MR. JOHNSON, ORIGINALLY OF NEARBY URBANCREST, WAS LATER REVEALED TO HAVE NO RECORD OF MENTAL DISTURBANCE OR CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR OF ANY KIND, ACCORDING TO PRESS ACCOUNTS.
It had last snowed in early March. The classroom window’s eastward view, in other words, was now primarily mud and dirty snow. What sky there was was colorless and rode somewhat low, like something sodden or quite tired. The ballfield’s infield was all mud, with only a small hyphen of snow atop the pitcher’s rubber. Usually, throughout second period, the window’s only real movement was litter or a vehicle of some sort on Taft, with the day of the trauma’s exception being the appearance of the dogs. It had happened only once before, earlier in the Constitution unit, but not again until now. The two dogs entered the window’s upper right grid from a copse of trees to the northeast and proceeded diagonally down towards the northern goal area of the soccer fields. They then began moving in gradually diminishing circles around each other, apparently preparing to copulate. A similar scenario had unfolded once before, but then the dogs had not reappeared for some weeks. Their actions appeared to be consistent with those of mating. The larger of the two dogs mounted the other’s back from the rear and wrapped its forelegs around the brindle-colored dog’s body and began to thrust repeatedly, taking a series of tiny steps with its rear legs as the other dog attempted to escape. This occupied slightly more than one square of the window’s wire mesh. The visual impression was of one large, anatomically complex dog having a series of convulsions. It was not a pretty sight, but it was vivid and compelling. One of the animals was larger, and black with a dun chest element, possibly a rottweiler mix, though it lacked a purebred rottweiler’s breadth of head. The breed of the smaller dog beneath it was unidentifiable. According to my older brother, we had had a dog for a short period when I would have been too young to remember, which had chewed on the base of the piano and the legs of a spectacular 16th century antique Queen Elizabeth dining room table our mother had discovered at a rummage sale, which was worth over one million dollars when appraised and caused the family dog to have disappeared one day when my brother came home from nursery school and found both the dog and the table missing, adding that my parents had been very upset about the whole business and that if I ever brought the dog up or asked our mother about it and upset her he would put my fingers in the hinge of the foyer closet and lean with all his weight on the door until all my fingers were so mangled they would have to be amputated and I would be even more hopeless at the piano than I already was. Both my brother and I had been involved in intensive piano instruction and recitals at that juncture, though it was only he who had showed true promise, and had continued twice a week with Mrs. Doudna until his own difficulties began to emerge so dramatically in early adolescence. The conjoined dogs were too distant to ascertain whether they had collars or tags, yet close enough that I could make out the expression on the face of the dominant dog above. It was blank and at the same time fervid—the same type of expression as on a human being’s face when he is doing something that he feels compulsively driven to do and yet does not understand just why he wants to do it. Rather than mating, it could have been one dog merely asserting its dominance over another, as I later learned was common. It appeared to last a long time, during which the dog on the receiving end underneath took a number of small, unsteady steps which bore both animals across four different panels of the fourth row down, complicating the storyboard activity on either side. A collar and tags comprise a valid sign that the dog has a home and owner rather than being a stray animal, which a guest speaker from the Public Health Department in homeroom had explained could be a concern. This was especially true of the rabies vaccination tag required by Franklin County ordinance, for obvious reasons. The unhappy but stoic expression on the face of the brindle-colored dog beneath was harder to characterize. Perhaps it was less distinct, or obscured by the window’s protective mesh. Our mother had once described the expression of our Aunt Tina, who had profound physical problems, as this—long suffering.
MARY UNTERBRUNNER, KNOWN ALSO BY OEHMKE AND LLEWELLYN’S GROUP ON THE PLAYGROUND AS BIG BERTHA, WAS THE ONLY OTHER GIRL WHO SOMETIMES EVER PLAYED WITH MANDY BLEMM AFTER SCHOOL HOURS. MY BROTHER, WHO WAS IN THE SAME CLASS AS MANDY BLEMM’S ELDER SISTER, BRANDY, SAID THAT THE BLEMMS WERE WELL KNOWN TO BE A DISTURBED FAMILY, WHOSE FATHER ALWAYS STAYED HOME ALL DAY IN JUST HIS UNDERSHIRT, AND THEIR YARD LOOKED LIKE A JUNKYARD, AND THEIR GERMAN SHEPHERD WOULD TRY TO KILL YOU IF YOU EVEN CAME NEAR THE BLEMMS’ FENCE, AND THAT ONCE, WHEN BRANDY DIDN’T CLEAN UP THE DOG’S DROPPINGS, WHICH WAS APPARENTLY HER ASSIGNED CHORE, ALLEGEDLY THE FATHER CAME ANGRILY STAGGERING OUT AND MADE HER LIE DOWN IN THE YARD AND PUT HER FACE IN THE DROPPINGS; MY BROTHER SAID THAT TWO DIFFERENT 7TH GRADERS HAD SEEN THIS, AND IT WAS WHY BRANDY BLEMM (WHO WAS ALSO SOMEWHAT SLOW) WAS KNOWN AROUND FISHINGER SECONDARY AS THE SHIT GIRL, WHICH SURELY COULD NOT HAVE FELT GOOD FOR A GIRL IN HER EARLY TEEN YEARS TO BE CALLED, NO MATTER HOW MUCH SHE DID OR DID NOT HAVE ON THE BALL.
