Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 124, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 757 & 758, September/October 2004

The Death of Doc Virgo by Hal Charles

The two Eastern Kentucky University professors who write under the byline Hal Charles often choose rural Kentucky as the setting for their stories. This time out they take us back to a turbulent era, the 1960s, when the citizens of Kentucky reacted very differently from urban America. As usual, they’ve added a touch of humor to their tale of mayhem.

You know, it’s been eight years since high-school graduation, and this is the first time I’ve been back to Woodhole. Too many painful memories. But one day last week I realized it was finally time to return to the Clement County Public Cemetery to pay my respects. Not a day passes I don’t think about the way you died.

1968. The Vietnam War had reached a turning point in public acceptance — except in Clement County, where kids dropped out of Woodhole High to enlist. The mini-dress was in. Not here. The Woodhole Alliance for Cleaner Kids (WACK) got the city council to pass an ordinance requiring girls under twenty-one to have their skirts one inch below their knees. The Wild Bunch was showing up in Lexington, but in the land time forgot, the Starz ’n Stripes Theater ran The Odd Couple for five straight months. It was either Mark Twain or W. C. Fields who looked prophetic for having proclaimed, “If I heard the world was going to end, I’d move to Kentucky because everything happens there later.”

But at Woodhole High in 1968 we couldn’t even read Mark Twain. WACK convinced the school board to ban his most famous book. Because Huck didn’t live with his father or mother, they labeled the classic as “un-American.” In English IV class, we were fed a steady diet of A Tale of Two Cities, To Have and to Hold, and Ivanhoe. All our meals consisted of Miss Large’s getting us to read the classics round-robin. Once when J.D. Bracy, who was both class clown and valedictorian, interrupted her dramatic rendering of Sidney Carton’s “far, far better” speech to ask if the uprising of Dickens’s French peasants could be equated to the Vietnamese expelling the French from their land, Miss Large paused in her crocodile tears, peered over her Ben Franklins with a look that could lop years off a young man’s life, and banished J.D. to the principal’s office till he could conduct himself “like a proper young gentleman.”

Luckily for J.D. and the rest of us, prim and proper Miss Large got knocked up by some local big shot and had to take a “leave of absence.” The way we heard it, Hortense, the wife of our county judge-executive, Homer Fanning, had a nephew who was truly desperate for a job. Wily old Hortense withheld her favors till His Honor convinced the school board that Waverly (we never knew if it was his first name or last) was the perfect temporary replacement for Miss Large. Those of us who had been to Judge Fanning’s traffic court feared this new appointment was going to come down on our heads harder than His Honor’s gavel.

While we waited for Waverly to walk into our senior English class that late September morning, we took to speculating about our substitute teacher. Leah Cokely hoped he was cute ’cause she was tired of turning down dates with “little boys who had more pimples than IQ points.” Brad “Bigasa” House, who played left tackle on the football team, guessed Waverly’d be “skinnier than the pole on a butterfly net” ’cause all the real men were in Vietnam — only he said “in country”; Brad wanted to be a jarhead even more than he wanted to be an NFL player. Howie Bowles figured the teacher had to be gay — his exact word was “queer.” Everybody knew, he claimed, that was the only type that went to college. But when Waverly entered the class, we were all proved wrong.

Muscular, and taller than most basketball players, he appeared to us in torn jeans, a tie-dyed T-shirt, a pair of sandals on which somebody had printed FLIP and FLOP, hair longer than Miss Large’s (who was Pentecostal), and a pair of wire-frame glasses like Nana, my mom’s mom, wore.

“You male or female?” says Brad half-seriously.

“Neither, bro. I’m a hermaphrodite.”

“See,” mutters Howie. “Didn’t I tell you he was a little light in his loafers?”

“Hey, bro,” says the teacher, who must have had radar ears, “I’m wearing sandals.” He perches on one foot like a stork and shoves the leather sole in Howie’s face.

“You from this planet?” tries J.D.

“Spaceship Earth,” the new teacher says, sitting down cross-legged on Miss Large’s always neat desk. “Species, Homo erectus.”

“Me, too,” says J.D., “especially when Leah bends over to pick up a pencil.”

The class all breaks up, except Leah, of course. I expect Waverly to jump all over us just to show his authority, but there he is, probably laughing the loudest. In fourteen years of education I’d never heard a teacher laugh before, like it was against their professional code or something.

“What’s this ‘bro’ stuff?” I ask.

