by Morris, Ian;
Ship snatched it up. “The calendar came,” he said.
“What calendar?”
“The Faces of the Future,” he said. “Remember, I told you?”
“Let me see,” I said. He gratefully handed it over and stood shifting on his feet as I opened it. I paged past January, a girl standing in a room of green light holding a test tube, to February and there was the Shipper, standing with his hands on his hips—without his glasses—in front of a wall chart of what I guessed was supposed to be the stock market with a red line zigzagging up and up.
“Looks terrific,” I said.
“Really? You think so?”
“Sure,” I said and meant it. Nobody’d come asking me to be on a calendar.
“Do you want one? I can get you one.”
“Yeah, I would, Ship.”
He smiled, not seeming to care, like he usually would, if I was putting him on. “Do you think Grey would want one?” he asked.
“Dennis,” his mother called from the hallway, “I’m not carrying this thing.”
“Okay, Mom,” he hollered. I winced at the volume of it and he smiled. It was the first laugh we’d had together in weeks. “You living here next semester?”
“Yeah,” I said, “you?”
“I don’t know, yet,” he said. “I have to talk to Howie about some things. It hasn’t been easy around here, you know.”
“Your mother is talking to you,” his father shouted from the hall.
“I suppose not,” I said.
He took his glasses off and rubbed the lenses with his scarf. “What’d you ask your dad for?”
“Huh?”
“Den-nis,” his mother hissed.
“For Christmas.”
“Your father is starting the car.”
“We don’t do it like that,” I said.
He stepped backward into the hall. “They’re going to leave without me.”
“Can’t have that,” I said, pushing the door shut. When he turned to leave, I called after him, “Ship”—he stopped—“you’re a good guy. Who cares what anyone says.”
Howie was in his room stuffing balled socks into a gym bag. He didn’t look happy to see me.
I said. “You know I’m staying.”
“In town?”
“Here.”
He cocked his eye and stared at me. “Can’t,” he said. “We’re shut down until the second of January. Come to the floor meetings sometime.”
“Sorry,” I said. Howie had sent around one of his memos a couple of weeks earlier but I threw it away without reading it.
“They’re putting a computer in the TV lounge,” he said.
“What for?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Homework.”
“Cool, I guess.”
“Hey Zim,” he said. “Some of the frats rent rooms over the break. I could give you the phone numbers.”
And I said, “That’s okay.” I went back to my room and filled my backpack with a pair of jeans, underwear, and socks, then scanned the shelves of the room for anything else I might need. None of the textbooks, the safety goggles from chem lab, the towels swiped from the natatorium were of any use. I pulled the drawstring and pushed my arms through the straps. Then I took my bike down and pushed it ahead of me out the door, and, without looking back as I usually did to see what I might have forgotten, pulled it closed and tugged at the knob to make sure it was locked.
As soon as I was out in the raw winter air, it hit me that I had three bucks in my pocket and no place to go. Rather than stand there looking lost, I got on my bike and coasted down the drive and turned west. With no destination in mind I pedaled into the wind, along the bay and the playing fields, into a wooded stretch along the lake, through wide-lawned suburban streets, and out of town, five miles and then ten. The two-lane highway I rode down sliced through snowy cornfields. Dead for the winter. Even rows of furrowed ground, frozen and black, their peaks rimmed with snow, like range upon range of distant mountains. Rows of stalks, slight and solid as bamboo, broken off a half a foot above the hard ground. The northwest wind blew snow across the bare road, each flake as small and hard as grains of sand. The sun was buried behind a solid sky of gray clouds and it was as dark as an autumn twilight. I rode until my hands went numb on the handlebars.
I thought about Grey back home, with two thousand dollars of my money in his pocket. For the first time, it struck me how hard it must have been for him to come looking for me. After all his talk of his business and the future, the thought that I didn’t need him anymore must have scared him. As for the money, I’d given it to him. This is how my thoughts turned until, cold and tired, I turned back toward town.
The snow that threatened all morning never fell. The streets were dry and gave up no reflections from the streetlights, as I rode up State Street. I rolled down the steep hill on East Washington and jumped the curb.
Dru came to the door holding a fashion magazine the size of a movie poster.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m kind of without a place to live at the present time.”
She thought about that, her eyes scanning the distance behind me as if she was making sure the coast was clear, then stepped back from the door and pulled it open. “In that case,” she said, “enter at your own risk.”
20
THE PRINCESS MODEL
After the claustrophobia of Rosewalter, I liked walking the factory’s catwalk at night—the feel of the cold grating underneath bare feet—but the first time it was creepy. The swaying lantern cast a circle of light on the far wall that raced across the floor and up the near wall and back again. The office that had the one good phone in the factory had no working lights, and I walked between the rows of sturdy desks and filing cabinets, with the lantern raised in front of my face, like I was exploring a wreck. The phone was an old two-line, white Princess model on the corner desk of the office, and the casters on the chair screeched when I put my feet up on the desktop. My breath flowed past the bell of the lantern in flaring streams, casting shadows of waves on the wall.
