Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online Page B

careful footwork as I followed him to our fiberglass boat. We hadn’t used it since last summer and it had deteriorated, like everything. My friends’ parents’ divorces were final now, the elms along Judd Street were mostly gone, and the bumper-sticker plague had worsened, its slogans having grown blunter and more jolting (BACK OFF, ASSHOLE; STICK IT, TRICKY DICKY ! ) . No one went near the bandstand anymore because of a hypodermic needle that had been found in the grass beside its steps.
    My father and I didn’t say much on the river. We tried all our lures, from a silver-bellied Rapala to a rubber-skirted Hula Popper, but didn’t attract any strikes. I didn’t care. I liked staring at the moving water. It beat imagining letters to dead soldiers soaking up rain on the floors of Asian jungles. It beat hearing Mr. Applebaum describe the role of LSD and devil worship in a recent California murder.
    My father cast his Hula Popper. “How’s school?”
    “The same, pretty much. I’m doing fine.”
    “Comfortable yet with algebra?”
    “Adjusting.”
    “How about that lunatic young teacher?”
    I grinned. I hadn’t realized my father knew.
    “All he talks about is Wounded Knee.”
    My father cast his lure again. I didn’t know which side he’d taken in the battle with the Indians. The government’s, probably. He voted Republican. Then again, he’d grown a mustache last fall and let his sideburns creep longer and go all bushy.
    “What does Applebaum think?” he asked me.
    “Shoot them. They never surrendered. Make them pay.”
    My father fell silent, reeling in his lure. It spluttered noisily along the surface, meant to imitate a crippled minnow. The effect drove bass crazy, supposedly. Not tonight, though.
    “They’re Americans, too,” my father finally said. I waited for him to say more, but that was it.
    He yanked the cord on our Johnson outboard motor and headed down the river, away from town, toward the maze of sloughs we called Rice Lake. We’d be out for at least another two hours, this meant, in jackets too thin for the chill of springtime dusk, but I wasn’t ready to go back. The water seemed safer than the land these days.
    The Indians dropped their weapons soon after that and Mr. Applebaum wheeled in a TV set so we could enjoy the scenes of their surrender. Heads down, in handcuffs, lines of captives shuffled toward armored wagons, guarded by FBI agents with rifles. Mr. Applebaum paced the aisles between our desks and made a fist as the wagons rolled away, pulling dust clouds behind them down a straight dirt road.
    “Walter, tell us something.”
    I didn’t look up.
    “Why is our nation safer and better off—socially, constitutionally, in all ways—than it was at this time yesterday?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Oh, please. Come on.”
    But I couldn’t do it, not this time. I was through, and my social-studies grade reflected it when I received my report card a month later. I didn’t mind for once. I didn’t care. I could afford this slipup, I decided, because there would probably never be another one. I wasn’t brave. I just happened to be tired.

T O OUR PARENTS, WHO JUDGED PEOPLE BY THEIR ACTIONS rather than their looks, Mr. Hulbertson was a good man, a doer of many civic-minded deeds, but to us, his sixth-grade students, whose senses remained unclouded by notions of virtue, he was an ugly man with noxious breath. But that was just our first impression. As the school year went on and contact displaced impact, a few of us, and eventually a lot of us, revised our view of him. He wasn’t ugly, he was loathsome. With his mouthful of stumpy, charred-looking gray teeth and his mildewed rag of lank black beard, he was abominable on every level, and what we’d initially thought of as his “bad breath” was neither his , we discovered, nor truly breath , since it stank not only on the exhale but slightly prior to the inhale, when a breath isn’t even a breath yet, only