Garden of Evil Read online

  ‘Of course it is, muchacho. But I’d like to hear you say it first, so that when I get around to calling it out loud, I pronounce it properly. That’s called “respect”.’

  ‘OK. Cool. My name is Javier Alejandro Alvarez. But it is cool if you call me Al. That is easy to say with respect, yes?’

  ‘All right, Al. How about you show me your essay?’

  Al Alvarez rocked his chair forward so that all four legs were on the floor, and then he said, ‘I did not exactly write it.’

  ‘I see. And why was that? Couldn’t you imagine what Paradise might be like? All mariachi music and chocolate chimichangas and hot young señoritas? Arriba! Arriba!’

  ‘You make fun of Mexican culture,’ Al Alvarez pouted. ‘That is not respect.’

  ‘Well, since you haven’t bothered to write anything down, maybe you’d like to tell me what you think Paradise might be like. Right now I’m thinking that you were simply too bone idle to put pen to paper, and that doesn’t deserve too much respect, does it?’

  Al Alvarez turned his head away. For a fleeting moment, Jim saw him catch Simon Silence’s eye, and Simon Silence gave him a quick nod of his head which looked to Jim like encouragement – like, ‘go on, don’t be afraid – tell him!’

  Jim said, ‘OK, Al. If you don’t have any ideas about Paradise – or if you do have ideas but you don’t want to tell me what they are, that’s fine by me.’

  He started to walk back toward the front of the class. ‘You want to work, you don’t want to work, that’s entirely up to you. I’m only here to tell you guys the difference between a preposition, a proposition, and a sharp kick in the ass. The whole point of Special Class Two is that you’re all here to help yourselves.’

  But before Jim had reached his desk, Al Alvarez stood up. ‘I tell you!’ he called out, and he sounded so shaken that Jim immediately turned around.

  His nostrils were flaring and he was clenching both of his fists. ‘I tell you about my Paradise!’

  ‘Go on, then, Al,’ Jim coaxed him. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘In my Paradise, I am surrounded by beautiful girls! So many beautiful girls I cannot count them! They take off all of their clothes and they dance around me! Then they kiss me and stroke me and take off all of my clothes, too!’

  ‘Al,’ Jim interrupted him. ‘I’m not so sure this particular concept of Paradise is going to be suitable for a mixed class of remedial English students. Maybe you should tell me later, in private. You know, man to incorrigible lecher.’

  But Al Alvarez wouldn’t stop. ‘I tell you what I do! I make love to them all, every one, in every way! Front, back, every way! And they are screaming with the pleasure! And they are all sweaty and shiny, and wriggle all around me like nest of snake!’

  ‘Al,’ said Jim. ‘How about you put a sock in it, OK?’

  ‘Then I take razor! Old-style razor! And every one of those beautiful girls, I slit their throat – slit! slit! slit! And we are all covered in blood! And I lift up my hands and my hands are all covered in blood, and I lick it with my tongue! This for me is Paradise!’

  ELEVEN

  Jim marched straight up to Al Alvarez and seized his upper arm.

  ‘OK, you,’ he told him, ‘you’re out of this classroom as of right now!’

  Al Alvarez stared at him, as glassy-eyed as Nudnik the teddy bear. He was sweating and shivering, almost as if he were having a fit.

  ‘You axed me!’ he protested. ‘You axed me what my Paradise was like!’

  Jim locked his elbow so that his arm was rigid and started to march him toward the door. As he did so, however, Simon Silence called out, in the clearest of voices, ‘H-R Four-Two-Four-Seven!’

  Jim stopped abruptly and turned around, although he still kept his grip on Al Alvarez’s arm. ‘H-R Four-Two-Four-Seven?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘I know what H-R Four-Two-Four-Seven is, Simon. It’s the act of Congress which was passed in two thousand nine to prevent the harmful restraint and seclusion of students, even though most of them heartily deserve it. However . . . Al here has been duly and properly cautioned about his disruptive conduct, and I am merely escorting him out of the classroom for his own safety and the general well-being of Special Class Two, most of whom didn’t come hear to him babbling on about orgiastic massacres.’

