Wayne like the plague, knowing he would expect to be invited to ride with me. With only a couple of hours more to get through, I had no intention of doing anything to draw the awful wrath of Dollen, and that included carrying freight with a talent for attracting her lightning.

One of the saddest sights is the sight of someone lingering hopefully. Leszinski stood at the top of the hill, shivering in the thin nylon jacket, trying to catch my eye, but I kept my eyes elsewhere.

Neglected, Wayne began to make a nuisance of himself, turning vaguely menacing as he strutted aggressively up and down the cowed line of “winkles” waiting their turn for a run down the hill. “Anybody looking for the ride of their life? Let Waynie steer. Waynie’ll give you little chicken poops a thrill. Who wants a thrill? How about it?” He halted in front of me. “Let’s us do it,” he said quietly. “You ain’t scared.”

But I was.

There was something genuinely humble and patient about the way he waited for his answer.

“No,” I said.

“Why?” Wayne wanted to know. “You got a nice big one. You could easy ride two. Why?”

I turned away from him and squinted at the low winter sun scraping through a tangle of leafless poplar branches. Because you’re bad luck, I wanted to say. Because just sitting at the
back of the room with you has made me stupid. But I only shrugged.

“Why?” persisted Wayne. “You got a real nice one, a tin one. We could go real fast on a tin one.”

“Aluminum,” I said.

“Them tin ones fly,” he continued doggedly. “You and me could really fly.”

“Take it,” I said. “You want to really fly – just take it.”

“Why, Myles? Why don’t you want to ride with me?”

I threw the tow rope at his feet. “You want to fly, go ahead. Take it. Just leave me alone.”

“I got one year to my driver licence,” said Wayne, sliding his eyes away from me and down the hill where Mrs. Dollen stood with her back turned to us, haranguing a miscreant from the vantage of Piss-Ice Death. “One year and I could drive you anywhere you want to go, Myles.”

He waited.

“All right,” he said at last, stooping down and savagely snatching the toboggan to his chest. “Fuck you, Myles.” For several yards he ran furiously down the slope, lurching blindly from side to side, the toboggan held up in front of him like a glittering shield. Then he flung himself upon it and shot off down the slope.

We were both turned in the same direction, Mrs. Dollen and I, both facing the rule-breaker who stood yards beyond Piss-Ice Death where the slope of the coulee began to level. There was no time for a warning. At the last possible moment Wayne slung his weight violently to one side and the toboggan veered sharply left. It ran up the ramp, struck Mrs. Dollen with terrible force in the back of her ankles, popped her up into the air, shot underneath her, and flashed over the lip, disappearing before she came twisting awkwardly down in a heap, a game bird dropped on the wing.

Pressing in around the body, staring at her legs poked out of rucked-up coat skirts at stomach-turning angles, we wanted the noises she was making to stop. We didn’t like it that an adult whimpered, panted, groaned open-mouthed, face down in the snow. We gave her pinched-face encouragement to try and be herself.

“Teacher, are you okay?”

“Teacher, are you hurt?” Eileen Kerning had found Mrs. Dollen’s glasses lying several feet from their owner in the snow. She dangled them above the prostrate figure and said, “Here’s your glasses, teacher. They aren’t broken.”

“My back,” said Mrs. Dollen in a scary, smothered voice. “My back, my back.”

We looked uncertainly at one another. “My back, my back, my back,” teacher shrilled at us.

Something had to be done. Suddenly the sky and snow grew dull, as if one were the pewter image of the other. Perhaps it was this draining away of the light which quickened us, bringing home the lateness of the hour. A toboggan was pulled up alongside her and Harvey Whiteside, who was a patrol leader in Boy Scouts and had a First Aid badge, issued directions for rolling her onto it. Mrs. Dollen did not submit to this manoeuvre calmly. At the critical moment she shrieked once again, “My back, my back,
my back!”
Her face was a match for the tired grey of sky and snow.

There was something thoughtful, almost meditative in the quiet, subdued fashion with which we drew our burden back to school. Without discussion we had all decided that dumb silence ought to surround this incident. Everybody that is except Wayne. Clearly pleased with himself, he fell into step beside me and began to sing “The old grey mare, she ain’t
what she used to be,” giving knowing winks and grins to anybody who looked his way. Nobody appreciated this. People began to drift further and further away from us, until we were quite alone.

