Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Esc

Rock House





From the highway where I parked my car, to the door of Rick’s house, my school-years friend, I climbed a mile of twisting, scrub oak-lined, tree-shrouded path that looked more and more to my satisfaction like an animal track the farther from the highway I traveled. Every foot into the late spring woods was a foot farther from everything else. When the sound of the last diesel truck faded in the leafy rustle, it was as if I had stepped back in time. Tree bark grew rougher, with gaps wide enough to slide my hand into. Roots crossed the trail like great, vegetable veins, and when I stopped the third time to recheck his instructions in the letter I’d received the week earlier, something large and ponderous crushed through the underbrush just out of sight. I stood, my heart paralyzed, his letter fluttering in my fingers, until the heavy snap of branches vanished in the distance and an unafraid mountain jay lighted on a rock near the trail to look me over.

Despite everything, I almost turned around then, but I’d lugged my suitcase so far already.

Rick’s eccentricities drove him to excess when he was young. He’d been a bookish, pale shadow in college. So had his sister, Lynn, but I’d been a reader too, and we’d found camaraderie in our novels, swapping books, discussing imaginary lives between classes. They were trust fund kids, unbound by finances, and their worries were not the world’s worries. By my junior year, I’d fallen in love a little bit with them both, but we didn’t have any classes together my senior year. Lynn grew increasingly quiet and absent in the way pale girls can, and Rick started haunting used bookstores for rare editions, expensive leather-bound volumes with cut edges and sewn in bookmarks. I remember the second to last time we talked. He put an old book with an indecipherable title on the table beside him, which, in idleness, I picked up. He snatched it from my hands, his cheeks suddenly red, like blood under the snow, and I saw in his eyes a rage that frightened me. The next day, he tried to apologize, but all I saw was the rage. His skin became a furnace with it, baking me. We never spoke again, but I passed him or Lynn on the quad every once in a while, and I mourned the darkness in their eyes, the burnished silk of their hair. Few people know books. Few like to talk about them.

So we drifted fifteen years apart, until his letter importuning me to visit, to see the “strange edifice of my rock house home,” as he put it, to “salve his maladies and afflictions.” As misfortune would have it then, time lay heavy on my hands, and my office found me useless. Three weeks vacation and “more if you need it” became my prescription. A week in the mountains with my old friend, Rick, seemed like the best of the bad options. If there was a way to arrange it, I wouldn’t go back. Nothing in the world seemed worth the effort.

Two turns more up the tree-shrouded track, then I came to a small clearing in the woods, thigh-high with alpine grass and spring flowers. After the aged forest’s overhanging gloom, the sudden space should have lightened my spirits, but instead I felt a twinge of agoraphobia, as if the overwhelming branches held me to the Earth, and their disappearance marked the opening of a gate between me and a gray abyss. My stomach rose. I staggered a step before shaking the impression away. His letter said the clearing was his front porch, but it seemed like any other undisturbed forest space. Certainly nothing manmade marked the scene at first. I looked for a minute to find it. The mountain’s shoulder swelled at the clearing’s other side into a black limestone cliff shot through with bright mineral lines. At its base, cut into the stone, stood an entrance, tall and pointed like a medieval cathedral’s, and when I drew close, the grass tips brushing against my fingertips, I saw that the door was stone too with a stone knocker in the center. Grotesque carvings lined the recessed archway, hideous heads no bigger than my fist, all caught in mid grimace, tiny mouths filled with cat teeth and sharp tongues. Human faces, just barely. I smiled at the sight. Rick lived on a better Earth, a literary one, and where I’d failed in my bookish dreams, he’d clearly pressed on.

I used the knocker, the sound no louder than a pebble tapped against a boulder, but a few seconds later, the door drew back.

“Allan, welcome to Rock House,” said Rick, shading his eyes against the clouded sky. “I didn’t realize it was day.” He laughed. “I didn’t realize it was spring.”

He’d become even more slender since school, still as pale, but his face had developed middle-aged character. Distinct lines crossed his forehead. A patrician patina surrounded his mouth. His hand rested on the door’s edge, and he opened it more to let me in as a waft of cool air brushed my face, smelling of dark stone and deep places. Awkwardly, I stepped across the threshold and into the gloom. The door closed behind me.

My eyes adjusted slowly. Thankfully, I put my suitcase down. “That’s a long way to carry groceries.” Two hefty lamps at either end of a dark couch provided the only light. The ceiling was high, maybe twelve feet. Later I would notice the engravings that marked its surface, but now it only seemed black except for a foot-wide crystal vein that meandered diagonally across the room.

“Backpacks are the secret.” Rick gestured toward the couch.

No carpet covered the floor. The same black stone, polished to a glassy sheen, absorbed the light, and although it looked slick enough to reflect an image, I could see nothing of myself within it, not even a shadow. Glad to be done with the uphill climb, I sat. Rick stood beside the couch, his arms crossed, a scattering of nearly white hair falling across his forehead and over his eyes.

“Your house is spectacular.” I turned in my seat. The walls bowed around the room, a rounded square, maybe twenty-five feet from side to side. Tapestries alternated with bare stone. A log smoldered in a niche cut into the wall. “It must have cost a fortune.”

“I had it built.” He leaned against the couch, partly sitting on the arm. For a moment he gazed around the room, perhaps trying to see it as I saw it. “It took time to find the right location.”

“But the effort! How long would something like this take?” I imagined craftsmen dynamiting the cliff face, burrowing into the mountain, and then widening their shaft into this chamber. The floor alone would have taken hundreds of hours to turn from raw rock into a slick black plane. Slowly, out of the darkness, two other doors took shape. It wasn’t just a single room. How big was Rick’s house?

“A project like this never stops. It takes a life of its own.” His voice sounded wan, like his complexion. “Remember, we used to talk about living in stone?” He rested his hand on his knee. “Beautiful, gothic palaces. Wuthering Heights. Prince Prospero’s castle. Gormenghast.” He sighed. “Khazad-dum.”

“So, a nice brick bungalow in the suburbs wouldn’t be enough for you?”

He smiled. “No, not for me. Not for Lynn either.”

I didn’t have time to reply. The shadow that marked the door on the left shifted, and a ghost filled it. I started half from my seat, but then the ghost said in Lynn’s voice, “It’s been a long time, Allan. The sun must be abroad.” I’d almost forgotten how low she spoke. How she drew that contralto note from such a narrow reed, I never knew, but it recalled the nights in her brother’s dorm, the three of us sprawled across his bed on our backs; Rick at one end, listening; Lynn at the other, propped by a pillow, a book in her hand reading out loud. My back against the wall, I crossed the two in the middle, our legs intertwined. I could almost feel Rick’s bare foot braced against my thigh; how Lynn’s leg draped over mine so that when she reached a climactic moment in the story her calf muscle tensed, pulling me closer to her; her voice soothing us both, like a steady wash of waves against a rocky beach. Now, her face and hair reflected the table light perfectly, but from a distance, a far moon behind thin clouds, and her white dress hung from her shoulders to her feet in an unbroken line.

She walked a step closer, and the lunar glow grew stronger. Where Rick had aged, Lynn had improved to lustrousness. She smiled and pushed her hair away from her ears. “Do you want to see the rest?”

The door on the right led to a kitchen and storage room. The chrome surfaces seemed out of place in the stone chamber.

Rick opened a cabinet beside the stove, revealing a large tank. “Propane for cooking and heat, although I prefer the fireplaces. There’s solar panels outside and battery storage for electricity. We have to budget our use, I’m afraid.” He turned off the lights. “We’ve grown used to darkness or candles. Books by candlelight, ah, that is the way they were meant to be read.”

