The Centaurus

But his joints held rigid. He remembered the thunder. Zimmerman might still be in the building; he never went home. The centaur listened for a rumble upstairs, and in that moment of listening everything altered. The girl dropped from around his neck. Without a backwards look, Venus vanished into the underwood. A thousand green petals closed upon her passage. Love has its own ethics, which the deliberating will irrevocably offends. Then as now, Caldwell stood on that spot of cement alone and puzzled, and now, as then, climbed the stairs with a painful, confused sense of having displeased, through ways he could not follow, the God who never rested from watching him.

He climbed the flights of stairs to his room on the second floor. The steps seemed built for the legs of a more supple species; his clumsiness was agonizing. Each wave of pain forced his gaze tight against a section of wall where a ball point pen had looped, a varnished newel post whose bevelled cap had been torn from the glue-glazed dowel stump, a corner of the stairs in which a little black drift of dust and grit had hardened, a windowpane filmed in grease and framed in rusty mullions, a dead stretch of yellow wall. The door to his room was shut. He expected to hear turbulence through it; but there was instead an ominous quiet. His skin twitched. Had Zimmerman, detecting noise, come and taken over the class?

This fear proved justified. He pushed open.the door, and there, not two yards away, Zimmerman’s lopsided face hung like a gigantic emblem of authority, stretching from rim to rim of Caldwell’s appalled vision. With a malevolent pulse, it seemed to widen still further. An implacable bolt, springing from the center of the forehead above the two disparately magnifying lenses of the principal’s spectacles, leaped space and transfixed the paralyzed victim. The silence as the two men stared at one another was louder than thunder.

Zimmerman turned to the class; it had been tamed into alphabetical rows of combed, frightened children. “Mr. Caldwell has graciously returned to us.”

The class obediently snickered. “I think such devotion to duty should be rewarded with a mild round of applause.” He led the clapping; his cupped palms patted each other daintily. Zimmerman’s extremities were queerly small for such a massive head and torso. He wore a sports coat whose padded shoulders and broad checkered pattern emphasized the disproportion. Above the ironical applause a few boys’ smirks glinted toward Caldwell. The humiliated teacher licked his lips. They tasted charred.

“Thank you, boys and girls,” Zimmerman said. “That is quite enough.” The gentle applause abruptly stopped. The principal turned to Caldwell again; the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven. Caldwell uttered a nonsensical-syllable that was meant to be a shout of praise and adoration.

“We can discuss this later, George. The children are anxious for their lesson.”

But Caldwell, frantic to explain, to be absolved, bent and lifted his trouser leg, an unhoped-for indecency that burst the class into loud hilarity. And indeed Caldwell had in his heart asked for some such response.

Zimmerman understood this. He understood everything. Though Caldwell instantly dropped the trouser leg and straightened to attention, Zimmerman continued to gaze down at his ankle, as if it were at an infinite distance from him but his eyes were infinitely percipient. “Your socks don’t quite match,” he said. “Is this your explanation?”

The class burst again. Immaculately timing himself, Zimmerman waited until he would be audible above the last trickling chuckles. “But George-George-you should not allow your commendable concern with grooming to interfere with another pedagogic need, punctuality.”

Caldwell was so notoriously a poor dresser, his clothes were so nakedly shabby, that there was rich humor even in this; though doubtless many of the laughers had been lost among Zimmerman’s elegant sarcastic turns.

The principal made a fastidious indicative gesture. “Are you carrying a lightning rod? Remarkably prudent, on a cloudless winter day.”

Caldwell groped and felt behind him the cold sleek arrow-shaft jutting from his pocket. He took it out and offered it to Zimmerman while he struggled to find the first words of his story, a story that, once known, would make Zimmer man embrace him for his heroic suffering; tears of compassion would fall from that imperious distended face. “This is it,” Caldwell said. “I don’t know which kid did it-”

Zimmerman disdained touching the shaft; palms lifted in protest, as if the bright stick were charged with danger, he took a few quick backward steps, his small feet twinkling with the athletic prowess that still lingered in them. Zimmerman’s first fame had been as a schoolboy track star. Strong-shouldered, lithe-limbed, he had excelled in all tests of speed and strength-the discus, dashes, endurance runs. “George, I said later,” he said. “Please teach your class. Since the program of my morning has already been interrupted, I’ll sit in the rear of the class and make this my month’s visit. Please behave, boys and girls, as if I were not present.”

Caldwell lived in dread of the supervising principal’s monthly classroom visitations. The brief little typewritten reports that followed them, containing a blurred blend of acid detail and educational jargon, had the effect, if they were good, of exalting Caldwell for days and, if they were bad (as they nearly always seemed to be; even an ambiguous adjective poisoned the cup), of depressing him for weeks. Now a visit had come, when he was addled, in the wrong, in pain, and unprepared.

Slyly pussyfooting, Zimmerman sidled down along the blackboard. His broad checkered back was hunched in a droll pretense of being inconspicuous. He took a seat in the last row, behind the cup ears and blazing acne of Mark Youngerman. No sooner was Zimmerman settled at the end desk than he noticed that level with him, two rows away, in the last seat of the third row, Iris Osgood sat immersed in dull bovine beauty. Zimmerman slid out of his seat into the one next to her and in a little pantomime of whispers asked her for a sheet of tablet paper. The plump girl fussed, tore off a sheet, and as he leaned over to take it the principal with a bold slide of his eyes looked down the top of her loose silk blouse.

Caldwell watched this in an awed daze. He felt the colors of the class stir under him; Zimmerman’s, presence made them electric. Begin. He forgot who he was, what he taught, why he was here. He went over to his desk, put down the arrowshaft, and picked up a magazine clipping that reminded him. Cleveland scientist charts creation-clock. Zimmerman’s face seemed huge at the rear of the room. “Behind me on the blackboard,” Caldwell began, “is the figure five followed by nine zeros. This is five-what?”

A timid girl’s voice broke from the silence, saying, “Trillion.” Judith Lengel, that would be. She tried, but didn’t have it. Her father was one of those biff-bang real estate salesmen who expected their kids to be May Queen, valedictorian, and Most Popular just because he, old Five Percent Lengel, had made a mint. Poor Judy, the kid just didn’t have it upstairs.

“Billion,” Caldwell said. “Five billion years. This is, under our present state of knowledge, believed to be the age of the universe. It may be” older; it is almost certainly at least this old. Now, who can tell me what a billion is?”

“A thousand thousand?” Judy quavered. Poor little bitch, why didn’t somebody get her off the hook? Why didn’t one of the bright ones like young Kegerise speak up? Kegerise sat there with his legs all over the aisle doodling on his tablet and smiling to himself. Caldwell looked around for Peter and then remembered the kid wasn’t in this section. He came in the seventh period. Zimmerman made a notation and winked over at the Osgood girl, who didn’t know what was up. Dumb. Dumb as pure white lead.