هذه قصة واقعية انا لا اكذب !!!!!!

السلام عليكم اخواني الكرام ارجوا ان تصدقوا هذه القصة الي انا سارويها لكم
مرة يا خواني الاعزاء .....

في ليلة قمت بتمارين رياضية كثيرة و بعدها رحة الى حمام برة البيت في ساعة متاخرة في الليل تقريبا الساعة 23:00 مساءا دخلت الحمام حسيت بشيء غير طبيعي لكن قلت مع حالي الحرارة تعمل هكذا و دوخة ....

دخلت وسط المغسل وجدت شخص واحد الي في ها الحمام ما تكلم معي غتسلت انا و ما كثرث بالنظر الييه لما كنت بنظر الييه اجد نظراته غاظبة جدا !!!!!

و بصراحة انا خفت كثيرا منه حتى اني كنت اسرع و لما خرجت من المغسل لقيت صاحب الحمام بينتظني اخرج حتى يقفل . قلت له في حد في الداخل راح بقول لي انت اااااخر واحد دخل الحمام لما قالها توترت بشدة لكن ما كنت اقدر اعمل شيء خرجت بسرعة و رحة جري على البيت و انا بقرا القران الكريم و الحمد لله ربي حفضني ..
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اسف بس انتو تحسبو ه الموضوع هههههههههههه



اليوم يايبلكم قصة من الراوي ادب الرعب وهو الاشهر فالعالم stephen king

طبعا هذا كتاب
بس انا اسف ماشي وافي
بنزلة قريب بالعربي
المهم الحين عنكريزي
53 صفحه


بدينا
















A high school Show and Tell session explodes into a nightmare of evil...

So you understand that when we
increase the number of variables,
the axioms themselves never change.
Mrs. Jean Underwood

Teacher, teacher, ring the bell,
My lessons all to you I'll tell,
And when my day at school is through,
I'll know more than aught I knew.
Children's rhyme, c. 1880


Chapter 1

The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning. What made it nice was that I'd kept my breakfast down, and the squirrel I spotted in Algebra II.
I sat in the row farthest from the door, which is next to the windows, and I spot¬ted the squirrel on the lawn. The lawn of Placerville High School is a very good one. It does not fuck around. It comes right up to the building and says howdy. No one, at least in my four years at PHS, has tried to push it away from the building with a bunch of flowerbeds or baby pine trees or any of that happy horseshit. It comes right up to the concrete foundation, and there it grows, like it or not. It is true that two years ago at a town meeting some bag proposed that the town build a pavilion in front of the school, complete with a memorial to honor the guys who went to Placerville High and then got bumped off in one war or another. My friend Joe McKennedy was there, and he said they gave her nothing but a hard way to go. I wish I had been there. The way Joe told it, it sounded like a real good time. Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was about the time I started to lose my mind.


Chapter 2

So there was the squirrel, running through the grass at 9:05 in the morning, not ten feet from where I was listening to Mrs. Underwood taking us back to the basics of algebra in the wake of a horrible exam that apparently no one had passed except me and Ted Jones. I was keeping an eye on him, I can tell you. The squirrel, not Ted.
On the board, Mrs. Underwood wrote this: a = 16. "Miss Cross," she said, turning back. "Tell us what that equation means, if you please."
"It means that a is sixteen," Sandra said. Meanwhile the squirrel ran back and forth in the grass, tail bushed out, black eyes shining bright as buckshot. A nice fat one. Mr. Squirrel had been keeping down more breakfasts than I lately, but this morning's was riding as light and easy as you please. I had no shakes, no acid stomach. I was riding cool.
"All right," Mrs. Underwood said. "Not bad. But it's not the end, is it? No. Would anyone care to elaborate on this fascinating equation?"
I raised my hand, but she called on Billy Sawyer. "Eight plus eight," he blurted.
"Explain. "
"I mean it can be . . . " Billy fidgeted. He ran his fingers over the graffiti etched into the surface of his desk; SM L DK, HOT SHIT, TOMMY '73. "See, if you add eight and eight, it means . . . "
"Shall I lend you my thesaurus?" Mrs. Underwood asked, smiling alertly. My stomach began to hurt a little, my breakfast started to move around a little, so I looked back at the squirrel for a while. Mrs. Underwood's smile reminded me of the shark in Jaws.
Carol Granger raised her hand. Mrs. Underwood nodded. "Doesn't he mean that eight plus eight also fulfills the equation's need for truth?"
"I don't know what he means," Mrs. Underwood said.
A general laugh. "Can you fulfill the equation's truth in any other ways, Miss Granger?"
Carol began, and that was when the intercom said: "Charles Decker to the of¬fice, please. Charles Decker. Thank you."
I looked at Mrs. Underwood, and she nodded. My stomach had begun to feel shriveled and old. I got up and left the room. When I left, the squirrel was still scampering.
I was halfway down the hall when I thought I heard Mrs. Underwood coming after me, her hands raised into twisted claws, smiling her big shark smile. We don't need boys of your type around here . . . boys of your type belong in Greenmantle . . . or the reformatory . . . or the state hospital for the criminally insane . . . so get out! Get out! Get out!
I turned around, groping in my back pocket for the pipe wrench that was no longer there, and now my breakfast was a hard hot ball inside my guts. But I wasn't afraid, not even when she wasn't there. I've read too many books.


Chapter 3

I stopped in the bathroom to take a whiz and eat some Ritz crackers. I always carry some Ritz crackers in a Baggie. When your stomach's bad, a few crackers can do wonders. One hundred thousand pregnant women can't be wrong. I was thinking about Sandra Cross, whose response in class a few minutes ago had been not bad, but also not the end. I was thinking about how she lost her buttons. She was always losing them off blouses, off skirts, and the one time I had taken her to a school dance, she had lost the button off the top of her Wranglers and they had almost fallen down. Before she figured out what was happening, the zipper on the front of her jeans had come halfway unzipped, showing a V of flat white panties that was blackly exciting. Those panties were tight, white, and spotless. They were immaculate. They lay against her lower belly with sweet snugness and made little ripples while she moved her body to the beat . . . until she realized what was going on and dashed for the girls' room. Leaving me with a memory of the Perfect Pair of Panties. Sandra was a Nice Girl, and if I had never known it before, I sure¬-God knew it then, because we all know that the Nice Girls wear the white panties. None of that New York shit is going down in Placerville, Maine.
But Mr. Denver kept creeping in, pushing away Sandra and her pristine panties. You can't stop your mind; the damn thing just keeps right on going. All the same, I felt a great deal of sympathy for Sandy, even though she was never going to figure out just what the quadratic equation was all about. If Mr. Denver and Mr. Grace decided to send me to Greenmantle, I might never see Sandy again. And that would be too bad.
I got up from the hopper, dusted the cracker crumbs down into the bowl, and flushed it. High school toilets are all the same; they sound like 747s taking off. I've always hated pushing that handle. It makes you sure that the sound is clearly audible in the adjacent classroom and that everybody is thinking: Well, there goes another load. I've always thought a man should be alone with what my mother insisted I call lemonade and chocolate when I was a little kid. The bathroom should be a confessional sort of place. But they foil you. They always foil you. You can't even blow your nose and keep it a secret. Someone's always got to know, some¬one's always got to peek. People like Mr. Denver and Mr. Grace even get paid for it.
But by then the bathroom door was wheezing shut behind me and I was in the hall again. I paused, looking around. The only sound was the sleepy hive drone that means it's Wednesday again, Wednesday morning, ten past nine, everyone caught for another day in the splendid sticky web of Mother Education.

