Miss Rhoades Never Did Mention the Blood by Paul Edmonds

Butch hadn’t planned on a dizzying carriage ride down a potholed memory lane when he awoke from the haze of his dreams that morning. The one-way ticket came in the form of the morning paper, rolled and bound with a single thin elastic wrapped twice around its bulge. He retrieved the paper, brought it up to the porch, and sat down in a rickety old chair.

The headlines above the fold relayed standard small town news: the Saint Francis Church bake sale was a success; a few hundred books were donated to the library by a local widow; police had finally apprehended those responsible for the missing milk crates behind Victory Supermarket. Below the fold was a photograph of an unpleasant-looking batch of school children manipulating mounds of cement-colored clay. The caption read: Mrs. Talbot’s kindergarten class express their artistic sides through a fun medium.

Butch closed his eyes. When he reopened them, tears spilled over the rims and trailed down his cheeks. He folded the paper, tossed it into a trash can, and went inside.

A visitor to Butch’s home, if he were to ever have a visitor, would be startled by the sharp contrast between the house’s placid exterior, with its bright green shutters and respectable landscaping, and the depressed condition of the interior dwellings. Expired hunting catalogs reached towards the ceiling in uneven stacks. Dishes, crusted with the vestiges of meals long ago consumed and evacuated, overflowed from the sink and onto the counter. Sunlight breached the darkness of the kitchen through frayed rips in the soiled curtains. Long shreds of wall paper hung to the floor like the coarse, filthy hair of some enormous beast. Butch had lived his entire adult life alone, and as his despair grew thicker with the passage of time, his attentiveness to affairs of a domestic nature had grown weaker.

Butch lumbered to the refrigerator and removed a plastic milk jug filled with flat Coca-Cola and rum. He chugged hard until the last drop slid down his throat then tossed the jug into the corner. He moved into the living room and flopped onto the sofa. An orchestra of springs played a series of sharp notes as he repositioned himself several times to find the sweet spot.

It was the photograph of the kids with their tiny hands thrust into clay that had gotten Butch maudlin on an otherwise fine late fall morning. He looked at the tiny scar on his left hand and had to fight back more tears. It had been clay, or, more specifically, a green plastic clay knife that had opened John Andrews’ eyes to Butch’s presence and the thick cloud of vulnerability and victimhood that seemed to follow him everywhere like an albatross.

Before Butch had grown into a portly man, he had been a diminutive boy. He was constantly mistaken for a student in classes one or two grades below his. This often resulted in some student teachers-aid, eager to set things right, forcing him into a schoolyard recess line with children who were not his classmates. This seemingly perpetual series of misunderstandings had been fertile ground for a lush garden of short jokes from the more vocal and less empathetic pupils at Sanders Street School.

Butch withdrew. Recess breaks were spent walking the perimeter of the schoolyard. He would fantasize about playing kickball or tag with the others, but no offers of play were extended to him. As time went on, he accepted his place in the schoolyard pecking order, and his thoughts never again flirted with silly hopes of friends and schoolyard tomfoolery.

He made his way up through elementary school without any major disturbances to his sheltered world until the third week of sixth grade when Mrs. Goudi’s students were ushered into a large converted storage room that served as the school’s art center. Town funding had dried-up before the room had been completed. Electrical wires snaked around beams in the exposed ceiling, and the faint smell of old building rot nagged incessantly at everyone’s nose.

The students were separated into groups of four. Each group had their own table, a large mound of clay, and a set of clay tools spread on black towels covered in lint. Miss Rhoades, the art teacher, announced that they would be doing something a little different that day. Instead of spending the entire period working on a single piece, they would work in five-minute shifts. All four members would work together, quickly, to create a clay model based on a theme she would read from a stack of index cards. After five minutes they would stand back, admire what they’d created, and smoosh everything together to prepare for the next one.

The first index card called for an animal one might find at the zoo. The children eagerly tore off large chunks of clay and began pressing and shaping individual body parts that would be assembled to create one cohesive form. The animals that resulted were at once hilarious and sad. Little Frankenstein bears and kangaroos stood in the middle of the work tables, their basic anatomies crippled by legs, paws, and ears of mismatched lengths and thicknesses. The animals looked sickly, afflicted with various defects ranging from scoliosis to gigantism. Butch and the rest of his group stared, with a mixture of curiosity and disappointment, at a rabbit-penguin hybrid that looked like it was caving-in on itself. Miss Rhoades called time and the animals were pounded back into nondescript lumps. The process repeated; food, furniture, and musical instruments were carefully crafted at each table, with equally dismal results.

