“Look Jared, I don’t care about your promises, I heard four years full of promises as a Criminal Justice major in college. I care about my money. You owe me this month’s protection fee and I’m going to get it before the fire drill starts.”
I ran my hand through my thinning hair. Jared was still going to try arguing with me. The tenth graders always tried to weasel their way out of paying me and every month I had to threaten them in the same way. Jared’s mouth started moving and I prepared my mental knife and fork for the bullshit sandwich he was about to feed me.
“Mr. Bailey, I swear I won’t sell any of my stuff while the fire drill is going on. I don’t even have any on me this week.”
The small flick of his eyes toward the tiles of the men’s bathroom floor only paved the way for what would be a crushing realization for Jared. He didn’t know who he was messing with. I see everything and I know everything. I’m the only security cop here at Morey High School. Jared was lying to me.
“Ok Jared, you only started selling here about three months ago, so maybe you don’t realize yet the full range of my power here at the school.”
The loud gulp that emanated from his throat could only have been more satisfying if I had force fed him a bullfrog and asked him to swallow it. I saved that thought for later.
“You have about two and a quarter ounces of low grade weed sitting in the toe of your gym shoes at the back of your locker. Not only that but your mother leaves two X’s and two O’s at the end of her daily letter of encouragement that she includes in your lunch box. By the way, you’ll find your Oreo’s are mysteriously missing out of today’s lunch. Lastly, and I’ll give you this advice free of charge, if you’re going to steal girls’ underwear from the locker room, you should probably keep it in something other than a see through plastic shopping bag, and you shouldn’t leave your lock picking directions sitting in plain sight.”
The blank stare, the color draining from his face, and the repetitive ‘uh, uh, uh’ sound dribbling from his pie hole told me that Jared’s brain was trying to wrap itself around the mental bitch slapping I had just given it. The time it took to rebuild a shattered illusion of superiority was something I had been able to scientifically measure over the past six years. I had a minute and twelve seconds before Jared would be able to speak in full sentences again, so I took a piss.
Jared paid me the twenty dollars. In the end they always pay me. Otherwise Mommy and Daddy find out that their little angels are selling weed in order to support their video game habit. Paper route my ass, they don’t want to work for their green and neither do I.
I had a busy morning collecting from all the dealers at Morey High School. The fire drill was scheduled to happen right after the last lunch period and it was only during a fire drill that I couldn’t keep an eye on the school and the kids at the same time. Because of this, I had to make sure to shake down every last lowlife so that they couldn’t peddle their wares without giving me my royalties.
The lunch period passed. I collected my food tax from the bullies and settled down in my small office to eat my lunch, count my riches and watch the Teacher’s Lounge Security Camera feed. It was Wednesday and the good stuff always happened on Wednesday. It appeared that Mr. Brazier and Mrs. Cod were at it again. Only partially hidden by the fur coat and leather trench coat on the rack, they were clearly discernible and their actions were even more readily identifiable. Well, Mr. Brazier taught sex education, I guess Mrs. Cod was helping him study his material.
The end of the last lunch period found me standing beside a fire alarm. Only I knew that the ink spray on this one had been disabled. It was my own personal tension reliever. I pulled the lever and all the kids and teachers left the building while I got to leisurely stroll around ‘checking’ the classrooms and bathrooms for stragglers. A group of seniors came around the corner, I recognized one of them from this morning, smiled in his direction and pulled the lever.
The school emptied in record time and I was overjoyed. This meant I had more time away from work. No sooner had I put my hand on the door to my office when the new English teacher Mr. Gibble came screeching around the corner, his hair piece sliding off his head and his breaths coming in short ragged gasps.
“Flurg blurga glubba mumb nimbly gumper,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak balding fat man.”
Mr. Gibble panted for an excruciatingly long thirty seconds before he could clarify.
“Mr. Juniper is on the roof of the school,” he gulped down air like a fish stranded on shore, “it looks like he’s going to jump.”
“He has no legs. I can’t see him hurdling the railing. I’ll get to it.”
Mr. Gibble, apparently satisfied, turned away and returned to his students outside. I decided to get this thing with Juniper settled first before I started raiding the lockers. Make an appearance, play the concerned hero and drag the ‘tard back inside with enough time left to search the lockers for valuables.
The trip to the roof was interrupted by two eleventh graders trying to suck each other’s lungs out under the stairwell. They each paid me five dollars to continue licking each other’s braces. The door hung in tatters, the axe that had been used to strike it down discarded just outside.
The roof was a flat expanse of sandy white dotted with aluminum vents and the remnants of the weathervane I had pulled apart to build legs for my rooftop sunning chair. The roof was my quiet spot, where I went when I felt like contemplating interesting things to do to the boys and girls who didn’t cough up the protection fee. Juniper had violated the door to my sanctuary, so we were already on bad terms when I found him sitting in his motorized black wheelchair looking out over the throng of students and teachers. They were paying him only a paltry amount of attention.
I walked up next to him and peered down into the crowd myself. Gibble was there, eating something out of a bag. Brazier and Cod were no where to be found, though I suspected that Brazier had had a sudden idea and needed some help fleshing it out. And there was Jared, handing over a small plastic sandwich bag to a ninth grader who then passed him money that I would be forced to confiscate from his locker later that day.
