Christine

People came in and went out, a lot of them kids from school. Before long I’d be seeing them in the halls again, and I felt a recurrence of that fierce nostalgia-in-advance and that sense of fright. In my head I could hear the home-room bell going off, but somehow its long bray sounded like an alarm: Here we go again, Dennis, last time, after this year you got to learn how to be a grown-up. I could hear locker doors crashing closed, could hear the steady ka-chonk, ka-chonk, ka-chonk, of linemen hitting the tackling dummies, could hear Marty Bellerman yelling exuberantly, “My ass and your face, Pedersen! Remember that! My ass and your face! It’s easier to tell the fuckin Bobbsey Twins apart!” The dry smell of chalk-dust in the classrooms in the Math Wing. The sound of the typewriters from the big secretarial classrooms on the second floor. Mr Meecham, the principal, giving the announcements at the end of the day in his dry, fussy voice. Lunch outdoors on the bleachers in good weather. A new crop of freshmen looking dorky and lost. And at the end of it all, you march down the aisle in this big purple bathrobe, and that’s it. High school’s over. You are released on an unsuspecting world.

“Dennis, do you know Buddy Repperton?” Arnie asked, pulling me out of my reverie. Our pizza had come.

“Buddy who?”

“Repperton.”

The name was familiar. I worked on my side of the pizza and tried to put a face with it. After a while, it came. I had had a run-in with him when I was one of the dorky little freshmen. It happened at a mixer dance. The band was taking a break and I was waiting in the cold-drink line to get a soda. “Repperton gave me a shove and told me freshmen had to wait until all the upperclassmen got drinks. He had been a sophomore then, a big, hulking, mean sophomore. He had a lantern jaw, a thick clot of greasy black hair, and little eyes set too close together. But those eyes were not entirely stupid; an unpleasant intelligence lurked in them. He was one of those guys who spend their high school time majoring in Smoking Area.

I had advanced the heretical opinion that class seniority didn’t mean anything in the refreshment line. Repperton invited me to come outside with him. By then the cold-drink line had broken up and rearranged itself into one of those cautious but eager little circles that so often presage a scuffle. One of the chaperones came along and broke it up. Repperton promised he would get me, but he never did. And that had been my only contact with him, except for seeing his name every now and then on the detention list that circulated to the home rooms at the end of the day. It seemed to me that he’d been dismissed from school a couple of times, too, and when that happened it was usually a pretty good sign that the guy wasn’t in the Young Christian League.

I told Arnie about my one experience with Repperton, and he nodded wearily. He touched the shiner, which was now turning a gruesome lemon colour. “He was the one.”

“Repperton messed up your face?”

“Yeah.”

Arnie told me he knew Repperton from the auto-shop courses. One of the ironies of Arnie’s rather hunted and certainly unhappy school life was that his interests and abilities took him into direct contact with the sort of people who feel it is their appointed duty to kick the stuffing out of the Arnie Cunninghams of this world.

When Arnie was a sophomore and taking a course called Engine Fundamentals (which used to be plain old Auto Shop I before the school got a whole bunch of vocational training money from the Federal government), a kid named Roger Gilman beat the living shit out of him. That’s pretty fucking vulgar, I know, but there’s just no fancy, elegant way to put it. Gilman just beat the living shit out of Arnie. The beating was bad enough to keep Arnie out of school for a couple of days, and Gilman got a one-week vacation, courtesy of the management. Gilman was now in prison on a hijacking charge. Buddy Repperton had been part of Roger Gilman’s circle of friends and had more or less inherited leadership of Gilman’s group.

For Arnie, going to class in the shop area was like visiting a demilitarized zone. Then, if he got back alive after period seven, he’d run all the way to the other end of the school with his chessboard and men under his arm for a chess club meeting or a game.

I remember going to a city chess tourney in Squirrel Hill one day the year before and seeing something which, to me, symbolized my friend’s schizo school-life. There he was, hunched gravely over his board in the thick, carved silence which is mostly what you hear at such affairs. After a long, thoughtful pause, he moved a rook with a hand into which grease and motor-oil had been so deeply grimed that not even Boraxo would take it all out.