The Distant Dead

SAL

SAL

Sal met the math teacher six and a half months before the math teacher died. It was the first day of sixth grade, a beautiful morning under a cloudless sky, and Mr Merkel saved him from humiliation with a touch of his hand.

The school bus stopped outside the Marzen General Store at seven fifteen, and Sal got up at five thirty to make sure he wouldn’t miss it. His uncles were still asleep, so he moved quietly, making a bologna sandwich for lunch and checking his backpack to make sure the notebooks and pencils from fifth grade were in order. When he set out the sun hadn’t risen above the hills, but the sky was a faint blue, and he could see Samson under the wheelbarrow. The dog lifted his square head as Sal walked by, then laid it down again.

The only sound as Sal walked the fire road to Marzen was the crunch of sand under his worn sneakers. He felt grown up and brave, walking alone to the bus that would take him to a new school in another town, but he couldn’t help thinking about how this day would have gone if his mother were alive. She would have made him scrambled eggs for breakfast, packed him a peanut butter sandwich and Fritos for lunch, and walked him the two blocks from their house to the bus stop. Though it was also possible she would have slept too late to do any of these things, and this thought made Sal’s head feel bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. To distract himself he made up a story.

Sal was a quiet boy, but his stories were loud, filled with angels and demons and epic battles between good and evil. Today the armies of Heaven and Hell flooded the hills with blood until Angelus, the greatest archangel of them all, slew Hell’s minions with a scythe Death himself had given him. Angelus had been Sal’s champion since Sal was five, sick with a fever so high it painted monsters in the corners of his room until the archangel strode in and killed them all. As Marzen came into view he knelt on his mighty knee in the fire road, victorious as always, while the heavenly host sang his praises to the sky.

Sal was thirty minutes early for the bus, so he sat on the curb in front of the general store and watched Angelus and the host dissolve in the newly risen sun. Then he took a sketchbook and a pencil from his backpack and drew Angelus with stars for eyes and his scythe raised high, battling a demon. He would color it that night, with the colored pencils his mother had given him for Christmas two years before.

Ten minutes before the bus came the seventeen other middle and high school students straggled up in ones and twos. None of them spoke to Sal; none were in his grade. It was dumb luck, his mom always said, that nobody else had a baby the year he was born. They barely spoke to each other, either – they were slurry and tired, yanked from their summer slumber and shoved into the morning. When the bus came they took seats as close to the back as they could. Sal sat by himself behind Mr Curtis, the bus driver.

Thirty-five minutes later the bus pulled up to Pershing Middle School in Lovelock, and Sal stood on the sidewalk amid a swirl of students and parents. The confidence that had carried him from his uncles’ house had evaporated as the bus lumbered down the interstate, and now he felt the first stirrings of panic. The school stretched low and flat to his left and right, and it was so much bigger than the three-room Marzen elementary school that it made him dizzy.

Gretchen Suarez, a seventh grader from Marzen, studied a piece of paper before setting off, her pink flip-flops smacking the cement. A group of Lovelock kids walked by, and they had those papers, too. Everybody had them. Everybody knew where to go except Sal, because he didn’t have the paper. His mom would have given it to him, like all the other kids’ moms had done, but she hadn’t woken up that one morning, and now Sal was going to cry, and this made him angry – at himself for being such a baby, and at his mother for leaving him all alone without the paper that would tell him where to go. He couldn’t be the kid who cried on the first day of school. It wouldn’t matter that he was wearing basketball shorts like all the other boys’, or that his backpack was the same dull blue as everyone else’s; he would always be the kid who cried on the first day, and that would ruin everything left that could still be ruined.

Then Sal felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see a man in his fifties, with kind gray eyes behind silver glasses. ‘You seem a little lost.’

Sal couldn’t speak, so he nodded.

‘Let’s see if we can figure out where you belong.’ The man led Sal through the blue front doors and into a small office. A woman with plastic-looking blond hair sat at a desk, typing on a keyboard with the longest, skinniest fingers Sal had ever seen. He couldn’t stop looking at them, even when she raised them from the keyboard and folded them together like a spider bunching up its legs. She looked over his head at the man.

‘Can I help you?’

‘This young fellow doesn’t know where to go.’ The man’s voice was whispery, but a thin wire of sound ran through it that settled Sal’s anxiety from a boil to a simmer.

‘Didn’t you get the email with his schedule?’ The woman sounded annoyed.

The man coughed an apology cough. ‘I’m not his father. I’m Adam Merkel, your new math teacher.’

At this, the woman’s whole face changed. She pushed back her chair and reached out one of those skinny hands. She’d painted her fingernails the same color as her skin, and it made her fingers look even longer. ‘Dr Merkel! How wonderful to meet you! I’m Dee Pratzer.’

‘Mr Merkel is fine,’ the man said as he shook her hand.

Sal was very good at telling what people were thinking. His mother used to say that as a baby, he’d touch her face when she was sad, and he’d have a look of knowing, as if he were older than the oldest man. Now he watched Dee Pratzer flutter her eyelashes, and he knew she was flirting, but not in the sexy-sexy way his mom used to flirt with her customers at the bar. Dee Pratzer was impressed by this man, and wanted him to like her. Sal gave the man – Mr Merkel – a good look for the first time. He was short, with thinning gray hair combed over his head. Even though the temperature would be over ninety by noon, he wore a brown tweed jacket over a crisp white dress shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but he looked as though he wished he were. As though, that morning, he’d started to put on a tie, then decided against it.

Dee Pratzer turned back to Sal. She was still annoyed with him but didn’t want Mr Merkel to see. ‘Didn’t your mother give you your schedule, sweetie?’

