I
Mr. Buttworst wrote an equation on the board, something that had more letters in it than numbers. Except this wasn’t English and x and y together don’t spell a damn thing to my knowledge. I could barely keep my eyes open, despite sleeping most of Sunday away. Johnny was face down on his desk, snoring loud enough that I could hear it. I rested the side of my face on my right hand for so long that my hand was falling asleep. “Shooting the shit time” had already taken place earlier in the class, and now the only constant was Mr. Buttworst’s voice, deep and scratchy, showing the class with great enthusiasm the mysteries of algebra. The man actually got excited about the subject, and I could tell by some of his bewildered looks that he couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t share his enthusiasm. The man was as serious about his belief in teaching as his conviction in math. Students respected him for that. Most of the prison guards were there to put in their time and pick up their paychecks.
Near the end of class, Mr. Buttworst handed out our quiz from last Friday.
I got a big red flag as was the case most of the time. I put a “u” next to it before throwing it in the garbage. The bell rang and I walked for the door, but Mr.
Buttworst stopped me.
“Do you have a second Tony?”
“Sure.”
Mr. Buttworst took a sip of coffee. “I talked to Ms. Pertie (she’s my guidance counselor) this morning and it turns out you need this class to graduate.”
I turned my head to the side because of his ashtray-coffee breath.
“I got more than enough credits to graduate,” I said.
“That’s true, but you need at least four semesters of core math classes.”
“But...”
“Business Math doesn’t count Tony. Although the name is nice and fancy, it is not considered a core class.”
I shook my head looking down at the floor.
Mr. Buttworst began again, putting his hand on my shoulder as we walked to the door. “Look Tony, I’m not trying to be the heavy. I hate this as much as you, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you about it. I know how important playing college ball is to you, but if you’re going to be here next year, it’s going to be hard to play there.”
“Nobody’s on me anyhow. They’re not interested in a five-ten catcher no matter how many guys he throws out, or what his batting average is.”
Mr. Buttworst smiled and wiped his mouth, pushing away the gray strands of hair hanging over his lip. “You’re too good of a hitter not to get noticed, Tony.
It’s all about being in the right place at the right time. I’m confident that place and time will find you. That is, if you take care of your grades first. Why don’t you ask Roman to help you out with your studying? I know you two are pretty good friends and believe me, if anyone could explain this stuff to you, it would be him.”
65
I agreed that Roman could help me.
I ran into Scotty at the lockers. He had the one next to me. Before I could slam my backpack down or rip open my door, Scotty started laughing.
“What the fuck is so funny?” I said.
“I was just thinking about Johnny,” Scotty responded.
“What about him?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“No. What? I just had him in class. He didn’t say anything.”
“I wouldn’t say anything if I was him either.”
“Spit it out Jakowski, what the hell?”
“Okay, Sunday morning when I woke up I went down to the kitchen and Johnny was passed out at the table. No big deal, happens all the time, right? But when I woke him up, his jeans were soaking wet from pissing himself.”
I started laughing a little but Scotty could hardly finish the story. He put his hand on my shoulder so he wouldn’t double over from laughing.
“That’s not even the best part,” he started. “After he cleaned himself up and borrowed some clothes, he came back to the kitchen and took a drink from a Tropicana container that somebody was using for screwdrivers the night before.
He said, ‘Good, it’s full’ before he started guzzling it. Turns out somebody had pissed in it, and I don’t mean a couple of drops either. This thing was filled to the brim with the yellow stuff. He’d taken several swallows before he noticed it wasn’t orange juice. He spent at least thirty minutes in my bathroom puking after that.”
I laughed hysterically right along with Scotty but didn’t dare tell him who pissed in that container, knowing it would be all over school before fourth hour.
And I really didn’t feel like getting my ass beat at lunch by Johnny the Killer. That little story brightened my day though.
I noticed at lunch that our little table was growing. What used to be just me, Roman, and Heather had turned into a table of seven people. Pick Bryant was back. Scotty had joined us for the first time. Sam Peterman, who at first I thought stopped just to give a “what’s up?” spent the entire lunch hour. One of Heather’s cheerleader friends also joined us.
Johnny and the boys’ attempt at embarrassing Roman with one final nail in the coffin at Homecoming had backfired. Three days ago the entire student body was either laughing at Roman or taking part in making him suffer. Today there were no flyers. No finger-pointing. No milk being dumped. People went about their business, awakening slowly from the aftermath of Homecoming and its parties. All of this because one girl had the balls to step up and go against the crowd. I was beginning to understand why he liked her so much.
