An Ocean in Iowa

  Suddenly Scotty was making his way down the aisle, and his classmates were whispering, “Make the bird, make the rabbit, make the alligator!”

  Mrs. Boyden left the projector light on for Scotty. She looked forward to watching him, of course, but she encouraged him for a more important reason. Early in her career, Mrs. Boyden had taught a young girl who loved to announce her assessment of the weather. This girl did so every morning after the Pledge of Allegiance. This girl grew up to be a weather-woman for a station in Chicago. Mrs. Boyden felt somehow she had done her part to nurture. She wondered if the same might hold true for Scotty Ocean; perhaps he would grow up to be a puppeteer and one day work on the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie show.

  One could never know.

  Scotty approached the center of the room. He stuck one hand in front of the projector light. It looked huge on the screen. He made a fist. The class grew quiet. Mrs. Boyden leaned on the windowsill, ready, too, to enjoy the show. Most classmates called out for the bird, a few requested the shark, and Carole Staley begged for the butterfly. Carole Staley’s mother had told Carole, who told Scotty that she (Carole) had been, in a previous incarnation, a butterfly. Carole suggested perhaps she and Scotty had maybe been butterflies together. Scotty could think of no worse punishment than being the same creature as Carole Staley.

  He held his fist motionless for a long time. The requests for various animals came pouring in. Finally, Mrs. Boyden quieted the group. “Scotty won’t do his show until everyone is quiet. Isn’t that right, Scotty?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  When all was quiet, except for the hum of the movie projector, Scotty began. “This is a new bird I’ve been working on,” he said. “The first time ever seen.”

  “Ooo,” whispered some classmates. Mrs. Boyden beamed.

  Scotty extended one finger, his forefinger, and wiggled it slowly. “This is a special kind of bird,” he announced. “The third base bird!”

  Only David Bumgartner and Dan Burkhett laughed. Only Bumgartner and Burkhett knew the meaning of third base and only because Scotty had told them. Mrs. Boyden apparently knew the meaning, too, because she promptly turned off the projector and sent the others off to an early recess. She then informed Scotty he would be staying inside.

  The worst punishment.

  As the others played outdoors—skipping rope, swinging, going down the slide and up the rope ladder—Scotty sat at his desk.

  Mrs. Boyden crossed her flabby arms and stared at Scotty. Then she took out a sheet of paper. “I’m going to write your father a note. What do you think I should say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I think I have to tell him something.”

  “No! Please!”

  Scotty imagined the Judge’s reaction: big hairy fists coming down hard on the kitchen table, the Judge’s voice, low and absolute, yelling so loud it hurt his ears, and Scotty undoing his belt and lowering his pants and feeling the slap of those hands, the sting from the Judge’s wedding ring, and so Scotty begged Mrs. Boyden, “Please, don’t write a note.”

  Mrs. Boyden stopped. Scotty was about to burst. So she put away her paper. “Where would a boy like you learn about such things?”

  Scotty shrugged.

  “Who taught you such an awful gesture?”

  Scotty stared at his desk.

  “Not your father, not your sisters.”

  “No.”

  Mrs. Boyden told him to approach her desk. She handed Scotty a blank sheet of paper. He returned to his desk where he used a green Husky pencil to write “I am sorry” over and over.

  After the other kids returned from recess, it was the time of day when all her students put their heads down on their desks, and Mrs. Boyden would read a story.

  “Today’s story is one of my favorites. ‘Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.’ It’s the story of a steam shovel that digs himself into a very deep hole.”

  Mrs. Boyden began to read. Glancing up at the class, she noticed that Scotty was still hunched over the piece of paper, writing “I am sorry.” Mrs. Boyden stopped reading and said, “That’s enough, Scotty.”

  But Scotty continued anyway. He was in the middle of printing his thirty-seventh “sorry” when the sheet of paper was taken away.

  Scotty looked up at his teacher.

  “That’s enough,” she said with a smile. She returned to her stool and continued reading.

  ***

  After school, Mrs. Boyden worked on her lesson plan for the following day. Before going home, she put her desk in order. She crossed to the windows to close the blinds. These were her end-of-the-day rituals, and they gave her a sense of completion. Passing by the desks of her students, she often saw remnants of the day: a scrap of paper, a broken crayon, some indication that minutes earlier little boys and girls had been learning.

