To Mance I said the only sensible words to cover the moment: "Never mind."
The mock splendor of an Alabama September made passage into the gloriously real splendor of an Alabama October, and Wolf — she of the Gift and/or Grail-appeared each day of the week to coax song from our pubescent vocal cords. And in a splendor all her own she would sit upon her throne (a.k.a. piano stool) and casually allow one of her black, wickedly spiked high heels to lose contact with the floor. At such times my crude brethren would often be mindlessly engaged in guessing what color panties she was wearing that day. Not me. I saw what she was up to, though, admittedly, I had to fight hard not to become thoroughly transfixed by the subtle movement of that high heel as she inched her nyloned foot free from its leather housing, letting the spike heel dangle.
Oh, my.
Perhaps nowhere in the pages of the history of eroticism has such a gesture been properly described. Nor can I describe it. But the tightness in my jeans wordlessly voiced my appreciation of the moment. Wondrous to me was the fact that she knew that I knew that no one else in the class fully appreciated the erotic ritual of that dangled high heel. More than that: There was no need to ask for whom that heel dangled — it dangled for me.
Alas, though, a Grail legend would not be a Grail legend if a venerable truth were not evident: For every Fair Damsel living only to offer the Gift of the erotic to some adolescent knight sans armor, there is a counterbalancing creature known as the Hideous Damsel — and Soldier Junior High School, Soldier, Alabama, was no exception. Opposite Lavenia Wolf in my dreams skulked Mrs. Eudora Hoagland, my English teacher. I sensed that were it possible for her to lay her sausage-link fingers on my Gift — as if it were a delicate, crystalline globe — she would have most gleefully dashed it to the floor, where Mr. Rydel, the janitor, would have swept its splinters and shards in with the other school-day dust and detritus.
Hoagland's favorite ploy was to delay me after class, drape her meathooks on my shoulders, and say, "Don't keep company with Starkey or Mance or Chick. Your job is to keep the right company."
My job? My job? What in the hell did she mean?
Then she would tighten those menacing fingers onto the thin rods of my clavicles, and I would imagine them breaking under her brute force like the bones of a small bird. I never failed to shudder when she touched me like that. A Hideous Damsel, yes. But worse. A genuine psychopath. This woman, I constantly reminded myself, could kill. The death-washed gray of her eyes told me that she wanted to. Needed to.
Halloween soon approached. Good thing, too, because aside from the daily dose of the erotic administered by Miss Wolf, the body of the school year was showing signs of jaundice. Our junior high football team (of which I was a member — wide receiver, though we lacked a quarterback capable of throwing me a pass) accepted its winless state so willingly that our head coach stormed home at the half of our third game and did not return until game six. After games there were dances which became moribund within thirty minutes. I did try to kindle a romantic fire with Tressie Sue Gimbel, one of the cheerleaders, but it was no use. How could Tressie's teasing flirtations compete with Wolf's archetypal eroticism? I mean, can a lady finger make as much noise as a cherry bomb? Is a BB gun as powerful as a cannon?
So there was Halloween and a school party put on by the PTA and starring the teachers and even our skeleton of a principal, Mr. Johnston. Naturally, Mance, Chick and I shunned such an unpromising mise en scene, opting to chase about our small town raising as much hell as possible. By mid-evening we grew bored enough to hurriedly don some makeshift costumes — Chick dressed as Satan, Mance as a pirate, and I as a vampire — and hustled to the junior high gym where the first person I saw was Tressie garbed as Snow White. What a tease!
But then I feasted my eyes on Miss Wolf.
Never have I seen such a comely witch. Never has black taken upon itself a neon jangle as it did flowing from the tip of her tall, peaked hat to the hem of her ankle-length gown — with her bare feet gracing the gym floor, each toenail screaming a red that I have yet to find on the color spectrum. Her lips were painted the same color. And I was enthralled.
Wolf was manning (why isn't there a word "womanning"?) the apple-bobbing caldron and the touchy/ feely display supposedly of dead body parts. You've seen the stuff I'm sure: peeled grapes for dead man's eyes, cold cooked spaghetti for brains, etc., etc. Nothing sui generis. Or so I thought. The apple-bobbing caldron was a huge crock pot that was blackwashed appropriately; the apples were buoyed in a gray, sudsy concoction that reminded me of dishwater.
As I observed from an oblique angle, Mance breathlessly exclaimed in my ear, "Nipples. Nipples." And he danced a little jig which I recognized as endemic to Mance. His southern drawl is so pronounced that I thought he said, "Naples, Naples," and I wondered why he was talking about Italy. Then I chanced a look at the front of Wolfs gown and I experienced a flash of intense white light, something of the nature of what folks encounter near death — a glance at Heaven I guess you'd call it. At that point I must have made my way to the caldron, probably lurching more like a zombie than gliding sinuously like a rakish vampire.
Wolf smiled at me. She hooked a brilliant red fingernail toward me and then reeled me closer. Closer to those hardened nipples and red lips and the Gift. She leaned forward — I smelled her perfume and my right leg went numb — and she whispered, "I like vampires."
"Oh, yes, ma'am," I said quickly. "So do I."
If memory serves me correctly, I hung around, occasionally bobbing for apples (temporarily losing my paraffin fangs) and smiling vacuously at Miss Wolf. The night wore on; ten o'clock — PTA quitting time — drew near. I had lost track of Mance and Chick and had nervously chewed through my waxy fangs when Miss Wolf, having dismissed some dorky seventh graders, cocked an eyebrow and said, "Would you like to put your hand in my special box?"
In times of extreme stress, the rushing of blood in the body of a thirteen-year-old boy has a geometry all its own; the heart pumps thunderously, in defiance of all laws of physics and physiology.
Hot blood.
She took my hand. From a shelf apparently below the Tupperware container of cooked spaghetti she lifted a shoe box with a fist-size hole in one end. There was a lid on the box so I couldn't see what was inside — more peeled grapes or spaghetti, I guessed.
I was wrong.
She pushed my hand within the opening and my fingers brushed a silken maze of materials — nylon, cotton, and powder puffy things. I started to jerk free, but she held my arm until my knuckles pressed against the nipple end of a balloon filled with warm water.
I believe I gasped. Somehow through the roar in my ears I heard Wolf's soft, apologetic laughter. I tried to act cool, but over Wolf's shoulder I noticed that Mrs. Hoagland had been watching from her sentry beneath the basketball goal.
She was frowning.
In that moment she became a vampire hunter stalking me with the sharpened point of an ash stake, hungry to plunge it into my heart. Hey, I'm serious. I'll never forget the look of hatred in her eyes. She hated Wolf (Jealousy? Envy?). She hated me. She hated my Gift. Even across the gym floor, her eyes whispered threateningly. I caught their vicious sentiment: "So you like to put your hand into strange boxes, eh?" they seemed to say. "How would you like it if I put yours into a paper shredder? Or a bear trap? Or a tank of piranhas?"
You get the idea.
Her eyes also had a few choice words for Wolf: "I'll have your job, bitch. I'll find a way to put your tit in a ringer."
The gym reeked of Hoagland's perfect hatred.