Dirty Love (26 page)

When Jimmy Swansea lit up his cigarette, the smell of its smoke filling the room, thirty-three young heads turned to him, and Francis knew he’d already lost them for the day anyway.

“Class, anyone who is not smoking a cigarette in this classroom is free to leave now, ten minutes early. If a hall monitor gives you trouble, send him to me.
Go
.”

Jimmy smiled as if he were the ringmaster in some dark circus of his own making. He inhaled deeply and blew out smoke and looked around at his classmates pulling on their backpacks and glancing back at him as they shuffled out of the room. Then it was just Jimmy and Mr. Brandt, and Jimmy’s expression changed because his circus now had no audience and Mr. Brandt was sitting on a desk across from him. “One day, Jimmy, and it may come sooner than you think, you’ll be dead in the ground and that’s when you’ll know you didn’t even begin to live your life.”

Jimmy was looking straight into Francis’s face. His earlier defiance had been replaced by a blankness, but it was a blankness that seemed to mask deeper fears he tried daily to ignore. He sat up and flicked his ash. Francis ignored it.

“Here’s what I know, Jimmy. You’re afraid there’s no place for you to go but where your parents have gone and the thought of that terrifies you so much you’ll do anything to escape the days leading right to where they are.”

“Don’t talk about my fucking family.”

“I don’t even know your family, Jim. And I mean no disrespect. But I want you to think about what I just said. You’re no clown. In fact, you’re a leader, I can see it. But you’re running from that role because if you step into it and work hard and become who you can truly be, you may just have to betray where you come from.”

Jimmy put the cigarette between his lips. He stood and pushed back his chair and walked out of the room. There was more Francis wanted to say to him:
One more interruption in my class, Jimmy, and I’ll break your fucking neck.
But those were the kinds of words Jimmy was looking for, the ones his days and nights served him up anyway. And Francis had never planned to use these other words either; usually they just came without forethought. He’d be sitting across from a difficult kid, looking into a face that always appeared to be so much younger up close, and he could feel the words begin to rise in him from who knows where. He suspected his subconscious was taking in things about these kids every day whether he wanted it to or not, and so he allowed his little speeches to come. Sometimes they brought changes in kids, subtle but good ones. Other times, as with Jimmy Swansea, nothing changed and he wondered if he’d wasted his time. A year after that day with the cigarette, Jimmy dropped out and Francis heard he’d joined the Marines, something that surprised him at first but then did not.

Last winter, Beth gone a year, Francis was driving a bit too fast up the highway. It was a Wednesday, close to midnight, and because he could no longer stand his quiet, empty house he’d pulled on his coat and climbed into his cold car just to drive. He hadn’t had a drink since his fifty-third birthday twenty-eight years earlier, but that night he’d wanted one—why not? He no longer had anything left to lose: a family, a job—and he was just on the cusp of deciding to exit the highway in search of a bar or roadhouse when he’d flicked on his radio and his car was filled with madly insistent violins. He had stumbled onto Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony just as it had begun, and now the barely contained hysteria of the strings section was pulling him headlong toward someplace wonderful yet horrible, this long, dark corridor inside him, his wife’s betrayed spirit hurling itself around his head, then he was pushing down on the accelerator to outrun her and there came the flashing of bright blue lights in his rearview mirror and at first they seemed to be part of the violins, the unrelenting violins, and Francis fumbled for the switch and turned off the radio, the silence a relief and an echoing failure as he pulled over and rolled down his window for the state trooper who shined his bright flashlight into his face.

“License and registration, please.” It was just a voice Francis had to squint at, the flashing blue in his mirror a strange respite. The officer pointed his light onto the empty backseat, and Francis handed over what needed to be handed over.

“I thought that was you, Mr. B.” The trooper shined his light into his own face. The strap of his hat was pulled slightly into both cheeks, and because he was smiling he looked fleshy when he wasn’t, but there, beneath thicker eyebrows, were the same blue-gray eyes that had narrowed up at Francis so many years earlier when he’d told Francis not to talk about his fucking family.

“’Member me?”

“Of course I do. Jimmy, right? How are you?” Francis had offered his hand and Trooper Swansea pulled off his leather glove and squeezed.

