School Strongarm
by Janice Daugharty
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty
Whole body hooped with fat, Alene shuffles through the screen door and around the tabby cat with an armload of videos and dumps them on the table before her new boyfriend.
There's a haze of smoke from the breakfast bacon, waffed with sun, but no sign of a dirty pot or pan or even a plate in the scoured kitchen to tell that breakfast has been begrudgingly served.
Except for the boyfriend's coffee cup, that is.
The shish-shish of Miss Adith's broom comes constant from the front of the roomy old house with the purl of crickets through open windows tall as doors.
"All they had," Alene says, scattering the confusion of video cases on the table. "A bunch of 'em you done seen."
"I ain't picky," says Randy and yawns with his brawny arms overhead. He has a reddish beard, polished-apple cheeks and dark scraggly brows. Black lashes, like sutures, corner the insides of his slit green eyes, lending a hard look. His hair is a weave of his beard and brow colors.
When he stands, his stomach is almost flat, but sitting his girth masses into a tick-tight pooch.
Miss Adith's broom swishes nearer the kitchen.
Alene hefts two of the tapes from the white tablecloth. "What you want 'Kujo' or 'The Babysitter'"?
Randy scuffs his feet and lifts from his chair so that the legs clank on the floor and checks the pictures on the cases. "They didn't have no westerns over there?"
"Nothing you ain't seen a dozen times."
"'Kujo' then, 'Kujo' is awright."
The crickety shish-shish now works its spell from the room off the kitchen.
Alene takes the "Kujo" tape to the small TV on top of the squat refrigerator, shoves it into the mouth of the rented VCR, decked on the tv, and starts toggling the rig of buttons: a babble of talk-show voices, then a slice of silence that shims between the shishing of the broom. The draggy music bolts with flashes of an oriental man--dark as a Negro on the bad tape--chopping toward the front of the poky screen.
"Mean, ain't he?" Alene says and laughs, sidling toward the screen door in the smoke-streaked sunshine.
Now that she has a boyfriend, and doesn't have to worry about people thinking maybe she's butch, she has whacked her lank sandy hair about two inches long all over. Problem is, she ended up with a spiny effect, funny instead of smart.
Miss Adith has swept an invisible pile of dirt to the doorway between the kitchen and bathroom. With a mighty swing of her corn-straw broom, she whisks it over the raised board threshold and stops to gouge out the cracks.
"Gotta go to work." Alene, at the door, checks her watch with the brown band bogged on her sausage wrist. "Randy, pick up your feet for Mama to sweep," she says, "you hear?"
He picks up his white crazed mug and swigs, watching TV and smoking, while Miss Adith sweeps around the rust-studded white refrigerator. Her sage hair bun capers across the screen with the swift bare soles of Kujo, who had just laid out six good men by himself.
Miss Adith in a white apron sweeps to the table and peeps under in her search for suspicious tracks. Shapeless gray skirt dipping in an arthritic curtsy. She frowns at the handsome tabby, set upright on a base of its curled tail, and her ears redden at the sight of Randy's number twelves planted flat on the patch of boot-sanded mahogany.
Whisking round his tooled-leather boots, she pokes at the insteps, then gathers her imaginary dirt behind the scurrying cat to the screen door.
"I'll be back for dinner," Alene says and shuffles down the green moldy steps ahead of the imaginary pile pushed by the very real broom.
###At the school where Alene works, she parks her blue crew-cab pickup in front of the office wing under a sheltering live oak, left front tire wallowing precisely into a pit in the dirt. The truck rocks to a halt. Cradling the school mail in her short fat arms, she slides out of the pickup, a short drop to the ground. Nothing compared to the drop before Tink Adams, the principal, ordered the shop boys to dig the hole, expressly for Alene.
Ambling along the chainlink fence and around the opening--no gate, which to Alene makes the fence about as necessary as a bird cage without a door--more State waste--Alene spies Tink's sharp, wan face through the span of jalousies set in the orangy brick of the new office wing.
