When Miss Jones waggled the finger, George was pretty sure his mother hadn’t felt insulted, she’d felt attacked, as if the world was tipping beneath her, and she’d bitten Miss Jones not as an act of triumphant assertion, but because she was trying to hold on. By her literal teeth. Life was unravelling under the threat of a single, terrible finger, looming as large as a coming apocalypse from which there would be no mercy, no forgiveness, just everlasting despair. Who wouldn’t lash out in the face of such a terrible affront?
That his mother had gotten it accidentally exactly right, well, that seemed to be just one of those things, and a part of him was pleased for her that, for once, she had. But the story that was told and the story underneath that story were different things, and perhaps irreconcilable.
The immediate result, anyway, was that George was airlifted out of Miss Jones’s third grade class at Henry Bozeman Elementary School and sent to the O Come O Come Emmanuel & Ransom Captive Israel Self-Directed Learning and Holiness Academy, which despite having ‘Israel’ in its name was wholly staffed by people who might never have actually met anyone Jewish in their entire lives. (Growing up in Tacoma, George knew any number of other evangelicals, plus a packet of Mormons, a few Catholics, and even practising Buddhists from the largest integrated Asian community in the country. Jewish people, not so much. He would only actually meet two Jewish people in his life before going to college in New York. Where he met several more.)
O Come O Come – loosely affiliated with his parents’ church, if perhaps only by good intentions – had a student body of a mere forty-eight pupils, kindergarten through twelfth grade, with learning done from self-read (and often self-marked) booklets, plus a half-day on Wednesday when the O Come O Come visiting minister held a church service in lieu of afternoon classes. This involved songs and sermons and a once-weekly change from the school uniform of yellow shirt with green tie and trousers to white shirt with green tie and trousers.
George was eight, and at eight the definition of normal is whatever is happening in front of you. He glossed over the differences from public school – starting with the comprehensively pale ethnicity of his new classmates – and got on with it, doing his usual ingratiation with the two elderly bachelorettes who ran the school: Miss Kelly with her red hair pulled back so tight she looked permanently surprised and Miss Aldershot with her kindly eyes, hairy chin and vicious way with a ruler.
George enjoyed himself there, on the whole, though his standards weren’t perhaps wildly high. He wasn’t a fan of the school-wide dodgeball, which was about all the elderly bachelorettes could come up with by way of physical education, aside from the occasional round of jumping jacks and running in place (all done for brief, sweaty spates without ever involving the removal of a tie), but he liked their library, though even ‘darn’ and ‘gosh’ had been blacked out of the school’s dog-eared copy of The Incredible Journey.
The boy closest to him in age there was Roy, an old-fashioned name even then, if not in quite the same way as ‘George’. Roy was a year older, a year taller, a year wiser, all of which was proved by the fact that he had a bike.
‘It’s from the War,’ he’d said to George when they first met. ‘My dad brought it back. He stole it from the Japs after we bombed them.’
This was the seventies and Roy’s dad was undoubtedly not much more than an infant during Nagasaki, but George swallowed every word like God’s Own Truth.
‘Wow,’ he said.
‘That’s why it’s so heavy,’ Roy said, tipping it up with some effort in his nine-year-old hands. ‘To survive the grenade attacks when you ride behind enemy lines.’
‘Wow.’
‘When I get older, I’m riding it all the way to Vietnam and throw grenades at the Japs.’
‘Can I try it?’
‘No.’
The school was on 35th Street. Roy lived on 56th and George lived on 60th in a house no one in the family would remember fondly. Usually his mother, who didn’t work, would pick him up at school and drive him home, but occasionally, when she was busy, he’d walk, going part of the way with Roy, who’d push the bike between them, its green metal bulk as steadfast and calm as a cow.
On this particular day, a spring one, the sun held court in the sky, with a few supplicant clouds criss-crossed by the vapour trails of jets from the nearby Air Force Base. Just the kind of lovely day when God liked to test you, Miss Kelly often said.
‘So then you find out the whole ship is a gun, right?’ George was saying, excitedly. ‘The whole ship! And it shoots this huge blast of light out the end and BOOM! They destroy the Gamilon home world!’
Roy’s family didn’t have a television because TV was where the Devil did his best recruiting (George had decided not to mention this problem to his own parents, though in retrospect it seemed unlikely they would have agreed, given the p**n ), so George would often fill their walk home with what Roy was missing.
‘Except it’s not a whole planet?’ Roy asked.
‘No!’ George shouted with amazement. ‘That’s the most incredible thing ever! It’s half a planet and it’s floating in space and there are cities on the top half and it’s all rocky and round on the bottom. Except it isn’t any more, because the Starblazers blew it up.’
‘Sweet,’ Roy said, with due respect.
‘No kidding, it’s sweet,’ George agreed seriously.
They reached 53rd, the busiest street between O Come O Come and their respective homes. They walked past the supermarket on the corner, its parking lot filled with slightly sluttier versions of their own mothers, along with kids smaller than Roy or George who tended to stare at their uniforms. Across the street was a gas station, filled with much the same.
Roy and George waited at the crosswalk for the light to change.
‘Except I think some Gamilons escaped or something,’ George said, ‘because no one seemed very happy. And there was also a lot of shouting and stuff I didn’t understand.’ He smiled again. ‘But the whole ship was a gun all along!’
The light turned green, and the ‘Walk’ signal came on. They entered the crossing, Roy pushing his bike along, George caught up in the unfathomable mysteries of Japanese animation.
‘I’m going to turn this bike into a gun,’ Roy said. ‘I’ll take it to Vietnam when I turn sixteen.’