There weren’t any stares coming from Johnny’s table. Even though they had lost a few of their regular members, they seemed to go about business as usual. I could hear Brunno trying to spit out a story that should have only taken twenty seconds, but it turned out to be a several minute ordeal. I also heard Jack in the high-pitched whine of his making fun of Johnny pissing himself. Johnny gave a firm elbow to his ribs stopping the story dead.
66
Was Roman’s torture over? Was that all it took, for the Homecoming queen to dance with the janitor. Rumor was that Heather had finally dumped the Killer. That sounded great, but I’ve heard those same words a thousand times over the years. Johnny was quite the laughingstock at school with both of his piss incidents, yet he seemed to be calm. Even more surprising, he actually came to school. I watched Heather and Roman talk. I watched as Roman smiled and even laughed sometimes. This was how it was supposed to be. Or was it just the calm before the storm?
II
As the days of October rolled by and turned into weeks, the leaves of the trees turned from dark green to light green and then from yellow to bright orange.
Roman informed me that the month October wasn’t named after a Roman emperor or god, like so many of its counterparts. It was also one of the few months that always had thirty-one days. October didn’t have to worry about jealous descendants stealing its days, since it was simply named after the Roman word for eight. I didn’t know or much care about emperors and such, but the time between the leaves being yellow and bright orange was an awesome display. There were only a couple of weeks, some years only a couple of days, to enjoy the colors. I wasn’t one to stop my car on the side of the road and gawk at a tree with my mouth open or anything like that, but I admit they made the ride to school a little more bearable. My grandfather once said that central Illinois was one of the few places in the world where you had to use your furnace and your air conditioner in the same day. I wasn’t sure if that was entirely true, especially the part about being one of the few places in the world, but there was one day that I got in my car and it was in the thirties and I turned on the heat on the way to school. On my way home I turned on the air, and when I passed the digital sign in front of Second National it read eighty-five. October in our neck of the woods was like the purgatory between seasons, the nexus of summer and winter.
During that time I spent at least an hour every day after school over at Roman’s. As it happened, Roman’s quiet way did not hurt his ability to teach and explain, and even though I was sure that Roman would fit in eating lunch at Harvard with professors and people with numerous letters after their names, he had an uncanny ability to communicate his point to average people, even idiots like myself. He put it in simple terms. The equal sign in an equation is no more than a mirror, what shows up on one side has to show up on the other. “X”,“y” and any other letter of the alphabet were just symbols in place of what really existed. Like the three cards buried in the tan envelope in the board game Clue. They were there the entire time, but until you did some deductions and eliminated some things, you didn’t know what they were. Mr. Plum in the library with a lead pipe. X equals five, y equals seven, and z equals eight. Plotting positive points on two planes seems to have more in common with a baseball field than I ever imagined. The first base line is the x-axis and the third base line the y. Anything in foul territory would have at least one negative number in it. Second base would be plotted 90, 90 as it was ninety feet down the first base line and ninety feet up the third line, 67
and if I drew imaginary lines from both first and third they would intersect at second making a diamond, or a square as it’s called in geometry.
Soon the one-legged A’s on my quizzes started to have two legs. I had never aced anything in the twelve years I’d been attending school. Suddenly with Roman’s help and even more important his imagination, I was pulling my grade up from the depths of the ocean, was on dry land and beginning to reach for the clouds.
I knew Roman was special, with a brain that just didn’t work like the rest of ours. You could tell that just by spending a few hours with him—but how special I never knew until one day at his house. That day hit me like a baserunner barreling me over at home plate. I was sitting at Roman’s kitchen table solving equations.
These equations though had square roots in ’em. Some shit huh, just when I finally start to get a handle on something they throw these in.
I was plugging away on my two hundred-dollar calculator (which we were allowed to use, thank Jesus and Mary) that Pops got for me. He was always shelling out the bucks if he thought it would help me in school. Anyway I was working on a square root when my calculator went dead.
“You got any batteries?” I yelled into the other room.
Roman walked in, not looking up from his book, and opened a drawer of the cabinet. Always with the reading, never enough words, never enough time it seemed.
“What’s the problem anyway?” he asked.
”Calculator went dead. I need the square root of four eighty-four.”
“Twenty-two,” Roman said as he placed the batteries beside me, still reading.
That was quick. Did he have that memorized or something?
I put the batteries in as he started to walk away. I pushed the square root of four eighty-four in the calculator. Twenty-two appeared. He must have had it memorized. Probably all the geeks in calculus had it memorized.
“Hey wait a second, how about three eighty-nine times six fifty-four?”
