From Away Read online

  There was my movie website, The Horrible Dr. Kehoe, but even I knew that was little more than a time-consuming hobby. Even if I achieved my ultimate goal of writing that book I was always researching on Italian Trash Cinema, I didn’t harbor illusions that anyone but me would want to buy it. I couldn’t send my niece through school on a vanity project.

  That left teaching. Well, I loved substituting. I loved talking to the kids, listening to them, making them laugh. Even if teaching didn’t pay much, it was a noble profession. The profession of both of my parents. I’d only have to take a semester at NoVaCoCo, the local community college, to finish my degree and get certified. Hard to say why I hadn’t done that long ago, except that it was what Mom had wanted, so it had seemed pretty pointless. Now it felt like the greatest idea I’d ever had.

  It was settled. I was going to become a teacher.

  I got up and had two Krispy Kreme donuts to commemorate the occasion.

  As if sensing my resolve, the automated phone service called me Monday morning and informed me that a history teacher was needed at Washington Irving High School. W. I. was one of my favorite venues; the kids were hip without being delinquent and the principal, Mr. Manning, had often encouraged me to think about a teaching career. Fate seemed to be leading the way.

  Of course, I knew being a real teacher would be different from substituting. For one thing, kids were always happy to see a substitute. They meant a break in the routine, no real work, a holiday. Facing those kids every day, following a real curriculum, well, that would be an awful lot like work. But I was up for it, I had no doubt of that.

  The absent teacher at W.I. had left a summary of the material I was supposed to cover—the economic boom of the twenties and how it paved the way for the Great Depression. It was just the sort of statistical droning I always hated—a surefire way to make history boring—so I decided to tell a story instead.

  Since it was Christmastime, I told my favorite Yuletide history story, the one about the English and German soldiers in World War I climbing out of the trenches in Flanders on Christmas Eve 1914 and celebrating together, singing songs, and playing soccer, then climbing back in and resuming killing each other the next day.

  I told it to every class that day, and I got better at it every time, so that even the kids who acted bored and superior were spellbound by the end, feeling the cold and the mud and the warmth of good will and the bitterness of the violent aftermath. I told it without moralizing, so that the rest of the hour was filled with kids discussing it and coming to their own conclusions, not ones a textbook told them to make.

  I had never felt more certain about my future.

  It all fell apart at lunchtime. I was walking down the hall when I heard sobbing. A freshman ahead of me heard it, too, pushed open the door to the boys’ rest room to check it out, spun on his heels, and hurried down the hall.

  I caught the bathroom door still swinging and stepped in. A girl was squatting on the floor by the sink weeping soggy, sloppy tears. Standing in front of her was a lanky boy in enormous jeans, greasy brown hair falling about his eyes.

  “Will you shut the fuck up?” There wasn’t any charity in his voice. He looked up to see who had walked in on them. “The fuck are you staring at?” the boy asked.

  And right then I knew why I would never become a teacher. Oddly, it was the same reason I wanted to be a teacher in the first place. I liked the kids. I identified with them. I was one of them. And because of that, I didn’t respond as a teacher; I didn’t say any of the things Cara Brendel would have said, like, “Is there a problem here?” or “Isn’t this a discussion you should be having off-campus?” I didn’t even come out with an old-fashioned, hard-ass teacher remark like, “Don’t you use that language with me, young man.”

  What I said was, “I’m staring at you, asshole.”

  The girl, as if suddenly embarrassed by her situation, struggled to stand up and cracked her head on the porcelain sink.

  The boy barked a laugh. “Stupid bitch doesn’t even know how to stand up.”

  I went over to help her. “Is he bothering you?”

  She shook her head rapidly, her short hair vibrating with shame. Another barking laugh from the boy. “Yeah, tell him how I’m bothering you! You’re the one sucking Nelson Duey’s dick.”

  The girl started her howling, gooey crying again, her humiliation increased by the fact that the freshman was standing in the doorway again with an audience of half a dozen other students.

  “Tell them all about it, jizz monkey!” The boy was playing to the bleachers now, getting gasps and laughs from the crowd.

  I tried to hustle the spectators out the door. “This isn’t any of your business, okay?”

  “She was doin’ me too, J.J.,” someone in the back of the clump hollered as I closed the door on them, and the girl sobbed even louder. Now, I’m not the kind of guy who gets mad easily, but when I looked at that girl and knew she was going to be “jizz monkey” to the whole school until the day she graduated, I just lost it; I spun around and pinned the boy to the greasy bathroom mirror with my forearm.

  “You cruel little fuck. How dare you humiliate her like that? I ought to shove your head in the toilet and flush it till you drown.” J.J. looked at me in wide-eyed shock. Teachers weren’t supposed to go this postal.

  I backed off, shaking the cramped muscles of my arm loose. J.J. looked scared and rattled and meaner than ever. I offered to lead the girl out, but she shook her head again. “No. I gotta explain to him. It’s not what he thinks. I love him.”

  What could I say to that? I just looked at her drowned cat eyes and wished her luck.

  Stepping out into the hall I saw a crowd gathered, buzzing with gossip. They stopped, dead silent when they saw me, so I could hear it clear as a bell when J.J. started hitting her.

