The plan was simple: when they finally came in and were seated he’d let the motherfucker’s have it.
Late the previous night, sweating alone in bed and listening to the sound of his mother’s rattling breath through the thin wall, he had decided. It was finished; there would be no more insults. He had borne his last. And with this sudden revelation he had calmed. No longer did his mother’s incessant death rattle draw a knife-edge along his spine. In fact, for the first time in a long time, he had actually smiled, lying there in the oppressive darkness with his hands folded neatly upon his chest. He had been just so when the sun finally leaked in through the tattered, filthy comforter he’d used for ages as a curtain. Strangely, considering his lack of sleep, he’d been refreshed, wide-awake. It was time to make a difference.
It was time to send a statement.
He shook himself free of the twin bed in one fluid movement. One of his three remaining shirts was right where it had landed the day before yesterday, lying in a wadded bundle atop the bureau he’d not opened in over ten years. He shuffled through a miasma of yellowed newspapers as he retrieved it and slid it over his head. He could smell his shoes on the other side of the doorjamb and already wore his slacks. Getting dressed was no ceremony.
In the bathroom, he slipped his feet into the open-toed shoes and pissed in the tub. The toilet had not worked in six months, and luckily they lived at the end of a gravel road. There were no neighbors and few visitors. His mother allowed only two showers a month due to some vague edict she’d discovered somewhere in the Bible years before. The only reason she’d bent to the satellite dish was the 700 Club, but the Artist scarcely watched television at all. The sex channels disturbed him and everything else made him tired.
He patted his hair into form standing before the filthy mirror, running a thumb through the smeared mess so he could get a bearing on his appearance. Not that he much cared, but he would want to look presentable for the photographers. There was no doubt, many pictures would be taken before the day was done. He used no deodorant under the false premise that he didn’t smell. His nose was dead, squashed to his face during his own high school days by a boy he’d never known. For a transgression he’d never placed. He’d never told anyone of this handicap. Not even his mother; her exaggerated anguish would have proved unbearable.
He rubbed his hands together, reaching for his toothbrush. The brand new tube of Crest Whitener lay in a puddle of water and razor stubble next to the sink. The toothbrush was in his back pocket and he flipped it out expertly. It was the one vanity he permitted himself: his teeth. Despite his forty-three years on the planet, he’d never had a solitary cavity. And in an unfair, chastising world, any little bit helped. He scrubbed religiously for ten minutes, applying the paste three times before he felt sufficiently clean.
However, his eyes darkened as he went about his business, bunching up underneath his bushy eyebrows until they became two hard knots embedded in his plump face. As he slid the toothbrush into his pocket his lip curled and then pulled away from the teeth. And there it was: his perfect sheet of white marred by the chipped incisor. That had been a large part of his sleeplessness, the constant awareness as his tongue tested the tooth over and over. The tip had been knocked away.
Its replay had grown monstrous in his mind’s eye. The berserk 1st period (Introduction to Art), his hell class. The others weren’t much better but they were bearable at least. To an increasingly shrinking degree. The thugs and gangsters knew he was afraid of them, their collective, obscene mass.
Of course, it was impossible to prove the foot had consciously tripped him; he didn’t even know whose foot it had been. He’d been too busy shaking the stars from his eyes after his head hit the filing cabinet. But he could still plainly hear the roar of laughter that had erupted, and the humiliation that had filled him from shoes to hairline. Thank God he hadn’t broken down and cried. For several shaken minutes he’d thought he would.
But finally he’d shook it off, clenching his teeth so tightly that even now he couldn’t be sure the chip had been caused by the filing cabinet, or simply his own bottled rage. It made no difference. The chip was finally reason enough.
In disgust at the scowling visage peering back through the sludge, he spit into the filthy sink. He closed his lips, shutting his teeth out of sight. Today old habits would be broken. He cracked his knuckles and turned to cut a swath to the door and around the corner. Very quietly, he slogged past his growling mother’s bedroom doorway, both hands on either wall of the thin, trailer hallway so he wouldn’t trip and wake her. He dared not because he was earlier this morning than usual, and nothing peculiar, or out-of-character happened within his mother’s walls that she didn’t take an interest in. Her questions could be merciless, unrelenting. She would discover his purpose before her bedroom door was open.
