Rational Actions

Grand Prize Winner 2009 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award:

Rational Actions by Noah Edelson

Mr. Edelson is the author of Cooperstown Dreams: Baseball Poetry for Children and a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul. As the writer/director, Edelson saw his short film "78" premiere at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, win the World Medal at the New York Festivals, and featured in over 35 festivals worldwide, including Sundance Japan. His script Hear, Boy! was awarded Best Feature Screenplay at the 2008 International Feel Good Film Festival, and his feature script Life Support garnered the 2014 Creative World Award for Comedy. He has been a writer/producer/director for television and film since the 1980's. His stories for adult readers have received honorable mention from The New Millennium Writings Contest and the Juniper Creek Writers' Conference. He has just completed his first novel, “Inhuman Anatomy.”

I always sat in front, listening to the soft tackity-tackity-tack of Tracy Maple’s laptop two desks behind me. Would she go out for a pizza, a drink, and a skinny dip? Don’t kid yourself. She was going for the frat boys, and that wouldn’t be me.

Not that I didn’t want to be one. The frat house is cheaper than an apartment or the dorms. God knows I tried to get rushed. But the fact is I look way young for my age, plus I skipped a grade. I’m not little. I just have sort of a fresh face. I’m the only freshman on campus that looks like he’s pushing fourteen, and all the girls I ask out think I’m “cute.” I’ve got a lot of friends who are girls. They definitely like me…”just not like that.” I’ve got an impish quality. Sounds like I’ve got a weird walk or I’m a Hobbit. Hobbits have hair all over the place and I barely have peach fuzz. And I’m much taller than any Hobbit. Nope, I’m a hairless imp. In all the fairy tales I’ve read, imps don’t get laid. Knights get laid. Shit, even frogs get kissed.

Danielle White thinks I’m charming, and every guy on frat row “wants a piece of that.” Danielle is Elizabeth Hurly gorgeous. She’s got legs that make sneakers look like a pair of stiletto heels. And Danni’s got this smell. Not strong or sweet or patchouli smelling. It’s simple, like the smell of clean, soft skin. I don’t think she uses perfume. It’s just her smell. I’m just making an observation. Danni’s great. I mean, great. But the last thing you want when you’re studying with a girl like that is to hear about her ex-fiancé in Fort Wayne. I know everything about Randall Pierce from his dream car to his ring size. He’s got a long red ponytail, he’s built like a Viking, and he hunts with a bow and arrow. He’s not going to college because he’s got his dad’s store to take care of: Pierce and Son: Everything for the Real Outdoors. Randy loves it. Says he’s never leaving. He hooked up with Danni’s high school Phys. Ed. Teacher two weeks after she started classes here. That’s like nine months ago and Danni still cries about him. That’s one fucked up dude to dump a girl that looks like Danni. And she knows how to have fun too, in a real playful, sexy way. She can tell a dirty joke, you know? It’s just comfortable and funny. Anyway she’s like a friend. You don’t want to wreck a friendship like that. She hangs out with me because, I don’t know. I do have perfect teeth and, even though I take lousy notes, I have a real knack for retaining facts. Danielle figures I’m not so tough to look at and frankly, she can use all the help with organic chem she can get. So I’m useful.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s worse to be able to hang with a girl like Danielle White or be invisible to a girl like Tracy Maple. The point is I didn’t get rushed by any of the frats for the same reason I can’t get a date. I’m like everyone’s kid brother who’s too young to play with the big kids.

It only sucked because I could save two hundred and forty-five dollars a month if I got out of those shitty dorms and into a frat house.

Professor Parker Bullington paces in front of the room fondling his pipe while he gives his rote lectures. You can’t blame him for playing with something while he’s in lecture mode. The guy’s been sharing his insights for almost forty years. These days you take his class for his rep and you pay the price. We’re his captives and as long as you turn in a paper that confirms you’d never be able to write in old English better than he…him… Bullington… you’re going to pass with flying colors. But he was so, I don’t know. He was sure that no one else was right in the world. But that didn’t bug me. I’m just mentioning it because it was a trait I noticed. I liked the guy. But you had to sit in front to really hear him. This was a big room for the guy to be lecturing in without a microphone. I know the kids in back didn’t hear a word. And if they did, they couldn’t understand it.

No, I wasn’t bugged. It was nothing like that. It was just for, I don’t know. I felt like doing it.

Sometimes you just have to try things. We’re students of life at a university known for testing limits. Right? All I did was test a limit. Hell, all the great thinkers paid the price at one time or another for going off the beaten path. I think the whole class benefited from it. And it’s not like I was out in the world trying out the social taboos. I kept it in the classroom.

