Night Shift (19 page)

He woke in the dark, Sally sleeping peacefully beside him. He bit back the scream, and when it was throttled, he fell back.

When he had looked back, back into the yawning darkness of the overpass, he had seen the blond kid and the birth-marked kid drive their knives into his brother—Blondie's below the breastbone, and Birthmark's directly into his brother's groin.

He lay in the darkness, breathing harshly, waiting for that nine-year-old ghost to depart, waiting for honest sleep to blot it all away.

An unknown time later, it did.

The Christmas vacation and semester break were combined in the city's school district, and the holiday was almost a month long. The dream came twice, early on, and did not come again. He and Sally went to visit her sister in Vermont, and skied a great deal. They were happy.

Jim's Living with Lit problem seemed inconsequential and a little foolish in the open, crystal air. He went back to school with a winter tan, feeling cool and collected.

Simmons caught him on the way to his period-two class and handed him a folder. “New student, period seven. Name is Robert Lawson. Transfer.”

“Hey, I've got twenty-seven in there right now, Sim. I'm overloaded.”

“You've still got twenty-seven. Bill Stearns got killed the Tuesday after Christmas. Car accident. Hit-and-run.”

“Billy?”

The picture formed in his mind in black and white, like a senior photograph. William Stearns, Key Club 1, Football 1, 2,
Pen
&
Lance,
2. He had been one of the few good ones in Living with Lit. Quiet, consistent A's and B's on his exams. Didn't volunteer often, but usually summoned the correct answers (laced with a pleasing dry wit) when called on. Dead? Fifteen years old. His own mortality suddenly whispered through his bones like a cold draft under a door.

“Christ, that's awful. Do they know what happened?”

“Cops are checking into it. He was downtown exchanging a Christmas present. Started across Rampart Street and an old Ford sedan hit him. No one got the license number, but the words ‘Snake Eyes' were written on the side door . . . the way a kid would do it.”

“Christ,” Jim said again.

“There's the bell,” Simmons said.

He hurried away, pausing to break up a crowd of kids around a drinking fountain. Jim went toward his class, feeling empty.

During his free period he flipped open Robert Lawson's folder. The first page was a green sheet from Milford High, which Jim had never heard of. The second was a student personality profile. Adjusted IQ of 78. Some manual skills, not many. Antisocial answers to the Barnett-Hudson personality test. Poor aptitude scores. Jim thought sourly that he was a Living with Lit kid all the way.

The next page was a disciplinary history, the yellow sheet. The Milford sheet was white with a black border, and it was depressingly well filled. Lawson had been in a hundred kinds of trouble.

He turned the next page, glanced down at a school photo of Robert Lawson, then looked again. Terror suddenly crept into the pit of his belly and coiled there, warm and hissing.

Lawson was staring antagonistically into the camera, as if posing for a police mug shot rather than a school photographer. There was a small strawberry birthmark on his chin.

By period seven, he had brought all the civilized rationalizations into play. He told himself there must be thousands of kids with red birthmarks on their chins. He told himself that the hood who had stabbed his brother that day sixteen long dead years ago would now be at least thirty-two.

But, climbing to the third floor, the apprehension remained. And another fear to go with it:
This is how you felt when you were cracking up.
He tasted the bright steel of panic in his mouth.

The usual group of kids was horsing around the door of Room 33, and some of them went in when they saw Jim coming. A few hung around, talking in undertones and grinning. He saw the new boy standing beside Chip Osway. Robert Lawson was wearing blue jeans and heavy yellow tractor boots—all the rage this year.

“Chip, go on in.”

“That an order?” He smiled vacuously over Jim's head.

“Sure.”

“You flunk me on that test?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah, that's . . .” The rest was an under-the-breath mumble.

Jim turned to Robert Lawson. “You're new,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you how we run things around here.”

