Anton's Odyssey Read online

  Dr. Zanders fetched Mary, and together they administered some intravenous fluids into my brother’s arm. Cotton had become lethargic and didn’t fight. They rolled him onto his side, and gave him a shot of an antiemetic in his left butt cheek. Within an hour, Cotton perked up and was able to sit up on his own. An hour after that, they cut us loose.

  “He should be back to his old self in twelve to thirty-six hours,” Dr. Zanders said as he walked us out the door. In a way, I was relieved that Cotton was better, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to cope with the tomfoolery of Cotton’s “old self.”

  We passed near the mess hall on the way home.

  “Oh, let’s get lunch!” Cotton suggested. His recovery was remarkable.

  I felt much better a couple of days later. I was required to meet the school guidance counselor, but I completely forgot about the appointment and received an angry message on my module from the school secretary. I ran as fast as I could. As I huffed and puffed to catch my breath, the secretary gave me a long and painful lecture about responsibility.

  The guidance counselor was a porky gentleman named Mr. Yongscolder who had a trimmed, graying beard. He wore an old-fashioned sensitive guy sweater. He didn’t seem too upset that I was late and asked me to sit in a chair facing his desk. He asked me for my pocket module, and he plugged it into his computer. I mashed my thumb against the vid screen. The computer validated my print, and I consented to upload my school records.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Yucaipa,” I said.

  “Yucaipa, California?” he said, surprised.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.” I knew of no other Yucapias in the universe.

  “I used to live in Yucaipa after I got my teaching certificate from the University of Redlands. My first teaching job was at Yucaipa High,” he said. “That was a long time ago, twenty-five, maybe thirty years. It was a pretty rough place back then. If I remember correctly, the word ‘Yucapia’ is an old Indian word that means ‘crappy place to live.’”

  Back home we made the same joke on a daily basis, but somehow an outsider cracking the gag came across as judgmental, offensive even. Mr. Yongscolder continued to flap his lips about the demerits of my hometown, either completely ignoring or completely oblivious to my scowling look of disproval.

  “I only stayed there for one school year,” he said. “I was very eager to leave. I got mugged three times in a single month.” With his sensitive guy sweater, Mr. Yongscolder would have been an easy mark for the goons and gangsters. “I had one good friend there,” he said, “Errol Clevins. He taught science. He was a good guy. It’s too bad I didn’t make a better effort to keep in touch with him. Is he still there?”

  The name was not familiar to me. No doubt Errol Clevins, just like Mr. Yongscolder, fled Yucaipa the first chance he got. “Errol Clevins, he was a science teacher right?” I asked, walking Mr. Yongscolder into a rather innocuous street hustle.

  Mr. Yongscolder nodded.

  “He always wore that….” I waved my hands in front of me, pointing back at my shirt, as if my adolescent brain lacked the power to articulate a description of the man’s clothing habits.

  “Yes, he always wore plaid shirts,” he said. Mr. Yongscolder fell into my trap even easier than I had anticipated. I understood why he got mugged so many times.

  “Oh I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said, trying to look both morose and sincere, “Mr. Clevins died. He got knifed.”

  Mr. Yongscolder’s eyes widened in shock and horror. “That’s terrible!” he cried. “It was a student who stabbed him, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, no actually,” I said, “it was another teacher.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  I had to be careful not to overplay my hand. “They said it was the stress of the job,” I said. “The police said the other teacher guy started carrying a knife because he was afraid of some of his students who were gang affiliated. His behavior became erratic. He started talking to himself and quit showering. One day Mr. Clevins confronted him about his body odor, and the guy just snapped and knifed him in the gut. He died on the way to the hospital.”

  “Now that I do believe,” Mr. Yongscolder said sullenly. “Certainly the stress of working with those delinquents could cause you to do strange things.”

  Mr. Yongscolder had forgotten that I was one of “those delinquents,” although he would get a stark reminder soon enough.

  “That’s too bad about Errol,” he said. “He was a good man.”

