The Wednesday Wars (20 page)

I think that she was the only one in the classroom who did not scream—and I'm including Mr. Bradbrook and Mr. Guareschi in that. We all crashed over chairs and tables and desks to the sides of the classroom, so that Mrs. Sidman was left completely alone, at her student desk, with two huge rats in her lap, who were shaking their heads and trying to get some idea of what had just happened to them.

Then they pulled up their snouts and clacked their yellow teeth.

Okay, so I panicked, too. After living with the bulging ceiling tiles for all this time, we had gotten to believe they would never come down. But now we were face to face with huge, scabby, yellow-toothed, angry rats, looking at us with eyes reddened with anger. And all we could think about was putting distance between us and them. And I want to point out, for the record, that it was members of the school board who were up on Mrs. Baker's desk first. Just about everyone else climbed the bookshelves and window shelf and radiators after throwing aside anything that got in our way.

Except for two people.

One was Mai Thi, who took off one of her shoes and stood beside her desk, ready to swing at anything that had yellow teeth. She looked as fierce as all get-out.

And the other was Mrs. Sidman, who I guess had determined that nothing more was going to happen to her at Camillo Junior High School without her say-so.

She grabbed the rats by the back of their necks—which was not easy, since they were so fat—pulled them off her lap, and hoisted them into the air. Their paws scrambled, their mouths hissed, their yellow teeth clicked, but Mrs. Sidman didn't care. She stood and held them up, like Macduff holding Macbeth's head.

By now, the screams—which had been increasing in volume—had brought Mr. Vendleri.

"Where do you want them?" asked the triumphant Mrs. Sidman.

"I've got a cage in the basement," he said.

"Lead the way," said Mrs. Sidman.

And he went ahead of her, closing all of the classroom doors as he went. But I wish that everyone in Camillo Junior High could have seen her, the noblest school board member of them all, Mrs. Sidman with her vanquished enemies still squirming in her hands, marching to the basement to dispatch them.

While the school board members went to have an emergency meeting in Mr. Guareschi's office, we tried to put Mrs. Baker's classroom back together, since absolutely all of the desks had been knocked over. It took us most of the day to get everything right. Someone—I think it was Mr. Bradbrook—had knocked the globe of the world off Mrs. Baker's desk, and there was now a deep valley where the Himalaya Mountains had once been. The red
Thorndike
dictionaries were going to need some help; most of their covers had come off when we stepped onto them to climb higher up the bookshelves. And at least two of our desks were gone for good, since all of their legs had splayed out.

Julius Caesar's army wouldn't have left such a mess after crossing the Rubicon.

That afternoon, Coach Quatrini held his cross-country tryouts. By then, the story of Sycorax and Caliban was all over school, and so we figured that tryouts might be delayed. And it might be that some coaches somewhere
would
delay a tryout on an afternoon when some of the tryoutees have just been traumatized by two gigantic rats falling out of their classroom ceiling. But Coach Quatrini thought it would give us motivation.

"The Big M," he said. "
Motivation.
You won't run fast unless you really want to run fast, and really wanting to run fast is what gives you Motivation. The Big M."

He had set out a course for us that stretched to someplace beyond human endurance. We were supposed to start at the gym doors and go around the parking lot (where Sycorax and Caliban were hissing in their cage, waiting for the exterminator to come put them in his truck), past the fence that enclosed the tennis courts, out onto Lee Avenue, down past Goldman's Best Bakery, around in front of the school by the main lobby, behind the elementary school wing, and so back to the gym doors.

"Four times," Coach Quatrini said, holding up four fingers. "You do that route four times. At tempo. Top seven will be varsity—that'll be all eighth graders, I expect. The rest of you will be junior varsity—if you're good enough to make that, you dang slugs."

And with that encouragement, Coach Quatrini blew his whistle and we began.

The sky had not improved during the day. The green and brown had swirled together, and the clouds had lowered themselves further and further, and they had dropped a kind of vapor from them that made it seem that we were running through the jungles of Vietnam, and breathing more water than air. I leaned forward, and I kept my arms low and my hands loose. I didn't rush it. But even so, by the time I passed Sycorax and Caliban—who hissed and threw themselves against the bars toward me when I kicked their cage to say goodbye—I was already feeling the wet air welling inside me. By the time I came around for the second time, things were slowing down considerably, and every eighth grader—and a whole lot of the seventh graders—were far ahead of me.

