Rook: Snowman (2 page)

He walked slowly between the lines of desks, looking one by one at his eighteen students. White, black, Hispanic, Chinese: all of them disadvantaged not only by poverty and social class, but by basic reading problems and stutters and word-blindness and a lack of concentration that would have embarrassed a gnat.

“Better still,” he said, “you could invent your own description of the way I look. You could coin a new
phrase, so that you conjure up in other people’s minds a vivid picture that describes me even more clearly than a photograph. In fact, since I not only look like shit but I feel like shit, that’s going to be your first project for this morning. Describe my hungover appearance in not more than twelve well-chosen words.”

There was a general groan of complaint and somebody threw a paper pellet at Washington and hit him on top of the head. “Keep your mo’ close nex’ time, short-ass.”

Jim returned to his desk, tucking in his shirt. Suzie Wintz winked at him and said, “Hi, Mr Rook. Looks like you partied pretty hard last night.” Suzie always looked fashion-magazine perfect. She had heaps of curly blonde hair and huge mint-green eyes and a permanent pout. She always described herself as ‘trainee mode’. But for all of her confidence and all of her sensuality, she could barely write more than three consecutive sentences, one of the most memorable of which had been ‘Shakespeare was balled and rote plas like Titanic’.

“There are three occasions in his life when a man is duty-bound to party,” Jim told her, sorting through his homework. “The first is when his voice breaks. The second is when he’s just about to get married. The third is when he realizes that life is one-third getting yourself together and two-thirds slowly falling apart again.”

“You just made that up.”

“Yes. Clever of me, wasn’t it? Now
you
make up a good descriptive phrase for the way I look, just like I asked you to.”

He turned his attention at last to the boy slouching in his chair two desks behind Linda Starewsky. At first sight, he looked unusually mature and handsome compared with most of Jim’s students. At this age, most of them still had small
heads and big noses and protruding ears and constellations of bright red spots. Jim called them ‘Quarks’ after the alien character in
Star Trek
. But this boy had a chiseled, adult-looking face, with high cheekbones and a straight nose and a very firm jawline. His black hair was cut
en brosse
and he had startlingly blue eyes. He wore a very white T-shirt with
Anchorage, Alaska
emblazoned on the front, washed-out blue jeans and very expensive Timberland boots. He had an olive-skinned sulkiness about him which put Jim in mind of a young Elvis Presley.

“So, you’re Jack Hubbard,” said Jim, approaching him and holding out his hand. “Welcome to the wonderful world of English and Special Needs.”

Jack eyed him up and down, and then reluctantly took his hand and shook it. “Okay,” he said.

Tarquin Tree put up his hand and said, “Okay if I write this like a rap?”

Jim turned to Tarquin, a skinny boy in a T-shirt with yellow and black hoops, like a bee. “You can write it any way you like, Tarquin, so long as it’s original, descriptive, and doesn’t rhyme ‘rap’ with ‘crap’.”

“I do a thing like that, Mr Rook? You won’t never see me do a thing like that! If you ever see me rhyme rap with crap, you got my permission to give me a slap. You can slap me so hard, you can give me a hit, I won’t never use no words like—”

“
Tarquin
,” said Jim, pointing his finger at him. Tarquin was instantly silent, although his hand kept flapping on the table in rap-time. Jim had told this year’s class that his finger was a phaser, set to kill. He didn’t point it very often, but when he did, they knew that he was serious. It meant
that’s it, you’ve gone over the line
.

“Get here okay?” Jim asked Jack. “You’re living over on La Grange, aren’t you?”

“Pico. My dad’s rented this house. I don’t know how long for.”

“He’s working here, isn’t he?”

“Finishing off a TV special, all about Alaska.”

“And what happens when he’s finished doing that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll stay, maybe we won’t.”

“You always follow your dad around?”

“Don’t got a choice. My mom died six years ago. And traveling around, that’s his work.”

“You must be finding the weather a little different.”

“It’s okay in Anchorage, this time of year. But up in Yukon-Charley it gets pretty cold.”

“Well, I hope you’ll have the opportunity to tell us all about it. How much of a chance did you get to study, up in Yukon-Charley?”

Jack shrugged. “We had books to read. Like encyclopedias and stuff.”

