March
The news from Khesanh that Walter Cronkite reported each night kept getting grimmer. The five thousand marines there were cut off and could get supplies only by air, even though any helicopter that flew over took a lot of enemy fire from the twenty thousand surrounding Vietcong troops. Meanwhile, the marines were dug into bunkers covered with three feet of earth to protect them from the mortar shells that the Vietcong were lobbing into the camp—about five hundred mortar shells a day. And when they weren't lobbing shells, the Vietcong were digging tunnels that they could use to put explosives beneath the marines. Some reports said that the tunnels were only a hundred yards away from the barbed wire around the Khesanh base. The marines had started to use stethoscopes and divining rods to see if they could find them.
You know things are bad when the United States Marine Corps is using stethoscopes and divining rods.
Still, the White House announced that the enemy offensive was running out of steam, that casualties at Khesanh were light, that we would never give up the marine base there.
We watched Walter Cronkite together every night after supper now—even my sister. We were all quiet, and not just because my father would have hollered if anyone had interrupted Walter Cronkite. Sometimes, though, my father himself would shake his head and whisper, "Five thousand boys trapped. Good Lord. Five thousand." We'd watch the pictures of the marines in their zigzagging trenches, or deep in their bunkers, holding their hands over their ears inside their helmets because of the thunder of the mortar shells. Then my father would reach for my mother's hand, and they would look at each other.
My sister sat rigid—with anger, I guess. She probably wanted to say something like "I told you so" or "If President Johnson had listened and gotten us out of there in time" or "No one in Washington knows what he's doing," but she didn't. When five hundred mortar shells are coming in every day on top of soldiers huddled in holes with their hands over their ears, even a flower child who wanted nothing but world peace could only watch and hope.
I also was watching the newscasts and hoping for a sign, any sign, of Lieutenant Tybalt Baker. There never was one—not in any of the films of the mortars or the trenches or the downed and burning helicopters or the wounded. Walter Cronkite didn't read off the names of the missing in action, so Lieutenant Baker was never mentioned. But I still watched anyway, holding my breath, hoping.
Which is what I think the whole town was doing.
Which is certainly what Mrs. Baker was doing.
But you would never have been able to tell that she was holding her breath at Camillo Junior High. She moved through our classroom as coolly as if Khesanh were just a proper noun in a sentence that needed to be diagrammed. It was early spring and we were her garden, and she was starting to see the bulbs and seeds that she had planted in us last fall coming up. She raked away our dead leaves, spaded new soil around us, and watered and fertilized.And we grew fast and green, let me tell you. Especially Mai Thi, who was now the best sentence diagrammer in the seventh grade—which may not sound like much, but with Mrs. Baker, it was a big deal.
During class, it didn't seem as if anything was bothering Mrs. Baker at all.
Except maybe the eight bulging asbestos ceiling tiles, which now had about as much bulge as asbestos ceiling tiles can take. They looked like sails in a full breeze.
We still didn't know exactly what was making them so heavy. Maybe the rats were hoarding supplies for the summer drought up there. Maybe Sycorax and Caliban were just getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But whatever it was, no one wanted those tiles to come down with whatever was bulging them out. Not even Danny Hupfer.
Which was why on the first Wednesday afternoon in March, while Mrs. Baker was grading and I was at my desk starting in on m>—who, let me tell you, was a whole lot smarter than Romeo, even though he ended up pretty badly, too—Mr. Vendleri came in with a ladder, eight new asbestos ceiling tiles, and a heavy mallet.
Mrs. Baker looked at him.
"A mallet?" she said.
He brandished it in the air, like Julius Caesar himself. "You don't know how big a rat on the loose can get in five months," he said.
Mrs. Baker looked up at the bulging ceiling tiles. "I have some idea," she said.
Mr. Vendleri set his ladder under one of the bulges. He steadied it, and grabbed his mallet tightly in his right hand. He took three steps up the ladder. Then, with his left hand, he slowly reached up to one of the bulging tiles. He tapped it a couple of times, and we listened.
Nothing.
He pushed against it.
Nothing.
He hit it lightly with the mallet.
Still nothing.
He came back down the ladder and went over to the corner of the room. He picked up the trash can and came back to the foot of the ladder. "I'll need someone to hold this underneath the tile when I take it off, just in case stuff comes out," he said.
"'Just in case stuff comes out?'" said Mrs. Baker.
"That's right," said Mr. Vendleri.
Mrs. Baker looked over at me.
Sometimes, I think she still hates my guts.
So there I was, holding this trash can underneath the eight bulging asbestos ceiling tiles, and Mr. Vendleri started to push up on one of them with his mallet. "You won't catch the stuff standing over there," he said to me. I moved a little closer. "Right here," he said, pointing to the target area. Then he turned and lifted one of the ceiling tiles with his mallet. We listened for the scrambling of two large rats.
