On another occasion Window forgot there was a senior parents’ meeting and took a shortcut to the Coke machine, bursting into the conference room in a T-shirt with his Walkman blasting Fine Young Cannibals. The vice-principal wrote him up for not wearing his custodian’s shirt and for listening to a headset, a safety hazard. Window finally made probation when another custodian claimed Window used his mop and bucket and left it dirty in the janitor’s closet. It was not a major crime, but there had been an accumulation of misdemeanors.

Window put his nose to the grindstone for six months, but two weeks after the probation was officially lifted, he left the vacuum cleaner in the band room again. “If you do this once more,” the vice-principal said, “you will be fired.”

Window received an unexpected windfall on his income tax return—eleven hundred dollars. Josie immediately made an appointment with Window’s attorney only to learn that the cost of the blood test had gone up substantially. Window was so upset he frittered away the money and then he left his vacuum cleaner in the band room for the third time. When the vice-principal read the union contract and learned that he could not fire Window for this offense, he instructed the head custodian to give Window more area to clean and to ride him, but the head custodian only paid lip service to the order. For one thing, Window never gave him any guff and for another, Ted Frank Page, who was bench-pressing over three hundred and fifty pounds, physically threatened the head custodian. It was not entirely for Window’s sake. Ted Frank Page learned that the head custodian had been bad-mouthing Page for laziness and like everything that was said at the janitors’ table, it worked its way around the grapevine in less than a day.

When a clutch cable for Window’s Citroën arrived from the auto supply house in Marseilles, a note went up on the custodians’ bulletin board stating that no custodian was to receive personal mail at the school.

Meldrick and Ted Frank Page installed the clutch cable and the auto instructor boiled out the radiator on the Citroën, but scarcely two weeks after it was running, the clutch cable snapped. It had been installed backwards and the Citroën sat in its accustomed home in the back parking lot for three more months until another cable was dispatched from Marseilles, France.

Window learned to consult the I Ching on his own and spent hours in the library asking it questions. Ray, the custodian who worked the special education area, asked Meldrick what Window was doing. Mystified, Ray hid by the library door and watched. “He shakes pennies in his hand and then tosses them down on the desk and writes something down and then he looks something up in a book. What is he doing?”

“It’s beyond comprehension,” Meldrick said. “Don’t even attempt an understanding.”