HELGA CAN SOUR EVEN FEEL-GOOD MORNINGS, AND THIS most definitely wasn’t one of those.
She seemed surlier than ever, so I grabbed the contents of my mailbox and left the school office as quickly as I could. Flora’s door looked locked shut, and when I got to my room, the one student I needed to talk with was nowhere to be seen.
“Anybody know where Miles is?” Why had he chosen to break his perfect attendance record today?
“I heard he always misses a lot of school,” a girl in the back said. “I guess he’s got some kind of condition.”
“Some kind of audition.” Carmen Gabel actually interrupted her third lipstick application of the morning to say this.
“He has like an agent,” Toy Drebbin added. Miles must really be something to have engaged the minds of two apathetic seat warmers. “He’ll be famous someday. In fact, I think he had like a tryout this morning. Some movie that’s shooting here.”
The girl across the aisle glared at him. “No,” she said firmly. “Today he’s sick.”
Toy’s narrow face flushed and he sputtered a bit before getting words out. “He shoulda told me it was a secret,” he finally said in a loud hiss. “Now I remember. Yesterday afternoon he was all splotchy and coughing and his stomach hurt.”
I didn’t know if Miles was exceptionally beloved, or whether I was especially disliked, but they were uniformly hell-bent on protecting him from me. I hated being the opposition, but that was my role. I was the law, the organization, officialdom. I was rules and regulations and prohibitions.
And to think I’d imagined teaching as a helping profession.
I squelched further discussion of Miles’s whereabouts and pushed the group toward the syllabus. Today’s activities included working on dangling participles, discussing “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, which they were supposed to have read last night, and SAT vocabulary building.
While they worked on analogies I flipped through the memos and notices that had been in my mailbox, tossing most directly into the circular file, then picking out one that looked slightly interesting, mainly because it was printed on bright yellow paper, folded in thirds, and stapled shut. It suggested somebody had cared about protecting whatever was inside.
Reading it was like being punched in the stomach.
STOP LOVING MUD PEOPLE OR ARE YOU ONE TOO, A JEW? YOUR KIND HAS TO GO. NO MORE NIGGERS AND GOOKS. NO MORE WARNINGS.
“Miss Pepper?” Carmen said. “Are you okay? You look sick.” I must have looked like death itself to have roused her out of her makeup fixation. But, in fact, why, for the first time this summer, was she paying attention to me? Was she concerned about me or was she checking to see if it worked? What about the rest of them? Several sets of eyes watched me. Why? I could feel the near-hysteria I’d witnessed on Flora the day before take hold of me.
Maybe she’d been right. Maybe my class was my enemy in a new and chilling way. The note was made of cut and pasted letters in a sickening familiar typeface. The school newspaper again.
Who was it? Why?
I heard echoes of Lowell warning me that being friends with Flora could bring me grief from them. Was Lowell them? And what sort of grief came next? And it wasn’t only about Flora, it was about April, too. It was against their rules to care about anybody whose skin wasn’t exactly like mine.
“Miss Pepper?”
I looked at her almost blankly, and then I remembered what she had asked. “I’m fine, Carmen,” I said slowly. But I wasn’t. I was hot inside, and chilled as well. And I was furious. “No,” I said. “No, I’m not. I’m sick. Sick of the hate and poison in a note I was sent. Sick of the kind of ugliness that hit at Miss Jones. That should never be in this school. That should never exist anywhere at all.” I was shaking under my skin, each nerve echoing the pounds of my heart. But I kept my voice from quavering. I was willing to show my anger, outrage. I wasn’t willing to show my terror. Just in case there was one among them who would gloat over it, delight in it.
“I’m going to trust in nursery rhymes. Names can never hurt me,” I said. “Because I don’t care what anybody calls me. I will never let anyone intimidate me out of what I know is right. I will never shut up and stand by, go along with something loathesome. I will never be a ‘good German’!”
