Rex Chase: A Novel

by Tim Wheat

  “MR. CHASE.”

  Not knowing everyone in the room had now fixated their gaze upon him and the class had ground to a halt, the young man replied without ever moving a muscle.

  “Not now. Sleeping.”

  Infuriated, the professor started up the aisle with his pointer in hand, looking as if he were going to whip the disrespectful young man. He had not spent countless years in higher education, not to mention fought for his country during the Great War, to be insulted by this blob at a desk. Students lifted their feet and moved their books as the professor pushed his way down the aisle where the offender sat. Papers fell to the floor, pencils dropped, and he stepped on a girl’s lunch as he approached, rapped his pointer on the desk and repeated himself inches from the young man’s face.

  “MR CHASE. I DEMAND YOUR ATTENTION IMMEDIATELY.”

  Edward Rex Chase, the son of a German immigrant mother and Russian immigrant father, was a perfect physical mixture of the two. Standing six feet four inches with a brawn he inherited from his father, he was tall, even for his German ancestry, which his sandy blond hair that hung down into his face also accented. It was his eyes though that often first caught the attention of most. A deep shade of blue, women would get lost in them like they were looking into the depths of the ocean. He exuded a warmth and kindness through his eyes that was uncommon, but could change in an instant when the time fit. Men, in the field of competition, had seen those same eyes burn with all the fury of a pacific typhoon as the physicality of the young man overwhelmed them. He brushed back his hair, rubbed sleep from his eyes and sat up, coming face to face with the stooped over professor.

  “It’s Rex. Can I help you with something Doc?”

  Girls around the room giggled and some of the men snickered as the furious eyes of the professor attempted to burn holes through the young man’s skull.

  “It’s what?” asked the professor.

  “Rex. Call me Rex,” said Chase. “My parents named me Edward Rex Chase, but I’ve gone by Rex since I was a kid.”

  More pronounced laughter echoed throughout the room as the professor grew even more incensed and replied in a gruff tone.

  “I know your name young man.”

  “Excellent. So now that that’s all settled, I think I’ll lie back down. I was having the most wonderful dream about that young lady right there.”

  Chase focused his eyes on a girl two rows ahead who had been staring at him during the exchange with the professor. He had seen her before and wished to approach, but the timing never seemed quite right. Something he had learned in his few years on the planet was that timing was crucial, and it looked to him like he got this one right.

  She giggled and blushed, her cheeks turning a bright crimson as adrenaline rushed through her body. It wasn’t often men made such bold statements to, or about, women in public. Something about those deep blue eyes had mesmerized her and now she realized that she was still staring at him as he returned her gaze. Upon coming to this realization she turned her head, giggling as her two friends whispered into her ears. The professor, looking back and forth between the two, attempted to interject once again.

  “Your insolence appalls me. I would expect nothing less from a plebe like you.”

  The insult was one Chase dealt with often during his life. Despite his being enrolled at Harvard, he was not one of the upper echelon of society often associated with the university. Both his mother and father held doctoral degrees, and in Germany they had taught at the University of Madrid. His mother a professor of history, and his father a professor of physics, they had fled the country during the Great War. Their relationship as a German and Russian couple was unacceptable in either of their home countries, so they emigrated to the United States.

  Instead of being accepted into the professional community, however, other intellectuals shunned the couple because they spoke in broken English. In and around the city, immigrants suffered through the stigma of stupidity because they did not command the language in a native tongue. The Chasiliov’s did their best to fit in, changing their last name to Chase, and naming their first born son Edward, but the language barrier had cast them their lot in this new country. It was a lot they would not let hold their son back.

  Alexei Chase worked two, sometimes three jobs, even during the depression, to provide for his family. Lucille Chase also worked as a nurse to help provide their son with the highest quality education. What most people didn’t know about Edward Rex Chase was that he had graduated high school at the age of 11, and had then studied with his parents until his enrollment at Harvard at the age of 17. It was lack of money and clout that had kept him from advancing in the traditional academic world, but as his body turned into that of a man’s it became evident he would be sought after for his athletic abilities. What got him accepted into Harvard was not the fact that he possessed more than enough knowledge to graduate with a doctoral degree in physics. It wasn’t that the class he was sleeping through, American History, was a subject his mother had him so well versed in he could recite the Constitution word for word. It was the fact that he could throw a baseball harder than anyone had ever seen, except for maybe Walter Johnson. With the insult taken in stride, and unlike the professor, showing no anger, Chase replied.

  “It’s just that your wife kept me up so late last night and I didn’t get a good breakfast this…”

  The professor interrupted, eyes burning with anger, his voice quivering.

  “Vos Brutus, ego te habiturum expelleretur.”

  His point made in Latin, the professor, rather pleased with himself, turned and made his way back down the aisle of students. As he started down the main aisle to the front of the room silence dominated and all eyes went back to Chase to see what would happen next. With a smirk on his lips Chase’s reply was terse.