  What I did next was pretty much the same thing you’d do. But then, you’re four.

  “You struck a student in the face?”

  Mr. Manning wasn’t encouraging me to think about a teaching career now.

  “Once. One time. Not hard. There was no bleeding. It was an educational thing. I wanted him to know what it felt like.”

  Manning sighed and shook his head. He looked like he hated this more than I did.

  “He was hitting that girl, Alec,” I told him, not defending myself, no hope for that, but just so Manning would know.

  “She says he wasn’t.”

  “You know she’s lying.”

  “Yeah, I know she’s lying. But what we know isn’t the issue here.”

  “What is the issue?”

  Manning tried to pace around his office, but it was too damn small. “Sam, do you really think that was the proper response for a teacher to have to a situation like that?”

  I let my head drop back on the masking tape that held the sofa together and told him, no, I didn’t.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Alec, this kid is such an asshole.”

  “That’s not our job. Our job is not to police the assholes of the world.” Manning sat on the edge of his desk, his big face heavy with sorrow. I wished he was being an officious jerk, but he wasn’t, and I was just sorry I’d made a good man feel this rotten. “Did you even think about what kind of lawsuit that kid’s family could bring against this school?”

  I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought anything, actually. Now I remembered a line in the Substitute Services Handbook: “Touching a student in any way to control or modify behavior is an unacceptable form of discipline.” I supposed a punch in the jaw fell into that category.

  “I like you,” Manning said. “The kids like you. But…I don’t think this job is a good match for you.”

  I saw it coming. He was going to put a “Do Not Send” request in my file, and I was about to be discontinued as a substitute teacher for Fairfax County Public Schools. Doing that would show good faith on the school’s part and maybe deflect the lawsuit. One substitute wasn’t a big sacrifice, and Manning had n
o idea I’d picked education as my career twelve hours ago. I nodded, prepared to fall on my sword, then asked, “What should I have done, Alec?”

  “Reported the incident. Sent the girl to a counselor. There are responsible ways to deal with these things.”

  “I guess that’s the problem. I didn’t want to deal with it. I wanted to punch that kid in the face.”

  Thing is, I’m not really a violent guy. I’ve only been in a couple of fights my whole life, if you don’t count getting beat up daily during junior high. One of them you might remember. It was on the occasion of your first visit to the National Zoo. You’d only just learned to walk, in the stumbling gait of a toddler, like a drunk just catching himself from falling on his face, over and over.

  There were grizzly bears, Siberian tigers, and zebras by the truckload, but what fascinated you were the sprinkler heads poking out of the grass next to the sidewalk. You would trundle up to one, drop with a thud onto your padded Oshkosh-covered bottom, and stare at the star-shaped metal apparatus with enraptured delight, completely ignoring the giraffe towering over your head. Beauty is a subjective thing.

  We were particularly close that week, you and I. Your mother had gone off to visit a friend in California for five whole days, her first time away since you were born… no, since long before that. You and I had bonded with rapturous abandon while she was gone. Watching marathon sessions of Felix the Cat, Betty Boop, Little Lulu, and Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons I’d spirited home from the shop, you laughing at them as if they’d been made just for you, and not for a generation fast fading into the twilight. We went on fast bike rides, you strapped in a seat behind me, through the wilds of Rock Creek Park, and you squealed with delight as flocks of pigeons scattered before our rocketship trajectory. It was all so carefree and so blissful that I sometimes remember it as a time from my own childhood, not yours. But no, I don’t think I ever had that much fun as a kid.

  That trip to the zoo, we took the day after your mother came back from LA (well, actually, she’d been to a place called Sherman Oaks, but she said it was right near LA), and you were still taking your revenge on her for leaving you by ignoring her completely and occasionally calling me “Mommy.” (“Bommy,” actually, was as close as you could get, but she knew what you were getting at.) Charlotte was depressed, as one usually is after deliberate attempts to go somewhere and have fun, and she refused to say even a word about her trip West. I was sulking, too, partially because your mom hadn’t gotten me a picture of that famous sidewalk staircase in Hollywood that Laurel and Hardy carried the piano up, over and over, in The Music Box like she’d promised she would, and partially because the rest of you were sulking and I didn’t want to feel left out.

  To make matters worse, on the night of your mom’s homecoming, when everyone was in mid-sulk, our old family cat Henry got out and somehow drank anti-freeze that was leaking from one of our redneck neighbor’s cars. We didn’t find him until the morning, panting and foaming at the mouth, curled up in our window well. Charlotte cradled his body in an old towel, and I drove through red lights all the way to the vet’s, but it was too late for the old guy, and we had to have him put to sleep to finish the job the poison had started. Your mother stayed with you in the waiting room, and I stroked the smoky old cat’s matted fur as he purred through the pain, looking up at me with a milky, uncomprehending eye. I watched the life go out of that eye and cried harder and more painfully than I ever did for my parents. The nurse technicians kept a respectful distance and watched as I shuddered and shook. I think they understand that when we mourn for a pet we mourn for more than just the animal itself; we mourn for the time it marked in our lives, the time that will never be regained. Henry had been the last link with the Kehoe family intact, and it was gut-wrenching to watch him leave us.

