Come Sit By Me Page 4

  “It’s not just up to me,” she said. “I have to answer to the principal and the school board.”

  I mulled this over. “What if they asked you what books Cale was reading?”

  “So far,” she said, “they haven’t. And if you don’t mind, I would appreciate it if you didn’t bring up the subject in your article.”

  I shook hands with her again, to show she could trust me. And also because I enjoyed shaking hands with her. Then I thought of something else. “Was there a yearbook that had Cale’s picture?”

  She brightened up. She hadn’t thought of that. “Well, let’s see, shall we?” She went to a shelf that held a bunch of old yearbooks, and took down the latest one. “So he was a junoir,” she said, flipping the pages. “Here’s the class picture, and the names. He should be second one in the third row…oh.”

  I peered over her shoulder. The class had sat on some bleachers in the gym. I saw what had surprised her. Somebody had taken a black magic marker and blotted out the face of the second person in the third row.

  She let me take the book from her, because after all there was no privacy issue with that. I stared at the blacked-out face. In death, Cale had become…nobody.

  I gave the yearbook back to her. I tried to decide if it was worthwhile to call my dad and ask him to pick me up, or if I should just walk home. I went outside to see what the weather was like, and found North Hawkins sitting there in a pickup truck. It was black but shiny, and big. He sat way up off the ground, and glanced over as I approached.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw me.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  “You got any wheels?” he asked.

  I had a feeling he knew I didn’t. “No.”

  “You want a lift?”

  “Sure.” I went around to the other side of the truck and felt like it ought to have a ladder to make it easier to get inside. But I made it. He started the truck and drove off. I wasn’t paying attention because I had my eyes on the rifle mounted over the windshield. I guess he noticed my surprise, because he said with a grin, “Don’t have them where you come from?”

  “We carry handguns instead,” I said, trying to be a tough guy.

  He gave a laugh as if he knew I was kidding. “I bet you never fired a rifle,” he said.

  “You’re right,” I admitted.

  “Really? I was just putting you on. You honestly never fired a rifle?”

  “Or anything else.” He might as well know the awful truth.

  He shook his head. “Well, we can fix that up right quick.” He pulled off to the side of the road.

  “Why are we stopping?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea.

  He took the rifle off its rack and got out. The next thing I knew, he opened the door on my side. “Come on,” he said, practically pulling me out. There was nothing but woods on either side of the road here, but I protested anyway.

  “You can’t just fire guns off anywhere,” I said.

  “This isn’t a ‘gun,’” he said. “It’s a rifle. Guns are artillery.”

  “Well, whatever it is. You could hit somebody.”

  “Naw. This ain’t the city. These here woods goes back for a mile or more before you find anybody living in them. Come on, you don’t want to be like Cale, do you?”

  “Cale? He didn’t have any trouble firing a gun, er, a rifle.”

  “Trouble was, he was just a pussy who was never raised with weapons, so he went crazy once he started.”

  We had started walking into the woods. I was interested, to tell the truth. “How did he get started?” I asked.

  North gave me a look. “Nobody knows,” he said. “You trying to find out?”

  “Just curious,” I said.

  “You remember what curiosity did to the cat,” he told me.

  He was holding the gun, so I didn’t argue.

  We stopped. He pointed toward something. “See that tree?” he said.

  “I see lots of trees.”

  ”The birch, with the white bark.”

  “OK, I see it.”

  He handed me the rifle. I held it awkwardly, and he showed me the right way. “This thing’s the trigger,” he said with a grin.

  “I figured that much,” I said.

  “Now raise it to your eye, align the sights and aim it at the birch.”

  I did. It was harder to pull the trigger than I thought.

  “Just squeeze until it fires,” he advised me.

  I did and when the gun went off, it was loud. Louder than I expected. Not like TV cop show loud.

  “Now you’re a man,” North said. “Except you missed the tree.” He laughed.

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  He just shook his head. “Give it another try,” he said.

  I raised the gun again and tried to aim more carefully. I realized that I wasn’t holding the barrel steady. North saw it too. He reached over and moved my hand farther down the barrel. That solved the problem. I fired again. Still loud.

  He nodded. “Got it that time,” he said. Even though I hadn’t seen either time whether I had hit the tree or not, I felt a sense of pride, and was angry at myself for it.

  “I’ll take you hunting sometime after the leaves fall,” he said. I liked hearing that too, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t go.

  chapter seven

  I FINISHED THE ARTICLE over the weekend, just as Terry had demanded. I put a little bit about Cale in it too, even though I hadn’t learned much about him. I knew I couldn’t write that he’d asked one of the dead girls for sex. It wasn’t necessary, because everybody seemed to know that anyway.

  Didn’t matter. Terry took everything about Cale out of the article. When I saw it and asked why, she said, “Ms. King doesn’t want anything about him in the paper. It’s a memorial issue, anyway, and it wouldn’t be respectful to the others.”

  “If it’s a memorial issue…” I started to say.

