Lori Ostlund - After the Parade

He made his way down the back stairs and paused to let his eyes adjust. He did not know where the light switch was, but he could discern the Christmas tree, which lay on its side like a giant tumbleweed. Near it was a pair of chairs, facing each other as though they’d been set up to facilitate an interrogation, an interrogation of the sort that required a dim, isolated, innocuous place. He stepped carefully over to the tree and saw the toolbox, just as Bill had described, but as he bent to retrieve it, he heard a low, throaty exhalation of air. It frightened him, the way that human sounds do when you think you’re alone, and he jerked his head toward it.

There, almost close enough to touch, was a young man leaning back against a column. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open wide, like that of a thirsty man trying to catch a drop of rain.

Perhaps Aaron made some small noise, or the boy simply sensed a presence, but his chin dropped and his eyes opened, and he was looking right at Aaron, each regarding the other with surprise. Just as quickly the boy looked down, though not before Aaron had seen the fear in his eyes. Aaron followed the young man’s gaze, down to where darkness shrouded his body. From this darkness rose a form that became another human being, a man with black hair that stood on end as though mussed from a pillow or a lover’s restless hands. It was Melvin.

* * *

Two stories up, in the well-lit faculty room on the second floor, it was easy enough to believe that he had imagined the whole thing, for there in front of him sat Felix eating a potato still steaming from the microwave while Kate passed around a bag of preserved plums, her weekly gift from a Japanese student who was concerned about her digestion. Eugenia was looking through a box of cassette tapes, and when she saw Aaron in the doorway, she said, “Aaron, do you have the Lake Wobegon tapes?”

“I have no interest in Lake Wobegon ,” he said. He was tired of people assuming he did. Nobody asked why he was carrying a toolbox.

Even Taffy was there, sorting through magazines, no doubt in preparation for a cut-and-paste activity of the sort that introductory ESL teachers relied on, snipping out pictures of people and labeling them with straightforward adjectives: HAPPY, SCARED, CONFUSED, EMBARRASSED.

“Taffy,” Aaron said, “may I speak to you in the hallway for a moment?”

He needed to tell someone what he had seen, to try to put into words the mix of emotions he had felt as he walked away from the two men. Taffy followed him out and stood with her hands on her hips. “What is it?” she asked in a voice that made it clear she had more magazines to sort through.

“Actually, it’s nothing,” he said, put off by her tone, but then the words tumbled out anyway. “It’s just that I went down into the basement to get the toolbox, and I came upon two students.” He held up the toolbox as though his story hinged on it.

“They were skipping class?” asked Taffy.

“I’m not sure.” This was a lie. Melvin had been sitting in his desk right up until break began, but noting this meant implicating him.

“You didn’t ask? The basement is off-limits to students. You should’ve asked.”

“They were… busy.”

“Busy?” said Taffy loudly, as though she took offense at the notion of students being busy, but then, perhaps noting his discomfort, she said, “Busy how? Are you telling me that they were doing something down there?”

He nodded.

“Did you recognize them?” she asked.

He thought about the look of shame in their eyes, shame not just at being caught but at the need that had brought them to this moment.

“No,” he said. “It was dark. I didn’t recognize them.”

* * *

The sliding door had been removed and propped against the wall. Bill and four students stood on the balcony smoking, as though being on the balcony were what mattered, the door itself inconsequential. The freed Japanese women regarded Aaron warily. He looked at his watch and saw that somehow only half an hour had passed since the break began. His students were filing back into the room, but Melvin, who never missed class, did not return with them. Nobody commented on his absence, perhaps because Melvin’s absence felt much like his presence. Later, when the afternoon session began, he was back, sitting at his desk, not laughing or smiling or talking — in short, acting as he always did, which meant that there was no way to know whether what had happened in the basement had upset him.

It had upset Aaron, his sense of decorum, for there seemed something unsavory about engaging in such activity in a school, the place where one went to improve one’s mind. The incident had reminded him of something else, something from his childhood that he did not like to think about because thinking about it reminded him of his own shame, never far away, even after all these years. When he was eleven, a man from Mortonville named Ronnie Hopkins was arrested and sent to jail. He was an older man with large hips who was married to a much younger woman with no hips at all; she had a “boyish” figure, people in Mortonville liked to say knowingly, after Ronnie Hopkins was arrested for having sex with a student — a male student — at the vocational school for the developmentally disabled where he worked.

The student was technically an adult, forty, but mentally a boy, and so the police had come to the house where Ronnie Hopkins lived with his hipless wife and three children, and arrested him. While he was in prison, his wife divorced him and his children refused to write, yet when Ronnie Hopkins was released two years later, he came back to Mortonville and settled in one of the trailer houses on the edge of town. That Ronnie Hopkins chose to return had made no sense to Aaron — no sense to anyone in town really — and as Aaron worked to understand, he considered two possibilities: Ronnie Hopkins was punishing himself, or he simply had no sense that the world beyond Mortonville might offer something different. He had always kept to himself, had never sat with the other men in the café, drinking coffee and rolling the tumbler of dice to determine who would pick up the tab for the table. Instead, he came in alone and sat alone, generally to eat a hamburger before work. He was polite, almost apologetic, when he needed something, ketchup or a refill of pop.

After prison, Ronnie Hopkins stayed even more to himself than before. He no longer went into the bank, where his wife, his ex-wife, was a teller, nor did he buy gasoline or groceries in town or come into the café for a hamburger. Yet he still went into Bildt Hardware to pick up some necessity like batteries or nails, even though everyone in town knew that Harold Bildt had become fixated on Ronnie Hopkins. Each night after he finished his paperwork, Harold drove by Ronnie Hopkins’s trailer house, making sure that Ronnie was inside and accounted for. Often, Aaron overheard Harold and his friends discussing Ronnie Hopkins, so he knew also that Harold refused to wait on him when he came into the store. Even if Edna, Harold’s wife, was not around, Harold stayed in his office with his pals, laughing loudly and ignoring Ronnie Hopkins, who would never dream of demanding assistance. He had not been that kind of man before his arrest, and he was certainly not that kind after.

One afternoon Aaron’s mother sent him across the street to let Harold know that the dishwasher was acting up again. Aaron did not like going into Harold’s office, where Harold and his friends talked about sex in coarse language that often made no sense to Aaron and about everything else in the world according to a rigid code of right and wrong that seemed never to require examination or recalibration. As Aaron made his way through the quiet store, past Gardening and Hunting, he came upon Ronnie Hopkins standing in Households, scrutinizing the Scotch tape as though he were picking out a wedding ring, but Households was near the office, so Aaron knew that he was actually listening to the men talk. While Aaron stood observing Ronnie Hopkins, he heard Marvin Hultgren say loudly, “What kind of man wants someone’s business up his rear end anyway?”