The new flat-top wing sits to the right of the check-mark breezeway, a curiosity against the old wing with portwine bricks and a steep hip roof. Grades K-12, all adequately schooled in the same building, though the State has just committed to a tacked-on row of rooms for the lower grades on the east playground.
Whatever suits 'em.
A small boy with crewed fair hair and freckles jogs through the breezeway, giving off whiffs of pencil-lead, like thyme. Cracked-marble eyes glancing back, he tugs open one of the double doors for Alene to sidle through.
"You behaving yourself, boy?" she says and notes that a cloud of fear passes over his face.
He lets the door go as she clears the threshold and skids off in white tennis shoes toward the office on the right.
Tink, slumping out, nabs him by the collar of his striped knit shirt. "Go on in there and wait; I gotta talk to Miss Alene a sec."
Tink walls his coffee-stain eyes and pockets his hands in his gray gabardines. His chest caves from the pitch of his hunched shoulders. "Been waiting on you," he says, backing her to the other side of the hall.
"Ain't late, am I?"
"No, no, nothing like that." Hissing, his rubbery top lip tips to his nose. "Just need to talk to you."
"Yeah," Alene says, shifting on burdened feet, "what's up?"
Tink props one hand on the sulfur-yellow wall and the color transfers to his tawny skin. "Well, I got this problem."
She waits while he blows, ssh, ssh, ssh.
"Yeah?" she says.
"See, it's like this," he says, tan hair splaying on his scrunched neck. "State board's onto us. After me to put somebody else on to keep up reports, that crap. Says you ain't got the get up and go to see to what-all they want."
"So you give this somebody-else my job, huh?"
Behind Tink, the motor of a water fountain kicks on, a sleepy strum on the brief cool hall.
He snorts, comes off the wall and places one stained hand on her shoulder. "You know I couldn't run this school without you, you know that. Why, it'd be like ever other school in Georgia--the whole US of A for that matter--fighting and all. Drugs. You know what I mean. Teachers running all over the principal. Huh!"
"Uh huh." She waits.
"It's up to me and you to keep this school clean and smooth-running."
"So, what?"
"What I done was..." He wipes his face as if trouble is dirt. "I put this lil ole shirt-tail gal on part-time. Kind of a half-secretary, you know?"
"Which makes me the other half-secretary."
"Yeah, I reckon you could put it like that."
"With half pay, right?"
"Sort of." He pockets his stained hands again. "Course, you know right along I been robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak, for so-called extra duties."
"God!" she says loud, over-shouting the buzzy clang of bells along the hall to signal change of classes. "I ain't making $400 a month as it is."
"Don't get all worked up now. Don't! You know I ain't gone short-change nobody. Least of all you. Can't do without my buddy Alene, now can I?"
"Can you?"
"It's a known fact I can't and I ain't." He's in her face, hissing, his hard top lip baring gray sawed teeth. "Why, no longer'n school took in this morning, had a teacher calling for Alene to help her out of a jam."
"Let's get back to this new decoration for the office," Alene says, shifting her armload of magazines and mail.
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call her no decoration," he says, "but she's got a lot of pizazz, I reckon you'd call it. Been to college. Ain't a bit above reports--statistics, that's what they want."
"I ain't had time to mess with no statistics."
"I know, I know. What you do's a sight more important than any ole statistics."
"About this gal..."
"Yeah?"
"She's pretty, huh?"
"Fair to middling."
"Young, right?"
He rocks his outstretched hand on the side. "So-so."
"I get it." Alene starts off toward the office.
"One more thing you oughta know." He bumps the wall with his stooped body.
"Yeah?" She stops.
"Had to move your desk to the cloak room."
"Cloak room?" She waits for two of the lunchroom ladies in white to pass between them and go into the office.
"Part-time janitor for the record." Tink palms the air as if to bounce back any protests. "Best me and the county board and super could come up with, so State won't get wind of you still on as secretary."
"I gotta hide out? Make like I'm a janitor?"
"Sort of." He crosses his arms and spews air. "Course, you'll go on doing what you been doing."
"Cloak room. What about when the school nurse comes on Wednesdays?"
