by C. R. Corwin
Every clipping I read dislodged a memory. Every memory stirred an emotion:
There was Lawrence’s story on Adlai Stevenson’s suffocating speech at the college in the fall of 1955. I remember Effie leading us in a hilarious fake prayer afterward at Mopey’s. “Good and merciful God,” she implored, “please do not let the Democrats nominate Adlai again in fifty-six. Eisenhower will surely humiliate him again, and we beats are already as beat as our beatness can bear.”
There was Lawrence’s story on the controversial decision by the college to put television sets in the dormitory lounges. I showed it to Eric. “Believe it or not,” I said, “I was one of the forty-seven snobs who signed the petition to have them removed.”
“You’d still sign it today, wouldn’t you?” he said.
“In a heartbeat,” I said.
There were oodles of sports stories—Lawrence absolutely hated writing sports—and oodles of stories on the useless projects undertaken by the college’s fraternities and sororities. There were also lots of those inane “man on the street” stories asking students what they thought of the latest world events. I found one where he’d actually quoted me. It was about the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott: “Negroes should be able to sit wherever they darn well please,” opines sophomore library science major Dolly Madison. I remembered how upset I was that he’d quoted me saying darn well instead of damn well. I remembered how I’d ranted on and on about censorship and the need for journalistic courage at such a crucial time in history. I remembered refusing to kiss him for a week.
There was a story on the debate team winning the state championship. DEBATERS TALK THEIR WAY TO THE TOP, the headline read. Above the story was a photograph showing Rollie and his three equally nerdy debating partners—Don Rodino, Herbert Giffels and Elgin “Bud” Wetzel—standing stiffly in front of the Ohio State capitol with their big first-place trophies. Lawrence had taken the photo, too. I recalled how angry Lawrence had been when the editor sent him to Columbus to cover the debate tournament. It was Easter vacation, after all, and the Baked Bean Society had planned a week’s worth of sleepless celebrating. I remembered seeing him off at the bus stop. He had his ugly plaid suitcase, his portable typewriter and The Harbinger’s big clunky camera around his neck. I could still see the long neck of the flashbulb attachment banging him in the chin every time he turned his face. “They better win the fucker,” he growled as I hugged him good-bye.
They did win, of course, and Lawrence dutifully took the photo and wrote the story. According to the date scribbled in the margin, the story ran one week after Easter.
Winning a state title in anything is a big story for a college paper, even in debate. But I doubt too many students read Lawrence’s story. They would have been more interested in another story that ran in that same edition—the one about David Delarosa’s murder.
I flipped through the files, forward and backward. I knew Lawrence hadn’t written any stories himself on David’s murder, of course, but I thought maybe he’d saved some of the stories written by others. If he had saved them, they weren’t in that tub.
But I did find one very small story on Jack Kerouac’s visit to the college the previous November that tickled me. I read it aloud to Eric. “Listen to this: ‘Nationally known avant-garde poet Jack Kerouac will appear at The E Pluribus Unum Coffee House, 2748 West Tuckman St., on Friday, November 23, at 8 PM’ Paragraph. ‘Kerouac’s novel, The Town and the City, was published in 1949. A new novel, On the Road, will be published some time next year.’ Paragraph. ‘The appearance is sponsored by The Meriwether Square Baked Bean Existentialist Society. Admission is free.’”
Eric was not exactly impressed with Lawrence’s story. “That’s it? The great Jack Kerouac was coming to your puny backwater college and that’s all the ink they gave it?”
I put the little clipping back in the folder. I put the folder back in the Rubbermaid tub. “Kerouac was a nobody then,” I said. I rested my head on the back of the seat, closed my eyes and chewed the head off another marshmallow peep. “We were all nobodies then,” I said.
***
Eric was thoughtful enough to carry the tub inside for me. But he wouldn’t stay for dinner no matter how many times I asked him. He was anxious to get to Borders, to play chess with his worthless friends. “Go on,” I said, “leave an old woman all alone on a Saturday night.”
I laughed along with him. I wished he’d realized I wasn’t joking.