Across the desk was this brass paperweight: a micrometer mounted on an oval base with a shallow well, in which lay a pile of corroded paper clips. Reaching with a fingertip I slid it toward me. The scored knob on the micrometer turned smoothly. It was probably a freebie from some salesman, and yet as well-made as an Italian derailleur. I dumped out the paper clips and lit a cigarette. The perfect black print of a woman’s right hand gripped the handset. With the tail of my shirt I tried wiping it off, but the stain was permanent. Not wanting to think too hard about what eerie phenomenon might explain this, I dialed our number back home. The ring when it came sounded far away, and I pictured the old black phone on the wall by the cash register ringing though the shop. We never had a phone upstairs. I could get to the one in the shop in three rings. Pop took five on a good day, when he heard it, which was hard when the door was shut, like it generally was in the cold weather.
The phone rang a fifth time and then a sixth. I stayed on long enough so that if Pop was there but not answering he would know it was me. As I counted the seconds between rings, Dru came in wrapped in a blanket and sat cross-legged on the desk, looking confused that I was listening so long without talking. I mouthed the word “ringing.” She gestured to me to hand her the cigarette, which had burned down almost to the butt in the time I had been listening to the phone back home ring. She took it carefully to her lips and took a single short drag which she blew out without inhaling and made a sour face.
As I hung up, she said, “You know these aren’t healthy.”
“My father smokes a couple of packs a day. He’s never sick.”
“So you’re saying they’re medicinal?”
Taking the butt from her, I ground it out in the well of the paperweight. “In a way,” I said and picked up the receiver again. “Do you want me to go?” she asked.
“That’s okay,” I said, but she slid off the edge of the desk anyway and wrapped the blanket around
her.
I dialed the Reeds’ number, and this time Mrs. Reed answered on the first ring.
“Tom? Where are you?” she asked.
“Still at school.”
“Is Grey there?” she asked.
“No, did he say he was?”
“He didn’t say anything. We haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
“He was here.”
“He was?”
“But he left. I thought he’d go home.”
“No,” she said. “Callie’s curious, as you can imagine.”
“Where’s she?”
“Right here. Do you want to talk to her?”
“I probably shouldn’t stay on any longer,” I stuttered. “This isn’t my phone.”
There was a silence and I got the impression that she was shaking her head to Callie. “You’re not in your room?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you coming home?”
“No.”
“All right, then. Tell Grey to call if you see him.”
When I went back to bed, Dru was lying on her back with her knees up, staring at the ceiling. “Who was it you called?”
“A neighbor,” I said. “Back home.”
The next day we took a shortcut along the frozen lake. The glare of the sun blinded us and the ice groaned under our feet. There was something about Dru in her leather jacket, her skin translucent with cold that made me want to possess her. I wrapped my arms around her waist and hoisted her over my shoulder. She laughed and slid down my back, swinging her legs around at the last minute to land on her feet like a bareback daredevil at the rodeo. When I turned she swatted me across the face. Then she went for my waist, taking me off my feet. I landed on my back, and she jumped me, pinning my shoulders with her knees. Her black eyes narrowed with determination, she cleared her throat loudly and let a glistening trail of spit drip from her mouth until it hung suspended just a few inches above my nose.
“Confess,” she said, speaking through her teeth so as not to move her lips and let the spitball fall.
“Confess what?” I said, feeling the snow melt and tickle down my collar.
“Why did Dewey send you to us?”
“He told me to bring you the letter,” I said and turned my head to the side so the glob of phlegm wouldn’t land on my face.
She sucked it in and then spit it out well beyond my head. “Why didn’t he come himself?”
“He was busy I guess.”
“Have you ever seen Dooley busy?”
“I don’t know. When he’s teaching maybe. What difference does it make?”
“None really. We have a history.”
“I know. He told me.”
“What did he say?”
“Are you sorry he sent me?”
She whacked me on the cheek with her mitten. “Don’t flirt.”
She got up and brushed the snow off her pants.
For a long time we walked with only the sound of the wind. Along the shoreline the spray had frozen into static crystal waves. Finally she said, “Sometimes I think we’re all full of it.”
“Why do you say that?”
“We just are,” she said. “I mean don’t you think?”
I said, “Sometimes when I’m watching you, I try to imagine what my father would think of you, but I can’t.”
“What’s your dad like, then?”
“You mean is he stupid?”
“No, I meant is he a normal father?”
“To me he is.”
“What’s your mother like?”
“I have no idea.”
Dru laughed. “I know what you mean.”
“No,” I said, “I mean I really have no idea. She took off when I was five.”
She put her hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you miss her?”
No one had asked me that before and it occurred to me that I did, sometimes. “No,” I said.
“Do you remember her?”
“Sort of.”