Luckily, there was a faint glow to lead him among the strewn rubbish. At the other end of the short hallway, in what passed for a living room (it was really nothing more than a cluttered storage area for the two), sat the twenty-five year old Zenith with its much younger (though hardly as resilient) VCR perched on top. The Fast Forward button had ceased working after only three months, but the clock still kept perfect time. It plainly, silently, read 3:21. He was very early indeed.
But today there was no way to stop the avalanche; there were too many lessons to teach.
He opened the front door with his foot firmly against the bottom so it wouldn’t squeak, and after he’d stepped outside into the damp, croaking stillness hunched around the mildewed trailer, he shut it with the same stealth. His skin had worked itself into gooseflesh along his spine. It was chilly and the shirt was too damned threadbare. He pulled lightly on the cheap doorknob, convincing himself the latch had caught. There was no way he was going back inside now. His resolve was strong and to go back would kill the animal that tensed there, equally capable of slinking back to its fetid cave or ripping someone a new asshole. Too many times in his life he’d ventured back to the cave; this day he would not.
His car was a heap, had been since the raccoon crossed in front of him three years back. The crumpled left fender had all but rusted away; the headlight still sat uneasily in its busted housing. No doubt it looked like hell, but it still ran. He didn’t figure he’d need it anyway, after today.
By the time he got to the driver’s side door, his pants were wet below the knee. The lawn mower had coughed its last toward the end of the previous summer, and he’d been left with a Sears Weed-Wacker to handle their property to the wood line. Said line having since marched forward, causing his mother to complain more vehemently about her “blasted ragweed and pollen allergies.” She refused to understand the basic premise he’d tried numerous times to convey: the Wacker had come with only two spools of fishing line. Those were used up now; more would have to be purchased. He simply had not gotten around to the errand. He had more important things to do than worry about ragweed and allergies. As far as his senseless nose was concerned, it was all in the old woman’s head anyway.
He pulled up hard on the handle and the door groaned open. He dove inside, suddenly wishing he’d remembered socks because now the wet pant legs clung to his skinny shins, sending chills into his bones. However, this was also no large matter; the heap’s A/C-heater miraculously still worked, and by the time he pulled up to his Art trailer at the first-year alternative school where he taught (or attempted to, he reminded himself bitterly), the pants would be dry. He’d be as ready as he’d get.
In the darkness inside the car, he felt with his right hand, searching out his laptop among the piled mess of papers, clothing, and assorted refuse piled to the windowsill on the passenger side. He felt its reassuring coolness and smiled. He hoped they would let him keep that at least; if not, oh well. He let it be and bent around the steering wheel so that his other hand slid beneath his seat. The .38 was much colder than the laptop had been. It caused another shiver to race along his spine and he straightened up abruptly, afraid his mother woul
d somehow see him hunched down in the darkness.
The gun was a funny story. He’d not bought it or stolen it, it had not been passed down by some lost uncle far gone in alcohol and World War II stories. Nothing of the sort. He’d simply discovered it one day while walking in the woods behind the trailer. There was an old highway pit located not far from the trailer, and on more than one occasion he’d actually pulled a bass or two from its shallow depths. It had been cold that morning and if he’d not had his dead father’s steel-toed work boots on that just so happened to be a size and a half too big, he would have never found it. But he had. As he’d pushed through the undergrowth between two gigantic oak trees, only the slight vibration slipping through the steel at the tip of his toe warned him he’d touched anything. He’d stopped, setting the cane pole and small tackle box into the crotch between two perpendicular branches, and squatted down. He’d had to dig even then, and when he finally came upon it, he was not completely sure of what it was at all. The gun was all rusted and caked with dirt, the chambers and barrel stuffed with it, but there it was all the same. He’d picked it up only after looking over both shoulders to make sure no one had followed him, was watching him at that moment commit the vague crime of discovery. He hadn’t fished that day, but he had gone to the pit, perching on its thin bank as he carefully washed the mud away. It had a wooden, pistol-grip handle that felt good in his hand. He wondered if it had been used in a murder, and pictured the killer slinking through the woods in the dark of midnight to hide it from prying eyes. And now it was his. He’d spent the rest of the day pretending to fire it even though the trigger was frozen and the thing seemed as incapable of violence as an infant mewling in its crib.
