T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

There was a general coughing and rustling, and then one of the school board members — a sour-looking woman with reading glasses dangling from her throat — leaned forward and reached for the microphone perched at the edge of the table. There was a thump followed by the hiss of static as she wrestled the thing away from its stand, and then her amplified voice came at us as if it had been there all along, just under the surface: “And since that concludes the formal business for the evening, we’re prepared to take your questions and comments at this point. One person at a time, please, and please come to the center aisle and use the microphone there so everybody can hear.”

The first speaker — a man in his thirties, narrow eyes, narrow shoulders, a cheap sportcoat and a turquoise bola tie he must have worn in the hope somebody would think him hip — rose to a spatter of applause and a cascade of hoots from the students against the wall. “Ba-oom!” they chanted. “Ba-oom!” In an instant the mood had been transformed from nervous anticipation to a kind of ecstasy. “Ba-oom!”

He took hold of the microphone, glanced over his shoulder at the students behind him and snapped, “That’ll be enough now, and I mean it,” until the chant died away. Then he half-turned to the audience — and this was awkward because he was addressing the board up onstage as well — and began by introducing himself. “My name is Robert Tannenbaum”—a burst of Ba-oom, Ba-oom! — “and as many of you know, I teach ninth-grade biology at Smithstown High. And I have a statement here, signed not only by the entire science department — with one notable exception — but the majority of the rest of the faculty as well.”

It was just a paragraph or so — he knew to keep it short — and as he read I couldn’t help watching the faces of the board members.

They were four men and two women, with the usual hairstyles and appurtenances, dressed in shades of brown and gray. They held themselves so stiffly their bones might have been fused, and they gazed out over the crowd while the teacher read his statement, their eyes barely registering him. The statement said simply that the faculty rejected the warning label the board had imposed on An Introduction to Biology as a violation of the Constitution’s separation of church and state. “No reputable scientist anywhere in the world,”

the teacher went on, lifting his head to stare directly at the woman with the microphone, “subscribes to the notion of Intelligent Design — or let’s call it by its real name, Creationism — as a viable scientific theory.” And now he swung round on the crowd and spread his arms wide: “Get real, people. There’s no debate here — just science and anti-science.”

A few members of the audience began stamping their feet. The man beside me pulled his lips back and hissed.

“And that’s the key phrase here, scientific theory — that is, testable, subject to peer review — and not a theological one, because that’s exactly what this is, trying to force religion into the classroom—”

“Atheist!” a woman cried out, but the teacher waved her off. “No theory is bulletproof,” he said, raising his voice now, “and we in the scientific community welcome debate — legitimate, scientific debate — and certainly theories mutate and evolve just like life on this planet, but—” “Ba-oom, Ba-oom!”

There was a building ferment, a muted undercurrent of dissent and anger, the students chanting, people shouting out, until the sour-looking woman — the chairwoman, or was she the super-intendent? — slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “You’ll all get your chance,” she said, pinching her voice so that it shot splinters of steel through the microphone and out into the audience on a blast of feedback, “because everybody’s got the right to an opinion.” She glared down at the teacher, then lifted the reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and squinted at a sheet of paper she held up before her in an attempt to catch the light. “Thank you, Mr.

Tannenbaum,” she said. “We’ll hear now from the Reverend Doctor Micah Stiller, of the First Baptist Church. Reverend Stiller?”

I was transfixed. I’d had no idea. Here I’d taken the train into the city every day and slogged on back every night, lingered at the Granite, hiked the trails and rocketed my way up the river to feel the wind in my face and impress whatever woman I’d managed to cajole along with me, and all the while this Manichean struggle had been going on right up the street. The reverend (beard, off-the-rack suit, big black shoes the size of andirons) invoked God, Jesus and the Bible as the ultimate authorities on matters of creation, and then a whole snaking line of people trooped up to the microphone one after another to voice their opinions on everything from the Great Flood to the age of the earth (Ten thousand years! Are you out of your mind? the biology teacher shouted as he slammed out the side exit to a contrapuntal chorus of cheers and jeers), to recent advancements in space travel and the unraveling of the human genome and how close it was to the chimpanzee’s. And the garden slug’s.

At one point, Dave even got into the act. He stood abruptly, his face frozen in outrage, stalked up to the microphone and blurted, “If there’s no evolution, how come we all have to get a new flu shot each year?” Before anyone could answer him he was back in his seat and the chairwoman was clapping her hands for order. How much time had gone by I couldn’t say — an hour, an hour at least. My left leg seemed to have gone dead at the hip. I breathed perfume. Stole a look at the woman beside me and saw that she had beautiful hands and feet and a smile that sought out my own. She was thirty-five or so, blond, no hat, no coat, in a blue flocked dress cut just above her knees, and we were complicit. Or so I thought.

Finally, when things seemed to be winding down, a girl dressed in a white sweater and plaid skirt, with her hair cut close and her arms folded palm to elbow, came down the aisle as if she were walking a bed of hot coals and took hold of the microphone. Her hands trembled as she tried to adjust it to her height, but she couldn’t seem to loosen the catch. She stood there a moment, working at it, and when she saw that no one was going to help her, she went up on her tiptoes. “I just wanted to say,” she breathed, clutching the mike as if it were a wall she was trying to climb, “that my name is Mary-Louise Mohler and I’m a freshman at Smithstown High—”

Hoots, catcalls, two raw-faced kids in baseball hats leering from the far side of the auditorium, adult faces swiveling angrily, the clatter of the rain beyond the windows.

She stood there patiently till the noise died down and the sour-faced woman, attempting a smile, gestured for her to go ahead.

“I want everyone to know that the theory of evolution is only a theory, just like the sticker says—”

“What about Intelligent Design?” someone called out, and I was startled to see that it was Dave, half-risen from his seat. “I suppose that’s fact?” I couldn’t help laughing, but softly, softly, and turned to the woman beside me — the blonde. “To all the Jesus freaks, maybe,”

I whispered, and gave her an unequivocal grin. Which she ignored.

Her gaze was fixed on the girl. The auditorium had grown quiet. I raised my hand to my mouth to suppress an imaginary cough, shifted my weight and looked back down the aisle.

“It is,” the girl said quietly, dropping her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look Dave in the face. “It is fact and I’m the one to know it.”

She clenched her hands in front of her, rocked back on her heels and then rose up once more on point to let her soft feathery voice inhabit the microphone: “I know it because Jesus lives in my heart.”