The Chickasaw Plum

Home Short Stories Poetry Articles Humor Links

J.E. BATTERSON grew up in Johannesburg South Africa during the '80's and '90's. Stories from his short story collection Sjambok Stories have appeared in print publications Struggle, and BIGnews. He lives in Los Angeles, CA with his wife and son. He is currently at work on a semi-autobiographical novel: Adventures In Truancy. The Chickasaw Plum appreciates his contribution to the June issue.

Jeremy

J.E. Batterson

Jeremy Pope sat in the headmaster’s office wondering what they were going to do with him. It was now Thursday; he had been waiting for his audience with the headmaster since the beginning of the week. He had been caught smoking dagga across the street from school with a couple of friends earlier that week, and he knew that he was in for a caning or worse. He was sure the hierarchy was in a conundrum, and that many interoffice memos bearing his name had found their way onto the headmaster’s desk - a few feet away from him behind a big closed door.

Jeremy knew that the headmaster, Mr. Walker, was surely eyeballing him through the closed door, as if endowed by X-ray vision. He could feel that malevolent stare penetrating his insides and his nerves. His body seemed far away. It was as if his head had become incredibly heavy, and that if he moved too suddenly, it would break off of his shoulders.

Jeremy set his jaw tight so as not to appear defeated. There were two things you could not do at the Academy. One was to wind up in Mr. Walker’s office, and the other was to show your fear. If you did either you were going to get your ass caned off. As Jeremy knew he was already guilty of the first charge and probably guilty of the second too, he knew he was pretty much fucked. He swallowed a mouthful of hot saliva that slid down his throat into the pit of his stomach.

Why did we move here in the first place? He thought miserably. He hadn’t wanted to in the first place, not like he had had much say in it. His mother had done her phony democracy trip the way she did whenever there was a big decision she had already made, but was attempting to make him feel as if he had participated in it.

“I got a great job offer. It’s in South Africa,” she had said.

His mother had told him on their way home from Marshall High School in Los Angeles where he was a sophomore. She said it as though she were asking him to consider the idea, even though he knew it was already a done deal.

He remembered that day now, almost a year ago. It had been horrifically hot, and they had been stuck in the late afternoon I-5 traffic. He had been listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind. It has just come out, and he had been listening to it nonstop for weeks now.

“South Africa!”

He had ripped the headphones off of his ears and looked at his mother with alarm, and quite a bit of anger as well. She might as well have told him they were moving to Mars.

“We can’t go to South Africa. That’s...what about my friends?”

“I need you to think about this,” his mother said. “It will be great for both of us.”

“Oh, you mean great like New York?”

“Don’t start with me,” his mother had snapped.

Jeremy had clamped the earphones over his head and blared the volume, and he didn’t speak to his mother for a week afterward. It was always her life that took precedence. Her needs came first; they had moved around so much, that Jeremy had lost count. She worked for a large banking conglomerate. She was a real climber too, and every year or two she would get a promotion, but it always meant moving to a new zip code, and away from the lives he had struggled for in all of them. The move this time wasn’t a change of zip codes; it was a change of planets.

He wondered about this and about all of the houses he had lived in until his head went numb, and he wasn’t sure he could remember all of them.

Two months later, they were on a plane bearing across the Atlantic towards the rhinoceros’s head of Africa, and a life, that in Jeremy’s mind, was nothing but a bright blur.

Jeremy was snapped out of his memory by the sound of a ringing phone in the headmaster’s offices. It didn’t ring like the phones back home. It too, like everything else in this country, was different. Its ring was lower and longer, like a mechanical bee that has been trapped inside of a glass jar.

Jeremy scrunched up his nerves, and tried not to squirm. The chairs in the headmaster’s office were designed to be uncomfortable, but you couldn’t stand up. If you did, the old maid receptionist behind the partition that separated the waiting area from the rest of the office would report you.

He had just turned sixteen, and he was at that stage where spurts of growth are inevitable. He felt uncomfortable in his school uniform, consisting of black wool pants, white button down, and tie. Uniforms were only one of the things he’d had to get used to since moving here with his mother. She had just bought him this one a couple of months ago, and already it didn’t fit.

He held his face so that it was inscrutable; his square chin and prominent Roman nose that was smattered with freckles around its bridge were set like a mask.

