Steel Beach (49 page)

There was a lot more,
all
of it alarming, but it was mostly either a re-hashing of what had gone before or fruitless attempts by me to tell him everything was going to be all right, that there was
plenty
to live for, that life was
great
…  and I leave it to you to imagine how hollow that all sounded from a girl who’d just tried to blow out her own brains.

Why he came to me for his confessional I never got up the nerve to ask. I have to think it was an assumption that one who had tried it would be more able to understand the suicidal urge than someone who hadn’t, and might be able to offer useful advice. I came up blank on that one. I still had no idea if
I
would survive to the bicentennial.

I recall thinking, in one atavistic moment, what a great story this could be. Dream on, Hildy. For one thing, who would believe it? For another, the CC wouldn’t confirm it—he told me so—and without at least one source for confirmation, even Walter wouldn’t dare run the story. How to dig up any evidence of such a thing was far beyond my puny powers of investigation.

But one thought kept coming back to me. And I had to ask him about it.

“You mentioned a virus,” I said. “You said you wondered if you might have caught this urge to die from all the humans who’ve been killing themselves.”

“Yes?”

“Well…  how do you know you caught it from us? Maybe we got it from you.”

For the CC, a trillionth of a second is…  oh, I don’t know, at
least
a few days in my perception of time. He was quiet for twenty seconds. Then he looked into my eyes.

“Now
there’s
an interesting idea,” he said.

The two firehouse Dalmatians, Francine and Kerry, sat at sunrise beside the sign that said

NEW AUSTIN CITY LIMITS
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.

They stared east, into the rising sun, with that total concentration only dogs seem capable of. Then their ears perked and they licked their lips, and soon even human ears could hear the merry jingle of a bicycle bell.

Over the low hill came the new schoolmarm. The Dalmatians yelped happily at the sight of her, and fell in beside her as she pedaled down the dusty road into town.

She rode with gloved hands firmly on the handlebars, her back straight, and she would have looked like Elmira Gulch if she hadn’t been so pretty.

She wore a starched white Gibson shirtwaist blouse with a modest clutch of lace scarf at the throat and a black broadcloth habit-back skirt, held out of the bicycle sprocket by a device of her own invention. On her feet were fabric and patent leather button shoes with two-inch heels, and on her head was a yellow straw sailor hat with a pink ribbon band and a small ostrich plume blowing in the wind. Her hair was pulled up and tied in a bun. There was a blush of rouge on her cheeks.

The schoolmarm wheeled down Congress Street, avoiding the worst of the ruts. She passed the blacksmith and the livery stable and the new firehouse with its new pumping engine gleaming with brass brightwork, the traces lying empty on the dirt floor as they always did except when the New Austin Volunteers took the rig out for a drill. She passed the intersection with Old Spanish Trail, where the Alamo Saloon was not yet open for business. The doors of the Travis Hotel were open, and the janitor was sweeping dust into the street. He paused and waved at the teacher, who waved back, and one of the dogs ran over to have her head scratched, then hurried to catch up.

The old livery stable had been torn down and a new whorehouse was being built in its place, yellow pine frameworks looking fresh and stark and smelling of wood shavings in the morning light.

She rode past the line of small businesses with wooden sidewalks and hitching rails and watering troughs out front, almost to the Baptist Church, right up to the front door of the little schoolhouse, bright with a new coat of red paint. Here she swung off the cycle and leaned it against the side of the building. She removed a stack of books from the basket and went through the front door, which was not locked. In a minute she came back out and attached two banners to the flagpole out front: the ensign of the Republic of Texas and the Stars and Stripes. She hoisted them to the top and stood for a moment, looking up, shielding her eyes and listening to the musical rattle of the chains against the iron pole and the popping as the wind caught the flags.

Then she went back inside and started hauling on the bell rope. Up in the belfry a few dozen bats stirred irritably at being disturbed after a long night’s hunting. The pealing of the school bell rang out over the sleepy little town, and soon children appeared, coming up Congress, ready for the start of another day’s education.