It's hard to run like Jesse Owens when you're feeling like you're drowning.

The third lap was better. Meryl Lee was standing by the main lobby, and when I ran past, she held up a dried rose with a ribbon on it.

When a girl holds a rose up to you, you run better, let me tell you.

By the time I came around for the fourth lap, I was up to Danny. I had even passed some of the eighth graders, and I could see the leaders in front of me again. I ran past the gym doors—"Can't you go any faster?" from Coach Quatrini—and out into the parking lot, where the exterminator truck had pulled up to unload Sycorax and Caliban into their new cage.

The sky had lowered itself even more, and everything looked like we were seeing it from underwater in a greenish haze. Even sounds were muffled, so that my footsteps seemed to come from far away.

But what wasn't muffled was the cry that came from the exterminator behind me, the sound of a large cage dropping, a scream, and the clicking of clacking teeth. I looked back, and there were the demon rats, racing with their scabby paws toward me, their eyes filled with the Big M—Murder!—and their pointy heads bobbing up and down with each leap. I couldn't scream; I couldn't get enough air into my lungs for screaming. I could only run. But the faster I ran, the more their yellow hatred grew, and every time I looked back—which was a lot—they were flat out after me, their scabby whiskers swept back by their speed, their yellow teeth clacking. I could imagine those teeth sinking into my heels like the assassins' daggers sinking into Caesar, and I ran faster.

I'd be running still if the tennis courts hadn't been there. Since they were, I sprinted into the courts and kicked the wire gate closed behind me. Sycorax and Caliban smashed into the gate and poked their yellow scabby snouts through.

Then they started to climb the fence. Really. They started to climb up the fence, never taking their red eyes off me.

Fear can bring out the Big M. I ran across the courts, and I was up and over the far-side fence before they were up and over the near-side one.

By that time, Mr. Guareschi, who had heard all the screaming, was trying to get the exterminator to go inside the tennis courts to catch the rats. But the exterminator wouldn't go near them. "Did you see those teeth?" he said. He got into his truck and drove a safe distance away.

Meanwhile, Sycorax and Caliban were climbing up the far-side fence after me. Before they reached the ground outside, the entire schoolyard had emptied—me last, when Danny Hupfer grabbed me from where I'd been standing in paralyzed horror.

So what happened after that is all a guess.

At the same time that Sycorax and Caliban hit the bottom of the fence and ran into the parking lot looking for me, a school bus was coming back in for the late-afternoon run. The driver later said that she saw the rats and tried to swerve but that they leaped onto their hind legs and jumped in front of her. She slammed down on her brakes, but the rats stood their ground, their paws up, their snouts pulled back, their yellow teeth clacking, their demon eyes flashing—none of which you'd have been able to recognize among the squashed bits when the bus, after skidding on the suddenly slick asphalt, finally came to a stop.

And as the exterminator drove away, since there was nothing more for him to do, the green and brown sky finally opened, and the rain came down in torrents, so fast it blew sideways, and when it had raged for about the time it takes to run two laps around Camillo Junior High, it stopped, and the green sky evaporated, and it was the ides of March ... a beautiful spring day.

A new record was set for the three-mile run for a Long Island school that afternoon—and I'm including high schools here. People said afterward that they had never seen anything like it—that kind of speed from a seventh grader.

So I made the varsity team, and had the Big M to keep running, especially since it stayed beautiful for the rest of March as the days grew longer—so long that it was still light when my father and sister came home from Hoodhood and Associates at suppertime. I practiced every afternoon after school with the other varsity runners—me, the only seventh grader—while the sun was yellow and warm, and the sky blue and white. I ran leaning forward, my arms and legs like pistons, head straight and still, hands loose, breathing controlled.

I ran like Jesse Owens with the Big M.

***

Meanwhile, the story of the rats grew larger. People went to visit the spot where they had met the bus. Doug Swieteck's brother had two teeth that he claimed were from Caliban, and he would show them to you for a quarter.

