Spooner (59 page)

T
hey gave Calmer the office that had been Cowhurl’s, and the secretary who had been Cowhurl’s, Alma, and authority to interview
anyone in the district, up to and including members of the board themselves, as well as access to personnel files and all
the district’s financial records.

It led to misunderstandings, his moving into Cowhurl’s office, and Calmer would rather have taken his own old office, but
it was already occupied, as it happened, by a woman who’d been Lobby Johnson’s assistant principal when Calmer was demoted
into classroom teaching. The woman was one of Cowhurl’s bunch and had written a letter for him claiming Calmer’s lack of organizational
skills was devastating faculty morale, and then written several others along the same lines that were signed by various members
of the staff.

The office itself was vast and yawning, a place for meetings maybe, not for work, and likewise the desk. Calmer hadn’t seen
a shine like that since the visit to the funeral home to pick out Lily’s box. There were no bookshelves in the room, or books,
not even a dictionary, and the secretary didn’t seem to understand who Calmer was or why he was there. She also appeared unsure
of what stage of mourning the place was supposed to be in, and answered the phone in a hushed voice, as if family members
might be just out of earshot, saying good-bye to Merle.

He made do with what he had. He brought in a few books and some copies of the
Atlantic
and the
New Yorker
, and put up a map of the world on the wall opposite the bank of windows, and hung his Think sign on the wall behind his desk.
Alma was afraid of him, afraid of everything, and for a long time she started whenever he stepped out of the office. He saw
that she was uncomfortable being asked to do things and preferred to be told. Cowhurl had called her when he wanted her and
never looked up from his desk when he gave her orders:
Call Mrs. Cowhurl and tell her I’ll be late for supper.

Calmer would say, “Alma, would you see if you can get me Lobby Johnson?”

In Alma’s long experience the nicer the boss was to you, the closer you were to being fired. And under this cloud her days
passed, as they had always passed at work, but then something strange: slowly, almost unnoticeably, she began to think of
Calmer in a different cast than any of the others, began grudgingly to trust him, and then to like him, and then one morning
found herself looking forward to his coming through the office door.

Calmer worked carefully, beginning with a simple time chart he drew of all the standardized testing the district had done
over the last dozen years, horizontal lines across the top designating months and years, and vertical components dropping
out of them at regular intervals, showing the test scores, school by school. Names were added, teachers and students alike,
and sometimes one of these names was familiar and would pull him off his spot to some other time and place, and he would occupy
the old landscape a little while, complete with Lily and his old job, and realize only later, perhaps walking into the empty
house, where he was on the time chart himself.

Before beginning the interviews, he built probability models for all the episodes of aberrant testing and could tell you,
within ten million or so, what the odds of an entire class of remedial math students scoring in the ninety-ninth percentile
of a standardized test were. The process was mostly trial and error, something like guessing your shoe size and then trying
on the shoe, but it imitated the sound of scientific research, even to science teachers, and put together with the now undecipherable
chart on the wall, it provoked confessions right and left.

Still, there were mornings Calmer could not remember why he was getting dressed for work or what work it was he was supposed
to do. One afternoon he walked into his old office instead of Cowhurl’s, and the current occupant—he had no idea who the woman
was—dissolved into a fit of weeping and began some kind of confession of her own, and Calmer had no idea about that either,
and while she was still sobbing he made his apologies for the interruption and left.

Another day he caught himself backing into his old spot in the faculty parking lot of the junior high school where he’d taught
English for the five years before he’d retired. He smiled at that one, the absentminded professor.

In the end—five and a half weeks of interviews, 116 subjects—he built two more models, one giving the district every benefit
of the doubt and one making the opposite case, and from these figures, he calculated best-case and worst-case scenarios of
the school district’s standing statewide without the cheating. Either result—the district in the top 40 percent of the state’s
schools or right in the middle—was ruinous politically, Flatt County being the richest, best-equipped, best-paying school
district in the state, voters expected the best test-takers to come out of it and any bond issue the school board might have
been contemplating for the next five years was now dead in its tracks.