The place reminded him of a doctor’s office; the glass in the partition was marbled so that the receptionists moved behind it in a blur. A trophy case that was situated opposite him was filled with cups of all shapes and sizes.

In the center of the case sat the State Rugby Championship Trophy -- a meticulously polished silver rugby ball with the name of the school engraved across its surface. It was the school’s one claim to fame. They had won it back in 1977, a year after the Soweto riots had changed the outlook of all South Africans. Those riots had been the turning point, the battle cry of the dispossessed. He had learned about it in his History class, the second lesson after second break. Several of the students bristled whenever their history teacher, Mr. Ramaja, a small Indian fellow with matinee idol features and brilliant white teeth, lectured about the Blacks. He was very bright, and one of the few teachers Jeremy paid any attention to.

The world outside of the classroom was changing rapidly. South Africans would go to the polls in less than a year to decide if the Blacks should be allowed to vote. Mr. Ramaja’s classes were always fairly divided between the more progressive minded students, and the more conservative ones. Heated arguments would rage inside of his classroom, and the faces of the other boys would become passionate, and their usually calm demeanors would unravel, and their hair would fly about. Mr. Ramaja’s classroom was the only place Jeremy knew what these strange boys were thinking.

The Headmaster’s door opened on his right without warning. He swallowed hard as he turned to look, but he couldn’t see anyone standing in the doorway. Only the murky delineations of a desk situated near a curtained window was visible.

“Mr. Pope, get your ass in here right now,” the headmaster barked.

Mr. Walker spoke with a South African accent that sounded both British and Australian at the same time.

Jeremy snapped to attention and marched through the doorway. In South Africa he had learned, they treated you like one of Pavlov’s dogs, so that when you are subjected to their many forms of control, you’ll respond accordingly and not break with them. The schoolyard protocols were only one in a series. There were social protocols, political protocols, and gender protocols. The whole country was led on a very short leash. As much as he hated to admit it, Jeremy was increasingly worried that he was being turned into a dog.

Jeremy entered the darkened office. The smell of man-sweat and tobacco hit him face forward, and his nerve diminished. This was not an office. It was the lair of some horrible beast. He still couldn’t see anybody, but continued walking gradually towards a chair in front of the desk. He heard the door close behind him too quietly, and he became aware of Mr. Walker standing behind him.

“Sit down, Mr. Pope. You’d better bloody well have some answers for me,” said Mr. Walker over his shoulder.

There was an understated menace in the man’s tone, and Jeremy could feel the malevolence raking off of him in almost visible waves.

Jeremy pulled out the chair at the front of the headmaster’s desk, and sat down. He could still sense Mr. Walker looming behind him, and he wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take. Fortunately, Mr. Walker circled around him and sat down in his own chair. As he did so, it creaked in protest but did not break. The man’s face was heavily bearded, and his arms were as big as a baboon, sunburned and sinewy. He had the short kinky hair that is characteristic of the Scots, and his cheeks had a ruddy look to them that Jeremy knew had become that way from drinking. He knew this, because his own father had had that same flush to his face when Jeremy had said goodbye to him over a year ago in the States.

“I’ve a right good bloody mind to turn your ass in to the police, boy,” Mr. Walker said at length. “Can you give me a reason why I shouldn’t?”

Jeremy swallowed hard. He had heard that Mr. Walker always started out asking you to defend yourself, as if this were some sort of judicial process from which there was a graceful exit should you answer to his satisfaction. Jeremy’s eyes flickered to the miniature cricket-bat Walker kept on display inside of a glass case mounted on the wall.

“It was a mistake, sir,” Jeremy said, being very conscious not to let his voice break. “It won’t happen again.”

“Dagga, young man, always happens again,” said Mr. Walker.

“It was my first time --” Jeremy began, but it was as far as he got.

Walker’s fist fell like a sledgehammer onto the desk. The force of it was so powerful, that Jeremy heard the legs of the desk whining against the blow. Walker’s face had contorted into a mean mask, and Jeremy raised his hands defensively so that he wouldn’t have to look at it.

“Don’t try and bullshit me!” Walker roared. “You think you’re smart don’t you, you little fuck!”