I sighed with content. The empty years after college already were fading. Books, a comfortable chair, and people to talk to about them.

Lynn excused herself when we entered the other hallway. Her fingers grazed my cheek. “It’s really good to see you again, Allan.” She entered the first room before closing a door behind her.

Rick grimaced, his emotions hard to discern in the hallway’s dim ceiling light. “She’s not totally . . . healthy. She tires, I’m afraid. We both do.”

I touched my cheek. The year after college I’d taken up with a goth girl who looked somewhat like Lynn, except with black lipstick and multiple piercings. The same slenderness. A passing resemblance in her eyes and hair, but the relationship was a failure. She didn’t read beyond Anne Rice. She felt lovemaking was too earthy, too mundane, below her ideas about death, decay and her fascination with vampires. I tried, but I couldn’t picture Lynn when I was with her. The few times she consented, it was an act of quid pro quo, a straight exchange of services. She liked me to drive to a cemetery where I could go down on her in the car’s backseat, the windows open so the cut grass and freshly turned dirt smells would fill her nose. She longed to couple on a fresh grave or in a tomb, but I was too squeamish. Her voice was wrong. She was not Lynn.

Rick opened a second door. Beyond him, the light didn’t show more of the hallway than a few feet.

“You said in your letter that you weren’t doing well. Something about ‘afflictions?’”

“Yes.” A switch clicked on. “This is the guest bedroom. I hope it’s comfortable enough for you.” A bedside light on a small stand showed a bed, a bureau and a chair. Like the front room, tapestries hung from the ceiling to cover the walls. “Afflicted, did I say that? I suppose I am.”

“You said maladies, too.” I shivered. Away from the fireplace, the air bit with cave cold. I wondered if I had packed a sweater. A thick, folded quilt covered the foot end of the bed.

Two other doors opened into bedrooms. The next revealed a bathroom, where both the toilet and the sink had been shaped directly from rock. A black curtain covered the shower. I didn’t realize the bathroom had a mirror until I stepped in front of the sink, where my own face startled me.

“How many square feet?” I still couldn’t see the hallway’s end.

“Two thousand, originally.” He sounded ironic. “Now, I’ve lost track.”

The heart of Rick’s house came at the last door. Another peaked cathedral arch like the front entrance waited, but this was unadorned, and our footsteps echoed when we entered. Rick turned on a single lamp on a reading table flanked by two soft-looking chairs. Its weak rays barely reached the walls, twenty feet away, and what they illuminated were books on shelves all the way around the room. A ladder attached to a rail fifteen feet above and mounted on wheels below provided access to the higher volumes. My breath caught in my throat. Books filled every space, all leather-bound, and rarities, no doubt. Their smell filled the air, parchment and ink and binding glues.

“My library.” Rick waved his hand. “It and this house have been my life’s work.”

The books’ spines felt cool across my palm. They were solidly packed from end to end. I saw no place to add a new acquisition.

Rick stood beside me. “Here’s an oddity.” He took a book from a shelf above his head. “Look at this one.”

Its brown cover had no title. I moved to the light, but when I tried to open it, the pages stuck at the bottom as if glued. “It’s damaged.” I held it out to him.

“No, not really. Look at the edge.”

I turned the book on end. The bottom pages didn’t look like paper at all. The surface was slick, and it clicked against my fingernail.

“Fossilization takes centuries, they say. Water carries dissolved minerals, and the minerals displace the organic material, cell by cell, so thousands of years later we can find complete trunks from ancient trees. Perfectly duplicated leaves in stone.” He took the book back. “We find the dinosaurs, even, revealed in rock’s slow triumph. Stone echoes.”

“But it is, as you say, a gradual process. You can’t be implying that your book is turning into a fossil.”

“It has been on that shelf for fourteen months. Some of the titles have become . . . permanent, a part of the wall and shelf. The shelves themselves.” He shrugged. “I’m not sad about it. There’s a poetry here. If the trend continues, my library will always exist. I only read the same one or two of them anymore anyway.” His tone became wistful. “Mostly I like to come in here and sit with the books around me.”

I shivered again, but not from the cold.

“You must see this, though, at the back of the library.”

He led me to a narrow exit surrounded by shelves, but it didn’t look like the other doors in the house, although its top led to a point too. The edges were rolled and smooth, more like flesh than stone, and a damp seep glistened on the surface. Rick handed me a flashlight. “The electrical lines don’t go this far.”

I had to rotate my shoulders to squeeze through the door, and the wet stone moistened my shirt. The flashlight cut a clear shaft in the darkness to reveal the library floor’s perfect plane broken into gentle corrugations, and instead of walls, long, natural stone columns connecting the floor to the ceiling. Tan stone replaced the black. “You broke into a cave?”

“I don’t think so. I only discovered this a few weeks ago. It wasn’t as large then.”

“What do you mean?” The light played across the ceiling, catching water drops in brilliant flashes dangling from stalactite teeth.

“I mean, this room is new. It didn’t exist when I finished the house.”

When I turned, the flashlight changed his face into a landscape of bright whites and shadows. “I don’t understand.”

He walked into the strange room, dragging his hands across the stone on either side, past me so that he stood near the middle. “This is the affliction I wrote you about. My malady. My evolving rock house.”

“Jesus, Rick.” A water drop released from the ceiling, caught the flashlight’s beam for a glittering instant, then plinked loudly like a glass bell into a shallow pool. “What can I do? Why did you ask me to come?”

He looked at me intently. “We ended on some awkwardness, I remember. I’ve always been sorry for that. It was my jealous soul.”

I couldn’t think of an adequate reply. A straightforward apology left me uncomfortable. “Are there bats, too?”

Rick shook his head.

He pointed his flashlight at his feet. The pool picked up the glare. It was if he stood on a radiant platform. “You have the imagination for it. I would have thought of you, eventually, but it was Lynn’s idea. She asked me to write.”

After much conversation, I grew too tired to talk. Most of the time he sat on his library chair, a book unopened in his lap. He’d lit a candle and turned out the lamp. I sat with him next to that flickering flame, reminiscing about the books we’d read in college. It made me happy to talk with him again, like those times when all that mattered were our thoughts and interpretations, when we considered ourselves a part of the literary elite, polishing off volume after volume, washing them down with wine and talk and long passing nights listening to Lynn read. I thought again of her leg draped over mine and the small contractions in her calf as her speech bathed us, of the intensity in her gaze moving from word to word. She kissed me goodnight the last time we read together, at the door of Rick’s room. It was the only time. The next day was when Rick grew so angry about the antique book.

Lynn had asked for me!

When I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer, I excused myself to my room. It wasn’t until I was in bed that I looked at my watch. It was only 6:30 p.m. I turned the light out.

The darkness descended. Nothing else describes it. Lying in bed, the quilt pulled to my chin, the utter blackness of a cave enveloped me. My eyes strained to see anything, vainly, waited to adjust to the darkness, but there was nothing to adjust to, and for the first time since I had entered Rick’s rock house, the weight of the mountain above me made its presence known. The quiet, too, was utter. No click of a clock. No whisper of air conditioning. No refrigerator buzz. Nothing except the rush of my own pulse in my ears, and soon I couldn’t hear that. I held my breath in the silence. Finally, I felt on the table beside the bed for my watch. The tiny green light exploded behind the time: 6:43. It winked out. I pressed it again just to see the hopeful green planet swimming in the unlit space. But when I pressed a third time, the light shone dimmer, and on the last press, the light barely came on before fading to nothing. My battery had died. Sadly, I put the watch back on the table. It felt cowardly to turn the table light on, and Rick had said they budgeted the electricity.

