Dust smears her town. One beaming yellow sun drowns in the smear. Two flags beneath the sun begin the trouble.
There's her school. There are the flags. There's her mother turning back, back toward their small brick home, back toward a sink full of bubbles and breakfast dishes and the George and Square radio show, leaving her-a pale child with large brown eyes, short blonde hair, and a gap between her new front teeth-by herself, scuffing to first grade on a hardened mud rut. There's the creosote bush near the rutted path and the snake hole lurking at its base; her older brother once crammed his bad penmanship there. She sees the hole and the bush and the sun and the flags, the American and the arc of happy ray-beams that Arizona salutes, flapping halfway down their pole.
Flags belong at the top of poles; her big sister draws them that way, and when they fly high they make her feel proud like something good about Arizona on national TV or the singing of hymns in church or the reports of the defeat of the communists in Viet Nam. But she doesn't ask the crossing guard at Fifth Street about the flags; with his badge and his steel bar he looks far too fierce. Instead she takes the sidewalk entrance past the flagpole peering up at the low flopping cloth. Has the janitor forgotten to raise them? Why hasn't anyone at school pointed out his mistake? If the janitor has forgotten, surely Mr. Rykken, their principal, will punish him; he's strict; in his desk he keeps a two-inch thick paddle. But has he arrived yet? Behind a prim round privet his office does look dark. Is he inside watching, angry that she lingers on the steps, that she stares up at the flags? The thought terrifies her. She scurries past his wicked window and down the long open corridor to the playground.
At the water fountain on the playground she falls in line behind that nice big girl named Eloise Moreno. When Eloise spins around and swipes a dribble off her chin, their eyes meet, and she feels brave, so she asks about the flag. Eloise leans against the brick wall and says, confidentially, "They do that if somebody's dead."
A moment later the morning bell delivers its angry, clanging summons. Trudging to class in a very straight line, she thinks about what Eloise said. If someone from the school's dead, she hopes it's Mr. Rykken. Although that's a bad thing to think, it's also too good to ever happen.
Her teacher, Miss Flynn, leads the class into the room. At the back of the line she thinks her everyday morning prayer: may I never see an s ahead in a word, for she has a lisp and it makes people snicker.
They're inside, squealing at the teddy bear on his high shelf in the corner. Dressed like a pirate for Halloween with a black eye patch and a cardboard cutlass, his hat has a Jolly Roger on it, and he sits atop a box that is a boat. "The janitor and Miss Flynn dressed him that way," says Robert Ruiz, her friend across the aisle. "I saw them when I came back after school." Miss Flynn swishes by, sailing a paper with numbers to circle onto their desks. She thinks about asking Robert about the flags-why they hang low-when a thin freckled hand taps her on the shoulder. "Don't forget your speech therapy," says Miss Flynn.
On her way to her speech class a crooked dust devil swirls down from the empty desert lot, from the land everyone says Howard Hughes owns. He's a freak, that Howard Hughes; his nails curl ten inches long. Thinking of him, with the whirlwind around her, she dashes for the door. Although the knob turns, the door stays down. When she tries it again, a foot in the gap helps her snake her way through. The door slams with a loud bang behind.
The little room is dark. There's sunlight from a high, north-facing window, but the bare bulbs surrounding the set of dusty mirrors are switched off. That's a second surprise. She expects to see Mr. Harris in front of the lighted mirrors in a child's chair with his knees nearly at his ears. His dark eyebrows and his dark eyes and the way his hands caress the pages of books please her. But no one is there. The room is empty.
She sits and smooths the pleats of her skirt, trying to remember the beginning of Mr. Harris' lessons about the sounds of words and how to make them. He gives her rhyming hints to conquer her fear of the words that have letters she can hear in her head but not say out loud. "A final s," he likes to say, "should never be a nettle, remember that the sound is like a teeny hissing kettle." His eyes are so gentle and nice whenever he says that rhyme for the fearful lisping plurals: moths, slides, and rustlers. During her last session the past Friday, he recited his rhyme about the r being a kitten that purred deep in her throat and she thought that she would like to hold his hand and show him how she pretended to be the burro, Brighty of the Grand Canyon, on the rocks beside her home. But he said such a strange thing then. "Do you know about the everlasting arms of God?" he asked, staring at the floor. "They can comfort you if ever you feel small." She began to ask, "Do you feel small?" but stopped herself because small began with an s and she hadn't wanted to lisp.
Now she wants to say the word small and his name as well, with a little kettle hiss on the end, for she plans to be better at every sound that day.
Mr. Harris keeps a tin filled with pumpkin candy. She can take some anytime. She searches for it and finds it with its black panther crouching on the lid. Her fingers grasp one crescent-shaped orange slab. "Around the ragged rock the rugged rustlers ran." She repeats that phrase into the mirror and licks the cloying candy once. "Cake, cookies, candies." She practices that too. Sometimes, when there were other kids in speech therapy, she did their sounds, their problem sounds. Then holding the candy between her thumb and forefinger, daubs it on her lips as though she is a starlet in front of her dressing mirror, all unready in her underwear.
