John Irving - Until I Find You

“Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he’s even shaving, ” she said, nodding in Jack’s direction.

“Well,” Mr. Ramsey replied, “there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days. There’s not always a choice. ”

“There’s always a choice,” the woman said stubbornly. She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter. “For example,” she continued, “I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning—not that anyone would take care of a blind dog. It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out. What I’m saying is, it’s never not complicated—but there’s always a choice. ”

“I see,” Mr. Ramsey said.

The big woman saw Jack looking at the gun; she put it away under the cash register. “It’s kind of early tonight to shoot anyone,” she said, winking at the boy.

“Thank you for the gas,” Mr. Ramsey said. Back in the car, he remarked: “I forgot that everyone is armed in this country. It would be cheaper and safer if they all took sleeping pills, but I suppose you need a prescription for sleeping pills.”

“You don’t need a prescription for a gun?” Jack asked.

“Apparently not, Jack, but what seems worse to me is that owning a gun must to some degree encourage you to use it—even if only to shoot a blind dog!”

“The poor dog,” Jack pointed out.

“Listen to me,” Mr. Ramsey said, just as the Redding campus rose out of the river mist—the red-brick buildings suggesting the austerity and correctional purpose of a prison, which Jack thought it might have been before it became a school. Redding actually had once been Maine’s largest mental asylum, a state facility that had lost its funding to the war effort in the forties. (That there were still bars on the dormitory windows was what gave the place the appearance of a penitentiary.)

“Jack Burns,” Mr. Ramsey intoned, “if you ever feel like running away from this place, think twice. The environment into which you escape might be more hostile than the school itself, and quite clearly the citizens have weapons. ”

“I would be shot down like a blind dog. Is that what you mean?” the boy asked.

“Well said, Jack Burns!” Mr. Ramsey cried. “A most prescient view of the situation, and spoken like a leading man!”

Jack bore scant resemblance to a leading man when he said a tearful good-bye to Mr. Ramsey in the corridor of his dormitory. Mr. Ramsey wept as he bid the boy adieu.

Jack’s roommate was a pale, long-haired Jewish kid from the Boston area, Noah Rosen, who was kind enough to distract Jack from the urge to weep by expressing his considerable indignation that their room had no door. Only a curtain gave them some measure of privacy from passersby in the hall. Jack instantly shook Noah’s hand and expressed his indignation about the curtain, too. They were engaged in the overpolite exercise of offering each other the choice of the desk with a window view, or the best bed, which was obviously the one farther from the curtain and the traffic in the corridor, when the curtain was flung open (without warning) and into their room stepped an aggressive-looking older boy—a seventh or eighth grader, Jack assumed—and this rude fellow asked, in a loud voice, a question of such offensiveness and hostility that Jack almost abandoned Mrs. Wicksteed’s be-nice-twice philosophy. “Which of you faggots has the little fag for a father?”

“His name is Tom Abbott,” Noah told Jack. “I met him in the washroom half an hour ago, and he called me a ‘kike.’ ”

“Hi, Tom,” Jack said, holding out his hand. “My name’s Jack Burns. I’m from Toronto.” That was being nice once, Jack was thinking, but he foresaw that the math could get confusing in a hurry. (Even when he was an adult, numbers would be his undoing.)

“Was that little fag with the blond beard your father?” Tom Abbott asked Jack.

“Actually, no. He’s a friend of the family,” Jack replied. “He’s a former teacher of mine, my drama coach—a great guy.” Jack turned to Noah and said: “Please help me keep count. I’ve been nice twice. That’s it for nice.” He walked past Tom Abbott, pushing open the curtain on his way into the hall.

“What did you say, faggot?” Abbott asked; he followed Jack into the corridor. “You think someone out here is going to help you?”

“I don’t want any help,” Jack told him. “Just an audience.”

There was a kid who looked like another fifth grader; he was sitting on a steamer trunk in the hall. His roommate stood in the doorway to their room, holding the curtain open. “Hi, I’m Jack Burns—from Toronto,” he told them. “There’s probably going to be a fight, if you’re interested.” Jack kept his back turned to Tom Abbott, calling to a couple of boys down the hall. “Talk about derogatory ! How about calling someone a ‘kike’? How about ‘faggot’? Doesn’t that sound derogatory to you?”

Jack felt a hand on his shoulder; he knew it wasn’t Noah’s. When someone touched you from behind, there was usually a way they expected you to turn. Chenko had told Jack to turn the opposite way—it caught your opponent a little flat-footed. Jack turned the opposite way and stepped chest-to-chest with Tom Abbott, the top of Jack’s head not quite touching Abbott’s chin. Tom Abbott had four or five inches and about thirty or forty pounds on Jack, but Abbott was no wrestler; he leaned into Jack with all his weight.

Jack caught him with an arm-drag and Abbott dropped down on all fours; Jack drove Abbott’s head to his knee and locked up the cross-face cradle. Tom Abbott wasn’t a third as strong as Emma Oastler; at best, he was only two thirds as strong as Mrs. Machado. It was as tight a cradle as Jack had ever had on anyone before. Tom Abbott’s nose was flat against his knee; he was breathing like he had a sinus problem. That was when Jack heard someone say, “That’s a halfway decent cross-face cradle.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jack asked. He couldn’t see who’d spoken, but it had been an older boy’s voice.

“I could show you how to make it tighter, ” the older boy told Jack. The surrounding faces of the kids seemed like fifth-grade faces. Jack had the feeling that the older boy was standing directly behind his head. Jack knew that Tom Abbott couldn’t talk—Abbott could barely breathe. Jack just kept cranking the cradle as hard as he could; he waited. “You can let him up now,” the boy with the older-sounding voice said.

“You shouldn’t call people faggots or kikes,” Jack said. “It’s derogatory. ”

“Let him up,” the older boy said. Jack let Tom Abbott go and got to his feet. “What are you doing in a fifth-grade dorm, Tom?”

Jack had a look at the older boy who was talking. Jack didn’t yet know that the boy was the proctor on their floor, but it was evident he was a wrestler. He was no taller than five-eight or five-nine; by his build, he was in Emma’s weight class or a little heavier. And while his cauliflower ears were mere trifles in comparison to Chenko’s—they weren’t even as bad as Pavel’s or Boris’s—you could tell he was proud of them.

Tom Abbott still wasn’t talking. He seemed resigned to his fate—namely, that the proctor was going to show Jack how he might improve his cross-face cradle. “You want to see tighter ?” the proctor asked Jack.

“Yes, please,” Jack said.

The proctor put Tom Abbott in another cross-face cradle. He stuck one of his knees in Abbott’s ribs, which had the effect of driving Tom’s hips in a diagonally opposed direction from his head and neck. “Not only tighter but more uncomfortable,” the proctor explained.