“Of course he can,” Sheldon assured him, “if you’re lucky enough to get a guy like Mike Otis in office.”
Wayne-o was impressed by Mike’s reparations to the toilet facilities. “Good,” he commented. “You see, I spend a lot of time in the can — not using it, but, you know, killing time between classes.”
Rosalie Gladstone also took a particular interest in the washrooms. “Those new mirrors — you can see yourself in them!” She snapped her gum loudly. “I like to brush my hair a lot because I’ve got such great-looking hair when it’s brushed right. The old mirrors are, like, foggy. I thought it was me.”
“Well, you thank Mike Otis the next time you see him,” Sheldon advised.
“Who?”
“The guy I just said got you the mirrors!”
“Oh, yeah. I guess so. I don’t know.”
Feldstein was skeptical. “I don’t know if I go for all this change. You know — clocks that give the right time, clean washrooms, new lighting. You can’t tell where it’s going to end. Before you know it, they’ll bring in the P.T.A., and then the staff’ll start taking over unused lockers and giving them away for not so much as a donut. I like the old ways.”
“Mike’s working to make those great days even greater,” Sheldon assured him.
“When I think of Mike Otis, I see my 200C’s,” said Feldstein sulkily. “But I’ve got to admit he’s sharp. From the standpoint of someone who once tried to negotiate with Mike Otis, I have to say I feel sorry for the school board. Still, the guy is bad news. He ruined my retirement.”
When sandblasting of the school’s stone front began, Sheldon had a large audience. “Mike Otis did this!” he shouted over the din of the machinery and the sounds of the usual morning traffic jam. “He saw what a dump the school was and went to work for us!”
“What are you talking about!” called someone. “Who’s Mike Otis?”
“The student body president, you jerk!” exclaimed Wayne-o. “He’s the guy who fixed up the can! Don’t you know anything?”
Sheldon beamed. He was making progress.
* * *
By Friday, Mr. Willis’s last period photography class had advanced to the enlarging stage. This was slightly behind schedule, as the teacher pointed out, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it was not possible to use chemicals at room temperature when the darkroom was fifty-seven degrees. Then there was Wayne-o’s annoying habit of arriving late and turning on the lights in the darkroom to see if anyone was there. And the class seemed to be having an inordinate amount of trouble just remembering to bring cameras to school. In many cases, there were no photographs to enlarge.
Looking at his contact sheet, Paul was impressed to see that most of his shots had come out. He was gratified to note that the pictures of Mike’s car were sharp and comprehensive. He intended to mail those to the world’s foremost car experts in the hope that one of them could identify the vehicle.
Mr. Willis came by and gazed critically at Paul’s work. “Not bad. I suggest you blow up —”
“Blow up?” came a worried voice from across the room.
“Enlarge!” snapped Mr. Willis. He turned back to Paul. “Do the one of the front view of the car.”
Paul had not counted on this. “Uh… but what about this one of these buildings?” He did not much care for presenting his picture of Mike’s car with Mike there. “I mean, the texture of the brick —”
“Boring,” said Mr. Willis. “Do the car. That bizarre grill, the hood ornament, the whole shape — which junkyard did you find it in?”
“The school parking lot,” Paul admitted in a low voice.
“Really?” remarked the teacher. “I wonder what it is.”
By the end of the class, only three of the students had produced finished prints. Many others had been ruined when the print drying apparatus decided to commit suicide, and incinerated a large part of the class work.
“No harm done,” Mr. Willis was saying as the janitor sprayed fire-extinguisher foam on the smoking machine. Paul noted that none of his classmates seemed perturbed in the least by the accident. Equipment failure was a common thing at Don’t Care High.
“Just a minor incident,” the teacher assured his bored class. “No problem. It’ll be good as new tomorrow.”
The janitor glanced into the smouldering machine and pronounced, “Yep, you can write this sucker off.”
“Well,” said Mr. Willis painfully, “we can still go back to the class and look at the prints we do have.”
The first picture was entitled “Wayne-o’s Mother.” It portrayed a pleasant-looking woman holding a cake with oven mitts.