  When Mrs. Boyden came to Scotty’s desk in the middle of the classroom, she suddenly stopped. In all her years of teaching, she’d never seen anything like it. “I am sorry” was printed countless times in pencil across the surface of Scotty’s desk. So many I am sorrys that it was obvious to her that Scotty had gotten the point, so many that Mrs. Boyden began to feel ill. So she took a bucket from under the classroom sink, filled it with warm, sudsy water—she wet a sponge and scrubbed Scotty’s desk clean.

  (13)

  Sometimes at night when he bathed, Scotty felt a vague memory, blurry, but it hung in his thoughts. Whenever he bathed, he concentrated hard to fight through its fuzziness. He remembered sitting in warm water at one end. Across from him, covered in bubbles, two brown nipples and a clump of hair between her legs, his mother. She’d hand him soap. He washed, or so he thought, he didn’t know. Only the breasts, her hair, and the space in between her legs held any clarity.

  Don’t get fuzzy, he thought.

  Scotty’s baths kept getting longer. He scrubbed and scrubbed, washing himself repeatedly, so that when Joan returned, she’d find him clean, smelling nice, no dirt under his nails. And the longer he stayed in the tub, he thought, the better he could remember her.

  (14)

  It was a Saturday afternoon in November when Tom Conway showed Scotty Ocean his father’s hidden treasure.

  His parents’ closet had been padlocked but not with precision. Tom had figured out how to get the closet door opened, and he allowed Scotty a glimpse. Hanging from the wall were machine guns, bayonet blades—a cache of weapons.

  “Authentic,” Tom Conway said.

  Scotty reached to touch the muzzle of an M-16 rifle. In drawers were pistols and knives. In a shoebox, wrapped like Christmas ornaments, were two hand grenades.

  “You pull the plug—then you toss.”

  Scotty said, “Can I touch one?”

  Tom said, “For a buck.”

  Scotty paid him later in nickels and dimes. He held the grenade. He felt its ridges. It was heavy. Heavy like a bowling ball but the size of a baseball.

  “So you pull this?”

  “Yep.”

  Scotty imagined yanking out the metal pin.

  “But don’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You only got seconds after you pull the pin.”

  “Guys in movies use their mouth.”

  “I know, Ocean.”

  “Ow.” Scotty imagined his teeth biting into a grenade. He wondered if his teeth would snap. “Ow,” he said again.

  “Quit going ‘ow.’”

  “What if you pulled the pin and forgot to throw it—or didn’t throw it in time?”

  “It’d blow off your hand, your face.”

  “You’d die?”

  “Maybe. You’d get metal chunks under your skin. You’d wish you were dead.”

  (15)

  The week before Thanksgiving, Brian Eldridge had his eighth birthday party. His three best friends slept over and then other boys including Scotty arrived for cake and games.

  Claire remarked that Brian Eldridge just wanted more presents. “And the more guests, the m
ore presents, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” Scotty said. Of course Claire was right.

  Brian had been given an Art-a-Matic. A red plastic boxlike container with an electric motor that spun five-by-seven-inch white cards. Plastic bottles of the three primary colors and a fourth bottle of white could be dribbled or squirted onto the spinning page. Centrifugal force sent the paint splattering outward.

  Heads bumped as the boys pushed for position. Only a few could watch from above at a time. And it astonished them, the way something blank could become colorful, like the fireworks on The Wonderful World of Disney, and so easy, just drops of paint.

  Scotty tried to ignore the Art-a-Matic’s popularity. His gift, a Butterfly yo-yo, which Claire helped him pick out at Wirtz’s drugstore, wasn’t the hit that he’d hoped it would be. It remained in its packaging next to Brian’s other unpopular gifts—a Slinky Caterpillar and a Wham-O glow-in-the-dark Frisbee.

  Brian’s cake was chocolate and Scotty hated chocolate cake, but he did like the punch, orange Hi-C mixed with 7-UP, so he stayed mainly around the punch bowl, where over the course of the afternoon, a large, doughnut-shaped ice cube floated, then melted.

  Brian’s mother unwrapped a package of prematted frames.

  Each party guest would get to take home their own memento of the day.

