Z. Packer - Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Bonza drove up in a Pinto that looked like it had been dipped in acid. He rolled — then pushed — down his broken car window.

“Having problems?” Bonza drawled. He lit a cigarette and slammed the car door. His head bobbed up and down, as if in agreement with himself. “Thought you said you’d seen some tough times.” He began to walk the perimeter of the school and she followed.

“They mill around whenever they want, they won’t shut up, they — they couldn’t care less about — I mean, when you’re teaching, don’t you ever see a — light in their eyes?”

The Baltimore Public School System ran a series of Vaseline-smeared camera shots of students eagerly raising their hands to answer questions, students traipsing through fields to release butterflies into the wild, smiling students clad in black graduation robes, a teary-eyed teacher, beaming from the front row. In each of these shots, the camera zooms in on one student, until their eyes are the size of fists on the television screen, with a twinkling star of light flashing through each retina.

“A light?” Bonza covered his mouth with his hand, then doubled over in an exaggerated bow, and when he finally came up, his hair flew back like that of a Labrador flicking off the waters of a mountain stream.

“Ohhh boy.” Bonza shook his head.

Lynnea felt her eyes narrow on him. “What’s so funny?”

He regarded the burning ash, turning serious. “Maybe,” he said, “you became a teacher for all the wrong reasons, hon. Maybe you just don’t care enough about them.”

“Listen,” Lynnea said. “I care. It’s the students who don’t care.”

“All right. So they don’t care. Whaddya do?”

She knew this was one of his little tests. She stuttered, but didn’t answer. He snapped his fingers to signal she was out of time and smiled his disapproval. She’d expected him to come up with one of his handy one-liners about teaching— teachers don’t teach, they coach; dilemmas aren’t solved, they’re managed —but all he said was:

“Robert the Cop quit teaching.”

Lynnea looked at him. “Doesn’t surprise me,” she said.

“Yeah. He’s a cop down in his blood.” Bonza seemed to lament this, and she could see why: during Robert the Cop’s role-play as teacher that summer, all the adults pretending to be students in his class pulled the same antics they’d pulled in other role-plays. But Robert the Cop never lost his composure. He gave them all detention, goose-stepping to each pretend student, pounding his fist on their desks for quiet. He ended by telling them they were all sorry motherfuckers, said they’d all amount to nothing, zero, zilch, nada, if they didn’t respect authority.

Before he began teaching school, Robert took night shifts so he could attend his classes during the day. After his turn at role-play teaching, he drove to a black part of town called Hollander Ridge and parked his unmarked Mazda at an intersection where the traffic lights never worked.

“Yep. I nabbed ’em,” he admitted the day after he’d given the tickets. “I needed to get my quota.” He’d handed out eleven speeding tickets and three vagrancy charges. Fourteen in all. “Payback.”

Lynnea knew it was revenge on the fourteen pretend students who’d given him hell in role-play, and she somehow felt complicit, as though she’d had the power to stop him but didn’t.

“It’s better that he quit.” Bonza leaned toward her, his black hair battered by the wind. “Robert didn’t have the heart for it. Not like you, hon.”

The wind jerked the four trees of the schoolyard until it gathered a shower of dead leaves to carry away; it swung open the flaps of Lynnea’s cheap green jacket so hard the lapels hit her face. She could see Bonza’s eyes scanning the school steps: no students. He threw his cigarette to the concrete, snuffed it out with his shoe, then grabbed her, kissing her with full, sloppy thrusts of tongue, his mustache scrubbing her face with its bristles. Lynnea pushed him away and gasped for air, trying to wipe away the saliva ringing her mouth, only to find both hands locked solidly in Bonza’s.

“C’mon. Let’s blow this joint.”

“Joint? I’m sure you have to get back home to your wife.” She used the steady bad-ass eyes she’d practiced in the mirror for her class. Bonza chucked his head to the side as though his wife were some sort of poem he’d read, hadn’t understood, and had dismissed.

Lynnea tried to pull away, but couldn’t. “No,” she said. “And I mean it.”

Bonza let go and looked at her as though he was tired and she was keeping him from getting his sleep. “Listen. Do you wanna learn all the right tricks or what?”

TWO WEEKS after the Bonza incident, Lynnea got a new student. The guidance counselor, Mr. Knight, handed her a thick, bulging folder.

“Sheba Simmons. Those are all her records, transfers.”

As Lynnea glanced down at the heavy folder, the guidance counselor whispered into her ear, “She knifed a teacher at her old school.”

“Yippee,” Lynnea said.

A girl walked into the office. She was over six feet tall and the legs under her miniskirt looked like those of a bodybuilder.

“Are you my new student?” Lynnea asked.

“Question is, You my new teacher?”

Mr. Knight pulled Lynnea outside the office and gave her the rundown on Sheba: Sheba did not live with a family but in a home for girls. Every afternoon a bus with iron grillework on the windows was going to pick her up, take her to Hollander Ridge. According to Mr. Knight, the place was a large formstone building with OUR LADY OF PEACE in bas-relief above the entrance.

Before Sheba entered the classroom, Lynnea told everyone that they would have a new student, and as soon as she said the name “Sheba,” Terra Undertaker howled, “Sheba. That a dog’s name!” The class began to bark wildly in various pitches, ranging from Chihuahua to Doberman.

When Sheba stepped into the room, the barking trailed off to nothing. Sheba sat in the chair closest to Lynnea’s desk, took out her notebook and pen, eyed the board, and began copying the day’s notes. No one moved, Lynnea included. Sheba, sensing that it was a bit too quiet, turned her head around to the class.

“Why y’all all back there?”

Lynnea didn’t know what she was talking about until she noticed that the desks and seats had traveled to the back half of the room, leaving her and Sheba in the front.

“Everyone,” Lynnea began, using her orchestra-conducting voice, “move your desks forward.”

A few pushed their desks, but that was it. Five students had come forward. Sheba stood and scanned the classroom.

“Y’all hear the woman! The woman say move !”

Desks clattered, seats edged across the tiled floor with persistent fart noises, girls dragged large fake designer handbags behind them like migrant workers told to flee the land. Sheba flitted her eyes as though all of this wasn’t quick enough for her, but would suffice. The students sat straight in their desks, not daring to speak. Sheba sat back down slowly, primly smoothing down her short skirt against her thighs before edging into her seat. Lynnea stood. The silence lasted almost a full minute. Finally, Sheba looked at Lynnea and said, “Is you gone teach us or what?”

VENUS WAS raking the same patch of leaves over and over. The leaves leapt from the broken prongs of the rake and settled back to where they’d originally lain. “Hello,” Lynnea said. “Venus. Venus? Hello?”

“Oh.” Venus turned, still raking. “How you doing?”

“Fine. Teaching. You know how that goes.”

“Ohhhh do I. They all crack babies. None a them’s got a bit a sense to them. Ought a skip schooling and send them all to the military.”