Stotan! by Chris Crutcher Read Free Book Online Page A

nights a week and all day Saturday, unless we work out. He works with the older kids, the first-and second-graders who come after school and on weekends when their parents are working. They’re a tough bunch; it’s a public-funded daycare and most of the kids are from low-or no-income families; but Nortie does a great job with them. It’s the one thing he’s really proud of—way more than his swimming. He even invited me over once to watch him work and I have to admit I wasamazed. I stayed three hours watching him do science experiments with them, play board games, work on school skills and play outside. He gets them so jacked up about learning and discovery, mostly because every time one of them figures out a problem or moves to a higher level in something, Nortie’s more excited than the kid. He teaches like he works out—with reckless abandon. If one attack skill doesn’t work, he chucks it and goes on to something else. When a kid’s having a hard time, he says, “Yeah, that was really hard for me too” and keeps working on it, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to have a hard time. Watching him, I was struck by the monumental difference between the way he works with these kids and the way my own daycare and elementary years were. He never puts them down. He just doesn’t do it, and that’s not only with their studies or their quiet time. It’s their whole time with him: playtime, lunch, you name it. That doesn’t mean he has no discipline; it’s that all his discipline is by agreement. He’s already gone over with them what is and isn’t okay and consequences are already set, so there are rarely hard feelings when Nortie activates them. He gets more respect at the East Side Childcare Center than in all the other places in his life combined. The woman who runs the place—her name’s MaybelleSawyer—says Nortie must have been a big, tough, happy black momma just like her, in his last life.
    But this afternoon it all crumbled for him. He’s worked himself into a paying position, has several groups of kids that he takes without any supervision, has already decided he’s going into elementary education in college—I mean, this is the one thing Nortie is sure about in his whole life—and he comes screaming up to my place in his dad’s car about 3:00 this afternoon, yelling my name. “Walker! Walker! Oh, God, Walker!” He shot across the lawn and into the house without knocking, and on upstairs, where I was lying on the bed listening to some old pre-Christian Bob Dylan albums that my brother turned me on to. He burst into the room and fell face down on the vacant bed and began sobbing and pounding the pillow. “I’m done! It’s all over!” he said again and again, then began convulsing and sobbing even more into the bed. I locked the door, then sat on the bed beside him and put my hand on his back between his shoulder blades. “Nortie,” I said, “what are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
    â€œI did it!” he sobbed. “I blew it! I blew everything! Oh, God!”
    I said, “Nortie, damn it, what happened? It can’t be this bad.”
    â€œIt is! It is!” and he sobbed some more.
    I let him go for maybe a minute, then rolled him over and grabbed his shoulders. He flinched. “Tell me what happened,” I said. “Just tell me what happened.”
    â€œI hit a kid, Walk. I hit a little kid. Right on the side of the head.”
    â€œOn purpose?”
    â€œNo,” he said. “I mean, yes. I mean, I didn’t mean to; I didn’t want to…. I got mad.” The sobbing started again.
    I felt the wind go out of me. I don’t know much about modern child-rearing practices, but I know physical punishment is out. I said, “Nortie, just tell me what happened.”
    My mom knocked at the door and asked if everything