Rage

CHAPTER 25

I held on to the pistol.

The impact of the slug knocked me straight backward against the blackboard, where the chalk ledge bit cruelly into my back. Both of my cordovan loafers flew off. I hit the floor on my fanny. I didn’t know what had happened. There was too much all at once. A huge auger of pain drilled my chest, followed by sudden numbness. The ability to breathe stopped. Spots flashed in front of my eyes.

Irma Bates was screaming. Her eyes were closed, her fists were clenched, and her face was a hectic, patched red with effort. It was far away and dreamy, coming from a mountain or a tunnel.

Ted Jones was getting out of his seat again, floating really, in a slow and dreamy motion. This time he was going for the door. “They got the son of a bitch!” His voice sounded incredibly slow and draggy, like a 78-RPM record turned down to 33 1/3. “They got the crazy-”

“Sit down.”

He didn’t hear me. I wasn’t surprised. I could hardly hear myself. I didn’t have any wind to talk with. He was reaching for the doorknob when I fired the pistol. The bullet slammed into the wood beside his head, and he shied away. When he turned around, his face was a stew of changing emotions: white astonishment, agonized unbelief, and twisted, murdering hate.

“You can’t… you’re…”

“Sit down.” A little better. Perhaps six seconds had gone by since I had been knocked on my ass. “Stop yelling, Irma.”

“You’re shot, Charlie,” Grace Stanner said calmly.

I looked outside. The cops were rushing the building. I fired twice and made myself breathe. The auger struck again, threatening to explode my chest with pain.

“Get back! I’ll shoot them!”

Frank Philbrick stopped and looked around wildly. He seemed to want a telephone call from Jesus. He looked confused enough to try and carry on with it, so I fired again, up in the air. It was his turn to go a hundred miles in his head during half a second. “Get back!” he yelled. “Get the Christ back!”

They retreated, getting back even quicker than they had gotten down.

Ted Jones was edging toward me. That boy was simply not part of the real universe. “Do you want me to shoot your weenie off?” I asked.

He stopped, but that terrifying, twisted expression was still on his face. “You’re dead,” he hissed. “Lie down, God damn you.”

“Sit down, Ted.”

The pain in my chest was a live thing, horrible. The left side of my rib cage felt as if it had been struck by Maxwell’s silver hammer. They were staring at me, my captive class, with expressions of preoccupied horror. I didn’t dare look down at myself because of what I might see. The clock said 10:55.

“DECKER!”

“Sit down, Ted.”

He lifted his lip in an unconscious facial gesture that made him look like a slatsided hound that I had seen lying mortally wounded beside a busy street when I was just a kid. He thought about it, and then he sat down. He had a good set of sweat circles started under his armpits.

“DECKER! MR. DENVER IS GOING UP TO THE OFFICE!”

It was Philbrick on the bullhorn, and not even the asexual sexuality of the amplification could hide how badly he was shaken up. An hour before, it would have pleased me-fulfilled me-in a savage way, but now I felt nothing.

“HE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!”

Tom walked out from behind one of the police cars and started across the lawn, walking slowly, as if he expected to be shot at any second. Even at a distance, he looked ten years older. Not even that could please me. Not even that.

I got up a little at a time, fighting the pain, and stepped into my loafers. I almost fell, and had to clutch the desk with my free hand for support.

“Oh, Charlie,” Sylvia moaned.

I fully loaded the pistol again, this time keeping it pointed toward them (I don’t think even Ted knew it couldn’t be fired with the clip sprung), doing it slowly so I could put off looking down at myself for as long as possible. My chest throbbed and ached. Sandra Cross seemed lost again in whatever fuzzy dream it was that she contemplated.

The clip snapped back into place, and I looked down at myself almost casually. I was wearing a neat blue shirt (I’ve always been fond of solid colors), and I expected to see it matted with my blood. But it wasn’t.

There was a large dark hole, dead center through my breast pocket, which was on the left. An uneven scattering of smaller holes radiated out from all around it, like one of those solar-system maps that show the planets going around the sun. I reached inside the pocket very carefully. That was when I remembered Titus, whom I had rescued from the wastebasket. I pulled him out very carefully. The class went “Aaahhh!” as if I had just sawed a lady in half or pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of Pig Pen’s nose. None of them asked why I was carrying my combination lock in my pocket. I was glad. Ted was looking at Titus bitterly, and suddenly I was very angry at Ted. And I wondered how he would like to eat poor old Titus for his lunch.