“If I were you,” I said to him, shaking with anger, “if I were you, I wouldn’t act so smart.”

He laughed.

“It was my toboggan,” I reminded him. “You used my toboggan. You had no business acting smart with my toboggan.

We returned from Christmas vacation to a surprise. Instead of Mrs. Dollen we found a substitute teacher, Miss Clark, an elderly lady familiar to some of us as the ineffectual conductor of the United Church Junior Choir. In a faint, tremulous voice she reported on teacher’s medical condition to the class. At first, the doctors had thought that Mrs. Dollen had ruptured a disc and would require an operation, but now this was ruled out. What she had done was strain a group of large muscles in her back. After another week of bed-rest it was believed she would be able to resume her duties in the classroom.

Miss Clark exhorted us to try and be on our very best behaviour when teacher came back to us because, as we could all imagine, Mrs. Dollen hadn’t spent a very happy Christmas laid up in hospital. It was up to us to try and make it up to her by being especially kind and good and considerate for the rest of the year, so that every single day would feel like Christmas for our dear teacher.

Last of all, Miss Clark said that although she knew many boys and girls would have sent Mrs. Dollen Christmas and Get Well cards (puzzled glances were exchanged at this bizarre notion) it might be encouraging to teacher if we all took a little time now to write her a short note telling her how much we missed her. Miss Clark held up a packet of envelopes and happily announced: “I have an envelope for each member of the
class so that our communications with Mrs. Dollen remain private and personal. I shall pass these out now.”

It took me all of thirty seconds to compose my private and personal communication to teacher.

That chore taken care of, I turned to scratching the rash on the backs of my hands, which had coincidentally appeared twenty-four hours in advance of school re-opening.

Wayne wanted to know what he was supposed to
do
. Anything that wasn’t routine, anything the tiniest bit out of the ordinary always threw him badly.

“Myles, Myles,” he hissed across the aisle at me, “what should I write?”

At that moment my father’s blood flowered darkly in me. I grabbed a pencil and savagely scribbled the sort of thing I had been hearing him entertain the barbershop peanut gallery with for years.

It took Leszinski a little time to wade back and forth in this message until he got the gist of it, but when he did he gave one of those barks of delight that usually coincided with Mrs. Dollen mentioning the word “period,” or her asking the class whether we had caught the author’s “point.”

Suddenly I found myself wildly scrawling on sheet after sheet of paper, shaken by a reckless, silent laughter.

And much more of the same.

Then, without warning, Alley Oop appeared in the doorway and Miss Clark was clapping her hands to attract our attention and piping at us in her benign, frail, old lady’s voice that we must hurry and finish our letters because the principal, who was on his way to visit Mrs. Dollen in the hospital, had dropped by to collect and deliver our good wishes. I could see Alley moving up my row, gathering envelopes, and I scarcely had time to thrust the incriminating letters into my desk and seal my own good wishes to teacher before Alley Oop’s big-knuckled, hairy hand was impatiently extended to receive my envelope.

That very day, going through my desk I found the letter which should have gone into the envelope intended for teacher, the one which said:

Reading and re-reading the words, I tried to will them away and onto the sheet of paper that had journeyed with Alley Oop to the hospital. But the words stubbornly remained where they were and they stubbornly insisted on saying what they said and nothing else. Worse, I knew it didn’t matter that the note I had sent wasn’t signed, she would recognize the handwriting. Teachers always recognized your handwriting.

The following Monday Mrs. Dollen returned to school walking with a stiff limp, leaning on a cane. We watched her make her way across the front of the room to her desk with the sort of awed silence that must have greeted Lazarus’s first turn around the graveyard. When she laid her stick across the desk top it was with the restrained menace of a gun man placing his revolver on the bar-room table. I could hear the clock on the far wall ticking clear across the room. “Thank you for your letters,” she said. “I read them all.”

The day of the accident Wayne had sung “The old grey mare she ain’t what she used to be.” This was and wasn’t true. For a start, Mrs. Dollen showed her old form when she gave Leszinski a couple of brisk cuts across the shins with her cane for leaving his legs out in the aisle, declaring as she did: “We’ve had one too many accidents around here lately. There won’t be any more.”