The Best American Essays 2013 (21 page)

Finally Mr. Spiro presented me with a test like the ones I was used to taking. “If you want to buy three pencils,” he began, “and one pencil costs four cents, how much would it cost you to buy all three?”

I was about to add three and four when I realized that this problem required a different kind of math. I could have figured out the answer by adding four three times, but something about being so bored that I had misbehaved, which had denied me the chance to work in my workbook, which had denied me the chance to learn to multiply, which seemed to be preventing me from going on to fourth grade, where I might be less bored and less tempted to misbehave, made me cry out, “That isn’t fair!”

But when Mr. Spiro asked me
what
wasn’t fair, I couldn’t put my grievance into words. We sat in silent stalemate until a pigeon flew in the room. It flapped around our heads and beat its wings against the walls. But this struck me as no more strange than anything else that had happened in that room; for all I knew, Mr. Spiro had trained that pigeon to fly in on cue and test some aspect of my psychology I would need to pass fourth grade. The safest response, I decided, was no response at all.

Mr. Spiro, on the other hand, leapt up on his desk and started waving his arms and shouting. Imagine sitting in a chair looking up at a full-grown man in a red-and-white-striped suit who is standing on his desk flailing at a pigeon. I might have understood if he had been flailing at a bee, but what harm could a pigeon do?

At last the pigeon found a crevice at the very top of the belfry and disappeared inside. My final glimpse of its bobbing rear is the image I still see whenever I hear the word
pigeonholed
.

Mr. Spiro smoothed his suit, climbed down from his desk, and asked me why I hadn’t been more upset. Hadn’t I noticed a pigeon was in the room?

All these years later, I still remember what I said. “Why should I be upset? This isn’t my office. I’m not the one who has to clean up after it.”

Then I remember nothing more until a disheveled Mr. Spiro led me back to class. Later he told my mother that I wasn’t
emotionally ready
to skip a grade. The experience left me more resentful than ever. I misbehaved more and more. The following year, my teacher grew so impatient with my incessant talking that in front of everyone else she said, “Eileen, has anyone ever told you how obnoxious you are?”

Obnoxious
, I repeated, delighted and appalled by the toxicity of the word.
Obnoxious
, was I? Fine. I shunned the company of the other girls and hung around with the roughest boys, who were even more obnoxious than I was. I still did well on tests—what was I supposed to do, pretend that I didn’t know how to add (or multiply, for that matter)? But I refused to act the part of the well-mannered little lady the grownups wanted me to play.

I looked for Mr. Spiro, but I never saw the man again. I searched in vain for his secret office. From outside, on the playground, I could look up and see the belfry. But the windows were now boarded up, and the pigeons, like me, couldn’t find a way to get inside.

That is, until the first day of sixth grade. Climbing to the third floor of our building, I followed the directions I had been given to the dead-end passage to my class, where I saw a small alcove that led to what once must have been Mr. Spiro’s office. My teacher that year—let’s call him Mr. F—had persuaded the administration to let him board up the windows and use the belfry as a darkroom. Or he hadn’t bothered to ask permission and simply had gone ahead and done it.

Mr. F seemed even more bored by school than I was. At least once a day he would put his feet on his desk, tell us how desperate he was to quit his teaching job and work full-time as a photographer, then lovingly describe the Hasselblad camera he was saving up to buy. Unfortunately, my parents and Mr. F’s parents were friends. If one of my classmates misbehaved, Mr. F pushed him in the darkroom and we heard terrible bangs and crashes. But nothing I did, no matter how unruly, earned me so much as a timid reprimand. My status as the smartest girl, coupled with my complete disregard for other people’s feelings and my lack of social grace, would have made me a pariah anyway. But Mr. F brought that fate upon me even sooner by handing back a test on which I had scored an A, asking me to stand, and demanding of my classmates that they try to be more like me.

Complaining about being praised is like complaining about being pretty. Even then I knew it was better to be me than Pablo Rodriguez, whose parents were migrant farmers and who, in sixth grade, could barely read or write, or the Buck brothers, Phil and Gregory, who seemed to get punished for no other reason than being large and male and black. But if
I
was so unhappy, it defies me to imagine how much angrier and unhappier kids like Pablo or Phil or Gregory must have been.

