A Key to Paradise
by
Barry Rachin
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Published by:
A Key to Paradise
Copyright © 2010 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For more information about available titles or general feedback, the author may be contacted directly at
[email protected].
A Key to Paradise
Part I
Grace Paulson took advantage of a free period at eleven forty-five and ran across the street to the Kentucky Fried Chicken. A colorful sign in the window trumpeted: ‘Today’s Special: Chicken Pot Pies only $2.55!’ Inside another cardboard display propped on the counter repeated the bargain. A bleary-eyed youth behind the counter took her order. “Anything to drink?”
Grace might not have recognized the former student, Kenny Kirkland, but for the telltale, strawberry birthmark on his neck. During her first teaching assignment fresh out of college, Grace suffered through an entire year with Kenny and his utterly tasteless brand of pubescent humor. That was over ten years ago. She did some mental calculations; the youth had to be in his early twenties now.
Grace remembered the incident that soured her on Kenny. It was the week before Easter, and the class was studying modern poetry. She chose a short verse by e. e. cummings.
I thank God for most this
amazing day:
for the leaping greenly
spirit of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything which is natural,
which is infinite, which is yes.
The teacher read the poem through slowly in a lilting, singsong cadence. The class listened attentively, a couple students even leaning forward in their chairs. This was why she chose education. A poem wasn’t just black on white. It was spiritually sustenance. Grace read the poem a second time, focusing on the luscious, disjointed imagery. Reaching the final stanza, that’s when Kenny bushwhacked e.e. cummings.
And for everything which is natural,
which is infinite, which is …
There was no exultant, primal ‘yes’. In its place, Kenny Kirkland blew a humongous fart, a flatulent outrage that turned the class upside down. And what could Grace Paulson do? Sniggering behind his sleeve, the practical jokester stole the show. When the laughter died away, Grace erased the free verse from the board—every tender syllable—and told the class to review their vocabulary until the bell rang.
“Whadayawanna drink?” Kenny repeated, running all the syllables together in a semantic salad. He didn’t even recognize his middle school teacher.
“Nothing, just the pie,” Grace said. The former class clown sported a goatee. He was a lot heavier now, more dissolute than morbidly obese, with a mop of curly red hair.
He rang up the order. “That’ll be 4.79.” Grace pointed to the sign next to his elbow. The youth scowled and punched in the correct number on the keypad. No apology. Not even a hint of embarrassment.
It was a few minutes past noon when Grace returned, and most teachers at Brandenburg Middle School were eating lunch in the staff dining room. Ed Gray, Chairman of the English Department, entered. The man was a bit of an oddity at Brandenburg. Gaunt and high-strung, he kept apart from the rest of the staff but was not unfriendly. A real bookworm.
Under his left arm was a tattered, hard-covered volume which he placed on the table as he sat down next to Grace. The binding of the book was coming unglued, the spine just barely holding the frayed, yellowed pages together. “Didn’t see that on the menu,” Ed remarked with a wry grin, indicating the chicken pot pie.
Grace plunged a plastic fork through the flaky golden crust and speared a wedge of chicken floating in a creamy, vegetable broth. The previous Tuesday, the KFC was sold out of chicken pot pies well before noon and she had to settle for a plate of fried chicken with a side order of lukewarm potato wedges and crumbly biscuit. Bait and switch. Even something as simple as buying lunch was becoming a royal pain in the derriere. And who could you complain to? The pudgy, white-suited colonel was long dead and no one in the store, with the exception of Kenny ‘the comedian’ Kirkland, looked old enough to vote.
So, let’s see. Kenney’s been out of school five years now. Never pursued a career. Here he is working for minimum wage at a fast food joint. How sad! How utterly …
“How is it,… the pot pie?” Ed’s voice jolted her back to reality.
“Actually, it’s quite good,” Grace replied nibbling on a succulent carrot. She told him about the incident at the KFC.
