Between Men by Richard Canning

Between Men by Richard Canning

Author:Richard Canning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2010-10-14T04:00:00+00:00


Rivals

David McConnell

Darius was neat and prompt. He arrived early in homeroom and sat quietly while the other boys played chess or flicked triangular paper “footballs” across their desks. Sometimes he made a flowery gesture to himself before recomposing his hands on the glazed plywood.

In his teacher Jane’s opinion he had an average mind, but every so often he spoke at length in class. On these occasions he was riveting and made no sense at all. He’d twitch. He’d flinch at the loud ticking of the clock as the words poured out. He’d only go still when his eyes rolled up at a patch of the acoustic-tile ceiling and he looked ready to faint. “Sharks are animals! Sharks are animals! You look at them and they have these major senses we don’t have. And they’re animals, so ... Also, the fishermen don’t know about the cancer cure thing!”

Waving for his attention, his teacher put in, “Are you saying they’d be more careful not to overfish sharks? Our speaker made the point that even though sharks are dangerous, they may benefit us.” Jane Brzostovsky knew the sense she tried to make for Darius wouldn’t calm him.

The student who’d just given his “homeroom speech” on sharks and who was still jumpy and flushed in patches squealed, “Yeah, because of what I just said—the cartilage!”

“No, no,” Darius groaned. “Because sharks are animals!” His gaze made an appealing but haughty sweep of his audience before drifting to the ceiling again like oracular smoke. He made a passionate gesture with one arm in a way that caused giggles. He seemed not to hear them. “This, this is not what they see!”

Jane began to wonder, as always, whether he were making sense too sophisticated for his age. Then she heard, “They’re as scared of us as we are of them!” An age-appropriate banality.

And then, again Darius: “I have a tooth from an extinct shark two thousand feet long.” Snorts of disbelief and No way’s went unnoticed. “I threw it in our pool. I won’t say why.” Was it a contentless compulsion to perform? Pure, childish rhetoric, in other words? “I know he loved his tooth.” Much laughter. And Darius laughed, too, as if for a moment allowing this was all a joke. The moment passed. “But he’s an animal—was. So you guys might be useful for cancer. You could be! This!” Thrillingly he seized the homeroom speaker’s hand and tried to hold it up. But the boy shook his arm free with a stormy look and blocked-sinus wheezing. Darius talked on. What could one say?

When the boy finally wound down and the bell rang, Jane reminded him to stay after class to discuss his own speech, next on the schedule. Darius sat, crossed his legs tightly, and put a jaunty hand on his hip. He looked exhilarated, proud, which somehow annoyed Jane. The truth was, she disliked him. Jane disapproved of irony, the vice of the age. And unseriousness bubbled up from Darius—like that moment of laughter today—even when passion had seized him.



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