Dog's Green Earth

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “This is probably one of the last days we can eat outside,” Lili said, as she sank into the padded wooden chair across from me. Rochester rushed up to sniff my hand and make sure it was me, then flopped on the grass beside my feet.

  “Then I’m glad we get to enjoy it together.” I raised my paper cup of lemonade to toast the mug of coffee I had gotten for her. Light cream, two sugars, the way she liked it.

  “How’d your bathroom survey go?” she asked. “Did seeing so many of them make you need to go, and go?”

  “I’m not quite that old,” I said, in what I hoped was wry humor rather than irritation. “I covered about half the campus and found a couple of single-use restrooms the work study student missed. I need to get back to Friar Lake after we’re finished eating, so I’ll have to come back tomorrow and finish.”

  “I’m interviewing new adjuncts tomorrow morning, so I can’t have Rochester.”

  “That’s okay, I have to host a meeting of the faculty senate subcommittee on academic ethics tomorrow afternoon so I can’t stay here too long.”

  “Why are they coming all the way out to Friar Lake?”

  “No on-campus classrooms big enough for them at the time they need to meet,” I said. “I’m glad to have them. The more faculty I can introduce to the facility the better.”

  “You know a meeting that big, about that contentious a topic, is going to degenerate into a shouting match, don’t you?”

  “Why should academic ethics be a big deal topic? We all agree plagiarism is wrong, and so is allowing students to make discriminatory comments in class. When I saw the meeting request, I figured it was just one of those issues professors like to bloviate about.” Before she could argue, I held up my hand and said, “Present company excepted.”

  “A professor at one of those big Midwest land-grant universities got censured for refusing to give a recommendation to a student who wanted to study in Israel,” she said. “The committee has been charged with developing guidelines for recommendations.”

  “I generally give a recommendation to any student who asks for one,” I said. “Except in the case of a student I gave a D to a couple of years ago. I told him I valued my academic integrity and I couldn’t write him a false letter. He couldn’t understand that, and I finally had to get up and physically walk him out of the adjunct area at the English department, because he wouldn’t let up.”

  “See, that’s a case where we need a policy. Another that has come up is a professor of philosophy here at Eastern. He put all his lecture notes in a three-ring binder and he’s selling them through the bookstore. A student complained, and the issue got bounced up to the committee. There are at least three more issues on the agenda that have people’s fur ruffled.”

  “I’ll have to plan to make my introduction and welcome and then duck out,” I said.

  14: Prayer for Health

  By the time Rochester and I got back to Friar Lake, Rigoberto and Juan had finished the work I’d assigned them and were sitting under one of the big oak trees near my office. I didn’t want to tell them that Rochester often peed around that tree.

  “You have more work for us, jefe?” Rigoberto asked. I noticed he was the one who always spoke; perhaps Juan didn’t speak much English.

  I pulled out my phone and looked at the list Joey had texted me. I sent them off to clean the biggest classroom in preparation for the meeting the next day. I realized I had given them too little do that morning; I’d have to figure out how to avoid that in the future and keep them busy, at least until Joey came back to take over.

  Epiphania called me that afternoon to discuss a meeting of the La Leche League, and I had to put together a proposal for her and send it off, and by the time I was finished I saw Juan and Rigoberto leaving in the battered sedan.

  There had to be other groups out there like the League; how could I find them? I did a lot of Google searching until I stumbled on a company that offered lists of groups and organizations, sorted by zip code order. I jumped through a couple of hoops, giving them my email address, accepting their privacy policy, then waiting for a confirmation email back from them.

  When I finally got access to the site, I discovered it was kind of a scam. Sure, you could get a list for free—but all it did was give you the name of the organization. If you wanted specific details, like contact person, address or phone number, you had to pay.

  Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem. I worked for Eastern, and I had a budget for program development. But the list was expensive, and the way they’d tricked me sat badly with me. I had a powerful urge to make a note of their URL and then go home that evening and hack into their database, taking whatever I wanted.

  I took a deep breath. For the most part, I’d been able to control my impulses toward digital burglary; the threat of a return to prison was a powerful motivator. But every now and then I’d get this urge to snoop around somewhere I didn’t belong.

  Fortunately, the tools I used to hack were on a separate laptop back home, stowed in the attic so that I’d have to take extra steps to retrieve it. I printed out the list of group names and went to work the old-fashioned way—Googling each one individually to find the information I needed. It was dull, tedious work, but it was legal.

  And that was what mattered.

  § § § §

  That evening, after I’d fed and walked Rochester and had dinner with Lili, I drove over to St. Mary’s Hospital in Langhorne, where Joe Senior was recovering from his bypass surgery.

  On my way there, I got a call from the soccer coach. The kid who had lost the retainer had a couple of them, so I could just throw away the one I had found.

  Before I walked into Joe Senior’s room, I glanced through the open door and saw Joey sitting by his bed. Joey was six feet tall and broad-shouldered, but in his father’s hospital room he looked tired and diminished. He wore a faded plaid shirt and jeans, and as usual a backwards ball cap over his dark hair.

