King Dork

“Oh no,” he said. “That’s the way it happened.” Then, realizing that I was still skeptical, he groaned and summoned what was left of his strength.

“Look at it this way: what year did your dad die?”

“O-nine, o-six, nine-three,” I said automatically.

“And what can you tell me about Mr. Teone’s car?”

I saw what he was getting at: he was saying Mr. Teone had had to buy his celebrated Geo Prizm in 1993 to replace the one he had smashed up by ramming into my dad. That seemed like reaching, even for Sam Hellerman. He could have bought the car used anytime after 1993. I regarded him dubiously but went along with it.

“What did he do with the smashed-up car?” I asked.

“Well,” said Sam Hellerman, “if you were a metal-shop teacher, and you needed to get rid of an incriminating car, what would you do?”

“The Hillmont Knight?” I said, catching on, but still doubtful.

“ ‘Presentated to HHS by the Class of ’94,’ ” he quoted, as smug as it’s possible to be when you’re about to slip into a coma. “He turned the evidence into a class project. Much better than pushing it in the reservoir.” He was right: Hillmont High Center Court was the last place anyone would look.

I shuddered a little at the image of Hillmont’s drama hippies leaning casually against what might have been my dad’s 316

murder weapon. Hell, I’d even climbed on it, and swung from its crankshaft lance once or twice. I suddenly realized that, if Sam Hellerman was right, Mr. Teone’s constant references to his ’93 Geo Prizm might have been more sinister than goofy.

There was one bit of evidence Sam Hellerman hadn’t covered, and I was pretty sure he did have a little theory about it that he had just forgotten to mention: the card for the Happy Day Dry Cleaners that had been stuck between the pages of The Seven Storey Mountain along with the TJA card. Maybe something to do with the bloodstains in Catcher, CEH 1960? That was just a guess. I started to ask Sam Hellerman about this but I noticed that he had finally slipped off. I stared at the wall for a while.

“Hellerman,” I finally said, in the direction of his coma-tose little form. “That is so . . .” I searched for the word.

“. . . retarded.” But then I said, “I don’t know, Hellerman,” because I really didn’t.

I put on The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and lay back on the bed, more or less alone with my thoughts, which under the circumstances didn’t have a lot to do with the English countryside of yesteryear.

DU NG EON S I N TH E AI R

Any way you sliced it, I was going to have a lot to think about over the Christmas break.

Despite Sam Hellerman’s confidence, I knew there were other ways to work it out. Presumably there is an actual story, one that really happened, behind the Tit-CEH-TJA nexus revealed by Tit’s note and Matthew 3:9–11, though I’d be willing to bet that if so, it would end up seeming to make even less sense. Life is stupid that way.

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It occurred to me that we had worked it out in much the same way we would have worked out the details of a particularly elaborate band. And the whole story, especially the complicated, multiply deceptive murder scheme, was Hellerman through and through. I mean, if Sam Hellerman were a loopy associate principal–pornographer who wanted to get rid of a cop he had known since childhood, that was exactly the sort of plan he would have come up with. That didn’t necessarily mean that Mr. Teone would have come up with the same plan.

Of course, if Mr. Teone really had murdered my dad, I wanted to know. But I was just starting to realize why I was so unsatisfied with Hellermanian theories on this matter: in the end, I didn’t want my relationship with my dad to be about Mr. Teone, or substitution ciphers, or broods of vipers, or pornography, or police corruption, or any of that stuff. And in reality, it wasn’t about any of those things, though it’s easy to forget that when you’re trying to solve codes and piece together an explanation out of scraps of paper and notes in the margins of books. I’m not a good detective, and I don’t even really want to be one. The only part of it that matters is that I miss my dad and wish he weren’t dead. And that I love making out with Celeste Fletcher and hope to be able to do it again one day. Family values and ramoning. That’s reality.

Now, Sam Hellerman had said I was “hung up on”

Matthew 3:9–11, and he wasn’t wrong, though it took a lot of thinking before I figured out why. It wasn’t only because the passage kind of creeped me out and kept popping up. And it wasn’t only because the brood of vipers kept reminding me of Rye Hell and the Catcher cult. I think it was also because it was something real, a piece of a book people had been reading for thousands of years, a part of the world that existed independ-318

ently from any of our conjectures. It was because my dad had probably read that quote, probably thought about it, probably wondered, as I had done, what it meant and how it applied to his life and the world. And he had read The Seven Storey Mountain and may have wondered why the SSM guy had chosen it for his epigraph. In a way, it put my dad in a picture made up of things that weren’t entirely imaginary or theoretical. It allowed me to imagine myself in his place in the past.

And those opportunities were pretty rare.

Even if every other element of Sam Hellerman’s theory turned out to be right, Timothy J. Anderson’s relationship to my dad and Tit and the Seven Storey Mountain guy could still have been random, unconnected to the rest of the story. And for some reason I found the randomness more satisfying. I imagined my dad, engrossed in The Seven Storey Mountain, perhaps attending church with his family. He notices the memorial card, if that’s what it was, for someone he has never heard of, on a table, in a pew, or in a missal or hymnal. He stops dead, struck by the coincidence that it uses the same quote as his book’s epigraph. He sits there thinking, “Wow, this is spooky and weird,” clips the quote off the rest of the card, and keeps it to use as a bookmark. Or he’s intrigued by it and starts his own little investigation into Timothy J.