Miss Rhoades looked up at the clock. Her sluggish hand pulled one more index card from the deck. “Alright, everyone,” she called, “this is the last one, so make it good. This will be an individual effort. The last theme is things you’d find on a tropical island.”

Butch’s mind scanned its repository of images for something that might be found on a long expanse of sand littered with tourists. He remembered something he’d seen in his dad’s office at the chair factory. Hanging from a rusty nail above his dad’s cluttered metal desk was a glossy photo of a scantily-clad blonde on all fours looking seductively into the camera. Sand clung to her body in sticky patches, a large yellow umbrella casting a long shadow over her curvaceous figure. Sitting at the table, his lump of clay peppered with several classes worth of lint and hair, Butch focused on the memory of that photo and the gentle stirring it had jump-started in his corduroys. He smiled and went to work. He constructed the top of the umbrella then set about fashioning a stand that would support the weight and awkward shape of the top. The first stand was too long and narrow; it collapsed immediately. He then constructed a thicker bottom piece, but that proved no good, either. Nervousness began to grip Butch like the cold hand of some hateful beast. His group mates had all managed to workup something passable, and the last thing he wanted was to be the odd man out, because that would draw attention from not only the other students but also Miss Rhoades. Anonymity, as much of it as he could get, was the name of his game. He had to improvise, and quick, because he could see Miss Rhoades checking her watch and returning the index cards to the top drawer of her desk. His eyes darted around the table, finally settling on the untouched line of clay tools waiting patiently on the black blanket. He selected one that looked like a plastic knife you’d get in a fast food restaurant and quickly packed clay around it. He placed the top of the umbrella onto the reinforced stand, and it worked!

Miss Rhoades called time. The class turned from their projects and started in on their own personal conversations. Miss Rhoades strolled from table to table, bestowing on occasion “nice job” or “good eye for detail” on a piece that struck her as not completely terrible. She arrived at Butch’s table with a flurry of cool air and perfume. She moved in close to examine his umbrella. Butch’s asshole puckered-up with fear; he must have misheard her instructions, failed to complete the requirements of the exercise in some way. Tiny pistons smoked and squealed in his heart as five seconds turned into ten then twenty.

Miss Rhoades placed a tiny hand on Butch’s shoulder. “Well, done, Butch. I’m declaring this the best sculpture of the day so far.” She smiled and moved onto the next table.

Butch’s tension subsided. He felt proud of his minor artistic accomplishment, but worried that Miss Rhoades’ compliment might draw attention from the others in his group. They would look at him with wide eyes, not to admire his work, but to deride him. His classmates would always pounce on an opportunity to reduce Butch to a punch line just like a barn cat would pounce on a gimp mouse. He looked up and glanced at his table mates. They were immersed in the details of their own preoccupations. Butch felt relieved that he had made it through another social interlude without incident.

Miss Rhoades gave instructions for cleanup. Clay tools were swept hastily into large plastic storage trays. Students went nuts smooshing their sculptures, consolidating the clay into large, smelly lumps. Butch sat in his seat with sullen eyes; he had to destroy his masterpiece, the creation that had garnered him rare positive recognition. He stared lovingly at his umbrella and remembered the attractive blonde in his father’s photo. Oh, how her eyes had called out to him! There had been something about the girl that excited him in ways his eleven-year-old libido didn’t fully understand, yet understood completely.

Butch’s thoughts were so entrenched in the heavenly details of the attractive blonde that he forgot all about the plastic knife encased in clay. He brought his hand down forcefully on top of the umbrella. Pain needled up his arm like someone had injected his hand with battery acid. He yanked his hand up to his face and stared in horror at the clay tool driven into his palm. It hadn’t made it through the back of his hand; a tiny patch of skin stretched into a miniature teepee over the shape of the tool’s sharp point. Blood sprayed from the wound and onto the table in thin, delicate threads. The top half of the tool was stripped of clay, the green plastic looking like exposed bone underneath dead flesh.