  Terry raised her hand and stopped me. “I know, I know,” she said. “But it’s not a memorial to him. He was the killer.”

  “But nobody knows why he did it.”

  “Not our job to find out.”

  “We’re the editors of the school newspaper,” I said. I was aware, of course, that she was the editor-in-chief and I was only the lowly managing editor.

  “Old news, Paul. You heard what Dr. Haynes said. We’re moving on.”

  “He said we’re going to respond to new challenges.”

  She gave me an exasperated look. “And a kid who died nearly a year ago isn’t a new challenge.”

  I let her win the argument. I went back to my locker to get some books, and rubbed my hand on the underside of the top shelf. Dents. Pockmarks. Whatever they were, I was sure that Cale had made them. Was it frustration he was feeling when he did that? Must have been.

  School got underway, and I fell into the routine. World lit from Ms. Hayward to start off the day. If you just kept up with the assigned reading, you were O.K. The classes always started with a lecture from her on the current topic; then she would ask Terry for comments. Nobody else mattered to Ms. Hayward, and Terry assured me I would get a B if I did the work. I decided to try for an A, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

  Mr. Barnes still taught social studies, and it was clear why he had sent some of his students to the library to work on projects. A full classroom was too much for him to handle. People chatted and texted each other while Mr. Barnes was explaining fascinating topics like the effects of the Glass-Steagall Act. He assigned people to projects, which just meant they gathered in groups to listen to music on their cell phones. The only way Mr. Barnes could have gotten anything done was to get rid of the most disruptive kids. However, this year Dr. Haynes had obviously told him to keep everybody in the same room. No trips to the library.

&nb
sp; The math teacher, a guy with thinning white hair named Mr. Gregorio, looked like he had learned math from Archimedes. He wrote numbers on the chalkboard very, very slowly, but they were the neatest-looking numbers I ever saw anybody write. I was in advanced math, which was pre-calculus, and the only problem I had trouble with was stopping myself from telling him to hurry up.

  And so it went. About one in every four students in the school was hoping to go to college. The rest would either join the military or risk being stuck in Hamilton their whole lives. Terry and I, and North and Junior, were among those who intended to go on.

  The first couple of weeks, I had to ride on the school bus with my sister and the other young kids until my dad finally agreed to buy me a car. It wasn’t much—a six-year-old Toyota. I had wanted a pickup truck, since about half the seniors drove one, but Dad said we hadn’t come to Hamilton to become farmers. And I had to agree to take Susan to school and bring her home. I pointed out that I needed to stay after to work on the newspaper so I would have an extracurricular activity on my record. Susan piped up that she could do her homework in the library while I worked on the paper.

  As it happened, that turned out well, because Susan made friends with Ms. Clement, the librarian. Susan’s really a great suck-up, and teachers always love her. Anyway, she volunteered to help out and started by shelving books and so on. She did that after school until I had finished with the newspaper.

  One day, driving to school, I brought up the subject I had in mind. “Do you know if the library keeps records of books that students have taken out?”

  “Sure,” she said. “If they’re still out.”

  “How about if they were returned?”

  “I guess. For this year, anyway.”

  “And how about…in other years?”

  “What do you mean, other years? This is our first year.”

  “Well, if I wanted to know, say, what kinds of books Cale Peters had checked out. Would it be possible?”

  She shrugged. “Everything’s on a computer. I don’t know if anybody bothers to erase the data from previous years.”

  “Could you, maybe, find out?”

  Well, Susan isn’t dumb. She caught on. “Why do you want to know that?” she asked.

  I tried the official answer: “I’m writing an article for the school newspaper.”

  “You already wrote a memorial article.”

  “Cale wasn’t in it.”

  “Of course. Nobody wants to remember him. And they’re not going to print anything you write about him, either.”

  I decided to give the truth a try. You never know. “Well, actually, I didn’t tell you this, and it’s a secret, but I have his old locker and that made me curious.”

  “Everybody knows that,” she said.

  “They do?”

  “Sure. Kids walk down that corridor just so they can see the locker. Corridor A, Row 3, number 105, right? They thought it was cool when I told them my brother had the locker. Of course, I told them it was just luck and you were really a doofus.”

  “Well, then I have a right to know what books he was reading.” I lowered my voice to sound serious. “Maybe something he read set him off. It could happen again.” I was glad Ms. Clement couldn’t hear me.

  “Then why don’t you ask Ms. Clem—? Oh, I get it,” Susan said. “She won’t let you see the records.”

  I thought of denying it, but what was the use? “They’re public records,” I said. “I have a right to see them.”

  “Yeah? You think kids have rights?”

  Well, she had me there. “Look, you could just do it and nobody would care. It’s not like she stands over the computer all the time.”

  “I would be betraying a trust,” Susan said, piously. The little hypocrite.

  So that meant the only thing that she would respond to was bribery. I thought about it for a minute. “I’ll let you drive my car.”

  “You will?” Then, to cover the fact that she had shown eagerness, she asked, “How far?”