A few weeks into term, I developed a crush on the boy across the aisle. He was handsome, thin, and lithe, with curly red hair and freckles. His name was Walter Rustic, which is why, whenever I read that ballad about the passionate shepherd wooing his lass (“Come live with me and be my love/And we will all the pleasures prove”), I imagine Walter Rustic saying those lines to me.

All of us were at the stage where we chased each other around the playground and tried to throw each other down in that hysteria-tinged way of not-quite-adolescents who don’t know any other means to touch or be touched. I was wearing a brand-new coat, which Walter had grabbed to slow me. As ecstatic as I was that he found me worthy of pursuit, I was upset that he had ripped the lining. My mother was always scolding me for ruining my clothes, and I was sure to get in trouble.

I hate to think that I squealed on Walter. I prefer to believe that Mr. F saw the ripped coat and asked me who had torn it. Either way, I watched in horror as he tugged Walter by the ear into that dreadful belfry—the
darkroom
, I suddenly thought—and we listened to the thwacks and grunts of a grown man throwing a boy half his size against a wall. I covered my ears and wondered what had happened to that pigeon. Had it made a nest inside that wall? What could it find to eat? Perhaps it subsisted on the crumbs of Oreos left by children who had accepted Mr. Spiro’s gift.

Then Walter disappeared. Not that day. Or the next. But he didn’t graduate from high school with the rest of us. My lack of popularity had reached such spectacular heights by then I couldn’t be bothered to consider that anyone else might be miserable for better reasons. But miserable they must have been. Kids killed themselves and killed each other. One of my classmates hiked out into the woods, put his rifle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Another set fire to her house with her family asleep inside. A carload of boys died in a drunk-driving accident. But no matter who disappeared or how, no one saw fit to discuss the matter with us. The job of a school psychologist isn’t, as people think, to offer counseling for troubled kids; it’s to administer
IQ
tests.

I have no memory of Walter Rustic after we left sixth grade. If I hadn’t gone back to my elementary school, I might have lived another forty years without wondering where he had gone. As it is, I called a friend who had been in that sixth-grade class. Walter? she said. Hadn’t I heard? He’d had a problem with drugs. Maybe mental illness had been involved. She didn’t know all the facts—she had gotten the information secondhand from her brother, who had been friends with Walter’s older brother, Frank, before Frank left town for Vegas. But Walter had been living on the streets in Corpus Christi, Texas, and he had fallen asleep in a dumpster. A garbage truck came along and turned the dumpster upside down and Walter’s skull got crushed.

Walter? Homeless? Crushed?

I called his brother and left a message, but Frank didn’t return my call. I Googled Walter and found a record of his arrest for attempted robbery in Queens, New York, in 1980, when we would have been twenty-four. But that created more mysteries than it solved. The records indicated that Walter had served two years of his sentence before being released “to another agency.” Had anyone helped him kick his habit? Treated him for mental illness? How and why had he moved to Texas?

I called the paper in Corpus Christi (I realized as I dialed that the name means
body of Christ
), and the editor sent me Walter’s obit. I hoped there would be a photo so I could see what the handsome, redheaded boy on whom I’d had a crush looked like as a man, but the only photo showed a body in a bag being handed down from a trash compactor.

According to the story, on December 22, 1986, Walter had crawled inside that dumpster behind Incarnate Word Junior High, trying to keep warm and sleep. The next morning the sanitation workers hooked the dumpster to their truck and tipped it back. A groundskeeper at Incarnate Word saw a man trying to scramble out of the dumpster and screamed for the workers to stop, but the roar of the engine prevented his warning from being heard. The lid came down on Walter’s neck. The fire department needed an hour to remove his body. When they did, they saw that he was barefoot and wearing rags. They were able to figure out who the man was only because he was wearing a hospital
ID
around his wrist. Apparently Walter had visited the
ER
the night before to have a swollen ankle x-rayed. There was a bottle of antibiotics in his pocket. He hadn’t been in town very long. A few days earlier he had been arrested for refusing to give his name, but he had listed his address as the Search for Truth Mission. Not that anyone there remembered him.