I looked at Benjamin Juniper. His grey ponytail hung limply down the back of the wheel chair and the spread of sweat stains from his armpits was almost touching the pocket protector at the front of his blue dress shirt. He wasn’t going to kill himself; he was just going to complain. That’s all the man had done since his accident.
“I was a champion track coach.”
“Oh here we go,” I rolled my eyes.
“And I could use the entire blackboard when I taught math.”
“That’s wonderful, really,” I lied.
“Then I decided to be a champion goat herder. You know, it’s getting popular among the young folk these days.”
“Goat herding? Yeah I herd that somewhere before,” I laugh but my joke is lost on Juniper who is revving up the whining engine.
“Then that accident, that horrific accident. It was the Goat Herding championships and I was in first place, followed closely by Bob Rancher. The event was Brazen Grazin’. The herders took their goats out onto a field of grass that had been specially grown so that it attracted the goats and made them eat. The herder’s whose goats ate the whole field of grass fastest would win. My goats ate like there was no tomorrow and finally there was no grass left. Then the goats all turned towards me, looking hungry and eager. They stared at my legs. I looked down and realized there were bits and pieces of grass stuck all over my jeans. Oh why didn’t I wear shorts that day? The goats knocked me down and I lost consciousness while I was being trampled. Next thing I know I wake up in the hospital without my legs. Me, Benjamin Juniper, star track coach of Broeing, Pennsylvania Morey Highschool’s track team, without a leg to run on. It’s unfair I tell you.”
“And so you’ve told me every other Wednesday for the past year and a half, Juniper. You pull one of these stunts every time we have a fire drill. Last time you tried to hang yourself in your office but you couldn’t lift yourself up to the noose. The time before that you tried drowning yourself in the pool but they happened to be draining it that day. Listen, I have important rounds to make and I can’t keep getting pulled away from my work to rescue you from the doldrums of whining to yourself.”
“I’m actually going to do it this time Mr. Bailey. I’m going to kill myself.”
“How,” I’m genuinely interested in the material he’s about to hand me for use at the next staff party.
“Well, that’s obvious. I’m going to jump off the building.”
It’s hard to listen to a man with no legs talk about jumping and not laugh yourself to tears. I didn’t even try.
“Speaking of near impossibilities,” I said once I could breathe again, “how did you manage to get up here, with an axe no less?”
I realized immediately that I had just prolonged this torture and mentally kicked myself. Juniper’s face lit up like a Christmas tree on fire.
“I tied a rope between the wheelchair and myself. Then I climbed the stairs step by painful step. The axe strapped to my back weighed me down but I struggled on. I slid back down the stairs three or four times and three or four times I started again, clawing for every inch with my aging fingers. I think I broke a few nails. Then I pulled up the…”
“Thanks,” I stopped him mid sentence, “I get it.”
Listening to Juniper whine was like putting your brain in a blender with salt and lemon juice, it’s a lot of work but you don’t feel anything.
“Times a-wasting Juniper. Let’s get you back inside so you can teach your math classes. Then later you can coach that miserable track team.”
“No can do Mr. Bailey. The class spends all it’s time shooting spit wads at me and the track team won’t listen to me because I have no legs.”
“Well then just go home. See your wife and eight kids, you went to the trouble of making all of them.”
“Can’t. The wife left me, said seeing me on the toilet with my stumps waving about creeped her out.” The smile on his face clashed horribly with what he had just said. The image sent a shiver of displeasure down my spine.
“Listen Juniper, if you manage to jump,” I suppressed a fit of laughter, “and splat yourself in front of all those teenies down there…well what do you think that’s going to do to their childhood? You don’t want to scar them for the rest of their lives, seeing their beloved legless teacher plummet to his death.”
Benjamin Juniper’ face turned sour at this. It looked like curdled milk trapped in a wrinkly plastic bag.
“Bah! Won’t bother them none. Hope it teaches them a lesson. Don’t be a Goat Herder. Yeah, that’s a good lesson to go out on.”
This meeting had gone on absurdly long. Three minutes of conversation with Juniper was three minutes I could have been collecting things to pawn after work. It had to stop.
“Alright old man, here’s the deal. If you manage to jump over that railing and fall to your destruction, I’ll quit my job, here and now. I’ll go home and never come back. It’s laughable, but there it is.”
Christmas spread across his face again and I realized my ploy may have backfired. A story quickly developed in my head to explain to the school if the man did manage to jump off the building. But how could he? He had no legs.
“That’s all the encouragement I needed Mr. Bailey. I little wager. Just like my track days back in high school. I was a champion hurdler, you’ll be in the unemployment line before summer.”
He backed his motorized wheelchair up, aimed it at the railing and drove it as fast as it would go.
“You’re actually going to do this?” was all I had time to ask before he hit the railing.
Benjamin Juniper was lazily flung with just enough force to slide between the bars of the railing and fall the three stories to the ground. He landed in a bush and was later found alive and complaining by the grounds crew. Not a single person but myself had seen him fall.
I went about my business for the rest of the day. Juniper asked me a few years later why I never upheld my end of the wager, why I hadn’t quit my job.
“Well, Juniper, you never actually jumped.”
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