TWO

A HUSBAND, I tell myself, is entitled to his wife’s extra years. The train moves out of Times Square, rocking through its dark tunnel, and in the lap of the old woman who sits next to me, I read the item in her newspaper. The average life expectancy of the American woman is now seventy-four years and seven months, of the American man, sixty-seven years and five months. I try to remember what it was then, on that walk in the Botanic Gardens when I told Sarah that if she died before she reached the average, I expected her to will me her extra years. It was only fair. According to the current United States census, she would have had twenty-two extra years to give me. It was less then. Times change, you see. “Nineteen years and seven months—I want them, Sarah. Will them to me.” That was not so much to ask of a wife, of a woman who said, even at the end, even after such cruel requests, that she loved you.

Sarah, Sarah. I am sorry. I assure you I do not need nineteen years and seven months now. Two years will be enough. It is not such a foolish request, believe me. I hear a rustling sound. The woman closes her newspaper and glares at me. My lips have been moving, I realize. I smile at the woman. You predicted I would be married again within a year, Sarah, though you said it more to plague me with guilt, I suspect, than out of concern for my happiness. But that is all right also. It is difficult to intimidate Harry Meyers. I think of Danny’s suggestion. Perhaps the time has come to consider such things.

At the Delancey-Essex station I get up to change for the BMT Myrtle Avenue Local. With the others, I walk past the hot pretzel stand and up the stairs. The train comes at once. In a minute we are outside. It is snowing again this morning and there will be many absences. That is just as well.

From the Williamsburg Bridge the outlines of the Brooklyn shoreline are blurred. Smoke from shipyard stacks trails through the white air. I am more tired than I wish to admit. My body aches. Tonight, I tell myself, I will leave the phone off the hook. It is the only thing I can do, unless I am prepared to talk to the police, or to endure another dinner with Danny. Three nights in a row, at four in the morning, the telephone calls have come. The voice is young, the words are the same. “I got my eye on you, Meyers—gonna doom you, man. Gonna doom you.” And then the usual, the repetition of what all the notes and letters have said about my slit gizzard, the intercourse with my mother, the revenge.

“Who is this?” I ask each time, and when he tells me that I know, he is, of course, correct. It will not be long now, he promises. The notes have held little mystery. At the time of the trial, though, the brother was a mere child. I could suspect anybody, you see. If I were to begin, where would it end? So I suspect no one.

We have crossed the river. The train is pulling into the Marcy Avenue station and I hum to myself. The boards are covered with ice and the wooden platform trembles from the train’s vibrations. The cold snaps at my cheeks. I see other teachers step from the train and hurry to the exits, but they do not know that I sing to myself. They do not try to talk to me and that is all right, also. Along the streets I trudge past my own students, some, I see, walking through the snow in slippers or sneakers, their bare legs exposed to the cold edges of the air. Well. It is their problem. They should have stayed home and banged on the radiators. I hum. I remember the students who sang the song years ago, in our schoolyard, an endless chain of them holding hands, weaving in and out, the words I sing to myself: Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, Mussolini is a meanie, Tojo is a jerk… Two young women teachers nod to me as I cross the street. In front of the Dime Savings Bank the Chassidic Jews are already lined up, huddled in their black coats, their schoolboy’s briefcases swinging at their sides, their beards warming their necks, their cheeks and ears red from the cold. I do not need to look into their eyes this morning, to have them say hello to me. Later. There will be time. I will be reimbursed properly then.

I have been walking too quickly. I breathe heavily. At the corner of Roebling and South Third, I stop. My school is before me. Junior High School Number 50, of Williamsburg. John D. Wells Junior High School, built in 1915 by the Board of Education of the City of New York, John P. Mitchell, Mayor, where, from nine to three, Monday through Friday, September through June, Harry Meyers is a teacher of the Hebrew language. It is insane, believe me. I cross the street. I see Rafael Quinones with his Rayshis Das tucked under his arm and I am strangely excited. It has been this way for almost twenty years, ever since the war, yet the sight still fascinates me: monkeys in motorcycle jackets, jabbering away in bastard Spanish, pinching the behinds of their girl friends, and carrying Hebrew books under their arms.

