ESSENTIALLY, I HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON.
Just which specific aspects of the U.S. Bill of Rights were being covered by Mr. Johnson while this story of Ruth Simmons and her lost Cuffie filled in panel after panel of the window I cannot say, as by that point it is fair to say that I was absent in both mind and spirit. This tended to happen throughout this period. To be fair, this was the reason why Mrs. Roseman and the administration were determined to keep me away from distractions of all kinds—prohibiting Caldwell and I from sitting near each other, for instance. I do not remember even noticing just when it was that the exterior’s dogs broke off their initial attachment and began moving in circles of somewhat different size, sniffing at the ground and the mud of the ballfield’s infield. The temperature outside was an estimated 45 degrees; it was melting that winter’s second to last snow. I do remember that it snowed heavily the next day, March 15, and that, as school was closed on the day after the trauma, we were able to go sledding after several interviews with the Ohio State Police and a special Unit 4 psychologist named Dr. Biron-Maint, who had a strangely configured nose and smelled faintly of mildew, and that later on that day Chris DeMatteis’ sled had tipped to one side and struck a tree, and his forehead had had blood all over it while we all watched him keep touching his forehead and cry in fear at the reality of his own blood. I do not remember what anyone did to help him; we were all likely still in shock. Ruth Simmons’ mother, whose name was Marjorie and had grown up admiring herself in different dresses in the mirror and practicing saying, ‘How do you do?’ and ‘My, what a funny and amusing remark!’ and dreaming of marrying a wealthy doctor and hosting elaborate dinner parties of doctors and their wives in diamond tiaras and fox wraps at their mansion’s beautiful burled walnut dining room table in which she looked almost like a fairy princess under the chandelier’s lights, now, as an adult, looked puffy and dull-eyed and had a perpetually downturned mouth as she drove the battered car. She was smoking a Viceroy and had the windows rolled up and was not even rolling down the window to call, ‘Cuffie!’ as the kindly, long suffering father before her had done. There was backstory above, in which the blind infant Ruth Simmons was lying in her bassinet in her tiny dark glasses holding out her arms and crying for her mother while the mother would stand with a glass with an olive with a toothpick in it and a downturned mouth looking down at the blind baby and then turning and looking at herself in the room’s ancient, cracked mirror and practicing giving a bitter, sardonic little curtsy without spilling her glass. Usually the baby would give up and stop crying after a while and just make small whimpering noises (this occupied only two or three panels). Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Ruth Simmons’ Playdoh figurine looked almost disfigured, less like a dog than a satyr or Great Ape which something heavy had run over. Her beautiful little snow white face with its dark glasses and hair ribbon is seen tilted upwards several degrees as she offers innocent, childlike prayers for Cuffie’s safe return, praying that her father has perhaps spotted Cuffie huddled inside a tire in one of their seedy neighbors’ unkempt yards, or has spotted Cuffie loping innocently along the side of Maryville Road and has stopped the car in the middle of traffic on the busy thoroughfare and knelt down with open arms by the side of the road for the dog to come running joyfully into his arms, her blind fantasies’ thought-bubbles occupying several of the panels that had previously been taken up by the actual scene of a frightened and limping Cuffie being harried by the two hardened, feral adult dogs along the seedy east bank of the Scioto River, which even in 1960 was already starting to smell bad above the Griggs Dam and had rusty tin cans and abandoned hubcaps scattered along its east bank by Maryville Road, and which my father said he could remember being able to fish right out of with a string and safety pin circa 1935, in knickers and a straw hat, with his parents in their own straw hats picnicking behind himself and his brother (who was later wounded in Salerno, Italy, in World War II, and had a wooden foot that he could unstrap and take right off with its special enclosing shoe provided by the GI Bill, so the shoe was never empty even when it was in his closet when he went to sleep, and worked for a manufacturer of cardboard dividers for different kinds of shipping containers in Kettering) in the shade of the many beech and buckeye trees that thrived along the Scioto before the University