The Bachman Books

[It was a year and a half later when I saw that commercial on TV for the first time. The one where the guy with the rifle takes aim at the padlock nailed to the board. You even get a look through the telescopic sight at the padlock-a Yale, a Master, I don't know which. The guy pulls the trigger. And you see that lock jump and dent and mash, and it looked in that commercial just the way old Titus looked when I took him out of my pocket. They show it happening in regular motion, and then they show it in slow motion, and the first and only time I saw it, I leaned down between my legs and puked between my ankles. They took me away. They took me back to my room. And the next day my pet shrink here looked at a note and said, 'They tell me you had a setback yesterday, Charlie. Want to talk about it?' But I couldn't talk about it. I've never been able to talk about it. Until now.]

Chink! on the intercom.

'Charlie?'

'Just a minute, Tom. Don't rush me.'

'Charlie, you have to-'

'Shut the fuck up.''

I unbuttoned my shirt and opened it. The class went 'Aaahhh!' again. Titus was imprinted on my chest in angry purple, and the flesh had been mashed into an indentation that looked deep enough to hold water. I didn't like to look at it, any more than I liked to look at the old drunk with the bag of flesh below his nose, the one that always hung around Gogan's downtown. It made me feel nauseated. I closed my shirt.

'Tom, those bastards tried to shoot me.'

'They didn't mean-'

'Don't tell me what they didn't mean to do!' I screamed at him. There was a crazy note in my voice that made me feel even sicker. 'You get your old cracked ass out there and tell that mother-fucker Philbrick he almost had a bloodbath down here, have you got it?'

'Charlie . . . ' He was whining.

'Shut up, Tom. I'm through fooling with you. I'm in the driver's seat. Not you, not Philbrick, not the superintendent of schools, not God. Have you got it?'

'Charlie, let me explain.'

'HAVE YOU GOT IT?'

'Yes, but-'

'All right. We've got that straight. So you go back and give him a message, Tom. Tell him that I don't want to see him or anyone else out there make a move during the next hour. No one is going to come in and talk on this goddamn intercom, and no one else is going to try and shoot me. At noon I want to talk to Philbrick again. Can you remember all that, Tom?'

'Yes, Charlie. All right, Charlie.' He sounded relieved and foolish. 'They just wanted me to tell you it was a mistake, Charlie. Somebody's gun went off by accident and--

'One other thing, Tom. Very important.'

'What, Charlie?'

'You need to know where you stand with that guy Philbrick, Tom. He gave you a shovel and told you to walk behind the ox cart, and you're doing it. I gave him a chance to put his ass on the line, and he wouldn't do it. Wake up, Tom. Assert yourself.'

'Charlie, you have to understand what a terrible position you're putting us all in.'

'Get out, Tom.'

He clicked off. We all watched him come out through the main doors and start back toward the cars. Philbrick came over to him and put a hand on his arm. Tom shook it off. A lot of the kids smiled at that. I was past smiling. I wanted to be home in my bed and dreaming all of this.

'Sandra,' I said. 'I believe you were telling us about your affaire de coeur with Ted.'

Ted threw a dark glance at me. 'You don't want to say anything, Sandy. He's just trying to make all of us look dirty like he is. He's sick and full of germs. Don't let him infect you with what he's got.'

She smiled. She was really radiant when she smiled like a child. I felt a bitter nostalgia, not for her, exactly, or for any imagined purity (Dale Evans panties and all that), but for something I could not precisely put my hand on. Her, maybe. Whatever it was, it made me feel ashamed.

'But I want to,' she said. 'I want to get it on, too. I always have.'

It was eleven o'clock on the nose. The activity outside seemed to have died. I was sitting well back from the windows now. I thought Philbrick would give me my hour. He wouldn't dare do anything else now. I felt better, the pain in my chest receding a little. But my head felt very strange, as if my brains were running without coolant and overheating like a big hot rod engine in the desert. At times I was almost tempted to feel (foolish conceit) that I was holding them myself, by sheer willpower. Now I know, of course, that nothing could have been further from the truth. I had one real hostage that day, and his name was Ted Jones.

'We just did it,' Sandra said, looking down at her desk and tracing the engravings there with a shaped thumbnail. I could see the part in her hair. She parted it on the side, like a boy. 'Ted asked me to go to the Wonderland dance with him, and I said I would. I had a new formal.' She looked at me reproachfully. 'You never asked me, Charlie. '

Could it be that I was shot in the padlock only ten minutes ago? I had an insane urge to ask them if it had really happened. How strange they all were!

'So we went to that, and afterward we went to the Hawaiian Hut. Ted knows the man who runs it and got us cocktails. Just like the grown-ups.' It was hard to tell if there was sarcasm in her voice or not.

Ted's face was carefully blank, but the others were looking at him as if they were seeing a strange bug. Here