The Last Chairlift

25. THE “POLICE REPORT”

I was having a heightened-imagination moment—indulging a worst-case scenario, provoked by my unidentified writer gene—when I urged the snowshoer to take a good look at himself in the mirror before he answered the door to our faculty apartment. When I was home, and Elliot was dolled up as a woman, of course I would answer the door. It was easy for me to tell the student that Mr. Barlow was on the phone or in the shower. The student could come back in twenty minutes, after the little English teacher had removed the makeup and was once more wearing men’s clothes. Furthermore, I persuaded Elliot to attach a small notebook and a pen to our door in the dormitory hall. Students could leave notes for him if he happened not to be at home or he wasn’t wearing the right clothes.

Unsurprisingly, there were smart-ass students who left funny notes for Mr. Barlow or (occasionally) for me. The important thing, or so I thought, was that we had a system in place—a way to keep the snowshoer safe when he was wearing my mother’s clothes. It didn’t occur to me that Elliot would ever dress as a woman when he went out, if only late at night or very early in the morning.

When I pulled an all-nighter—when I had a term paper due, or I was studying for an exam—the snowshoer would drive out to Portsmouth Avenue and pick up a pizza for me. There was a strip of fast-food joints, a bar or two, and gas stations galore. Portsmouth Avenue wasn’t far from downtown Exeter or the academy campus, but it was far enough that you had to drive. Naturally, when I was pulling an all-nighter, Mr. Barlow went to the pizza place dressed as himself. And he always went for a walk, or took a run, in the early morning. After his walk or run, I would hear him in the shower—all this was before the dining-hall bells for breakfast, before the students were up and about in Amen Hall.

I didn’t know that Elliot occasionally took an early-morning walk in downtown Exeter, dressed in Little Ray’s clothes. And when the snowshoer pulled an all-nighter of his own—when he was grading blue books, or otherwise engaged, after I’d gone to bed—I only later learned that he sometimes drove out to the Portsmouth Avenue strip and picked up a pizza as a woman.

This was risky business for Mr. Barlow. I’m guessing it began when I was a student at the academy. I’m not sure if it continued when I was away in Pittsburgh, or if it went on later—when I was a college student in Durham, once again living with him in Exeter. In retrospect, it’s obvious that Elliot’s cross-dressing was meant to be; it was who she was.

Roland’s, that pizza place on the Portsmouth Avenue strip, attracted an unsavory late-night clientele. Maybe it was open later than any other joint with a liquor license in Exeter. Late at night, it was more of a bar than an eatery, but you could call ahead and order a pizza—you could pick it up, if you dared.

Similarly sketchy, in terms of its clientele, was a downtown Exeter convenience store called Verne’s, which was on Water Street—near the falls and the town’s most frequented fish market. Verne’s was open for business as early in the morning as Roland’s stayed open late at night—accordingly, their respective clientele were not unsavory in the same way. Men, drinking alone or together, were the majority of the late-night lowlifes at Roland’s. Teenage boys, actual or virtual delinquents—high school troublemakers (or dropouts), malingering before (and after) school—comprised the young thugs who hung out around Verne’s. Smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk was the closest they could come to political protest.

It would later emerge that the snowshoer seriously outdid himself to look like a woman on certain late-night and early-morning expeditions, when he (as a she) drove out to Roland’s to pick up a pizza or took a ten-minute walk to Verne’s—under the pretense of picking up a pack of gum, or a take-out cup of tea to sip on his walk back to Amen Hall. I say the gum and the tea, or even the pizza, were pretenses, because I know now that Mr. Barlow made these intrepid sojourns as a woman to test his powers of transformation. But the way I learned what Elliot was up to was not quickly forthcoming.

