IT'S - Chapter 4

""Don't Look Back" (Dave Mooney)

Dave ducked. As he glanced out the window in a panic, he saw a US Air 727 passing about twenty feet above the plane he was riding. Dave hated flying on American airplanes. If it hadn't been Dan who had summoned him to Boulder on a moment's notice, Dave wouldn't have gone. He wouldn't have had to buy plane tickets for the last weekend before Christmas holidays. He wouldn't have had to spend twelve hours flying from Toronto to Detroit to Chicago to Atlanta to Denver to complete a trip which, if taken direct, would at most have lasted four hours. But it was Dan who had phoned, so Dave was sitting in the exact middle of the coach section on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Denver, a flight which featured several small children screaming at the tops of their lungs, near misses with large commercial airliners at regular intervals, and American beer.

Dan had been almost completely incoherent when he had called. "She's back!" were the first words Dave heard when he picked up the phone.

"Who's back? Who is this?"

"Miss Thistlebottom. Dan Culberson. She's back. Come to Boulder. We need you again."

This was too weird. This call couldn't be a fake, because nobody else but The Winners Club(TM) knew about Miss Thistlebottom and what had happened to her. And it could only be Miss Thistlebottom who could reduce Dan to speaking in sentences of four words or less.

"Are you trying to infer," Dave demanded, "that Miss Thistlebottom is back in Boulder again, despite the fact that we .  . . you know?"

"I'm not inferring; you're inferring," Dan replied. And I'm not implying, either. I'm telling. And apparently '. . . you know' wasn't enough. She's back, and we need you again."

It had to be serious. Dan was even correcting grammar now. "But how? I mean, I was there. There was the Strunk and White that we got her with and. . . "

". . . with which we got her. You'd better watch what you say and how you say it over the next couple of days, my friend. I'll see you in Boulder tomorrow and explain it all then. And in the meantime, you have plane reservations to make. Later."

"Yeah, I guess." But Dan had hung up. This was going to be the weirdest Christmas ever.

* * * * *

"Mom! Can I go to Johnny's place to play hockey?" Davey was grabbing his stick on the way out the door.

"Of course, Sweetie. But first I'd like you to meet your new --."

"I don't know, can you go to Johnny's place?" a strange voice demanded. "Perhaps you meant to ask 'May I go to Johnny's place?'"

An elderly woman in a tweed suit had bustled into the room. "'Can' is used to describe the ability to perform an action. 'May' is used to ask permission. So, ask again: 'May I go to Johnny's place to play hockey?'"

Davey's mother smiled weakly. "Meet Miss Thistlebottom, Davey. She's going to be the new English teacher."

"H'lo, Miss Thistlebottom," Davey mumbled without enthusiasm. So this was the person who was going to replace Miss Roughage, the previous English teacher who had vanished without a trace two weeks earlier. Miss Roughage had been Davey's favourite teacher. He tried requesting permission to leave again. "Mom, may I go to Johnny's place to play hockey?" he asked, placing special emphasis on "may".

"Of course, Dear. Be sure to be home by dinner. We're having your favourite -- Spam haggis."

"Great," Davey thought, as he raced out the door. "At least something is going right today."

* * * * *

Hockey just hadn't been the same lately since Richie and J.P. "went on a long trip," as Mr. Bumblefister, the Principal, had tried to explain at the school assembly earlier that week. Sometimes adults could be so dense. All the kids knew that Richie and J.P. were dead, but they knew that if Mr. Bumblefister found out that his story was not being believed, then he would become furious and probably cancel the field trip to the zoo. So they had to be extra careful to pretend to believe his story, which was bad enough, but Richie was the best goalie in the class and now they would have to find somebody else.

Johnny Shea was Davey's best friend. They played road hockey together every day after school, usually with the other members of The Winners Club, but Davey and Johnny would be there, regardless. Johnny was a good guy. He had some peculiar quirks, though. Take his dog. Please. It was a little poodle which the Shea family took out to be clipped once a month, as was the fashion. But Johnny insisted that it was a fierce wolf which he had imported from Norway. He named his poodle "Fennie," and he fed it, of all things, prunes. This seemed not to worry Johnny's parents, although Davey noticed that they never let Fennie near their carpet.

The hockey game was already underway when Davey arrived. Johnny was there, of course. So were Bobby, Lenbie, Wickie, and Dee. "Where are Angus, Evie, and Danny?" Davey asked, jumping into the game.

"Angus is stuck in his room again," Lenbie replied, flipping the ball forward to Wickie. "He told his mother that if they filled her with helium, Goodyear could rent advertising space on her side. He's grounded until he's 35."