I watched him back out of my driveway. I watched his truck disappear up my street. I’d lived by myself in that house for forty years, but I couldn’t remember ever feeling more alone than I did that afternoon. Not even James’ silly face could cheer me. I put on my old gardening clothes. It was only four o’clock. I could spend a couple hours in my flower beds before the sun went down. But I made it no farther than the glider on my back porch. I pulled my legs up to my chin. I wrapped my arms around my shins. I rocked myself like a baby in a cradle. I watched the squirrels. I watched the rabbits. I watched the sparrows hop about on my trumpet vines. I watched the daylight fade. I wiped my nose and my eyes on my sweatshirt and went inside.
I dumped a can of tomato soup into a saucepan and put the burner on low. I pulled out my plastic cutting board and assembled my favorite sandwich—two thick pieces of Texas toast, two pieces of provolone cheese, a layer of thinly sliced tomato, a sprinkling of oregano. I sprayed my big iron griddle with Pam. I grilled my sandwich until the provolone was gooey, until the sad scent of oregano filled every inch of my little house. I clicked on the living room TV. I watched the news and then an old Lawrence Welk rerun on PBS. I put on my pajamas and moved my exciting night of television viewing to my bedroom.
Luckily for my mental health there was nothing worth a damn on television that Saturday night. The more I clicked my remote, the angrier I got—at the cable company, at the culture that produced such drivel, at God and the wicked world he created, finally at myself. “Get a grip, Dolly!” I heard myself growl.
I rarely call myself by my real first name like that. So when I do, I know I’d better obey.
I got out of bed and made a mug of Darjeeling tea. I gathered up my portable phone, my address book, some stationery, and a big flat book to write on. I crawled back into bed. I had work to do.
First I called Eric. It was only ten o’clock but he was already home. Knowing Eric, I did not have to ask if he was alone. “I’ve got another person for you to find,” I said. I waited for him to find something to write on. I waited for him to find something to write with. “Her name is Penelope Yarrow. Y.A.R.R.O.W. She’s an old girlfriend of Gordon’s apparently. From the sixties.”
Next I called Andrew J. Holloway III. I expected to get his answering machine, but he, too, was home, and from the silence on the other end, apparently just as alone as Eric and me. I got right to my question: “Exactly how long could a little slip of paper survive in a dump? Before rotting away or whatever paper does?”
“That depends on a lot of things,” he said. “Was it buried? Was it exposed to the air? To moisture? Was it sealed in something? If so, in what?”
“So theoretically, a piece of paper could survive for fifty years or more out there?”
“Under the right conditions—sure.”
I got down to the nitty-gritty. “Did Professor Sweet ever tell his students to be on the lookout for a restaurant receipt? Bags or wrappers with the word Mopey’s on it?”
“Uh—no.”
I put a chuckle in my voice. “Just the Betsy Wetsy dolls, old soda pop bottles and cocoa cans?”
He put a chuckle in his, too. “That’s right.”
Now I made sure my voice sounded deadly serious. “Did you know he actually saved all the cocoa cans—in his personal collection?”
“No, I didn’t,” Andrew said.
Chapter 15
Monday, April 30
I woke up in a surprisingly good mood for a Monday. I hadn’t caught up on any of my yard work over the week
end. And I wasn’t one inch closer to finding Gordon’s murderer. But I had managed to exorcise a demon or two, my what-if-Lawrence-hadn’t-strayed demon in particular, and good gravy, I was just feeling better about things. I took James on a longer walk than usual and doubled up on his treats. I put on a spring blouse and a pair of lightweight khakis. I dug around in the jewelry basket on my dresser for my bluebird brooch.
I got to the morgue right at nine. I made my tea and got to work marking up the weekend papers. At noon I headed down the hill to Ike’s.
“Morgue Mama!” he sang out. “I didn’t know you were rewarding us with your presence today.”
“I didn’t know myself until five minutes ago.”
“Well, it’s good to see your face,” he said. “I just hope you’re in the mood for chicken salad.”