  Simon Silence was unfazed. ‘He isn’t breathing right, Mr Rook. H-R Four-Two-Four-Seven specifically says that a member of staff must not forcibly escort a student by restricting his or her breathing.’

  Jim took three or four steps back toward Simon Silence, and Al Alvarez had to come stumbling behind him. ‘Listen, Mr Silence. How about I restrict your breathing so that you keep your opinions to yourself?’

  Simon Silence kept on smiling at him. ‘You should chill, Mr Rook. There’s too much at stake. You can’t afford to lose your cool.’

  ‘You think so? Well, OK, we’ll have to see about that. Now, come on, Al, I want you out of here, now.’

  He manhandled Al Alvarez into the corridor. When they were outside, and the classroom door was closed behind them, he released his grip on the boy’s elbow, but he shoved him hard against the wall.

  ‘What the hell did you think you were saying in there?’ he demanded.

  Al Alvarez shook his head. He was still perspiring and his nose was running, too. He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve.

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘You don’t know? You don’t know? All that stuff about having women every which way and then cutting their throats and licking their blood?’

  ‘I swear I don’t know, Mr Rook. It all just come into my head. It was like my brains was boiling. I never thought nothing like that before, never. If I said something like that at home, my momma would kill me.’

  Jim stood close to Al Alvarez, saying nothing, while the boy gradually calmed down. After a while Jim laid his hand on his shoulder and said, ‘How about a drink of water?’

  ‘I’m OK, sir. Really. I don’t know what happened in there.’

  ‘You want to go back in, or do you want to go home? I don’t mind if you want to call it a day.’

  Al Alvarez leaned across and cautiously peered through the porthole in the studio door, as if he were afraid of what he might see. Most of the students were milling around between the benches – the boys throwing a baseball to each other, and the girls all trying to dance like Rihanna. Only Simon Silence had remained in his place, writing and sketching in his notebook and coloring in his drawings with his felt-tip pens. He looked up and saw Al Alvarez and Jim looking in through the porthole, and he smiled to himself and went back to his work.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Jim, ‘what do you think of that guy?’

  ‘Simon? He got something, sir. Don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s like he got mojo, only stronger than mojo. My grannie would have called it brujeria.’

  ‘You feel that?’ asked Jim. He knew what both of those words meant. Mojo meant self-confidence and personal magnetism and sex appeal. Brujeria meant serious magic, which would normally be cast by a brujo, or a worker of spells.

  ‘Don’t know what it is exactly,’ Al Alvarez repeated. ‘But, yes. I feel that.’

  ‘So when you came out with all that orgy stuff, and slitting women’s throats . . . do you think maybe that it was Simon who made you think of that?’

  Al Alvarez glanced at Jim and Jim could tell that he was nervous. ‘I don’t know, sir. I wouldn’t like to say nothing like that.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘I ain’t afraid of nothing, Mr Rook. I don’t want to cause no trouble, that’s all.’

  ‘Yesterday, Al, I would have picked you out as the joker of the class. So what’s different today?’

  Al Alvarez looked down at the floor and wouldn’t catch Jim’s eye. ‘I don’t want to cause no trouble, that’s all.’

  Jim hesitated for a moment, and then he opened the studio door and ushered Al Alvarez ba
ck into the classroom. Immediately, the boys stopped throwing their baseball around and the girls stopped swaying their hips and waving their arms in the air.

  ‘OK, everybody,’ said Jim. ‘The situation is now settled and it’s time to carry on with some work. I’m going to read you another poem and then I’m going to give you a half-hour to make some notes about what you think it means.’

  He went across to his desk and picked up one of his poetry books. ‘This is by a poet called John Lupo, and it’s called The Book of Years.

  ‘High on a windy hill

  With a steel-gray lake glittering in the distance

  I was reading The Book of Years

  And the wind in the grass whispered footnotes to me

  Explaining what each sentence really meant.

  Codas, cadenzas.

  I read about my childhood; and my father

  And my brothers; and the days I went to school

  It was all there, my childhood, in The Book of Years

  And the wind in the grass kept on whispering to me

  “This is what your teacher tried so hard to tell you

  And – see – your father loved you, even if he never found the words.”

