After that it was easy to get Deborah and Carl to commit their ten-year-old twin sons, Matt and Larry, to the school. I felt no remorse about playing on the Harrises’ contrition — they had almost killed me. Besides, the important thing was the education of the children. “Okay. School starts next Monday at eight. We haven’t worked out busing, so for now it’ll be the responsibility of parents to provide transportation to and from, and also you’ll need to supply Matt and Larry’s lunches. I recommend a sandwich, Pop-Tarts, and a piece of fruit. You might stock up on eight-ounce cartons of low-fat milk. Additionally, we ask all students to bring along a favorite toy. I typically kick off the year with an open play session, in order to implant the idea that learning is fun.”
Deborah said, “The boys’ favorite toys are their bow-and-arrow sets. Is that going to be all right in class?”
“What kind of arrows? Do they have metal points, or those rubber suction cups?”
“They’re carbon steel shafts with two-bladed broadheads and helical fletches. They’ll shave a hair,” said Carl.
“Tell you what. Have Matt and Larry bring their bows and quivers, and we’ll work out something in the way of a target range out back.”
Which is exactly what we did, come Sunday — we affixed, Meredith and I, to the tangerine tree out back, a round piece of cardboard painted eggshell-white and crayoned with an imperfectly round, lavender bull’s-eye. I held the flimsy target against the trunk and queried, “Higher? Lower?”
“Higher.”
“Here?”
“Up more.”
“Here?”
“Higher.” She came and held the target against the tree while I delicately tapped in narrow finishing brads meant for fiberboard or plaster, for hanging light pictures. I’d gotten the nails from the tool cabinet in the basement. They were short, soft, inadequate.
“Pete, can we talk? About those fifth- and sixth-grade bio electives I was going to teach? Seeing as, so far, there aren’t any fifth- or sixth-graders? I mean, there’s Susy Jordan, she’s smart enough for bio, she’s smart enough for physics I’ll bet, but you know, she’s only second grade. I thought I might take the opportunity to switch over from science, and do an elective in religion.”
“Religion?” It seemed like trouble, tackling religion at the elementary level, though what kind of trouble, and for whom, I wasn’t sure. Meanwhile the nails were bending; it was as if they were made of putty.
“Pete, I feel like I don’t know anymore what’s up and what’s down. It might help me to teach a course in spiritual doubt,” biting her lower lip, brushing away from her face, with one hand, a hovering green bug. Meredith’s abrupt movement shook free a couple of imperfectly pounded nails, which trembled from their ragged holes and dropped to the ground. No way this crummy cardboard bull’s-eye was going to withstand arrow impact. I chucked the remaining picture nails and Frisbeed the cardboard over the pit; it winged spinning in an upward arc, planing skyward, six, eight, ten feet. In higher air it paused — the illusion of rest at the peak of ascent — before plunging to rest atop a triangle of nautical spear tips.
“Touchy.”
“Sorry.”
“What’s bugging you, Pete?”
I clutched the hammer. The sun was directly overhead and the air cool. There was a distant sound of splashing water — the Kinsey kids, no doubt, performing elaborate nose dives, cannonballs and can openers and watermelons and such, in their shallow aboveground vinyl pool. This mid-afternoon country club clamor of pre-adolescent recreation reminded me to take a stroll around the block and pay a courtesy visit to Delia and Hiram Kinsey, who most likely would voice no objection to sending their kids to school by way of a couple of backyards, provided right of passage could be obtained from the McElroys, which might be difficult considering Pat McElroy’s staunch isolationism, a position echoed all too clearly in the menacing advertisements posted on trees and the picket fence wrapping the McElroys’ quarter-acre lot: BACK OFF.
“Karen Kinsey is twelve. That’s sixth grade exactly,” I told Meredith matter-of-factly.
