Rebecca Coleman: The Kingdom of Childhood

He shoveled a pile of chips into his mouth with his fingers. Behind him, Scott lifted the lid on the Crock-Pot, glanced at its contents, and set to work making himself a cheese sandwich. I rose from my chair and leaned toward Russ, resting my knuckles on the table. Scott, sensing danger in the quiet, turned just enough to cast a nervous gaze on me. In a hissing whisper I told Russ, “I HATE your Ph.D.”

“I don’t have a Ph.D,” he hissed back.

“And I hope they never give you one,” I spat. Voice rising, I added, “I hope you’re stuck in committee hell, talking about goddamned Iceland and its goddamned fisheries for the rest of your life. I hope you die revising the fucking thing.”

“Jesus, Mom,” said Scott.

Russ raised his eyebrows high and nodded adamantly. “That’s nice , Judy. Wow, I feel like celebrating our marriage all of a sudden. How about some mu shu pork?”

In the months that followed I felt bad about what I said. But you see, I only meant I hoped he would be revising his dissertation for the rest of his life, unrewarded. I didn’t mean it literally, that I hoped he would die.

The history teacher was hot. At five foot four or so, she was short enough to make Zach feel tall standing beside her, and she had a lot of loosely-curled hair the color of black coffee that bounced against her back as she moved across the classroom. When she turned to write on the board, her butt jiggled beneath her pencil skirt in such a way that Zach wasn’t gaining a great deal of knowledge about the Roman Empire.

“When Tacitus visited Germania,” she told them, her voice bearing just a hint of a Spanish accent, “he called it ‘hideous and rude, dismal to behold.’ He found the people warlike, with a violent system for justice. Traitors were hung from trees. Adulterous wives had their hair cut off and were driven through the streets naked, by their husbands, with a whip. Cowards and those of loose morals were buried in bogs under mud and held down with willow branches. Tacitus wrote that this was because glaring offenses must be displayed as a warning, but pollution must be concealed. He said, ‘No pardon is ever granted, for no one turns vices to mirth here.’”

The girls around Zach sat with their pens poised, their expressions serious and a little offended. The guys grinned.

“I thought you guys would like that part,” their teacher said. A low titter made its way across the classroom. “Remember this as you write up your group reports. A written history doesn’t have to be boring.”

There was a squeal of chair legs against flooring as the students turned their seats around to break into small groups. Zach had partnered up with two other Madrigals: Temple, whose SAT score was somewhere around the hundred-and-fiftieth percentile, and Fairen, who was also bright but appealed to Zach because the sort of friendship he hoped to develop with her, in another era, might have gotten one of them buried in a bog. She was lovely in a fine-boned, slightly asymmetrical way, with a long white throat and multi-pierced ears that stuck out past her hair when it fell, white-blond, on both sides of her face. Zach found her pale, bejeweled ears fascinating. Scott called her “Dumbo.”

“A history of Maryland written in the style of Tacitus,” Temple read from the sheet in front of them. “We could hammer this out in a weekend. And it’s not due until right before Christmas break.”

Fairen rolled her eyes. “This is what happens when the real teacher dies in July and they have a month to fill the spot.”

Zach looked over the sheet and scowled. “We’re supposed to do a section on the ‘legends of Maryland.’ How does Maryland have any ‘legends’? It’s a frigging state .”

Temple patted the desk noisily with his palms and let his gaze drift toward the ceiling. “We could look up old Indian stories, I guess. Or urban legends. Crybaby Bridge, the Chesapeake sea monster, that sort of thing. The Bunny Man.”

“What’s the Bunny Man?”

“A guy in a rabbit suit who runs around with an axe, chopping up people who get onto his property. People claim he hangs out at the old hospital complex off Pine Road. It’s abandoned now, but it used to be a tuberculosis hospital.”

“I know that place,” said Fairen. “I’ve driven past it a bunch of times. Scott said it was a mental hospital.”

“Scott’s a moron. But it doesn’t matter. We can put that part in as a legend, too, since everyone believes it even though it’s bullshit.”

She folded her hands like a model student and looked down at the list of requirements. “It says we need to have five illustrations. Maybe we can go down there and take some photos. It’d be really cool if we wait until the project is almost due and the trees are all bare and wintery looking.”

Temple shook his head. “It’s a five-hundred-dollar trespassing fine if you get caught. Plus there’s all kinds of druggies and skinheads and runaways who hide out there.”

Fairen smiled. “Zach here’s a black belt in judo. He can take ’em on. Or we can ask Scott to come with us. He’s pretty scrappy.”

Temple groaned. “ Don’t ask Scott. He’ll be dragging us down there every weekend just because he knows his folks would flip out if they knew he was doing it. I don’t care that he’s like that, but he’s not going to pull me down with him.”

Zach looked at Fairen to see what she would say. He had known these people for only a couple of months, since he had moved to town and started participating in the summer Madrigals concerts at senior centers and music camps. He felt comfortable with Temple and Fairen and her fairly obnoxious friend Kaitlyn, but Scott remained something of a mystery to him. He carried himself like the silverback gorilla of the pack, and perhaps his mother being a teacher was the reason why; on the first day of school, it had taken only minutes for Zach to infer that Scott’s ass was the one to kiss if he had any intention of fitting in. Scott was a senior, and had been at this school all his life; yet in his Abercrombie khakis and rugby shirts, he looked more like he had been airlifted in from a prep school than raised on brown rice and folk tales. Even so, Zach liked the guy well enough. Not that disliking him seemed to be an option.

“Listen,” she said, “I just want to take a few photos. If you don’t want to go, fine. Zach and I will go, and I’m sure Scott will be happy to come along.”

Temple looked to Zach for help.

“I think it’d be pretty cool,” said Zach. “It’s supposed to be based on Germania, after all. It says in there that they offered human sacrifice. Maybe if we make it real creepy, she’ll think it’s genius.”

Temple folded his arms against the desk and dropped his head onto them in resignation. Above it, Fairen smiled at Zach. It wasn’t that Zach believed Fairen’s idea was better. On the contrary, he thought it was risky and dangerous, and not in a fun way. But he felt compelled to support her anyway, based on a bit of wisdom taught to him by his dad: never side against a strong woman, because it never ends well.

1964

Mainbach, West Germany

They lived in a tidy half-timbered home at the end of a country road, there in the rural reaches of Bavaria. Five days a week, sometimes six, Judy’s father climbed into his navy-blue Mercedes sedan and drove to Augsburg Air Base, twenty minutes away by Autobahn. Although he was a civilian, he could have elected for his family to live on base, to have Judy attend the fifth grade at the American school, but John Chandler spurned these things. His daughter was no military brat. He was an expert on the cultures of the Soviet republics, and no expert on culture would wall up his family in cinder-block Americana for two years while the heart of West Germany beat just outside the guard towers.