I went back into the bathroom and took out my Flair. I was going to write some¬thing witty on the wall like SANDRA CROSS WEARS WHITE UNDERPANTS, and then I caught sight of my face in the mirror. There were bruised half moons under my eyes, which looked wide and white and stary. The nostrils were half flared and ugly. The mouth was a white, twisted line.
I Wrote EAT SHIT On the wall until the pen suddenly snapped in my straining fingers. It dropped on the floor and I kicked it.
There was a sound behind me. I didn't turn around. I closed my eyes and breathed slowly and deeply until I had myself under control. Then I went upstairs.


Chapter 4

The administration offices of Placerville High are on the third floor, along with the study hall, the library, and Room 300, which is the typing room. When you push through the door from the stairs, the first thing you hear is that steady click¬ety clack. The only time it lets up is when the bell changes the classes or when Mrs. Green has something to say. I guess she usually doesn't say much, because the typewriters hardly ever stop. There are thirty of them in there, a battle scarred platoon of gray Underwoods. They have them marked with numbers so you know which one is yours. The sound never stops, clickety clack, clickety clack, from September to June. I'll always associate that sound with waiting in the outer office of the admin offices for Mr. Denver or Mr. Grace, the original dipso-duo. It got to be a lot like those jungle movies where the hero and his safari are pushing deep into darkest Africa, and the hero says: "Why don't they stop those blasted drums?" And when the blasted drums stop he regards the shadowy, rustling foliage and says: "I don't like it. It's too quiet."
I had gotten to the office late just so Mr. Denver would be ready to see me, but the receptionist, Miss Marble, only smiled and said, "Sit down, Charlie. Mr. Denver will be right with you. "
So I sat down outside the slatted railing, folded my hands, and waited for Mr. Denver to be right with me. And who should be in the other chair but one of my father's good friends, AI Lathrop. He was giving me the old slick eye, too, I can tell you. He had a briefcase on his lap and a bunch of sample textbooks beside him. I had never seen him in a suit before. He and my father were a couple of mighty hunters. Slayers of the fearsome sharp toothed deer and the killer partridge. I had been on a hunting trip once with my father and Al and a couple of my father's other friends. Part of Dad's never ending campaign to Make a Man Out of My Son.
"Hi, there!" I said, and gave him a big shiteating grin. And I could tell from the way he jumped that he knew all about me.
"Uh, hi, uh, Charlie. " He glanced quickly at Miss Marble, but she was going over attendance lists with Mrs. Venson from next door. No help there. He was all alone with Carl Decker's psychotic son, the fellow who had nearly killed the chemistry physics teacher.
"Sales trip, huh?" I asked him.
"Yeah, that's right. " He grinned as best he could. "Just out there selling the old books."
"Really crushing the competition, huh?"
He jumped again. "Well, you win some, you lose some, you know, Charlie."
Yeah, I knew that. All at once I didn't want to put the needle in him anymore. He was forty and getting bald and there were crocodile purses under his eyes. He went from school to school in a Buick station wagon loaded with textbooks and he went hunting for a week in November every year with my father and my father's friends, up in the Allagash. And one year I had gone with them. I had been nine, and I woke up and they had been drunk and they had scared me. That was all. But this man was no ogre. He was just forty baldish and trying to make a buck. And if I had heard him saying he would murder his wife, that was just talk. After all, I was the one with blood on my hands.
But I didn't like the way his eyes were darting around, and for a moment just a moment I could have grabbed his windpipe between my hands and yanked his face up to mine and screamed into it: You and my father and all your friends, you should all have to go in there with me, you should all have to go to Greenmantle with me, because you're all in it, you're all in it, you're all a part of this!
Instead I sat and watched him sweat and thought about old times.


