“Will you still take me dancing?” I asked.
A series of harrumphs ensued, punctuated with sighs and dark looks from under a lowered brow. “I have to coordinate a dragnet all over the damn town tonight. Beat the bushes. Search dumpsters. Find a suspect who has once again eluded us, although it seems she might have been apprehended had we been given a discreet tip.”
“The dance doesn’t start until ten-thirty.”
“Perhaps you can persuade your old classmate to go with you.”
“The sight of policemen was likely to frighten her, and she needed to be approached by a friendly, familiar face. I was going to convince her to turn herself in at the station.”
“Class of what?”
“Nineteen aught three. We rode dinosaurs to school, wrote in cuneiform, and eagerly awaited the invention of the jitterbug.”
“Well, tonight you’ll have a wonderful chance to jitterbug till dawn. I will be occupied at headquarters those same hours, bawling out the uniformed officer and eagerly awaiting the apprehension of Miss Emily Parchester.”
The conversation was clearly going nowhere, and I was clearly going to chaperone the Homecoming dance alone. I was saved from further remarks by the appearance of “Broast the Bantams,” accompanied by hordes of goose-stepping freshmen yelling unintelligible things about the future of the freshmen, class of ‘90. They seemed to be predicting they would do “mighty finey.”
“That doesn’t rhyme,” I pointed out to Caron once she and Inez had ceased their shrieks.
“Nothing rhymes with ‘ninety,”’ she said. “We had to come up with something to yell at pep rallies and this sort of thing, but no one could produce a single acceptable rhyme.”
“I’ll have to agree with that. Who thought up ‘mighty finey’?”
“I did, Mother.”
Peter glowered from one side of me, Caron from the other. Miss Don was undoubtedly displeased with me, as was a nameless pregnant woman, the denizens of the lounge, a paranoiac Parchester, and the staff of Happy Meadows.
I told Caron and Inez to find a ride home, gave Peter a shrug, and exited to my bookstore, where there were no storms in the port. The jackhammer provide a pleasant drone that precluded thought. It was exactly what I needed.
ELEVEN
The Book Depot grew dim as the day latened, but I did not turn on a light in the front room. The street crew had departed in a roar of dozers and dump trucks, and the ensuing tranquility was too lovely to be disrupted. I waltzed about with a feather duster, savoring the solitude as I sneezed my way through a week’s accumulation of dust. The teachers’ lounge seemed very distant; naggish thoughts of the dance were firmly dismissed.
I was in my office at the back, nose-deep in a ledger that appeared to have been depleted by an embezzler, but in reality was depressingly seW-depleted, when I heard someone knock on the door. Despite the “closed” sign, customers did occasionally insist on admittance. One would think they could read.
It was Evelyn, her cheeks flushed from the chill in the air and her eyes bright from, I supposed, the excitement of the parade. I let her in and invited her to the office for coffee.
“No thanks,” she said, “we’re going to have to hurry if we’re going to be on time for the game. Because of the Homecoming activities, it begins half an hour earlier than usual, and the bleachers are apt to be packed.”
“Is this some kind of cruel joke?”
She shook her head. I protested steadily as I turned off the office light and locked the door. I continued to protest as I was driven to my apartment to fetch a scarf, hat, and gloves; and I did not falter as I ate a hamburger, drank several gallons of coffee as a preventive measure against the cold night air, and actually paid money to a gate attendant to be admitted to Falcon Stadium, Home of the Fighting Falcons, No Alcoholic Beverages Permitted. At that point, my protests became not only redundant, but also irrelevant.
We joined Sherwood on the fifty-yard line. A red-and-gold plaid blanket awaited us, along with a thermos of coffee and a discreet flask of brandy. I had not attended a football game since high school, having managed to avoid them throughout college as a matter of principle. Scrunched between Evelyn and Sherwood, my feet already numbing, my nose beginning to drip, surrounded on four sides by screaming fans, I remembered why.
“Why did you do this to me?” I asked Evelyn. “I was having a perfectly nice time at the Book Depot. I planned to go home, read the newspaper over a Lean Cuisine and a drink, and prepare myself for the dance. My plans did not include freezing in the bleachers, spilling coffee in my lap, or watching a group of faceless hulks batter each other to pulp over an ovoid plaything.”
Evelyn laughed. “But it’s Homecoming, Claire. We must applaud the ladies of the court and cheer on the Falcons to victory. Where’s your school spirit?”
“In my living room, curled on the couch.”