  “I never had him as a teacher,” I said, “but my friends seemed to really like him.”

  Mr. Yongscolder was silent for a while as he processed the terrible news of his long forgotten friend’s fictitious death. Eventually he regained his focus. “Let’s take a look at your records!” he said. “Let me see here....” He scrolled down the vid screen. “Here are your standardized test scores. Reading and writing are average and at grade level. That’s okay, I guess. Analytic reasoning is slightly above average. I.Q. is well above average.” He looked up at me with raised eyebrows and said accusingly, “You haven’t been applying yourself have you?”

  “No sir,” I said, doing my best to seem agreeable.

  “Well hopefully, we can provide the right environment here at the Magic Sky Daddy Comprehensive School that will permit you to excel,” he said with a smile. He looked back down at the vid screen. “Uh oh! Looks like you haven’t been doing well in math.”

  “I do all right!” I protested, even though I knew I was terrible.

  Mr. Yongscolder shook his head. “No, that is simply not true. You clearly require remediation. I am afraid that you will be the only high school student in seventh grade math.”

  “But I was in math with kids my own age at my old school,” I whined.

  “That’s probably why you haven’t been making any progress these last few years,” he countered. “I understand you don’t like it, but it’s for your own good.”

  I said nothing. I hated it when adults forced things upon me “for my own good.” How would Mr. Yongscolder like it if I put him in a headlock to force his fat butt to get some exercise “for his own good?”

  Mr. Yongscolder looked back at my file. “Looks like your former school never performed a psychological profile,” he said. “The security folks here have a program that could compile a profile for me, but I think we can complete a basic assessment pretty quickly right here and now.”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew I wasn’t nuts like the fictitious teacher who allegedly knifed Mr. Yongscolder’s friend, so I wasn’t too worried.

  “So where should I start?” Mr. Yongscolder said, mostly to himself. “Oh yes, if you could be an animal, what animal would you be?”

  It took a herculean effort on my part to keep my eyes from rolling. Even as an uneducated simpleton, I knew the question hardly probed into the depths of one’s psyche. No doubt if I told Mr. Yongscolder that I wanted to be a large predator or bird of prey, he would think I was well adjusted. If I told him I wanted to be a parasite like a tapeworm or liver fluke, he would think I was prone to delinquent behavior. If I said I wanted to be a housecat, he would think I was lazy. If I said I wanted to be an animal that was extinct, he would think I was depressed. If I said I wanted to be a baboon, he would think I was immature. I give him an answer I thought showed I possessed insight.

  “I’d want to be a red salmon,” I said. I had once written a report on red salmon for biology class, so I knew a little bit about them. I had gotten a B minus on the project, which was pretty good for me.

  “Really,” Mr. Yongscolder said with concern, “aren’t they extinct?”

  “No, you’re thinking of the king salmon.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The king salmon was very big. Red salmon turn bright red in color when they swim upstream to mate.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Mr. Yongscolder said. He scratched his head. “Tell me though, why would you want to be
a red salmon?”

  “Well, I wish I could swim for one thing…”

  Mr. Yongscolder frowned. I could tell he thought I was a bit too concrete in my thinking, so I quickly added, “…but what I really like about red salmon is that they are never plagued by existential angst?”

  “Really,” he said, intrigued, “how do you mean?”

  “Red salmon never worry about whether or not they are doing the right thing. They don’t agonize about the meaning of life, or what course in life they need to follow. For them, there is only one clear path to follow: You’re born. You swim out to sea. You survive long enough to eat and get big. You return to your old stream. You mate, and then you die. Even if you aren’t successful and get eaten along the way, you can take solace in the fact that at least you were doing exactly what nature intended.”

  I could tell right away by the puzzled look on his face that Mr. Yongscolder did not like my answer. “I don’t know about that!” he said. “It doesn’t seem right for someone your age to worry about such things. Wouldn’t you rather be a wolf or a golden eagle?”

