Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  At ten o’clock I took the last shuttle from the library to the parking lot. There were usually seven or eight passengers, all of us silent, sagging a bit in our seats, as we felt our day drag to its end in sleep: a middle-aged librarian from the circulation desk, another from the rare-book room, a graduate student from the math department, two undergraduate history majors, an ROTC instructor who had spent the evening reading newspapers in the periodicals room, a journalist who was researching a historical novel, an instructor from the art department.

  I recognized the art instructor. I had seen the name card on his office door: Donald Poole. He was tall, red-haired, with a heart-shaped face and eyes the color of pecan shells. You could see the yellowish shine of those eyes in the dark bus. “Good night, Mr. Poole,” I said to him each time at the empty parking lot.

  During the day I saw him often in the halls of the fine arts building. Two large sections of freshman Introduction to Art History (a requirement for all prospective majors) were crowded into adjoining lecture halls. He taught one; I was in the other. Sometimes, when my lecturer paused for breath, I could hear his voice through the walls.

  “Good morning, Mr. Poole,” I said when we passed in the halls, his pink face looming above the crowds of students. “Lovely day, Mr. Poole.” I’d read the schedule posted on his office door and I knew that he had three morning and two afternoon classes, including a photography lab; that Thursday afternoon was reserved for conferences with his advisees. I knew that each day, after art history, he had lunch in the faculty dining room. Half a dozen people from the art department walked over, like a group of gossiping old women, heads together, steps measured and slow.

  I myself didn’t eat lunch, not anymore. At the convent it had been bologna sandwiches on Monday, chicken salad on Tuesday, cheese on Wednesday, chopped ham on Thursday, tuna salad on Friday, and egg salad on Saturday.

  Now I avoided even the odor of food, circling carefully around the cafeteria with its surrounding embracing fumes of kitchen air, heavy with the tang of meat, of onions, of tomato sauce, all bound together by the sharpness of overheated frying oil. Instead, I went for a long walk, scarcely noticing the weight of my book pack. The campus was very large and still undeveloped. Some parts were flat and empty—old cane fields where you could still see shadows of the planted rows. Other areas, slight shell rises, were covered with oak and pecan trees, hackberry and cypress. I walked it all, taking long swift strides, feeling my runner’s muscles stretch and then relax, learning all over again the pleasure of motion through space. Feeling how fine and soft and gentle the air was as it flowed across my skin.

  Escaped from my drugstore tower, escaped from my convent school, free to wander the surface of the earth.…Well, only the walks and roads and paths of the campus, and only at lunchtime. A part-time freedom. But still free.

  I had been away so long—five years at school—I was used to a different autumn, a northern autumn of leaf turn and leaf drop, where even warm days held the knife edge of coming winter and the predictable death of growing things: of flower beds turned to bare ground, of grass and fields gone pale with frost. I knew fall as a time of threatening and preparation, of woolen clothes and increasing dark.

  I was surprised and amazed by this endless summer that stretched on toward Christmas, growing a little thinner perhaps, but keeping its light and its heat, its grasses and its flowers. Great tall hedges of white and pink bloomed in November. I asked their names: sasanquas. I looked them up—the rootstock for camellias, the encyclopedia said. I knew about camellias. There’d been a half-dozen bushes clustered at the front door of my grade school. Their flowers appeared just after Christmas holidays. Once a boy picked one to give to the nun who was our teacher. She thanked him with a smile and fastened it to the very edge of her black veil, right at her shoulder. All day long I stared at that small bit of pink drifting back and forth on a sea of black.

  My first college semester ended. I wrote term papers, studied for exams, took them, saw my name on the dean’s list. My mother got a letter from the school announcing the good news. She read it, slowly as always, and smiled. David folded the letter into his wallet and showed it to everyone he knew.

  Like a proud father, I thought, only he wasn’t my father. But perhaps he’d forgotten that by now.

