Burning Questions of Bingo Brown (12 page)

“It happened about three miles past the bowling alley, right side of the road,” Billy said. “Let’s go.”

It had been a warm October, more like an extension of summer than fall, and today was the first cold day of the season. The leaves had already turned golden and red, but they had stayed on the trees, stubbornly refusing to fall.

Now as Bingo and Billy pedaled down the street, the trees relaxed their hold and the leaves began to rain down. In a shower of gold and red, the boys headed for State Route 64.

They rode fast, leaning over their handlebars, pedaling hard until they were past the bowling alley, then they slowed down and coasted along the straight stretch before the curve.

Billy gave a signal and pulled off the road. “It must have happened here.”

He leaned his bike against a tree and began walking back and forth, looking for clues in the deep weeds. Bingo stopped his bike, but he did not get off.

“It couldn’t be here.”

“Why not?” Billy called.

“Boehmer said on a curve.”

“This is a curve.”

“But I thought he meant that Mr. Mark didn’t make the curve, like he was going too fast.”

“That’s what I thought too. But my mom talked to the ambulance driver and he said Mr. Mark went straight off the road. Look!” Billy Wentworth jumped the ditch.

“Look at what?” Bingo pulled his throat so he could swallow.

“The tracks. See, he hit right here. There’s his tire mark.”

“But if he went straight off the road, that would mean—” Bingo broke off. His fingers curled around his neck.

“Yeah, that would mean he did it deliberately.” Billy Wentworth kept striding back and forth in the weeds. “This is the tree he hit. Look at the marks.”

He pulled aside some leaves so Bingo could see the ruined bark.

“And look how all the weeds are trampled over here. This is it, I tell you! The ambulance pulled off right here. Mr. Mark landed right about—” he measured off a few steps “—here.”

Billy stood in the center of the weeds with his arms outstretched.

Bingo stayed on the other side of the ditch. He held his throat with one hand, his handlebars with the other.

“Come see for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

“I believe you.”

Billy bent forward. “Here’s something that looks like—” Suddenly Billy fell silent. He held onto a tree for support.

He swallowed. “This is it all right.”

He walked toward Bingo slowly, touching trees as he came. He stepped over the ditch and went down on one knee.

“But why would he do that?” Bingo asked. “Why would he do it on purpose?”

Billy got up slowly. “Maybe there was a car. Boehmer wasn’t here. He doesn’t know everything. I got to rest a minute.”

“You?”

Billy nodded. He leaned on the seat of his bicycle. “This was not the best idea I ever had,” he admitted.

Bingo looked at Billy’s pale face. For the first time Bingo felt like the stronger one.

“Are you all right, Billy?”

“Yeah, but I’m sorry we came.”

“I am too.”

“Don’t tell anybody, but I can’t stand the sight of blood. Even if I’m not sure it really was blood, it gets to me.”

They rested on their bikes. The strength that had sent them speeding out here in a blaze of falling leaves was gone.

Finally Billy said, “I’m ready if you are.”

Bingo nodded.

They turned their bikes around and slowly started for home.

B
INGO CAME IN THE
house slowly. He felt as if eight years had passed since he heard about the accident instead of eight hours. At any rate, he felt eight years older.

“Is that you, Bingo?” his mom called from the kitchen.

“Yes.”

“Well, come on back. I’ve got some news.”

Bingo went into the kitchen and leaned tiredly against the door.

“I called Millie, and she says Mr. Markham has regained consciousness. He’s not out of the woods yet by any means, and there’s no telling when he’ll be out of the hospital, but he
is
conscious.”

Bingo nodded.

His mother eyed him curiously. “I thought you would be so excited.”

“I’m too tired to be excited. I just hate the whole thing.”

“Well, of course, I do too.”

“Not like me.”

Bingo turned away. He took two steps into the dining room and then came back and leaned on the door again.

“I went out there and saw it.”

“What?”

“The place where the accident happened.”

“Bingo, I wish you hadn’t done that.”

“I do too.”

She kept watching him. “That surprises me. It’s not like you.”

“I thought it might help me understand.”

“Understand what?”

“How it happened … why it happened. I didn’t even know it was going to happen.”

