Rooster (2 page)

Instead, Gloria had said nothing. She accepted Principal Helmsley's revisions without comment or complaint and returned to her office to make the required phone calls, beginning first with Common House, the town of Winston's home for adults with special needs, both physical and mental, where her proposal was enthusiastically accepted.

“We've had so many budget cuts here lately,” the program coordinator, a woman named Pam Yuler, said. “We'll take anyone you can give us.”

“That's about who you'll get,” said Gloria, not intending to be smart, but feeling no guilt for saying it.

“Why don't we start him or her in the Games Room? We hold spelling bees there. We play musical chairs. Indoor golf.”

“It'll be a he. Do you have anything else?” Gloria could not see Rooster in a Games Room filled with people who were either physically unable to help themselves, or mentally incapable of much more than reading a children's book or spelling their own names, if that.

There was a pause as Mrs. Yuler thought for a moment. “Let me talk to the floor staff. They're a bit more in touch with some of these things than I am. Can I have your number?”

Gloria had given her the number on her cell phone as well as in her office. She knew she'd be spending some time in her car over lunch. The car was her refuge during stressful times like this: a safe place to which she could go for comfort, peace and the intoxicating smell of new leather.

She closed her eyes to ease the strain on her head, then opened them with a start when something banged against her windshield. It was Rooster, his face pressed tight against the glass, smiling at her with the wide-eyed delirium of a homicidal maniac.

Gloria suppressed the urge to scream and rolled down her window.

“Scared you, didn't I?” Rooster beamed with delight. At least his friends weren't with him, she thought. That would have made a bad situation even worse.

“Yes, you did, a little. What can I do for you, Rooster?” Gloria's heart rate slowly began to settle. “Get your hands off the car, please. I just had it waxed.”

“You can tell,” said Rooster, running his fingers along the side panels. “She's smooth.”

“What do you want, Rooster?”

“That's what I'm here to ask you. Mrs. Jarvis in the office said you wanted to see me about something. I remembered seeing you out here daydreaming in your car, so I thought I'd come back and check.”

Gloria sighed and briefly shook her head. “I wasn't daydreaming. I was relaxing and recharging.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I like that. I'll have to remember that for math tomorrow. ‘Honest, Mr. Armstrong. I wasn't daydreaming. I was relaxing and recharging.'”

“You should try to stay awake in math tomorrow.

You have a test, as I recall.”

Rooster grimaced as he remembered the test. Then he changed the subject. “So, what did you want me for?”

Gloria had to think for a moment before she could explain. In truth,
she
did not want to see him for anything ever again. It was Sergeant Helmsley who wanted her to see him, and for reasons that Gloria still could not fully understand.

“Can we talk about this tomorrow? How about first thing? Nine o'clock in my office.”

“How about now? I have to study first thing. I have a math test, remember?” Rooster pulled a package of cigarettes from his coat pocket and tapped out a fresh smoke.

“You should study for that tonight.”

The ringing of Gloria's cell phone put a temporary stop to their conversation. It was Mrs. Yuler from Common House. She'd talked to some of the other staff members and they had given her a few more ideas. The kitchen could always use an extra hand, the laundry crew was overwhelmed and the bowling team still needed a supervisor.

“Excuse me?” said Gloria, shooing Rooster and his cigarette smoke away from her car. She cupped her hand over the receiver and hissed at him, “Tomorrow at nine. My office.” Then she returned to Mrs. Yuler. “I didn't hear that last one. What was it again? A bowling team?”

“It's not really a team. We have four people here who like to go bowling. It was their own idea a few years ago. One of them used to bowl quite a bit and she got a few of the others involved. So twice a week we'd put them on the Common House bus and take them down to the bowling alley here in town and they'd have a great time. But we had to stop that with all the cuts we've had this year.”

“What does the supervisor do?”

“Well, he would meet the team down at the alley and see that they all got back. Make sure everyone's okay.”

Gloria thought for a moment.

“That was the job that most of the girls here wanted filled, actually,” Mrs. Yuler said. “They said it would take care of a lot of the trouble they've been having if the Strikers could get back on their feet again.”

“The Strikers?”

“That's what they call themselves. They like to think of themselves as a team.”

Gloria watched Rooster as he drifted across the parking lot, away from the school.

“What kind of trouble could they cause?”

“Oh, the Strikers are a very interesting group. Two of them are extremely loud, some would say obnoxious, which I would tend to agree with, but that's just me. The third one never seems to stop talking, which can get on your nerves, although he's much cheerier than the first two, and the fourth one, Dorothy-Jane-Anne, is the quiet one. She doesn't say much, but she usually creates more chaos than the rest of them put together. And lately, because they haven't been bowling at all, they've been letting their frustrations get the better of them, and it's been causing some problems.”

“Really.” Rooster was no longer in sight.

“Oh, yes. They're quite a bunch. They'd be a challenge for anyone. A real challenge.”

A small smile began to creep across Gloria's lips. Could this be what Mrs. Helmsley was thinking when she revised Gloria's plan?

“I understand you have a real challenge at your end to find a task for.”

“Yes, yes, we do,” said Gloria, still smiling. Then, quickly, she frowned. “How did you know that?”

“I spoke with Judith.”

“You know Judith Helmsley?”

“We play bridge together. I called her this afternoon, just before I called you. It's our bridge night tonight. I had to know if she was coming or not.”

“Did she know about the Strikers?”

