72
By the Spring of Nineteen Ninety, the friendship between me and Daina
had grown with our partnership running the local science fiction club
and the subsequent regular dinners she had been treating me to a few
times each week. She had also been inviting me on occasional errand
trips when they involved passing my end of town and with the warmer
weather she noted that she liked to hike. Having grown-up with the ski
area my father managed, I was used to hiking as well and this soon
became a Saturday morning routine for us. Sometimes it would be in
local parks, other times on the edge of the mountains with steeper,
but more scenic terrain. And we'd spend this additional time talking
about ourselves.
I avoided all topics of concern such as my 'situation' and my
problems with the medical community. I would later find out she was
holding back on some issues as well. So we talked of our family
backgrounds and previous jobs. In her case, growing up in Denver,
she had concluded to be a teacher in her final years of High School
and, as the awareness of the need for Special Education grew, she had
decided to specialize in it as did her two closest sisters in age.
She was a student teacher at a Denver public school as part of her
last year in College. She then moved to Yuma, Colorado, where she
had landed two part-time jobs as the special education teacher for
two rural schools, spending half a day at one school, then the other
half day at the other. She noted how one of the school's gave her a
room, but the other gave her the back of a semi truck in the parking
lot. One school paid for minimal supplies while the second insisted
that cost was included as part of her pay and she
should buy what was needed for the students. Daina quickly found
herself using the supplies of the better school to squeak by with the
other school. After two years of it, the better school offered her a
full-time job and she didn't look back.
For the next seven years of her life she lived in Yuma while teaching
at that one rural school. As all new teachers starting out, she had
formed part of a group of new girls in town and then one by one over
the years each of the other girls found a local boyfriend and
eventually settled down to marry and make a home. But in Daina's
case this didn't happen, she didn't explain this much other than how
she had gradually become lonely as these friends she used to do
things with were now focused on their husbands and coming children
and no longer had time for her. By her ninth year living in Yuma she
had decided that there would be no future for her there, beyond what
she already had, and decided to let the school district know she was
leaving at the end of the school year.
She assumed she'd find a replacement teaching job pretty easily in
the Summer of Nineteen Eighty-Six but soon discovered that school
districts had been locking up new special education teachers from the
coming college graduates during the Spring and by the time she
started looking in the Summer, the job openings were few and far
between. Often, if there was still an opening it was for a reason, a
bad administration or job location. She finally had her first
solid job nibble in Commerce City, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. It
served as the city's industrial district and according to her had all
the ambiance of a polluted gravel pit. The interview went well
enough and she soon had a call on her answering machine saying that
they wanted to hire her. Rather than return the call that day, she
decided to wait until the morning.
When morning came, she got a call from my town for an interview at
one of our school districts and she accepted it and was soon there.
She liked the neighborhood and the interview went well and she was
offered a job on the spot. She accepted, then returned home to let
the Commerce City school know that she had already accepted another
offer. And that was what brought her here. She soon joined
the other new teachers who had started at the school that same Fall
and one of them, Rochelle, had decided to explore the social
opportunities and had stumbled across a listing for the science
fiction club and brought Daina along...
How about me? She wondered. What about me? I bounced
back. She was curious about my own personal history and social life
and I pretty much told her about my computer programing skills and
being part of the club, but offered little else that she already
didn't know. Remembering how much fun it was to discover the
thoughts my high school friends had about me based on what was in our
year book, I instead asked her what she thought I was like, and up
to, in my spare time?
I soon discovered that Rochelle had been talking about me as part of
her long line of past boyfriends as if I were another notch on her
bedpost. I found that very funny and assured Daina nothing of the
sort had happened. For if it had, Rochelle would have had a much
bigger story to tell about me! I laughed to myself. I wanted to
know what other rumors were out there about me. Daina didn't have
much else other than to share that I seemed to fit the profile of a
serial killer.
This brought another laugh for me as I was curious why. Well, my
being a single male, the feel of the 'trashy tale' I had written and
brought to the Writers' Group as my first submission, etc.. All
seemed to fit the preconceived notion of what a serial killer would
be like. ''And so you decided to spend more time at my place and
take up hiking with me?'' I asked with a huge smile. Well, she
had concluded that I probably
wasn't...
''Probably?'' I echoed back and then spent the next couple of years
during our subsequent hikes pointing to little copses of bushes &
tress, gaps between large boulders and saying to her, ''That'd be a
good place to hide a body!''
No comments:
Post a Comment