DEC SAT AT the table outside the guidance office waiting for Mr. Marlborough. Ezra sat across from him, his pointy chin resting in the cup of his hand.
“My mother’s upset,” he said. Dec looked at him dubiously. “She can’t understand why you don’t come around any more.”
Dec frowned. “And you told her I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I hope?”
Ezra looked surprised. “Do you really hope you’ll have a nervous breakdown?”
“Idiot,” said Dec.
Ezra grinned. “But, seriously, why don’t you come over Saturday? She’ll make macaroons just for you. She likes you way more than me.”
Dec smiled. “Thanks. I’d like that.”
“And it might be a good idea to get away?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Dec. “In fact, ask your mother if I can move in.”
Then Mr. Marlborough arrived. “Ah, the brain trust,” he said. “What can I do for you fellas?”
In a moment, he had found them the 1986 edition of The Fife and Drum with its garish tartan cover. He owned every yearbook published in his thirty-two-year stint at Ladybank Collegiate.
“I’m going to have to retire,” he said, “or get me some more shelves.”
Dec thanked him and was about to take the book, when something occurred to him.
“Do you remember my mother?” he asked. “Lindy Polk?”
The counsellor seemed to thumb through a Rolodex in his head. “Nope,” he said finally. “Sadly, my memory is dominated by those students who gave me the most work.” He indicated his ageing face. “Every one of these wrinkles has a name.”
“What about Dennis Runyon?”
Marlborough grimaced and pulled down the flesh beside his left eye. “See those crow’s feet? That’s Denny Runyon territory.”
“That bad, eh?”
Marlborough looked thoughtful. “Yes, that bad. But you’ll notice I’m pointing at what are commonly called laugh lines.” He shook his head. “I remember Runyon convincing his whole class to walk clear through home room and out onto the roof of the tech wing.”
The boys looked at each other in frank approval.
“Denny Runyon could convince a rabbit to jump into a stewing pot,” said Marlborough. He laughed and then frowned again. “He convinced more than one instructor to find employment elsewhere.”
Dec pictured the wired up, fast-talking water-haulage man, a con artist from an early age.
“What made you think of him?” asked Marlborough. Then he stopped himself. “Oh, right! The accident. Sorry. That must have been a shock. Well, if it’s any consolation, there are a lot of people who’d tell you he had it coming. Which is sad, because he was a smart cookie.”
Back in the hallway, Dec and Ezra sat side by side and flipped open the yearbook. Lindy Polk was all over the place: “Hangin’ with the Chick Brigade,” “Home on the Range,” “The Queen of the Pumpkin Patch.” Here she was riding on a football player’s shoulders, his helmet in her raised hands. There she was in the quad with a math book lying open on her chest, her eyes shut, “Catchin’ Sum Rays.” And there she was in her grad photo, her wild hair tamed for the occasion and her lipstick glistening.
Lindy Polk (Reddi Wip)
Who can forget Home Ec with BV, Geog with BV, Book keeping
with BV. “Mamma Mia, let me go!” How about that trip to
Mont Tremblant…so many hommes so little temps. Reddi Wip
is off to St. Lawrence College for Accounting if Richy Rich
doesn’t make his move and whip her off to Shangri La.
Whatever, wherever… Go get ’em Polkeroo!
“BV is Birdie?” asked Ezra. Dec nodded. “And Richy Rich?”
“My dad. I guess she did a co-op placement at Steeple Enterprises.”
“That was how they met?”
Dec nodded. “As far as I know. He does actually go into the office sometimes. He’s on the board of directors.”
Ezra wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx. “And what better time to drop in than when there’s a fox on co-op placement.” He looked at her picture and barked admiringly.
“That’s my mother you’re barking at,” said Dec.
“Sorry.”
“And, in case you’d forgotten, my dad is hardly the lecherous type.” Dec looked at his mother’s grad picture again. The wicked smile. “It’s hard to imagine him coming on to her. He’s so…” Dec couldn’t think what.
“So unlecherous?”
“So… boring.”
There was an awkward exchange of glances. Then they both turned back to the yearbook. The pages flipped past, one year in the life of a small-town high school.
What was he looking for? It was like looking through Where’s Waldo, except Dec had no idea what Waldo was. All he knew was that the yearbook was missing from Lindy’s bookshelf and nothing was supposed to go missing from the House of Memory. All he could think was that somebody didn’t want it lying around.
They were near the end of the book before they found anything of interest. Two boys were poised over the open hood of a car in the auto mechanics shop. They were mugging for the camera, one of them with a sledgehammer, the other holding his face in mock horror. The “victim” was Clarence Mahood.
Ezra whistled. “Pre-bald days,” he said. “But you’d know that gut anywhere. Not to mention the car. It’s the Duster, isn’t it?”
But Dec was too busy staring at the boy with the sledgehammer. He sported a very bad shag, and a wild man’s grin. Dec recognized him right away.
With a high performance V-8 and 340 horses under the hood,
this Duster can take anything in town,” says Clarence the hood
Mahood. Wanna bet, Clare? That’s Denny Runyon fixing to do
some surgery!!!
“Hey!” said Ezra, who had just read the caption. “That’s Runyon?”
Dec nodded.
Then it came to him.
The time he had gone to Lindy in her room when she was playing the guitar. A yearbook had been open on the loveseat beside her. He tried to see the page again in his mind’s eye. A dance — that was it. Immediately, he began to flip back through the yearbook, his tongue between his teeth. He stopped at a two-page spread, a collage of the spring prom, “Nights in the Kasbah.”
“Yes!” he said, stabbing at one of the pictures with his finger. It was Runyon all right, although it was easy to see why he hadn’t noticed him earlier. He was in some kind of an Arabian get-up with a fez perched on his head. He was flexing his biceps for the camera. A girl wearing harem pants, a halter-top and veil, like a genie from some corny Arabian Nights movie, was draped over his shoulders, her arms tight around his neck.
Lindy Polk.