The Taste of Penny (16 page)

Football days, he says.

Football days, I say. Of which tomorrow is one of those.

Listening, he says.

I propose that James and I, tonight and all subsequent football day eves, remove every gate arm on campus for its own protection. I believe this may be a cost-saving maneuver.

Immediate Supervisor tips his head back and mouths some numbers.

You may be onto something, he says. Do it.

So we log some overtime unbolting all sixty-nine gate arms from the mechanisms and after work, like usual, there is no time for the bank. James doesn't bring it up, and I won't bring it up. Instead we sit in the Laundromat opening and closing dryer doors, appreciating the suction of the seals, pulling out the lint screens and admiring their lack of fuzz.

Steve brings bowls of something that looks to be nipples in rice for the three of us from the Korean Grocery. The brown oblongs have little asterisks on one side. I opt out. James eats mine. He pops the things into his mouth like it's a good old time. Steve and James take 15-minute turns in the tanning machine. Their skin tones have achieved the greasy bronze of fried chicken.

I go to visit the Herp girl, who loves to pull the peeling skin from the back of my neck and feed it to the fish. She is giddy about the prospect whenever I come in. Except now, when I push through the door, she cold shoulders me. At the sight of me under the threshold of the still jingling door chimes she reaches for a small puff adder and drapes it around her neck, knowing that I won't approach her like that.

It's an interesting tongue on that necklace, I say from across the store.

She says nothing. She flips through a sea horse catalog and adjusts the puff adder. Normally a bitchy snake, known to hiss and play dead, it's nearly as calm with her as she is with it. I putter around the store, not knowing exactly what to do. I kick the side of one of the black tubs and the alligators' cat eyes meet mine.

Don't disturb them, she says. I actually have a lot of work to do today.

What work? Does any place in this strip mall besides the Korean Grocery do business?

Battery-Mart does fine, she says. Mail order is our bread and butter.

You want to feed the fish? I say, offering her my neck.

Your friend, the tan guy, was in here, she says. He told me about your girlfriend.

What girlfriend?

The one you have.

He tell you he's after her?

He told me you're on-ramp to marry.

I wouldn't say anything like that.

She puts the puff adder in its little cage. I take this as a signal, come closer.

You lied to me Broth Man, she says.

I never said anything.

Your eyes lied for you. And maybe you know a little more than I'd have a deceptor like yourself knowing. She glances at the snakehead aquarium.

Okay, I say, I get the problem here, but understand you could have been the one to break me free of her. You were the only possible chance I've seen.

You may consider yourself, as far as this store is concerned, on the illegal list henceforth. Not to be bought, sold, traded, or tampered with.

She adjusts the top of a tarantula cage, the jumper, and I back away. When the door bells jingle she is back in the sea horse catalog. I go next door and tell James I have a fucking question for him.

Well I have a fucking question for you, he says, massaging some bronzing skin cream into his forearm. Why did you do that today? It's a stupid idea.

It's a win-win.

It's no win-win. It's unnecessary. Anyone can take those gate arms off before the football games. Anyone can do that. Not just you or me. I've got us under control.

You told the Herp Girl I have a girlfriend.

Here's what you don't get, he says. I'm helping you. In every respect, I am always helping you. And it's about time you wised up to that.

 

The next morning we bolt on all sixty-nine gate arms, grabbing us both time-and-a-half and still saving the university over what they would have spent replacing so many. Then the very next day, on the way in, the day we're going to get to the bank and do that thing, no matter what, really, James's gate arm radar is off the charts. Could be 15, 20, he says. But when we walk into the
locker room two cops are there and Immediate Supervisor with a look on his face. The cops put me and James against the lockers. Immediate Supervisor points at James and they let me go and cuff him, march him out. Immediate Supervisor tells me to go wherever it is James told me to go because gate arms are down all over campus and he should know.

They got him on felony destruction of public property, and some other things I didn't know about, vandalism, assault. They didn't even think to consider what vehicles he was driving through the gate arms, which were all stolen—mopeds, and motorcycles and a few beat-up Pontiacs. He had been coming at night all this time.