The students shiver in the cold. The girls wait in line at the entrance, restrained by the school patrol guard. Inside, they will get free heat and soup. Across from the school, in a narrow parking lot, boys and girls shuffle in a circle. Ruben Fontanez, I know, is within. I look their way. They see me and draw their circle tighter, but this is not the time to see if they are shielding their leader. I open the iron door and feel the warm air. The tiled floor is slippery. Perhaps, I think, perhaps it has been Ruben Fontanez, my wild-eyed monkey, who has been disturbing my sleep.

In the main office the teachers complain to one another. They all agree that those who stayed home were wisest. I punch my time card and Miss Teitlebaum does so also, smiling at me. Her loose-fitting plastic raincoat cannot hide the contours of enormous breasts. She is the envy of her thirteen-year-old students. She wears a black rainhat pulled down over her hair and she looks, I realize, like a larger Mary Santini. I cannot speak. A helpless-looking young man wanders our way and Miss Teitlebaum introduces him to Mrs. Davies, the secretary in charge of assigning substitute teachers. I escape from the office. I see more unfamiliar faces walking nervously from the entrance. The monkeys will have easy prey today and, in truth, I envy them.

Let me explain: years ago things were reversed. In those days Junior High School Number 50 was Public School Number 50 and Williamsburg contained only Jews and gypsies and the Italians who lived on the other side of Broadway. Then I taught Spanish to Jewish boys and girls. Teaching was a pleasure, students were bright, I was useful. A portrait of Luis Torres hung above the blackboard: Luis Torres, a Spanish Jew, companion to Columbus, the discoverer of tobacco, the first Western man to set foot on American soil. Like the Jews of ancient Spain, my students spoke a proud Castilian dialect. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain on August 2nd, 1492. The very next day they sent Columbus on his mad journey. This was not mere coincidence, I would suggest to my students.

But the Jews of Williamsburg had their revenge. In 1934 the parents drove the language of the Inquisition from the school. They attacked the Board of Education with petitions, demanding that Hebrew—a useful and traditional language, they said—be placed in the curriculum. The outcome was never in doubt. Harry Meyers surrendered with the Board of Education. When the expulsion from the Spanish classes took place, he became a teacher of Hebrew. It was not such a difficult thing to do. I knew the language. There were emergency examinations at Livingston Street. Sarah and I did not have to disrupt our lives. It was no small thing at the time, believe me.

I have remained here since then, through all transitions. For just as the Moors had followed the Jews from Africa to Spain, so the colored followed them to Williamsburg. The war came, Jews prospered, and those who could afford it left the area. The city built projects for the black newcomers, and when, in time, they too began to leave the neighborhood, the monkeys climbed into the evacuated buildings. Hebrew remained in the curriculum. Who was left to organize petitions, after all. Not monkeys, I can assure you. As for Harry Meyers, his chance to get out had passed long before. He does not fool himself about such things.

Along the hallways, I see signs which promise a life without poverty. Above the students’ cafeteria is a huge poster: “Los últimos serán los primeros.” Nobody is fooled. Here students do not look at pictures and posters. Remove all signs and replace them with mirrors. Then the children will pay attention. I walk back up the stairs and lock my galoshes and overcoat in the closet of my official room. I sip the tea I have purchased in the teacher’s cafeteria and look out over the empty rows of desks and chairs, engraved with the names and obscenities of generations of students, Spanish carvings obscuring Jewish and Negro curses.

I will tell you something: it will be as quiet when they are in their seats as it is now. When Harry Meyers enters a classroom there is silence. When I ask a question, hands go up. When I assign homework, it is done. The other teachers marvel at me. Their tales of fights, of knifings, of foul language, of ignorance: they are nothing to me. “In my classes,” I tell them, “the Inquisition reigns.” They do not understand, though. They try still to love their children, to help them, to offer futures. They get nowhere.

I crumple the plastic cup and drop it into my wastebasket. I take out my Hebrew books. Monkeys are monkeys, you see. Anybody can tame them. Here Harry Meyers rules, it is true, but elsewhere things are different. In the back compartment of my briefcase are the other books. I leave them where they are and zip my briefcase closed. I place it on the floor, under the desk, and go to the window. I do not look at the students below. I do not look at the buildings across the street. I think only of my other students.

I am also, you see, still a teacher of Spanish. For almost thirteen years now, I have held the other job, and even Morris’s arguments cannot persuade me to give it up. When Harry Meyers retires he will be able to take care of himself. There will be no nursing homes, no city hospitals, no charity. I will have money accumulated, I will account to nobody.