  “Esset eciam ydiota scire de naevulus super eam interioris dextro femore. Autid modicum sonitus illa facit, cum tu…”

  His sentence cut short at the sound of the professor dropping his pointer to the floor. All the blood drained from his face at the realization that this young man knew very private, very explicit things about his trophy, twenty-three year old wife. As he turned around to face Chase, the classroom buzzed. A young woman asked another what they had said and the question bounced around the class as young Rex Chase interjected a line in native German.

  “Oder vielleicht doch lieber Deutsch?” .

  “Mozhet byt’, russkiy?” then flowed from his tongue in perfect native Russian.

  The smirk on his face widened, and Chase fixated his deep blue eyes on the arrogant instructor below. His gaze was intense and the professor looked away as Chase delivered the final blows, addressing the entire class.

  “The professor here, who has been so kind as to call me an imbecile in Latin, failed to realize that not only do I speak Latin, but I speak it better than the pauper’s drivel that spewed from his mouth. I informed him of some intimate, and very private details of his young wife, also in Latin. Then I challenged him to speak to me in German or Russian, which, it seems, he will be declining to do.”

  If possible the jaw on every man in the room would have dropped to the floor. The ladies, though he had all but just admitted to having an affair with a married woman, looked at him as if he were Will Rogers in the flesh. Chase sat down, looking pleased as punch, but still glaring at the now disheveled professor, who took a moment, gathered himself and muttered with great anger.

  “Mr. Chase. You will leave my classroom and never return. I’ll be reporting all of this to the dean.”

  “Suits me,” Rex said. “I’m not sure I would have learned anything in here anyway.”

  Chase stood to leave the room. Whereas the other students carried, pens, paper and book bags, he just retrieved a baseball mitt and ball from under the desk. The girl a couple of rows ahead, who had been trying not to look at him, locked eyes with Chase as he turned at the end of his row. She looked at him, expectance in her eyes, and he flashed a smile t
hat made every woman’s heart in the room elevate. Brushing hair from his face Chase once again addressed the entire class without unlocking his gaze from the young woman.

  “I bid you all farewell. Come to me if you need help in this course, or any course for that matter, and to be clear, I’m just speaking to Mary Elizabeth.”

  The young woman’s eyes grew large and her face felt flush once again as she stuttered to reply.

  “H h how d d did you know?”

  Chase, seeing how uncomfortable he made her, cut her off with his explanation.

  “It wasn’t much. You have your name written on the front of your notebooks. I like how you put a heart over the ‘I’ in Elizabeth.”

  Chase flashed another smile that warmed her to her soul, and all of her embarrassment melted away. The adrenaline began pumping once again as she returned his smile and replied.

  “Too bad for you this is one of my best subjects. It’s physics that I find difficult.”

  “Physics it is then. Those hacks Oppenheimer and Einstein haven’t written a formula I don’t understand.”

  Chase flashed another smile, turned, and bound up the lecture hall stairs three at a time. Upon reaching the top, but before opening the doors, he turned and spoke to Mary again.

  “Oh, I’m in Conant Hall if you need me. Just ask for Rex, they’ll know who you’re talking about.”

  “But, Conant Hall is for graduate students,” came a rather sheepish voice from the front of the room.

  Chase looked at the professor with disapproval and spoke again, while digging a crumpled piece of paper out of his back pocket and making his way down the stairs.

  “Yeah, they’ve been letting me stay there while I finish up my doctoral programs. I almost forgot to give this to you.”

  Chase reached the front of the room and walked across to hand the paper to the professor. The professor took the note in his hands and opened it, his eyes growing large once again as he came to the realization of what happened around him.

  “B,B,But, you can’t be more than twenty two.”

  “Twenty-one,” said Chase. “Yeah, the dean heard you were a little rough on some students, and people were having a hard time learning from you because you were so god awful boring. He asked me if I could audit your class this semester and maybe give you some pointers on how not to be such a jerk. I wrote this up before I came in today. I’ll see you in the dean’s office Tuesday at nine.”

  Chase turned, winked at Mary Elizabeth, bound up the stairs, and out the swinging doors.

  *******************

  2.

  The Sonoran Desert. Arizona. U.S.A.

  An unmerciful sun beat down on the young woman as she stood monitoring workers in the Arizona heat. Days before she had been relaxing in a quiet section of San Francisco, but an urgent letter from her father brought her to the god forbidden place. Her father was Nicholas Sarff, a lesser known, but imaginative and competent physicist. He brought her to the Southwest to help keep rowdy workers in line, as well as to help keep him in line. A bottle of Jack Daniels was never too far out of his reach and the recent stresses of the current job made him want to drink twenty-four hours a day. Despite his shortcomings with the drink, however, Sarff was a loving and compassionate father, allowing his daughter to live on her own in San Francisco even though he disapproved.

  At the age of twenty-six, never married, and devoid of a boyfriend, Angela Sarff was on the verge of becoming an old maid. The men toiling under the desert sun, however, could not keep their eyes or minds on their work. One man in particular seemed to take a liking to her and was not minding his job as he focused on her instead.