  “We’d have to find someplace where the police won’t pull you over,” I said. I was already having second thoughts. I knew who would be in the most trouble if Susan ran into anything. Or anybody.

  “How about the cemetery?” she said.

  “What cemetery?”

  “There’s an old cemetery south of the town where kids park at night to have sex.”

  I was shocked. “How would you know that?”

  “What’s the matter? That girl who rides you around in her Miata doesn’t put out?”

  “She’s the editor of the school newspaper,” I said, as if that explained anything.

  Evidently it did. “She probably gets off on romance novels instead of the real thing. I could introduce you to a couple of girls…”

  “No!” I said, although I wondered if I shouldn’t take her up on the offer. No, if they were girls from her class, I’d probably get arrested for child molesting. “Look, get me Cale’s library records and I’ll take you to the cemetery. During the daytime. To drive.”

  “Let me drive the car first.”

  “No. That’s a lot more risky for me than what you have to do.”

  “Not if Ms. Clement catches me.”

  “I have confidence in your skill at sneakery.”

  “Is that a word?” she said suspiciously.

  “It is now.”

  My confidence in Susan was justified. So was my distrust. The next day, when she got in the car, she showed me the printout of Cale’s records, but wouldn’t hand it over until I let her get behind the wheel of the Toyota. So I drove us out to the cemetery. It had a lot of old-fashioned gravestones and monuments and even crypts, which were like stone sheds where the coffins, also stone, had been interred above ground. I had once read that in the 19th century there was a big fear of being buried alive, which made people who could afford it build crypts where they could open the coffins and get out if they suddenly woke up.

  Anyway, I switched seats with Susan and she gave me the folded printout. I didn’t look at it at first because I wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to go wild with the car. I had left the engine running, and watched as she shifted into drive. “The big pedal is the brake,” I said.

  “I know, dummy,” she replied. She pressed down on the accelerator pedal too hard, and the car lurched forward. I reached for the wheel, but she pushed me away and steadied the car. I took a deep breath and eyed the brake pedal. I could probably reach it with my leg if I had to.

  But Susan got the hang of it soon enough, and we made a circuit of the road that led through the cemetery. Some parts were shaded by trees, and I could well understand why kids came here to park at night. Susan sped up as she came back to where we had started, so she could make the circuit a second time. I remembered that I still had the printout and opened it.

  Cale had taken out one book: Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe. He had never returned it. The librarian had sent him several overdue notices, and the total fine would have been $26.50. If Cale had survived. If the librarian had survived.

  Well, that was interesting in a way, but Cale sure didn’t start shooting up the library because of an overdue book. He’d probably lost it, and paying for the book would have cost him less than $26.50.

  What was the book about? I pulled out my Blackberry and looked it up. (I know: why am I using a Blackberry? Because my dad got one cheap.) The book was old, written back in 1929 by Thomas Wolfe, some guy who wrote three more books and then died. This was his first. It was a novel that was supposed to be based on his own life. A pretty long book, evidently. Maybe Cale didn’t return it because he had trouble finishing it. The title was taken from a poem by John Milton, according to Wikipedia. The lines were:

  “Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:

  And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
”

  Well, that was extremely helpful. Not.

  Nobody had suggested to me that Cale was this closet intellectual who liked to read dense books.

  Then I read that the angel of the title was really a statue in the local cemetery in the town where the novel took place. I looked up and said, “Stop!”

  Susan hit the brakes. “What’s the matter?” she asked. I had nearly dropped my Blackberry, but I pointed out the window. “There’s an angel,” I said.

  “Yeah, dummdumm, it’s an angel. On somebody’s grave,” she replied. “Why’d you yell at me?”

  I started to get out, but then remembered where I was. I reached back, turned off the engine, and took the keys. Naturally, Susan protested, but I told her she could drive around some more after I looked at the angel.

  It wasn’t a tombstone. It was a monument, the tallest thing in the cemetery. Maybe twenty feet high. The angel was holding a book in one hand and pointing with the other. The expression on her face was so angry that you just had to look to see what she was pointing at. As far as I could tell, it was one of the crypts on the other side of the road that ran through the cemetery grounds.

  On the pedestal that held the angel, it said, “SALLY DENNIS, 1905-1927. A fallen angel may rise again.” I walked around it, looking on all four sides. Nothing else. I tried to see the title of the book she was holding, but I would have had to climb up to do it.

  I went back to the car, where Susan was waiting impatiently. “I didn’t know you were so interested in tombstones,” she said.

  Handing her the keys, I said, “Cale must have been interested in that one.”

  chapter eight

  I ASKED MY DAD if he had a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. He said, “Did some teacher assign that for class?”

  “No, I just heard it was fun to read,” I said.

  “Who told you that?” Usually Dad wasn’t that interested in what I was reading.

  “Nobody,” I replied. “Just saw it online.”

  “When I was your age, people often read it when they were young,” he told me. “But it’s not very useful, if you want to learn how to write well.”