6

Grounded

“PETER PAN a faggot. He a boy they say can fly, but I don’t think no boy can fly. That’s stupid. Rick, this boy that moved ’round my block, me and him climbed our row roof and jumped off. It was snow on the ground. It looked like a lot of snow. It wasn’t. I didn’t want to jump first. I pushed Rick. He screamed all the way down. The snow didn’t break his fall. He broke his leg. They couldn’t get me off. They had to call the fire trucks, and then I ran from the men when they was on the roof. It was dark then. That’s why I think Peter Pan stupid. Can’t no boy fly. I don’t want to fly nohow. I want to drive me a Cadillac.”

Isaac sat down after he read his report. “That’s interesting,” the teacher said. “You seem to be saying you don’t like the book because you find it unbelievable, and Peter somewhat . . . childlike. But that was the whole point of the book.”

“Naw, I’m saying he a faggot.”

“Don’t use that word,” the teacher said.

“Why? You asked me to write what I feel about the book. Now you telling me I’m wrong,” Isaac said.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all. Let’s move on to the next report,” the teacher said.

“Fuck you,” Isaac said under his breath. He didn’t know why he was thrown into this school with these people. They were stupid, retards, jellyheads.

It was after he mowed down half the fence at Roosevelt Junior High that he was transferred. It wasn’t even his fault. The men had been tearing up a field to expand the parking lot. Isaac and Rick had gone there one night to see if they could get a piece of the equipment to work. They couldn’t get the tractor or the bulldozer to start, but Rick managed to get the steamroller started. Isaac was the one who set it in motion. He was playing with the levers, and the steamroller began moving forward. It took off in a slow and steady line, crunching over gravel. Isaac was excited. He felt powerful atop the machine. It was moving like a tank.

“We at war, Ricky. We killing the Japs.”

“You crazy, Isaac. I’m not playing no stupid war game with you.”

“We killing ’em. We at war with them Commie bastards. We going to show ’em not to be messing with us,” Isaac said.

Rick was the one who saw the fence. It seemed to pop up in front of them right out of the night. He screamed for Isaac to stop.

“I can’t stop it,” Isaac yelled.

Rick jumped off the side and rolled across the gravel. Isaac was too scared to jump. He could see himself tripping and getting his bones crushed to dust under the runaway machine.

“I’m riding it out, Rick. I’m going through this mind field. If I don’t make it out alive, give my Purple Heart to my mama.”

“You crazy, Isaac. You really crazy. Bail out, man. Bail out!”

Isaac stayed on, and they heard sirens. Rick took off, turned himself into a shadow and vanished in the darkness, but Isaac was caught. He was placed in the custody of his father. No charges were pressed against him, but the next morning he had to bring his parents to school.

“You go see ’bout that hard-head boy,” his mother said to his father. “I’m too shame to go, and say what to them white people—the fool didn’t mean to run down the fence? Far as I know, he did it on purpose.”

So his father went. Before his hands had even opened, he was sitting before the principal with his hat on his knees and his head bowed. The fence had to be paid for.

Isaac sat quietly until the principal said, “It would be best to place your son in occupational education.”

“O.E.? No!” Isaac said. “I’m not going to a school for retards. I’m not riding the blue cheese.”

“Isaac, you be quiet when the man is talking,” his father reprimanded.

“I’m not going to no school for jellyheads.”

“Isaac, set there and be good,” his father said.

That was when the principal told Isaac he would have to leave the office. Isaac stood outside the door feeling as if he were going to throw up. He knew his record. He had failed the seventh grade once, and he was on his way to a second trip through the eighth grade.

That wasn’t his fault either. He was bored. They were always trying to teach him things he did not want to know, and there were always tricks. He had to find themes in stories, and write thesis statements, and make paragraphs.

In seventh grade there had been sentence diagramming. That wrecked two whole years for him. Seeing a sentence all strung out, dangling from a line with parts of it sticking off of it like branches from a tree, made Isaac want to crawl out on one of those branches and hang himself from a particle, or article, or something. His teacher would put a sentence on the board like

 

When the black cat crept around the corner of the white fence, the brown and tan spotted dog gave chase.

 

and Isaac would say, “That dog stupid to be chasing a black cat. Don’t he know black cats bad luck?” Then he would be asked to be quiet, to just do his work or leave the room.

And he was always being asked to draw three-dimensional pictures of boxes and rectangles, and to measure lines, and to find the area of a square.

 

If a man has 77 cords of wood, and his neighbor borrows 10 and burns them, only to discover he had 32 cords of wood in his own barn, how many cords would the man and his neighbor each have if the neighbor returned the wood he borrowed?

 

Isaac could not bear it. There were too many numbers and words thrown together. He would start wondering what a cord was, and why the neighbor borrowed wood if he already had wood, and why couldn’t the neighbor borrow more wood than the man had? That was a real test for negative numbers. And why didn’t the neighbor just chop down a tree in the first place, and how could the neighbor return wood that he burned, anyway?

He was thrown out of school for three days because of negative numbers.

Isaac knew very well there were negative numbers, but he wasn’t interested in them. The teacher told him to think of them as money.

“They not money. If we going to talk about money, let’s talk about money.”

“Well, O.K.,” the teacher said. She handed Isaac ten pennies, and Isaac put them in his pants pocket.

“Now let me have them back,” the teacher said, and she put out her hand.

“Naw, man. You a Indian giver. They mines.”