He’d managed to clean it up, first nonchalantly and then with a surprising burst of urgency as things began deteriorating at school. It was easy to remember the date when he’d discovered the pistol; it was August 11, one week to the day before his teaching assignment began. Almost nine months ago now. Nine long months with the hooligans; nine long months of their trash talk and disrespect; nine long months of bullshit. He turned the key in the ignition and eased the old ride into Reverse. With practice he’d learned to avoid the grinding protest of the transmission, and thankfully, this morning the car let him off easy. No backfires of warning, no metallic screams issuing from beneath the hood. It was as if the two were in conspiracy. He backed to the turnaround and bumped to the asphalt road farther down the way.
His mind played in the past as if attempting to file and relish memories that would soon be gone. His palms were sweaty but his grip was strong on the wheel. To each his time and purpose, he tried to convince himself. That much felt right at least, it was just a shock to find a purpose at this stage of life to be such at odds with the nature he’d always presumed of himself. Regardless, a strong man stood up when the door was pushed open while a weak man retreated to the shadows. And although he knew the twilight areas very well, he was sure to the depths of his soul that he had been sequestered there long enough.
He pulled to a stop at the intersection of Highway 51 and 44. He glanced at his watch; another thirty minutes to the school, and forty-five minutes before the hoods came pounding at his door. As he jumped out to the highway his mind took him back to the past, almost as if protecting him from the fast-approaching future.
And what started as benign shadows gradually morphed into images that made it hard to breathe.
He saw himself as the helpless boy, playing with his father before the night of the Accident. Even though he’d only been four years old when his father was killed cleaning his brother’s rifle, he could still look back on many times as if they’d never ceased to be. He could still smell his father’s breath and the hint of whiskey that always hung around his face like a lace veil. The fact remained: that was the only smell the Artist could remember, the only thing capable of stirring his other feelings. There were thoughts of his mother then too, young and pretty, laughing with her hair blowing about her head, until she bound and lashed it to the nape of her neck so tightly her eyes bugged and he feared she would scream. Now, after the passage of years, it seemed that image-woman had been someone different, a phantom left behind to guile a young man into believing things that had never existed at all. And maybe it was true; perhaps his mind had concocted such fragments in the hopes these shadows would lend comfort to someone as sad as---
The thought shattered when he realized he was grinding his teeth again. He wanted no excuses for his behavior even though his life was wrought with them. His squashed nose was only one example; his life thus far had placed him as the shit that got wiped off everyone else’s shoes.
There were the boys and men who’d pushed him around all the way from the playground to the faculty lounge. There were the girls who’d bound him up so tightly inside that he’d been reduced to spilling his seed with his own free hand clamped tightly to his mouth in hopes his mother would not hear and come to investigate. And it didn’t stop there, not hardly.
Through his life had rolled all manner of persecutor and fiend. He had no friends he trusted, no friends at all actually. Acquaintances, fellow students, professors, co-workers, and now colleagues, but never once anyone he could trust. That meant his mother too. Perhaps she did love him, but how was he to know? Her suspicion and close-minded isolation made her as little desirable for companionship as he knew others considered him to be. The Artist had read philosophy; he knew Kant, Hume, Satre, and Russell. He knew history and sociology; he’d studied all these disciplines in college and on his own in hopes of one day finding the key to the “strangeness” that somehow everyone saw or felt in him, but that he was unable to do anything about. Every day he continued to wipe the sand off his shoulders, scrape the shit from his shoes.
