Garden of Evil Read online

  Dr Ehrlichman jabbed his finger at Jim and said, in a bunged-up voice, ‘Don’t you get sarcastic with me, Jim. The Reverend Silence believes that Simon needs to learn more street slang in order to spread the word of God into the ghettoes and among the gangs. The way he speaks now, they won’t listen to what he says for a moment.’

  ‘So he’s joined Special Class Two not to improve his English but to dumb it down. You know something, Walter, I don’t think there’s an antonym for “remedial English”. Maybe West Grove should invent one. We could call it “stupedial English.”’

  ‘That’s enough, Jim. I’m very sorry that you’re not interacting constructively with Simon Silence, but the plain fact is that the Reverend Silence donated a very substantial sum of money toward the upgrade of our sports facilities.’

  Jim said, ‘What? Say it isn’t so.’

  ‘The pool, as you know, is in a serious state of disrepair. It urgently needs a new filtration plant, and new pumps, and new tiling. The Reverend Silence has agreed to give us three-point-five million toward it.’

  ‘Three-point-five million dollars? He wants his son to speak like a wanksta and he’s prepared to pay three-point-five million dollars for it?’

  Dr Ehrlichman shrugged. ‘You should be proud of yourself, Jim. Your reputation has obviously spread far and wide. The Reverend Silence insisted that Simon be tutored by you, and you alone. You’ve done this college a very great service.’

  Jim slowly shook his head. ‘I think you’ll find that I’ve done exactly the opposite, Walter. Is your nose still blocked up?’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s the ragweed.’

  ‘If your nose is still blocked up, that’s why you can’t detect the sickening whiff of kingdom come.’

  Jim stalked back along the main corridor, fuming. As he reached the foot of the stairs the math teacher, Roger Ball, came squelching past in his thick-soled sneakers, with his unkempt brown beard and his brown check shirt and his brown corduroy pants.

  ‘Jim! Where have you been? How was your vacation? Laura and me, we went to Cancun! What a time we had there! We had one of those bottles of tequila with an agave worm in it, and Laura – goddamnit, you’re not going to believe this – Laura swallowed the damn thing! She swallowed it!’

  ‘What?’ said Jim, staring at him as if he didn’t recognize him.

  ‘We had one of those bottles of tequila with an agave worm in it,’ said Roger Ball, less certainly this time.

  ‘Yes? And?’

  ‘Laura . . . swallowed it.’

  Jim kept staring at him. He was so angry that he didn’t trust himself to say any more. He knew that it wasn’t Roger Ball’s fault that he had to keep Simon Silence in Special Class Two, but the way he felt at the moment he would have yelled at anybody, even the janitor.

  He turned his back on Roger Ball and started to climb the stairs.

  ‘Maybe we could have a drink one night?’ Roger Ball called after him. ‘I could ask Henry and Ricardo to come along. Maybe we could go for burgers, too?’

  Jim didn’t answer. He was only halfway up the stairs, however, when a young girl came breezing past the top of the staircase. She was slim, and wearing a clinging gray jersey dress. Her hair was light brown and long and flowing as if she were walking in a wind.

  High on a windy hill . . .

  As Jim went up the next three stairs, the girl turned her head and looked down at him. He recognized her at once from her photograph. She was beautiful, even more beautiful than her mother had been. Those hazel eyes, and those feline cheekbones, and that slightly pouting smile.

  I read about you dancing in The Book of Years . . .

  Jim’s entire skin felt as if it were shrinking. He gripped the handrail tightly, and for a split second he thought he was going to lose his balance and fall backward. As it was he stumbled and struck his left knee on the riser in front of him.

  ‘Jim!’ shouted Roger Ball. ‘Jim, are you OK up there?’

  But now Jim was clambering up the stairs, as fast as he could. By the time he reached the top, the girl was already halfway along the corridor.

  ‘Bethany!’ he shouted. ‘Bethany!’

  TWELVE

  Before she reached the end of the corridor, she turned around. She was lit up by the sunlight that came through the second-to-last window in the same way that Simon Silence had been illuminated when he had first walked into the classroom that morning. A celestial ray from heaven.