  I walked in the room, where Joe Senior was sitting up in bed and talking animatedly with Joey. He didn’t look like a guy who’d just suffered a major heart attack; his color was good, and he was smiling. If anything, he looked better than his son.

  Joey’s dad was shorter and stockier than he was. The dome of his head was bald, surrounded by a fringe of white like one of those old-time monks. But I saw the family resemblance in the roundness of his face, and the way his smile reached all the way up to his eyes when he saw me. Joey smiled the same way.

  “Steve! What brings you over to this sorry excuse for a center of healing?” Joe asked.

  “Came to check on you. Make sure you’re not terrorizing the nurses.”

  “I’ve got my boy here to keep tabs on me,” Joe said. He looked from me to Joey. “Let me guess. Mark sent you over? He’s worried about Joey, isn’t he?”

  “Should he be?” I asked, looking at both of them.

  “He needs to get more sleep,” Joe said. “When he was a teenager you had to get a forklift to force him out of bed. Of my three boys Joey was the one who slept the most.” He shook his head. “Now he’s here all the time. I tell him to go home, but he doesn’t listen.”

  “Mom needs a break now and then.”

  “Why don’t I stay here and keep your dad company for a while, and you go home,” I said to Joey. “Visiting hours end at nine anyway. I’ll stick around until then.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Joey said.

  “What? You worried we’ll talk about you?” his father said. “Go on, get out of here, you big bum.”

  I could see the uncertainty on Joey’s face, but finally he stood up. He leaned down and kissed his father’s forehead. “Take care, Pop. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Joey reached out to shake my hand, but I pulled him into an embrace. “Take care of yourself,” I said. “You’re no good to anybody if you let yourself get run down.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Mark says.”

  He took one more look at his father, t
he way Orpheus couldn’t resist looking back at Eurydice, and then he walked out. I sat down beside Joe in the surprisingly comfortable armchair and looked around at the single room. It was painted a pale green, with a big framed photograph of a Bucks County barn along the side wall. Across from Joe’s bed was a whiteboard with the day and date, as well as the name of his nurse and his CNA, or certified nursing assistant.

  Joe was wired up to a monitor that beeped softly as it tracked his heart rate, the lines spiking up and down in a regular pattern. “I’m glad you came over, Steve,” Joe said. “How’s my boy doing at Friar Lake? He won’t tell me anything.”

  “The property’s running like a well-oiled clock. You and he did a great job with the renovation, so there haven’t been any big problems.” I rapped on my head. “Knock on wood.”

  “And Walter Gibbs, the guy who replaced me?”

  “I’ve only met him once, briefly, on Friday.”

  “Steve. I have three sons. I know when somebody’s hiding something. Spill it.”

  I shrugged. “Just what Mark said. That Gibbs has a lot of new forms and procedures, and he’s coming down hard on Joey.”

  “Lousy time for me to get sick. I hate to pull Joey away from work, but my other boys don’t have such flexible jobs, and they’ve got wives and families to look out for.”

  “I’ll keep a handle on things at Friar Lake while Joey’s out,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”

  We segued into conversation about mutual friends and acquaintances from Eastern, where Joe had spent the bulk of his career. I didn’t realize it was nine o’clock until a nurse came in and told me I had to go.

  I wished Joe well and a quick recovery from his bypass surgery and promised once more that I’d look after Joey at Friar Lake. If the physical plant started to show signs of neglect, that would reflect poorly on him, and perhaps even on me. I needed to make sure that didn’t happen.

  § § § §

  Tuesday morning I drove up the winding road to Friar Lake right behind Juan and Rigoberto, and I gave them a list of chores that ought to carry them all the way through the day. Then I left Rochester in my office and went over to Eastern to finish my bathroom survey.

  It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, and the campus was still in an early-morning slumber. The sun glittered on dew on the undisturbed lawns, and only a few eager students hurried along the flagstone paths from dorms to classroom buildings.

  The ability to create your own schedule was a revelation to me when I landed at Eastern. Pennsbury High classes began at 7:45 AM, and I had to catch my bus at seven. I struggled to drag my teenage carcass out of bed in time to pull on my clothes, down a glass of orange juice and a couple of brown sugar and cinnamon pop-tarts, grab my backpack and run out to the bus.

  At Eastern, my first class was at ten AM, and all I had to was get up early enough to hit the dining hall for breakfast beforehand. I was only in class for twelve hours a week, leaving me plenty of time for playing club tennis, taking a yoga class in one of the dance studios, and putting in ten hours at my work-study job.

  There was homework, too, but reading books for my English classes never seemed like work. I went to every class, paid attention and took notes, so I didn’t have to cram too much for exams the way some of my classmates had to. Overall, it had been a pretty halcyon four years.

  I continued my building survey at Blair Hall, which housed the English department, where I had taken many of my classes. The old Gothic building had undergone an unfortunate makeover in the 1960s, and a lot of the character you could see in old photographs had been stripped out—the wood moldings, the stone finials—and replaced with fluorescent lights and linoleum floors.

  I documented the bathrooms there and finished as much of the survey as I could by before I had to hurry back to Friar Lake. Rochester jumped up and down in delight, and I took him out for a walk around the property and to check on Juan and Rigoberto. I found them relaxing in the cool of the chapel. “It’s muy caliente out there, jefe,” Rigoberto said. “We just take a break to cool down.”