When our wrestling matches were away, we had early-morning weigh-ins in our gym before we got on the team bus. The wrestlers who were worried about their weight went to the gym earlier to check what they weighed; if they were a little over, they put on their sweats and ran in the cage before weigh-ins. One early morning, Matthew Zimmermann was on his way to the gym to check his weight, when he saw my mother. She was walking on Court Street, coming from downtown. Zimmer waved to her, but she didn’t wave back. “Either she didn’t see me or she didn’t recognize me—she just kept going,” Zim said, when he told me of the sighting. We were talking on the team bus. Zimmermann was puzzled that my mom was in town in ski season, when we were wrestling away.

“It wasn’t her,” I told him. “She’s not in Exeter.”

“I would swear I saw her,” Zimmer said. “Nobody looks like her.”

He hadn’t seen Little Ray, but I didn’t think twice about it. I knew that Zim was gaga about my mother. I thought he’d been hallucinating and had imagined he saw her. I didn’t doubt that Zimmer imagined her when he was beating off.

When I later told the snowshoer how Zim had fantasized that he’d seen Little Ray walking on Court Street at an ungodly hour of the morning, we both laughed.

“Zimmermann must be cutting too much weight,” the little English teacher told me.

“Imagine Ray walking anywhere at that hour,” I said. “Skiing, sure—she’d go skiing in the dark.”

“Poor Zim,” Elliot said, sighing. “I fear he is so infatuated with your mother that he sees her in his sleep.” We laughed and laughed.

We also laughed at the “Police Report,” which we read every week in our local newspaper, the Exeter Town Crier. The reported police business in the town of Exeter was generally not of a highly criminal nature, and the report itself was without attribution. Mr. Barlow and I could only speculate who might have written it: an exceedingly terse police officer or an unusually laconic journalist—in either case, a minimalist. There were wild animals causing trouble, and being captured, in town. “A raccoon, up to no good, was netted on Cass Street,” said the “Police Report.” There were pets in need of rescue, and “domestic disputes”—these were said to occur all over town. “A rowdy household on School Street merited an officer’s visit,” was one deadpan account.

There were often altercations, or similar incidents, in the parking lot at Roland’s. “Young men, behaving like hoodlums,” were more than once reported in the vicinity of Verne’s—less than innocently whiling away their time in the out-of-school hours. Reports of “public indecency” were never sufficiently described—not, at least, to my satisfaction or the snowshoer’s. Reports of “tense relations between town and gown” were downplayed or too vaguely stated; Elliot and I wanted to know more. Academy students were warned not to hang out at Verne’s, where townie toughs picked on the prep-school kids.

And during that time when I was an Exeter student, someone was killing cats—not just killing them but hanging them, in perfectly made hangman’s nooses. The cats were being executed. Not a breath of speculation in the “Police Report” in the Exeter Town Crier about who might be stringing up the cats—the unnamed reporter didn’t venture to guess. Both the town and the academy were rife with rumors. On the Exeter campus, the townies were suspected. In town, the perpetrator was presumed to be one of the prep-school kids. Many of the cats were hanged on or near academy grounds; cats were popular pets among faculty families. Academy housing hadn’t been conceived for cats or dogs, yet no one was slipping the perfectly made nooses around the necks of dogs.

“It must be a bird lover,” Elliot speculated. “Probably a young person,” he added.

“Another cat found hanging, this one on Spring Street,” was the full extent of the coverage in the Town Crier.

“Whoever writes the ‘Police Report’ isn’t a writer,” Mr. Barlow told me repeatedly.

“A townswoman was charged with lewd behavior on the Swasey Parkway,” was all the “Police Report” had to say.

“Lewd behavior where on the Swasey Parkway?” the snowshoer cried. “In a car, on one of the benches, in the grass?”

What sort of lewd behavior? I was dying to know.

“A cat in a noose on Tan Lane, the remains of another on Green Street,” was all the “Police Report” deemed fit to tell us.

“Whoever is writing this isn’t a cat—a cat would care!” Elliot said. He was more indignant about the writing than what was happening to the cats. Yet the little English teacher seemed scarcely interested in the most mysterious and most exhaustive “Police Report”—at least in my short memory of reading the Exeter Town Crier.

