City Kid

I edged closer, trying to make out what he was drawing. Maybe they were lions. One large one lying down and three little ones on the far side of the paper.

I squatted beside Luke’s desk. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Mary. Will you come with me for a minute? Bring your picture.

“Luke and I are going to do a little work,” I said to Miss Eckhardt. “We’ll be back in about a half hour.”

I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing. I could feel the stopwatch pressing on my thigh in the front pocket of my jeans. I knew both Luke and I should still be in his classroom while I “charted” his behavior. But I couldn’t stand to waste the time. It was already clear that he did no work and his behavior was negative. What I had to know was why and I couldn’t find that out with a stopwatch. I had to listen to Luke, even when he wasn’t talking, and I couldn’t do that in a roomful of thirty kids.

I walked down toward the music room, Luke beside me, hoping that Jerry had gone back to the clinic.

I was glad to find the music room empty, filled only with a musty, unused smell.

“Let’s sit here,” I said to Luke. He wiggled onto a chair at the long table and I sat beside him. He kept his picture under the table.

“I think,” I said, “that those were tigers on your paper. Very, very tired tigers.”

Luke’s round eyes stared at me.

“They probably get very tired because of all the noise in the zoo and had to lie down,” I said.

Luke turned away and we sat silently for three or four minutes. I concentrated on Luke – the ring of grime on the back of his neck, the sharp points of his elbow bones. What went on in his head when he set fires? What was he thinking right now? I felt, rather than saw, Luke move, and then slowly he brought his piece of paper up from under the table.

“Nope,” he said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear him. “They’re lions. They got no stripes.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should have noticed.”

Luke got a little stub of a pencil from his pocket. “And this one’s got fur around her face,” he said, drawing whirls around the lion’s face.

“It’s a her,” I said.

“Yup. Even though she’s got fur like a beard.”

“It must be a pretty big cage,” I said. “Those little lions are so far away from the big lion.”

“It’s not a cage. It’s Africa. It’s the mother lion and her babies in Africa, and then a zoo keeper came to Africa and they got caught and he put them in a big field with a big, BIG, fence around it.”

Luke was on his knees on the chair drawing a fence around the lions.

“There are three babies … and –” Luke stopped suddenly, obviously surprised at himself. He wasn’t ready to trust me with any more. “That’s all.”

It was enough for one day.

“That’s a good story,” I said.

We sat silently looking at the lions.

I had no materials with me. What to do? What to do? Suddenly I remembered the stopwatch. We were supposed to use the stopwatch. I took it out of my pocket and laid it on the table.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked Luke.

He nodded without expression.

“This one works like this. Press the thing at the top to make it go. See, there are sixty seconds in a minute. Press it again to make it stop. Now this little thing on the side makes the hands go back to the beginning when you press it. Try it.”

I nudged the stopwatch toward Luke.

Luke stared at it, then touched it tentatively with one finger. Suppose he threw it, dropped it, broke it. Suppose he did? I wanted him to know I trusted him. And I did trust him. More than that. Already more than that.

Luke picked up the stopwatch and held it carefully in his left hand, pushed the button on the top with his right index finger. Tick, tick, tick. The stopwatch and my pulse beat together. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.

“Okay,” I said. “Time me. Give me something to do and see how long it takes.”

Luke pushed the top button and then the side button. The hands returned to the top. He looked at me steadily. “What can you do?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Think of something.”

“Can you do dition?”

“Dition?”

“Like pluses. Add.”

“Oh. Sure. Addition. I think so.”

“All right. One million dollars plus two million dollars. Write it down here. Go.”

Luke snapped on the stopwatch and turned over the lion picture. I wrote it down.

“Ten seconds. Twenty seconds,” Luke counted off the seconds.

“Three million dollars. There.” I pushed the paper back.

Luke clicked off the watch and put it down carefully on the table away from the edge. He studied my face and then, never saying anything, turned back to the paper and wrote 100 beside my dition and turned back to me.

“You can keep it if you want,” he said.

“Thank you, Luke,” I answered. “Listen, we’ve got to go back now, but I’m going to come down here every week, a couple of times a week or more, and see you. If that’s okay with you.”

Luke nodded and we walked back to class without talking.

Just outside the door, he stopped. “When you comin’?” he asked.

“Tomorrow,” I said, without thinking. “I’ll be down again tomorrow.”

Chapter 5 (#u042f5711-346d-5f23-a1b5-d9f6af79f374)

Time dragged the next morning. It was harder than ever to sit through Current Methods of Teaching Mentally Challenged Adolescents and Practicum in Teaching Reading to the Mentally Challenged. This was a practicum with no practice, only mimeographed sheets. Finally the clock buzzed its muted signal to freedom and I was out and on my way to School 23.

I thought about Luke as I drove. I’d talked to Cal the night before. I didn’t understand it. Luke just didn’t seem that bad to me. Was it because I had taught such seriously disturbed children before that now Luke seemed easy in comparison?