“Of course you didn’t know it was going to happen. No one can predict accidents.”

Bingo looked down at his feet. For the first time he knew what his mother meant when she said,
You are so interested in yourself and your own problems that you never notice anyone else.

“People have accidents all the time, Bingo,” his mom went on. “People are careless. Remember my wreck? A woman in Head Hunters had given me a terrible body wave, and I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror and backed straight into a telephone pole. Little things cause accidents most of the time.”

“But not always.”

“Bingo, you’re making too much of this. Mr. Markham was on his way home. He was tired. He went off the road.”

Bingo pulled at his throat. “It looked like he did it on purpose.”

“No, Bingo, no. Now, I’ve met Mr. Markham. He isn’t the type. There’s an explanation. A dog darted into the road. He swerved to avoid a car. Any number of things could have happened.”

“Mom,” Bingo interrupted. “One time—this was last week—Mr. Mark had us write letters. And these letters were to someone who was thinking of suicide, to talk them out of it. Mr. Mark said these were the most important letters we would ever write in our lives. He said a person’s life depended on them. And Mom, what worries me, what I can’t get out of my mind—” He pulled at his throat, but this time it didn’t let him swallow. “—what I keep thinking about and thinking about is that maybe we were writing the letters to him.”

“Oh, no, Bingo, surely not.”

“Yes, Mom, and maybe our letters weren’t good enough. I mean, I didn’t really try, because I thought it was stupid. But if I had known I was writing to him—that it was for real—if I had known that, then I really would have tried. I mean, maybe he went off the road because all of us thought the letters were stupid and didn’t try.”

He and his mother stared at each other across the kitchen. Then his mother came and put her arms around him. “Honey, your letters didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“How do you know?”

The phone rang and his mother tightened her grip on him. “Bingo—”

He turned his head toward the phone, and she put her hands on his face and turned him back. “Listen to me, Bingo.”

“I better answer the phone.”

“Let the phone go. I want to talk to you.”

Bingo pulled away. “It might be for me. It might be about Mr. Mark.”

His mother followed him to the phone, anxiously wiping her dry hands on her jeans. He picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Bingo, is this you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s me—Melissa.”

Bingo looked up and met his mother’s worried eyes. He said, “It’s for me. You can go back to the kitchen. I’m fine.”

His mom said, “I’ll wait.”

Melissa said, “I tried to call Dawn.”

“You did?”

“Yes, I called the Nautilus and a man named Mike answered and said she wasn’t there. I said I wanted to know if Dawn had heard about Mr. Markham’s accident. Mike said, ‘Is Mr. Markham the guy on the motorcycle?’ I said, ‘Yes, he’s my teacher. Did she hear?’ Mike said, ‘She heard. That’s why she didn’t come in today.’ I said, ‘Could you please give me her home phone number?’ Mike said, ‘No, she doesn’t want anybody calling her.’ I said, ‘I hate to beg, but I have to talk to her.’ He said, ‘Well, give me your name and I’ll have her call you.’ So I gave it to him, but she hasn’t called.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve been sitting by the phone for two hours. She should have called by now, don’t you think? Or do you think it was just something Mike said to get rid of me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because I’ve got to know what happened. I’ve just got to. I’m the kind of person who wants to know everything, Bingo. I’ve always been that way.”

“Well, I did hear he’s conscious. Someone at the hospital told my mom.”

“I heard that too. But you know what really worries me? What really worries me is him not having on his helmet, doesn’t it you?”

Bingo said stiffly, “Yes.”

There was a pause and then Melissa said, “Bingo, you don’t sound like yourself. Is there somebody there with you?”

“Yes.”

“Is it your mom?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it. Listen, you want me to call you back?”

“No, I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

“All right, but come early so we can talk. I better get off the phone too and give Dawn a chance to call. Bye, Bingo.”

Bingo hung up the phone. At once his mother said, “Now, listen to me, Bingo.”

“I’m listening.”

“Well, look at me.”

Bingo looked up.

“I don’t know whether your teacher went off the road on purpose or not. Maybe he did. But it was not up to you kids and your letters to stop him.”

“But, Mom, if our letters had been really good—”

“No! Mr. Markham was your teacher, Bingo, and you looked up to him and trusted him and that was exactly what you should have done. Your teacher betrayed you.”

