Mr. Verner's Revenge

Disembodied, discombobulated high school English teacher Bill Speer floats at the front of the class watching in horror as star quarterback Henry Connolly and his girlfriend, Becky, blonde head cheerleader, laugh loudly while pointing menacingly at him.  Within a second all the other students join in, their laughter like an insane chattering of coyotes.

Speer acts quickly, slipping a silver whistle into his mouth and blowing shrilly, watching as the cork pea throws itself madly against the air hole.  The strategy works.  The students are shocked into silence.  While he has their attention, he bangs his night stick full force against the lectern.  Reaching behind himself, he unhooks handcuffs from his belt, holds them up for everyone to see.  Then he points with the black stick to Connolly and his girlfriend.  “You two, come here.”

Their smiles evaporate as they turn to each other.  Rising slowly, they walk zombie-like to the front of the room.  After handcuffing them together Speer makes the pair stand in a corner.  Horror stretches the other students’ faces when he holds up a 9-millimeter handgun and slowly presses the muzzle to the side of Henry Connolly’s head.

Bill woke from last night’s out-of-control-class dream before pulling the trigger.

Today is the first day of class in his second year of teaching.  With his back nearly pressed against the wall he stares out at vacant faces.  His noddle legs wobble.  Can he find his voice?  Can he convince these thirty inmates he has something important to say when he doesn’t believe it himself?

Just as he begins describing upcoming assignments two girls near the windows begin a conversation, their whispers like air leaking from balloons.  He ignores it for as long as possible before saying,  “You two have something important to discuss?”

The girls smile at each other while classmates stifle giggles.

Bill makes it through the rest of the introduction having only one out-of-body experience.  Later, when he asks if there are questions, Tommy Sanders, right tackle on the football team, raises a bandaged hand.  Sanders wears a white t-shirt that reads, “No Pain, No Gain.”  Beneath the lettering is an opened hand turned upward.  A railroad spike is driven through the palm, and blood runs graphically on either side of the wound.  “We’re not going to have to read a lot, are we?” Sanders says.

“Of course not.  We wouldn’t want to blemish the school record by passing literate students.”

Class members look at one another to see if they have been insulted.

 When the bell signaling the end of fourth period rings his students pour into the hall, heading outside for lunchbreak.  After a few seconds he follows them, stepping into the desert sunshine that floods the campus.  His favorite bench is vacant, so he sits in the shade of the Mexican Elder that looks like a gigantic bunch of broccoli.  Across the street on a neighbor’s lawn, a gang of students with indiscernible faces suck e-cigs, vapor billowing out of their mouths like rising cumulus clouds.  Some of the kids are probably from his class, and they’re laughing about their geek English teacher.  One of them might be Cindy Lawson, the cheerleader who tried to get Bill into trouble last year.

His watch reads 12:35.  He pictures Deborah at a window seat on the train from Arizona, more than halfway through a book she plans on finishing during her five-hour trip to El Paso.  She’s coming to spend a few days with Bill, prepared to discuss plans for their upcoming wedding.  He has, now, fulfilled the condition she set for acceptance of his marriage proposal: that he demonstrate reliability by holding down a full-time teaching job for a year.

He started the job enthusiastically enough.  But he’s a teacher, not a policeman, and it’s impossible to cope with kids today, kids who are armed-and-dangerous, high on study drugs, eager to have unprotected sex in shadowy school stairwells.  His desire for Deborah, however, had been feverish at the time, and he readily agreed to her demand.

She’s an attractive woman, and he tries to remember the way she looked the last time he saw her.  He recalls her wide-brimmed straw hat, like something out of nineteenth-century fashion, the white umbrella carried to protect her creamy skin from the desert sun, her smile, doled out judiciously from the shadow beneath her hat.

 Try as he might, though, he has trouble picturing her face.  Months have passed since he saw her.  He considers delving into the photo section of his wallet for her photo, but fights the impulse.  Instead, he stares across the street at the group of students.  That is Cindy Lawson.  She stands with arms akimbo, legs spread wide, as if she’s about to launch into a cheerleading routine.  Two male students linger nearby, mesmerized by voluptuous body parts.