I hoped that what I was saying was true. I had had to hear it out loud, but it wasn’t easy getting it out. It had to make its way bumpily up through my vocal cords, over the bangings of my panicking heart. But the more I said, the more words demanded airtime. “These days there’s too much tolerance for hate and no tolerance for anything else,” I heard myself say. “My car radio’s broken, and I don’t mind. I don’t want to hear it. It’s all about hate—all sorts of hate, who wants to make cruel fun of whom. Why doesn't anybody call in to say it’s wrong to be so ugly, so undemocratic, so un-American? When did it get fashionable to hate and to be right out front about it, to sell it, even? The rappers, the INS, the Limbaughs, the skinheads, the woman haters, the anti-Semites, the gay bashers? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. This is too cheap, too easy, too ugly, too ignorant and stupid. I refuse to be any part of it!”
I was close to shouting. Going to flunk deportment, if we still had such niceties. I took a series of deep breaths. Slowly, my blood level simmered down until I could see my class clearly again. Not a one of them spoke, or moved. They were gape-mouthed, incredulous.
I didn’t know if they’d heard or cared about a single word I’d said, or if they’d merely been dazzled by the sight of a teacher going stark-raving mad.
I sighed. “This city started as an experiment in tolerance. Now, we’ve been voted the Most Hostile City in the United States,” I said. “Please don’t think the new title is something we have to keep justifying. That’s all I was trying to say.”
And that was that. Despite my rhetoric, I spent the rest of the interminable morning fighting and defeating—then fighting again—the urge to give up. I wanted to be out of the mix, out of the messes people made. Uninvolved and absent. Unafraid.
But capitulating out of fear meant I was letting the anonymous them call the shots, and I’d be damned first. I took more deep breaths.
“Woody?” I said at the end of class. “Could you stay a moment? I have a question about your exam.”
His eyes widened, then he flicked a glance from his buddy across the aisle back at me. Woody did not look well. His skin had a jaundiced undertone and dark shadows under his eyes. Earlier in the summer he’d looked frighteningly angry. Now, he looked just plain frightened. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
His buddies, accepting the idea that he was in academic trouble, didn’t question me when I closed my classroom door to have privacy.
Woody slouched in a front row chair, legs straight out. His T-shirt was black, against which a single large red rose glowed. But what initially appeared to be a pearl of dew on one petal was actually a drop of blood. The image reminded me of the dark side of fairy tales—the pricked finger, the deep sleep.
Woody was trying hard to look bored, tapping his fingers on his black jeans and keeping his eyes focused on the ceiling.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “Be straight with me.”
He stared as if I’d spoken in tongues. Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward. I felt a flutter of optimism. “I don’t have stuff to say. You said you wanted to talk about my paper.”
My optimism collapsed in a dusty heap. “Cut it out. You didn’t hand in an exam and we both know it.” He had gone on automatic pilot, looking outraged by the suggestion of a no-exam scam, but his eyes dulled and he shrugged and closed his mouth as if protest weren’t worth it. “And that’s not the issue now,” I continued. “You were distraught. I’ll let you make it up.”
He still said nothing, but he looked willing to listen, so I kept going. “Yesterday you said you felt responsible for what had happened to April, that she was dead and it was your fault. Why? What happened?”
He shook his head and redirected his eyes to the tips of his clunky shoes.
“Okay, then I’ll suggest something. You and April spent time together every night.”
He settled back in his chair and looked like his formerly smug self. “How could we? She worked, you know.”
“Yes, and I know you got her the job. Is that why she made up a name for the place? Or because it was a sleazy operation?”
His smirk faded and he swallowed before he finally spoke. “Both. And because Buddy was white and her brother didn’t want her to work for whites. And because Buddy didn’t put her on the books and he said she shouldn’t say she worked there. Okay, now?”
“And—look, I can’t resist—did you really date Lacey Star?”
He rolled his eyes. “Not exactly date,” he said.
I didn’t ask for further clarification. “But about April—you must have known she didn’t work the hours she told her family. All I can figure is that you saw each other, secretly, from ten to eleven, until her brother picked her up.”
He sighed. “You aren’t making sense.”
“Then help me out. The day I saw the two of you on the bench, she was upset. It didn’t look like a casual encounter. In fact, it looked deadly serious. She disappeared that night.”