“Try this,” Sherwood murmured, handing me a liberally spiked cup of coffee. “It’s my contribution to spirit. Enough of this and you’ll be on your feet with the optimates screeching for a touchdown.”
“I thought this was forbidden,” I said. I sipped at it anyway; the worst they could do was haul me away to jail, which was probably a good deal warmer and quieter.
“
“That’s odd,” Evelyn said. “He surely didn’t produce a grade above a D on a pop quiz or turn in an assignment in his own handwriting. Word of that would have spread across the school more quickly than a social disease. Did Miss Don actually relent and agree to let him play?”
“All I heard was that our Mr. Immerman was in the office most of third period,” Sherwood said, “and Jerry was there during fourth period. His absence encouraged the drivers’ ed class to engage in a brief but successful game of strip poker in the backseat of the Buick; an anonymous young lady was rumored to have lost a
I agreed with Sherwood, although I was curious. I finished my coffee and asked for directions to the concession stand. Once we had unwrapped the blanket, much as the Egyptians might have done to check on decomposition, I fought my way down the rows of metal benches and went to see if Jerry had confided the details to his beloved.
Paula Hart was in the back of the concrete shed, watching popcorn explode in a glass box. I inched my way through the crowd to a corner of the counter and beckoned to her. “I hear Immerman was reinstated,” I said.
She gave me a puzzled look. “Yes, I believe he was. Can I get you a box of popcorn or something to drink, Claire? We have a limited selection of candy bars, but they’re ancient and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone over eighteen.”
“Did he convince Miss Dort to rescind the order, or did Jerry have a word with her?”
A frown that hinted of irritation flashed across her face, but she quickly converted it to a smile. “I have no idea. it’s really too loud and crazy in here for conversation, and I do have to watch some of the less mathematically inclined when they make change. Perhaps you might ask Miss Dort.”
“I’d love a box of popcorn,” I said, determined not to be dismissed despite the jostling crowd and my disinclination to eat anything prepared by adolescents. When she returned, I began to dig through my purse. “Now that Miss Dort is acting principal, what do you think she’ll do about Jerry’s graduate-school transcript?”
Paula’s hand tightened around the box until I could almost hear the popcorn groan. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she managed to say, her lipstick beginning to crack.
“I’d ask him, but I suspect he’ll be occupied with this thing between the Falcons and the Bantams for the next two hours. Of course, it wasn’t clear what Mr. Weiss intended to do. He sounded grim at the last teachers’ meeting, however; you two must have been alarmed.” The last bit wasn’t exactly speculation. but it seemed tactful to pretend.
“The police haven’t mentioned the graduate-school transcripts. How did you find out about them?”
“The police have the same problem I had initially,” I said. “They saw them in the personnel file, but they didn’t assume there was anything significant about the coach being exceptionally well educated. One has to understand the workings of the education bureaucracy to see why all teachers shouldn’t be exceptionally well educated.”
Her Barbie doll face crumpled. Ignoring the startled looks from the students beside her, she snatched up a napkin and blotted her eyes. “It was awful, just awful. Weiss made it clear he could have Jerry fired at any time. He also stopped me in the corridor late one afternoon after a club meeting and suggested that he-he and I engage in-in-a-oh, it was dreadful!”
“Did you tell Jerry that Weiss wanted sexual favors in exchange for job security?” I continued, unmoved by her display.
“Jerry called me that evening, and I just broke down.” She sniffled bravely into the napkin. “He was furious, but I managed to calm him down and talk some sense into him. He wanted to go right over to Mr. Weiss’s house, pound on the door, and make a terrible scene. It would have cost him his job for sure. With that on his record, he wouldn’t have been able to coach anywhere.”
Or buy a cottage and reproduce, I amended to myself. I was about to ask more questions when the bleachers above us erupted in a roar. The band took up the strains of the Falcons’ fight song, competing with the opposing band’s blare. Paula gave me an apologetic look and scurried away to blink bravely, if somewhat damply, at the popcorn machine. I left the crushed box of cold popcorn on the counter, and went back to join Sherwood and Evelyn on the fifty-yard line.
The band marched onto the field and arranged itself in some mysterious way that must have had some significance to those higher in the tiers. The cheerleaders bounced about like irregular ping-pong balls, shaking their pompoms among other things and arousing the pep squad to frenzied squeals. The drill team formed two lines and shook their pompoms among other things. The scene reminded me of a primitive, sacrificial ceremony in which virgins would go to the grave intact. To the
