November 21, 2011
Inevitable
The caterpillar on my toothbrush
no longer than a waterdrop
arches itself so beautifully
I suddenly forget all about
pepper spray.
On the crest of the green hill
overlooking the city
a column of oaks
stand watchful,
waiting for
the inevitable glory.
They’ve been waiting
a very long time.
I know a good woman
who turned 100 yesterday.
She tells me, “Heaven
is overbooked.
I have to wait in line.”
She tells me that
my work is important.
“Just love your wife,” she says.
“Bake her a pie.”
She is younger than I.
September 13, 2011
Flinch
Mr. Knight carries his paddle into our sixth-grade classroom the day after we learn to play Flinch. The paddle is a wooden cutting board with six quarter-sized holes drilled into it. He calls it the Board of Education but he isn’t kidding around and we don’t laugh.
The reek of thirty-two sweating students permeates the air like onion juice. Mr. Whitley, our teacher, opens all the window panes on the playground side of the classroom to let the air circulate. The smell of newly mowed grass fills me with longing for the outdoors, just outside my grasp. I want to hit that grass running and not look back.
I stare out at the row of sycamore trees beyond the chain link fence at the edge of the field. Way past that fence, so far beyond I can hardly imagine it, boys twice my age are fighting communists in a place called Vietnam. Sometimes I watch the soldiers shooting their rifles on the six-o’clock news. I think about them as Mr. Knight fingers his paddle and wonder if communists looked as grim as he does.
“We had an agreement,” Knight says gravely. “Some of you in this room—perhaps most of you—have violated that agreement.” He clenches his square jaw and his forehead turns crimson. He looks like a man about to explode.
He was a police officer in Los Angeles for twenty years before coming to our school in the fall of 1966. At first I liked the idea of having a cop for a principal. There was a word I’d learned: street scum. That’s what cops called the sleaziest criminals in Los Angeles-I’d read about that in Reader’s Digest. I imagined Knight’s huge arms cinched around some mugger’s neck, snarling, “You’re history, street scum.”
He could have retired, he’d once told us, but he’d always wanted to work in the public schools and now he had his chance. Some emergency position had opened up and he was available to fill it. He stands a good six feet tall and looks like Ben Cartwright fresh from the Ponderosa, silver hair slicked back with Vitalis. His body seems to be carved from granite. Everything about him is bulky and square. His head reminds me of an enormous block of ice. Knight clicks his teeth when he speaks and always looks like he’s just removed the holsters from his belt.
I never see him without a suit and tie, even on the hottest days, and he insists that we conform to a certain meticulous dress code as well. Boys’ hair below the collar is a felony in his rule book; shirt tails have to remain tucked in even during basketball practice. Violators sit against the stucco walls until the end of recess. Girls in pants are sent home.
It’s his first year as a principal and we aren’t making his job easy for him. He reminds us of this constantly. We’re repeatedly violating our agreements established at the start of the school year—to walk, not run in the hallways; to talk quietly in the cafeteria; to avoid roughhousing in line. Above all, we’d agreed to never hit each other on the school grounds. If we did all these things, he agreed to keep his paddle locked up in his desk drawer.
“I want you all to understand that I keep my promises,” he says. Perspiration is beading on his forehead and I wish he would wipe it off. He looks volatile. Soldiers in the Vietnam jungles swea like that; I’ve seen it on the close-ups on their faces on the CBS Evening News. They look miserable in their grenade-laden uniforms, thick helmets and heavy boots. I wonder if the soldiers ever play Flinch for relief in the jungles.
Flinch is what got us into trouble. Mr. Knight has no idea how fun it is to play. He just looked out of his office window during noon recess and saw us all slugging each other in the shoulders.
“I promised you that under no circumstances would I tolerate violence of any sort in this school,” says Knight stiffly. “Today I will fulfill my promise.”
