Contrary Thoughts

Could the instructors please increase production?
Students aren’t passing through quickly enough.
Skirting the edges, avoiding corruption.
All about rigor, but not really rough.

Do you say, “shopping cart”?  Do you say, “Buggy”?
Can’t get a win, so we look for a tie.
Tell us that everything’s perfectly ducky.
Shedding a tear in the blink of an eye. 

They deserve 3, but they’re looking for 7.
Faltering while they’re saluting the flags. 
Contrary thoughts about Limbo and Heaven —
Trying to travel without any bags.

Tear down the statues of Huck Finn and Sawyer,
leave us the sculpture of Fred the Flamingo.
Go ahead, buddy, and hire a lawyer,
guard all your winnings from scratch-offs and bingo.

Chip Meister

Mr. Q

Joe Benton wore camouflage to school and said openly at the age of 13 that he had been called to the Lord. He told anyone who asked that he wanted to be a preacher, and very nearly ran to class and found his seat in the first row so he could be as close as possible to the pulpit. Even teachers had been trying to get Joe to sit anywhere except in the first row since the 3rd grade. Yet, he always found a way, even when he was moved to another seat, to creep up to the front.

Mr. Q’s English class was perhaps the most interesting class at Mann Middle School, and maybe ever. To enable himself a better and more informed view, Joe sat right smack in the middle of row one and waited expectantly, even breathlessly, for Mr. Q to read from the large well-worn literature book that he used to contain and capture enthusiasms.

The classics were Mr. Q’s daily regimen—particularly the likes of Huckleberry Finn, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Great Expectations, and The Catcher In The Rye.

Mr. Q had long ago given up asking the students to read, explicate, and discuss.

They never read at home; they manufactured all possible impediments against explication and annotation; they complained everything was busy work. And discussion? Well, it was impossible to discuss when so few had read in the first place. Perhaps this was a compromise, and it may even have marked him as a bad teacher, but Mr. Q decided the best method was simply to read good books to his students, who spread the texts out in front of them and followed along in silence. It seemed the orality of their somatic selves had been restored and their ancestors, illiterate, but wise, had emerged from Plato’s Cave and demanded stories they could pass down through generations, or at least through the halls like notes carefully folded and written as if on skin.

Mr. Q had several years ago tried to get his students to take up the slack and help save his voice that by the day’s end became raw and terribly gritty, but their cold readings soon, um, “What whore through yonder window break?” degenerated into stumbling snooze-fests. Although the rest with earnest enthusiasm enunciated so badly that the story was lost amongst all the mispronounced words; and, of course, with each new reader, there was the problem of locating the place in the text the last reader had abandoned. Soon the entire class devolved into daydreams.

So, Mr. Q took over completely and read and read and read. This time he selected a story that he had always liked: The Catcher In the Rye—the curriculum map be-damned, Principal Blaugh be-damned, Pencey Prep, the fencing team, Stradlater, be damned!

Mr. Q. would read a section and explicate as he went and discuss with himself—although Joe Benton, who sat solidly in the front row, would interrupt freely. It was a miracle how this worked but it did work—reading aloud—meeting Old Spence, leaving Pency, finding New York City and

. . .

Mr. Q felt like a dream squasher when he ignored Benton’s raised hand, which shot up for a third time—in the middle of, say, Holden’s ride in the cab when the cabbie talked about the fish frozen right there in the pond throughout the entirety of winter. “What do you make of the frozen fish imagery?” Mr. Q asked.

And, the entirety of the class wanted to get on with it and find out what was going to happen, but Benton forced everyone to slow down, to look carefully at what was happening and to talk about each scene.

Yet again Benton had kept his arm raised throughout the entire reading—this section about Holden buying the record for his sister Phoebe and then dropping it, breaking it.

Accompanying Benton’s raised hand was an outbreak of rolling eyes and shifting seats and finally unkindness: “Shut up, Joe!” Or, “God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason”; or, “Do you want an ass-kickin, seriously?”