“What was the last book you read?”

“
McGeary’s Snowmobile Maintenance
.”

“Say
what
?” said Washington, with a hoot, but Jim gave him a look which meant,
remember your first day, when you had to tell me what
you’d
been reading
?

“How about novels, or poetry, or plays?”

Jack shook his head. “Only this one novel,
The Process
, about a guy who crosses the Sahara Desert and goes out of his brain.”

“That sounds cool. Do you still have a copy?”

“It’s probably packed up someplace, but yes, I guess.”

“That’s a pretty empty spot, the Sahara. Just like Yukon-Charley, I guess. Did you associate with any of the feelings in the book? I mean, the isolation, that kind of thing?”

Jack lowered his eyes and thought for a moment. Then he raised them, and said, “You’re never alone, wherever you are.”

Jim made a little circling gesture with his hand, to indicate that he wanted to explain himself more fully.

“You can be right out in the snow, hundreds of miles from the nearest trading-post. Nothing but white wherever you look. White, white, white, until you’ve got stuff dancing in front of your eyes, and you’re sick of it. But you aint never alone. Never.”

There was something in Jack’s voice that led Jim to think that learning to deal with his isolation up in Alaska must have been one of the most critical experiences in his life so far.
White, white, white, until you’re sick of it
. He hadn’t heard one of his students speak so vehemently about anything for a very long time. Not since Waylon Price had gone looking for his missing sister one night, and found her in a rundown house off Melrose, dead of an overdose.

“Well,” said Jack, “you’ve come fresh into this class today but it shouldn’t take you any time to settle. Rook’s First Law is that everybody in this class has to be friends and help each other, because Rook’s Second Law states that nobody is stupider than anybody else, even though I have to admit that some people are really working on it. You’re allowed to laugh at each other’s mistakes, because that’s what it’s like in the real world outside of this classroom, everybody laughs at your mistakes, and that’s a fact of life you’re just going to have to learn to deal with.”

Jack picked up his pen and said, “Do you want me to … describe you? Like everybody else is?”

“Sure. This is the first time you’ve seen me. Maybe you’ll come up with something really fresh.”

“Yeah, like you look like fresh shit,” put in Ray Krueger, and then ducked his head down, in the hope that Jim hadn’t seen him.

“Ray,” said Jim, “I have a little chore for you. I want you to go to the men’s room and pull out a hundred sheets of
toilet tissue. I want you to write on every single one, ‘This is the only place for shit.’”

“You’re kidding me, Mr Rook. That’s going to take me for ever.”

“If you argue, I’ll make it ‘excrement’ instead.”

Ray reluctantly stood up and made his way to the classroom door, accompanied by whistles and clapping and Bronx cheers. He was a skinny boy, with bleached-blond hair that flopped around in front of his eyes. He was amazing with animals, sensitive and gentle and intuitive, and he desperately wanted to be a vet. The only trouble was, his English skills were those of an eight-year-old, and he had an alarming tendency to burst out with insults and obscenities, just at the wrong moment. Borderline Tourette’s, the college psychiatrist reckoned.

Ray left the classroom. Jim went over to his desk and dropped back into his chair. He started to sort out all of the homework that he had dropped in the parking-lot.

Tarquin Tree had written, ‘Hamlet goes halfway nuts because he’s the only one who knows the truth about who offed his father. The only way he can get his revenge is by offing King Claudius. He offs Claudius, but he gets offed, too, on account of the swords are poisoned. So the moral is that if your mother’s a fox watch out for your uncle.’

He thought: he’s getting there. At least he’s read the play and understood it. And even if he can’t fully express himself in writing, he’s had a try.

He smeared his hand over his face as if he could smooth it out and rearrange it, but it didn’t make him feel any better. He probably had one or two Anacin tablets in his desk drawer, so he pulled it open to have a look. Immediately, he shouted out, “
Ah
!”

Crouched right in the front of it, right on top of his college diary, was a huge green furry rat. God, it must have gotten
itself trapped in his drawer somehow, at the end of last semester, and slowly suffocated, and then rotted.

“Hey, what’s the matter, Mr Rook?” asked Washington, half rising to his feet. “You look like – you look like you seen a ghost.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Nobody panic.” Jim picked up his mechanical pencil and gave the rat a tentative prod. “Kyle, go call Clarence, would you? Tell him to bring his protective gloves and a plastic trash bag.”

