Miss Scott kept Rooster after class one Friday and begged him to tell her what was wrong. Why had he drifted to the bottom of the class? She asked in a voice so heartbroken that Rooster started to cry. He cried as hard as when Warthog had beaten him. To see Miss Scott’s suffering expression felt even worse than the kicks and slugs. Rooster cried until his nose started to bleed and his eyes looked bruised like Raccoon’s. But even with Miss Scott’s arms around him, hugging him as she also cried, even then all Rooster could say was, “I can’t tell you. I promised that I’d never tell.”
The following Monday a judge in family court issued a bench warrant, and Rooster was removed to foster care pending an investigation by social welfare agents. Wednesday, Aardvark and Rabbit were also placed in foster homes.
Rooster told himself, “These trials are merely for the short term.” Rooster rallied his comrades, telling them, “The glory of our future will justify these present, temporary hardships.” They had one another, he said. They had Miss Scott’s lovely ministrations. In a few years they’d run the school; as the biggest, smartest kids they’d rule the hallways and the playground. The three suffered now so that their future runty classmates would not be bullied and humiliated.
One day Rooster would be a lawyer. Rabbit, a brain surgeon. Aardvark, a rocket scientist. And they’d each buy their respective parents a country club mansion and a private jet. They’d explain, finally, about the secret pact of Flunk Klub, and everyone would share a hardy guffaw. Their parents would love and admire them even more for the foresight and dedication the three friends had shown as fifth graders.
Sniffing glue also helped. If Rooster sniffed hard enough his mind sputtered and hissed like a lump of burning plastic. He buried his face in a paper bag and breathed until he could feel bugs crawling under his skin and he could hear strangers’ thoughts. One Saturday afternoon Rooster made a game of following Aardvark. Rooster lingered a block or two behind, dodging behind hedges and crouching in the shadow of garbage cans so that he’d not be seen. By doing so he trailed Aardvark all the way to the public library. Watching his friend duck inside, Rooster’s blood boiled with rage. He told himself, Aardvark is plotting to betray us. He is doing assignments for extra credit, and at year end he will move on to the sixth grade and abandon Rabbit and me to our shame!
Rooster went to inform Rabbit of this treason. Rooster looked everywhere: at the foster home, in the alleyway, behind the grade-school Dumpster, but Rabbit wasn’t anywhere to be found. A horrible truth took shape in Rooster’s burnt-plastic mind, but he rejected the idea. When his resignation outweighed his fear, Rooster went to the Natural History Museum. There, studying an exhibit about ancient Egypt, stood Rabbit. To make matters worse, Rabbit had a pad and pencil and was jotting notes.
Rooster, who had founded Flunk Klub, was bereft. He would be held back to repeat fifth grade, alone. His comrades who had shared so much abuse were traitors. Such treason! Their selfishness would doom future generations of ten-year-olds to the same cycle of harassment and misery. How quickly they had forgotten, but Rooster was resolved to remind them.
On Monday, leaning sideways from his desk, whispering, Rooster proposed, “Friends, let us share glue behind the Dumpster during lunch period.”
Innocently, they both accepted. Once the trio was assembled and the paper bag was readied, Rooster graciously allowed his friends to breathe the fumes before him. When Rabbit and Aardvark were thoroughly wasted, their eyes dilated and their slack lips leaking drool, Rooster roundly confronted them. “I expose you!” shouted Rooster. He leapt upon the helpless pair, his knees battering Aardvark and his fists pummeling Rabbit. Rooster shouted, “The library? The museum?” He shouted, “Explain yourselves!” So totally were his friends incapacitated by the toxic fumes of glue that Rooster could slug and stomp them with no resistance.
After lunch period, when Miss Scott almost wept over the sight of Aardvark’s broken nose and Rabbit’s torn ears, the two took their seats at the Reading Table and told her not to fret. “I tumbled down some stairs,” Aardvark said. “It is the price I paid for not thinking more of others.”
Rabbit said, “It was my own clumsiness. My ears are a small loss in exchange for a brighter future.”
