Famous Blue Raincoat by Ed Gorman

Author:Ed Gorman [Gorman, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery short stories
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2015-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Closing Circle

That morning in social studies class, Mr. Prescott said that he wanted each student to write a one-page essay about the AIDS hospice being burned down the week before. One man had died in the fire.

When Mr. Prescott gave out the assignment, several of the twelfth grade boys exchanged smirks. A lot of the parents in the small town of Ainsworth hadn’t wanted the state run facility there in the first place. Nobody was supposed to have been in the hospice that night, anyway. The patient had arrived a day early and so the doctor had let him stay the night.

“Did I say something funny, Richie?” Mr. Prescott said. He was the assistant football coach, had played first-string halfback at the university, and was known to have an extremely bad temper.

The smirk died quickly on Richie Hayworth’s face.

“No, sir, you didn’t say anything funny.”

“Then why were you smiling?”

Richie glanced at a couple of his friends, then back at Mr. Prescott. ‘Well,” Richie said, “because of who that guy at the hospice was.”

“Who was he?”

“Well, you know, Mr. Prescott. A fag.”

Half the class laughed out loud. It was like the day Mr. Prescott discussed how some people were trying to ban Huckleberry Finn because of the expression “Nigger Jim.”

“Fags” was an expression just like that.

“Richie, let me ask you a question.”

“All right.”

“Are you sorry that somebody burned the hospice down?”

Richie glanced at his friends again.

“My dad said they didn’t belong here,” Richie said after a time. “My dad said they shouldn’t have used Ainsworth to experiment on.”

Richie obviously kept waiting for Mr. Prescott to get angry but he didn’t. He just said, “Class, how many of you feel that the state shouldn’t have set up that hospice here in the first place?”

Mr. Prescott counted the hands of a class of twenty-three students, eighteen boys and girls put their arms up.

“All right. Then let me ask you one more question, class. How many of you think it was a good thing that the hospice was burned down?”

Six or seven hands tentatively started to rise but then paused midway and came back down.

Nobody had the nerve to be quite that honest.

Mr. Prescott looked them over, as if assessing each of them individually, and then said, “I’m going to give each of you an ‘A’ for your papers.”

Smiles.

“But there’s one thing you have to do for me. You have to be honest on your papers, all right?”

“That’s all?” Richie said.

“That’s all, Richie. Just put down your honest feelings about the hospice and the people in it and the fire last week. And tell me what you really feel.”

The bell rang ending the school day, inviting the kids outside to the warm Indian Summer afternoon. The trees in the hills had just started to turn, and the farmers on their green John Deere combines had just started to harvest, and in the new Wal-Mart, Halloween costumes had just appeared.

A few moments later, all the students but one had hurried out of Mr. Prescott’s room.

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