Rook: Snowman (6 page)

TT mewed and lifted her paw as if to say
Look, dummy. Look what’s happening on your coffee table. This is a message. This is a sign. Look at what I’m showing you, and learn
.

“I don’t know!” Jim shouted at her. “I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking at!”

The cards whirled around faster and faster; and the snowstorm of fragments blew around the entire living-room, and even out of the window, on to the balcony, like confetti. Then, just as abruptly as they had started to dance, the cards dropped on to the table, and lay there, lifeless and scattered, while the snowstorm gradually subsided, and all of the pieces spiraled to the floor.

“Very enlightening, I don’t think,” said Jim, looking around his paper-strewn living-room. “Also very messy.” Tibbles Two jumped down from the couch and went into the kitchen, where he could hear her noisily lapping up her soya milk. He stood up and collected all the remaining Tarot cards. He checked them all, thumbing through the whole deck three times over, but there was no sign of the card with the hooded figure on it. Must have been one of the cards that self-destructed, and turned his living-room into Santa’s grotto. He followed Tibbles Two into the kitchen and dropped the rest of the deck into the trash.

He was just about to take a shower when the doorbell rang. He peered through the spyhole and saw a grossly distorted version of Mervyn Brookfeller, who lived across the hallway. He opened the door and said, “Hi, Mervyn. I was going to take a shower. Then I was going to come over and thank you for cleaning up my apartment. You did a fantastic job.”

Mervyn was six feet three inches and wore platform soles which made him look even taller. He also sported an immense golden quiff which probably took him over six feet five. He wore a white satin vest embroidered with poppies and tight white satin pedal-pushers. His nails were as long as a woman’s, and immaculately painted with purple polish. Although he was only a tenant like everybody else in Jim’s apartment block, he had somehow appointed himself unofficial super, fixing everybody’s fuses, levering the teaspoons out of their sink disposal units, keeping the hallways hoovered and listening to everybody’s problems. He sang in cabaret at The Slant Club on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, under the name of Chet Sideways.

He stalked into Jim’s apartment and looked around at all the ripped-up fragments of card. Then he turned to Jim with his arms held out wide, wordlessly seeking an explanation.

Jim said, “I’m sorry. You did a terrific job, really. But when I got home, there was kind of an event.”

“An event? It looks like you got married. Congratulations. Who’s the lucky girl?”

Tibbles Two came out of the kitchen licking her whiskers.

“You married a cat! How different! I mean, most men are always hankering after a little pussy … but you had the nerve to make it legal!”

“Shut up, Mervyn,” said Jim. “Something happened here … something weird.”

“In that case you’d better pour me a stiff drink.”

Jim poured him out a large glassful of Jack Daniel’s. He took a mouthful and shuddered, as if a goose had walked over his grave. “That hit the spot! So tell me what’s been happening here.”

“I don’t know … but I feel like somebody’s trying
to tell me something.” He told Melvyn all about the frozen drinking fountain and the iced-up washroom and the dancing Tarot cards.

“You’re being warned,” said Melvyn, emphatically. “There’s no question about it. You’re being warned from beyond. My Aunt Minnie kept seeing toads in her yard, and the next thing she knew she met my Uncle Irvine. And my brother Aaron had a sign. His electric kettle shorted out, and left a burn mark on his kitchen wall in the shape of a bearded man. The next day he went out and he was run over by a bearded man in a Buick Electra.”

“And?”

“And what? He died. He was only twenty-three.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“That was my brother, Jim. Do you want me to show you a picture of him?”

“No, don’t worry.”

“But he had a warning, just like you’re having a warning now. Very low temperatures, that’s always a sign of impending evil. Didn’t you ever see
The Exorcist
? And things that whirl around, all on their own. Very bad news. And all that ripped-up paper, looking like snow.”

Yes, thought Jim. That was exactly what it looked like. Snow. Four figures toiling through a snowstorm. Somebody was trying to tell him something about cold and ice and snow; and somebody was trying to warn him that something terrible was going to happen to him.