Roman looked up from his book. “Two hundred fifty-four thousand, four hundred six.” Roman had a look of bewilderment on his face, not from actually doing the math but from me asking him. “Aren’t those new batteries working?”
“How about six thousand seven hundred eighty-nine divided by fifty-four?” I responded. At this point I was just letting my fingers type in whatever they wanted.
Roman gazed at the wall for about three seconds. “One hundred twenty-five point seven, two repeating.”
My display said the same.
“Are those batteries working or not?” Roman asked.
“They’re working fine, I just want to know how in the blue fuck you can do that in your head so quick, or do it at all for that matter?”
Roman put the book down and gave a sigh. “I’ve always been able to do it. I don’t know how or why, but the numbers just pop in my head some how.
They look so clear, like they’re on a piece of paper, right in front of my face. I add them just like everybody else, just in my head.”
68
“Bullshit like everybody else, that’s fuckin’ amazing, you need to get on Letterman or somethin’.”
Roman smiled. “That’s all right, there’s enough stupid human tricks out there.”
“Hey, don’t forget Thursday I really gotta buckle down, I’ve got a mid-term test over everything we’ve had so far. You’re gonna help me, right?”
“Sure,” Roman responded. “I’ve got just the thing.”
III
Thursday was one of those days that seemed to prove my grandpa’s theory; it was colder than a witch’s tit on the way to school, but now it was warm. The sun was out, there were no clouds to be seen, and the leaves on the trees seemed to be emitting light of their own. I pulled into Roman’s driveway, and as I got out of the Pinto, he was walking out the front door.
Roman wore a smashed-down hat with a flimsy brim all the way around it.
He carried two cane poles in one hand and a tackle box in the other. He stepped down off the porch and motioned with his head for me to follow him up the driveway. We walked around the back of the house to a space of dirt about three feet by three feet. Roman handed me a large Styrofoam cup and grabbed the shovel that was leaning against the back of his house.
“I watered this pretty good about ten minutes ago. Let’s see what we have.” Roman shoved the blade into the moist brown dirt. He turned the scooped pile over like he was afraid of hurting it. What seemed like thousands of night crawlers lay at our feet. I could tell that Roman was pleased by the look in his wide eyes. If I hadn’t seen him with the fishing poles, I might have thought he was looking at dinner. Instead of eating them, Roman placed the worms one by one in my Styrofoam container. When he was pleased with the number, he picked a handful of damp dirt and covered the wigglers with it.
I wanted to ask what the hell we were doing. Had Roman forgotten that my future lay in the balance with this test, or what? He opened the Pinto’s hatch and placed the fishing gear inside. We both got in.
“Am I missing something here?” I asked with the key in the ignition.
“What do you mean?” Roman said.
“I’ve got the test of my life tomorrow. Did you forget?”
“No, I didn’t forget.” Roman sat with his hands in his lap looking straight ahead waiting for me to start the car and back out.
“Hello, what in the hell are we doing?” I asked.
Roman turned with the serious face I had seen so many times before. “This is part of your lesson, maybe the final lesson. Do you want my help or not?”
I shook my head in confusion and started my blue angel.
About halfway to the lake Roman broke the silence. “One more thing, once we get to the lake, there is no conversation unless it’s about fishing. Agreed?”
I nodded a reluctant yes. What in the name of Christ? All this time I’ve spent gettin’ my grades up and now I’m gonna flush it down the toilet because Roman wants to go fuckin’ fishing. And now we can’t talk either. What is this, 69
Kindergarten naptime? What could I do though? Roman had done so much for me, I had to humor him, but I still wasn’t thrilled about the idea.
IV
We walked down a path through the woods to a clearing next to the lake.
On the bank sat an old picnic table, close enough to the water that you could still fish while sitting, even with the old cane poles Roman had brought. I had learned to fish on this very bank with my father and my father from my grandpa and so on.
The picnic table looked as though it been there forever, but it was still sturdy enough for me and Roman to sit on.
Before I had as much as a nibble on my line, Roman had already caught a small blue gill and a decent-size catfish. He threw them both back. I finally got a bite and it was a big one. Roman had to help me pull it in. It was a very nice size fish, but it was only a carp. I got the hook out and began to throw it back.
“Wait,” Roman said. “Put that one in the bucket. Carl wants it.”
“Carl wants it for what?” I responded. “You can’t eat these damn things.
They’ve got a mud vein in them. It’ll make ya sick.”
“Carl knows how to clean them. Just trust me,” Roman said back.
“Let me get this straight, we’re throwing away the good size catfish and blue gill, but we’re keeping these dirty-ass mud fish?”
