Karras closed the door, threw it at the girl across the aisle. She yelled and the others immediately joined the fracas.
Except Luke. He turned and looked at me as though from a million miles away, and then turned back to his desk. It was as though he looked but didn’t see me, any more than he heard the shouts and yells around him.
At his desk, small and alone, Luke drew something on a paper. I put the stopwatch and data sheet in my pocket and moved to a windowsill near his desk.
What was he drawing? Horses? I couldn’t quite tell.
“The first two rows go to the board.”
Eleven bodies crowded along the blackboard at the side of the room, grabbing chalk from one another.
“Luke,” Lisa said, “aren’t you in the first row? Go to the board.”
Reluctantly, Luke stuffed his picture in his desk and walked to the blackboard.
By the time he arrived, there was no chalk left and almost no space. He wedged himself in between two other boys, looked up and down the chalk rail and then, seeing no chalk, just stood silently.
“All right, now,” Lisa said. “I’ll call out a problem for each of you. You write it on the board, figure it out, and then we’ll check it. John, nine plus five. Ed, seven plus six. Luke, eight plus six.”
Luke had no chalk. He could easily have asked to borrow some, or told Lisa. He did neither. He just stood, doing nothing, and then returned to his seat.
“Luke,” Lisa called sharply. “Where are you going? I told you to write your problem on the board. Eight plus six. Go on now.”
But Luke’s head never turned. He hunched down in his seat, turning his picture over and over.
A boy at the board hit his neighbor with an eraser.
“John! Stop that! Now read your answer to the class and see if they agree.” As Lisa talked she went toward Luke, then stood in front of his desk. “What’s the trouble, Luke? Don’t you feel well?”
Luke shrugged without looking up. A boy in the back row yelled, “John’s hittin’ Ed again. Lookit him, Miss Eckhardt.”
“John, get back to your seat, since you can’t behave at the board.”
As soon as Lisa turned away, Luke pulled out his picture and spread it on the desk, his head bent down so that it almost touched the paper.
I edged closer, trying to make out what he was drawing. Maybe they were lions. One large one lying down and three little ones on the far side of the paper.
I squatted beside Luke’s desk. “Hello,” I said. “I’m Mary. Will you come with me for a minute? Bring your picture.
“Luke and I are going to do a little work,” I said to Miss Eckhardt. “We’ll be back in about a half hour.”
I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing. I could feel the stopwatch pressing on my thigh in the front pocket of my jeans. I knew both Luke and I should still be in his classroom while I “charted” his behavior. But I couldn’t stand to waste the time. It was already clear that he did no work and his behavior was negative. What I had to know was why and I couldn’t find that out with a stopwatch. I had to listen to Luke, even when he wasn’t talking, and I couldn’t do that in a roomful of thirty kids.
I walked down toward the music room, Luke beside me, hoping that Jerry had gone back to the clinic.
I was glad to find the music room empty, filled only with a musty, unused smell.
“Let’s sit here,” I said to Luke. He wiggled onto a chair at the long table and I sat beside him. He kept his picture under the table.
“I think,” I said, “that those were tigers on your paper. Very, very tired tigers.”
Luke’s round eyes stared at me.
“They probably get very tired because of all the noise in the zoo and had to lie down,” I said.
Luke turned away and we sat silently for three or four minutes. I concentrated on Luke – the ring of grime on the back of his neck, the sharp points of his elbow bones. What went on in his head when he set fires? What was he thinking right now? I felt, rather than saw, Luke move, and then slowly he brought his piece of paper up from under the table.
“Nope,” he said in a voice so soft I could hardly hear him. “They’re lions. They got no stripes.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I should have noticed.”
Luke got a little stub of a pencil from his pocket. “And this one’s got fur around her face,” he said, drawing whirls around the lion’s face.
“It’s a her,” I said.
“Yup. Even though she’s got fur like a beard.”
“It must be a pretty big cage,” I said. “Those little lions are so far away from the big lion.”
“It’s not a cage. It’s Africa. It’s the mother lion and her babies in Africa, and then a zoo keeper came to Africa and they got caught and he put them in a big field with a big, BIG, fence around it.”
Luke was on his knees on the chair drawing a fence around the lions.
“There are three babies … and –” Luke stopped suddenly, obviously surprised at himself. He wasn’t ready to trust me with any more. “That’s all.”
It was enough for one day.
“That’s a good story,” I said.
We sat silently looking at the lions.
I had no materials with me. What to do? What to do? Suddenly I remembered the stopwatch. We were supposed to use the stopwatch. I took it out of my pocket and laid it on the table.
“Do you know what this is?” I asked Luke.
He nodded without expression.
“This one works like this. Press the thing at the top to make it go. See, there are sixty seconds in a minute. Press it again to make it stop. Now this little thing on the side makes the hands go back to the beginning when you press it. Try it.”
I nudged the stopwatch toward Luke.
Luke stared at it, then touched it tentatively with one finger. Suppose he threw it, dropped it, broke it. Suppose he did? I wanted him to know I trusted him. And I did trust him. More than that. Already more than that.
Luke picked up the stopwatch and held it carefully in his left hand, pushed the button on the top with his right index finger. Tick, tick, tick. The stopwatch and my pulse beat together. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.
“Okay,” I said. “Time me. Give me something to do and see how long it takes.”
Luke pushed the top button and then the side button. The hands returned to the top. He looked at me steadily. “What can you do?”