unduly influenced the city fathers into building the Maryville commuter road to more conveniently connect Upper Arlington to the West Side proper. With the faithful dog’s lustrous brown eyes now moist with regret at leaving the yard, and with fear, because Cuffie was now far, far away from home, further by far than the young little dog had ever been before. We have already seen that the puppy was only one year old; the father had brought him home from the A.S.P.C.A. as a surprise on the previous Good Friday, and had allowed Ruth to bring Cuffie along to Easter services at St. Anthony’s Catholic Church (they were Roman Catholics, as poor people in Columbus often were) in a small wicker basket covered with a checkered cloth from which only the dog’s wet, inquisitive little nose had shown, and he had been every bit as quiet as Ruth’s mother had said he better be or else they were all going to have to get up and leave even if it was right in the middle of the services, which for Roman Catholics would have been a terrible sin, even though one of Ruth’s elder sisters had surreptitiously kept poking at one of the puppy’s paws with a hatpin to try to get it to cry out, which it didn’t, none of which Ruth had had any idea about as she sat on the hard wooden pew in her dark glasses, holding the basket in her lap and swinging her little legs with gratitude and joy at having a puppy for a companion (as a rule, the blind have a natural affinity for dogs, whose eyesight is not very good either). And the two feral dogs (whose fur was matted, and their ribcages showed, and the piebald one had a large greenish sore near the base of its tail) were hard and cruel, and showed their teeth at Cuffie whenever he faltered, even when they went through the pools of half-frozen mud and sludge that plashed into the river out of the mouths of huge cement pipes with curse words written on them with spraypaint, and even though Cuffie was just a dog and didn’t have thought-bubbles as you or I do, the look in his soft brown eyes spoke volumes as the piebald dog suddenly leapt up into one of these huge pipes and its matted head and tail with the big sore disappeared, and the larger, black dog began growling at Cuffie to follow into the pipe, which was not gushing but had a trickle of something dark orange and terrible smelling (even to a dog) out of it, and in the next square Cuffie was forced to put his little forelegs up onto the lip of the cement pipe and try to pull his hindquarters up into it with the black dog growling and chewing at his rear tendons. The dog’s illustrated facial expression said it all. It conveyed that Cuffie was very frightened and unhappy and wishing only to be back in the fenced yard wagging its brindle tail and waiting for the tap, tap sound of Ruth’s miniature white cane coming up the sidewalk to greet Cuffie and bring him in to rub his stomach and whisper to him over and over how beautiful he was and how wonderful his ears and little soft paws smelled, and how lucky they all were to have him, as the black dog leapt easily up onto the lip of the trickling culvert behind Cuffie and, with an ominous look to either side, disappeared into the round black mouth of the pipe, completing the horizontal row.
Meanwhile, in the inception of the real incident, Mr. Johnson had evidently just written KILL on the chalkboard. The most obvious flaw in my memory of the incident as a whole is that much of the trauma’s inception unfolded outside my awareness, so intently was I concentrating on the window’s mesh squares, which in the narrative I was filling the next row of with panels of the unhappy mother, Mrs. Simmons, weaving the family auto slowly down the snow filled streets of the neighborhood while she plucks at various grey hairs that she is trying to find and get a grip on with tweezers in the rearview mirror, as well as scenes of the father, outdoors in the falling snow, operating a large, gas-operated appliance which looks a little like a power lawnmower but is larger and has twice as many rotating blades, as well as being the distinctive bright orange that spo