After today there would be no more sand, no more shit. Of course, he knew the rumors of jail, the lonely and violent men caged safely away from society. It would be like walking purposefully into a room filled with hungry lions. He was still a virgin and didn’t want to lose this in any of the many fashions he’d heard described when talk of incarceration came up. But there were solutions to that problem too. He just didn’t like to think of them. He’d had the oiled .38 planted firmly in his mouth weeks ago, just as an experiment and didn’t think himself capable of that.
At an uncharacteristic sixty miles an hour he reached below the seat and pulled the .38 out again. It was warm now from riding the bare floorboard and bits of finger nails, dust, and flecks of paper clung to its oiled surface. He ran it up and down his pant leg until its former luster was apparent once more. He cared less about the pants.
From the mile marker he had fifteen minutes more driving. The sun was just beginning to bruise the ragged, treed horizon. He pushed the pistol into a niche in the mess piled high in the passenger seat and unconsciously ground his teeth together until he pulled up alongside his trailer at the high school.
He’d had to lock up every piece of art he’d created during his Bachelor’s degree in the back closet. All that painstaking work simply pushed into the dim recesses of a closet along with a rotten mop and a broken projector. He slowly got out of the car and went up the three short steps. He slid his key home. Seconds later he was inside, flipping the light switch. In his mind’s eye he could still see where everything had been before classes started. The ideas he’d had about explaining certain techniques, discoveries he’d made in charcoal, pencil, and pen. Clay figures he’d been especially pleased over. They were all back there in the closet. He’d tried all right, but even in the first few days it was clear things were not going as planned. The kids (and he laughed bitterly now, recalling how many times they’d been referred to as such in Theory classroom management courses) had never cared for a single moment. The monsters had no discipline, no respect for anyone or anything. Two pieces of his artwork had actually been stolen before he was completely onto their intention to hound him. Later, he’d found them broken in a garbage can situated near the main common’s area. r />
These hoodlums were just like the classmates he’d endured twelve years of public school with. Only these were criminals and thugs, rapists, robbers…goddamned thieves. And they believed him laughable. Just like the all the ones disappearing down the trail of years, only these were covered in different skins and were infinitely more callous in their pranks.
The Artist carefully set down his bag and walked back to his car.
He looked over his shoulder to assure himself no one would see. The only other cars were parked at the Administration building, and that was on the other side of the P.E. field. Squatting inside the car, he reached into the niche and extracted the .38. He pulled his shirt out and stuck the gun into his waistband. Then he walked back inside.
He wouldn’t wait at the door again. When they came in they would find him sitting at his desk. He glanced at this watch. Seventeen minutes until the statement began.
A full eight minutes after the last tardy bell rang most of the class had made it inside. There were still several, loud, shuffling groups filtering in, and as they made their way to their tables they were resolute in getting the rest of the others going again as well. The Artist had his roll book out, looking up amid the loud clamoring to match the present faces to the names. It took him five minutes just to get the lunch count; they were especially vocal and abusive today. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he’d changed the routine. He’d not been waiting outside as he usually did, and any break in routine was enough to throw these monsters off track. There was really only one lesson they could learn and he was finally ready to teach it.
He closed the roll book and set it aside. He wiped his dry mouth and stood up. “Listen up! Listen up!” he said, trying to get above the tumult. It was no use. A couple had already waved him off with smirks on their faces, and the Artist had distinctly heard the term ‘asshole’ issued from somewhere in the back of the room. What finally got them quieted down was the response from a smart-ass question about why “the Chronic’s shirt gets to be out, if’n we gots to wears ours in?”
The Artist smiled savagely enough to catch a few eyes before he whipped the .38 into sight. A gigantic hush descended as he waved it slowly in front of his face, smiling and shaking his head ‘yes’. By God, they’d listen now.
“I’m glad you asked that, Denisha. Now that I’ve got everyone’s attention I’m going to tell you why.” Surprisingly, for the first time in his life, he heard actual confidence in his voice. His gun hand seemed not to have noticed though, because it shook very slightly. He tried to hide the tremor by bringing the pistol down to his side. He still had it aimed at everyone.