"I know you two'll hit it off fine. Like I told the wife, 'Alene can get along with most anybody, long as they behave.'"
Alene stalks off toward the second door on the right, a brown cut in the sulfur yellow wall. And as she passes the principal's office, she spies a toothy girl with a brown ponytail at her old spot by the copier.
"One of these days, Tink Adams"--Alene turns back--"you bunch of cowards is gone get your tail in a crack, trying to play it both ways."
###She opens the door of the dark cloak room and a spirit of dank air furls over her.
"New office!" she says and blows and flips the light switch by the door. The powerful sulfur yellow blows back at her.
In the middle of the narrow windowless room stands an old floor fan. She plugs it in and steps in front of the hot draft and rattle, watching papers flip at the edges from stacks on the floor before her tank-green desk. Cardboard boxes of student and teacher records, which she hasn't got around to filing, have been placed about; and in the seat of her reinforced swivel chair, a couple of books donated to the school library, which she hasn't got around to reading yet. One more favor for Tink, who can't abide smut--even the word "cult" is a no-no--in his school library.
Nothing but skid marks in the dust on the desk top where her junk has been slid into boxes.
A staticky crackle comes from one of the shimmed boxes and then a woman speaking in a precious lilt: "Alene, Alene?" Pause. "Alene, how about coming to room 6A for a minute?"
More staticky crackle as Alene grabbles among the boxes for the intercom, gives it up and follows the black cord feeding from the wall to a nest of papers under the desk.
"Alene, Alene?"
She presses the return button on the black plastic box. "What you want?" she says.
Staticky crackle, then, "I have a boy here who can't seem to keep his hands to himself. Want to step over to room 6A and have a little talk with him?"
"Be right there." Alene puts the intercom on the desk and passes back through the hot draft.
She starts to turn off the light but leaves it on--let the State start picking up the tab for her sorriness, same as they do for everybody else's.
At room 6A Alene opens the door off the musty brown hall, facing all forty-or-so wide eyes of the sixth graders and the young blonde teacher, who was hired because she was home-grown.
One boy in the center row of desks sits head-high above the rest: black oily hair and pimples that fill in his fine scattered beard. He has that soft-muscled look that comes just before nature decides where to overlay squares on slopes. He's the only one in the class who doesn't look up.
The teacher at the front of the lofty room sits perched on her desk with slim legs tapering to the floor. She nods toward the boy.
"Blane Ford," Alene says in her sweetened tough voice, "you wanta step out here in the hall with me?"
He sits for a minute, smirking, then stands, snorts and kicks one stringy leg across the desk and struts with his arms crossed toward Alene.
She waits for him to pass to the dim hall, then follows him out, closing the door behind her.
Still holding to the knob, she again waits as he backs into the wall by the jamb and slides down, both clunky white sports shoes charged with supporting his weight, made up for the most part of height.
"What you wanta go messing with them girls for?" she says in a doubtful teasing tone.
He mumbles, looking down at the toe-punched leather of his shoes. "I ain't done it."
"Yeah, you did," she says, coming around to face him square. "Been at it ever since school started week before last; like to raped a little gal first day."
"Teacher's just picking on me."
"No, she ain't." Alene edges to his other side, feeling the tension hum in his stringy body like an electric wire. "Ain't no picking to it," she says, still in her old-aunt mode, toying before taking hold.
He grunts. Buckles his knees, then stiffens them.
Done with the sweet stuff, she grabs his left elbow and yanks him off the wall and his head flies up as he wheels, facing her. He grits his teeth and clinches his corded fists. She steps so close that her body touches his as he backs across the hall to the door of 6B.
"Me," she hisses, "I ain't picking on you, I'll just pinch your head off and send it home to Mama on the schoolbus."
He puffs through his little boy nose--an undecided snub.
"You hear?" she says.
He stretches, puffing, a good foot taller than Alene.
"You hear?"
"Yessum."