“Good, real good. Married, kids, the whole shitstorm. You?”

“Retired, Jimmy. I lost my wife last year—” He stopped himself. He had said it only to explain his speeding, and he felt cheap.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. B.”

“Francis.”

Jimmy let out a short laugh. “I can’t. Isn’t that funny? To me, you’ll always be Mr. B.”

“Was I driving too fast?”

“Yeah, there’s black ice. You should take it slow.” Jimmy handed Francis his license and registration.

“No ticket?”

“Not tonight.” Trooper Swansea flicked off his flashlight. He was just a shadow in the road. “Listen, I know I was a handful as a kid. I want to thank you for not taking any of my shit.”

“I had worse, Jimmy.”

“Really?”

“No, I’m just lying to make you feel better.”

Jimmy laughed softly. He patted the roof of Francis’s car. “You take it easy, Mr. Brandt.”

“You too, Jim.” Francis put the car in gear and pulled carefully back onto the highway. In his rearview mirror the flashing blue lights went dark and there were only the headlights of Trooper Swansea growing smaller and smaller till Francis was alone. He drove a long while, it seemed. He kept the radio off.

Mr. B.

How many times in his adult life had he heard grown men and women call him that? And nearly always with respect and affection. He’d be in the grocery store or walking down the street—even in this beach town he’d retired to—or else at the mall to buy a new belt or socks, and he’d pass a graying man or woman whose eyes would come alive and they’d smile widely and wave as if they were still kids. “Hey, Mr. B.!”

Sometimes they’d keep walking, but more often they’d stop and want to chat. If they were doing well (employed, married, still reasonably healthy), they seemed to want to point all that out to him. If they were not doing well (divorced, unemployed, maybe had gained a lot of weight or smoked and drank too much), they did not stop him at all, or if they did, it was a brief conversation where they deflected his questions with vague generalities, or else they tried to talk about their son or daughter whom Francis had also taught.

Walking away from these run-ins, Francis often felt he’d been awarded a mantle of respect he just did not deserve. There were all those years he’d been hungover in class, his mouth dry, his head being squeezed by a large invisible hand, the sea of adolescents before him a blur of flesh and denim he saw only as his tormentors. Then he’d glimpse a girl looking at him. Her eyes would be focused, her lips parted in some kind of private concentration on whatever it was he was trying to tell them, and he’d take a deep breath and wipe the cool sweat from his forehead, and work harder. The sober years were far better. Even though they did not come until his fifties, he’d felt like an athlete at the top of his game, each day a challenge he seemed to have the tools and desire to overcome. And driving away from Jimmy Swansea that night, Francis no longer wanted a drink. For while he had no work and his wife had left him behind for all time, he did have something to lose, didn’t he? The largely unearned and undeserved respect of hundreds of mothers and fathers, of wives and husbands, of troopers and janitors and teachers and lawyers and electricians and bar owners, all of whom had once been children sitting at desks covered with ink graffiti, tubes of buzzing fluorescent light above, the beckoning world outside their windows while Mr. B stood before them trying to teach them something about reading and writing and the truth.

“Can I have some of that?” Devon emerges from the hallway barefoot in a T-shirt, her short shorts nearly covered by it. Her hair is wet and combed back from her face so that she looks both older and younger.

“Of course.” Francis starts to stand.

“I’ll get it, Uncle.” She breezes past him, smelling of shampoo and clean cotton, and he sits back down and takes the printed page from the GED website and folds it in two. No essays on important goals for now.

She sets a glass of ice on the table in front of Beth’s place. It’s the center chair facing the French door out to the yard, and Devon pours herself tea from the carafe.

“Sugar?” He holds a spoon out toward her.

“No, I’m good.”

“I know you are.”

She smiles, but her eyes seem to darken as she rests the carafe on the table and sits. She nods at the papers before him. “L.A.?”

“Yeah, but we’re going to skip all the rules for now. I just want you to write something.”

“What?”

“An essay. It’ll be part of the test.”

“About what?”

“They’ll give you an assigned topic, Devon, so you need practice with that.”

“You’re giving me a topic?”

He nods at her and smiles. “I am.”