Once, when I was a child, I’d gone on a cave tour with my father. The guide stopped us in a curved hallway, and then he turned out the lights. He said, “This is what a blind man sees every day of his life.” Delighted at first, I wiggled my fingers in front of my face, but the guide kept the lights off for too long. I pressed against the wall, trying to grow small, too afraid to reach for my father. My heart stuttered. Then, something touched the back of my neck.

Later, they told me I had had a seizure.

I don’t know. I don’t remember that part, but it seemed to me, in the instant before all memory fled, something whispered in my ear, its talon on my neck, sharp nail against my skin, teeth clicking together, an airy whisper saying things I didn’t want to understand.

Now, in the room’s darkness, I lay still for a minute, an hour, a night. Who could guess how long? It seemed, bizarrely, as if the bed were slowly spinning. I tried counting breaths, and wondered if I would be able to tell the difference between being awake in the lightless room or asleep in a lightless dream.

Then, I did hear a noise, a slippery creep that could have been nothing, the sound of a single hair in my ear brushing against another, or the near undetectable rush of a lone drop of water running down the wall, but it repeated. Something was in my room. I became a child again as the steps approached my bed, singular, each, and loud now that came toward me, until they must be at my bed’s side. Then, a touch against the quilt. A silky swish of something brushing toward my face.

My heart, my chest, the muscles of my neck, tensed so I thought I would burst. My back arched slightly as my body clenched. I couldn’t scream or voluntarily move. Maybe I whimpered. I’m not proud of it, but the darkness like that, and the sound in the black. Then, a warm caress on my face, a warm breath of air against my lips. Lips on my lips. It took me a second to react, to realize the tongue seeking mine was real and human. I reached out from under the quilt to find an arm, and my fingers moved up to wrap in long hair. The lips pulled away. Cloth rustled. Soft clothes dropped to the floor. The quilt lifted to let in a cool draft, and the bed rocked. Knees bumped knees. The kiss again. I caressed her, slid down to the hip’s fine curve and pulled her toward me.

In that total dark, only the baby seal feel of her skin on mine existed. Only her exhalations, warm and explosive against my neck. Only the taste of her mouth, the sweat on her face. Only her fertile smell. We could have been floating above a desert or marooned at sea or on an arena’s wide-open floor.

Some time later, her leg still draped over my stomach, her head on my shoulder and my hand on the small of her back, my breath at last slowed to normal. I broke the peace. “After all these years, why now?”

She kissed the underside of my chin, then moved her hand between her thigh and my stomach, down until she held me again, and soon, much sooner than I would have believed possible, I stirred. She levered herself back into position, supple as an eel, but this time my senses expanded beyond the languid cavort beneath the quilt, beyond my hands gliding from sweat-slick shoulder blades to curving back, beyond our consuming mouths, to the room’s stone walls, as if our gasping breath served as a bat’s sonar, sending signals back to me. I sensed the room and the halls and the moisture trapped in the rocks, and a liquid, mineral sentience around us, listening and urging, greedily absorbing, until, behind that, I felt a brooding overwhelming possessiveness. The walls of Rick’s rock house became quiveringly alive, dampness flushed, as if the mountain was reaching into the room, guiding us, huge limestone fingers holding us together, connecting us so firmly and deeply and singly that I thought we had become just one orgasmic being. For an instant I tried to slide out from under Lynn, from under the mountain, but the feeling was too strong, too good, too frightening, and the second time with her it was if my skull emptied out along with everything else.

When it ended, Lynn stroked my chest. Her damp hair stuck to the side of my face. She spoke. “You ask why now?” I listened to the empty room, just as sightless, but the mountain had retreated, and I felt we were alone. She said, “Nostalgia, maybe.” Her palm lay still on my heart. “I needed a change.” As quietly as she had entered, she left, navigating from the black room by feel or memory.

She’d said, “nostalgia,” but we’d never been lovers before. Nostalgia for what? I wondered. But I didn’t think about it long; I could still feel her skin against my hand, the touch of her lips under my chin. The sheets were clingy with our sweat.

I don’t know how long I was awake after that sleep before I realized it. What I noticed was a swelling of passing candlelight under my door, spreading long yellow fingers that crept across the floor before vanishing, and I felt as if I had slept for some time. I didn’t stir at first. The stately wash of light crossing the stone produced a strong déjà vu, like this wasn’t the first passing of the light, as if this was a routine for me.

Turning the light on, I got out of bed. Goosebumps prickled my legs as I pulled on my socks, but even with them, a cool draft I hadn’t noticed the night before crossed my ankles. Fully dressed, wearing both my sweatshirts, I followed the draft to one of the tapestries. The heavy fabric pulled aside reluctantly, the bottom edge of the cloth no longer cloth at all, but solid rock. At the base of the wall, a ragged hole a foot across blew a steady breeze. The room light didn’t reveal anything past the first foot, but the small tunnel sloped down from the floor. Roomy for a rat; too small for a person.

My watch truly had died. I wondered about the time.

Rick sat in the kitchen with a candle next to his plate. “Nothing tastes good to me anymore.” He pushed a spoonful of eggs from one side to the other. “But I’m never hungry, anyway.” I took a chair on the other side. He looked at me for a long time. “My tastes have grown too sensitive, perhaps. All my senses feel acute.”

I asked him about the hole in my room, but he shrugged his shoulders once, as if to say there was nothing he could do about it.

He dropped his fork onto the table. “Do you remember how we used to talk about living in castles?”

I nodded. “Great stories in castles.”

“It’s the stone. The people are impermanent, but the stone lasts. That’s why they were given names. There were other features too.”

“Drafts.”

“People hiding behind the arras.”

I thought about the tapestries hanging in my room. With the lights out, a voyeur wouldn’t need to hide behind them. He could stand right beside my bed. “Poor Polonius,” I ventured, uncertainly.

“Noises, too. No conspiracy would be safe in a castle. The quietist breath around a corner, down the hall, behind a closed door, might echo to the king’s ears. The acoustics can be unpredictable.”

Maybe he had a point he was trying to make with this conversation, but with the memory of my and Lynn’s throaty gasps so fresh in my ear, I didn’t want to know. I left the table and opened a cupboard beside the sink. “Do you have any bread?”

“It’s gone bad. Canned goods or the refrigerator are all I have to offer.”

Lynn drifted into the kitchen, her white dress brushing against the floor. In the candlelight, I couldn’t tell if she looked at me or not as she sat. Rick took her hand, kissed her knuckles, “You’re wasting.”

“Aren’t we all?” She took a pinch of Rick’s eggs from his plate and put it in her mouth.

An orange in the bottom refrigerator drawer would do for a breakfast. “I’m chilled. I think I’ll eat by the fireplace.”

“We’ll join you.” Rick stood, still holding Lynn’s hand.

The fire had died, but soon a couple good sized logs were blazing, warming my shins and face. Ruddy light illuminated the room better than the table lamps. Medieval images decorated the tapestries: knights, castles, banquets, stylized dragons, horses, grain tied in vertical bundles, and the images continued onto the ceiling, etched deeply, but they were black on black, so only the contrast of the fire-lit surfaces to the unlit grooves revealed them at all.

Rick and Lynn took seats farther away. I wondered if the fire’s heat reached them. Lynn seemed paler than yesterday, if that were possible. Dark circles underscored her eyes. “Man’s relationship to stone goes way back.”

Rick nodded, as if this were a continued conversation. “I like Lot’s wife. That was a fitting reward.”

I ventured, “Didn’t she turn into a salt pillar?”

Lynn sniffed. “Too bad about that. The first rain must have dissolved her into a puddle. Tokien’s stone trolls. Rain and wind wouldn’t touch them.”

“Ah, yes, and Ozmandias, King of kings. Time consumed his kingdom, but his statue remained.”