“You must have heard some Afro-Americans use that term,” answers Waverly. “Listen some—”

“There are no Afro-Americans in Clement County,” volunteers Leah.

“Or black people, neither,” adds Brad.

The new teacher picks up a textbook from Miss Large’s desk. “Molding Young Minds,” he reads slowly.

“That’s ‘mold’ as in ‘fungus,’ ” says J.D., who was cleverer than the rest of us combined. “You going to start by having us write one of those ‘How I Spent My Summer Vacation’ papers, because we already—”

“Right now I’m not interested in your summer vacation,” says Waverly.

“No?” says Howie. “How’d you spend your summer?”

Without blinking, the new teacher says, “In the Cook County jail.”

The room grows quiet. After a while Brad says, “What’d you do, man? Jaywalk?”

Waverly grins. “A bunch of us staged a sit-in at the Democratic National Convention, and we were carted off by the Windy City pigs.”

“I resent that word,” says Howie. “My dad’s the local sheriff and he works hard.”

“Listen carefully. I didn’t say your father was a pig,” returns Waverly, still not raising his voice or crying like Miss Large did when we said something she didn’t agree with. “I said the Mace-in-the-face, jackbooted, baton-wielding Gestapo dressed in Chicago police uniforms were pigs.”

“Be that as it may,” says J.D., using a phrase I know he picked up from Laugh-In, “what hieroglyphics you gonna make us read this year?”

“Yeah,” charges Howie, “you gonna hand out the same textbooks my mom and dad used to read here?”

Waverly stands and opens his hands as if holding a globe. “What would you like us to read this fall?”

Now we don’t know what to say because as long as we had been part of the Clement County School System we had just read what we’d been told.

Leah says, “You’d let us read anything we want?”

“As a class, yes. I’ll make you a covenant—”

“A what?” says Howie.

“A deal, a bargain,” explains Waverly. “I’ll promise to let you all read what you want if you promise to actually read, think, discuss, and write about it.”

“How can we lose?” I say.

“But what are we going to study?” poses Brad.

“It doesn’t matter,” says Waverly, “as long as you do the work on your own.”

The room grows silent again, which makes me very much aware that for the first time in my educational existence we’ve been discussing something, not being lectured to. While Waverly stands there as solemnly as if he were Moses waiting for the Lord to present him with the Ten Commandments, a frog suddenly jumps out of Whitley’s bib overalls. Now Whitley is a little slower than the rest of us, and this is long before any one of us has ever heard the term “special education” or “mentally challenged.” Miss Large and Principal Pike always let Whitley keep Delbert, his pet frog, with him because it kept Whitley happy and out of their hair. But suddenly there is Delbert, hopping across the classroom floor tiles like they’re a bunch of lily pads on Plummer’s Pond.

Right about the time Waverly bends over and picks up old Delbert, J.D. says, “That’s it. We’ll study frogs, warts and all.”

Without hesitation, our new teacher walks over to the board and with bold left-handed strokes writes two words in chalk: TOAD LIT.

“My Lord,” says Howie, burying his head under his arms, “I’m going to spend my final year in high school being taught toad lit by a hippie.”

Throughout the fall we kept Waverly’s covenant, and although at first you couldn’t have gotten any of us to admit it — in public, at least — English IV meant more to all of us, except maybe Brad, than Friday-night football games. Waverly stuck to his part of the bargain in trying to make us stand on our own. He found all sorts of “fab” things to study about frogs. Sometimes with unexpected consequences.

One day Waverly had us read out loud a poem called “The Death of a Toad.” This poet named Wilbur (not the same guy who could talk to Mr. Ed) ran over a frog with his lawn mower, but, as he watched it, he couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead. Leah must have really been affected. In her next class, Biology Lab, she refused to dissect a frog because, like Wilbur, she couldn’t be sure whether it was living or deceased. Of course Whitley, who was always afraid something would happen to Delbert, sided with Leah. Principal Pike, on the other hand, sided with Mr. Feathers, the lab teacher, and both my friends got Saturday detention.

When Waverly heard about this development in class the next day, he was upset. He went on for almost the entire period about “correspondences,” which at first I thought was a big word for letters, but our new leader explained it was really “the one life shared by human nature and Mother Nature.” Even when we didn’t know what Waverly was talking about, we had to admit that coming from his mouth it sure sounded good. What could we do about Principal Pike’s punishment of our friends? Waverly told us to meet him a half-hour before school started at the main entrance.