“Do I have to write it right now?”

“Yep. You’ll have forty-five minutes.”

She looks out the window, squints at the sun on the yarrow and asters against the fence. “You know I don’t even want to do this.”

“You’ll thank me later, Devy. At least college will remain an option for you.”

“I’ll never go to college.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I hate school.”

“Not when you were little. You used to run up to me with your report cards. Nothing but A’s.”

She glances at him, her eyes incredulous and resigned, as if she sees just what she thought she would. It makes him feel old.

“Let’s just get this over with.”

“All right.”

“Well? What’s my topic?”

He has no idea what to say. But he opens his mouth and begins to speak. “I want you to write about something bad that’s happened to you, something you wish did not happen but you ended up learning a lot from it anyway.”

She rests her finger on the lip of the glass. “Something bad?”

“Yes.”

“What do you mean by bad?” Her chin is low. She’s looking at him as if he’s just revealed something bad about
himself
, and he can see his mistake. She thinks he’s trying to draw her out, to tell him things Marie in her emails has alluded to without any real specifics, mainly the depression Marie fears she’s passed on to her daughter.

“I’ll leave that to you. Anything from burning a batch of cookies to whatever comes, but make it honest and don’t skimp on the details.”

“Cookies?”
There’s a patronizing but mischievous light in her eyes, and he feels them both shift back onto safer ground.

“Brownies then.”

“I need my headphones. I can’t write without music.”

“They won’t be allowed during the test, Devon.”

“I hate this.”

“I know.” He pushes toward her a notebook, pencil, and pen. He peers at his watch, and he ignores her bare foot beginning to tap under the table. “Begin . . .
now
.”

S
HE WANTS A CIGARETTE.
She hasn’t for a while, but she does now. Outside the glass doors, Francis waters flowers with a hose. He looks so much older in the sunlight, his shoulders slightly hunched, his eyebrows bushy and white. She stares down at the open notebook. She keeps tapping her heel on the carpet. With no music in her head, there’s too much in her head: Trina’s Facebook page. The word
WHORE
under the picture of Devon at a pool party. It might have been at home, it could have been at the Welches’, but it was last summer, her in that red bikini, one arm around Davey Price, the other Rick Battastini. They had just lifted her up, and she liked this picture because even with her legs in the air, her body leaning forward, her stomach looked flat and tanned, and all three of them were laughing and two seconds later Davey and Rick tossed her backwards into the pool, but Trina didn’t take that picture.

Trina, who’d been her best friend since they were twelve. Half-Italian like her, her breasts were already showing in seventh grade, and by freshman year they were big, her waist small, her hair black and curly while Devon’s was long and too straight, her breasts small, her hips like a boy’s so she ran faster in track and would’ve gotten stuck going only to lower classmen jock parties if it weren’t for Trina who dated seniors like Bobby Connors. He worked and drove an almost new Sentra and would pick them up down in Lafayette Square. Trina had told her mother she was watching movies at Devon’s and Devon had told her mother she was watching movies at Trina’s, and Trina would sit up front with Bobby, his black Nike cap sideways on his head, his whiskers shaved into a chin strap like a West Coast rapper. He was big from lifting weights, but his blue eyes looked sweet even when he was trying to look badass.

His best friend Luke McDonough was almost always in the backseat. He had blond hair he gelled into a sideways flow across his forehead, and he was constantly chewing gum, texting someone as she climbed in, smiling at her though his eyes never really seemed to see her. Gangsta rap would be shouting out from Bobby’s speakers, and Bobby would be driving before Devon had even buckled up, something she stopped doing once she noticed Trina never did.

It was always about the house parties. They’d cruise from one to the next, sometimes hitting three or four in one night. They’d pass vodka nips around because you could toss them out the window if you got pulled over and vodka didn’t stay on your breath like other things did. Some parties were in quiet neighborhoods or culs-de-sac, and they had to keep the noise down for the cops. But the best ones were in houses in the woods or out on Whittier Lake, Luke McDonough’s place when his mother and father were away for the night. His father sold computers or something, and his mother worked in a bank and they had a pool and a boathouse with a motorboat in it, though Luke never let anybody take it out, even when he was shit-faced.