Mr. Verner's Revenge

On the first day of class in my second year of teaching high school English I’m paralyzed by sudden panic.  Until now I’ve managed to ward off this fear.  I hang at the front of the room, the target of sixty belligerent eyes.  My noodle legs wobble.  I’m afraid I won’t find my voice.  Even if I do, I know I can’t convince these thirty inmates that what I have to say is important.  How can I?–I don’t believe it myself.  When I stagger down the aisles passing out the syllabus my hands shake.

I remember last night’s out-of-control-class dream.  In the dream the star quarterback on the high school football team, Henry Connolly, and his girlfriend, Becky, the blond head cheerleader, started laughing and pointing at me for no reason.  Within a second the other students had taken it up.

I acted quickly, slipping a silver whistle into my mouth and blowing shrilly, watching as the cork pea threw itself madly against the air hole.  The strategy worked.  The students were shocked into silence.  While I had their attention I went to the front of the room and banged my night stick full force against the lectern.  Reaching behind myself I unhooked handcuffs from my belt, holding them up for everyone to see.  Then I pointed with the black stick to Connolly and his girlfriend.  “You two, come here.”

Their smiles evaporated as they turned to each other.  Rising slowly they walked zombie-like to where I stood.  After I handcuffed them together I made the pair stand in a corner.  Horror stretched the other students’ faces when I held a 9 millimeter handgun to the side of Henry’s head.  But I woke from the dream before killing the quarterback.

Back at the front of the room, my voice quakes as I read the syllabus aloud.  While I’m at it two girls near the windows hold a conversation, their whispers like air leaking from balloons.  I ignore it for as long as possible before exploding:  “You two have something important to say?”
The girls smile at each other while their classmates giggle.

I make it through the rest of the syllabus with only one out-of-body experience.  Later, when I ask if there are any 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, palm turned upward.  A railroad spike is driven through the hand, and blood runs graphically on either side of the wound.  “Do we really have to read this stuff?” he says.

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

Class members look at one another to see if they've been insulted.  The first day of class, and already I've established an adversarial relationship.

 I dismiss the students long before the period ends.  They pour into the hall.  After a few seconds I follow them.  I find the nearest exit and step out into the desert sunshine that floods over the Bermuda grass campus.  My favorite bench is vacant, so I go and sit in the shade of a Mexican Elder that reminds me of a broccoli stalk.
Across the street on a neighbor’s lawn a gang of students with indiscernible faces suck cigarettes, smoke billowing out of their mouths like cumulus clouds.  Some of them are probably from my class, and they’re laughing about their geek English teacher.  I think I see Cindy Lawson over there, the cheerleader who tried to get me into trouble last year–my first year.

I look at my watch: 8:45 am.  I picture Deborah, her neat brown-cloth suitcase in hand, boarding the train in Tempe at this very moment.  I can see her picking a window seat, opening a book she will undoubtedly finish during the eight-hour trip across the desert to El Paso.  She’s coming to spend a few days with me, prepared to discuss plans for our upcoming marriage.  I have, now, fulfilled the condition she set for acceptance of my marriage proposal: that I demonstrate my sincerity by holding down a full-time teaching job for a year.

I hate my job already, though I started out enthusiastically enough.  But I’m a teacher, not a policeman, and I can’t cope with kids today–kids who are armed-and-dangerous, high from sniffing spray paint, eager to have unprotected sex in shadowy school stairwells.  My desire for Deborah, however, had been feverish at the time, and I readily agreed to her condition.

She’s a beautiful woman, and I remember the way she looked the last time I saw her.  Her wide-brimmed straw hat, like something out of nineteenth-century fashion.  The white umbrella she carried to protect her creamy skin from the desert sun.  Her smile, doled out judiciously from the shadow beneath her hat.

 Oddly enough, though, I now have trouble recalling her face.  Months have passed since I saw her last.  I consider delving into the photo section of my wallet for her picture, but I fight the impulse.  Instead, I stare across the street at the group of students.  That is Cindy Lawson, I decide.  She stands akimbo, legs spread wide, as if she’s about to launch into a cheer-leading 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 me.  She was doing her term paper on Nabokov, and she wanted to ask questions about a character in one of his novels.  I 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 I felt perspiration bead on my nose.

After she talked in vague generalities about her term paper–which she actually 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.”

To be helpful, I said, “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?” she said.

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

“No exceptions?” she said, dropping a pencil, bending from the waist to pick it up.

“No exceptions,” I said, looking away.

A week later, I was summoned to the principal’s office.  When I went in, Hal Bremmer sat in his brown-leather captain’s chair peering out a window.  At the sound of the door he swivelled to face me.  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.”  His pencil-line eyebrows rose quizzically above his dark eyes–like a drawbridge over murky water–and all I could imagine was an accusation of sexual harassment.  I was just beginning to revel in the thought of being fired when Bremmer said, “She claims you told her medical problems were all in her head.  You should know better than to say something like that to a student, Speer.”