Lynn closed her eyes. “The Easter Island heads. I love a good megalith.”

“They’re everywhere.” Rick pushed his chair closer to Lynn so he could put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, and his fingers wrapped around her upper arm. It was not a brotherly embrace. “Stonehenge, Carnac, over 50,000 megaliths in Europe alone.”

A log popped loudly, shooting a spark onto the floor. It pulsed a deep heart red for a minute before winking out, and it made me sad. “What time is it?”

Rick laughed, as if I’d finally asked the right question. “It’s our time, of course.”

Lynn nodded. “Our time, yes. The stone age.”

With the firelight on their white faces, on Lynn’s white dress, they looked more like statuary than people.

“No, I mean time of day.”

Lynn sighed in disappointment. “Oh, I thought you meant . . .” She disentangled Rick’s arm from her shoulder. “We don’t open the door. Sun, moon, stars and clocks don’t matter anymore. That’s the beauty of Rock House. That and the books. I don’t know what season it is.” She yawned. “I woke too soon. I’m going back to bed.”

“It’s late spring.” Suddenly it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember if I’d slept only once in their house, of if I’d slept several times. It was disorienting. “Do you know now long I’ve been here?”

Lynn looked at me from the doorway, her face a pale wisp in the shadow. “You have always been here in a way.”

Rick stared into the fire until the top log burned through and fell in two pieces, scattering a dozen glowing coals across the stone. He started, as if out of deep thought. “Let’s go look at the tunnel you discovered.”

He picked up a flashlight in the kitchen and soon crouched on the floor behind my room’s tapestry. “I never visit in here. Really, with the way things are, I should inspect every day.”

“What do you think is happening?”

He shined the light down the hole. “A thing of beauty, surely.”

I fell to my knees beside him. The light didn’t reach the tunnel’s end.

“I thought you said it was too small to go through.” Rick scrunched his shoulders together and squeezed part of his body into the hole. “I’ll bet I could skinny down this.”

My hand fit in the gap between his back and the top of the hole. “It was smaller earlier.”

He wiggled out, then turned so he rested against the wall. “I’ll stay here for a while. If I sit quietly long enough, I hear things. Maybe I’ll hear the mountain changing.” He smiled. “I’m feeling a bit tired anyway.”

Rick placed his hands flat on the cool floor and leaned his head back. I realized he wore the thinnest of shirts, the collar open to mid- chest. How could he not be cold? His eyes were shut, and he looked nearly asleep already.

“I’ll peruse your library for a bit.”

Rick nodded.

I took a candle with me down the hall and through the library’s arched door. After some searching, I found a copy of an old favorite, Lud in the Mist. The chairs were as comfortable as they looked. The candle cast a bright light from the table. Soon I was deep into the book, reading each page by yellow glow, holding my finger under the next, ready to turn. From the other chamber, the gentle chime of water dripping into the pool provided a jeweled rhythm, steady and clean. From time to time, I caught myself nodding before reading on.

When the candle burnt down to the nub, I lit another, and after what seemed like no time at all, another one. Page after page turned weightlessly, and it seemed as if I’d been reading Lud in the Mist all my life, as if I’d reached the last page just to flip back to the beginning again. Somewhere in there, I slept, then woke to the library’s total blackness, but the weight of the book was comforting on my lap, and water dripping from stone onto stone didn’t sound intimidating at all. When I lit the next candle, I saw many stubs on the table top, their burnt wicks caught in the last smears of wax. I brought my hand before my face. My fingernails were longer than I ever remembered seeing them.

I put the book aside. My back cracked a dozen times when I stood, and both knees popped on their first steps. The candle cast a globe around me, wavering in Rock House’s drafts. A few clicks of the hallway switch on the moisture-coated wall were futile. A drip fell on my wrist. I held the candle high. On the ceiling above the light switch, a stalactite several inches long glistened; beyond that, droplets clung to the ceiling as far as the light reached. The floor felt as if it had a slight tilt to the left, and the corners that had looked so square and keenly hewed from the rock in my memory seemed rougher. The hallway didn’t look as much like a hallway now as it looked like a passageway.

The light switch in my room was no good either.

The tough parts of walking with a bare candle for illumination are that every little breath threatens to puff it out, and that the light shines directly back into the eyes. I cupped my free hand behind the flame to protect it and to shield myself. A breeze flowed from the hole in my wall, where the tapestry had flopped back into position, although the air pressure held it away from the wall. Rick’s legs stuck out from under it.

I tried to speak, but my voice croaked like a rusty pipe instead. I coughed, then tried again. “Have you heard the mountain changing?” The question didn’t have the feel of a joke.

Rick didn’t answer, and when I crouched beside him, my candle nearly guttered out. I put my hand on his leg. The hard surface cooled my hand. Already mourning, I pulled the tapestry away. Rick’s eyes were closed. His skin had taken on the same shade as the stone in his new library room, which meant, if anything, he had gained color. Reluctantly, I touched his face. As hard as the rock it had become, an incredibly detailed and expression-filled rendering of my old friend, his head leaning back, tilted just a touch to the side, as if he’d fallen asleep while sitting there. The wall behind him held him tight, and his legs had melded to the stone floor.

“Ah, Rick.” Suddenly exhausted, I sat at his feet, the heavy tapestry resting against my back. Soon, water drips soaked my sweatshirts. I could almost feel the hungry minerals looking for a way into my skin, to begin the molecule-by-molecule replacement. All I needed was to sit and let it happen. The thought of it was attractive, to sit, to gain respite, to put all things aside. This was the first of three temptations.

Beside him, the hole in the wall had widened to almost my height, peaked at the top like the library door. The tunnel sloped just as steeply, but now the candle illuminated a set of steps leading away. Rousing myself, I stood on the top stair. I had never felt an invitation more clearly. “Come down,” it said, and it would be so easy to slip from one step to the next, easing ever deeper into the earth, until the entrance behind would be long forgotten, and the journey in became all that there was. The voice called within me. I even took another step down, so that it seemed the rock trembled, while the limestone stairs became more slippery. In that sedimentary air, I smelled the fecundness of an ocean, the hidden underside of the bowl that held the sea, filled with seaweed and fish flesh. What waited at the bottom of that long descent? What lay at the root of the world? But I turned away from this second temptation to flee the room. The last I saw of Rick were his feet poking out from under the solid tapestry, never to move again.

Which brought me to Lynn’s room. I should have been thinking of how she would respond to her brother’s fate, but I wasn’t sound anymore. Rock House felt like a drowsy hallucination with all the logic of a daydream. I thought of warm afternoons on the summer porch, drifting to sleep with bees in the background, where my imagination lifted anchor and anything could happen, except here was no sun other than the tiny one balanced on my candle’s wick, and no warmth to relax into. Instead, I was eager to see her so I could share her thoughts on stone that changed and on a brother who had joined it. Only Lynn and Lynn’s voice offered a counter to the mountain’s offer. She, who walked undaunted in the perpetual night, might help me to understand.

And she waited for me, awake on her bed, lying on her back, a nearly translucent sheet covering her. She didn’t blink against the light. “I hoped you would come, Allan.” Her low voice lingered in the air. “I knew you would be on time.”

“What time, Lynn? In time for what?”

“To make it complete. Immortality is possible, but loneliness would be certain if you were not here.”

Confused, I moved next to her on the bed. Candlelight penetrated her sheet, revealing her without uncovering. Here, too, the ceiling dripped. A drop hit the sheet, soaked in. Her skin, where it touched the wet fabric, showed through.

“Be with me,” she said, “and I will stay unafraid.” Other than her eyes and mouth, she hadn’t moved. “Did I ever tell you who my favorite characters in all of literature are?”

I put my hand on her arm. It was reassuringly soft. “Aren’t you cold?”

