It wasn’t that Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys.
Well, actually it was because Miss Thorton didn’t trust 13-year-old boys. She’d
seen enough of them in her day. It had been, after all, nearly 20 years since
that promising day that she had stood with the roll of paper in her hand
proclaiming her a graduate of our state teacher’s college.
So much promise, promise that would be soiled by years of
disappointments, rejections, bypasses, and dreams unfulfilled. Unmarried,
unrecognized, un-promoted, and uninspired, she found herself relegated to “teaching”
Study Hall. Gone were the dreams of filling young minds with the glories of poetry
and great novels. There was little chance now, it seemed, that she would be
remembered as anyone’s inspiration, only as the one who could spot two students
passing notes in the farthest corner of her kingdom, and, it was rumored, could
spot the smell of a “Corn Nut” from a hundred feet away.
There was only one reward for her assignment. That reward
was the provision of ample time to reflect upon the perfidious nature of young
boys, those vile, scheming, lascivious creature who comprised half of her care.
Oh, they were base and evil. “See,” she would think to herself, “how sweetly
the young girls attend their maidenly duties and prepare themselves for life.”
The thought that she had once sat in this very room in such preparation and
that her efforts failed, epically, never entered her mind.
She was, after all, better off than the teachers at the “colored”
school who taught with hand-me-down textbooks for half her meager salary. And,
she reflected, she had never given birth to anything as vile as a boy.
“Boys,” she would think, whose need for punishment was the sine qua non of her life. She operated under
the assumption that they—the boys—were permanently and assiduously up to no
good. With this as a guide, and with sharp eyes, she had exposed many a pernicious
plot. Concomitantly, she had relegated, she didn’t know how many, promising
lads to a life of shame-showered repentance.
It was her only joy, as I have intimated.
Her attention on this day focused on two of the worst. They
were the worst for two reasons. First, they were sharp and cunning, evil beyond
their years. Second, she had been, so far, unable to catch them at anything
more deleterious than drawing pictures of jet planes strafing Chinese soldiers.
Even then, Mr, Caruthers, the principal, had refused to punish such pernicious
behavior to the degree she deemed appropriate. “Probably,” she thought, “he had
been guilty of a similar crime, only with Nazis and Japs for targets.”
The day, she fumed when she saw the first of the pair leave
his seat and squirm his way to her desk. Reaching her, his beady eyes narrowed,
and deceit oozed from them like sewage from a cracked pipe.
“May I go to the library?”
The library? A lifelong drunk couldn’t have asked directions
to a temperance hall and sounded anymore incongruous. “For what purpose?”
“Gotta do a paper.” His eyes turned dirty yellow, a sure
sign of mendacity.
“Don’t you think you might need to take notes?”
The miscreant looked at his empty hands and his mind made a calculation
that would have impressed Isaac Newton. “Yessum,” he said and marched back to his
desk, to return a few minutes later, flashing the cover of a “Big Chief.” When
he passed the desk of his partner-in-crime, the teacher had detected a sly signal
that would have impressed the most adroit Soviet spy.
He was soon off, followed by his evil twin, to engage in
whatever bit of mischief they had devised.
Today, though, they weren’t the only ones with a plan. Miss
Thornton was harboring her own. She beckoned toward Rita Mae Collingsworth, the
richest and most despised girl in class, a tandem that made her a most
excellent temporary monitor. “I’ll be right back,” she said after seating the
young girl on “The Throne of Temporary Authority,” as the other kids called it.
Miss Thornton entered the library and motioned the Librarian
for silence. She then sleazed near, holding up two fingers with a questioning look.
The Librarian, a world-class whisperer, said, “In the magazine section.” She added,
“I’ll swear, I think those boys have a real interest in geography.” She started
to add a laudatory coda, but Miss Thornton had left the scene.
She approached the nook containing magazines with
the prowess of an Apache. She stopped before turning into it and strained her
ears. Ah, she could hear perfectly.
“Look at this one,” a voice said.
“Gollee,” another voice said, adding, “Do white women’s look
like that?”
“Boogie Shannon says they do.”
“None of them look the same. Wonder why?”
“Just the way the lord made them, I reckon.”
“I wonder why they don’t take pictures of white women like
this?”
“I guess they let them do it in Africa but nowhere else.”
“Man, that’s something.”
“Gollee. Turn the page.”
That was enough. She sprang. The scene was all she had
suspected: two sets of eyes as large as coffee saucers, two faces strained with
terror, and an open copy of a National Geographic,
The eyes belonged to Kenny Gardner and me, and the ordeal
that lay ahead of us would have made Tomás de Torquemada shake his head in awe
and admiration. I believe, to this day, that it’s the reason Kenny never played
for the NFL, and I’m not a cultural anthropologist with a Nobel Prize under my
belt.
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