Mr. Whitley unwittingly taught us to play Flinch yesterday during song time. We’d just finished singing “Empty Saddles in the Old Corral,” and Mr. Whitley was looking relaxed with his guitar in his lap. He’d let his guard down and told us how he’d worked as a hired hand on a farm the previous summer, picking fruit and bailing hay. It was tedious work, he said, and to pass the time he played Flinch with his buddies. The idea was to catch another guy off guard by pretending to hit him while shouting “Flinch!” If the guy flinched, he lost and had to offer his shoulder as a punching bag, but if he didn’t flinch, he got to slug you as hard as he wanted.
“We played ‘til we were black and blue,” chuckled Mr. Whitley. “I’ve never been so sore in all my life.”
We thought it was a hilarious story and could hardly wait to play Flinch ourselves. We couldn’t imagine any harm in it, especially when it was endorsed by our own teacher.
“I want everyone who was involved in this violent hitting game to stand up,” says Knight. An anguished embarrassment holds us paralyzed. I want to look around but don’t dare. We’ve all played at least once. The girls hit the hardest. I’ve played twice, once with Tim Cardinal and once with Ed Smith. I beat Smith and slugged him, but he winced and said he’d just had a tetanus shot there, so I didn’t play any more after that. Skinny Marcia Corneil made me flinch but I’d run away before she could sock me. “Coward,” she screamed after me. She was a fast runner and grabbed my sleeve but I twisted away, laughing.
“I’ve talked to some of you already,” says Knight. He pulls out a small green notepad. “I have your names. If I have to call your names out loud, you’ll regret it. That’s another promise. I’m going to count to three. Then I start reading.”
Marcia sits in the front row facing Knight. She has a giggling problem whenever she feels tense and I can tell she’s trying hard to stay under control. She can’t help it; she covers her mouth but a snicker emerges like a stifled fart.
“QUIET!” Knight screams, and smashes his paddle onto the top of her desk. My heart feels like it will heave itself out of my chest. Marcia turns white and doesn’t speak for the rest of the day.
We sit stunned, wondering what might happen next. I wager that my name isn’t on Knight’s list. I haven’t played anywhere near his office. Still, I feel my face reddening, and I’m certain I’ll give myself away if he asks me point blank.
“One,” counts Knight. “Two...”
Cory Kilmer, who could pass for 16, stands reluctantly, biting his lip. Cory has bullied me a few times for no good reason, but he depends on me for math advice so we never stay enemies for long. He seems to be in a perpetual bad mood. Sometimes I feel sorry for him. He told me once that his oldest brother is a Green Beret in Vietnam, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think he even has an older brother.
Rob Newton, the top athlete of the class, rises with Cory. He holds his hands behind his back as though handcuffed, a look of wary resignation darkening his face. I’ve never, ever seen Rob cry, not even when he got hit in the eye by a line drive playing baseball, and I can tell he’s not about to cry now. He looks like a young Marlon Brando in that movie about the motorcycle gangs, and just last week he beat Mr. Knight in a 100-yard sprint, just for fun, a recess race that left the principal crimson in the face and panting like a tired horse. If Rob chose to run now he could make it.
Marc Roux is also standing. Mark has a lot of difficulties in school. He’s even bigger than Cory Kilmer; his shoulders are broad and heavy and stooped. He’s a gentle boy most of the time, with a pudgy baby-faced complexion. His brain works in slow motion; he talks haltingly, and when other children tease him (as they frequently do) he flies into dreadful rages that send everyone scattering. When he loses his cool he’s unrestrainable; no amount of coaxing can pacify him. Teachers give him space to pace in the playfield like a wounded creature of the wild. For hours he’ll mutter angrily to himself and box imaginary enemies with his fists. If confined, Mark will panic, throw desks, kick chairs to splinters. Kids have nicknamed him King Kong.
David Caulkins and Ed Smith also stand and fidget with their hands. I writhe beneath Knight’s intent gaze, praying that my complicity will not be evident. Finally he puts his notepad back in his shirt pocket, removes his jacket, and rolls up his sleeves. He orders Marcia to the back of the room, then commandeers her desk to a central location at the front of the class.
“Line up,” he whispers to the boys, gripping his paddle like a police pistol. I’ve never witnessed a public flogging, but it feels as though this will be something very much like it. My skull is pounding.