“That’s my mother,” Wayne-o explained, “and she’s just taken a cake out of the oven. Chocolate. You can’t tell because it’s black and white.”
The second picture was an extreme close-up shot of a crushed grapefruit.
“I call it ‘Perseverance of Citrus,’” said Trudy Helfield blandly.
Mr. Willis was round-eyed. “Why?”
“I was taking a picture of this pushcart downtown, and some Toyota rammed right into it. What a mess. Have you ever seen a banana make contact with a brick wall at thirty miles an hour? Anyhow, this grapefruit’s rolling down the street, dodging all the cars like it’s going out of style, and I’m thinking, What courage! Bus comes out of nowhere — wow! This is all that’s left.” She pointed dramatically to the photograph. Mr. Willis swallowed hard. “So? The title?”
Trudy shrugged. “My brother thought it up. He’s a philosophy student.”
Paul was last. “This is… um… a car… uh… taken from the front.”
“And —?” prompted Mr. Willis.
“Well… uh…” Paul drew a blank.
“That’s my car,” came an unmistakable monotone from the back of the class.
Paul tried to look surprised.
The teacher looked at the photograph and then at Mike. “Yes,” he said, smiling strangely. “Of course it’s your car. Quite impressive, too. What kind of car is it, Mike?”
Mike paused, then said, “A black one.”
Mr. Willis sent everyone home early.
As Paul walked out the door of the photography class, he found himself staring into a cardboard sign that read:
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
REPAIRS UNDER WAY
PLEASE BEAR WITH US
MIKE OTIS
STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT
He stared at the sign for an instant, then stepped forward quickly, shielding it from view with his body until Mike had walked out of the classroom and out of sight. Then he went to look for Sheldon.
His friend was not hard to locate. Paul simply followed the trail of signs until he came upon Sheldon, happily affixing one to the stretch of wall outside the music room.
“Hey, check it out!” Sheldon greeted him. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve gone completely and totally insane!” Paul seethed. “What happens when the teachers see these things?”
Sheldon shrugged. “What’s wrong with them? Mike’s just keeping the students aware of what’s going on, and showing his concern for their inconvenience.”
“Oh, Mike is, is he? I just had to throw myself in front of one of those things so your precious Mike wouldn’t see it and hit the ceiling!”
“Mike’s far too mellow to hit the ceiling,” said Sheldon defensively.
“Not mellow — dead, maybe. Sheldon, these signs have Mike taking credit for all the school repairs! In writing!”
“I admit that they may imply that Mike’s in charge of the improvements,” said Sheldon, “but there’s nothing the staff can object to. They’re just nice little ‘Pardon us’ signs, that’s all.”
Paul sighed. “I counted seven of those stupid things on the way over here. How many did you make?”
Sheldon indicated his armload. “I didn’t count. Around thirty, maybe. It’s a big school. It won’t take long to get the rest of them
up now that you’re here.”
Paul shook his head to clear it. “What are you going to do for a whole weekend without any acclaim to heap on Mike Otis? What if, God forbid, some work is done over the weekend that you don’t notice, and Mike has to go unthanked?”
“Look,” said Sheldon, “I’ve been stuck at Don’t Care High a lot longer than you have. I’ve put up with the decaying building, sweated in the heat, shivered in the cold, and hocked my life for a few cubic inches of locker space. But mostly I’ve put up with the people. I think there are a lot of nice guys who go to this school, but half the time you have to hold a mirror to their mouths to see if they’re still breathing. If you go by their liveliness, most of the kids probably qualify as vegetation. Now, this year everything started to go right. I met someone who, despite his ambition, is a person I can talk to. And together we made Mike Otis student body president. At first it was just a joke because we could have made my little brother’s gerbil president. But now I see we can do something. I’m not sure what it is, but I think I see that it’s possible for the students of this school to be different than they are now, and that’s something we have to try.” He smiled engagingly. “At least you’ll admit we don’t have anything better to do.”
Paul gazed at his friend with grudging admiration. If Sheldon wanted to go into politics, he certainly had the mouth for it.
