The Boy from Left Field (7 page)

Dangerous Connections

Hawk felt as if he’d been slapped in the face. He crumpled up the paper and threw it on the floor.

Someone hissed a warning. He looked up and saw Panny giving him a “what’s going on?” look. He shrugged his shoulders and opened his notebook.

“Now we’re going to have three personal contributions on the Middle Ages from those of you who wrote your essays on medieval themes,” Ms. Calloway announced. “Rahul, do you want to go first?”

“Okay.”

A short, stocky boy got out of his seat and headed for the front of the class. He was wearing dark trousers and a bright white shirt that contrasted nicely with his glossy black hair and cinnamon-coloured skin.

“I wrote my essay on the monasteries,” he reminded them. “My personal creative contribution is a story I’ve written about a monk who finds a manuscript from Roman times, one that tells about the Greek gods, which, when he reads it, makes him lose his faith in Christ and start believing in Zeus, Hermes, Artemis, and the other gods. But first I’ll remind you of their Roman names.”

Hawk sat wide-eyed, wondering if this boy was some kind of genius, or maybe he had swallowed a USB memory stick that some history professor had lost.

The talk went on for a while. Hawk sat transfixed. Afterward there were several questions, and even a correction or two.

“I think you’ve got a couple of the attributes of Hermes wrong,” a girl in sparkly jeans suggested.

Ms. Calloway led a brief discussion about the transition from the pagan gods to Christianity. There were a few probing questions. Hawk looked on, amazed. He was trying desperately to remember the rough dates for the Middle Ages.

The second “personal contribution” was a modern rewriting of Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.” Hawk had a vague notion that Chaucer was some kind of famous poet of the Middle Ages, but he didn’t even know what a pardoner was. The presenter this time was a boy named Albert Mostley, a chubby, bespectacled kid with unruly red hair. His vocabulary was enormous and he dropped in a few side remarks that had the class roaring with laughter.

By the time this presentation was over, Hawk had learned a lot about Chaucer — and his world — but he was also ready to run out of the room and disappear. What kind of class had he landed in? He would never make it with this bunch. “Smarts” were one thing, but being a walking, breathing, ad-libbing encyclopedia was another!

The last talk, however, really sank his hopes. A student named Wang got up, a nearsighted, slender boy with a crewcut and a “Walk for Cancer” T-shirt, and proceeded to trace out the relations between medieval Europe and China. Not only did he flash maps of the trade routes, and charts of important dates and personages, but he offered them a comparison between the main dialects of Chinese and those of Turkish middlemen on the Spice Road between east and west using, of course, the original languages and explaining the most important Chinese characters and how they had changed over the centuries.

This talk was so knockout smart that Hawk didn’t expect any tough class questions, but there were a couple, and Ms. Calloway mentioned a few things about the spice road that even young Wang didn’t know. She also promised to play the class some music by a Canadian singer who had travelled that route a few years before and had written music about her experiences with different cultures.

Minutes later came the lunch break. Of course, Hawk hadn’t brought any lunch, and he wandered out of the room in a daze, wondering if he should head home then, or just wait to get kicked out of the class when his turn came to show his work.

He was looking around for Panny, who seemed to have been delayed in the classroom, when a tall, dark-haired boy approached him and shook his hand, “My name is Charles,” he said. “Welcome to the class.” Hawk mumbled a thanks. The boy had a bright and glittering smile that Hawk didn’t quite like.

“You got my note?” the boy asked. “Just a little joke, of course. It doesn’t matter if you’re Native. I’m inviting you into my club anyway. It’s a special group — called the Ferrets. The members are all my friends. It’s a secret society and the teachers don’t know, so if you say a word to anyone, you’re toast. I mean
anyone.
It would be a good idea to join. There’s an initiation, of course — and there’s dues. I have lots of members, though, and I can protect you, because you’ll work for me.”

With that the tall boy drifted off to join a couple of his friends who had stood by smirking as they watched the proceedings with a fixed, goggle-eyed intensity.

