Gentlemen Read online

  It was pretty loud, and then Haberman banged something against the side of the barrel, and it made this loud buh-DUMP! buh-DUMP! sound and that was his way of telling us to sit down, shut up, and see what’s up with the barrel. Once it was more or less quiet, he cleared his throat. He was a seriously heavy smoker. You’d see him out front, sucking down one cigarette after another between classes. I’d never seen anyone smoke that fast. He worked the thing like it was a straw in an extra-thick milk shake, and figure he’d started smoking at fifteen or sixteen, he’d probably been sucking ‘em down for thirty or forty years. So anyway, whenever he cleared his throat, it sounded like there was furniture moving around in there. Kind of made you cringe. Then, like always, he said, “Good morning, class.”

  He said morning even though it was one class to go before lunch, but the clock said it wasn’t noon yet, and so he said good morning to us before class. It was this little tug-of-war he did with us. We wanted the day to be getting on and getting over, and he wanted to hold us right where we were. In Haberman’s world, it was always morning, it was always some crappy Tuesday morning, and that was just the way he liked it. He would’ve liked us to respond with Good morning, Mr. Haberman, and I’m sure some classes did, but we weren’t one of them. Some of us nodded at him but that was about it.

  “All right, then,” he continued. His voice was sort of tweety and gravelly at the same time, like a bird caught in a cement mixer. That was the cigarettes again. He must’ve had a girl’s voice once. Tommy, Bones, Mixer, and me, we all smoked, but not like that. We couldn’t score that many cigarettes, first off.

  “This book we’re about to start is a particular favorite of mine,” said Haberman, “and as you can see, I will be going to some unusual lengths to attempt to teach it to you. I have a little teaching aid here to start with.”

  I looked around, expecting someone to stand up. I thought a teaching aid was a person, but I guess I was wrong. Maybe that’s a teacher’s aid.

  “What do you suppose this is?” he continued. He gestured toward the blue plastic barrel with his right hand, sort of sweeping toward it so that you could see the palm of his hand, like this was a game show and the barrel was the prize. It was the kind you’d use to catch rainwater or hold the sort of heavy-duty junk that’d poke through garbage bags. It still looked kind of familiar. There was a little notch taken out of the lip of the thing, and I felt like I knew it’d be there, which would’ve meant I’d seen it before. But I couldn’t think where that might’ve been. Maybe I’d just noticed that when I walked in.

  “A barrel,” said Reedy from the back of the room. We didn’t raise our hands in here, because sometimes Haberman would leave you hanging for a while, hand in the air, dick in the wind, before calling on you. I guess he was waiting to see if anyone else would raise their hand, but why would you do that if someone else was already going to answer? What are we, going to fight over it?

  “That’s right,” said Haberman. “It’s a barrel. Can we all agree to that?”

  It seemed like maybe he was insulting us. Of course it was a barrel. No one answered him exactly, but there were enough of those small noises that basically meant, Yeah, OK, that he moved on.

  “And what do you suppose is in it?”

  He held up both of his hands and shrugged his shoulders, and we could see that he had a piece of wood in his left hand. It was like one of those little clubs you used to brain fish once you hauled them onto the dock. That would’ve been what he hit the barrel with before.

  I looked from the club to the open top of the barrel. You could see some blanket, dark wool and scratchy-looking.

  “A blanket,” I said. I don’t know why I spoke up. I guess I felt like someone had to or he’d just keep at it. Also, I didn’t want to just sit there and be insulted. I’d get into it with him, if that’s what he was angling for.

  “An awfully big blanket, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What?” I said.

  “An awfully big blanket. It must be quite large to fill up this whole barrel. More like a tent, I should think.”

  “It’s not a tent.”

  “Well, an awfully, awfully big blanket, then…”

  “Something wrapped in a blanket…then,” I said.

  “Ah, yes, I believe you are onto something, Mr. Benton. In fact, I will concede the point. It is, in fact, something wrapped in a blanket.”

