The two downed firemen untangled themselves, and the whole group was preparing to charge into the inferno when two suit-coated figures ran over to them. One was Mr. Johnson, the Human Submarine, and the other was Mr. Grace. They were talking hard and fast to the fire chief.
Great rolls of hose with shiny nozzles were being unreeled from the pumpers and dragged toward the front doors. The fire chief turned around and yelled, “Hold it!” They stood irresolutely on the lawn, their nozzles gripped and held out before them like comic brass phalluses.
The fire chief was still in conference with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Grace. Mr. Johnson pointed at Room 16. Thomas Denver, the Principal with the Amazing Overshaved Neck, ran over and joined the discussion. It was starting to look like a pitcher’s mound conference in the last half of the ninth.
“I want to go home!” Irma Bates said wildly.
“Blow it out,” I said.
The fire chief had started to gesture toward his knights again, and Mr. Grace shook his head angrily and put a hand on his shoulder. He turned to Denver and said something to him. Denver nodded and ran toward the main doors.
The chief was nodding reluctantly. He went back to his car, rummaged in the back seat, and came up with a really nice Radio Shack battery-powered bullhorn. I bet they had some real tussles back at the fire station about who got to use that. Today the chief was obviously pulling rank. He pointed it at the milling students.
“Please move away from the building. I repeat. Will you please move away from the building. Move up to the shoulder of the highway. Move up to the shoulder of the highway. We will have buses here to pick you up shortly. School is canceled for-”
Short, bewildered whoop.
“… for the remainder of the day. Now, please move away from the building.”
A bunch of teachers-both men and women this time-started herding them up toward the road. They were craning and babbling. I looked for Joe McKennedy but didn’t see him anywhere.
“Is it all right to do homework?” Melvin Thomas asked tremblingly. There was a general laugh. They seemed surprised to hear it.
“Go ahead.” I thought for a moment and added: “If you want to smoke, go ahead and do it.”
A couple of them grabbed for their pockets. Sylvia Ragan, doing her lady-of-the-manor bit, fished a battered pack of Camels delicately out of her purse and lit up with leisurely elegance. She blew out a plume of smoke and dropped her match on the floor. She stretched out her legs, not bothering overmuch with the nuisance of her skirt. She looked comfy.
There had to be more, though. I was getting along pretty well, but there had to be a thousand things I wasn’t thinking of. Not that it mattered.
“If you’ve got a friend you want to sit next to, go ahead and change around. But don’t try to rush at me or run out the door, please.”
A couple of kids changed next to their buddies, walking quickly and softly, but most of them just sat quiet. Melvin Thomas had opened his algebra book but couldn’t seem to concentrate on it. He was staring at me glassily.
There was a faint metallic
“Hello,” Denver said. “Hello, Room 16.”
“Hello,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“Charlie Decker.”
Long pause. Finally: “What’s going on down there, Decker?”
I thought it over. “I guess I’m going berserk,” I said.
An even longer pause. Then, almost rhetorically: “What have you done?”
I motioned at Ted Jones. He nodded back at me politely. “Mr. Denver?”
“Who’s that?”
“Ted Jones, Mr. Denver. Charlie has a gun. He’s holding us hostage. He’s killed Mrs. Underwood. And I think he killed Mr. Vance, too.”
“I’m pretty sure I did,” I said.
“Oh,” Mr. Denver said.
Sarah Pasterne giggled again.
“Ted Jones?”
“I’m here,” Ted told him. He sounded very competent, Ted did, but at the same time distant. Like a first lieutenant who has been to college. You had to admire him.
“Who is in the classroom besides you and Decker?”
“Just a sec,” I said. “I’ll call the roll. Hold on.”
I got Mrs. Underwood’s green attendance book and opened it up. “Period two, right?”
“Yeah,” Corky said.
“Okay. Here we go. Irma Bates?”
“I want to go
“She’s here,” I said. “Susan Brooks?”
“Here.”
“Nancy Caskin?”
“Here.”
I went through the rest of the roll. There were twenty-five names, and the only absentee was Peter Franklin.
“Has Peter Franklin been shot?” Mr. Denver asked quietly.
“He’s got the measles,” Don Lordi said. This brought on another attack of the giggles. Ted Jones frowned deeply.
“Decker?”
“Yes.”
“Will you let them go?”
“Not right now,” I said.
“Why?” There was dreadful concern, a dreadful heaviness in his voice, and for a second I almost caught myself feeling sorry for him. I crushed that quickly. It’s like being in a big poker game. Here is this guy who has been winning big all night, he’s got a pile of chips that’s a mile-high, and all at once he starts to lose. Not a little bit, but a lot, and you want to feel bad for him and his falling empire. But you cram that back and bust him, or you take it in the eye.
So I said, “We haven’t finished getting it on down here yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means stick it,” I said. Carol Granger’s eyes got round.
“Decker-”
“Call me Charlie. All my friends call me Charlie.”
“Decker-”
I held my hand up in front of the class and crossed the fingers in pairs. “If you don’t call me Charlie, I’m going to shoot somebody.”
Pause.
“Charlie?”
“That’s better.” In the back row, Mike Gavin and Dick Keene were covering grins. Some of the others weren’t bothering to cover them. “You call me Charlie, and I’ll call you Tom. That okay, Tom?”
Long, long pause.
“When will you let them go, Charlie? They haven’t hurt you.”
Outside, one of the town’s three black-and-whites and a blue state-police cruiser had arrived. They parked across the road from the high school, and Jerry Kesserling, the chief since Warren Talbot had retired into the local Methodist cemetery in 1975, began directing traffic onto the Oak Hill Pond road.
“Did you hear me, Charlie?”
“Yes. But I can’t tell you. I don’t know. There are more cops coming, I guess.”
“Mr. Wolfe called them,” Mr. Denver said. “I imagine there will be a great deal more when they fully appreciate what’s going on. They’ll have tear gas and Mace, Dec… Charlie. Why make it hard on yourself and your classmates?”
“Tom?”
Grudgingly: “What?”
“You get your skinny cracked ass out there and tell them that the minute anyone shoots tear gas or anything else in here, I am going to make them sorry. You tell them to remember who’s driving.”
“Why? Why are you doing this?” He sounded angry and impotent and frightened. He sounded like a man who has just discovered there is no place left to pass the buck.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it sure beats panty raids, Tom. And I don’t think it actually concerns you. All I want you to do is trot back out there and tell them what I said. Will you do that, Tom?”
“I have no choice, do I?”
“No, that’s right. You don’t. And there’s something else, Tom.”
“What?” He asked it very hesitantly.
“I don’t like you very much, Tom, as you have probably realized, but up to now you haven’t had to give much of a rip how I felt. But I’m out of your filing cabinet now, Tom. Have you got it? I’m not just a record you can lock up at three in the afternoon. Have you got it?” My voice was rising into a scream. “HAVE YOU GOT THAT, TOM? HAVE YOU INTERNALIZED THAT PARTICULAR FACT OF LIFE?”
“Yes, Charlie,” he said in a deadly voice. “I have it.”
“No you don’t, Tom. But you will. Before the day’s over, we are going to understand all about the difference between people and pieces of paper in a file, and the difference between doing your job and getting jobbed. What do you think of that, Tommy, my man?”
“I think you’re a sick boy, Decker.”
“No, you think I’m a sick boy,
“Yes…”