Late one weekend night, a married couple picked up a pizza at Roland’s. As they were driving out of the parking lot, the wife saw what she thought was an assault in progress. When the couple got home, the wife called the police. The wife said she saw “a big man, who appeared to be making an unwelcome advance on a small woman, who was trying to fight him off.” Before the police dispatched a squad car with two cops, the precinct called Roland’s and asked Roland what he knew.

“Nothin’,” Roland replied. This sounded like something the real Roland would say, but Roland took his baseball bat and went into the parking lot to investigate. Shortly before the squad car arrived, Roland found the big man—the alleged attacker. It appeared that the small woman had successfully fought him off, because the guy was lying facedown in the parking lot.

“It hurts to move,” the big man whispered to Roland, who’d nudged him with the baseball bat.

“The guy looked dead, but he was moanin’,” Roland told the Town Crier. When the two cops arrived, they rolled the big man onto his back. According to Roland, “There was gravel embedded in the guy’s forehead.”

The big man’s two drinking buddies were still drinking in Roland’s. The guy with the gravel embedded in his forehead had followed a “small, pretty woman” into the parking lot. Roland said he’d seen her before, but he didn’t know her name. “She never calls and orders a pizza—she just shows up and waits,” Roland said. “She drives a dark-colored VW Beetle—there’s a lot of them around,” he added, which (for Roland) was positively loquacious. Mr. Barlow and I had never known Roland to have this much to say.

And Roland wasn’t through talking. The three drinking buddies were local Exeter men, all shipyard workers at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The local Exeter men were said to be in their late twenties or early thirties. The big, gravel-pocked man who had a mix-up with the small, pretty woman was described by Roland as “havin’ made unwelcome advances on women alone before.”

The injured attacker was treated at Exeter Hospital for “two separated shoulders and two broken collarbones.” He was released into police custody, but the police also released him—pending charges, “yet to be filed,” by the mystery woman he’d attacked. The police were hopeful she would come forward and identify herself. “We only want to ask her some questions,” a police spokesperson said.

Her injured attacker could not explain exactly how she’d gotten the best of him in the parking lot. “She was stronger than she looked,” the shipyard worker told the police. “She got behind me, somehow.”

The police spokesperson sounded unsympathetic about the attacker’s injuries. It seemed the shipyard worker was attempting to kiss and fondle the woman—“when he found himself lying facedown in the parking lot, with the little woman cranking on his arms.”

“Did you read this?” I asked the snowshoer. For the Exeter Town Crier, it was a virtual novella of a “Police Report.”

“There’s definitely more detail than usual, but it’s both blandly written and inconclusive,” the little English teacher said.

“I’m not talking about the writing!” I exclaimed. The snowshoer shrugged. “A ‘small, pretty woman’ who was ‘stronger than she looked’—she also sounds like she knows how to wrestle,” I told him. “You drive a dark-colored VW Beetle,” I reminded him.

“How did the ever-eloquent Roland put it—‘there’s a lot of them around,’ or words to that effect?” Mr. Barlow asked me. But I wasn’t buying it; my suspicions were aroused. I must have sensed that this was something more than a cross-dressing compulsion. Something stronger was at work than Elliot’s desire to wear a woman’s clothes.

I began to believe my mother. Mr. Barlow was a woman—“she just wasn’t born one,” as my mom had told me.

Yet I didn’t exactly confront the snowshoer—not entirely, not at first. What I said to him was: “It could have been you, Elliot. You look very pretty as a woman, and you’re stronger than you look.”

“And you thought Zimmer was fantasizing,” the snowshoer said.

“You could easily get behind a bigger guy and take him down,” I told him.

“Easily,” he agreed, smiling. “But I’m not sure how I would manage to separate both his shoulders and break both his collarbones,” Mr. Barlow said.

