Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  The house, situated at the outer edge of the campus, had recently been purchased by the university, which was buying adjacent property to ensure the possibility of future expansion. In fact, the house we lived in then would be leveled a few years after we moved out, along with all the others on that block, to make room for a medical school annex. The house’s previous owner, also a professor, had apparently been a different order of being from William Henry Devereaux, Sr., because his basement was full of tools. There was a huge workbench, complete with a heavy, cast-iron vice at one end and a jigsaw I discovered how to turn on at the other. There were also a sander and several drills and a special tin case containing dozens of drill bits. One whole wall sported hooks from which hung hammers, planers, handsaws and hacksaws, and the grips on all of these were worn smooth with use. Off in an unlit corner stood a cluster of yard tools: two or three rakes, a snow shovel, a hoe, a spade. I remember thinking when I discovered the spade that there’d been no reason to borrow one from our neighbor when my father dug the hole to bury Red. To my knowledge, my father never ventured down into the dark cellar, so he never knew what tools were at his disposal. When the furnace went out, he called for help, and when the repairman arrived my father showed him to what he understood to be the door to the cellar where the furnace was located. That was about as much information as he could furnish.

  His tools were nearly all I knew about the man who’d occupied the house before it became ours, except that he had lived there for many years. We’d heard he never married, and therefore had no children. Which seemed to me a shame, because when I handled his tools, I always pictured a man who wouldn’t have minded the company of a boy like me as he worked. I’d concluded he might even have enjoyed it.

  The afternoon my mother crept noiselessly down the cellar stairs instead of calling to me as she usually did, I had taken a coil of rope, climbed onto a chair, and tied a knot onto one of the pipes that formed a complex grid running along the ceiling of the cellar. The moment before I turned around and saw her, I had been testing the rope by yanking on it with both hands, to see if the knot would stay tied, if the pipe would hold my weight. To another kid, I would have looked like I was about to swing, Tarzan-like, from one imaginary tree to another, but at the moment our eyes met, I knew this was not the conclusion my mother had come to, and I let loose an explosion of violent grief I had not known until that very moment I possessed.

  How did I get from the chair I was standing on and into her arms? How did I know to go there, know that she would not be angry? There was no way to explain to my mother what I didn’t fully comprehend myself—that I didn’t want my life to end, rather just to know that the pipe would hold me if I needed it to later, if things got worse, if they became unbearable.

  And how did she know the right words to whisper as she clutched me to her, her fingers digging in beneath my jutting boyish shoulder blades? How did she know to say that we—she and I—were going to forget this? How did she know to whisper these words so fiercely that I would have no choice but to believe her? Did she recognize the ambiguity of her message to me? Was it the pain of his abandonment we would eventually forget? Was that what she meant? Or was it the fact that she had come down into the cellar and found me standing on a chair? Both, I felt certain. What I didn’t know was how we’d manage to do this necessary thing. How would we forget? Was it time we would put our faith in? God’s grace? Each other? It didn’t matter. Only her certainty mattered. It simply would be done. I had her word. I was to trust her, and I did.

  By the time I open my eyes, the world has tilted back again, and the boxcars are merely boxcars, not the skyline of some lost, submerged city. Not even squinting at them, blurring the edges of my vision, can make them into anything but what they are. Which is just as well. It is a mistake, I feel certain, to be sentimental about a boy visited by a fleeting thought, a passing sorrow. After all, not far from where I sit, a man my age, a man named William Cherry, has recently surrendered his life by lying down on the track and allowing something larger and more powerful than himself to bear away and out of the world some pain I will never know. What I wonder is this: Did this world tilt for William Cherry, as it just did momentarily for me? Had he forgotten that the world could do such a thing? Did the visible world become infinitely alien just before his leaving it? Or did the world fail to tilt? Did it remain mundane and true to his trained, melancholy expectation right to the end, its boxcars merely boxcars, all lined up along the seemingly endless track, as far as William Cherry’s eye could see?

  I do not want to die. I’m as sure of this, I think, as a man can reasonably be. I do not want to learn, when I speak to Phil Watson tomorrow, that the asymmetry he thought he felt in my prostate is a tumor, and yet, there is a part of me that would thrill to receive such news. Why that should be I cannot imagine. Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not. The thought of Lily’s having found someone to replace me is not welcome, but an urgent new love—and what makes the world stranger than love?—is a thing that I could half-wish for her. For me.

  Half. I can hear Tony Coniglia whispering to me that I’m permitted half.

  The more immediate question is what I’ll be permitted by the young uniformed officer I see approaching through the snow on foot in my rearview mirror. How long has the revolving blue and red light of his cruiser been flashing back there? When the cop taps on my window, I roll it down and provide my license. He studies this with his flashlight, then shines the light in my face to see if I’m the same guy. Would I mind stepping out of the vehicle? he wonders. Hell, no. Have I been drinking? Hell, yes. Where am I headed? Good question. Would I mind answering it? Allegheny Wells, I tell him. That’s what you think, he replies. Where I’m headed is the backseat of his cruiser. He takes me by the elbow, the big, helpful lug.

