Swimmer Page 6

  He hung up his crumpled blue linen jacket and sat down at his desk. He opened his copy of New American Poets and began to thumb through it very slowly, licking his thumb with every page that he turned. Gradually, Special Class II began to settle down. At the very back, Nestor Fawkes sat down first, frowning expectantly. Nestor was wearing a washed-out T-shirt and grubby jeans and trainers that were worn through right to the soles. His cheekbones were bruised, and there was a livid scratch on his forehead.

  Out of everybody in Special Class II, Nestor was the one student that Jim was most reluctant to leave. Nestor still needed his help, both emotional and educational, but he was going to have to leave him behind. What else could he do? He couldn’t shoulder responsibility for the whole world. For one thing, he didn’t have the time. You should allow yourself to be selfish sometimes, that’s what Mervyn had said.

  Stella Kopalski kept on chattering. She had blond, piled-up hair, and eyes as green as spearmint, and today she was wearing an ultra-tight white T-shirt and an extra-short blue denim skirt, and white high-heeled ankle boots. ‘You know what I’m thinking of doing this summer?’ she was saying. ‘I’m going to work in this topless bar, Jugg’s, on Sunset. I’ll bet you I’ll land me a part in a movie by September.’

  Jim didn’t say anything, but continued to leaf through his poetry book. He and his students had only six more hours together, and then he was going off to Washington to work for the government’s Literacy Action Force. If he hadn’t managed to change their lives by now, he never would. Stella Kopalski had written one of the saddest and most eloquent poems that he had read this year, but, if she felt it was her destiny to work in a topless bar on Sunset, there was nothing he could do about it.

  Whenever I open up my closet doors,

  My clothes, on hangers, remind me of the days I’ve spent

  With friends, with dearest friends; with people who have loved me good and true.

  With people who are dead, or disappeared.

  I bury my face in the soft forest of cotton and wool, and cry and cry for all of you.

  And there was Tarquin, arch-rapper, tall, gangly and black, with his Sony headphones on his ears, listening to some macho music about bitches and blowing people away. And Washington Freeman III, still leaning back in his chair and pontificating that society owed him a living, no matter what he did. ‘I didn’t ax to be born, now did I?’ And Laura Killmeyer, who had grown out of her witch phase, with the deathly-white make-up and the arched eyebrows, and who was dressed in Gap now, tight black T-shirts and big flappy canvas pants, and short-cropped crimson hair. And Dottie Osias, who had stopped slavishly following Laura Killmeyer and was making her own fashion statement, which was principally baggy and orange.

  Jim loved them all; and if they had ever guessed how much he loved them they would have been deeply embarrassed, even though they loved him too. Joyce Capistrano, Randy Relling Jr and Linda Starewsky, with her bouncing red curls and her arms and legs like a newborn giraffe. Waylon Price and Christophe l’Ouverture, who came from Haiti and was deeply interested in voodoo. Every year, Jim’s remedial English class had presented him with new challenges – but more than that, it presented him with new faces, and fresh chances, and startling new opinions.

  ‘Okay …’ he said at last, looking up from his book. ‘You and I have two more days together. After that, I’m going off to Washington, D.C., to develop a literacy program for the federal government. And you … well, you’re all going off to do whatever it is that young people do when they finish community college. Take over General Motors; open up a peanut stand; dance; sing; go to Hollywood.’

  ‘You ever coming back, man?’ asked Tarquin.

  ‘To West Grove? No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘What about the kids coming here in September? Kids who can’t read and write too good?’

  ‘They’ll be well taken care of. Ms Schaumberg is taking over Special Class II, and believe me she knows what she’s doing. You should hear Ms Schaumberg reciting the Gettysburg Address. Enough to send shivers down your back.’

  ‘Just lookin’ at Ms Schaumberg, that’s enough to send shivers down anyone’s back! Like, Night of the Living Dead, or what?’

  ‘You behave yourself, Tarquin. Ms Schaumberg is a lady, and one of the best remedial English teachers in the county.’