Nothing.
So Mr. Vendleri tilted the tile to get it out ... and Shredded Everything came pouring down: homework announcements, PTA letters home, blue dittos, Bazooka bubblegum wrappers (these were from Danny), chewed up Number 2 pencils, red and green and blue and yellow construction paper, napkins from the cafeteria, part of a black sneaker (this was from Doug Swieteck, who had been looking for it for a couple of months), a gnawed picture of me leaping across stage in yellow tights, and scraps of Meryl Lee's "Mississippi River and You" project. It all came down like wet snow.
"Hold the trash can under it!" hollered Mr. Vendleri.
Which is exactly what I was doing, except that the stuff was also falling into my eyes and hair and down the back of my shirt, and I think I must have started screaming because Mrs. Baker came and took the trash can from me. "Maybe you should find a different way to collect the refuse," she said to Mr. Vendleri, brushing the rat-chewed stuff off me.
By the time Mr. Vendleri brought back a tarp, I had pretty much gotten my shaking under control.
He handed me that mallet. "What am I supposed to do with this?" I asked.
"Swing at anything that has yellow teeth," he said.
"Oh," I said quietly. I wasn't sure if that was better than having the rat-chewed stuff come down on my head.
But even though I started to shake again, I held the mallet over my shoulder ready to strike, which you have to admit is not only brave and courageous and true and blue and worthy of Jim Hawkins himself, but also pretty remarkable, considering I still had rat-chewed stuff in my hair and down my back.
But we never saw Sycorax or Caliban. Mr. Vendleri replaced the bulging ceiling tiles with eight new ones, then stepped from the ladder and stood back. "Good as new," he said.
"Are you sure?" asked Mrs. Baker.
"I'm sure," I willed him to say. "I'm sure. I'm sure. I'm sure."
"I'm sure," said Mr. Vendleri.
"Then," said Mrs. Baker to me, "you may return to Julius Caesar"
But let me tell you, it's not easy to read a Shakespeare play when you've just been holding a mallet over your shoulder, ready to swing at anything that has yellow teeth, and Mr. Vendleri is still poking at the other tiles to see if they were bulging, too, and knowing that any tile could come crashing to the floor along with Sycorax and Caliban, and they would not be happy, let me tell you.
I wanted to read Julius Caesar standing on my desk, but that would definitely not have been worthy of Jim Hawkins.
When he finally left, Mr. Vendleri told us he'd come check on the new asbestos ceiling tiles tomorrow. "Thank you," said Mrs. Baker. Then she went back to her grading. I wondered if she had wanted to stand on her desk, too.
Grading, by the way, is also something that makes it hard to read Shakespeare. When your teacher is covering papers with red ink a few desks away from you, and you know that yours is in the stack and it's probably coming up soon, and that your grasp of nonrestrictive clauses might not be all that it should be, it's hard to read anything. Even though there was some good stuff in Julius Caesar: "You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!" It doesn't have the cut of a Caliban curse, but it's all right.
It also didn't help that Mrs. Baker kept wiping at her eyes during her grading. She'd told us that she had a terrible cold, but she hardly needed to tell us. Her eyes were mostly red all the time, and the way she blew her nose could be pretty impressive. Sometimes while sitting at her desk, she'd just stop doing whatever she was doing and look somewhere far away, like she wasn't even in the classroom anymore.
It was a terrible cold, and day after day it kept on, and even seemed to be getting worse. Meryl Lee said that she was up to half a box of Kleenex per class, which has got to be some kind of world record.
So when she announced on Friday that members of the school board were coming to our room to observe and evaluate classroom performance by both students and their teacher, she told us in a soggy voice that drowned at the end. But drowning or not, she kept going.
She was Mrs. Baker.
"I will expect you all to be polite to the school board members. I will expect you to be on your very best behavior. I will expect you to show in an appropriate manner what you have been studying this school year."
"When are they coming?" asked Meryl Lee.
Before I tell you what Mrs. Baker said, I have something else to tell you, because you won't believe what happened otherwise if I don't. When Julius Caesar is coming into Rome—which is a place where very bad things will happen to him—this soothsayer comes up to him to tell him what's going to happen. And this is what he says to Julius Caesar:
Beware the ides of March.
So now I'll tell you what happened after Meryl Lee asked, "When are they coming?"
"Beware the ides of March," I said.
And Mrs. Baker looked at me, and her eyes opened a little bit, and without looking away from me, she said to Meryl Lee, "A week from today, Miss Kowalski."
Which was the ides of March!
"You are a soothsayer, Mr. Hoodhood," said Mrs. Baker.