Chapter 5

I came awake with a jerk out of a nightmare I hadn't had for a long time; a dream where I was in some dark blind alley and something was coming for me, some dark hunched monster that creaked and dragged itself along . . . a monster that would drive me insane if I saw it. Bad dream. I hadn't had it since I was a little kid, and I was a big kid now. Nine years old.
At first I didn't know where I was, except it sure wasn't my bedroom at home. It seemed too close, and it smelled different. I was cold and cramped, and I had to take a whiz something awful.
There was a harsh burst of laughter that made me jerk in my bed except it wasn't a bed, it was a bag.
"So she's some kind of fucking bag," Al Lathrop said from beyond the canvas wall, "but fucking's the operant word there."
Camping, I was camping with my dad and his friends. I hadn't wanted to come.
"Yeah, but how do you git it up, Al? That's what I want to know. " That was Scotty Norwiss, another one of Dad's friends. His voice was slurred and furry, and I started to feel afraid again. They were drunk.
"I just turn off the lights and pretend I'm with Carl Decker's wife," Al said, and there was another bellow of laughter that made me cringe and jerk in my sleep¬ing bag. Oh, God, I needed to whiz piss make lemonade whatever you wanted to call it. But I didn't want to go out there while they were drinking and talking.
I turned to the tent wall and discovered I could see them. They were between the tent and the campfire, and their shadows, tall and alien looking, were cast on the canvas. It was like watching a magic lantern show. I watched the shadow bot¬tle go from one shadow hand to the next.
"You know what I'd do if I caught you with my wife?" My dad asked Al.
"Probably ask if I needed any help," Al said, and there was another burst of laughter. The elongated shadow heads on the tent wall bobbed up and down, back and forth, with insectile glee. They didn't look like people at all. They looked like a bunch of talking praying mantises, and I was afraid.
"No, seriously," my dad said. "Seriously. You know what I'd do if I caught somebody with my wife?"
"What, Carl?" That was Randy Earl.
"You see this?"
A new shadow on the canvas. My father's hunting knife, the one he carried out in the woods, the one I later saw him gut a deer with, slamming it into the deer's guts to the hilt and then ripping upward, the muscles in his forearm bulging, spilling out green and steaming intestines onto a carpet of needles and moss. The fire¬light and the angle of the canvas turned the hunting knife into a spear.
"You see this son of a bitch? I catch some guy with my wife, I'd whip him over on his back and cut off his accessories."
"He'd pee sitting down to the end of his days, right, Carl?" That was Hubie Levesque, the guide. I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. I've never had to go to the bathroom so bad in my life, before or since.
"You're goddamn right," Carl Decker, my sterling Dad, said.
"Wha' about the woman in the case, Carl?" Al Lathrop asked. He was very drunk. I could even tell which shadow was his. He was rocking back and forth as if he was sitting in a rowboat instead of on a log by the campfire. "Thass what I wanna know. What do you do about a woman who less lets someone in the back door? Huh?"
The hunting knife that had turned into a spear moved slowly back and forth. My father said, "The Cherokees used to slit their noses. The idea was to put a cunt right up on their faces so everyone in the tribe could see what part of them got them in trouble."
My hands left my knees and slipped down to my crotch. I cupped my testicles and looked at the shadow of my father's hunting knife moving slowly back and forth. There were terrible cramps in my belly. I was going to whiz in my sleeping bag if I didn't hurry up and go.
"Slit their noses, huh?" Randy said. "That's pretty goddamn good. If they still did that, half the women in Placerville would have a snatch at both ends. "
"Not my wife," my father said very quietly, and now the slur in his voice was gone, and the laughter at Randy's joke stopped in mid roar.
"No, 'course not, Carl," Randy said uncomfortably. "Hey, shit. Have a drink. "
My father's shadow tipped the bottle back.
"I wun't slit her nose," A1 Lathrop said. "I'd blow her goddamn cheatin' head off. "
"There you go," Hubie said. "I'll drink to it."
I couldn't hold it anymore. I squirmed out of the sleeping bag and felt the cold October air bite into my body, which was naked except for a pair of shorts. It seemed like my cock wanted to shrivel right back into my body. And the one thing that kept going around and around in my mind I was still partly asleep, I guess, and the whole conversation had seemed like a dream, maybe a continuation of the creaking monster in the alley was that when I was smaller, I used to get into my mom's bed after Dad had put on his uniform and gone off to work in Portland, I used to sleep beside her for an hour before breakfast.
Dark, fear, firelight, shadows like praying mantises. I didn't want to be out in these woods seventy miles from the nearest town with these drunk men. I wanted my mother.
I came out through the tent flap, and my father turned toward me. The hunting knife was still in his hand. He looked at me, and I looked at him. I've never forgotten that my dad with a reddish beard stubble on his face and a hunting cap cocked on his head and that hunting knife in his hand. All the conversation stopped. Maybe they were wondering how much I had heard. Maybe they were even ashamed.
"What the hell do you want?" my dad asked, sheathing the knife.
"Give him a drink, Carl," Randy said, and there was a roar of laughter. Al laughed so hard he fell over. He was pretty drunk.
"I gotta whiz," I said.
"Then go do it, for Christ's sake," my dad said.
I went over in the grove and tried to whiz. For a long time it wouldn't come out. It was like a hot soft ball of lead in my lower belly. I had nothing but a fingernail's length of penis the cold had really shriveled it. At last it did come, in a great steaming flood, and when it was all out of me, I went back into the tent and got in my sleeping bag. None of them looked at me. They were talking about the war. They had all been in the war.

My dad got his deer three days later, on the last day of the trip. I was with him. He got it perfectly, in the bunch of muscle between neck and shoulder, and the buck went down in a heap, all grace gone.
We went over to it. My father was smiling, happy. He had unsheathed his knife. I knew what was going to happen, and I knew I was going to be sick, and I couldn't help any of it. He planted a foot on either side of the buck and pulled one of its legs back and shoved the knife in. One quick upward rip, and its guts spilled out on the forest floor, and I turned around and heaved up my breakfast.
When I turned back to him, he was looking at me. He never said anything, but I could read the contempt and disappointment in his eyes. I had seen it there often enough. I didn't say anything either. But if I had been able to, I would have said: It isn't what you think.
That was the first and last time I ever went hunting with my dad.