It had seemed innocent enough when Cindy stayed after class one day to talk to Bill.  She was doing her term paper on Nabokov, and she wanted to ask questions about a character in one of his novels.  Bill felt nervous about being alone with Cindy—a girl in woman’s body—who was something of an exhibitionist.  That day she wore a bone-white gauze blouse tucked into a black-leather miniskirt that showed every inch of her athletic legs.  The air in the room suddenly went thin, and Bill felt perspiration bead on his nose.

After she talked in vague generalities about her term paper, which she hadn’t started writing yet, she said she was almost positive she wouldn’t hand it in on time.  “I’ve been having these awful headaches,” she said, “and the doctor can’t find anything wrong.”

“I went through a period like that last year.  The doctor decided they were stress headaches.  Maybe that’s what’s causing yours.”

“So is it okay if I turn my paper in late?”

“You know my policy, Cindy, one letter-grade deduction for every two days late.”

“No exceptions?”  She dropped a pencil, bending from the waist to pick it up.

“No exceptions,” he said, looking away.

A week later, Bill was summoned to the principal’s office.  When he went in, Hal Bremmer sat in his brown-leather captain’s chair peering out a window.  At the sound of the door Bremmer swiveled.  Bremmer was prematurely bald, his only hair a slipped horseshoe of black velvet resting on pink pixie ears.

He said, “One of your students, Cindy Lawson, has leveled a serious charge against you.”  Bremmer’s pencil-line eyebrows rose quizzically above his dark eyes, like a drawbridge over murky water, and all Bill could imagine was an accusation of sexual harassment.  He was just beginning to revel in the thought of being fired when Bremmer said, “She claims you said her medical problems were all in her head.  You should know better than to tell a student something like that, Speer.”

“She misinterpreted my comment,” Bill said, detailing the particulars of the brief conversation with Cindy Lawson.

Although the explanation seemed to satisfy Bremmer, the principal dressed him down anyway, lambasting Bill for being so foolish as to meet privately with Cindy Lawson in the first place.  “You know how that might look to people who don’t understand your commitment to teaching.”

Bill was nodding in agreement when Bremmer leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his knobby head, directing his gaze toward the ceiling.  Smiling dreamily, he said, “She is hot, though, isn’t she?  I wouldn’t mind meeting with her after class myself, if you catch my drift.”  He gestured with his eyes to the banana-yellow vinyl couch hunkered beneath the window at the side wall.

End of interview.

Nothing ever came of the Cindy Lawson incident, but it forever poisoned Bill’s opinion of the principal.

Sitting on the bench beneath the Mexican Elder he wonders why the thought of Deborah being here by day’s end doesn’t brighten his mood.  An image pops into his head.   He pictures himself waiting at Union Depot while each and every passenger exits the train. Deborah’s face is not among those in the clamoring throng.  She decided not to come after all.

If Deborah doesn’t come will he be alone forever?  He pictures himself thirty years from now, a decrepit, burned-out teacher, getting ready for retirement.  And death.  One thing he’s suddenly sure of:  if Deborah doesn’t show, he won’t be teaching next year.  The idea makes the day seem sunnier.

The bell sounds for next period, and the inmates across the street begin to trickle back to the prison.  Their hair is dyed orange and red and green and blue.  Some wear rings through their noses.  They drag their balls-and-chains behind them, their faces blank, staring at their phones, hypnotized by cat videos.  After they pass him Bill stands and follows them inside.

After lunch, he monitors fifth-period study hall.  Even as a student he hated study hall, and this is the first of the year.  The inmates, however, love it.  They resume their misbehaviors as if there had been no summer break.  Several start making animal grunts at the back of the room.  He ignores the sound despite the murmur of laughter crescendoing in the class.  But when two prisoners begin yipping like coyotes, he says, “Quiet!  This is study hall.  Study!”  The inmates laugh into their hands, deeply satisfied they have provoked a response.

Halfway through the period, Winny DeMarest, a dirty blonde with a scar that bisects her right eyebrow, approaches his desk.  She has pen and paper in hand.  Explaining she has a history paper due seventh period, she says, “Will you look at the introduction, Mr. Speer?”  That’s all she’s written so far.  The first sentence reads, “People take it for granite that we Americans will always have freedom of speech.”  While he pretends to read the rest of the paragraph, he monitors the girl in his peripheral vision.  She’s contorting her face into grotesque masks, forcing her classmates to giggle.  He heads the misbehavior off by handing her paper back.  “Excellent,” he says.  “Sit down.”