  ‘Bethany!’ he panted. He was running now, with all his loose change chunking in his pants pockets.

  He knew that Bethany was dead. He wasn’t deluding himself that she had somehow mysteriously come to life again, or that Jane had made a mistake when she had identified her body. But ever since he was seven years old he had been able to see dead people, and talk to them – especially if they wanted him to see them, and to talk to them – and if the dead daughter that he had never known about wanted to talk to him now, this was an opportunity he wasn’t going to miss.

  He slowed down as he approached her. He was panting. The sunlight that surrounded her was dazzling, and swarming with golden specks of dust. She looked so bright that he could barely see her face, and her light brown hair waved all around her in that unfelt wind.

  ‘Bethany,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see you, Daddy.’ Her voice was very muted, as if she were speaking to him from inside a closet, with the door closed. ‘I came to tell you something.’

  ‘I never knew about you, sweetheart,’ said Jim. ‘Your mommy never told me about you. I never even knew that you were born.’

  ‘I want to come back, Daddy.’

  Jim had tears in his eyes, but he had to shake his head. ‘You can’t come back, sweetheart. There’s no way that you can come back.’

  ‘You can do it, Daddy. I know you can.’

  ‘I can’t, baby. If only.’

  ‘Think of all the things we could do together, Daddy. We could go for picnics. We could walk on the seashore. We could read a book together, on a windy hill. We could talk and talk and talk and never stop.’

  Jim reached out his hand for her, but he knew that even if he touched her, he would feel nothing at all. This was Bethany’s spirit, that was all, not her body. As Ogden Nash had written, in his poem about the Thirteenth Floor, ‘The clean souls fly to their home in the sky.’

  Bethany said, ‘Please, Daddy. Please find a way. Simon will help you.’

  ‘Simon? You mean Simon Silence?’

  Bethany nodded. ‘Simon will help you. You only have to ask him.’

  ‘How do you know Simon? Bethany – how do you know Simon?’

  ‘Daddy, don’t be angry with me.’

  ‘I’m not angry, sweetheart, but I need to understand what the . . . what the connection is. How can Simon help me to bring you back? You’re gone, and I wish so much that I had gotten to know you before you went, but there’s no way for you to come back. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry, but that’s the way it is.’

  ‘I can come back, Daddy. We can all come back. Simon will help you.’

  ‘Bethany—’

  ‘We could walk on the seashore, Daddy. You remember the seashore. We could ride on the horses on the carousel.’

  In The Good Old Summertime . . .

  Jim felt as if an earth tremor had rippled through the floor underneath his feet. ‘What do you know about that?’ he asked her.

  ‘We could read a book on a windy hill. We could talk and talk and talk and never stop.’

  ‘What do you know about the seashore?’

  But now Bethany turned away, and the sunlight shone brighter, until it was dazzling, and she simply melted out of sight in front of him.

  He stayed where he was, with tears sliding down his cheeks. The sunlight faded again, and then a cloud passed over the sun.

  ‘Mr Rook?’ said a voice, and it was a voice that he recognized.

  ‘What is it, Simon?’ he asked, keeping his back to him
.

  ‘I was just making sure that you were all right, Mr Rook.’

  Jim dry-washed his face with his hands. ‘Any reason why I shouldn’t be?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s always very stressful, when you lose somebody you love. Especially if you never had the chance to get to know them.’

  Jim turned around and walked back toward Art Studio Four. The door was open and the usual noise was coming from inside – the boys throwing their baseball around and drumming dubstep rhythms on the benches, the girls laughing and chattering and singing.

  Simon Silence was standing outside the door in his loose white linen shirt and his loose white pants. He wasn’t smiling, though, and in some subtle way his face seemed to have altered. His nose looked flatter and his eyes appeared to slant more than they had before. He looked older, too, although Jim couldn’t work out why.

  He held up an apple – pink, and green, and shiny. ‘I polished it for you already,’ he said.

  Jim hesitated, and then he took it. ‘What kind of a game are you playing here, Simon? What’s going on?’