Chapter 6

Al Lathrop was still thumbing through his textbook samples and pretending he was too busy to talk to me when the intercom on Miss Marble's desk buzzed, and she smiled at me as if we had a great and sexy secret. "You can go in now, Charlie. "
I got up. "Sell those textbooks, Al."
He gave me a quick, nervous, insincere smile. "I sure will, uh, Charlie."
I went through the slatted gate, past the big safe set into the wall on the right and Miss Marble's cluttered desk on the left. Straight ahead was a door with a frosted glass pane. THOMAS DENVER PRINCIPAL was lettered on the glass. I walked in.
Mr. Denver was looking at The Bugle, the school rag. He was a tall, cadaverous man whg looked something like John Carradine. He was bald and skinny. His hands were long and full of knuckles. His tie was pulled down, and the top button of his shirt was undone. The skin on his throat looked grizzled and irritated from overshaving.
"Sit down, Charlie."
I sat down and folded my hands. I'm a great old hand folder. It's a trick I picked up from my father. Through the window behind Mr. Denver I could see the lawn, but not the fearless way it grew right up to the building. I was too high, and it was too bad. It might have helped, like a night light when you are small.
Mr. Denver put The Bugle down and leaned back in his chair. "Kind of hard to see that way, isn't it?" He grunted. Mr. Denver was a crackerjack grunter. If there was a National Grunting Bee, I would put all my money on Mr. Denver. I brushed my hair away from my eyes.
There was a picture of Mr. Denver's family on his desk, which was even more cluttered than Miss Marble's. The family looked well fed and well adjusted. His wife was sort of porky, but the two kids were as cute as buttons and didn't look a bit like John Carradine. Two little girls, both blond.
"Don Grace has finished his report, and I've had it since last Thursday, con¬sidering his conclusions and his recommendations as carefully as I can. We all appreciate the seriousness of this matter, and I've taken the liberty of discussing the whole thing with John Carlson, also. "
"How is he?" I asked.
"Pretty well. He'll be back in a month, I should think."
"Well, that's something."
"It is?" He blinked at me very quickly, the way lizards do.
"I didn't kill him. That's something."
"Yes." Mr. Denver looked at me steadily. "Do you wish you had?"
"No."
He leaned forward, drew his chair up to his desk, looked at me, shook his head, and began, "I'm very puzzled when I have to speak the way I'm about to speak to you, Charlie. Puzzled and sad. I've been in the kid business since 1947, and I still can't understand these things. I feel what I have to say to you is right and necessary, but it also makes me unhappy. Because I still can't understand why a thing like this happens. In 1959 we had a very bright boy here who beat a junior¬-high school girl quite badly with a baseball bat. Eventually we had to send him to South Portland Correctional Institute. All he could say was that she wouldn't go out with him. Then he would smile. " Mr. Denver shook his head.
"Don't bother. "
"What?"
"Don't bother trying to understand. Don't lose any sleep over it. "
"But why, Charlie? Why did you do that? My God, he was on an operating table for nearly four hours "
"Why is Mr. Grace's question, " I said. "He's the school shrink. You, you only ask it because it makes a nice lead in to your sermon. I don't want to listen to any more sermons. They don't mean shit to me. It's over. He was going to live or die. He lived. I'm glad. You do what you have to do. What you and Mr. Grace decided to do. But don't you try to understand me."
"Charlie, understanding is part of my job."
"But helping you do your job isn't part of mine," I said. "So let me tell you one thing. To sort of help open the lines of communication, okay?"
"Okay…"
I held my hands tightly in my lap. They were trembling. "I'm sick of you and Mr. Grace and all the rest of you. You used to make me afraid and you still make me afraid but now you make me tired too, and I've decided I don't have to put up with that. The way I am, I can't put up with that. What you think doesn't mean anything to me. You're not qualified to deal with me. So just stand back. I'm warn¬ing you. You're not qualified. "
My voice had risen to a trembling near shout.
Mr. Denver sighed.
"So you may think, Charlie. But the laws of the state say otherwise. After hav¬ing read Mr. Grace's report, I think I agree with him that you don't understand yourself or the consequences of what you did in Mr. Carlson's classroom. You are disturbed, Charlie. "
You are disturbed, Charlie.
The Cherokees used to slit their noses . . . so everyone in the tribe could see what part of them got them in trouble.
The words echoed greenly in my head, as if at great depths. They were shark words at deep fathoms, jaws words come to gobble me. Words with teeth and eyes.
This is where I started to get it on. I knew it, because the same thing that hap¬pened just before I gave Mr. Carlson the business was happening now. My hands stopped shaking. My stomach flutters subsided, and my whole middle felt cool and calm. I felt detached, not only from Mr. Denver and his overshaved neck, but from myself. I could almost float.
Mr. Denver had gone on, something about proper counseling and psychiatric help, but I interrupted him. "Mr. Man, you can go straight to hell."
He stopped and put down the paper he had been looking at so he wouldn't have to look at me. Something from my file, no doubt. The almighty file. The Great American File.
"What?" he said.
"In hell. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Any insanity in your family, Mr. Den¬ver?"
I'll discuss this with you, Charlie," he said tightly. "I won't engage in "
" . . . immoral sex practices," I finished for him. "Just you and me, okay? First one to jack off wins the Putnam Good Fellowship Award. Fill yore hand, pardner. Get Mr. Grace in here, that's even better. We'll have a circle jerk."
"Wh
"Don't you get the message? You have to pull it out sometime, right? You owe it to yourself, right? Everybody has to get it on, everybody has to have someone to jack off on. You've already set yourself up as Judge of What's Right for Me. Devils. Demon possession. Why did I hit dat l'il girl wit dat ball bat, Lawd, Lawd? De debbil made me do it, and I'm so saw ry. Why don't you admit it? You get a kick out of peddling my flesh. I'm the best thing that's happened to you since 1959. "
He was gawping at me openly. I had him by the short hair, knew it, was sav¬agely proud of it. On the one hand, he wanted to humor me, go along with me, because after all, isn't that what you do with disturbed people? On the other hand, he was in the kid business, just like he told me, and Rule One in the kid business is: Don't Let 'Em Give You No Lip be fast with the command and the snappy comeback.
"Charlie "
"Don't bother. I'm trying to tell you I'm tired of being masturbated on. Be a man, for God's sake, Mr. Denver. And if you can't be a man, at least pull up your pants and be a principal. "
"Shut up," he grunted. His face had gone bright red. "You're just pretty damn lucky you live in a progressive state and go to a progressive school, young man. You know where you'd be otherwise? Peddling your papers in a reformatory somewhere, serving a term for criminal assault. I'm not sure you don't belong there anyway. You '
"Thank you," I said.
He stared at me, his angry blue eyes fixed on mine.
"For treating me like a human being even if I had to piss you off to do it. That's real progress. " I crossed my legs, being nonchalant. "Want to talk about the panty raids you made the scene at while you were at Big U learning the kid business?"
"Your mouth is filthy," he said deliberately. "And so is your mind."
"Fuck you," I said, and laughed at him.
He went an even deeper shade of scarlet and stood up. He reached slowly over the desk, slowly, slowly, as if he needed oiling, and bunched the shoulder of my shirt in his hand. "You show some respect," he said. He had really blown his cool and was not even bothering to use that really first class grunt. "You rotten little punk, you show me some respect. "
"I could show you my ass and you'd kiss it," I said. "Go on and tell me about the panty raids. You'll feel better. Throw us your panties! Throw us your pant¬ies! "
He let go of me, holding his hand away from his body as if a rabid dog had just pooped on it. "Get out," he said hoarsely. "Get your books, turn them in here, and then get out. Your expulsion and transfer to Greenmantle Academy is effective as of Monday. I'll talk to your parents on the telephone. Now get out. I don't want to have to look at you."
I got up, unbuttoned the two bottom buttons on my shirt, pulled the tail out on one side, and unzipped my fly. Before he could move, I tore open the door and staggered into the outer office. Miss Marble and Al Lathrop were conferring at her desk, and they both looked up and winced when they saw me. They had obviously both been playing the great American parlor game of We Don't Really Hear Them, Do We?
"You better get to him," I panted. "We were sitting there talking about panty raids and he just jumped over his desk and tried to rape me. "
I'd pushed him over the edge, no mean feat, considering he'd been in the kid business for twenty nine years and was probably only ten away from getting his gold key to the downstairs crapper. He lunged at me through the door; I danced away from him and he stood there looking furious, silly, and guilty all at once.
"Get somebody to take care of him," I said. "He'll be sweeter after he gets it out of his system. " I looked at Mr. Denver, winked, and whispered, "Throw us your panties, right?"
Then I pushed out through the slatted rail and walked slowly out the office door, buttoning my shirt and tucking it in, zipping my fly. There was plenty of time for him to say something, but he didn't say a word.
That's when it really got rolling, because all at once I knew he couldn't say a word. He was great at announcing the day's hot lunch over the intercom, but this was a different thing joyously different. I had confronted him with exactly what he said was wrong with me, and he hadn't been able to cope with that. Maybe he expected us to smile and shake hands and conclude my seven and one half se¬mester stay at Placerville High with a literary critique of The Bugle. But in spite of everything, Mr. Carlson and all the rest, he hadn't really expected any irrational act. Those things were all meant for the closet, rolled up beside those nasty mag¬azines you never show your wife. He was standing back there, vocal cords frozen, not a word left in his mind to say. None of his instructors in Dealing with the Dis¬turbed Child, EdB 211, had ever told him he might someday have to deal with a student who would attack him on a personal level.
And pretty quick he was going to be mad. That made him dangerous. Who knew better than me? I was going to have to protect myself. I was ready, and had been ever since I decided that people might just might, mind you be following me around and checking up.
I gave him every chance.
I waited for him to charge out and grab me, all the way to the staircase. I didn't want salvation. I was either past that point or never reached it. All I wanted was recognition . . . or maybe for someone to draw a yellow plague circle around my feet.
He didn't come out.
And when he didn't, I went ahead and got it on.


Chapter 7

I went down the staircase whistling; I felt wonderful. Things happen that way sometimes. When everything is at its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a little while. There is a sudden electric what-¬the hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burned down.
A girl I didn't know passed me on the second floor landing, a pimply, ugly girl wearing big horn rimmed glasses and carrying a clutch of secretarial type books. On impulse I turned around and looked after her. Yes; yes. From the back she might have been Miss America. It was wonderful.