A few minutes later, the prisoners begin whispering to each other.  Every so often they stop to look up at their teacher.  Then they resume their conspiratorial chatter.  Bill smiles slowly, momentously, staring at each and every one of them.  He wants to send a message:  ‘I know what you’re up to:  plotting strategies to make me crazy.  But how naive you are.  Do you seriously believe I’m that easy?  I could teach you a thing or two about disruption.  I know how to play the game.  After all, I was one of the students who drove Mr. Verner insane.’

 

The high school was a penitentiary, sitting at the top of a small hill of Bermuda lawn.  From the road the two guard towers at the front of the building were clearly visible.  Every morning when reaching the school steps, Billy Speer had an upset stomach from not wanting to be there.  And each morning he fought an urge to turn and run.  He could enter the desert behind the old Forbes house, go to the huge cottonwood tree where somebody had made a Tarzan vine out of steel cable, and spend the better part of a day swinging perilously, fifty feet above the earth at the far end of the pendulum arc.

But he didn’t start skipping regularly until senior year.  In tenth and eleventh grades, he still dutifully scaled the steps to the prison, made the obligatory appearance in home room, went through the motions of attending classes.  At lunchtime he stood smoking cigarettes with the others behind the metal shop building, listening to the sounds of machinery inside: inmates making license plates.

Right after lunch was English with Mr. Verner, who Billy had for both sophomore and junior years.  Mr. Verner only lasted three years altogether.  Why students harassed him so much was evident.  Mr. Verner was simply the kind of man kids could make nuts.  For that reason alone they felt obligated to do it.  Billy was never as committed to the responsibility as the other students—at least he didn’t like to think so—but he did his part.

Mr. Verner was a stick man with brown wig hair and an upper plate of yellow false teeth that slipped whenever he yelled at students.  Which was often.  He couldn’t have been much over forty when he first started teaching at Cabeza de Vaca High, but by year two he looked sixty, and was already stooped and haggard.  None of the students had any compassion for him.  No relenting.  It was all in good fun.  Besides, he was asking for it.  What kind of teacher makes students read Romeo and Juliet aloud in class, but has them skip the love scenes?

Even though Mr. Verner deserved the harassment, Billy didn’t enjoy the physical stuff, like some of the others.  Star quarterback Tad Pooley, for instance, who once tipped Mr. Verner’s chair over with him in it.  Mr. Verner had a bad habit of balancing on the back legs of the wooden chair.  One day, Pooley commanded attention by simply winking secretively at his classmates.  He headed to the front of the room under the guise of asking a question about last night’s homework.  Students held their collective breath, for Pooley had become the most daring of tormentors.

While talking to Mr. Verner, he slipped his toe under a raised front leg of the chair.  When he lifted his foot, upsetting the delicate balance, Mr. Verner toppled backwards, striking his head on the aluminum chalk tray.  “Are you all right, Mr. Verner?” Pooley said, smiling at the class while helping the teacher to his feet.  Billy couldn’t get over the look of gratitude on Mr. Verner’s blanched face.

No, Billy didn’t condone that kind of abuse.  He did other things.  He was the one, for instance, who glued Mr. Verner’s middle desk drawer shut so the teacher couldn’t pull it out one morning.  Billy was the one who initiated the fake fight with Jerry Singletary, the fight that saw them throwing paper wads at each other while Mr. Verner, the true target of fire, tried to break it up.  Billy was the one who invented the pocket radio scam.  He didn’t know it at the time, but it was this scam, more than any other, that showed what a fragile mind they were toying with.

It was simple fun.  Two kids brought transistor radios to class.  They sat on opposite sides of the room.  The kid on the right side would play his radio first—softly, almost subliminally—until Mr. Verner noticed.  When he proceeded to that side of the class, the first radio would be turned off and the second switched on.  Mr. Verner would stop in mid-step, turning abruptly to see if he could catch the culprit.  Students would stare straight ahead, barely able to contain their glee.  This would go on for an incredibly long time, Mr. Verner darting back and forth from side to side.  He was the biggest fish ever baited.