“Isaac, stop this. Work with me on this one. Give me the pennies.”

Isaac dug into his pocket and retrieved the change.

“See, now I’m in debt for ten pennies. I started with zero. Now I’m minus ten.”

“That ain’t right. Them your ten pennies, and you took ’em back. Indian giver,” Isaac said.

“Maybe this will help,” the teacher said. She put the money in his pocket. “Let’s pretend for a minute. Work with me now. Let’s say you owned the pennies—”

“Then I was robbed,” Isaac said. “Talking ’bout give you the money. That’s robbery where I come from.”

“Isaac, be serious. You have to let me help you.”

Isaac sighed. “All right.”

“Now, you owned the money, and then loaned them to me, and I spent them. Since I started with zero, I would owe you ten less than I have. Let’s say then that my husband gave me twenty pennies, and I paid you back, how many would I have?” the teacher asked.

“Ten,” Isaac said.

“Very good!” the teacher bellowed.

But Isaac would have none of it. In a fit, he tore down the number line over the chalkboard and ripped it up. “Isaac crazy,” the students screamed, and then he got three days’ suspension.

But as long as Isaac was quiet, his teachers didn’t bother him. He asked to be excused almost every period to go to the bathroom, or get a drink, or blow his nose. He roamed the halls.

Down in the bowels of the school Isaac saw enormous furnaces that roared like dragons. In another part of the basement he found cots and cans of food, gigantic silver cans covered with dust. They were big enough to be eaten by monsters, he thought. Why, a monster could eat the cans whole.

Once a year the whole school went to visit the cots and cans. Isaac loved the air-raid drill. In case of a war, everyone would stay down there and eat the canned food and sleep on the cots. But there were only about fifty cots, and three hundred people could fit in the shelter. A yellow and black sign at the entrance to the shelter told you that. Isaac knew there were more than five hundred students in the school, plus teachers. Now that was a test for negative numbers. But he figured he wouldn’t be one of those minuses. He wouldn’t be less than zero. He would be the first one down there, slide right down the wooden banisters all the way from the third floor, and then sprint down the basement stairs. He would eat canned beef and powdered eggs until all the Commies were dead.

When Isaac was in the seventh grade for the second time, a white boy in the eighth grade, a boy no bigger than a ten-year-old, was caught stealing a can of food and was suspended for three days. He was one of fifteen children, and his family lived in a run-down house near the school. “Stupid Polack,” Isaac had said. “Greedy gut. What he want? For us to go hungry in a atomic war?”

Isaac had explored much of the universe by wandering the halls of the school. There were rats in cages, dead newts in jars, sewing machines, maps of other countries and globes that would bounce like balls, charts of the human body full of veins or muscles or bones, strange boxes in the girls’ lavatories that read “Modess.” Isaac knew where the janitors ate lunch and when the oil delivery truck came. He knew if you turned the gas on high in the lab and then threw a lit match at it, you could blast your eyebrows and lashes right off of your face. He also knew that if you closed yourself inside a locker, you couldn’t let yourself out, and that the fat dictionary in the library had nasty words in it. Isaac knew lots of things, all kinds of things. But still he was failing. That was what the principal was telling his father, that he was stupid, a loser.

Isaac was transferred the next week to the Occupational Education Center in Capital Park, despite his protestations. A tour impressed him, though he would not admit it. There were all kinds of shops, a machine shop, a woodworking shop, even an auto shop. He was told that he would spend half the day in shop and half in classes.

Isaac didn’t mind the school that much. It was better than Roosevelt, really. During his first month there he hadn’t been asked to diagram a sentence, to add or subtract negative numbers, to draw one geometric shape. In wood shop he learned how to drive a nail and turn a screw. He was even taught how to use a saw, not just the handsaw but the power saw too. He made his own tool box and a pencil box, and he had been allowed to burn his name into the side of each. Now he was working on a footstool for his father.

Isaac’s English teacher was beginning to spoil things, though, with this Peter Pan thing. What did he want Isaac to say? He wrote what he felt, and now he felt wrong. Why couldn’t you call Peter Pan a faggot? All Isaac knew was that if some boy with those fairy boots came through his window, talking about his shadow wouldn’t stick to him, he would have beat him up. He would have pushed Pete right back out the window, just like he pushed Rick from the roof, and then he would watch him hit the ground. Foop! Pete would grow up then, some stupid white boy with fairy boots and a broken leg, and a shadow all balled up on the ground.

If he had been back at Roosevelt, this would have been the time to roam. During his first few weeks at the new school, Isaac had wandered down to the basement. He had heard sounds coming from one of the rooms there. What he heard sounded like animals, but when he peeked inside, he saw a room full of jellyheads.

They were sitting around some tables with teachers. Their bodies were soft and doll-like. Some were twisted and bent into unnatural positions, some strapped in wheelchairs, some wearing helmets.

One boy knelt in a corner, a helmet strapped to his head, and he was banging, banging, banging his head on the cement floor.

Isaac was staring at this boy when one of the children at a table pointed at him and began making noises. “Ooh ah coa ah coa ah,” Isaac heard him say.

A teacher turned to Isaac and smiled. “He’s asking you to come in. Would you like to come join us?”

Isaac took off running, tripping as he climbed the stairs. He got up and kept running, not looking behind him, and he hadn’t gone back to the basement since.

If a boy could really fly, these were the children he should take, Isaac thought. He should take these retards and dump them in Never Land.