Richard Rogers

Richard Rogers was tall. 

He stood at the back of the class photos, looking at the camera and he never smiled.  He didn’t need to.  Something in him always smiled. 

He moved slowly and delicately, sometimes it seemed like he wasn’t moving at all.  In the classroom he sat behind everyone else, his knees knocking the top of his wooden desk.  He looked out the window when the teacher spoke, one ear listening to the convention of birds in the tree tops, the other to Miss McFuller.

She was an exasperated woman but Richard Rogers took her to the edge.  It didn’t matter how much little attention he paid, if she asked him a question, he answered correctly.  Which way does the moon swing, do zucchinis have to be green, are peas from or pod or a nod, should grass be cut in winter or summer, what is an hypotenuse, what did Darwin teach us, what did Einstein discover. 

She spluttered at his answers.

The moon, Miss McFuller, swung to the right during the week and to the left on the weekends.  Zucchinis were white before green.  Grass needs to be cut in summer.  The hypotenuse was the longest length of a right-angled triangle.  Darwin taught evolution and Einstein gave us the theory of relativity.  Miss.

If she sighed and told him to look at her, not out the window, he would look directly at her, his brown eyes gentle and enquiring. 

“Sorry, Ma’am.”

She would blush and look away, as if he had touched her intimately. 

But Richard Rogers was like that.  He could squat down low for a card game, put down a five dollar note, watch the game animatedly and then poof, he’d be pointing to the tip of a crow’s wings, measuring its span, commenting on its blackness. 

“Beauty everywhere,” he mumbled to me one day.

“What?” I said, rushing to get to class. 

The bell had already rung.  Richard Rogers never ran for the bell.  It wouldn’t get him anywhere faster he said.

“Beauty,” he spoke more loudly and a few teachers turned.  He made a squiggle in the air with his hand, drawing the shape of a flower.

“Everywhere,” he shouted. 

He loped a long, unaware of those who smiled around him or how his squiggle was at this very moment, lodging deep in their hearts.  

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Washington

Washington City.  I struggled from the train platform through the hordes of people all rushing to get to work.  The taxi pulled up at the chalk-white steps below the Hill.  I paid the driver and got out.  Breathed the air.  It smelt of talking.  I walked up the hill, over the green grass to the spot where George Bush had said we should meet.  Now ninety years old and dying of stomach cancer, his back was straight enough with a small stoop of the shoulders, but he didn’t shuffle like I expected and his stamina was formidable. 

He put his hands on his stomach before he shook hands with me. 

“I neglected my stomach,” he told me.  “I neglected to notice what it was thinking.” 

I was tongue-tied.  I was twenty-three years old.  I knew of this man only by history books and yet what I’d read said he made too many decisions based on his gut.  He winked at me and smiled.

“Relax.  Dying is the easy part.  I’d been scared of it so long when it finally came to me I laughed.  It is almost wonderful.”

He took my hand.  "We will be friends"

“I’m a Democrat,” I blurted out, my face going hot and red, feeling foolish.  What a stupid thing to say. 

“They die too you know,” George Bush said. 

I laughed with him.  I had trained as a psychologist for the dying and George Bush was to be my first patient.  He’d heard of me through my grandfather who had praised my sensitivity, my tender hands that played Beethoven at midnight and might be a source of solace to the dying, my old man’s soul in a young woman’s body that listened so beautifully and so tenderly.

We walked across the grass together to his limousine.  He slipped an arm through mine and said, “I don’t need a walking stick but a hand I don’t mind.” 

His minder opened the door.

“Eight o’clock Monday morning then.”

“Sir?”

“You have the job.”

I nodded, trying not to grin too much, trying to maintain a professional approach.  My first paid job.  The black limousine, shiny against the neat, coiffed green of the grass, pulled away slowly as if carrying the Queen.

I almost waved.  When the car was finally out of sight, I whooped, a fist in the air, a gush of air in my lungs, a terrific noise that caused passing senators at the hill top to pause a moment and wonder.

I had a job to do.  


Written by Jedda Bradley