Читать книгу Coasters - Gerald Duff - Страница 15

Sixty dollars per diem is sixty dollars more than I have right now, Waylon told himself as he drove through the parking lot beside the main building, looking for a visitor’s space. I don’t care if it is language arts instead of math. I can get through five classes of anything on a substitute basis.

The telephone call from the vice principal of Thomas Jefferson High had come the night before when he was dozing in front of the television set, and Waylon had not been able to get straight just which teacher it was he was being asked to fill in for while she enjoyed a spell of sick-leave, but he had made certain of the subject matter the school had hired him to teach.

“You can do English subbing, can’t you?” the vice principal had asked him just as the credits for some sit-com were rolling across the screen of Charlie McPhee’s TV set.

“Oh, yes,” Waylon had said. “That’s my native language.”

“Three sections of sophomore language skills, one junior American Lit, and an hour in the afternoon assisting with the senior class play.”

“That would be no problem,” he said, sitting up to get a better timbre into his telephone voice. “Sixty dollars a day, you said.”

“Before deductions,” the woman said. “Love Is Eternal.”

“Pardon me?”

“Love Is Eternal,” the woman said again. “That’s the name of the play the seniors are doing this year. It’s about Abraham Lincoln.”

“Got you,” Waylon had said. “I love the theatre.”

Why not find a place in the teachers’ lot, he said to himself, not seeing any spaces marked for visitor parking, there’s bound to be at least one that sick English teacher’s not taking up this week.

The set of steps up to the row of doors into the building was filled with teenagers milling about and uttering high-pitched yelps, and Waylon felt the same sensation of weakness kick up just below his breastbone that he had always experienced each morning of his high school years as he approached to enter those doors. Unlike back then, though, no one this time purposely jostled against him as he passed through the crowd and nobody reached out to slap whatever he was carrying out of his hands.

Not a single person even seemed to notice him, in fact, and he felt reassured as he stepped into the lobby of the building, pausing to let three or four girls swarm past him in a clot. The older you get, the more you fade into being just a part of the landscape in the country of the young, he considered, and there was a pure comfort in that fact, a consolation for the neural slowdown.

The same thing was true for the two women and the one man behind the counter in the administrative office, and Waylon had to ask for help three times before one of them took notice and brought him a sheaf of papers telling him where to go when for the next several hours.

“Just go into the classroom and do it, huh?” he said to the woman who handed him the packet, and she gave him an appraising look and said nothing until he finally dropped his eyes and left her presence to find his way to the first room listed on the top sheet of paper she had given him.

It was on the second floor, and most of the seats were taken when he walked into the room, though not much noise was going on and none of the students staring randomly about themselves seemed to notice that a stranger had just come in. Not like the days when he was putting in his own time at Thomas Jefferson, Waylon considered. This generation of kids was probably doped to the gills by eight o’clock each morning, though, and wouldn’t have noticed if a kangaroo in overalls had hopped up on the desk at the front of the classroom, dropped trou, and moved its bowels.

“I’m not your regular teacher,” Waylon announced, “those of you who’re able to tell the difference. She’s taken ill.”

“Who has?” asked a blonde girl in the front row, so thin, Waylon noted when he looked at her to respond, that he could see tendons in her neck.

“Your regular English teacher,” he said and looked down at the sheet of paper on the desk to find her name. “Mrs. Watts.”

“That’s not our teacher’s name,” said a Hispanic kid in the middle of the room. “I ain’t never heard of no Mrs. Watts.”

“It is, too,” several voices said together.

“It is not, neither,” others countered.

The dope’s beginning to wear off, Waylon told himself, must have been really stepped on by the time it got to the sophomore class. They’re sounding like kids ought to when a substitute teacher walks into the room. “Cut the horseshit,” he said in a loud voice. “I’m a Viet Nam vet, and I feel a flashback coming on. I won’t be held responsible for what might happen if I see any enemy in here. Agent Orange has just eaten my nerves slap up.”