Rooster

  Rooster

  Don Trembath

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  Copyright © 2005 Don Trembath

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording or by any information storage

  and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission

  in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Trembath, Don, 1963-

  Rooster / Don Trembath.

  ISBN 1-55143-261-7

  I. Title.

  PS8589.R392R66 2005 jC813’.54 C2005-901966-2

  Summary: Rooster wants to graduate from high school,

  he just doesn't want to work for it.

  First published in the United States, 2005

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005924421

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing

  programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada

  through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the

  Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council.

  Cover design and typesetting: Lynn O'Rourke

  Cover photography: Getty Images

  Orca Book Publishers

  Box 5626, Stn. B

  Victoria, BC Canada

  V8R 6S4

  Orca Book Publishers

  PO Box 468

  Custer, WA USA

  98240-0468

  Printed and bound in Canada

  08 07 06 05 • 5 4 3 2 1

  To my mom,

  small in stature, big in support,

  encouragement, laughter,

  companionship, character and love.

  Contents

  1

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  16

  1

  Gloria Nixon was furious with the way things had gone, but as she well knew, how she felt about things didn’t matter. Not at Win–ston High School, anyway. No way. At Winston High School, if you weren’t the school principal and your name wasn’t Judith Helmsley, what you thought or cared about or said meant nothing. Gloria knew it, and everyone else knew it too.

  That didn’t matter either, of course. How Gloria felt and what she knew fell into the same category. But, dammit, she was irritated! Especially this time. As a matter of fact, this time she was so irritated, so frustrated and so annoyed, she came this close to saying something. This close!

  “I was ready to let her have it,” she told her husband, Bernie, at lunch. She was talking to him on her cell phone from the front seat of her car. Her hands were still shaking as she talked, and her head hurt from the stress of it all, which was not a good sign. Slim, neat, extremely health-conscious and meticulously well-groomed, Gloria was nevertheless vulnerable to headaches that could sideline her for days and rashes that would haunt her for weeks when anxiety got the better of her.

  “Good for you,” said Bernie, himself an elementary school teacher on the opposite side of town. Gloria had become one of the three guidance counselors at Winston High last year. They were both twenty-seven. They’d been teaching for four years and married for two.

  “She thinks she can push anyone around.” Gloria’s nostrils flared as she spoke.

  “She obviously doesn’t know you very well.”

  “Next time she does something like this, that’s it.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  “I’m going to tell her to take this job and shove it.”

  “Careful now. We’ve got eight years left on the mortgage, and that car you’re sitting in isn’t paid for either.”

  Ironically, as Gloria sat in her brand-new, candy-apple-red, freshly washed and waxed BMW, the very student she was most upset with walked past her. Roy Cobb, or Rooster, as he was better known, was a tall thin kid with dark spiky hair and a pointed nose. He had two earrings in his right ear and another on his right nipple, which he insisted on showing off whenever the weather allowed for it by taking off his shirt and strutting around the school grounds. He was smoking, as usual, although God only knew what. Gloria shook her head and followed him with her eyes.

  The file on Rooster was as thick as any she had in her office: His father died when he was ten. His mother, Eunice, thin and pointy as well, and a pain, if the truth be known, remarried three years ago. Irving was her new husband. He was a former baseball player, apparently. None of the gym teachers had ever heard of him.

  Rooster had no brothers or sisters, a fact that provided Gloria with the only sense of relief she ever felt when discussing him with her colleagues, or even just thinking about him, as she was now. He was born and raised right here in the small city of Winston, Alberta, population 47,000. He was in grade twelve at Winston High.

  Gloria had been his English teacher in grade ten. At the start of that school year, she’d made the mistake of announcing to her students that she’d gotten married over the summer. From that day on, Rooster announced her arrival in the classroom each morning with a noisy rendition of “Here Comes the Bride.” He oohed over her engagement ring but wondered aloud why it wasn’t a bit bigger. “Did he get you something else with it? An Xbox or a stereo or something?” He continually referred to her husband as her “old man,” and when, in an uncharacteristically public display of anger, she told him that the next time he called Bernie an old man, she’d bring Bernie to school to talk to Rooster personally, Rooster switched to calling him her “kept man” and began wondering aloud what other sorts of things she let him do.

  Her frustration mounted with each writing assignment he submitted. Generally regarded as a lazy student who wasted his potential at every turn, there was no questioning his ability as a writer — when he chose to put his mind to it.

  The closet in my mother’s bedroom is a cluttered jumble of shoes, pantsuits, bright summer dresses and very small bras, he penned for his assignment on descriptive writing. She hides chocolate bars and hard candies on the top shelf, a habit from when I was small and constantly hounding her for something fun to eat. On the floor in the back right corner is a box of old photographs, including many of my father, who is dead now. She still cries occasionally when she looks at them, which is why there is always a box of Kleenex nearby, and little balls of used tissues on the floor.