“I’m not sure how you would manage to do that, either,” I admitted, “but I’ll find out.”

“Please tell me when you find out how one does that, Adam,” the snowshoer said, still smiling. “It definitely sounds like it could be a useful thing to know.”

I definitely knew who would know, and I knew when and where to find him. Long before and after wrestling practice—even after the other coaches had showered and left the coaches’ locker room, and well before the other coaches got there—Coach Dearborn could be found smoking on the locker-room bench. Mr. Dearborn lived and smoked in the coaches’ locker room, as if he expected to die there. His wrestlers knew he was available to them there. In those days, no one minded the smoke. Coach Dearborn had been a middleweight at Illinois, but his weight-cutting days were over. Elliot and I had estimated that the revered coach weighed more than two hundred pounds.

One late afternoon, when I’d lingered after practice, I found Mr. Dearborn with just a towel around his waist in the coaches’ locker room. He was alone, sitting on the bench, using an empty tennis-ball can as an ashtray. His big biceps and a formidable pair of trapezius muscles were the most noticeable—they hung in slabs. Although he smoked everywhere else, I never saw him with a cigarette in the wrestling room. He could still kick the ass of any wrestler at Exeter.

“What’s up, Adam?” Coach Dearborn asked me. I had the “Police Report” from the Town Crier, which I put on the locker-room bench beside him. “I’ve seen it,” he said, without looking at it. “I wondered if your mom was in town, and if someone made the mistake of hitting on her.” We both laughed.

“Whoever she was, it sounds like she knew what to do,” I told him. The butt of his cigarette looked small in his big hand. He used the butt end to light a fresh cigarette. When Mr. Dearborn dropped the butt in the tennis-ball can, there was a hiss—there was water in the can, which the coach swished around. I knew he was waiting for me to say more. “It sounds like she slipped behind him and took him down—a duck under, maybe, or some kind of slide-by,” I suggested.

“I’ll bet on a duck under—that way, all her weight would be riding him down. That would explain the embedded gravel in the big guy’s forehead—he landed face-first,” Coach Dearborn pointed out.

“Then what?” I asked him. He took a long drag on his cigarette, as if he needed to think about it, but it was pretty clear he’d already thought it through.

“A fight in a parking lot isn’t the same as a wrestling match, Adam—you can pin a guy with a cross-face cradle, but a cross-face cradle doesn’t end a fight. There’s no ref in the parking lot—there’s no one to stop the fight. You have to end it,” the coach explained.

“You have to hurt the guy, you mean,” I said.

“You’ve got all your weight on the back of his neck and his shoulder blades—that is, if you’ve hit the duck under right,” Mr. Dearborn continued.

“It sounds like she hit it right,” I pointed out.

“So you run an arm bar or a chicken wing past ninety degrees—you run the guy’s elbow up to his ear, or to his temple. There’s no ref to stop you,” Coach Dearborn reminded me. “You run the arm bar or the chicken wing till you feel his shoulder pop—you’ll hear his collarbone break, too. There’s no crowd hollering in the parking lot—you’ll definitely hear a collarbone break, if it’s quiet. It makes a clicking sound,” Mr. Dearborn added. “And popping the second shoulder, or busting the other collarbone, is even easier,” he went on. “The guy’s already hurting—he won’t resist you. Most guys, especially the big guys, can’t get to their feet if they can’t support their weight with one or both arms. That guy at Roland’s couldn’t even get off his face,” the coach concluded.

“I don’t suppose you know a small, pretty woman who could have managed all that,” I said to him. If the snowshoer even crossed Coach Dearborn’s mind, the coach was poker-faced about it.

“She must be from out of town,” was what the coach said, after another long drag on his cigarette.

“Roland said he’d seen her before,” I reminded Mr. Dearborn. “If it happens again, I suppose we’ll know she’s from around here,” I added.