  On the short drive to the station I notice him studying me in the rearview mirror. “Tell the truth,” he grins when we pull into the lot, and for a second I think he’s going to accuse me of indulging suicidal thoughts out there in the dark railyard. “You’re that duck guy, aren’t you?”

  With my one phone call, I try Tony Coniglia. He’s responsible for this mess, is my reasoning. But there’s no answer at Tony’s. He was drunker than I, though. If he’s passed out, it’ll take more than a ringing phone to rouse him. I consider calling Teddy. Getting me out of jail in the middle of the night is the kind of duty that would appeal to him. He’s always on the lookout for a new Hank story for his repertoire. But he’ll tell this one badly, just like all the others, and besides, I’ve been too mean to him at the restaurant to call him now.

  “Your wife ain’t home?” the old cop says, eyebrow raised, when I hang up. I can read his thoughts. Going on two o’clock and this poor bastard’s wife isn’t home. No wonder he’s drinking. “I tell you what,” he says. “We have lovely accommodations right here.”

  Fine with me, at this point. “There are lots of other people I could call,” I tell my escort as he leads me down a corridor to the drunk tank. I don’t want him to think I’m alone in the world, a man without friends or colleagues. I mean, hell, there are academic deans I could call who’d come and get me if I asked. The only reason I’m here is to fulfill a prophecy.

  “Monday night. You got the place practically to yourself,” I’m told, and it’s true. The cell’s got a half dozen cots, only one of which is occupied. “You’ll like your roommate too. We’re pretty upscale tonight.”

  Truth underlies all reality. I believe this. Often there are several explanations for observable phenomena that make varying degrees of sense, but the correct interpretation of the facts is always recognizable for its beauty, its simplicity. Tony Coniglia did not answer his telephone for the simple reason that he wasn’t there to answer it. He wasn’t there to answer it because he can’t be in two places
at once. If he’s here, he can’t be there. And he’s here. I see this.

  I decide not to wake him to say hello, though I’m tempted. I don’t because it would rob him of tomorrow morning’s mystical moment when he awakes and finds me in the same cell and cannot for the life of him account for my being there, with or without the application of Occam’s Razor. He will not rest easy until everything is explained to him, until the rich possibility of a world different from the one we know is thoroughly dispelled, though it is this other world we yearn for.

  I lie down on a cot across the cell from Tony’s and consider the future. By the time William of Occam was my age, he’d been excommunicated and was on the run, ecclesiastically speaking, from a vengeful pope, whose authority he continued to question in a series of inflammatory pamphlets, sort of op-ed pieces, with a distribution smaller than that of the Railton Rear View. There was, of course, no middle class to write for, and William, long banished from the university, would in any case have perceived a different academic mission from mine at West Central Pennsylvania University. He’d probably have felt a greater kinship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who always imagined himself speaking to an elite few colleagues and graduate students, the modern-day equivalent of the medieval scholastics, bearers of learning and arbiters of secular taste. At my age, fifty, William of Occam still had fourteen more years to live, and sixty-four was a ripe old age in the fourteenth century. Best of all, his life didn’t leak out of him gradually, like a tire with a tiny puncture. He died of the Black Death, and he never saw it coming until it was upon him, a dirty, brutish, democratic foe who argued with William in precise, elegant syllogisms, defeating all the philosopher’s logic and unifying in swift death, as life never could, the conflicting impulses of reason and faith that had shaped his life.

  These are strange thoughts for a man to have in a Railton, Pennsylvania, jail cell at two in the morning, and if what’s written on the ceiling above me is any indication of the intellectual tenor of my cell’s former inhabitants, I’m the only one to concern myself with such issues. As I stare at the ceiling it occurs to me that this is the second time today I’ve been advised to eat shit. I close my eyes and fall asleep counting boxcars.

  When I awake Tony Coniglia is standing over me. He looks like he might be having the kind of transcendent moment I foresaw last night.

  “What I asked you to do was come and get me, not come and join me,” he gives me to understand.

  “What are you talking about?” I say, propping myself up on one elbow.

  “I used my one phone call last night to leave a message on your machine,” he explains.

  I can’t help grinning at this. “I called you too,” I admit. “You weren’t in either.” I hand him the bottle of aspirin I always keep in the glove compartment of the Lincoln and was wise enough to bring in with me last night. He chews several tablets thoughtfully. When we compare notes, it turns out that we’ve been run in by the same young cop, that neither of us has been charged.

  “He wanted to book me until I told him I was a professor,” Tony says. “Until I told him my name was Hank Devereaux.”

  “He must have been pretty surprised to run into another one half an hour later.”

  “Did you tell him your father was back in town?” Tony says. “Because that would explain it.”

  I can’t remember mentioning my father’s return to Tony, but I must have, because he knows. I’m going to have to go see W.H.D., Sr., today, a duty I’ve been putting off. “When do you suppose they’ll let us out?” I wonder, swinging my feet onto the floor. Though today promises to be no more fun than yesterday, I would like, for some reason, to get on with it.