Well, as the sun was rising — “rosy-fingered,” Waverly called it — he had us sit down in a line in front of the doorway. We interlocked our arms as if we were doing a sit-down version of a square-dance reel. Since it was kind of boring just squatting there, Waverly began to play a tune on his guitar and taught us the words. When Principal Pike and the rest of our teachers arrived, they couldn’t get through a human chain singing “We Shall Overcome.” I have to admit it was fun watching Howie’s father try to lift us as we went limp. We all got off with a stern warning and an hour’s lecture, but Howie’s rear end was too sore to stage another sit-in for at least a week.

What doesn’t break you, Waverly taught us, makes you stronger. We began to hang out together more. At lunch we refused the hospital food of the caféteria and sat outside under the big walnut tree with our teacher. Now most of us had grown up eating meat and potatoes, catfish and slaw, but not him. We were willing to try his nuts and raisins, but stopped short of that foul-smelling bean dip.

On Saturday, Waverly decided we needed a show of “solidarity” with “our brothers and sisters in detention,” so he parked his Volkswagen van outside their classroom, took out some supplies he had bought at Whitley’s father’s hardware store, and invited us to help him with a new paint job. Well, Principal Pike couldn’t stand us having fun together — or maybe it was the loud music. Waverly’s radio picked up the Lexington stations, and while we painted, green mostly, we listened to music whose real meaning he explained. In The Association’s song “Along Comes Mary,” he pointed out that Mary was a sort of code word for marijuana. When the Byrds got through singing, he asked us what we thought a tambourine man was. Most of us were certain it was a musician, but he said that the song’s original writer, Bob Dylan, used it as a “metaphor” for a coke dealer.

Of course that’s the moment Sheriff Bowles shows up in his spanking-new police car like they drive on Adam-12. He hears what Waverly says, spits out a wad of tobacco, and says he doesn’t think the song is some commercial for Coca-Cola. Waverly says no — that “coke” is slang for something people snort. Then, I swear to God, the sheriff looks at him strangely, scoffs, and challenges him: “Well, smartie, how do they keep the Coke bottle from getting stuck in their noses?”

Now we’ve all lived in Clement County our entire lives, but we know a little about drugs. After all, during the 1940s they used to raise hemp down on the Kentucky River for the war effort, and there are a lot of those plants down there that can still produce some high-quality highs. We can’t contain ourselves and break out laughing.

Undeterred, the sheriff begins circling Waverly’s van, on which we’ve painted a lot of green hoppers. “Boy,” he says to Waverly, “what do you call this thing?”

“That,” says J.D. proudly while I’m humming the Batman theme song, “is the Toadmobile.”

“It’ll be towed, all right,” says the sheriff, grabbing the squad car’s microphone, “soon as I can get Barger’s Wrecker Service over here.” Then Sheriff Bowles does the harshest thing to us he could.

He calls for a meeting of WACK.

The Woodhole High School auditorium looked like it had been decorated for a VFW meeting or at least a political convention. All the flags and red-white-and-blue bunting made it look like the Fourth of July, though it was closer to Halloween. With Mr. Marcum leading the marching band in a medley of patriotic hymns, our parents herded us kids into the auditorium as if we were no more than stray cows. I never understood the connection between this “Mom, the flag, and apple pie” stuff and clean kids, but then again, until that year, school had never trained me to think at all. I was far from the class bottom-dictorian, but years of mental inactivity had me more worried about taking the ACTs in a few weeks than that night’s WACK shebang.

Judge Fanning opened the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance. Then Brother Powell had us all read the Ten Commandments out loud from the wall because, “Sure as I’m a-standing here humbly before ya, one day the United States Supreme Court is gonna tell us we can’t post them no more.” It sure sounded strange that Brother Powell would criticize our country in the middle of Patriotism Central, but I was just a kid — what did I know?

Various parents approached the microphone at center stage as if it was an upright snake at first, then, feeding on each other’s energy, proceeded to criticize the strange behavior the class of ’69 was displaying — singing strange songs, holding protest meetings, eating that “California food,” even “God-fearing, frog-gigging kids disobeying direct orders to dissect them critters in biology class.” I dozed through the program just as I did while Mom and Dad watched Walter Cronkite read the evening news. That’s the way it was, with nobody sure if the meeting was over, when Leah’s daddy, who owned the local radio station (WMLP, where there’s “More Listening Pleasure”), took the microphone to disagree with the others.

