Devon leaves it on and crosses the side street to the lot of the 7-Eleven. An open Jeep is parked there, the top down. One boy sits in the passenger seat, two more in the back. They all have their shirts off and they’re all looking at her. She takes them in for only a half second, but she can see they’re her age, maybe a year or two older. Tanned. Dark tats around their arm muscles to make themselves look badass, the two in the back with an earbud in each ear, sharing an iEverything, the one in the front wearing shades, and she steps up onto the concrete walk in front of the store and grabs the door handle and she knows they’re checking out her ass in her black jeans and they may even be calling out to her but she’s got her Dr. Dre phones on and that’s her excuse for completely ignoring them. It’s what she tries to do now, but she catches herself walking into the 7-Eleven just a beat slower than she has to, letting them linger on what she won’t ever give them.
The inside air is almost cold and her skin gooses up. She moves down the aisle past bags of chips and cans of dip to the drink cooler in the rear, the Vegas singer in her head suddenly a hard penis she’s sucking on, that part of it always a letdown, the rush coming before any of them unzipped their jeans or dropped their cargo shorts and she got down on her knees or lay down on a bed or leaned over in the front seat of a car or once squatted up against a tree while her old boyfriend shoved himself into her mouth and throat and his friend caught it all on his phone and then everything that would happen began to happen.
Devon grabs a Diet 7UP. The can is barely cool, though, so she grabs a Coke instead. She won’t eat much later to make up for the calories, and besides she needs the jolt to get through Francis and his “lesson.” Such an old word. One that comes from an old man. But because it comes from him, she can’t hate it.
A new song comes on now. It’s desperate and too fast, the lead singer with his string tie no longer a hard-on to her but a fucking baby crying over how jealous he is. She reaches down and flicks her finger across the screen till she gets one with only instruments. They’re ancient, from a CD Sick gave her from a movie about Jesus. The word Mesopotamia is in her head. And Aramaic. Words from the only class she ever liked from the only teacher she’d ever liked at a school she’d only ever hated. This is music from some land of goats and olive trees, wooden flutes and lambskin drums that beat together like a herd of camels racing or a throng of people pulsing in jeering waves at Jesus forced to carry his cross, the thudding in her chest as her father’s Lexus pulls out of the driveway on a Saturday night, Charlie Fucking Brandt behind the wheel, his thinning hair freshly gelled, Devon’s pathetic mother standing at the window pretending she doesn’t know what she knows, the crying that will come later that Devon will try to block out with her Dr. Dre’s, though she’ll still feel the vibrations of it in the air of her closed bedroom. Dangerous vibrations. Like she feels now as she reaches the counter and the driver of the Jeep is taking her in. He’s bigger than the rest. A faded red tank top over a shelf of chest muscles, blue eyes that ignore her face completely and drop to her breasts, hips, and crotch. Then he’s out the door and in his Jeep and she’s only looking at the man she buys a drink from every afternoon.
He has gray hair and dark skin, his shoulders narrow, ashy spots under each eye that make him look unhealthy. He never looks at her body, only her face, and he half smiles at her and takes her money without ever trying to talk to the girl wearing headphones. A man in her head cries out a song from some mountaintop rising above a desert plain, and she imagines it’s him, the man’s dry fingertips touching her palm as he places there one quarter and one dime, and then she’s out in the heat again and she’s glad to see the Jeep gone. She cracks open her cold Coke and drinks down half of it, swallowing and swallowing, and she sees Jesus down on one knee, that crown of thorns pressing into his forehead, the cross pushing its weight onto his back, and she walks across the lot under the sun, everything matched up again: the heat and this desert music, the smell of something dead coming off the ocean, a crowd judging you, a crowd of people calling you names and wanting only to hurt you.
FRANCIS SITS AT the kitchen table trying not to feel put upon. His grand-niece walked into the house right on time for their lesson, but she was flushed and sweating, the blue stud in her nose a bright contrast to the red headphones over her ears.