So that he might better mentor his friends, Rooster went begging to Miss Scott, asking that they three be billeted in the same foster home. Miss Scott championed his request, and soon Rooster, Rabbit, and Aardvark were sharing the same bedroom, the same bathroom, the same brown paper bag. None was tempted to visit the library or museum. They hung a calendar on the wall of their room and crossed off the remaining days of the school year. They forgot the difference between Idaho, Iowa, and Ohio. They forgot the difference between “repugnant” and “repellant.” By far, the most difficult goal to which they’d ever aspired was to not live up to their enormous potential, but they bravely met the challenge. It wasn’t easy, but they flunked. In summer school they were forced to work extra hard to not make any effort.
On the final day of summer school, they watched Miss Scott open the drawers of her desk and extract photographs…keepsakes…mementos, these she collected in a cardboard box. When her desk was emptied and the box filled, she looked at the three of them in the otherwise deserted classroom, and Miss Scott said, “I’ll miss you, next year.”
“We’ve failed at failing,” Rooster told himself. Despite all their worst efforts they were being sent on to sixth grade. They’d forfeited their prestige, their families, their time, and ultimately they were to be shunted to the next grade where they’d remain at the bottom of the insidious pecking order. Oh, such corruption! In that moment, Rooster’s anger overwhelmed his love for his teacher. If she cared at all she’d never graduate them. To Rooster, it was obvious Miss Scott was merely passing her problems to another teacher. She was discarding them. His blood leapt to his face, his entire body clenched into a fist of rage, and Rooster shouted, “You bitch!”
Aardvark and Rabbit stared at him. Miss Scott stared at him.
“How can you send us to sixth grade?” Rooster demanded. “You call this an ‘education’?” Only because he’d loved her so much, he ran to the front of the room and knocked the cardboard box from her desk. Scattering the photographs and keepsakes on the floor, Rooster ground them under his feet, tearing and spoiling them, and he shouted, “Fucking son-of-a-bitch bullshit stupid little pussy game!”
When everything was ruined, Rooster waited, panting, sweating, for an answer.
Miss Scott didn’t cry. Nobody cried. It was progress, if you could call it that.
“You’re not going to sixth grade,” she said. Making no effort to retrieve her ruined things, Miss Scott took her coat from the back of her chair and slipped her arms into the sleeves. She fastened the buttons. She pulled open a drawer of her filing cabinet and took out her purse. “I’ve had three students fail regardless of my best efforts,” she said, snapping open her purse and fishing out a ring of keys. “Therefore, I’ve lost my job.” Leaving the mess beneath Rooster’s feet, she walked to the door, opened it, stepped through it, and disappeared from their lives forever.
Instead of graduating to sixth grade, Rooster, Rabbit, and Aardvark graduated to marijuana. They’d acquired great skill at being stupid, and their second year came and went much easier. The three never even learned their new teacher’s name. They returned to their respective parents. They persevered.
The next year, instead of graduating to sixth grade they graduated to prescription painkillers. They were twelve-year-old giants towering over ten-year-old runts. At this point they lumbered like great lummoxes among their fellow fifth graders. No one treated them like heroes; no one treated them with so much as an ounce of respect until one spelling bee when Rooster flubbed “receipt” and overheard Gnu giggle. When Recess period rolled around Rooster, Rabbit, and Aardvark stalked out to the playground where they took turns slamming their fists into Gnu’s weeping face. It goes without saying that Gnu wouldn’t tell, and if he did??
?what did it matter? Flunking fifth grade no longer held any terror for them, and to bolster their stupidity, the three friends sat in a quiet corner of dirt and rolled a joint. They smoked it and giggled over what they’d buy when they were rich. As Rooster sprawled on the ground something sharp jabbed into his spine. He reached around and found the object: a little statue, a figure wearing a crown…he almost recognized it but couldn’t quite. Rooster showed the little figure to Rabbit and Aardvark, but they only shook their heads. No one could give it a name. Rabbit licked it with his tongue and bit it with his teeth and declared the figure was made of black plastic. Aardvark proposed they melt it, and to this end he produced a wooden kitchen match. When the little crown caught fire it burned with a guttering blue flame and gave off the odor of feces and burning hair. Whatever the thing was, it offered a spiral of acrid smoke that, without thinking, all three friends leaned forward to inhale.
