One night after the swing-shift custodians left and the school was all but vacant, Centrick Cline started complaining to Duffy about Hammermeister. Hammermeister didn’t like his nose ring and earrings, was a racist motherfucker—“Hey, man, why didn’t they hire Alec Baldwin for the job? This geek motherfucker said he comes by at three A.M. and he better not catch me in the weight room. I clean the weight room,” Centrick Cline said, “an’ I ain’t ’posed to be in the weight room?”

Duffy’s own latent anger flared. They stood together and pissed about Hammermeister for forty-five minutes. Then Duffy took a customary inspection of his area, making sure he had not left a beer can on a desk somewhere before turning out the lights. When this was done, it was close to one A.M. and Duffy slugged down two quick cans of Hamms, lit a Gitane cigarette, and furtively entered Hammermeister’s office. He stood before the tarantula cage a moment and then lifted the lid. He took another puff on the Gitane and blew it on the spider.

The hairy spider shocked Duffy somewhat by setting itself down. But rather than confirming his worst fear by jumping, it froze. Duffy removed a long pencil from Hammermeister’s desk and nervously positioned it over the spider’s thorax. Closer and closer until suddenly Duffy thrust down at it, and the large body of the spider exploded like an egg, spurting yellow matter all over the room. When Duffy let go of the pencil the spider sprang straight up in the air and landed on his shoulder. He batted the spider down and scrambled out into the commons area, grabbed his coat, and fled the building.

Hammermeister came in Friday morning, and the first thing he noticed when he stepped into his office was that the lid of the tarantula cage was ajar. He hastily closed the door thinking that the spider had escaped, since he didn’t want it to bolt out into the main office. Somehow he knew something like this was going to happen. He had a funny premonition.