* * *
That night, there was more high drama and adventure going on in the next apartment, where the late movie raged on as usual. It was impressive that, night after night, the neighbours managed to find a movie with the appropriate quota of gunfire, explosions, sirens, and hand-to-hand combat. Better still, why was the hero always named Steve? Yes. Another Steve was getting another medal, and another leading lady. Was there a rule that all dashing, high-action adventure types had to be named Steve? Or was this a series — the same Steve as last time (but a new leading lady!)? Even more instructive, this movie had a Paul in it. Paul was the snivelling coward who got no medal and no girl, but did get his thriving law office torched while he was inside, double-crossing Steve to save his own hide. Tough darts, Paul.
He crawled into bed and pulled the covers up around his ears. Tomorrow Sheldon was going to go back to school and resume his efforts to establish Mike Otis as the saviour of Don’t Care High. Hmmph. But Sheldon did have one point: Neither of them had anything better to do. After all, what did it hurt to tell everyone that Mike Otis was wonderful, so long as Mike Otis didn’t mind? So what would it hurt to help Sheldon who, in a world of Feldsteins, Morrisons, Daphne Sylvesters and Auntie Nancys, had befriended a lost soul from Saskatoon? It could even be fun. It was certainly better than sitting in a law office with no spirit of adventure, waiting for someone to throw a Molotov cocktail.
That settled it. Next week he would try to become one of the president’s men.
6
The weather warmed up, and the rain began. Don Carey High School dripped. In some fourth floor rooms, the problem was so bad that classes had to be relocated to the basement, which seeped. Feldstein’s stairwell had four inches of water, and the locker baron was forced to spend his office hours in hip boots. The halls became semi-swamp, and the ancient terrazzo floors were so slippery that one workman atop his stepladder slid fifteen feet before crashing heavily into the fire doors. He sustained a sprained ankle and multiple bruises.
It was this news that greeted Mr. Gamble upon his arrival Monday morning, the rain and traffic already having grated on his nerves.
“The parking lot is a swimming pool!” he told Mrs. Carling as he took off his boots and wrung out the cuffs of his pants. “Some idiot parked a big black, gas-guzzling dinosaur in my space! I don’t need to hear about accidents and floods. It’s just like the school board to paint our walls when what we need is to have our roof fixed!”
“The injured man is in the nurse’s office,” the secretary informed him. “He’s very upset. He wants to sue —”
“I’ll see him.” The vice-principal walked out of the office and stopped short. Directly facing him, bold as brass, was one of Sheldon’s signs. “ ‘Mike Otis?’ ‘Sorry for the inconvenience?’ What the —?” He ripped it off the wall, opened the office door, and yelled, “Morrison!”
Mr. Morrison came over and examined the sign. “I know. They’re all over the school.”
“He takes credit for all the work we’ve been fighting for for years,” growled Mr. Gamble.
“It is a little high-handed,” Mr. Morrison admitted. “But it’s a nice idea, don’t you think? Certainly for a boy like Mike —”
“There’s no way Otis made those signs. I know that boy!”
“Then who did?” asked one of the secretaries.
“How should I know?” raved Mr. Gamble. “Presumably the same troublemaker who nominated Otis in the first place!”
“Son-of-a-gun,” commented Mrs. Carling.
“‘Sorry for the inconvenience!’” snorted the vice-principal. “For two pins I’d go on that P.A. system, and then the true meaning of inconvenience —”
“You can’t!” exclaimed one of the junior secretaries, aghast. “The boss would never let you make an announcement!”
“That’s another thing wrong with this dump! He hides there in his office, leaving us up to our necks in work, not to mention water, but heaven help us if we try to touch that P.A. system, because it might take away from his morning vaudeville routines!” He shuddered. “I’ll be in my office.” He stormed inside and slammed the door.
May I have your attention, please. Here are the day’s announcements:
Due to lack of interest, the Don Carey Alumni Association will not be meeting again this year. Therefore I am cancelling the call for volunteers to serve on the decorating committee — not that there were any.
Unfortunately, the cafeteria will not be serving food today due to water leakage into the supply of dehydrated mashed potatoes. The dining area, however, should be shovelled out by noon.