“I assume so. I don't know for sure. I know her daughter's been a volunteer here for some time now, so she probably knows something about them.”

“No kidding.”

“Oh, yes. Elma's been here every Sunday afternoon for three or four years. So, I don't know what Judith knows or doesn't know. It's a good idea, though. We could sure use the help, providing he comes.”

“Oh, he will,” said Gloria, with renewed confidence. “We'll be by tomorrow after school. They'll want to meet him first, I'm sure, before they get to work.”

“They'll interview him. That's what they do whenever someone new comes along. They'll sit him down and they'll interview him. I've seen them do it before. It's very entertaining. I hope he makes it through.”

Gloria was beaming when she snapped shut her cell phone. She stepped out of her car with a smile on her face and shut the door. She saw the smudges from Rooster's fingertips all over the side panels and around the front to the hood. She didn't care.

Suddenly she was not upset at all.

2

A
fter leaving Mrs. Nixon, Rooster went for a walk through the ravine. It was his favorite place in Winston. The city had paved the pathway that ran through the trees and along the Winston River three years ago, making it a perfect place for cyclists, skaters, joggers and walkers alike to do their thing.

Rooster took one last pull on his cigarette and flicked the butt into a muddy puddle. He exhaled the smoke through his nose and buried his hands in his jacket pockets.

It was one o'clock and he had nothing to do. That wasn't exactly true. He had school to do, but school had become even more difficult than usual to get up for in recent weeks. The thought of attending classes every day was almost as hard to take as the reality that very soon his days as a student in the Winston public school system would be over.

Rooster himself was only vaguely aware of his predicament. To him, school was the same in grade twelve as it had been since the beginning of junior high: boring, irrelevant, a place to go to get out of the house.

He wrote about these feelings once in a grade eleven essay. The topic had been “If you could change one thing in the world, what would it be?”

Given that there would be quite a rush among my
classmates to end world hunger, stop all wars and provide housing for the homeless, I think I'd tackle a smaller,
yet still significant, issue —make schooling mandatory up
to grade seven. After that, you're on your own.

People like Mrs. Nixon and Mr. Taylor made going to class slightly more tolerable only because they were so easy to tease and so entertaining when they became upset.

Especially Mrs. Nixon. Where they got her from was something he would like to know. She clipped around the hallways in her high heels every day, smiling and saying hi to kids who flipped her the bird as soon as her back was turned. At least Rooster said things to her face.

Principal Helmsley was at the other end of the scale from Mrs. Nixon. She was a monster. No kid in his right mind flipped her the bird, no matter which way her back was turned, because everyone knew she had eyes all around her head.

She also had a daughter, Elma. Rooster and his friends called Elma “Junior” because she was so much like her mother. Elma didn't like that.

“Don't call me Junior,” she would say, her voice booming down the hallway exactly the way her mother's did. “I'm my own person.”

“Okay, Junior,” Rooster said the last time she hollared at them. “We won't call you Junior anymore, Junior.”

Also like her mother, Elma was tough.

One day in gym, during a game of murder ball, she gave Andy Gilmore a bloody nose when she hit him flat in the face with the ball.

“I said nothing above the waist,” cried Mr. Johnston, the gym teacher, holding a towel to Andy's nose.

“He ducked right into it,” said Elma. She was holding a new ball in her hand, looking like she was ready to throw it at someone else.

“He did not duck. He didn't even see it coming.”

“Then he should have ducked.”

Mr. Johnston folded the towel so the bloody part was on the inside. “You do that again, you'll go right down to the office.”

“If I do that again, he won't have a face left,” Elma countered. “And I will if he opens his mouth one more time.”

Aside from his girlfriend, Jolene, Rooster had two very good friends, both of whom he had known since childhood — Dennis Davis, better known as Puffs because of his gigantic puffy hair, and Jayson Cullen, the super-jock of Winston High.

Puffs was a little guy, built like a pillow, with soft stubby arms and legs sticking out. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Puffs, as Rooster called them, were extremely rich and divorced. His father ran his own software business. His mom was a special events organizer. Puffs did work for both of them. He was a computer genius. Last year, with the help of his dad, he set up his own small business, Puffs On Tap, that provided quick, affordable help for the computer-challenged. It quickly made him a ton of money, most of which he invested, also with the help of his dad.

“My dad told me if I keep this up, I'll be a millionaire by the time I'm thirty,” he told Rooster one day on their way to school.

“Why thirty?” said Rooster, who had never had such predictions come his way. “Why not twenty-seven, or thirty-two?”

“Good question. I'll have to ask him.”

Puffs' other passion in life, apart from money and computers, was Gracie Armstrong, a classmate who had thick, wavy brown hair, long shapely legs, a beautiful shiny smile and a twenty-year-old boyfriend named Nick, who picked her up in his convertible every day after school. In the summer, when the sun was out, they drove around Winston with the top down, Gracie's hair flying in the wind like streamers trailing behind a kite.

Jolene hated Gracie and was constantly on Puffs' case about her. “What do you even see in her?”

“Isn't it obvious?”

“She's obnoxious. She's a big mouth in a body that will be smothered in fat by the time she's forty.”

“That gives me twenty-three years.”

“I bet she can't even read,” said Jolene another time.

“And?” said Puffs. “Your point is?”

Jayson was a star in volleyball, basketball, track and rugby. After he graduated, he had full scholarship offers at universities across the country, including one for football from McGill University in Montreal, even though he hadn't played football for two years.