William J. Schafer

On that day I did two exciting things:  first of all, I cut school, and second, I stole from Burkhardt’s Hardware Store a small K-Bar pocketknife with two blades, one long and pointed, the other short and rounded.  The knife had a solid walnut handle, and it was satisfying to hold its weight in my hand.  I wanted to do something with the knife.  I spent much of the rest of the day trying to find out what that was.  The most exciting thing was that to get the knife I cut school.  I left two hours early, after band practice.  The way I left was this:  coming from band rehearsal we always marched as a group.  We marched across the halls, made a sharp turn and marched down the steps of the cafeteria for lunch.  It was very simple to leave unobserved.  As the rest of the band went forward I straggled.  I marched slower and slower, while the other band members surged ahead, laughing and talking.  Mr Grayman, the band director, was at the head of the group as they went down the stairs.  I went straight, past the stairs, past the great trophy case, past the central study hall and out the doors at the far end of the long building.

I marched to the parking lot, to my car, which I loved inordinately.  It was a dark dusty-grey-colored Hudson Terraplane.  A 1938 Hudson Terraplane with a hood ornament, a rocket of amber plastic like my father’s amber cigar holder.  The left front fender was crumpled.  I could do nothing about it, because no one had seen a fender for a 1930 Hudson Terraplane for years.  Because it was crumpled, the headlight slanted slightly downward.  The car actually looked sheepish if viewed from in front.  I loved the car—I loved it though it was dusty and dark and the finish was long dead and scabbed with rust.  It was exactly my age—sixteen years old.  I got in the car and started it.  It started unwillingly.  It started unwillingly because the battery was weak.  The battery was weak because the tail lights often stuck on and drained it.  Sometimes I had to have the car pushed, but today the engine caught, then the whole car shook itself very slowly as it idled, the tailpipe rattling and holes in the muffler roaring.  I drove across the bridge, drove up Main Street and parked half a block from Burkhardt’s Hardware.

I walked to the store and stopped for a moment to look at the display in the window.  There were harnesses.  There were leather things of all sizes and shapes.  There were bright, shiny chains.  There were blackjacks, which you couldn’t buy without a permit.  There were wonderful and strange things lying hieratically across the window. There was a plaster Boston bulldog, a model for collars, very very old, whose left ear had chipped off.  There was a peculiar little head, a man’s head of white plaster, concentrically grooved like strange African sculpture.  On this head you could plant grass seed, then fill the head with water, and soon you had a little white head covered with long green hair.  But without the green hair it only looked like an exotic sculpture, a bald head with mystical grooves and a small hole bored in the top.  Alas, poor Yorick!  I had always wanted one of these heads and had never bought one.

I walked past the hardware store and stopped before the Main Street Cinema.  That was my object—to see what was playing at the theater.  But I had already seen both movies that were playing, and I didn’t feel like sitting through either one again.  I stopped at the little concessions booth next to the theater and bought a big bag of caramel corn and a coke.  I ate the caramel corn standing on the corner and swilled down the coke.  Then I walked back to Burkhardt’s and looked in the window for a long time.  I counted things in the window.  There were thirty-three pocketknives.

I went inside Burkhardt’s, a large, long store, and wandered around.  A little old man with suspenders and a bow tie came out from the back office and looked at me.  He asked me if I wanted anything, and I said I was just looking.  He stared suspiciously, then turned back into his office and picked up a sandwich.  As he ate the sandwich he watched me, but his glance kept shifting back to his newspaper.  It was easy to steal the knife.  It was on a card with many other knives, and the staples that held it were slightly loose at the bottom.  I simply pushed the top of the knife, the knife fell into my hand, and my hand went into my pocket while the old man was looking at his newspaper.  When he looked back, I wandered to the rows of little plaster heads stacked like a hecatomb against one wall.  I looked at the man and smiled; he didn’t smile back but stared over his rimless spectacles and chewed his sandwich very carefully.