I hear the first buzzer, and I return to my desk. Beyond my classroom the noises begin. It is nothing. I think of three o’clock. That is when I will take my briefcase and walk away from the school, past the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, beyond Broadway, to Cuomo Street, where I am employed by a Chassidic Yeshiva to teach Spanish to their madmen. Well. Do not let their long black coats and their holy beards fool you. They are all madmen, especially the young ones. Look into their eyes sometime and you will see that it is true.

I hear my monkeys outside my room, running through the hallways. I hear the shouts of teachers and I rise from my desk and go to the door. I open it and look out. When they see Harry Meyers, students stop running. Their transistor radios are turned off. As they pass my classroom, their eyes scan the floor. My own students walk quietly to their seats. They take out their books. At once the monitors are at work: the blackboard is washed, the coat closet opened, the attendance taken. I close the door and walk the aisles. My students work.

There was another note in my mailbox this morning, I remember, but I think only of the end of the day, of the cowboys who lie in wait for me. All weekend long, Morris has been warning me. They terrify him. When we were boys it was different. Then we invented the term to mock them. We would wait outside the Chassidic Yeshiva and as they shuffled down the streets away from us, their long silken coats sweeping the gutters, their eyes fixed downward under their broad-brimmed black hats, we hurled our taunts at them. We were boys as they were, Jews as they were, but Americans as they were not.

The Chassidic Jews of the eastern European villages, my father told me, would greet their Rebbes by riding backwards on horses. The Belzer Chassidim, whose descendants were packed together in a corner of our neighborhood, wore their shirts unbuttoned even in winter. Their hearts were exposed to the Lord. They believed in the transmigration of souls, we discovered, and so we would yell after them that in their next incarnation they would not even be cowboys. They would be the rocks and the grass which receive the leavings of cows.

Now, though, Morris is frightened. Times change, you see. Every morning he prays for my safety. There is no reasoning with him anymore. He is an old man. He fears “the evil eye,” the somersaults they turn when they worship, the power of their Ba’al Shem Tov. As for me, I try to make light of his fears and, in truth, I think of only one thing now: the end of the year. Then I will retire, I will cease my ridiculous odyssey. I will leave my monkeys and cowboys.

My monkeys have stopped bothering me long ago. With my cowboys, though, there is something new every day—a dead bird in my desk, parts of animals in my locker, unsigned notes which predict gruesome future incarnations. I teach an evil language, they say. I am a victim of Satan’s Chassidism. My own arguments prove useless. They submit only to serve the Lord with greater joy. Perhaps it is so. Years ago, when the position of Spanish teacher at their Yeshiva became available, the other Yeshivas accused them of being renegades. But my cowboys knew what they were doing. I had been hired to train their young men in the language needed to deal in rents, in loans, in the sale of jewels. To their clients they claim to be, not from the shtetls of Galicia, but from the cellars of the Marranos. They are the descendants of the Spanish Jews who, after 1492, took their religion underground. They too know of Luis Torres, though the knowledge has not passed to them from my lips.

In the aisle next to the window, the third seat from the front is deserted. Ruben Fontanez is somewhere else this morning. Well. There are other things to think about. Morris presses me to move in with him, to use my Board of Education pension to buy the bed next to his. Prices are rising. What will my savings be worth in a few years, he asks. Now I can afford the price of a lifetime bed. Later they will suck blood from me. The administrators of his home read newspapers also, I think. They depend on statistics. For every man who reaches seventy-five, seven men leave empty beds at sixty-six.

There is laughter and my eyes shift to the door. Other eyes look back at me through the window, then are gone. Hector Cruz giggles. Maria Sanabria makes noises in her mouth. I pull the door open, but the corridor is empty. I place the knuckles of my right hand on Hector’s head. The class is still. I think of Menachem Schiffenbauer, the Rebbe’s son, at work on a new translation of the Zohar, from Spanish to Hebrew. William Wright, one of my Negro students, presses a hand on his mouth to stifle a giggle. I could clamp my fingers on the nerves at the back of his neck, but I leave him alone. It is best if I save my energy. At three-thirty I will need it.

