Algebra II was in Room 16, but my locker was at the other end of the hall. I walked down to it and regarded it.
My locker. It said so: CHARLES DECKER printed neatly in my hand on a strip of school Con-Tact paper. Each September, during the first home-room period, came the handing out of the blank Con-Tact strips. We lettered carefully, and during the two-minute break between home room and the first class of the new year, we pasted them on. The ritual was as old and as holy as First Communion. On the first day of my sophomore year, Joe McKennedy walked up to me through the crowded hall with his Con-Tact strip pasted on his forehead and a big shit-eating grin pasted on his mouth. Hundreds of horrified freshmen, each with a little yellow name tag pinned on his or her shirt or blouse, turned to look at this sacrilege. I almost broke my balls laughing. Of course he got a detention for it, but it made my day. When I think back on it, I guess it made my year.
And there I was, right between ROSANNE DEBBINS and CARLA DENCH, who doused herself in rosewater every morning, which had been no great help in keeping my breakfast where it belonged during the last semester.
Ah, but all that was behind me now.
Gray locker, five feet high, padlocked. The padlocks were handed out at the beginning of the year along with the Con-Tact strips. Titus, the padlock proclaimed itself. Lock me, unlock me. I am Titus, the Helpful Padlock.
“Titus, you old cuffer,” I whispered. “Titus, you old cock-knocker.”
I reached for Titus, and it seemed to me that my hand stretched to it across a thousand miles, a hand on the end of a plastic arm that elongated painlessly and nervelessly. The numbered surface of Titus’ black face looked at me blandly, not condemning but certainly not approving, no, not that, and I shut my eyes for a moment. My body wrenched through a shudder, pulled by invisible, involuntary, opposing hands.
And when I opened my eyes again, Titus was in my grasp. The chasm had closed.
The combinations on high-school locks are simple. Mine was six to the left, thirty right, and two turns back to zero. Titus was known more for his strength than his intellect. The lock snapped up, and I had him in my hand. I clutched him tightly, making no move to open the locker door.
Up the hall, Mr. Johnson was saying: “… and the Hessians, who were paid mercenaries, weren’t any too anxious to fight, especially in a countryside where the opportunities for plunder over and above the agreed-upon wages…”
“Hessian,” I whispered to Titus. I carried him down to the first wastebasket and dropped him in. He looked up at me innocently from a litter of discarded homework papers and old sandwich bags.
“… but remember that the Hessians, as far as the Continental Army knew, were formidable German killing machines… ”
I bent down, picked him up, and put him in my breast pocket, where he made a bulge about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
“Keep it in mind, Titus, you old killing machine,” I said, and went back to my locker.
I swung it open. Crumpled up in a sweaty ball at the bottom was my gym uniform, old lunch bags, candy wrappers, a month-old apple core that was browning nicely, and a pair of ratty black sneakers. My red nylon jacket was hung on the coat-hook, and on the shelf above that were my textbooks, all but Algebra II. Civics, American Government, French Stories and Fables, and Health, that happy Senior gut course, a red, modern book with a high-school girl and boy on the cover and the section on venereal disease neatly clipped by unanimous vote of the School Committee. I started to get it on beginning with the health book, sold to the school by none other than good old Al Lathrop, I hoped and trusted. I took it out, opened it somewhere between “The Building Blocks of Nutrition” and “Swimming Rules for Fun and Safety,” and ripped it in two. It came easy. They all came easy except for Civics, which was a tough old Silver Burdett text circa 1946. I threw all the pieces into the bottom of the locker. The only thing left up top was my slide rule, which I snapped in two, a picture of Raquel Welch taped to the back wall (I let it stay), and the box of shells that had been behind my books.
I picked that up and looked at it. The box had originally held Winchester.22 long-rifle shells, but it didn’t anymore. I’d put the other shells in it, the ones from the desk drawer in my father’s study. There’s a deer head mounted on the wall in his study, and it stared down at me with its glassy too-alive eyes as I took the shells and the gun, but I didn’t let it bother me. It wasn’t the one he’d gotten on the hunting trip when I was nine. The pistol had been in another drawer, behind a box of business envelopes. I doubt if he even remembered it was still there. And as a matter of fact, it wasn’t, not anymore. Now it was in the pocket of my jacket. I took it out and shoved it into my belt. I didn’t feel much like a Hessian. I felt like Wild Bill Hickok.
I put the shells in my pants pocket and took out my lighter. It was one of those Scripto see-through jobs. I don’t smoke myself, but the lighter had kind of caught my fancy. I snapped a light to it, squatted, and set the crap in the bottom of my locker on fire.
The flames licked up greedily from my gym trunks to the lunch bags and candy wrappers to the ruins of my books, carrying a sweaty, athletic smell up to me.
Then, figuring that I had gotten it on as much as I could by myself, I shut the locker door. There were little vents just above where my name was Con-Tact-papered on, and through them I could hear the flames whooshing upward. In a minute little orange flecks were glaring in the darkness beyond the vents, and the gray locker paint started to crack and peel.
A kid came out of Mr. Johnson’s room carrying a green bathroom pass. He looked at the smoke belching merrily out of the vents in my locker, looked at me, and hurried down to the bathroom. I don’t think he saw the pistol. He wasn’t hurrying that fast.
I started down to Room 16. I paused just as I got there, my hand on the doorknob, looking back. The smoke was really pouring out of the vents now, and a dark, sooty stain was spreading up the front of my locker. The Con-Tact paper had turned brown. You couldn’t see the letters that made my name anymore.
I don’t think there was anything in my brain fight then except the usual background static-the kind~you get on your radio when it’s turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.
I turned back to Room 16 and opened the door. I was hoping, but I didn’t know what.
CHAPTER 9
“… So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change. For example-”
Mrs. Underwood looked up alertly, pushing her harlequin glasses up on her nose. “Do you have an office pass, Mr. Decker?”
“Yes,” I said, and took the pistol out of my belt. I wasn’t even sure it was loaded until it went off. I shot her in the head. Mrs. Underwood never knew what hit her, I’m sure. She fell sideways onto her desk and then rolled onto the floor, and that expectant expression never left her face.
CHAPTER 10
Sanity:
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is Mrs. Underwood’s dying declaration: So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.
I really believe that.
I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It’s all logical, it’s all sane. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyros. Logic and sanity. Like Coca-Cola, it’s the real thing.