  “He writes better than some of my best students,” she would moan in the staff room. “He doesn’t even have to try.”

  In grade eleven, he began asking her if there were any “little Bernies” on the way yet. When she scolded him one day for asking about things that were “extremely personal,” Rooster said, “Wow, I figured old Bernie would be too young to have problems like that.”

  By grade twelve, he’d found an additional target for his troublesome ways in the form of Mr. Taylor, a kind, passive English teacher who fervently believed that kids must find their own passions in order to pursue them with the vigor necessary to learn. “I want you to write a book report on any book you choose,” he said, with a level of joy that no one in the class could quite understand. “I’m not going to burden you with one of my choices. I want you to choose. Anything. Anything at all.”

  Rooster selected Penthouse Forum: The Anthology, 2003 edition. The essay he wrote was entitled, “Penthouse: Great reading, but where’s the love?”

  Sure, I have a greater appreciation for co-ed aerobics classes, and who knew w
orking overtime could be so enjoyable? But you do get tired of it all after a while, don’t you? I mean, I didn’t, but not all adults are like the people in this book, are they?

  Mr. Taylor had not anticipated this response to his assignment.

  “Can we do a pictorial essay on the same topic next time?” Rooster asked when the written essays were finished.

  “That would not be appropriate,” said Mr. Taylor, blushing slightly.

  “Speak for yourself,” said Rooster.

  Gloria shuddered to think of what might be coming next from the boy. And while she was happy to know that he would be leaving the school for good in a few months— if his marks permitted him to graduate, that is— she had spent more than a few minutes wondering what was in store for him in the future.

  “Why waste your time?” Bernie had said to her just last week. “He’ll be out of your hair soon. That’s a good thing.”

  “He’s still a young person graduating from my school who will be living in my town,” said Gloria earnestly. “I think it’s natural to think about.”

  “You think he might do something to the house?” said Bernie, suddenly frowning.

  “Or the car. He has no scruples. He’s proven that already.”

  Rooster’s dismal history made the decision earlier in the day by Principal Helmsley to involve him in Gloria’s plan to get students more active in the community almost impossible to comprehend.

  “Who?” Gloria had said in their meeting, her brain refusing to accept what her ears had unmistakably heard.

  “Rooster Cobb. He’s perfect for it. Talk to him after school. We have to get moving on this. The year’s almost over.”

  In fact, Gloria’s plan had been to partner some of the “star” students at Winston High with places like Common House in the same way that other kids sign up for work experience programs, except the emphasis would be on volunteerism, and social and community awareness.

  “We’ll go the star-student route next year,” Principal Helmsley said, leaning back in her chair. She was a big, intimidating woman, standing over six feet tall on size twelve feet. She could palm a volleyball without effort and was known to patrol the hallways at school like a drill sergeant examining the troops. Her white hair was short and severe, much like her sense of humor. She wore glasses that magnified the heat that came from her eyes when she was angry. “For now, Rooster’s your boy.”

  “May I ask why?”

  Principal Helmsley came forward in her chair. “This is it for him. His last chance. He does well, we can see about getting him out of here at graduation. If he blows it, too bad. He’s back again in the fall for another year, or he can live his life as a high-school dropout. See how far that gets him.”

  In hindsight, this was the point in the conversation where Gloria had felt that she had enough anger and courage inside her to speak out against Principal Helmsley’s idea. This was the exact moment that she was referring to when she had talked to Bernie.

  “But that’s not the point of all this!” she had wanted to say. “This is to reward the special people in our community, and to give the best of our students the opportunity to show the world how truly great they really are. This is so the young people and the old people and the special needs people can come together and share and grow and do beautiful things with each other. You’re turning it into a final testing ground for a worthless little twerp who we already know is going to fail miserably and take the school’s honor with him and probably crush the spirits of the people he’s working with. I think that’s wrong! I think you’re wrong, Mrs. Helmsley! You are absolutely, totally dead wrong, and I am not going to stand for it!!”

  Instead, Gloria had said nothing. She accepted Principal Helmsley’s revisions without comment or complaint and returned to her office to make the required phone calls, beginning first with Common House, the town of Winston’s home for adults with special needs, both physical and mental, where her proposal was enthusiastically accepted.

  “We’ve had so many budget cuts here lately,” the program coordinator, a woman named Pam Yuler, said. “We’ll take anyone you can give us.”

  “That’s about who you’ll get,” said Gloria, not intending to be smart, but feeling no guilt for saying it.

  “Why don’t we start him or her in the Games Room? We hold spelling bees there. We play musical chairs. Indoor golf.”

  “It’ll be a he. Do you have anything else?” Gloria could not see Rooster in a Games Room filled with people who were either physically unable to help themselves, or mentally incapable of much more than reading a children’s book or spelling their own names, if that.