Chapter 8

The first floor hall was deserted. Not a soul coming or going. The only sound was the hive drone, the sound that makes all the schoolhouses the same, modern and glass walled or ancient and stinking of floor varnish. Lockers stood in silent sen¬tinel rows, with a break here and there to make room for a drinking fountain or a classroom door.
Algebra II was in Room 16, but my locker was at the other end of the hall. I walked down to it and regarded it.
My locker. It said so: CHARLES DECKER printed neatly in my hand on a strip of school Con Tact paper. Each September, during the first home room period, came the handing out of the blank Con Tact strips. We lettered carefully, and during the two minute break between home room and the first class of the new year, we pasted them on. The ritual was as old and as holy as First Communion. On the first day of my sophomore year, Joe McKennedy walked up to me through the crowded hall with his Con Tact strip pasted on his forehead and a big shit-eating grin pasted on his mouth. Hundreds of horrified freshmen, each with a little yellow name tag pinned on his or her shirt or blouse, turned to look at this sacrilege. I almost broke my balls laughing. Of course he got a detention for it, but it made my day. When I think back on it, I guess it made my year.
And there I was, right between ROSANNE DEBBINS and CARLA DENCH, who doused herself in rosewater every morning, which had been no great help in keep¬ing my breakfast where it belonged during the last semester.
Ah, but all that was behind me now.
Gray locker, five feet high, padlocked. The padlocks were handed out at the beginning of the year along with the Con Tact strips. Titus, the padlock pro¬claimed itself. Lock me, unlock me. I am Titus, the Helpful Padlock.
"Titus, you old cuffer," I whispered. "Titus, you old cock knocker."
I reached for Titus, and it seemed to me that my hand stretched to it across a thousand miles, a hand on the end of a plastic arm that elongated painlessly and nervelessly. The numbered surface of Titus' black face looked at me blandly, not condemning but certainly not approving, no, not that, and I shut my eyes for a moment. My body wrenched through a shudder, pulled by invisible, involuntary, opposing hands.
And when I opened my eyes again, Titus was in my grasp. The chasm had closed.
The combinations on high school locks are simple. Mine was six to the left, thirty right, and two turns back to zero. Titus was known more for his strength than his intellect. The lock snapped up, and I had him in my hand. I clutched him tightly, making no move to open the locker door.
Up the hall, Mr. Johnson was saying: " . . . and the Hessians, who were paid mercenaries, weren't any too anxious to fight, especially in a countryside where the opportunities for plunder over and above the agreed upon wages . . . "
"Hessian," I whispered to Titus. I carried him down to the first wastebasket and dropped him in. He looked up at me innocently from a litter of discarded homework papers and old sandwich bags.
" . . . but remember that the Hessians, as far as the Continental Army knew, were formidable German killing machines . . . '
I bent down, picked him up, and put him in my breast pocket, where he made a bulge about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
"Keep it in mind, Titus, you old killing machine," I said, and went back to my locker.
I swung it open. Crumpled up in a sweaty ball at the bottom was my gym uni¬form, old lunch bags, candy wrappers, a month old apple core that was browning nicely, and a pair of ratty black sneakers. My red nylon jacket was hung on the coat-hook, and on the shelf above that were my textbooks, all but Algebra II. Civ¬ics, American Government, French Stories and Fables, and Health, that happy Senior gut course, a red, modern book with a high school girl and boy on the cover and the section on venereal disease neatly clipped by unanimous vote of the School Committee. I started to get it on beginning with the health book, sold to the school by none other than good old Al Lathrop, I hoped and trusted. I took it out, opened it somewhere between "The Building Blocks of Nutrition" and "Swimming Rules for Fun and Safety," and ripped it in two. It came easy. They all came easy except for Civics, which was a tough old Silver Burdett text circa 1946. I threw all the pieces into the bottom of the locker. The only thing left up top was my slide rule, which I snapped in two, a picture of Raquel Welch taped to the back wall (I let it stay), and the box of shells that had been behind my books.
I picked that up and looked at it. The box had originally held Winchester .22 long rifle shells, but it didn't anymore. I'd put the other shells in it, the ones from the desk drawer in my father's study. There's a deer head mounted on the wall in his study, and it stared down at me with its glassy too alive eyes as I took the shells and the gun, but I didn't let it bother me. It wasn't the one he'd gotten on the hunt¬ing trip when I was nine. The pistol had been in another drawer, behind a box of business envelopes. I doubt if he even remembered it was still there. And as a mat¬ter of fact, it wasn't, not anymore. Now it was in the pocket of my jacket. I took it out and shoved it into my belt. I didn't feel much like a Hessian. I felt like Wild Bill Hickok.
I put the shells in my pants pocket and took out my lighter. It was one of those Scripto see through jobs. I don't smoke myself, but the lighter had kind of caught my fancy. I snapped a light to it, squatted, and set the crap in the bottom of my locker on fire.
The flames licked up greedily from my gym trunks to the lunch bags and candy wrappers to the ruins of my books, carrying a sweaty, athletic smell up to me.
Then, figuring that I had gotten it on as much as I could by myself, I shut the locker door. There were little vents just above where my name was Con Tact pa¬pered on, and through them I could hear the flames whooshing upward. In a minute little orange flecks were glaring in the darkness beyond the vents, and the gray locker paint started to crack and peel.
A kid came out of Mr. Johnson's room carrying a green bathroom pass. He looked at the smoke belching merrily out of the vents in my locker, looked at me, and hurried down to the bathroom. I don't think he saw the pistol. He wasn't hur¬rying that fast.
I started down to Room 16. I paused just as I got there, my hand on the door¬knob, looking back. The smoke was really pouring out of the vents now, and a dark, sooty stain was spreading up the front of my locker. The Con Tact paper had turned brown. You couldn't see the letters that made my name anymore.
I don't think there was anything in my brain fight then except the usual back¬ground static the kind~you get on your radio when it's turned up all the way and tuned to no station at all. My brain had checked to the power, so to speak; the little guy wearing the Napoleon hat inside was showing aces and betting them.
I turned back to Room 16 and opened the door. I was hoping, but I didn't know what.


Chapter 9

" . . . So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change. For example '
Mrs. Underwood looked up alertly, pushing her harlequin glasses up on her nose. "Do you have an office pass, Mr. Decker?"
"Yes," I said, and took the pistol out of my belt. I wasn't even sure it was loaded until it went off. I shot her in the head. Mrs. Underwood never knew what hit her, I'm sure. She fell sideways onto her desk and then rolled onto the floor, and that expectant expression never left her face.


