Life After Genius

by M. Ann Jacoby

  The good feeling does not last. As soon as Samuel Winslow ducks into his car and drives off, Martin hands Mead a shovel and says, “I think it’s time you learn what it is your father and I do around here. From the ground up.”

  Mead stares down into the hole in which Delia’s casket now rests. “You want me to shovel dirt?”

  “Maybe a few aching muscles will teach you a little respect.”

  And he walks off. Just like that. Mead glances around for his savior: his father. Surely he won’t allow Uncle Martin to stick his son with a gravedigger’s job. But he has already left, slipped into the hearse and out of sight while Mead wasn’t looking.

  “Shit,” Mead says.

  Lenny hands him a pair of leather gloves. “Here, wear these. It’ll help.”

  MEAD IS READY TO QUIT AFTER TEN MINUTES. After twenty, he’s exhausted. Lenny, on the other hand, has the strength of ten men. And yet he is twice as old as Mead. So Mead picks up his shovel and gives it another try. Sweat rolls down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging them. His shirt is sticking to his back. It’s enough to drive a person mad. Mead sets down his shovel, takes off his shirt, and mops his brow with it. If only his mother could see him now; she’d be horrified. On the strength of that thought, he keeps digging.

  “Want some sunscreen?” Lenny says.

  Mead shakes his head. “I’m fine.” And he keeps digging, but can barely lift his arms. Each shovelful of dirt feels as if it is going to be his last.

  Someone is walking through the cemetery, over on the far side. Mead looks up, hoping that it is his father come back to rescue him, but it isn’t. Where the hell is the man anyway? Okay, fine. So maybe his father thought it would be a good idea for Mead to do this for a while. A little manual labor to teach him to be more respectful. Blah, blah, blah. But enough is enough. Mead has been out here for almost an hour now in the hot, blazing sun. His father should know better. After all, Mead was excused from gym class for nine years in a row.

  He’s closer now, the cemetery walker. He seems to be heading this way. Mead stops digging and shades his eyes for a better look. That walk. He recognizes that walk. It belongs to only one person that Mead knows and that person is Herman Weinstein. He’s here. Holy shit. He’s here in High Grove. It’s not that Mead hasn’t been expecting him; he just didn’t expect him quite so soon. But that’s not true either. He’d wanted Herman to follow him. That was the plan: to lure the guy away from his lair. Only now that he is here, Mead realizes that he doesn’t have any idea what to do next. “Lenny,” Mead says. “Do you have a gun in your truck?”

  “It ain’t worth killing yourself over, Teddy. Pace yourself and you’ll be fine.”

  “What? No, you don’t understand. That person over there, walking this way, he’s dangerous. You know, crazy, like a dog with rabies.”

  Lenny stops shoveling and looks up. “Where? I don’t see no one.”

  “Over there,” Mead says and points. “Right over there.”

  Lenny walks over to his pickup truck and reaches into the back. Mead thinks he’s reaching for the shotgun but instead he lifts out a cold can of Coke and hands it to Mead. “Here. I think it’s time you took a break.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you don’t see him?”

  “What I see is a very exhausted and confused young man.”

  Lenny is staring at Mead the way the grocery clerk was looking at Aunt Jewel. “I’m not crazy, Lenny. He’s there. Look.” But when Mead looks again, Herman is gone.

  LENNY AND MEAD TOSS THEIR SHOVELS into the back of his truck. Job done. And Mead is still breathing, a miracle in and of itself. He hurts, though. His arms, his back, his legs. Hell, there isn’t one square inch of his body that doesn’t hurt.

  “Your uncle and I are going huntin’ tomorrow. You should join us.”

  “Yeah, right,” Mead says. “Me out in the woods with my uncle and a loaded gun. Great idea, Lenny.”

  “Seems to me your uncle is the one ought to be afraid.” And he looks out across the cemetery in the direction Mead thought he just saw Herman, as if Mead is the crazy one. Which he is not. He saw Herman. He knows he did. Lenny opens the driver’s side door and says, “I’m gonna stop by my house before heading back to the store, get cleaned up and check in on my dad. He ain’t been feeling too good lately. Would you like me to drop you off at your house?”

