Gentlemen (3 page)

“What do we have here?” he said, putting the little club into a drawer in his desk and turning back to look at the board. He looked at it like he'd just come across it, like he wasn't the one who just wrote all of those words and there wasn't still chalk dust on his fingertips. He should've known by then that we didn't respond to open questions like that, and one little stunt with a barrel wasn't going to change that. He remembered, I guess, and without turning around, he said, “Mr. Benton? What do we have here?”

I wasn't sure why he was singling me out, so I kept it simple. “A list.”

“That's right, Mr. Benton. We have a list. A list of what?”

“A list of words.”

“Yes. It is that, but what else is it?”

He turned around, but he wasn't looking at me. He was
looking around the room. I guess he was looking for someone who might answer his question, but there were no takers.

“These,” he said, waving behind him, “they are words, but what else are they?”

There was still no response—the kind of no response where you could imagine hearing crickets.

“This,” he said, stabbing his finger into the
W
in
watermelon,
“what is this?”

I thought he was going to call on me again, but he didn't.

“Mr. Reed, you seem to have a lot to say today”—Haberman heard every whisper, he just didn't react to most of them—“so what is this?”

“Uh, watermelon,” Reedy said in a fake-dumb way designed to get laughs, but he only got a few little snorts.

“Is it? Is it, really? Do you like watermelon, Mr. Reed?”

“Yeah, it's OK.”

“Well, then, would you like a slice? Why don't you come up here and take a slice of delicious watermelon?”

He circled the word in chalk as he said it, so we knew he was talking about what was on the board and not what was in the barrel. Reedy thought it was a joke or something and didn't say anything, but after a while you could tell that Haberman was waiting for him to respond.

“I can't,” Reedy said.

“Why not? You say it's watermelon.” He circled it again. “Come up here and have some nice watermelon.”

And now Haberman was sort of glaring at Reedy, like he was angry at him for saying it was watermelon. Reedy looked over at the barrel. He'd guessed a jug of water.

“It's not a real watermelon,” Reedy said, and you could see he was sort of uncomfortable now. The way Haberman did that, switched from smiling and joking to angry, so that you knew he wasn't really joking in the first place, it could creep you out if you were on the receiving end of it.

“What is it then?”

“It's a word…”

“No!” said Haberman. It was almost a shout, and Reedy sat there squirming in his seat as Haberman went on a long coughing jag from the stuff he'd kicked up in his lungs. When he was done, he picked up like it hadn't happened.

“That is not wrong, Mr. Reed, it is merely redundant.”

Reedy gave him a blank look.

“Mr. Benton has covered that, I believe. I asked what else it is. What else is it?”

Reedy just kept beaming that blank look, and Haberman broke out into a smile again. So now it's like he wasn't really mad. He was a strange dude. He looked at me, and I probably had half a smile on, because it's funny if this stuff isn't happening to you, and I knew what he was going to say, anyway.

“It is an idea.”

He looked around after he said it like he expected us all to fall out of our chairs from the sheer amazingness of this. When we didn't he just went on.

“It is not a real watermelon. It is a guess, Mr. Biron's guess. Maybe there is a watermelon in the barrel, and maybe there isn't. In fact, I will tell you that there is not. If you were to come up here and attempt to lift this barrel, you would know that whatever it is that's in there, it is far too heavy to be a watermelon. So there is no actual watermelon, either in the barrel or on the board. So what does that leave us with?”

Haberman's pace was picking up, so we knew he was going to answer his own question without risking one of us getting it wrong.

“It leaves us with the idea of a watermelon. Mr. Biron hit the barrel. He thought about what he heard, what he felt, and it seemed to him like a watermelon. Is that fair to say?”

He looked at Max, who nodded and said, “Yeah.”

“Perhaps you even pictured a watermelon, with that green, mottled rind, and that classic ovoid shape?”

Max didn't know what at least a few of those words meant, and I knew one and not the other, but he shrugged and said, “Sure.”

“That is what we have here: a word signifying the idea of a watermelon. In fact, we have many words signifying many ideas. Not all of them can be right. Actually, little secret here, none of them are. Though one is close.”

He didn't look at anyone in particular when he said this, so we didn't know who was close.

