sixteen-year-old boy, but he didn't like getting up from the table while his old man lingered.
Annie waved good-bye. His mother called, 'So long, son,' as he went out the front door. His only answer was a grunt. As soon as he got around the corner, he lit a cigarette. The first drag made him cough. He felt woozy and lightheaded and a little sick; he was just learning to smoke. Then his heart beat harder and he felt more alert. He enjoyed that feeling, even if it wasn't the main reason he'd started smoking. People he liked smoked. So did people he wanted to be like. That counted for more.
He smoked two cigarettes on the way to Roosevelt, but made sure the pack was out of sight before he got to the campus. Smoking there was against the rules. The principal had a big paddle in his office, and he wasn't shy about using it.
'Morning, Armstrong,' a boy called.
'Hey, Joe,' Armstrong answered. 'Can I get some answers to the algebra from you?'
Joe shook his head. 'I don't know how they do that stuff. I'm gonna flunk, and my old man's gonna beat hell out of me.'
'Me, too,' Armstrong said dolefully. He still had a couple of periods to go before he had to turn in the math homework, such as it was. He didn't look forward to English literature, which he had first, with any great enthusiasm, either. Memorizing chunks of The Canterbury Tales in the original incomprehensible Middle English wasn't his idea of fun. But getting walloped because he didn't do it also wasn't his idea of fun, so he tried.
English Lit did have one compensation. He sat next to Lucy Houlihan, a redhead who had to be one of the three or four prettiest girls at Roosevelt High. That would have been even better had Lucy had the slightest idea he existed. But she didn't. She had a boyfriend: Frankie Sprague, the star tailback on the Regiment. Still, she couldn't shoot Armstrong for looking at her, as long as he didn't drool too much while he was doing it.
The textbook, naturally, didn't include 'The Miller's Tale.' Herb Rosen, one of the class brains, had found out about it, and started whispering. By the time the whispers got to Armstrong, they were pretty distorted, but the piece still sounded juicier than anything the class was studying. He wondered why they couldn't read the good stuff instead of boring crap about sweet showers.
A trail of sniggers ran through the class. 'The Miller's Tale' would do that. 'And what is so funny?' Miss Loomis inquired. She was a tall, muscular spinster with a baritone voice. She didn't use a paddle. She wielded a ruler instead, with deadly effect. Nobody said anything. The sniggers didn't stop, but they did ease. Miss Loomis looked at the students over the tops of her half-glasses. 'That will be quite enough of that,' she declared, and got on with the lesson.
As soon as Miss Loomis turned back to the blackboard, Lucy asked Armstrong, 'Why is everybody laughing?' She hadn't heard, then. Well, some guys would be shy about saying such things to a girl.
Armstrong wasn't shy about anything-and having Lucy notice him for any reason at all was a reasonable facsimile of heaven. He gleefully told her everything he'd heard about 'The Miller's Tale.' Odds were, Chaucer wouldn't have recognized it. It was still plenty to make Lucy turn pink. Armstrong watched the blush in fascination- so much fascination that he didn't notice Miss Loomis bearing down on him.
Whack! The ruler scorched his knuckles. He jumped and yelped in pain. Miss Loomis fixed him with a glare that would have paralyzed Jake Featherston. 'That will be enough of that,' she said, and marched back up to the front of the classroom.
Lucy, damn her, didn't even say she was sorry.
He was glad to flee English Lit for government, even though Miss Thornton, who taught it, was almost as big a battle-axe as Miss Loomis. She didn't look so formidable, being round rather than tall, with a bosom about the size of the USS Remembrance. But she was a stickler for detail. And, naturally, she picked on him. 'Why is the new Confederate Constitutional amendment so important?' she demanded.
'Uh,' he said, and said no more. He remembered his father saying something about the amendment, but couldn't remember what to save his life-or his grade.
'Zero,' Miss Thornton said crisply, and wrote it in the roll book. She asked Herb Rosen. Herb didn't just read Chaucer for fun; he even read textbooks for fun.
'Because now their president can be elected for lots of terms, not just one,' he answered. 'It looks like the Freedom Party is setting things up for him to be president for life.'
A girl stuck up her hand. Miss Thornton nodded to her. She said, 'I don't think that's true. Our presidents can be elected more than once, and nobody's ever been president for life.'
'That's because we've got a custom of stopping after two terms. Even Teddy Roosevelt lost when he tried for a third one,' Herb said. That touched off a discussion about the role of unwritten custom in government.
Armstrong Grimes listened with no more than half an ear. Somebody was going to be on top, and somebody else was going to get it in the neck. That was how things worked, as far as he could see, and nobody could do anything much about it. The most you could do was try to be the fellow who came out on top.
Miss Thornton left him alone for the rest of the period. But when the class ended, he had to go on to algebra, and he got it in the neck. Mr. Marr, the algebra teacher, had lost his right arm during the war. He'd had to teach himself to write and eat lefthanded. He'd done it, too, and come away convinced that anybody could teach himself to do anything. But Armstrong hadn't been able to teach himself to do algebra.
He had to go up to the board to try a problem. He butchered it. Mr. Marr glared at him. 'If you multiplied one side of the equation by six, why didn't you multiply the other side by six, too?' he snapped.
'Uh, I don't know,' Armstrong answered helplessly.
'Well, that's obvious,' Mr. Marr said. 'Sit down.' He did the problem himself. When he did it, it looked easy. Multiply, subtract, and what do you know? X equals seven. Armstrong knew he wouldn't be able to do it himself, not if he lived to be a hundred.
'Not your day today,' somebody said when the bell rang and they escaped to lunch: a period's worth of freedom.
'No kidding,' Armstrong said. 'They can't teach for beans, and I'm the one who gets in trouble on account of it.' That a lot of the other students in his classes were having no trouble at all didn't occur to him. Far easier to blame his teachers than himself.
After lunch came chemistry. He'd had hopes for chemistry. If they'd shown him how to make things that blew up, he would have worked hard. But learning that lithium was always +1, oxygen was always -2, and carbon was ±4 left him cold. He staggered through a quiz, and hoped he got a C.
Wood shop went better. His hands had some skill in them, even if he'd never make a big brain. He was making a spice rack for the kitchen, and everything was going about as well as it could. Mr. Walsh stopped and watched him work with a file and sandpaper. The shop teacher nodded. 'Not bad, Grimes,' he said. 'You keep it up, and you'll have no trouble finding a job when you get out of high school.'
The only reason Armstrong intended to graduate was that he knew his old man would murder him if he didn't. He didn't tell that to Mr. Walsh. If the teacher hadn't heard it a million times before, he would have been amazed.
At last PE, and Armstrong came into his own. He was stronger and faster than most of the other boys in his class, and he reveled in it. And from PE he went straight to football practice. He was only a second-string defensive end, but he threw himself into every play as if his life depended on it. The harder he practiced, the more playing time he'd get when the game came Friday night.
And there across from him, taking snaps in the single wing, was Frankie goddamn Sprague. Think you're going to get your hand under Lucy Houlihan's blouse, do you? Armstrong spun past the tackle trying to block him, steamrollered the fullback, and knocked Frankie Sprague right on his ass.
XI
'I'm off.' Chester Martin blew Rita a kiss and Carl another one. His wife and their son sent kisses through the air back toward him, too. He was glad to get them as he went out the door and headed for the bus stop.
It had rained the day before, the first rain of the season in Los Angeles. The sky was a brilliant blue now, as if the rain had washed it clean. Even late in October, the weather would get up into the seventies. Chester remembered Toledo with a fondness that diminished every year he stayed in California. You couldn't beat this
