Shoulder the Sky (10 page)

“Yes.” I stared at the black lipstick marks Lilly had left on the white cup. It made the cup look like it had a moustache.

“So things were pretty bad with Jake?”

“Don't make me even think about it.”

“Just thought you might want to talk.”

“Jake is past tense.”

“That's very grammatical.”

“It's not about grammar, ding dong. Let's not talk about him. Or me. Let's talk about Martin. How are you?”

It was like my sister had just arrived back from an extended visit to the evil empire of Jake. I didn't quite know how to react. “I'm doing okay,” I said. “Dave's been helping me a lot.”

“You still do some pretty peculiar stuff.”

“It's my age.”

“What were you doing digging around in Mom's old flower bed at eleven o'clock the other night? That was pretty creepy. I thought maybe you had like killed someone, chopped them up into little pieces, and were burying the pieces in the garden.”

“Right,” I said and sipped my cappuccino. I couldn't understand why she'd make something like that up. But then sisters like mine were hard to figure out. I decided to change the subject. “I think they fired Mr. Miller.”

“He was my favourite teacher in the school.”

“He lost it in class after Scott Rutledge got killed.”

“We should go see him.”

“Can we do that?”

“Sure.”

“All right. I think Darrell should come with us.”

“The Egg Man?”

“He doesn't get out of the house much.”

We looked Mr. Miller up in the phone book and tried calling but didn't get an answer. We picked up Darrell and went anyway. We rang and we knocked. No answer. But there was music coming from the house. Loud metal music. We waited for a lull between tunes and hammered hard on the door. It finally opened.

The heavy metal mud wrestling math teacher was home alone. He had been drinking. “Let me turn down the music,” he said. “Come in.”

Mr. Miller was wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants. He hadn't shaved for a couple of days. The house smelled like beer. “We came over to say hi,” Lilly said.

“Things are a bit of a mess,” he said apologetically, picking up some music and wrestling magazines from the sofa so we could sit down. The room looked like thieves or vandals had trashed it.

“I'm sorry to hear they kicked you out of school,” Darrell blurted out.

Mr. Miller rubbed his face. “Oh, that. I've always been a little too emotional, I guess. People expect that just because I'm big and play that macho image thing that I don't hurt easily. But inside, I'm like china.” He started a zigzag trek around the room, picking up crushed beer cans. He had an armload of them and looked at us like he didn't know what to do next, so
Lilly went into the kitchen and came out with a black garbage bag.

“You should recycle those,” Darrell offered up.

“Yeah, Darrell, I will. I promise.”

“How are you feeling?” Lilly asked Mr. Miller. I was kind of shocked that she was trying again to be helpful.

“I'm working it out, I think. I liked Scott. I just hated seeing a kid get wasted like that for no reason.”

“Life sucks,” Lilly said. It was a favoured motto of hers and Jake's.

“And then you freaking die,” Mr. Miller said, dumping his armload of crushed beer cans into the bag.

“Are you going to appeal your dismissal?”

“I don't know. I haven't figured that out yet. Maybe I should move on from teaching.”

“No way,” I said.

“Why? You think that it matters? You think it does any good? Kids like me because I'm a good entertainer. That's me. Show biz. But that's all.”

Lilly pulled out a pack of gum, opened it, and flipped a piece into her mouth in that way she has of doing it. Then she offered a piece to Mr. Miller. He fumbled with the wrapper and put the gum in his mouth. “The year I had you for math, I have to say you were the only teacher I had who wasn't ugly and ignorant.”

“Gee thanks.”

“When my sister says that, she means that, Mr. Miller.”

Then Darrell cleared his throat and broke our code of silence by telling Mr. Miller and Lilly about our discussion. “Martin and I both agreed we'd change places with Scott — retroactively speaking — even though he's now dead and we're still alive.”

Mr. Miller looked startled. “That's not good. In fact, it's a little scary.”

“I'm still seeing the shrink,” I said.

“My brother needs all the help he can get,” my sister said.

“And I'm working things out in my own way,” Darrell added. “I don't quite have the emotional baggage Martin has.”

Mr. Miller looked halfway between stunned and bewildered. Lilly took the opportunity to say, “There are a lot of messed up kids at that school. And you understand them. Some teachers just go there to do a job and get paid. You were there to do more.”

“I tried but it didn't seem to do any good.”

“You probably couldn't tell if you did any good,” Darrell explained, “unless you could leap ahead ten years and see those students. Then you'd know for sure if you had an impact. If we had time travel, you could do that.”