Chapter 10

Sanity:
You can go through your whole life telling yourself that life is logical, life is prosaic, life is sane. Above all, sane. And I think it is. I've had a lot of time to think about that. And what I keep coming back to is Mrs. Underwood's dying dec¬laration: So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change.
I really believe that.
I think; therefore I am. There are hairs on my face; therefore I shave. My wife and child have been critically injured in a car crash; therefore I pray. It's all log¬ical, it's all sane. We live in the best of all possible worlds, so hand me a Kent for my left, a Bud for my right, turn on Starsky and Hutch, and listen to that soft, harmonious note that is the universe turning smoothly on its celestial gyros. Logic and sanity. Like Coca Cola, it's the real thing.
But as Warner Brothers, John D. MacDonald, and Long Island Dragway know so well, there's a Mr. Hyde for every happy Jekyll face, a dark face on the other side of the mirror. The brain behind that face never heard of razors, prayers, or the logic of the universe. You turn the mirror sideways and see your face reflected with a sinister left hand twist, half mad and half sane. The astronomers call that line between light and dark the terminator.
The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Hallow¬een cowboy suit with his guts and his trick or treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.
No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts it up to one ten and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stickup. You look at it when you hear your dad talking about slitting your mom's nose.
It's a roulette wheel, but anybody who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principle of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say it's crazy. It's all so cool and sane.
And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tarpit big enough to hold it.
But that's me, and I started to tell you about them, those bright college bound students that, metaphorically speaking, walked down to the store to get milk and ended up in the middle of an armed robbery. I'm a documented case, routine grist for the newspaper mill. A thousand newsboys hawked me on a thousand street corners. I had fifty seconds on Chancellor Brinkley and a column and a half in Time. And I stand here before you (metaphorically speaking, again) and tell you I'm perfectly sane. I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four o, thank you very much.
So, them. How do you understand them? We have to discuss that, don't we?
"Do you have an office pass, Mr. Decker?" she asked me.
"Yes," I said, and took the pistol out of my belt. I wasn't even sure it was loaded until it went off. I shot her in the head. Mrs. Underwood never knew what hit her, I'm sure. She fell sideways onto her desk and then rolled onto the floor, and that expectant expression never left her face.
I'm the sane one: I'm the croupier, I'm the guy who spins the ball against the spin of the wheel. The guy who lays his money on odd/even, the girl who lays her money on black/red . . . what about them?
There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new.
I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even.
I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest.
What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down.


Chapter 11

If someone had screamed something melodramatic at that precise moment, some¬thing like Oh, my God, he's going to kill us all! it would have been over right there. They would have bolted like sheep, and somebody aggressive like Dick Keene would have belted me over the head with his algebra book, thereby earning a key to the city and the Good Citizenship Award.
But nobody said a word. They sat in utter stunned silence, looking at me atten¬tively, as if I had just announced that I was going to tell them how they could all get passes to the Placerville Drive In this Friday night.
I shut the classroom door, crossed the room, and sat behind the big desk. My legs weren't so good. I was almost to the point of sit down or fall down. I had to push Mrs. Underwood's feet out of the way to get my own feet into the kneehole. I put the pistol down on her green blotter, shut her algebra book, and put it with the others that were stacked neatly on the desk's corner.
That was when Irma Bates broke the silence with a high, gobbling scream that sounded like a young tom turkey getting its neck wrung on the day before Thanks¬giving. But it was too late; everyone had taken that endless moment to consider the facts of life and death. Nobody picked up on her scream, and she stopped, as if ashamed at screaming while school was in session, no matter how great the prov¬ocation. Somebody cleared his throat. Somebody in the back of the room said "Hum!" in a mildly judicial tone. And John "Pig Pen" Dano slithered quietly out of his seat and slumped to the floor in a dead faint.
They looked up at me from the trough of shock.
"This," I said pleasantly, "is known as getting it on."
Footsteps pounded down the hall, and somebody asked somebody else if some¬thing had exploded in the chemistry lab. While somebody else was saying he didn't know, the fire alarm went off stridently. Half the kids in the class started to get up automatically.
"That's all right," I said. "It's just my locker. On fire. I set it on fire, that is. Sit down."
The ones that had started to get up sat down obediently. I looked for Sandra Cross. She was in the third row, fourth seat, and she did not seem afraid. She looked like what she was. An intensely exciting Good Girl.
Lines of students were filing out onto the grass; I could see them through the windows. The squirrel was gone, though. Squirrels make lousy innocent bystand¬ers.
The door was snatched open, and I picked up the gun. Mr. Vance poked his head in. "Fire alarm," he said. "Everybody . . . Where's Mrs. Underwood?"
"Get out," I said.
He stared at me. He was a very porky man, and his hair was neatly crew cut. It looked as if some landscape artist had trimmed it carefully with hedge clippers. "What? What did you say?"
"Out." I shot at him and missed. The bullet whined off the upper edge of the door, chipping wood splinters.
"Jesus," somebody in the front row said mildly.
Mr. Vance didn't know what was happening. I don't think any of them did. It all reminded me of an article I read about the last big earthquake in California. It was about a woman who was wandering from room to room while her house was being shaken to pieces all around her, yelling to her husband to please unplug the fan.
Mr. Vance decided to go back to the beginning. "There's a fire in the building. Please "
"Charlie's got a gun, Mr. Vance, " Mike Gavin said in a discussing the weather tone. "I think you better "
The second bullet caught him in the throat. His flesh spread liquidly like water spreads when you throw a rock in it. He walked backward into the hall, scratching at his throat, and fell over.
Irma Bates screamed again, but again she had no takers. If it had been Carol Granger, there would have been imitators galore, but who wanted to be in concert with poor old Irma Bates? She didn't even have a boyfriend. Besides, everyone was too busy peeking at Mr. Vance, whose scratching motions were slowing down.
"Ted," I said to Ted Jones, who sat closest to the door. "Shut that and lock it.
"What do you think you're doing?" Ted asked. He was looking at me with a kind of scared and scornful distaste.
"I don't know all the details just yet," I said. "But shut the door and lock it, okay?"
Down the hall someone was yelling: "It's in a locker! It's in a Vance's had a heart attack! Get some water! Get . . . "
Ted Jones got up, shut the door, and locked it. He was a tall boy wearing wash-¬faded Levi's and an army shirt with flap pockets. He looked very fine. I had always admired Ted, although he was never part of the circle I traveled in. He drove last year's Mustang, which his father had given him, and didn't get any parking tick¬ets, either. He combed his hair in an out of fashion DA, and I bet his was the face that Irma Bates called up in her mind when she sneaked a cucumber out of the refrigerator in the wee hours of the night. With an all American name like Ted Jones he couldn't very well miss, either. His father was vice president of the Pla¬cerville Bank and Trust.
"Now what?" Hannon Jackson asked. He sounded bewildered.
"Um." I put the pistol down on the blotter again. "Well, somebody try and bring Pig Pen around. He'll get his shirt dirty. Dirtier, I mean."
Sarah Pasterne started to giggle hysterically and clapped her hand over her mouth. George Yannick, who sat close to Pig Pen, squatted down beside him and began to pat his cheeks. Pig Pen moaned, opened his eyes, rolled them, and said, "He shot Book Bags."
There were several hysterical laughs this time. They went off around the room like popping corn. Mrs. Underwood had two plastic briefcases with tartan patterns on them, which she carried into each class. She had also been known as Two Gun Sue.
Pig Pen settled shakily into his seat, rolled his eyes again, and began to cry.
Somebody pounded up to the door, rattled the knob, and yelled, "Hey! Hey in there!" It looked like Mr. Johnson, who had been talking about the Hessians. 1 picked up the pistol and put a bullet through the chicken wired glass. It made a neat little hole beside Mr. Johnson's head, and Mr. Johnson went out of sight like a crash diving submarine. The class (with the possible exception of Ted) watched all the action with close interest, as if they had stumbled into a pretty good movie by accident.
"Somebody in there's got a gun!" Mr. Johnson yelled. There was a faint bump¬ing sound as he crawled away. The fire alarm buzzed hoarsely on and on.
"Now what?" Harmon Jackson asked again. He was a small boy, usually with a big cockeyed grin on his face, but now he looked helpless, all at sea.
I couldn't think of an answer to that, so I let it pass. Outside, kids were milling restlessly around on the lawn, talking and pointing at Room 16 as the grapevine passed the word among them. After a little bit, some teachers the men teachers¬-began shooing them back toward the gymnasium end of the building.
In town the fire whistle on the Municipal Building began to scream, rising and falling in hysterical cycles.
"It's like the end of the world," Sandra Cross said softly.
I had no answer for that, either.


