It’s not a spider. It’s an accident. You don’t belong to an order of witches that venerates the spider, and the batik wall-hanging isn’t in your bedroom because you think the spider will afford you protection from enemies. You bought it at some crafts festival in a park, and it looked like a pinwheel to you, and you hung it up in your bedroom.
How, in this age, are grown-ups still afraid of a witch? Spells, curses, bloody sacrifices: none of them really believe in any of that, do they? It’s just for fun, that stuff. You had assumed everybody knew that. It seemed obvious, self-evident. There aren’t any witches. There are just the stories people tell each other, who knows why. But when you finally go to trial, almost a whole year from now, you’ll learn better, and feel trapped. Four days from now you’ll do what you have to do, and, when your story is assembled by the powers that have agreed to do the telling, meaningless details will be woven into a tale that would seem absurd to everyone if they weren’t all proceeding backward from its bloody end.
The wall-hanging is long gone by the time I set foot in your old apartment, of course, and so is the God’s-eye you’d thumbtacked above your window frame. Times have changed. It’s hard for me to imagine something like it here in the college student’s bedroom where I stand, years later, trying to picture you and Albert N. one Saturday morning in 1972, a meaningless shape overlooking the scene like an omen neither you nor your weekend lover were capable of heeding. Laurie, the student who lives here now, stands in the room with me, waiting for me to leave; I’m only here by her good grace. I am an intruder trying to see what the intruders before me saw just before they saw nothing ever again.
You can’t do this kind of work unless you’re willing to be an intruder once in a while.
* * *
IT’S MORNING: Wednesday. It’s a little grey today, those coastal clouds that cast long shadows and then usually clear out while you’re checking on the traffic in your rearview. You drive to school with the expectation that things will conform to their observed pattern: it shouldn’t really rain today, you think. But it does; the warm asphalt of the high school parking lot smells sweet, the rain splashing hazily on it as you walk, purse held in both hands over your head, to class.
You call roll; no Gene Cupp again. On your desk, to remind yourself, you leave the attendance book open, and it distracts you throughout the period. Are the kids distracted, too, by this meaningless variance in the expected order? Do they even notice the studied tidiness of your desk, how it looks the same each day? Probably not; they’re kids, you think, and when you hear yourself think it, you notice how easily the thought comes to you now. Your first year as a teacher, you struggled to think of students as people living in a different world from yours: you still felt young, just as you still feel young today. Just no longer that young.
Teaching high school means facing daily reminders of the exact distance between your present-day station and the days of your youth. Some people get a little bitter about it. You haven’t yet. You position yourself by the door just before the bell rings, so you’ll be able to stop Jesse on his way out without making much of a show of it. Young men are very sensitive about how their teachers treat them when their peers are looking.
“Jesse?” you say as he’s about to pass you.
“Miss Crane?” he says, stopping. Several other kids bump him as they pass, without excusing themselves.
“You’re friends with Gene.”
“Yeah?” He looks suspicious, or scared, you can’t tell which.
“Well, I’m a little worried about him. He hasn’t been here in over a week.”
Jesse purses his lips; he’s suppressing a laugh there behind that downy attempt at a mustache.
“I think he’s, uh, done,” he says.
“Done?”
“Well, they sent him a, an, uh, they said he wasn’t going to pass algebra again so he has to do it in the summer if he wants to graduate.”
“OK,” you say; you feel like it’s a delicate moment: you wait to see what else Jesse has to say.
“So, I think he’s done,” he says again.
“Oh, but he—he shouldn’t just quit, there are ways—” You’re not sure what to say; you should probably be having this conversation with Gene’s parents.
Waiting to see if you’re done with your sentence, Jesse watches your face with the sort of curiosity you’d expect from a lepidopterist wondering whether a butterfly he just noticed in a familiar setting is actually new. When he realizes you’re waiting for him to answer, he says, sounding a little old for his years: “Oh, I know there are. His old man told him, ‘You have to get your diploma,’ too. I’ll tell him you asked, but—”
“You think he’s done.”
“Sorry,” says Jesse Jenkins, and you hear in his voice what it might sound like if he really felt sorry: it’s a distant echo. It is distinctly possible that you are only imagining it.
“Sorry to keep you,” you say. “Will you tell him he’s welcome in class whether he’s going to graduate or not?” You’re doing your duty: trying to give your students as much as you can give them in the time allotted to you as their teacher.
“You got it,” Jesse says, the way you might promise a child that you’re checking for monsters underneath the bed.
4.
YOU ARE SOUND ASLEEP. It’s one in the morning. In the parking lot of the Taco Bell over in San Luis Obispo, Gene and Jesse are sitting side by side in the front seat of Gene’s blue Ford Torino. Gene is too high to drive, but nobody can tell Gene anything when he’s high; Jesse hopes that the bag of tacos they’re working through will help him drive less erratically, and then maybe Jesse will mention that Miss Crane said he should come back to class, that it’s no big deal.
Taco Bell is closed now; Gene is a cook there, and he worked closing shift tonight. About an hour ago, he turned the OPEN sign around at the window and scraped down the grill, washing the spatulas and serving spoons afterward in the tiny sink in the back. Then he went back to the line and, gloveless, assembled twelve tacos, heavy on the ground beef and light on everything else: any leftover beef he has to throw away, but the lettuce and the olives and the tomatoes and the sour cream will go back into cold storage for the night. If he hits the reserves too hard, he’s supposed to charge himself for an extra meal on his time card, so Gene’s after-work tacos consist of hours-old seasoned ground beef ladled into a hard shell and given a cursory dressing of two other things apiece, varying it from taco to taco to minimize the amount taken of each ingredient. Sour cream and olives. Tomato and lettuce. Lettuce and olives. Olives and cheese. Some of the combinations don’t really taste good at all without the other stuff that’d usually be on there, but Gene doesn’t seem to notice. In the front seat, later, a joint in one hand and a Marlboro Red in the other, he identifies each taco by whatever two-topping combination it happened to catch: “You like tomato and cheese? I got two tomato and cheese.”
Jesse is scared of Gene these days, who seems to be getting worse. He smokes so many cigarettes. It makes him look like one of those people who hang around outside the public library but never check out any books. He’s smoking right now, a sour cream and olive taco in his free hand.