“No sir! I’m not bullshitting you, sir!”

“Look at me when you’re speaking to me, goddamn it!”

Jeremy looked up, and saw that Walker enjoyed this. He had a wicked gleam in his eye that hadn’t been there at first. His lips were curled up slightly at the corners of his mouth, and the emotion in his face had subsided. He had brought Jeremy to the place where he could wound him the most.

All of Jeremy’s defenses broke down; he had no more illusions. He was a fragile being in the palm of this man’s hand. Walker could and would do anything he wanted, and there wasn’t a single thing he could do to stop him. Jeremy had never experienced his own smallness quite like this.

Mr. Walker tossed the half-full Ziploc bag of marijuana they had found in Ian’s locker onto the desk. A little hash-pipe was jammed inside of it too. Jeremy’s eyes went from the bag to Mr. Walker, and then repeated the same circuit before finally alighting on his lap.

“If I have to tell you one more time to look at me when you are in here, it’s all over!” said Walker in an ominous tone. “I promise you.”

Jeremy forced his head up, and looked out from wounded eyes.

“Explain how Mr. Proudman found this dagga on you.”

“I --” Jeremy stuttered, and shook his head.

“You what, Mr. Pope? You think you’re tough, don’t you? Let me tell you! If you go to jail, do you know what those Blacks are going to do to your little white ass?”

Jeremy forced himself not to break eye contact with Mr. Walker. He knew he had to choose his words carefully; he had never before experienced this kind of horror or the need for such precision. He knew that if he misspoke, he was going to get beaten.

“I’m giving you thirty seconds to answer,” Mr. Walker said, and leaned back in his chair, and folded his arms -- never once taking his eyes of off Jeremy.

Mr. Walker’s furious eyes bore into his soul, as he scrambled for an answer. Tiny beads of sweat stood out on his brow, and his limbs hurt from the tension. He became very aware of the ticking of the desk-clock on Mr. Walker’s desk.

He had known at the time that ditching classes to smoke dagga with Ian Smith and Leonard Brink was asking for trouble, but he’d gone anyway. They were both a year older, and hilarious as shit.

Ian was impossibly tall, and thin too. His shirt was always coming un-tucked because he couldn’t find one long enough. Mr. Johnson the English teacher had made him shave in the courtyard one day in front of the entire class because he had come to school with a robust five-o’clock-shadow. Jeremy had been amazed to hear that the teachers kept razors and even hair clippers in their desk drawers for such occasions.

Leonard Brink was a short fat kid, who could make you laugh until your side hurt. He had a great big gut that bounced when he walked, and horrible acne that got worse instead of better every year. He knew he was never going to make it on his looks, and so he used humor as his weapon of artifice instead. The other kids called him “fatty boom-sticks” until he had beaten one kid up pretty badly, and the name calling had ceased.

He remembered the day they had both approached him, as he walked out of the main gate after school. His mother had bought a house nearby, and he usually walked home. It was a nice neighborhood. The houses were cordoned off from the streets behind high-walls, and most of them had tennis courts and swimming pools, and electronic gates with built in intercom-systems.

“Hey!” he had heard Ian calling that day.

Jeremy turned around and saw Leonard and Ian walking towards him. He had felt very self conscious then. He had barely spoken to anyone since he had gotten here. He had tried several times, but the boys at school mostly ignored him. Whenever he walked towards a group of them, they would scatter on the wind. Only when he had them directly pinned in, would any of them talk to him. But the conversations he had with the other students were contrived, and he had given up trying.

“American kid,” Leonard had yelled again as both of them huffed up to him.

“Hey,” Jeremy had said without enthusiasm. He wondered if they were going to pick a fight with him. Fighting was a big thing over here. Someone was always kicking the crap out of somebody else. It was really dullsville.

“You live on Bryanston Drive, right?”

“Yeah,” Jeremy answered.

“Me too, man,” said Ian. “You want to walk with us? We’re going to pick up some videos. You want to come watch?”

“Definitely,” Jeremy had said, and started walking beside them, still expecting them to start pummeling him at any point.

The videos they had picked up had been porno, and when they had asked Jeremy if he smoked, they hadn’t meant cigarettes. After a few weeks of getting high at Ian’s house, Jeremy had stopped being so cautious around them.