Immediate Supervisor promoted me to full-time, and I got some new responsibility for my football-day gate arm removal initiative and since there's way less gate arm work with James out of commission. Steve's Korean Laundry & Tan went out of business, and they expanded the Korean grocery into where it used to be. Now, instead of going to a Laundromat with James, me and my girlfriend sit bitterly on the porch most nights drinking margaritas and eating cold cereal with milk.

I went and visited him once. I guess it was the same old James, just something in him seemed trammeled, beaten. It made me sad to see that, because I'd always admired him for being so admirable in the way like he was above trammel or beat.

I brought him a Downy dryer sheet and he tipped his head back and laid it on his face, breathed deep for a while. It wasn't like a real jail. There was a counselor listening in. James folded the dryer sheet neatly and tucked it in his breast pocket.

At first I thought I was helping us keep our jobs, man, he said. Then I realized I couldn't stop. I had to take them out.

I told him that I understood, it was okay. A momentary look of anger flashed across his face.

They called to me in the night, he said. I shook just to approach a gate arm. They haunted my dreams.

I'm not sure if he said any of this for my benefit or the counselor's or for his own self. He confirmed once again that no matter what his circumstances, he would always have a way with the world that I would not.

ON MY WAY TO WORK THE CAR TIRE POPS ON A small porcupine at the curve where the kiddies speed and five roadside crosses are maintained. I struggle a bit, flinging the chair from the back seat, and then wheel along the shoulder to school. A Celica pulls over and a blonde gets out. She approaches me cautiously, cobra-like, swaying side to side. She has what appears to be a dead koala slung off her shoulder. “What happened, Professor?” she says.

“I've ruptured my tire on a pointed animal.”

“If you'd like I can give you a ride to school. If you'd like.” She had been to my treehouse just recently with two boys. They'd made off with the duck family, my prize. The boys carried the mother and two ducklings. This girl picked up the last duckling, and they all scrambled away just before Big Daddy pulled in. Because of this I'm apprehensive. I learned day one on this gig, you never know what the students are up
to. She's also in my fifth period, gifted.

But she's helping me into the Celica's passenger side before I've accepted the offer. She folds my chair neatly and tucks it in the trunk, ties it down with black yarn from her koala.

“I'm sorry I can't figure your name offhand?”

“Ever,” she says, “It's actually Evelyn, but I'm from the South where they say it like
Everlyn
. You always call me Ms Quick in class.”

She cranks the car, expertly drops it into gear, then pauses. Her hands fall into her lap and she's still, closes her eyes, then grits her teeth like an angry chimp and moans a little.

“Pardon me for a moment,” she says.

“Are you okay?” I ask. She vibrates. She holds up one pulsing finger.

I adjust the seatbelt, stare straight ahead, eye her with the peripheral—her hands jumping on her knees, right foot up and down on the brake so we roll then stop, roll then stop, tipping her head back and forth in a nodding motion. I straighten the pleats in my slacks, stroke my beard. I count the reflections of my face in the cracked side view mirror, consider flinging myself out the door when the wheel rides the ditch. She shakes herself like after a good pee and apologizes, then steps off the clutch. Without even looking she swerves back onto the asphalt. She drives with the koala hanging off her shoulder.

She guns it as we race through the bends leading to school. “Again, I'm sorry about that. It's an odd thing that happens to me, the result of an unfortunate accident.”

“No problem,” I say.

“I'm a virgin,” she says. “I swear it.”

I don't say another word. Several more bends and we're
there. She helps me out, unfolds my chair, and apologizes again. I thank her and she roars off to the student parking lot.

 

I'm the first handicapped teacher here, and the principal installed these shoddy wooden planks as a wheelchair ramp. I engage the parking brake to not roll backwards as I open the door.