“An innocent mistake,” he said. “The clerk probably forgot that the pies were on sale today.”
“Perhaps,” Grace countered, “but then he wasn’t the least bit concerned about ringing up the wrong price and actually seemed offended when I pointed out his mistake.”
Ed shrugged and pursed his lips but had nothing more to say about the matter. Grace, on the other hand, couldn’t let it rest. She had a nagging suspicion that, out of pig-headed spitefulness, the next dozen customers to order the chicken pot pie would be charged full price.
She broke off a section of the papery crust, swirled it around in the thick broth and deposited the soggy dough on her tongue. Regardless of price, the pie was awfully tasty. “Now that’s an ancient artifact,” Grace gestured toward the damaged book. She was teaching eighth grade English and worked with Ed on the curriculum committee during the summer.
"A collection of Pushkin's short stories," Ed replied, turning his attention to the food on his plate.
Grace wracked her brains. She had a decent grounding in Russian literature—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov. She’s even read some Turgenev and a smattering of Gogol but no Pushkin.
After a moment Ed raised his head and noticed Carl, the janitor’s helper, staring at the clothbound object by his tray. "It’s quite good," Ed said. His thin, delicate fingers danced over the torn binding.
Carl’s face went blank and then the hint of a smile formed at the corners of his lips. The smile faded just as quickly as it had appeared. "I’m familiar with Pushkin."
There was an uncomfortable pause, as though some code of etiquette had been breached and no one in the dining room quite knew how to set things right. Ed Gray smeared the watery brown gravy from his meat loaf onto the mash potatoes with the flat side of his knife. "You’re familiar with Pushkin?" He repeated the man’s words without bothering to look up.”
“The father of modern Russian writing.”
Tapping his fingers in rhythmic staccato a second time, the Chairman of the English Department opened the front cover of the book and began turning pages at random. His forehead furrowed and lips tightened in a thin, bloodless line. "But that's not possible," Ed countered in a slightly petulant tone. "Pushkin wrote in the early eighteen hundreds. There was nothing modern about his prose. Perhaps you have him confused with someone else."
Carl glanced up at a florescent light that had been flickering erratically then resetting itself throughout the meal. The corners of the bulb had turned a sickly bluish-orange; there was no more life left in the mottled tube. “Pushkin broke with the romantic tradition. Everything changed after that."
Dead silence. Those teachers who, for the sake of propriety, had averted their eyes, now stared intently at the janitor in the blue coveralls. Ed Gray blanched; he had the look of a man free falling through space. No one spoke for the remainder of the meal.
Grace finished her chicken pot pie, sopping up the last remaining
peas and carrots with a piece of crust. She glanced curiously at the janitor’s helper. How long had Carl been employed there? She couldn’t recall when the wiry man first appeared at Brandenburg Middle School. It may have been in the spring of 2004, a particularly cold year with many snow storms and an endless series of illness that thinned the classes by half on any given week. Or it might have been the following September. No one really noticed. Nor did they care.
The janitor's helper. Teachers sometimes used the term interchangeably with his name but not in a mean-spirited way. There was technically no such thing as a janitor's helper. But the man was too old, in his late thirties, to be a career-minded new recruit. He swept the floors, scraped and painted old furniture. He washed the windows and emptied the trash. He did whatever Bob Watson, the head janitor for the past fourteen years, told him to do. He did his job quietly, unobtrusively. Hardworking and dependable, you saw him and didn't see him at the same time.
A nonentity to most of the staff, Carl brought a sandwich and a piece of fruit to work in an old-fashioned lunch pail and sat in the far corner of the lunch room, most days, with the cafeteria workers and bus monitors. Lean and muscular with a perpetual scowl, he ate his food without looking up or taking part in the general conversation. Neither liked nor disliked by the rest of the staff at Brandenburg Middle School, he was the janitor's helper.
