The Waste Lands (25 page)

“Please tell them I’m fine,” he said, “and tell my father I’m sorry that I was rude to him.”

He wasn’t, but all his father really wanted was that apology. Once Mrs. Shaw conveyed it to him, he would relax and begin to tell himself the old lie—he had done his fatherly duty and all was well, all was well, and all manner of things were well.

“I’ve been studying very hard for my exams,” he said, chewing as he talked, “and it all came down on me this morning, I guess. I sort of froze. It seemed like I had to get out or I’d suffocate.” He touched the dried crust of blood on his forehead. “As for this, please tell my mother it’s really nothing. I didn’t get mugged or anything; it was just a stupid accident. There was a UPS guy pushing a hand-truck, and I walked right into it. The cut’s no big deal. I’m not having double vision or anything, and even the headache’s gone now.”

She nodded. “I can see how it must have been—a high-powered school like that and all. You just got a little spooked. No shame in that, Johnny. But you really
haven’t
seemed like yourself this last couple of weeks. ”

“I think I’ll be okay now. I might have to re-do my Final Essay in English, but—”

“Oh!” Mrs. Shaw said. A startled looked crossed her face. She put
Charlie the Choo-Choo
back down on Jake’s desk. “I almost forgot! Your French teacher left something for you. I’ll just get it.”

She left the room. Jake hoped he hadn’t worried Mr. Bissette, who was a pretty good guy, but he supposed he must have, since Bissette had actually made a personal appearance. Jake had an idea that personal appearances were pretty rare for Piper School teachers. He wondered what Mr. Bissette had left. His best guess was an invitation to talk with Mr. Hotchkiss, the school shrink. That would have scared him this morning, but not tonight.

Tonight only the rose seemed to matter.

He tore into his second sandwich. Mrs. Shaw had left the door open, and he could hear her talking with his parents. They both sounded a little more cooled out now. Jake drank his milk, then grabbed the plate with the apple pie on it. A few moments later Mrs. Shaw came back. She was carrying a very familiar blue folder.

Jake found that not all of his dread had left him after all. They would all know by now, of course, students and faculty alike, and it was too late to do anything about it, but that didn’t mean he liked all of them knowing he had flipped his lid. That they were talking about him.

A small envelope had been paper-clipped to the front of the folder. Jake pulled it free and looked up at Mrs. Shaw as he opened it. “How are my folks doing now?” he asked.

She allowed herself a brief smile. “Your father wanted me to ask why you didn’t just tell him you had Exam Fever. He said he had it himself once or twice when he was a boy.”

Jake was struck by this; his father had never been the sort of man to indulge in reminiscences which began,
You know, when I was a kid . . .
Jake tried to imagine his father as a boy with a bad case of Exam Fever and found he couldn’t quite do it—the best he could manage was the unpleasant image of a pugnacious dwarf in a Piper sweatshirt, a dwarf in custom-tooled cowboy boots, a dwarf with short black hair bolting up from his forehead.

The note was from Mr. Bissette.

Jake felt like crying. The concern was stated, and that was wonderful, but there were other things, unstated things, in the note that were even more wonderful—warmth, caring, and an effort (however misconceived) to understand and console.

Mr. Bissette had drawn a small arrow at the bottom of the note. Jake turned it over and read this:

He flipped open the folder. A sheet of paper had been clipped to the first page of his Final Essay. It was headed FROM THE DESK OF BONITA AVERY, and Jake read the spiky, fountain-penned lines with growing amazement.

Jake pulled the sheet off the clip, revealing the title page of his stunningly original and richly symbolic Final Essay. Written and circled there in the red ink of Ms. Avery’s marking pen was the notation A + . Below this she had written
EXCELLENT JOB!!!

Jake began to laugh.