Butch’s mouth twisted into an expression of shock that was almost comic. He used the index finger and thumb of his free hand to dislodge the tool. Rivulets of blood ran down his wrist, spreading dark red stains up the arm of his grey flannel shirt. Blood collected in tiny pools on the table’s surface, cracked and carved-up from decades of art class vandalism. He looked around frantically, expecting Miss Rhoades and the other kids to have witnessed the tragedy of his absentmindedness. No one had noticed. He stood up with the quickness of a puma, sending his chair into the radiator behind him. Before he could see if anyone noticed the loud crash of the wooden chair against the radiator’s metal sheath, he was out the door and in the cool air of the deserted hallway. Ducking into the boys’ room, Butch was greeted with a rancid mixture of bleach and feces. He moved to one of two sinks bolted to the wall and ran his hand under cold water. At first another flurry of pain ran up his arm, but the coldness of the tap water soon served as a mild numbing agent. He wrapped his hand in a brown paper towel and moved into one of the stalls, closing the door behind him. A single bare light bulb hung over the stall. He unwrapped the bandage and examined the wound under the bulb’s cheap yellow glow. The wound wasn’t as large as the first bolts of pain and the blood had led him to believe; it was only about a quarter inch across. The bleeding had slowed to a crawl, and the pain had weakened to a dull throb.

Butch exited the stall, washed the tears from his face under another blast of cold water, and exited the bathroom. The period had ended while he was dressing his hand. Lunch hour had arrived. Fifth and sixth graders groped their way through the swell of other students en route to the cafeteria in the basement. He walked back to Miss Rhoades’ room and peeked through the long rectangular window in the door. His stomach sank as he spied Miss Rhoades pumping the trigger on a plastic spray bottle filled with blue liquid and wiping a clump of paper towels over the small pools of blood on the art table. Butch dashed up the hall. He stopped at the classroom, retrieved his sack lunch, and crashed through the front doors. An insanely bright September afternoon greeted him. Students were supposed to eat their lunches in the cafeteria, but Butch dismissed protocol and settled on a hot cement window ledge on the far side of the building near the basketball hoops. The humid schoolyard air brought tiny drops of moisture to the surface of his skin. Sweat collected underneath his paper towel bandage and stabbed at his wound. Peeking into the darkness of his paper lunch sack, he retrieved a bologna sandwich, tore it from the foil, and sank his teeth into it. The morning had been a long, grueling ordeal, and he needed to fill his tank.

Butch was down to his last bite when a long shadow washed over his body like an angry storm cloud. He looked up and saw John Andrews. A ripe mixture of body odor and hair grease wafted off of John and loitered in the air between them. John leaned in. His yellow teeth jutted crazily from his gums in a crooked formation. His breath was a vibrant bouquet of Cheetos and wood rot. John had seen what happened in art class, witnessed the whole mess. He even ran his finger through the smatterings of blood on his way out the door, a spark in his eye and the urge to laugh rumbling in his throat. He swatted the last piece of sandwich from Butch’s hand; it fell to the ground and quickly summoned the attention of several large ants.

Butch’s eyes widened. He stared up at John, already prepared to accept whatever awaited him with no fuss or fight. Butch’s reluctance to retaliate was due less to the fear of amplifying John’s fury as it was to getting into hot water with the disciplinary matrons of the schoolyard. John leaned in closer and made long sniffing sounds, moving his nose about Butch’s face and neck. “Hmm, smells like a ripe old pussy to me.” He took a step back. His husky frame loomed over Butch. “Yeah, I saw what happened back there. Saw that blood spray outta ya like a stuck fuckin pig.” He laughed the way a crazy old shut-in might laugh after confiscating a child’s kickball. Butch curled the lunch sack in his hands. The movement folded fingernails into his palm, drawing fresh blood that soaked through his paper towel bandage. His eyes followed John’s movements. He said nothing.

“Then,” John continued, raising an index finger, “you ran outta there all scared like a big fuckin pussy.” He smiled wide. Chapped lips broke apart under yellow scabs.

Butch backed into the window behind him; he could retreat no farther. The outline of John’s body was carved into the sun’s bright glow. From where Butch sat, a fiery halo stretched around John’s head and down his shoulders. “What do you want?” is all that slipped past Butch’s lips.

John paused. In his brief career as a schoolyard thug, he had never before been asked that question. His ubiquitous and non-discriminating bullying had always been accepted without question. His victims generally regarded it as something that simply existed, like clouds or green grass, without devoting much time to contemplating some deeper meaning or purpose.

John squinted and looked at Butch’s bloody bandage. “Lemme see where you got stuck,” he said. “I wanna see what got your panties in a bunch.”