  At Christmas that year, they gave me a small gold circle pin. It was the first time I had seen a blue-and-white Tiffany box. It was also the first Christmas present my mother had ever given me. We had our first tree that year, too, all peach and silver to complement the living room colors. And a Christmas party to fill the rooms and a New Year’s breakfast to toast the coming year.

  Second semester began, the final half of my freshman classes. Same classrooms, same buildings, same schedule.

  Every noontime I jogged for an hour, crisscrossing the campus methodically, until I was familiar with every walk (gravel, asphalt, brick, flagstone), every road, every parking lot, every building (brick, stucco, clapboard, metal siding, glass, Georgian, Gothic, classic revival, modern, Quonset barracks), every lawn, every field, every piece of sculpture, every birdbath, stone bench, and sundial. I knew them all. And I had my favorite spot, the unused area between the computer science building (four stories of glass and steel) and the Campus Police Headquarters (wooden army barracks with a tall antenna waving over the roof). I called it the Garden of Proserpine—we had read Swinburne those last weeks of high school and the soft drifting images still lingered in my mind. Here where the world is quiet. Here where all…

  The Garden of Proserpine was enclosed by a brick wall covered by wild fig vine. Within were flower beds gone to weeds and thistles, and wide brick walks, domed like a turtle’s back, mottled by moss and mold. At the center where there should have been something—a fountain or a sundial or a statue—there wasn’t anything, just a brick circle and two concrete benches, shaped like scallop shells, shallow seated and high backed, inscribed GIFT OF THE CLASS OF 1937. I always sat there for a moment or two, listening to the chameleons chase insects through the rustling weeds, letting Swinburne’s soft hundred-year-old words flow through my memory. Then I squeezed through a narrow break in the brick wall and walked across the adjoining stubble field of carelessly mowed grass. (How well kept St. Catherine’s had been. My eyes were unaccustomed to neglect.) On the far side of this field was another path leading to a drinking fountain, a cement column with water burbling into its leaf-clogged basin. I cleared the drain with my fingers; it made small sucking breathing sounds. The water tasted strange, metallic and faintly bubbly like stale club soda. The path itself was overgrown, broken, and uneven. Many of the bricks were missing. With a pencil I dug away the moss-crusted sand of an empty spot. There, an inch or so below the surface, I found the missing brick sunk into the unresisting earth.

  As if the earth were quicksand, I thought, as if everything, buildings, benches, grass and trees, and people, were sinking. I replaced the gritty covering, packed it down, left it to subside.

  The path led through an allée of live oak trees. They’d been planted much too close together years ago; now their branches locked overhead, solid, impenetrable, dark and bare beneath. Their acorns fell steadily, heavily, a rainy pattering uneven sound. A happy sound, like laughter. They covered the walk, left greasy nut oil smears on the path. Stepping very lightly, I could balance my weight on the fragile shells and skate across the surface, acorns beneath me rolling like wheels.

  That is what I was doing when I saw him. He seemed to pop out of nowhere, to rise from the ground. I suppose he’d been leaning against a trunk, his own darkness hiding him.

  “Having fun?” he said.

  “Yes.” I saw denim jeans, denim shirt, wide belt with a big silver buckle. “I’m playing I’m six years old and you’re playing you’re a cowboy.” He was a black man, wide face, wide-set eyes, wide shoulders. A square.

  He stood away from the tree trunk. “I wondered why you walked back here every day.”

  I scraped t
he squashed acorns off my shoes, carefully, against the edge of the bricks. “I like it.”

  “I come this way because it’s a shortcut to the parking lot.”

  “There’s a fence.”

  “And a hole in the fence.”

  We came out of the little grove into the full sunlight. I checked my watch and began to walk faster. “I’m late for class.”

  We trotted down the gravel walk past Physical Plant Maintenance, ROTC, Health Services. At the Biological Sciences building, I stopped to change shoes.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Running shoes look awful.” I stuffed the Reeboks in my book bag. “I thought you were going to your car.”

