The Runner Page 7

  Bullet didn’t say anything.

  Tommy laughed. “Okay, it was a dumb question, I know you don’t read. I wish you were a senior, man, I’d like to sit in some classes with you. You’re a good influence. No, I’m serious. But how you stay smart beats me. You’re weird, Bullet, an absolute weirdo. Even before you shaved your head to look the part. You’re absolutely unconnected. Why else do you think I listen to you?”

  “You don’t listen to me,” Bullet pointed out.

  “Well, more than I listen to anyone else. I’ll be damned if I’ll quit the paper.”

  “I know.”

  “They can’t make me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “We do get some stuff in, we get some past them. They’d like me to quit, I think. I may be flattering myself, but I think they would.”

  “If I were them, I would.”

  “Yeah. So I won’t. Besides, what’s the point of life if you don’t do something about it, about all the things. Seriously, Bullet.”

  The car had pulled up by Bullet’s mailbox, where Tommy always let Bullet off. Bullet waited a minute before getting out, to answer Tommy. “Are you sure there is any point?” he asked.

  Tommy started to answer quickly, then stopped himself. Bullet opened the door.

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? The real question,” Tommy said. “You’re something, Bullet, you know that? A loner. You’d better get running. I’ll see you.”

  Bullet jogged down the rutted dirt driveway, splashing through puddles. His poncho kept the bag of groceries dry, but the rain beat down on his scalp. That was one bad thing about not having any hair—in a cold rain it really got to you, right away. Too bad, Bullet thought.

  He was too late to get his dinner cooked and eaten before his parents had theirs, so he put his groceries away and went upstairs. His mother was in the kitchen, with a chicken in the oven; he could smell it, so he guessed she’d made it in from town all right. “I’m back,” he said, before going on up to his room. The farm used to have chickens, and a couple of cows too, when she was a child. There were stalls in the barn, empty for years and years now, and a wooden butter churn in her pantry under the shelves where she kept the tomatoes and beans she put up all summer long. Now there was only OD and a tractor and the pickup.

  Bullet opened the door of his wardrobe—a big square piece of furniture, with cowboys and Indians Liza had painted on it, why he never knew—and lifted out the twenty-two he kept wrapped in an old towel on the floor of it. He unrolled the towel, then took some oil to the stock. He’d figured he could get something as trade-in for the twenty-two, when he went up to Salisbury for the Smith and Wesson, so he kept it looking good.

  When he heard the kitchen empty, he went downstairs. He put the steak on to fry, and while it was cooking he took a flashlight out into the vegetable garden. His feet squelched down into the muddy soil and the rain soaked his shoulders. He was hoping to find a couple of late tomatoes, but all he could see that was ripe was a zucchini, so he leaned down and broke that from its thick stem.

  He was sitting at the table, eating slices of raw zucchini, the thick steak and some bread and butter, when his father came to the door. Bullet knew the man was there but he didn’t look up.

  “Have you forgotten about the barn doors?”

  “No,” Bullet said.

  There was a long silence. Bullet cut himself a big bite of steak and chewed. He spread butter around another piece of bread.

  “I asked you a question.”

  I answered it.

  “Don’t think you can avoid the job. You still have your keep to earn.”

  Bullet felt his hand tighten around the fork, but he ate as methodically as before. After a while he heard the footsteps going back down to the living room where his father had his desk and his precious books. He heard the door close. He heard his mother on the back porch starting to run wet laundry through the hand ringer of the old washing machine she still used, because until it broke down there was no need to get another. So his mother thought the rain would stop in the night. Usually, his mother was pretty good on weather. Saturday’s meet was up beyond Easton, where the land was a little hillier and two days of rain would leave the course muddy, underneath a deceptive dry layer. Usually, the land could absorb one day’s rain.

  CHAPTER 8

  A westerly wind was blowing the sky clear as Bullet slid into his desk. The bell rang. First period, US History, and they hadn’t seen even McIntyre’s nose since the second week of school. Rumor had it McIntyre was spending the semester between the faculty lounge and the local bar, while Walker taught his classes.

  Walker usually gave them a minute or two to settle down while he checked off the roll; then they got to work, taking quizzes, reviewing the reading, discussing. Bullet stretched his legs out. Funny—nobody was having any trouble settling down that morning.

  Walker stood behind the big desk at the front of the classroom. He looked around. He seemed to be listening, standing there at the front, his eyes roaming. He looked young, permanently underfed, and had that wimpy beard—but he was doing okay. He seemed to know what he was talking about and he kept shifting tactics on them, so he was always running things. He didn’t give Bullet any trouble, either, no trouble at all. Bullet didn’t mind him.

  “I see,” Walker said. “It looks like we’d better do some thinking about it.”

  Bullet didn’t know what he was talking about. The rest of the class did: there was a restless movement, leaning forward at their desks, and a babble of voices rose on questions and arguments.

  “What are they going to do about it?”

  “Who’s responsible?”

  “I think it’s terrible, just terrible.”

  “Serves him right, if you ask me.”

  At the tail end of the outburst a girl’s voice wailed, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand it at all, I don’t understand what’s happening,” and another outburst began.