It took Calmer two more weeks to recheck his work and write the report. Thirty-one pages, single-spaced. Alma probably could
have polished it off in a couple of hours—when she got going out there it sounded like a hailstorm on the roof—and had knocked
gently on his open door several times that day, offering to take the job off his hands. He saw that she was getting used to
him now and was both anxious and resigned at the prospect of his leaving, knowing that work would go back to what it had always
been when they brought in Cowhurl’s replacement.

As for the report, Calmer had promised Larsson confidentiality and was good to his word, and so he typed it himself, all day
and half of the next. He called Larsson then and heard the flat dread in the man’s voice when Calmer told him it was finished.

“I’ll have them cut your final check first thing in the morning,” Larsson said.

It came back to Calmer that he was being paid. A hundred, was that it? The number sounded right, and Christ knew he could
use an extra hundred, but when he thought about that, he couldn’t remember what he needed it for. Maybe something for Lily,
he thought. Maybe something for Lily.

A moment passed, Calmer and Larsson each thinking his own thoughts, and finally Larsson broke the silence.

“No one sees it but you and me,” he said.

“That was the agreement.”

Another long pause, and then, “How bad is it, Calmer?”

O
ut of long habit, Calmer woke up early, an hour at least before dawn, and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. Two fried
egg sandwiches, pickles, some peas he’d set on a shelf in the refrigerator. There was an open glass of orange juice in there
too, and he paused, thinking of having a little vodka with it, but there was a long, busy day in front of him and he didn’t
want to start it with a logjam in his thinker.

He sat down to organize the day’s work, but nothing came.

He noticed the folder lying on the counter and remembered typing something yesterday. Something long. He stared at it a moment,
blank, and a moment passed and it all came back to him at once. The Cheever story, the one about the man swimming home in
the suburbs. Calmer felt a small wash of relief; the memory lapses were beginning to worry him.

He stared for a moment at the folder, thinking of the beautiful piece of work inside—fantastic and ordinary at the same time,
seamless, unpredictable sentences. And it occurred to him that something as ordinary and fantastic as the story itself had
happened as he’d copied the words, in those moments they were in his own hands, taking them off one page and transcribing
them onto another, which is to say that for a little while they had been his in the same way that they must have been Cheever’s
when he first wrote them. The thought crossed his mind to have the class try the same thing. Not the whole story but a page
or two. Old-fashioned, but what could it hurt?

He picked up the folder, thinking that he’d better get going if he meant to Xerox twenty-three copies before class.

Three hours came and went and found Calmer sitting casually at his old spot on the corner of a desk situated at the front
of room 110 at Toebox Junior High School.

At ten minutes after eight, the classroom door opened and the school’s principal, whose name Calmer didn’t remember, walked
in, a young woman a step or two behind. Ten minutes previous he’d escorted this same woman out, thinking she was a substitute
teacher who’d stumbled into the wrong classroom.

As the interruption came, Calmer was discussing the style differences between short stories and novels, and was pleased with
the way things were going so far, the class unusually attentive for the first period of the day.

Then the door opened and he saw the principal and the young woman and remembered the startled expression on her face a few
minutes earlier. He’d said, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here,” and escorted her out the door and pointed the way to the principal’s
office, and assured her that someone there would know where she was supposed to go. Afterwards, he’d thought he heard her
running up the hall.

The principal moved in closer and asked quietly if he might have a word with Calmer outside, and Calmer followed him back
through the door and into the hall to sort out the misunderstanding.

He gave the principal no trouble at all, leaving peacefully, apologizing for the mistake, inside out with embarrassment. Still,
he rode an old, sweet, familiar feeling all the way home, the feeling of having a class of kids in the palm of his hand, and
was as surprised as anybody when he stepped into Larsson’s office later that afternoon to deliver the report and found him
apoplectic. He threw Calmer’s check at him across the desk.

“I hope you realize what you’ve done,” he said.

“Actually…” Calmer said, and it was a day or two before it came back to him, that he had in fact distributed to each student
in room 110 of Toebox Junior High the same thirty-one-page report he’d given Larsson, detailing the district’s long-term and
ongoing cheating scandal on standardized tests, and the theft of $177,500 from the district’s discretionary account, traceable
to the office of the superintendent, Dr. Merle Cowhurl, D.Ed.