  “No, not particularly. You have met my mother, haven’t you?”

  “I’ll drop you at the store then,” Lenny says. But their exit from the cemetery is blocked by a blue Dodge coupe that is trying to come in while they are trying to get out. The driver honks her horn several times. “Why don’t she just go around me?” Lenny says. “She’s got plenty of room.” He waves her through and she pulls up alongside the truck, rolls down her window. A pretty blonde in dark sunglasses. Peering over the top of them, she says, “Have you got a Theodore Fegley in that truck? I was over at the furniture store looking for him and his father said he was over here.”

  Lenny looks at Mead and raises his eyebrows. “Seems that the young lady is looking for you.”

  She lifts the dark shades up off her eyes. “Hey, Theodore,” Hayley Sammons calls to him through the open car window. “Don’t tell me you forget about our date. We were supposed to go swimming, remember? Out at Snell’s Quarry?”

  HAYLEY PEELS DOWN TO A TWO-PIECE bathing suit that makes her look like a model straight out of the pages of a Sears Roebuck catalog: pretty, perky, and shapely, but not too shapely. Not Penthouse shapely. Not sleazy. She looks like a nice, Midwestern girl with a nice, normal body. Dropping her clothes in a heap, she walks out onto a low ledge of rock and dives in. Just like that. Without even first testing the water with her toe. She swims out several yards before popping back up to the surface.

  Mead crawls into the backseat of the Dodge to put on a pair of swimming trunks that Hayley just happened to have in a duffel bag in the trunk of her car. She claims they belong to her brother, but Mead suspects a boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend.

  In the midst of changing his clothes, someone screams. Mead covers himself with his hands and peers out the window expecting to see the horrified face of one of his mother’s friends staring back. Or another one of his ex-classmates. Instead he sees a body falling through the air, cannonball-style. It hits the lake and sends a geyser of water skyward. Back in the 1800s, Snell’s Quarry was mined for limestone; in the early 1900s, it was abandoned; and sometime around the middle of that century the residents of Grove County turned it into a popular swimming hole. Rocky Beach. Limestone Lake. It goes by many names and has many personalities.

  Mead pulls on the swimming trunks and gets out of the car just in time to see another boy jump from the highest point of rock. Dead Man’s Leap. That’s what it’s called. The story goes that a quarryman leapt from that ledge to his death the day he learned they’d be closing the place down. Back before it was filled with water. Now it’s looked upon as a rite of passage: boys as young as eight jumping off that rock in the belief that when they hit the water they will be men.

  Mead sits on a low ledge of rock and dangles his feet in the lake. The water is cool and feels good after shoveling all that dirt under a hot summer sun. He takes a moment to check out the other swimmers in the lake, in case one of them is Herman. But none is. Then he turns around and checks out the sunbathers, but none of them is Herman either. Maybe Lenny is right. Maybe he was seeing things. That has to be it. Hard labor and hot sun will do that to a person, make him delusional. This is exactly what he needs. To sit and relax. To dangle his feet in cool water and watch a pretty girl swim back and forth across the lake. Like Forsbeck always says, “Nothing rejuvenates a man like a woman.” He was referring to the women who fold out of men’s magazines, but Mead is pretty sure it applies to this situation too.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Hayley asks.

  Mead shakes his head. She pulls herself up out of the lake and sits next to him on the rock, then leans forward to wring
out her hair. Like the girls in the unisex bathroom back at the dorm. “So what was it like going off to college so young,” she asks, “going off to a big city all alone at the age of fifteen? Were you scared?”

  “No.”

  “Liar. You must’ve been scared. At least a little.”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  Another scream pierces the air as a boy, knees tucked up to his chin, drops from the cliff and hits the water in an explosion.

