Frank Portman - King Dork

What the hell was going on around here? It was mind-boggling.

The other thing that happened was hardly less surprising.

Sam Hellerman suddenly started hanging out with the Hillmont High fake-hippie drama crowd. I swear to God.

This came without warning. I walked out of fourth period expecting our paths to converge at around locker number 414, as usual, and to continue on to our usual lunch-period routine of eating at the cafeteria and trying to remain unob-trusive and unharassed till the bell rang. But I walked past locker number 414, and he wasn’t there. I backtracked, looked around, and finally saw him sitting on the lawn near the drama hippies. No, not near —with them. I can’t remember 110

ever having been so surprised. He must have known I’d be looking for him, of course. I tried to get his attention, but he deliberately avoided looking up to the exit of building C and locker number 414, where he had to have known I’d be.

God only knows what they were talking about. He didn’t seem to be doing much talking, but it was hard to tell.

Somehow I couldn’t see him actually becoming a faux-hippie drama person himself—that would be too bizarre. But how would I know? Maybe that’s how it always begins: you sit with them on the lawn during lunch; then, later that night, a pod grows under your bed with a little fake-hippie version of you inside; then the fake-hippie you hatches, kills the original you, and takes your place. Before you know it you’re embroidering your jeans, singing “Casey Jones,” smoking pot from a pipe you made out of an apple, and playing Motel the Tailor in the class production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Could that really happen to Sam Hellerman? Ordinarily I’d have said no, but after witnessing the courtship rituals of Pierre Butterfly Cameroon and Née-Née Tagliafero, I had to admit that my sense of what did and what did not constitute a believable thread in the fabric of reality suddenly didn’t seem very adequate.

I wasn’t about to barge in on that groovy Happening, I can tell you that. Instead, I went on alone to the cafeteria, semidazed, with a lot on my mind.

TH E BAD DETECTIVE

Channel two was showing two horror movies back to back every Wednesday and Sunday night for the whole month of October. I was in my room brooding over this and that—Fiona, my dad’s library, Paul Krebs, and the whole weird Sam 111

Hellerman pod-hippie situation that had erupted earlier that day. Strangely enough, the first movie on channel two that night was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which has pretty much the same pod-oriented story line. It almost made me feel as though I was on the right track with the pod-hippie theory. I put on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and turned the TV

volume almost all the way down, watching the movie while listening to the music, and thinking things over.

I know it doesn’t make much sense, but somehow the puzzle of my dad’s teenage library and the mystery about his death had become connected in my mind. I would decipher part of a cryptic notation in Catcher, CEH 1960, or be struck by something in Brighton Rock, CEH 1965, and it would somehow feel like I’d gotten somewhere on the “accident” issue, too. At weird moments, like that night, I’d also have this crazy sense that the other puzzles in my life, like Fiona and Sam Hellerman’s increasingly odd behavior, were somehow connected to my dad and The Catcher in the Rye as well. I mean, they all got muddled together sometimes.

I’d always wondered why the police, at least to judge from the newspaper articles, appear to have put so little into the investigation of my dad’s death; usually when a cop is killed, they turn the world upside down to see justice done.

Maybe it was obvious to them that it hadn’t been a murder, and the newspaper had just played up the ambiguity. They hadn’t found the car that hit him, which was weird, too. Or possibly they had found it, and it just hadn’t been thought newsworthy? I wished there was someone I could ask about it, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin. The reporters who wrote the articles? Hmm. I would also have given quite a lot to know what he had been working on when the “accident” happened. I’m sure that played a role in the investigation, but if it had ever been mentioned publicly, I had missed 112

it. I even dared to try to ask my mom once, but all she did was cry. And what was Fiona doing tonight? And what the hell was up with Sam Hellerman anyway?

But what this all had to do with tits, back rubs, and dry cleaning, I hadn’t the barest clue.

I’m a bad detective, though, really. I let my emotions and prejudices dictate what I choose to investigate, rather than trying to look at the whole picture with an objective eye. I hadn’t looked at A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies very carefully because they hadn’t been obviously marked up and pummeled like Catcher, CEH 1960, but mostly because I had something personal against them. And because of that I had missed something pretty important.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers had ended, and Rosemary’s Baby had begun. I put on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and turned to look at my dad’s books on my desk. I was reaching for The Journal of Albion Moonlight, CEH 1966, which I had decided would be next on the agenda of my one-man book club, when I accidentally knocked the stack of books to the floor.

A Separate Peace, CEH 1962, fell in such a way that it was open under the bed, and when I went to retrieve it, I noticed a slip of paper that had fallen out. It was half a sheet of graph paper that had itself been folded in half. On the inside of the folded paper was this weird clump of letters, neatly written in the graph paper’s squares in dark blue ink: q

f f q g a r f q q f a s u

x q d f q j g u q y e u m d

q y u m V e q x x u m d q z

g r j g m g f e m H q d h u

g e m e x u m f q P o q e q

q z a y m d u m x q v f q d

u a e d q u t F Y g h u m V

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And on the other side, in black, and hardly less weird: Mon cher monsieur,

The bastard is dead. Thrown into the

fire. Long live Justice and the

American Way.

Regards,

Tit

So Tit was a person? “Tit lib friday”—an appointment at the library with Tit? And someone was dead? And it had something to do with Superman?

The note was dated 6/31, but the six was heavily and awkwardly inked and clearly had originally been a five.

My first thought, influenced no doubt by having been watching Rosemary’s Baby with a Black Sabbath sound track, was that the little parallelogram of letters might be a magic charm or spell of some sort. And maybe “thrown into the fire” alluded to the burning of witches or something like that?

Or perhaps the charm was an element of some kind of death spell, a spell that had apparently worked, if the reference to the “dead bastard” was any indication. You send this magic parallelogram to someone, innocently disguised as an ordinary note, and soon after seeing it, the person dies. Except that that would mean that my dad would have been the one who died. But of course he had died, only not for thirty years or so. Maybe he’d received the note as a kid but hadn’t actually looked at the evil parallelogram till six years ago. Or the death spell had a built-in delay, a kind of long fuse.

And now I had seen it, too. I started to calculate, wondering how long I had. . . .

I got a little creeped out. Then I realized that was nuts.

Getting a grip, I looked at it again. Perhaps it was the 114

kind of puzzle where you search for words and circle them.