Did you guess the new schoolmarm was me?

Believe it or not, it was.

Who did I think I was kidding? There’s no way I could figure I was really capable of teaching much to the children of West Texas. I had no business trying to mold young minds. You have to train
years
for that.

But wait a minute. As so often happened in an historical disney, things were not quite what they seemed.

I had the children four hours a day, from eight to noon. After lunch, they all went to another room, just off the visitors’ center, where they got their
real
education, the one the Republic of Luna demanded. After about fifteen years of this, forty percent of them would actually learn to
read
. Imagine that.

So I was window dressing for the tourists. It was this argument that Mayor Dillon and the town council finally used to persuade me to take the job. That, and the assurance that the parents didn’t really care
what
we studied during the morning classes, but that, by and large, Texans were more concerned than the outside population that their children learn “readin’, writin’, and cipherin’.” The quaintness of this notion appealed to me.

To tell you the truth, after the first month, when I frequently thought the little bastards were going to drive me crazy, I was hooked. For years I’d complained to anyone I could make hold still long enough to listen that the world was going to hell, and lack of literacy was the cause. A logical position for a print journalist to take. Here was my chance to make some small contribution of my own.

Through trial and error I learned that it’s not hard to teach children to read. Trial? Before I developed my system I found many a frog in my desk, felt many a spitball on the back of my neck. As for error, I made plenty of them, the first and most basic being my notion that simply exposing them to great literature would give them the love I’ve always felt for words. It’s more complicated than that, and I’m sure I spent a lot of time reinventing the wheel. But what finally worked was a combination of old methods and new, of discipline and a sense of fun, punishment and reward. I don’t hold with the idea that anything that can’t be made to seem like a party isn’t worth learning, but I don’t believe in beating it into them, either. And here’s an astonishing thing: I
could
have beat them. I had a hickory switch hanging on the wall, and was authorized to use it. I found myself head of one of the few schools for several hundred years where corporal punishment was allowed. The parents supported it, Texans not being a bunch to hold much with newfangled or fuzzy-headed notions, and the Luna Board of Education had to swallow hard, as well, because it was part of a research project sanctioned by the CC and the Antiquities Board.

I’m sure the final results of that study will be skewed, because I didn’t use the switch, beyond once in the early days to establish that I
would
, if pushed far enough.

Like so much in Texas, it was a lot of work for a result most Lunarians would feel wasn’t worth the effort in the first place. Ask any educator today and he’ll tell you that reading is not a skill of any particular use in the modern age. If you can learn to speak and to listen, you’re fine; machines will handle the rest for you. As for math…  
math
? You mean you can really figure out what those numbers add up to,
in your head
? An interesting parlor trick, nothing more.

“All right, Mark,” I said. “Let’s see how you handle it.”

The tow-headed sixth-grader picked up the deck and held it with his index finger along the top, his thumb pressing down on the middle, and the other three fingers curled beneath the cards. Awkwardly, he dealt in a circle, laying one piece of pasteboard before each of the five other advanced students gathered around my desk, and one before me. He was dealing straight from the top of the deck. You gotta crawl before you can run.

Hey, you teach what you’re good at, right?

“That’s not bad. Now what do we call that, class?”

“The mechanic’s grip, Miss Johnson,” they chimed in.

“Very good. Now you try it, Christine.”

Each of them had a shot at it. Many of the hands were simply too small to properly handle the cards, but they all tried their best. One of them, a dark-haired lovely named Elise, seemed to me to have the makings. I gathered the cards up and shuffled them idly in my hands.

“Now that you’ve learned it…  forget it.” There was a chorus of surprise, and I held up one hand. “Think about it. If you see someone using this grip, what do you know? Elise?”

“That they’re probably cheating, Miss Johnson.”

“No probably about it, dear. That’s why you can’t let them see you using it. When you’ve done it long enough, you’ll develop your own variation that doesn’t
look
like the grip, but works just as well. Tomorrow I’ll show you a few. Class dismissed.”