“If that little woman is as small and pretty as the newspaper said, it’ll happen again—if she’s from around here,” Coach Dearborn said. “I suppose you’ve noticed, Adam, there are more men who are assholes than there are small, pretty women—around here, anyway.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” I told him. As I was leaving the coaches’ locker room, I saw him light another cigarette. I knew; Coach Dearborn knew, too. We wouldn’t have long to wait for a follow-up episode—namely, the next time an asshole made the mistake of hitting on the wrong little woman.

From what I could visualize, given the subdued “Police Report,” it began with two younger assholes the second time. Two of the town’s troublemaking teenagers had followed what sounded a lot like the same small, pretty woman. She was walking away from Verne’s when they saw her. In the early mornings, a French Canadian couple managed the convenience store. The husband said he’d seen the little lady before. “She’s a real lady—her manners are very ladylike, and she wears the nicest-looking clothes,” the husband added.

“She looks really nice for so early in the morning,” the wife had observed.

“She likes tea, not coffee—she gets a hot tea to go,” the husband remembered. I knew Mr. Barlow liked tea, not coffee.

About the two young hoodlums who’d followed her from Verne’s, the French Canadian couple were less complimentary. Those two boys had been caught shoplifting once. Those two thugs had been known to harass any pretty girl around Verne’s—many times, or so the French Canadian couple maintained. It appeared that the police had a history with those two. According to the “Police Report,” their names were withheld because of their young age, but it was clear they’d gotten themselves in trouble before.

Keep in mind: Elliot Barlow was in his early thirties, but he’d always looked younger than he was. The two teenagers, who followed the snowshoer as far as the fish market before they made their clumsy moves, must have imagined the little lady was their age, or not much older. In the town of Exeter, these two miscreant yokels had never encountered a full-size woman—not to mention, a full-size man—who was only four feet nine.

“She was just real pretty,” one of the yokels said later.

“We were just messin’ around with her—we weren’t tryin’ to hurt her, or nothin’,” the other yokel said.

“Yeah, we didn’t know she was older—not till we got real close,” the primary culprit reported. According to the Town Crier, he’d been the first of her two attackers.

“Those two boys were trying to kiss her, and she wanted no part of them,” the fish deliveryman later said.

The two horny hoodlums had herded her into the fish-market parking lot. At that hour of the morning, the store wasn’t open for business. The parking lot was virtually deserted—only the deliveryman was there, unloading his van.

“Come here, cutie,” the first of the two teenagers said.

When he grabbed her, and tried to kiss her, the little woman did something to the boy’s wrist. When the second teenager touched her, she did the same thing to him.

“I tried to come to her assistance”—not quite the full extent of the fish deliveryman’s account. What he added was mystifying to me. “I thought there was something a little off about her,” the fish deliveryman further said. This was noticeably not clear in the “Police Report,” but the fish deliveryman’s wrist was injured in the scuffle—if there was a scuffle; it didn’t sound like much of one.

Inside the store, the fishmonger said he heard the “hullabaloo.” By the time he got to the parking lot, the small woman in jeopardy had left—“she was nowhere to be seen,” he said. “All I saw was three guys, holding their wrists,” the fishmonger added.

The Exeter Hospital stated that the two teenagers were treated for “surprisingly similar wrist injuries” and released into police custody. The police summarily released them—pending yet-to-be-filed charges by the mystery woman the boys had attacked. The fish deliveryman, who was also not named, was released by the hospital and questioned by the police. The two teenagers had soft-tissue injuries—“tears in both the anterior and posterior radioulnar ligaments” for the first attacker, and “a single tear in the palmar radioulnar ligament” for the second. Somehow, in the scuffle that didn’t sound like much of a scuffle, the fish deliveryman suffered “more extensive damage to the distal radioulnar joint”; in fact, he had “a distal radius fracture and more than one tear in the radioulnar ligament.” All three were looking at “likely surgeries.”

