Deja Vu In A Dream: A True Short Story Page 5

  But, one day I stopped at the edge of the girls’ schoolyard, wondering why I should walk around the building. What harm would it do for me to cut through the girls schoolyard and get to the penny candy store on the adjacent block much quicker ? It’s not like I would bother any of the girls or disrupt any of their games, although I was sure a few goody-goody girls would scold me as I went by. As I stood on the border of the girls’ schoolyard thinking about my options, Sister Helen, mingling among the girls who ran around playing, spotted me, and I looked at her. She shook her head slowly at me and wagged her finger, no, no, no, because she knew what I was thinking.

  Sister Helen had a reputation for being tough, and I had never had a confrontation with her, but, I thought, how tough can she be? After all, under that clumsy dress, she was still a girl, and what girl could outrun me? I checked out the avenues of evasion in the schoolyard before eyeing Sister Helen one last time. She was still watching me with her finger slowly wagging.

  I can beat her, I figured, and I took off running across the left side of the schoolyard.

  She was good. She headed me off so that I had to veer quickly to the right side. But she blocked me again, forcing me back to the left, while alarmed girls in the schoolyard yelled at me to cease and desist. Then, in close quarters, no matter which way I dodged, Sister Helen was in front of me. When I finally decided to barge through her outstretched arms, she nabbed me, shook me around, pulled my hair and escorted me back to my starting line with one hand gripping my collar and the other pinching and twisting my ear. I might have been able to break loose, but I figured that although it may be fair to evade the teacher, punching or kicking would be inappropriate. A few nasty girls buzzed around like mosquitoes as Sister Helen led me out of the schoolyard, shouting rules at me, but it didn’t bother me much. I already knew the rules, and, I had been in a fair fight, a straightforward contest with established rules. I didn’t feel humiliated, because, to feel humiliation, I thought, you had to be ashamed of yourself, ashamed of some moral failure, and I wasn’t. I thought it was a nice try. I would be proud of myself when I told the story to my buddies, though they would remind me that I got beat. “So what,” I’d answer, “that’s beside the point.” As Cyrano de Bergerac once said, “A man does not fight merely to win.” I had underestimated Sister Helen and, maybe, her entire gender, and my respect for her increased exponentially. Nothing immoral there, just good for a laugh, so I took the long walk around the building to the candy store.

  Adult now, on my way back from the junk store with my small electric motor, I thought of Brother Euclid, that son of a bitch. But I was too busy to dwell on the subject until later that night sitting at home with my feet up reading a book and unable to concentrate. That son of a bitch.

  Yes, wasn’t I a perfectly understanding adult, the decent, non-violent citizen, student of Aristotle? Shouldn’t I be proud of myself?

  Sure. So, why was I haunted?

  I had always reasoned that if anyone had a right to break a promise to me, it would be me. If I decided that my vow of vengeance was misguided, I had a right to do so. Yet, somewhere, deep in my psyche, there seemed to be a small dark hole, something missing. Maybe, despite my reasoning, that dark hole represented my broken promise to myself. Might I be feeling some kind of failure?

  The first thing that comes to mind would be a failure of courage, but I knew that couldn’t be the problem. I had been tested too many times to worry about it; I honestly couldn’t think of a situation where I acted cowardly, unless you count public speaking, which is a common dread, or asking a girl for a date (I’d rather fight a Bengal tiger bare-handed than intrude upon the sensitivities of a goddess. Usually, I wait for them to ask me for a date, but it can be a long wait, so… you gotta do what you gotta do).

  So, why the haunting? Why the dark hole?

  I couldn’t figure it out. But I came up with a possible solution: Go now. Go to Brother Euclid.

