Here comes Heller down the annex hall! Twiddle, piddle; piddle, pat!! How the man does love his own broad broom!!!
Past the girl’s lavatory he painstakingly goes, strewing red wax and sweeping up the same in the shimmer of varnish, past Room 113 where Art the visible mirror of God’s in visible glory is held up by Miss Schrack, past 111 where typewriters lurk under tattered black shrouds through which here and there a space bar thrusts an eerie silver hand, past 109 with its great brittle ochre map of the old trade routes whereby spice, amber, fur, and slaves were transported across Carolingian Europe, past 107 smelling of sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide, 105, 103, doors all shut, glass frosted, facing green lockers that dwindle to an insane perspective of zero, Heller goes, gathering under the methodical push of his broom buttons, fluff, pennies, lint, tinfoil, hairpins, cellophane, hair, thread, tangerine seeds, comb teeth, Peter Caldwell’s psoriasis scratchings, and all the undignifiable flecks and flakes and bits and motes and whatnot dust that go to make up a universe: he harvests these. He hums inaudibly an old tune to himself. He is happy. The school is his. Clocks all over the wooden acres tick in unison 6:10. In its subterranean mansion one of the vast boilers makes an irrevocable decision and swallows in a single draft a quarter-ton of hard pea coal: Pennsylvania anthracite, old Lepidodendra, pure compressed time. The furnace heart burns with a white heat that must be viewed through a mica peephole.
Heller hugs to his rusty heart the underside of this high school. It was the promotion of his life when he was lifted from the custodial staff of the elementary building, where the little children, ticklish-tummied as lambs, daily made a puddle or two of rancid vomit to wipe up and perfume with sal ammoniac. Here there was no such indignity; only the words on the walls and now and then a malicious excremental mess in one of the male lavatories.
The memory of people and people’s clothes touches the halls with a dry perfume. The drinking fountains wait to spurt. The radiators purr. The side door slams; a member of the JV basketball team has entered with his gym bag and gone down to the locker room. At the front entrance, Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Phillips meet on the steps and enact, one tall and one short, an Alphonse and Gaston routine as to who is to go in the door first. Heller stoops and sweeps into his broad pan his gray mountain of dust and fluff, enlivened by a few paper scraps. He transfers this dirt to the great cardboard can waiting at this corner. Then, setting himself behind the broom, he pushes off and disappears behind the corner, piddle, pat.
There he goes!!!!
“George, I hear you haven’t been feeling too well,” Phillips says to the other teacher. In the light of the hall in front of the trophy case he is startled to observe a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of Caldwell’s mouth. There is usually some imperfection or oversight of grooming about the other man that secretly distresses him.
“Sometimes up, sometimes down,” Caldwell says. “Phil, a strip of missing tickets has been preying on my mind. Numbers 18001 to 18145.”
Phillips thinks and as he thinks takes-his habit-a jerky sidestep, as if smoothing the infield. “Well, it’s just paper,” he says.
“So’s money,” Caldwell says.
He looks so sick in saying it that Phillips asks, “Have you been taking anything?”
Caldwell makes his pinched stoic mouth. “I’ll be O.K., Phil. I went to the doctor yesterday and an X-ray’s been taken.”
Phillips sidesteps the other way. “Show anything?” he asks, looking at his shoes, as if to check the laces.
As if to drown out the implications of Phillips’ extraordinary softness of voice, Caldwell virtually bellows, “I haven’t found out yet. I’ve been on the go steadily.”
“George. May I speak as a friend?”
“Go ahead, I’ve never heard you speak any other way.”
“There’s one thing you haven’t learned, and that’s how to take care of yourself. You know now, we’re not as young as we were before the war; we mustn’t act like young men.”
“Phil, I don’t know any other way to act. I’ll have to act childish until they put the half-dollars over my eyes.”
Phillips’ laugh is a shade nervous. He had been a year on the faculty when Caldwell joined it, and though they have been through much together Phillips has never quite shaken his sense of being the other man’s senior and guide. At the same time he cannot rid himself of an obscure expectation that Caldwell out of his more chaotic and mischievous resources would produce a marvel, or at least say the strange thing that had to be said. He asks, “Did you hear about Ache?”-pronounced Ockey. A bright and respectful and athletic and handsome student from the late Thirties, the kind that does a teacher’s heart good, a kind once plentiful in Olinger but in the universal decay of virtue growing rare.
“Killed,” Caldwell says. “But I don’t understand how.”
“Over Nevada,” Phillips tells him, shifting his armload of papers and books to the other arm. “He was a flight instructor, and his student made a mistake. Both killed.”
“Isn’t that funny? To go all through the war without a scratch and then get nailed in peacetime.”
Phillips’ eyes have a morbid trick-little men are more emotional-of going red in the middle of a conversation if the subject were even remotely melancholy. “I hate it when they die young,” he blurts. He loves the well-coordinated among his students like sons, his own son being clumsy and stubborn.
Caldwell becomes interested; his friend’s neat centrally parted cap of hair suddenly seems the lid of a casket in which might be locked the nugget of information he so needs. He asks earnestly, “Do you think it makes a difference? Are they less ready? Do you feel ready?”
Phillips tries to direct his mind to the question but it is like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. They push away. “I don’t know,” he admits. “They say there’s a time for everything,” he adds.
“Not for me,” Caldwell says. “I’m not ready and it scares the hell out of me. What’s the answer?”
There is silence between the two men while Heller passes with his broom. The janitor nods and smiles and passes them by this time.
Again, Phillips cannot bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it keeps shying gratefully into side issues. He stares intently at the center of Caldwell’s chest, as if a curious transition is taking place here. “Have you spoken to Zim merman?” he asks. “Perhaps a sabbatical is the answer.”
“I can’t afford a sabbatical. What would the kid do? He couldn’t even get to high school. He’d have to go to school in the sticks with a lot of clodhoppers on the bus.”
“He’d survive, George.”
“I doubt it like hell. He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet. I can’t fade out before he has the clue. You’re lucky, your kid has the clue.”
This is a sad piece of flattery that makes Phillips shake his head. The rims of his eyes deepen in tint. Ronnie Phillips, now a freshman at Penn State, is brilliant in electronics. But even while in the high school he openly ridiculed his father’s love of baseball. He bitterly felt that too many of the precious hours of his childhood had been wasted playing cat and three-stops-or-a-catch under his father’s urging.
Phillips says weakly, “Ronnie seems to know what he wants.”
“More power to him,” Caldwell shouts. “My poor kid, what he wants is the whole world in a candy box.”
“I thought he wanted to paint.”
“Ooh.” Caldwell grunts; the poison has wormed an inch deeper into his bowels. Sons are a heavy subject for these two.
Caldwell changes the subject. “Coming out of my room today I had a kind of revelation; it’s taken me fifteen years of teaching to see it.”