True to form, the “Police Report” did not speculate if this small, pretty woman was the same small, pretty woman who’d done different damage to the shipyard worker in the parking lot at Roland’s. “We’d appreciate it if the woman or women attacked would contact us,” was all the police spokesperson had to say.

“I don’t suppose you know anything about this episode in the fish-market parking lot,” I said to the snowshoer, when we’d both had time to read about the feisty woman—a martial-arts marvel—in the most recent Town Crier.

“She can’t be from around here—it sounds like she knows some aikido-type techniques,” Mr. Barlow said.

“Aikido-type techniques,” I repeated. “What do you know about aikido?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” the little English teacher said, smiling.

I went once more to the man I knew would know. This time, I didn’t bother to bring a copy of the Town Crier with me. I already knew Coach Dearborn would have read the “Police Report.” This time, he didn’t ask me what was up. “Sit down, Adam,” the coach told me. I sat next to him on the long bench in the coaches’ locker room. Mr. Dearborn plunked his cigarette into the tennis-ball can, where it hissed. I was a little alarmed that he hadn’t lit a fresh cigarette—he hadn’t even taken a last drag—and he didn’t bother to swish the water around in the tennis-ball can, which he put down on the bench between us. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?” the coach asked me. When I nodded, he said, “Give me your left hand.”

The pain was so sudden and sharp that I flinched and cried out. It happened so fast, I didn’t see what the coach had done. When he felt me flinch, he stopped, but he still had hold of my wrist. Coach Dearborn knew how to control your hands—when he had your wrist, you weren’t getting it back. “That was a rotational wristlock, Adam—it causes radioulnar rotation,” he told me. Now he did something a little different. The pain was as sudden and sharp, but it came from somewhere else in the joint of my wrist. Once more, the coach stopped hurting me, but he still held my wrist. “That was a pronating wristlock, Adam—there are also supinating and hyperflexing wristlocks, but you get the idea, don’t you?”

“I get it,” I told him, and he let my wrist go. “Are they aikido techniques?” I asked him, rubbing my left wrist.

“I don’t know much about aikido, but it strikes me as unrealistic,” Mr. Dearborn said, lighting a cigarette. “Wristlocks in wrestling are submission holds—you make your opponent yield to the pain. Submission holds, like choke holds, are illegal now, but they used to be legal,” Coach Dearborn told me.

“I don’t suppose you would have shown Mr. Barlow any illegal holds—no choke holds or submission holds, no wristlocks,” I said.

“Mr. Barlow is a good teacher, Adam,” Mr. Dearborn said. “Good teachers are also good students—if you like to teach, you like to learn. Mr. Barlow has made himself a model student of the sport of wrestling, not just the moves and the holds but wrestling history—including the rules, and the changes in the rules.”

“It sounds like you showed him some submission holds, maybe wristlocks,” I ventured to say.

“I don’t recall the context, but I’m pretty sure the subject of wristlocks would’ve come up,” Mr. Dearborn said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. He could see I was still rubbing my left wrist. “There’s ice in the training room, Adam—about twenty minutes before practice, put some ice on that wrist.”

“What would you say if I told you Mr. Barlow sometimes dresses as a woman—what do you know about that?” I asked him.

“I’ve heard of it,” Mr. Dearborn said neutrally. From the way he said it, I couldn’t tell if he meant he’d heard of Mr. Barlow doing it, or he’d just heard of cross-dressing in general.

“I didn’t think Mr. Barlow was doing it outside our faculty apartment—I don’t really know if he is the small, pretty woman in those parking lots,” I told Coach Dearborn.

“I think Mr. Barlow is one of the best guys at this school,” Mr. Dearborn told me.

“I think so, too—I just worry about him,” I said.

“Worrying about someone is fine—you just have to be selective in what you worry about, Adam.” The coach could tell I was puzzling over what he meant. “Anyone can lose a fight, Adam—especially in a parking lot, where there are no rules. I lost twice,” Mr. Dearborn told me, “and that was on the mat, where I knew the rules.”

