“Okay then, what’s the deal with you and Cheryl?”
“The deal?”
“Yeah, the deal. The two of you. We know you’ve been having, or rather, you’ve been…”
“Been what?”
“You know. Making it.”
“We have?”
“Don’t deny it. We’ve been watching.”
I’m a big guy. I’m big now, and I was big then. I took my left hand and clenched it around Matt’s throat, my thumb on top of his voice box. I lifted him off the buffed linoleum and cracked the back of his head on a locker’s ventilation slits. “Look, you meddlesome, sanctimonious cockroach…” I bounced him onto the floor, my knees locking his arms as surely as cast-iron shackles. “If you dare even hint, even one more time, that you or any other sexless, self-hating member of your Stasi goon squad have any [slug to the face] right to impose your ideas on my life, I’ll come to your house in the dead of night, use a tire iron to smash your bedroom window and then obliterate your self-satisfied little pig face with it.”
I stood up. “I hope I’ve made myself clear.” I then walked away, toward the caf, climbing up flights of stairs, but I felt like I was walking on an airport’s rubber conveyor belt.
I was maybe halfway across the middle floor when I heard sounds like popping fireworks, no big deal, because Halloween was coming up shortly. And then I noticed two grade nine students running past me, and then, some seconds later, dozens of students stumbling over themselves. One girl I knew, Tracy, who took over my paper route from me back in 1981, yelled at me there were three guys up in the cafeteria shooting students. She fled, and I remembered the ship turning upside down in The Poseidon Adventure, and the looks on the actors’ faces as they clued into the fact that the ship was flipping: smashed champagne bottles, dying pianos, carved ice swans and people falling from the sky. The fire alarm went off.
Against the human stream, I rounded a stairwell – one with a mural of Maui or some other paradiselike place. The wall was pebble-finished and rubbed my right arm raw. At that point the alarm bell felt like crabs crawling on my head.
At the top of the stairs Mr. Kroger, an English teacher, stood with Miss Harmon, the principal’s assistant, both looking besieged; life doesn’t prepare you for high school massacres. When I tried to pass, Mr. Kroger said, “You’re not going up there.” Meanwhile, the gunshots were coming fast and furious around the corner and down the hall in the caf. Mr. Kroger said, “Jason, leave.” The sprinklers kicked in. It was raining.
“Cheryl’s in the cafeteria.”
“Go. Now.”
I grabbed his arm to move him away, but he toppled down the stairwell. Ob, Jesus – he went down like a box of junk falling from a top cupboard.
The shots from the caf continued. I ran toward the main foyer leading there. Bodies lay all around, like Halloween pumpkins smashed on the road on the morning of November first. I slowed down. Only one of the foyer’s front windows hadn’t been blasted out, and sprinkler water was picking up patches of light reflected from the trophy cases and the ceiling’s fluorescents. Lori Kemper ran past. She was in the drama club and her arm was purple and was somehow no longer connected properly. On the linoleum was Layla Warner, not so lucky, in a disjointed heap by a trophy case. Two other students, equally bloody, ran by, and then there was this guy – Derek Something – lying in a red swirl of blood and sprinkler water, using his arms to drag himself away from the cafeteria doors. He croaked, “Don’t go in there.”
“Jesus, Derek.” I grabbed him and hauled him back to the stairwell.
Inside the caf’s glass doors I saw three of the school’s younger loser gang wearing camouflage duck-hunting outfits. Two of them were arguing, pointing rifles at each other, while the third guy with a carbine looked on. Students were huddled under the banks of tables. If they were talking, I wasn’t hearing anything, maybe because of the fire alarm and the sirens and helicopters outside. Once I entered the main foyer, what I remember is the silence in spite of the noise. In my head it might just as well have been a snowy day in the country.
I thought to myself, Well, a rifle’s a rifle. You can’t go in there unarmed. I scanned the immediate environment to find something, anything, I could use to kill a human being. The answer was just outside one of the blown-out windows: smooth gray rocks from the Capilano River, inside tree planters as a means keeping cigarette butts out of the soil. I walked out the window hole and saw riflemen and ambulances and a woman with a megaphone. Up the hill were hundreds of students, watching the events from behind cars; I could see their legs poking from below. I grabbed a river rock the size of a cantaloupe – it weighed as much as a barbell – and walked into the cafeteria. One of the gunmen lay in a heap on the floor, dead.
I yelled to the guy standing over him, “Put that gun down.”
“What? You have got to be…”
He took a shot at me and missed. Then, in the best shot of my life, I estimated the distance between us, the mass of the rock, and the potential of my muscles. One, two, three, pitch, and the evil bastard was dead. Instantly dead, as I’d learn later. Justice.
And then I saw Cheryl. The carnage of the room was only now registering, the dead, the wounded, the red lakes by the vending machines. I climbed under a table and held Cheryl in my arms.
I whispered her name over and over, but her gaze only met mine once, before her head fell back, her eyes on the third gunman, who had been captured beneath a large, heavy tabletop. Students were now fighting each other for a place on top of the table, like people on the Berlin Wall in 1989, and then they all began to jump in unison, crushing the body like a Christmas walnut, one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE; and the distance between the tabletop and the floor shrank with each jump until finally, as I held Cheryl in my arms, the students – unbeknownst to the forces of the law outside – might just as well have been squishing mud between the floor and table.
It’s a few minutes later, and I’m sitting shirtless on a smooth driftwood log that escaped from a boom up the coast. The air smells of mussel shoals, and Joyce and Brodie are in the low tide, chasing the long-suffering seagulls. The dogs seem able to amuse themselves without human intervention, which allows me to be expansive for a moment…
Okay, here’s something which kind of ties into all this: one of my first memories. It’s of my father, Reg, making me kneel on the staticky living room rug. I’d just been watching fireworks on the TV – it was the American bicentennial summer, 1976, so I was five. I’d been changing channels and lingered a microsecond too long, a game show where a rhinestoned blond “temptress” was showcasing a fridge-freezer set about to be won or lost. Reg, detecting lust/sin/ temptation/evil, slapped the OFF button and then made me say a prayer for my future wife, “who may or may not yet be born.” I had no idea what she was supposed to look like, so I asked Reg, whose response was to scoop me up and wallop the bejeezus out of me, after which he stormed out into his car and drove away, most likely to a men’s religious discussion group he enjoyed bullying once a week. My mother peeked out the front window, turned around to me and said, “You know, dear, in the future, just think of an angel.”
From then on, I could never look at a girl without wondering if she had been the target of my prayer, and the bellies of pregnant women counted, too. When I first saw Cheryl, in ninth grade, it was obvious that she was the antenna who’d been receiving my prayers. You just know these things. And when she became religious, that was my confirmation.
Sitting here on my log, I can feel women looking at me with the soul-seeking radar I once employed looking for my future wife. It’s younger soccer-mom types mostly, married, here on the beach on a workday, frazzled from handling over-sugared toddlers cranky from too much sun. There are some teenage girls, too, but being on the far side of my twenties, I’m pretty much invisible