I step into the corridor and walk to the boys’ bathroom. A frail misshapen monkey scurries by me. It is Manuel Alvarez, from the C.R.M.D. class. Above the urinals obscene drawings and swastikas mingle with warnings, in Spanish, of the girls who have the sickness. I wander past Manuel’s room, where the students are already at work, shining teacher’s shoes, playing knock-hockey, watching their television shows. Manuel crouches in a corner of the room, a pygmy of a monkey. His eyelids droop, his mouth hangs open, but I wonder. There is something about him that makes me think he is more than a child with retarded mental development. It is a thought I do not dwell upon. I return to my own room and close the door behind me.

You must understand something: I was not always like this. When the monkeys first began trickling into the school, Harry Meyers tried to be kind to them. Perhaps it was Sarah’s influence. They are a strange people in a strange land, she said. She spoke to me of the war which had just passed, and I was not without feeling. Give them time, Harry. Give them time, she said. So I tried. Believe me. I helped them, I tutored, I was easy in discipline, I brought them home for warm dinners. It got me nowhere. They exhausted me. They did to me what they do to the others. And so I began to find weapons.

I did so out of necessity, I assure you, though not without some pleasure. When I squeezed a monkey on the muscle of his arm, I discovered that he would listen to me. I found other spots: the back of the neck, the shoulder muscles, the ears. The correct pressure wrought wonders. Sarah reminded me that half of them did not know their rightful fathers, that they would wait turns in the winter to use the shoes which allowed them to play outside: but the conditions of their life were nothing to me. Around the school I became known as Mad-Man Meyers. My reputation grew. Sarah never knew and that is just as well. The Jewish students, the Negroes, the Italians—if you laid a hand on them you would have rabbis and mothers and priests counseling with the principal. Monkeys told no tales. Your ghost has haunted me from time to time, Sarah. I admit it. But I have stayed alive. It is no small thing.

At the buzzer, I give the order and my students line up at the side of the room. I open the door and they march in pairs down the corridor. Danny would be proud, I think, if he knew of my methods, my reputation.

My students, of course, know of Danny. A glass – enclosed bulletin board on the second floor tells them the story. The articles and pictures have been there for more than twelve years and have played no small part in maintaining my reputation. I admit it. My first class of the day files into the room and I tell them to take out their books and begin the exercises in their workbooks, at the back of chapter six: Jacob and Leah on the Kibbutz. I walk the aisles and examine their work. I will tell you something: they are not idiots. Monkeys who have studied with Harry Meyers can recite the Aleph-Bes and translate from the Hebrew language. In my classes students learn a subject. I am not in the business of vocational training.

I bend over, aware of how the points of Gladys Yambo’s lavender sweater hypnotize the boys who sit around her. She writes her answers in Hebrew and I correct her lettering. I glare at the others and they are quick to fix their eyes on their own work. “You are improving, Gladys,” I say, and walk on. It will be a long day, and though I still take some small pleasure in the fact that I teach something, the joy which once accompanied my exercise of authority, I know, has long since disappeared. There is no danger in my actions, no cleverness in their resistance.

Only Ruben Fontanez threatens to change things. Ah, Ruben, Ruben. We do not fool one another, do we. The first time I saw you, less than eight weeks ago, when the school clerk brought you to me to enroll you in my official class, I knew you meant trouble in my life. But that is all right also. I am ready.

I sit in front of the room and call the students to me, one at a time, to check their homework. I think of Ruben Fontanez. He seemed, at first glance, to be like the others, an ordinary monkey. He was a little shorter than most, perhaps a little uglier. A bump rose from the left side of his forehead. His mouth, his nose, and his eyes were pinched together in the center of his face. His face was the face of a monkey, it is true, but his eyes, you see, his eyes were the eyes of a cowboy.

There is nothing to do but wait. I grade my students’ homework and wonder why they should fear Harry Meyers. I was not so different, my brothers. Sarah understood what it meant to be the last of seven boys. I was not born to change anything. It is enough for the youngest to survive. I look into my students’ faces and, where the empty seat is, I can see Ruben, his neck craned forward, his lopsided head lowered toward his desk, his eyes upon me. Lately, when he is present, the others are bolder. They laugh when my back is turned, they answer questions without raising their hands. Ruben says nothing. Before and after class I see them cluster around him. With him, my threats and weapons are useless. Harry, Harry, you are an old man. Hurry from the school.