“That’s right. The lake is overpopulated with them anyway. By catching them we leave more room for your catfish.”
I gave a sarcastic “Okay” and threw the carp in the bucket of water.
We sat there silent for hours. I don’t remember even speaking another word. It was damn peaceful though. The lake water was becoming calmer every minute it seemed. The big oaks and maples in their orange and yellow attire stood tall and hung out over the top of us. They were there for no other reason than to shield us from the clatter of real life, from algebra. The leaves rustled occasionally, some falling in the water in front of us, and the wind blew slowly, barely touching the tip of my nose. It smelled dry and clean, like a piece of wood just before it was thrown into the fireplace. Even though the sun was beginning to set and with it the warmth of the day, I still felt like I could sit there late into the night.
There wasn’t a word spoken. Not while we packed up the fishing gear and the bucket of carp, not on the walk up the hill back to the car, not even on the ride to take Roman home. I finally got it, and wasn’t about to be the one that ruined it.
Now, there were no hidden algebra meanings in putting a worm on a hook or throwing a line into the lake, but there was a way to relax, a way to escape. Roman knew I had myself all worked up over the test and wouldn’t be worth a shit in that kind of state. If Roman had simply told me to chill, it would only have made me more flustered.
It was completely dark by the time we got back to Roman’s. I helped him unload the stuff in the driveway. He put the poles on the porch and came back for the bucket and tackle box.
“I was just trying to...” Roman started.
70
I put my hand up and stopped him in mid sentence. “I know. I get it man.
Thanks.”
V
My stomach was in knots on Monday, the day we got our mid-term back.
I’d already visited the throne room twice before I left for school and would have to leave class for it again if I didn’t settle down. It was kinda funny. Roman’s fishing escapade had calmed me down so much that I wasn’t a bit nervous before or during the actual test. I thought I knew every problem, and when I handed it in I would tell you I didn’t miss a single point. But now, now I was shitting bricks as they say, hoping for a “C”.
Mr. Buttworst got right to the point. He walked up and down the aisles of desks, flipping through the papers at each individual’s desk. Mr. Buttworst would give the average student a comment or two as he handed out the graded papers.
Students that were your everyday nerds and expected an “A” simply got a smile.
People like me and Johnny usually got neither. We were lost causes.
Mr. Buttworst walked over to Johnny’s desk and stood in front of him. The Killer was face down already asleep with a patch of drool running down his chin.
Mr. Buttworst picked up a book from another desk and slammed it down next to Johnny’s head. The Killer jumped up like someone had just sent forty-thousand volts through his body. Mr. Buttworst handed him the test and walked on. Johnny looked at it briefly and lay his head back down. You could never tell whether Johnny got an “A” or an “F”; he always had the same expression.
I was usually right there with Johnny, but not this time. I had too much riding on it, including my baseball career. Mr. Buttworst was three desks away. I was sure that one of two things would happen in my anticipation. Either the acid in my belly would eat right through the lining of my stomach wall and kill me, or I would shit myself right there in my seat. Mr. Buttworst got to my desk and held the test up in front of his face. The thick lenses of his glassed peeked up over the paper. I swear the same thickness was used for the windows of the space shuttle.
His eyes scanned down the page, checking his own grading one more time. Come on already. Satisfied, the burly hunter sat the test on my desk face down.
“Nice work Tony,” Mr. Buttworst said smiling.
Wow. I got the comment and the smile. It must be good. I lifted the paper slightly off the desk and peaked underneath, like something would have escaped if I turned it completely over. Marked on the top of test in red ink was a “B”. On a test like this, a mid-term, a “B” might as well have been an “A”. It meant there was no way I could flunk the class unless I turned in nothing the rest of the semester. I wanted to hold it out the window and yell “B!” as loud as I could.
Instead I let out a squeaky high-pitched fart that lasted only a second. My stomach felt better now. Most of the class busted out in laughter, including Mr. Buttworst.
The girl in front of me looked up at the ceiling, like she was trying to see a bird overhead.
“Scuse me,” I said, smiling.
71
VI
At lunch our table’s cast of characters grew again with the addition of two more cheerleaders. Johnny’s table was two girls away from becoming a sausage fest. Heather was sitting next to Roman looking at him as he ate.
“You want to go out with us after the game Friday, Roman?”
Roman swallowed hard. “I have to work.”
“Yeah, I know, I mean afterwards. A few of us are going over to Scotty’s house to hang out. It’s not going to be big, just a few of us, like Tony, Sally, Scotty, me and a few others.”
“I don’t get off until late.”