The only other time at which Mr. Johnson had substituted for the real teacher in any of my classes had been for two weeks in 2nd grade, when Mrs. Claymore, our homeroom teacher, had been in a traffic accident and came back with a large white metal and canvas brace around her neck which no one was allowed to sign, and could not turn her head to either side for the remainder of the school year, after which time she retired to Florida with independent means. As I remember him, Mr. Johnson was of average height for an adult, with the standard crew cut, suit jacket and necktie, and eyeglasses with scholarly black frames that everyone who wore glasses in that day and age wore. Evidently, he had subbed for several other grades and classes at R. B. Hayes as well. The only time anyone had ever seen him outside school was one time when Denise Kone and her mother saw Mr. Johnson in the A&P, and Denise said his cart had been full of frozen foods, which her mother had associated with the fact that he was unmarried. I do not recall noticing whether Mr. Johnson wore a wedding band or not, but the Dispatch articles later made no mention of his being survived by a wife after the authorities stormed the classroom. I also do not remember his face except as it existed in a Dispatch photo afterwards, which was evidently taken from one of his own student yearbooks several years prior. Barring some obvious problem or characteristic, most adults’ faces were not easy to attend to closely at that age—their very adultness obscured all other characteristics. To the best of my recollection, Mr. Johnson’s was a face whose only memorable characteristic was that it appeared slightly tilted or angled upwards in its position on the front of his head. This was not excessive but only a matter of one or two degrees—imagine holding up a mask or portrait so that it was facing you and then tilting it one or two degrees upwards off of normal center. As if, in other words, its eyeholes were now looking slightly upwards. And that this, together with what was either poor posture or a problem involving his neck like Mrs. Claymore, caused Mr. Johnson to look as if he were wincing or slightly recoiling from whatever he was saying. It was not gross or obvious, but both Caldwell and Todd Llewellyn had noticed Mr. Johnson’s wincing quality, too, and remarked on it. Llewellyn said the sub looked like he was scared of his own shadow, like Miles O’Keefe or Gunsmoke’s Festus (who we all hated—nobody ever wanted to be Festus in re-creations of Gunsmoke). On his first day substituting for Mrs. Roseman, he introduced himself to us as Mr. Johnson, writing it on the chalkboard in perfect Palmer cursive as did all teachers of that era; but as his full name recurred so often in the Dispatch for several weeks after the incident, he tends to remain now more in my memory as Richard Allen Johnson, Jr., 31, originally of nearby Urbancrest, which is a small bedroom community outside of Columbus proper.
According to my brother’s own flights of fancy in childhood, the antique table we had possessed before I was old enough to be aware of anything that was going on had been burled walnut, with a large number of diamonds, sapphires, and rhinestones inset in the top in the likeness of the face of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533-1603) as seen from the
right side, and that the disappointment of its loss was part of the reason our father often looked so dispirited on coming home at the end of the day.
The easternmost row’s second to last desk had a deep stick figure with a cowboy hat and much oversized six-shooter gouged deeply into it and colored in with ink from some previous 4th grader, obviously the product of much slow, patient effort over the course of that previous academic year. Directly ahead of me were the thick neck, upper vertebrae, and severely bobbed hairline of Mary Unterbrunner, whose neck’s pale and patternless freckles I had studied for almost two years, as Mary Unterbrunner (who would later become an administrative secretary at the large women’s detention center in Parma) had also been in my 3rd grade homeroom with Mrs. Taylor, who read the class ghost stories and could play the ukulele and was a great deal of fun as a homeroom teacher so long as you didn’t get on the wrong side of her temper. Mrs. Taylor once hit Caldwell on the back of his hand with her ruler, which she carried in the large kangaroo pocket of her smock, so hard that it swelled up almost like a cartoon hand, and Mrs. Caldwell (who knew judo, and who you also did not want to fool around with in terms of her own temper, according to Caldwell) came down to the school to complain to the principal. What teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration. For the sake of the visual interest of the narrative that day, I wish that I could say that each panel of the story that the window generated from the view of the two dogs either mating or struggling for dominance remained animated, so that by the end of the class the window’s wire mesh squares were all filled with narrative panels like the pictorial stained windows at Riverside Methodist Church, where my brother, mother, and I attended Sunday service each week, along with my father when he felt up to getting up early enough. He often had to work at the office six days a week, and he liked to call Sunday his day to try to glue what was left of his nerves back together. But that was not how it worked. It would have taken some kind of mental marvel to hold each square’s illustrated tableau in memory throughout the whole narrative of the window, not unlike the backseat game on trips where you and someone else pretend that you’re planning a picnic, and he says one item that will be brought, and you repeat that item and add another, and he repeats the two mentioned previously and adds a third, and you must repeat and then add a fourth which he must remember and repeat, and so on, until each of you is trying to hold a memorized string of 30 or more items in your mind as you each keep adding to it further by