Soon, I reply. Soon. But where, I wonder, is my wild-eyed monkey. Despite his absence from official class this morning, I am certain he is in the building. I feel his eyes. He knows, you see. I have seen him between classes, next to the biology laboratory, his eyes poring over the bulletin board that I myself have lingered over more often than I care to admit. Not the one that secures my reputation, but another. One time I pressed my fingers into the muscle that joins his shoulder to his neck, forcing him to move on, but he seemed to feel no pain. “I seen you too,” he said, and smiled. They are the only words I have ever heard from him.

Still, there should be nothing strange here. Millions of Americans, I am certain, have read the same magazine articles. It is natural for a young boy to be fascinated by the future. I have seen other students in front of the board, taking notes, astounded by the miracles of coming decades, by spare parts and transplants and organ banks, by fetal surgery and cold storage embryos.

On the Frontiers of Medicine: Control of Life. When the buzzer sounds, I send José Colon back to his seat. I collect the work they have done this period. The halls swell with noise. In my room new monkeys replace the ones who have left. In my thoughts, Ruben remains. I cannot fool myself. He has seen the full-color picture of a completely rebuilt person, made solely of synthetic and transplanted parts, of Dacron arteries and silicone rubber lungs. The captions are irrelevant. Ruben knows. It is only a question of time.

The day passes. Outside, the snow ceases to drop from the sky and the sun appears. In the street below, the old men sit on the stoops, waiting for the dismissal bell. Then they will get a chance to observe the young Spanish girls. The ice turns to water, the snow to slush. I pull down the shades to keep the sun out. At lunchtime I buy a cheese sandwich in the teachers’ cafeteria and retire to the teachers’ lounge. Mr. Greenfeld, the C.R.M.D. teacher, is asleep on the couch. At night he moonlights as a bartender. He places the bets on football and basketball games for the other teachers. His class goes unattended. His weapons are equal to mine. On the first day of the semester he informs his class that he is a former marine. He locks the door, pulls the shades, and beats up the strongest boy in his class. If he has trouble the second day, he orders the strongest boy to beat up the troublemaker. By the third day of each semester his job is secure.

Across the street, in a third-story window, a Puerto Rican woman suckles her child. A substitute teacher stares at her. She laughs and blows him a kiss. He looks at me. I do not respond. He turns and leaves the room, flustered. It is too late, I think. Nothing that Life magazine predicts will come to pass for Harry Meyers. This body will leave the way it came. There is little danger for anyone. There will be no superior race bred in test tubes, no facsimiles of great men reproduced from single cell tissue-cultures. I have nothing to fear, I remind myself. I wonder, though, if I am the only one who sees it. Perhaps Ruben is already plotting with the cowboys. When the first silicone hearts are ready and the pumps are primed, you see, when they have put the first brains into cold storage, then the monkeys will invade. They are waiting.

The thought amuses me. Ruben and his monkeys will storm the walls of the hospitals and the laboratories and the organ banks. The cowboys and the colored will ride with him. The police will be powerless. Some things people will accept, but no man will ever carry a new heart while others are asked to wait. Of this I am certain.

I put the crusts of rye bread into the cellophane sandwich bag and drop it in the wastebasket. You are playing games, Harry Meyers, I tell myself. Enough. Mr. Greenfeld turns in his sleep and begins to snore. I sip my tea. Perhaps Morris is right. The cowboys will drive me mad. Perhaps Ruben knows nothing. He is only a boy, after all.

I am feeling better. Some of the aching has left my body. I think of the story in the article, of the dead man’s family who donated his kidney so that another man might live. I can see the pictures of the doctors rushing the dead man’s kidney to the hospital in a bucket, grafting it into the waiting patient. Gift Of Life From The Dead. The living man’s excretory functions were restored. I see him and his wife as they smile at me. I wonder if they get together for dinner with the family of the man whose kidney they use.

Mr. Greenfeld rubs his eyes. The steam pipe in the corner of the room knocks. I am warm. I close my eyes. Why should I fear Ruben when there are phone calls and cowboys to worry about. I will be retired before Jackson is released. That is something. My brother Simon can rest in peace then. It was a sin against God that Harry Meyers should be a teacher of His language. All my other transgressions he forgave.