"Evie's at the library, naturally," Dee interrupted. "But she said that she would be going out with us tonight. And Danny is amper-deity knows where, but he wouldn't miss Hide and Seek in the dark for anything, so we'll see him soon enough." She stole the ball off Wickie's stick and raced off down the street in the other direction.

"Great," Davey said. "It should be fun. Guess who I met today?" Bobby easily stopped Dee's shot and started down the street himself.

"Elvis?"

"Buffalo Bob?"

"The Pope?"

Bobby tripped over his own feet and the ball dribbled to Johnny.

"Nope nope nope. Be serious. It's the new English teacher." Davey took a pass from Johnny and wound up for a shot. "Her name is Miss Thistlebot --. Uh oh." His shot had sailed wide of the net and started rolling down the street. As the six stood and watched, the ball skipped through the intersection and bounced into a storm drain."Uh oh."

"I'm not getting it," Wickie exclaimed. "Davey shot it -- he should get it."

"No way. I'm not going near no storm drain. Not after what happened to Richie."

"Chicken!" Bobby called. "That was at night, and this is daytime. Nothing is going to happen. Chicken!"

"I'm no chicken! It's just that the ball is probably in the sewer by now and it's time for me to go home for supper because we're having Spam haggis and I promised my dying grandfather on his deathbed that I wouldn't ever go chasing street hockey balls down a storm drain on a Thursday and I. . . "

"Chicken!" Bobby screamed. The others had taken up the taunt by now, too.

"Chicken!"

"Chicken!"

"Chicken."

"Pork."

Pork?

"Would you like the chicken or the pork for your complimentary in-flight meal?" The flight attendant gave that friendly-yet-not-quite-sincere smile that flight attendants give.

"Oh. I ordered the vegetarian meal." Dave was slightly disoriented.

"I'm sorry, sir. There are no vegetarian meals on this flight. Perhaps you would like just the salad?" She proffered some wilted brown iceberg lettuce.

"The chicken will be fine, thank you." Dave hated flying on American airplanes.

* * * * *

"I mean it. She was there for the whole meal!"

Davey was waving his hands in the air telling his story. "She's an English teacher, right? And every time I say anything, she corrects me. So I try saying things wrong on purpose. I was telling her about the trip we're going to take to the zoo, so I says 'The class are going to go to the zoo next week.' Everybody knows that should be 'is,' not 'are,' right? So she doesn't say anything. So I says to her, 'Shouldn't that be "is," not "are"?' And she says, 'That's colon-u-k-u-s.' So I says, 'I've never heard of no "colon-u-k-u-s rule,"' and she says, 'That should be "I've never heard of any 'colon-u-k-u-s rule.'"' I could just kill her. So I say 'I ain't following any colon-u-k-u-s rule' and she says '"Ain't" isn't a word.' Well, I know it is so I go to my room and I get my dictionary that Miss Roughage gave us. And right there in black and white is 'ain't'! So I shows it to Miss Thistle-whatsits and she looks at the dictionary, then she looks at me, then she looks at the dictionary again, then she cuffs me behind the ear! So I says 'What did you do that for?' and she says 'Where did you get this?' and she waves the dictionary in my face. 'This is Horrid Permissiveness at its worst!' she says. 'It's almost Linguistic Anarchy!' Then she gets this really spacey look in her eye and she says 'Chambers would never accept a travesty like "ain't" to sully their pages.' So what could I do? So I excuse myself and come here. And she's going to be our new English teacher."

"Brutal," Bobby moped. "I'm really going to miss Miss Roughage. She was the best."

The Winners Club was sitting in the corner of the big empty field where they liked to play Hide and Seek. It wasn't quite dark yet, so they were sitting and chatting, waiting for the sun to set and for Evie to show up. She wasn't there yet, and neither was Angus, but they weren't expecting him. Danny spoke.

"You know, it was really spooky the way Miss Roughage vanished. Mr. Bumblefister says that she's gone on a long trip to visit relatives, but I don't believe that. And it's not like she moved, because she didn't even say goodbye."

"You don't think that she's --?" Johhny asked quietly.

"No . . . I don't think so," Danny answered. "Her name never showed up in the paper. It's not like a teacher can all of a sudden die and not even have an announcement in the paper. It's something spooky, but I don't know what. It's almost as if she never --."

"Hi guys!" Angus had appeared suddenly and was climbing over the fence into the field.

"Angus! How did you get here? I thought that you were grounded!" Danny looked at him in amazement.