“Mom, don’t say that. He didn’t betray us.”

“Oh, yes, he did. A person is given a wonderful gift, Bingo—life. Life! And if he throws it away—as your teacher may have tried to do—if he throws it away, he’s never going to get it back. Never! You can’t change your mind next month and say,
Well, I’m tired of being dead. I think I’ll pop back into the world.
It doesn’t work that way. You slam the door shut, and you’re never going to open it up again. To me, slamming that door is betrayal to everybody you slammed the door on, and it is the cruelest betrayal in the world.”

Bingo looked at his mother. “Oh, Mom,” he said. “I wish you’d been there last week to write a letter.”

M
ELISSA WAS TAKING UP
money for Mr. Mark’s card. “Does anybody have the right change?” she asked. “The card was ninety-nine cents, remember, so everybody owes three cents. Does anybody have exactly three cents?”

Melissa had on her Care Bears shirt with baby-blue barrettes holding back her hair. She looked anxiously around the room.

Bingo put up his hand.

“Bingo, you have the right change?”

He nodded.

She came back to his desk, smiling. “Oh, Bingo, thanks. Now I have your three cents and my three cents so I can make change.” She picked up Bingo’s pennies and turned around. “I can make change now, everybody. I—”

She broke off with a gasp. Boehmer was in the doorway. He said, “Am I interrupting?”

Bingo moved behind his shield—Billy Wentworth. He was grateful for whatever protection he could get these days.

“No, Mr. Boehmer, come in,” Miss Brownley said. “We were just taking up money for a card for Mr. Markham.”

“I won’t take but a minute,” Mr. Boehmer said. Melissa said, “Scoot over, Bingo. I’ll sit with you.”

“What?”

“Scoot over.”

Bingo couldn’t move. If he scooted over even an inch, he would be in Boehmer’s line of vision, and he’d have to scoot over a lot more than that to make room for a whole girl.

Melissa sat down and shoved him over with her hip. He gasped.

“I hope it’s not bad news about Mr. Mark, don’t you?” she said calmly.

He couldn’t speak. He concentrated on making his face appear normal. He knew his face looked odd, tortured even, because this was the first time he had ever sat beside a girl, and while he had intended to sit by girls at a later time—in front of a TV set or a movie screen—he had never planned to do it in front of Boehmer. Sweat formed on his upper lip.

“Class,” Mr. Boehmer said, “some of your parents have been talking to me.”

There was an audible intake of breath at this betrayal by their parents. Normally Bingo would have worried that his mother had been one of them, because she was not the type to say something like, “I don’t want to give my name, Mr. Boehmer, but—” She would say, “This is Bingo Brown’s mother, and Bingo tells me that—”

But he had too many other things to worry about now.

“It was probably my mom,” Melissa said to him.

Sweat poured down Bingo’s face. His cheeks burned.

“Your parents have the feeling that some of you—actually, many of you have questions about Mr. Markham’s accident and how he’s getting along.

“Now, I haven’t been very good, I’m afraid, in supplying answers. So I’ve asked a friend of mine, a doctor, who’s seen Mr. Markham daily, to come in and talk to you. His name is Howard Gaston—Dr. Gaston—and he agreed to come and talk to you after lunch. You can ask him anything you want, all right?”

“I have tons of questions, don’t you?” Melissa said.

Bingo shrugged.

“Well,” Mr. Boehmer said, “that’s all, class. You get back to what you were doing.”

Mr. Boehmer went out of the room.

“Here, I’ll leave this for you to sign,” Melissa said. She put the card in front of him and got up.

Bingo looked down at the card. It was a long one. On the front was a bunch of bananas, and each banana had a smiling or hopeful face drawn on it. At the top were the words,
The whole bunch hopes you’re feeling better.
Inside was the rest of the message.
And you’re back hanging around with us again soon.

Bingo flattened the card. He was surprised he was still capable of carrying out simple tasks. He wrote his name under the freckled banana that didn’t look as hopeful as the rest.

Bingo could not eat lunch. This was Wednesday—pizza day—and so everyone in the cafeteria except Bingo was eating happily.