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

Although the explanation seemed to satisfy him he dressed me down anyway, lambasting me 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,” Bremmer said.  I was about to agree when he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his knobby head, gazing dreamily at the ceiling.

Smiling, he said, “She is hot, though, isn’t she, Bill?  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.

Sitting on the bench beneath the Mexican Elder I recall the sense of hope I experienced at the prospect of being fired.  The thought of Deborah being here by day’s end doesn’t brighten my mood.  An image pops into my head.  I picture myself waiting at Union Depot while each and every passenger exits the train.  I search fruitlessly for Deborah’s face among the clamoring throng, but she’s nowhere to be seen.  She has decided not to come after all.

If Deborah doesn’t show I’ll probably be alone forever.  Thirty years from now I’ll be a decrepit, burned-out teacher, readying myself for retirement.  And death.  I consider this prospect.  One thing I’m suddenly sure of:  if Deborah doesn’t come, I won’t be teaching next year.

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 me through hollow eyes.  After they have gone I stand and follow them inside.

After lunch, I monitor fifth-period study hall.  I’ve always 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.  I ignore the sound despite the murmur of laughter crescendoing in the class.  But when two prisoners begin yipping like coyotes, I say, “Quiet!  This is study hall.  Study!”  The inmates laugh into their hands, deeply satisfied that they have provoked a response.

Halfway through the period, Winny DeMarest–a miscreant with a scar that bisects her right eyebrow–approaches my desk.  She has pen and paper in hand.  Explaining that 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 I pretend to read the rest of the paragraph, I monitor the girl in my peripheral vision.  She’s contorting her face into grotesque masks, forcing her classmates to giggle.  I cut the clowning short, handing her paper back.  “Excellent,” I say.  “Sit down.”

A few minutes later, the prisoners begin whispering to each other.  Every so often they stop to look up at me.  Then they resume their conspiratorial chatter.  I smile slowly, momentously, staring at each and every one of them.  I want 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.  I know all about these games.  After all, I was one of the students who drove Mr. Verner insane.

* * *

The high school seemed to me like a brick prison then, 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 I reached the school steps I had an upset stomach from not wanting to be there.  And each morning I fought an urge to turn and run.  I 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 ground at the far end of the pendulum arc.

But I didn’t start skipping regularly until my senior year.  In tenth and eleventh grades, I still dutifully scaled the steps to the penitentiary, made the obligatory appearance in home room, went through the motions of attending classes.  At lunchtime I 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 I had for both my sophomore and junior years.  Mr. Verner only lasted three years altogether.  Why we harassed him so much was evident.  Mr. Verner was simply the kind of man kids could make nuts.  For that reason alone we felt obligated to do it.  I was never as committed to the responsibility as the other students–at least I didn’t like to think so–but I did my 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 us.  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.  If any of us had cared to notice what we were doing to him we might have relented.  But we never bothered.  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, I didn’t go for the physical stuff, like some of my classmates.  Star quarterback Tad Pooley, for instance, who once tipped Mr. Verner’s chair over.  Mr. Verner had a bad habit of balancing on the back legs of his wooden chair.  One day Pooley commanded our attention by winking secretively at us.  “Watch this,” he whispered, heading to the front of the room under the guise of asking a question about last night’s homework.  We held our collective breath watching him, 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.  I could never forget the look of gratitude on Mr. Verner’s blanched face.

No, I didn’t condone that kind of abuse.  I did other things.  I was the one, for example, who put Mr. Verner’s middle desk drawer in upside down, so that the contents spilled onto the floor when our teacher pulled it out one morning.  I was the one who initiated the fake fight with Jerry Fudderman, the fight that saw us throwing paper wads at each other while Mr. Verner, the true target of fire, tried to break it up.  I was the one who invented the portable radio scam.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was this scam, more than any other, that proved what a fragile mind we were toying with.

It was simple fun.  Two kids brought portable 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.  We would stare straight ahead, barely able to contain our 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 any of us had ever baited.

About a week after we had tired of the portable radio scam, the school broadcasted, over the PA system, news of one of the space flights.  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.  When he got to me, I tried to explain that he was mistaken, that it was the speaker on the side wall he heard, but Mr. Verner pulled me roughly out of my seat, grabbing my shoulders and shaking soundly.  “Get it out of you, Mr. Speer,” he screamed.  “Get it out of you.”  Then he gave me detention.