  If that wasn’t the answer, it was still the best one I could come up with to chase the ghost away, so I decided to pay Brother Euclid a visit. I lived a few states away from New Hampshire, and I knew I’d have to be patient, so I consulted my calendar and started planning the trip, very happily it turned out. I had a show opening in six weeks, so I couldn’t go anywhere right now, but in six weeks I’d be fat with cash and due for a vacation. I walked around happily for weeks, euphoric at times, feeling as though a weight had lifted off my shoulders, straight up and away. The small dark hole turned into a bright spot, an opportunity for fulfillment. I felt buoyant, and I thought, “Wow, why hadn’t I done this before? This is great!” It amazed me that a simple decision could be so liberating, so pleasant.

  So, to hell with being civil; I’d apologize to Aristotle later. As I relaxed between working hours, I occasionally tried to imagine the confrontation with Brother Euclid, savoring the details of what might happen. How would he greet me, I wondered? Probably like an old friend, bygones be bygones, though not without trepidation on his part. Oh, really? Old friends? He had another think coming.

  I savored my plan down to the last detail. What would I say? How about, “Hi there Brother. Remember me? You know, the kid you brought into your office and slapped the shit out of?” Or I might say, “You still slap kids around, like in the old days? Remember how you used to grab me by the collar and swing me around?” Here, maybe I would demonstrate by walking around his desk and rocking him around in his chair. “Remember that? Ah, fond memories.” What would he say when he saw that I was not friendly, as he sat behind his desk as the principal of the new Catholic high school in my hometown? I tried to imagine the scene as realistically as possible, imagining every detail. He’d probably tell me to get the hell out of his office, so, if I lost control by laying a hand on him, so be it. He’d call 911, and I’d swallow the assault charge. It would probably be better than swallowing the bad memory, the broken promise. I could pay the fine or do the time standing on my head, the better to savor the experience. Oh yeah, it would be good.

  What would he look like, I wondered, after all these years?

  Then I froze. Wait a minute. The son of a bitch must have been 45 or 50 years old when he was pushing us around, which means he might now be 70. It was conceivable that he could be as old as 75! I was barely 30, and I suddenly saw him with white hair and a frail body, a body that had already been scrawny in 1959.

  Shit!

  That would not be good. How could I shove around a skinny old man?

  I’d have to be a natural born bully to do that, and I had always held bullies in the highest contempt. They were despicable, and I wasn’t one of them; I was one of the boys who objected to bullies, who carped at them to leave little kids alone.

  Sitting in my bedroom with my feet up and a book in my lap, I stopped trying to read, totally stunned. The whole vengeance scenario in my imagination rapidly dismantled and crumbled into absurdity. It was impossible. I wouldn’t do it, no matter how justified. The sight of a frail old man would surely temper my resentment and dissolve my anger. Can you imagine a healthy 30-year old man roughing up a 70-year old? What if the old shit had a heart attack in my presence? I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t be a witness to it, never mind being the culprit.

  “Get over it,” I would say to any such bully.

  Get over it. Like I did. Hope for poetic justice and let it be. Frail, nasty old men were better left to die naturally, without my help.

  After recovering from the shock, I decided to cancel my visit and laid the issue to rest, hoping that poetic justice had caught up to Brother Euclid. I went back to my reading, until it occurred to me that I could save a lot of money by not making that trip to New Hampshire--good deal.

  In subsequent years, the ghost of Brother Euclid never haunted me again, even when, years later, I attended a barbecue at my brother Ray’s house in New Hampshire. After the meatfest, we gathered on the patio for some laughs, and we had stoked up on a little too much beer by the time we turned to old Sacr
ed Heart memories. Of course, Brother Euclid came up in the conversation.

  “Let’s go see that bastard, right now,” Ray suddenly suggested when the laughter died down, “Right now.” Brother Euclid’s office was only a half-hour drive away, but I only laughed affectionately at Ray’s sentiment and wondered how much beer he had drunk.

  “The guy’s probably eighty years old,” I chuckled. “What are you gonna do, kick his cane out from under him? Hit him over the head with it?”

  “You’re chicken!”