  ‘You the man, Mr Rook.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate your saying so. Now, shall we get on?’

  ‘You don’t understand. You the man. My kid brother coming here next year. Who’s he going to turn to? Ms Schaumberg, I don’t think so. Maybe she teach English good, I’m not saying she don’t. But what we learned here in this class with you, Mr Rook, that weren’t just English, that was like how to live our lives and stuff.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Tarquin. I’m only a teacher.’

  ‘No, Mr Rook. You the beacon. You taught me all kinds of shit I didn’t even want to listen to. Walt Whitman, some stupid white faggot. William Shakespeare, about a thousand years old, from England, who cares? And then you taught me Theodore Spencer and stuff like that and you open up my eyes like I was blind before.’

  Tarquin jabbed his finger in the air and he was so emotional that he was almost crying. ‘I was blind before, like Stevie Wonder, only poor as well. So before you go let me quote you this Theodore Spencer poem that you quoted to us.

  ‘She was a high-class bitch and a dandy

  Prancing man was he and a dandy

  Man he was with that tall lady.

  ‘I should have known that a bitch and a dandy

  Dancing man – and Oh, what a dandy! –

  Would with a prance of a dapper dandy

  Dance into grass: and to grass that lady.

  ‘Bitch as she was – and he was a dandy

  Prancing man – it makes me angry

  That those dance people should stagger and bend.

  I think of that dandy and bitch and am angry

  ‘That over that bitch and over that dandy

  Dancing man – and Oh, what a dandy

  Man he was with tall lady! –

  Only crass grass should dance in the end.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Jim, very impressed. ‘That must be the first poem you ever learned by heart.’

  ‘I learned it to show you,’ said Tarquin, defiantly. ‘I always understood that poem, but I never knew why. It clicked with something inside of my head. And that’s what you did for all of us, Mr Rook. You clicked with something inside of our heads. And that’s the biggest compliment that I ever paid to anybody, ever.’

  It was then that Dr Friendly rapped on the classroom door, and opened it. ‘Mr Rook … A word, please.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jim. ‘Meanwhile, class, you can read John Ciardi’s “Elegy”, page two hundred and twenty-one in your Twentieth-Century American Poets and tell me what you think if it by the time I come back. And I’m looking for some really original ideas. You’ve finished all of your exams now. I want you to think for yourselves … because that’s what you’re going to have to do, now that you’re going out into the big, wide, distressingly expensive world.’

  Outside in the corridor, Dr Friendly immediately put his arm around Jim’s shoulders and propelled him over to the far side of the corridor. ‘James … Jim – I know you prefer it if I call you Jim – we’ve just had some very serious news.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Jim. He had never seen Dr Friendly like this before. Usually he made a point of making Jim feel that he was only half listening to what he was saying, and he hardly ever missed an opportunity to tell him what a criminal waste of time and public resources he considered it to be, trying to teach literature to the underclass. He was a tall, gangly, overpowering man, with a shock of wiry white hair and bulbous eyes. A respected teacher who had been brought into West Grove Community College last year to produce a far better educational average. But sometimes improving the average meant quietly abandoning the slowest and the neediest, and those who were incapable of passing
any exams at all.

  ‘Jim … it’s Dennis Pease. We had a call from LAPD about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘What’s happened? Is he hurt?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s worse than that, James. He’s been drowned. He went surfing last night off Will Rogers State Beach, with a bunch of friends. They reported him missing around one a.m. His body was washed up this morning, just after six.’

  ‘Oh, God. Tell me it’s not true.’

  ‘I’m sorry, James. His mother identified him about an hour ago.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Jim felt so shaky that he had to lean against the door. Dennis Pease had been one of his most promising and sensitive students – a boy who had worked painfully hard, not just to overcome his severe reading difficulties, but also the scathing nagging of his alcoholic mother. She had done everything she could to make him feel that he was letting her down by going to college, when he could have been making $8 an hour working in a car wash or packing bags in a supermarket. How could he love his mother if he never gave her money to pay for her vodka?