“Sure, Mr. Norman.” His right eyebrow was split with a small scar, a scar Jim knew. There could be no mistake. It was crazy, it was lunacy, but it was also a fact. Sixteen years ago, this kid had driven a knife into his brother.

Numbly, as if from a great distance, he heard himself beginning to outline the class rules and regulations. Robert Lawson hooked his thumbs into his garrison belt, listened, smiled, and began to nod, as if they were old friends.

•                           •                           •

“Jim?”

“Hmmm?”

“Is something wrong?”

“No.”

“Those Living with Lit boys still giving you a hard time?”

No answer.

“Jim?”

“No.”

“Why don't you go to bed early tonight?”

But he didn't.

The dream was very bad that night. When the kid with the strawberry birthmark stabbed his brother with his knife, he called after Jim: “You next, kid. Right through the bag.”

He woke up screaming.

He was teaching
Lord of the Flies
that week, and talking about symbolism when Lawson raised his hand.

“Robert?” he said evenly.

“Why do you keep starin' at me?” Jim blinked and felt his mouth go dry.

“You see somethin' green? Or is my fly unzipped?”

A nervous titter from the class.

Jim replied evenly: “I wasn't staring at you, Mr. Lawson. Can you tell us why Ralph and Jack disagreed over—”

“You were
starin'
at me.”

“Do you want to talk about it with Mr. Fenton?”

Lawson appeared to think it over. “Naw.”

“Good. Now can you tell us why Ralph and Jack—”

“I didn't read it. I think it's a dumb book.”

Jim smiled tightly. “Do you, now? You want to remember that while you're judging the book, the book is also judging you. Now can anyone else tell me why they disagreed over the existence of the beast?”

Kathy Slavin raised her hand timidly, and Lawson gave her a cynical once-over and said something to Chip Osway. The words leaving his lips looked like “nice tits.” Chip nodded.

“Kathy?”

“Isn't it because Jack wanted to hunt the beast?”

“Good.” He turned and began to write on the board. At the instant his back was turned, a grapefruit smashed against the board beside his head.

He jerked backward and wheeled around. Some class members laughed, but Osway and Lawson only looked at Jim innocently.

Jim stooped and picked up the grapefruit. “Someone,” he said, looking toward the back of the room, “ought to have this jammed down his goddamn throat.”

Kathy Slavin gasped.

He tossed the grapefruit in the wastebasket and turned back to the blackboard.

He opened the morning paper, sipping his coffee, and saw the headline about halfway down. “God!” he said, splitting his wife's easy flow of morning chatter. His belly felt suddenly filled with splinters—

“Teen-Age Girl Falls to Her Death: Katherine Slavin, a seventeen-year-old junior at Harold Davis High School, either fell or was pushed from the roof of her downtown apartment house early yesterday evening. The girl, who kept a pigeon coop on the roof, had gone up with a sack of feed, according to her mother.

“Police said an unidentified woman in a neighboring development had seen three young boys running across the roof at 6:45
P.M
., just minutes after the girl's body (continued page 3—”

“Jim, was she one of yours?”

But he could only look at her mutely.

Two weeks later, Simmons met him in the hall after the lunch bell with a folder in his hand, and Jim felt a terrible sinking in his belly.

“New student,” he said flatly to Simmons. “Living with Lit.”

Sim's eyebrows went up. “How did you know that?”

Jim shrugged and held his hand out for the folder.

“Got to run,” Simmons said. “Department heads are meeting on course evaluations. You look a little run-down. Feeling okay?”

That's right, a little run-down. Like Billy Stearns.

“Sure,” he said.

“That's the stuff,” Simmons said, and clapped him on the back.

When he was gone, Jim opened the folder to the picture, wincing in advance, like a man about to be hit.

But the face wasn't instantly familiar. Just a kid's face. Maybe he'd seen it before, maybe not. The kid, David Garcia, was a hulking, dark-haired boy with rather negroid lips and dark, slumbering eyes. The yellow sheet said he was also from Mil-ford High and that he had spent two years in Granville Reformatory. Car theft.