  “When do you suppose they’ll serve breakfast?” is what the other Hank Devereaux in the cell would like to know.

  CHAPTER

  32

  After I retrieve my car from the railyard, I drive out to Allegheny Wells behind a news van that sports the logo of a Pittsburgh television station. When I ask myself what sort of story can have attracted a news team from so far away to this two-lane macadam blacktop that leads from Railton to Allegheny Wells, I don’t like the conclusion I come to. I like it even less when I get to Allegheny Estates, where there’s a cop directing traffic at the turnoff. Instead of turning left into Estates I, I turn right between the tilting stone pillars of Estates II and follow the road that leads up through the trees to Paul Rourke’s house, where I pull in and turn off the ignition. The second Mrs. R., in furry slippers, a flannel nightgown, and a winter coat, is seated in a deck chair eating Sugar Pops from a tall box. It’s still early. Twenty minutes to eight. Sunny and warming but still cold.

  “Permission to come aboard?” I call up.

  She’s looking down at me. “Wow,” she says dully. “I actually know something nobody else knows.”

  Her husband’s voice, from somewhere inside the house, is heard. “Mark the calendar.”

  I climb the stairs and join her. There are two folding chairs on the deck, which means we’re fine if her husband doesn’t join us. When she hands me the box of cereal, I take a handful. “Sugar Pops are tops,” I tell her, this slogan returning to me across the decades. If I’m not mistaken, the woman I’m speaking to may be hearing it for the first time. “What is it that you know that nobody else knows?” I ask her.

  “Your whereabouts,” says her husband, coming out through the sliding glass door. He’s got two cups of coffee, one of which he hands to me. The second Mrs. R. looks at her husband to see if the other one might be for her. When he drinks from it, she gets up and goes inside. Rourke settles into the vacated chair. His hair is still shiny and wet from the shower. “I knew you’d come over to my side eventually,” he says, putting his feet up on the rail. They haven’t taken very good care of their deck. The wood is dry and splintering. Two or three boards have buckled, and some of the nails used to keep the others in place have begun to inch up dangerously.

  “Pretty nice view,” I tell him. “No leaves to obstruct it.”

  Actually, the trees over on this side of the road are budding, at least some of them. Whereas on the other side they are so thick we can see only occasional glints of metal and glass. Still, it’s clear that cars and vans line the entire winding road up through the trees, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a mobile satellite hookup being assembled atop a truck.

  “A wild guess,” I say. “Another duck has died.”

  “You just missed an interview with Lou Steinmetz on the local news. He claims they know the identity of the perpetrator.”

  “He used the word perpetrator?”

  Rourke nods. “He didn’t mention you by name though.”

  What’s occurred to me is that the second Mrs. R. has not returned with her coffee. I’ve been prepared to offer her my chair. Rourke notices me glancing over at the sliding door. “Don’t worry about her,” he says. “She’s off smoking her first joint of the day.”

  “No kidding?”

  “She hasn’t been anything but stoned since we got married.”

  “Huh.”

  He nods. “I’ve pretty much had to quit. I think it may be responsible for my blackouts.”

  “I never knew you smoked.”

  “How do you think I’ve kept from coming after you with a baseball bat?”

  “Then you shouldn’t stop,” I say.

  He snorts. “Just do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody you came over here. I’ve been promising people for years that if you ever did I’d throw you off this deck for the pleasure of watching you roll all the way down to the road.”

  I know my role in this drama. I stand up halfway and peer over the side, showing the requisite respect for his fantasy. It’s a hell of a drop, too. Unless he hit a tree head-on, a tumbling man wouldn’t stop until he reached the pavement.

  “Not that you’re interested, but I got a call from that schmuck Herbert this morning,” Rourke says. “The union’s managed to get its hands on a copy of the list.”


  I study him for a moment before I say anything. “I was under the impression you believed me when I told you there wasn’t one.”

  “Not exactly,” he corrects me. “You told me you didn’t make one. That I believed.”

  “But now you say there’s a list.”

  “For every department.”

  “Including English?”

  “Including English.”

  I consider this. “I’m touched, Reverend,” I tell him, and it’s the truth, I am.

  Now it’s his turn to study me. “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  “You’re always accusing me of lying.”

  “You always are.”

  “And yet you believe me now.”

  He shrugs. “Just this once.”

  We’re quiet for a minute. “I guess you better tell me who. I’ll go see Jacob.”

  “Fucking Jacob.”

  In fact, when I said Jacob’s name, I was myself visited by an ugly thought.

  “Call Herbert,” Rourke says wearily. “Let him tell you. Or Teddy. I’m sure that little gossipmonger knows by now. Three of the four were predictable anyway.”

  “Orshee?”

  “That’s one.”

  “Finny?”

  “Two.”

  I take a deep breath. “Don’t tell me Billy Quigley?”

  “You’re three for three.”

  “And someone I wouldn’t guess?”