The Patriot

by Evan S. Connell

  It was after midnight when he made up his mind. He would have gone to a hotel but for two facts: he was entitled to sleep in the house because his rent was paid, and secondly—and this was what decided him—he had been told to get out and stay out.

  So it was that he entered the house and tramped loudly through the lounge, went up the steps to his room making as much noise as possible, and carefully slammed the door. He waited to see if anyone would try to throw him out, but nobody did. He dried himself off, crept into his bed feeling very wretched, and lay there wide awake all night, shivering and sneezing and anxious for the dawn.

  He was up early, with a bad cold, and got out of the house before anyone else was awake. After breakfast at the drugstore he read magazines until eight o’clock, thinking it would be impolite to inquire for rooms earlier, and then began where he had left off the previous night. Shortly before noon he found an enclosed sunporch. It was small, it was warm only in the vicinity of the electric heater, and he would have to walk through the landlord’s living room to make use of the shower and toilet; however it cost only fifteen dollars a month and it was on the opposite side of the campus from the fraternity.

  With his head completely stopped up, but otherwise feeling somewhat better, he drank several cups of boiling-hot tea in the drugstore and then returned to the house. The brothers, who were just filing out of the dining room singing one of their favorite songs about good fellowship, ignored him and he was thankful for this. He did not ask any of them for help in moving, and none of them volunteered.

  About an hour later he was in his room halfway through packing when he had a visitor, a small, intrepid brunette who told him without a smile that her name was Jo Flanagan, and that she had come to help him move. Melvin gazed at her in stupefaction. She was, if not homely, no better than plain. Her nose was long and sharp; it seemed to proclaim her independence, and her chin had a cleft. She disdained cosmetics, but she had a naturally sweet odor so that he did not back away from her as he was inclined to do at first. She wore glasses, presumably because she needed them, and drew her long hair back into a soft bun. Except for wearing saddle shoes, a plaid skirt, and a baggy lemon-colored sweater with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, she could have been a frontier schoolteacher.

  “You certainly have a lot of junk,” she said, with her hands on her hips.

  “There’s a whole lot more in the closet,” Melvin said vaguely, unable to stop looking at her.

  “Let’s get busy,” she said. She picked up a pair of trousers that had been on the floor for a week.

  Melvin sat on the desk and fumbled for a cigarette, still watching her. “Aren’t you assisting the wrong party?” he asked. “What I mean is, nobody else wanted to help me.”

  She was going through the closet. “Did you ask for help?”

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t.”

  She stepped out of the closet to look at him sharply, and exclaimed, “You’re exactly the way I thought you’d be!”

  Melvin shrugged and began drumming his heels against the desk.

  “What’s that?” she demanded. “Don’t tell me you painted that.” She had paused before Kip Silver’s abstract.

  “It was a gift,” Melvin said, “except now he may want it back. I don’t know what to do—whether to take it or leave it here. It’s even heavier than you’d think,” he added pertinently.

  “It’s bunk,” she remarked without giving it another glance.

  “Well, now, I don’t know about that. It stays with you. Those marks—those tracks—whatever they are—if you look at them long enough you can close your eyes and still see them, which proves—well—they have what you could sort of call a dis-harmonic continuity, I think.” This phrase struck him as appropriate, and he continued. “The—ah, associations one discovers in contemporary art are significant. Modern artists have learned to visualize. And the spatial concept, too, is—oh, this is all difficult to explain unless you’ve studied art, and I don’t suppose you have.” He paused. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Flanagan.”

  The name meant nothing. He sat on his hands and watched her move about the room.

  “How did you know I was leaving the fraternity?”

  “I saw you last night. You passed by the boarding house where I live and looked at the sign in the window. I waved to you but you didn’t wave back; you only stared at me. Did I frighten you?”

  “I don’t remember. I think I had a fever last night. Are you sure it was me?”

  “It was you,” she sighed. “It couldn’t have been anyone else. Is your cold getting worse?”

  He nodded, sniffling.

  At last she said, “There! I think we’re ready.”

  “Good. I want to get away from here.”

  Outside the fraternity house she asked, “Now which way?”

  “I figured you’d know,” he said, looking down at her affectionately. “I thought maybe you were my fairy godmother.”

  “You could certainly use one, brother Isaacs. I never heard of anybody who got into so much trouble.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For one thing, you exasperate your professors by asking ‘Why?’ Doctor Peters was getting set to brain you last week.”

  “He’s an imbecile,” Melvin said promptly. “I know more about the course than he does. Anyway, he didn’t know why half the time.” He walked a few steps and said, “How did you know about that?”

  “I sit next to you,” she replied coldly

  “You do?”

  “It’s a good thing you intend to be an artist,” she said, “because you’re much too tactless to be successful at anything else.”

  “Flanagan,” he muttered. “Oh, sure, that name sounds familiar now.” He looked at her again. “You’re the one with the books! Every time you come into the room you’ve got an armload of books. What’s your first name?”