“I get it,” I said. The coach sat smoking in his sweatpants and socks; he was wearing a T-shirt, but he still had to put on his wrestling shoes. The other coaches would soon be arriving in the locker room, the snowshoer among them. As before, I was leaving the coaches’ locker room when I saw Mr. Dearborn light a fresh cigarette.

“You shouldn’t smoke so much,” I told him. I understood what he meant about selective worrying, but I was worried about him, too.

With his cigarette, which he held between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, Coach Dearborn pointed to his left wrist. “Ice, Adam,” he said, smiling. “Twenty minutes should suffice.”

When I once more mentioned the episode in the fish-market parking lot to the little English teacher, I tried to be as incisive concerning fights without rules as Coach Dearborn had been with me. “I don’t care what you know about wristlocks, Elliot, or that your wrestling has enabled you to get the better of a drunk, a deliveryman, and a couple of teenagers—you were lucky,” I told him. “Anyone can lose a fight, Elliot. Even Coach Dearborn lost—he lost twice—and that was on the mat, where he knew his opponent didn’t have a knife or a gun. What if, next time, one of your attackers has a knife or a gun?”

“My dear Adam,” the snowshoer said. “I’ll be more careful next time—if there is a next time,” he said. “I just wanted to see if I could be convincing as a woman.”

“It sounds like you were pretty convincing,” I told him. “I’m just not sure how the fish deliveryman got the worst of it—he was hurt worse than the boys. I thought the deliveryman was trying to help you, or is that just what he told the cops?”

“He tried to feel me up under my coat—under your mother’s coat, I should say,” Mr. Barlow explained. “I’m not sure how feeling me up constitutes coming to my assistance, as the fish deliveryman said.”

“He said ‘there was something a little off’ about you. What did he mean by that?” I asked the snowshoer.

“I suppose he meant he couldn’t find my boobs, though he was feeling all around for them,” Elliot admitted.

“So you broke his wrist,” I said.

“I thought he had it coming,” the snowshoer said. “I feel bad that I had to hurt those boys, but I tried to hurt them a little less.”

“I think they had it coming, too,” I told him.

“I’ll be more careful, Adam—maybe there doesn’t need to be a next time,” the little English teacher said.

“I thought we had a system in place—a way to keep you safe,” I said. “You’re easy to recognize, you know—as a man or as a woman. There’s no adult as small as you, Elliot—no one I’ve seen, not around here,” I told him.

“I’ll be more careful—I promise,” Mr. Barlow said. “I had to get your mom’s coat dry-cleaned,” he told me. “It smelled like fish!” We were both laughing when we heard the knock on the door to the dormitory hall; in the context of the moment, the knock made us jump.

“You look okay,” I quickly told him.

The snowshoer sighed. “I know,” he said, disheartened. It was only then I realized how much he hated looking like a man.

I opened the door and admitted Matthew Zimmermann, who was not a resident of Amen Hall. Zimmer looked a little disturbed about something, as usual. He had a note in his hand. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. He’d taken it off the notebook on our door to the dormitory hall. “You must have a Holy Roller in the dorm—a genuine Bible-thumper,” Zim said.

In rather elegant or old-fashioned handwriting, all the note said was “Deuteronomy 22:5.”

“The Bible-thumpers are obnoxious with the shit they hold up at football games,” Zimmer was saying. “They always sit in the end-zone seats, where the TV cameras can find them—John 3:16 is a big one with those end-zone Christians,” Zim told us.

“Everyone has seen that one—I’ve looked it up,” the snowshoer said. He gave a cursory look at the Deuteronomy note, which I’d handed to him. “John 3:16 is, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’—you know, that one,” Mr. Barlow said, handing the note back to me.

“What’s the Deuteronomy say?” I asked the little English teacher.