The classroom had history. It was a product of the early nineteen hundreds: worn hardwood floors, carved wood moldings, brass hooks to hang your hat on, worn brass doorknobs on the heavy oak door, alabaster lighting fixtures that held real light bulbs. The blackboard dominated the front, and was made of real slate framed in a wood frame. On the institutional olive walls, you’d see a few portraits of our founding fathers, and on the back wall, “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” Inspiring.

All that rustic academia was offset by seventy-eight seat/desk combos made of plastic, Formica and chrome metal tubing. You could still see the dots of wood putty and varnish where the old desks were screwed down.

While this was a time of discovery and experimentation, some just felt certain traditions and rituals should be left in tact. Dr. Parker Bullington was not in favor of liberating student desks and without fail arrived at the classroom ten before two so he could create rows, aisles and order. Just like it used to be. This cut into his lunch, but the statement of order was one he wanted his students to learn.

His final touch was closing the window. It was large and opened out to the quad. Five lights by five lights, twenty-five ancient panes of glass joined by the wood of an oak tree that was most likely a sapling on this campus over two hundred years ago. It was a picture frame of picture frames and by far was the most interesting attribute of the room. Including the ninety minutes that Dr. Bullington paced and lectured next to it twice a week.

Bullington loved his corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, his cardigan sweaters, and his pleated slacks. He chose a robin’s egg blue button down shirt and brown wingtips to put the period on his fashion statement. His bent stem pipe lived in his breast pocket. He handled it constantly but never smoked. They were his robes and he wore them like a lord. His reign would lead the common folk through the battlefield of early English literature. Make these serfs read Beowulf and Chaucer until they loved it…no, needed it.

Although he got high points in the academic trivia department, his work was considered pretty average in literary circles. (I’d call him an over achiever though.) Over his career Bullington had published three novels. Since no one had published in old English recently he figured that reviving the style would bring him fame. You can’t argue with a guy’s passion for something. Two out of the three masterworks were required reading for the class. They even had medieval dirty parts. I mean literally dirty, peasants doing the nasty, with rats and the plague all around them. (Too much information about your fantasy life Dr. B.) Except for pages seventeen and three hundred fifty-six, everything else was like a sleeping pill on a page. I’m not knocking the guy’s life work or anything. He gets a ton of credit for trying to get these books to make sense. The novels were annotated with old English hieroglyphics on one side of the page and his translation of his text on the other. Kind of like how Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, in French then translated it back to English. Only Beckett’s stuff is understandable in both languages.

Bullington’s books got him a few brown-nosing freshman readers and footnote in a new edition of The Canterbury Tales. Nevertheless, the volumes were of note because they were all set in 12th century England and they were written in a dead language. So the Doctor was gone a lot speaking at other colleges on “The Relation of Literature to Lifestyle for the Medieval Everyman.” The impressionable minds in the lecture hall did not always understand these engagements, because he presented stories and his insights in old English along with a single-spaced handout of the translation. He never stopped for questions.

In the classroom his quirks were sort of amusing, but they were definitely overshadowed by his, “I’m-a-dead-language-expert-so-I-know-about-life” attitude. If you listened to him for any length at all you would know three things about him.

He knows the struggles, heartbreak and joys of the English peasant.
No one can weave a story better than he. There have been others through history that may have been his equal, but never his better.
His image of himself was about as warped as a Fun House mirror.

Bullington conceded that there have been writers that have had a better command of Modern English than he…him. However he always made a point of saying, “Just because you can put words together in a pleasant form doesn’t mean your storytelling is any good.” (We heard that line once a week.) He was the king of his classroom. We were his obedient courtiers, no, vassals. We listened to every word he said and were expected to take it for gospel.

Hell, Tracy Maple took down every word he said on her laptop. She was an exceptional typist. And she looked damn fine in a tank top. I could never get the guts to introduce myself to her.

Right before Spring Break we had to turn in our midterm papers on “Dating in the 12th Century.” (Dr. B. had his fun side.) I get to the room while Bullington is finishing the desks; sit down in my assigned seat, and when he’s checking his seating chart trying to remember my name, my desk moves a little. Bullington looks at me like I just shot his dog. He doesn’t say a thing till the whole class is there with pens ready to take notes. Then he starts right in on the lecture, without a hello or anything, and collects all our papers while he’s talking. Dropping the stack of papers on his desk like we should feel pity for his burden, he goes into his routine, lecturing, pipe fondling and pacing in front of the class. He’s almost brushing by the pleat on my khakis.

While he’s doing this, I’m thinking (and I swear to god I don’t know why) all I need to do is lift my leg, and he’d drop. I wouldn’t even have to do it hard. If I kicked him in the nuts right now he’s a sack of potatoes. He’d be so surprised he wouldn’t know what happened to him.

He was just so completely vulnerable. He came centimeters away from my leg and I thought about it again. All I’d have to do is raise my foot. It wouldn’t take much. I squeezed back a smile, picturing him on the floor writhing around, moaning.