“But the ideas are still there. The sand that Ms. Bialis may have imagined running through her fingers, may have
remembered from a trip to the Cape, it is up on this board. We have, let's see, fourteen ideas up on the board, and though none of them match the contents of this barrel, they are all, in their own way, just as real.”

I was looking at the barrel and thinking, Christ, if that's the point he wanted to make, he could've used a Dixie Cup, a Dixie Cup with something wrapped in a napkin, and we could have flicked the side with our fingers. Haberman paused to cough up more lung butter, then continued.

“If I were to tell you what's in this barrel, not show, but just tell, would it be any more real? You would not be able to see it or touch it. It would exist only in your mind. Suppose, for example, I was lying?”

The smile crept back onto his face.

“And here are two more for you to ponder,” he said, turning away.

Haberman picked up the chalk and wrote on the board. We couldn't see what he was writing, since he made a better bore than a window, but when he stepped back we could see two new words at the end of the list:
CRIME
and
PUNISHMENT.
We'd seen those words before, since that was the book he'd handed out the week before. It was on most of our desks,
Crime and Punishment,
by some Russian dude.

Haberman gave all his classes the same books. It was like a point of pride or whatever. He said, actually said to us, that he could teach Melville to a stone—hard to miss the point there, looking down at the new copy of
Moby-Dick
on your
desk—and maybe he could, if he made the questions easy enough. The first question on our test had been “What kind of animal was Moby-Dick?” But that didn't mean he wouldn't put us through a lot of hot air along the way. We figured he gave the same little speeches to all his classes, too, about metaphors and allusions and shadows in caves.

We figured this latest book would just be more of the same. So now that he brought it up it was like he actually had a point with all of this barrel crap, and we were probably getting to it. Still, it felt like Tommy could walk in right now, lean over and say, What'd I miss? And I could say, Nothing much, and not be far off. He'd say, What's with the tub? And I'd just shrug. I looked over at the door but there was no one there.

“And what are these?” said Haberman, flicking the point of the chalk back and forth between the two new words. “Mr. Benton?”

And it was pretty clear he wanted me to say ideas, but I didn't exactly want to be his go-to guy, so I held up my copy of the book and said, “Homework.”

I got a few laughs out of that line and Haberman frowned, but before he said anything, Lara was like, “Ideas!” She was truly happy to figure this one out, like a puppy finding a squeak toy.

“That's right!” he said, turning toward her.

She leaned forward, in case he asked her something else, but he just plowed ahead on his own.

“What is a crime? What is it really? It is the idea that someone has done something wrong. One person may consider something a crime, and another person might consider it something else. The characters in this book certainly cannot agree. Is a fight in the hallway a crime? It fits the definition of assault, but it is more likely to end in detention after school than in a courtroom. Why is that? A minor has some wine in church; is that underage drinking or religious expression?”

And this is why people hate people like him. He wasn't wrong, exactly, but he was full of crap, because there are laws. Obviously. They're written down and if you break them and you aren't careful, you go to jail or get your head kicked in by the cops, and just because it hadn't happened to him or anyone he knew didn't mean it wasn't real, that it was all an idea. I do something serious and my life is flushed down the pipes, and sure, I might do it anyway, but that's a chance I'm taking, and I still know the fact of the matter. But he just kept going, acting like he was on a roll.

“And what is punishment? Well, it comes after a crime, doesn't it, after a crime or at least a transgression of some sort? The ideas are linked. They are universal.
Tsumi to batsu,
that is crime and punishment in Japanese. I don't know why I remember that; I just do.”

And I was thinking: I don't know why I don't care; I just don't.

“The concept, and it is eastern as well as western, is that the crime creates an imbalance, and the punishment restores that balance. It is yin and yang or action and reaction, but is it true? Isn't it all just an idea? Couldn't you look at it differently? The crime changes things—a house that was standing is now burned down—and the punishment changes things more—a man that was free is now in jail. Excuse me, a man
who
was free. Is that more in balance or more out of balance? A case could be made either way. Ideas can be linked to one another, and they can also be at odds with one another. To an extent, everyone must be their own judge, their own jury. Think about that as you read this book. How does it apply to Raskolnikov? What is his conception of crime? Does it change over the course of the book?”