Mervyn flitted around, picking up little pieces of playing card. He bobbed down by the coffee-table, where there was only one card left, face-down, the card which Jim hadn’t had the time to turn over.
That which crosses you
– that which stands in your way.

“Don’t touch that!” said Jim, as Mervyn bent forward to pick it up, but it was already too late.

“This is a bit grim, isn’t it?” said Mervyn, waving the Death card between his manicured fingertips.

Four

The next morning started hot and hazy. The sky over Los Angeles was a weird, unearthly bronze, as if God were using a strawberry filter.

At first, Jim was worried that TT might want to come to college with him; but after breakfast she curled up on her chair on the balcony and fell asleep, so she was obviously quite content to stay where she was.

As he stepped out of the elevator he bumped into Mervyn. Mervyn was wearing a woman’s satin robe with black-and-green Japanese flowers splashed all over it. He had been out to the corner store to buy himself a huge bottle of papaya juice. “It’s so good for the equilibrium. You can go on all the scariest rides at Knott’s Berry Farm and never feel dizzy. They used to give it to kamikaze pilots.”

“Keep an eye on my cat, would you?” Jim asked him. “She seems okay, but you never know.”

“Well, exactly. Especially with the threat of you-know-what hanging over you.”

“The Death card doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to die. It could mean the death of anything. A relationship. A part of your life.”

“Scary, though!
Brrr
! Watch how you drive.”

By the time Jim arrived at college he was already five minutes late. Dr Friendly came out of the staff room just
as he was turning the corner into the main corridor and called, “James!”

“I know. Antietam. And, please, try to call me Jim.”

“I just want you to know that we have some VIP visitors this afternoon. Two assistant secretaries from the Department of Education in Washington. George Corcoran from Postsecondary and Madeleine Ouster from Special.”

“I see. So you want me to make sure that my class appears to be slightly less subnormal than usual.”

“I’m not – I’m not
denigrating
them, James. It’s just that you wouldn’t train a pig to run the Kentucky Derby, would you?”

“No, and you wouldn’t eat a racehorse sandwich, either. So what’s your point?”

Dr Friendly inhaled, ready to say something, but then he decided against it.

Jim reached his classroom and dropped his books on to his desk. Everybody vaguely shuffled themselves into a tidier sort of slouch, and Washington took off his baseball cap. Jim paced around for a while, looking at them. Maybe, in the final analysis, Dr Friendly was right. Maybe he was wasting his time and the taxpayers’ money. But he had only to look at their expectant faces, one after another, to know that he couldn’t abandon them. He couldn’t leave them with no knowledge of literature at all. That would be like keeping a child locked in its room all its life, and never telling it that there were trees outside, and other people, and sky, no matter what color it was.

“Today, I feel reasonable,” he announced. “I have slept properly, showered, shaved and eaten a bowl of Chex with Greek yogurt on it. I am therefore ready to read your impressions of what I looked like yesterday.”

He passed up and down the aisles between the desks, collecting their sheets of paper. “I think you guys have
a grudge against paper. It starts off white and rectangular and smooth. By the time you’ve finished with it, you’ve almost managed to turn it back into wood pulp.

He held up Joyce Capistrano’s effort, which was full of tiny holes. “Look at this. I wanted a shining contribution to expressive literature. What did I get? A lacy cake mat.

At the very back of the class, Nestor Fawkes tried to cover his paper with his elbows. Nestor was a sallow, unsmiling boy who came from a severely dysfunctional family. His face was always blotched with crimson spots and blue bruises. His older brother was in jail for attempted murder and his father regularly beat his mother until she could hardly walk. Nestor always wore cheap, ill-fitting clothes and his sneakers were falling apart. Jim doubted that there was any hope for him. Life was never that kind. But he had to try. If an understanding of
Look Homeward, Angel
couldn’t save him, then nothing could.

“Nestor, you want to give me your paper?”

Nestor tilted his head and looked up at Jim sideways. “It aint no good.”

“What do you mean it aint no good? Don’t you mean ‘it isn’t any good’?”

“That’s what I said, sir. It isn’t any no good.”

Jim came up close to him. “Who are you?” he demanded.

Nestor blinked in bewilderment.

“Who are you?” Jim repeated.