“Are you saying I—”
“Not necessarily, but I have to believe you had more than a casual relationship, and that you know a whole lot that’s important. What I can’t imagine is why, if you didn’t hurt her yourself, you aren’t telling the police.”
He shrugged. He was a virtuoso with the gesture and used it much too often, as if it summed up his entire existence.
“So are you saying the rumors are true?” I asked. “Did she have a second job at a massage parlor?”
“April? No way in hell she’d—you knew her. She was going to go to college, be something. That’s all she’d talk about, almost. How could you believe that kind of…of stuff?”
I waited.
“Okay, listen.” Woody leaned forward in his seat. He looked drawn, much older than his years. He sounded that way, too. World-weary, ancient. “Yes. I have a part-time job at a gas station. I get off at ten, too. I used to meet her and spend an hour with her before she was picked up.”
“Her brother picked her up every night?”
“Him or somebody else he knew. Her family wouldn’t let her ride the bus at that hour. I’d have driven her home, but it would have made too much trouble. But we didn’t do anything wrong, her and me. We had a lot to talk about. She knew things. She was wise in a way that… Anyway, we kept a low profile because there wasn’t any time, really, and because—”
“Your father. I remember.”
He looked surprised. “But the night she disappeared? I didn’t see her. I went where we met, except she wasn’t there. I waited fifteen minutes, then I went to Buddy’s, but it was locked up. I figured maybe she hadn’t worked that night—she was upset after school. Maybe Thomas had come early, that she’d gone home, so that’s what I did, too. Go home. Don’t blame me for not wanting to tell the cops. You really think they’ll buy that story? Even if it is the truth? How about my father? Or Thomas, who was doing everything on earth to keep us from each other?”
“Where did you meet every night? Maybe she went there, got there early—she never went to work that night—and maybe there’s a witness who saw her there and knows what happened.”
“We met at the comer where she was seen. By the witness. The one who saw her get into a van.”
“At eleven.”
“Lookit,” he said. “I know you mean well. No offense, but you don’t understand a thing that’s going on and you’d be best off if you didn’t push, you know? It’s not something you can make better. And I’m not talking about April and me. All I can say is no matter what you might hear or think, I never would have hurt her. I never put a hand on her or took her anyplace in that van or in anything else that night—I didn’t even see her—and that’s the truth. We were close, but I would appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around, okay? To my pals, the Vietnamese aren’t… And April didn’t like my being with them, either.”
“But I still don’t…you said you were responsible…”
“For her being killed.” He swallowed hard, then nodded. “I’m going to feel rotten about it until I’m dead, too. But not because I did it.”
“Then what? How?”
“Why aren’t you asking the creep she worked for? Telling the police about him?”
“I did.”
“Good. He was always coming on to her, touching her, making bad jokes. Big mistake, my listening to Lacey and getting April that job. I told her to quit, but she needed the money. She was going to go to college, no matter what.”
His words hung in the air. No matter what couldn’t include the what of being abducted. That what mattered.
“This is making me crazy, Woody. All other issues aside, I have to say it again, I know what I saw on the bench that afternoon, and—”
He stood up, and I realized with a start how large and menacing he could be. “No!” he said. “You don’t know what you saw, you only think you do.” His skin grew paler and the premature lines on it seemed to deepen before my eyes. “Look, Ms. P., there’s this story my last English teacher told us about a bunch of blind people trying to see an elephant. One touches a leg and says oh, yeah, an elephant is a tree trunk. And one maybe touches the tail and says you’re wrong, it’s a snake. And one touches a side and says it’s a wall, and—”
“I’m familiar with that story.”
“Then you should understand. No offense, but you’re like one of those blind people. You saw a little piece of something and from that you made up a whole thing—only the thing you made up is wrong. Not the real thing at all.”
“Then tell me what I saw.”
“I can’t. I swear it. It’s a matter of life and… I sound like bad TV. But we’re talking about something serious. What you should understand is that those blind guys who thought they saw the elephant could feel real good about their tree trunks and their snakes. But if they didn’t get out of the way, the thing they didn’t see—the elephant—could kill them.” He paused and folded his arms across his chest and waited for some kind of response.