Still under the delusion that somebody was playing a radio, Mr. Verner crossed to the far side of the room and accosted Dee Dee Wainwright, the future head cheerleader.  “Give it up,” he said, motioning for Dee Dee 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.  Dee Dee said, "I'm reporting you to the principal for that."  The ever-chivalrous Tad Pooley leaped out of his chair and got right into Mr. Verner's face, causing the teacher to stumble backward and fall to the floor.  Mr. Verner was fighting back tears 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 I got out of detention.  Since we lived in adjoining neighborhoods, we started home together.  Tad and I weren’t friends, but because I felt a need to impress the quarterback I agreed with Tad when he maligned our English teacher with every dirty word he could muster.  Even though I was feeling slightly sorry for Mr. Verner, I joined in, reminding Tad of the breast-touching incident, suggesting that Mr. Verner could be dismissed from school for less than that.  By then we were in front of the prison, and I noticed Mr. Verner’s second-floor window was open.

It had rained a few 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.  I bent and scooped out a handful, making a huge mud meatball.  The look on Tad’s face showed he approved of my plan.  If I had thought too much about what I was doing the whole thing would have failed miserably; at the moment of release I would have doubted my skill, hesitating just long enough to ruin the delivery.  But just like in my days of Little League pitching, when I threw the ball without thought, I flung the mud glob toward the open window.  Time slipped into slow-motion as Tad and I stood with our faces tilted up, our mouths agape.

For some reason I imagined our physics teacher, Mr. Radowitz, lecturing us 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 I watched as the mud ball arced perfectly into the window.  A second later, Mr. Verner let out a terrified scream.

We ran for our lives, laughing hysterically as we 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 I took a couple of swings on the Tarzan vine while recounting the mud ball incident.  Tad couldn’t get over it, and later, when we separated at Maple Street, he shook my hand.  I had never felt so high.  I knew Tad would tell everyone about it the next day.  My position in the school hierarchy would rise.  I would be a hero–a legend in my own time.

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

Home for Christmas break during my sophomore year, I stood at night outside the central YMCA on Brown Street, waiting for my father to pick me up.  He had dropped me off earlier because my car wouldn’t start.  While I had been inside swimming a few laps, a rare winter snow had blown in, frosting the streets.  I watched as cars spun their tires trying to climb the hill.

The night was bitterly cold.  Breath came out of my mouth like cigarette smoke.  I stood shivering near the front wall, praying for my father to show up soon when, out of the darkness beyond a nearby street lamp, a transient stepped into the light.  He was a pathetic figure in a tattered black overcoat and a 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 he was ten feet away I realized the transient didn’t see me.  I considered moving out of his way, but I didn’t want to step into the biting wind.  The old man stopped dead before bumping into me, looking up from the depths of his shell with a weathered face.  There was something instantly familiar about his watery blue eyes, and before I even thought it, I said, “Mr. Verner.”  He scanned my face, nodding his head all the while.  Finally, he said, “Yes, yes.  I remember you.  Mr. Speer, isn’t it?”  He coughed into his hand a couple of times, then went around me along the wall, disappearing into the darkness beyond the street light.  I wanted to ask what had happened over the years, to tell him about my own changes–attending college and all–but when I ran to the edge of the building where he had turned, Mr. Verner was gone.  My father’s green Ford rolled up then, and I had no time to search for my old English teacher.

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

I started off at Woodrow Wilson, but soon requested a transfer to my old alma mater.  My career began well–I was idealistic, and young enough to relate to the kids.  I had a notion then about teaching more than subject matter.  I was going to teach students about truth, honor, compassion.  But that was back before the cynicism set in, before the administration issued me my riot gear.

* * *

 Union Depot–a red-brick building with a spire much like a church steeple–is on the historic registry.  I’ve been waiting behind it for twenty minutes now.  The train is late.  Standing beside me, 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 Palo Verde 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 in a syrupy accent to his sons.  “Better study hard, become responsible citizens.”  When the father notices me watching the boys’ reaction, he says, “Isn’t that right, Mister?”

“That’s right,” I say.  But when I turn my gaze back to the transients I find myself envying their freedom.  The sound of their laughter carries 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.

A buzz of excitement surges through the crowd at the rear of the depot as the train appears around a bend.  People push forward, anxious to meet loved ones.  I step out cautiously, but am swept along in the wave.  People are through the gate now and out onto the platform before the train groans to a stop.  I stand with my back against the chain-link fence, waiting for a glimpse of Deborah.  But as the last happy family passes me, headed back to the parking lot, I don’t see her.  My spirits lift.

I’m just about to leave when she steps down from the last coach.  She carries her brown suitcase in one hand, a raised white umbrella in the other.  I walk numbly forward.  She sets the suitcase down, raises her umbrella to give me a hug.  Unfortunately, she’s even more beautiful than I remember.

“Good to see you, Bill,” she says.

“Good to see you, too.”

 As we walk toward the gate I notice a freight train lumbering away from the station to the west.  Before it slips past the passenger train I catch 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, I wonder.  In my mind I picture 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 my face.