Butch pressed his hand to his chest and shook his head. John grabbed at his wrist and started to pull. Butch made the mistake of letting one of his thrashing legs connect with John’s muscled thigh. John retaliated by pulling Butch’s head back by the hair. The sounds of tiny hairs being ripped from his scalp bounced around in Butch’s skull. Sweat rolled down from Butch’s forehead and into his eyes. That was all the leverage John needed to seize control of Butch’s bandaged hand. John pulled the bandage off and let it fall to the asphalt. Butch’s bloody wound was littered with flecks of brown paper towel lint. John used his thumbs to spread the wound apart, forming a tiny mouth in the palm of Butch’s hand. Butch started to cry, which only served to amuse John. Laughing grunts came through John’s nose. “Oh, c’mon,” John said. “This ain’t nothin but a scratch. You got all fuckin weepy over this?” He poked at the tiny red mouth with his thumb nail. Butch, racked with pain and humiliation, closed his eyes and turned his head.

Groups of students began to flow into the schoolyard. A boy dribbling a basketball walked up to Butch and John, and looked at them with a vacant expression.

“Fuck off,” John said, and the boy ran way. Butch turned his head to the side. The wound was still bleeding. John wiped the blood aside with his thumb. It was then that Butch’s mind grasped the subjective meaning of what it meant to be crazy. No one else was with them to enjoy John’s clever display of theatrics. This was for John’s amusement alone. Butch wanted to vomit, but held back lest John’s fury flare to some uncontrollable level.

The schoolyard was filling quickly with more students. Basketball games were forming and the hopscotch grid already had a line eight deep. John maintained a strong hold on Butch and took a quick look around to see if they were being watched. They weren’t. John turned back to Butch. John’s expression had softened to one of mild befuddlement. He seemed to be staring not at Butch but at the pane of glass at Butch’s back. Butch then realized that John was looking at his own reflection. John’s chapped lips parted slightly, and his breathing grew longer, deeper. Butch contemplated pulling from John’s grip and running apeshit back into the building. But before he could do so, John’s eyes refocused on him. John’s filthy smile reappeared, his tombstone teeth looking moldy in the shadows of their close proximity. It was then that Butch saw John’s neck moving in and out, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as wet sucking sounds came from somewhere behind his flesh. John pulled Butch’s hand forward, the crusty red mouth staring up at the blazing sun. Butch’s tears grew fatter, his nose ran uncontrollably. With a single quick movement, John lowered his head above Butch’s hand and let a large glob of phlegm escape from between his pursed lips. The thick green glob grew thinner, longer, until it became a string that dangled just above Butch’s hand. The wind picked up and the string did a little dance before it met with Butch’s open wound. The phlegm pooled in the tiny red mouth and overflowed into Butch’s palm. The phlegm followed sweat-slicked folds and wrinkles, stretching out to form slippery wet tentacles.

Butch thought he was going to faint. It was the fear of what John might do to his limp body that pulled him back from the brink. John let out a loud cackle, drawing the attention of Mr. Bishop, who was on recess duty that week. Butch’s eyes met with Mr. Bishop’s.

John’s instincts must have sent out a signal; he turned and saw the kindly old teacher walking towards them. John turned to Butch and whispered in his ear, “That’s a little something to help that cut heal. Don’t mention anything or I’ll put my fist up your ass.” He released Butch’s hand, turned without acknowledging Mr. Bishop, and casually strolled around the side of the building. Mr. Bishop approached Butch. Butch looked up at him with red, watery eyes. His wounded hand was curled into a fist and stuffed under his armpit.

“What did he do to you, Butch?” Mr. Bishop asked. His voice was stern yet gentle. He had been Butch’s fourth grade teacher. Mr. Bishop had a soft place in his heart for Butch. He worried about him. Butch was bright, but terribly timid. Mr. Bishop could envision the beating the world would inflict on Butch if he didn’t find some courage and strength. He had miserable thoughts of Butch hurting someone if he couldn’t claw his way out of the sheltered world he’d created for himself.

“I . . . well . . . everything’s fine, Mr. Bishop,” Butch mumbled under quick, sharp snorts. He wiped his nose with the back of his good hand. “Everything’s fine. John was just asking me something about class.”

