Suzanne was right: Jason's Nissan did need a carwash. Sorely. It was a perfect target for finger artists writing WASH ME on the windows, but his ex-wife's reminder triggered in Jason a rebellion against carwashes. They were a waste of time, money, and water. It hadn't rained a drop since Halloween, aside from a stingy Christmas drizzle, and the word drought peppered more and more conversations now. Jason knew the moment he succumbed to the graffiti's plea, it would rain that day.

Though he had dreaded the stop-and-go snail's pace from Beverly Hills to Sun Valley—the palpable fear that had wrested him from an imminent kiss with Suzanne's roommate—traffic turned out to be a breeze that afternoon, plenty of space between the cars. Though the dusty windshield and its finger-drawn WASH ME—Jason beheld the dream highway the dreamers and visionaries of the freeway system had imagined: five wide-open, glass-smooth lanes either direction. Jason got to Sun Valley with plenty of time to spare.

Having time to spare, he began to search for the national cafe. The one the nation's coffee snobs turn to for their brew. Since teaching at San Anselmo in the mornings he yearned for a really good cup of coffee. The quest took him to parts of Sun Valley he'd never seen before. Where the pieces of Los Angeles' jackhammered sidewalks, concrete steps and slabs of old sidewalk, rose to the sky in ash-gray mountains, jumbled with the careless abandon of children's toy blocks. Acres upon acres where the scarred earth and stench brought on by a ceaseless caravan of trucks bearing the city's refuse, its unwanted diapers and old shoes, banana skins and egg shells, coffee grounds and phonograph records and dental floss, revealed Sun Valley's nature as chief dumping ground for the big city. Downwind a scent of rotting meat was enough to turn Jason's stomach. Now he knew how Sun Valley had earned the sobriquet, Scum Valley.

Facing a last mountain of garbage, defended by seagulls hoping for a morsel of rotting fish, he turned around and headed back to Jefferson Night School.

It was one of those remarkable classes. Wholly unprepared thanks to the zigzag course of the day, and yet it took off. Jason remembered one of the gibberish games from acting class at Eureka College. Pairs were formed: one spoke English, the other gibberish. The students loved that. The energy crackled in classroom 39 and he clocked out early, pushing himself. He had to reach the office before Mr. Leonard left in his elderly BMW. A volunteer erased the board and Jason quickly put everything away in his backpack. The roster he penciled in while the students played the gibberish game.

Jason was so doggone happy. Humming his imagined song for the San Anselmo stage, snapping fingers. Couldn't wait for Mr. Leonard's reaction. It occurred to him that his stomach pains and cramps provoked by teaching had diminished during the last weeks of winter to the point where he could ask himself, “Hey, where's my acid reflux?” And his students' numbers were increasing. No fudging required.

The second he closed the door to room 39, Miss Fenwick came, dragging her milk crate on clattering plastic wheels, spilling books and papers. She walked slowly, with great poise and dignity.

“Jason, I've got a question” Miss Fenwick said, fingering her long bony chin and adjusting her gold glasses on the ridge of her long nose.

“Did you ever have this student, Fermin?”

“Last name?”

“Acosta,” Miss Fenwick said.

“Oh yeah,” Jason said impatiently. During the slow trajectory back to the bungalow, he paid Miss Fenwick only a slim portion of his attention. Distracted by his need to show Joey Leonard “Too Many Marias” before he bailed from the office.

“Yeah. Kind of quiet and very polite,” Jason said.

“I'm thinking of moving him down to Literacy.”

Jason gave Miss Fenwick the fragmentary attention of responsive glances and robotic murmurs that a bored parent lends to a child's speedy prattling. Jason could listen but not hear Miss Fenwick's words. His inattention, in due time, would turn into an source of deep regret, just as a child's unheeded words warning of a serpent that lay in the grass ahead.

“That's funny,” Jason said. “I moved him up to your level because my level was too easy.”

“You know how they say, you break it, you own it?” Miss. Fenwick said. “Fermin has broken English in every conceivable way. He doesn't own it. He doesn't know how to write the alphabet. I don't think he's had any schooling in his country. He can barely write his own name.”

“Strange. Are you sure it's the same Fermin?” Jason said. “The Fermin I knew was doing texting on his cell phone,” Jason said.

“What's strange about that?”

“He was texting in English.”

(to be continued)

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