Although Mr. Q tried to quell the unkind words—he could do nothing about the eye-rolling and after several of these interruptions or interpolations about arcane textual points, Mr. Q began to ignore Joe’s hand, too, which remained high in the air. Yet, Benton’s enthusiasm was boundless—even after dismissal when the students very nearly raced from the room, he waited patiently until Mr. Q had carefully bookmarked his place in the literature text and interrupted the silence with yet another question. Benton would wait for a minute, and his unanswered questions—many of which were quite insightful and on-point—hung in the air and then dissolved into algebraic geometry class with Mrs. Guliable.

One had to hand it to Joe though; the boy was filled with eternal expectation: and no matter the student rebuff, the eye-rolling, the chair scraping, the unkind comments, Joe waited eternally or so it seemed for answers that never came. Joe might well have been waiting expectantly for answers for a lifetime.

. . .

Joe Benton was designated as a “walker.” He lived in Bird Town—composed of a series of beat-up rental trailers that huddled off to the side of the highway. The trailers had been brought in when a hurricane’s high waters had displaced many from their homes. Once the water receded, the trailers remained, and had been purchased and converted into rental units. These trailers served nearly every purpose: one had even been converted into a makeshift church in which Benton’s father preached. There were trailers that had been made into a second hand store, a yarn shop, and even a small library. The steel mill, only a few miles away, pumped out smoke and soot and caused everyone to hold their noses whenever they made our way through Bird Town.

Bird Town held no closer proximity to Hightop than many of the other homes where busses ran. Many of the bus drivers, however, could not navigate the difficult road that ran in front of the trailers. The matter had been put before the school board, who had proposed a solution: a path was devised that wound its way down the hillside, behind Mann Middle, across the busy highway, and then in the long slow descent toward Bird Town. With a bit of pep, Benton and his rag-tag gang including Mimi Friend, Buster McCarthy and Bard Percival could make it to school in less than 15 minutes, if they were really huffing it.

Joe, unlike the rest of the rag-tag gang, was never late. The rest didn’t even like school and had they not been compelled to be there, they wouldn’t have showed up. Unlike the more privileged, who dragged themselves to school with full stomachs, Bentner and the Bird Town group never seemed tired or angry either. Most of these kids knew that whatever they did, didn’t count for much. As long as they passed, they would soon be making their way from the top of the hill down to Mann Middle School—whose playing fields spread out like a promised land. From Mr. Q’s vista view—the High School’s football field and the circular cinder track that ran around it resembled a painting.

. . .

After class, Joe stood in front of Mr. Q with a persistence that would not be abated. Mr. Q was ready with his standard answers: about Holden wanting to protect the innocence of children—waiting to catch the kids from the cliff –wanting to protect his sister Phoebe from bad words scribbled on the elementary school walls.

Joe waited until Mr. Q finally looked up from his book.

“Mr. Q, I really enjoyed the reading.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

“In fact I pretty much enjoy what you read everyday. I always come to class and when I feel my mind wandering, I draw pictures of what you read in order to keep my mind focused. It wasn’t as easy when you read Jude, the Obscure.” Benton waited for a laugh and when he realized that one was not going to present itself, he continued.

“I have a favor to ask you, Mr. Q. Feel free to say no. But, well, my little sister—Bennie—has been pretty sick and hasn’t been able to make it to elementary school; well, my father won’t let her—in her condition. He won’t even let her walk across the road, and well, we don’t have a car that’s working at least so he can’t drive her. So, well, Bennie has to stay at home, and she doesn’t have very much to do.” This time the silence seemed as if it was on Joe’s side. “Well, after you read today about Holden wanting to give the record to Phoebe but dropping it, I thought, well, that you might be willing to walk home with me after school and maybe spend twenty minutes reading to Bennie. Or, we could do it on the weekend but because I know that you must be busy and got things to do.” Joe paused. “I know that it’s a real big favor to ask. . . and well, it wouldn’t have to be every day, but I’ve already told Bennie that you’re such a good teacher. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to ask,” Benton paused and used the tip of his finger to scroll out the word yes on the blackboard. The word faded and disappeared before he even finished writing it. “And, I’m not, as I usually do, going to press you for an answer but Bennie’s real sick. . . Well, I’m off to Ms. Guliable’s class and, I hope you decide, well, you know.” And, with that Joe left Mr. Q in the room alone.

