The Heat of the Sun (4 page)

Le Vol slammed his knife against his plate. For a moment I thought he might leap up, denunciations at the ready, and rush to Trouble’s table. Dimly, I remembered a harangue he had
delivered one night in the dorm upon the subject of a certain Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York) and the wickedness of his policy on the Philippines.

Elmsley sniggered, ‘He looks like a sissy. A preening sissy.’ And, as if to illustrate his own unlikely manliness, he speared a roast potato on his fork and stuffed it, whole, into
his mouth. Chewing rapidly, cheeks ballooning, Elmsley resembled more than ever a hairless, pustular rat.

Things moved fast for Trouble after that. Soon he was surrounded by a circle of admirers. In the dining hall, his table was uproarious. Laughter exploded repeatedly; pellets
of moistened bread flew back and forth. In the dorm before lights out, and sometimes even afterwards, he played his phonograph. How well we came to know the oeuvre of Sophie Tucker!

There was no stopping Trouble. Many were the tales of smoking, drinking, midnight expeditions out of bounds. There was one story, a myth perhaps, of Trouble and the Townsend twins returning in
the back of a farmer’s truck, on a Sunday morning, all the way from Burlington, reclining on hay. When Trouble was punished, it made no difference. Neither threats nor the swish of a
master’s cane deterred him. Never had a nickname seemed so apt. He said he had been tossed out of another school; that was why he had arrived at Blaze so late.

My sympathy for Trouble withered as his popularity grew. Le Vol professed himself disgusted with Trouble, and I agreed. Springs would judder as Le Vol, in the cubicle next to mine, shifted
restlessly on his cot, struggling to read Mr Wells or Mr Adams as Sophie Tucker boomed out. One night he strode to Trouble’s cubicle and shouted, halfway through ‘Nobody Loves a Fat
Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love’, that Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York) was a capitalist lackey, a criminal, and a liar.

Acolytes clustered in Trouble’s cubicle: crushed together on the trunk or cross-legged on the floor. I pictured them – the Townsend twins, Earl Pritchard, Ralph Rex, Jr –
twisting their necks towards their idol in unison as he clapped his hands, whooped, and declared that Le Vol had to be his friend: ‘You hate the senator? Marvellous! But so do I.’

Defeated, Le Vol stalked away.

‘What I don’t get,’ he said to me later, ‘is the Scranway angle.’

‘What angle?’ I said.

‘On Trouble.’

Le Vol often brought up Trouble: I never did. We hunched, bored, across a library table, hearing cries from the playing fields. The sky outside glimmered like steel. There could be no prospect
of Nirvana, even had we been willing to go there again. Something, it seemed, had ended for us, or had never really begun.

‘Scranway hasn’t done a thing,’ Le Vol went on. ‘It’s odd. Trouble’s a prime candidate for Pussy in the Well.’

‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘I can’t see it. He’s no Billy Billicay.’

‘Don’t believe it. Scranway’s biding his time.’

Those last weeks of that fall term were Trouble’s season, his time of greatness. The trick with eccentricity is to carry it off with brusque elan, as if unaware of it as
eccentricity at all. Trouble was the type who, in his admirable self-absorption, his superlative egotism, simply acted as he wished to act, and found that weaker types fell in with him avidly.

No doubt his father had shown him the way. Curious, I studied the papers in the library, searching for news of the great man. I found it frequently. Week after week, Senator B. F. Pinkerton
(Democrat, New York) fulminated on the floor of the Senate, urging America to join the war in Europe. His reasons interested me little; what intrigued me was the respect, the awe in which the world
appeared to hold him. A large, florid man with a stern centre parting, pince-nez and a carefully cultivated moustache, he resembled his son only in his look of formidable self-possession. He
pictured himself, I imagined, as a statesman in the Roman mould – not as the bluff, blustering walrus in a starched collar that I saw.

Likewise, B. F. Pinkerton II never acknowledged what was, to others, his defining characteristic: his size. He was uncommonly small. Perhaps that was why he had made himself into an athlete of
formidable prowess. Often he was seen going to and from the gym, a pair of boxing gloves dangling from his neck. Strange to think of him slamming at a punching bag, even swinging a fist at a heavy
opponent!

From a window in the library, I could see the tennis courts, crisscrossed through a mesh of wiry fences. Once I watched as Trouble slammed through set after set with a willowy fellow from Iowa
called ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins. When Trouble served, he propelled the ball across the net with a force that suggested it was an enemy to be vanquished; when Hoppy sent a shot back high, Trouble
leaped explosively and his shirt rode up, exposing the hollow of his barely fleshed belly, the hard downward arch of his ribs.

