Devil House(26)

The prosecution moves to introduce Exhibit 3-L, says the DA. It’s a batik wall-hanging. Albert N. is right: it’s an abstraction, the sort of thing an artistic child, under pressure to describe his work to a schoolteacher, might call “a design.” There are craze-lines like the cracking finish on an old guitar all over it; at its center, there’s a rounded shape where these lines seem thicker, six of them uniformly segmented, angling in toward the center from either side.

It’s not a spider. It’s an accident. You don’t belong to an order of witches that venerates the spider, and the batik wall-hanging isn’t in your bedroom because you think the spider will afford you protection from enemies. You bought it at some crafts festival in a park, and it looked like a pinwheel to you, and you hung it up in your bedroom.

How, in this age, are grown-ups still afraid of a witch? Spells, curses, bloody sacrifices: none of them really believe in any of that, do they? It’s just for fun, that stuff. You had assumed everybody knew that. It seemed obvious, self-evident. There aren’t any witches. There are just the stories people tell each other, who knows why. But when you finally go to trial, almost a whole year from now, you’ll learn better, and feel trapped. Four days from now you’ll do what you have to do, and, when your story is assembled by the powers that have agreed to do the telling, meaningless details will be woven into a tale that would seem absurd to everyone if they weren’t all proceeding backward from its bloody end.

The wall-hanging is long gone by the time I set foot in your old apartment, of course, and so is the God’s-eye you’d thumbtacked above your window frame. Times have changed. It’s hard for me to imagine something like it here in the college student’s bedroom where I stand, years later, trying to picture you and Albert N. one Saturday morning in 1972, a meaningless shape overlooking the scene like an omen neither you nor your weekend lover were capable of heeding. Laurie, the student who lives here now, stands in the room with me, waiting for me to leave; I’m only here by her good grace. I am an intruder trying to see what the intruders before me saw just before they saw nothing ever again.

You can’t do this kind of work unless you’re willing to be an intruder once in a while.



* * *



IT’S MORNING: Wednesday. It’s a little grey today, those coastal clouds that cast long shadows and then usually clear out while you’re checking on the traffic in your rearview. You drive to school with the expectation that things will conform to their observed pattern: it shouldn’t really rain today, you think. But it does; the warm asphalt of the high school parking lot smells sweet, the rain splashing hazily on it as you walk, purse held in both hands over your head, to class.

You call roll; no Gene Cupp again. On your desk, to remind yourself, you leave the attendance book open, and it distracts you throughout the period. Are the kids distracted, too, by this meaningless variance in the expected order? Do they even notice the studied tidiness of your desk, how it looks the same each day? Probably not; they’re kids, you think, and when you hear yourself think it, you notice how easily the thought comes to you now. Your first year as a teacher, you struggled to think of students as people living in a different world from yours: you still felt young, just as you still feel young today. Just no longer that young.

Teaching high school means facing daily reminders of the exact distance between your present-day station and the days of your youth. Some people get a little bitter about it. You haven’t yet. You position yourself by the door just before the bell rings, so you’ll be able to stop Jesse on his way out without making much of a show of it. Young men are very sensitive about how their teachers treat them when their peers are looking.

“Jesse?” you say as he’s about to pass you.

“Miss Crane?” he says, stopping. Several other kids bump him as they pass, without excusing themselves.

“You’re friends with Gene.”

“Yeah?” He looks suspicious, or scared, you can’t tell which.

“Well, I’m a little worried about him. He hasn’t been here in over a week.”

Jesse purses his lips; he’s suppressing a laugh there behind that downy attempt at a mustache.

“I think he’s, uh, done,” he says.

“Done?”

“Well, they sent him a, an, uh, they said he wasn’t going to pass algebra again so he has to do it in the summer if he wants to graduate.”

“OK,” you say; you feel like it’s a delicate moment: you wait to see what else Jesse has to say.

“So, I think he’s done,” he says again.

“Oh, but he—he shouldn’t just quit, there are ways—” You’re not sure what to say; you should probably be having this conversation with Gene’s parents.

Waiting to see if you’re done with your sentence, Jesse watches your face with the sort of curiosity you’d expect from a lepidopterist wondering whether a butterfly he just noticed in a familiar setting is actually new. When he realizes you’re waiting for him to answer, he says, sounding a little old for his years: “Oh, I know there are. His old man told him, ‘You have to get your diploma,’ too. I’ll tell him you asked, but—”

“You think he’s done.”

“Sorry,” says Jesse Jenkins, and you hear in his voice what it might sound like if he really felt sorry: it’s a distant echo. It is distinctly possible that you are only imagining it.