Ian’s place was huge. It was way nicer than his, and the swimming pool was spotlessly clean. Ian’s parents had bought one of the newer Creepy-Crawlers -- underwater robotic devices that chugged around the circumference of a pool, sucking up all of the debris and grime that inevitably ended there. When he had been on the phone with his cousin back in the states, Jeremy had described the Creepy-Crawley as “an underwater vacuum cleaner.”

Ian, Leonard, and Jeremy would roll joints on the living room table while the Black gardener outside trimmed and watered the lawns, and tended the multitudinous varieties of roses growing along the high garden walls. Ian’s parents got home late, and they would always air out the house before they got back. It was all very surreal.

They soon became good friends, and inseparable. He didn’t have to worry what he said, or what they thought of him, in fact, Jeremy thought they were the best friends he had ever had. If he had to live in exile in this strange place, he couldn’t imagine two better people to spend it with.

At first He had found South Africa bewildering. Everything in this country was counterintuitive. There were so many different languages and cultures you had to be aware of and wary of too. Soda and milk came in liter bottles. Cars drove on the opposite side of the road. Black women carried massive bags balanced atop their heads without the use of their hands. Most of the Blacks worked in the White Suburbs north of Johannesburg as maids and gardeners for next to nothing. It was the only job they could really get around the city. The Coca-Cola billboards above the freeway bore the universal Coca-Cola label, but were worded differently. Geniet Jy Dag, Geniet Coca-Cola, they said.

Jeremy had subsequently learned that geniet was the Afrikaans word for enjoy. The television programming was several years off. Jeremy had overheard some boys from school discussing how cool that new show The Simpson’s was. It was 1993. The Simpson’s had been playing in the States since the earlier half of 1990. What “new” show would they be talking about next? Who’s the boss? Jeremy wondered.

Mr. Walker had had enough of Jeremy’s stony look. Thirty seconds had passed. With a heavy sigh, as though he were greatly disappointed, Mr. Walker shook his head.

“Get up.”

Jeremy swallowed another mouthful of saliva. He blinked, uncertain of what was expected of him, but did not move. Mr. Walker sprang up and circled around the desk. He was surprised that a big man like him could move so easily. Mr. Walker clamped a hand onto Jeremy’s shoulder. It was a strong hand, like a vice grip, and the tips of Mr. Walker’s fingers dug into his flesh. Jeremy felt very far away. He wasn’t even aware that he was standing, until Mr. Walker shoved him towards the desk.

“Bend over, boy,” Mr. Walker said ominously.

Jeremy turned his head, but before he could glance backward, Mr. Walker gripped his neck between his hands and forced it back towards the desk. Jeremy realized again what a small and fragile creature he was compared to this man.

“Don’t look at me,” Mr. Walker snapped. “If you turn around again, I’m going to go even harder on you. Put your hands on the desk!”

Jeremy complied. He spread his hands on the desk, and bent over so that his ass was pointing outwards. His heart beat in his throat, and his scrotum felt cold and very small. He heard Mr. Walker sliding the glass case open beside him. He heard the miniature bat being pulled from its perch; it made a dull click as Mr. Walker picked it up.

Very quietly, he crept behind Jeremy.

“It’s bloody well time somebody taught you Americans how to bloody well behave,” Mr. Walker said in a hushed tone that bordered on ecstasy. “You bastards think you can push the whole world around, don’t you?”

Jeremy heard a dull sound -- like a pop -- before he felt the pain. Mr. Walker had not hit him with the flat side of the bat, but with the curved side. The bat’s curved ridge had struck him on the tailbone, and a sharp bolt of pain ran along the curvature of his spine in a blinding flash. His body had jolted upright by reflex, but again Mr. Walker’s hand forced his face downwards. A second later he gasped for air, but this inhalation was cut short by another blow. Jeremy bit into his lip so hard, that his mouth filled with blood. It was hot and salty, and a bit of it dribbled from the edges of his mouth.

“Smoking dagga in this school is not allowed!” Mr. Walker roared, striking him repeatedly with the bat.

Jeremy was determined not to cry, but he couldn’t stop himself from whelping. He still couldn’t move because Mr. Walker had him pinned with his free hand. With each successive blow, his whelps got louder. His ass and his tailbone burned like they were on fire, and his thoughts moved in all directions.