  Fortunately, before the other boys could put pressure on Scotty to take his turn, the paint supply began to run out.

  Brian’s mother told Scotty the next time he came over he’d get his chance at spin art. She wrapped up a piece of cake in Saran Wrap and said, “How about some extra?”

  The three boys who spent the night—Richard Hibbs, Chip Fisher, and Craig Hunt—bragged about their night.

  “We didn’t sleep,” Brian claimed. “Told ghost stories.”

  Scotty didn’t spend nights away from home. He had no interest. If his mother returned and he wasn’t home, she might worry about him. And if she were to come back, Scotty didn’t want to miss a thing.

  Craig Hunt approached Scotty and held out his still-wet Art-a-Matic spin painting.

  Scotty didn’t know what to do or say.

  Then Craig mentioned how he’d seen an even bigger Art-a-Matic at the Iowa State Fair. He told Scotty how if you brought your own T-shirt and paid a dollar, you could make a painting on your own shirt. Proudly holding up his spin painting, Craig said, “Good, huh?”

  “No,” Scotty said.

  “Say it’s good.”

  Craig Hunt had been held back because he was thickheaded and a behavior problem. He was by far the biggest kid in Mrs. Boyden’s second grade class, and he was already eight, eight from the first day. In fact, with Craig’s birthday coming up in March, he’d be the first to turn nine.

  Sticking his painting into Scotty’s face, Craig Hunt said, “Tell me it’s good.”

  Scotty remembered that the week before, Craig Hunt had dropped a fourth grade boy during recess with a swift, effortless kick to the boy’s groin. The boy fell over shrieking in pain. Tom Conway claimed to have seen it happen. By the next recess other boys had been told and soon the whole school seemed to know. Avoid Craig Hunt whenever possible. And if he traps you or you sit next to him on the bus, be nice and agreeable.

  Scotty imagined the pointed toe of Craig Hunt’s cowboy boot landing between his legs. He didn’t want to scream or turn blue in the face.

  Which is why Scotty Ocean agreed that Craig Hunt’s spin art was actual art.

  ***

  At show-and-tell later that week, Christine Bettis displayed three pages of Spirograph drawings. Intricate patterns of geometric designs, symmetrical swirls made in red, blue, black, and green ink. All you do is hold the pen, Scotty thought.

  Scotty remembered Joan complaining about Spirograph. “Anyone can do that,” she had told her children. “It takes no skill.” Etch-A-Sketch, Lite-Brite, and an automatic pencil with a goofy, beelike face called the Bizzy Buzz Buzz Drawing Set—these were cheating toys.

  And the previous Christmas, when Maggie asked for the Barbie drawing kit, which, through tracing, enabled a person to draw the newest teen fashions, Joan said a resolute no. A crying Maggie said, “But I want to make art, too.” Joan explained that anything that only required tracing is not art. “Anyone can trace!”

  “Be originals,” Joan had tried to engrain in them. “All you need is blank paper and something to draw with. A pen, a pencil, your own blood.”

  Scotty understood the pen and pencil. But blood? What was he supposed to do, he wondered—cut himself, prick his finger? Claire explained that what Joan meant was that they were to paint from their heart. The heart pumps blood, she went on. But Scotty thought Claire was wrong, and he hoped that the next time he scraped a knee or had a bloody nose he’d have a sheet of blank paper nearby, for he’d let the blood drip and then quickly use his fingers to make a drawing of himself or a house with a yard or maybe something abstract, which he knew Joan would like.

  (16)

  Mrs. Boyden announced to the class that she had a special treat. Then she introduced the artist Miss Clarissa Jude to the class. “It’s an honor,” Mrs. Boyden said, “to have an actual artist come to our classroom. Aren’t we lucky, class?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Boyden,” the children said.

  Miss Jude was the most popular artist in the greater Des Moines area. A painter of still lifes, she specialized in bowls of fruit.

  Standing in front of the class, with gray hair, pinched lips and brittle, blotched hands, Miss Jude spoke to the students about art. Her nasal voice irritated Scotty. He wanted a teacher with pizzazz. He wanted an artist like his mother, a smiling artist with pretty eyes and long hair and soft hands.