  “When I was twelve,” Hayley says, “my father took me to the west coast. I’d never even been outside of High Grove before. But he had, hundreds of times. He’s a train conductor and travels all over the United States. He used to tell us stories about all the places he’d been, all the people he’d met. He’d bring back avocados from California, red rocks from Colorado, and coconuts from Florida. He made the world beyond High Grove seem so exciting and full of adventure, so when he asked me to come along with him that summer, I jumped at the opportunity. It was to be our little secret: the two of us sneaking off to California together. I wasn’t supposed to tell my mother because then she’d want to come along and my father wanted it to be just us two. So we made up a story. We told her we were going to visit my father’s relatives in Kansas because we knew how much she disliked my aunt, and it worked. She stayed home with my brother and I got my father all to myself.

  “It was great. I still remember sitting by the train window and watching the world go by. I was amazed at how big it was. Our country. How varied. There were mountains and canyons and forests and rivers where the water ran so fast you’d drown trying to cross them. Or so my father said. It was beyond anything I could’ve ever imagined. Then we got to California and I saw the ocean. It was huge. As big as the sky. I never wanted to go home. But of course, I had to. And it was pure torture because even after I got home I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about where we’d been, about all those wonderful experiences I’d had. I had to keep them all to myself because otherwise my mother would’ve found out and been really mad.”

  Mead looks over at Hayley. Her hands are tucked under her legs, her chin raised up to the sky, a smile on her face so broad you would swear she was looking at her beloved Pacific Ocean right now.

  “Did she ever find out?” Mead asks.

  Hayley lowers her chin and stares at her feet, her toes drawing circles under the water. “Three summers. My father took me to the west coast three summers in a row. Then, on the fourth, he told me he was gonna take my brother Eric instead. Oh, was I mad. I was so furious that I went and told my mother all about it. No way was I going to let my little brother go to California without me, even if it meant dragging my mother along. But you know what? She already knew. She’d known all along. All that time I thought my father was lying to my mother, when in fact he was lying to me.”

  She looks up at the sky again. Smiles. Then looks over at Mead and says, “What about you, Theodore? Has anyone ever lied to you?”

  “Yes,” he says and pushes off into the water.

  SITTING TOGETHER ON THE FAR SIDE of the quarry, Mead and Hayley look back across the water toward the parking area. Hayley says, “I’ve never been very good at math. I guess that would make me stupid in your book.”

  Meads shakes his head. “Mathematical thinking is deeply unnatural. It makes things complex where they would at first appear simple. Take, for example, this rock we’re sitting on. Describe it to me.”

  “This rock? I don’t know. It’s big. And hard.”

  “Exactly. Now if you give me a ledger pad and a pen, I can probably get back to you with a mathematical description of it in about a week.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that math is stupid, not me.”

  “Not stupid, no. It seems impractical when applied to something as simple as a rock but when that same principle is applied to a complex idea —like the theory of relativity —the beauty of mathematical thinking becomes clear. The complex becomes simple.”

  A boy jumps off the cliff and screams. Hayley and Mead look up as he falls through the air. When he hits the water, Hayley grabs Mead’s hand and says, “Come on, Theodore, let’s go jump off a cliff.”

  He pulls his hand free. “No way. I’m not going up there. Someone got killed once jumping off that ledge.”

  “That was before the quarry got filled with water, Theodore.” She grabs his hand. “Come on. Let’s not think about it, let’s just do it.”

  A PREADOLESCENT BOY, who apparently has not a single working brain cell in his entire head, steps off the cliff. His body drops out of sight, his feet disappearing first, followed quickly by legs, torso, arms, and head, the quarry swallowing him up whole. He screams as he falls through the air and hits the water with a loud splash.

  “You’re looking a little pink there, Theodore,” Hayley says and touches her index finger to his right shoulder, leaving behind a white mark. “Did you think to put on any sunscreen?”

  “I’m fine, Mother,” he says.

  “Sorry,” Hayley says. “I was just commenting.”

  “Hey,” some kid behind them yells. “Stop holding up the line and jump already.”

  “Why don’t you go next,” Hayley says to Mead.

  “No,” he says. “Ladies first.”