"Now see if you can't go on back in there and behave yourself, and don't listen or do your lessons if you don't want to. But see you set there and let everbody else do theirs. Learning ain't gone do you much good now nohow; you bout to turn sixteen and then you can quit. I ain't innerstid in no report on your learning, but when the report on your behaving passes through my office, I want a A on it."
Reaching up and seizing him by the scruff of the neck, she steers him toward the door of 6A. As she swings the door wide, locking eyes with the open-faced sixth graders, she smiles and lets go of Blane Ford.
He stumbles inside and she closes the door softly.
###Stepping from the swelter of the breezeway into the cold-storage of the sulfur-yellow hall, she again faces Tink.
"Gotcha some chocolate cake," he says and hands her a wrapped wedge of cake with runny chocolate icing stuck to waxed paper.
"Your new secretary make it?" Alene takes it and stalks off toward the lit cloak room.
"Don't do like that now," he says and goes on into his office.
Alene stops in the cloak room doorway, facing blowing papers at the rear and a table set up for the county nurse in the middle.
"How you, Alene?" says Gladys the nurse, peeping from a squat behind the table with stoppered bottles and celophane packets on top.
"Was doing fine till this morning," Alene says and turns around, heading for Tink's office.
On her way in, she hears the phone ring and Tink answer, no trace of the other half-secretary.
"Hello?" he says and waits. "Yeah, sug, what you want?" He listens with his top lip flipped on gray teeth. "A new one? Any new one, right? Yeah, sug, yeah, yeah, ain't no trouble."
He slams the phone. "Janie. Wanting another old romance to set and read. I swannee! I done picked over everthing in that blasted library."
"Hey, Tink," Alene says, "me and you gotta talk."
He slumps around his desk and sits in his chair with fingers steepled under his knob chin. "Listen, talking about libraries, we gone have to go on and do something with that damned Ann Lewis. NAACP or not. Gone have to scare her up so good she'll be begging us to let her go. Or start working one. Scared to death if she files a complaint with State, you'll come after her."
"Tink, I ain't...." Alene starts.
"Course she's gone holler and take on about you running over her cause she's black, everlast one of us knowing she ain't worth a flip in that library. Been laying up on the couch evertime I go by. And me warning her. And the other teachers is all complaining cause she won't let their classes come in groups to check out books."
"Tink." Alene waves a hand before his bland face, an old habit that she knows feeds his ego--principal doggedly driven to put his school on top. "Tink, I ain't staying under no such conditions, understand?"
"Huh?" he watches her with his mouth gaped.
"Run off Ann Lewis yourself; I ain't working for you no more."
"Where you reckon you'll get another job then?"
"I don't know, in Valdosta maybe."
"You can't drive all the way up there, morning and night. Sides, look at the cost of gas and all. Here, you finally got you a boyfriend, got a truck payment ever month."
"I'll get by." She hikes herself up by pressing on the chair arms and walks off.
"I hate to mention this, but ain't everbody's gone hire a woman in your shape," he says. "Know what I mean?"
She keeps walking toward the door, throwing her voice back. "Let me eat my dinner while I study on it."
###Miss Adith has slid the videos down the table in front of Randy, still sitting with his boots crossed in the same chair, now watching "The Babysitter."
As if he isn't even there, Miss Adith fills up the rest of the oval oak table with bowls of creamed corn and butterbeans and steamed okra and squash, a fluted platter with a painted turkey full of fried chicken thighs and wings. And a black iron skillet of faintly charred cornbread.
Alene waddles through the screen door again, letting in the tabby cat. Her face is red from the noon heat and deepening to a purplish rose from the added heat of the oven. Of course, her blood pressure is up.But if Miss Adith, trailing from the stove under the long window to the table in the middle of the room, notices Alene's fired face, she doesn't say anything. Hasn't spoken except when absolutely necessary since Alene picked Randy up on the road, hitch-hiking 94.
Alene has always been bad to pick up hitchhikers because she knows what it's like to be on foot and begging rides. Before she got her truck. Unlike most people who are afraid to give strangers a lift, she's never worried about somebody overpowering her. Odd how fat can be mistaken for muscle and big talk for power. Even she has begun to believe it.