Teacher's Garden

Remember last week's story, when I told you that story was a short short story?

Ah. Well, about that...

Teacher's Garden - a story by M. K. Dreysen

If anybody had asked him, Ed Grange would have said that his garden was really the center of his life. Sure, when he went to the Master Gardener meetings, everyone else there gave him a bit of the side-eye. Or, more than a bit, he would have cheerfully admitted.

That's what you get for growing the fun stuff, Ed would have said. Nightshades and carefully treated rotten logs seeded with the deadliest of mushrooms, various toxic toads and frogs; the one single pure perfect rose, a wild beast grown now across the entire back fence and threatening to bring the whole neighborhood into the family. So very many other toxic or deadly species, beautiful and ugly and all of them wonderful.

Ed Grange rehearsed the speech in his mind. How he'd show off his wonderful, deadly little creations to an interested questioner. Similar to the speeches that he gave his kids every year when he brought in samples to show them. "Look at them, won't you? This is what the fungi have in wait for you. There, a wonderful little button mushroom, tasty and safe, growing right next to its closest, most deadly of cousins."

He showed the students a picture, and then most delightful of all, he brought out his traveling log for all to marvel at. Death cheek by jowl with mundane yet wonderful life. "And only a few delicate specks to show you the difference. At night, you can't see them at all, even with the best flashlight available."

Mister Grange had, of course, practiced that particular speech every year for most of the past thirty years of science teaching. First half of his morning, freshman science. Second half senior physics but by then even Mister Grange recognized that the kids had grown tired of his schtick. That's when he introduced these budding scientists to the lab.

In the meantime, he practiced, in his mind, the art of showing off his wonderful garden. With no real expectation that he'd ever have the privilege, of course, but just in case. And because, he did admit, it didn't hurt to have a more or less constant devotion to safety.

Not when your evenings and weekends were spent in a garden with this many ways to kill you.

****

"Veronica told me Old Grange said that there are days he has to suit up in HAZMAT gear," Mel Abernathy said. Veronica was Mel's older sister, by two years. So Mel had the advantage of older student gossip, both in navigating the tumult of high school and in trying to understand Mister Grange's oddness.

Greg Washington scratched his head. His sisters were all younger, so he'd be the one passing on gossip and secrets, rather than benefiting from it. But Greg mostly thought of Veronica as impossibly beautiful and impossibly out of reach. About to be valedictorian, head buried in books and marching band and almost anything else but gossip.

"Veronica said that, did she? So what?"

"She also said that the seniors will pay a hundred bucks to anyone who scores a psychedelic mushroom out of Grange's garden. Senior Blowout's coming up, and there's been a Grange's magic mushroom bounty that nobody's ever had the courage to claim."

Senior Blowout, the great fuckoff party of the senior year. An annual tradition at Jefferson High, all the adults pretended not to notice the next-day hangovers.

So long as nobody drove, nothing got burnt or destroyed, and everyone showed up to class the next morning, the Blowout stayed a quiet tradition. "And when they all get busted for drugs and screw up our turn?" Greg asked.

Mel shrugged. "Sure, that's probably why nobody has every tried."

Greg had moved to Jefferson in between freshman and sophomore year; here it was, after spring break and headed for the end of his first year here, and he'd discovered how much of the little community ran on these sorts of little understandings.

Like, because the Gulf was only a half hour's drive, every kid got a little bit of leeway on those occasional days when the wind and surf and sun were too good to pass up. So long as they kept their head down, nose clean, and didn't attract the attention of the cops or the national park rangers when they blew class for the beach.

Or how, it was similarly understood that the big Spring Break, when all the college kids from up north came down, that nobody at school got any bright ideas to go out and join them.

That way, when the Jefferson spring break came around after the college kids had all flown back north, the cops and the rangers didn't come out in force the way they did for the older kids.

These and a thousand little, quiet rules that kids like Mel, who'd been here since third grade, somehow had picked up through osmosis or something. "I'd have thought raiding a teacher's backyard garden for magic mushrooms would be breaking the rules," Greg pointed out.

"Most years, sure," Mel agreed. "But I've got a little secret. Grange is going to a science conference this spring."

"And?"

****

By brutal tradition, Senior Blowout took place on a Sunday night. That was the deal, go out and blow off the steam, get loaded up on beer or trashcan punch and then stumble into school for the longest Monday of your young life.

Ed Grange went to his physics conference, this particular year, the week before Senior Blowout. Not on purpose, really.