The boys shuffle forward to the front of the class like captured POW’s. Despite the open windows, the room feels as though all oxygen has been sucked out. Nobody breathes. I turn and look at Mr. Whitley. He sits on the edge of his desk in the back of the room with a perplexed grimace creasing his face. I decide to experiment with E.S.P., another subject I’ve been reading about in Reader’s Digest, and focus all my concentration on sending him a mental message. “Say something,” I silently shout. “Speak up. This is your fault. You can stop it.” He’s the only one in the room capable of intervening but he sits there staring numbly like the rest of us.
“Do you agree that you violated our agreement by hitting other children in the playground at noon?” Mr. Knight asks David Caulkins, the first boy in line. David nods his head and flares his nostrils. He’s a tall lanky guy and a terrific fighter with a long right jab when he needs it. I heard he fought Cory Kilmer once in the Long John Silver Drive-In parking lot, and the fight was over in seconds with Cory covering his face and falling to his knees.
“Put your hands on the desk,” orders Knight. David bends spread eagle over the desk and lowers his head, facing the class. His eyes are scowling and utterly defiant; he refuses to close them. I send a desperate mental S.O.S. to Mr. Whitley, so loud I’m sure everyone in the class will intercept it. Knight raises his paddle high and swings it like a golf club. It hits David’s pants with the sound of rifle crack and everyone in the room gasps and jerks in their seats.
David’s eyes grow wide for an instant as though a bullet has passed through him. Then he shuts them tightly and his mouth trembles into the shape of a dark sneer. He shudders involuntarily and grips the sides of the desk as though he might pick it up and hurl it backward. Mary Grant, loveliest girl in the class, trembles and turns her face away.
“Next,” says Knight. I glance back at Mr. Whitley. His expression is dispassionate and without emotion, but his skin is flushed. I feel a sudden surge of disgust rush through my veins. So much for ESP, I think. David limps back to his desk, clearly in pain.
Rob Newton winces when Knight’s paddle hits his seat, but he strides back to his desk as though nothing significant has happened. But when Ed Smith gets smacked his face blanches and he looks like he might get sick. He cries out and slams his fists on the desk and kicks the chair. “That’s enough,” warns Knight, but Ed kicks three more times. I hear some girls start to cry.
Cory Kilmer is next in line; at the swat he makes a funny face with rolling, bulging eyes that only the class can see, but nobody laughs. Besides, I can’t say for sure that he’s joking since the corners of his eyes grow wet and he waddles back to his seat as though his spine is hurt.
Last in line is Marc Roux. His rounded shoulders are hunched over more than usual, his face crestfallen. Knight must be mistaken. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play Flinch with Marc since he gets so crazy when angered. I don’t understand why he has stood up with the others. Most perplexing of all is why Knight would take the risk of swatting him, of all people.
I look pleadingly back at Mr. Whitley but his eyes are glued to Knight at the front of the class. I suddenly recognize that it’s fear clouding his face. So that’s it. He’s as unnerved and intimidated as the rest of us.
“Do you agree that you violated our agreement-” Knight begins, but Mark interrupts him with a strangled “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Let me finish,” insists Knight in a hoarse whisper, wagging his finger below Mark’s nose like a furious umpire. “Didn’t you hit children in the playground at noon?” he says.
Mark stares at him in disbelief.
“Didn’t you?” Knight persists, his voice rising.
Mark nods.
“I can’t hear your head rattle,” says Knight.
“Yeah,” says Mark. “I guess so.”
“Don’t you backtalk to me,” yells Knight, hitting the desk top with another loud slap. Mark quivers and jumps back.
“You will do as I say. Bend over,” Knight commands.
Mark obeys and Knight swings hard and the pop that follows makes me think of the snap of a redwood tree in a hard wind. Marc recoils, closes his eyes and looks like he’s just clicked on a landmine that will detonate as soon as he lifts his foot. He slowly turns to face Knight with a glare of repressed fury. I send him an ESP message. “Do it,” I urge. “Go berserk.” Knight snaps his fingers and points to Mark’s desk. Mark exhales long and deep, turns and hobbles dejectedly back to his seat, his eyes huge and moist.