“Uncle, do you mind if I take a quick shower first? I stink.”
“No, not at all.” He had practically yelled this for he never knew if she was talking to him through blasting music between her ears or not. She smiled at him and disappeared down the hallway. Moments later he heard her bathroom door close, but that was over forty minutes ago, nearly thirty of it with the water running.
This is not a new situation for him, of course. With the hard cases, it was always a walk along a high wire. Call them to task and then risk having them close themselves off more than they already were; ignore this opportunity to teach Devon something important—about consideration, for example, or someone else’s water bill—and abdicate his responsibility to her entirely. But what was his responsibility? It wasn’t Charlie or Marie who had called him at one in the morning on a Tuesday, but Devon, this young woman he’d known and loved since she was an infant.
“Uncle Francis?” She sounded as if she’d been crying or drinking or both. He was in bed and had been asleep a long while. When the phone rang in the darkness, he thought Beth. It’s Beth. And he sat up and jerked the receiver from its cradle. He needed to know where she’d gone, and he needed to explain himself.
“Uncle?” A plaintive voice. Then there was Beth lying in her casket in pearls and a light blue dress, and Francis was trying to make out the glowing orange numbers of the alarm clock. He began to see the face that was joined to the voice in his ear, his grand-niece who had her mother’s pretty eyes and small mouth, her father’s square jaw. Her own chopped bleached hair.
“Devon?”
“Can I come live with you?”
Her voice had sounded so small and it’d carried him back to the child she’d been just a few years before. Diminutive and thin with black hair she liked her mother to braid for her, how after an Italian Sunday dinner Marie had cooked, Devon liked to sit on the lap of her Great-Uncle Francis and he’d read to her from books she’d pull from her shelf. But once, when she was six or seven, it’d been a fairy tale that ended badly for everyone, something Francis hadn’t seen coming. “Uncle? Did all the kids really get eaten?” And her young voice seemed to come from a part of herself poised to curl up away from the world.
“Devy? What’s wrong? Where are you?”
“I can’t take it anymore. They’re fighting. Everybody’s—”
“Who’s fighting?”
“My fucking parents. Please, Uncle, please—”
There was more to that conversation, but he no longer remembers it. And there was more to Devon’s troubles than her mother and father’s faltering marriage, something he sensed without Marie’s long-winded, worried, and vaguely defensive emails to him either.
Francis sips iced tea, adjusts his glasses, and reads again the sample essay topic from the GED website:
What is one important goal you would like to achieve in the next few years? In your essay, identify that one goal and explain how you plan to achieve it. Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.
But what if the student has no goals? What then? What if his or her only goal is to get through today? Francis had seen so many kids like that over the years, the ones who openly slept on their forearms on their desks, or those who couldn’t sit still and would do anything to make their day more interesting: write cunt eater on the board just before class; flick a pen cap at a slow girl across the room; light up a cigarette ten minutes before the bell rang—Jimmy Swansea, the way he sat back and blew smoke out his nostrils and stared at Mr. Brandt staring at him. What Francis had wanted to do was march down the aisle and grab Jimmy’s throat and jerk him up from his chair, but Jimmy was six
feet and a hundred eighty or ninety pounds, a boy who, like so many of them, was being raised in a neighborhood much like Francis had been raised in too—no fathers, or if they had them, they were bad fathers, drunk or cruel or distant or all three. And mothers who, unlike his own, had given up in some way or another so that these children sitting before him—too thin or too heavy, poor teeth and bad skin, one or two surprisingly fit-looking, like Jimmy Swansea—were to him solitary ghosts just drifting from one demand on them to the next, and on his good days he could usually summon enough compassion for them to at least try to do the right thing.
When Jimmy Swansea lit up his cigarette, the smell of its smoke filling the room, thirty-three young heads turned to him, and Francis knew he’d already lost them for the day anyway.
“Class, anyone who is not smoking a cigarette in this classroom is free to leave now, ten minutes early. If a hall monitor gives you trouble, send him to me. Go.”