The school day was not yet fifteen minutes old.
“Yeah, I’m going to tell you all why,” he said a little louder.
Then Jerome spoke. His hard, black face showed neither fear nor respect. If anything, he looked merely disgusted. He sat at the third table back from the left. No one else ever sat at his table, unless it was one of the girls he’d enlisted for the day. No one was there today. “You crazy muthafucka,” Jerome said dangerously. “You betta be cool and put dat goddamn toy down.” He was getting to his feet amid the claustrophobic silence inside the trailer when the Artist shot him in the throat. Jerome’s eyes showed surprise for the briefest instant after a spray of blood painted the students and walls behind him, and then he simply went down taking his table with him. It flipped on its side as if erecting a barrier between the back of the class and the front. The Artist thought it fortunate that he couldn’t see the body lying over there. Of course, he could plainly see the stain of blood washing out to pool near the floor A/C vents, but he could handle that.
Finally, he had their attention.
“I feel this class is in need of a statement, students” (and the word was like sugar on his tongue); “I feel this whole school is in dire need of one, but I cannot control that. What I can control is this classroom, my classroom, and by God, today I will do Just That!” He walked from around his desk, coming into full view. He scanned the faces and saw none fixed like Jerome’s before he’d given the thug his due. Everybody looked very attentive now, their eyes were wide open; they appeared finally ready to learn something. Thankfully, no one was banging on his door yet. Through the window he could scan the entire area around the P.E. field clear to the Admin. Building. He saw only one student walking, and she was carrying a clipboard, probably bringing the lunch count to the office. There would be no lunch count today from the Artist’s room. The only thing to come out of here would be a body count.
He set his jaw and began speaking. “Since your first day you have shown me little to no respect. None of you has applied yourself to anything except making my life miserable. You see, none of you understand. I went to school so that I could help people like you. If you would only listen sometimes…” He felt himself beginning to lose his thread and held the gun up high again. Cheryl, a girl sitting in the second table, right, screamed before clapping her hand over her mouth. Her eyes looked as if they’d explode. The Artist paused for a curious moment and then he shot her in the left breast. She fell away from the chair as if she’d been poured off and the class threatened to erupt in a stampede. Two more shots through the ceiling canceled any such thing from happening.
“Shut Up! Shut Up! Goddammit, Everyone Shut the Fuck Up!” The Artist slammed his free hand into the flimsy bookshelf he had perched across his desk, and sent the thing flying. He noticed the computer stand and printer went with it. He stood there in the shocking silence hardly able to believe that he’d uttered such profanity. The kids looked more surprised that he’d cursed than the fact that he’d just shot two people in the last several minutes.
There was no mistaking the growing activity outside now. People were starting to pour across the field, some running closer, some running away. The one common thing was the running. Nobody was lollygagging now out there. The Artist could make out a knot of teachers talking frantically to the new security guard. The guy was no more than nineteen, wore a bullet-proof jacket habitually, and was a hundred pounds overweight. There was no way he was coming in here.
Unbelievably, the trailer door swung open and the Foreign Language teacher poked her head inside. She looked directly down the barrel of the Artist’s .38 and before she could say a word he told her to politely leave or he would kill her. “I don’t have anything against you, Ms. Breckenridge, but you have to get out.” The woman went screaming, her hands high above her head.
It was a small town; it would not take long for the small contingent of police to arrive. After that, the Big Boys would be here: State Troopers, probably a SWAT team.
There was a boy (the Artist never could remember his name) hunched near the dying girl he’d shot for screaming. He had his shirt off and was attempting some frantic first aid with the feebly moaning girl lying on the floor. The sound caused the Artist to swallow hard.
“I never wanted anything like this to happen,” he began explaining as the other twenty students in the classroom stared wildly about, wondering what it was they should do. They decided to listen to whatever it was the lunatic had to say.