turns. This was never a game I excelled at, although my brother could sometimes perform feats of memory that amazed my parents and may even have frightened them a little, given how he eventually turned out (our father often referred to him as the brains of the outfit). Each square in the window’s mesh filled and recounted its part of the story of the poor unhappy owner of the brindle dog only while that particular square was attended to; it reverted to its natural state of transparency once the entire panel was actuated and filled and the story moved on to the mesh’s next square, in which the little girl whose young and unworldly brindle-colored dog, Cuffie, had dug its way out under the shabby back fence and escaped down to the banks of the Scioto River, wearing a lemon-colored pinafore, pink hair ribbon, and shiny black patent leather shoes with polished buckles, was sitting in her 4th grade Art class making a Playdoh statuette of Cuffie, her dog, all by touch, at the State School for the Blind and Deaf on Morse Rd. She was blind, and her name was Ruth, although her mother and father called her Ruthie and her two older sisters, who played the bassoon, called her Ruthie Toothie because they were trying to convince her—we see this in three consecutive panels where the sisters, who are older and have the disagreeable expressions and akimbo postures that cruel people in cartoons always have—of how unfortunately homely she is, due to her terrible overbite, and of how everyone can see it but her, and there is nearly a whole horizontal row of panels of Ruth in dark glasses with her little hands over her face, crying over the older sisters’ remarks and chants of Ruthie Toothie, your dog has gotten loothie, while the little girl’s poor but kindhearted father, who works as a groundskeeper for a wealthy man in a white metal and canvas brace who owns a lavish mansion in Blacklick Estates with a wrought iron gate and a curving driveway over one mile in length out past Amberly, is driving the family’s old, battered car slowly up and down the cold streets of their shabby neighborhood, calling Cuffie’s name out of the open car window and jingling the brindle dog’s collar and tags. A series of panels in the very top row of mesh squares, which is often reserved for flashbacks and backstory elements that help fill in gaps in the window’s unfolding action, reveals that Cuffie’s collar and vaccination tags have gotten torn off as he wriggles under the Simmons family’s yard’s fence in excitement over seeing the two stray dogs, one black and dun and the other predominantly piebald, that have loped up to the cheap wire fence and urged Cuffie to come join them in some freely roaming dog adventures, the dark one, who in the panel has angled eyebrows and a sinister pencil mustache, crossing his heart over the promise that they won’t go far at all and will be sure and show the trusting Cuffie the way back home again. Much of the specific day’s storyboard, which extends like arms or the radial spikes one often sees around a cartoon sun, involves the split narrative of small, pale, blind Ruth Simmons (who is not bucktoothed in the slightest but is, understandably, not a very good Playdoh sculptor) sitting in her Art for the Blind class wishing desperately that she could know whether or not her father has been successful in finding the dog, Cuffie, who is Ruth Simmons’ faithful canine companion and never chews on anything or makes any trouble for the household and often sits devotedly under the small, wobbly desk the father had found in the trash of the wealthy manufacturer he works for, and which he had brought home and nailed empty spools onto the drawers of for drawer handles, and Cuffie often sits under there resting his nose on Ruth Simmons’ patent leather shoes as she sits in her dark bedroom (it doesn’t matter to blind people whether the lights in a room are on or not) at the desk and does her homework in Braille, while her sisters practice the bassoon or lie in the light on their bedroom’s plush carpeting talking pointlessly about boys or the Everly Brothers on the princess telephone, often tying up the phone for hours at a time, while the father moonlights at his night job of singlehandedly lifting heavy crates into the rear of delivery trucks, and the family’s mother, an Avon Lady who has never successfully sold even one Avon home product, spends every evening lying splayed and semiconscious on the living room couch, which is missing one of its legs and is propped unsteadily up with a phone book while the father tries to scavenge the right kind of wood to replace the leg, Mr. Simmons being the kind of poor but honest father who makes his living with physical labor rather than poring over facts and figures all day. The top row’s backstory of the window’s large, black and dun dog is somewhat vague, and consists of a few hastily sketched panels involving a low cement building filled with dogs barking in cages, and a back alley in a seedy district in which several garbage cans are overturned and a man in a stained apron is shaking his fist at something we cannot see. Then, in the main row, we see the family’s father getting a demanding phone call from the wealthy owner of the mansion telling him to come back and start priming the large, expensive, gas-driven industrial snowblower for the mansion’s long driveway with lines of small colored lights all along its length like a runway, because the owner’s personal meteorologist has said that it’s getting ready to snow again like the absolute dickens. Then we see Ruth Simmons’ mother—whom we have already seen take several pills throughout the day from a small brown prescription bottle in her handbag, by way of another upper row’s backstory—relieving the father and driving the battered family car aimlessly up and down the seedy neighborhood’s streets, very slowly and weaving a bit, as a dens
e, persistent snow begins to fall and the streetlights begin to glow and the panel’s light turns ashy and sad, the way late afternoon in Columbus in winter so often makes the light seem sad.