Jimmy smiled as if he were the ringmaster in some dark circus of his own making. He inhaled deeply and blew out smoke and looked around at his classmates pulling on their backpacks and glancing back at him as they shuffled out of the room. Then it was just Jimmy and Mr. Brandt, and Jimmy’s expression changed because his circus now had no audience and Mr. Brandt was sitting on a desk across from him. “One day, Jimmy, and it may come sooner than you think, you’ll be dead in the ground and that’s when you’ll know you didn’t even begin to live your life.”
Jimmy was looking straight into Francis’s face. His earlier defiance had been replaced by a blankness, but it was a blankness that seemed to mask deeper fears he tried daily to ignore. He sat up and flicked his ash. Francis ignored it.
“Here’s what I know, Jimmy. You’re afraid there’s no place for you to go but where your parents have gone and the thought of that terrifies you so much you’ll do anything to escape the days leading right to where they are.”
“Don’t talk about my fucking family.”
“I don’t even know your family, Jim. And I mean no disrespect. But I want you to think about what I just said. You’re no clown. In fact, you’re a leader, I can see it. But you’re running from that role because if you step into it and work hard and become who you can truly be, you may just have to betray where you come from.”
Jimmy put the cigarette between his lips. He stood and pushed back his chair and walked out of the room. There was more Francis wanted to say to him: One more interruption in my class, Jimmy, and I’ll break your fucking neck. But those were the kinds of words Jimmy was looking for, the ones his days and nights served him up anyway. And Francis had never planned to use these other words either; usually they just came without forethought. He’d be sitting across from a difficult kid, looking into a face that always appeared to be so much younger up close, and he could feel the words begin to rise in him from who knows where. He suspected his subconscious was taking in things about these kids every day whether he wanted it to or not, and so he allowed his little speeches to come. Sometimes they brought changes in kids, subtle but good ones. Other times, as with Jimmy Swansea, nothing changed and he wondered if he’d wasted his time. A year after that day with the cigarette, Jimmy dropped out and Francis heard he’d joined the Marines, something that surprised him at first but then did not.
Last winter, Beth gone a year, Francis was driving a bit too fast up the highway. It was a Wednesday, close to midnight, and because he could no longer stand his quiet, empty house he’d pulled on his coat and climbed into his cold car just to drive. He hadn’t had a drink since his fifty-third birthday twenty-eight years earlier, but that night he’d wanted one—why not? He no longer had anything left to lose: a family, a job—and he was just on the cusp of deciding to exit the highway in search of a bar or roadhouse when he’d flicked on his radio and his car was filled with madly insistent violins. He had stumbled onto Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony just as it had begun, and now the barely contained hysteria of the strings section was pulling him headlong toward someplace wonderful yet horrible, this long, dark corridor inside him, his wife’s betrayed spirit hurling itself around his head, then he was pushing down on the accelerator to outrun her and there came the flashing of bright blue lights in his rearview mirror and at first they seemed to be part of the violins, the unrelenting violins, and Francis fumbled for the switch and turned off the radio, the silence a relief and an echoing failure as he pulled over and rolled down his window for the state trooper who shined his bright flashlight into his face.
“License and registration, please.” It was just a voice Francis had to squint at, the flashing blue in his mirror a strange respite. The officer pointed his light onto the empty backseat, and Francis handed over what needed to be handed over.
“I thought that was you, Mr. B.” The trooper shined his light into his own face. The strap of his hat was pulled slightly into both cheeks, and because he was smiling he looked fleshy when he wasn’t, but there, beneath thicker eyebrows, were the same blue-gray eyes that had narrowed up at Francis so many years earlier when he’d told Francis not to talk about his fucking family.
“’Member me?”
“Of course I do. Jimmy, right? How are you?” Francis had offered his hand and Trooper Swansea pulled off his leather glove and squeezed.
“Good, real good. Married, kids, the whole shitstorm. You?”