Hawk just stood there, stunned. Slowly, he wandered down the hall, past the gabbing, joking kids. No one paid him much attention. He wondered what he had gotten into, coming to this school. These kids were all too weird. Too smart in the wrong way. Scary. Maybe he
should
head home right away. He felt so confused; he didn’t know what to do.

“Hello! Hawk! Wait a minute, please.” Ms. Calloway stood at the classroom door, calling after him. She beckoned to him and he drifted slowly back.

“You were going to the lunchroom, I suppose,” she said. “We don’t sell food at the school, Hawk, and it looks like you haven’t brought any.” Ms. Calloway smiled, but her voice was warm and somehow reassuring.

“Panny had to stay behind a minute to talk to me about her presentation, but she and Albert are going to share with you,” she told him. “In fact, here they are now. I hope you’re going to enjoy your time with us, Hawk. I’ll want you to do a presentation to the class, but in your case I think we can expand the subject a bit. So give some thought to what you want to talk about.”

“Okay…. Thanks, Ms. Calloway.”

Panny and Albert slid up beside him and Albert tapped him on the shoulder. “You can have half my ham sandwich,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that for just anyone,” he added.

“And I’ve got an extra muffin,” Panny said. “Bring some food tomorrow, Hawk-boy!”

Ms. Calloway laughed and turned back to her classroom.

“So, what was bugging you in there?” Panny asked. “You made a face and threw something on the floor like it was a bad message from a fortune cookie.”

Hawk thought at once of Charles’s warning:
If you say a word to anyone, you’re toast.
He couldn’t just blab. He had to learn more about the Ferrets. Maybe this was a test.
Maybe Panny and Albert were part of it!

“So?” Panny waited for his answer.

“Oh, nothing,” Hawk lied. I was just ticked off that I’d forgotten my lunch. I was pretty sure I couldn’t buy anything here and I was getting hungry.”

“You want that sandwich right now?” Albert asked.

“No, that’s okay. I feel better now…. Except that I don’t think I belong in this class. Those presentations were over the top. It would take me five years to do something like that.”

“Oh? It only took me a few hours,” Albert said. “Actually, I wrote a whole detective story based on ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ and was going to recite it in Middle English, but I thought it would just confuse the class.”

“Stop bragging,” Panny told him. “You know what Ms. Calloway says. We have to celebrate other people’s achievements, not just brag about our own. Now we have a chance to help the Hawk-boy get over his worries about being able to do a presentation.”

“I don’t have any worries,” Hawk said.

“Okay, you don’t have any worries, but we can still help you,” Panny insisted. “Now let’s eat!”

They came to the bottom of the stairs and entered the lunchroom, a large space already packed with dozens of kids from various parts of the school. Hawk gazed around, dazzled by the noise, the buzzing energy, the ordered chaos of the place. Almost at once, he spotted Charles, ensconced with some of their classmates in a nearby corner. The dark-haired boy nodded vaguely at him and made a face. Hawk couldn’t quite read his expression, but he knew he didn’t like it.

The three friends settled down together at the end of a long table and began their meal. With a resigned look, Albert passed half his sandwich over to Hawk. After the first few bites of food and a couple of sips of their shared juices, Panny said, “Okay, Hawk. So you have to do a presentation. Well, I have an idea for you — take it or leave it.”

“What is it?” Hawk mumbled, reaching for one of the juice cans.

“You should give a talk on Native life and customs or history,” Panny suggested. “We hear a lot about Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese — but almost nothing about our Native Canadian people. Does that interest you at all?”

Hawk thought about it. He might be able to do it, but would his father despise him for it, thinking that his mother had suggested it? Would his mother try to take it over? And would he be able to dig up enough material — material that the kids would be interested in and take seriously? All of this weighed on him. He knew it would take up a lot of time; time he’d hoped to spend with Mr. Rizzuto looking for Babe Ruth’s lost baseball. He hadn’t dared speak of that quest to his father, and he was still a bit shy to tell his new friends about it — they might laugh at him and tell him to “get real.”

“I don’t know,” he said to Panny. “I don’t know if I should do that.”

“Why not? Isn’t your father active in Native rights? I’m sure he’d be able to help you. You can call him on my phone right now. If he doesn’t like the idea, you can find something else. We can help you choose right now. And you can ask Ms. Calloway to approve it when we’re back in class.”