  “What?” I asked, because he was still playing with us, and I’d just as soon get this over with.

  “Ah, what, indeed,” said Haberman. “Now we are approaching the heart of the matter.”

  He paused now and scanned the room. If he’d made a point, I’d missed it, but he stood there to let it sink in, anyway.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to let each of you try to figure that out. What, oh what, is contained within this barrel, wrapped, as Mr. Benton informs us, within this blanket? It could be anything, so I’m going to let each of you investigate, albeit, in a very limited manner.”

  We sat back in our chairs, slouching, trying our best to look like we couldn’t care less, but I’ll give it to Haberman, we were all kind of wondering now.

  “You each get,” he said, taking a half step back and smacking the side of the barrel with the fish club—buh-DUMP!—“one whack.”

  Reedy whispered something about the whole class whacking off and the back of the room cracked up a little. Haberman ignored it, just stood up there behind the barrel, a fish club curled inside his fingers with their yellowed nails and a weird smile twisting on his lips.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning, shall we?” he said, extending his right hand toward Lara, first seat, first row, and gesturing for her to come over.

  Lara was one of those girls, not exactly fat but definitely pushing the envelope, who wouldn’t be allowed to be a cheerleader at a less crappy high school. But she was one at ours, and even though it wasn’t a game day, wasn’t even football season, she was dressed like it: a short blue skirt showing plenty of her thighs and sneakers with no socks. Being a cheerleader wasn’t a big deal here, like it was some places, just like being on our football team didn’t put a crown on your head. The preppy types, chicks included, played soccer in the fall, and the hard kids didn’t do sports, so that left the kids in the middle for football and cheerleading.

  Lara wasn’t exactly sure what to do. She just got up and stood in front of Haberman, like she was reporting for duty, and he took her hand and put the little wooden club in it. She tapped the barrel with it, super light, like it was made of glass. The wood just sort of plinked off the plastic. I was thinking, How the hell is she supposed to get a read on what’s in there from that? And sure enough, she had no idea.

  “What do you think is in the barrel, Ms. Bialis?” Haberman asked. He called everyone by their last name. Hers sounded like a prescription drug.

  Then it was like she realized her mistake, and she went to hit the thing again, harder, but Haberman grabbed the club from her on the backswing and said, “One per customer, Ms. Bialis.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Bunch of sand, I guess.”

  So Haberman was all like, “A bunch of sand!” Super dramatic, like a game show host again. I watched a lot of game shows, because my mom liked them. Then Haberman put the club down on top of the blanket in the barrel. The club stayed there, sort of sunk in, so that told me something. The blanket was lying flat along the top, and it was not stuffed full. He turned around, picked up a broken stick of chalk, and wrote SAND on the board. Then he turned back around and said, “Mr. Biron,” meaning Max, first row, second seat back.

  Max gave the thing a good whack and said, “A big watermelon.”

  “Excellent,” Haberman said and wrote WATERMELON on the board.

  It went on like that for a bit, Haberman writing down each guess, and then it was my turn. As I walked up to the front of the room I was thinking that this was totally unlike Haberman. I mean, th
is was English class; the only props we ever had in here were books. I was thinking this was something that Mr. G would do, and I was wondering if Haberman knew we liked Mr. G and hated him and was trying to like steal some of his thunder. I took the club from him and weighed it in my palm, you could feel the sweat and grease on it from the other hands, but it was a good, solid club.

  I glanced over at the guesses so far. A lot of them were types of plants: watermelon, tree stump, things like that. Bridgit guessed clay, which wasn’t a plant but sort of had that feel to it. I was thinking something along those lines, and I hauled off and really slammed the side of the barrel. I hit a knuckle on the plastic and the club stung my palm, but I stood there real still, trying to read the vibrations.

  There was definitely something solid in there, and then a little liquid give at the center. Watermelon was a good guess, but I didn’t want to copy Max. Plus, whatever was in there was big. It was tough to get an exact read, but too big to be a watermelon, except maybe at the farm exhibits at the Big E. What did it feel like? And then it came to me.