It was incredible that the rat’s fur had grown so long and such a poisonous shade of green. He prodded it again, and to his disgust it fell apart, revealing its whitish, semi-liquefied insides, and a membrane of transparent green slime. The smell was appalling, like overripe cheese. Then he suddenly realized that it
was
overripe cheese. This wasn’t a rat at all, but a cambazola and lettuce ciabatta. He had hurriedly dropped it into his desk drawer on the last day of last semester when Karen Goudemark, the new biology teacher, had come into his classroom to introduce herself.

Like the Queen of Denmark, Karen Goudemark was a fox. Brunette, pretty, confident, with a bosom that you had to make a deliberate effort not to look at, because you were both professionals, after all. And gorgeous lips. And great ankles. You didn’t greet a woman who looks like that with a messy half-eaten cheese roll in your hand.

To a chorus of exaggerated revulsion, Jim lifted the ciabatta out of his desk, balanced on his diary, and dropped it into his wastebin.

“Something sure is rotten in the state of Denmark,” said Billyjo Muntz, flapping her hand in front of her nose.

“An extra credit for a spontaneous and appropriate quotation from the Bard,” said Jim.

“I got one! I got one!” said Joyce Capistrano. “Act 1, scene 2 – ‘the memory be green’!”

“Okay, an extra credit for you, too. But let’s get back to work, shall we? I’ve got your homework to sort out.”

He was just about to sit down again when Ray walked back into the classroom. He didn’t have any toilet-paper, and he was frowning as if he couldn’t understand what was happening to him.

“Ray?” said Jim. “Ray – is everything all right?”

Ray stared at him. “I went to the guys’ room,” he said.

“That’s right. And?”

“And … I think you’d better take a look for yourself.”

Two

Jim stepped out of the classroom just as Clarence came along the corridor wearing a livid red pair of industrial gloves and carrying a heavy-duty plastic bag. “What’s going down now, Mr Rook? You only been back here ten minutes and already there’s an emergency crisis.”

“Tautology,” said Jim.

“What’s that? Contagious?”

“Tautology means using two words when one word will do. Like emergency crisis.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly precisely what it is. So what’s going down here?”

“I don’t know yet. I thought I had a rat in my desk but it wasn’t, but Ray went to the mensroom and there seems to be some kind of a problem there.”

“You had a rat? Why are you walking so fast?”

“I always walk fast. It wasn’t a rat, it was a cheese sandwich.”

“Easy mistake to make, I guess.”

“When they rot, Clarence, it isn’t easy to tell the difference between a human being and a pig.”

“I thought you said it was a rat.”

“It wasn’t. It was a cheese sandwich.”

They arrived outside the door to the mensroom and stopped. Ray, who had been following close behind them, pointed to the small circular window in the middle of it.
The glass had always been frosted; but now it was covered in sparkling ice-crystals, too. Jim reached up and touched it, and his fingertip made a small melting dimple in them.

He laid his hand flat against the door. It was so cold that there was a patina of fog over it. When he took his hand away, he left a palm and fingerprints on it.

“You went inside?” he asked Ray.

Dean nodded his head wildly up and down. “You can’t believe it, Mr Rook! It’s like a goddamned ice-cave in there!”

Jim said, “Second time this morning.”

“For what?” asked Clarence.

“Unnatural cold. The water-fountain outside Geography Four was frozen solid.”

“That’s impossible.”

“I don’t care. I saw it. And what about this? You feel this door. That’s impossible, too. This is the second-hottest day of the year so far.”

“What do you think it is, Mr Rook?” asked Ray. “Second Ice Age, maybe?”

“I don’t have any idea,” said Jim. Whatever it was, he felt so hungover that he wished it weren’t happening. It was going to be enough of a struggle getting through a normal college day without an ‘emergency crisis’. He pushed the mensroom door, and it opened up with a squeaking, cracking sound. Inside, there was a dense frozen fog, so that it was almost impossible to see, but he cautiously stepped forward, waving his arms from side to side to clear it. Clarence came up behind him, but Ray stayed in the doorway, reluctant to come any further.