They pleaded with me to let them stay just a little longer. I finally relented and told them “just this once,” then had one of them shuffle the cards and pick out the ace of spades and put it on top of the deck. I dealt them each a hand of five card draw.

“Now. William, you have a full house, aces and eights.” He turned his cards over and, by golly, teacher was right. I went around the circle, naming each hand, and then turned over the top card on the deck in my hand and showed them it was still the ace of spades.

“I can’t
believe
it, Miss Johnson,” Elise said. “I was watching
real
close, and I didn’t see you dealing seconds.”

“Honey, if I wanted to, I could deal seconds all day right under your nose. But you’re right. I wasn’t this time.”

“Then how did you do it?”

“A cold deck, students, is the best way if you can manage it, if people are really watching the deal. That way, you only have to make the one move and then you deal perfectly straight.” I showed them the original deck in my lap, then got up and started herding them toward the door.

“Preparation, children, preparation in all things. Now for the pupils who finish the next four chapters of
A Tale of Two Cities
by class time tomorrow, we’ll start learning the injog. I think you’ll like that one. Skedaddle, now. Dinner will be on the table and your parents are waiting.”

I watched them scramble out into the sunshine, then went around straightening the desks and erasing the blackboard and putting papers away in my desk. When it all looked tidy I got my straw hat from the rack and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind me. Brenda was sitting there, her back against the wall, grinning up at me.

“Good to see you, Brenda,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Same as always. Taking notes.” She got up and dusted the seat of her pants. “I thought I might write a story about teachers corrupting youth. How’s that sound?”

“You’ll never sell it to Walter unless it has sex in it. As for the local paper, I don’t think the editor would be interested.” She was looking me up and down. She shook her head.

“They told me I’d find you here. They told me you were the schoolteacher. I told them they had to be lying. Hildy…  what in the
world
?”

I twirled in front of her. She was grinning, and I found I was, too. It had been quite some time since the day of my house raising, and it was very good to see her. I laughed, put my arms around her, and hugged her tight. My face was buried in the ersatz leather of her buckskin fringed Annie Oakley outfit, which came complete with ersatz shootin’ iron.

“You look…  real good,” I said, then touched the fringe and the lapels so she’d think I meant her clothes. The look in her eye told me she wasn’t so easily fooled as she used to be.

“Are you happy, Hildy?” she asked.

“Yes. Believe it or not, I am.”

We stood there awkwardly for a moment, hands on each other’s shoulders, then I broke away and wiped the corner of one eye with a gloved fingertip.

“Well, have you had dinner yet?” I said, brightly. “Care to join me?”

As we walked down Congress Street we talked of the inconsequential things people do after a separation: common friends, small events, minor ups and downs. I waved to most of the people on the street and all the owners of the shops we passed, stopping to chat with a few and introducing them to Brenda. We went by the butcher shop, the cobbler, the bakery, the laundry, and soon came to Foo’s Celestial Peace Chinese Restaurant, where I pushed open the door to the sound of a tinkling bell. Foo came hurrying over, clad in the loose black pants and blue pyjama top traditional among Chinese of that era, his pigtail bobbing as he bowed repeatedly. I bowed back and introduced him to Brenda who, after a quick glance at me, bowed as well. He fussed us over to my usual table and held our chairs for us and soon we were pouring green tea into tiny cups.

If mankind ever reaches Alpha Centauri and lands on a habitable planet there, the first thing they’ll see when they open the door of the ship is a Chinese restaurant. I knew of six of them in West Texas, a place not noted for dining out. In New Austin you could get a decent steak at the Alamo, passable barbecue at a smokehouse a quarter mile out of town, and Mrs. Riley at the boarding house produced a good bowl of chili—not the equal of mine, you understand, but okay. Those three, and Foo’s were it as far as a sit-down meal in New Austin. And if you wanted tablecloths and quality cooking, you went to Foo’s. I ate there almost every day.