Knight says he’s finished. He says he wants to talk to the five boys in private in his office. “That will be the end of hitting at recess,” he announces wearily. “That goes for all of you. There are some of you who didn’t stand. I’ll find out who you are. You’ll be hearing from me-I promise.” He strides out of the class like an angry drill sergeant, followed by the five boys.
Knight doesn’t follow through with his threat and no one else confesses. There are no more public paddlings after that and nobody plays Flinch again, nor does anyone discuss the paddling, not even the five boys. Mr. Whitley acts as though nothing has ever happened, and we all avoid Knight as much as possible. Several weeks later, Knight arranges for our class to see a science fiction film, “The Fantastic Voyage,” at a downtown movie theater. We cheer as the villain, a Russian spy shrunken inside a scientist’s blood vessel, is consumed by a giant white corpuscle.
Two days after the paddling, Marc Roux goes nuts during noon recess. I discover a crowd of children marveling at the huge star-shaped hole he’d punched in the classroom window pane with his bare fist. “He didn’t even cut himself,” says one girl. “He just slugged it and stormed away.” Nobody seems to know why, and Mark doesn’t return to school for a week. Kids leave him alone after that.
A month later, Cory Kilmore and Mike Duperalt begin arguing on the softball field during an afternoon recess game. Cory calls Mike a gook bastard; Mike swings his bat like a golf club and Cory lays screaming in the dirt, holding his leg. I run for Mr. Whitley and later watch the ambulance men put Cory on a stretcher and haul him away. I feel sick and don’t do too well in math that day. I don’t see Cory again until the first week of 7th grade, where he hobbles from class to class in a leg brace.
Each evening on the 6:00 news, the body count of soldiers killed in Vietnam appears in cold white letters on the television screen against film footage of bomb smoke and burning villages. I’m glad I’m not there. Mr. Whitley tells us about a buddy of his who’s a soldier, who has to crawl into dark underground tunnels in the jungles to flush out the Viet Cong. He has to be careful, Whitley said, because the tunnels are sometimes booby trapped with sharpened bamboo spikes that can swing up and impale your face, leaving you helplessly trapped and alone to die in the subterranean labyrinth. That story inspires some of the boys to build their own underground tunnels after school in the loose earth down by Lindo Channel.
It gets me to thinking about booby traps. I imagine laying one for Knight, right there in his neat and tidy office—something that would spring up when he opens his drawer, the one with the paddle in it, and leave him forever sorry he left the Los Angeles Police Department.
© Ed Aust, 1998
The reek of thirty-two sweating students permeates the air like onion juice. Mr. Whitley, our teacher, opens all the window panes on the playground side of the classroom to let the air circulate. The smell of newly mowed grass fills me with longing for the outdoors, just outside my grasp. I want to hit that grass running and not look back.
I stare out at the row of sycamore trees beyond the chain link fence at the edge of the field. Way past that fence, so far beyond I can hardly imagine it, boys twice my age are fighting communists in a place called Vietnam. Sometimes I watch the soldiers shooting their rifles on the six-o’clock news. I think about them as Mr. Knight fingers his paddle and wonder if communists looked as grim as he does.
“We had an agreement,” Knight says gravely. “Some of you in this room—perhaps most of you—have violated that agreement.” He clenches his square jaw and his forehead turns crimson. He looks like a man about to explode.
He was a police officer in Los Angeles for twenty years before coming to our school in the fall of 1966. At first I liked the idea of having a cop for a principal. There was a word I’d learned: street scum. That’s what cops called the sleaziest criminals in Los Angeles-I’d read about that in Reader’s Digest. I imagined Knight’s huge arms cinched around some mugger’s neck, snarling, “You’re history, street scum.”
He could have retired, he’d once told us, but he’d always wanted to work in the public schools and now he had his chance. Some emergency position had opened up and he was available to fill it. He stands a good six feet tall and looks like Ben Cartwright fresh from the Ponderosa, silver hair slicked back with Vitalis. His body seems to be carved from granite. Everything about him is bulky and square. His head reminds me of an enormous block of ice. Knight clicks his teeth when he speaks and always looks like he’s just removed the holsters from his belt.