  I didn’t know what to say. They weren’t my employees, and I wasn’t familiar enough with their schedule. Instead of responding, I opted to remind them of the big meeting that afternoon. “Take one more look at the classroom and make sure it’s clean,” I said, and returned to my office.

  Attendees for the meeting began arriving at three-fifteen. I left Rochester in my office and stood out in the parking lot directing faculty toward the classroom building and accepting their compliments about how beautiful the property was.

  I recognized Oscar Panaccio from the design committee meeting, but I didn’t think he knew I was his neighbor, and I was happy to keep it that way, when he grumbled, “Must cost a lot to keep a place like this up.”

  “We’re actually a profit center for the college.” I remembered Lili’s admonition, and added some honey. “The money we bring in from renting the property out and running executive education programs helps pay the bills for your offices and classrooms.”

  He frowned and walked away. I knew his type, the kind of old guard professor who was against everything new, from online teaching to initiatives for special populations, like veterans and first-time-in-college students. The general complaint was that things had worked well at Eastern for over a century, so why change now?

  Fortunately his was one of the lone dissenting voices about Friar Lake; most people had only nice things to say.

  A few minutes before three-thirty I hurried to the classroom and stepped up to the podium. “Good afternoon,” I said into the microphone, but the audience was too busy talking to each other to pay much attention.

  I repeated the greeting, more forcefully, and that got more of the faculty to look up at me. I introduced myself, welcomed everyone to Friar Lake, and invited them to bring their professional association meetings there. Then I turned the session over to the committee chair.

  I slipped out the back door to wait in the parking lot for any stragglers. Then I checked on Rochester through the window of my office – he was happily chewing on a rawhide bone. I went back to the classroom, where as Lili had predicted, an argument had broken out.

  Oscar Panaccio was on his feet. He reminded me of the stereotype of professors when I was in college, in his brown sports jacket with leather elbow patches. I imagined that he smoked a pipe and drank sherry in the afternoons.

  “I don’t want anyone forcing me to write a recommendation for a student I don’t respect or a program I don’t think is worthwhile,” he said.

  “No one is going to require you to write a recommendation you don’t want to,” the chair said. She was a South Asian woman in a bright blue business suit. “But if you refuse, you’ll have to provide a reason why. It can be student performance, or the quality of the program they’re applying for. But you can’t use personal bias as a reason.”

  “Who’s going to say what personal bias is?” he demanded.

  I backed out of the room as my phone buzzed with an incoming text. Rick wanted to know if I was free to meet him that evening at the Drunken Hessian. I figured I deserved a beer after my experience with the faculty senate, so I texted back that I could meet him at six-thirty.

  The meeting was still going strong at five o’clock, and it wasn’t until six that the chair called an end, apparently without having come to any kind of consensus. I stood by the door waiting for them all to leave so I could lock up. Oscar Panaccio and the Asian woman were still talking when everyone else had walked out. I was surprised at how much vitriol he was spewing, especially to a fellow professor and a woman of color.

  His opinions were still stuck in the 1950s, about female students who dressed provocatively, frat brothers who shared papers with each other, and his opinion that race and economic background shouldn’t affect college admissions. I guessed he was about seventy, and after I did the math I figured that meant he had gotten his PhD in the 1980s. He’d obviously missed the women’s movement, the
civil rights era, and the was pointedly ignoring all the social issues of the current times.

  Maybe he’d been able to avoid all those because his academic discipline was biology, and the basics of what he taught hadn’t changed. Or perhaps he was the kind of old fossil Eastern needed to get rid of in order to move forward.

  I went up to the podium and shut down the computer and the projector, and they took the hint and walked outside. I shut down the lights, locked the door, and hurried past them back to my office to get Rochester.

  They were still arguing when the dog and I walked to my car. There were two more vehicles in the lot, which I assumed belonged to them. Technically I should have waited for them to leave, but I was worried I’d be late to meet Rick, so I left them there.

  As I did, though, I remembered the last meeting I had left that Oscar Panaccio had attended, and the man who had died afterward. I said a small prayer for the health of the faculty senate president.

  15: First to Turn

  I took Rochester out as soon as we got home, and then had some time to kill before going to meet Rick. Was there anyone else I need to research before I drove down to the Drunken Hessian? I looked at Rochester in the corner chewing on a bone and remembered the retainer he had found after the soccer team practice. That came from an orthodontist, right? And Todd Chatzky’s widow was an orthodontist. Maybe my dog was trying to give me a clue.

  I Googled Dr. Chatzky in Stewart’s Crossing and got no results. But how could that be? Rick had specifically mentioned she was an orthodontist with an office on Main Street. I looked around my office for inspiration and spotted a photo of Lili and me. Of course. Todd’s wife had kept her maiden name, at least for her practice.

  I went back to Google and looked for orthodontist, Stewart’s Crossing, and Dr. Wendilyn Jackson popped right up. I was a bit surprised that she was black, and just to be sure I Googled her name and “Chatzky” and came up with a couple of references.