  Angela was five feet eight inches tall with blond hair that extended just past her shoulders. Her eyes were a bright blue and the light danced across them like the waters of the Caribbean. She wore a tight sleeveless shirt, which was quite uncommon for a lady. Its lines accentuated her well-proportioned breasts and followed her slim body past a tight, muscular midsection, to her thin waist. The curve of her hips was that of a beauty queen or pin up girl and the shorts she wore left little to the workers’ imaginations. Her legs were long and lithe, and the sun painted her skin a deep brown so it almost seemed as if she glowed under the light. She carried herself demurely and though she paid them no mind, men fawned over her every chance they got. As she stood watching them work, she noticed her father shuffling across the old mining camp where he headquartered his newest facilities.

  It was obvious to even the most casual observer that Angela did not receive her stunning beauty from her father. He was a short man, five feet tall, and almost as round. He wore small horned rim glasses, a gray custom suit, and looked one-hundred percent out of place in the Arizona desert. Angela once joked that he reminded her of the Monopoly guy, but with regular glasses instead of a monocle. He acted hurt at the time, but the very next day he had shown up to the dinner table wearing a monocle. The family laughed about it for months, but those were days past and the present was not the same.

  Laughter, which was once commonplace in the Sarff household, disappeared after Angela’s mother’s death. Her father buried himself in his work, refusing to believe she wouldn’t be returning from her daytrip to the mountains, whereas Angela retreated and become detached from even her closest confidants. Her mother had been the rock that held the family together. She made the clocks tick, and the wheels go around. Without her, life didn’t seem worth living, and Angela contemplated ending her own life on a number of occasions.

  What would her father do then, though? It was that solitary question that kept her going all these years, and when her father needed her the most, she jumped on a train and come straight to him. Now she smiled as he ambled across the dirty camp in her direction, dropping a chart, stooping to pick it up, just to drop another. It felt good being here with him, working with him. Maybe someday she would be able to forgive those responsible for her mother’s death, but today would not be that day. Nicholas’ eyes shone as he approached his daughter.

  “You look so much like your mother. It’s uncanny. I still haven’t the slightest clue why that woman ever gave me the time of day.”

  “Well, I, for one, am glad that she did,” Angela said with a smile as she stooped over and kissed her father on his wrinkled forehead. “Other than you dragging me out into this god forsaken desert, I couldn’t ask for a better father.”

  The smile left Nicholas’ face and transformed into a mixture of anger and apprehension at the mention of summoning his daughter. Angela noticed the abrupt change in mood and, figuring her father to be drunk, comforted him.

  “I’m just kidding you daddy. I’d go dig holes with you in the Sahara desert if you asked me.” His look softened as she added. “What’s wrong daddy?”

  “It’s nothing, nothing, nothing.” Nicholas often repeated himself. “It’s just this project has me all out of sorts. It seems like I’m chasing my tail half of the time, but then I get these fantastic ideas and we leap forward.”

  “Well, I know we are working on some magnetic device down there, but I can never keep up with you when it comes to physics.”

  Angela was playing to her father’s ego and it was working. The truth was, however, that she possessed as keen a mind for physics as he did. Her mother had encouraged her and they had even planned on Angela attending a university, but upon her mother’s death she let go of her dreams. Instead she chose to be near her father and help him. It was a choice she never regretted, but sometimes wished could be easier.

  “Well, well, well, well, well, my young lady.” Nicholas said with a newfound joy and bright smile on his face. “This magnet device we are working on will be the crowning achievement of my entire career.” Nicholas began making his way toward one of the mineshafts where the workers were digging a side shaft by hand. “I have come across something so magnificent, so incredible, so, so, so, awesome.”

  Then the short fat man tripped over an outcropping and seemed on his way to an inju
ry riddled tumble onto some sharp rocks. Out of nowhere, though, a muscular arm reached out, grabbed him by the bicep, and with one arm, righted the fall. It was the same young man who had been eyeing Angela all morning. His attentions here kept her father from taking a nasty spill, and Angela was grateful.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much. My father gets to working and talking about his physics, and doesn’t pay attention to the world around him.”

  Nicholas delivered a quick “Hmmph,” and started walking toward the mine again. “Angela dear, these men have work to finish. Please leave them to it.”

  The young man smiled at Angela, tipped his cap and delivered a polite “You’re welcome ma’am,” as she looked at him again, then turned to catch up to her father. What had she just felt? She recognized it; it was a feeling she hadn’t had since she was a young teenage girl. It was apprehension over speaking to a member of the opposite sex, but in this case that was absurd. He was a ditch digger making a pittance and stood a decent chance of dying before he ever left, but something about him made her heart flutter. She turned back one more time before following her father into the mine, just to see the young man smiling a wide toothy grin. The filthiness of his face accentuated the whiteness of his teeth as he stood, his foot propped on his shovel and arms rested on the handle.

  “You’re losing it Angela.” She murmured to herself with a smile on her face. “You are losing it.”

  *******************

  3.

  Boston, Massachusetts. U.S.A.

  The game being played on the field in front of him held little personal importance to the young German. He saw this little detour to an American baseball game as a small nuisance in his ever growing, ever thickening plot to bring down his country’s greatest rival. While, in actuality, he was an American citizen, born and raised in New York City; his allegiance was with the Fuhrer and furthering the agenda of the Third Reich. He grew up impoverished. His mother died when he was six, and his father had difficulty finding a job during this Great Depression.