About a week after students tired of the pocket radio scam, the school broadcasted, over the PA system, an announcement about the upcoming seniors’ production of “Oklahoma,” which was accompanied by music from one of their practices.  This was the day Mr. Verner snapped.  He mistook the broadcast for the radio scam, going up and down the aisles from student to student, trying to find the guilty party.  Billy tried to explain to their teacher that he was mistaken, that it was the speaker on the side wall he heard, but Mr. Verner pulled Billy roughly out of his seat, grabbing his shoulders and shaking soundly.  “Get it out of you, Mr. Speer,” he screamed.  “Get it out of you.”  Then he gave Billy detention.

Still under the delusion that somebody was playing a radio, Mr. Verner crossed to the far side of the room and accosted DeeDee Wainwright, the future head cheerleader.  “Give it up,” he said, motioning for DeeDee to hand over a radio she didn’t possess.  She scoffed in his face.  That’s when Mr. Verner reached out as if to search her and touched a nubile breast.  DeeDee slapped him with a roundhouse right that spun his head.  The ever-chivalrous Tad Pooley leaped out of his chair and shoved Mr. Verner hard, causing the teacher to stumble and fall to the floor.  Mr. Verner was stammering when he stood up.  In a pathetically feeble voice, he said to Pooley, “You have detention today.”

An hour after everyone else had gone home, Tad and Billy got out of detention.  Since they lived in adjoining neighborhoods, they started back together.  The two boys weren’t friends, but because Billy felt a need to impress the quarterback, he agreed with Tad when the quarterback maligned their English teacher with every dirty word he could muster.  Even though Billy felt slightly sorry for Mr. Verner, he joined in, reminding Tad of the breast-touching incident, suggesting that Mr. Verner could be fired for less than that.  By then the boys were in front of the prison, and Billy noticed Mr. Verner’s opened second-floor window.

It had rained two days ago, and in the dirt tract next to the sidewalk a small mud bog had formed.  Though it looked like chocolate pudding, it had the consistency of ground beef.  Billy bent and scooped out a handful, making a huge mud meatball.  The look on Tad’s face showed he approved of the plan.  Had Billy thought too much about what he was doing the whole thing would have failed miserably; at the moment of release he would have doubted his skill, hesitating just long enough to ruin the delivery.  But just like in his days of Little League pitching, when he threw the ball without thought, Billy flung the mud glob toward the open window.  Time slipped into slow-motion as he and Tad stood with their faces tilted up, their mouths agape.

For some reason Billy imagined their physics teacher, Mr. Radowitz, lecturing on the event.  “What are the chances that the projectile will arc perfectly into the opening?” he might have said.  “And even if it does, what chance is there that Mr. Verner still occupies the room this long after school has let out?  And what are the odds, if both these conditions are met, that the irresistible force (the mud ball) will meet the immovable object (Mr. Verner).”  Tad and Billy watched as the mud ball arced perfectly into the window.  A second later, Mr. Verner let out a blood-curdling scream.

The boys ran for their lives, laughing hysterically as they plunged down the steps, around the concrete retaining wall, and up the hill toward home.  In the desert behind the old Forbes house, Tad and Billy took a couple of swings on the Tarzan vine while recounting the mud ball incident.  Tad couldn’t get over it, and later, when they separated at Maple Street, he high-fived Billy.  Billy never felt so good.  He knew Tad would tell everyone about it the next day.  Billy’s position in the school hierarchy would rise.  He would be a hero, a legend in his own time.

Apparently, though, Tad never told anyone about the incident.  In fact, he never paid attention to Billy after that.  Why would he?  Tad was the star quarterback on the football team, and Billy was a nobody.  Oddly enough, Tad and his girlfriend went away to the same college as Billy.  Tad attended on a football scholarship.  The last time the schoolmates saw each other was during freshman year when Billy passed Tad and DeeDee and a few of their friends on the commons.  “How are you guys doing?” Billy said.  Tad and DeeDee walked right by without saying a word.

Home for Christmas break during sophomore year Billy stood at night outside the central YMCA on Brown Street waiting for his father to pick him up.  Dad had dropped Billy off earlier because Billy’s car wouldn’t start.  While he was swimming laps in the Y a rare winter snow had blown in frosting the streets.   Billy watched as cars spun their tires trying to climb the hill.