"I am. I decided that I had to escape. And looky here." He reached under his jacket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. "I finished the Approval Draft of 'Mushrooms of Paraguay -- Installation and Maintenance' and I'd like you guys to sit in on the review."

"That's great, Angus! We'd be honoured. Have a seat. Davey was just telling us about the new English teacher."

"Teacher from hell, Angus," Davey confided. "She sits there and nitpicks you all day. We're going to miss Miss Roughage. A lot. Here's Evie."

Evie had just come into view across the field. She was running as fast as she could, and she seemed excited. She was waving a book of some sort in the air.

"Lookit (pant pant) this," she gasped as she fell in a heap on the ground in front of the rest of The Winners Club. "I (pant pant) found it in the library (pant pant) at school. It's (pant pant) got an inscription in the front."

"It" was a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Davey took it from Evie and gasped. It must have weighed about four pounds.

"This is amazing." Davey slowly turned the book over in his hands and examined it closely. "Is this silver?" he demanded.

"Yeah, I think so. I found it behind a stack of Punch magazines in one of the back rooms. It looks like it's been there forever. Read it."

Davey opened the front cover and peered at the inscription in the fading light. "Towards the improved grammar of the students of Rocky Mountain Elementary School. Edna Thistlebottom, November 5, 1935." Davey gasped again. "Wow! This must be about thirty years old by now!"

"Edna Thistlebottom," Evie giggled. "Can you possibly imagine a stupider name for a person?"

Davey and Danny looked at each other. "Ummmmm," Danny said. "Let Davey tell you about the new English teacher."

* * * * *

"This is your Captain speaking."

The voice from the speaker above Dave's head caused him to snap back to attention.

"Due to adverse weather conditions in Denver, this flight will be landing instead in Salt Lake City, Utah. For your comfort and convenience, you will be billetted at the Airport Ramada Inn in Salt Lake City until weather conditions in Denver improve. For your nutritional enjoyment, a complimentary meal of chicken or pork will be served at the Salt Lake City airport upon our arrival. Those of you with connecting flights from Denver will be booked upon the next available flights to your destination. Thank you for choosing Delta Airlines, and on behalf of myself and the crew, I hope you are having a pleasant journey."

"Excuse me, sir." The flight attendant was picking up something from the floor near Dave's feet. "I think this fell off your lap." She handed him a silver-bound copy of Strunk and White.

"Peculiar," Dave thought. "The last time I saw one of these was back in Boulder when I was a kid." He looked around to see who might have dropped it, but nobody in the immediate area seemed like a likely candidate. There was an old woman dressed in a tweed suit and sensible shoes sitting across the aisle, but she was engrossed in the in-flight movie, and she didn't seem the type to be carrying around grammar handbooks. Not that anybody was.

"Excuse me, sir." It was the flight attendant again. "What would you like to drink? We have Coors Light, Bud Light, and Genessee Cream Ale."

* * * * *

Davey was "it." He normally hated being "it," but today he loved it. This was because today they were playing "Sardines," which is a version of Hide and Seek in which one person hides, and the rest of the group looks for that one person. Then whenever anyone finds the person who is "it," they join the "it" person in the hiding place. The last person to find the hiding place loses the round, but gets to be "it" the next time. Davey knew the best place, and that's why he was so excited to be "it."

He raced across the field and went up to the storm sewer set into the bank of the river. It was about four feet from the ground and about four feet in diameter. It only ever had any water in it during spring runoff, so there shouldn't be anything dangerous about it. Then he remembered: Richie and J.P. had gotten "theirs" in the sewer, hadn't they? Maybe this wasn't such a great idea after all.

"NINETY-EIGHT! NINETY-NINE! ONE HUNDRED! READY OR NOT, HERE WE COME!" Damn. He glanced at the sewer, glanced at the sky, and listened for the shouts of The Winners Club as they raced across the field in search of him. With a sigh, Davey hoisted himself into the sewer.

* * * * *

"Quit shoving!"

"Be quiet!"

"Your elbow's in my gut!"

"Shhhhh!"

Nothing can make more noise than a group of schoolkids trying to be silent. Lenbie was the last one to find them, and he hadn't shown up yet.

"That stupid book is digging into me! What did you have to bring it in here for?"

"It's not a stupid book, it's a very valuable book. And I brought it here because it's too valuable to leave in the middle of some stupid old field."

"But it isn't too valuable to bring into a smelly sewer and to stick into my ribs?"

"Shhhhh!"

"Ouch!"