For the final period of the day, Mr. Q read to his rather large class of 30 students that he forced to convene in a circle so that they had to look at one another—this had the added benefit of keeping them quiet and flipping through pages. He caught them when they attempted to talk to one another as they so often did. But his reading was lacklustre as he considered what Joe had asked.

That night he slept terribly—a swelling began in his hands and spread up his arms. There was a perpetual discomfort as if he was trying to wreck himself as he slept, and he would toss and wake up every two hours and try to settle back into his fitful dreams where he was climbing a rock face, continually positioning his hands to ascertain where he was—hauling himself up inch-by-inch.

What’s wrong with you, Mr. Joe said to him. Many of his colleagues formed one of two groups: those who loved their subject matter and those who loved the kids. Mr. Q didn’t really belong to either group. He had been a popular student and as a teacher, he had found ways—he began to believe—to live his life in reverse. He simply didn’t know how to act when one of the students paid him any attention.

He felt rather disconcerted suddenly being outside with Joe after school the next day. He hadn’t told Principal Blaugh where he was going. Outside with a light snow falling and drifting down toward his shoulders, he remembered when he had been in American High himself and had sneaked out back near the loading dock and the dumpsters to hit his first butt. And, he hadn’t even told his school friends about this. By the end of the year, he was almost smoking an entire pack a day. He couldn’t seem to smoke them fast enough. There had been complaints from that kid—what was his name? Kevin or Ken?—who never much came to school and suffered from terrible asthma—had an inhaler that he carried with him everywhere. Justin or Jim?—no not Jim—had complained that just “being around” Q was going to give him an asthma attack.

“I thank you Mr. Q for doing this—for saying that you’d read to her. I have my copy of the literature book with me in case you forgot yours. Yes, the big literature book. Literature with a capital L.

“We didn’t know what was wrong with Bennie at first. She started losing weight and although we didn’t have the money, we took her to all kinds of specialists anyway.”

A light snowfall accumulated on their coats.

They were solidly in the back woods now—the trail—a remarkably narrow one snaked through the trees in a slow and steady descent.

“Well, like I said, we didn’t know at first. I don’t think we wanted to know but Bennie kept losing weight until it was like her bones were shining through.”

They were in the heart of the woods now, where the sunlight couldn’t find them. The tree trunks were different there, too—like the thighs of giants. Errant branches grabbed at them trying to prevent entrance.

“Careful of your steps around here, Mr. Q. There are ruts and you don’t want to break your ankles. That’s no fun.”

The path was tricky for a bit and opened up into a flatter area, which signaled that the woods would soon end. They found themselves standing at the intersection of State Route 118 and School road, waiting for the light to change and the little walking man to start blinking.

The blinking man was accompanied by a beeping as he and Joe picked their way across the street. The snow, mixed with a strong wind, caused them to move sideways. There was something about the snow that led kids to the windows, wondering what it was they were missing in the great world beyond.

Bird Town—transplant trailer parks—meant to blow away or flood or collapse in on themselves. Bird Town nestled and perched but could as quickly be gone and in truth, few would miss it. Ten trucks—maybe 15—were gathered together around an open square. He and Joe crossed a kind of chasm and a whole new section of Bird Town with perhaps 20 more trailers that upon first glance had been stashed out of sight: the discarded, the disenfranchised, the dismissed..

“This is it.” Joe spread out his hands. “Been working on it for sometime now—since the beginning of the year, really. Thought after I finished it might be a place that you’d like to visit. I know those teachers don’t think we give much of a damn, but I think you might be surprised and there’s more of us around here than you might think who are school-interested.

Mr. Q tentatively made his way up the two-step. What stood before him was something of a small miracle. The trailer had been transformed into the most perfect of classrooms—a chalkboard, black as coal, stretched across the front of the room and a wooden, not metal boarder framed it, a chalk tray, also made of wood, ran the length of the board, ten desks, handmade and pieced together, sat in two rows of five across the room. “My father and I have been nearly on this for the better part of the year.” Joe stepped inside and waved at a little girl who sat in the center seat, front row.

J. Bradley Minnick