May you rest in peace, Simon, wherever you are. If you hold a grudge, I do not blame you. The room is too warm. “You are the only one left, Harry. Answer me the truth: will you pray for me? I have no sons left. All our brothers are gone.” I hear his voice. I am in the hospital room and it smells of ammonia. I stand by the bed, petrified by the face before me, freshly shaven, soft and pink. I looked more like Simon than any of the others, people said. He was second youngest. You could tell we were brothers. The blood leaks down from its perch beside his bed, the tubes run from his nose, the other relatives shake their heads. This body once pounded my body, I remember, when it caught me raiding the icebox on Yom Kippur. Simon Meyers, good enough, some said, to be a champion like Benny Leonard. Eighteen hours of fasting had only made him stronger. Did you hate me all those years, Simon? Our lives went their separate ways, we were brothers at weddings and funerals only. When our father died I went to the synagogue every morning for a year. You knew.

“One year is enough, Simon. I am sorry.”

There was no need for that, Harry. He had wanted you to lie to him. He would not have questioned you if you had said yes. That was foolish. He had seen his own two sons in the grave before him. Simon, Simon. It seems impossible to me that you were only sixteen years old when you caught me. You won the middleweight tournament at the Educational Alliance. People had plans for you. You were only four years older than me. This spring you would be sixty-nine. You were no champion. Less than two years ago I covered you with dirt. You spent your life like our father and our brothers, candling eggs in the semi-darkness behind a drawn curtain. In the old warehouse near the 18th Street pier: Meyers Butter & Eggs. I could have said yes, I suppose, since you were the last. I wonder: do you remember that night you chased me around the house and I hid from you under the tablecloth? It was Friday night. We had returned from synagogue and the candles were lit on the table. I escaped between the slick mahogany legs and our chase resumed through the bedrooms. Our father cuffed you on the ear for running and I laughed. I was seven or eight then. You were closest to me in years. We must have loved one another in those dark rooms on Howard Street, Simon. People said we looked like brothers. When I saw you in the hospital, though, you could not have pounded my body with your fists. You could not even bind your arms every morning with your beloved black straps. Still, one year was enough, Simon. I am sorry.

I smile and open my eyes. The door moves. Perhaps, I think, perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps it pleased him to have me tell the truth. He left me as he knew me. Would I have been Harry Meyers if I had said yes? Simon, Simon. You wanted to be pinched, didn’t you, to make sure you had not yet left this world. Well. Your brother did not let you down. Miss Teitlebaum’s head is in the doorway.

“What—?” I ask.

Miss Teitlebaum smiles and apologizes for disturbing me, but the substitute teacher in social studies is having trouble with my official class. Mr. Vance, the Assistant Principal, asked if I would look in. Her breasts move into the room. She closes the door behind her. I cough and bring up phlegm.

“If you’d like me to try—”

I swallow. “I’ll go, I’ll go.”

Mr. Greenfeld’s eyes open. Miss Teitlebaum smiles at him. Her chest rises. I lift my glasses and rub my eyes, at the corners.

“Do you want me to come along?”

“No, no. I will handle them. What room?”

“Four-twenty-five. The substitute is Miss Dabney—it’s only her second time here. She’s—”

I stand and take my briefcase. I push by Miss Teitlebaum, out the door. I walk to the right, then up one flight of stairs. I am pleased, I realize, to be needed in such a situation. I have been too gentle with my monkeys lately, I must admit. In the corridor I can hear the shouting. On the walls are pictures of Betsy Ross sewing a flag, of Washington crossing a river, of Lincoln dead in his memorial. A young woman stands outside a door. She is almost in tears. She tries to speak but I gesture to her to be silent. I do not want them to know I am approaching. I stop beside the room, then peer in through the window of the door. Ruben is standing on the teacher’s desk, his arms outstretched, his short legs stamping out a wild dance as the monkeys clap for him. “¡Mira! ¡Mira!” they scream.

I push the door open. “¡Cuidado!” comes a shout from the back of the room. “Meyers!” I slam the door shut. Ruben laughs and does something with his hands. The students are quiet. Ruben is in another world, dancing furiously. He wears tennis sneakers. I set down my briefcase in the aisle and move toward him. “¡Cuidado! Ruben. ¡Mira!… Meyers! Meyers!” come the shouts. They do not disturb my wild-eyed one. I time my attack and snatch him by his left ankle. He lurches backwards and, as he throws something over my head to the others, he laughs. I pull at his leg and he loses his balance. “Be careful—” I call as he falls from the desk. I let go. He seems to stop in midair, to twirl like a ballet dancer. He lands lightly on the toes of his sneakers. He laughs again. His eyes are blazing now and he dances away from me, his feet moving with incredible speed. I see other eyes at the door, peering in. It is Manuel. Some students clap for Ruben, but I glare and they stop. He tries to sneak by me, but I push him back, then grab him by the wrist. Nobody speaks. Ruben’s feet stop moving.