An article published on Christmas Day (“Officials close the book on man’s grisly death”) added only that Walter Rustic had been a “native of Liberty, N.Y., a town of 4,293 near the Catskill Mountains,” and neither his mother nor his brother could be reached for comment. And so, the reporter wrote, “The sad case of the man who died in a dumpster is closed.” Except the sad case had a happier coda. In 1988 a shelter for homeless men was opened in Walter’s honor not far from where he died. The Rustic House for Men offers a hot meal and a place to sleep for vagrants, although most people probably assume that the name is intended to connote a rural retreat rather than to honor the ragged, barefoot man who died in a dumpster a few blocks away.

I figured I had the facts. But I still seemed to be missing something. I dialed Walter’s brother one last time. An elderly woman answered and told me that she was Walter’s brother’s mother. Which meant she was Walter’s mother too.

“You knew Walter in sixth grade?” she said. “He’s been in your mind all these years?”

I wanted to lie and say I had been thinking about her son for forty years and was very, very sorry he had been beaten up on my account. Instead, I asked if Walter ever talked about Mr. F. But his mother said Walter never talked about school at all. He made it to junior year before he dropped out. I wanted to ask her why, but it’s hard to press a dead friend’s mother as to whether he had been mentally ill or addicted to drugs. All she would say was that Walter had loved to travel. He had traveled from state to state to state, calling her now and then to say hello and ask her to send him money so he could get something to eat. His favorite place had been Tupelo, Mississippi, where he visited Elvis Presley’s birthplace. Another time he called her on New Year’s Eve and told her that he had been picked up as a vagrant, and the police liked him so much they invited him to join their party and share their pizza.

Then, on Christmas Eve 1986, she was sitting in her house in North Carolina—she had moved there a few years earlier—wrapping a present for Walter when she got “the horrible phone call” telling her that he had died. She hadn’t even known he was in Texas, but she flew to Corpus Christi and spoke to the sisters at Incarnate Word, who told her that her son had died in the arms of two nuns, and she got some comfort in hearing that, as she still derives comfort from knowing that the Rustic House for Men takes in vagrants like her son “and gives them a hot meal and a warm clean place to sleep and keeps them there a while until they’re ready to get a job or go out on the road again.”

I have no doubt that Walter would have ended up homeless or dead even if he had been blessed with a more caring sixth-grade teacher. I was only twelve years old. I don’t hold myself responsible for the beating that Walter received that day. But being thrown against a wall doesn’t do anyone any good. It isn’t much fun to occupy any of the circles of hell to which all but the most popular and well-adjusted students find themselves consigned. But schools fail different children in different ways. Kids like Pablo grow up unable to read and write, with no way to earn a living. Kids like Walter Rustic grow up to be dead.

And kids like me? We make it through. We end up who we were meant to be. Sometimes we end up someone better. Despite Mrs. Neff’s refusal to allow me to work in my workbook, despite Mr. Spiro’s decision that I wasn’t ready to skip a grade, despite a similar decision the following year to advance the two smartest boys while leaving me behind because—as the principal claimed—girls don’t finish courses in science or math, I studied those courses on my own and got accepted to Yale, where I earned a degree in physics. I was too far behind my classmates, too angry and confused and lacking in confidence to go on to physics grad school. But I’m not sure how much I care. What gadget might I have invented, what small theorem might I have proved, that could have mattered half as much as my being forced to learn compassion? I gave up the chance to spend my life multiplying and dividing so I could become an authoress and tell the stories of all those poor pigeons who didn’t make it out of school alive, who survived childhood but not adulthood, who are missing from our community. Although how can we measure what we have lost? To what can we compare their absence?

JON KERSTETTER

FROM
River Teeth

O
CTOBER
2003,
BAGHDAD, IRAQ
. Major General Jon Gallinetti, U.S. Marine Corps, chief of staff of CJTF7, the operational command unit of coalition forces in Iraq, accompanied me on late-night clinical rounds in a combat surgical hospital. We visited soldiers who were injured in multiple IED attacks throughout Baghdad just hours earlier. I made this mental note:
Soldier died tonight. IED explosion. Held him. Prayed. Told his commander to stay focused
.