The bullet had smashed through the hard, high-density plastic dial, sending highspeed bits of shrapnel out through my shirt. Not one of them had touched my flesh. The steel behind the face had caught the slug, had turned it into a deadly lead blossom with three bright petals. The whole lock was twisted, as if by fire. The semi-circular lock bar had been pulled like taffy. The back side of the lock had bulged but not broken through.

[It was a year and a half later when I saw that commercial on TV for the first time. The one where the guy with the rifle takes aim at the padlock nailed to the board. You even get a look through the telescopic sight at the padlock-a Yale, a Master, I don’t know which. The guy pulls the trigger. And you see that lock jump and dent and mash, and it looked in that commercial just the way old Titus looked when I took him out of my pocket. They show it happening in regular motion, and then they show it in slow motion, and the first and only time I saw it, I leaned down between my legs and puked between my ankles. They took me away. They took me back to my room. And the next day my pet shrink here looked at a note and said, “They tell me you had a setback yesterday, Charlie. Want to talk about it?” But I couldn’t talk about it. I’ve never been able to talk about it. Until now.]

Chink! on the intercom.

“Charlie?”

“Just a minute, Tom. Don’t rush me.”

“Charlie, you have to-”

“Shut the fuck up."'

I unbuttoned my shirt and opened it. The class went “Aaahhh!” again. Titus was imprinted on my chest in angry purple, and the flesh had been mashed into an indentation that looked deep enough to hold water. I didn’t like to look at it, any more than I liked to look at the old drunk with the bag of flesh below his nose, the one that always hung around Gogan’s downtown. It made me feel nauseated. I closed my shirt.

“Tom, those bastards tried to shoot me.”

“They didn’t mean-”

“Don’t tell me what they didn’t mean to do!” I screamed at him. There was a crazy note in my voice that made me feel even sicker. “You get your old cracked ass out there and tell that mother-fucker Philbrick he almost had a bloodbath down here, have you got it?”

“Charlie…” He was whining.

“Shut up, Tom. I’m through fooling with you. I’m in the driver’s seat. Not you, not Philbrick, not the superintendent of schools, not God. Have you got it?”

“Charlie, let me explain.”

“HAVE YOU GOT IT?”

“Yes, but-”

“All right. We’ve got that straight. So you go back and give him a message, Tom. Tell him that I don’t want to see him or anyone else out there make a move during the next hour. No one is going to come in and talk on this goddamn intercom, and no one else is going to try and shoot me. At noon I want to talk to Philbrick again. Can you remember all that, Tom?”

“Yes, Charlie. All right, Charlie.” He sounded relieved and foolish. “They just wanted me to tell you it was a mistake, Charlie. Somebody’s gun went off by accident and-

“One other thing, Tom. Very important.”

“What, Charlie?”

“You need to know where you stand with that guy Philbrick, Tom. He gave you a shovel and told you to walk behind the ox cart, and you’re doing it. I gave him a chance to put his ass on the line, and he wouldn’t do it. Wake up, Tom. Assert yourself.”

“Charlie, you have to understand what a terrible position you’re putting us all in.”

“Get out, Tom.”

He clicked off. We all watched him come out through the main doors and start back toward the cars. Philbrick came over to him and put a hand on his arm. Tom shook it off. A lot of the kids smiled at that. I was past smiling. I wanted to be home in my bed and dreaming all of this.

“Sandra,” I said. “I believe you were telling us about your affaire de coeur with Ted.”

Ted threw a dark glance at me. “You don’t want to say anything, Sandy. He’s just trying to make all of us look dirty like he is. He’s sick and full of germs. Don’t let him infect you with what he’s got.”

She smiled. She was really radiant when she smiled like a child. I felt a bitter nostalgia, not for her, exactly, or for any imagined purity (Dale Evans panties and all that), but for something I could not precisely put my hand on. Her, maybe. Whatever it was, it made me feel ashamed.

“But I want to,” she said. “I want to get it on, too. I always have.”