When the meal was done, Carl rose abruptly and grabbed his lunch pail. "After we set the gap on the boiler," he said over his shoulder, directing the remark at Bob Watson, “I'll change that dead bulb.”
"No hurry," Bob replied with a dry grin. "Whenever you get to it."
******
Once word got out that Ed Gray, head of the English Department, had been bested, one-upped, made a fool of - take your pick - by Carl Solomon, the teaching staff were divided in their loyalties. Those who disliked Ed and saw him as a pretentious windbag got a sadistic satisfaction out of the incident, while strangely refusing to admit that the janitor's helper could score any higher than dull normal on a Stanford-Binet.
Those who supported Ed Gray, which was most of the senior teaching staff and the head librarian, Miss Curson, felt that Ed had been duped; in all likelihood, Carl was talking off the top of his head and had never read a damn thing worthy of literary consideration.
“You know that custodian, Carl, ...the janitor’s helper,” Grace spoke in a casual tone, as though the information was of no great importance.
Pam Sullivan, the office manager, raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips by way of a response. “You sure are desperate for a date.”
Grace winced. She told her about the incident with Ed Gray and Pam’s mouth eased into a wicked grin. “Serves him right, the arrogant snot!” As a part of the office staff she had no allegiances to the head of the English Department and felt free to speak her mind. Unlocking a file cabinet, Pam fingered through a stack of manila folders. “Carl Solomon... lives over on East Ave. Whenever I call over there some old lady with a foreign accent answers the phone.”
“His mother?”
Pam shrugged. The door opened. A boy with jet black hair and Hispanic features dropped off an early release form. He waited patiently while Pam checked the signature. Pam always nabbed the underage forgers. She knew where a stepfather habitually lifted the pen off the paper in the middle of a signature or crossed the t’s with a downward slash. The boy sauntered off down the corridor in the direction of the entrance. A bell rang shrilly. Students spilled out into the hallways and began rushing pell-mell off to their next class. Grace ran her tongue over her lips. “How long has Carl been working at Brandenburg?”
“Damned if I know. A couple years at least.” She grinned again. “Seems like we got ourselves a real mystery here.”
Grace didn’t like where the conversation was going. “Maybe the incident was nothing at all. A tempest in a teapot.”
“A what in a who?” At the far end of the hall, Principal Skinner exited a classroom with a teacher’s aide and was moving in their direction.
Grace reached for the door. “Gotta run.”
******
The rest of the day went by in a blur. Several students stayed after for extra help with an essay assignment: WHAT I WOULD DO IF I WON THE MASSACHUSETTS STATE LOTTERY. One freckle-faced, floppy-eared boy, Benny Finnegan, reminded Grace in a twisted sort of way of Alfred E Newman from Mad Magazine. The public health nurse visited the Finnegan family in October after an outbreak of head lice and an older sister, Nadine, had been treated for rickets.
Benny said he would spend at least a hundred grand on Play Station 3 video games. “Yes, well let’s see if we can get that down in print,” Grace suggested. She tried to picture the gawky youth as a middle-aged homeowner burdened with a mortgage and family obligations, but her mind balked at the effort. What if this silly kid ended up marrying the girl of his dreams and his life unfolded a huge success? Grace’s life over the past few years had spun out of control, her dreams gone up in acrid smoke.
“A comma after the dependent clause, Benny,” she said gesturing to a spot on the page. The boy lifted his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator circulating randomly between floors. Then he smiled, a goofy, endearing gesture. With a knot welling up in her throat, Grace smiled back.
Another bell rang. The clock on the wall registered three-thirty. Grace and her daughter would be on the road to Cape Cod by six. They had her cousin’s cabin for the weekend. A minivacation in Mashpee. No matter that the weather had turned abruptly colder with frost on the early morning ground. The Cape was especially beautiful this time of year free of summer tourists and gridlock. And she definitely needed to get away.
Bob, the head Janitor, stuck his head in the door. “Pam said you were looking for me.”