For the first time, and with alarm, she notices a row of rag mops and empty buckets. The room is a broom closet. The mops, like evil men, stand at attention, awaiting orders. She shoves her chair backward and flees.
Outside everything's better. The morning sun shines, yellow and round. A tranquil choir of wind carols in the pines. Quiet soothing pines, content with the plain brown birds pecking underneath their boughs. She walks on the sunny strip of the open school corridor, taking an interest in a steady stream of ants that disappear into a concrete crevice; small bits of candy dropped on their trail enrage and excite them. Sitting near the ants on a low brick wall, she chews her candy until her milkman, Mike, roars by in a big green truck. She jumps up then to see him, and the shamrock, and the leprechaun on the side of his truck.
"Hi, Mike!" She leaps up on the wall and waves.
"Oh, Mike!"
"Come back!"
Mike's gone, but a penny of her milk money from her pocket strikes bright ringing sounds on the poles under the overhang. Ta-ting-ding. Ta-ding-ting. She does that for a while. Then she swings some figure eights. Leaning out far, like a lady she's seen at the circus, she notices someone at the far end of the school. It's a janitor rubbing one hand with a red rag.
Her collar tightens against her throat. She pulls herself behind the pole, then peeks out. The janitor tucks the rag in his back pocket and strides straight for the school office.
Back. Back to the speech therapy room. But where to hide? A large paper chart of an open mouth with a graveyard of teeth and a raw red tongue hangs at a tilt on yellowed tape at the side of a filing cabinet. She batters her way behind. And there, between the chart and the filing cabinet, she cowers, listening for the coming footsteps.
A dusty smell of old paper tickles her nose. The big clock on the wall, which has always moved before, doesn't. A sparrow crashes the window and rockets away. The pink plastic dials on the front of Mr. Harris' record player make a funny clown face and a crazy man's face and the face of the man called Dr. Scar on the Chiller TV show. She shudders at the row of threatening mops.
In a flood of light, the door opens. Someone is searching the room. "Come out of there," says an angry woman.
She keeps still.
"I can see your shoes. Come out."
She wriggles free. A sour woman blocks the doorway, tucks her blouse into her skirt. "Are you waiting for Mr. Harris?"
She nods. She hates the word yes (with its sinister last s) and never says it.
> "Come along," the lady orders.
On the way to the office the lady tugs at the standing collar of her dress and picks at her cuffs. "All this trouble," the lady says with a sniff. "I've got to leave early for lunch. I've got company coming. From Chicago. Do you know where Chicago is?"
She shakes her head.
"I didn't think you would. Out here there's no regard for the really important places. New York. Boston. Those are cities. Sometimes I think the entire East Coast of America could fall into the ocean and no one out here would bother to read about it."
"Here she is," the lady announces to a bosomy woman when they enter the office.
"Well," says the bosomy woman, picking up the phone, "our Miss Flynn-" she rolls her eyes upward, "-never collects her mail in the morning."
"Isn't she the oddest bodkin?" says the lady.
The bosomy woman winks. "Sit here," she says. There's a chair beside her desk.
The other lady raps on a door and disappears. That's Mr. Rykken's office. She knows it. The lady going in, knocking first, means he isn't dead.
What's the penalty for swinging on the poles? The two-inch thick paddle? She wonders how hard it will hit, and she knows she'll find out soon.
"The principal will see you," says the lady, reemerging.
Mr. Rykken at his clean steel desk wakes from a trance. His pale gray eyes water; his brown skin stretches into a smile under a mad halo of frowsy, white hair. A cheap print of a young woman picnicking beside a grassy green waterfall is propped on the desk before him, while the room in every corner holds a sense of emptiness, grass-stained golf shoes and a set of encyclopedias, bookmarked with sheets of colored facial tissue. As she sits down in a chair beside his desk, Mr. Rykken scribbles on a pad of paper. When he finishes, he tears off the note and folds it in half. "Did you especially like Mr. Hawwis?"
She nods, frowning; Mr. Rykken makes w's of r's.
"I thought so. I liked him myself. I know you will wemember the many things he taught you."
He glides open his bottom desk drawer. Now it's coming. Now she'll feel the paddle.
Into the drawer he reaches, bringing something out. A box of pencils slides across the desk with the folded note on top.
"Take these to Miss Flynn," he says, tapping them, "I suppose she's short of supplies."
She stares numbly.
"Go on," says Mr. Rykken.
She blunders back two steps.
"Go back to your class."
It's a long way back, a long lonely hall. A boy comes out of the bathroom and pretends to vomit. A ball hits some metal doors hard.
"Has Mr. Harris gone somewhere?" she asks Miss Flynn when she returns to her room.
"My God," says Miss Flynn, scanning the note. "Dear, dear Jesus and God." Miss Flynn sits for a moment with her palm pressed to her forehead. "Put the note in your desk. Take it home to your mother. Hurry now. Don't miss your recess."
She leaves the room, watching Miss Flynn, whose eyes glisten, whose mouth trembles.
***~~~***