‘My mom’s dead,’ Sal said, and waited to see what she did. People’s reactions to this statement said a lot about them, he’d found. Some people didn’t know what to say, so they stammered and looked away. These people Sal liked. The ones who popped right out with their pity didn’t mean a word of it, and they weren’t to be trusted. He had a good idea which type Dee Pratzer would be.

She puckered her lips and said, ‘You poor dear.’ Sal looked down so she wouldn’t see his satisfaction.

‘Do you have a copy of his schedule?’ Mr Merkel asked, and Sal realized he hadn’t checked to see what he thought of his mom being dead.

Dee Pratzer printed out a sheet of paper like the ones the other kids had and handed it to Mr Merkel. He turned to Sal and smiled a twinkly, generous smile. ‘You’re in my class for first period. How about I show you where it is?’

Mr Merkel’s first-period class had twenty-three sixth graders, and the other twenty-two were there when Sal and Mr Merkel arrived. In fact, Sal and Mr Merkel were late, and the students were chasing one another around, swinging their backpacks, and rummaging through the boxes of rulers lined up on the air conditioner. The noise they made was joyful and animalistic and loud, and Sal found it harrowing.

Mr Merkel, too, seemed taken aback. He stood in the doorway, his black leather briefcase hanging from one hand. Then he stepped inside and pulled the door shut. This small gesture had the effect of reducing the decibel level by half. A dozen of the children looked stricken, as though caught in very bad behavior, while the remainder merely looked disappointed.

‘Take your seats, please,’ Mr Merkel said in his soft voice, but that filament of sound thrummed just enough to nudge twenty-two summer children into fall. Sal watched them sort themselves according to a hierarchy they must have established in elementary school. Six pretty, white girls sat at one table. They’d glued sparkly beads on their sneakers, so their feet glittered as they bounced their thin legs on the plastic seats. Eight brown kids crowded around another table, Paiute and Latino, their handed-down backpacks faded and frayed. Three kids with the hangdog look of misfits took a third table. Five boys sat at a table in the back, the ones whose shoulders had begun to spread just a little and who wore their athleticism like invisible capes. Sal sighed. The Marzen elementary school had been the same, only smaller.

When everyone was seated one chair was left, with the boys at the back table. Sal sidled along the wall and sat in it, trying to look as though he belonged there. He might not have athletic shoulders or the crisp, white, back-to-school Nikes they wore, but at least he was wearing basketball shorts like theirs. The five boys looked him over, first with curiosity and then, when they’d scanned him from his unruly hair to his ragged sneakers, dismissal. Sal’s face warmed. He wouldn’t be sitting there tomorrow, he knew. His chair would mysteriously migrate to the misfits’ table, as it had in Marzen.

Mr Merkel pulled a sheaf of paper from his briefcase and stood beside his desk. He smiled, but it wasn’t the twinkly smile he’d given Sal in the office. This smile was thin and didn’t reach his eyes, and it made Sal uneasy. Mr Merkel looked a little like Sal had felt when he got off the bus.

‘I thought I’d start by telling you about myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Dr – Mr Merkel. I moved from Reno to teach here.’ He set the papers on his desk. He drummed his index fingers together, then picked up the papers again. ‘I was a professor at the University of Nevada, in the mathematics department. Number theory, mostly. Though I taught calculus, too, and statistics.’ He ruffled the edges of the papers with his thumb. ‘You’re probably wondering why I’d leave that job to come here.’

Sal didn’t think anybody was wondering this except for him, but the frenzy of the early minutes had been smothered by the hum of the fluorescent lights, so they were listening, at least.

‘I wanted to get back to the beginning,’ Mr Merkel said. ‘Back to when kids first get excited about math. When they start to see it’s more than multiplication tables and long division and realize it explains everything. Why the sky is blue. Why your chair holds you up. Why the wind blows from the west. It explains these things whether you speak English, Chinese, or Spanish. Two plus two is four no matter where you live, and the circumference of a circle is its diameter times pi no matter your religion. Our ability to understand these things is what separates us from the rest of the animals, and binds us together as a species.’ He had an energy about him now, sparking and electric. ‘Math,’ he said, ‘is the one true language of humanity.’

One of the pretty girls smacked her gum, but the girl next to her watched Mr Merkel without blinking. Sal glanced around at the boys at his table. Two were bewildered. Another two were intrigued, but Sal could tell that the flush on Mr Merkel’s cheeks made them uncomfortable. The fifth, a lanky boy with straight dark hair, watched Mr Merkel with curiosity, spinning a pencil between his thumb and forefinger. Sal looked back to Mr Merkel, waiting for the next verse of the poetry that had sprung so unexpectedly from this unassuming man.

But Mr Merkel had lost his way. He cleared his throat and looked at his papers. In the silence he seemed to shrivel. The air in the room deflated as students shifted in their seats, some in disappointment, others in relief that the odd little speech was over.

Mr Merkel handed the papers to the nearest student, a girl with black hair in a high ponytail. ‘Take one and pass them around.’

When the papers made their way to Sal he read the title: ‘Sixth Grade Math Topics and Expectations of Students.’ A single-spaced outline filled both sides of the page, with headings like ‘Ratios and Proportional Relationships,’ ‘Number Systems and Fractional Equations,’ and ‘Prime Numbers and Prime Factorization.’ Nowhere did it mention the color of the sky or the direction of the wind.

‘We will start with ratios and proportional relationships.’ Mr Merkel turned to the whiteboard. His back in his brown tweed jacket was rounded like a shell.

The lanky boy at Sal’s table leaned forward, a smirk lifting one side of his mouth. ‘He looks like a turtle,’ he said, and the other boys laughed.