"Why be a hero?" Jack asked.
"At an all-boys' school, Jack, there are heroes and there are foot soldiers. It's happier to be one of the heroes."
Emma had been right: Mr. Ramsey had some difficulty seeing over the steering wheel. He was as short as Mrs. Machado, and twenty pounds lighter. That he'd made himself a hero at an all-girls' school did not hide from Jack the likelihood that Mr. Ramsey had played the role of foot soldier in an earlier life. His neatly trimmed, spade-shaped beard was the size of a child's sandbox shovel; his little feet, in what Jack guessed were size-six loafers, could barely reach the brake and accelerator pedals. "Where will you spend the night?" Jack asked. The thought of Mr. Ramsey driving back to Portland--alone, in the dark--made the boy afraid for him. But Mr. Ramsey was a brave soul; his only fears were for Jack.
"If there's trouble, Jack, gather a crowd. If there's more than one bully, go after the toughest one first. Just be sure you do it publicly."
"Why publicly?"
"If he's killing you, maybe someone in the crowd will stop him."
"Oh."
"Never be afraid to take a beating, Jack. At the very least, it's an acting opportunity."
"I see."
Thus they drove through southwestern Maine. The loneliness of the place was heart-stopping. When they were almost at the school, Mr. Ramsey pulled into a gas station. Jack was relieved to imagine him driving back to Portland with a full tank. It was the sort of rural gas station that sold groceries--mostly chips and soda, cigarettes and beer. A blind dog was panting near the cash register, behind which a hefty woman sat on a stool. Even sitting down, she was taller than Mr. Ramsey. Being a wrestler had
made Jack an expert at guessing people's weight. This woman weighed over two hundred pounds.
"For better or worse, we're on our way to Redding," Mr. Ramsey informed her.
"I could have told you that," the big woman said.
"We don't look like we're from Maine, eh?" Mr. Ramsey guessed. The woman didn't smile.
"Seems a shame to send a boy away to school before he's even shaving," she said, nodding in Jack's direction.
"Well," Mr. Ramsey replied, "there are many difficult circumstances that families find themselves in these days. There's not always a choice."
"There's always a choice," the woman said stubbornly. She reached under the cash register and brought out a handgun, which she placed on the counter. "For example," she continued, "I could blow my brains out, hoping someone would find the dog in the morning--not that anyone would take care of a blind dog. It might be better to shoot the dog first, then blow my brains out. What I'm saying is, it's never not complicated--but there's always a choice."
"I see," Mr. Ramsey said.
The big woman saw Jack looking at the gun; she put it away under the cash register. "It's kind of early tonight to shoot anyone," she said, winking at the boy.
"Thank you for the gas," Mr. Ramsey said. Back in the car, he remarked: "I forgot that everyone is armed in this country. It would be cheaper and safer if they all took sleeping pills, but I suppose you need a prescription for sleeping pills."
"You don't need a prescription for a gun?" Jack asked.
"Apparently not, Jack, but what seems worse to me is that owning a gun must to some degree encourage you to use it--even if only to shoot a blind dog!"
"The poor dog," Jack pointed out.
"Listen to me," Mr. Ramsey said, just as the Redding campus rose out of the river mist--the red-brick buildings suggesting the austerity and correctional purpose of a prison, which Jack thought it might have been before it became a school. Redding actually had once been Maine's largest mental asylum, a state facility that had lost its funding to the war effort in the forties. (That there were still bars on the dormitory windows was what gave the place the appearance of a penitentiary.)
"Jack Burns," Mr. Ramsey intoned, "if you ever feel like running away from this place, think twice. The environment into which you escape might be more hostile than the school itself, and quite clearly the citizens have weapons."
"I would be shot down like a blind dog. Is that what you mean?" the boy asked.
"Well said, Jack Burns!" Mr. Ramsey cried. "A most prescient view of the situation, and spoken like a leading man!"
Jack bore scant resemblance to a leading man when he said a tearful good-bye to Mr. Ramsey in the corridor of his dormitory. Mr. Ramsey wept as he bid the boy adieu.
Jack's roommate was a pale, long-haired Jewish kid from the Boston area, Noah Rosen, who was kind enough to distract Jack from the urge to weep by expressing his considerable indignation that their room had no door. Only a curtain gave them some measure of privacy from passersby in the hall. Jack instantly shook Noah's hand and expressed his indignation about the curtain, too. They were engaged in the overpolite exercise of offering each other the choice of the desk with a window view, or the best bed, which was obviously the one farther from the curtain and the traffic in the corridor, when the curtain was flung open (without warning) and into their room stepped an aggressive-looking older boy--a seventh or eighth grader, Jack assumed--and this rude fellow asked, in a loud voice, a question of such offensiveness and hostility that Jack almost abandoned Mrs. Wicksteed's be-nice-twice philosophy. "Which of you faggots has the little fag for a father?"
"His name is Tom Abbott," Noah told Jack. "I met him in the washroom half an hour ago, and he called me a 'kike.' "