  I knew insisting on being a salmon would only complicate matters. He might even send me for formal psychiatric evaluation. I knew I had to change my answer, but I didn’t want to aimlessly go where Mr. Yongscolder was leading me.

  “I guess I wouldn’t want to be a red salmon. You’re right. Following a clear path probably has its down sides.”

  “Then what would you be?”

  “I’d be a mountain goat.”

  “Yes,” he said nodding, “yes, I like that. Mountain goats are sure footed and can reach high places. Your answer is a good one. It shows you have ambition.”

  Of course, Mr. Yongscolder’s conclusion ran completely counter to the proclamation he had made just a few minutes earlier about how I have not been applying myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to point that out to him.

  “Let’s move on,” he said, putting my zoological yearnings to rest once and for all. “Let’s take at look at your disciplinary file. Have you been a good boy?”

  I gulped nervously. As my file opened, Mr. Yongscolder jaw dropped and his eyes boggled.

  “Good God!” he shouted. “In all my years, I’ve never...” he stammered, at a loss for words. He would get an even worse shock when he opened Cotton’s file. Perhaps he would even drop dead from a heart attack. He looked at me sternly and said, “We have zero tolerance for fighting at the Magic Sky Daddy Comprehensive School.”

  “I don’t get into fights!” I protested.

  “Then what do you call all of these?” he asked sternly, pointing to line after line of reports of suspension and detention.

  “Those were just scuffles.”

  “Oh, and would you please educate me about the difference between a fight and a scuffle!” he said sarcastically.

  I gave him the standard definition from our old neighborhood. “A scuffle is when somebody gets a black eye. A fight is when the loser gets carted away by an ambulance and the winner gets carted away by the police.”

  “Well be that as it may, fight or scuffle, if you step out of line even once, I’ll have the captain turn this ship around and return you and your family back to Yucaipa.”

  I knew Mr. Yongscolder’s threat was empty. It took a lot of work, fuel, and money to divert a ship in space, and I knew that no captain would ever turn back for something as trivial as kids scuffling. Up to that point in time, I worried that the crew would simply jettison me out the airlock into deep space if I got into too much trouble, but because Mr. Yongscolder didn’t threaten me with evacuation, I knew it was off the table as a disciplinary tool.

  Mr. Yongscolder dismissed me. Fortunately, mother agreed to take Cotton in for his pre-enrollment assessment, so I didn’t have to see Mr. Yongscolder again for a while.

  Homeroom was at the far side of the ship. I got lost a few times, but eventually found it. My classmates had segregated themselves based on apparel. Kids wearing slacks and button down shirts sat to the right, looking cheerful and prosperous. Kids wearing ball team jerseys, baggy jeans, cargo pants, or worn patched hand-me-downs sat to the left, scowling like hoodlums. I found sinister sneers and dirty looks far less intimating than button down shirts.

  In the corner, sitting by himself was without a doubt the geekiest, wimpiest kid I had ever seen. His face, or what I could make out beneath his thick glasses, suggested he was fifteen years old, but he was at least a head shorter than the next shortest kid in the room. Arms and legs so skinny and stick-like, he reminded me of the daddy long leg spiders that used to lurk in our bathroom. He had a huge head, and his spectacles were so big and wide that they seemed to magnify his face. His blue eyes darted unnaturally, up-down, left-right, up-down, left-right, over and over again. I was surprised the constantly changing image that bombarded his brain didn’t make him sick. He had a straight brown hairdo looked like his mother had placed a bowl on his head and trimmed around the edges while she was either in a hurry or really drunk. He pecked away at his deck. The top of the vid screen read, “advanced differential equations, a guide for independent study.” Clearly he was some sort of achiever.

  A kid in baggy clothes walked over to me and declared, “You’re sitting in my seat,” but I wasn’t sitting in his seat. I had noticed him earlier sitting quite comfortably by the door, chatting with his two prosperous buddies. He had pegged me as an easy mark. Sitting alone, I had no friends around to stick up for me.

  “This isn’t your seat,” I said.