  “Nah. He’d just call the cops and it would turn into a big deal. You’d look pretty stupid getting dragged away from an old man’s office. And if you smack him around, you’ll have to face charges and tell your story to a judge who won’t sympathize with you in the least. Are you prepared to push around an eighty-year-old man?” I asked.

  “Him? Yes, absolutely. Come on, let’s do it. He’s still there at the high school.”

  “I’m not gonna do that.”

  “Chicken! You’re chicken!”

  “No, I’m just not going to bully an old man, then get arrested for it--even if he is a scrawny piece of shit. It’s not worth it.”

  “You’re chicken!”

  “Not really. No,” I smiled.

  Ray had too much beer, I thought. And, needless to say, we didn’t make the trip.

  Not long later, on the phone long distance with my sister, she informed me that Brother Euclid had died. The obituary appeared in our home town newspaper where she still lived. He had remained as the principle of the new Catholic high school until he died.

  “Are you coming up for the funeral?” she joked.

  “No, but Ray might want to go up and piss on his grave.” (Ray now lived in Florida).

  We laughed, imagining Ray’s reaction to the news.

  “I should call him and tell him I’ll order the flowers for him. Ask him how much he wants to spend,” she suggested.

  “Yeah,” I laughed, “Ask him if he prefers a wreathe or a bouquet.”

  As we laughed, we could imagine the expletives coming from Ray over the phone.

  “How old was he, anyway?”

  “I think--85, the paper said. Something like that”

  “Wow. They hang on like cockroaches, those nasty ones. Hard to kill. You know, like when you see a cockroach climbing through a shag rug, and you stomp on the little bastard, and when you lift your foot, you see him uncurl and keep going?”

  “I know what you mean.”

  The next twenty years went by without any reference to Brother Euclid that I can remember, turning him into ancient history, no longer useful, even for a joke.

  Then--I have no idea what triggered it, because I was over 60 years old--I had a dream that sounds like a scenario for a nightmare but wasn’t.

  In my dream, I had been sentenced to death, I don’t know why or by whom, but I was strangely calm about it, sitting in an old fashioned jail cell located in a high tower, with dirty stucco walls and a barred door standing wide open, no jailers in sight. I thought the death sentence must be a ruse of some kind; “they’re probably just trying to scare me,” I thought. Outside my high window, I could hear someone pounding nails into wood, and I boosted myself up to take a look. They were building a gallows at the edge of a baseball field, near a grassy embankment that I recognized because I had had a job one summer during my college years as a groundskeeper at a school for “troubled boys,” a countryside retreat for rich grammar school kids whose parents flocked around on visitors’ days driving Mercedes’ and BMWs, and I had mowed the grass on that field many times. I decided to check out the gallows to see if it was real, and I walked out of my cell unimpeded--still no jailers. No one was there when I got there, and I climbed around on the unfinished structure. It was made entirely of very clean blonde wood and sanded to a very smooth finish. I ran my hand over its fresh surface, still dusty from the sanding, then decided to examine the trap door where I would stand for the execution. I hung from the platform by my hands to measure my height, noting that my feet were well off the ground, then calculated the length of the rope they would use to hang me. How about this, I thought: even adding the length of the rope, my feet would still dangle off the ground by at least a couple of feet.

  It was real--a real gallows; they really intended to hang me. But they wouldn’t--because I was leaving; no thank you, folks. I started climbing the grassy embankment and I knew I’d be safe on the other side. I’d gotten away. Then, halfway up the hill, I turned to look back and I saw the executioner standing in the baseball field wearing a black robe with a hood, looking at me, and I recognized him. It was Brother Euclid.

  I was very contented about my escape; it had been a very close call, and I turned away from the field and continued up the embankment.

  I woke up staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, my mind still halfway in the dream.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  It was like the feeling you get from an intense episode of déjà vu, a deep fascination and wonder as you search your memory for a source, for the original occurrence.

  What the hell brought that on, I wondered, after fifty years?

  I don’t know, but I know the mind works in mysterious, fascinating ways.

  It’s awesome.