I went out the front door and walked back to my car.  When I got to my car, I saw a ticket lodged under the one good windshield wiper.  I had parked by a meter and forgotten to put money in it.  I almost always did that.  I put the ticket in the glove compartment.  There were three other tickets in there, old and damp, turning green and molding.  Soon, the police would be after me to pay the tickets, or they would tow my car away, or my father would find out.  All the things I could think of were bad.

The car started again, still unwillingly.  I turned it around and drove back down Main Street.  I had no place to go, nothing to do.  As I drove I took the knife from my pocket and bounced its solid weight in my hand.  It was very nice.  I wondered what the blades looked like.  I wanted to go somewhere to find out.  I stopped at the Spudnut.

The Spudnut was a shop built down a dark hallway in a shopping center near my house.  It had been there for two years.  First it had been bright and shiny, and the neon sign glowed cheerfully.  Then it became a hangout for high school kids who had ditched school and had nowhere else to go, nowhere they wouldn’t be seen.  They could go to the Spudnut and not be seen, because it was down the little corridor, and no one went past there except women who were shopping, and they paid no attention to the Spudnut.  Since it was just past noon, no one was in the Spudnut but the counterman.  He was a short, balding man with a sharp temper.

He didn’t like high school kids.  He wanted to sell big carry-home bags of Spudnuts to respectable housewives, but few of them ever stopped there.  He rarely spoke even if you addressed him directly.  When you ordered, he would grunt and get your order with violent grace.  I asked for coffee and a half dozen Spudnuts.  Spudnuts were doughnuts which were supposed to be made with potato flour.  They tasted like every other kind of doughnut.  They came in all different flavors and all different shapes and sizes.  The ones I got were chocolate covered.  There were also pink ones that made me feel a little sick just looking at them.  And green ones and yellow ones that looked as if they were covered with candle wax.

I liked the Spudnut because it had an interesting rest room.  The rest room was back of the counter, and the man who ran the Spudnut didn’t like you to use it.  He would ungraciously point to it if you demanded to know.  It was very small and narrow and seemed to squeeze you as you went it.  There was just a basin and a toilet.  There was a small always-empty glass detergent dispenser above the basin. The basin was stained and dirty, and the stains always looked the same.  One was shaped like a map of South America.  There was a wire waste can always full of the same crumpled towels, which had been there as along as I could remember.  Everything was always the same at the Spudnut.

On the little booth around the toilet there was a green box for toilet paper.  It was always half full.  Someone kept it half full, which was considerate.  More important, on the wall next to the booth was a whole frieze of writings and drawings, graffiti all scribbled over each other.  These writings, like nothing else in the rest room, changed.  My favorite, though, had been there several months.  It was written in blunt, dull pencil, slightly smudged.  It was just above eye level as you sat on the can.  It was small verse, a verse of genius.  It went this way:

This always made me burst into laughter.  I suppose the man must have thought there was something wrong with me, because I always laughed after I went into his rest room.  I suppose he thought I was doing something evil.   I never did.  I read the aphorisms there, laughed at some of them and always laughed at this one.

This day when I went into the rest room, I washed my hands in the cold water which came out of the tap marked H.  Why is that?  Why in all rest rooms does only cold water come out of the tap marked H?  Why is it they have taps which won’t stay on but always spring back, so you can only get one hand washed at a time?  “One hand washes another.”  I thought of this saying—I had never known what it meant.  I supposed it applied to Spudnut rest rooms.  On this day, I took the knife out of my pocket and opened it.  The blades were still slightly oily.  They were marvelous.  The longer blade was about two inches long, and the other blade was about an inch and a half long.  Still, it looked useful.  I left the longer blade open.  It was very sharply pointed.  With it I scratched my name on the wall just above the basin.  Then I left the rest room, had another cup of coffee, finished my last two Spudnuts, left the Spudnut, got into my car and drove back to high school, arriving at the parking lot just in time.  I parked in the lot and stood next to my car.  The last-period classes were over, and students began to come across the lawns and the parking lot.

I looked just like the others. ###

Originally published in the Ball State University Forum (Spring 1972)