“It’s our last regular season game, and it’s in Bloomington. We won’t be back until after midnight anyway, especially if we get one of the shitty buses.
Think about it at least.”
I nudged Roman’s elbow with my own.
He looked at me and then at Heather. “Maybe.”
VII
“Maybe” wasn’t a “no”, but it wasn’t the answer Heather was looking for.
If there was only one word that described our blond friend, it had to be persistent.
So much in fact that after school sitting at Roman’s kitchen table, trying to stay ahead of the game in algebra, I heard a knock at the door. Heather decided to join our after-school study group. Really, it was me with my two hundred dollar calculator, Heather with her seemingly endless supply of French flash cards, and Roman reading not his homework, but the book of the day.
Heather was flipping through her flash cards, looking busy. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the real reason Heather was there. Roman’s “maybe”
was just not quite good enough in Heather’s book. She probably didn’t mind that much if Roman was a no show at Scotty’s Friday. What bothered her was the fact that Roman didn’t jump at an opportunity to hang out with her. Did she want Roman? I don’t think so, but the heart seems to be attracted mostly to the things it cannot have. Roman wasn’t trying to play games with her. Yes he was attracted to her—you could see that in his eyes—but it just wasn’t Roman’s thing to hang out.
Anyway, Heather noticed me staring at her. “Why doesn’t he come in here and study instead of sitting by himself?”
“Because he’s not studying. He’s readin’, for entertainment purposes I mean. Haven’t you seen that other room? There are about five hundred books in there, stacked to the ceiling on bookshelves. Those are the ones he’s read. The ones you saw on the floor when you came in were the ones he’s workin’ on. He goes through each one in a couple of hours and then on to the next. He’s some kind of fuckin’ speed-reader. That’s all he does is read, not just good stuff either.
He reads manuals and shit on how things work. He fixed the engine in the Pinto by some book he read.”
“What about his homework?”
“You’re not hearin’ me sister. A couple of weeks ago he was helpin’ me with my algebra. I decided to test him a little bit. I started rattling things off like
‘what’s five hundred and eighty-two times four hundred and seventy-five’ or 72
‘what’s the square root of seven hundred and eighty-three.’ The man spit out the answers faster than I could get them off the calculator. He’s a genius Heather.
Geniuses don’t have homework.”
Heather looked toward the living room, trying to process everything I’d just thrown at her. Roman walked in and poured a glass of water from the tap. He drank it down like a camel at a watering hole. When he finished he turned and walked back toward his book.
“Il est grossier pour ne pas offrir à vos invités quelque chose boire,”
Heather said to Roman.
Roman stopped without turning around, matching the dialect with elegance. “Pardonnez-moi, vous aiment le jus d'orange ? Je ne prends aucun champagne.”
I itched the top of my head. “What is this, keep the dumb guy out of the loop?”
Roman turned around. Heather ignored me and continued to look at Roman.
“L'eau sera belle,” she said continuing to manipulate the language of love.
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” I asked.
“Heather just reminded me of what a rude host I’ve been. Would you like something to drink Tony?”
“You got Miller Lite?”
“Sorry. I’m fresh out. I’m sure Carl could help you out. That’s his flavor.”
“I’m just joking,” I said. “Water’ll work.”
VIII
At Scotty’s we played dirty Jenga. Jenga itself was the game with the little wooden rectangles that you stacked neatly to make a tower that was about a foot and a half tall. When it was your turn, you had to remove any one of the rectangles from the tower and place it on top of the tower anywhere you would like. If you pulled a rectangle and the tower fell, you lost. We added the dirty part by writing little words on the rectangles. My mother would have referred to them as lewd acts. Really they weren’t that bad—things like “suck on someone’s toe” or
“French kiss someone.” It wasn’t like we wrote, “tie someone down and have your way with them” on any of the pieces. If you pulled a rectangle out successfully, you got to choose the person you did the act with. If you pulled a piece out and the tower fell, the other players got to choose any one of the acts written on the pieces, and with whom you had to do the act. It was an entertaining game at the worst.
Me, Scotty, and his girl all sat around drinking, waiting on Heather and Sally. By the time they got back from the football game I had drunk at least five beers. It ended up being only couples with the exception of Heather. Twelve forty five came and went and I had pretty much written Roman off for the evening. To my surprise at one o’clock he showed up. He wasn’t wearing his janitor get-up as I thought; instead he was back to the plain T-shirt, jeans, and a flannel.
“Time for dirty Jenga,” I said half-buzzed. We all sat down at the kitchen table except for Roman, who stood by the counter loo