Antrim, Donald - Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

“Thanks.” I stepped over and we moved on. Ray told me, “Other parkside families are taking sides. The Lloyds with the Websters, the Glazers with the Bensons. Coalitions are developing.”

“They’ve captured Chuck Webster.”

“That’s too bad, Chuck’s a good guy. There’s a sinkhole up here, careful. Remember that time Paul and Cindy Garrison’s daughter Mindy fell off Jack Conley’s glass-bottom reef-tour boat, and no one realized it until everybody saw Mindy through the glass, about to get run over by the propeller, and Chuck dove in and fetched her out and gave her mouth-to-mouth? I always admired that.”

Ray ducked beneath a branch. I ducked after him. He guided a path through brambles and ferns that gave onto a wall of leaves hanging like black curtains. “Here we are, my friend,” he said, stepping out of the forest and onto a narrow white beach: the peninsular tip of Turtle Pond Park. We’d gone away from, not toward, town. Waves were coming in close. Salt smells blended with the complex atmospheric odors that accompany rough weather in this part of the world, forming a cool perfume evocative of the miseries of childhood. Here in the wide open the wind was fierce, and it didn’t take long to get soaked. Ray hollered, “My world’s gone, Pete. There’s no logic left. Kunkel was crazy, he caused deaths. Miriam’s. Other people’s.”

“Ray, I know you’re in pain. I wish it hadn’t happened, hadn’t had to happen. Jim was warning us. He was sending a message.”

Ray shivered, his teeth chattered. “There is no way that I can accept that.”

I reached into the knapsack and brought out The Egyptian Book of the Dead. “Got a light?” I scooped a hollow in the sand, then tore pages from the book and crumpled them into a pile in the shallow campfire depression. I knelt over, guarding paper from pelting rain, and said, “Hate to do this to a book, especially a library copy.” Ray said, “Well, anyway, no one except you is ever going to want to check that out.” He crouched down and butane-lit a page; as the fire caught and kindled I added more pages; I kept ripping out text. Surf broke and rolled nearly to our shoes. We warmed our hands above incendiary hieroglyphics soaring aloft on convective heat, tumbling wetly up the beach, and Ray told me, “I want a better world too, Pete.”

“Then help me. Join my school. Become a teacher.”

“Me?”

“You have so much to offer. You can stock an aquarium. Take the kids wading in tidal pools, go snorkling over the reef. The pay’s not great but the rewards are priceless.” I had a feeling, as I said this, of conviction: the home school was more than a kitchen table fancy. By pitching the vision to potential colleagues — first Ben, now Ray — I made intention tangible; and I knew, whether the feral biologist signed on or not — I knew the school would come to pass.

Ray felt my enthusiasm. “I could teach?”

“Why not?”

“I’m a researcher.”

“You know things, Ray. Look around. The ocean, the sky, this terrible weather. It’s all happening. The world at work. Your world.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

I ripped more pages. Lightning struck over the water. I counted slowly to seven before hearing thunder rumble in above waves crashing onto nearby rocks littered with cast-up debris. That meant the storm was seven miles out to sea. So it was moving away. As if that mattered. Everything was drenched. The fire was a lost cause. I raised my hands with palms turned upward and cupped to catch rain, and drank a libation of sweet rainwater. Ray, too, cupped his hands and drank. He exclaimed, “In the beginning of time, this is what there was.”

“Ray, are you hungry? Break bread with me.”

That’s when I discovered my fig bars’ contaminated condition. Not by eating one myself but by watching Ray eat one. He spat fig. Talk about your difficult moments. But wasn’t it fitting? — the bereaved taking into his mouth the blood of his wife’s executioner. Ray couldn’t see the elegance of this symmetry, he was too busy going berserk from the putridity of blood and rot that had entered his mouth via a leaked-on fig bar; and he was saying words to me, attempting to anyway — something garbled I couldn’t quite make out but that was, judging from tone and inflection, harshly accusatory. He got up then and started walking away. Staggering, actually, was more like what he was doing; he staggered, retching, down the beach. What could I say? Let him go. I have to admit I was relieved to find myself alone again. But I felt sorry, too, that our evening had come to this distressing close, because, crummy weather aside — wasn’t the weather an integral part of the evening? Hadn’t the weather in some ways defined the evening? — rotten weather aside, our hour together on the beach, watching the world and feeling exposed to elemental forces, had been, as Ray himself had claimed, beautiful.

At dawn the storm passed. It was half a mile to Midnight Pass and the old humpbacked bridge sportsmen favor for grouper and snook. Walking on sand was tiring; I rested on a bridge railing and let the heat of morning dry me. No one out fishing today, which was odd, seeing as it was a Saturday. Perhaps it was the wrong time of day. Maybe wisdom or fear regarding storms kept the cane-pole fishermen home in their beds. I’m not much of an angler myself. I trekked along the South Main flood canal, checking the black water for nictitating opalescent eyelids of partly submerged gators. South Main intersects with palm-lined Osprey Avenue. Left on Osprey, it was a mile to town. My shoes were full of sand; I took them off and banged them against a tree. After the Tarpon Bank Savings and Loan I crossed an unfortified yard — a few still remained — coming out between two birdbaths onto Water Street. Three blocks away sat the Southshore branch of the public library, opposite which I paused to enter the tall bushes and, checking to make sure no one could see, urinated quickly, before zipping up and coming out to study the library bulletin board advertising poetry clubs, garden societies, yard sales, bake sales (including one to raise money for the failing library system), babysitting services, papier-mâché workshops, housepainting, handgun seminars, car repair, and lawn work. A printed handbill announced that night’s big town meeting out at Terry Heinemann’s Clam Castle. Another poster, elegantly hand-lettered in purple Magic Marker and rubber-cemented with scissor-cut crayon renderings of famous storybook characters, detailed the library’s Saturday morning Mother and Child Story Time program.

It was six-thirty. Story Time was scheduled to begin in an hour. It warmed my heart to see programs like this being offered. I’d managed to save the binding and a few index pages of The Egyptian Book of the Dead; if I waited a bit, I could drop them off on my way home, then stay on at the library and witness this vital childcare service in action. I crossed the street and hid behind a car fitted with a wide-angle passenger-side rearview mirror perfectly angled for personal grooming. My hair was matted. I finger-combed it, using spit for styling. There wasn’t much I could do without a proper bath. Saliva did at least remove a layer of thicker grit plastered like a fright mask on my face, but my nails were mechanic’s nails, my arms the arms of a dirt farmer.

At seven, Rita Henderson, our volunteer head librarian, arrived in her Buick. She unlocked the library and went inside — my cue to tuck in my shirt and shuffle out of concealment. At first I was afraid to confront Rita. I loitered awhile in Young Adult. It’s my business, after all, as an educator, to keep abreast of school-age literature. I have to say that I was shocked by the number of YA volumes dealing with death in one form or another: the loss of a sibling, a parent, a friend, a pet; cancer, addiction, war. And the fiction! Title after title featuring orphans.