“I need construction paper. Two reams.” Because of a tight budget and dwindling resources, art supplies were kept under lock and key in a closet off the boiler room.
“I can get that for you now,” he replied.
Everybody was fond of Bob, both students and faculty alike. Short and heavy set, he lumbered about the school with a pokey, low-keyed authority. When the rear door got damaged by an errant delivery truck, he rebuilt the frame from scratch and hung the new door. During outdoor recess, Grace had watched him shim the jamb using cedar shakes, plumbing each side with a 48-inch level. When the new door was finally hung, it swung freely and closed tighter than the original. Once finished, Bob packed his tools and went back to collecting adolescent trash and cleaning heel marks.
“Here we are.” Bob held the boiler room door open for her and they were both were greeted with a blast of warm air. “Need anything else?”
“Just the paper,” Grace replied.
Bob removed a key from a box perched on a cluttered desk and disappeared into the supply room. Almost a foot tall, the box was egg-shaped with two, sleek drawers which followed the sloping contour of the wood. Grace stepped closer and ran a finger over the coffee colored surface, which was smooth as a freshly powdered, newborn’s bottom. The box wasn’t so much a container to store small objects as a work of art, a sensuous, freeform sculpture. Grace shook her head in disbelief. “Your talents are endless,” she said as Bob came up behind her with the reams of paper.
“Black walnut,” he remarked shyly, indicating the carcass, “with red birch handles.”
Grace pulled a drawer gently open. “And this?” She gestured at the orangey wood with paisley swirls ranging from blood red to lemony yellow.
“Amboyna burl from Cambodia,” Bob removed the delicate drawer and handed it to her. The inside was lined with emerald flocking. “The tricky part is gluing the amboyna directly to the walnut.” He caressed the burnished wood with a stubby finger. “The surface is wet-sanded with tung oil through eight, separate grades of sand paper. It takes a week or so for the finish to properly cure. Then it’s rubbed out to a high luster with rottenstone and beeswax.”
The boiler
suddenly fired up with a loud swoosh. Grace’s nostrils tingled with the faint odor of fuel oil. “The box belongs in a museum not a boiler-room.”
“That’s not for me to say,” the janitor replied with a mischievous grin.
Grace handed the drawer back to him. “What?”
“Carl Solomon built the box. He’s the artisan.” Bob Watson shook his head emphatically. “This stuff is so far out of my league …” He left the sentence unfinished. The boiler clicked off and a pump turned over making a rhythmic, whirring noise. “If you want to see more of his handiwork, Carl has another box on display at the Brandenburg Art Center through the holidays.”
Grace felt the breath catch in her throat. Something inchoate rumbled deep down in her solar plexus sending waves of indefinable emotion rippling up to the surface. Bob returned the key to the delicate drawer and inserted it in the box. “And yes, despite all rumors to the contrary, he does read Russian literature.”
******
If you wish to appeal this decision, please notify the Brandenburg District Court within fourteen days of receipt … Grace crumpled the letter from the district court and flung it in the trash.
The Toyota dealership had promoted her ex-husband, Stewart, to assistant manager in June. Now he cruised about in a fully-loaded Camry XLE—a twenty-five thousand dollar car with heated outside mirrors, chrome-tipped dual exhaust, a rear lip spoiler and leather-wrapped steering wheel. All this extravagance, yet the state of Massachusetts couldn’t see fit to increase his child support by twenty-five, lousy bucks.
And that was only half the problem.
Grace got home from school around five-thirty. Her daughter, Angie, arrived two hours earlier. The sixteen year-old collected the mail and laid it out—sales fliers, junk mail, credit card applications, magazines and assorted bills—on the kitchen table along with the court letter perched conspicuously on top of the pile. Angie was sure to ask about the letter, and Grace would be compelled to tell her. To tell her what? Your father, the congenital philanderer who favors blustery lies over simple truths, is a skinflint. He begrudges his own flesh and blood an extra hundred bucks a month.