  ‘No game, Mr Rook. You saw her for yourself, didn’t you?’

  ‘Don’t tell me that you saw her, too?’

  Simon Silence shook his head. ‘I can’t do that. I don’t have that facility, unlike you. But I heard you calling out her name, and I heard you talking to her.’

  ‘Then you’ll have guessed what she said.’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long silence between them. Then Jim said, ‘Let’s get back to this class, shall we? Let’s see if the rest of them can all aspire to be as good at English as you are. And let’s see if you can learn some more street speak.’

  ‘I’m koolin’ it.’

  ‘Don’t you try to mock me, Simon. I mean it. You and I, we need to sit down at recess and we need to talk.’

  ‘Of course we do, sir,’ said Simon Silence, and returned to his place.

  Jim stood in front of the class and held up his hand for silence. ‘Let’s hear from somebody who hasn’t spoken out before.’ He looked from one disinterested face to the next, until he stopped at the baby-pretty girl with the scraggly blonde curls. Today she was wearing a tight white T-shirt with the slogan I BEAT ANOREXIA on her breasts, in shiny scarlet letters. She was chewing gum and staring into the middle distance.

  ‘You,’ said Jim. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘You talking to me?’ she said, in a squeaky voice, pointing at herself like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

  ‘Yes, I’m talking to you. Do you want to tell us your name?’

  ‘Oh – OK, it’s Hunni. It’s spelled the same way as “funny”, but with an “i” instead of a “y”. Hunni Robards.’

  ‘OK, Hunni, what feelings did you get when I read you The Book of Years?’

  ‘What feelings did I get? I felt sorry for myself. That’s how I felt.’

  ‘Why is that, Hunni?’

  ‘I felt sorry for myself because it’s, like, obviously me who’s laughing and dancing and like lighting up the whole world and making the wind feel warm, and then I’m kind of like written out of it. It’s a bit like being the best character in a daytime soap, you know like Days Of Our Lives, and then you get some fatal illness or knocked down by a truck and you can’t even come back in a later episode unless it’s a dream.’

  ‘So you really thought that poem was all about you.’

  ‘For definite,’ said Hunni, chewing her gum even more emphatically. ‘Absolutely and for definite.’

  Jim pointed at Kyle Baxter, sitting in the front row. ‘How about you, Kyle? What did it mean to you?’

  ‘I felt very strongly that it was written about me. The wind whispering in the grass, explaining how to put words together so that you can understand what they mean. And then that chorus of coda, which means the conclusion or closing part of a statement, and cadenza, which means a virtuoso solo passage in a piece of music, typically near the end.’

  ‘Hey, I’m glad you explain that, man,’ put in DaJon Johnson. ‘I thought coda cadenza was some kind of a drug, like, you know, codeine, like the dude who wrote the poem was whacked out of his brain.’

  Jim paced from one side of the classroom to the other. He felt that he was beginning to detect a pattern here. It wasn’t unusual for his students to see the world only from their own point of view. Many of them had lived all their lives within the same twenty-block neighborhood, and had rarely ventured further than the bodega on the corner. In the past, he had known students had never even been to the beach, even though it was less than twenty minutes away, and who had never seen the ocean.

  But almost all of the responses that this class had been giving him this morning had been selfish almost to the point of absurdity. Both Jesmeka Watson and Rebecca Teitelbaum had wanted to be celebrities – ‘mega famus’ in Jesmeka’s words – and adored by thousands. Joe Chang had wanted to be a member of a gang that inspired fear wherever they went. Even Kyle Baxter the Dictionary Dude had wanted everybody in the whole world to know that he was smarter than they were.

  It had been the same with the poem, The Book of Years. Every student seemed to think that the poet had written it especially for them, as if he had known them personally.

  Jim was always aware that one of the most important aspects of his job as a teacher of remedial English was to develop his students’ sensitivity to other people’s needs – particularly when it came to a potential employer, who was assessing their suitability for a job. Yet in only two days, this class were beginning to show signs that they were oblivious to everybody’s needs except their own.