Dru thought it over and said, “It might not be a bad thing. I mean if you don’t remember then what are you missing?”
“I suppose,” I said, “but I’d say it pretty much is always a bad thing.”
“I guess,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced.
“How come you’re not going home?” I asked her.
“They get me once a year,” she said. “Dad’s fiftieth birthday was October. I went up for that.”
Ahead of us, the Armory came into view, an ugly red brick menace built to look like a medieval castle. It’d been the National Guard armory until it got burned out in the sixties and turned into a gym. We climbed rocks onto solid ground, Dru refusing my hand so she could bound up the icy rocks ahead of me.
When I got to Dooley’s office he was packing up to get out of town. His cracked leather bag was open on his desk and he was shoving papers in it without looking at them first. There was a bottle of scotch open next to his hot plate, where the kettle whistled. He looked at me and went back to his packing as though he hadn’t seen me, then snapped his bag shut and went to the whistling kettle.
“Tea?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Yeah.”
He poured the water into the cup and dunked the tea bag up and down while pouring whiskey in. Then he raised the cup to me. “To the most wonderful time of the year.”
He sipped, shuddered, and returned to the shelves behind his desk and began to take books down and set them in a pile on the floor.
I waited as long as I could bear before I said, “So did you get my paper?”
“I did,” he said but didn’t turn around until he had another armload of books. He put those on the pile, went to his desk, dug through a folder, and slid the paper across the desk.
I picked it up, suddenly worried about what I was going to find. I didn’t worry in vain. Turning the pages, I found the margins crowded with Dooley’s crabbed handwriting in green ink, words circled, arrows surrounding whole paragraphs and then shooting off the edge of the page and starting again on the next. My hands shook as I turned the pages, trying to get to the end to see what the grade was, but when I got there nothing was written.
“There’s no grade,” I said.
He grumbled something that I couldn’t hear.
“Is it that bad?”
Dooley laughed. “Bad isn’t the word for it. Unacceptable, pat, unambitious, trivial.” He motioned to me to hand him the paper. I did. He scanned two of three pages, stopped, and read, “‘Tecumseh returned from Greenville to learn that his brother had a vision and became a profit.’”
“That’s right.”
“P-r-o-f-i-t.’”
“Shit,” I said.
“Quite,” Dooley said.
“Anyone could make that mistake.”
“Anyone careless. Which primary sources did you use?”
“Sir?”
“Which were referenced?”
“In the book?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t see any.”
“Did you find the spelling of names differed from one text to another?”
“Some of them.”
“Which did you use?”
“Whichever I was looking at when I typed them.”
“Was that your method?”
“I guess so.”
He ran his fingers through the graying mess of hair on his head, got up, hiked up his cords, and walked to the bottle. Again he offered me a drink and again I turned him down, though I wanted just then to say yes, even if it was ten o’clock in the morning.
“You’re putting me in a hard spot. This isn’t passing work. If you were any other student, I’d fail you.”
“Then do it,” I said.
He stopped pouring and glared. “Don’t say that if you’re not prepared to accept the consequences. I’m not going to fail you. I’m going to do much worse.” He stood looking out the window at the un
iform gray sky of a winter afternoon. “I’m going to give you a C—but only after you’ve promised me that you will never disappoint me again.”
“I won’t,” I said.
He held up a hand. “Don’t answer so quickly. You’ll be making fools of both of us if you go back on your word.”
“I’ll take the C.”
He unscrewed the cap on his pen and I watched the tip trace a semicircle at the bottom of the page and then he slid the paper back across the desk. “I ran into our friend Harold Sing the other day.”
“Did you?” I said.
“He tells me he’s been seeing you.”
I saw where this was going. “I guess he has.”
“That wouldn’t have anything to do with a love of theater?”
“I’d call it a growing appreciation.”
“Yes.”
“Where are you heading?” I asked just to change the subject.
“Majorca.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, there’s a conference on the causes of the Inquisition.”
I laughed. “Pop would say it was just a bunch of Catholics with too much time on their hands.”
Dewey laughed. “Marvelous. I will submit that hypothesis.”
When we got back to the factory that evening, I wrote the following letter to Aunt Berthe:
I did not go home for Christmas. I have made many attempts to contact Pop by phone and he does not answer. I have reported my absence to the Reeds and they have passed my message on to him.
Your Nephew
For the next three weeks Dru and I lived a fugitive life, hiding out from the morning sun on the dirty windows beneath a lead-heavy pile of blankets. Then, by some convergence of nerve, we’d dart barefoot to the only bathroom on the second floor. We got in the habit of showering together under a sprinkler head that hung over the drain in the corner beside a stationary sink, having learned that we could expect three minutes of hot water on the best of days, a brisk ballet of goose-pimpled pirouettes beneath the spray, one of us rinsing off while the other shivered in the raw air, then the sprint back to the room and the heat of the radiator, where we dressed from a single pile of clothes on the floor.