“I was reading over my daughter’s homework assignment the other night, a story by Kentucky’s own Jesse Stuart called ‘Frog-Trouncin’ Contest.’ Anyway, they put this frog on a seesaw and smack the other end with a mallet to see who can lift that frog closest to heaven...”

“Sounds like a great idea,” says Mel Large, who is Miss Large’s brother and head of the Chamber of Commerce. “We could make it part of our annual Fourth of July celebration.”

“Heck,” says Sheriff Bowles, who pitches for our traveling softball team, the Woodhole Whackers, “we could form a frog-trouncing team to take on them yahoos in surrounding counties.”

Amidst all the applause, Waverly strolls onstage and, in disgust, grabs the microphone vacated by Leah’s daddy. As he waves his hands for the crowd to quiet, most of the townspeople stand up — not out of respect, mind you, but to get a good look at him. Hippies are as rare as black people in Clement County. “You’re missing the point of Mr. Stuart’s story,” our teacher starts as though the auditorium is nothing more than a big classroom. “As Amos Johnson says therein, frog-trouncing is mean, even crueler than cockfighting.”

Howie’s dad stands up. “You got something to say to me about my cock, you say it to my face.”

Waverly throws up his hands in front of his face in mock self-defense. “Hey, I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

Well, the student body starts to howl with laughter. Waverly grabs his guitar and shouts into the microphone, “You all know what a hootenanny is?”

“Yahoo!” screams Whitley as loud as if Delbert has just given birth.

Led by Waverly’s six-string and the senior class, we end the WACK meeting, amidst the overruled protests of Sheriff Bowles and a few members, on a musical note, with everyone singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

There was more changing in Clement County that fall than the color of its leaves or the minds of its students. Fact is, things got downright serious. One day Waverly made it to class late because someone ran him off the road. Somebody else spray-painted on the window of the Toadmobile HIPPIE GO HOME while he was parked at Judge Fanning’s. Hortense Fanning was already in a tizzy because her best friend, Miss Large, had just up and moved to Florida.

Then, on top of everything else, I got in trouble — or nearly did. It was the Saturday we took the ACT, the test that determined whether we went on to college and where. Mom and Dad had put pressure on me since I learned how to read that I was going to be the first Lowe to go to college, but I’d always taken better to sports than to books. Luckily, my room proctor turned out to be Waverly, and I sat down behind J.D. because we were friends and such. By the end of the session I was so tired I needed one of what Howie always called “a left-handed cigarette.” As I started out into the afternoon sun, Waverly called me into his room and locked the door behind him.

“Carson” — everyone else called me Kit, after the pioneer who was born in an adjacent county — “when most students ’round here need help, they look up for guidance. Now, unless you worship J.D. Bracy as your chief deity, you were cheating back there.”

I don’t bother to deny it. No sense to it. Not when you’re caught red-handed and red-faced. I’m wondering how to look my disappointed parents in the eyes when Waverly does something I don’t expect.

“Carson, I wrote on your test: ‘STUDENT GOT SICK AND NEVER FINISHED.’ Now you’ve got another chance to take the ACT in six weeks. That’ll mean a lot of extra studying, but we’re going to get through it, bro.”

I look at him with tears hiding behind my eyelids. “Why... why are you doing this for me? No one...”

Waverly pulls his scraggly blond hair back into a ponytail. “When I got in real big trouble recently, I realized we all make mistakes and that everybody needs a second chance.”

And every Saturday I came back to school for some tutoring. Maybe it was because I spent the extra time with Waverly that I felt I got to know him pretty well. He was usually so upbeat he was infectious. I mean, Sheriff Bowles was all over him like flies on a bull. Waverly would get pulled over for coming to a rolling stop, speeding, or failing to signal a turn, but Judge Fanning would never fine him more than a buck an offense (which taught me to never underestimate the power of a woman). And through it all Waverly’d be grinning, a living smiley-face like those Miss Large used to stick on our papers.

But then along about the end of October the sheriff stopped harassing him, and we expected Waverly to be even happier. Instead, he seemed miserable. Adults just don’t make sense. Some days he looked too tired even to show us how to make those paper airplanes that soared over school property out onto Route 52. We’d catch him going over to the door and looking around or staring out the classroom windows as if something was out there we couldn’t see.