"Sometimes I scare even myself," I said.
"Prophecy is not an unalloyed gift," she said. "Be careful how you use it." Which is a teacher strategy to get you to look up the word "unalloyed," which I did, and it still didn't make much sense.
But what happened later that day was even weirder.
In Gym, Coach Quatrini announced that he was planning to form the Camillo Junior High School cross-country team. It wouldn't be a regular team, since cross-country was a fall sport. But he wanted to start the seventh and eighth graders now so that he could choose a varsity team and have them run over the summer and be ready to begin real competition by September. He expected everybody to try out—everybody—and to get us started in our training, we would be running two miles at tempo.
"What's 'at tempo'?" I asked.
"Race pace," he said.
"How bad could that be?" I said to Danny.
"Bad," Danny said.
Coach Quatrini had us stretch for three minutes, then do four short sprints down the length of the gym, and then stretch for another two minutes. Afterward, he took us outside to the track—where there was a pretty brisk March wind that cut right through my T-shirt. He put us at the starting line, held up his stopwatch, and blew his whistle.
Danny was right. Race pace could be bad.
I don't know how many times Coach Quatrini used the word "faster," but if a word can get worn out and die, this one died like Julius Caesar. He liked to add words to the front of "faster," words like "a whole lot" and "can't you go any" and "you'd better get" and "dang it." He also added words after "faster," like "you wimps" and "you slugs" and "you dang slugs" toward the end. It wouldn't have taken much for him to be able to play Caliban on the Festival Theater stage.
Afterward, when we all had our hands on our knees and were trying to suck some air into wherever it wasn't that it needed to get, he reminded us that we all had to try out for the varsity team and promised that tryouts would be a whole lot harder than what we'd just done.
Toads, beetles, bats.
Now here's where the weird part comes.
Into my head jumped this sentence: Tryouts will be in a week, on the ides of March.
And as soon as I thought it, Coach Quatrini said, "Tryouts will be in a week, and you better be a whole lot faster than this, you dang wimpy slugs."
I wondered if somewhere down deep within me, I really was a soothsayer—even if only the first parts of the sentences were the same.
I ran over the weekend, not because I was worried that Coach Quatrini would think I was a dang wimpy slug, but because I was pretty sure that if I didn't, I might have something awful happen to me after running at tryout pace on the ides of March. I ran three miles on Saturday, and then four miles on Sunday afternoon, even though it was the Sabbath and I deserved some time off.
And actually, there was another reason for running over the weekend. An even better reason.
My father was mad at my sister, which meant somehow that he was mad at me, too, and it was better to be running with my lungs screaming for air than be in a house with my father screaming at me.
And let me tell you, it wasn't for anything I'd done.
Now that he had the new junior high school contract, my father needed to hire someone else in his office as a receptionist for weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings, and since he didn't want to pay anyone much for this, he decided that my sister should do it, and he would pay her $1.35 an hour, and not take out any taxes.
He announced this at supper on Friday night.
"I can't," said my sister, while passing the lima beans and not taking any.
"Of course you can," said my father. "It's about time you started a real job."
"I'm already working," said my sister.
We looked at her.
"Who for?" my father asked.
"For Bobby Kennedy," she said.
"For Bobby Kennedy?" said my father.
"Mr. Goldman is letting us use the back of his bakery for campaign headquarters."
"Bobby Kennedy?" said my father again. "Bobby Kennedy is a rich kid from Cape Cod who's never done anything on his own his whole life."
"Bobby Kennedy will end the war, end the discrimination that's splitting our country in two, and end the control of the government by a handful of fat old men."
My father—who was not fat and old yet, but who could probably imagine himself that way—started to get a little louder. Not a good sign. "You might as well go work for that Martin Luther King."
"Maybe I will. He and Bobby Kennedy are the only ones who care that this country is about to explode."
"He's a Communist."
"Oh, there's deep political analysis. He's leading a demonstration for striking sanitation workers, so he must be a Communist."
"Now you've got it," said my father. "You start work Monday afternoon."
I think you can figure out how the rest of that conversation went, and how my mother and I didn't say much, and how we never did make it to dessert, and why it was a healthy thing for me to be running over the weekend.
Even though I hadn't done a thing.
Still, I was glad that Bobby Kennedy was running for president. It was hard every night hearing President Johnson and all of his generals with medals spread over their chests say how well the war was going and how the enemy was about to give up, and then having CBS News cut to pictures of soldiers who were wading through rice paddies and holding their rifles high above the water, or who were carrying out a buddy whose face was covered with dried blood, or who were huddled in holes and covering their heads as the mortars came over in Khesanh. After that, you just wanted someone to say the plain truth, and maybe Bobby Kennedy would be that someone.