“This is my temperature, now. I have . . . grown accustomed to it.”

Her lips were colorless with chill. I wrapped my palm around the side of her face. Her jaw moved under my hand. Her gaze shifted to meet mine. I smiled. “No, you never told me your favorite characters.”

Then I noticed her hair. The candlelight revealed so little, but when I shifted to caress her face, the light fell on her hair spread across her pillow. They were one. The bed, the pillow, her hair had turned to stone. The side of her face, where my fingers rested, shifted. Skin grew solid. Below the syncopated patter of water dripping everywhere, I could hear her body changing, like ice crackling in a cup.

“Medusa and her two sisters. The Gorgons were misunderstood.” Her breath grew short. “It’s not too late, Allan. Embrace me now. Be with me, and we will be eternal.”

The third temptation: a single move, and the intervening sheet would be gone. I could cover her, and my hardness would meet hers, forever. No more fleshy disappointments. No blind stumbling among the blind who didn’t recognize the world they lived in. No reading books that none understood or talked of or cared about. It could be all Lynn and stone and our glittering underground world. I could see it now: we’d become the castle walls that stand long after the defenders have left the ramparts, the darkling cave that held dragons, the tall rocks at Stonehenge, all everlasting. I could be like that too with Lynn, an unseen monument to literature and love. Might someone stumble upon us in a far future? What would they make of the lovers’ statue?

I could choose to be immortal and unchanging, or I could stay among the flawed, the human.

Stone crept across the side or her mouth. “Quick,” she whispered. Then an eye glazed over, and what once was liquid and living stilled. I tried to squeeze her hand, to communicate what I couldn’t say and what she couldn’t hear, now, but her hands had already gone rigid. My heart froze. I might as well have turned to stone for the little I did in Lynn’s last moments with me. At the end, her sheet crystallized. With a touch, it shattered, leaving Lynn on her bed, waiting for me to join her for all time. The empress of limestone.

Finally, the grief drove me out of her room and out of Rock House. The front door gave way stiffly, reluctantly. Outside, a hard winter sun glared off an unbroken snow field. My eyes burned and watered. I covered them for minutes before I could look upon the sunlit world. Across the snow, trees’ bare limbs rattled in the wind. Late spring had become winter.

I waded into the snow.

A year later, I looked for Rock House again. Underbrush choked the trail so I made a dozen bad turns, but when I came to the clearing, there was no door. Just rough stone, cool even on a hot, summer day. I rested my face against the hard surface. The rock wall would last as long as time, as long as Rick and Lynn.

In silence, the mountain neither praised nor condemned. It only stood, like those great immortal books that Rick and Lynn and I read late at night, night after night, intertwined on his bed. All those marvelous authors whose works became human monuments. They would survive forever. So, with my fragile flesh pressed against the unmoving stone, I couldn’t help feeling that hesitation stole my choice. My chance to last had passed.

Behind me, the sun heated the waving grass. Trees creaked and leaves brushed against one another in an unceasing whisper. All living, living until winter came and stilled them, living until new grass and leaves and trees replaced them, temporary, fleshy and weak. Pretty in the sad way a soap bubble buoyed in the wind is pretty, catching the light until it pops.

I trudged away from Rock House, deeper and deeper into the living land, empty of all hope.

If you can, some time, rest your hand on a castle wall. Touch a statue. Pick up a round rock from a river and put it in your pocket.

Only stone goes on.





Mrs. Hatcher’s Evaluation





Yesterday’s conversation with Principal Wahr kept Vice Principal Salas awake all night. “We need to cut the dead weight, Salas. Those teachers who aren’t on board with the new curriculum will be moved out, and I want them moved out immediately.” Wahr, a skinny man with just the barest wisps of white hair on an otherwise bald head, kept one hand on his keyboard and the other on his phone. As he talked, he studied his computer screen which Salas couldn’t see. “Hatcher’s the worst. She ignores the lesson plan template we instituted last year. She doesn’t write her objectives on the board for the students to see, and I’ve sat in her class. Lecture from the tardy bell to the dismissal bell. She’s a dinosaur. I’m adding her to your evaluations. Vice Principal Leanny has ignored Hatcher’s performance forever. We need fresh eyes on her.”

“I haven’t heard anything bad about Hatcher,” said Salas. “She earned teacher of the year two years ago.”

“Popular student vote. Doesn’t mean squat.” Wahr leaned forward. “Here’s how I know she needs to go. My son is going to be a freshman next year, and I don’t want him in her class. Best practice, Salas. We’re a ‘best practice’ school, and all the studies say lecture doesn’t work in social studies.” Wahr turned his attention back to the computer screen, then tapped a couple keys. “Watch her. I’ve got to eliminate a teaching position, and now that the state has removed tenure protection, she’s the best candidate. Here’s two other possibilities. You’re doing their evaluations now.” Wahr dropped file folders on the desk between them. “Evaluate and choose. Somebody’s got to go. Budget, Salas. Budget and best practice.”

He knew Hatcher, a pleasant, older woman, tending toward fat, who looked like Salas’s grandmother. He’d never observed her teaching, though. That night, as the moon moved a tree’s shadow across his bedroom wall, Salas realized he’d have to start Hatcher’s evaluation immediately. He’d get notes from Leanny, then drop in to Hatcher’s last period American History class.

Vice Principal Salas organized his day by piles. The tallish one on the left contained discipline action sheets for students in trouble, many for attendance issues, but also for cell phones in the classroom, smoking, drugs, insubordination, and one for a Theodore Remmick, a freshman who’d brought a small propane torch to school in his backpack. Parent contact sheets made the middle pile. He spent most days on the phone talking to parents, often about the first stack. Teacher evaluations made up the third pile. Much of the time he avoided the third pile. He’d been vice principal at Hareton High for fourteen years, and he knew all the teachers. If they weren’t sending kids for discipline (which meant they weren’t good at classroom management), then he limited his contact with them to drop in visits while they were teaching. Salas evaluated the N-Z teachers. Leanny handled the other half of the alphabet.

Salas dreaded evaluations. Before he’d taken the vice principal job, he’d taught four P.E. classes and one Remedial Reading (his minor had been English), so he felt silly trying to evaluate the academic disciplines. He’d gone into P.E. because he liked sports and kids. He’d been an indifferent student himself.

“Hi, Salas. What did you need?” Vice Principal Leanny leaned into his office without stepping in, her gray-rooted dark hair pulled into a ponytail. She’d started teaching French and Spanish the same year Hatcher joined the faculty, but moved into administration after ten years. With Jack Quinn’s retirement from tech ed three years ago, the two women were the longest tenured employees in the building and old friends.

“What can you tell me about Mrs. Hatcher?”

Leanny grimaced. “Wahr’s after her, isn’t he? It’s not the first time. Best teacher we have. I don’t know why Wahr wants to mix up the evaluations. I’ve been giving her exemplaries as long as I can remember.”

“No one gets exemplaries!” Wahr had directed them not to give teachers the highest rating. He had said, “Everyone can get better. Besides, if we give a teacher the highest rating, it’s hard to fire him.”

“I know. Wahr has a fit.”

Salas said, “I heard she ignores the curriculum and just lectures. That doesn’t sound good.”

“You haven’t observed her, have you? Don’t do a drive by. Give her a half hour.”

“Can you send me your notes on her for this year? I need to get up to speed.”

“Sure. Check your e-mail later.” Leanny rubbed her forehead, as if she had a headache. “Theodore Remmick is waiting outside. Is he for you? His family lives on my street. They’re a piece of work.”

Salas sighed. “Yeah, send him in.”

“By the way, I heard you’re Wahr’s hit man now.”

