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Chapter 5
By lunch hour, Mrs. Clark had suffered about all she wanted to of the fourth grade for one morning. She needed the break.
The break that the elementary teachers got wasn't as good as the ones the teachers got over in the high school; there, they got a full hour of break time each day -- well, a fifty-minute hour, and that was close enough, and they got lunch hour, too. The elementary
teachers only got the thirty minute lunch hour, and sometimes it wasn't enough to recover and get ready to put up with the kids for the last couple of hours a day.
Most days, Mrs. Clark was just happy enough to sit in the break room, try to bring her blood nicotine level back into balance, and try to gather her strength, while she wished she taught at the high school, wondering what had ever convinced her she wanted to teach
elementary school.
At that, she was glad she'd turned down the chance to go over to the middle school this year. The elementary kids were bad enough, but when they got a little older and reached puberty, it was hormone hell over there.
But, today was different, mostly because she remembered that she'd smoked her last cigarette in her purse in the break room just before class started. There was a cigarette machine over in the high school break room, and it was the closest one she knew of. Besides,
she thought that John Pacobel, the biology teacher, was on break during her lunch hour; that gave her the chance to get that bag with that snake in it off of her desk, where she wouldn't have to think about it.
Sure enough, Pacobel was in the break room, going over some papers that appeared to have something to do with sports. The biology teacher was also the girl's softball coach -- or, perhaps, the other way around might have said it better.
Pacobel took tremendous pride in the fact that he'd coached the girl's softball team to a state championship four years before. When you drove into town, right under the sign that said, "Spearfish Lake" was a sign that read, "Class B Girls Softball Champions, 1983." It
didn't say, "Home town of Jenny Easton," Spearfish Lake's most famous resident, even though the popular pop singer had made enough money to buy the whole town if she wanted to.
However, Linda Clark wasn't exactly John Pacobel's greatest fan. She'd been at the state final game against Camden St. Dismas, back in 1983, and remembered how Pacobel had almost blown it by leaving his daughter in pitching while she was getting shelled. Only
a tremendous last-inning save by Brandy Evachevski, Jenny Evachevski/Easton's younger sister, had pulled the game from the fire, and Pacobel acted as if it had never happened.
But that wasn't the reason that Linda didn't like the softball coach, and she knew it. The coach had long been shed of his wife, and with his only daughter off at college someplace, he had a reputation for sleeping around -- with girls that had been on his softball,
volleyball or basketball teams. He was careful about it; he never messed with a girl while she was in school, but after she graduated, she was fair game. That certainly fit the letter of the law, but not the intent, she thought.
Linda wasn't along in her dislike, but the teacher had tenure, and couldn't be booted out on rumors. Besides, that state championship drew him a lot of water, even though no Spearfish Lake girls team had ever gotten close to the playoffs since 1983, mostly because
another Brandy Evachevski hadn't come along.
First things first. She dropped a handful of quarters into the machine, made it burp up a pack of Virginia Slims, then turned to the coach, opening the pack. "John, I've got a problem," she said.
A little irritated at the interruption, Pacobel looked up from his stat sheet and his struggle to decide whether to pitch the Hekkinan girl. She wasn't that great a pitcher, but she was the athletic director's daughter, and that made things a little more difficult. She couldn't
be left on the bench all season . . . "What is it?" he asked.
"One of my kids brought this to class," she said, setting the unopened bag on the stat sheets. "She said it crawled out of her bathtub drain this morning, and she'd like to know what it is."
Pacobel picked up the bag and opened it, pulling out the peanut butter jar. He looked at the remains of the snake, a little the worse for wear after its bout with the hair dryer. "Northern Water Snake," he said after a moment. "Immature. Kind of strange, being out this
time of the year."
"Well, it was living in the sewer, so maybe it's a little different," she commented, lighting a Virginia Slim.
"Yeah," Pacobel frowned, holding the jar up to the light to get a better look. Something wasn't right, but he couldn't put a finger on it.
"Well, I guess I can tell Tiffany it was a Northern Water Snake," Linda commented.
"That's close enough for elementary school," Pacobel agreed.