Finally, Mr. Morrison urges me to remind you to keep selling those raffle tickets or else we will be unable to purchase a prize. That’s all. Have a good day.
To begin his career as an Otis man, Paul decided to start off by watching Sheldon, the master, at work.
Sheldon started right after homeroom by telling a group of soggy Don’t Care students he amassed in the slippery hallway that Mike Otis had anticipated this situation and pleaded with the school board to do something about it.
“Bureaucrats! They wouldn’t listen! Mike begged them to fix the roof and waterproof the school before the rest of the work, but he just couldn’t get through to them!”
“Mike — Mike —” repeated Cindy Schwartz in a puzzled tone. “Isn’t he the guy who you said got the halls painted?”
“Exactly,” said Sheldon, snapping his fingers in triumph.
“And he fixed the can, too,” added Wayne-o.
“Why does he do all this stuff?” came a voice from the group.
“Why does he do it?” repeated Sheldon, leaping up onto a bench for height. “Because he cares!”
An enormous hum went up in the hall.
“Bad move, Shel,” whispered Paul. “I think caring is even worse than having ambition.”
“It had to be said sooner or later,” Sheldon replied in a voice vaguely reminiscent of last night’s Steve. “Let’s go to class.”
In English, Miss Vlorque was handing back Friday’s test. As Sheldon and Paul entered the room, she had called Dick Oliver up to her desk to discuss his paper.
“Dick, you did very well, but one thing confuses me. Why did you write ‘Cooking’ under ‘subject’ in your exam booklet?”
Dick looked completely blank.
“This is English,” Miss Vlorque went on. “Shakespeare.”
“You’re kidding!”
Miss Vlorque blew up. “How could anyone possibly mistake this for a cooking class? Do you see cooking equipment anywhere? Have we cooked anything?”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, but I thought this was… you know… theory.”
“If you didn’t even know what course this was, how could you have done so well? You got a ninety-five!”
Dick shrugged. “I studied.”
Miss Vlorque buried her face in her hands. “Tell me this isn’t happening! This is a joke, right?”
Dick thought it over. “Do you think I could stay in this class for the rest of the term? I mean, cooking class has probably started without me, and I seem to be good at this.”
“Do what you like!” she moaned. “Just go and sit down!”
“Man!” Dick muttered to Sheldon and Paul as he headed for his desk. “I should have known right off when there wasn’t any stove that something was wrong. But, you know, you cut a few classes, come late a couple of times, maybe you don’t pay attention so hot in the first place — it all gets by you. You know — Hamlet, omelet. It’s all so similar.”
Sheldon and Paul exchanged agonized glances.
“No sense staying here,” said Sheldon in a strangled voice. “We’d only get kicked out anyway.”
The two burst out laughing and ran for the door. They found a nice dry place to hide where they could chuckle themselves out. They had regained their collective composure in time to share Wayne-o’s big entrance into English class about twenty minutes later.
Paul made his first stab into the world of politics in chemistry class. He looked way up into the exquisite countenance of Daphne Sylvester and said, “So what do you think of all the great things Mike Otis, our student body president, has been doing lately?”
“Who?”
“He’s the guy who fixed the can,” called Wayne-o from across the lab.
Another voice rang out. “Hey, someone told me today that that guy Mike cares.”
A hum waxed and waned.
Paul turned triumphant eyes back to Daphne. She draped her gorgeous frame over the lab stool and motioned for him to begin the day’s experiment.
Undaunted, Paul forged on. Working shoulder to shoulder with Sheldon, he helped spread the word of Mike Otis all through the halls of Don Carey High School. Even the most dubious and disinterested had to sit up and take notice when, on Wednesday, an emergency roofing crew arrived, just as Sheldon and Paul had predicted. In fact this was due to an area of roof that had caved in under the weight of water, completely demolishing Mr. Willis’s fourth floor office. Sheldon called it “the school board giving in to Mike Otis’s reasonable demands.” Peter Eversleigh called it conceptual. Wayne-o called it another great achievement by the guy who fixed the can.