All that changed for a while when we got to the next story in Toad Lit. The day seemed different from the moment Principal Pike interrupted class with a package that was marked SPECIAL DELIVERY. Well, Waverly just leaves this thing the size of one of my mother’s hat boxes sitting on the corner of his desk, and he seems to pay no attention to it. Now we’re all like kids at a birthday party who have just got to open a present the moment we spot it, but Waverly sits there in the lotus position on Miss Large’s once-sacred desk recounting Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, going on about how Prince Edward changes clothes with his exact twin, a pauper boy, and lives his life in disguise. Now I was just wondering if Waverly had chosen to say something about this Twain book because WACK had gotten Huck Finn banned when I saw the box move. Leah jumped. So did Delbert. That sucker leapt right from Whitley’s hands and hopped toward the desk. A couple of kids shook their heads, settled back, and I swear the box moved again. Now I’d never been to one of those séances, but at that moment you could have easily convinced me that spirits were loose in that classroom.

Finally Brad gets up and heads for the box. “If you’re not going to open it,” he says, “I am.”

Leah just looks all goo-goo-eyed, and everybody knows her puppy-love crush on Waverly is starting to reach full, adult doghood.

“Is that the largest Mexican jumping bean in captivity?” asks J.D.

“ ‘It might be a parrot, or it might be a canary, maybe, but it ain’t,’ ” says Waverly. “ ‘It’s only just a — ’ ”

“Frog,” I finish, remembering our homework assignment was to read that short story by Twain.

“Fab, Carson,” says Waverly. And he begins to unwrap the box. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages, I present for your entertainment... Notorious.” And from the box he pulls this huge green and squatty thing the size of a house cat with big eyes. “Bufo alvarius, commonly known as the notorious jumping frog of Calaveras County.”

“Now,” says Whitley, picking up Delbert, “Waverly and me, we each gots one of our own.”

Waverly explains how he got a friend of his in California to send him the frog. Now Notorious wasn’t a champion or nothing, our teacher stresses, but he was still competitive.

“How far you think he can leap without any buckshot in him?” says J.D., who must have read the story, too.

“Let’s find out,” Waverly answers, and draws a line in chalk at the front of the room. Then he has Whitley set Delbert down. Now frogs are like your kid sister or brother — they never perform when you want them to, but finally Whitley sweet-talks his little buddy into leaping.

I put my pencil down at the spot, and we measure the long jump. “Six feet, seven and one-half inches.”

Howie wants to start a betting pool like we do on the Kentucky Derby, but Waverly says authoritatively, “There are some things we do in life for reasons other than money.” Then he sets Notorious down. The frog sits there like a jade doorstop, looks to the back of the classroom, and vaults as if it sees a swarm of flies there.

Everyone is more astounded than if Principal Pike actually smiled. I measure it off. “Nineteen feet, two inches,” I announce.

“Holy kangaroo, Batman,” says J.D.

Word got around quick about that feat, and it wasn’t long before the city fathers heard about Notorious. Now, Halloween celebrations have been banned in Clement County since before Brother Powell. I mean, I’d never once gone trick-or-treating because years ago the preachers were convinced Halloween was a pagan holiday and we weren’t going to be “parishioners of the pitchfork.” So for the Saturday Fall Festival, which is even bigger than Court Day in Mount Sterling or the Mushroom Festival in Estill County, the city council proclaimed the highlight would be... ta-da: the Jumpfrog Jubilee.

Up to that Saturday, farmers had been turning over everything including pond scum to uncover the biggest bullfrogs that had gone ungigged. The finals were like the Cincinnati Reds playing the Woodhole Whackers — Notorious beat the local favorite by nine feet. Waverly had his picture taken, and all seemed right with the world.

Everybody sat around eating pumpkin pie and drinking cider, a lot of it hard once our parents started to leave. Brad, J.D., Howie, Whitley, and I built a bonfire to keep back the cold that had started to accompany the October nights.

Whitley picks up a thick woolly worm and says, “Sure sign we gonna have lots of snow this winter.”

“Speaking of signs,” chirps in Leah, “what’s yours, Waverly? With your love of nuts and berries and toads, it’d have to be an earth sign.”

J.D., who’s smart outside of school, too, knows what’s going on, so he moves between our teacher and his girl to ensure that any sparks flying that night are going to come from the fire. Brad, who knows he has to be passing Waverly’s class to be eligible for the football playoffs, pretends to be more interested than he is. Howie’s not sure how to act because he knows there’s something going on between his father and Waverly and has confided in me that ever since our teacher caught him selling imported marijuana he’s afraid Waverly’s going to tell his father.