Chapter 12

No one said anything for maybe five minutes not until the fire engines got to the high school. They looked at me, and I looked at them. Maybe they still could have bolted, and they're still asking me why they didn't. Why didn't they cut and run, Charlie? What did you do to them? Some of them ask that almost fearfully, as if I had the evil eye. I don't answer them. I don't answer any questions about what happened that morning in Room 16. But if I told them anything, it would be that they've forgotten what it is to be a kid, to live cheek by jowl with violence, with the commonplace fistfights in the gym, brawls at the PAL hops in Lewiston, beat¬ings on television, murders in the movies. Most of us had seen a little girl puke pea soup all over a priest right down at our local drive in. Old Book Bags wasn't much shakes by comparison.
I'm not taking on any of those things, hey, I'm in no shape for crusades these days. I'm just telling you that American kids labor under a huge life of violence, both real and make believe. Besides, I was kind of interesting: Hey, Charlie Decker went apeshit today, didja hear? No! Did he? Yeah. Yeah. I was there. It was just like Bonnie and Clyde, except Charlie's got zitzes and there wasn't any popcorn.
I know they thought they'd be all right. That's part of it. What I wonder about is this: Were they hoping I'd get somebody else?
Another shrieking sound had joined the fire siren, this one getting closer real fast. Not the cops. It was that hysterical yodeling note that is all the latest rage in ambulances and paramedic vehicles these days. I've always thought the day will come when all the disaster vehicles will get smart and stop scaring the almighty shit out of everyone they're coming to save. When there's a fire or an accident or a natural disaster like me, the red vehicles will rush to the scene accompanied by the amplified sound of the Darktown Strutters playing "Banjo Rag." Someday. Oh, boy.