I laughed. He stopped pacing and got real quiet. I guess a laugh wasn’t appropriate for what he was Thou-ing about.

Bullington stared at me. “Yes?”

“Nothing.” My eyes shot down to my notebook. Blank page. I took my pen from behind my ear, looked up and caught his silent eyes still on me. Pen in hand, I was ready when he was. He took the cue and started droning again. There was no way I could keep up with him. My notes morphed from words to scribbles.

See, I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Nothing was bugging me. I just had this thought itching my brain, heading down to my leg. He kept on pacing. Tracy kept typing. How the hell she could keep up was a mystery to me. She was probably keying in bullshit just to look good.

I raised my right leg at the knee.

Contact.

He didn’t go down for, I don’t know, four to six seconds. His knees were together like he was going to block the kick, but he was way late. He sucked air, looking right at me like I was an escapee from Area Fifty-One. Before he hit the floor he gave us his quote for the yearbook, “Zounds!”

Short for “Gods wounds!” Although a relatively up to date cuss word for this class, it was the first time any of us had heard it in a definitive context.

All the kids are standing around him now and, like a miracle, Bullington gets up too. I swear to god, I would have paid to watch this. This Old English professor looks me right in the face and growls. I mean a real primal sound. Then he spins me around, grabs me by the back of my pants and launches me through the window. And as I’m going through, I’m thinking, “This guy must work out.” At one fifty-eight I’m no football player. But you try throwing that kind of weight for any kind of distance. Plus, the fact that I was hitting twenty-five panes of ancient, thick glass tied together with cured oak was like doing a belly flop onto concrete. If I just went with it I could have taken the header, ducked and rolled onto the grass. But I was resisting, trying to stand up, so I took a full body slam and about nine panes of glass out the window into the quad.

So this part I don’t remember at all, but the doctor says I have the intestinal injuries because I didn’t go all the way through the window. I hit the glass, and kind of bent over at the waist. You figure Bullington wasn’t bench pressing one fifty-eight consistently. If he were, with the momentum he had on me, I would have flown through that baby. Hell, I can press one eighty-two and I don’t work out like a maniac.

I passed the class.

We all did.

Nobody saw my leg move.

Yeah, he swore on the Gutenberg Bible that I “provoked him with a kick to the groin.” The sad truth is, out of seventy-eight students in the classroom, none of them could back him up. They were too busy taking notes. Most of the depositions said they heard him say “Zounds!” all squeaky, saw him growl at me, like he was an animal. Then he ran me through the window. Donna Bennett said she thought she saw me crossing my legs, but she didn’t think it was an act of aggression.

It wasn’t really. An act of aggression, I mean. It was only an experiment. Not even. An urge. An itch that I had to scratch.

Don’t feel bad for either of us though. I’m taking some time from school and healing up pretty well. My folks settled with the university for “an undisclosed figure,” along with a written apology from Professor Bullington, on university stationery. It’s the only thing he’s written in modern English that’s gone public. I had it framed.

Bullington got an early sabbatical. Plus he doesn’t have to teach at the school anymore. (I think that was part of my parents’ settlement.) He’s touring Asia this year with his Old English stand-up act. If it was so riveting for English speaking lecture halls just imagine how much students in Tokyo are sucking into their brains. When he gets back, he’s going to head up the newly formed Ye Olde Englishe Department. So he gets to be the boss of all these new teachers. Well, a teacher and a T.A. But that’s not nothing. So I figure he’s got nothing to complain about.

I got get-well cards from all over the place. Even from Bullington’s family. My bank account is now stone cold solid. Sigma Chi and the Tri Delts both are going after me to pledge next spring. Top it all off, Tracy Maple came to visit me…twice. The second time, Danielle showed up just as Tracy was leaving. Danni starts in like she’s looking out for me. She would “despair to see me involved with that girl.” I think I’ve got a shot with both of them when I’m walking again.

Something still bugs me about this whole thing. I can’t nail it down. You get these feelings in your brain like something’s not right and your stomach says, “Yeah, something’s bugging me.” When I was a kid I couldn’t steal a soda from the refrigerator without confessing to my mom. It’s easy for me to get uneasy about little things. My dad says it’s a natural reaction to the trauma and I should get over it. I guess I will. I look at it like the glass is three quarters full. Aside from a couple of stitches and a male nurse who keeps asking me if I want a sponge bath, college is turning out pretty well.

You know how you feel like kicking a can to see how much noise it will make going down the street, or throwing a stone at a drifting log? The log could turn out to be a crocodile and bite your leg off. But you had to throw that stone.

Who knows what that noisy can is going to wake up? No matter what it turns out to be, two things are for sure: You didn’t plan on waking that thing up, and you had to kick the can.