I was thinking, How does it apply to who? I looked at the clock and it was a little more than ten minutes to go before lunch, and that ten minutes went pretty much the same way. Haberman did the talking, and now he was talking about this dude Raskolnikov. It made me think of
rascal,
a word my gramps used to use. A minute or so to go and a few people actually raised their hands. Again, it wasn't something that happened much in here. Haberman picked Max, and Max goes, “So what's in the barrel anyway?”

Haberman curled his mouth up into half a smile, spread his hands, and said, “Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Whatever you think is in there, well, then that is what's in there. In
every way that matters, the contents are in your mind, not in the barrel.”

Which is the same crap he'd been saying all class and not an answer. One more example of why we didn't raise our hands much.

When the bell finally went off, he gave us our homework, adding another twenty-five pages to the twenty-five none of us had read the night before. We figured we'd find a one-page wrap-up of the book on the Internet before the test. Bones found a pretty good site for those last time. I didn't need it for that one, because I'd seen the movie, but I figured I'd check it out for this one. I didn't think there was a movie of
Crime and Punishment.
I hadn't heard of one, anyway. Maybe there was an old one, but I didn't watch any of that black-and-white crap.

We grabbed our stuff quick. Haberman's class was a haul from the cafeteria, and you didn't want to be at the end of the line and have to stand there forever like a tool. We'd sort of formed up around my desk, you know, assembling Strike Force Delta, but just as we were heading out, Haberman was like, “You three, Benton, Bonouil, and Malloy, a moment, please.”

That's me, Bones, and Mixer, and we gave each other a quick look. We hadn't done squat and had no idea what this was about. It turned out he wanted help getting the stupid barrel out to his car. That still didn't answer the question of why us, and as the others pushed past you could see they were looking at us and thinking the same thing. He shouldn't have been allowed to just jack our lunch like that, but if we walked out, we'd be the ones in trouble.

Haberman was either lucky or good, because if he'd asked
just me, I'd just as likely've said no thanks and taken my chances. If I end up in detention with Tommy, then I end up in detention with Tommy. I knew the way. If Tommy was suspended already, well, then I'd be a full step up the ladder from him. Mixer probably would've done the same thing. Bones might or might not've. He was on the brink of failing in here. English is a core class and no one wanted to do tenth again, especially Bones. He'd already failed a grade once. The first time we met him was his second try at fourth grade.

He was pretty different back then. He was still called Gerard, for one, and he wasn't so angry. I mean, he was ten, and there's only so angry a ten-year-old is going to be. He was just hyper and a year older than the rest of us. It wasn't the kind of thing you discussed, but everybody knew. We'd seen him around in the hallways and the cafeteria, so we knew he wasn't new to the school, and we knew he hadn't been in our class the year before, so it wasn't too hard to piece together that he'd been held back. He just came with fourth grade, like the furniture.

You could tell it wasn't something he wanted to talk about, but he loosened up some in the second half of the year. He'd made two friends by then, the same two friends he had now, and the teachers mostly hadn't bothered to change the tests from the year before. Even the pop quizzes were mostly the same. He'd been left back one year, but in a way, it's like the teachers are left back every year. Anyway, he started giving Mixer and me a heads-up on the quizzes and tests, the
ones he remembered anyway. It was probably the first and only time in his life he qualified as smart. But that was when the other kids turned on him. I guess maybe they wanted him to share the test info a little more widely.

Toward the end of the year, they started in on him. They'd be like, “So long! Say hi to the next class. We'll write you when we get to fifth grade, let you know how it is.” I think that's when the anger really started to creep into his system. And then every year after that, the teachers handing his tests back face-up, a big red D or F on top, having to sweat it out every June, whether or not he was going to move ahead with the rest of us.

Hell, it even kind of makes me angry, thinking about the little kid he was back in fourth grade. He used to jump off the top of the slide and yell “Spider-Man!” We'd all be laughing and he'd be smiling and his face'd be bright red from the attention.

But that smile was gone now, and it's like all that was left were the Ds and Fs. And it's kind of funny, too, because all those little bastards who made fun of him were right: That kid, the kid he was, never really did make it out of fourth grade. And two years into high school, I was starting to suspect that I was friends with someone who didn't really exist anymore. Just sometimes he'd make an appearance, the old Bones, smiling out at me about some dumb thing and I couldn't help but smile back. We had a history, you know, and isn't that what friendship is?