“Why were you absent from official class this morning?” I ask, tightening my grip on his wrist.

“I was there,” he says. “You ask anybody.”

“He was there—he was there—!” the students shout.

I grab his hair on the smooth side of his forehead and tug at it. “Nobody plays me for the fool, Ruben Fontanez,” I say.

“I was there,” he says again.

I see something move across the back row, from lap to lap. “Juan—bring that to me!” I drag Ruben down the aisle with me. He plants his feet and resists. I let go of his hair. “¡Ahora!” he shrieks, and then he yanks his wrist from my grip, dances lightly over my briefcase, and dashes from the room.

I will not catch him, I know. I take two strides and seize Juan by the back of the neck. Now that Ruben is gone, the students are quiet again. I do not have to apply much pressure. Juan reaches into his desk and brings forth a tiny doll. The other monkeys giggle. “What is this?” I demand. They are quiet. I let Juan go and I walk to the front of the room. The substitute teacher starts through the door but I motion to her to stay away. I look at my monkeys. They keep their eyes down, their heads bent. I look at the doll again, on the desk in front of me. It is about seven inches long, constructed of rags and adhesive tape and pipe cleaners. The head is made of papier mâché and it has been painted. Two long hatpins are stuck in the chest.

I pick up the doll and my eyes open wider. The evidence is unmistakable. The monkeys watch my expression, I know, but I cannot conceal my rage. The eyeglasses made from a paper clip, the large crooked nose, the graying hair. “Talk!” I say, and look out at my monkeys. “Talk or I will know what to do.” They look down. “All right,” I say, and walk up and down the aisles. I stop next to Rafael Quinones He looks up at me briefly, almost smiles, then fixes his eyes on his desk. He is afraid. I grab the back of his flannel shirt and pull him out of his seat. “Hey—let go, manl” he cries. I twist his ear, then fix my grip along the sides of his neck. He squirms. “What you want with me? I no make the muñecos—” I squeeze harder. “Ruben—he make them of everyone. Last week he make one of me. He even make one of his mother—” He tries to sit, but knows it is no use. The others will not condemn him. It is no disgrace to give Harry Meyers information. “Every day he come in with a new one and go sticking pins in them.” I squeeze. “This the first time he do one of you. That the truth—”

The monkeys jabber. “Go on,” I say to Rafael. “More.” He shrugs, and shakes his shoulders. His neck, I see, is filthy. His mustache is almost full grown. He stays in school until he is old enough to get working papers. “Let me go, man,” he says. “I no make those voodoo dolls—” Behind me I hear laughter. I release Rafael and walk quickly to the door, but when I look out the corridor is deserted.

I stare at the doll. The room is silent. When the buzzer sounds, I let my monkeys proceed to their next class. I notice that the mouth Ruben has drawn seems to be smiling, curved around the bulbous head. I drop the doll into my briefcase.

The day moves on. Outside the sun is brighter. I assign written work to my classes and sit at my desk. I stare at the doll period after period, and find, despite myself, that I am developing an affection for my likeness. When the last period of the day is over and my official class returns to get their coats, Ruben is not with them. The bell rings and I escort my class to the exit. Across the street I see the old men. They are happy now. I return to my room and look at the doll again. It smiles at me. I remove the hatpins and let them drop to the bottom of my briefcase. I bend the two pipe cleaner arms forward, so that they are clasped, resting on the stomach, and I place the doll gently in the briefcase, beside my books.

In the main office I punch the time clock. I speak to no one but I am smiling broadly, more broadly than the likeness I carry with me. Students still linger near the school, smoking, talking, not wanting to return to their homes, to go to their jobs. I do not blame them. In a hallway I see a ninth grade Negro and a female monkey going at one another hungrily. That is all right also. I cross the street, toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Below the underpass there is fresh writing on the walls, in chalk, but I do not read the messages. The snow melts quickly. I feel strong. Harry Meyers is prepared to meet his cowboys.