Read Online Indigo by Richard Wiley - Free Book Online Page B

had lost the teacher files. Now what would he do about the damned visas?
    There was a knock on his door but Jerry didn’t move, and in a moment another message appeared on his floor. “Nurudeen is ill today.” He had asked his secretary to check on the boy, hoping that if Nurudeen were in school he could perhaps push him up against the wall and scare the truth out of him.
    Jerry read each of the newspaper articles carefully, but they didn’t say much. Each one gave his name, relating the fact that he had been arrested and then released. The papers assumed his guilt and had reserved much of their wrath for the judge who had let him go. “If a Nigerian had committed such a crime what would ‘his own recognizance’ mean?” one of the papers asked, and in another, though there was no photograph of Jerry, there was one of the judge who had freed him and a caption which read “Justice thinks American too slow to run.”
    Jerry pushed himself away from his desk and smiled into the empty room. He picked up his phone and dialed Lawrence Biko’s number and was told that Lawrence was gone. Good, maybe that meant he was on his way to school. Jerry stood and went out into the hall. The best thing now would be to attend to business. There was a school to run and the best thing that he could do was to run it.
    In the outer office Jerry told his secretary that if Lawrence came he could be found in the English room where he would be observing class. The school’s English teacher was a favorite of his, a woman named Hortense Blyth whom he’d recruited the year before. He loved the woman’s name, and since literature had been his own subject, when he’d taught so many years before, he really did enjoy it when he and Mrs. Blyth were occasionally seated together at dinner parties.
    As soon as he entered the room, however, Jerry realized that the class being taught was the one that would have contained Nurudeen had Nurudeen been in school. The class quieted, and he feared for a moment that Mrs. Blyth might actually speak to him. But she only smiled, and then continued her lesson, knowing quickly that he was there in an attempt to structure his time.
    Jerry felt the tension leave him as he listened to the class. Perhaps he should have remained a teacher when he’d had the chance, all those years ago. He remembered a discussion he and Charlotte had had on the eve of his first administrative job, a sudden appointment that took him from his classroom in the middle of the term. He and Charlotte had talked about what it would mean to lose contact with the students he loved, but his administrative star had risen, and in the end he hadn’t missed teaching very much. Now, though, he saw the wonder of the classroom freshly and the thought struck him that, in the end, he might go back. Some administrators did that, he was sure that they did. Some went back and taught again.
    He had not been aware of the time and was surprised when the period ended only a few minutes after he entered the room. He would have stayed for another one, but as the students filed out his secretary appeared at the door and waved until he looked at her.
    â€œSomeone is here now,” she said, so Jerry went back to the office slowly, to the rhythm of the passing students and the sudden belief that someday he would teach again.
    But when he entered the office it wasn’t Lawrence Biko who was there. Instead an attractive woman sat in the reception area, and Jerry thought he knew immediately that this was Nurudeen’s stepmother. She was a poised and calm-looking woman, and Jerry was suddenly certain that she was fed up with the turncoat nature of Nurudeen’s dad. She would tell him now what was really going on.
    â€œPamela,” said his secretary, reading from a slip of paper in her hand.
    â€œGood morning,” the principal said.
    The woman was young, perhaps not yet thirty-five, and she was quite