  “Jo. Josephine. In a way, I’m sorry you’re moving because I could see your light burning from my room.”

  On their second trip across the campus she carried his tennis shoes and racquet, a bag filled with apples and candy bars, and the greasy brown coveralls he had worn at Pensacola.

  “Now, honestly!” she remarked as they were nearing the porch.

  “What’s the trouble?” said Melvin, without looking around.

  “Wouldn’t you consider discarding this ghastly ensemble?”

  He knew she was referring to the coveralls; she had made a face when she found them under the bed.

  “I’m not ever going to throw them away,” he said. “They mean a lot to me.”

  “How about letting me wash them?”

  “I’ll wash them myself one of these days,” he answered. “I’ve been planning to, but there hasn’t been time.”

  “I knew you’d be like this,” she said. “I just knew it.”

  On the third trip he took another box of textbooks while she carried his lamp and an album of phonograph records and marched directly behind him, wearing the lampshade as a hat. He sensed she was keeping step with him, which would make them look all the more ridiculous, but every time he peered over his shoulder she skipped.

  “You certainly don’t know the first thing about music,” she said. “I think I’ll drop these records.”

  “I would imagine you like jazz,” he said, and stopped.

  She prodded him with the lamp. “What are you going to buy me to eat when we finish moving?”

  “Who said I was?”

  “I believe I’ll have a sirloin steak. I adore steak. And pâté de foie gras. We’ll have a lovely evening.” She began to read the titles on the album: “ ‘Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.’ ‘Little Joe the Wrangler.’ ‘The Cowboy’s Lament.’ ‘I’m Sad and I’m Lonely.’ ”

  “I enjoy those,” Melvin said.

  “ ‘The Old Chisholm Trail.’ ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ ”

  “I like them. I’ll play them whether anybody else likes them or not.�
��

  “Keep moving,” she said, and he felt the lamp in his ribs.

  “How long have you been sitting next to me?” he asked as they walked up the steps to the sunporch.

  “Long enough, brother Isaacs. Long enough.”

  “It’s funny I never saw you. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it gets sort of fantastic.”

  She sighed, and remarked with an air of boredom, “You only notice blondes. Even a bleached blonde can make your eyes pop. Men are impossible, don’t you think?”

  She ordered a hamburger instead of a steak, and while they sat across from each other in the booth he saw that she did have a certain slight, winsome charm. Not very much, but a little. She was not totally unattractive. He saw that her shoulders were really quite graceful, and her nose was not as sharp as he thought. She seldom smiled, but when she did he was very much pleased.

  “Why do you read detective stories?” she asked.

  He had hoped his paperbound thrillers would get by; after all, thousands of intelligent people read them, millions perhaps. He told her he wanted to find out who the killer was. She asked why. He didn’t know, but the question struck him as unfair.

  “Where did you get that calendar?” she asked.

  Melvin winced. The calendar had a picture of a rosy-cheeked blonde lolling on a bearskin rug. “I saw it in a pool hall in Pensacola,” he said. “I thought it was attractive, so I bought it.”

  “But it’s several years old!”

  “Oh, well,” he said. “The days don’t change much. Let’s discuss something else.”

  “Who shot the bear? All right! I know! You like the calendar and nobody had better throw it away.”

  “That’s right,” he said firmly, and had a drink of water. “Tell me, do you by any chance work for the FBI?”

  “Oh, no. Home economics is my field. That seems bourgeois to artists, but it’s quite fascinating to me.”

  “Then you’re not here for an education. You’re after a husband.”

  “You’re much too direct. Men have so little tact.”

  Melvin could not think of anything to say to this. As they were leaving the drugstore where he had taken her for dinner he remarked, grinning, that he would have to write home about quitting the fraternity.

  She looked up at him, seemed to be considering what he had said, and suddenly asked, “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing!” he exclaimed, grinning more broadly. “Except that this isn’t the first time I’ve quit something and my father isn’t going to like it. He keeps wanting me to get incorporated.”

  “What a preposterous idea!”

  “Who’s preposterous?” said Melvin. “Me or my father?”

  “Well,” she answered thoughtfully, “I’ve never met him, but I suspect both of you are.”

  “You know,” he said a few minutes later, “you’ve sure got a nerve. I don’t mean just now—not what you’ve just said, but everything.” He looked down at her curiously. She smiled and avoided his eyes.

  Presently she said, “This is where I live.”

  They stopped walking and looked at each other. Then Melvin said, “Good-by. It’s been nice meeting you.” He thought she was waiting for him to say something more. “Thanks for helping me move,” he added. Still she seemed to be waiting, but after a moment she turned away, a bit sadly, he thought, and went inside.

  That evening while writing to his parents he found himself thinking of her. He very much wanted to see her again, but could not imagine why. He decided he was grateful for the assistance, and with that he continued writing.

  The letter was delivered sooner than he had anticipated; the next evening his father drove to the university and they argued for several hours. At last, as he put on his hat, Jake Isaacs exclaimed, “Nothing is easier than to get along in the world, to make friends. Is this impossible for you?”