  Or maybe I’m just being hypersensitive, thought Jim. They’re only kids, after all, and kids are selfish by definition. Maybe I’m just being grouchy.

  He went up to the boy with the red hair and the raging red acne, who was sitting directly behind Joe Chang. Today he was wearing a black T-shirt with showers of dandruff on his shoulders.

  ‘So, what’s your name, son?’ he asked him.

  ‘Tomas – well, Tommy. Tommy Makovicka.’

  ‘Makovicka? That’s unusual. What kind of a name is that?’

  ‘It’s Czech, sir. My great-grandfather came from Kladno, that’s a city near Prague.’

  ‘OK. That’s interesting. Does it mean anything, “Makovicka”? I know that most Czech names have a meaning. Like “Rybar” is a fisherman, and “Novak” means somebody who’s new in town.’

  Tommy Makovicka flushed redder than ever. ‘It does mean something, yes, sir. It means “Poppyhead”.’

  With the exception of Simon Silence, everybody in Special Class Two burst out laughing. Jim immediately lifted his hand for them to quieten down.

  ‘OK, OK. Don’t tempt me to go around the class and tell you what all of your surnames really mean. Some of you would be laughing on the other side of your face, believe me.’

  He turned back to Tommy Makovicka and said, ‘All right, Tommy, what did The Book of Years mean to you – if it meant anything?’

  ‘Some of it’s true and some of it isn’t.’

  ‘Excuse me? You want to explain that?’

  ‘When it says my dad loved me even if he never said so, that’s not true. He never said so because he never did. He only loved my sister, Khrista. He was always telling her how clever she was and how beautiful she was and he was always telling me how stupid and ugly I was.’

  ‘Can’t blame the dude for tellin’ the truth!’ sang out DaJon Johnson.

  Jim turned around to DaJon Johnson and made a zipper gesture across his lips. Then he said, ‘OK, Tommy – what part of the poem do you think is true?’

  ‘Khrista was always laughing and dancing like it says in the poem. She was always flirting and going out with these really evil guys, just because they had money and fancy cars. “Laughter and tears,” that’s what it says in the poem and that was true, because these guys always used to treat her so bad, but she still kept on going back for more.

  ‘One day she didn’t
come home and they found her in Selma Park, and she was dead. One of those guys must have given her too much smack and then dumped her when she OD’d. So that’s the true part of the poem. You give somebody too much, more than they deserve, and you end up killing them. They’re gone.’

  ‘Well, that’s a very sad story, Tommy, even though I’m not too sure that the poem really says that, and I’m not too clear what your point is.’

  ‘The point is, I was so glad when she died,’ said Tommy, his face flushing even redder. ‘It was like I finally got my revenge on my dad, right? It was better than sticking a knife in him, because he had lost his beautiful, clever Khrista for ever, and he was stuck with stupid, ugly me, and it was his fault. Like, yessss!’

  The classroom was silent. Jim saw that one or two students were staring at Tommy, and they were obviously shocked. But most of them looked as if they understood how he felt, and some of them were actually nodding in approval.

  He turned to Simon Silence, to see if he was smiling, and of course he was. But it was not the sloping, self-satisfied smile that he usually smiled. It was a smile of quiet acknowledgement, as if everything was working out just the way he wanted it.

  ‘All right,’ said Jim, ‘I think that’s enough about The Book of Years. The poet who wrote it, John Lupo, said himself that it was all about memory, and how our lives seem to be so different when we look back at them. Why the hell didn’t we see some of the things that were going on right under our noses? Why didn’t we realize what was about to happen to us, before it was too late?

  ‘Anyhow – now I’m going to hand out some papers which have ten sentences on them. Some of these sentences have words that are spelled incorrectly, or very bad mistakes in grammar.’

  ‘Grammar?’ frowned DaJon Johnson. ‘Like, a grammar coke?’

  ‘Grammar like in the English language, DaJon. I think even you know that.’

  He started to walk slowly down the side of the classroom, giving four papers to the students sitting at the end of the benches, so that they could pass them down. He had just handed four papers to Tommy Makovicka when his attention was caught by one of the scores of pictures on the wall beside him.