Problems with People by David Guterson

engine, seed drill, macadam, a new type of road construction. Hamish McAdam? Hamish McAdam had taught photography and science, and had once been celebrated because, as a hobby, and involving kids, he’d installed a weather station on the school’s roof that not only collected data but got mentioned, many evenings, on a television news show by a meteorologist rolling through suburbs and towns, rain, wind, and temperatures. People’d thought well of Hamish because of that, Hamish who’d built this weather station on his own dime, Hamish who gave extra time to his students, Hamish who, in the faculty room, happily ate his lunch among women while the other guy teachers held down guy tables. Hamish who kept a fishbowl in his classroom, balanced his checkbook with an overkill graphing calculator, ate a warm cafeteria cookie with a carton of milk or worked a crossword puzzle during morning break. Hamish who wore, in his hair, or what was left of it, shiny gel, so that it stood up like gleaming bristles. Hamish who fought the weight battle openly, noting aloud the fat and carb content of items and assisting others with conspicuously fast conversions of nutritional-content information—grams to ounces, milligrams, milliliters. His signature wardrobe—argyle sweater vest, cuffed cords, plaid socks, and saddle shoes—had always seemed, to her, too studied, but really, if she was fair, who wasn’t studied when it came to self-furnishings? Hamish was crisp, well cropped, gelled, clean-shaven, cheery, and a pleasant enough faculty presence, until, one day—maybe five years ago, she thought—he’d left the building “on probation” while an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing went forward,the wrongdoing along the lines of inappropriate involvement with a student, which no one knew anything about but which everyone, meaning all the teachers in their building, discussed anyway, vigorously and speculatively, based on what little the principal had revealed to this or that faculty or staff member; those small bits of “fact” made the rounds and gathered together until a full-blown rumor factory was up and running, all of this before blogs and social media had become so powerful that surmises and allegations could go viral and that way become, at high speed, vehement and ridiculous. Rumors about Hamish became vehement and ridiculous with less digital help; it had been mostly old-school at school; exponential word of mouth. Was it 2005? She thought it might have been 2005, the Hamish-McAdam-might-be-a-perv-gossip-fest, because, she remembered, that was the year the district went on strike and there were plenty of meetings and a lot of downtime and talk, some of that talk about the issues behind striking—pay, mainly, higher pay—and some of it about Hamish McAdam. Hamish McAdam, one of their union reps but not present at meetings, not present, apparently, because something had happened, but what was that something, the details? It was said, it was thought—the story went, anyway—that the weather station on the roof called for regular monitoring, that Hamish had established a rotation of students to go up there, carefully, with a key and safety measures, for the purpose of checking and maintaining equipment, of taking notes—of learning things—that these were his hand-picked, favorite students, girls and boys but mostly girls, because Hamish’s favorite students were girls—he had a girl, each semester, asa “teacher’s aide,” always a girl, to enter grades in his book and do other small but necessary things—and that some of these stints involved evening visits for purposes related to relative humidity or some such twilit or dark-of-night phenomenon, no one really knew, but anyway, summer evenings on the roof, beneath the moon, under stars, with Hamish sometimes unexpectedly on hand offering snacks, soft drinks, and a telescope on a tripod, which he invited his student monitors to look through