  She gives him a look that suggests that she suspects he is trying to get out of this altogether, but she steps ahead of him anyway. “There’s really nothing to it, Theodore,” she says as she stands silhouetted against the blue sky, her body a perfect figure eight. Mead squints and she looks naked. He could squint at her all day and maybe work up a mathematical equation to define her body. The sines and cosines of lust. An algebraic equation that sums up the seductive qualities of the female body. The complex made simple. But he really should not be thinking about Mr. and Mrs. Sammons’s daughter in this way. He needs instead to start thinking about what to do next, now that Herman is in High Grove. If, indeed, he actually is.

  Hayley bends her knees and jumps. Screams all the way down.

  “It’s your turn,” the boy behind Mead says. Some teenager with pimply skin, red hair, and a sunburn that looks as if it’s going to keep him up all night.

  “I know,” Mead says and steps to the edge. Hayley bobs to the surface below and looks up. “Come on, Theodore,” she says. “Jump. It’s fun.”

  The quarry looks different from up here. Bigger. Rockier. Mead imagines that he is standing exactly where that quarryman was standing eighty years ago. Looking down. Thinking about all those years he spent chipping away at this rock to feed his family. All the holes he drilled to make casings for sticks of dynamite. All the stone he hauled off one chunk at a time. Each year the quarry got deeper, wider. Twenty years he worked here, maybe thirty. Thirty years digging his own grave. So really, Mead got off easy because he only wasted three years of his life. Less, really, because he didn’t even learn about the Riemann Hypothesis until his second year of college. And he didn’t become entwined with Herman until this year. All those long hours of hard work undone by one person. Like the fellow who closed down the quarry.

  “Hey, buddy, are you gonna jump or what?”

  Mead looks down at the smooth surface of the water but all he sees are hard jagged points of limestone. He begins to tremble. It starts in his knees and works its way up his body. A cloud passes in front of the sun and the air turns cold. Mead tries to step back from the ledge but can’t. He’s frozen. Is this how the quarryman felt? Afraid to go forward, unable to go back? Frozen in time? Someone touches Mead’s shoulder. He turns to see who it is and his heart leaps up into his throat. Because it’s Herman.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Mead says. “Sneak up on people like that.”

  “We have unfinished business, Fegley. You walked out on our deal.”

  “We didn’t have any deal, Weinstein.”

  “Of course we did, Fegley. Don’t be coy. You’re too smart to be coy.”

  “I’m not smart, I’m an idiot. Otherwise I wouldn’t
have let you trick me.”

  “Trick you? I’m hurt, Fegley. I thought we were friends.”

  “No. We were never friends, because friends don’t screw each other.”

  “Some friends do,” Herman says. “And they enjoy it too.”

  “Go away,” Mead says and tries to shrug off Herman’s hand.

  “Not until you agree to come back.”

  “No,” Mead says. “Never.”

  “In that case, Fegley, you leave me no choice.” And Herman grabs Mead with both hands and pushes him off the cliff.

  MEAD OPENS HIS EYES AND SEES several faces looking down at him. Is he lying in a morgue? He checks out the faces in search of his Uncle Martin. He doesn’t want anyone else to embalm him because Mead knows that before his uncle injects formaldehyde into any body, he always performs the two tests of death. The first involves a saucer of water, placed on the chest of the deceased to detect the shiver of a beating heart or a working set of lungs; the second, a rubber band wrapped around a finger, white means go, red means stop. But Mead does not see his uncle; all he sees is the pimply-faced kid with red hair. And Hayley.

  “Theodore,” she says, “are you okay?”

  Mead sits up, surprised to find that he is still at the top of the cliff in one piece and not at the bottom in several. “Where’s Herman?”

  “Who?” Hayley asks.

  “The guy who tried to push me off the cliff just now.” Mead turns to the pimply-faced kid. “You saw him, right? Tall guy? Dark hair?” The pimply kid shakes his head. “But you must have. You were standing right here the whole time.”

  The pimply kid looks at Hayley and shrugs.

  “No one tried to push you, Theodore. You fainted.”

  “But he was here. I saw him.”

  Hayley takes hold of Mead’s hand. “Come on, Theodore. Let’s go back to the car. I think you’ve had enough sun.”