Picture Trouble at an impromptu game of baseball: hunched forward, feet shifting, bat prodding the air behind his shoulders, tongue stuck in a corner of his mouth in a parody of concentration.
When Earl Pritchard rockets the ball towards him, Trouble strikes at it like an uncommonly graceful lumberjack, connects with an explosive crack, and pelts from base to base as if he is flying.
Always, when I think of Trouble in those days, it is of a little man in motion: clattering downstairs, no hand on the banister; darting across the quadrangle, hailing an acolyte; on the lawns,
running against the wind on a windy day.

Trouble’s greatness came to a head on the night before we left for Christmas vacation. We had stayed up late in McManus II, freed already from the constraints of term.
Fellows played cards, wrestled, roared with laughter. Some sang dirty songs. Some smoked. Some took turns on the landing, watching for masters, but no one really cared if we were caught.

I found myself in Le Vol’s cubicle, where Le Vol, in his element, argued politics with a bellicose Elmsley and a lumbering fellow from Texas called Joe Boyd, who prodded the air with a
knobbly index finger. I only pretended to listen. From time to time others joined us, then drifted away, shaking their heads.

One thing was odd. Sophie Tucker was silent. ‘Where’s Trouble?’ I heard it said, and ‘What can Trouble be up to?’ That he was
up
to something was clear. The
Townsend twins had also gone missing; so had Ralph Rex, Jr.

The mystery would be explained, but not before a master came clumping up the stairs, yelled for order, and lights were extinguished at last.

I had drifted asleep when a hand shook me. I sat up sharply. Above the cubicles, snow flurried against high windows, fracturing the light of a gibbous moon.

Le Vol, eyes excited, held a finger to his lips. ‘Trouble’s sent word. Something’s up.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Quick! Get dressed. We’re going. All of us.’

He held out my trousers, coat, boots. Dazed, I pulled them over winter pyjamas. Icy gusts skirled between the cubicles. By the far wall a window yawned wide. Outside, a ladder stood against the
sill. In hushed eagerness, fellows clambered down into the snowy yard.

Joe Boyd disappeared from view. Le Vol and I were the last ones left.

‘You go,’ I said. ‘I can’t – my leg.’

‘I’ll hold the ladder for you. Give me that.’ He grabbed my ashplant and tossed it from the window.

From the ladder, he called back: ‘Now, follow, you hear?’

‘But you
hate
Trouble,’ I said.

‘Sharpless, this is rebellion – the Boston Tea Party!’

Doubtfully, I watched as Le Vol descended. The ladder shook as I made my way after him, swinging out my damaged leg numbly between rungs. Snowflakes stung my face. I shouted to Le Vol to hold
the ladder steady.

‘Not so loud,’ he shouted back.

When I reached the ground, Joe Boyd raced towards us. He had stolen the wheelbarrow from the gardener’s shed.

‘The cripple-carrier! In you get, Sharpless!’ he cried, and rammed the clumsy vehicle into my calves.

With a gasp, I collapsed into its depths and we were off, charging across the fields and up the hill. Snow churned beneath the single wheel; several times the barrow lurched, and I almost found
myself pitched to the ground.

Laughter sounded, and raised voices, before the graveyard came into view. Through barren trees appeared an orange incandescence, shivering and crackling against the night.

We rounded a corner. Between tomb-slabs was a mighty bonfire, and circling it, uproarious, were perhaps forty fellows. All seemed ecstatic. I saw Elmsley, arm-wrestling with Hoppy Hopkins; the
Townsend twins; Earl Pritchard; Ralph Rex, Jr; Quibble and Kane – Quibble, in a cap with woolly earflaps, a drunken grin on his face; Kane, swaying dangerously, knife-nose red at the tip.
Cigarettes glowed in gloved hands; beer foamed from brown, glinting bottles; and on the other side of the fire Trouble had clambered up to the top of a vault and gazed down benevolently on the
revels he had commanded. Weirdly, he appeared to hover above the flames, and I found myself wondering if he was angel or demon.

Somebody thrust a beer bottle into my hand. Le Vol had gone, vanishing into the crowd. A dog barked and the Townsend twins, tuneless in unison, caterwauled a song by Sophie Tucker.