I was glad he was running for president.
And so maybe, after all, I had done something to make my father mad. Just not out loud.
At Gym on Monday, Coach Quatrini had us run three miles, all at tempo. Let me tell you, after running for two miles and hearing "Can't you go any faster, you dang wimpy slug?" in your ears for most of it, you start to wonder if life is worth living. You still have four more times around the track, and the sky is turning darker, and the air is thinner, and you can't feel the ends of your fingers, and your legs are rock heavy, and there's something hurting deep down in your guts—probably your liver is about to explode—but that doesn't matter so much because your lungs are drying out, and that hurts so much that nothing else can get your attention.
"It'll be five miles on Friday," said Coach Quatrini when we were finished.
Five miles on the ides of March!
On Wednesday afternoon, Mrs. Baker asked how my cross-country preparation was going.
"Death, a necessary end," I said, "will come when it will come."
Mrs. Baker smiled. "Do you think that death is coming for you on the cross-country course, Mr. Hoodhood?"
"You know what happened to Julius Caesar on the ides of March?" I said. "Cross-country tryouts will make that look like Opening Day at Yankee Stadium."
"It's because you run so straight up," she said.
"Because I run so straight up?"
"And tight. You run so tight. I've watched you. It looks as if you're digging your fingernails into your palms."
Which is exactly what I always did.
"Are you saying I could run better?"
She put down her copy of Julius Caesar. From her lower desk drawer she took out a pair of bright white sneakers and put them on. "Caesar shall go forth," she said.
"Where?" I asked.
"Out to the track."
"The two of us?"
"Are you embarrassed that I might be faster than you?" she asked.
"I'm not really worried about that, Mrs. Baker," I said.
"Perhaps you should be," she said. "Look what happened to Julius Caesar when he underestimated those around him."
So we went out to the track, with Mrs. Baker wearing bright white sneakers.
Really.
"Let's start with your stance," she said. "Let's lean you forward a little bit, so that you can always be moving into the next stride, instead of holding yourself back on each stride. Lean this way."
I did.
"Run fifty paces and come back."
I did.
"Again."
I did.
"At tempo," she said.
I did.
"That's fine. One could only wish that you took as easily to diagramming sentences. Now, your arm position, and then your head position, and then we'll get to breathing patterns."
By the end of the afternoon, Mrs. Baker had remade the way that I ran. "I look like a jerk," I said. "If Romeo was a runner, he would run like this."
"What you look like," she said, "is Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics running like that."
So, figuring that you can't argue with four gold medals, that night I ran like Jesse Owens through the dark March streets. Leaning forward. Arms and legs like pistons. Head straight and still. Hands loose. Breathing controlled.
And then I ran like Jesse Owens in Gym on Thursday, and came in before Danny. And in front of a whole lot of eighth graders. And I heard only one "Faster, you wimp!" Just one.
Running like Jesse Owens really worked!
So that afternoon, at the very end of the day, after everyone else had left, I went up to Mrs. Baker's desk.
"A big day for us both tomorrow," said Mrs. Baker.
"The ides of March," I said.
"Let's hope we both emerge unscathed." Which, in case you missed it, was the teacher strategy again to make me look up the word "unscathed."
"Mrs. Baker," I said, "you helped a lot with my running."
"Thank you, Mr. Hoodhood."
"So I thought I would try to pay you back."
"Pay me back."
"Yes. To help you get ready for tomorrow, when the school board comes."
"You want to coach me in teaching, Mr. Hoodhood?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever been a seventh-grade English teacher?"
"No, but you've never been a track runner."
Mrs. Baker raised a single eyebrow. "So what do you suggest, coach?"
"No teacher jokes," I said. "No one ever laughs at teacher jokes."
"All right.... No teacher jokes."
"And no folding your arms like this." I folded my arms across my chest. "It makes it look like you're about to shoot us if we don't do what you say."
"That is the point," said Mrs. Baker.
"And no rolling your eyes, even if someone says something really stupid."
"I never roll my eyes," said Mrs. Baker.
I looked at her.
"All right," she said. "No rolling my eyes. Anything else, coach?"
"When someone does something good, I think you should let them know, with some sort of code."
"I think you mean that when someone does something well—as in obeying the rules of proper diction—we should use a code. What do you suggest?"
"Well, maybe 'Azalea' for something good, and 'Chrysanthemum' for something really good."
"Thank you, Mr. Hoodhood. We'll dispense with the code, and I'll simply use the unvarnished English language to tell you when you've done something well. But as to teacher jokes, folding of arms, and rolling of eyes, I'll consider your advice."
I nodded.