rtsmen and hunters normally wear, which is the mansion’s wealthy owner’s company’s trademark color, and is also the color of the special snowpants the owner makes the stoic and uncomplaining father wear, beginning to push the machine through the dense, wet snow of the mansion’s driveway. The driveway is so long that by the time the father has finished snowblowing the whole thing he will have to start back at the beginning again, as the snowfall (which you can also see in the background out the mesh window of the State School for the Blind and Deaf classroom, even though little Ruthie obviously is unaware) is becoming heavy and turning into a real snowstorm, with the father’s thought-bubble in one panel saying, ‘Oh, well! It is not so bad, at least I am lucky to have a job, and I am certain that good old Marjorie will find Cuffie in time to bring our pet home in time for Ruthie’s return from school!’ with a patient, uncomplaining expression on his face as the loud, heavy appliance (which the mansion’s owner had patented and his company manufactures, which is why he makes Mr. Simmons wear the undignified orange pants) erases the driveway’s white like a chalkboard being cleaned with damp paper towels by someone serving out an admin- istrative detention. It was thus that I did not literally see or know what began to unfold during the Civics class, although I received the full story so many times from classmates and authorities and the Dispatch that in memory it nearly feels as if I were present as a full witness from the beginning. Dr. Biron-Maint, the administrative psychologist, gave his professional opinion that I was a full witness, but had been too traumatized (shellshocked was his stated term; each child’s parents received a copy of his evaluation) to be able to acknowledge the memory of it. However crude or erroneous, my role in all legal proceedings after the incident was thus limited by Dr. Biron-Maint’s diagnosis, which my mother and father assented to in writing. Such is adult memory’s strangeness, though, that I can still recall in great detail the sight of Dr. Biron-Maint’s nostrils, which were of noticeably different shapes and size, and can remember trying to imagine various things that might have happened to his nose in life or perhaps even in his mother’s stomach as a baby to produce such a marked anomaly. The clinician was very tall, even by adult standards, and I spent much of the required interview looking up at his nostrils and lower jaw. He also smelled the way someone’s bathmat can smell in the summer, though I did not identify this scent as such at the time. To be frank, the consensus was that Dr. Biron-Maint gave many of us the willies even more than Mr. Johnson, although having to watch something like that would obviously be traumatic for anyone, especially young children.
LATER, MR. DEMATTEIS WAS FORCED OUT OF THE WHOLESALE NEWSPAPER DELIVERY TRADE BY WHAT CHRIS DEMATTEIS SAID WERE ELEMENTS OF ORGANIZED CRIME THAT WERE MOVING DOWN FROM CLEVELAND AND TAKING OVER ALL NEWSPAPER AND COIN OPERATED VENDING MACHINE BUSINESSES IN THE STATE, FORCING MR. DEMATTEIS TO TAKE A JOB AS A TAXI DISPATCHER, BUT AT LEAST CHRIS STOPPED HAVING TO GET UP SO EARLY THAT HE COULD NOT STAY AWAKE IN HIS CLASSES, AND LATER DISCOVERED A NATURAL TALENT FOR MANUAL MACHINE OPERATION IN MR. VAUGHAN’S INDUSTRIAL ARTS CLASS AT FISHINGER, AND IS NOW A SHOP STEWARD AT PRECISION TOOL & DIE ONLY A FEW BLOCKS FROM MY OWN FIRM’S OFFICES.
In the midst of writing on the chalkboard, illustrating that the phrase due process of law appears identically in both the Vth and XIVth Amendments, Mr. Richard Allen Johnson inadvertently inserted something else in the phrase, as well—the capital word KILL. Ellen Morrison, Sanjay Rabindranath, and some other of the class’s more diligent pupils, copying down word for word what Mr. Johnson was putting up on the chalkboard, discovered that they had written due process KILL of law and that that, too, was what was on the chalkboard, which Mr. Johnson had stepped one or two steps back from and was looking up in evident puzzlement at what was written there. At least, many classmates later reported this as puzzlement because of the way, even though the sub was facing the chalkboard and thus had his back to the class, his head was now cocked curiously over to the side, not unlike a dog’s when it hears a certain type of high sound, and he remained that way for a moment before shaking his head slightly as if shaking off some confusion and, using the board’s eraser to erase the KILL of law, replaced it with the correct of law. As usual, Chris DeMatteis had his head on his desk in the second row and was asleep, because his father and older brothers ran a newspaper delivery service for newsstands and retail vendors covering over a third of the city early in the morning, and often they made DeMatteis get up as early as 3:00 in the morning to pitch in and help, even if it was a school day, and DeMatteis often fell asleep in his classes, especially if it was a sub. Mandy Blemm, who most of the other children at R. B. Hayes knew very little about in terms of the realities of her personal life or history (both I and Tim Applewhite had been placed in Miss Clennon’s slow readers class with Blemm in 3rd grade, although Applewhite later got bused to a special school in Minerva Park, as he just could not read at all—he literally was a slow reader, whereas Blemm and I were not), rarely ever