Somebody Else’s Kids

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“Nigger! There’s a nigger in here! Let me out,” Tomaso shouted. “I ain’t staying in no place with a shitty nigger in it.”

Lori was indignant. “He’s no nigger. That’s Boo. And you shouldn’t oughta call him names like that.” She came over to take Boo’s hand.

I turned to latch the hook and eye.

“That ain’t gonna keep me in,” he said. “I can bust that easy. You won’t keep me in here with no locks.”

“It isn’t for you,” I replied. “It’s for him.” I indicated Boo. “He gets lost sometimes and this helps to remind him to stay in the room.”

Tomaso glared. His shoulders pulled up under the black jacket. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t hate you. We don’t even know one another.”

Abruptly Tomaso jerked around and grabbed a chair. Twirling it briefly above his head, he then let loose and sent it flying across the room and into the finches’ cage. The birds fluttered as the cage swayed wildly, but it did not tip over. Lori squealed in surprise. Boo dove under the table.

This reaction seemed to please Tomaso. He set off on a rampage. Tearing from one side of the room to the other before I even had a chance to move from the door, he flung books off the shelves, cleared the top of my desk with a swoop of his arm, ripped Lori’s work folder into quarters and threw it into the air like confetti. Another chair went flying. Luckily it only grazed the west wall of windows and fell harmlessly to the floor. Once he started, I remained against the door and did not move. I was fearful of inciting him further. Or letting him get loose outside the room.

Tomaso stopped and turned back to me. “There. Now you hate me, don’t you?”

“I’m not precisely in love with you for doing that, if that’s what you mean,” I replied. “But I don’t hate you and I don’t like your working so hard to make me do so.”

“But you’re mad, aren’t you? I made you mad, didn’t I?”

Cripes, what did this kid want? I had no idea what to say to him. I was not mad. I did not hate him. Terror was more along the lines of what I was feeling right then, but I was not going to admit that either. My palms had gotten cold and damp and I wiped them on my jeans. Birk did not prepare me at all for this one.

“I bet you think I feel sorry I done that,” he said. “Well, I don’t. Here, let me show you.” He grabbed a potted geranium off the counter and crashed it to the floor. “There.”

Still with my back to the door to keep him contained in the room, I did not move. My mind was going at the speed of light, trying desperately to sort out viable alternatives before the kid wrecked my entire room. Or worse, decided to hurt someone. My inaction was not so much from indecision as it was from fear of consequences if I made the wrong move. I did not reckon this boy gave much opportunity for replay.

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” he said. “Cat got your tongue? Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you get mad? Aren’t you normal or something? Are you some fucking kind of crazy teacher?”

“I’m not going to let you make me angry, Tomaso. I don’t want to feel that way.”

“You don’t? You don’t?” he sounded outraged. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you go ahead and hate me like everybody else does? What makes you think you’re so special?”

“Tomaso, sit down. Take off your jacket and sit down. It’s time we got started on the afternoon’s work.”

Reaching down for a piece of the broken pot, he lofted it at me. Not a serious throw in my opinion. I imagine if he had meant it, he would have hit me. We were not that far apart, and I doubted that he missed when he aimed.

“What are you going to do about me? Are you going to suspend me? Are you going to get the principal?”

“No. I’m just going to wait until you decide it’s time to work.”

“Hey man, I ain’t never gonna decide that, so you might as well just give up.”

I waited. Sweat was running down along my sides and I pressed my arms tight against my body to stop it.

“At my other school they called the police. They took me to juvie. So you can’t scare me.”

“I’m not trying to scare you, Tomaso.”

“I don’t care what you’re trying to do. I don’t care about anything.”

“I’m just waiting, that’s all.”

“You can send me to the principal, if you want. And he can give me whacks. You think I haven’t had whacks before? I’ve had a million of them. And you think I care?”

I waited without saying anything. My stomach reminded me of the price I was paying for a calm exterior.

“I could bite your titties off.”

My back against the coolness of the glass in the door, I waited.

“Hmmf. Mmmmmph. Pphuh.” Tomaso was full of noises when I would not talk back to him. He was not ready to give in yet. Still too much pride at stake. And God only knows what else.

My gut feeling was that Tomaso did not really want to leave. No single thing I could put a finger on told me that, but I felt it. I studied him carefully.

Sometimes I think I missed my calling. I should have been a swindler. In the end, my best defense always seemed to come down to the good con game I play. My gut told me this boy was hot air. That was enough to go on. I pushed myself off the door and walked by him to the other side of the room. Righting chairs and slinging papers back on my desk, I sat down at the worktable. Reaching under, I pulled Boo out and sat him down in a chair. Then I beckoned Lori over and took her L and O flash cards. My stomach was doing the chacha, a surefire clue to me of the extent of my concern for winning this game of psychological bunco. If he chose to walk out the door I would have no alternative but to go out and physically drag him back in. That would be a really lousy way to start any relationship. All I was operating on was a hunch. A hunch about a kid I did not even know.

Boo was upset by the disruption in our routine. He rocked his chair back and forth and twiddled fingers before his eyes. I reached over to reorient him and he grabbed my arm. With noisy sniffs, he smelled up the length of my exposed skin.

Tomaso approached us. He stood behind my chair as I prepared the flash cards and struggled with Boo. I could hear him but not see him.

“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked.

“No. Not very well.”

“Hmmph. White honky. I don’t want to go to no room with a white honky teacher in it.”

“You wish I spoke Spanish?”

“I could kick you in the ass.”

I swallowed. “Do you speak Spanish?”

“Of course I do. I am Spanish. What’s the matter with you? You blind or something? My father, my real father, his grandpa came from Madrid. In real Spain, not Mexico. My father’s grandpa, he fought bulls.”