The whole day—the long, scary, confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, mysterious day—was condensed in great, roaring sobs of laughter. He slumped in his chair, head thrown back, hands clutching his belly, tears streaming down his face. He laughed himself hoarse. He would almost stop and then some line from Ms. Avery’s well-meaning critique would catch his eye and he would be off to the races again. He didn’t see his father come to the door, look in at him with puzzled, wary eyes, and then leave again. shaking his head.

At last he
did
become aware that Mrs. Shaw was still sitting on his bed, looking at him with an expression of friendly detachment tinctured with faint curiosity. He tried to speak, but the laughter pealed out again before he could.

Then he thought,
I wonder what she made of “choo-choo
,
choo-choo?,
” and he began to laugh wildly again.

At last the spasms began to taper off to giggles. He wiped his arm across his streaming eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shaw—it’s just that . . . well . . . I got an A-plus on my Final Essay. It was all very . . . very rich . . . and very sym . . . sym . . .”

But he couldn’t finish. He doubled up with laughter again, holding his throbbing belly.

Mrs. Shaw got up, smiling. “That’s very nice, John. I’m happy it’s all turned out so well, and I’m sure your folks will be, too. I’m awfully late—I think I’ll ask the doorman to call me a cab. Goodnight, and sleep well.”

“Goodnight, Mrs. Shaw,” Jake said, controlling himself with an effort. “And thanks.”

As soon as she was gone, he began to laugh again.

DURING THE NEXT HALF hour he had separate visits from both parents. They had indeed calmed down, and the A + grade on Jake’s Final Essay seemed to calm them further. Jake received them with his French text open on the desk before him, but he hadn’t really looked at it, nor did he have any intention of looking at it. He was only waiting for them to be gone so he could study the two books he had bought earlier that day. He had an idea that the
real
Final Exams were still waiting just over the horizon, and he wanted desperately to pass.

His father poked his head into Jake’s room around quarter of ten, about twenty minutes after Jake’s mother had concluded her own short, vague visit. Elmer Chambers was holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other. He seemed not only calmer but almost zonked. Jake wondered briefly and indifferently if he had been hitting his mother’s Valium supply.

“Are you okay, kid?”

“Yes.” He was once again the small, neat boy who was always completely in control of himself. The eyes he turned to his father were not blazing but opaque.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry about before.” His father was not a man who made many apologies, and he did it badly. Jake found himself feeling a little sorry for him.

“It’s all right.”

“Hard day,” his father said. He gestured with the empty glass. “Why don’t we just forget it happened?” He spoke as if this great and logical idea had just come to him.

“I already have.”

“Good.” His father sounded relieved. “Time for you to get some sleep, isn’t it? You’ll have some explaining to do and some tests to take tomorrow.”

“I guess so,” Jake said. “Is Mom okay?”

“Fine. Fine. I’m going in the study. Got a lot of paperwork tonight.”

“Dad?”

His father looked back at him warily.

“What’s your middle name?”

Something in his father’s face told Jake that he had looked at the Final Essay grade but hadn’t bothered to read either the paper itself or Ms. Avery’s critique.

“I don’t have one,” he said. “Just an initial, like Harry S Truman. Except mine’s an R. What brought that on?”

“Just curious,” Jake said.

He managed to hold onto his composure until his father was gone . . . but as soon as the door was closed, he ran to his bed and stuffed his face into his pillow to muffle another bout of wild laughter.

WHEN HE WAS SURE he was over the current fit (although an occasional snicker still rumbled up his throat like an aftershock) and his father would be safely locked away in his study with his cigarettes, his Scotch, his papers, and his little bottle of white powder, Jake went back to his desk, turned on the study lamp, and opened
Charlie the Choo-Choo.
He glanced briefly at the copyright page and saw it had originally been published in 1942; his copy was from the fourth printing. He looked at the back, but there was no information at all about Beryl Evans, the book’s author.

Jake turned back to the beginning, looked at the picture of a grinning, blonde-haired man sitting in the cab of a steam locomotive, considered the proud grin on the man’s face, and then began to read.