On the day they had been caught smoking dagga, Ian and Leonard and Jeremy had decided to skip classes. They had crept down past the pool, where Mr. Proudman was watching the Standard Seven’s doing their 10am laps. There was a little wall that surrounded the pool, and it gave them just enough cover so that they could make it past without being seen. They had climbed over the gate with the barbed wire at the edge of the property, and darted across the road to their private hideaway.

They always carried an old jacket with them. They needed it to throw over the barbed wire covering the top of the gate so that they wouldn’t get tangled and end up needing some stitches. There was a drainage pipe that was situated below the road, and that emptied into a shallow river bed. Apparently they were not the only ones in the school’s history to have discovered it. It was wide enough to crouch in, and rectangular, and there was graffiti on the walls; musings like: John is a fag, and Richard loves Emily, and Fuck Mandela. It was here that they would light up, and kill off a couple of periods before creeping back the way they had come with eyes the color of embers.

They had been sitting in the pipe, giggling uncontrollably, when Mr. Proudman’s face had appeared in the smoke-filled-drain. He was a stern faced Afrikaner with dulled eyes, and a deeply tanned face. He was actually a fairly nice guy. He had sat with Jeremy one day when he had first gotten here. The man had been so full of questions about America, what was it like? How cold did it get on the East Coast? What did Jeremy think of Clinton?

Jeremy had been the first to notice Proudman staring in at them, and he dropped the smoldering joint on the ground and rubbed it out with his shoe. Leonard and Ian were oblivious, and continued giggling, until Jeremy alerted them.

“Guys!” he had hissed. “Teacher!”

That had slapped the laughter out of them. They went suddenly rigid as planks, and turned about face to stare at Mr. Proudman with terror.

“You boys come out of there right now!” Mr. Proudman had said.

There was little else they could do. The drainage pipe disappeared into darkness behind them, and none of them had had the balls to retreat further inwards.

When they stepped back out into the sunlight, their eyes were burning red, and they smelled like dagga. Mr. Proudman had marched them up to the office, for their sentencing. Luckily, the headmaster had been out all week, and so their official sentencing had been delayed.

They had found another baggie of dagga in Ian’s locker; he had gotten the worst of it. The police had come and taken him away in handcuffs, and questioned Leonard and himself. Both of them just kept repeating the same thing over and over, that they didn’t have any more dagga on them.

In the end, the police had left their punishment up to the school. Ian was not so lucky. Jeremy had tried calling his house all week. His mother had answered the phone, and when he had asked to speak with Ian, she had started crying, and asked him not to call back.

Leonard had been suspended after an unusually wicked beating from the headmaster, and it was the same story with his parents. When Jeremy had tried calling, his father had accused Jeremy of influencing his son.

“Don’t let me catch you hanging around my son, you hear me?” Leonard’s dad had shrieked at him through the phone. “I catch you boys hanging out together, I’m going to come over there and knock your skull myself!”

Every advance Jeremy had made had crumbed in a week. The rest of his peers at school, who had slowly started to warm to him now that he was in with Ian and Leonard, were now treating him like he had the plague. It was as if they feared his guilt might spread to them by osmosis. It had been the worst week of his life, and his whole world didn’t make an ounce of sense.

His mother had been so angry when the headmaster’s assistant had called her that she had stopped speaking to him. He could hear her car pulling in the driveway well after sunset each night, but she didn’t stop by his room like she usually did to say goodnight. The only company he had was his worry and his imagination.

He would lie on his bed for hours, wondering what they were going to do to him. Right before he drifted off, his mind would flooded with an image of the girl he saw in the cafe, usually after school, where he stopped by each day for a coke and a bag of potato chips. She was so beautiful, and even through his stinging pride, he felt a thrill thinking about her.

She was always dressed in a white tennis outfit. She had straight brown hair, and very defined features. Her fragrance made his head swim. She smelled like air, and a vague sweetness he couldn’t define. It swept through the entire cafe, along the aisles of bread and potato chips; all the way to where he had been standing the first time he had seen her. He guessed she was around his age, sixteen, or maybe a year or two older.