I never see him without a suit and tie, even on the hottest days, and he insists that we conform to a certain meticulous dress code as well. Boys’ hair below the collar is a felony in his rule book; shirt tails have to remain tucked in even during basketball practice. Violators sit against the stucco walls until the end of recess. Girls in pants are sent home.
It’s his first year as a principal and we aren’t making his job easy for him. He reminds us of this constantly. We’re repeatedly violating our agreements established at the start of the school year—to walk, not run in the hallways; to talk quietly in the cafeteria; to avoid roughhousing in line. Above all, we’d agreed to never hit each other on the school grounds. If we did all these things, he agreed to keep his paddle locked up in his desk drawer.
“I want you all to understand that I keep my promises,” he says. Perspiration is beading on his forehead and I wish he would wipe it off. He looks volatile. Soldiers in the Vietnam jungles swea like that; I’ve seen it on the close-ups on their faces on the CBS Evening News. They look miserable in their grenade-laden uniforms, thick helmets and heavy boots. I wonder if the soldiers ever play Flinch for relief in the jungles.
Flinch is what got us into trouble. Mr. Knight has no idea how fun it is to play. He just looked out of his office window during noon recess and saw us all slugging each other in the shoulders.
“I promised you that under no circumstances would I tolerate violence of any sort in this school,” says Knight stiffly. “Today I will fulfill my promise.”
Mr. Whitley unwittingly taught us to play Flinch yesterday during song time. We’d just finished singing “Empty Saddles in the Old Corral,” and Mr. Whitley was looking relaxed with his guitar in his lap. He’d let his guard down and told us how he’d worked as a hired hand on a farm the previous summer, picking fruit and bailing hay. It was tedious work, he said, and to pass the time he played Flinch with his buddies. The idea was to catch another guy off guard by pretending to hit him while shouting “Flinch!” If the guy flinched, he lost and had to offer his shoulder as a punching bag, but if he didn’t flinch, he got to slug you as hard as he wanted.
“We played ‘til we were black and blue,” chuckled Mr. Whitley. “I’ve never been so sore in all my life.”
We thought it was a hilarious story and could hardly wait to play Flinch ourselves. We couldn’t imagine any harm in it, especially when it was endorsed by our own teacher.
“I want everyone who was involved in this violent hitting game to stand up,” says Knight. An anguished embarrassment holds us paralyzed. I want to look around but don’t dare. We’ve all played at least once. The girls hit the hardest. I’ve played twice, once with Tim Cardinal and once with Ed Smith. I beat Smith and slugged him, but he winced and said he’d just had a tetanus shot there, so I didn’t play any more after that. Skinny Marcia Corneil made me flinch but I’d run away before she could sock me. “Coward,” she screamed after me. She was a fast runner and grabbed my sleeve but I twisted away, laughing.
“I’ve talked to some of you already,” says Knight. He pulls out a small green notepad. “I have your names. If I have to call your names out loud, you’ll regret it. That’s another promise. I’m going to count to three. Then I start reading.”
Marcia sits in the front row facing Knight. She has a giggling problem whenever she feels tense and I can tell she’s trying hard to stay under control. She can’t help it; she covers her mouth but a snicker emerges like a stifled fart.
“QUIET!” Knight screams, and smashes his paddle onto the top of her desk. My heart feels like it will heave itself out of my chest. Marcia turns white and doesn’t speak for the rest of the day.
We sit stunned, wondering what might happen next. I wager that my name isn’t on Knight’s list. I haven’t played anywhere near his office. Still, I feel my face reddening, and I’m certain I’ll give myself away if he asks me point blank.
“One,” counts Knight. “Two...”
Cory Kilmer, who could pass for 16, stands reluctantly, biting his lip. Cory has bullied me a few times for no good reason, but he depends on me for math advice so we never stay enemies for long. He seems to be in a perpetual bad mood. Sometimes I feel sorry for him. He told me once that his oldest brother is a Green Beret in Vietnam, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think he even has an older brother.