“What?” He glanced guiltily at the folders the principal had given him.

“Wahr hands that duty off. He’s never fired anyone. The last time the school lost teachers, he gave it to the head counselor. Sorry it’s you. The counselor quit the next year. He worried he’d be asked to do it again.”

Salas shrugged. “What are you going to do? Send Remmick in, would you?”

Theodore Remmick has to be the smallest boy in the freshman class, thought Salas. The boy’s feet hovered above the floor as he sat in the chair by the round table where Salas talked to the discipline problems. Remmick’s nose was narrow, and his hair hung over his eyes as he looked down.

“Why a propane torch?” said Salas. “What were you going to do with it?”

Remmick said, “Did you know a cow didn’t kick over a lantern in the O’Leary’s barn to start the Chicago fire in 1871? Some newspaper guy invented the story to sell papers.” Remmick smiled without looking up. “Like a fire that killed 300 people needed a fabrication to be more interesting.”

Salas paused. Sometimes a kid would deny the accusation. Sometimes he rationalized or defended, or he wouldn’t speak at all. Talking nonsense introduced a new tactic.

“You know, a propane torch is a safety issue.”

“The fire burned so hot the roofs blocks away caught fire before the flames reached them. The fire jumped the Chicago River. That’s a big river. And it kept going. Started on Sunday morning and didn’t stop until Monday evening when the wind died and it rained.”

“What does this have to do with a propane torch? Were you going to burn something?”

Remmick brushed the hair off his forehead. His eyes were brown and clear. “From Lake Michigan’s shore, the sky above the city turned orange. Thousands of people fled to the lake. I saw flame tornadoes rising through the smoke, and it roared like a train.” He closed his eyes as if feeling heat on his face.

“Son, why’d you bring a propane torch to school?” Salas put the torch on his desk. It was tiny, a hobbiest’s tool, not much larger than a cigarette lighter.

“Project for class. Can I go now? I’m missing band.” He squirmed in his seat.

Salas looked at the boy thoughtfully. “They don’t have torches in the shop?”

“I’m not in shop. History. It’s a group assignment. I volunteered it.”

The discipline guide for the district didn’t list a propane torch in any category, so Salas decided to lump it under “item inappropriate for a school setting” on the action sheet. “A week lunch detention, and any project in the future that involves flame or explosions, assume you can’t do it.”

Remmick hopped from the chair, and then offered Salas his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Salas. I’ll keep it in mind.”

When the boy left, Salas shook his head. I could write a book, he thought for the umpteenth time in his education career.





The History department head, Mr. Young, really was young. The wall posters still hadn’t yellowed, and he flinched when he saw Salas at the door: a classic, inexperienced reaction. He had become the department head by arriving late at the meeting last spring, when the history teachers voted on who would attend the extra meetings and take charge of the departmental paperwork.

“According to the district pacing guidelines, the American History classes should be looking at the causes of WWI. If she’s only to 1871, she’s almost a half century behind.” Young ran his finger down the teaching objectives for the class. “They should know mutual defense alliances, nationalism, militarism and imperialism, and from the unit they will be able to discuss America’s emergence as a military and industrial power. They only get a week. We have to be to the Cold War by April’s end or the first week in May.” He thumbed open a section in the notebook. “We have two required benchmarks for the unit: a multiple choice test and a short essay question. I have the rubric for the essay if you’d like to see it.”

Salas tried to look interested. He remembered being 15 himself and his own tour through American History. He recalled biplanes from WWI, but nothing else, which made him think about Snoopy vs. the Red Baron. Of the classes he’d hated, history bored him the most. If it weren’t for sports eligibility, he’d never be motivated to pass.

Salas almost asked Young what he thought of Mrs. Hatcher, but he didn’t want to start rumors.

From the back, Hatcher’s classroom looked like most social studies rooms. She’d covered one wall in maps. Presidents and historical scenes covered the other wall. A long whiteboard stretched across the front. Book-filled cabinets stood behind him. He smelled dry erase markers and carpet cleaner as he leveraged himself into a student desk the right size for a 6th grader, maybe, but not comfortable for an adult.

Mrs. Hatcher stood beside her desk at the front, straightening papers—she’d waved when he walked in. Salas filled in the preliminary observations on the evaluation check list. Although Hatcher did have writing on her white board, Salas didn’t understand it. In one column were names: “DeKoven, Meagher, Catherine, Barber.” Then some presidents: “Harrison, Jackson, Adams, Monroe” Then some states: “Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Ontario.” Salas was pretty sure Ontario was in Canada. She’d written one sentence on the board: “It ends at Fullerton Ave.”

What Hatcher had not written were the class learning targets, which were required. Somewhere she should have posted what teaching standards the students were addressing for the day, and what they should be expected to do when the lesson ended. Salas had the WWI standards Young had given him, including, “I will be able to explain why America became involved in the First World War.”

Students trickled into the room, taking desks around Salas. Theodore Remmick came in, nodded in Salas’s direction, then found his place. A dark-haired girl who clearly didn’t know the dress code, dressed showing too much skin, sat in the desk in front of him. “You look pretty mature to be a freshman,” she said.

“Just a visit,” said Salas.

The tardy bell rang. Salas waited for tardy students so he could record Hatcher’s procedure with them, but students filled all the desks, and there were no tardies. Conversation buzzed in the room.

Hatcher started speaking without asking for the students to quit talking. Salas gave her a low mark in the “Commands student attention before beginning instruction” category.

“We’ve moved the Chicago Fire project to Saturday.” By the time she said “Saturday,” the room had grown quiet. “Can somebody bring a big box fan? I’ll provide the extension cord.”

A boy sitting underneath the covered wagons poster raised his hand.

“Thank you, Sean. Remember it’s at 10:00 in the back parking lot.” She stepped behind her podium. “We’re going to jump four years to 1876 today and talk about the Battle of the Greasy Grass, which some might recognize as the Indian name for the battle better known as Custer’s Last Stand.”

Salas flicked through the required social studies scope and sequence guide for American History. He couldn’t find the Chicago Fire, and the class should have covered Custer’s Last Stand a month earlier, and only in passing. The district’s guidelines emphasized teaching the industrial revolution into the 1870s, and to be “cautious” in discussing “controversial” topics, which included the “resettlement of indigenous natives.”

“Five years after Chicago’s devastating fire, the city was rebuilding and recovering to become one of America’s busiest commerce centers. Meanwhile, 1,200 miles away, in the Montana wilds, General George Armstrong Custer led the 7th Calvary in an attempt to return Cheyenne and Lakota Indians to their reservations.”

Most students were not taking notes, and although they weren’t talking, they didn’t seem to be paying attention to Hatcher, either. Her soft, almost melodious voice lulled him, and within a few minutes, he lost track. The dress code violation slumped into her desk so her shoulders lowered to the chair’s top. He wrote a comment on the evaluation sheet, “Straightforward lecture. No attempt to engage students’ attention.” He also noted she hadn’t given the students a task, like taking notes, nor had she handed out any aids to guide their thinking, like a graphical organizer or an outline template.

Hatcher droned on and on. Salas looked up at the clock. Only ten minutes into the class. He thought about leaving and then returning to watch what she did in the last five minutes, but the room’s warmth relaxed him. Several students had closed their eyes. Besides, the waiting papers in his office weren’t going anywhere.

His thoughts drifted to what he knew about The Battle of the Little Big Horn: almost nothing. He’d seen a movie with Dustin Hoffman in it years before, Little Big Man, that had the battle in it.

Hatcher’s voice rose and fell in the background, like a breeze. Salas listened, and he found himself imagining the sun setting behind the low Montana hills. He pictured sitting on a horse blanket, back from the cooking fire. It had been too hot during the day for him to want to sit closer. He leaned against his bedding, his mind drifting. They’d been told not to set up tents, which meant they’d do a night march, another long, stumbling trek in the dark, walking from one desolate spot to the next.

