A Charter to That Other Place Page 3

  Chapter Three: Rodrigo

  He preferred “Rod”.

  And as far as he was concerned, the rich were just as guilty as the poor of not wanting to work hard.

  For over a decade he had donated money to the private school his kids attended, and it was clear to him that the foundation board members wished his name wasn’t on the checks. Both the elementary school and the high school campus were festooned with plaques and bricks commemorating anyone who had contributed so much as a dollar, and he was no exception. But he should have been.

  His name was fastened to the rear end of the Ring of Honor, the part facing away from the high traffic area, the part occupying the side of the circular planter box that faced the empty lawn marked with a sign that read “Keep Off The Grass”. He once did some research into the names engraved on each side of his. Neither had donated any money.

  The name to his left owned a small concession supply company that kept the school snack bar stocked with trail mix at just above cost.

  The name to his right had operated the rider mower for half the twentieth century.

  Both worthy contributions, from Rod’s point of view, but hardly comparable to the number of digits he had infused into the foundation budget during his children’s tenure. And for all its venerability, the school had proven to be not so great after all, at least for Magdalena and Antonio.

  Lena had maintained a GPA in the high 3.0 range right up until her senior year, but no private universities accepted her, and the only UC campus that took her in was UC Merced. It was as though having St. Bonnie’s on her application was some sort of warning to the admissions boards, an academic biohazard decal. Then Lena validated the boards’ stringency by flunking out of Merced by the end of her first quarter. Not that academic ability had much to do with it. She admitted to hardly attending any of her classes, much less study for them. She made frequent trips into San Francisco and claimed to be forging a modeling career. Rod and his wife, Rita, sensed some exaggeration of her prospects, but also thought it best to let her live a life of no regrets or resentment, so they supported her move to the city.

  Meanwhile, Tony was having a hard time luring any scouts to his baseball games. St. Bonnie’s was in a league of likewise small-pond schools, and there was no club team within a forty-five minute drive, so it was hard to gauge whether his statistics meant much. He was hoping to be a walk-on player for the team of whatever college accepted him. Rod and Rita therefore figured they were going to have to nurse two failed dreams in the near future, but at least baseball would keep Tony in school for a while. Hopefully long enough to finish, or close enough to where he only had to be a regular college student for a dozen units or less.

  Then there was Arturo. If the charter school had not been approved, Rod still would have paid for Artie to attend St. Bonnie’s. He didn’t want to stigmatize him. But as their youngest grew closer to the high school phase of the St. Bonnie’s experience, he appeared on his way to getting even less out of it than his older siblings. Artie was a bright kid of no discernable useful interests who came across as two years younger than he really was. He was as petite as his sister, as easily distracted as his brother, and shared their passion for attention.

  Rod wasn’t bothered much by the role that getting attention played in his children’s aspirations. He was hardly in a position to criticize anyone for wanting accolades, much less those who treaded water with him in the same gene pool. What bothered him was that they wanted the attention to come so effortlessly: through looks for Lena, athletic ability for Tony, and something yet to be determined for Artie. For even if Rod considered himself gifted in any way, he had disliked most of his time spent earning money. His working hours were a dim, sour dribble of memories.

  Every job he held felt as though it had to be withstood, the office as much as the fields. The fields for more obvious reasons: heat, cold, mud, dust, snakes, spiders, flies, wasps, cramps, cuts, exhaustion, thirst, hunger, disrespect, disdain, and of course wages. But it did offer a kind of inspiration to move up and away from it that the office did not. The fields left no doubt that there was something better. The office made him wonder if that was all there was.

  There was a clarity to his rise from laborer to foreman to manager to owner. The math was easy. So many hours led to a certain amount of money, a certain amount of effort led to an impression on management, an impressive amount of saving led to land of his own. The office was harder to quantify. It was recognizing cues and hitting marks with enough subtlety to win before anyone else knew they had lost. It was hard to know who was worth befriending. He had a formula in the fields: if someone tried to forget the job during off-hours by dousing their free time with alcohol, loud music, and bad jokes, he had no use for them. Rod did not want to forget where he worked. He used it as motivation.