  Melvin answered wearily that he supposed it was.

  “But if you would try! If you would try, you could be like everyone else! You tell me again and again that something was wrong, something made life in the fraternity undesirable, but you don’t know what. All I ask is that you explain what kind of a reason is that!”

  Melvin was too exhausted and discouraged to reply. His father plucked at his sleeve and peered into his face with an expression of eagerness.

  “Why don’t you cooperate? Just once?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Melvin said after a pause, “I do cooperate.”

  “Excuse me, you do?”

  “I do. It’s the others who don’t.”

  Jake Isaacs quickly stepped backward and placed one hand over his heart. “All right! That’s the way you feel. I’ll go back to the city. Who am I to interfere? Never, not once, have I tried to persuade you, to influence you in any manner. All right, it’s settled, I’m going. Do as you wish. Except please make a serious attempt to pass your examinations. Another misfortune, after everything that has happened, another one, to be perfectly frank, I couldn’t stand.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Your best! You will do your best, did you say? How good is that?”

  “We’ve gone through all this before. Please, let’s not talk about it! How did Kahn make out in Las Vegas?”

  “Gambling, he won, how much he doesn’t say. Leah, however, is wearing a diamond. It’s bad business, gambling. To get back to the subject, however, perhaps this is asking too much; it seems to me you go out of your way to antagonize people, the fraternity for example.”

  “It’s all over,” Melvin said. “I’m not going to ask them for another chance, so there’s no point in you even suggesting it.”

  “If that’s the way you—”

  “It is! It is.”

  “I’m not saying another word.”

  “I doubt that,” Melvin said. “Anyway, I’ll do the best I can on the examinations.”

  Examinations began the next morning and continued through Friday. What with the argument ringing in his ears and the questions being altogether different from the ones he had expected, he grew increasingly despondent and bewildered. It was as though the examiners had discovered what material he had studied and made certain to avoid it. By Friday afternoon he was convinced he had failed at least two subjects, and perhaps more.

  Late that night, too discouraged to sleep, he sat on the edge of his cot for a time, then got dressed and went for a walk. He saw a group of men strolling in the direction of one of the women’s dormitories and it occurred to him that they were going to give a serenade, so he followed. Much to his surprise, they approached the rear of the building and one after another furtively entered by means of a basement window. There were no lights in the dormitory, it was long after midnight, and after thinking the matter over a few minutes Melvin also climbed through the window. It was quite dark in the basement. He began feeling his way along, came to a stairway, and went up and found himself in the lounge. Moonlight streamed through the french doors. The lounge struck him as being exceptionally pleasant, and, immersed in moonlight as it was, it gave an air of profound serenity. He picked a magazine from the coffee table and turned through it, looked at some pictures and read half a dozen lines by moonlight, and decided he had fallen asleep and was dreaming this, it seemed so unreal. He dropped the magazine on the coffee table, impressed by the fact that it made a noise, and walked up the central staircase and found himself in the second-floor corridor. It was deserted. He went on up to the third floor. This, too, was deserted. He was puzzled, yet more convinced than ever that he was dreaming, for he could distinctly remember that he had followed a group of men here and if they had been real he would have met them somewhere within the dormitory. He was alone, though, able to perceive everything as vividly as though he were awake. Just then a door opened very close to where he was standing and someone tiptoed out, carrying what appeared to be a woman’s undergarment. Melvin tapped him on the shoulder and was amazed to see him spring high in the air with a shriek of fright, and it
seemed to him that simultaneously there was shrieking and screaming everywhere. Lights popped on, an insane head half-alive with metallic spools of Medusa hair and pinched narrow-set eyes was unexpectedly glaring at him, someone else raced out of one room into another, out again followed by three women in nightgowns beating him over the head and shoulders, doors slammed, the mad, bristling, night creature took another breath and resumed her infuriating, mindless scream so that he was tempted to strangle her. He felt a stunning blow at the base of his skull, nails raked his cheek, and he flew through the corridor as fast as he could go in search of the fire escape. From nearby came a dismal, blood-curdling whine.

  He flung up the window and went stumbling down the ladder blinded by the night, the dormitory lights and the full moon in his eyes; someone clawed him as he went past the second floor, and a moment later he was hanging by one hand from the bottom rung, kicking his feet, unable to see how far he was from the ground. Above him women were screaming and dropping things. It was like an ant hill. He let go, tensed for a long fall, planning to double up and roll at the last moment, and was badly jarred because his feet had been only a few inches off the ground. He keeled over in the snow, mute and stiff with shock. He thought he had splintered his spine. Painfully he dragged himself upright by grasping the fender of a car parked conveniently nearby and discovered it was a police car.

  The rest of the night he lay on a bench in the city jail, twisting back and forth, slowly, so as not to throw any sudden pressure on his spine, and got up finally, scratched his name and the date on a wall of the cell, and then sat down with his head in his hands.