“God knows—we’ll have to look it up,” Mr. Barlow said, smiling. “It’ll be something worse,” he told us. “The Gospel according to John is Jesus—Jesus says mostly nice things. But Deuteronomy is Moses—Moses is harsh. Moses is full of ‘you shall not’ this and ‘you shall not’ that. Moses lays down the law in an uptight, Old Testament way,” the snowshoer said.

“I’ve been worrying about something,” Zimmermann blurted out, in his 110-pound way.

“Oh, boy—there’s lately been a lot of worrying going around, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said.

“You should talk to Coach Dearborn,” I told Zimmer. “The coach has a theory about selective worrying.” This was meant, of course, for the snowshoer to hear, though I saw no reason not to share the selective-worrying theory with our starting 110-pounder.

“I’ve been thinking about something—it’s just a crazy idea, but I thought I should say something about it,” Zim told us. “That little woman who’s been beating up those guys—what if it’s your mom, Adam? What if it’s your wife, Mr. Barlow? She could do it, you know,” Zimmer told us. “And I swear I saw her—I told you!” Zim said to me.

“Adam told me. You didn’t see her, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said. “Ray hasn’t been in town—it wasn’t her you saw,” the snowshoer said.

“The woman I saw was small enough to be her—she looked even smaller!” Zimmer exclaimed. “And there’s no one as pretty as she is,” he assured us.

It sounds like you were pretty convincing, I almost said again to the little English teacher, but I didn’t.

“Stop worrying, Zim,” Mr. Barlow said.

“And what do you guys make of the cat killer? The creepy feline hangman!” Zimmer cried. The pitiless violence in the town of Exeter had seriously upset him.

“I’ll bet a cat isn’t doing it,” I told our 110-pounder.

“I’ll bet the small, pretty woman in the parking lot isn’t the cat killer, Zim,” the little English teacher said.

After Zimmermann left, the snowshoer and I had a hard time finding a Bible in our faculty apartment. “I know I have one, but I never read it—I just use it to look up things,” Elliot kept saying. I kept looking at the almost ornate handwriting on the note—it was hard to believe an Exeter student had handwriting like that.

Mr. Barlow finally found a Bible. It was partially hidden behind an L.L.Bean catalog in the bathroom he shared with my mom; Little Ray got some of her long underwear, for skiing, from L.L.Bean. “The good old King James Version—just what I like to read when I’m taking a dump,” the snowshoer said. We were both laughing when he put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat on it. He quickly found the passage in Deuteronomy. I could see his lips move as he read it to himself—our laughter dying. I could see in his expression what he’d meant when he said Moses wasn’t as nice as Jesus.

“Read it,” I said to him. Mr. Barlow was a good reader. I didn’t doubt that he would find the voice to imitate how harsh Moses could be—in an uptight, Old Testament way.

“According to Moses, ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.’ Well, thank goodness, that couldn’t be more clear!” the little English teacher declared. “Whoever Moses was, he was a much better writer than the tentative soul who is writing the ‘Police Report.’ ”

“So you’ve been seen, you’ve been recognized—so somebody knows,” I said to him.

The snowshoer shrugged. “Or someone has heard something,” Elliot said, sighing. “My dear Adam, you have to stop worrying—you worry too much.”

I held up the handwritten note. “This doesn’t look like a kid wrote it,” I told him.

“I’ll tell you who knows,” the snowshoer suddenly said. “The fish deliveryman definitely knows I don’t have any boobs—he was groping all around for them! Does the note smell like fish?” Mr. Barlow asked me. I sniffed it—it didn’t smell like fish.

“You’ve got to be more careful—you promised,” I reminded him.

“I promise, my dear Adam,” the little English teacher told me. “But it’s not always clear what you need to be afraid of.”

I would remember that, if not Deuteronomy 22:5—I would, in fact, make an effort to forget the judgmental Moses. But New Hampshire is Puritan territory. In a country of sexual intolerance, there’s more than one Moses around.