Salas twitched, then looked around the room. Had any students noticed he’d almost gone to sleep? None appeared to be looking at him, though. Some were in the exaggerated slump mode like the girl sitting in front of him. A couple rested their heads on their arms. Some propped their elbows on their desks and cupped their chins.

Still, Hatcher continued talking. “Single-shot Springfield carbines jammed when overheated,” she said, and then went on to horses used as breastworks. Twenty minutes passed. Salas closed his eyes. The pencil in his hand grew heavy, reminding him of a gun stock, how it would feel, its solidity. He propped the gun across his knees, sitting on the ground. In the distance, gunfire, the heavy pop of Springfields filled the afternoon air. Custer’s forces, he thought. Custer would drive the enemy back and join them. There were so many hostiles! Even their women were in the battle, waving blankets, scaring the horses away. Did Reno and Benteen know what they were doing?

He took a long, warm drink from his canteen. Other soldiers sat around him, exhausted, frightened. They smelled of dust and horse sweat and days of travel. More gunfire to the north, but the sounds didn’t appear to be getting closer. A horsefly landed on his neck. Bit him. He slapped at it, too tired to care.

Behind the muffled battle sounds and the tired horses’ breathing, he heard a bell. He cocked his head. Who would be ringing a bell on the battlefield, in the sun and dirt and waving grass? He regripped the rifle, and it became a pencil, and the dismissal bell rang, ending class.

“Tomorrow we will cover the aftermath,” said Hatcher. “Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the others make for an interesting story.”

Salas looked around, confused. Some students appeared dazed too, but they shook it off before heading into the hallway.





Before going home that afternoon, Salas stopped in the school library to pick up a book on Custer’s Last Stand, but the books were gone. The librarian said, “It was a massacre. Every source checked out before the first bus left the parking lot. Kids were on the computers doing searches like crazy until we closed.”

That night it took a long time to fall asleep. What had happened in Hatcher’s class? The experience unnerved him a bit. Had he suffered a fugue or a blackout? He scratched at the spot on his neck where the horsefly had bit him. The insect must have been in Hatcher’s room, and he incorporated it into the Custer hallucination, because it left a distinct welt on his skin. When he did fall asleep, screams and gunfire and arrows haunted his dreams.





At the day’s beginning, Leanny leaned into his office the same way she’d done the day before. “Did you watch her yesterday? What did you think?”

Salas nodded. When he’d gone over his observation sheet from the day before, he had a hard time remembering what he’d seen in Hatcher’s class. If he’d drifted off while evaluating her, it wouldn’t be fair to the teacher.

“I’m not sure.” He swallowed. “I’m not sure what I learned.”

Leanny nodded knowingly. “But you learned, didn’t you? Did you know that more Hatcher kids go into education than any other teacher in the building? Talk to counseling. They’ll tell you. I’ll bet half the history teachers in the district are Hatcher’s former students. You want to know something else interesting? Look up Theodore Remmick’s grades for this year. He hasn’t had a mark above ‘D’ since sixth grade.” She laughed. “I saw him in the lunch detention room yesterday after you talked to him, reading.”

Salas checked his to-do list. He needed to observe the other two teachers Wahr had added to his evaluations, plus handle today’s parent contacts. He hoped he wouldn’t have a schedule buster, but he ended up spending the morning talking to a junior who had started (and ended) a fight in the locker room. Fighting drew an automatic suspension, but the other student’s parents also wanted to press assault charges, so the campus police officer visited his office several times, as did the district’s lawyer, both boys’ parents, the teacher, and witnesses who couldn’t agree on even the most basic details.

At one point, the parents who wanted to press charges started yelling at Coach Persigo for not supervising the locker room “in a professional manner.” They said they wanted to sue him and the school district.

It took Salas a half hour afterwards with Persigo to convince him the parents weren’t going to sue. “I’ve been in the district too long to put up with this shit,” said Persigo. “We got a real chance to make the playoffs this year. I don’t need the distraction. I can’t teach classes, coach baseball and worry about lawsuits at the same time. No respect. There’s no respect. ”

A false fire alarm cleared the building ten minutes before lunch, which took forty-five minutes for the fire department to respond to, so Salas spent almost an hour wandering around the practice football and baseball fields with the students and their teachers, waiting for the okay to reenter the school.

Leanny caught up to him as he followed the students back into the building. She walked beside him for a minute without talking. Finally, she said, “Do you have an opinion about the new evaluation forms?”

“They’re clear. Fill in the rubric. Add up the score. Teachers know what’s expected. Evaluators know what to look for.”

“Did you notice there’s no measurement like ‘Instills a love of learning in students’? It doesn’t say, ‘Changes students’ attitude about the subject’ or ‘Enriches students’ lives’ or ‘Provides a meaningful adult role model’ or “Creates an environment for student self discovery’?”

Salas put his hands behind his back. Most students were entering the building through the gym doors. They’d piled up to squeeze through the bottle neck, and they weren’t in a hurry to get back to class. He and Leanny stopped behind the milling heads. “You can’t evaluate those areas. They’re subjective.”

“Exactly,” said Leanny. “How much do you remember from high school? I mean, if you had to take a subject test in any class you took, how would you do?”

Leanny smiled at him, which made Salas think she was leading him to a trap. “Not well, probably. I haven’t studied for the tests.”

“Exactly, so if you don’t remember much, and you can’t pass the tests, what was high school’s point? Did you get a measurable experience from it?”

Mostly Salas remembered being on the baseball team during high school. He remembered sitting in Algebra, keeping one eye on the clock and one on the cloud cover out the window. If it rained, they’d go to the gym to throw, which he didn’t like. In the winter, he did weight room work and he ran. By late February, he started marking the calendar, tracking the days left until spring training. He loved it when the coaches trotted with them out to the field, wearing their sweats and ball jackets. He loved wheeling the trashcan full of bats into the dugout. He remembered stepping onto the freshly swept infield and how satisfying a grounder thumping into the glove’s pocket felt.

“I decided to major in P.E. in high school.”

“So other subjects for four years were worth it. You discovered what you loved!”

The crowd shuffled forward. In a few minutes he would be back at his desk, trying to do a full day’s work in the half day he had left.

“I don’t know. Where are you going with this?”

“Just saying the evaluations aren’t the whole picture. Maybe high school is more than observable, measurable achievement.”

Wahr waited for Salas in his office. “We need to move up the schedule on these evaluations. The superintendent wants preliminary staffing done by next week. I’m putting out a note to teachers who are quitting, transferring or retiring. We still have to cut a position, though. How’s Hatcher’s evaluation? Did you watch her?”

Salas didn’t know where to go in his own office. Wahr partially sat on the desk, so Salas didn’t feel like he could sit in the desk chair. He felt like an intruder. “She looks bad on paper. She lectured for the whole period.”

“Just like I said. You need to do at least two more observations. We can’t move on a teacher without three full observations. Collect her lesson plans and check her students’ benchmark test scores to complete the packet.”

Salas thought about the class he’d watched. He could still smell the horses at Greasy Grass. “She gave an . . . interesting presentation. Being in her room felt . . . different.”

“I don’t care if she delivered the Sermon on the Mount. You can’t talk to fifteen-year-olds for that long and be effective. She’s an expensive, entrenched fossil who’s teaching like it’s 1950. I can replace her with a first year teacher whose salary would be half as much and who would know the latest trends in education.”

“She might not be our best choice to cut.”

Wahr snorted, pushed himself up from the desk, and said, “I need a name by next week. It ought to be Hatcher, but somehow we’ve got to trim a position. Make a choice.”