  Dr Friendly said, ‘If you want to dismiss your class for the day, James, I’ll quite understand. Of course we’ll be holding two minutes’ silence and saying a special memorial prayer at tomorrow’s final assembly.’

  Jim shook his head. ‘No … this is something my students and I need to talk over together. I’m not just sending them all home in a state of shock.’

  ‘Well, please yourself. But go easy on the mush, won’t you?’

  ‘Go easy on the mush? The mush? A friend and a fellow student has drowned, a young guy not even twenty-one years old, and you’re asking me to go easy on the mush?’

  Dr Friendly gave an awkward shrug, as if he had accidentally left his coat hanger in his jacket. ‘It’s just that … well, I know that your methods of teaching tend to be a little on the emotional side.’

  ‘Of course they’re on the “emotional side”,’ Jim retorted. ‘I’m teaching these young people to express their feelings. I’m teaching them to tell the world what they really think. What do you want me to do? Go back in that room and say, “Dennis Pease is dead, guys, get on with your work”?’

  Dr Friendly laid a hand on Jim’s shoulder. His voice tasted like the oil being poured out of a freshly opened sardine can. ‘Do you know what I’ve always liked about you, James? Your single-mindedness. You don’t meet many single-minded people any more. But you … you support that class of dummies like they’re candidates for Princeton. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not waxing sentimental here, but I’ll kind of miss you when you’re gone. Like waking up one morning and realizing that you don’t have a cold any more.’

  Jim said, ‘You’ll excuse me, won’t you? I have some bad news to tell my dummies.’

  Dr Friendly nodded and smiled, and said, ‘Of course. And be sure to tell them that Dr Ehrlichman and I … we both join them in their sense of loss.’

  Jim hesitated. In his mind, he formed the most blistering retort he could think of, couched in the kind of street language that he was always telling Washington Freeman III not to use. But then he thought: No. That won’t do you any good; and Dr Friendly will only think that you’re being hostile and out of control; and more than that, it’s an insult to Dennis, who is dead.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what they’re going to carve on Dennis’s headstone; but I know what they’re going to carve on yours.’

  ‘Come on, James. Let’s be mature.’

  ‘Of course. You’re right. But it’s a pity that Dennis never got the chance to be mature.’

  Dr Friendly frowned at him. He opened his mouth and then he closed it again. He obviously didn’t understand what Jim was talking about, and didn’t want to understand, either.

  ‘I’ll catch you later, in the staff room,’ he said, and went squelching off along the highly waxed corridor in his rubber-soled shoes. At the corner, however, he stopped and called back, ‘Go on, then, tell me. What will they carve on my headstone?’

  ‘“George Friendly … Misnomer”,’ said Jim, and went back to Special Class II.

  The grief was very hard for him to take. Special Class II sat in silence while he gave them the news; then Stella Kopalski started to sob, and Laura Killmeyer too, and even the boys were sitting with their heads bowed and tears dripping on to their Twentieth-Century American Poets.

  Jim walked slowly down the aisle between the desks, laying his hand on every shoulder. ‘Dennis was a quiet guy,’ he said. ‘He had his own struggles, but he fought them hard, and he never gave in. His mother, as most of you know, had a drink problem, and she made his life very miserable for most of the time. But Dennis never said a single word against her. He understood that she was sick – and that she was just as much of a victim of her illness as he was.

  ‘I guess the saddest thing is that Dennis was about to graduate with very good marks, with a chance of finding himself a job doing what he loved the most, which was working with sick and disabled people. And he wasn’t lonely or isolated any longer. He had friends … not just here in Special Class II, but outside of college too. It’s very hard to understand why somebody like Dennis gets taken away from us. We almost blame them for hurting us so much. But let’s try to think of all those moments when he made us laugh, and when he made us feel better, just because he was alive.’