  “Yeah, what makes you so sure?” he said, puffing out his chest trying to look tough.

  I studied him closely. He wore baggy pants and a Barstow Backyard Brawlers hockey jersey. Fans of the minor league team came to watch the fights and could care less if their team ever won. His attire was the standard issue uniform of a gangster, but a hard life of abuse or neglect had not been etched into his face. The bridge of his nose was straight and had never been broken. His eyebrows were uninterrupted by scars and had never been stitched back together. His teeth were white, no gold, no veneer. His were also some of the straightest teeth I had ever seen. A few years ago, at the age when real gangsters got beaten to a pulp as part of gang initiation, his momma was taking him to the orthodontist. She probably took him by the Bruno Burger on the way home. He was a soft kid, trying to prove he was hard, a wankster. The kid wasn’t a threat to anybody or anything other than his loving parents’ good reputation.

  “I know this isn’t your seat,” I said, “because it’s my seat.”

  “No, it’s my seat,” he countered. “I was sitting there before you got here.”

  “Well, it’s my seat now, and if I ever catch you sitting in it, I’ll take you out into the hallway and mop the floor with your skull.”

  “Hey easy, easy,” he said, raising his hands defensively. “I was just kidding around.” Backing off slowly, he returned to his buddies by the door.

  I heard a laugh from behind me, and someone tapped on my shoulder. I turned to see a well-tanned, well-muscled kid wearing a Fontana Gridiron Gridlock arena football jersey.

  “That was really funny what just happened,” he said. “Richard is a total cream puff, but he wants people to think he’s tough.”

  “Yes, I figured that out easily enough,” I replied.

  “You really going to do that?” the big kid asked, “mop the floors with his skull?”

  “No, I was just hustling him the same way he was hustling me,” I said. “I doubt he’ll ever bother me again.”

  The large boy laughed again and asked, “What’s your name bro?” He seemed friendly enough, with a big goofy smile.

  “Anton,” I said.

  “Family new to the ship? Didn’t see you on the last voyage.”

  “Yeah, I’m new.”

  “First time in space?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get IASAS?” He didn’t spell out the acronym but rather pronounced it as a single word, “eyes-ass.”

 
“Yeah a little. Not too bad though. My mother and brother got it much worse.”

  “You puke?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Damn! You must be pretty tough. My first voyage I was as sick as a dog.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he grinned with pride, “I puked all over the doctor. Ruined his fancy leather shoes. Man, he was sore at me! Gave me a big ol’ shot in the butt, the pervert!”

  “He did that to my brother too,” I said sympathetically. “It look liked it hurt.”

  “Naw, that was a different doctor. We got a new doctor this trip.”

  “That’s right. I hear the one we got now is like a general or something in the Space Marines.” I tried to sound informed, which I wasn’t.

  The big kid nodded. “My dad said it has something to do with our special cargo. His foreman wouldn’t even tell him what it is. He said nobody knows, not even able starmen, only senior officers. They had to totally gut out the ship, redo the ventilation system and everything. Took them twenty-seven days working ‘round the clock while we were in port.”

  “Did you stay on the ship when they were fixing it?” I asked.

  “Only at night. It was too noisy with all the hammering and tooling during the day, so I spent most of the time at the beach.”

  “Did you surf?”

  “There were a lot of surfers there,” the big kid said. “Most were pretty cool, and one even gave me a beer. I never went in the water, though. I hear it’s really cold, and I don’t swim too good. Also, I didn’t want to catch crabs.” I suspected that the big kid, although friendly, wasn’t very bright.

  “Name’s Hammond!” he said, putting out his hand. I shook it. He squeezed my hand as hard as he could, trying to show off how strong he was. When convinced he had caused me enough pain, Hammond finally let go. “Where you from?” he asked.

  “Yucaipa,” I said.

  “Really, I’m from Fontana, just down the road, sort of,” he said, “or at least I was. We still have a house there but we haven’t lived there in years.” He scratched his head. “Hey, Yucapia? That’s pretty ghetto isn’t it?”