The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier Read Free Book Online

of them, the birds scatter and beat their way into the air—an exhilarating noise. He climbs over a wire fence and into a spindly cherry tree with a few red leaves still curling open inside it. It is almost autumn. He is biting into a wild cherry, gnawing around the hard, blackened dimple at one end, when he hears a sudden pop and a chip of bark flies into his side. He lights out.
    Pierre Douglas doesn’t even see where the damned squirrel goes, only a flash of its tail and a twitching in the leaves. He rests the stock of the gun against his shoe, squinting into the sunlight. The wind is blowing in hard gusts from behind him, and because the elastic bands keep vanishing from his bathroom counter, he has to hold his hair out of his face with his hand. His girlfriend, Claire, wants him to wear his hair like he did when they first started dating, loose and scrappy like Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, but he likes it better when it’s fastened into a ponytail. He hardly listens to Sonic Youth anymore. Lately he’s been getting into Tom Waits and the early Van Morrison. When he opens the back door, standing the gun against the wall, he can hear Claire singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to their son Pierre, the only song that will put him to sleep this early in the day. Claire calls the boy Pierre Jr., but Pierre himself likes to call him Pierre the Second—it makes him sound like royalty, he thinks, like a king, or maybe a pope. He finds Claire hovering over the playpen in the living room and kisses her, taking her whole ear into his mouth. Her singing voice skips and grates as she leans into him. She smiles. He can hear Maury Povich delivering his closing monologue on TV, which means that it’s almost three o’clock, which means that he needs to get to school. He was caught stealing electronics components a few years ago and has to attend class every day as part of his probation. Most of his teachers don’t seem to give a damn whether he shows up or not, but Mr. Taulbee, his English teacher, will have his ass in a sling if he’s not there by threefifteen. He’ll be back in an hour or so, he tells Claire, and when he asks her if she wants him to pick up something to eat, she suggests Chinese food. Chinese it is, he says, as long as you promise to stop hiding my hairbands. He kisses her goodbye, and then pats Pierre the Second on the belly, and he drives to Springfield High School in their shaky old Plymouth.
    Tommy Taulbee is already calling the last name on the roster, James Young, when his three missing students come through the door: Pierre Douglas, Chrissy Symancyk, and Ethan Hummer. They slump into their seats, sinking so far that he can barely see their faces, and he makes three quick checkmarks by their names. The way his students sit at their desks makes him think of miners being lowered into the earth, or moles disappearing into their burrows. His back winces just to look at them. It is the first time in more than a month that his entire class has been here, and he pauses to admire the descending row of identical checkmarks in his roster. He has always, ever since he was a boy, loved images like this: the clean downward repetition of signs and letters. He assigns his students a freewriting exercise on the topic of family, and for thirty minutes, while they scratch away with their pens and pencils, he grades the last of their papers from the day before. The wind pushing through the courtyard makes a sandy noise against the window. The PA system clicks once or twice and then falls silent. When their time is up, he collects his students’ exercises from the front of the room and spends the last fifteen minutes of the hour giving them their next major assignment, which is due in mid-October. They have been studying African folklore in their textbook, and he wants them to write a folktale of their own, an original story that either teaches a lesson or presents the origin of something or relates the exploits of a