  Codas, cadenzas.

  And then I turned a page and you appeared

  Laughing and dancing, and the wind blew warm

  I read about you dancing in The Book of Years

  I read about your laughing and your tears.

  But then I turned the page and all the grass could say,

  Confused, was “What? Where is she?”

  And the day grew dull; and the steel-gray lake no longer shone.

  I closed The Book of Years, for you were gone.

  Codas, cadenzas.’

  ‘Hey, that’s a tearjerker, man,’ called out DaJon Johnson, from the back of the class. ‘Next time why don’t you read us a poem that make us all bust out laughing.’

  Jim smiled and said, ‘I will, don’t worry.’ He held up another book, with a yellow cover. ‘Ogden Nash, one of America’s most humorous poets. Next time I’ll read you his poem A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor. It’s about a bum who goes to a hotel, intent on murder, but Maxie, the elevator boy, takes him to the thirteenth floor, where murderers have to shuffle around and around together with their victims in a conga, for all eternity.

  ‘Here,’ he said, and opened the book, and read a few lines.

  ‘“We are higher than twelve and below fourteen,”

  Said Maxie to the bum,

  “And the sickening draft that taints the shaft

  Is a whiff of kingdom come.

  The sickening draft that taints the shaft

  Blows through the devil’s door!”’

  ‘That don’t sound at all humorous to me!’ DaJon Johnson protested. ‘That sounds real scary! The dead and the living, dancing a frickin’ conga together, for ever and ever? Hooo-wee!’

  But it was Simon Silence that Jim was looking at. He wasn’t just smiling now, he was grinning, and showing all his teeth. Jim could almost have sworn that his eyes lit up like two quartz-halogen pinpricks.

  ‘OK . . . I’ll be back in a minute,’ said Jim. ‘Jot down some of your thoughts about The Book of Years. Try to relate what the poet is saying to your own lives. Did your parents make a point of telling you that they loved you, or did they keep it to themselves? Did you listen to your teachers, or did you always think that you knew better? Did you ever lose anybody that you really cared about? If you wrote a book about your own life, what would you choose for a title?’

  ‘How Gorgeous Am I?’ suggested Jesmeka Watson.

  ‘Stupid And Fucked-Up But With Really Cool Hair, Part One,’ said Rudy Cascarelli.

  Jim left Art Studio Four and went downstairs to the main corridor. He walked past the open door of his usual classroom, Special Class Two, and saw that the decorators had nearly finished replastering and redecorating the ceiling. The floor was covered with white-spattered sheets and the air was filled with a strong smell of emulsion paint.

  As he passed Senior Spanish, Sheila Colefax came hurrying out, with a clutch of plastic folders pressed against her bosom.

  ‘Jim!’ she said. ‘How are you?’

  Jim stood in front of her and lifted both his hands to stop her. ‘Wait a second, Sheila, let me get this right.’ Very slowly and carefully, he said, ‘No debemos comer la carne como esto.’

  Sheila blinked at him. ‘What are you trying to say to me, Jim?’

  ‘I’m trying to say, “We must stop meeting like this.” It’s only a joke, Sheila. You know how much I like you.’

  ‘Well, all right. I understand it’s a joke. But next time say, “Debemos parar el encontarnos como esto.” What you said was, “We must stop eating meat like this.”’

  ‘Oh, shoot, I’m sorry. Back to the phrase book. But you knew what I was getting at, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, to be truthful, I didn’t. I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘Oh. OK. How were the Woodpeckers?’

  ‘The Woolspinners. I didn’t go.’

  ‘Not because of me, I hope?’

  ‘No. Yes, a little, maybe. I guess I wasn’t in the mood.’

  ‘Maybe some other time, huh? Things are kind of fraught at the moment.’

  ‘I know. I’m surprised they haven’t closed the college altogether.’

  ‘If that last victim had been a student, I think they would have done.’

  Sheila said, ‘What’s going on, Jim? Do you have any idea? I mean, you know quite a lot about those black magicky sorts of things, don’t you?’

