City Kid. Mary MacCracken

are three babies … and –” Luke stopped suddenly, obviously surprised at himself. He wasn’t ready to trust me with any more. “That’s all.”

      It was enough for one day.

      “That’s a good story,” I said.

      We sat silently looking at the lions.

      I had no materials with me. What to do? What to do? Suddenly I remembered the stopwatch. We were supposed to use the stopwatch. I took it out of my pocket and laid it on the table.

      “Do you know what this is?” I asked Luke.

      He nodded without expression.

      “This one works like this. Press the thing at the top to make it go. See, there are sixty seconds in a minute. Press it again to make it stop. Now this little thing on the side makes the hands go back to the beginning when you press it. Try it.”

      I nudged the stopwatch toward Luke.

      Luke stared at it, then touched it tentatively with one finger. Suppose he threw it, dropped it, broke it. Suppose he did? I wanted him to know I trusted him. And I did trust him. More than that. Already more than that.

      Luke picked up the stopwatch and held it carefully in his left hand, pushed the button on the top with his right index finger. Tick, tick, tick. The stopwatch and my pulse beat together. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.

      “Okay,” I said. “Time me. Give me something to do and see how long it takes.”

      Luke pushed the top button and then the side button. The hands returned to the top. He looked at me steadily. “What can you do?”

      I shrugged. “I don’t know. Think of something.”

      “Can you do dition?”

      “Dition?”

      “Like pluses. Add.”

      “Oh. Sure. Addition. I think so.”

      “All right. One million dollars plus two million dollars. Write it down here. Go.”

      Luke snapped on the stopwatch and turned over the lion picture. I wrote it down.

      “Ten seconds. Twenty seconds,” Luke counted off the seconds.

      “Three million dollars. There.” I pushed the paper back.

      Luke clicked off the watch and put it down carefully on the table away from the edge. He studied my face and then, never saying anything, turned back to the paper and wrote 100 beside my dition and turned back to me.

      “You can keep it if you want,” he said.

      “Thank you, Luke,” I answered. “Listen, we’ve got to go back now, but I’m going to come down here every week, a couple of times a week or more, and see you. If that’s okay with you.”

      Luke nodded and we walked back to class without talking.

      Just outside the door, he stopped. “When you comin’?” he asked.

      “Tomorrow,” I said, without thinking. “I’ll be down again tomorrow.”

Chapter 5

      Time dragged the next morning. It was harder than ever to sit through Current Methods of Teaching Mentally Challenged Adolescents and Practicum in Teaching Reading to the Mentally Challenged. This was a practicum with no practice, only mimeographed sheets. Finally the clock buzzed its muted signal to freedom and I was out and on my way to School 23.

      I thought about Luke as I drove. I’d talked to Cal the night before. I didn’t understand it. Luke just didn’t seem that bad to me. Was it because I had taught such seriously disturbed children before that now Luke seemed easy in comparison?

      Partly, perhaps. Or was it his environment that didn’t give him a chance? It seemed as if people didn’t listen to him. Did Luke realize this and so didn’t bother to talk? Maybe his resistance grew into refusal to do work and he escaped into the fantasy of his drawings. I would have to get into the office and read his records carefully.

      I arrived at ten to one, and the yard at the west side of the school that served as parking lot and playground was jammed with kids. A heavy woman, with a plastic kerchief tied over her gray hair and black galoshes on her feet, stood in the center of the yard blowing short shrill blasts on a whistle. The children cheerfully ignored her, pushing, shoving, moving like a tidal wave from one side of the yard to the other, back and forth, swirling around the teacher almost without noticing her.

      Occasionally something would distract them. A fight would break out between two boys, and a small group of ten or twelve children would form a protective circle around the combatants, their cheers drowning out the agitated whistle blasts.

      A long loud bell rang inside the school and the wave of children rearranged itself.

      “Line up. Line up. We’re not going in till I see straight lines.”

      The children separated themselves into a dozen or so groups.

      “Straighten up those lines” – a few more whistle blasts. The children didn’t move at all, except to dart from their clusters to pick up a forgotten glove or book.

      “All right. Kindergarten first.” No one seemed to expect to have to form lines as they had been instructed to do, and one group after another tramped through the side door. Once again, words were meaningless.

      Lisa Eckhardt was mixing paint when I walked into her second grade.

      “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon. Come on in.”

      “I know,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be here so soon. I think we’re only supposed to come twice a week in the beginning.”

      “Well, feel free. Come whenever you like. You know, Luke actually said something to me yesterday. Didn’t do any work, of course, but he did say good-bye when he left. And that’s something. I wasn’t sure he even knew I existed.”

      The door burst open and the kids poured in. Lisa yelled, “Put your boots in the closets or else wipe off your feet. The floor’s getting too wet to paint on.”

      “Okay, Miss Eckhardt.”

      “We gonna paint. All right!”

      In between pokes and yells and boots tossed across the classroom, the children managed to find a pile of men’s shirts and help one another button them up.

      I watched, liking what I saw. Obviously they had all done this before and knew what to do. It was noisy and chaotic, but there was a sense of unity, almost of a family. The bickering was part of their communication.

      Remembering Luke’s pictures, I knew this was not the time to take him out of class. During art, at least, he could be doing the same thing as the rest of the class.

      Luke came in last. No boots. No gloves. His hands rough and red, nails black with dirt. I stood beside him as he hung his jacket on a hook in the closet.

      “I’m going to come back for you in about a half hour,” I said. “I have to go down to the office right now. Okay?”

      Luke nodded without expression. He stood by the coat closet, alone and silent. I wanted to get him a shirt, help him button it, find a paintbrush. Instead, I walked to the door. It would not help to treat Luke like a baby in front of the other children.

      Mrs. Karras was nowhere in sight when I walked into the office, but the secretary willingly gave me the key to the file and in a minute I had lifted out Brauer, Lucas. The file was thick and the folder smudged and bent. It had obviously been in and out of the drawer many times. I took the file to the music room and sorted the contents on the long metal table.

      There were four piles of pink absence slips signed by the truant officer. Twenty-five