probably think she’s hot, too. It’s not like we don’t all know it; she’s on homecoming court every year. But seriously. She’s put on a little ass-weight, I think. I mean, she’s not that hot. Is she? Do you think she is? Hot like Woody Trask hot? I heard she’s a prude, too. I just don’t think they make sense.”
“What do you mean?” I fantasized that others were watching Crotch as he conducted a perfectly normal conversation with a perfectly normal student.
“As a couple,” she said. Across the room, even Ted seemed subject to Woody’s charms—he was nodding and laughing as Woody patted him jokingly on the belly. “I’m not sure they’re very yin and yang as a couple. You know what I mean?”
Although it was clearly difficult, she broke her gaze from Woody to look at me. Unaccustomed to such attention, I blushed and looked down at the instrument in my hands. “Not really, I guess,” I answered. “I mean, I don’t know them very well. Not as a couple. Or separate. They seem all right to me. I don’t know. I can’t comment on her ass-weight. Or his. I don’t know. I guess I can’t really comment.”
Her exasperated expression was exactly what my inane remark deserved. After a moment Ted took up his baton and we launched into the worst dry run of “Flight of the Bumblebee” in human history. Halfway through it, Ted tossed the baton over his shoulder and gripped his shaking head with both hands. The instruments blurted to sudden halts, and the music, such as it was, was replaced by peals of laughter. The band instructor beamed at the talentless fools he called Ted’s Army, and he flipped back a page of his music. “Let’s not ever play that again,” he said, giggling.
Individual instruction, which took up one-third of study hall one day per week, represented the only scenario in which I could speak to a friendly face without the crowding of enemies. Ted was on a tight schedule—he had a flutist right before me and a drummer directly after—so there was not much time for chitchat. That was fine. We ran through pieces, he commented on and adjusted my performance, and every once in a while he even stood behind me to use his shadow-fingers to transmit each correct depression. Often after I sat down, while he busied himself lowering the music stand to my height, I would take a moment to relish the isolation of the cramped room and everything about it: the cheesy posters of Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, the embouchure mirrors on the back wall, the gap-toothed xylophones in the corner, the varnished autoharp for some reason mounted above the door, and the supply closet—a shallow nook that was always open and gleaming with a million mouthpieces, reeds, drumsticks, and miscellaneous spare parts. It was the breadth and versatility of the closet that proved Ted’s longevity and worth, not the buffoonery of his inept army.
Separating each of these otherwise amorphous days were my doomed dawns. That pile of shovels, the charred poker beside the hearth, my father’s soiled hands: any of these would work as the instrument of my demise. Still I studied and spooned my cold food out of cans, and still my father wandered the grounds, staring into space and water as if listening for guidance.
“How?” I asked one evening.
It had been a few days since we had last spoken; the topic, though, had not changed. “A knife,” he said, looking at me for a moment before going back to reading the stack of newspapers that arrived each day in the mail. But now he was too distracted to read. He looked at me again, his eyes less scarlet than in the past, less hooded with anger. “I have a knife from Scotland,” he said softly, “with a blade so sharp there would be almost no pain.” The wounds of my mother’s ear: maybe it was the same blade, maybe it would be the last thing she and I shared.
He was chopping wood two days later at dusk, strange helices of muscle thickening across his back with each swing, when I next approached. I stood watching for ten minutes. What had been trees divided and diminished, again and again; what had been dark and armored with bark became yellow, then white, until the pure heart of the wood shone with brilliance. Flecks stood out like white freckles against the brown of his skin. He exhaled loudly and