Dreamland Lake (8 page)

Then she sort of skips to the back of the room, a little out of breath. Actually, she’s old, but she tries to act like a young chick. She flips on the overhead projector that throws a poem on the front screen. Then she calls on Isabel Wilson. “Isabel, you have such a
fine
voice. Read this poem aloud to us!” So Isabel, who’s the class star, does. It’s a poem with no rhyme about a bunch of bulldozers wrecking a building. Or, maybe, it’s about dinosaurs eating rocks. You can’t tell which. And that, according to Miss Klimer, is the artistry of it.

Then she flashes up another poem which is stranger than the first one. It’s got words going all over the page in little circles. You have to hang by your heels if you want to read all of this one.
If
you want to.

So Miss Klimer, who knows it, reads it to us. It’s just sounds—like crash, zowie, ker-thump, and like that. Only in circles.

“Notice the
shapes
and
sounds
in this poem, boys and girls. Isn’t it a
noisy
poem?”

“Yes, it’s very noisy,” Isabel Wilson says.

“
Very
noisy,” Miss Klimer says. Flip looks across the room at me. It’s going to be one of those weeks, his eyes tell me. We’re anxious enough as it is for the days to keep moving, since the Camera Shop won’t have the enlargements ready until Thursday. We kind of wondered how we’d be able to wait that long.

But Miss Klimer is saying, “Now starting tomorrow, I want each and every one of you boys and girls
to find a poem on his own. A poem you will read aloud to the entire class. A poem that deals with the
reality
of today—no hearts and flowers and romance, now. Remember, a poem takes the whole world for its province.”

Isabel Wilson puts up her hand, “Would you say, Miss Klimer, that poetry is universal?”

“Oh, yes, Isabel, oh, yes, indeed, I would. Well said.”

So on Tuesday, since we’re good little middle-class children . . . and since most of us would rather keep Miss Klimer off our backs even more than we like to give her a little trouble . . . well, because of these things, most of us turn up with poems.

“Now then,” she says to start the class, rubbing her hands together as though we’re all really going to enjoy this. “Who will be the first to share with us a poem he’s discovered?” Her eyes flit around the room, looking for somebody likely.

Isabel’s raring to go, of course. She ruffles the pages of poetry she’s copied out to show she’s got quite a lot to choose from and wouldn’t mind being called on more than once. Isabel wasn’t as bad as she sounds, by the way. It was just that she didn’t see herself as a student. She saw herself as the Assistant Teacher. Outside of class, she was easier to put up with.

“Well now, Isabel, I think we’ll just save your selections until last so we’ll have something to look forward to.” Isabel nods like this is probably psychologically sound.

And I put my hand up. This freezes Miss Klimer’s eyes in midflit. I’m not what you’d call an aggressive participant. That means I never volunteer. But I have a poem, and I’d just as soon get it out of the way so
I can relax and think my own thoughts. And providing I can pick it out myself, I don’t mind poetry—rhymed or unrhymed—it’s all the same to me. What I do mind is being addressed as “boys and girls.”

“Brian Bishop has a poem,” Miss Klimer says, like she’s not so sure I do. “Stand up and read it to us.” So I do. I’d found it in a fairly new book, and it met all the requirements. It was very modern and up-to-date, and it was all about a high school band marching down a street in the fall—very moody, and with sound effects, and quiet after the band goes off in the distance. Short too. When I finish it, Miss Klimer looks pleased—and somewhat relieved. So I sit down, and Miss Klimer starts looking for the next victim. Arlene DeSappio has her hand halfway up, but Miss Klimer’s looking everywhere but at her. She calls on a few more boys and girls, and they give theirs.

By then, Arlene is waving her hand in the air, and so Miss Klimer says, “Yes, Arlene, now you.”

So poor old Arlene jumps up and starts in without even looking down at her page. In this high, fast monotone she recites:

which brings on sort of a groan running through the half of the class that had Mrs. Vogel back in fifth grade. This happened to be Mrs. Vogel’s favorite poem, and she made us all memorize it. But Arlene plugs along with it like it’s hot off the presses and way up on the charts.

The nearer the end, the faster she went. Arlene was developing a very good bosom. But from the neck up, she was lost. When she finished, she dropped back into her chair, kind of flushed.

Then Miss Klimer says, “Yes . . . well, that was, of course, a poem highly praised in the last century. And certainly very well known . . .” Then she gives up because we all get the point except Arlene, who’s looking bewildered because she’d been aiming to please. “Well, let’s move right along. I wonder if
you
have a poem, Philip Townsend?”

He does; and he gets up, and comes to the front of the room, and announces the title: “Frankenstein.”

Then he begins, sort of acting it out with appropriate gestures of one hand:

This performance is met with a long ovation from the class, who never counted on any entertainment in Language Arts. They love it. And as Flip returns to his seat, people reach out to shake his hand and ask him for a copy of it and like that.

When it’s finally quiet, Miss Klimer draws herself up extra tall and says, “When we speak of modern poetry, we do not include
morbid doggerel.
That so-called verse is, among other things, tasteless. I do think, Philip Townsend, that you have a twisted sense of humor and a preoccupation with the grotesque. Isabel, I think we need you, read some . . .” But the bell rings then. And Miss Klimer sits down, completely disgusted, as we all try to see who can get out the door first.