FETCH
Hank stands with one foot planted a step in front of his other, all his weight balanced on that behind foot. He crouches down on his rear leg, squatting low on that behind leg, his knee bent, his torso, shoulders, and head all twisted and pulled back to the farthest point from the toe of his forward foot. At the moment he exhales, Hank’s rear leg explodes straight, that hip flexing to throw his whole body forward. His torso twists to throw one shoulder forward. His shoulder throws his elbow. His elbow throws his wrist. All of that one arm swings in a curve, cracking fast as a bullwhip. His every muscle snaps that one hand forward, and at the point where Hank should fall onto his face, his hand releases the ball. A tennis ball, bright yellow, flying fast as a gunshot, the ball flies until almost disappearing into the blue sky, following a yellow arc as high as the sun.
Hank throws with his entire body, the way a man’s supposed to throw. Jenny’s Labrador retriever bounds after the tennis ball, a black smear shooting toward the horizon, dodging between the tombstones, then bounding back, tail wagging, and drops the ball at my feet.
How I throw a ball, I only use my fingers. Maybe my wrist, a little, I have skinny wrists. Nobody ever taught me any better so my throw bounces off the first row of tombstones, ricocheting off a mausoleum, rolling through the grass, and disappears behind somebody’s grave marker, while Hank grins at his feet and shakes his head from side to side, saying, “Good throw.” From deep down in his chest, Hank hawks a wad and spits a fat throat oyster into the grass between my bare feet.
Jenny’s dog only stands there, part black Lab, part stupid, looking at Jenny. Jenny looking at Hank. Hank looking at me and saying, “What’re you waiting for, boy, go fetch.” Hank jerks his head at where the tennis ball has vanished, lost among the headstones. Hank talks to me the same way Jenny talks to her dog.
Jenny twists a strand of her long hair between the fingers of one hand, looking behind us to where Hank’s car sits in the empty parking lot. The sunlight shining through her skirt, no slip underneath, the light outlining her legs all the way up to her panties, she says, “We’ll wait. I swear.”
Written on the close-up tombstones, no dates come any newer than 1880-something. Just guessing, my throw landed around the 1930s. Hank’s throw went all the way back to the stupid Pilgrims on the stupid Mayflower.
With my first step I feel wet against the underneath of my bare foot, some ooze, sticky and still warm. Hank’s spit smears under my heel, webbed between my toes, so I drag my foot on the grass to wipe it. Behind me, Jenny laughs while I drag that foot up the slope toward the first row of graves. Bouquets of plastic roses stick in the ground. Little American flags twitch in the breeze. The black Lab runs ahead, sniffing at the dead, brown spots in the grass, then adding its piss. The tennis ball isn’t behind the row of 1870s graves. Behind the 1860s, more nothing. Names of dead folks stretch away from me in every direction. Beloved husbands. Cherished wives. Adored mothers and fathers. The names stretch as far as I can see, getting pissed on by Jenny’s dog, this army of folks lying dead just below us.
With my next step, the ground explodes, the mowed grass geysers with land mines of cold water, hosing my jeans and shirt. A booby trap of sheer, freezing cold. The underground lawn sprinklers drive sprays of water, blasting my eyes shut, washing my hair flat. Cold water hits from every direction. From behind me comes laughter, Hank and Jenny laughing so hard they fall into each other for support, their clothes, wet and sticking to Jenny’s tits and molded over the shadow of her bush. They fall to the grass, still hugging, and their laughter stops as their wet mouths come together.
Here’s the dead pissing back on us. The ice-cold way death can hit you in the noontime of a sunny day just when you’d never expect.
Jenny’s stupid Labrador barks and snaps at a stream of water, biting the sprinkler head next to me. Just as fast, the automatic sprinklers drop back into the ground. My T-shirt drips. Water runs down my face from the soaked mop of my hair. Sopping wet, my jeans feel stiff and heavy as concrete.
Not two graves away, the ball sits at the base of a tombstone. A headstone not coated in dust or moss. Fresh-carved in granite, the words “Beloved Husband,” the name “Cameron Hamish,” and this year’s date. Some poor dead bastard. Pointing my finger, I tell the dog, “Fetch,” and he runs over, sniffs the tennis ball, growls at it, then runs back without it. Walking over, I pick up the wet yellow fuzz. I tell the tombstone, “Sorry to disturb you, Cameron. You can go back to feeding the worms, now.” Stupid dog.
