Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel by Donald Antrim Read Free Book Online Page B

nocturnal action. As, in fact, I did that very night, standing at the dark entrance to the impenetrable-seeming public glade—I paused a moment, there at the stone gate marking the park’s western perimeter, to let my eyes adjust to the primordial dark beneath the hammock canopy; but also to consider the meanings of things, and to experience, if I could, wrapped in gloom, a few realizations about the consciousness of personality. It was something I’d been thinking about ever since the night of the ex-mayor’s death. Now, standing outside Turtle Pond Park, getting ready to go in and carry out the promise hastily made to the doomed man, I discovered inside my heart a radiant sensation of connectedness: to Jim Kunkel, and to his, and my, and all our ancestors going back to the first voyagers in the realm of the psyche: the pre-Christian fertility cults of the Nile, of the Danube Basin, of Asia and Africa. It was subtle at first, a tingling kind of mild appreciation of my relationship to others, of ambitions and acts determining not only my own destiny but the destinies of people requiring care and compassion from me: Meredith, the kids of the third grade, the townspeople who might one day cast their ballots in support of Pete Robinson for mayor. The foot—which was thawing, incidentally, at a rapid rate, leaking onto my fig bars, though I didn’t know this until later—the foot seemed suddenly symbolically freighted with all our aspirations and dreams, the collective dreams of a community. Indeed, it was as if it were not Jim Kunkel’s foot being buried, not Jim’s foot at all, but a flesh-and-blood vessel containing the Hopes of Men—Jim, me, anybody and everybody—for a better, wiser world that might spring from soil made fertile by blood and bone. Such were my thoughts. Imagine my chagrin when, immediately upon stepping past the stone threshold to the dark and misty park, I heard the husky voice of my former star pupil, Ben Webster himself, calling out to me in a stage whisper, “Hey, Mr. Robinson, is that you? What are you doing here? Get away from there. You’re going to step on a mine.”
    “Hello?”
    “Over here,” from behind the bushes.
    I stepped lightly. “Ben, it’s late. What are you doing up at this time of night?”
    “Give me a break, Mr. Robinson. I’m not a kid anymore.” He wore jungle fatigues and combat boots and a dark beret; his face was smeared with charcoal. He wore a holster. He said, “Stay low, be quiet, follow me,” then proceeded to duck-walk into deeper recesses of forest. I hunkered down. Clearly Ben was intimate with this marshy topography trimmed in elephant-ear ferns and hanging mosses; he led an easy path beneath silhouetted black limbs hanging low; his steps generated no sound. Mine, of course, reverberated. I said, “Sorry, I’m not very good at this kind of thing,” and Ben whispered back, “Concentrate on step placement, Mr. Robinson. You’ll get the hang of it. There’s a big root up here, watch out.”
    “Ben, did you say mines?”
    “Claymores. That jerk Mr. Benson planted them. We’ve located some but we don’t have the technology to disarm or remove them.”
    “We?”
    “Me and my dad.”
    “How is your dad?” I knew Chuck Webster from PTA meetings. Years before, when Ben was little and attending grade school, Chuck Webster had been a friendly and supportive presence at our bimonthly open-house conferences concerning core curriculum and dress codes. His input was always appreciated by the teaching staff, who felt from him a sensitivity unusual in the lay community, to the diverse and often contradictory objectives—the whole “socialization versus individuation: which to encourage?” problem, with its attendant classroom dilemmas around issues of fair grading for “fast” and “slow” learners, how to reward effort, whether to encourage interdisciplinarianism, etc.—of primary education. Ben said, “Dad’s okay, I guess. Why don’t you