Smiths' Meat is Murder Read Free Page A

Fitness Exam is administered.
    Anyway, to make a predictable story as quick and painless as possible, Buddy only managed, through some heroic and grotesque take on peristalsis, to inch himself halfway up the rope climb before he froze. A record-breaking number of jeers and negative encouragements boomed throughout the rambunctious coliseum. He would go no further, up or down.
    “Crucify him!” someone yelled.
    Miss Hall, our gym teacher, had the face and build of a mid-air collision involving Newt Gingrich and Sluggo from the ‘Nancy’ comic strip. She was perpetually dressed in a coach’s jacket and wide wale corduroy coaching shorts that were so tight, when she walked a disturbing “ffffit, ffffit, ffffit” sizzled from her loins.
    “Get your fat ass to the top of that rope and back down here a-sap!” The veins in her neck bulged like Alexiev’s.
    A smartass named Mahoney started jerking the rope from side to side, trying to liberate the brilliant hunger artist like you would a pear from a tree. Hall swung atMahoney with a backhanded hack of her arm wrestler’s forearm. There was a single thud, followed by a short series of smaller thuds, as if someone had spilled the holiday ham from its can onto a hardwood floor. Mahoney came to rest near the bleachers, and crawled like a wounded animal under them for cover.
    “Stay out of my sight!” Hall sneered as she repositioned her wristwatch that had shifted dramatically in the attack.
    Buddy just hung there, deaf to everything. For more than fifty minutes. That had to be something of a record right there. Reagan himself should have dragged his old bones up that rope and given Buddy a gold medal. I certainly couldn’t hang from a rope for almost an hour while people insulted me.
    His parents had been sobbing when they showed up to talk him down. Finally, the three of them collected into a single weeping unit and slouched off toward Christmas break.
    * * *
    Allison smelled like Halsa brand shampoo. It has a very distinct scent. Not the green apple or orange kind, but the brown henna kind that comes in the bottle with the Swiss mountain scene on the label. I’d say I catch a whiff of that scent on other people no less than once amonth, and it never fails to shake me a little. She wore her hair in a short black bob during what was the heyday of colossal styles, and I was clobbered. At that age I learned a hair-do has magical powers.
    I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but sometime during that spring she got under my skin. A simple turn of her head could liberate in me a bolt of libidinous energy powerful enough to shoot my satellite from the sky. Our last names were close in spelling and we were both in the “accelerated class” as they liked to call it, so to my discomfort and delight, she always sat close by.
    When she sat in front of me, I’d stare at her through the prison lattice of her chair back and try to make out the lines of her underclothes. Her blue pastel uniform blouse covered the mystery of her skin like a palimpsest. I wanted to scrape away the cheap paint and reveal the hidden pornographic landscape.
    When she sat beside me, I’d gaze at her out of the corners of my eyes, straining them to the point of headache, until curlicue floaters sailed through my frame of vision. When she’d shift in her seat, so would I, but self-consciously, carefully.
    I was becoming a more horrible student by the minute, and a smoker. Allison smoked like a starlet, Merit Lights, so I took it up and practiced harder than a future Olympian to impress her at “The Lung”—abenchless, concrete slab of a patio near the dumpster behind the cafeteria. On rainy mornings I’d hang out at The Lung before school and chain-smoke beneath the impotent tin awning that hung over the door, listening to a tape of
Hatful of Hollow
or
All Mod Cons
on my walkman.
    I played it out in my head countless times: Allison soaking wet, pushing against me to fit beneath the awning while