Ed, nice as the strange old science teacher was to those patient enough to listen to him, had still not connected well enough to any of his students, nor any of his fellow teachers, to have heard of the Blowout. Not even after damned near thirty years of teaching at Jefferson. It was pure accident that the physics society had scheduled their conference that particular week, and even greater an accident that Ed noticed in time to take the vacation days Principle Vickers had been nagging him to use.

"Does he have dogs?" Greg whispered.

"Nope, just cats. And we aren't going inside."

And, though the two sneaks didn't know the future, they also didn't have to contend with what by now be ubiquitous wireless security cameras. And even the cats weren't a problem, since if Ed Grange had any real fear of his garden it was that Snowball and Midnight would get into it and go for a taste of the rhododendrons. Or the foxgloves.

Mel had parked his ancient Chrysler, Mom and then Veronica's hand me down, at the Circle K a mile or so away, and then the boys had walked the rest of the way. Pure daylight, "He's not here so there's no point getting Mrs. Kravitz or somebody calling the cops on us after dark."

Greg liked that part a lot. Jefferson wasn't the whitest suburb in the city, but it was an awful damned close second. Greg knew damned well what kind of trouble he'd get into if he ended the year on the kind of note that began with "Mom, about the cops...".

He said to himself, even as he walked up to the door and knocked. "You're sure he's out of town?"

"Yeah, Veronica said he bragged about going for the past month."

"Why are we doing this, then?"

"A hundred bucks and years worth of bragging rights. Don't worry Greg, it's perfectly safe."

The pair waited, listened. And then Greg walked around and opened the side gate to the backyard. "After you, Master Abernathy."

"No, no, by all means Master Washington, you proceed."

****

Mel at least had sat through Ed Grange's mushroom lecture, and the demonstration with the carefully treated log.

He'd also heard, because his grandfather was a Master Gardener, that it was a carefully constructed scam. "Ed's not quite that crazy," Grandpa had told him. "He plants that log just so he can scare you all. But when he shows his slides, he's got the different species of fungus more segregated than that. Sure, he puts the logs next to each other, but they're only crossed by accident. One species per log."

"You asked your grandfather about Grange's magic mushrooms?"

"Oh for fuck's sake," Mel said. "No, shit for brains, I asked him about our goofy-assed science teacher and the mushroom demonstration. Grandpa provided the rest on his own. Now that you're through showing how little you trust your best friend, can we get on with the fungus picking? Pretty please?"

The logs were artfully arranged around the yard, most in the shade and protection of larger plants. The sunlight helped the boys match up the live specimens against the forager's book that Greg had found at the library. "Ah, here we go," he murmured as he knelt down next to one particular log, set off by its lonesome. "One of my cousins said he used to go through cow patties to get shit like this."

"For himself?" Mel asked, kneeling next to his friend.

"Nah, he sold them to dumbshits like us. 'Kids too poor and stupid to get high any other way'."

Mel snorted. "Not one of your favorite cousins, I hope?"

"Nah, Burn's an asshole. Great stories, but really he's kind of a fuckwad." Greg laid out a couple of sandwich bags, and then pulled out a pen knife. "How many, do you think?"

"Couple dozen, I'd guess. Enough to prove it, not enough for Grange to suspect. And come on, how many of them are gonna try these things, anyway?"

Greg grunted. "Right, I know I'm not eating any of the damned things."

Greg reached beneath the branches of the largest rose he'd ever seen in his life, thorns almost as long and thick as his thumb, and started cutting their harvest free.

Overhead, unnoticed by either boy, the vines of the rose began to contract. All of the other fungi in the yard were protected by either their own poisons, or those of the plants they had been set beneath.

Ed's magic mushrooms, on the other hand, were protected by his one and only rose.

****

Ed Grange came home from his conference with a handful of new ideas, and a handful of new addresses to mail mushrooms to. And other of his garden's delights, depending on the season.

Most of them were, he told himself, perfectly respectable research contacts. The toxins Ed grew were, after all, of great scientific interest. That was his view of it. If some of his colleagues like to experiment on their own person, that was their business. Ed just made sure that he used the proper conventions of labeling and that the addresses all pointed to real labs.

The old science teacher set down his bags, then happily puttered around in his kitchen, petting Snowball and Midnight, for most of an hour before he noticed the rose.

And its well-captured prizes. "Ah. All these years and it finally happened. Someone finally just couldn't resist."