The Centaur Read Free Page A

to Zimmerman. A teacher in our public school system shouldn’t have to put up with crap like this.”
    “O. K., Al, you win. Thanks. Thank you very much.” The rod of silver was too long; it stuck up out of his side coat pocket like a car aerial.
    “A teacher ought to be protected from kids like that. Tell Zimmerman.”
    “You tell him. Maybe he’ll take it from you.”
    “Well, he might. That’s no joke. He just might.”
    “I didn’t mean it as a joke.”
    “I was on the board, you know, that hired him.”
    “I know you were, Al.”
    “I’ve often regretted it.”
    “Hell, don’t.”
    “No?”
    “He’s an intelligent man.”
    “Yes—yes, but there’s something missing.”
    “Zimmerman understands power; but he doesn’t keep discipline.” Fresh pain flooded Caldwell’s shin and knee. It seemed to him that he had never seen Zimmerman so clearly or expressed himself so well on the subject, but Hummel, annoyingly obtuse, merely repeated his own observation. “There’s something missing.”
    His sense of passing time was working on Caldwell’s bowels, making them bind. “I got to get back,” he said.
    “Good luck. Tell Cassie the town misses her.”
    “Jesus, she’s happy as a lark out there. It’s what she’s always wanted.”
    “And Pop Kramer, how’s he?”
    “Pop’s tops. He’ll live to be a hundred.”
    “Do you mind the driving back and forth?”
    “No, to tell you the truth I enjoy it. It gives me a chance to talk to the kid. The kid and I hardly ever saw each other when we lived in town.”
    “You have a bright boy there. Vera tells me.”
    “It’s his mother’s brains. I just pray to God he doesn’t inherit my ugly body.”
    “George, may I tell you something?”
    “Sure.”
    “For your own good.”
    “Say anything you want, Al. You’re my friend.”
    “You know what your trouble is?”
    “I’m stubborn and ignorant.”
    “Seriously.”
    My trouble is
, Caldwell thought,
my leg is killing me
.
    “What?”
    “You’re too modest.”
    “Al, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” Caldwell said, and moved to turn away.
    But Hummel kept pinning him. “Your car’s holding up all right?” Until they had moved ten miles out of town, the Caldwells had done without a car. They could walk everywhere in Olinger and take the trolley to Alton. But when they bought back the old Kramer place they needed a car. Hummel had put them on to a ’36 Buick for only $375.
    “Just wonderful. It’s a wonderful car. I kick myself every day for smashing up that grille.”
    “That can’t be welded, George. But the car runs all right?”
    “Like a dream. I’m grateful to you, Al, don’t think I’m not.”
    “That engine should be all right; the man never drove it over forty. He was an undertaker.”
    If Hummel had said that once, he had said it a thousand times. The fact seemed to fascinate him. “I’m not scared,” Caldwell said, guessing that in Hummel’s mind the car was full of ghosts. Actually, it was just an ordinary four-door sedan; there was no room to carry corpses. True, though, it was the blackest car Caldwell had ever seen. They really put the shellac on those old Buicks.
    His conversation with Hummel was making Caldwell anxious. A clock in his head was ticking on; the school called to him urgently. Disjointed music seemed to be tugging at Hummel’s exhausted face. Images of loose joints, worn thread, carbon deposits, fatigued metal webbed across Caldwell’s apprehension of his old friend: Are we falling apart? In his own mind a gear kept slipping:
Shellac on those old Buicks, shellac, shellac
. “Al,” he protested, “I got to high-tail it. You won’t take a cent?”
    “George: now not another word.” And this was the way with all these Olinger aristocrats. They wouldn’t take any money but they did take an authoritative tone. They forced a favor on you and that made them gods.
    He walked toward the door but Hummel limped along with him. The three