  “I am.”

  “This is the wrong way.”

  “Sure is,” he said. “My name’s Mike and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “You wish.” I hurried to class.

  He was there the next day, waiting outside the classroom door.

  “How did you know which room?”

  “It’s my old police training.”

  “Your what?”

  “I was a cop for three years.”

  I stood stock-still, I was that surprised.

  “That sure got your attention.”

  “Yes,” I said, shifting my books from one arm to the other.

  “Then I got tired of chasing bad guys and came back to premed the way my father wanted me to do in the first place. Come on, you need a Coke.”

  With fingers linked through the straps of my book bag, not touching me, he directed me to the vending machine inside the building’s entrance.

  “What’ll it be? I’m a big spender.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, I’m thirsty.” The can rolled into his hand. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “That bench there. It’s a beautiful day, let’s talk.”

  “About what?”

  “How the hell do I know what you want to talk about.”

  “Look,” I said, “I’ve got a class.”

  “No, you don’t…I looked up your schedule in the dean’s office.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “Nanda Woods. I saw it on your notebook yesterday.”

  I gave a little hiss of annoyance. “They’re not supposed to give out any information.”

  “The secretaries know me. I worked on a case out here and they might just think I’m still with the gendarmes.”

  I sat down on the bench, not sure whether I should be angry or flattered.

  “You want to hear about that case? Of course you do. You’re dying to hear about my case. There was a lot of thieving in the parking lot, radios, tape decks, all in broad daylight. We worked for weeks and never even had a suspect.”

  “No?”

  “Not one. After a while it just stopped by itself.”

  We sat and stared across the campus. Because it was Friday afternoon people moved more quickly than usual.

  “Are you going to the library now, the way you always do?”

  “You’ve been following me.”

  “Yep. When you finish studying, have a beer with me at the Rathskeller.”

  “I stay until ten.”

  Mr. Poole walked down the steps of the art building. He was carrying a bright orange bag in his hand.

  “Bars are still open at ten.”

  “It’s too late then. I go home.”

  “Okay. What about tomorrow?”

  “I work Saturdays.”

  “Where?”

  “You want to know too much.” I laughed and felt better. I had been beginning to feel caught or cornered. Or something like that. Not a pleasant feeling at all.

  Monday it was raining hard. He waited outside my chemistry class. “I guess you missed your walk.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “In the rain?”

  “I walked around the lake. To watch the snapping turtles.”

  “You can’t watch snapping turtles.”

  “That’s why I didn’t see any.”

  “Great,” he said. “Just great. Have a Coke.”

  We drank it in the crowded lounge, smoky and sweaty and too noisy to talk.

  “See you.”

  He wasn’t there the next day, nor the next. I found myself watching for him. Then he was back, grinning, asking: Found any good walks lately?

  That was how it went all semester. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he was not. Either way, alone or with company, I kept to my schedule. There was a week of storms, of swirling winds and skies split and streaked with lightning. Wrapped in plastic, I splashed along, undeterred, invincible. Every day I passed Mr. Poole hurrying to lunch, hunched and curled over against the rain, umbrella close over his head, eyes on the wet ground, moving at a trot. He did not seem to hear my greeting, but each day I said, “Hello, Mr. Poole.”

  The rain ended. The azaleas started to bloom, and the camellias put out their stiff waxy flowers. The oak grove was silent now, the acorn fall ended, the nuts stripped away by the storms. Under the trees the soaked ground smelled of spices, of nutmeg and black pepper.

  He waited outside my chemistry class. He wore a black knitted cap perched high on his head.

  “That was some weather last week,” he said, falling into step beside me. “You walk in all that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, I hate rain. I’d have skipped classes except for my mother. She gets so upset when I stay home.…It just ain’t worth the fight.”

  “I didn’t know you lived at home.”

  “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t even know my last name.”

  That was true. I never thought of him as having or needing a name. He was just him.

  “My name,” he said dramatically, “is Michael Joseph Mitchell. How about that?”