Chapter 13

Seeing as how it was the school, the town fire department went whole hog. The fire chief came first, gunning into the big semicircular school driveway in his blue bubble topped Ford Pinto. Behind him was a hook and ladder trailing firemen like battle banners. There were two pumpers behind that.
"You going to let them in?" Jack Goldman asked.
"The fire's out there," I said. "Not in here."
"Did you shut ya locka door?" Sylvia Ragan asked. She was a big blond girl with great soft cardiganed breasts and gently rotting teeth.
"Yes. "
"Prolly out already, then."
Mike Gavin looked at the scurrying firemen and snickered. "Two of 'em just ran into each other," he said. "Holy moly."
The two downed firemen untangled themselves, and the whole group was pre¬paring 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 build¬ing."
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 chink! from the upper corner of the room. Somebody had just opened the intercom system.
"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 home! " Irma screamed defiantly.
"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 Kesser¬ling, 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 fright¬ened. 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 un¬derstand 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, Charlie. Isn't that what you meant to say, Tom?"
"Yes…"
"Say it."
"I think you're a sick boy, Charlie." The mechanical, embarrassed rote of a seven year old.
"You've got some getting it on to do yourself, Tom. Now, get out there and tell them what I said. "
Denver cleared his throat as if he had something else to say, and then the inter¬com clicked off. A little murmur went through the class. I looked them over very carefully. Their eyes were so cool and somehow detached (shock can do that: you're ejected like a fighter pilot from a humdrum dream of life to a grinding, overloaded slice of the real meat, and your brain refuses to make the adjustment; you can only free fall and hope that sooner or later your chute will open), and a ghost of grammar school came back to me: Teacher, teacher, ring the bell, My lessons all to you I'll tell, And when my day at school is through, I'll know more than aught I knew.
I wondered what they were learning today; what I was learning. The yellow school buses had begun to appear, and our classmates were going home to enjoy the festivities on living room TVs and pocket transistor radios; but in Room 16, education went on.
I rapped the butt of the pistol sharply on the desk. The murmur died. They were watching me as closely as I was watching them. Judge and jury, or jury and de¬fendant? I wanted to cackle.
"Well," I said, "the shit has surely hit the fan. I think we need to talk a little. "
"Private?" George Yannick asked. "Just you and us?" He had an intelligent, perky face, and he didn't look frightened.
"Yes. "
"You better turn off that intercom, then. "
"You big-mouth son of a bitch," Ted Jones said distinctly. George looked at him, wounded.
There was an uncomfortable silence while I got up and pushed the little lever below the speaker from TALK LISTEN to LISTEN.
I went back and sat down again. I nodded at Ted. "I was thinking of it any¬way," I lied. "You shouldn't take on so."
Ted didn't say anything, but he offered me a strange little grin that made me think he might have been wondering about how I might taste.
"Okay," I said to the class at large. "I may be crazy, but I'm not going to shoot anyone for discussing this thing with me. Believe it. Don't be afraid to shoot off your mouths. As long as we don't all talk at once." That didn't look as if it was going to be a problem. "To take the bull by the horns, is there anyone here who really thinks I'm going to just up and murder them?"
A few of them looked uneasy, but nobody said anything.
"Okay. Because I'm not. We're just going to sit around and bug the hell out of everybody. "
"Yeah, you sure bugged the hell out of Mrs. Underwood," Ted said. He was still smiling his strange smile.
"I had to. I know that's hard to understand, but . . . I had to. It came down to that. And Mr. Vance. But I want everyone here to take it easy. No one is going to shoot the place up, so you don't have to worry. "
Carol Granger raised her hand timidly. I nodded at her. She was smart, smart as a whip. Class president, and a cinch to speak a piece as valedictorian in June ¬"Our Responsibilities to the Black Race" or maybe "Hopes for the Future. " She was already signed up for one of those big league women's colleges where people always wonder how many virgins there are. But I didn't hold it against her.
"When can we go, Charlie?"
I sighed and shrugged my shoulders. "We'll just have to wait and see what hap¬pens."
"But my mother will be worried to death!"
"Why?" Sylvia Ragan asked. "She knows where you are, doesn't she?"
General laugh. Except for Ted Jones. He wasn't laughing, and I was going to have to watch that boy. He was still smiling his small, savage smile. He wanted badly to blow everything out of the water obvious enough. But why? Insanity Prevention Merit Badge? Not enough. Adulation of the community in general¬-the boy who stood on the burning deck with his finger in the dike? It didn't seem his style. Handsome low profile was Ted's style. He was the only guy I knew who had quit the football team after three Saturdays of glory in his junior year. The guy who wrote sports for the local rag had called him the best running back Placerville High School had ever produced. But he had quit, suddenly and with no explana¬tion. Amazing enough. What was more amazing was the fact that his popularity quotient hadn't lost a point. If anything, Ted became more the local BMOC than ever. Joe McKennedy, who had suffered through four years and one broken nose at left tackle, told me that the only thing Ted would say when the agonized coach demanded an explanation was that football seemed to be a pretty stupid game, and he (Ted) thought that he could find a better way to spend his time. You can see why I respected him, but I was damned if I knew why he wanted me in such a personal way. A little thought on the matter might have helped, but things were going awful fast.
"Are you nuts?" Harmon Jackson asked suddenly.
"I think I must be," I said. "Anyone who kills anyone else is nuts, in my book. "
"Well, maybe you ought to give yourself up," Hannon said. "Get some help. A doctor. You know."
"You mean like that Grace?" Sylvia asked. "My God, that creepster. I had to go see him after I threw an inkwell at old lady Green. All he did was look up my dress and try to get me to talk about my sex life."
"Not that you've had any," Pat Fitzgerald said, and there was another laugh.
"And not that it's any business of his or yours," she said haughtily, dropped her cigarette on the floor, and mashed it.
"So what are we going to do?" Jack Goldman asked.
"Just get it on," I said. "That's all."
Out on the lawn, a second town police car had arrived. I guessed that the third one was probably down at Junior's Diner, taking on vital shipments of coffee and doughnuts. Denver was talking with a state trooper in blue pants and one of those almost Stetsons they wear. Up on the road, Jerry Kesserling was letting a few cars through the roadblock to pick up kids who didn't ride the bus. The cars picked up and then drove hastily away. Mr. Grace was talking to a guy in a business suit that I didn't know. The firemen were standing around and smoking cigarettes and wait¬ing for someone to tell them to put out a fire or go home.
"Has this got anything to do with you beating up Carlson?" Corky asked.
"How should I know what it has to do with?" I asked him irritably. "If I knew what was making me do it, I probably wouldn't have to."
"It's your parents." Susan Brooks spoke up suddenly. "It must be your parents.
Ted Jones made a rude noise.
I looked over at her, surprised. Susan Brooks was one of those girls who never say anything unless called upon, the ones that teachers always have to ask to speak up, please. A very studious, very serious girl. A rather pretty but not terribly bright girl the kind who isn't allowed to give up and take the general or the commercial courses, because she had a terribly bright older brother or older sister, and teachers expect comparable things from her. In fine, one of those girls who are holding the dirty end of the stick with as much good grace and manners as they can muster. Usually they marry truck drivers and move to the West Coast, where they have kitchen nooks with Formica counters and they write letters to the Folks Back East as seldom as they can get away with. They make quiet, successful lives for them¬selves and grow prettier as the shadow of the bright older brother or sister falls away from them.
"My parents," I said, tasting it. I thought about telling them I had been hunting with my dad when I was nine. "My Hunting Trip," by Charles Decker. Subtitle: "Or, How I Overheard My Dad Explain the Cherokee Nose Job." Too revolting.
I snatched a look at Ted Jones, and the rich, coppery aroma of paydirt filled my nostrils. His face was set in a furious, jeering expression, as if someone had just forced a whole lemon into his mouth and then jammed his jaws together. As if someone had dropped a depth charge into his brains and sent some old, sunken hulk into long and ominous psychic vibrations.
"That's what it says in all the psychology books," Susan was going on, all blithely unaware. "In fact . . . " She suddenly became aware of the fact that she was speaking (and in a normal tone of voice, and in class) and clammed up. She was wearing a pale jade colored blouse, and her bra straps showed through like ghostly, half erased chalk marks.
"My parents," I said again, and stopped again. I remembered the hunting trip again, but this time I remembered waking up, seeing the moving branches on the tight canvas of the tent (was the canvas tight? you bet it was my dad put that tent up, and everything he did was tight, no loose screws there), looking at the moving branches, needing to whiz, feeling like a little kid again . . . and remembering something that had happened long ago. I didn't want to talk about that. I hadn't talked about it with Mr. Grace. This was getting it on for real and besides, there was Ted. Ted didn't care for this at all. Perhaps it was all very important to him. Perhaps Ted could still be . . . helped. I suspected it was much too late for me, but even on that level, don't they say that learning is a good and elegant thing for its own sake? Sure.
Outside, nothing much seemed to be going on. The last town police car had ar¬rived, and, just as I had expected, they were handing out coffee and. Story time chil¬luns.
"My parents," I said:


Chapter 14

My parents met at a wedding reception, and although it may have nothing to do with anything unless you believe in omens the bride that day was burned to death less than a year later. Her name was Jessie Decker Hannaford. As Jessie Decker, she had been my mom's roommate at the University of Maine, where they were both majoring in political science. The thing that seemed to have happened was this: Jessie's husband went out to a special town meeting, and Jessie went into the bathroom to take a shower. She fell down and hit her head and knocked herself unconscious. In the kitchen, a dish towel fell on a hot stove burner. The house went up like a rocket. Wasn't it a mercy she didn't suffer.
So the only good that came of that wedding was my mother's meeting with Jes¬sie Decker Hannaford's brother. He was an ensign in the Navy. After the recep¬tion, he asked my mother if she would like to go dancing. She said yes. They courted for six months, and then they were married. I came along about fourteen months after the nuptials, and I've done the math again and again. As near as I can figure, I was conceived on one of the nights just before or just after my father's sister was being broiled alive in her shower cap. She was my mom's bridesmaid. I've looked at all the wedding pictures, and no matter how often I've looked, it always gives me a weird feeling. There is Jessie holding my mother's bridal train. Jessie and her husband, Brian Hannaford, smiling in the background as my mom and dad cut the wedding cake. Jessie dancing with the minister. And in all the pictures she is only five months away from the shower and the dishrag on the hot stove burner. You wish you could step into one of those Kodachromes and ap¬proach her, say: "You're never going to be my aunt Jessie unless you stay out of the shower when your husband is away. Be careful, Aunt Jessie. " But you can't go back. For want of a shoe the horse was lost, and all that.
But it happened, which is another way of saying I happened, and that's it. I was an only child; my mother never wanted another. She's very intellectual, my mother. Reads English mysteries, but never by Agatha Christie. Victor Can