  It was then that Nestor Fawkes stood up, with his poetry book in his hand, and said hesitantly, ‘That poem you gave us to read, Mr Rook … there’s a verse in it I’d like to say out loud, for Dennis.’

  Washington Freeman III groaned, said, ‘Man …’ and shook his head, but Jim said, ‘Go ahead, Nestor. It’s an elegy, after all.’

  Nestor cleared his throat.

  ‘Ah, love has followed them and tears attest

  They stood as slim as grass, they moved like fish

  Into the silent oceans where they rest

  Dark as the squid. Like trees they held their wish

  A season on the leaf, and cannot perish.’

  Nestor could barely manage to finish the last line because his voice was so choked. The sheer sorrow that filled the class was overwhelming, and Jim said, ‘Let’s have a few moments of quiet now, to think about Dennis. But after that, I think we ought to share a few memories, and then we ought to go home. This has been a very sad way to end this year, but I hope you’ll all leave here tomorrow with hope for the future, as well as regrets for the past.’

  He sat at his desk and watched the morning go by. The class talked quietly amongst themselves, and he heard fragments of their conversations. ‘Do you remember the time I’m carrying my lunch tray and Dennis trips me up? Like, corned beef and mashed potato goes flying everywhere, and Dottie gets a broccoli tiara. Like, it was the first antisocial thing he’d ever done in his entire life. And I’m just about to rip his head off. But he’s like, “I’m so sorry, man, I don’t know why I did that.” But the reason he did it was because he didn’t want to be scared of nobody no more.’

  ‘How about that time he came in dressed like a girl, with a blond wig and high heels and everything, because Ray had called him a faggot?’

  Jim closed his eyes. He was listening to young people who had come to his class only a year ago as children, both emotionally and educationally, and were now capable of analyzing other people’s behavior and their own, and expressing how they felt. He was proud of them all, but right now he could only think that another precious light had winked out, long before morning.

  He was walking across the parking-lot when he was hailed by Lieutenant Harris. It was almost midday and the temperature was up in the high nineties. Lieutenant Harris was carrying his bronze coat over his arm, and his yellow-striped tie was loosened to half-mast. ‘Jim! Talk to you for a moment?’

  ‘Sure. I was on my way home.’

  ‘What did you do, dismiss the class?’

  ‘We had a discussion first, then I let them go. Dennis Pease was a very popular student. Friends with everybody, poor guy.’
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  ‘That was what I was going to ask you about. Did he have any enemies at college? Any run-ins with anybody? Maybe not from your class, but other classes?’

  Jim shook his head. ‘Dennis was as mild as milk. I don’t remember him having a run-in with anybody, ever.’ He paused, took off his sunglasses and said, ‘Why?’

  ‘He never had trouble with girls? Or one particular girl?’

  ‘No way. I think he’d dated a couple of times, but there was nobody serious.’

  ‘You know that for certain?’

  ‘Listen, lieutenant … I teach remedial English. Poetry, drama, expressive literature. I equip my students to put their deepest feelings into words. If any one of them has any kind of romantic trouble, believe me, I’m the first to know it.’

  Lieutenant Harris took out a crumpled handkerchief and dabbed at the reddened furrows on his forehead. ‘Anybody else I should talk to? Who was his closest buddy?’

  ‘Is there something wrong here, lieutenant? I thought that Dennis was drowned when he went out surfing.’

  ‘He was. Except that the medical examiner has told me that there was bruising on his ankles which suggests that he was pulled down under the water … and pulled down with considerable force.’

  ‘What are you saying? That somebody murdered him?’

  ‘The positioning of the fingermarks sure makes it look like a possibility, yes. To have inflicted similar bruising on dry land, somebody would have had to drag him on his stomach along the ground, which would have caused some knee and elbow bruising too, which he didn’t have. Or maybe somebody pulled him down from the top of the parallel bars in the college gymnasium.’

  ‘You can count that out. Dennis hated phys ed with a passion.’