“What are you saying? I should hold bio lab for one pupil? You know, Pete, I’m having a hard time getting on board with this whole school idea. I know you want to help. I believe you want to do the right thing as a teacher. I believe you believe in education. But I don’t get it. Here we are out in the yard tacking up a bow-and-arrow target on a tree, and there’s a hole full of stakes three feet away, and I guess I don’t get it.”
“What’s to get? Archery as a phys-ed elective? Come on, it’ll be great. The target range is well away from the trench. Look, I’ll show you,” dropping the hammer and walking to pit’s edge and bending down, carefully, kneeling in the soft muck, one hand on the ground for balance, the other reaching over the tops of Meredith’s pretty bamboo spears (a narwhal and an inverted “pop art” snow cone cup), in order to retrieve the fallen target; and, target in hand, pacing off steps, toe to heel to toe, from pit to tree. “Right. The target range isn’t three feet, as you say, from the pit, it’s, well, let’s see here, it’s about, what? Seven? I fail to see the problem.”
“Seems dangerous is all.”
“Kids, Meredith. Kids. What are they going to do? And if you or I come out here and coach safe shooting, that’s a plus, as I see it.”
“How so?”
“Proper coaching inspires respect for weaponry and helps define the concept of sport.”
“Why do you think you have to do everything, Pete? This isn’t our responsibility. Other people’s children, Pete. They’re not our children! They’re not our responsibility!”
Such exquisite distress. But what, exactly, about? Was I being condescending? Was I lecturing? It’s a problem of mine, I’ll admit it, a tendency to become insistent to the point of excluding other people’s viewpoints. It’s something a lot of teachers probably struggle with in their personal lives: the adamant vocal style appropriate for driving home a lesson, and yet so hurtful among friends or at home.
Meredith shook her head and gave me a look it seemed best, in the spirit of marital harmony and academic diplomacy, to overlook. I said, “Do you suppose we might get a spare set of encyclopedias and dictionaries from one of the libraries? Hon?”
“I can check with Rita, but I think all the oversized volumes already went to Abe.”
“Abe?”
“He and Jerry and the other guys liked your idea of throwing books at the land mines in the park. They loaded up Abe’s van this morning. I forgot to tell you. They’re over there now.”
“At the park?”
There was no time to waste. I grabbed wallet and keys and hopped in the car and fastened my seat belt and backed out of the drive and sped off hurriedly through moderate downtown shopping traffic. On Water Street I got nothing but green lights all the way to Hyacinth; it was as if God were clearing a path. Explosions sounded from the direction of the park, dull concussive rumbles like construction site dynamite, audibly and subaudibly vibrating the hard and elastic surfaces of things: steering wheel, gas pedal, the car seat headrest, my head. Along the way, on Main Street, I noticed a bright sign in the window of Dick Morton’s clothing store, BIG WEEKEND CLEARANCE SALE! ALL MENSWEAR HALF PRICE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! and I made a mental note to stop in there later, to see about purchasing some presentable new dress shirts and a snappy bow tie to start off the teaching year.
At the park, things looked wild and dark. There is, of course, no auto access to the grounds, so I pulled up on the street outside, right behind Abe de Leon’s Dodge van and Tom Thompson’s Mazda. I shut off the engine, got out and locked the car door, then walked along the sidewalk, searching for a gap in the bushes, a route into the hammock. Everything was quiet, not even birds called. Presumably all the forest creatures were tensed up, waiting for bombs to go off. Overhead, twisted hardwoods draped leaf-heavy branches over thickets of briar and thorn that clogged the park’s walkways and nature trails, strangling smaller botanicals and forming a natural barrier between the roadway and the interior. It was impossible to see more than a few feet into that savage foliage. Finally I plunged on in, stepping lightly, pausing occasionally to orient myself, and to remove thorns snagging my clothes, brittle green points anchoring in the fabric’s weave, biting through to draw blood. Was Ben Webster still combing these woods for his vanished father? Or had son and dad reunited and gone home to a hot meal and comfortable beds? And Ray! — it grieved me to imagine a smart, personable guy like Conover, running berserk in swampy public hammocks, rending his clothes.