  As Miss Jude spoke, the door swung open suddenly. Joan Ocean stood in the doorway, her paint shirt specked with every color, a large brush in her hand. She dipped the brush in her mouth and painted a mustache on Miss Jude; then she painted flowers coming out Miss Jude’s ears…

  “That’s enough, Scotty!” Mrs. Boyden called out to Scotty, who was laughing so hard he’d covered his face. “That’s enough!”

  When Scotty looked up, he saw the eyes of his classmates staring at him. He saw Mrs. Boyden poised ready to come down the aisle after him. He saw Miss Jude standing by the blackboard, a fake smile on her face. Miss Jude had no mustache, no flowers out her ears, and for Scotty, his mother was nowhere to be seen.

  Miss Jude resumed her talk about art. She told the class they could paint whatever they wanted. “Just so it’s real,” she said.

  When she asked what the budding artists might have in mind for subjects, hands rose in the air. “A dinosaur,” said one. “A tree.” “A swing set!”

  “Those are all real things,” Miss Jude said.

  Yeah, but not as real as what I’m going to paint, Scotty thought.

  ***

  Carole Staley and Scotty Ocean sat next to each other every time there was Art. Carole’s crush on Scotty was no longer a secret. Ever since she kissed his forearm, everybody had known. Scotty detested Carole and avoided her at all times. But during Art in Mrs. Boyden’s class, he gravitated toward her, often sitting with her at the same table, sharing crayons, construction paper, and finger paints. It was during Art that Carole’s kissing missions ceased, and Scotty left her pigtails alone.

  Only Art could call a truce.

  And with the arrival of Miss Clarissa Jude, for an afternoon, they would be inseparable, taking over the table in the back of the room. Sitting as far away as possible, they spread out large sheets of white paper. They moved quickly up to the front of the room to secure the best paints. Carole carried as many plastic paint bottles as she could. Scotty followed with only two.

  “I’m just using black and white today,” he said.

  He watched as Carole took red and green, mixed them, squirted in some yellow, used a big thick brush to stir, dropped in three dribbles of blue. She painted a sun in the corner of the page. She mixed more colors. “Purple comes from red and
blue,” she said, looking over at Scotty who stared at his paper. “Scotty, what are you painting?”

  “Oh, only the realest thing I know.”

  All morning they worked, forgetting about the time, not even hearing the announcement over the intercom about the next day’s Thanksgiving assembly. And when the kids were excused for lunch, Scotty and Carole kept on painting.

  “Okay, you two. Finish up. You’ve got to eat. Artists have to eat.”

  ***

  When they returned from lunch, the paintings had been hung across the chalkboard, and along the bank of windows.

  “Twenty-five paintings, boys and girls, and Miss Jude has stayed here to judge your work. She will give it a critique. Let’s thank Miss Jude.”

  The kids clapped.

  Carole’s painting hung third from the left. Scotty’s had been pinned on the far end. He knew from the placement of his painting that he would go last. He loved being last.

  Miss Jude started with Lucy Titman’s painting.

  “Hmmm, very nice, Lucy. Very nice. Can everyone see that it’s an apple?”

  “Yes,” the kids said.

  “Can you see the worm?”

  “Yes,” the kids said.

  “Very good, Lucy. Isn’t it very good?”

  “Yes!”

  Lucy smiled and Mrs. Boyden smiled and Miss Jude licked a gold star and put it on the painting in the upper corner. “A gold star for Lucy.”

  David Bumgartner had painted the next one.

  “Hmmm,” Miss Jude said, studying it. “It looks like a fish to me.”

  “A whale,” said David, who suddenly covered his mouth because he’d not been called on.

  Mrs. Boyden smiled, for the Bumgartner boy was learning.

  “Oh, I see the whale now,” said Miss Jude. “Oh yes indeed. And is that the whale spout?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Class, do you see the water spurting up?”

  “Yes, Miss Jude.”

  “Whales have spouts which spurt water. Not only is your painting recognizable, but it’s taken from real life. Very, very good.”

  Tim Myerly, the new boy, started to clap, which caught on. All of the kids except Scotty and Carole clapped. Carole didn’t because she was next up and all she could think about was what Miss Jude would say. Scotty refused to clap. He didn’t think much of the whale. He would later tell Claire, “A dumb whale.”