Jim closed the folder with hands that trembled slightly.

“Sally?”

She looked up from her ironing. He had been staring at a TV basketball game without really seeing it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forgot what I was going to say.”

“Must have been a lie.”

He smiled mechanically and looked at the TV again. It had been on the tip of his tongue to spill everything. But how could he? It was worse than crazy. Where would you start? The dream? The breakdown? The appearance of Robert Lawson?

No. With Wayne
—
your brother.

But he had never told anyone about that, not even in analysis. His thoughts turned to David Garcia, and the dreamy terror that had washed over him when they had looked at each other in the hall. Of course, he had only looked vaguely familiar in the picture. Pictures don't move . . . or twitch.

Garcia had been standing with Lawson and Chip Osway, and when he looked up and saw Jim Norman, he smiled and his eyelids began to jitter up and down and voices spoke in Jim's mind with unearthly clarity:

Come on, kid, how much you got?

F-four cents.

You fuckin' liar . . . look, Vinnie, he wet himself!”

“Jim? Did you say something?”

“No.” But he wasn't sure if he had or not. He was getting very scared.

•                           •                           •

One day after school in early February there was a knock on the teachers'-room door, and when Jim opened it, Chip Osway stood there. He looked frightened. Jim was alone; it was ten after four and the last of the teachers had gone home an hour before. He was correcting a batch of American Lit themes.

“Chip?” he said evenly.

Chip shuffled his feet. “Can I talk to you for a minute, Mr. Norman?”

“Sure. But if it's about that test, you're wasting your—”

“It's not about that. Uh, can I smoke in here?”

“Go ahead.”

He lit his cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly. He didn't speak for perhaps as long as a minute. It seemed that he couldn't. His lips twitched, his hands came together, and his eyes slitted, as if some inner self was struggling to find expression.

He suddenly burst out: “If they do it, I want you to know I wasn't in on it! I don't like those guys! They're creeps!”

“What guys, Chip?”

“Lawson and that Garcia creep.”

“Are they planning to get me?” The old dreamy terror was on him, and he knew the answer.

“I liked them at first,” Chip said. “We went out and had a few beers. I started bitchin' about you and that test. About how I was gonna get you. But that was just talk! I swear it!”

“What happened?”

“They took me right up on it. Asked what time you left school, what kind of car you drove, all that stuff. I said what have you got against him and Garcia said they knew you a long time ago . . . hey, are you all right?”

“The cigarette,” he said thickly. “Haven't ever gotten used to the smoke.”

Chip ground it out. “I asked them when they knew you and Bob Lawson said I was still pissin' my didies then. But they're seventeen, the same as me.”

“Then what?”

“Well, Garcia leans over the table and says you can't want to get him very bad if you don't even know when he leaves the fuckin' school. What was you gonna do? So I says I was gonna matchstick your tires and leave you with four flats.” He looked at Jim with pleading eyes. “I wasn't even gonna do that. I said it because . . .”

“You were scared?” Jim asked quietly.

“Yeah, and I'm still scared.”

“What did they think of your idea?”

Chip shuddered. “Bob Lawson says, is that what you was gonna do, you cheap prick? And I said, tryin' to be tough, what was you gonna do, off him? And Garcia—his eyelids start to go up and down—he takes something out of his pocket and clicked it open and it's a switchknife. That's when I took off.”

“When was this, Chip?”

“Yesterday. I'm scared to sit with those guys now, Mr. Norman.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Okay.” He looked down at the papers he had been correcting without seeing them.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Jim said. “I really don't.”

On Monday morning he still didn't know. His first thought had been to tell Sally everything, starting with his brother's murder sixteen years ago. But it was impossible. She would be sympathetic but frightened and unbelieving.

Simmons? Also impossible. Simmons would think he was mad. And maybe he was. A man in a group encounter session he had attended had said having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn't put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue.