by Morris, Ian;
“This is Dru,” I said.
“Hi,” Dru said.
“Hey,” they answered, looking at her the way you might a toddler on a ledge.
“What’s going on?” I asked Callie, hoping to get the straight story from her. She looked half asleep, the dark skin under her eyes even darker with exhaustion.
“We’re just trying to figure out how to work this,” Grey answered for her.
“He won’t get on the ferry,” Callie said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“What did you say?” I asked him.
“Listen,” Callie said to Dru, “do you want a sweater?”
“Would you mind?” Dru said.
While Callie fetched the sweater from the truck, and while they clucked and cackled like girls do when they try on each other’s clothes, Grey and I walked to the edge of the bluff. The rising sun turned the eastern sides of Otter and St. Raphael Islands from black to green. It’d been a cool night and the light glittered on the frost like quartz. Below us was the beach that we’d pushed off from in Grey’s blue canoe just months before.
Grey put his hand on my shoulder and I flinched, thinking he was going to pull the kind of stunt that he used to, trying to scare me into thinking he was going to push me off the bluff.
“You can’t leave,” I said, “not before Callie has her baby. And if you stay that long you might as well stick it out.”
“Easy for you to say,” he said.
“I trust Spires. I always got the feeling he liked us, no matter what he said, more than he liked any law-abiding FIB anyway.”
“I guess we’ll see.”
“We had a little trouble of our own.”
Grey looked over his shoulder at Dru, who was smoothing her necklace over Callie’s brown sweater. “Like what?”
“Long story. When I tell you, you won’t believe it.” I looked over the edge of the bluff and said, “I remember this being higher.”
“Still high enough,” he said and gave me a shove.
I caught myself before I got close to the edge and took a wild swing at his arm. He jumped out of the way and laughed. “I’m still smarter than you.”
“Head wounds bleed a lot.” That’s what the trauma doctor told a waiting room full of bewildered Stovepipe Theater members, to explain how Roy could be sitting up in an emergency-room bed with a turban of gauze around his head, drinking juice through a straw. This information Dru got from Bea’s roommate after dialing her way through nearly every number she knew. She hung up the phone and threw herself against my chest, crying for the first time since the incident. I assumed she’d heard for certain that Roy was dead. “He’s going home tomorrow,” she said between sobs. I thought, in my own grief, “That’s a nice way to put it,” until, out of nowhere, she added, “I wonder if he’ll transfer.”
“What do you mean transfer?”
“To another school,” she said.
I asked, “Are you saying he’s not dead?”
She laughed and pushed away from me, leaving my shoulder soggy. “Of course, silly. What did you think?”
“That he was.”
Around us the shop, crowded with the first repairs of spring, looked much the same as I’d left it at Thanksgiving, though I noticed the picture of Pop and my mom had been taped back in place on its broken mount above Pop’s bench. Dru turned the metal dial on the phone, with her hand on the lever. “This is cool,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”
I knew by the handprints on the curtains above the kitchen sink that Trudy was history. The house was otherwise tidy, if not spotless. “Pop, it’s me,” I called, as though I’d just come back from an afternoon at the Reeds’. There was no answer.
“Kitchen,” I said to Dru, by way of a tour. “There’s the living room.”
“Great,” she said, “where’s the bathroom?”
When she emerged, smelling of soap, carrying Callie’s sweater over her arm, and looking like she’d come from the ball rather than ten hours on the run, I showed her my room, as pristine as I’d left it.
“You’re neat,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. “So are you.”
“I meant the room.”
The kitchen door slammed, and we walked to the kitchen to find Pop in his riding clothes, red-faced from exertion, reaching for the cane to beat down the intruder whose footsteps he’d heard coming at him down the hallway.
“Eh?” he said, looking first at me, then at Dru, then at me again, determined to keep staring until he understood what he was seeing. The sight of him without Trudy and back on the bike gave me more comfort than I ever would’ve dreamed, and I wanted to hug him except for the fact that I never had. Dru stood beaming, a little uncomfortable and anxious, I think, to make a good impression, which surprised me because who was he to her? Or, more to the point, who did she want to be to him?
I said, “Pop Dru, Dru Pop”
She reached out her hand and he shook it, saying, “How do you do.” Swear to God, just like that: How—do—you—do and clicked his heels together.
At dinnertime, Pop pulled his easy chair up to the head of the table so that Dru and I could have the two kitchen chairs. We had buttered noodles, green beans from a can, and beer. Dru had found a sweatshirt and jeans I hadn’t worn since junior high that fit well enough and sat cross-legged, watching Pop out of the corner of her eye each time he leaned forward and extended his arm as far as it would reach to put his glass back on the table.
Dru went to sleep before dark in my bed. I lay on the couch in the living room as Pop reclined in his chair. I told him the story of why we’d come home. I left out my failing grades. Grades were irrelevant.
He sat in his chair with his legs crossed, smoking and watching me as I talked. “Roy,” I said, “you’d’ve liked him”—I said that a couple of times, “you’d like Mike, he’s a good guy” … “That’s Bea I’m talking about, I don’t think you’d like her,” and on like that. He watched and listened and just when I was wrapping up and was going to ask what he thought about the whole mess—though I have no clue what I would’ve done with that information—I heard him snore.
The next morning Dru and I went out for a walk, west through the state park. We came out of the woods, which had been damp, into a clearing, which was bright. This was Sitwell land. By then almost all of the undeveloped land was Sitwell land. Spring had come late, but it had come, and the ground was soft and the air filled with the stench of turned up mud and rot. We held hands and that felt strange because I’d never held her hand like that before. I guided her across the field.
When we reached the bluff, she hesitated because the path leading to the cove was steep and the dirt was loose. She gripped my hand tighter, the sweat of her palm mingling with mine, as we descended a stairway of exposed roots. At the bottom I let go and we hopped the stones to the water’s edge.
She pulled off the sneakers she’d borrowed from Callie, rolled up my jeans, and waded into the icy water, her calves white against the onyx surface of the lake. There was the sound of laughter in the distance and the ferry rounded the bend, its rails lined with day tourists scuttling off to the outlying islands for the afternoon. They waved. Dru waved back, as though she’d lived here her whole life.
27
WATER
I wonder if Crowder had died whether we would’ve had the guts to show up for a hearing in front of the same board of regents we’d spattered with his blood. Luckily, we’ll never have to find out.
Of course, in spite of Roy’s fortunate survival, those of us who hadn’t been expelled already were expelled now. Only Bea (four credits from her BS) objected. She said, in front of all of us, that this had been Harold’s fault, and mine. She said that if she’d known anyone was going to get hurt she never would have gotten involved. The Chancellor—give him credit—looked Bea square in her cold, hazel eyes and told her he hoped we all felt that way.
It was funny seeing them all in their clothes. Bea in slacks for the first time
I’d ever seen and a yellow sweater and white blouse underneath. Majors was dapper as ever in a blue blazer, though on his face was something I’d never seen, something that looked like remorse, but could have also been doubt. Harold wore an aquamarine polyester suit that might have been meant as a gag, but no one was in the mood and so the gesture lost all effect. And most surprising of all was Harriette, without the makeup and pink and looking too young for anyone getting kicked out of college her senior year. She looked to me, more than anything, like a bank teller.
Dru wore the same black number she’d worn at that first party. It was wrinkled at the hem.
Afterward there was nothing to do but retreat into the protective custody of our permanent addresses and let our parents pull whatever strings they could to steer us back toward lucrative professions, except for me, whose father had no strings to pull. This, I realized, was what Dooley had meant about consequences.
I told Dru I had to pick up my things at Rosewalter. She said she’d be at Bea’s.
The day was warm and humid. The semester was coming to an end and, unlike the fall semester, when nerves over exams combined with bleak weather for a pathological mood on campus, the warmth of spring defused the anxiety and the students looked complacent and content. The ivy on the walls of Rosewalter was turning green. Girls lay in halters on the grass.
I knocked on Ship’s door once, then twice (not calling his name because I figured he’d never answer if he knew it was me) before I gave up. I was heading down the stairs when I saw him coming through the double doors. He saw me, stopped, turned back and ran. He beat me outside to the courtyard, but I caught him by the arm when he made the mistake of turning to see if I was still following him.
“Come on, Ship,” I said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to get my stuff out of the room.”
He squinted in the sun and thought about it.
“You’re going that way anyway. Don’t make me get a court order.”
“That’s good coming from you,” he said.
We made a deal. I’d wait in the hall while Ship packed up my stuff and handed it to me. I leaned against the wall, looking down a couple of times as floor mates who might’ve recognized me came out of their rooms. I heard slamming dresser doors and the sounds of Ship’s footsteps and then after about ten minutes the door opened again, and I saw my blue Bellwether backpack hanging from the end of Ship’s chicken claw fingers. I took it from him, saying, “That wasn’t so bad. Now will you let me apologize?”
He slammed the door.
“I’m saying I’m sorry,” I said through the door, “and asking you to forgive me.”
“Go away,” he said.
I waited for him, but he wouldn’t come out. “All right, but you’re going to regret this,” I said, having no idea why he would. I was halfway up Observatory Drive before I remembered that I’d left my bike behind.
The shuffling of sneakered feet echoed through the observatory. Elise Winters stood in front of a school group, second graders from the size of them, trailing their hands along the curved rows of books and stumbling as they tilted their heads up to look at the domed metal roof. “Can anybody tell me,” she asked them in a singsong voice, “what word you can find in ‘observatory’?”
A girl in back said, “Servant.”
Elise tilted her head, as she thought of what to make of that and said, “Yes, ‘servant’ and what else?” A long silence and then she said, “Observe, right? Can anyone tell me what observe means?” This time she didn’t wait. “It means ‘look,’ doesn’t it? That’s what we do here. We look at things with the big telescope behind me.”
She saw me, smiled, not especially surprised, and made a gesture with her eyes to all the kids standing around, meaning I’d have to come back. I nodded that I understood, waved, and left. I’m sure she thought I was coming back. I wondered how long she’d wait.
By the time I got to the lecture hall, Dooley was already into the announcements that he started every class with. I stood in back by the doors, scanning the rows for a seat. “Papers are due on Thursday at four,” Dooley said, speaking softly as he always did when he began. “That means on my desk. The department’s secretaries have been instructed to indicate papers that are late. This is done by drawing a skull and crossbones in the upper-right-hand corner.
“After Monday’s lecture my attention was called to a book that was left behind by a student.” He held it up, a paperback with a glossy cover like you buy at the grocery store checkout line. He studied the cover and read, “‘Slugs—they crawl, they mate, they crave human blood.’”
“Oh, my God,” a girl’s voice called out, “that’s mine.”
There was a soft ripple of laughter as she stood in the middle of a row, climbed over knees and backpacks to the aisle, and jogged to the front. Standing on her toes, she reached up toward the lectern. Dooley looked again at the book and then down at the girl in mock disapproval. Scarlet with embarrassment, she took the book from him and walked back to her seat, cradling it to her chest.
“Before the advent of electronic communication, it was routine for the presidents to pursue what they perceived to be national interests without explaining their intentions to their citizens.” Dooley’s voice filled the room without the need for amplification, the increase in volume the signal that his lecture had begun. “With the coming of radio and television, it became necessary for the executive branch to either inform or deceive its constituents. In matters of war, this nation’s leaders would always choose the latter. Truth became a commodity, hoarded by intelligence agencies, concealed from the public and—as demonstrated by the Pentagon Papers—ultimately from the leaders themselves.”
Not seeing any seat other than in the first row, I waited until Dooley turned to the map, then I retraced the same route taken by the girl with the misplaced potboiler and sat in the aisle seat.
“The encounter of the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy with phantom North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin was not an incident of war exploited to justify the commitment of us military forces. It was a fabrication whose need was determined in advance to prod an ignorant public into embracing a foreign policy whose ends they were forbidden to know under the power of executive secrecy”—he turned back from the wall and spotted me immediately, as if he’d been scanning the crowd every day for my face, maybe he had. He paused, sorted the papers on his lectern, opened his mouth to begin, shuffled the pages in front of him again, before saying, his voice somehow louder than the volume of his lecture, “Mr. Zimmermann, what did I say about sitting up front?”
“What did you do?” Dru asked. We were sitting on the porch of Bea and Harriette’s house on Williamson Street. A couple of doors down, a father was throwing a Frisbee with his daughter.
“I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “First I laughed, like he was making a joke, but he just stared, until I realized he wasn’t going to start talking again until I moved, so I got up and I left.”
The father and daughter stood on opposite sides of the street. Before he threw, the man pantomimed the gesture of throwing and each time the girl, who might have been ten or eleven, raised her arms to be ready, but never caught the Frisbee. Always it bounced off her hands or chest or, once, her forehead.
“I talked to my folks,” Dru said. “Dad says he’ll pay for me to go to law school.”
When she said that, I was watching the girl wind up to throw the disc back. “Don’t you have to take some test?”
“I already did.”
“When?”
“Before the show. When you were in Chicago.”
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
“Why would I have?” she said, with a teasing intimacy.
“Is there one around here?”
“One what?” Now she was watching the girl. After twisting her body until her back was to us, she let go of the Frisbee. It fluttered a few feet and fell to the grass. The father, looking both ways for cars, jogge
d across the street and back to his original spot, as he’d done four or five times since we’d been watching, before throwing the Frisbee again, seemingly thinking if he was patient enough and determined she would reach him with her next throw.
“Law school.”
“The way it works is you don’t just go to one. You want to go to a good one. You want to go to the best one you can get into.”
“Which one would that be?”
She looked at me. All the potential for deception I’d seen in her eyes the first time we met now showed for real. “In my case that would be in Philadelphia.”
“I can’t go there,” I said. “Not with Pop—”
“I know,” she said and waited for the significance of the sentence to penetrate my thick skull. When she saw that it had, she said, “You should come and see me, you know. I wouldn’t mind.”
“I’d like to,” I told her. “But I don’t think I ever will.”
I think she’d expected me to argue with her, and when I didn’t the energy she’d reserved for the fight to come had no place to go and turned into a doe-eyed pity. “It’s my fault,” she said.
And I said, “I know.”
Callie was wrong that night at Friendly’s over Thanksgiving vacation when she said I could come home and nobody would think anything of it. I wasn’t shunned, but no one was particularly glad to see me. On the other hand, Grey and Callie, with the arrival of Baby Freda (after Callie’s father Alfred)—because of the child’s beauty (she had her father’s jet hair, her mother’s wide brown eyes) and because they’d increased the island’s ever-dwindling population, if only by one—became Island Royalty.
It didn’t bother me much, being the town pariah. I’d been one of them once, I would be again, whether they liked it or not. I wasn’t going anywhere. People would forget how I’d let them down and others would get the chance to fuck up worse than I had.
I spent a rainy afternoon pulling together discarded components and bolting them on an old Raleigh frame a FIB had left behind to settle a bill. A battered, dull silver, the bike was a sad substitute for the one that for all I knew still leaned in a corner of Ship’s room, but I wouldn’t be testing it the way I had the other. I didn’t have to. Pop had little of the old spring left in his legs. Whether it was the accident, or the cigarettes or the liquor or the lethargic months with Trudy in the house or just the withering of passing seasons, we never talked about it.
