Read Rage for Free Online Page B

you."
        Outside, one of the town's three black-and-whites and a blue state-police cruiser had arrived. They parked across the road from the high school, and Jerry Kesserling, the chief since Warren Talbot had retired into the local Methodist cemetery in 1975, began directing traffic onto the Oak Hill Pond road.
        "Did you hear me, Charlie?"
        "Yes. But I can't tell you. I don't know. There are more cops coming, I guess."
        "Mr. Wolfe called them," Mr. Denver said. "I imagine there will be a great deal more when they fully appreciate what's going on. They'll have tear gas and Mace, Dec… Charlie. Why make it hard on yourself and your classmates?"
        "Tom?"
        Grudgingly: "What?"
        "You get your skinny cracked ass out there and tell them that the minute anyone shoots tear gas or anything else in here, I am going to make them sorry. You tell them to remember who's driving."
        "Why? Why are you doing this?" He sounded angry and impotent and frightened. He sounded like a man who has just discovered there is no place left to pass the buck.
        "I don't know," I said, "but it sure beats panty raids, Tom. And I don't think it actually concerns you. All I want you to do is trot back out there and tell them what I said. Will you do that, Tom?"
        "I have no choice, do I?"
        "No, that's right. You don't. And there's something else, Tom."
        "What?" He asked it very hesitantly.
        "I don't like you very much, Tom, as you have probably realized, but up to now you haven't had to give much of a rip how I felt. But I'm out of your filing cabinet now, Tom. Have you got it? I'm not just a record you can lock up at three in the afternoon. Have you got it?" My voice was rising into a scream. "HAVE YOU GOT THAT, TOM? HAVE YOU INTERNALIZED THAT PARTICULAR FACT OF LIFE?"
        "Yes, Charlie," he said in a deadly voice. "I have it."
        "No you don't, Tom. But you will. Before the day's over, we are going to understand all about the difference between people and pieces of paper in a file, and the difference between doing your job and getting jobbed. What do you think of that, Tommy, my man?"
        "I think you're a sick boy, Decker."
        "No, you think I'm a sick boy, Charlie. Isn't that what you meant to say, Tom?"
        "Yes…"
        "Say it."
        "I think you're a sick boy, Charlie." The mechanical, embarrassed rote of a seven-year-old.
        "You've got some getting it on to do yourself, Tom. Now, get out there and tell them what I said. "
        Denver cleared his throat as if he had something else to say, and then the intercom clicked off. A little murmur went through the class. I looked them over very carefully. Their eyes were so cool and somehow detached (shock can do that: you're ejected like a fighter pilot from a humdrum dream of life to a grinding, overloaded slice of the real meat, and your brain refuses to make the adjustment; you can only free-fall and hope that sooner or later your chute will open), and a ghost of grammar school came back to me: Teacher, teacher, ring the bell, My lessons all to you I'll tell, And when my day at school is through, I'll know more than aught I knew.
        I wondered what they were learning today; what I was learning. The yellow school buses had begun to appear, and our classmates were going home to enjoy the festivities on living-room TVs and pocket transistor radios; but in Room 16, education went on.
        I rapped the butt of the pistol sharply on the desk. The murmur died. They were watching me as closely as I was watching them. Judge and jury, or jury and defendant? I wanted to cackle.
        "Well," I said, "the shit has surely hit the fan. I think we need to talk a little. "
        "Private?" George Yannick asked. "Just you and us?" He had an intelligent, perky face, and he didn't look frightened.
        "Yes. "
        "You better turn off that intercom, then.