Anyway, like I said, Haberman asked all three of us, so any one of us bailing kind of screwed the others. Plus, with three of us, it seemed like it would be quick and easy to haul the barrel out to the parking lot. Throw in the facts that Haberman had a sweet car and English was on the first floor, and we were just like, All right, whatever.

But we were wrong, because it turned out that he was not kidding about the barrel being heavy. A watermelon, my ass. At first we tried to slide it along the floor, but that didn't work at all. The blue plastic dragged along the tile, sticking more than it slid. The floor was smooth enough, but there was some kind of grit on the bottom of the barrel. We started to tip it over to roll it, but Haberman said no way, so we had to lift it. It was tricky to grip, so it took two of us to get the thing off the ground. Then Bones found some space in the middle and became like the outboard engine. He did most of the pushing us forward, while Mixer and me did most of the lifting. Haberman didn't even pretend he was going to help. He was just like, “This way,” but we knew where the teachers parked.

There was the usual mob scene between classes. Kids who had early lunch period coming back, eating snack packs of Oreos and picking their teeth. Kids who had late lunch heading that way. People talking at their lockers, some couples kissing, and here we come like the hired help. I hated that. I hated how it made me feel. I knew they were looking at me, and normally I might shoot them a look or shoulder into
them when I walked by, but it's hard to look tough when you're squatting down and red in the face, so I just kept my eyes straight ahead and kept my feet shuffling along.

“This frickin' sucks,” I said, loud enough for Haberman to hear, and of course, I didn't really say frickin'. He didn't say anything. What did he care? We were the ones breaking into a sweat. Mixer and Bones sort of grunted their agreement. They knew what I was talking about. I knew everyone around us was like, There go those losers. Get used to the heavy lifting, boys. They're no better than me, but that's not what they were thinking then, and I just wanted to pop someone in the mouth.

We finally reached the big double doors. Haberman opened the one on the right, and he was like, “After you, gentlemen.”

He always called us gentlemen. Any group of guys in the hallway or rolling into class a little late got one of those. He called the girls ladies. I wondered what he called the principal, Your Majesty? Anyway, it was like, Yeah, screw you very much, and we were through the doors and out into the sunlight and open air.

“I've got to put 'er down for a sec,” said Mixer, and that was fine with me. We dropped the barrel at the top of the wide stone steps that led down into the front parking lot. Just three steps, real short and wide, so they wouldn't be a problem getting down. I straightened up, and for a second it was actually kind of cool. Being outside on a nice day was one
thing, but being outside on a nice day when you were supposed to be in the god-awful gloomy hallways of the Tits was another thing entirely. Pretty nice.

“All right, then,” said Haberman, like he was our boss and not our teacher. Totally ruined it. We leaned back down, wedged our fingers between the heavy plastic and the hard granite. We lifted with our legs and not our backs, like we learned when we helped Tommy's dad move into his apartment in the city. Gary, who told us that, was Tommy's stepdad now. It was kind of a bad scene, that move, but it was good advice.

“Not for nothing,” said Bones, “but what the hell's in this thing?”

“Are you recanting your guess, then, Mr. Bonouil?” said Haberman.

“Yep. I'm recanting all of those guesses, everybody's.”

“Everyone was wrong? Not one of your classmates hit the jackpot?”

“Nope,” said Bones. He was grinding his teeth and spitting out his words between huffs and puffs. He wasn't looking at Haberman, but he was talking right at him, if that makes any sense. He was talking to Haberman like he was a freshman and not a teacher. It's not a real offense, not like shoving him or something, but it was close to one, especially the way Bones was going about it.

Bones was just not good at this, at provoking people, picking arguments. He had no volume control, and everything he
said just sounded like a threat. This was more Mixer's game, and as long as Bones had hung out with Mixer, he never could pick it up. Bones lacked the mental tools for it, I guess, and the patience.

Mixer was excellent at this kind of thing, at needling people without giving them any real good excuse to smack him. Since fourth or fifth grade, he'd been able to get the other guy to start it, roomful of witnesses, and then pound the poor kid into the ground “in self-defense.” With teachers, he could just piss them off without giving them any good cause for punishing him. You couldn't do it all the time, otherwise people would catch on. Mixer knew that. He saved it for special occasions, and he was smart about it.