  “Everybody knows how things go here, he asked for it.”

  “But what’s going to happen now?”

  “Hold on,” Walker called. “Hey, wait a minute. Hold on,” waving his hands up in the air until he had their attention. “I said think about it. I haven’t heard any thinking.”

  “What’s to think about? We all know what happened and we all know why.” That was Cheryl from the front row, sounding impatient and sure of herself.

  “You know, Miss Haskins, one of the most rewarding things about history is that it teaches us how much we don’t know. The case of Richard the Third is a good example—do you know about Richard the Third?” Nobody did. Nobody wanted to. “Then I’ll tell you, but not today. Mr. Tillerman—do you know what happened?”

  Bullet shook his head; he wasn’t about to be dragged into anything.

  “But you can’t use him for an example of anything. Bullet never knows, he doesn’t care, he doesn’t pay attention to anything,” Cheryl argued.

  “Bullet?” Walker asked her. He looked at Bullet, but not as if he had asked a question. Bullet just stared back at him. “He seems to know enough to pass the course,” Walker said. “So you can’t say he never, can you? There’s a lesson in that. So suppose we start with just what did happen. Facts.”

  “Four whites jumped a black guy—”

  “There were eight of them the way I heard it and—”

  “I heard five—”

  “Outside the parking lot—”

  “That’s not on school property—”

  “And beat him up.”

  “They were all kids. Students. Here.”

  “Nobody knows who they are.”

  “Yeah, but we can guess.”

  “They split before the cops got—”

  “Except the black—”

  “He couldn’t move, the way I heard it.”

  “His name’s Tamer, Tamer Shipps,” one of the black students interrupted. Until then they’d all sat quiet. “And they were wearing ma
sks I hear. Your guys. He hadn’t done anything.”

  “He went into the student lounge.”

  “He’s a student, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “But what?” Walker asked, into the uncomfortable silence.

  “But everybody knows they don’t go in there.”

  “They?” Walker asked.

  “Blacks. He knew, everybody knew he was going to try something.”

  “There’s no law—”

  “There’s a law that says he can. In fact.”

  “Yeah, but everybody knows how we live with that—”

  Cheryl’s loud voice cut across the argument. “Let’s forget that. There is a law and that is a fact. Like there’s a draft law. It’s a law that forces people to do what somebody thinks they ought to do. What’s important to me is, I’m not in favor of four to one odds in a fight—”

  “Five.”

  “Eight.”

  “Whatever the number,” Cheryl overrode them. “What we’re missing here is motive. Why. Why this Tamer went in there. He knew, didn’t he?” she insisted across the room at the blacks.

  “We all know,” they answered.

  “Then why did he try going in there?” she demanded.

  There was a long silence. Walker outwaited it.

  “Because,” Cheryl finally continued, “if you go looking for trouble and you find it, you have nothing to complain about.”

  “He is not complaining.”

  “It’s you who’s complaining, far as I can tell.”

  “He wasn’t looking for trouble. He was looking for a place to sit down out of the rain.”

  “And you forgot to ask why your guys had to beat him up, while you’re asking why. We all know why there were four of them.”

  There was another silence. Bullet watched the class, watched Walker watching.

  A white boy changed the subject. “What I want to know is what they’re going to do about it. I mean, I figure I know why this Tamer went in there and I think he’s right—well, I do—but I want to know what they’re going to do about roughing somebody up.”

  “What do you think should be done?”

  “It wasn’t on school property.”

  “Let it blow over, it won’t happen again.”

  “You believe that?”

  “You know who they are, your guys—I bet. You’ve got to know. They broke the law, assault and battery. They should get thrown out of school. We would be and you know it.”

  This time Walker took over the silence. “This isn’t thinking you’re doing. Start to finish, you’re not thinking. You’re judging—do you know what I mean?” They didn’t. “Motive may call for judgment, but the law is beyond that.”

  A babble of protests arose.

  “Laws just guarantee the status quo, the position of the people in power.”

  “You’re confusing law with justice, Mr. Walker.”

  “You believe in the law?”

  “Laws can be wrong, everybody knows that.”

  He waved his hands again to silence them, and after a while they piped down, unsatisfied. He turned around and started writing on the board:

  These, in the day when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth’s foundations fled,

  “That’s poetry, this isn’t English class.”

  “Shut up, you jerk.”

  Followed their mercenary calling

  “Mercenary, that means money, I’m for that.”

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  And took their wages and are dead.

  “What kind of a poem is that, Mr. Walker?”

  “At least it’s not all about beauty and love.”

  “It’s not even a poem, all it does is rhyme. It doesn’t have the right language.”

  “What about heaven falling, that’s a metaphor or whatever, isn’t it? Heaven doesn’t fall.”

  “Unless you’re Chicken Little.” They laughed.

  Walker ignored them and wrote on:

  Their shoulders held the sky suspended,

  They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;

  “Aha! Parallel structure.”

  “I get all I can take of this in English.”

  “Why doesn’t he say anything? What’s the point?”

  What God abandoned, these defended,

  “Now we know who the bad guys are.”