“Perceptive as ever, Leah,” says Waverly. “I’m a Virgo.”

“The sixth sign,” says Leah, who has developed a sudden passion for astrology or whatever topic is on Waverly’s lips at the moment.

“Usually,” adds the teacher, “represented by a virgin—”

“That’s sure not Leah, then,” says J.D., and she punches him on the arm, hard.

“Holding the grain of the harvest,” continues Waverly, sliding over the controversy. “It’s usually thought to be a fertility symbol.”

“The way you fertilize young minds,” I add.

“Where I come from,” says Brad, “fertilizer is usually what horses leave in the bottom of their stalls.”

“How come you’re so smart, Waverly?” says Howie. “You seem to know everything.”

“Years of schooling. I got my Ph.D. at Berkeley.”

“Is that PHD as in ‘Piled Higher and Deeper’?” says J.D.

Ignoring him, Leah says, “I never liked the name Waverly. I think we should call you Doctor Virgo.”

“Doc Virgo,” I say.

And before I know it, all of us are chanting “Doc Virgo, Doc Virgo” like we’re at some kind of pep rally.

Slowly the fire burns down, and everybody drifts away in a preview of our post-graduation life. Till it’s just me and Doc Virgo, and Notorious, of course. Doc starts to say something, then pulls out his guitar. The first song I recognize as Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing.” I have the feeling Doc is trying, even more roundabout than his questions in class, to communicate with me on another level.

“Here’s a song I’m trying to write,” he announces. “It comes from ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.’ ” His strings sound like a November wind bidding farewell to the fall. “The bird is on the wing,” he sings in a voice not as gravelly as Dylan’s.

Just when I think I’ve got him translated, he stops and does the unexpected. He rolls up something crystalline in paper, lights it, and tokes. Then he hands the joint to me.

“What is it?” I say, trying to act as if smoking dope is something I do every day with no more thought than cleaning the supper table.

“Bufotenine. Dried venom from Notorious’s back. It’s an hallucinogen.”

I inhale and hold. The world spins and turns colors like when I’m on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Clement County Fair. I can hear Doc breathe, or maybe it’s me. I think I return the joint to him. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” I say.

“Damn, Carson,” he says in an echo chamber, “you’re getting perceptive.”

I fight to stand up. “You can’t go.”

“Easy, bro. Remember me telling you about second chances. That came from the heart, mine.” He taps his chest and sweeps his fingers across the six-string. “That group I went to Chicago with last summer, the one I told you about, was from the university in Wisconsin where I was teaching. SAVE, Students Against a Violent Environment. Soon as we got out of jail they wanted to make a statement. Well, I met them one night and it turned out they wanted to blow up the ROTC building on campus.”

“I thought they were against violence.”

“One of the contradictions common to youthful idealism. So as I let them off on campus with their explosives, I was scared to death of what I’d gotten myself into. I was supposed to wait for them, but I took off and drove to this fishing cabin in Minnesota an old girlfriend’s family owns.”

“You just left them,” I think I say, trying to put the simplest of stories together.

“What else could I do? I hid out for a while, then, as a last resort, I called Aunt Hortense, and voila.”

Two and two didn’t add up to four, but I was in the ballpark. “Those times you were looking out doors and windows you were looking for your friends?”

“Or the feds or a bounty hunter. SAVE claimed credit for the bombing, and the authorities had files on all members of the group — including me. So now I’ve got to go. Once a picture of me and Notorious shows up in some newspaper, I’m history. Hell, I don’t even know who ran me and the Toadmobile off the road. Might have been my old friends in SAVE.”

“That’s a far-out chance,” I counter.

“Listen, I had a friend in the college who was hired by Hoover’s Heroes to do nothing but subscribe to out-of-town papers and clip anything out of the ordinary. Believe me, I know how the Establishment works.” He takes a long hit. “But I guess it doesn’t make much difference who finds me first, SAVE or the Man.”

“I was learning so much,” I protest. “Without your help, Doc, I can’t get high enough ACTs.”

“How many times have I told you that you’ve got to learn to do things on your own?”

I’m mad now, and the single toke is starting to wear off. I pick up Waverly by his tie-dyed T-shirt. “I won’t let you leave. I won’t.” Then I’m shaking him and crying. When I finish wiping my eyes dry, he’s gone.