even took her book or pencils out in class, and always sat looking at the desktop in a withdrawn or sullen manner, and never paid attention or completed any of her assignments, until the school authorities reached a point where they became so concerned that they began making plans to have Blemm transferred to Minerva Park as well, at which time she would abruptly begin completing her assignments and being involved in classroom goings on. Then, as soon as the administrative heat was off, she would once more revert to just sitting there staring at her desktop or biting dead skin off of the sides of her thumbnail very slowly for the whole class period. She had also been known to eat paste. Everyone was a little afraid of her. At the same time, Frankie Caldwell, who now works in Dayton as a quality control inspector for Uniroyal, had his head down and was drawing something on his theme paper with great precision and intensity. Alison Standish (who later moved away) was absent again. Meanwhile, the Xth Amendment (the first I-IX are what comprise the familiar Bill of Rights, although the Xth Amendment was adopted simultaneously in 1791) contains the phrase The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, and so forth, which Mr. Johnson, while at the board, according to Ellen Morrison and every other pupil taking notes, wrote as The powers not delegated KILL to the United States THEM by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it KILL THEM to the States, at which time there was again, evidently, another long classroom silence, during which the pupils all began looking at one another while Mr. Johnson stood with his back to the room at the board with his hand with the yellow chalk hanging at his side and his head again cocked to the side as if he were having trouble hearing or understanding something, without turning around or saying anything, before picking up the board’s eraser once again and trying to continue the lesson on Amendments X and XIII as though nothing unusual had taken place. According to Mandy Blemm, by this time the room was deathly quiet, and many of the pupils had an uneasy expression on their face as they dutifully crossed out the THEM and KILL THEM that Mr. Johnson had initially inserted in the quotation. At this same time, in the window, a terrible series of events was transpiring for Ruth Simmons’ father, who in a diagonal series of panels in the protective mesh was stoically and uncomplainingly clearing the long black driveway of snow with the enormous Snow Boy brand device that the owner’s company engineers had invented in his R&D laboratories, which was why he was now so wealthy. This was just the beginning of the era of power lawnmowers and snow removers for ordinary consumers. Meanwhile, Mrs. Marjorie Simmons’ car was stuck in the street’s heavy snow and was idling with the windows so fogged up that the observer had no idea what she might be doing in there, and Cuffie and the hardbitten feral dogs were presumably still traversing the lengthy industrial pipe that ran from the Scioto River to a large industrial-chemical factory on Olentangy River Road, as for several consecutive panels there are depictions of the cement exterior of the pipe but no visible activity or anything exiting the pipe at either end except for the ominous orange trickle into the river. The whole Civics classroom had
become very quiet. The total number of words on the chalkboard after the erasures was either 104 or 121, depending on whether one counted Roman numerals as words or not. If asked, I could probably have told you the total number of letters, the most and the least used letters (in the latter case, a tie), as well as a number of different statistical functions by which the relative frequency of different letters’ appearance could be quantified, although I would not have put any of these data in this way, nor was I even quite aware that I could. The facts about the words were simply there, much the way a knowledge of how your tummy feels and where your arms are are there regardless of whether you’re paying attention to these parts or not. They were simply part of the whole peripheral environment in which I sat. What I was, however, wholly aware of was that I was becoming more and more disturbed by the graphic narrative that was unfolding, square by square, in the window. While compelling and diverting, few of the window’s narratives were ever gruesome or unpleasant. Most had upbeat—if somewhat naive and childish—themes. And it was only on days when there was enough time before the bell rang for the end of Civics that I got to see how they ended. Some carried over from the prior day, but as a practical matter this was rare, as it was difficult to hold all the unfolding details in mind for that long.