It was eleven o’clock on the nose. The activity outside seemed to have died. I was sitting well back from the windows now. I thought Philbrick would give me my hour. He wouldn’t dare do anything else now. I felt better, the pain in my chest receding a little. But my head felt very strange, as if my brains were running without coolant and overheating like a big hot rod engine in the desert. At times I was almost tempted to feel (foolish conceit) that I was holding them myself, by sheer willpower. Now I know, of course, that nothing could have been further from the truth. I had one real hostage that day, and his name was Ted Jones.

“We just did it,” Sandra said, looking down at her desk and tracing the engravings there with a shaped thumbnail. I could see the part in her hair. She parted it on the side, like a boy. “Ted asked me to go to the Wonderland dance with him, and I said I would. I had a new formal.” She looked at me reproachfully. “You never asked me, Charlie.”

Could it be that I was shot in the padlock only ten minutes ago? I had an insane urge to ask them if it had really happened. How strange they all were!

“So we went to that, and afterward we went to the Hawaiian Hut. Ted knows the man who runs it and got us cocktails. Just like the grown-ups.” It was hard to tell if there was sarcasm in her voice or not.

Ted’s face was carefully blank, but the others were looking at him as if they were seeing a strange bug. Here was a kid, one of their own, who knew the man who runs it. Corky Herald was obviously chewing it and not liking it.

“I didn’t think I’d like the drinks, because everybody says liquor tastes horrible at first, but I did. I had a gin fizz, and it tickled my nose.” She looked pensively in front of her. “There were little straws in it, red ones, and I didn’t know if you drank through them or just stirred your drink with them, until Ted told me. It was a very nice time. Ted talked about how nice it was playing golf at Poland Springs. He said he’d take me sometime and teach me the game, if I wanted.”

Ted was curling and uncurling his lip again, doglike.

“He wasn’t, you know, fresh or anything. He kissed me good night, though, and he wasn’t a bit nervous about it. Some boys are just miserable all the way home, wondering if they should try to kiss you good night or not. I always kissed them, just so they wouldn’t feel bad. If they were yucky, I just pretended I was licking a letter.”

I remembered the first time I took Sandy Cross out, to the regular Saturday-night dance at the high school. I had been miserable all the way home, wondering if I should kiss her good night or not. I finally didn’t.

“After that, we went out three more times. Ted was very nice. He could always think of funny things to say, but he never told dirty jokes or anything, you know, like that. We did some necking, and that was all. Then I didn’t see him to go out with for a long time, not until this April. He asked me if I wanted to go to the Rollerdrome in Lewiston.”

I had wanted to ask her to go to the Wonderland dance with me, but I hadn’t dared. Joe, who always got dates when he wanted them, kept saying why don’t you, and I kept getting more nervous and kept telling him to fuck off. Finally I got up the stuff to call her house, but I had to hang up the telephone after one ring and run to the bathroom and throw up. As I told you, my stomach is bad.

“We were having a pretty blah time, when all of a sudden these kids got into an argument on the middle of the floor,” Sandra said. “Harlow boys and Lewiston boys, I think. Anyway, a big fight started. Some of them were fighting on their roller skates, but most of them had taken them off. The man who runs it came out and said if they didn’t stop, he was going to close. People were getting bloody noses and skating around and kicking people that had fallen down, and punching and yelling horrible things. And all the time, the jukebox was turned up real loud, playing Rolling Stones music.”

She paused, and then went on: “Ted and I were standing in one corner of the floor, by the bandstand. They have live music on Saturday nights, you know. This one boy skated by, wearing a black jacket. He had long hair and pimples. He laughed and waved at Ted when he went by and yelled, 'Fuck her, buddy, I did!' And Ted just reached out and popped him upside the head. The kid went skating right into the middle part of the rink and tripped over some kid’s shoes and fell on his head. Anyway, Ted was looking at me, and his eyes were, you know, almost bugging out of his head. He was grinning. You know, that’s really the only time I ever really saw Ted grin, like he was having a good time.

“Ted goes to me, ‘I’ll be right back,’ and he walks across the rink to that inside part where the kid who said that was still getting up. Ted grabbed him by the back of the jacket and… I don’t know… started to yank him back and forth… and the kid couldn’t turn around… and Ted just kept yanking him back and forth, and that kid’s head was bouncing, and then his jacket ripped right down the middle. And he goes, ‘I’ll kill you for ripping my best jacket, you m.f.’ So Ted hit him again, and the kid fell down, and Ted threw the piece of his jacket he was holding right down on top of him. Then he came back to where I was standing, and we left. We drove out into Auburn to a gravel pit he knew about. It was on that road to Lost Valley, I think. Then we did it. In the back seat.”