  “Meat,” I said. “Some kind of meat.”

  A few of the girls were like, Ewww, and then there was laughter in the back of the room. I figured that Reedy’d probably said something about me beating my meat, so I gave him a look. He looked down quick, but I could see he was smiling, so I knew I was right.

  “Meat,” said Haberman, as if he’d never heard the word before and he was mulling it over. “Very interesting.”

  He wrote it on the board and I sat down. This went on for a while, burning up like half the class. It was sort of interesting at first, but by the time it’d snaked around to the last desk, we pretty much got the point. Finally, there were fourteen guesses on the board, one for each student, and Haberman was ready to settle in on a nice boring lecture. Sometimes he just pulled what he said out of his ass, but you could tell that he’d put some thought into what came next. It sounded planned out, rehearsed is the word.

  “What do we have here?” he said, putting the little club into a drawer in his desk and turning back to look at the board. He looked at it like he’d just come across it, like he wasn’t the one who just wrote all of those words and there wasn’t still chalk dust on his fingertips. He should’ve known by then that we didn’t respond to open questions like that, and one little stunt with a barrel wasn’t going to change that. He remembered, I guess, and without turning around, he said, “Mr. Benton? What do we have here?”

  I wasn’t sure why he was singling me out, so I kept it simple. “A list.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Benton. We have a list. A list of what?”

  “A list of words.”

  “Yes. It is that, but what else is it?”

  He turned around, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking around the room. I guess he was looking for someone who might answer his question, but there were no takers.

  “These,” he said, waving behind him, “they are words, but what else are they?”

  There was still no response—the kind of no response where you could imagine hearing crickets.

  “This,” he said, stabbing his finger into the W in watermelon, “what is this?”

  I thought he was going to call on me again, but he didn’t.

  “Mr. Reed, you seem to have a lot to say today”—Haberman heard every whisper, he just didn’t react to most of them—“so what is this?”

  “Uh, watermelon,” Reedy said in a fake-dumb way designed to get laughs, but he only got a few little snorts.

  “Is it? Is it, really? Do you like watermelon, Mr. Reed?”

  “Yeah, it’s OK.”

  “Well, then, would you like a slice? Why don’t you come up here and take a slice of delicious watermelon?”

  He circled the word in chalk as he said it, so we knew he was talking about what was on the board and not what was in the barrel. Reedy thought it was a joke or something and didn’t say anything, but after a while you could tell that Haberman was waiting for him to respond.

  “I can’t,” Reedy said.

  “Why not? You say it’s watermelon.” He circled it again. “Come up here and have some nice watermelon.”

  And now Haberman was sort of glaring at Reedy, like he was angry at him for saying it was watermelon. Reedy looked over at the barrel. He’d guessed a jug of water.

  “It’s not a real watermelon,” Reedy said, and you could see he was sort of uncomfortable now. The way Haberman did that, switched from smiling and joking to angry, so that you knew he wasn’t really joking in the first place, it could creep you out if you were on the receiving end of it.

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s a word…”

  “No!” said Haberman. It was almost a shout, and Reedy sat there squirming in his seat as Haberman went on a long coughing jag from the stuff he’d kicked up in his lungs. When he was done, he picked up like it hadn’t happened.

  “That is not wrong, Mr. Reed, it is merely redundant.”

  Reedy gave him a blank look.

  “Mr. Benton has covered that, I believe. I asked what else it is. What else is it?”

  Reedy just kept beaming that blank look, and Haberman broke out into a smile again. So now it’s like he wasn’t really mad. He was a strange dude. He looked at me, and I probably had half a smile on, because it’s funny if this stuff isn’t happening to you, and I knew what he was going to say, anyway.

  “It is an idea.”

  He looked around after he said it like he expected us all to fall out of our chairs from the sheer amazingness of this. When we didn’t he just went on.