  He had yet to find a reliable white-collar equation. Professional relationships were developed as much during free time as they were during office hours. Blatant ambition was uncouth and aroused suspicion. The complexity of this more lucrative phase in life led to his interest in charity as a means to establish some purity, with St. Bonnie’s as his primary beneficiary. In his more honest moments, he admitted to himself that his initial reasons for focusing on his kids’ school had a lot to do with mixing in his money with the more established pot. But when his frustrations mounted and he got wind of the charter, he re-evaluated why schools appealed to him.

  Rod saw them as more emblematic of the office jockeying that had been so challenging for him, which he perhaps could have started to understand as a child if his schooling hadn’t been so spotty thanks to his family’s perpetual movement, driven by the seasons and the farming cycles they dictated.

  He also felt schools provided a filter that revealed which families were worthy of charity. Not so much at St. Bonnie’s, whose students would have ample opportunities to fail if necessary before finding their place in life. But such distinctions would definitely emerge at the charter, which he knew would be populated by plenty of kids with a razor thin margin of error.

  Other community institutions offered no such test. Parks struck him as watering holes for his old co-workers from the fields to drink beer at the picnic tables and exchange crude stories. Libraries, recreation centers, and playgrounds were dumping grounds for their kids to tumble and shriek under the beaten gaze of their wives. He didn’t want to be associated with that. School was revelatory. If a kid could see the value in it and motivate themselves to make it through and rise above the dusty chaos, that was the kind of person he could get behind. There would be plenty who wouldn’t cut it, of course, but Rod calculated that at least his money was funding an effective method of sorting them out, and not just paying for a miniature circus in one of the glorified tents scattered throughout the rest of the county.

  Besides, his contributions had so much to do with the fun parts of campus. The state would pay for the personnel of the charter, while Rod would give them a place to work, and the students a place to play.

  He had submitted the plans for the renovation before the charter board had found all of its members, so they would have the design ready to roll out as part of their lobbying efforts should the plans be approved. And they were approved rather quickly. First by the property owners, who were so pleased to have a bold new tenant who generated such good publicity that they practically waived the lease, then by the county Board of Supervisors, eager to fill one of the mounting number of empty buildings, especially along the frontage road so visible from the freeway.

  Rod had explained the plans at many a meeting over the previous year, and was growing tired of hearing himself talk about it. So the first weekend of having all the volunteers on site ready to make it happen was just what he needed to revive his gusto. He toured the old dealership with the crew in tow, some of whom had no construction experience whatsoever, which inspired Rod even more.

  He could tell by the vehicles. The bigger white pickup trucks, and they were
all white, belonged to the professionals. The smaller pickups and SUVs, most of them white as well, were the dilettantes.

  They were all white because white showed the dirt and made it look like someone was working hard, which came in handy when someone didn’t feel like working. His first job in a field inspired this belief, as he was bossed around by a foreman who never got out of his truck, his white truck, except when the owner was around. The foreman would then use the dusty veneer of his hood to draw crude maps with his finger and do math problems in answer to the owner’s questions, in order to send a not-so-subliminal message about his efforts. Rod thought of it as finger-painting with bullshit. The only task the foreman executed with any diligence was rinsing his truck at the end of every shift, so as to clean the slate for the next show.

  He recalled that first foreman whenever he was able to attend one of Tony’s baseball games. His son always looked for an excuse to slide headfirst early in the game, so that the front of his uniform would be dirty and everybody would therefore conclude he was hustling, and fail to notice when he decided not to run out a grounder or go hard after a ball hit in the gap. Rod kept waiting for someone to catch on, for a coach to bawl him out and claim the dirt on his jersey was performance art, but no one ever did. On the way home after a game, Rod finally called him on it, and Tony freely confessed. They laughed about it until Tony said he suspected a lot of people were onto him, but didn’t dare say anything because they were hoping his father would include the baseball program in his campus largesse. Rod stopped laughing and told his son that was nonsense, but meanwhile swore to donate money to the team the day after Tony was once and for all scolded for lack of hustle.

  That day never came.

  Rod turned away from the dirty white pickup trucks and proceeded with the walkthrough he had dreamed about for months.

  He led the volunteers along as though he should have his arms spread wide apart the whole time, perhaps a staff in one hand. At each stop he didn’t just explain the future layout and purpose of the space in which they stood. He described a scene from the future.