They heard a shuffling noise outside along the river bank. When the shuffling led to a face appearing at the end of the sewer, though, it wasn't what The Winners Club expected at all. Instead of Lenbie's familiar smirk, what materialised before them was a truly hideous apparition. It was a clown's greasepaint mask, but it wasn't a clown; it was a woman dressed in tweed. She was wearing pince-nez glasses and her hair was drawn back in a bun. In her hand were, well, they weren't quite balloons, but they looked like balloons. Yellow balloons. And she looked eerily familiar. Almost like...

"Margaret Thatcher!" Evie gasped.

"No, sweetie," the apparition answered gently. "The author is being inflammatory again. I think your friend Davey can tell you who I am."

"You're Miss Thistlebottom," Davey hissed. The Winner's Club gasped.

"You're Miss Thistlebottom?" Bobby demanded. "You're going to be our new English teacher?"

"That's right. I think that we should get off on the right foot, shouldn't we? That's why I came by here this evening. I'm going to be your new English teacher, and I think that we can really work together to elevate the level of grammar at Rocky Mountain Elementary School. And after hearing young Mr. Davey speaking at supper tonight, I certainly have taken on a heroic task."

"So you're going to help us make less mistakes?" Angus asked.

"Fewer. 'Fewer mistakes,'" Miss Thistlebottom corrected gently. "'Less' is used for estimated quantities; 'fewer' is used for countable quantities. I'll help you make fewer mistakes."

"Why?" Johnny asked. "Do we really talk that bad?"

"Badly!" Miss Thistlebottom snapped. "'Do we really speak that badly?' Yes, we do. Well, not I, of course. I have a good mind to give you a good --." She stopped abruptly. "I mean, your speech would be so much more becoming of a young gentleman such as yourself if you used proper word formations." She smiled benignly. "Now, Mr. Davey, what is that frown doing on your face?"

"You'll never make up for Miss Roughage. She was the best teacher, ever. You're not as nice as her."

"Not so nice as she! Use 'as' for positive comparisons and 'so' for nega --. I mean, ahem, oh, really?"

"Yeah. She used to always be nice to us. And she would --."

"'She always used to'! Must you split infinitives? Must you torment me like this? If we were in the classroom right now, I'd --." Miss Thistlebottom's voice was continually rising in pitch until she caught herself. "I mean, why do you keep talking about Miss Roughage so much? She was just another teacher, wasn't she?"

"Nope." Davey's response caused Miss Thistlebottom to grit her teeth. "She was the best! As far as Miss Roughage, she let us say anything we wanted to."

"As far as? As far as? I can't take this! Miss Roughage was the worst sort of English teacher! She was one of those flakey modern teachers with an Education degree in her pocket and granola in her hair who didn't care one whit about the English language and how it is meant to be used. 'What is important for these children,' she would say, 'is for them to explore, to create, to discover for themselves the tools of communication. If we spend all our time teaching them how to parse the present pluperfect subjunctive mood, they will grow restless and distracted and will not learn to tap their creative energies. We must allow the students to learn for themselves the mechanisms by which thoughts are transferred from mind to paper. Teaching them rules only teaches them to regurgitate. Teaching them to create teaches them vital life skills. As long as the children communicate, then the actual agents of composition will inevitably follow.' Pah!"

Miss Thistlebottom's voice was rising and her face was getting red. It almost seemed that her eyes were starting to glow with a faint yellow tint. "Anyone who can't form sentences using the standard, agreed-upon rules of the language isn't communicating. They're flailing in ignorance, demonstrating the paucity of their thought processes to all who care about precision, accuracy, and clarity." She had climbed into the sewer during her tirade and was approaching The Winners Club, who were in turn slowly backing away from her. "And the next one of you ankle-biters who makes even the slightest grammatical error in my presence will feel my wrath! Do you understand?"

No one said anything.

"Do you understand?"

"Hi, guys!" Lenbie called, sticking his head in the sewer. "I could hear you halfway across the field. You really should of kept your voices down."

"Should have!" Miss Thistlebottom shrieked as she spun around to face Lenbie. "'Should of' is wrong! Wrong wrong wrong! Sloppy speech is the sign of sloppy thought. Do you hear me? Sloppy speech is the sign of sloppy thought!"

With this distraction, The Winners Club save Lenbie fled deeper into the sewer, away from Miss Thistlebottom. Davey, who was trailing the pack, looked back to see Miss Thistlebottom holding out a balloon for Lenbie to take. "Should of! Should of!" Davey heckled as he turned a corner.

Miss Thistlebottom jerked her hand back just as Lenbie was about to grasp the balloon. She looked behind her at the space which Davey had just vacated, looked at Lenbie, and then spun on her heel and raced deeper into the sewer in pursuit.

* * * * *