The Talisman

30

Thayer Gets Weird

1

Through the window Jack could see boys in coats, hunched against the cold, crossing to and fro between the library and the rest of the school. Etheridge, the senior who had spoken to Jack that morning, bustled by, his scarf flying out behind him.

Richard took a tweed sport jacket from the narrow closet beside the bed. “Nothing is going to make me think that you should do anything but go back to New Hampshire. I have to go to basketball now, because if I don’t Coach Frazer’ll make me do ten punishment laps as soon as he comes back. Some other coach is taking our practice today, and Frazer said he’d run us into the ground if we cut out. Do you want to borrow some clean clothes? I at least have a shirt that’ll fit you—my father sent it to me from New York, and Brooks Brothers got the size wrong.”

“Let’s see it,” Jack said. His clothes had become definitely disreputable, so stiff with filth that whenever he noticed it Jack felt like Pigpen, the “Peanuts” character who lived in a mist of dirt and disapproval. Richard gave him a white button-down still in its plastic bag. “Great, thanks,” Jack said. He took it out of the bag and began removing the pins. It would almost fit.

“There’s a jacket you might try on, too,” Richard said. “The blazer hanging at the end of the closet. Try it on, okay? And you might as well use one of my ties, too. Just in case anyone comes in. Say you’re from Saint Louis Country Day, and you’re on a Newspaper Exchange. We do two or three of those a year—kids from here go there, kids from there come here, to work on the other school’s paper.” He went toward the door. “I’ll come back before dinner and see how you are.”

Two ballpoints were clipped to a plastic insert in his jacket pocket, Jack noticed, and all the buttons of the jacket were buttoned.

Nelson House grew perfectly quiet within minutes. From Richard’s window Jack saw boys seated at desks in the big library windows. Nobody moved on the paths or over the crisp brown grass. An insistent bell rang, marking the beginning of fourth period. Jack stretched his arms out and yawned. A feeling of security returned to him—a school around him, with all those familiar rituals of bells and classes and basketball practices. Maybe he would be able to stay another day; maybe he would even be able to call his mother from one of the Nelson House phones. He would certainly be able to catch up on his sleep.

Jack went to the closet and found the blazer hanging where Richard had said it would be. A tag still hung from one of the sleeves: Sloat had sent it from New York, but Richard had never worn it. Like the shirt, the blazer was one size too small for Jack and clung too tightly to his shoulders, but the cut was roomy and the sleeves allowed the white shirt cuffs to peek out half an inch.

Jack lifted a necktie from the hook just inside the closet—red, with a pattern of blue anchors. Jack slipped the tie around his neck and laboriously knotted it. Then he examined himself in the mirror and laughed out loud. Jack saw that he had made it at last. He looked at the beautiful new blazer, the club tie, his snowy shirt, his rumpled jeans. He was there. He was a preppy.

2

Richard had become, Jack saw, an admirer of John McPhee and Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould. He picked The Panda’s Thumb from the row of books on Richard’s shelves because he liked the title and returned to the bed.

Richard did not return from his basketball practice for what seemed an impossibly long time. Jack paced back and forth in the little room. He could not imagine what would keep Richard from returning to his room, but his imagination gave him one calamity after another.

After the fifth or sixth time Jack checked his watch, he noticed that he could see no students on the grounds.

Whatever had happened to Richard had happened to the entire school.

The afternoon died. Richard too, he thought, was dead. Perhaps all Thayer School was dead—and he was a plague-bearer, a carrier of death. He had eaten nothing all day since the chicken Richard had brought him from the dining room, but he wasn’t hungry. Jack sat in numb misery. He brought destruction wherever he went.

3

Then there were footfalls in the corridor once more.

From the floor above, Jack now dimly heard the thud thud thud of a bass pattern, and then again recognized it as being from a record by Blue Oyster Cult. The footsteps paused outside the door. Jack hurried to the door.

Richard stood in the doorway. Two boys with cornsilk hair and half-mast ties glanced in and kept moving down the corridor. The rock music was much more audible in the corridor.

“Where were you all afternoon?” Jack demanded.

“Well, it was sort of freaky,” Richard said. “They cancelled all the afternoon classes. Mr. Dufrey wouldn’t even let kids go back to their lockers. And then we all had to go to basketball practice, and that was even weirder.”

“Who’s Mr. Dufrey?”

Richard looked at him as if he’d just tumbled out of a bassinette. “Who’s Mr. Dufrey? He’s the headmaster. Don’t you know anything at all about this school?”

“No, but I’m getting a few ideas,” Jack said. “What was so weird about practice?”

“Remember I told you that Coach Frazer got some friend of his to handle it today? Well, he said we’d all get punishment laps if we tried to cut out, so I thought his friend would be some Al Maguire type, you know, some real hotshot. Thayer School doesn’t have a very good athletic tradition. Anyhow, I thought his replacement must be somebody really special.”

“Let me guess. The new guy didn’t look like he had anything to do with sports.”

Richard lifted his chin, startled. “No,” he said. “No, he didn’t.” He gave Jack a considering look. “He smoked all the time. And his hair was really long and greasy—he didn’t look anything like a coach. He looked like somebody most coaches would like to step on, to tell you the truth. Even his eyes looked funny. I bet you he smokes pot.” Richard tugged at his sweater. “I don’t think he knew anything about basketball. He didn’t even make us practice our patterns—that’s what we usually do, after the warm-up period. We sort of ran around and threw baskets and he shouted at us. Laughing. Like kids playing basketball was the most ridiculous thing he’d seen in his whole life. You ever see a coach who thought sports was funny? Even the warm-up period was strange. He just said, ’Okay, do push-ups,’ and smoked his cigarette. No count, no cadence, everybody just doing them by themselves. After that it was ’Okay, run around a little bit.’ He looked . . . really wild. I think I’m going to complain to Coach Frazer tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t complain to him or the headmaster either,” Jack said.

“Oh, I get it,” Richard said. “Mr. Dufrey’s one of them. One of the Territories people.”

“Or he works for them,” Jack said.

“Don’t you see that you could fit anything into that pattern? Anything that goes wrong? It’s too easy—you could explain everything that way. That’s how craziness works. You make connections that aren’t real.”

“And see things that aren’t there.”

Richard shrugged, and despite the insouciance of the gesture, his face was miserable. “You said it.”

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “You remember me telling you about the building that collapsed in Angola, New York?”

“The Rainbird Towers.”

“What a memory. I think that accident was my fault.”

“Jack, you’re—”

Jack said: “Crazy, I know. Look, would anyone blow the whistle on me if we went out and watched the evening news?”

“I doubt it. Most kids are studying now, anyway. Why?”

Because I want to know what’s been happening around here, Jack thought but did not say. Sweet little fires, nifty little earthquakes—signs that they’re coming through. For me. For us.

“I need a change of scenery, Richard old chum,” Jack said, and followed Richard down the watery green corridor.