  “Michael Joseph Mitchell,” I said, “that cap makes you look like a hijacker on the way to Cuba.”

  “If I wanted to go to Cuba, my old man would buy me a ticket.” But he stuffed the cap in his back pocket. “I’ll see you around.”

  All that warm flowery rain-streaked winter, I went to classes, went to the library, studied. Once my English teacher stopped me. “My dear Miss Woods”—she was one of the older teachers who addressed her students formally—“you have a definite flair for words.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely.

  Behind their glasses, her eyes were pale blue, rimmed with pale pink. “I’m curious to know what high school you attended.”

  “I didn’t go to a public school,” I said quietly. “I went away to boarding school. Matter of fact, I integrated it, which was not a very happy experience,” I added, watching the blue eyes blink with embarrassment. “But it was a very good school.”

  She smiled a tiny thin smile. Nodded her understanding. And never spoke to me again.

  And that’s the way it was. People seemed to pull away from me. Except for Mike, who appeared and disappeared on his own schedule, I was alone.

  There was a kind of quiet over my days, a tinny sound, like the silence after an ice storm. (But of course we had no ice here, only rain, and wind.) Evenings at home in my mother’s house, I closed the door to my bedroom and played Der Rosenkavalier over and over again. The silver-blue music echoed my feelings. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing your own face there. The face I saw was white.

  And of course I worked with my mother. Her designs grew steadily more popular; her shops thrived. In April Newsweek did a small story, including a picture of the two of us—we looked quite elegant and stylish. The title was “A Modiste in the Grand Tradition,” and it compared my mother to Mainbocher. Who is that? my mother asked. I looked up the name in the library.

  A few days later Mr. Poole stopped me. “Fine picture,” he said, “I recognized you immediately. Would you like an extra copy? I’ve got one in my office.”

  “Why yes,” I said, “yes, I would.”

  His office was long and narrow
. At the top of its single window an air-conditioning unit rattled and creaked and dripped into a metal baking pan on the sill. There were bookcases along each wall, unpainted boards supported by bricks. Over the desk was a single black-and-white photograph of a metal sculpture, the head of a man in a top hat, sharp nose and smooth-painted features with a shirtfront and tie.

  Mr. Poole rummaged through the papers on his desk, began opening drawers. “I’ll find it in a minute. I put it aside specially.”

  “There.” I pointed to a wire basket on the floor next to the desk. Newsweek was on the top of a heap of magazines.

  “I knew I had it.” He handed it to me solemnly. “Please give your mother my best wishes for continued success.”

  How could a few words of print be all that important? A cause for rejoicing. Like a wedding. Or a birth.

  “Thank you,” I said properly. Then, pointing to the framed photograph, “What is that?”

  “Remarkable, isn’t it? Don’t you recognize it?”

  “Me? I’m just a kid from the slums.” And at once wished I hadn’t said it.

  “Yes, well.” His yellow eyes twitched like water drops on silk. “That’s Man with a Top Hat, by Elie Nadelman. Active during the twenties and thirties. The original is in the Modern Museum in New York. I have a book on him somewhere, if you’d like to see it.”

  “No thanks,” I said. “It just caught my eye.”

  Rolled copy of Newsweek in my hand, I gathered my ghetto around me and removed it from his office.

  That evening as the shuttle bus left us in the brilliant artificial daylight of the parking lot, I called politely, “Good night, Mr. Poole.”

  One Friday—another week finished—I sat with Mike on the scuffed grass of the quadrangle. Suddenly he began doing push-ups, counting loudly.

  “Whatever are you doing?”

  “Push-ups.”

  “I can see that. Why?”

  “You were dreaming, a million miles away. I didn’t think you’d miss me. And exercise is good for you, they say.”

  “You look ridiculous, bobbing up and down like that.…I was thinking about the weekend.”

  “Yeah?” He stopped, flipped himself upright, wrapped his arms around his knees.