“Retired, Jimmy. I lost my wife last year—” He stopped himself. He had said it only to explain his speeding, and he felt cheap.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. B.”
“Francis.”
Jimmy let out a short laugh. “I can’t. Isn’t that funny? To me, you’ll always be Mr. B.”
“Was I driving too fast?”
“Yeah, there’s black ice. You should take it slow.” Jimmy handed Francis his license and registration.
“No ticket?”
“Not tonight.” Trooper Swansea flicked off his flashlight. He was just a shadow in the road. “Listen, I know I was a handful as a kid. I want to thank you for not taking any of my shit.”
“I had worse, Jimmy.”
“Really?”
“No, I’m just lying to make you feel better.”
Jimmy laughed softly. He patted the roof of Francis’s car. “You take it easy, Mr. Brandt.”
“You too, Jim.” Francis put the car in gear and pulled carefully back onto the highway. In his rearview mirror the flashing blue lights went dark and there were only the headlights of Trooper Swansea growing smaller and smaller till Francis was alone. He drove a long while, it seemed. He kept the radio off.
Mr. B.
How many times in his adult life had he heard grown men and women call him that? And nearly always with respect and affection. He’d be in the grocery store or walking down the street—even in this beach town he’d retired to—or else at the mall to buy a new belt or socks, and he’d pass a graying man or woman whose eyes would come alive and they’d smile widely and wave as if they were still kids. “Hey, Mr. B.!”
Sometimes they’d keep walking, but more often they’d stop and want to chat. If they were doing well (employed, married, still reasonably healthy), they seemed to want to point all that out to him. If they were not doing well (divorced, unemployed, maybe had gained a lot of weight or smoked and drank too much), they did not stop him at all, or if they did, it was a brief conversation where they deflected his questions with vague generalities, or else they tried to talk about their son or daughter whom Francis had also taught.
Walking away from these run-ins, Francis often felt he’d been awarded a mantle of respect he just did not deserve. There were all those years he’d been hungover in class, his mouth dry, his head being squeezed by a large invisible hand, the sea of adolescents before him a blur of flesh and denim he saw only as his tormentors. Then he’d glimpse a girl looking at him. Her eyes would be focused, her lips parted in some kind of private concentration on whatever it was he was trying to tell them, and he’d take a deep breath and wipe the cool
sweat from his forehead, and work harder. The sober years were far better. Even though they did not come until his fifties, he’d felt like an athlete at the top of his game, each day a challenge he seemed to have the tools and desire to overcome. And driving away from Jimmy Swansea that night, Francis no longer wanted a drink. For while he had no work and his wife had left him behind for all time, he did have something to lose, didn’t he? The largely unearned and undeserved respect of hundreds of mothers and fathers, of wives and husbands, of troopers and janitors and teachers and lawyers and electricians and bar owners, all of whom had once been children sitting at desks covered with ink graffiti, tubes of buzzing fluorescent light above, the beckoning world outside their windows while Mr. B stood before them trying to teach them something about reading and writing and the truth.
“Can I have some of that?” Devon emerges from the hallway barefoot in a T-shirt, her short shorts nearly covered by it. Her hair is wet and combed back from her face so that she looks both older and younger.
“Of course.” Francis starts to stand.
“I’ll get it, Uncle.” She breezes past him, smelling of shampoo and clean cotton, and he sits back down and takes the printed page from the GED website and folds it in two. No essays on important goals for now.
She sets a glass of ice on the table in front of Beth’s place. It’s the center chair facing the French door out to the yard, and Devon pours herself tea from the carafe.
“Sugar?” He holds a spoon out toward her.
“No, I’m good.”
“I know you are.”
She smiles, but her eyes seem to darken as she rests the carafe on the table and sits. She nods at the papers before him. “L.A.?”
“Yeah, but we’re going to skip all the rules for now. I just want you to write something.”
“What?”
“An essay. It’ll be part of the test.”
“About what?”
“They’ll give you an assigned topic, Devon, so you need practice with that.”