"And, coach, one more thing before you leave," said Mrs. Baker. She reached into her lower desk drawer again and pulled out a wooden box. "Open it," she said.
I did. Inside was a round silver disk on a velvet dark red ribbon. "XVIth Olympiad—Melbourne—1956," it said.
Mrs. Baker leaned back in her chair. "It was for the women's four-by-one hundred relay. Don't look so surprised. You didn't think I'd spent my whole life behind this desk, did you?"
And I suddenly realized that, well, I guess I had. Weren't all teachers born behind their desks, fully grown, with a red pen in their hand and ready to grade?
"Go home now, Mr. Hoodhood," said Mrs. Baker. "And tomorrow, run like Jesse Owens."
The ides of March dawned on Friday with a green and brown sky, the color of the water in a dying pond. All morning, the sky hung low, and sometimes the green and brown clouds would roll up and rumble a bit, and then settle back down like a layer of unhappiness over everything.
We all talked in whispers, and we waited for something to happen up in heaven.
Or maybe up in the asbestos ceiling tiles.
And since waiting gets boring really quickly, I decided that in the pause between nonrestrictive clauses and weak verb systems, I would tell Danny about the scene where Julius Caesar gets stabbed—which is a lot better than the scene where Juliet gets stabbed—and act it out with appropriate sound effects—which I do pretty well, since I have some experience acting out Shakespeare onstage, as you might remember.
I don't know if it was because of the green and brown sky or because of her cold or because of something else, but Mrs. Baker came over like Brutus himself to do Julius Caesar in.
"Mr. Hoodhood," she said, "I have not taught you the plays of William Shakespeare for the last five months for you to demean them by acting as though they were all about people stabbing each other."
I thought that was unfair.
"But they are," I said. "They do it all the time. Macbeth kills Duncan, Macduff kills Macbeth, Brutus kills Julius Caesar, then Brutus kills himself, like when Juliet kills herself after Romeo kills himself, but not before Romeo kills Tybalt—"
"And is that all you've learned from Shakespeare?"
I thought that was unfair, too.
Mrs. Baker held out her hand. "Give me the book," she said.
I opened up my desk.
"Shakespeare is all about the power of goodness and honesty and faithfulness," she said. "It is about the abundance of love. It is about the weakness of armies and battles and guns and..." She stopped. Her mouth worked back and forth. "It is about the endurance of love," she whispered. "Give me the book."
I handed it to her—at the same moment that the classroom door opened and Mr. Guareschi walked in, accompanied by Mr. Bradbrook and two other members of the school board.
"Mrs. Baker," said Mr. Guareschi.
Mrs. Baker looked at him. Both of our hands were still on Shakespeare.
"Mrs. Baker, you know Mr. Bradbrook, of course, the chairman of the school board. And Mr. Smilzo. And you know Mrs. Sidman, who has just returned from Connecticut and been appointed to our school board."
Mrs. Baker nodded to each one. "How good to have you back, Mrs. Sidman," she said.
Mrs. Sidman smiled. Her eyes darted around a little bit, like she was expecting something awful to happen but didn't want to show that she was expecting it.
"Mrs. Baker is one of our very finest teachers," said Mr. Guareschi.
"She will have a chance to show that to be true," said Mr. Bradbrook. He pointed to the book that Mrs. Baker and I were still holding. "What are you giving to that young mind?" he asked.
Mrs. Baker looked at me, then back at Mr. Bradbrook. "This is a volume of Shakespeare's plays," she said a little weakly. She let go of the book.
Mr. Bradbrook came over to my desk and peered at the book. Then he took it from me and weighed it in his hands. He looked at the gilt edges, and fingered the red ribbon tied at the spine. "This seems like an awfully expensive volume for our schools to be purchasing," he said.
"It is my own copy," said Mrs. Baker.
Mr. Bradbrook was relieved. He looked down at me. "Young man, do you think you'll enjoy reading the Master's plays?"
"I already do," I said.
"When I was a boy your age," said Mr. Bradbrook, "I would memorize long passages and recite them whenever I was called upon to do so. When you read the Master's lines, perhaps you, too, will be moved to memorize some. Perhaps one day you may even enact some."
"I already have," I said.
"Or perhaps Mrs. Baker will assign selected lines to you. Do you think that you might enjoy learning a line or two?" He patted the top of my head. Really. He reached out and patted the top of my head.
Danny Hupfer nearly fell out of his chair.
"He has already memorized quite a bit," said Mrs. Baker.
"Has he?" said Mr. Bradbrook. He seemed sort of surprised. "Well, let's hear some from the boy."
Mrs. Baker looked down at me. I couldn't really tell what was in her eyes. I thought at first that there might be a death threat, but either I'm getting used to them or that wasn't what was there.