  “Imagine a room full of third graders in their bright-colored shirts,” he said as they drifted around an empty sales office, having already told them the wall separating the office next door would be knocked out. “About six wearing yellow, six wearing blue, six green, and six red. The teacher has already covered the lesson, and now they’re in breakout sessions, working in small groups as the teacher and a couple of parents work the room and offer them help, or encourage them to expand on an idea, or play along with their jokes before getting them back on track…”

  “Imagine a crisp valley morning,” he said as they gathered in the middle of the main showroom floor. “The sun shining through the big display window that now has the school logo etched onto it. The kids have put their backpacks and projects on the shelves in the old parts department, each kid has their own designated spot. They gather here for announcements and the Pledge of Allegiance. Dale comes out from his office on the second floor, up where old Webb Townsend used to steer the ship when this baby was full of shiny new backhoes and rider mowers.”

  Rod paused and softly cackled. “They propped him up there even after his son took over. Remember? Let him look through the window and glare at everyone. I thought for sure he would die in that office.”

  “I’m glad he didn’t,” Dale shivered for effect. “Webb would make a very scary ghost.”

  The volunteers laughed.

  Rod smiled at Dale and took his cue to get back on track.

  “Dale, Mr. Copeland, calls a few of the kids up to the catwalk to acknowledge their achievements. They race up the steps and get their certificates, or trophies. But most of all they can see their classmates, they see all the colors. And they can see the teachers, the staff, and the parents who care about them. All these people who have their back, they’re all right there in front of them, looking up at them...”

  Rod stopped himself from getting too emotional by announcing that his favorite part was next, and then guided everyone over to the abandoned service area. He unlatched one of the garage doors and pulled the long oval chain that rolled it open until it reached the top with a metallic thud. He stood in the opening with his back toward the rising sunlight and let it shine around him.

  “Imagine the kind of playground we used to play on,” Rod announced to his squinting audience. “Not the kind at school, the kind you order from a catalogue, but the kind we created ourselves in vacant lots and the big backyards of those dads who liked to putter around and tinker with stuff. More of a constant project than a playground, where we used anything we could get our hands on to make our own structures and make up games, conduct experiments, challenge ourselves and each other. Inner tubes, tires, pieces of plywood, two-by-fours, boxes, crates, barrels, oil drums, old bicycle parts, that was our equipment. Those were the moving parts of an adventure that never looked the same for more than a day. Do your kids ever play those video games where they build a town, or create a ship or a vehicle of some sort?”

  Many of the volunteers nodded.

  “Well this will be the real deal. And here, look outside…”

  He led them through the garage door and across the pavement to the edge of the lot.

  “The property extends out into this meadow,” he gestured across a field of brittle grass dappled with scrub brush and a dry creek running through it. “The kids will not only have a variety of materials to work with, they’ll have a variety of space.”

  “So we’re just going to let them run around in a meadow full of gopher holes and in a garage full of old junk?” Candice asked.

  Dale spoke up from the back of the tour. “Adventure playgrounds are a concept that gained traction in England and then other parts of Europe. It’s starting to spread through the states with great success.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” she said.

  “There’s growing research that demonstrates we’re over-protecting children,” Dale moseyed around the edge of the group, working his way forward. “Allowing kids to have a sense that they’re facing obstacles on their own and creating worlds of their own fosters problem solving and provides a healthy way for them to act out on their natural need to feel independent. When kids are watched so closely for so much of their lives, they’re left with a weird combination of wanting independence more than ever, but being really terrible at knowing what to do with that freedom when they get it. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on them, of course. But we’ll try not to intervene unless someone is about to do some serious damage.”

  Most of the crowd responded with appreciative chuckles.

  Candice shrugged. “You’re the experts.”

  “But we’re not the last word,” Dale reached the front and stood next to Rod. “We’ll try things, and if you as parents decide that a certain idea isn’t working , then you have the power to make us get rid of it. This is a partnership.”

  Candice nodded, but apparently only to keep time while she considered whether to pursue the matter further.

  Rod veered away from Dale’s research and got promotional again before Candice could form another question.

  “And there’s other ways our kids can use their free time,” he headed for the front of the building, beckoning the tour to follow him around the corner. “If your kid is more the quiet type, a little more laid back, we’ve got perpetual landscaping going on.”