Rob Newton, the top athlete of the class, rises with Cory. He holds his hands behind his back as though handcuffed, a look of wary resignation darkening his face. I’ve never, ever seen Rob cry, not even when he got hit in the eye by a line drive playing baseball, and I can tell he’s not about to cry now. He looks like a young Marlon Brando in that movie about the motorcycle gangs, and just last week he beat Mr. Knight in a 100-yard sprint, just for fun, a recess race that left the principal crimson in the face and panting like a tired horse. If Rob chose to run now he could make it.
Marc Roux is also standing. Mark has a lot of difficulties in school. He’s even bigger than Cory Kilmer; his shoulders are broad and heavy and stooped. He’s a gentle boy most of the time, with a pudgy baby-faced complexion. His brain works in slow motion; he talks haltingly, and when other children tease him (as they frequently do) he flies into dreadful rages that send everyone scattering. When he loses his cool he’s unrestrainable; no amount of coaxing can pacify him. Teachers give him space to pace in the playfield like a wounded creature of the wild. For hours he’ll mutter angrily to himself and box imaginary enemies with his fists. If confined, Mark will panic, throw desks, kick chairs to splinters. Kids have nicknamed him King Kong.
David Caulkins and Ed Smith also stand and fidget with their hands. I writhe beneath Knight’s intent gaze, praying that my complicity will not be evident. Finally he puts his notepad back in his shirt pocket, removes his jacket, and rolls up his sleeves. He orders Marcia to the back of the room, then commandeers her desk to a central location at the front of the class.
“Line up,” he whispers to the boys, gripping his paddle like a police pistol. I’ve never witnessed a public flogging, but it feels as though this will be something very much like it. My skull is pounding.
The boys shuffle forward to the front of the class like captured POW’s. Despite the open windows, the room feels as though all oxygen has been sucked out. Nobody breathes. I turn and look at Mr. Whitley. He sits on the edge of his desk in the back of the room with a perplexed grimace creasing his face. I decide to experiment with E.S.P., another subject I’ve been reading about in Reader’s Digest, and focus all my concentration on sending him a mental message. “Say something,” I silently shout. “Speak up. This is your fault. You can stop it.” He’s the only one in the room capable of intervening but he sits there staring numbly like the rest of us.
“Do you agree that you violated our agreement by hitting other children in the playground at noon?” Mr. Knight asks David Caulkins, the first boy in line. David nods his head and flares his nostrils. He’s a tall lanky guy and a terrific fighter with a long right jab when he needs it. I heard he fought Cory Kilmer once in the Long John Silver Drive-In parking lot, and the fight was over in seconds with Cory covering his face and falling to his knees.
“Put your hands on the desk,” orders Knight. David bends spread eagle over the desk and lowers his head, facing the class. His eyes are scowling and utterly defiant; he refuses to close them. I send a desperate mental S.O.S. to Mr. Whitley, so loud I’m sure everyone in the class will intercept it. Knight raises his paddle high and swings it like a golf club. It hits David’s pants with the sound of rifle crack and everyone in the room gasps and jerks in their seats.
David’s eyes grow wide for an instant as though a bullet has passed through him. Then he shuts them tightly and his mouth trembles into the shape of a dark sneer. He shudders involuntarily and grips the sides of the desk as though he might pick it up and hurl it backward. Mary Grant, loveliest girl in the class, trembles and turns her face away.
“Next,” says Knight. I glance back at Mr. Whitley. His expression is dispassionate and without emotion, but his skin is flushed. I feel a sudden surge of disgust rush through my veins. So much for ESP, I think. David limps back to his desk, clearly in pain.
Rob Newton winces when Knight’s paddle hits his seat, but he strides back to his desk as though nothing significant has happened. But when Ed Smith gets smacked his face blanches and he looks like he might get sick. He cries out and slams his fists on the desk and kicks the chair. “That’s enough,” warns Knight, but Ed kicks three more times. I hear some girls start to cry.
Cory Kilmer is next in line; at the swat he makes a funny face with rolling, bulging eyes that only the class can see, but nobody laughs. Besides, I can’t say for sure that he’s joking since the corners of his eyes grow wet and he waddles back to his seat as though his spine is hurt.