"Holling Hood, do you know any lines or not?" That was from Mr. Guareschi.
And I almost said, "You block, you stone, you worse than senseless thing" to him. But whatever it was in Mrs. Baker's eyes, it told me that that might not be the right thing to say.
Probably a Caliban curse wouldn't work, either.
So I tried something else.
"This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar.
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world,'This was a man.'"
Meryl Lee clapped.
Even Doug Swieteck clapped.
I looked at Mrs. Baker's eyes.
"Azalea," she said quietly.
"What was all that about?" said Mr. Bradbrook.
"The power of goodness and honesty and faithfulness," said Mrs. Baker. "Now, if Mr. Guareschi will show you your seats, the class will work through the day's lesson." She went up to the board.
"This is the sentence you'll be diagramming," she said to us all, and wrote it out:
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
Then she turned to us. "Who can identify the implied verb?" she asked.
For the next hour, we did pretty well by Mrs. Baker. We answered everything she threw at us, and even Doug Swieteck helped out. (He answered the implied-verb question.) And Mrs. Baker did her part, too. There were no teacher jokes. She never crossed her arms. And when Doug Swieteck, who I guess thought he was in the rhythm after he got the implied-verb question right, called Alfred, Lord Tennyson—and you have to admit, it is a bizarre name—Alfred, Lord Tennis, Mrs. Baker did not roll her eyes. Not even a little.
It was an hour of pretty spectacular stuff. Let me tell you, we could have been America's Model Classroom of 1968. Mrs. Baker was so pleased that she even let me act out the stabbing scene from Julius Caesar after all—probably because she had forgotten all about the soothsayer business, which she shouldn't have, since when I got to the "Et tu, Bruté? Then fall, Caesar!" part, an asbestos ceiling tile over Mrs. Sidman's head that wasn't even bulging suddenly gave way, and it wasn't Julius Caesar who fell. It was Sycorax and Caliban who plummeted onto Mrs. Sidman's lap.
I think that she was the only one in the classroom who did not scream—and I'm including Mr. Bradbrook and Mr. Guareschi in that. We all crashed over chairs and tables and desks to the sides of the classroom, so that Mrs. Sidman was left completely alone, at her student desk, with two huge rats in her lap, who were shaking their heads and trying to get some idea of what had just happened to them.
Then they pulled up their snouts and clacked their yellow teeth.
Okay, so I panicked, too. After living with the bulging ceiling tiles for all this time, we had gotten to believe they would never come down. But now we were face to face with huge, scabby, yellow-toothed, angry rats, looking at us with eyes reddened with anger. And all we could think about was putting distance between us and them. And I want to point out, for the record, that it was members of the school board who were up on Mrs. Baker's desk first. Just about everyone else climbed the bookshelves and window shelf and radiators after throwing aside anything that got in our way.
Except for two people.
One was Mai Thi, who took off one of her shoes and stood beside her desk, ready to swing at anything that had yellow teeth. She looked as fierce as all get-out.
And the other was Mrs. Sidman, who I guess had determined that nothing more was going to happen to her at Camillo Junior High School without her say-so.
She grabbed the rats by the back of their necks—which was not easy, since they were so fat—pulled them off her lap, and hoisted them into the air. Their paws scrambled, their mouths hissed, their yellow teeth clicked, but Mrs. Sidman didn't care. She stood and held them up, like Macduff holding Macbeth's head.
By now, the screams—which had been increasing in volume—had brought Mr. Vendleri.
"Where do you want them?" asked the triumphant Mrs. Sidman.
"I've got a cage in the basement," he said.
"Lead the way," said Mrs. Sidman.
And he went ahead of her, closing all of the classroom doors as he went. But I wish that everyone in Camillo Junior High could have seen her, the noblest school board member of them all, Mrs. Sidman with her vanquished enemies still squirming in her hands, marching to the basement to dispatch them.
While the school board members went to have an emergency meeting in Mr. Guareschi's office, we tried to put Mrs. Baker's classroom back together, since absolutely all of the desks had been knocked over. It took us most of the day to get everything right. Someone—I think it was Mr. Bradbrook—had knocked the globe of the world off Mrs. Baker's desk, and there was now a deep valley where the Himalaya Mountains had once been. The red Thorndike dictionaries were going to need some help; most of their covers had come off when we stepped onto them to climb higher up the bookshelves. And at least two of our desks were gone for good, since all of their legs had splayed out.
Julius Caesar's army wouldn't have left such a mess after crossing the Rubicon.
That afternoon, Coach Quatrini held his cross-country tryouts. By then, the story of Sycorax and Caliban was all over school, and so we figured that tryouts might be delayed. And it might be that some coaches somewhere would delay a tryout on an afternoon when some of the tryoutees have just been traumatized by two gigantic rats falling out of their classroom ceiling. But Coach Quatrini thought it would give us motivation.
"The Big M," he said. "Motivation. You won't run fast unless you really want to run fast, and really wanting to run fast is what gives you Motivation. The Big M."
He had set out a course for us that stretched to someplace beyond human endurance. We were supposed to start at the gym doors and go around the parking lot (where Sycorax and Caliban were hissing in their cage, waiting for the exterminator to come put them in his truck), past the fence that enclosed the tennis courts, out onto Lee Avenue, down past Goldman's Best Bakery, around in front of the school by the main lobby, behind the elementary school wing, and so back to the gym doors.
"Four times," Coach Quatrini said, holding up four fingers. "You do that route four times. At tempo. Top seven will be varsity—that'll be all eighth graders, I expect. The rest of you will be junior varsity—if you're good enough to make that, you dang slugs."
And with that encouragement, Coach Quatrini blew his whistle and we began.
The sky had not improved during the day. The green and brown had swirled together, and the clouds had lowered themselves further and further, and they had dropped a kind of vapor from them that made it seem that we were running through the jungles of Vietnam, and breathing more water than air. I leaned forward, and I kept my arms low and my hands loose. I didn't rush it. But even so, by the time I passed Sycorax and Caliban—who hissed and threw themselves against the bars toward me when I kicked their cage to say goodbye—I was already feeling the wet air welling inside me. By the time I came around for the second time, things were slowing down considerably, and every eighth grader—and a whole lot of the seventh graders—were far ahead of me.
It's hard to run like Jesse Owens when you're feeling like you're drowning.
The third lap was better. Meryl Lee was standing by the main lobby, and when I ran past, she held up a dried rose with a ribbon on it.
When a girl holds a rose up to you, you run better, let me tell you.
By the time I came around for the fourth lap, I was up to Danny. I had even passed some of the eighth graders, and I could see the leaders in front of me again. I ran past the gym doors—"Can't you go any faster?" from Coach Quatrini—and out into the parking lot, where the exterminator truck had pulled up to unload Sycorax and Caliban into their new cage.
The sky had lowered itself even more, and everything looked like we were seeing it from underwater in a greenish haze. Even sounds were muffled, so that my footsteps seemed to come from far away.
But what wasn't muffled was the cry that came from the exterminator behind me, the sound of a large cage dropping, a scream, and the clicking of clacking teeth. I looked back, and there were the demon rats, racing with their scabby paws toward me, their eyes filled with the Big M—Murder!—and their pointy heads bobbing up and down with each leap. I couldn't scream; I couldn't get enough air into my lungs for screaming. I could only run. But the faster I ran, the more their yellow hatred grew, and every time I looked back—which was a lot—they were flat out after me, their scabby whiskers swept back by their speed, their yellow teeth clacking. I could imagine those teeth sinking into my heels like the assassins' daggers sinking into Caesar, and I ran faster.
I'd be running still if the tennis courts hadn't been there. Since they were, I sprinted into the courts and kicked the wire gate closed behind me. Sycorax and Caliban smashed into the gate and poked their yellow scabby snouts through.
Then they started to climb the fence. Really. They started to climb up the fence, never taking their red eyes off me.
Fear can bring out the Big M. I ran across the courts, and I was up and over the far-side fence before they were up and over the near-side one.
By that time, Mr. Guareschi, who had heard all the screaming, was trying to get the exterminator to go inside the tennis courts to catch the rats. But the exterminator wouldn't go near them. "Did you see those teeth?" he said. He got into his truck and drove a safe distance away.
Meanwhile, Sycorax and Caliban were climbing up the far-side fence after me. Before they reached the ground outside, the entire schoolyard had emptied—me last, when Danny Hupfer grabbed me from where I'd been standing in paralyzed horror.
So what happened after that is all a guess.
At the same time that Sycorax and Caliban hit the bottom of the fence and ran into the parking lot looking for me, a school bus was coming back in for the late-afternoon run. The driver later said that she saw the rats and tried to swerve but that they leaped onto their hind legs and jumped in front of her. She slammed down on her brakes, but the rats stood their ground, their paws up, their snouts pulled back, their yellow teeth clacking, their demon eyes flashing—none of which you'd have been able to recognize among the squashed bits when the bus, after skidding on the suddenly slick asphalt, finally came to a stop.
And as the exterminator drove away, since there was nothing more for him to do, the green and brown sky finally opened, and the rain came down in torrents, so fast it blew sideways, and when it had raged for about the time it takes to run two laps around Camillo Junior High, it stopped, and the green sky evaporated, and it was the ides of March ... a beautiful spring day.
A new record was set for the three-mile run for a Long Island school that afternoon—and I'm including high schools here. People said afterward that they had never seen anything like it—that kind of speed from a seventh grader.
So I made the varsity team, and had the Big M to keep running, especially since it stayed beautiful for the rest of March as the days grew longer—so long that it was still light when my father and sister came home from Hoodhood and Associates at suppertime. I practiced every afternoon after school with the other varsity runners—me, the only seventh grader—while the sun was yellow and warm, and the sky blue and white. I ran leaning forward, my arms and legs like pistons, head straight and still, hands loose, breathing controlled.
I ran like Jesse Owens with the Big M.
***
Meanwhile, the story of the rats grew larger. People went to visit the spot where they had met the bus. Doug Swieteck's brother had two teeth that he claimed were from Caliban, and he would show them to you for a quarter.
Mrs. Sidman was the most heroic figure of the story, and even first graders were drawing pictures of her carrying Caliban and Sycorax through the halls of Camillo Junior High. In all of those pictures, she looked like the warrior that Ariel had wanted to be—stern and serious and powerful. A third grader drew a coat of arms for her with two dead rats beneath her feet. Charles, the Fifth Grader of the Lovely Handwriting, inscribed the motto beneath: "To the Death!" The D had a whole lot of swirling loops inside it.
The only one who came out badly in the stories was Mai Thi, and honestly, I couldn't figure it out. No one but Mai Thi had stood her ground beside Mrs. Sidman while all the rest of us scrammed across the room. But instead of her getting a coat of arms and being made into a warrior, people started to talk about her, and not just behind her back, but so that she could hear them. About how people in Vietnam ate rats. How she was just hoping for a good meal. How she thought they were ratburgers on the run. Stuff like that.
Until one day, when outside the yellow forsythia branches were weaving themselves together, and the daffodils were playing their trumpets, and the lilacs were starting to bud and getting all giddy, we were going through the lunch line and Mrs. Bigio handed Mai Thi her Tuna Casserole Surprise, and one of the penitentiary-bound eighth graders said loudly to Mrs. Bigio, "Don't you have any Rat Surprise for her?" and then he turned to Mai Thi and said, "Why don't you go back home where you can find some?" and then Mai Thi started to cry, just stood there crying, and Danny took his entire tray—which was filled with Tuna Casserole Surprise and two glasses of chocolate milk and red jello with peaches—and dumped it over the penitentiary-bound eighth grader's stupid head, and then, before the eighth grader could open his stupid eyes to see who had done it, Danny punched him as hard as he could and broke his stupid nose.
Which got Danny a four-day suspension.
Which Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer used to take him to Washington, D.C., because they were so proud of him.
At lunch recess on the day he came back, he told us about climbing the Washington Monument, touring the White House, seeing Hubert Humphrey waving from a limousine, sprinting up the Capitol steps three at a time, running at tempo through the maze of fences the police were putting up to control the demonstration that Martin Luther King, Jr., was bringing to Washington next month, and walking up to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and shaking his hand—all of which we believed except for the last part.
But this next part is no lie: When we got back in from recess, Mrs. Bigio and Mrs. Baker were holding two trays filled with fried bananas. Really. Fried bananas rolled in crushed nuts, dipped in coconut, and topped with caramel sauce. Warm caramel sauce. Can you imagine what all four of those together smelled like? Sweet, and fruity, and spicy, and warm, and creamy, and chewy, all at the same time—that's about as close as I can get. It's the kind of smell that makes you hungry just thinking about it.
Mrs. Baker held the tray like she was carrying gold and frankincense and myrrh. "It's a recipe from Vietnam," she said. "Mrs. Bigio has made them for our class." We cheered. "The caramel sauce is called nuoc mau. Did I say that correctly, Mai Thi Huong?"
Mai Thi shrugged and smiled, and Mrs. Baker laughed, and then she and Mrs. Bigio walked up and down the aisles, and we each took a plate with a fried banana smothered in caramel sauce on it.
And when Mrs. Bigio got to Mai Thi, she stopped, and lifted a plate down onto her desk, and said, "I am so sorry, Mai Thi. I am so sorry."
That night, Walter Cronkite reported that in Khesanh, some of the tunnels the Vietcong were digging now reached to within fifty yards of the marine fences. There were more mortar shells lobbed in. There were more pictures of the marines deep in their bunkers with their hands over their ears. Casualties were light, the White House announced.
In Camillo Junior High, we ate fried bananas with warm nuoc mau. We sang a song that Mai Thi taught us about bananas—though it could have been about elephants and we wouldn't have known it, since we only knew two words of Vietnamese. And when we were done, Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi held each other tightly, and it seemed to all of us that they did not want to let go.