  We drove away from the animal hospital, and you watched with fascination as your mother and uncle bawled like babies. It wasn’t a sight you had ever seen, so you laughed at us at first, thinking we were making faces. Then you started crying, too, not out of sorrow for the noble cat who had known my brother and my mother and father, who’d slept with me every night through high school, who had sat on the bed and watched with a contented purr during my first make-out session with Julie Haley, who had slept beneath your crib like a watch-cat during the first nights of your life, who had painfully clambered up onto your grown-up bed when that transition came and always stayed at your feet through the long nights, eyes aglow, a warm, vibrating nightlight. You didn’t understand yet that he was gone, that you’d have to sleep alone for years to come. You only cried because we were crying so hard, and it must have scared the hell out of you to see the people who kept you alive and fed falling to pieces like that.

  We couldn’t go straight home to a house so empty of prowling, so we decided to take you to the zoo, walk around in the tropic heat of a DC summer and sweat the sorrow out of ourselves. Once your little Velcro running shoes hit the steaming asphalt, the thrill of being bipedal took the sadness right out of you, and even your mother and I found ourselves laughing as we chased you past the flamingos and elephants, past the hippos and rhinos as you raced from sprinkler head to sprinkler head like a misguided bumblebee trying to pollinate those metal blossoms.

  What it was you found so fascinating about the irrigation system I never learned. It wasn’t an obsession that stayed with you, thankfully; I’ll be very surprised if you’ve grown up to become a landscape gardener. I suppose it was that the animals were too big and too far away from your ankle-biter perspective for you to comprehend them, so you opted instead to focus on something you could grasp in your hand. Or with your mouth. Your mother and I took turns bending down to stop you from wrapping your lips around a sprinkler—we didn’t have much faith in the sanitary qualities of the District of Columbia Department of Water and Power.

  It was Charlotte’s turn to crouch and keep you from kissing the rusty metal star when I noticed the laughter of a group of high school kids over by the alligator pit. The big kid in the middle (and wouldn’t it always be the big kid in the middle?) was tossing something into the pit. Tossing repeatedly, like a farmer sowing crops. And with every toss came a gale of encouragement and laughter from the boys and girls around him. I strolled over to the rail to see what worthwhile endeavor this young man was engaged in that garnered such support from his peers.

  A great metallic blue ‘gator sat in the reeds beneath them. Hooded eyes sunk into its monster-movie skull reflected just a hinted glint of the marshy Washington sun. And, kerplunk, a penny landed on the steak-knife ridges of its massive back. A back already covered with copper disks. Heads and tails. Lincoln and the Memorial. The girls laughed the loudest.

  Do I have to tell you how much this pissed me off? You’re my Maggie; you’re thinking all the same things now as you read this. Seeing this magnificent creature being treated like a sight gag by this Neanderthal football player, knowing that if the world were a just place, Bubba there would be occupying his rightful place in the food chain as this alligator’s chew toy. If the walls of this pit were to miraculously fall away, Godzilla would lift his massive trunk onto his powerful legs and bolt with startling speed toward that fool. Would the girls be laughing then?

  Of course, none of that would happen. Bubba was safe and superior, and the animal powerless and at his will. Had this numbskull seen that grotesque photograph that was posted by the sea lion pool—a graphic autopsy picture of a dead female, its guts stuffed with shiny coins that idiot tourists had thrown to it, as if it were a living wishing well? Did the asshole know he might be killing this great beast to get a laugh? Did he care?

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  Bubba looked surprised, as if he was shocked to see anyone else at the zoo.

  “What’s your problem?” he said, and the girls laughed. I still haven’t figured out why that was clever.

  “Don’t throw pennies on the alligator.” It was exactly what I meant to say, which didn’t make it s
ound any less foolish.

  “Why? Is this your own personal alligator? Does it belong to you?” Another laugh from his fans.

  Ordinarily, I would have just frowned and walked off, but today I saw before me the face of Henry being put to sleep, and I couldn’t let it go.

  “Yes, it does,” I said. “This is the National Zoo. This alligator belongs to all of us.” I suppose I could have come up with a dorkier thing to say if I’d had the time.

  The girls laughed again, but it sounded meaner when it was directed at me.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he replied. Another laugh. Bubba knew his audience.

  But then, I swear it was as if I heard a voice in my head—or felt the urgency of an unseen person standing at my side. And this person was pissed off, fed up and just not willing to take crap from anybody “Fuck yourself,” I said and this time there was no laugh, for the words sounded much uglier coming from me. The girls gasped, and Bubba swung at me. Instinctively, I raised my arm and blocked his punch—I think I was more surprised by this than he was. The Other’s anger was still fueling me, so I swung and landed a useless blow on his right pec, but my next punch hit him right in the face.

  You see it all the time in the movies, the right-cross to the chin, but I’d never done it before. I was shocked at how powerful the impact felt and how dull the sound was—just the opposite of the way it plays on the screen. I had a moment of deep and abiding satisfaction before Bubba began to pound me into ground beef.