Last in line is Marc Roux. His rounded shoulders are hunched over more than usual, his face crestfallen. Knight must be mistaken. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to play Flinch with Marc since he gets so crazy when angered. I don’t understand why he has stood up with the others. Most perplexing of all is why Knight would take the risk of swatting him, of all people.
I look pleadingly back at Mr. Whitley but his eyes are glued to Knight at the front of the class. I suddenly recognize that it’s fear clouding his face. So that’s it. He’s as unnerved and intimidated as the rest of us.
“Do you agree that you violated our agreement-” Knight begins, but Mark interrupts him with a strangled “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Let me finish,” insists Knight in a hoarse whisper, wagging his finger below Mark’s nose like a furious umpire. “Didn’t you hit children in the playground at noon?” he says.
Mark stares at him in disbelief.
“Didn’t you?” Knight persists, his voice rising.
Mark nods.
“I can’t hear your head rattle,” says Knight.
“Yeah,” says Mark. “I guess so.”
“Don’t you backtalk to me,” yells Knight, hitting the desk top with another loud slap. Mark quivers and jumps back.
“You will do as I say. Bend over,” Knight commands.
Mark obeys and Knight swings hard and the pop that follows makes me think of the snap of a redwood tree in a hard wind. Marc recoils, closes his eyes and looks like he’s just clicked on a landmine that will detonate as soon as he lifts his foot. He slowly turns to face Knight with a glare of repressed fury. I send him an ESP message. “Do it,” I urge. “Go berserk.” Knight snaps his fingers and points to Mark’s desk. Mark exhales long and deep, turns and hobbles dejectedly back to his seat, his eyes huge and moist.
Knight says he’s finished. He says he wants to talk to the five boys in private in his office. “That will be the end of hitting at recess,” he announces wearily. “That goes for all of you. There are some of you who didn’t stand. I’ll find out who you are. You’ll be hearing from me-I promise.” He strides out of the class like an angry drill sergeant, followed by the five boys.
Knight doesn’t follow through with his threat and no one else confesses. There are no more public paddlings after that and nobody plays Flinch again, nor does anyone discuss the paddling, not even the five boys. Mr. Whitley acts as though nothing has ever happened, and we all avoid Knight as much as possible. Several weeks later, Knight arranges for our class to see a science fiction film, “The Fantastic Voyage,” at a downtown movie theater. We cheer as the villain, a Russian spy shrunken inside a scientist’s blood vessel, is consumed by a giant white corpuscle.
Two days after the paddling, Marc Roux goes nuts during noon recess. I discover a crowd of children marveling at the huge star-shaped hole he’d punched in the classroom window pane with his bare fist. “He didn’t even cut himself,” says one girl. “He just slugged it and stormed away.” Nobody seems to know why, and Mark doesn’t return to school for a week. Kids leave him alone after that.
A month later, Cory Kilmore and Mike Duperalt begin arguing on the softball field during an afternoon recess game. Cory calls Mike a gook bastard; Mike swings his bat like a golf club and Cory lays screaming in the dirt, holding his leg. I run for Mr. Whitley and later watch the ambulance men put Cory on a stretcher and haul him away. I feel sick and don’t do too well in math that day. I don’t see Cory again until the first week of 7th grade, where he hobbles from class to class in a leg brace.
Each evening on the 6:00 news, the body count of soldiers killed in Vietnam appears in cold white letters on the television screen against film footage of bomb smoke and burning villages. I’m glad I’m not there. Mr. Whitley tells us about a buddy of his who’s a soldier, who has to crawl into dark underground tunnels in the jungles to flush out the Viet Cong. He has to be careful, Whitley said, because the tunnels are sometimes booby trapped with sharpened bamboo spikes that can swing up and impale your face, leaving you helplessly trapped and alone to die in the subterranean labyrinth. That story inspires some of the boys to build their own underground tunnels after school in the loose earth down by Lindo Channel.
It gets me to thinking about booby traps. I imagine laying one for Knight, right there in his neat and tidy office—something that would spring up when he opens his drawer, the one with the paddle in it, and leave him forever sorry he left the Los Angeles Police Department.
© Ed Aust, 1998
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