I stood up, too. I resented having him lecture me from above, which provided a sudden moment of insight where I saw myself looming over students day after day. “Meaning what?” I asked Woody quietly. We were still not nearly at eye level, and I had to tilt my head back a bit.
“Meaning you have to stop thinking you know what you’re seeing. You could get trampled. You’re not a bad person, and neither am I. I’m trying to help you. You could get in trouble. Real bad. Please don’t.” And without waiting for my response, without even a flicker of interest in how I would respond, he walked to the door.
“Is that what happened to April?”
He turned back, one hand gripping the doorknob. “What do you mean?”
“Did she see too much? Did she ask the wrong questions? Does what happened to her have to do with those other things I don’t understand?”
“Please,” he said. “Please. I’m taking care of it myself. Trust me. I’m doing what she wanted, doing my best already. Don’t push me.”
But I had one more push left. I picked up the yellow paper from my desk. I hated to even touch it, to reacknowledge its existence. “Is this the elephant?” I asked quietly.
He blanched. “Jesus, Miss P., don’t—what is that? The thing you were talking about? Why’re you showing it to me? I feel like I’m going crazy! How’d you get that? Where? Why does everything have to do with me?”
He looked enormous—and fragile. A brittle tree about to topple. Either I was seeing him for the first time or something had changed about him, drastically. He seemed a victim, not a thug. “Woody,” I said in a near whisper, “are you in trouble, too? Do you need help?”
He rolled his eyes, raised his brows, almost grinned, then grimaced as if in pain. Expressions spilled one into the other, combining shock, near-laughter, the suggestion of tears, and, I thought, fear—all at once, as if I’d said something so beyond belief—and perhaps also so true—that there was no possible response except incredulity.
“Thanks for asking,” he said in a strained, low voice. And then he was gone.
So much for my Would he? Ask him. It hadn’t worked the way I’d hoped, to put it mildly. I sat back down at my desk, semiconvinced that if I waited long enough, some all-encompassing idea would come along, something that clarified the situation. I wanted to feel more certain than I did that Woody truly had nothing to do with April’s disappearance—but he had such an air of desperation clinging to him and was so adamantly close-mouthed that I wondered. Had he done it? If not, did he know who had? Did he know why?
And what was the greater, further danger he repeatedly warned me about? What was the elephant I couldn’t see?
My thoughts circled, swallowing themselves like cerebral serpents. Give it up, I counseled myself. Maybe April had truly gone for a kinky joyride. There’d been a recent news story like that. An entire town searching for a girl thought abducted by a stranger. She came back—at the stranger’s insistence. She refused to press charges, because she’d willingly, enthusiastically, gone.
Maybe April had, too. Maybe the rigid pressures of her life, the careful monitoring by her family, and the dark side of all her self-discipline had been too much. Maybe she well and truly needed a break for freedom so that she didn’t break instead.
Except that she’d been seen struggling. Was it an act? A cover-up?
I should let go of futile and directionless speculation about April Truong, and direct all future futile and directionless speculation to my own life. And be safe.
And give up Flora, too? And anything else I wanted that didn’t meet with my anonymous censor’s approval?
Finally, I stood up. I was getting nowhere here, except closer to the fear again. Back off, a part of me insisted. The adult part, I feared.
But the two-year-old in me dug in and refused. I was going to do what I thought was right. There was nothing else I could do.
I walked down the hall. Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth, approaching from the other direction, waved. A sign, I decided, that I had made the correct decision and I was on the right track.
“I’m still thinking about April,” he said when I caught up to him. A perfect opening.
“Me, too, and feeling really sorry for her family,” I said. “Whatever hullabaloo or concern there was that first night is over. No yellow ribbons on trees for her. The Truongs must feel abandoned. I’m going to make a—not a sympathy call, but a sympathetic call, even though I’m a little nervous about going.”
I’d thought I’d have to sell him the idea, but he nodded immediately. “Great idea!” he said. “Want company?”