  There was a pause as Mrs. Yuler thought for a moment. “Let me talk to the floor staff. They’re a bit more in touch with some of these things than I am. Can I have your number?”

  Gloria had given her the number on her cell phone as well as in her office. She knew she’d be spending some time in her car over lunch. The car was her refuge during stressful times like this: a safe place to which she could go for comfort, peace and the intoxicating smell of new leather.

  She closed her eyes to ease the strain on her head, then opened them with a start when something banged against her windshield. It was Rooster, his face pressed tight against the glass, smiling at her with the wide-eyed delirium of a homicidal maniac.

  Gloria suppressed the urge to scream and rolled down her window.

  “Scared you, didn’t I?” Rooster beamed with delight. At least his friends weren’t with him, she thought. That would have made a bad situation even worse.

  “Yes, you did, a little. What can I do for you, Rooster?” Gloria’s heart rate slowly began to settle. “Get your hands off the car, please. I just had it waxed.”

  “You can tell,” said Rooster, running his fingers along the side panels. “She’s smooth.”

  “What do you want, Rooster?”

  “That’s what I’m here to ask you. Mrs. Jarvis in the office said you wanted to see me about something. I remembered seeing you out here daydreaming in your car, so I thought I’d come back and check.”

  Gloria sighed and briefly shook her head. “I wasn’t daydreaming. I was relaxing and recharging.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like that. I’ll have to remember that for math tomorrow. ‘Honest, Mr. Armstrong. I wasn’t daydreaming. I was relaxing and recharging.’”

  “You should try to stay awake in math tomorrow.

  You have a test, as I recall.”

  Rooster grimaced as he remembered the test. Then he changed the subject. “So, what did you want me for?”

  Gloria had to think for a moment before she could explain. In truth, she did not want to see him for anything ever again. It was Sergeant Helmsley who wanted her to see him, and for reasons that Gloria still could not fully understand.

  “Can we talk about this tomorrow? How about first thing? Nine o’clock in my office.”

  “How about now? I have to study first thing. I have a math test, remember?” Rooster pulled a package of cigarettes from his coat pocket and tapped out a fresh smoke.

  “You should study for that tonight.”

  The ringing of Gloria’s cell phone put a temporary stop to their conversation. It was Mrs. Yuler from Common House. She’d talked to some of the other staff members and they had given her a few more ideas. The kitchen could always use an extra hand, the laundry crew was overwhelmed and the bowling team still needed a supervisor.

  “Excuse me?” said Gloria, shooing Rooster and his cigarette smoke away from her car. She cupped her hand over the receiver and hissed at him, “Tomorrow at nine. My office.” Then she returned to Mrs. Yuler. “I didn’t hear that last one. What was it again? A bowling team?”

  “It’s not really a team. We have four people here who like to go bowling. It was their own idea a few years ago. One of them used to bowl quite a bit and she got a few of the others involved. So twice a week we’d put them on the Common H
ouse bus and take them down to the bowling alley here in town and they’d have a great time. But we had to stop that with all the cuts we’ve had this year.”

  “What does the supervisor do?”

  “Well, he would meet the team down at the alley and see that they all got back. Make sure everyone’s okay.”

  Gloria thought for a moment.

  “That was the job that most of the girls here wanted filled, actually,” Mrs. Yuler said. “They said it would take care of a lot of the trouble they’ve been having if the Strikers could get back on their feet again.”

  “The Strikers?”

  “That’s what they call themselves. They like to think of themselves as a team.”

  Gloria watched Rooster as he drifted across the parking lot, away from the school.

  “What kind of trouble could they cause?”

  “Oh, the Strikers are a very interesting group. Two of them are extremely loud, some would say obnoxious, which I would tend to agree with, but that’s just me. The third one never seems to stop talking, which can get on your nerves, although he’s much cheerier than the first two, and the fourth one, Dorothy-Jane-Anne, is the quiet one. She doesn’t say much, but she usually creates more chaos than the rest of them put together. And lately, because they haven’t been bowling at all, they’ve been letting their frustrations get the better of them, and it’s been causing some problems.”

  “Really.” Rooster was no longer in sight.

  “Oh, yes. They’re quite a bunch. They’d be a challenge for anyone. A real challenge.”

  A small smile began to creep across Gloria’s lips. Could this be what Mrs. Helmsley was thinking when she revised Gloria’s plan?

  “I understand you have a real challenge at your end to find a task for.”

  “Yes, yes, we do,” said Gloria, still smiling. Then, quickly, she frowned. “How did you know that?”

  “I spoke with Judith.”

  “You know Judith Helmsley?”

  “We play bridge together. I called her this afternoon, just before I called you. It’s our bridge night tonight. I had to know if she was coming or not.”