“Look at me,” Lilly said. “You had an impact on my life. You really did. Because of you I want to be a
teacher. I'm going to go to university and get an education degree.” Lilly was lying, of course, but it was a lie generated out of kindness.

Mr. Miller looked at the guitar hanging on the wall. “I was thinking about the band, a reunion, maybe going back on the road. We had some good times, you know. I used to be one hell of a guitar player.”

“You still are, Mr. Miller,” I said.

Stuff That May or May Not Be Important

Rollo May says that if you put a man in a cage, the first thing he does is get angry. He shouts or refuses to eat and rattles the bars of his cage. But sooner or later, he quiets down and begins to accept his fate. He gets a hollow look about him. After a while, his anger shifts to mere resentment and before long he starts to lose his feelings of rebellion. Worse yet, he eventually considers himself responsible for his predicament. After that there is not much hope, perhaps even if he is freed from the cage.

Emerso

Stuff

The Great Pyramid is aligned almost perfectly north-south and east-west. The guys who lined it up that way took their directions from the stars. The limestone blocks were cut from cliffs with copper saws and dragged to their destination. Most of the damn thing is granite, though, and somebody had to chip away at it with tools made of harder rocks.

The granite blocks weighed about fifty tons each and it took two million of them to make the whole structure. The blocks were dragged along on a kind of causeway affair. They say 170 men could haul one block. There would be a guy or a whole bunch of guys with pitchers of some kind of greasy
stuff that would lubricate the track ahead to make things at least a little bit easier. Then the stones had to be shoved up a ramp and put into place.

The story goes that everyone was really proud of their hard-ass jobs — the block chippers, the draggers, the guys with the pitchers full of whatever pouring slimy goo to create a monument. They worked their hands to the bone and some got crushed along the way and some got really messed-up backs. A bunch of them got bit by snakes in the Nile. Some probably got depressed because they didn't believe it was all worthwhile.

It was probably better than wasting your time watching television, I'll admit, but it was like another mistake of history, a monumental waste of time.

Herodotus, who came along a mere two thousand years later, wrote about this big stone bozo of a building in the ancient city of Cheops. He did some research and learned about the male slaves who did most of the work. And where were the women? you might wonder. How come they didn't have to help drag rocks? Answer — because the slaves thought it was an honour to do the labour. Go figure. Anyway, Herodotus somehow determined what the Egyptian hackers, haulers, and greasers were eating: radishes, onions, and garlic. One whole shit-load of vegetarian food.

A hundred thousand men worked over twenty years to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

I'm thinking that H. must have left out some of the vittles consumed on the job. Maybe they used papyrus to make garlic and radish sandwiches or something. No mayo in those days, for sure. So you have a work crew of 170 very proud, shirtless Egyptians taking lunch break and it's as hot as the planet Venus. They chow down on their veggies and discuss how cool it is to be hauling big-ass rocks to make a tomb monument for whatever pharaoh it was. (Sorry, I can't quite remember his name, which shows you how well big rock edifices work to preserve the memory of despots.)

After lunch when they got back to shoving their prize 50,000 pounder, can you imagine the level of flatulence amongst the boys? A veritable cloud of radish, onion, and garlic farts surely must have been downright visible hovering over the scene. But there would be no vampires for sure. They didn't have any problem whatsoever with vampires in those days.

And whenever you mention pyramids, someone starts thinking aliens were involved. Like this makes a lot of sense — you invent faster-than-light-speed travel, take your shuttle to a distant planet named Earth, and then help a bunch of vegetarians move rocks that are way too big for them to be messing with in the first place. I think not.

And if these aliens showed up and saw crews of 170 men shoving a stone and simultaneously farting radishonion-garlic
farts, do you really think they would hang around? I mean, the Egyptians didn't even have pulleys. They thought they were like rocket scientists because some brilliant pharaoh pleaser had suggested the work would go easier if you employed the greaser guy with the pitcher of gobs to slime up the skid.

If the aliens showed up then, they left with ideas about better things to do.

What history teaches us, as usual, is that most of the things people spent their lives doing were a waste of time.

Napoleon showed up in 1798 at the pyramid in Cheops; he was trying to conquer the world at the time and somehow found himself in Egypt. He was impressed, of course, because he thought there were enough stones in the pyramid to build a stone wall around France. And of course, he loved the idea of some ruler who could boss around thousands if not millions of his citizens. (“Okay, you guys over there. Go shove big rocks for twenty years.”

“Yes, your dignity, we'd be honoured.”)

Today we build Wal-Marts and video stores in shopping malls that have expected life spans of twenty years. After that, they get torn down or are turned into indoor go-cart tracks.

Emerso