Mrs. Sidman was the most heroic figure of the story, and even first graders were drawing pictures of her carrying Caliban and Sycorax through the halls of Camillo Junior High. In all of those pictures, she looked like the warrior that Ariel had wanted to be—stern and serious and powerful. A third grader drew a coat of arms for her with two dead rats beneath her feet. Charles, the Fifth Grader of the Lovely Handwriting, inscribed the motto beneath: "To the Death!" The
D
had a whole lot of swirling loops inside it.

The only one who came out badly in the stories was Mai Thi, and honestly, I couldn't figure it out. No one but Mai Thi had stood her ground beside Mrs. Sidman while all the rest of us scrammed across the room. But instead of her getting a coat of arms and being made into a warrior, people started to talk about her, and not just behind her back, but so that she could hear them. About how people in Vietnam ate rats. How she was just hoping for a good meal. How she thought they were ratburgers on the run. Stuff like that.

Until one day, when outside the yellow forsythia branches were weaving themselves together, and the daffodils were playing their trumpets, and the lilacs were starting to bud and getting all giddy, we were going through the lunch line and Mrs. Bigio handed Mai Thi her Tuna Casserole Surprise, and one of the penitentiary-bound eighth graders said loudly to Mrs. Bigio, "Don't you have any Rat Surprise for her?" and then he turned to Mai Thi and said, "Why don't you go back home where you can find some?" and then Mai Thi started to cry, just stood there crying, and Danny took his entire tray—which was filled with Tuna Casserole Surprise and two glasses of chocolate milk and red jello with peaches—and dumped it over the penitentiary-bound eighth grader's stupid head, and then, before the eighth grader could open his stupid eyes to see who had done it, Danny punched him as hard as he could and broke his stupid nose.

Which got Danny a four-day suspension.

Which Mr. and Mrs. Hupfer used to take him to Washington, D.C., because they were so proud of him.

At lunch recess on the day he came back, he told us about climbing the Washington Monument, touring the White House, seeing Hubert Humphrey waving from a limousine, sprinting up the Capitol steps three at a time, running at tempo through the maze of fences the police were putting up to control the demonstration that Martin Luther King, Jr., was bringing to Washington next month, and walking up to President Lyndon Baines Johnson and shaking his hand—all of which we believed except for the last part.

But this next part is no lie: When we got back in from recess, Mrs. Bigio and Mrs. Baker were holding two trays filled with fried bananas. Really. Fried bananas rolled in crushed nuts, dipped in coconut, and topped with caramel sauce.
Warm
caramel sauce. Can you imagine what all four of those together smelled like? Sweet, and fruity, and spicy, and warm, and creamy, and chewy, all at the same time—that's about as close as I can get. It's the kind of smell that makes you hungry just thinking about it.

Mrs. Baker held the tray like she was carrying gold and frankincense and myrrh. "It's a recipe from Vietnam," she said. "Mrs. Bigio has made them for our class." We cheered. "The caramel sauce is called nuoc mau. Did I say that correctly, Mai Thi Huong?"

Mai Thi shrugged and smiled, and Mrs. Baker laughed, and then she and Mrs. Bigio walked up and down the aisles, and we each took a plate with a fried banana smothered in caramel sauce on it.

And when Mrs. Bigio got to Mai Thi, she stopped, and lifted a plate down onto her desk, and said, "I am so sorry, Mai Thi. I am so sorry."

That night, Walter Cronkite reported that in Khesanh, some of the tunnels the Vietcong were digging now reached to within fifty yards of the marine fences. There were more mortar shells lobbed in. There were more pictures of the marines deep in their bunkers with their hands over their ears. Casualties were light, the White House announced.

In Camillo Junior High, we ate fried bananas with warm nuoc mau. We sang a song that Mai Thi taught us about bananas—though it could have been about elephants and we wouldn't have known it, since we only knew two words of Vietnamese. And when we were done, Mrs. Bigio and Mai Thi held each other tightly, and it seemed to all of us that they did not want to let go.

The next week, Mrs. Sidman read the names of the seven members of the Camillo Junior High School varsity cross-country team during Morning Announcements. "We are very glad to have these seven students represent our school," said Mrs. Sidman, "most especially Holling Hoodhood, who will represent the seventh grade. Holling came in with the fastest time during tryouts—almost a minute faster than any of the eighth graders on the team. We wish you all luck, boys!"