She reached across the table and handed him the phone. He took it warily, hesitated for a moment, and then boldly dialed his father’s number.

When Jim Eagleson first answered the phone he sounded gruff and angry, but he was surprised, and even pleased, when he realized that it was his son calling. Stumbling and fumbling a bit, Hawk managed to get out the information about the class project. His father asked a few questions, then there was a long pause. Finally, his father said, “Sure, it sounds like a good idea. Just get your teacher’s okay, and I can help you with it this weekend.”

Hawk thanked him and then, encouraged by his father’s tone, quickly told him about their sudden move from the taxi into Selim’s room.

“Hmmm…. That’s probably for the best,” his father said. “One month, huh? Well, hopefully something will happen in one month.”

When Hawk handed the phone back to Panny, she gave him a look of mock disappointment. “That’s terrible, Hawk-boy. You mean I’ll never see your famous live-in taxi?”

Out in the school playground a few of the boys asked Hawk to kick a soccer ball with them. One of them was Charles.

“You don’t want to spend all your time with fat boys and oriental chicks, do you?” Charles asked him. Hawk shrank at the insult but decided to join in anyway, if only to show Charles that he wasn’t afraid.

They played for a while, and when the bell rang they lined up with the others. Charles said to Hawk, “Let me read your palm, will you?” When Hawk looked baffled, Charles commanded, “Hold out your palm, Princess!” Hawk stuck out his right hand and Charles thrust a folded piece of paper into it. Hawk shoved it in his pocket.

Back in his seat, Hawk pulled out the note and read it:
Bring one dollar on Monday. Otherwise trouble. The Ferret Master.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in math study — in this case they were dealing with graphing. Ms. Calloway explained that they would combine with a partner to graph multiple intelligences by producing a double bar graph with which each student could compare his or her multiple intelligences to a friend’s. But since, according to Ms. Calloway, the existing information forms for multiple intelligences weren’t adequate for grade four, they would design their own questionnaires and use them in preparing the information. Then they would make large graphs and demonstrate them to the class.

Hawk set to work with a very cool, slender, dark-eyed girl named Eliza Dean. He figured that one of his “intelligences” was physical, since he played so much baseball, but the others kind of baffled him. He wasn’t particularly good at math, no good at music, and what the heck, he wondered, did “interpersonal” mean? His project partner kept trying to get his attention, telling him over and over exactly what he should do. “I like your blond braids,” Eliza said. “But you seem to be a bit out of it.”

“Piss off!” Hawk told her. The pressures of the day were becoming too much for him. His comment reached the neighbouring desks and some of the kids giggled. Ms. Calloway called Hawk up to her desk.

“Are you having a problem, Hawk? Can I help you?”

“No, I’m all right. It’s just that girl — she’s too bossy.”

“Eliza? Well, I’m sure if you’re patient you won’t find her so. She probably just wants to help you. Why don’t you try again?”

“Okay. But Ms. Calloway, what does
interpersonal
mean? I don’t know if I’ve got it or not.”

Ms. Calloway smiled. “Well, I’ll tell you, Hawk. You just go back to your desk and try to get along with Eliza. And if you succeed, then you can assume you’ve got interpersonal intelligence.”

Hawk returned to work. Eliza seemed amused. He continued to find her bossy, but he gritted his teeth and bore it. After a while she seemed to loosen up, and to consult him before she plunged ahead, and he began to like her better. He enjoyed what they were doing, and the afternoon passed more quickly.

The day ended with some free time for those kids who had completed their work and had no homework due. “You can have free time today, too, Hawk,” Ms. Calloway told him. “But in the future you’ll have to earn it. For the next fifteen minutes you can work at anything that interests you.”

Hawk moved off to one of the computers and began to surf the Web. He looked up Babe Ruth and found more information about the missing baseball. He felt badly that he couldn’t be right there with Mr. Rizzuto, helping to dig out more information on those baseball games of long ago. He might not be as great at research as the kids in his new class, but he was sure he would learn fast. He might even find some important clues that would lead them to that missing baseball.