  He had to speak a little more loudly upon reaching the main entrance, as the freeway just beyond the frontage road made its presence felt, with as many big rigs as cars roaring past.

  “The Townsends kept the same landscape design pretty much since they opened the place,” Rod bobbed his head in the direction of the standard grass-and-shrub layout that used to welcome customers. The grass was baked, but the shrubs had deep roots and enough shade against the building to survive the drought. “It’s nice enough, all well and good, but nothing like what our kids can come up with. I’ve got deals with n
urseries and seed distributors, and we’ll divvy this plot into several different parcels and constantly reinvent them. You’ll never know what to expect as the seasons roll on, but if you have a kid who’s involved with this, one thing you can expect is that they’ll end up being a master gardener.”

  “If your child is more The Secret Garden than Lord of the Flies,” Dale added.

  Rod didn’t get the reference, but neither did many of the others. One of the contractors laughed politely.

  “Stop pretending like you get it,” his buddy chided him.

  “Anyway…” Rod milked the awkward moment for a laugh of his own.

  “See?” Dale surrendered. “If something doesn’t work, we admit it.”

  His confession got the reaction he was initially hoping for.

  Rod caught his eye and teased him with a broad swipe of his brow to signal a sense of relief, then signaled the start of the renovation.

  “Let’s do this!”

  The cheers were throaty but for a moment, as it seemed to suddenly dawn on the non-professional help that they didn’t know what to do.

  Rod had already been working with the contractors who were involved, so they knew their jobs. Finding tasks for the rest of the volunteers was more complicated. He wanted them to come back, so he had to locate procedures that were neither too menial and boring nor too intricate and frustrating.

  The first move was to wave the volunteer hours under their noses. He wrote down their names, and their children’s names, and told them he would get the list to the parent who had volunteered to log everyone’s hours. She had developed a system that involved everyone receiving an ID number, so Rod told them they would get their numbers the following weekend, and that they would be the first to officially bank some time. The volunteers were as pleased as he hoped they would be. Even Candice seemed to have moved past her skepticism over the playground and was back on board.

  Rod asked each of them if there was a part of the tour that interested them. After they named their spot, he asked them what skills they had to offer, or if they couldn’t think of any, asked them what they would be comfortable doing. He then matched their abilities with whatever was needed in that particular part of the property.

  Once everyone had a place and a project, Rod managed to stay involved and keep moving. He delivered tools on request, braced beams, held boards, and brought lunch. He sensed when someone was getting tired or frustrated and talked to them for a while about their kids.

  His strategies worked, at least for the laypeople, as attendance for the following weekends remained steady amongst them. It was the pros who started to fade, as the prison construction had fallen behind schedule and the firm started to offer weekend overtime pay. Some of the fathers had already fulfilled their contract to the prison, so not all of them were eligible, but Rod could feel the thinned out ranks in his muscles, which would finally heel by Wednesday after a weekend of labor that reminded him of his days in the fields.

  The parts of him that weren’t sore appreciated the reminder. Spending so much time at a desk, on a computer, in business casual suits, and behind the wheel of a company car often added a dash of guilt to his days. He was confident he had earned the right to soften up his schedule after all he had accomplished. He considered it back pay for all his previous work. But it never quite fit. When sitting in conferences rooms and scanning the other executives in attendance, it was obvious who had worn the white collar most of their lives, and who couldn’t help but tug on theirs, trying to hide the blue one underneath. Sometimes he was the only one, and when he did spot a fellow climber, they were inevitably able to spot him back. They would dine or have a drink together after the meeting and wonder if the others could classify them as well as they could detect themselves.

  So he embraced the tightness in his shoulders and forearms that weekends at the old dealership wrought, and grinned a little bit when his lower back seized up, knowing it was temporary, that when the renovation was over, he was not due back in the fields, that the wind and sun and rain would bounce off the windows he now worked behind.

  He did hire some extra help when the modular buildings arrived. They could only squeeze four classrooms out of the old dealership, which would serve Kindergarten through third grade, so a portion of their state funds went into the modular rooms. They were well-preserved leftovers from the nearby Army base, and the only input Rod and Dale offered was to request that they form a right angle in the farthest corner of the pavement from the main building, creating a semi-courtyard for grades four through eight. Nobody associated with the charter had any experience hooking up such a unit, and even if Rod did, he would not have been interested. The main building was his baby, and he was a doting father.

  Sometimes when a section was complete, when two sales offices had been converted into one classroom, or the rusty shelves in the parts department had been replaced and painted in bright colors, Rod would stand by himself in the middle of what had been done and admire the work, turning slowly, hands on hips. After this proud rotation, he would hold his ground and stare at nothing in particular, letting the satisfaction throb.

  When the name of the school had been professionally engraved on the big showroom window, and he thought everyone had gone home, he stood in the middle of the main floor and watched the sunset shine through the letters and the logo, a silhouette of an oak tree that the engraver had reproduced beautifully.

  Dale’s voice startled him, but not enough to distract his gaze.

  “Abby did a beautiful job on that window, didn’t she?”

  “Is that her name?” Rod said, keeping his eyes on the orange and purple glow rising from the hills that bordered the valley. “She kept calling herself ‘Siena’s Mom’.”

  “We’ve got some talented parents.”

  Dale came up beside Rod and patted him on the back.

  “We certainly do.”

  Rod returned the gesture.

  Dale joined him in admiring the view for a moment.

  “Final walkthrough tomorrow,” Rod said out of appreciation rather than as a reminder.

  “We’ll nail it.”

  “They’ll find some little things,” Rod smiled. “But that’s okay. We covered the big picture.”

  And as they proceeded through the inspection the next day, Rod barely paid attention to anything the inspector had to say. Dale was at the man’s elbow taking notes, so Rod hung back and imagined the best places to mount a plaque with the name “Rodrigo Pluma” on it. Almost every wall seemed to suffice. Above any doorway would work, too. On the grounds outside, he pictured some of those short cement pillars with the slanted tops holding aloft his commemorations, one in the landscaping area, another at the threshold of the meadow.

  He was able to camouflage his daydreaming with responsive nods when Dale would ask him if it was possible to address the latest announcement by the inspector, who seemed to point out issues for the sake of listening to his own voice. It wasn’t until they reached the signpost in front of the building that the inspector asked a question that required more than a yes or no answer.

  “Any plans for the sign?”

  The inspector looked up the pole at the big John Deere logo with the Townsend name above it.

  Dale and Rod looked up, too. Rod had some definite ideas, but couldn’t remember if he had shared them with Dale.

  “Rod?” Dale asked.

  Apparently he had not shared them.

  Dale and the inspector looked back down in Rod’s direction, who kept his eyes on the sign.

  Webb Townsend and his son had been big donors at St. Bonnie’s. Their names were all over that campus, including the front part of the ring of honor, the part facing the center court of campus, where everyone walked.

  “We’re taking it down,” said Rod, still facing skyward. “And keeping the pole.”

  He finally lowered his sights and looked at Dale and the inspector.

  “I’d like to raise a flag.”

>   “Good idea,” the inspector nodded.

  “Sure is,” Dale grinned.

  And when he took the sign down the following weekend, he would tell people that he was just excited about school starting when they asked him why he couldn’t stop smiling. He made sure no contractors were part of the crew. He told them that weekend was for installing white boards and bulletin boards, for moving desks and furniture. He told them it would be a good weekend for some of the other parents to get in some volunteer hours.

  He rented a cherry picker that he rode to the top of the sign before anyone could form a plan on how to take it down. Some of the parents finally realized this when the sign started to wobble and Rod braced it with both hands.

  “Mr. Pluma!” one of them called up. “We don’t have any ladders long enough to come help you!”

  “And I don’t think you can hold it long enough to get another cherry picker out here!” said another.

  “Oh well,” Rod played dumb. “I guess I’ll just have to shove it off. Look out below!”

  Once all the people at the bottom were out of his way, he pushed on the letter ‘s’ in “Townsend” and sent the sign falling to the sidewalk. The steel frame screeched, the plastic casing shattered, the light bulbs inside exploded. Rod looked down at the small-scale destruction and thought it would be best to suppress his latest smile.

  But the volunteers started to cheer, so he smiled more broadly than he had all day, since he could pretend it was in response to them.

  He lowered himself to the continued ovation, and his smile ran out of room and became laughter.