  “It is not a real watermelon. It is a guess, Mr. Biron’s guess. Maybe there is a watermelon in the barrel, and maybe there isn’t. In fact, I will tell you that there is not. If you were to come up here and attempt to lift this barrel, you would know that whatever it is that’s in there, it is far too heavy to be a watermelon. So there is no actual watermelon, either in the barrel or on the board. So what does that leave us with?”

  Haberman’s pace was picking up, so we knew he was going to answer his own question without risking one of us getting it wrong.

  “It leaves us with the idea of a watermelon. Mr. Biron hit the barrel. He thought about what he heard, what he felt, and it seemed to him like a watermelon. Is that fair to say?”

  He looked at Max, who nodded and said, “Yeah.”

  “Perhaps you even pictured a watermelon, with that green, mottled rind, and that classic ovoid shape?”

  Max didn’t know what at least a few of those words meant, and I knew one and not the other, but he shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  “That is what we have here: a word signifying the idea of a watermelon. In fact, we have many words signifying many ideas. Not all of them can be right. Actually, little secret here, none of them are. Though one is close.”

  He didn’t look at anyone in particular when he said this, so we didn’t know who was close.

  “But the ideas are still there. The sand that Ms. Bialis may have imagined running through her fingers, may have remembered from a trip to the Cape, it is up on this board. We have, let’s see, fourteen ideas up on the board, and though none of them match the contents of this barrel, they are all, in their own way, just as real.”

  I was looking at the barrel and thinking, Christ, if that’s the point he wanted to make, he could’ve used a Dixie Cup, a Dixie Cup with something wrapped in a napkin, and we could have flicked the side with our fingers. Haberman paused to cough up more lung butter, then continued.

  “If I were to tell you what’s in this barrel, not show, but just tell, would it be any more real? You would not be able to see it or touch it. It would exist only in your mind. Suppose, for example, I was lying?”

  The smile crept back onto his face.

  “And here are two more for you to ponder,” he said, turning away.

  Haberman picked up the chalk and wrote on the board. We couldn’t see what he was writing, since he made a
better bore than a window, but when he stepped back we could see two new words at the end of the list: CRIME and PUNISHMENT. We’d seen those words before, since that was the book he’d handed out the week before. It was on most of our desks, Crime and Punishment, by some Russian dude.

  Haberman gave all his classes the same books. It was like a point of pride or whatever. He said, actually said to us, that he could teach Melville to a stone—hard to miss the point there, looking down at the new copy of Moby-Dick on your desk—and maybe he could, if he made the questions easy enough. The first question on our test had been “What kind of animal was Moby-Dick?” But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t put us through a lot of hot air along the way. We figured he gave the same little speeches to all his classes, too, about metaphors and allusions and shadows in caves.

  We figured this latest book would just be more of the same. So now that he brought it up it was like he actually had a point with all of this barrel crap, and we were probably getting to it. Still, it felt like Tommy could walk in right now, lean over and say, What’d I miss? And I could say, Nothing much, and not be far off. He’d say, What’s with the tub? And I’d just shrug. I looked over at the door but there was no one there.

  “And what are these?” said Haberman, flicking the point of the chalk back and forth between the two new words. “Mr. Benton?”

  And it was pretty clear he wanted me to say ideas, but I didn’t exactly want to be his go-to guy, so I held up my copy of the book and said, “Homework.”

  I got a few laughs out of that line and Haberman frowned, but before he said anything, Lara was like, “Ideas!” She was truly happy to figure this one out, like a puppy finding a squeak toy.

  “That’s right!” he said, turning toward her.

  She leaned forward, in case he asked her something else, but he just plowed ahead on his own.

  “What is a crime? What is it really? It is the idea that someone has done something wrong. One person may consider something a crime, and another person might consider it something else. The characters in this book certainly cannot agree. Is a fight in the hallway a crime? It fits the definition of assault, but it is more likely to end in detention after school than in a courtroom. Why is that? A minor has some wine in church; is that underage drinking or religious expression?”