“Is that right?”

“It’s true. I ain’t lying. My father’s grandpa fought real live bulls.”

“He must have been brave.”

“He was. He coulda got killed, but he wasn’t. He was real, real brave. Braver than anyone here.” A pause. “Braver than you.”

“Probably so.”

Tomaso was still behind me so that I could not see his face. I was instead looking at Lori and Boo as I talked to Tomaso. Lori watched us, first one and then the other. Boo was again fluttering his fingers in front of his face.

“What’s wrong with that kid?” Tomaso asked. He had come closer. I could sense him just inches off my right shoulder. “How come he does that with his hands?”

“Sometimes he does that when he’s frightened or unsure about things. It makes him feel better or something, I guess. I don’t really know. He doesn’t talk yet so he can’t tell us.”

“It makes him look weird. What kind of freaky place is this anyway? What’s wrong with her?” He indicated Lori.

“Nothing’s wrong with me!” she replied hotly.

“Lor,” I said.

“Well, nothing is.”

“I know it. But Tomaso is new. He doesn’t know us yet and he has questions.”

“Well, he shouldn’t ask them. They aren’t polite.” Anger gave a petulant edge to her voice. “He comes in here and calls us names and then he goes and wrecks our stuff and you don’t do nothing. He called Boo a nigger and that’s nasty, don’t you know? And he tore up my folder and it had all my good work in there to show my dad.”

“Lor,” I said softly but firmly. “Not now. I’ll get to you later on it, but hang on to things for the moment, okay?”

She slapped the tabletop.

A tremendously long silence loomed up. I had no idea where it came from but all of a sudden we were in it looking at one another. My mind was blank. Tomaso came around and sat down in one of the chairs. Boo dropped his head to the table and loudly sniffed at it. I put a hand out to stop him.

“Boo. Here,” I said and tried to distract him with the flash cards.

“Boo?” Tomaso said. “What kind of crappy name is that? No wonder the kid is crazy. He sounds like a goddamn ghost. Shit.”

Lori was angry still. She glared across the table at Tomaso.

“What are you staring at, kid? Jesus, you look at me like I got three heads or something. Didn’t no one tell you it ain’t polite to stare?”

“How come your dad lets you say words like that?” she asked. “My dad would spank me if I talked like that.”

A strange expression changed Tomaso’s features. “I could pound you right into the bloody ground. Smash your dumb-looking little face right in, I could, if you don’t shut up.”

“Don’t your dad care?”

A fragile pause.

“Fuck off, would you? Sheesh, you’re a nosy kid.” He turned his chair so that he would not have to look at her. “She’s wrong, you know,” he said to me. “My father cares. My real father. He’s down in Texas. When he finds out they got me in a foster home up here, and how they stuck me in some fucking baby class, he’ll come take me away.”

I nodded.

“I don’t really belong in a class like this. My real father, he’ll come get me pretty soon. He knows I’m waiting.”

Over the recess period I had two aides take the three children out to the playground while I went down to the office for a quick look at Tomaso’s folder.

Not much of a file. Tomaso was one of the hundreds of migrant children who pass through our part of the state every year. His schooling had been sketchy. No one had made a serious attempt to find out what had happened when he was elsewhere, or for that matter, what had happened here.

The only notable thing in the folder was his family history. Even that was all too similar to the stories of many other children who had worked their way to me. He had been born down south, Texas, it said, although in truth it was probably Mexico. His mother had died when he was an infant. His father had remarried. A million little details clouded my mind as I read, the agonies I had come to know lives like Tomaso’s held. When he was five, his stepmother had fatally shot his father and older brother in a family argument. I stopped. Reread: Fatally shot his father. Tomaso had witnessed the occurrence.

After the father’s death, the stepmother was imprisoned, and Tomaso, the sole surviving member of the family, was placed in the custody of the state. Seven foster homes followed. All this had happened in the Southwest. Then a paternal uncle showed up and took Tomaso off to live with him. Authorities in Washington state found Tomaso at age seven picking strawberries in the fields. He had never been in school. Then child abuse in Colorado, and Tomaso was removed from the uncle’s care. Into foster homes again. Three of them this time. He never stayed very long. “Antisocial personality,” “unable to form attachments” was scrawled over and over again along the way. Back to the uncle’s care after a four-month separation, north to our state. The next time Tomaso was heard from, he had been sold to a couple in Michigan for $500. Finding him unmanageable, the couple tracked down the uncle to get their money back. Unable to get it from him, they contacted authorities. The uncle was arrested. For some reason I could not determine, Tomaso was returned to our state. Back into foster-home placement.

His school career, to say the least, had been erratic. Between the late starts and the frequent moves, Tomaso had never been in any school longer than four months. Nor did anyone seem to know in what grade to place him. In Washington they put him in first grade, second and third in Colorado, second grade here, third in Michigan and fourth here again. An IQ test administered in Colorado gave Tomaso a full-scale IQ of 92. The group test in Michigan gave him an 87. All his academic skills were delayed. In math he was more than a year behind the rest of the children in his class. His reading skills were hardly above that of a first grader.

However, it was not his IQ or his attendance or his lack of skills that had brought Tomaso to my room that November. What had was obvious. After numerous attempts to keep him mainstreamed in a normal classroom in his home school, the teacher had finally given up after coming across Tomaso strangling a younger pupil on the playground. The routes of suspension, whacks and even being sent to juvenile hall with a parole officer did not markedly affect Tomaso’s behavior. Having no full-time classroom for severely disturbed children in the district, the authorities placed him on homebound instruction. However, at this the foster parents protested. They would turn Tomaso out if he were made to stay home all day. The only alternative had been my room. Still on homebound in the mornings, Tomaso became my new student in the afternoons.