I was enormously relieved. I didn’t know whether April’s parents would welcome our concern or consider it an intrusion. I didn’t know if they spoke English, or whether April’s sullen brother would willingly serve as interpreter.
“When?” Five asked.
“Tonight, around eight? The Truongs work all day, so after school wouldn’t be any good. I’ll call them around six, see if it’s okay. If it’s not, I’ll call you. Otherwise, does it sound all right?”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you here, at school.”
I walked taller, felt just a tad John Wayne-ish. No yellow-bellied sheet of paper was going to tell me what I could or could not care about.
My momentary elation ebbed when I reached the back stairs and realized that sour Aldis Fellows had been watching me. She had a gift for creeping up on a person. “For a minute I thought you were part of the man’s midday mob,” she said.
“Five’s?”
Aldis nodded. “Current events, my foot! The man’s blind and has no sense of discipline whatsoever. Did you hear the noise from the room while he was out there with you?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”
“He thinks they’re reading magazines and having small group discussions, but just ask around. They’re using him. He doesn’t understand what kind of boys they are.”
“Using him for what?”
She looked at me as if I were pathetic. Then she looked around. “Drugs,” she whispered. “That room at noon is ground zero for dealing and making plans, talking over strategy, distributing.”
I must have looked dubious.
“He’s a dupe. A nice enough man, but a fool. People must have fawned over his good looks his whole life, and he’s gotten too used to it. He would never wonder what those boys actually want from him, just take it for granted that they like him.”
Was it possible? He had joked about how little actual attention he paid the group. He thought of it as insulation against Phyllis and Edie, so maybe… I felt sorry for him if it was true, but worried, too.
“I’m sorry to drag a nice man like that into this, but I am going to have to report it, and anyway, if he’s that stupid and lax, he deserves it.”
“What made you think that drugs—”
“I thought it would be different here, this summer. I was looking forward to it, but it’s all the same, everywhere.” She gestured in the direction of Flora’s closed room. “She still in hiding? Still in a righteous sulk?”
“I wouldn’t call it…it must have been—” I was having trouble shifting gears, still worrying over the possibility that Five was an unwitting front for student crime.
“Those people,” Aldis said with a weary shake of her head. “Anything that happens to them becomes a major issue.”
“But having your room trashed—”
“Look, it happens. We’re way past the sweet little schoolhouse of yore.” She clomped down the stairs behind me, lecturing. “You’ve lived in an ivory tower here with your privileged students.”
“I thought you just said things were the same everywhere.”
She ignored my point. “Now,” she went on, “what with the people who were let in this summer, you can see how the world really is. And it’s her people who are responsible for a lot of the change, too. And not for the better, either.”
“I don’t feel comfortable with this talk about Flora’s people, as if she’s an interchangeable—”
Aldis simply didn’t care what I had to say. “Some people should wise up and smell the coffee,” she continued. “Maybe other people who are tired of what’s been going on in this country for the last twenty years are trying to get their message through.”
“What do you—”
“Don’t you just get sick of how everything gets twisted into a big civil rights case?” she demanded from behind. “I mean if a white teacher is hassled, who would care? You’d look to see if they had caused their problems in some way, antagonized somebody. But with them—it’s all a great meaningful outrage, a hue and cry. Poor me, poor me, I’m so oppressed. Meanwhile, who made the problem in the first place? I tell you, this minority business has gone too far. Time to put on the brakes.”
She was so sure of the universal acceptance of her words that when we reached the bottom of the staircase and we were again side by side, she almost saluted me in a burst of camaraderie. “Good talking with you,” she said as she strode off and out the door.
I stared at her retreating back, her sensible shoes, wondering just how intensely she believed those brakes had to be applied—and where—and whether mudslinging and mail, phone, and in-box terrorism were a part of the braking apparatus.
Aldis, her dark suspicions about student drug-dealing and her ugly assumptions about Flora, became part of the note, of the mud in Flora’s room, of the desecrated church.
Too much, I thought, my breath short. My short-lived self-confidence had gone through meltdown and there was no oxygen left in the building. I needed air. Desperately.