When I turn to throw the ball back to Jenny, the grass sloping down below me is empty. Beyond that, the parking lot spreads, empty. No Hank or Jenny. No car. All that’s left is a puddle of black oil dripped out of Hank’s engine pan, and two trails of their wet footprints walking out and stopping where the car was parked.
In one huge throw every skinny muscle the length of my arm whips, heaving the ball downhill to the spot where Hank spit. I tell the dog, “Fetch,” and it only looks at me. Still dragging one foot, I start back downhill, until my toes feel warm, again. This time, dog piss. Where I stand, the grass feels coarse. Dead. When I look up, the ball sits next to me, as if it’s rolled uphill. Where I can see, the cemetery looks empty except for thousands of names carved in stone.
Throwing the ball, again, down the long slope, I tell the dog, “Fetch.” The dog just looks at me, but in the distance the ball rolls closer and closer. Returning to me. Rolling up the slope. Rolling uphill.
One of my feet is burning, the scratches and bunions of my bare foot stinging with dog piss. My other foot, the toes fused with Hank’s foaming, gray spit. My shoes, in the backseat of his car. Gone. Me, dumped here to babysit her stupid pooch while Jenny’s run off.
Walking back through the graves, I drag one foot to wipe it clean on the grass. With the next step, I drag the other foot. Dragging each foot, I leave a trail of flattened skid marks in the lawn all the way to the empty parking lot.
This tennis ball, now the dog won’t go near it. In the parking lot, I stand next to the pool of dripped crankcase oil, and I throw the ball, again, chucking it hard as I’m able. The ball rolls back, spiraling around me on the hot, gray cement, forcing me to keep turning to watch it. The yellow ball circles me until my head’s spinning, dizzy. When the ball stops at my foot, I throw it, again. Rolling back to me, this time the ball takes a detour, rolling against the grade, breaking that Law of Gravity. The ball circles in the pool of Hank’s crankcase oil, soaking up the black muck. Stained black, the tennis ball rolls within kicking distance of my bare foot. Looping, jumping, doubling back on itself, the ball leaves a trail of black across the gray parking lot, then it stops. A black tennis ball, round as the period at the end of a sentence. A dot at the bottom of an exclamation point.
The stupid black Lab shakes, too close, spraying me with dog water from its sopping fur. The stink of wet dog and spatters of mud stick everywhere on my jeans and T-shirt.
The ball’s oily, black trail forms letters. Cursive letters spell words across the concrete parking lot, writing the sentence: “Please help!” r />
The ball returns to the puddle of engine oil, soaking its fuzz with black, then rolling, writing in big, loopy handwriting: “Rescue her.”
As I reach to pick it up, just squatting down to grab the tennis ball, it bounces a few steps away. I take a step, and the ball bounces, again, reaching the edge of the parking lot. As I follow, it bounces, coming to a complete stop as if glued to the road, leading me out of the cemetery. The blacktop burning hot and sharp under my bare feet, I follow, hopping from one foot to the other. The ball leads, bouncing a row of black dots down the road ahead of me like the twin tracks of Jenny and Hank’s footprints leading nowhere. The black Lab follows. A sheriff’s patrol car cruises past, not slowing. At the stop sign, where the cemetery road meets the county road, the ball stops, waiting for me to catch up. With each bounce, the ball leaves less oil. Me, not feeling much, I’m so pulled forward by this vision of the impossible. The ball stops bouncing, stuck in one spot. A car trails us, crawling along at the same speed. The horn honks, and I turn to see Hank behind the wheel, Jenny sits beside him in the front seat. Rolling down the shotgun window, Jenny leans her head out, her long hair hanging down the outside of the car door, and she says, “Are you crazy? Are you high?” With one arm, Jenny reaches into the backseat, then reaches out the car window, holding my shoes in her hand. She says, “For crying out loud, just look at your feet…”
With each step, my raw feet leave behind a little more red, blood, my footprints stamped in blood on the pavement, marking my path all the way from the cemetery parking lot. Stopped in this one spot, I’m standing in a puddle of my own red juice, not feeling the sharp gravel and broken glass on the roadside.
One bounce ahead of me, the tennis ball waits.
Sitting behind the steering wheel, Hank twists one shoulder backward, hooking his arm over the seat back and pinching the tab of the door lock between two fingers. Pulling up the tab, he reaches down and yanks the handle to throw open the door, saying, “Get in the car.” He says, “Get in the fucking car, now.”