“Sounds delightful.” I sat at a table by the window. It gave me a beautiful, unimpeded view of the empty storefronts across the street.
Ike brought me my tea then got busy making my sandwich. “What kind of bagel you want that on?” he bellowed over the top of his espresso machine.
“Surprise me,” I bellowed back.
He chose pumpernickel. He piled the chicken salad high. He went crazy with the cream cheese.
Ike’s lunchtime rush only lasts about twenty minutes. As soon as things quieted down he joined me, bringing me a free bag of potato chips. “You getting anywhere with that murder?” he asked.
It tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “You’re pretty well plugged into the black community—right?”
He laughed and helped himself to a potato chip. “I’m black, if that’s what you mean by plugged in.”
I knew I was blushing. “Let me try that again—What’s the general opinion of Shaka Bop?”
He laughed harder. “Good Lord, Maddy, that was even worse than before. There are eighty thousand black people in this city. We don’t exactly get together every Saturday night in some big hall and vote on general opinions.”
If he could tease, I could tease. “No? We white people do.”
“Oh, I know you do!” he answered. “Oh, I know you do!”
We laughed and ate potato chips and then we got down to a serious appraisal of Shaka Bop.
Shaka, of course, was still going by his real name when David Delarosa was murdered. One night at Jericho’s, during his last set of the night, he announced his plans to leave town. It came just two weeks after the police tried to pin David’s murder on him. He hooked the neck of his saxophone over his shoulder and pulled the microphone to his lips. “If Hannawa don’t love Sidney Spikes no more,” he said in an affected sharecropper’s voice, “then ol’ Sidney’s through with Hannawa.” It was an angry good-bye. We begged him to stay but we understood when he didn’t.
I remember Effie and Chick being especially upset that the city’s racist police had driven Sidney away from the people he loved. But to tell you the truth, I had the feeling that he was ready to move on anyway. He was a very talented musician. His reputation was spreading. It was time for him to move on to a bigger city and a bigger life.
The bigger city Sidney chose was San Francisco. As the years went by, word got to us that he was playing up and down the west coast, from Vancouver to L.A., that he was making occasional forays into New York to record. Sidney seemed to be on the cusp of fame. But the 1960s were not good to jazz musicians. Clubs closed by the bucketful. Record labels switched to rock and roll and soul. I remember Gordon reading us a letter from Sidney at one of our parties. It was a sad letter. Sidney said he’d been forced to “hang up my horn for a while” and take a job as a mechanic at a garage in Oakland.
In 1968 we learned that Sidney had joined the Black Panther Party. We also learned that he’d changed his name—legally changed it—to Shaka Bop. I was divorced from Lawrence by then. And I’d pretty much stopped running with the old Hemphill College crowd. But I do remember Gordon and Effie dragging me to Hannawa’s first McDonald’s about that time, to see what all the fuss was about. I remember Gordon explaining to us over those miserable little hamburgers that Shaka was the name of a great Zulu king during the early nineteenth century, famous both for his brilliance and his brutality.
Anyway, Shaka moved back to Hannawa in 1973. He formed a band and played at weddings and block parties. He helped organize a food bank for the poor. He ran for City Council and lost. He opened a small auto repair shop in Thistle Hill, a gritty inner city neighborhood just south of downtown.
A few days after Gordon’s funeral, I’d gone to my files in the basement and dug up a feature we’d run on Shaka back in 1978. It was one of the last stories Cynthia Buckland wrote for The Herald-Union before moving up to The Columbus Dispatch:
HANNAWA—Shaka Bop says he isn’t just fixing cars, he’s fixing lives.
Since moving back to Hannawa five years ago, the popular jazz musician and one-time member of the radical Black Panther Party has been making sure that the city’s working poor can get to their jobs.
“Being poor isn’t easy,” said Bop, who was born on the city’s south side as Sidney Thomas Spikes in 1933. “You get a job that doesn’t pay anything and it’s nowhere near where they let you live. Maybe you can get there by bus but maybe you need a car.”
And those cars, he pointed out, are hardly brand new.