  Jim thought about Ricky’s Satanic painting, and the look on Simon Silence’s face when he had quoted Ogden Nash’s line about ‘a whiff of kingdom come.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess I know a little about those black magicky sorts of things. But I have no idea at all what this particular ritual is all about – if it is a ritual. The white paint, and the eight white cats. I’ve never heard about anything like it, ever.’

  Sheila touched Jim’s arm. ‘I have to go this way, to have these test papers copied. I’ll see you later.’

  Jim watched her go, in her high-necked white blouse and her black pencil skirt, and he thought he could detect a slight suggestion of sashay in the way she was walking. It occurred to him that maybe she liked him more than she had previously let on. In fact, maybe, in her own suppressed way, she was flirting with him. Pity this wasn’t the time for it.

  He knocked on the door of Dr Ehrlichman’s office. Dr Ehrlichman was smooth-talking someone on the phone, and repeatedly smoothing his bald head with his hand as he did so. When Jim stepped into his office he mouthed ‘sit down’ and pointed to the chair in front of his desk. Jim waved his hand to indicate that he would prefer to stand. He knew from experience how low down that chair was.

  ‘Well, that’s so generous of you,’ said Dr Ehrlichman, on the phone. ‘That really is so generous. We’ll be seeing you at Thanksgiving, I very much trust?’

  He hung up and then he steepled his hands and raised both eyebrows and said, ‘Jim? And what can I do for you?’

  ‘I want that kid out of my class,’ Jim told him.

  ‘I’m sorry. Which kid?’

  ‘You know what kid I’m talking about. Simon Silence. Only son of the Reverend John Silence of the Church of the Holy Outburst, or whatever it’s called.’

  Dr Ehrlichman gave an exaggerated double-take. ‘Simon Silence? I talked to him myself, when the Reverend Silence brought him here. I thought he was unusually polite, and articulate, and eager to learn.’

  ‘Exactly. Everything that my usual students are not.’

  ‘I thought you would be delighted to have a student like that in your class. Somebody to set a level of excellence to which all of his fellow students could aspire.’

  ‘Walter – Special Class Two does not have levels of excellence. Special Class Two exceeds my expectations if they make any kind of sense at all. These are kids who don’t know how to make letters int
o words, let alone words into sentences, and most of the time they speak in riddles. Like, what the dilly yo?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘What’s going on, Walter?’

  ‘I still don’t understand why you should want Simon Silence out of your class. He can only improve your end-of-year average.’

  ‘The reason why I want him out is nothing to do with his academic ability. The reason I want him out is because he’s creepy, and he’s having a very bad influence on all of the rest of Special Class Two, and he’s even having a bad influence on me. I have never been so bad tempered and erratic in my behavior in my life.’

  Dr Ehrlichman tugged a Kleenex out of a box on his desk and made an elaborate performance of blowing his nose. ‘Ragweed,’ he said. ‘It always gives me post-nasal drip.’

  ‘I want him out,’ Jim insisted. ‘I want him out today. You can put him into any other class you like, but not mine.’

  At the same time, strangely, he thought about Simon Silence’s offer of an apple. He could picture what it would have looked like, pink and green, and what it would have tasted like. That sweetness, that sudden burst of acidity. And that calliope playing, far, far away.

  Here – would you like an apple? I have plenty.

  Dr Ehrlichman carefully folded up his tissue and tossed it into his wastebasket. Then he gave a grimace and said, ‘I’m sorry, Jim. No can do.’

  ‘Of course you can. You principal, he student. You tell him, “Go to other class, student,” he have to go. End of smoke signal.’

  ‘Well, in this particular case it’s a little trickier than that. Without beating around the bush, the Reverend Silence specifically requested that Simon be enrolled in Special Class Two.’

  ‘That’s insane. He doesn’t need remedial English. All he needs is somebody to sort out his face. Goddamn kid keeps smiling all the time, like he thinks something’s funny.’

  ‘Jim, this is beginning to sound very much like personal dislike.’

  ‘Walter – no wonder they made you principal! You have such a keen understanding of human nature!’