She had noticed him once or twice, staring at her. She had given him a sweet little nod those times, before climbing into her mother’s massive BMW and disappearing until the following day, when she would appear before him again like some divine vision. Thinking about her made him feel calm, and he was more determined than ever to talk to her the next time he saw her.

The beating stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Mr. Walker yanked Jeremy’s head back so that his ear was level with his lips.

“If you ever smoke that shit in my school again, I’ll let the Blacks have you.”

Jeremy wasn’t sure how he had gotten out of the office. When he had though, the fresh air had filled his lungs the way air fills the lungs of a newborn baby after nine months of confinement in the womb. His ass burned, and when he had stuck his fingers in to massage it, they had come away smeared with blood.

He had been very careful not to burst into tears as he limped through the courtyard and into the bathrooms. On a normal day the time it took to cross the courtyard seemed very short. Today, it seemed like the longest distance he had ever walked. In science class, the teacher had asked them to explain Einstein’s famous quote: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

Jeremy hadn’t known how to answer the question then, but crossing the yard with everybody staring from classroom windows, he knew he could take a pretty good stab at it.

It was dim and cool in the bathrooms. Urinals stood in rows on one side, and stalls on the other. He closed the door to one of the stalls, and sat down on the covered toilet. He was still determined not to cry, but he felt so humiliated. He put his face in his hands, and his body shuddered from the over-expenditure of adrenaline. He felt completely alone. He felt as if he had nobody in the world. He had been exiled here for some reason unknown to him.

There had been so much he had had to get used to.

Sitting on the toilet with his ass beaten bloody, Jeremy couldn’t find a single thing to enjoy about this country. Convenience stores were called cafes, and nobody seemed to like anybody else here either. The Afrikaners disliked the English, The English disliked them back. The conservatives were especially resentful of Americans, because America kept calling them out on Apartheid, and wouldn’t stop.

There were nightly stories of Whites being carjacked or murdered, and sometimes at night, he could hear gunshots echoing all the way from the township of Alexandria.

The Blacks couldn’t agree among themselves due to tribal differences, and most of the Whites weren’t too thrilled about the Blacks in any form, agreeing or disagreeing.

The Black men who covered the sidewalks of downtown Johannesburg carried brown paper bags with the American Confederate Flag printed on both sides. He had seen their gardener, Philemon, trudging up their driveway one day with one such bag. A little confused, Jeremy had asked him why he would carry a bag like that.

Philemon was an older gent with an arched back and weathered skin, and had regarded him with confusion when he had asked the question.

“America, number one!” he had said, and smiled toothlessly.

Nothing about this country made sense. And worst of all, he had lost Ian and Leonard, the two people who had. Still no tears came, even though Jeremy had to swallow several times to stop them. If the other boys knew that he had cried, they would tease him unmercifully.

When he was confident he had won the war with his emotions, he had gotten off of the toilet seat, and wandered back into the daylight. He was going to sneak along the Southward wall so as not to be noticed by his peers. The south facing walls had no windows, and he knew he could make it through Geography class -- the last period of the day.

He wasn’t going to stop by the cafe after school. He knew that the girl would notice he was miserable, and he didn’t want her to see him like that. He would just get home, close the door, and not come out for a long, long, time.

He had only taken a few steps when he heard somebody call his name. He turned around, and saw that a couple of boys he knew vaguely were following behind him at a distance. They motioned him over, and Jeremy went to them.

The boys closed around him in a circle, and several packs of cigarettes were thrust at him at once. Jeremy took one, and somebody lit it for him with a match.

“Don’t worry, man,” one of the boys said. “Walker is a real bastard.”

“I tell you he’s queer,” said another.

Jeremy saw then that he had gained a sort of acceptance by these boys. His eyes wandered around the faces in the circle. He saw that they were not that different from the boys he had known back home. The circumstances of their lives were different, certainly the country was different, but they were human after all.

Jeremy inhaled a lungful of smoke, and a brilliant smile surfaced on his face.

“What a Motherfucker,” he said.

The boys around him started laughing, and shaking their heads, each one telling him of their separate encounters with Walker at the same time. All of the voices fused into one, and Jeremy couldn’t stop smiling.

4.26.07

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume IV - Number 6 - June 2007

Home Short Stories Poetry Articles Humor Links