BY NOW I BARELY NOTICED THE weight room’s gym chemical sweat and a soundtrack like Poison’s Greatest Hits. But it was hard to ignore Zowitzki, who was now in my face with an ultimatum after practice.
“Listen, Lefferts,” he said, “if it makes you feel any better, you’d be in very good company. A couple of guys who might surprise you.”
“I’ve never been real good at going with the crowd,” I said.
He shook his head. “Man, you are making such a mistake.” And he walked away.
That sort of ruined my session. I benched the weight and walked out the door . . . and kept walking. Down the long, winding entrance and right out to the real world.
Somebody’d told me that Jarvis lived just off campus. So I took a right, on Concord County Highway 63A, which headed a few miles down to what passed for the village of Engleside, which was basically a general store, a pizza place, a gas station, and a couple of nice churches. I wasn’t actually allowed to walk off campus. Only A-students had “town privileges.” But if Ward wanted to drive past me and bust me then . . . fine.
I tried to listen to the peepers somewhere in the ditch in front of the cornfield so I could stop imagining stomping Zowitzki’s head into mush. Then I saw JARVIS stenciled onto a black metal mailbox in front of a muddy driveway that led to a big, rambling old house. Wicker chairs with faded paint filled the porch, facing in every direction, just like his classroom.
Jarvis answered the buzzy old doorbell wearing a plain white T-shirt and smoking an unfiltered cigarette.
“Jack. What’s up? Come on in,” Jarvis said, turning around and walking down a hallway next to some old wooden stairs, like it was totally normal that some kid would show up on his doorstep.
I followed him into this room with papers sliding off desks and tables, books sliding out bookshelves, a shelf of vinyl records, coffee cups with rings of evaporated coffee, CDs in random piles. An old poster tacked to the wall said LET GO, OR BE DRAGGED and the name of some Buddhist temple.
He swept a few books off an old leather wingback chair that a cat had clawed into shreds. Then he slumped into the chair behind his desk and slipped a Benny Goodman CD into a boom box as old as the one in the classroom. The bookshelf had a whole section of sci-fi novels by V. R. Hamilton. I recognized the name from the fantasy section at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper East Side. Luke loved that writer. He’d read every book the guy had ever written, which was, like, a dozen. This felt like home.
“So what’s up?” he said. “You need an extension on the short story? Take another week.”
“Thanks.” I said. I didn’t say anything else. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. But when he spoke again, it was like he’d read my mind.
“Things okay at home?” He stabbed his cigarette butt into an ashtray that said “I Got a Rush from Mount Rushmore.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. How come you have all this stuff from all these states?”
“Read Kerouac a lot. Now road trips are my religion.” He lit another cigarette and waited for me to say something. So I told him about my dad. Not that there was much to tell. I mean, it didn’t sound like too many kids around here had real relationships with their parents anyway. But still. It was weird that Dad hadn’t even e-mailed me. Then, I hadn’t e-mailed him either.
“My guess is your dad is still too new at parenthood to know that he’s trying to live his life through you,” Jarvis said. “I did that with my first kid. Fortunately, it didn’t work. Stick it out. He’ll grow up and see what he was doing, and hopefully, when he’s finally happy with himself, he’ll be happy with you.”
Jarvis’s wife walked into the room. She had a happy, lined face and brown hair with gray streaks in it. She was wearing blue-jean overalls covered in dirt. Jarvis introduced us.
“Jack! Johnny has talked about you.”
Johnny? Johnny Jarvis. Sounded like a pro tennis player, instead of a fringe prep teacher. I stood up and shook her hand. “Glad to meet you.”
“Nice of you to drop by on such a glorious day. Honey, I’m going to get a little garden time in before it gets dark, if you need me,” she said. “Otherwise we’ll have no garlic at all next July!” And she was gone.
“So you guys are doing The Bacchae in history? Great stuff.” He puffed out circles of smoke, which drifted apart in the late-afternoon sun coming through the window. “Kingdoms don’t work out so well in the long run. But you can’t have people running around just having fun all the time, either, can you? Like this place. For starters.”
“You mean Oakhurst Hall is the kingdom?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “But imagine if I ran this place. It’d be anarchy, right? Crazy old English teacher.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. Then he stood up, like he had something more important do to, so I did too. “My advice?” he said. “Keep your eyes and ears open. Listen when you hear something that makes sense, and ignore the rest.”
We walked down his hallway. “One other thing, Jack,” he said, as we reached the old heavy wood front door of his house. This sounded like it was going to be heavy. “I don’t know why you don’t have the confidence to lead discussions or offer opinions. I wasn’t there for the first fifteen years of your life. But . . . this place needs kids like you. Take off the muzzle.”
“I’m trying,” I said. It sounded true. He opened that heavy, creaky door.
“Sir? Can I ask you a question? When you talked about me to your wife . . . what did you say?”
Jarvis paused, as if he had to remember. “I guess I told her about that your take on the Gatsby paper was the one I’ve been waiting twenty years for and couldn’t figure out myself. That it’s simple: The reason rich people end up so unhappy is because they’ve never had the balls to aim higher than the safety of the dollars.” Then he shrugged, as if that was obvious.
“Thanks,” I said. “And V. R. Hamilton? All those books? Is he good?”
“Some of the reviewers thought so. But the pay sucks.”
V. R. Hamilton was Johnny Jarvis! “My best friend really likes your books, sir.”
He smiled. “Tell him I’m almost done with The Lycocambrian Mythos, Part VII: Creep in Wolf’s Clothing.” Then he laughed. “I leave the real literature to the people with vision. The ones who are smart enough to create things that change the world.”
Maybe I was imagining it. Or maybe he looked me straight in the eye before he closed the big, old wooden door.