She was tracing the graffiti on her desk again. “It didn’t hurt very much. I thought it would, but it didn’t. It was nice.” She sounded as if she were discussing a Walt Disney feature film, one of those with all the cute little animals. Only, this one was starring Ted Jones as the Bald-Headed Woodchuck.

“He didn’t use one of those things like he said he would, but I didn’t get pregnant or anything.”

Slow red was beginning to creep out of the collar of Ted’s khaki army shirt, spreading up his neck and over his cheeks. His face remained fumingly expressionless.

Sandra’s hands made slow, languorous gestures. I suddenly knew that her natural habitat would be in a porch hammock at the very August height of summer, temperature ninety-two in the shade, reading a book (or perhaps just staring out at the heat shimmer rising over the road), a can of Seven-Up beside her with an elbow straw in it, dressed in cool white short-shorts and a brief halter with the straps pushed down, small diamonds of sweat stippled across the upper swell of her breasts and her lower stomach…

“He apologized afterward. He acted uncomfortable, and I felt a little bad for him. He kept saying he would marry me if… you know, if I got preggers. He was really upset. And I go, ‘Well, let’s not buy trouble, Teddy,’ and he goes, ‘don’t call me that, it’s a baby name.’ I think he was surprised I did it with him. And I didn’t get preggers. There just didn’t seem to be that much to it.

“Sometimes I feel like a doll. Not really real. You know it? I fix my hair, and every now and then I have to hem a skirt, or maybe I have to baby-sit the kids when Mom and Dad go out. And it all just seems very fake. Like I could peek behind the living-room wall and it would be cardboard, with a director and a cameraman getting ready for the next scene. Like the grass and the sky were painted on canvas flats. Fake.” She looked at me earnestly. “Did you ever feel like that, Charlie?”

I thought about it very carefully. “No,” I said. “I can’t remember that ever crossing my mind, Sandy.”

“It crossed mine. Even more after with Ted. But I didn’t get pregnant or anything. I used to think every girl got pregnant the first time, without fail. I tried to imagine what it would be like, telling my parents. My father would get real mad and want to know who the son of a bee was, and my mother would cry and say, ‘I thought we raised you right.’ That would have been real. But after a while I stopped thinking about that. I couldn’t even remember exactly what it felt like, having him… well, inside me. So I went back to the Rollerdrome.”

The room was totally silent. Never in her wildest dreams could Mrs. Underwood have hoped to command such attention as Sandra Cross commanded now.

“This boy picked me up. I let him pick me up.” Her eyes had picked up a strange sparkle. “I wore my shortest skirt. My powder-blue one. And a thin blouse. Later on, we went out back. And that seemed real. He wasn’t polite at all. He was sort of… jerky. I didn’t know him at all. I kept thinking that maybe he was one of those sex maniacs. That he might have a knife. That he might make me take dope. Or that I might get pregnant. I felt alive.”

Ted Jones had finally turned and was looking at Sandra with an almost woodcut expression of horror and dead revulsion. It all seemed like a dream-something out of le moyen age, a dark passion play.

“That was Saturday night, and the band was playing. You could hear it out in the parking lot, but kind of faint. The Rollerdrome doesn’t look like much from the back, just all boxes and crates piled up, and trashcans full of Coke bottles. I was scared, but I was excited, too. He was breathing really fast and holding on to my wrist tight, as if he expected me to try to get away. He…”

Ted made a horrid gagging sound. It was hand to believe that anyone in my peer group could be touched so painfully by anything other than the death of a parent. Again I admired him.