Mr. Bishop knelt down and put his hand on Butch’s shoulder. “Well, Butch, from what I can see, everything is definitely not fine.” He scratched underneath Butch’s chin to get him to look up. “You know, Butch, I’m your friend. There’s nothing you can tell me that will get you into trouble. And no one will hurt you for what you tell me, I’ll make sure of it.”

Butch stifled the urge to spill his guts. He politely reiterated that everything was just fine and walked away before Mr. Bishop could make another attempt at extracting the source of his troubles. Butch went back into the building and hid in the custodian’s closet for the remainder of lunch. He rinsed his hand in the giant sink. The phlegm had begun to dry and he used his fingers to wipe it from his skin. The water sent burning waves through his hand and into his wrist. The area around the wound had gotten darker, redder. He got some powdered soap from a dispenser on the wall and cleaned his wound the best he could, biting his lip to stave off more tears.

Butch soldiered through the rest of the day, went home, and watched reruns of Mr. Ed until his mother got off work. He tried hard to hide his busted hand, but it was no use. His mother picked up on his odd behavior and nearly shrieked when she removed his napkin bandage and saw a swollen, infected hand. Stricken with horrified concern, she drove him to the emergency room. He returned to school the next day.

Butch had a few more run-ins with John Andrews that year, but all were minor in nature, comparatively speaking. John moved away the following summer. He never spoke a word to anyone about the day he hocked a clam into Butch’s open flesh. John kept that pleasant memory all for himself. Over the next couple of decades, Butch’s thoughts would revisit the day he impaled his hand with the clay tool. John’s menacing eyes, the shame of being victimized in front of his favorite teacher, the bloody smile puckering its bloody red lips, everything would play out in crisp Technicolor in that place where present time ends and memory begins. It was not the defining moment in his life, just a single floor plank of the small warehouse that was his mind. A warehouse crammed with pallets of single-serve emotions and televisions that would only display a single wavy vision of the human condition.

Butch now sat on his creaky old sofa. White lines ran down his dirty face where tears had forged their paths. The house sat silent. The early morning picture show had just ended, and his mind snapped back into the present with the force of a car wreck. He rubbed his eyes and made his way towards the liquor cabinet; he needed to take the edge off. He knelt down at the splintered pine cabinet and rooted around inside. Most of the bottles were empty. His hand seized upon a bottle of clear liquid, the label missing, peeled off. He uncapped the bottle and downed what was inside. He was about to wipe his mouth with the front of shirt when he saw it: a tuft a brown hair bouncing about on the other side of his shrubs. At first he thought he was seeing things, perhaps a blurry scorch of light mutated by some leftover tears. He rubbed his eyes hard with the front of his shirt. When he looked out the window again, there was no mistake; the tuft of brown hair was real, and it was scampering around less than fifteen feet from his window.

Confusion married panic, and Butch understood what was happening. Oh, God, he’s back!, Butch thought, his mind racing around in an incoherent frenzy. That son of a bitch is back! His heart took off, tears rushed back to his eyes. He stood up quickly and stumbled backward, spilling onto the sofa. From where he was sprawled, he had a clear view out the window. The hair was still loitering outside on the gravel road just beyond his property. Butch started massaging the palm of his hand with his thumb. He shook uncontrollably and rolled onto the dirty carpet. He took small steps towards the window. Snot dripped onto his shirt. “Not this time,” he mumbled under deep sobs.

Butch left the room and returned with his shotgun. He got on his knees and moved cautiously to the window. He opened it with great care, put the muzzle of the shotgun through the opening, and rested an elbow on the sill. He quieted his breathing, waiting patiently for any sign of movement. The crop of hair reappeared behind the shrubs where the driveway began. Sweat burned Butch’s eyes. He blinked rapidly, his finger tapping the trigger. A hand emerged from the side of the bushes, then a sneaker, and before Butch could reconsider, the shotgun fired with a deafening blast that echoed throughout the house and sent birds scattering from nearby trees. Butch ran outside, gripping the shotgun. His bare feet moved over trim grass, still damp with morning dew. He reached the driveway, turned around sharply, and went back inside. Butch spent the better part of that morning locked in his bathroom, the grainy scope of what he’d done slowly coming into focus. What was left of the Boy Scout had rearranged the cables in his brain beyond untangling. Had he noticed the boy’s walkathon sponsorship clipboard before it was swallowed by the growing pool of blood, he would have recognized the name on the top sheet, scrawled in pencil: John Andrews, Jr.