“Nestor Fawkes, sir.”

“That’s right. You Nestor Fawkes. You student. Me Mr Rook. Me teacher. You write. Me mark. In other words, try your best and don’t be a pessimist. You might just surprise me.”

Nestor sat with his head bowed, saying nothing. Jim took hold of the edge of his paper and slowly dragged it out from under his elbows. In extremely neat block capitals, Nestor
had printed:
LIKE A MAN I SAW DEAD BY THE FREEWAY HIS EYES EMPTY BY CROWS

He laid his hand on Nestor’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. If Laura Killmeyer could communicate by touch, then maybe he could, too. He wanted Nestor to know that he had written a stark and graphic description which was all the more shocking because of what it told the reader much more about the person who had written it than the person it had been written about. At the age of nineteen, who had ever seen a man lying dead by the highway, with his eyes pecked out? And, Jesus, thought Jim, did I really look as bad as that? I have to give up tequila slammers.

He returned to his desk and sat down. “Okay,” he said, “I’m going to read through your estimable efforts, and in the meantime you can open your
Twentieth-Century American Poets
to page one-two-eight and read ‘Auto Wreck’ by Karl Shapiro. Read it three times. Read the last verse four times, or even more, until you think you understand what he’s driving at. He says about this auto wreck,

Who is innocent
?

For death in war is done by hands;

Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic;

And cancer, simple as a flower, blooms

But this invites the occult mind,

Cancels our physics with a sneer,

And spatters all we know of denouement

Across the expedient and wicked stones
.

Ray Krueger put up his hand. “What’s ‘day nooming’, Mr Rook?”

“It’s when French guys take their pants down,” put in
Tarquin Tree. “Everybody say, ‘look at dose guys, day mooning.’”

“It’s day-
noom
-ing, not day-moon-ing.”

“Noom, moon, what’s the difference?”

“What do you mean, what’s the difference? You of all people, man! You’re the one who said you wanted to work for NASA. You’re going to go to the interview and tell them you want to try for a noom shot?”

Jim was used to this surrealistic banter and he didn’t discourage it. All of his students heard words differently, and read them differently, if they were able to read them at all. He deliberately gave them challenging texts to make their minds work, to make them ask questions, to give them confidence. He encouraged them to dismantle words like the engines they took to pieces when they went to the college auto shop, and put them back together again.

“Okay, that’s enough,” he told them, lifting both hands. “It’s
denouement
. Use your dictionaries for words that you don’t understand. Don’t mumble under your breath when you read. You’re remedial English students, not half-wits. And – Dottie – you don’t need a ruler to count down the lines. Be brave. Set yourself afloat on a sea of words. They’ll carry you along, no problem, like the Lady of Shallott. You won’t drown.”

“Yes, sir, Mr Rook, sir,” said Dottie, flushing hot pink and stowing her Disney ruler back in her bag.

“And, Ray –
denouement
is a French word, yes. But it means the final working out of a story or a plot. The loosening, the unraveling, when everything eventually becomes clear.”

“Hey, Mr Rook, you learn something every day.”

Washington eased himself back in his chair and said, “My dad says you learn something every day and you
forget something every day. Yesterday he forgot who was the NBA Rookie of the Year, the year I was born.”

“Julius Irving, Philadelphia,” said Jim. “Now shut up and turn your wandering attention to reading this poem.”

Washington stared at him open-mouthed. “How do you know that? That’s amazing. Julius Irving. I can’t believe you said that.”

“The poem, Washington?”

When Special Class II had finally settled down into their usual state of whispering, giggling, passing messages and suppressed fidgeting, Jim leaned back in his chair with his feet on the desk and read their descriptions of yesterday’s hangover. ‘He looked like a ghost peering in through a dirty window.’ That was Dottie’s, and he gave her a six for it. ‘A bowl of wrinkly sago pudding with 2 prunes for Is.’ That was Mandy Saintskill, a black girl from Haiti. ‘Imagine a wino carrying a crumpled-up bag with a bottle of whiskey in it but the crumples make a face.’ That was Laura Killmeyer’s, very psychic. He gave it four.