“He had an old black car, and it made me think of how my mother used to tell me when I was just little that sometimes strange men want you to get in the car with them and you should never do it. That excited me too. I can remember thinking: What if he kidnaps me and takes me to some old shack in the country and holds me for ransom? He opened the back door, and I got in. He started to kiss me. His mouth was all greasy, like he’d been eating pizza. They sell pizza inside for twenty cents a slice. He started to feel me up, and I could see he was smudging pizza on my blouse. Then we were lying down, and I pulled my skirt up for him-”

“Shut up!” Ted cried out with savage suddenness. He brought both fists crashing down on his desk, and everybody jumped. “You rotten whore! You can’t tell that in front of people! Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you! You-”

“You shut up, Teddy, or I’ll knock your teeth down your fucking throat,” Dick Keene said coldly. “You got yours, didn’t you?”

Ted gaped at him. The two of them shot a lot of pool together down at the Harlow Rec, and sometimes went cruising in Ted’s car. I wondered if they would be hanging out together when this was all over. I had my doubts.

“He didn’t smell very nice,” Sandra continued, as if there had been no interruption at all. “But he was hard. And bigger than Ted. Not circumcised, either. I remember that. It looked like a plum when he pushed it out of, you know, his foreskin. I thought it might hurt even, though I wasn’t a virgin anymore. I thought the police might come and arrest us. I knew they walked through the parking lot to make sure no one was stealing hubcaps or anything.

“And a funny thing started to happen inside me, before he even got my pants down. I never felt anything so good. Or so real.” She swallowed. Her face was flushed. “He touched me with his hand, and I went. Just like that. And the funny thing was, he didn’t even get to do it. He was trying to get it in and I was trying to help him and it kept rubbing against my leg and all of a sudden… you know. And he just laid there on top of me for a minute, and then he said in my ear: 'You little bitch. You did that on purpose,' And that was all.”

She shook her head vaguely. “But it was very real. I can remember everything-the music, the way he smiled, the sound his zipper made when he opened it-everything.”

She smiled at me, that strange, dreamy smile.

“But this has been better, Charlie.”

And the strange thing was, I couldn’t tell if I felt sick or not. I didn’t think I did, but it was really too close to call. I guess when you turn off the main road, you have to be prepared to see some funny houses. “How do people know they’re real?” I muttered.

“What, Charlie?”

“Nothing.”

I looked at them very carefully. They didn’t look sick, any of them. There was a healthy sheen on every eye. There was something in me (maybe it came over on the Mayflower) that wanted to know: How could she let that beyond the walls of herself? How could she say that? But there was nothing in the faces that I saw to echo that thought. There would have been in Philbrick’s face. In good old Tom’s face. Probably not in Don Grace’s, but he would have been thinking it. Secretly, all the evening news shows notwithstanding, I’d held the belief that things change but people don’t. It was something of a horror to begin realizing that all those years I’d been playing baseball on a soccer field. Pig Pen was still studying the bitter lines of his pencil. Susan Brooks only looked sweetly sympathetic. Dick Keene had a half-interested, half-lustful expression on his face. Corky’s head was furrowed and frowning as he wrestled with it. Gracie looked slightly surprised, but that was all. Irma Bates merely looked vapid. I don’t think she had recovered from seeing me shot. Were the lives of all our elders so plain that Sandy’s story would have made lurid reading for them? Or were all of theirs so strange and full of terrifying mental foliage that their classmate’s sexual adventure was on a level with winning a pinball replay? I didn’t want to think about it. I was in no position to be reviewing moral implications.

Only Ted looked sick and horrified, and he no longer counted.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Carol Granger said, mildly worried. She looked around. “I’m afraid all of this changes things. I don’t like it.” She looked at me accusingly. “I liked the way things were going, Charlie. I don’t want things to change after this is over.”

“Heh,” I said.

But that kind of comment had no power over the situation. Things had gotten out of control. There was no real way that could be denied anymore. I had a sudden urge to laugh at all of them, to point out that I had started out as the main attraction and had ended up as the sideshow.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Irma Bates said suddenly.

“Hold it,” I said. Sylvia laughed.

“Turnabout is fair play,” I said. “I promised to tell you about my sex life. In all actuality, there isn’t very much to tell about, unless you read palms. However, there is one little story which you might find interesting.”

Sarah Pasterne yawned, and I felt a sudden, excruciating urge to blow her head off. But number two must try harder, as they say in the rent-a-car ads. Some cats drive faster, but Decker vacuums all the psychic cigarette butts from the ashtrays of your mind.

I was suddenly reminded of that Beatles song that starts off: “I read the news today, oh boy…”

I told them: