David Wallace - Oblivion

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.