Behind his back the teachers call the principal Big Daddy because he throws his weight around. I call him Big Daddy to his face as a joke. We watch TV together at my treehouse, World Wrestling Federation, soap opera sports. He hired me on after I busted through an abortion clinic with a personalized Louisville Slugger wedding gift bat, losing my faculty job at the University, losing my legs when the abortion doctor shot me in the base of the spine to protect himself, losing the Wife because of her love for the abortionist and not for me. Yet amid local controversy the principal declared me simply the most qualified candidate to teach gifted high school health, which the state requires for graduation. He added that I was acquitted anyhow. The abortionist, in fact, dropped all charges he felt so sorry for me, which I appreciate. He didn't have to do that. So the school brought me in on one-strike-you're-out probation.

“I'm going to need your AAA,” I say, slamming the office door behind me. “But let me ask you something.”

“Shoot,” he says. He's clicking through WWF Divas Online, one of the few pleasures of the sort he allows himself.

“This Evelyn Quick from gifted. She epileptic or something?”

“Epileptic?” he says. “No, nothing that serious. Watch out for that one.”

“Watch out?”

“She seized up on you? Shook a little bit, maybe apologized?”

I nod. He hands me the AAA card.

“You want to hear a story, Professor?”

“I always want to hear a story.”

“The story with her has to do with a claim. One doctor's assertion that somehow, at random…The right button in her head or something. That was his conclusion. To every second opinion, she's definitely got some misfiring synapses, but they don't even show up on the EEGs.”

“What conclusion?”

“Head trauma, Professor. Claims she randomly orgasms.”

“Orgasms. Can it be?”

“Can anything be? Weird on any number of levels. Now are we on for SmackDown tonight?”

 

You'd think the gifted kiddies would be the gift. That this would be the class teachers clamor to get. But they are the terror. This one group caused the early retirement of six teachers in the previous school year, an important reason Big Daddy was able to bring me on.

And they are clever. In the three weeks I've been here they've managed to fully uncover the circumstances about me and the by-default manner in which I came to teach them. They did not approve. They found my acre and have begun disassembling the lawn. I am powerless to stop them. The police, who are all pro-choice, think it's funny. Big Daddy thinks it's just part of what we have to put up with as teachers.
The kiddies' pranks.
It's especially cruel of him though. He knows what the lawn décor means to me. It means a lot.

The Wife and I'd started collecting them early on in the marriage. If she had a bad day, instead of bringing her flowers, I'd show up with a birdbath. When I got the flu she'd come home with a naked cupid who peed ground water. That's how it started. We went from a simple peeing naked cupid to the esoteric, the
tacky, the tasteless. There's the grinning gargoyle curio shelf, a pair of flashing highway construction barrels, herds of frolicking pink-eared antelopes, lapdogs, toadstool stools, miniature horses impaled on sturdy wire from decorative pails, the obligatory herd of reindeer, and the mother duck and her ducklings which seemed entirely too wholesome for anyone to make off with. All that's left me is the grinning gargoyle, a single frolicking pink-eared antelope, and the lawn jockey.

The kiddies' methods are predictable by now. Those ornaments without any lifelikeness are simply destroyed. The birdbaths reduced to rubble, the highway barrels sawed into piles of plastic squares. But the animal-like ornaments are disappeared, replaced with fist-sized stones atop notes written in the voice of the stolen ornaments, describing why they, the ornaments, chose to leave me.

The lawn is so overgrown with grass and weeds these days the chair can't make it through. There's a path from the driveway to the treehouse elevator that's paved. But I wake up to my missing animal-like lawn ornaments replaced with notes that I can't even retrieve. So I call Big Daddy. He arrives and wades out into the yard, then reads them to me.

The duck family note read:
Dear Professor, You should know our departure has nothing to do with the weather. You might be telling yourself that we perhaps went south for the winter. This would so be wishful thinking on your part. Our intentions are 100 percent non-migratory. Our time with you has been most unpleasant. As a mother I've been embarrassed to raise children around you. You are a fowl, fowl human being. It is no wonder your wife fled. We are hastily following suit. C-ya, The Ducks.