Then I saw the effigy hanging from the yew. A scarecrow draped in a school jacket, it swayed from a rope around its neck. I gasped, and did not think now that Trouble might be an angel.

In the firelight, all of us were demonic.

Elmsley appeared beside me. He was shorter than I, and his rodenty face nuzzled close to mine in a parody of affection. ‘The Billy Billicay Memorial Service!’ he cried. ‘The
scarecrow was my suggestion. But I don’t think it pays to stand out too much, do you?’

‘At Blaze, you mean?’ I said.

‘Let’s say someone might be in trouble soon – get it?’

Turning, I saw a figure deep in shadow, withdrawn amongst the trees. It was Scranway, his overcoat shrouding him like a cloak. Unmoving, he held Hunter’s lead; it was as if, late as it
was, he had just happened to be taking his dog for a walk and paused, with idle interest, upon this unexpected scene.

Blaze was bleak when term resumed, a place of clanking pipes, of overshoes in heaps inside entrance halls, of icicles on gutters and frost on glass, of the doggy, stale smell
of snow-spattered coats drying on lines of verdigris hooks. Classrooms were stifling; leaning forward, head on arms, I stared from steamy windows, watching the crisscross flurryings of snow. At
night I huddled under my blankets in my dressing gown. Everything I did – bathing, buttoning my shirt – was awkward, as if my fingers were twice their normal size. Quadrangles and
courtyards were slippery, slushy. Snowballs whizzed by and exploded into powder against backs, chests, and walls, to the accompaniment of delighted or anguished cries.

We were in Literature with Mr Gregg when the bad things began. Striding up and down between desks, slapping a fellow on the head from time to time, Mr Gregg was discoursing on
Shakespeare’s late romances and the difficulties critics encounter with a form that dares to mingle comedy and tragedy, realism and fantasy. Often he wrote quotations, names or dates for us
to copy down, squealing out rapid-fire curlicues of chalky, illegible handwriting. When he informed us of Dr Johnson’s negative judgement of
Cymbeline
– ‘
Unresisting
imbecility
... so like the minds of most in this room’ – he charged to the board to record it for us.

Classrooms at Blaze had twin blackboards that slid up and down like sash windows. That day, both boards in the room had been left in the upper position. Impatiently, Mr Gregg reached for the
pole with a hook in the end that stood behind his desk. As the outer board thudded into position, he seized a stub of chalk, scrawling up
S
.
JOHNSON
(1709–84), followed by the quotation in full.

None of us copied it down. Intent upon his task, Mr Gregg had not noticed the other blackboard that now stood revealed, looming over the class from on high. But at once, every fellow had eyes
for nothing else.

First there was silence, then explosive laughter.

Mr Gregg reeled around. Every face, he realized, was fixed upon the board above, where the question was posed in handwriting of a clarity he could never have emulated:

Underneath, a crude drawing suggested the answer.

Trouble sat diagonally across from me, three seats ahead. I could not see his face, but the flush that spread up his neck stood out clearly enough. As turmoil reigned around him, he seemed
suspended in place: but only for a moment.

He rushed from the room.

‘Mr Pinkerton!’ Mr Gregg cried, lunging to the door, and called again down the corridor: ‘Mr Pinkerton!’

Soon the charges were known all over Blaze. Joe Boyd told us the story that evening at dinner; he had heard it from Hoppy Hopkins, who had heard it from a fellow in Form
C.

This was the story. Before Trouble came to Blaze, he had been at naval school in Maryland, where (so it was said) he had proved himself unusually inept. With his shabby gear, his supercilious
quips, his inability to stand to attention, the penalties he incurred for his classmates were legion. None of them liked him; or rather, only one did. This was Scotty Ridgeway, the handsome,
popular son of an admiral who had distinguished himself in the Spanish–American War. Scotty Ridgeway, like his father, was a model of seamanly prowess, but Scotty’s academic work was
not up to much. All he wanted was naval glory. Bad grades would not only deprive him of his place as an officer cadet, but disgrace him in his father’s eyes. Quietly, he grew desperate: but
Trouble was on hand. When an important test loomed, Trouble broke into the school office, stealing the papers to give to his friend.

Soon the crime was traced, but worse was to come when a diary discovered in Trouble’s desk revealed crimes still darker. Trouble, it appeared, had been at the centre of a circle of
corruption. Scotty Ridgeway was the first of his victims; later, the two of them initiated others into the vilest depravities.