“You scrape together a few hundred bucks and buy an old beater,” he said. “You pray every morning it’s going to get you to work and you pray all day long it’ll get you home at night.”
That’s where Shaka Bop’s Auto Run Right shop in Thistle Hill comes in. Bop and his team of talented young mechanics work with missionary zeal to keep the city’s old cars on the road, whether customers can afford to pay for the repair work or not.
“Half the time we charge only half of what other garages would charge,” Bop said. “And half the time we charge nothing but a smile.”
“You’re not saying Shaka Bop had something to do with that professor’s murder, are you?” Ike asked. His voice was uncharacteristically defensive.
I pawed the air. “No more than I’m saying he had anything to do with David Delarosa’s murder. But he was a part of the crowd Gordon ran with. On the periphery of it anyway. Back then and now. Maybe he has some helpful impressions.”
Ike squinted at me. “And that’s why you came to see me today, is it, Maddy? To see if Ike the Black Man had some helpful impressions of him? Before you ask him for helpful impressions of others?”
“Something like that,” I admitted.
Ike softened. Pretended to pout. “And I thought it was my chicken salad.”
“I’ve offended you.”
He didn’t move in his chair. But I could feel his soul reach across the little table and give me an enormous hug. “Oh, Maddy,” he whispered, “why does this world have to be the way it is? Everybody categorized by this and that? What was God thinking?” He took the last potato chip from the bag and broke it in half. He didn’t hand my half to me. He slipped it straight into my mouth. “We black people have a very high opinion of Shaka Bop. Including this black man. It pissed us off when they hauled him in fifty years ago and it would piss us off again if he got unnecessarily dragged into this.”
I sucked on the chip like it was a communion wafer. My knees were quivering from the intimacy Ike had allowed to flower between us, as innocent as it was. “I hope I haven’t unnecessarily pissed you off, Ike.”
“You know, Maddy,” he said. “I have always wanted to meet the great Mr. Bop in person. When you gonna go see him, anyway?”
***
I walked back up the hill to the paper. My bluebird brooch felt like it weighed five hundred pounds. Which was a good thing. After that half hour with Ike both my brain and my heart felt like they were pumped full of helium.
Anyway, the second the elevator door opened I knew a big story was breaking. People in the newsroom were talking louder. Walking faster. Huddling for impromptu meetings. Using other people’s phones. Mind
lessly gulping from other people’s coffee mugs. “What gives?” I asked Margaret Newman, who was wiggling into her raincoat as she ran by.
“They got the other brother,” she said.
I raced to Dale Marabout’s desk. His phone was cradled under his chin. His feet were propped on the corner of his desk. From the way he was rhythmically tapping his toes together I gathered he was on hold, listening to some peppy tune. “Randy Depew?” I asked him.
He Grouchoed his eyebrows. “They got him in Las Vegas. Some hot sheets motel. Pizza delivery guy recognized him from America’s Most Wanted.”
Before I could ask another question, Dale twisted toward his computer screen and started spitting questions into his phone. I headed for my desk.
I just love it when a big story breaks like that. Oh yes, big stories are usually tragic stories. But just the way the newsroom comes alive to cover them, it’s better than—well it’s better than almost anything.
And so I settled in at my desk and watched everybody else work. Dale had the lead story to write, about how Randy Depew was apprehended and what was likely to happen to him when police got him back to Hannawa. Bob Beyer and Nan Ritchey put a sidebar together chronicling events from Paul Zuduski’s murder to the shootout in Hannawa Falls. Margaret was pulled off her feature on the county’s disappearing frog population and sent to police headquarters to catch any crumbs that came out of there. Burl Chancellor was given the politics sidebar, how a future trial would affect Congresswoman Zuduski-Lowell’s re-election. Our TV writer, Roxanne Kindig, was assigned the America’s Most Wanted angle, how that show was making it impossible for criminals to evade justice. Other reporters were pulled in to the coverage as needed. All afternoon Managing Editor Alec Tinker trotted from desk to desk, like one of those damn plate spinners you used to see on The Ed Sullivan Show, to make sure it all came together by deadline.