Monday morning everybody sensed something was wrong as we sat in our first-period English class waiting for the newly christened Doc Virgo, who was never late. All of us took it as a bad sign when Whitley broke the anxious silence with the news that upon graduation the city had offered him the job of being custodian at the Clement County Public Cemetery.

Then Principal Pike walks in looking even graver than when he announced to us Miss Large was going on leave. “I... I don’t know how to tell you this,” he stammers, “but very early this morning Sheriff Bowles was called to Bend Road... you know, where the Palisades start to overlook the Kentucky River. Down below, he found what was left of the vehicle... I believe you call it the Toadmobile or such.”

At that moment Leah faints, her falling head striking the wooden desktop with a thud.

“I’m sorry,” Principal Pike adds as though as an afterthought.

School was called off Wednesday morning for the funeral that Hortense and the judge hastily put together. There was no visitation or anything at the Dezarn Funeral Home as Sheriff Bowles claimed the body was so mangled that even a closed casket would have been grotesque. Most of the town showed up, including those hypocritical members of WACK, who I was sure were silently thanking the powers that be that Doc Virgo was gone. Some of the class openly wept, some stood in disbelief, and others, I was sure, were relieved our hippie teacher no longer walked among us.

Yeah, Doc, it was a sad time for most of the senior class. In fact, that day was a lot like today — cold, overcast, and a little drizzle seeping through the heavy air. I see Whitley’s done a fine job keeping your marker looking nice. How do you like this marble frog on top here? Gift of the class of ’69. Looks like it’s poised for tomorrow’s ninth annual Jumpfrog Jubilee, not that any toad will ever break Notorious’s record.

Whitley ever tell you about all the speculation on your death? Some said you couldn’t make that S-curve on Bend Road in the early morning fog. Some thought the slick roads that day might have been a contributing factor, but others just knew you were high on drugs. Some kids in the class swore it could have been Brother Powell or one of those WACK fanatics showing their love of God by killing off a sinner. Brad always suspected J.D. had something to do with it, what with him being so jealous of Leah’s mooning after you. Did you know those two got married, moved to Ohio? After she finally got over you, of course. Our next substitute teacher kept Brad eligible right through baseball. He went to EKU on a football scholarship — graduated a couple of years ago, then joined the Marines. ’Course there was always that rumor you’d gotten in with a bad crowd before you came and they had something to do with it. Everybody knew Sheriff Bowles had it in for you — though they didn’t know what you knew about him — and he did find the wreck. Funny, after being the focus of that Lexington TV station’s “If it bleeds, it leads” story, he suddenly up and left. Went South, far South. Dade County, I hear.

Yeah, there were a lot of rumors, but we know the real truth, don’t we, Doc?

I didn’t want to do it, and as long as you were sober, you pled with me, but I had to. We both knew it was the only way things could end. I know you told me it could ruin my life if people found out, but they never did, and besides, I’d made up my mind. I had to even the score with you.

That Sunday night I drove the Toadmobile out on Bend Road you were so scared and high on toad juice you couldn’t do a thing to stop me. After the way we’d decorated it, though, I hated to roll that beautiful vehicle over the Palisades. What a waste! I have to admit I was surprised it didn’t burst into flames like all those cars do in the movies.

I thought it was a simple, clever plan. After you passed along what your Aunt Hortense had told you about her friend Miss Large dallying with the sheriff, it was easy for me to convince Bowles to take care of things properly. Closed casket, quick funeral, no investigation.

Remember how I told you I’d never be able to pass the ACTs without you, that you’d let me down? Well, Doc, I was wrong. Maybe it was easier because you were gone, but you were right — I had to do it on my own. Yeah, I’m still going to college at nights working on my Ph.D. Piling it higher and deeper, like old J.D. used to say. Don’t want to teach high school all my life.

Yeah, Doc Virgo died that night. Big picture and story in the Lexington paper for everybody to see. For somebody to clip and file. But Waverly, he started to sober up about the time we reached the I-75 rest stop in my car. Haircut and a shave in the men’s room, a Tilghman College sweatshirt to replace the tie-dyed tee. And you thought nobody was listening the time you told us about Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper. Not a day goes by, especially when I hear a frog croak, that I don’t see my all-time favorite teacher climbing into that eighteen-wheeler hitching south.

And each time that image comes to mind, I hope Waverly made as much of his second chance as I have of mine. Oh, one last thing you might want to know. This last spring I taught my high-school English class a new unit — called it Toad Lit.