Bones was always the other guy, the one it was easy to get going. If you wanted a fight, it'd take all of about three words to get Bones to go. And early on, that happened a lot. Back in elementary school, when he was just this skinny, aggressive kid, he used to get into a lot of fights. But at some point, I guess around sixth grade, he just stopped following the rules.

Kid fights don't usually have clear winners. Sometimes, like if somebody slips or takes one clean on the nose, yeah, it'll be pretty obvious. More often, kids just grab and paw and swing wide at each other until they get it out of their system. Then they stop when the one who's getting the worst of it decides to quit while he can still pretend he won, or at least call it a draw. The way to quit is to sort of pull back and stall until the teachers get there. Everyone knew the deal, but
Bones got to the point where he wouldn't stop until he was pulled off. Sometimes it took three of us.

That's when people stopped wanting to fight him. That's how he got the nickname, too. You might think it's because he's skinny, skin and bones, but that's not it. It's because pulling him off a kid in a fight was like pulling a dog away from a bone. And it might seem like it'd be hard to be friends with someone like that, but that's only half the story, because it was cool, too. It's like rappers have pit bulls, you know? And when kids stopped wanting to mess with him, they stopped wanting to mess with us. There wasn't much of a difference back then. We were tight. If Bones saw someone giving me trouble, he'd give it right back to them.

Haberman didn't know any of this, of course. He thought he was talking to a student, but really, it was like he was poking a dog with a stick. He was a teacher and that'd probably always been enough to keep him safe, just the name, the word. But Bones didn't put a lot of value in words. He could understand being in the school, just that there are different rules in there and walls and doors to hold him in place, but we were out of the school now. Just a few yards out, but those must've seemed like some long yards to Bones. His voice, his body language, it'd all changed from the hallway to here. He was coiling up, giving all the warning signs that anyone who'd gone to school with us would've recognized. But Haberman had never seen them before.

“And why do you suppose your classmates all got it wrong?” he said.

“Well, A, because you said so, and B, because they didn't have to lift it.”

We arrived at Haberman's car and dropped the barrel near the trunk.

“Yes, this is the one. You three seem to know that already, though. I guess I know who to ask if my tires mysteriously sprout holes.”

Yeah, we knew his car. It was a sleek little MG sports car. Vintage, dark red, real nice. There weren't any other cars like that in the teachers' lot. There was one sweet BMW in the student lot, but that was new. This thing was like an antique, but it ran smooth. I'd heard the engine hum by a few times.

We served detention in a little room that was just thirty or forty yards from here, and in the nice weather, the windows were open. Everyone sort of wondered why such a wreck of a teacher had such a sweet car—he made more noise coughing than the car made starting—but I guess it was just that family money of his. If I had that kind of money, I'd buy a car like that, too. I was counting the months till I got my license. There weren't too many left, but it felt like they were just crawling by.

“Well, then, Mr. Bonouil,” said Haberman, getting back to Bones's question. “You have had to lift it. Knowing what you know now, after all of your hard-earned insight, would you like to revise your guess?”

“I'd prefer you just tell me,” said Bones. He stood up straight and he was three, maybe four inches taller than Haberman. He could pound him into dog meat, and out here in the parking lot, it seemed like that just might happen. But Haberman just kept ignoring the vibe, running right through the red lights.

“Oh, I don't think you'd believe me if I did.”

Now they were looking right at each other, and I was thinking, Don't do it, because it just wasn't worth it. Yeah, that sucked, hauling that thing past half the school and everything, but it was over now, so I broke in.

“Yeah, well, you better believe that this thing won't fit into that trunk,” I said.

“Hmmm?” said Haberman, looking down and sizing things up a bit. “You're quite right, Mr. Benton. Sometimes, you know, I think you're holding out on me.”

I ignored that last comment and said, “We'll have to dump it out. It'll probably fit without the barrel.”

It would fit if there was any give to it, because the shape was the problem. So once again, the topic swung around to what was in the barrel. Haberman took the keys out of his pocket and unlocked the trunk, which rose open on its own once he removed the key. Just a few things in there: another blanket, like the one in the barrel but folded flat, a jug of water, and a jack. I didn't see the tire iron, but it might've been in the shadows farther back.

“You could've filled this thing up with lead shot, just to make us carry it,” said Bones. I could tell he was still angry, because we'd stopped lifting, but his face was still red.