The night was bitterly cold.  Breath billowed out of his mouth like cigarette smoke.  He stood shivering near the front wall praying for his father to show up soon when, out of the darkness beyond a nearby streetlamp, a transient stepped into the light.  He was a pathetic figure in a tattered black overcoat and dirty yellow stocking cap.  His head was tucked turtle-like into his collar.  He huddled along the wall, barely able to make progress against the wind.

 When the transient was ten feet away Billy realized the man didn’t see him.  Billy considered moving out of his way, but didn’t want to step into the biting wind.  The old man stopped dead before bumping into Billy, looking up from the depths of his shell with a weathered face.  There was something instantly familiar about his watery blue eyes, and before even thinking it, Billy said, “Mr. Verner.”

The transient scanned Billy’s face, nodding his head all the while.  Finally, the old man said, “Yes, yes.  I remember you.  Mr. Speer, isn’t it?”  He coughed into his hand a couple of times, then went around Billy along the wall, disappearing into the darkness beyond the streetlight.  Billy wanted to ask what had happened over the years, to tell Mr. Verner about his own changes—attending college and all—but when he ran to the edge of the building Mr. Verner was gone.  Dad’s green Ford rolled up then, and Billy had no time to search for his old English teacher.

The encounter with Mr. Verner had a profound effect.  When Billy went back to school for the next semester he changed his major from astronomy to English Education.  At the time he knew it had something to do with Mr. Verner, but just didn’t know what.  He did know he’d suddenly discovered a purpose in life.  As much as he had labored in the physical sciences, he sailed through the liberal arts.  He discovered a real appetite for literature, and he read as if unable to sate a starving mind.  Educational theory was easily mastered, and Billy could hold his own in any conversation with student or professor alike.  The process of his maturation accelerated at light speed, and his mission in life became startlingly clear.  Despite advice from professors that he pursue a graduate degree, Billy decided to become a high school teacher.  And even nobler still, he decided to return to his hometown to teach English.

Starting off at Bruce Babbitt High, he soon requested a transfer to his old alma mater.  His career began well.  He was idealistic, and young enough to relate to the kids.  He had a notion then about teaching more than subject matter.  He was going to teach students about truth, honor, compassion.  But that was back before the cynicism set in, before the administration issued him his riot gear.

 

 Union Depot, a red-brick building with a spire much like a church steeple, is on the historic registry.  Bill’s been waiting behind it for twenty minutes now.  The train is late.  Standing beside him, leaning against the back wall, is a family of four, mother, father, and two boys.  The father talks loudly in an East Texas accent about two transients who sit on boulders in the thin shade of a paloverde tree on the other side of the tracks.  The two derelicts are obviously waiting to hop a train.

“That’s you two if you don’t get an education,” the father says to his sons in a syrupy accent.  “Better study hard, become responsible citizens.”  When the father notices Bill watching the boys’ reaction, he says, “Isn’t that right, Mister?”

“That’s right,” Bill says.  But when he turns his gaze back to the transients he hears the sound of their laughter carrying across the tracks, a happy, carefree song of the open road.  One of them has a black dog on a leash, and the animal wags its tail like a windshield wiper in heavy rain.

A buzz of excitement surges through the crowd at the rear of Union Depot as the train appears around a bend.  People push forward, anxious to meet loved ones.  Bill steps out cautiously, but is swept along in the wave.  People are through the gate now and out onto the platform before the train groans to a stop.  He stands with his back against the chain-link fence, waiting for a glimpse of Deborah.  But as the last happy family passes him, headed back to the parking lot, he doesn’t see her.

He’s just about to leave when she steps down from the last coach.  She carries her brown cloth suitcase in one hand, a raised white umbrella in the other.  He walks numbly forward.  She sets the suitcase down, raises her umbrella to give him a hug.  Unfortunately, she’s even more beautiful than he remembers.

“Good to see you, Bill.”

“Good to see you, too.”

 As they walk toward the gate, he notices a freight train lumbering away from the station to the west.  Before it slips past the passenger train he catches a glimpse of the two transients and the dog scrambling across the tracks.  The men carry tattered khaki packs, like Boy Scouts on an outing.  Where are they headed, Bill wonders.  In his mind he pictures their escape.  The long, hot ride across a stark desert.  The jubilant arrival at the coast.  Their first tentative steps from white beach into silky ocean.  A cool breeze of freedom in his face.