That’s pretty much the way the week went. But on Thursday we quick-marched through the route, hurling papers at porches with wild abandon and bad aim. So we were downtown at the Camera Shop just before it closed.

“Game of hide-and-seek?” said the guy behind the counter, who’d been looking at the pictures. He pulled the enlargements out of a big manila envelope. We’d had them blown up to eight by tens. I was trying to elbow Flip out of the way so I could see them, but he was jamming them back into the envelope and paying the clerk.

“Come on, Flip, let’s have a look at them,” I said as he was taking giant strikes down Market Street. “Not here,” he said. “Someplace where we can concentrate.”

We could either go to The Napoli for a soda, or we could take the bus home. Finances didn’t cover both. “To the Napoli,” Flip said, so I knew he couldn’t wait, either.

The Napoli was empty at that time of evening. It smells like chocolate syrup and has the reputation of doing a little quiet business in the narcotic trade. But it has big, high-backed booths, and it’s about the only place where you can sit down in privacy.

“Come on, cut the build-up,” I said.

“Order first.” So we ordered—the usual: all-chocolate sodas with sprinkles. And two waters on the side.

“Now,” I said.

“Now.” And he began to pull the pictures out of the envelope slow and easy, trying to drive me crazy. He acted like he was going to keep both of them, but, at the last second, scooted one across the table at me.

So we both look. My stomach’s turning over. We exchange them and look again.

Then we look at each other. “Might have known,” Flip said finally.

It was clear as anything. In both pictures. The face looking out from behind the tree belonged to Elvan Helligrew. A big, round moon-face.

I should have been relieved. At least, it wasn’t some mad monster or a stranger. It was, at least, somebody we knew. Somebody harmless. And I should have been mad too. Since, instead of taking our route for us that day, Elvan had been stalking us through the park, poking his nose into our private business. But I don’t know. I still had this weird feeling. In a way, I felt embarrassed for Elvan for doing it. And too, I still felt insecure. Like we thought we were alone, but we weren’t. Like you’re always at the mercy of somebody or something that’s watching when you’re not. But instead, I said to Flip, “Well, that clears up the mystery.”

“Part of it,” he said. Then the sodas came.

We had to walk home, but the days were getting
longer so it was still light. In the distant past, we’d done some jump-riding: leaping up on the back bumper of the Number Five bus and hanging on for dear life. But we’d outgrown that. I was tall enough so they’d see me through the back window from inside the bus.

I could take longer strides than Flip, but he walked faster to make up for it. We headed off past the Public Library and out West Jefferson Avenue which finally ends up at the entrance to Marquette Park. But we turned off and cut across the campus of the Bible College before we got there.

Along in through there, Flip said, “I wouldn’t have thought he could manage it.”

“Who?”

“Elvan, who else? How’d he go creeping along within a few yards of us without us hearing him? Size he is, you’d think he’d sound like a rhinoceros battering down a jungle.”

“Light on his feet, I guess. He’s spongy.”

“Yeah, like a dirigible.”

We were just coming out of the other gates of the Bible College onto West Monroe Street, which is the quickest way home, when Flip said, “Well, I hate to have to do it, but we’ve got to be nice to Elvan.”

“I’d hate to have to do it too. So why?”

“Why? Use your head. We’ve got to find out why he was in the woods. We’ve got the evidence.” He waved the manila envelope. “Now we got to get to the motive.”

“We’ve already got to the motive,” I said, trying to get the upper hand. “I can give it to you in a nutshell. You remember the next day, when you took after him in the cafeteria about not delivering?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you remember how he acted. Like he
wanted
you to call him every name you could think of. Like, maybe, if you started slapping him around, he wouldn’t have minded that, either.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the way he is,” Flip said, kind of ashamed-sounding.

“And that’s the way he’s always been—long as I can remember—always wanting attention, always wanting to hang around with some gang or other. Nobody’d ever have him. Listen, in the middle of that whole thing in the cafeteria, he called you
old buddy
—
OLD BUDDY
—get it? He doesn’t care what he has to do to get in with us—you, especially.”

“Good luck to him on that.”

“Good luck nothing! According to you, we’re going to be nice to him now. We’ll be stuck with him till high school graduation. Maybe longer. Just so you can find out what we already know. You better realize, when we start being nice to him, it’s not going to be easy to get rid of him.”

“When did you take up practicing psychiatry?” Flip wanted to know. “You’ll be charging thirty-five, forty dollars an hour to shrink people’s brains before we know it.”

“Yeah, and you’ll want to go into partnership with me, so we’ll be broke all the time same as now.”

“Well, I’m not saying you’re wrong. But you’re overlooking a few points.”

“Such as?”

“Such as what we found in the tennis clubhouse. And what we found carved into the concrete roller coaster thing.
And
what we found by the bridge, which is hanging up on my closet door and is authentic.”

He had me there. I’d have gladly forgotten those
Nazi souvenirs. “What’s that got to do with Elvan?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe something. We’ve got to find out, don’t we? We’ve got to get into his confidence. Then if we find out he didn’t have anything to do with that part of things, well, then we’ll have to turn our investigation in a new direction.”

“Instead of turning our investigations in new directions and spending the rest of our lives with Elvan Helligrew and all those fun things, I got another idea,” I said. “We could forget the whole thing.”

“Could we?” Flip said.