  “Unless God is the bad guy.”

  “How much longer is there till the period ends, anybody got a watch on?”

  And saved the sum of things for pay.

  “I get it so far, let’s see what the third stanza says.”

  “What do you mean you get it, the thing doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “It’s not supposed to make sense, it’s poetry.”

  “Think Walker’s gone off the deep end?”

  There was a third stanza. Walker wrote underneath the last words: EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF MERCENARIES—Housman. Then he turned around.

  “Well?” he asked.

  They all kept their eyes on the board, not looking at Walker. Wow, Bullet thought unwillingly. He caught Walker’s pale eyes on him and wiped his face clean of expression.

  Finally someone said, “You don’t write the title at the end, it goes at the top.”

  For a minute Walker looked blank, and Bullet hoped he’d blow up. But he didn’t. “What side is Housman on?” he asked. “You know what mercenaries are?”

  “Yeah, us in Vietnam.”

  “How does Housman feel about mercenaries?” Walker asked.

  They argued it back and forth, with Walker stepping in only when he had to say, “We’re not interested in how you feel about mercenaries, but with how Housman feels.” Bullet didn’t listen to the argument, which had nothing to do with him. He kept his eyes on the words chalked onto the board. An epitaph is what goes on a tombstone, he thought, cut in with a chisel, and boy is that right for this.

  Shortly before the bell rang, Walker made his point: “This poem is thinking, as opposed to judging.

  “Use it as a model, okay?” Walker asked the class. Then, “Can anyone guess what Housman did for a living?”

  “Soldier.”

  “Something physical, athlete?”

  “Poet.”

  “Nobody earns a living as a poet, jerk.”

  “I think he was a mortician. I mean, it’s very depressing.”

  “Big game hunter?”

  “Doctor?”

  “Lawyer?”

  “Indian Chief?”

  Walker shook his head solemnly. “Mr. Tillerman?” he asked.

  Bullet stared at him. What do you want with me?

  “Can you narrow it down? Do you think he was educated?”

  “Sure,” Bullet said.

  “Why?” Walker insisted.

  “Teachers always do that, use educated men as examples,” Bullet answered. It wasn’t what Walker wanted him to say. He knew what Walker wanted him to say, about the way you had to have worked on your mind to be able to do that, like you had to work on your muscles to bring your stride down exactly right.

  Walker seemed unoffended. But he told the class, briefly, that Housman was a college professor who taught classics, in England, and then that they could leave the room. “But it’s five minutes,” they told him. He dismissed them anyway, “Except Mr. Tillerman. Could I have a word with you?”

  Bullet stayed in his seat. Walker came over close to him. Now what.

  “You liked it, didn’t you.” Walker indicated the board behind him. Bullet shrugged. “I want to talk to you,” Walker said, “because I don’t seem to be able to . . . make any connection with you. The other students don’t seem to . . . like you. Although they don’t dislike you. In fact, they respect you.”

  None of this made any difference to Bullet. But you had to look out for guys like Walker, they kept looking for ways to get inside you. And they weren’t dumb. He kept his face deadpan, his eyes fixed
on Walker’s little pale eyes. Walker stood there.

  “How did you get a name like Bullet?” Walker asked.

  I named myself, which is none of your business.

  A pale, foolish smile moved Walker’s mouth. “Have it your way, but if there’s anything you want to talk to me about—well, I just want you to know I’m here, if you need to talk.”

  Bullet stood up, impatient with this. He didn’t have to stay and listen.

  “Because you don’t strike me as happy,” Walker said, “and—”

  “I’ve got a class to get to,” Bullet interrupted. He left the room before Walker could see that he was about to burst out laughing. The guy was a jerk, a smart jerk, but still—not smart, educated. Him and his beard and trying to get people to think: a few years of teaching would show him what was what.

  The cafeteria that day was quiet, but it hummed with the intensity of subdued conversations. Bullet sat down with the wimps, who shifted over to give him lots of room. They didn’t know what to say, after hello, and they were smart enough to keep quiet, keep their eyes down. Bullet ate, and looked around. The usual, he thought: tables of whites, tables of Negroes—the wimps occupying the no-man’s-land in between. Bullet noted missing faces among the whites. He scanned the tables to see if the big figure of Tamer Shipp was there. He thought he’d recognize the guy. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think Tamer was in the room. That made sense, if he couldn’t even move out of the cops’ way, but he wondered about the whites—there were a few possibles among the absentees. Lying low, probably.

  Bullet chewed, taking in the tension that filled the whole big room, just like the light from overhead fluorescent bulbs filled it, getting into every corner, flowing under the tables and showing the way feet were planted on the floor, ready to run, tense. Guys ate hunched over their trays, their eyes not on the people they were eating with, but scanning the room. Girls kept their eyes down, not looking at anyone, not talking much.

  “Gee,” said one of the wimps, a scrawny tenth grader with thick glasses and a madras shirt, “I’m staying home for a few days.”

  “How can you get away with that?”

  “My mom’ll get my dad to let me, when I tell her. I’m not coming back here until this cools down.”