Hatcher started the afternoon class with Sitting Bull, but by the end had somehow moved into the Alaskan gold rush. Afterwards, when he looked at his observation sheet, he had written “last American frontier,” “Jack London,” and “Klondike.” He hadn’t written how she began class, whether the students’ learning objectives were on the board, or if she had varied her teaching technique.

As he walked away from her room, though, he rubbed his wrists. They ached and his hands were icy cold as if he had been holding a heavy gold pan in the frigid river’s rolling water, swirling and swirling and swirling the nondescript sand at the pan’s bottom, hoping for telltale color, hoping for a nugget to make the weeks in the wilderness worthwhile. Moving through the hallway, jostled by students going to class, he thought he could still hear the mosquitoes’ incessant buzz, and smell the wind coming down from the frozen mountain tops, still snow-capped in the summer’s middle.

After school, the librarian said, “Sorry. We had a rush on gold mining books. You missed out again.”





Coach Persigo called Salas that evening, just after Salas had settled in front of the television with a sandwich and a beer. The public broadcast station scheduled an interesting sounding documentary on the Alaskan Gold Rush.

“That kid’s parents hired a lawyer. He called me to schedule a deposition. Thirty-five years teaching school, and my techniques are called into question because one immature kid can’t settle an argument without hitting another immature kid. Is that my fault? Kids get into it some time. Is that my fault?”

Salas gripped the phone tightly. He never knew what to say to a teacher in full rant mode.

“I’ve got grandkids, Salas, and I don’t see them enough. My gutters need painting. I don’t have time to waste on a stupid lawsuit.”

Salas gave him the school district’s lawyer’s number. “I’m sure it will come to nothing, Coach. The parents don’t have a case. You know how folks can get. A week from now we’ll be laughing about this.”

Persigo didn’t speak. Salas could hear him breathing. The television showed a snow-covered mountain range, and then zoomed until it focused on a lone man leading a burro up a rude trail. A pick and shovel were strapped to the animal’s back. Salas longed to turn up the sound.

“You’d better be right,” said Persigo. “Life’s too short.”





Salas met with Mrs. Hatcher at lunch to go over his observations, a mandated step in the evaluation process. She dropped her lesson plan book on his conference table and sat in the same chair students who were in trouble used. Even her hands are plump, Salas thought. She personified softness, like a teacher-shaped pillow, but she gazed at him sharply, and when she smiled her face broke into laugh lines.

“Your lecture interested me,” said Salas. “You clearly know your subject area.” (“Subject Area Knowledge” was another area on the evaluation, but he wasn’t sure how to evaluate her there. Did she really know her subject area? He’d fallen into the weird daydream both days, and he didn’t know what she’d said.)

“I love history. I think what I’ve learned most as a teacher in all these years is a passion for my subject.” Her voice was just as gentle in person as in the classroom, and she smelled of lavender.

“Yes, that’s clear.” Salas took a deep breath. He ran his finger down the check-sheet identifying her shortcomings, which were many. But he couldn’t force himself to make a criticism. He had thought this conference would be perfunctory. He’d point out that she ignored the district’s guidelines and policies, allow her to say whatever she wanted in her defense, and then be able to say later they had had a meeting, which the union required. He’d done numerous evaluation meetings in the past with other teachers that were no more substantial.

The truth, he thought, is I don’t have any idea what’s going on in any teacher’s classroom. I’m in them such a small percentage of the time. He remembered his first assistant coaching position. The head coach had sent him to the practice field with the freshmen boys who wanted to play infield. He was supposed to show them technique and evaluate who could start for the first freshmen game coming up in a week. Ambition and idealism filled him. Any boy can learn to play better, he’d thought. They just needed time and the right instruction. He worked with the group for two hours, but just before the practice ended, the head coach stopped by to watch. He said to Salas as he left, “Bad technique. It’ll be a miracle if they win a game this year.”

Salas had been dumbfounded. He thought, But you should see how far they’ve come! You should have seen them two hours ago!

“Can I see your lesson plans?” Salas asked.

Mrs. Hatcher pushed them toward him. She’d written little in individual days. This week, for example, included the Chicago Fire, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Alaska Gold Rush. Hatcher had written “1850-1900” and drawn an arrow through the week.

“Not very detailed,” said Salas.

Mrs. Hatcher laughed. “Detail’s in the head, Mr. Salas. I know what to cover.”

“But I don’t see your learning objectives. You haven’t written the standards you’re teaching. You don’t write them on the board either. I’m supposed to be able to ask any student in your class the learning objective for the day’s lesson, and they should be able to tell me. That’s best practice.”

“Did you ask them this week?”

“Uh, no, but you never stated an objective. They wouldn’t know it.”

Mrs. Hatcher picked up her lesson plan book. “The goal is always the same, Mr. Salas. When they leave my room, they know a little more history than when they came in, and they want to find out more.”

“It’s hardly measurable.” Salas felt miserable. This wasn’t how he’d planned this meeting. He was on the defensive, while Mrs. Hatcher seemed confident and self assured.

“Come in tomorrow. Ask the kids at the beginning and the end. You might find it interesting.”

“What’s the lesson?”

“It’s a good one. The wizard of Menlo Park. Did you know, at the same time Custer made his fatal pursuit at Bighorn, Thomas Edison was working on the idea that would become the phonograph? History is seeing connections. Little Big Horn occurs in 1876, the same year H.G. Wells, the guy who wrote The Time Machine turned ten. H. G. Wells dies in 1946, the year after the atomic bomb. Albert Einstein will be born in 1879. So, three years after Custer’s men have to use their single-shot carbines as clubs because they can’t clear jams from their guns fast enough, the man who gives us the math for the nuclear age comes into the world. Einstein died in 1955. I was a year old in 1955. Einstein, a man who lived when I lived could have talked to people who remembered Little Big Horn. History’s a big story, Mr. Salas, but it’s not incoherent. Everything touches everything. That’s the lesson.”





Salas checked on the lunch detention kids after Mrs. Hatcher left his office. Theodore Remmick had taken a seat in the back, where he read quietly. He had propped the book up on the desk. At first, Salas thought it was a Japanese anime so many kids liked. A bright cartoon image splashed across the book’s cover, but when Salas took another step closer, he could see the title: The Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The illustration showed a fireman handling a fire hose. He looked panicked.

Principal Wahr met Salas in the hallway outside the detention room. His words echoed in the empty hallway. “Persigo’s in your half of the alphabet, right?”

“Yes, I meant to talk to you about him.”

“No need. He turned in his resignation. Some nonsense: lawyers, kids fighting in the locker room, and no respect. He’s going to finish the year, but he’s done. One less evaluation on your plate. Phys Ed averages 54 kids a class. We’ll replace him, but we still need to eliminate a position. Put your action plan on my desk Monday. I don’t want to be messing with staffing while graduation is coming up. Here are the forms you’ll need.” He handed Salas a multi-page packet. “Have you observed the other teachers I suggested?”

“This afternoon, if I’m not interrupted.”

But the drama teacher reported someone had stolen her purse from her desk, so Salas spent the time going over surveillance footage with the campus police officer. After two hours, they noticed the teacher didn’t have her purse when she came into the building from the parking lot.

He only had time to get to Hatcher’s class as the bell rang. Students left her room more slowly than they did most classes, and they had the somewhat dazed expression he now recognized.

“I’m going to the library,” said a boy wearing a rock band sweat shirt. “What else did Edison do?”

“Had you ever heard of Tesla?” said his friend. He rubbed his hand through his hair as if to quell static electricity. “Or Henry Ford?”

They both blinked at the lights in the ceiling like they’d never seen them before.