by Kluge, P. F.
“Okay,” I said. “Stop it.”
“She’ll eat you alive, she’ll chew you up and spit you out,” she said. “How do you think I got that call in the middle of the night? She told him I was down there. You’re making a terrible mistake, Billy.”
“Well,” I said, “it won’t be my first.”
She got up and walked out, headed to the office. I stayed behind a while, giving her time to pull herself together. Rejection isn’t easy to handle. Well, I knew that. I’d learned it from her.
When I stepped into the office, Linda was gone. I reached for the phone and made the call I’d been avoiding. Knowing for sure, I decided, was better than not knowing. So I got an answering machine which gave me another number. “River Lanes,” she said, but it was her, working at a bowling alley.
“It’s me,” I said. “Trailer court trash.”
“Could you narrow it down a little?” she asked.
“It’s Billy.”
“Hey, Billy. I was wondering how long it would be, before you called me.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been crazy up here. I guess you know why.” I didn’t know how else to put it. What was I supposed to say? I missed you something awful and by the way could it be your screwed-up-brother is killing folks up here? “I was going to call you...”
“Listen,” she said. “I’ll be in Columbus tomorrow night.”
“What for?”
“State Pharmaceutical Convention. Not the whole shebang, just the planning committee. Back to back meetings all day...So...” She sounded different, normal, perky. None of that heavy, sexy, hit-me-with-your-best-shot challenge I’d heard before. “Tomorrow night is free.”
I meet her on the sidewalk, outside a little bungalow in a nice Columbus neighborhood that’s called German Village. It’s kind of a movie set. Where I come from there are old farm houses with lots of small rooms and there are new houses, ranch houses, that plan for a visit from every living relative on the same day. Here, the houses are no bigger than the shacks on River Road, but there the resemblance ends because these are houses that people worked on. Some are old but kept up, some new and made to look old but it comes out the same and it looks good, I have to admit, everybody all close and sociable, restaurants and bars mixed in with houses. As we walk, we look in windows, peek over fences into backyard gardens, try out a few back alleys. We come to a park with people in it, dog walkers and kids playing and a bench just waiting for us.
“Whose house are you staying at?” I ask. Friend of a friend she says, travels a lot, leaves the key under the doormat. She can have the place whenever she wants it, she says. How often is that? I ask. Whenever she wants to be alone. She likes being in a neighborhood where no one knows her.
“How have you been, Billy?” she asks.
“You told me you heard the news. We lost two students.”
“Yes.”
“It was the same night you visited,” I say. I hate it, but there’s no point in dancing around it. She nods, like oh yeah, now I remember fucking your brains out, at least that’s what I think she thinks because women like to go into that vague number, like your world-beating night is ho-hum to them.
“I’ve got an alibi alright,” she says. “Question is, do I need one?”
“No,” I say. “But your brother might.”
She tenses immediately, pulls away, sits forward. Now we aren’t such park bench buddies anymore, all comfortable and easy. I’ve screwed it up and now it feels like one of those end-of-the-affair scenes, conducted in autumn, in fading light, out in the open, in a public place, two people about to walk away forever, closing credits coming up while leaves blow across the sidewalk.
“I told you he didn’t do anything,” she says. “I guess you didn’t believe me.”
“Just listen,” I say. “The professor who got killed was the professor who wrecked his chances at the college.”
“You told me already.”
“Those students who got killed that night? The night we were together...” I didn’t add, that night before the morning you were in such a rush to leave. “Chances are, it was the same weapon that killed the professor.”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s innocent. Period. You’ve got nothing. Leave it alone, Billy Hoover.” She is trembling when she turns to me. “You can believe me or not. It’s up to you.”
“Ten minutes of his time, talking to me, and he’s off the hook. He can move on and God bless him.”
“Yeah, right,” she says. “It’s amazing what you can do to a person in ten minutes.” She didn’t have to specify: kill them, screw them, make a baby, end a life. “If that’s all you came down here for, you can turn right around.”
“That’s not all I came down here for,” I say. “I guess you know that.”
She nods and we sit together, saying nothing, letting the minutes pass. It’s tense alright. But then, while we’re sitting quietly, things change. It feels like something good is taking over. Time out. She smiles at me after a while, takes my hand in hers and rests the two of them on my leg and those things don’t just happen by accident.
“So what else is new, up your way?” she asks.
“I’m taking back the farm,” I say. “She’s moving out.”
“Sounds good.”
“She works in the same office I do. Hired by the cops.”
“Doing what?”
“She’s got a list of names. All our less-than-happy-graduates...” Then I stopped myself. “All but one, I mean. I’ll take care of him, Lisa. I really will.”
“Maybe you will,” she says, and it’s in a low, quiet non-arguing voice. And right then, right in Schiller Park, is I guess where I fell for her. Don’t get me wrong. She’s still the hot number behind a screen door, wearing a fuck-me-I-dare-you look on her face, so sexy she scares me. At the same time, though, she’s like a kid on that park bench. When I lean over to her—she sees me coming, eyes wide open—and tuck a closed fist under her chin, the softest possible uppercut, kissing her, tasting lips and mouth and the littlest bit of tongue, I prolong the kiss the way you do, just daring the world—or the other person—to laugh at you. I close my eyes—a double dare—and after a while I open my eyes, she’s staring at me, surprised, amazed, even, as though this woman who’s sure as hell done everything has never tried this before.
“You always keep your eyes open?” I ask.
“So I can see what’s happening. Seeing is a turn on.”
“Well, try closing your eyes. That’s a turn-on, too.”
“Billy!”
“Come on,” I say. I feel like I’m in the back seat of a car, trying to get a girl to lose her bra. “Try it,” I say. Amazingly, she does what I tell her. We kiss again and when she opens her eyes, she finds me looking at her.
“You cheated.”
At the restaurant, Lisa attracts attention, especially with her coat off, wearing black slacks that might have come off a man’s silk suit and a white blouse that isn’t too frilly so it’s the kind of basic outfit that’s the sexiest thing in the world on the right woman, like a nurse’s uniform, which is why nurses show up in lots of porn movies, I figure. As a hostess leads us across the dining room, I see folks are checking her out, guys shooting sneaky glances her way and women noticing because women always notice stuff like that so they act puzzled: you mean you actually think she’s something special?! They question the guy’s taste, act disappointed in him, only it’s a no-win situation, because the no-taste guy who stares at Lisa is the no-taste guy who’s out with her. You can’t blame a guy for looking, even if it’s rude, like looking at food that showed up on somebody’s plate and wondering, are you gonna eat at all? Okay if I have a bite?
“So tell me about your farm,” she asks, after she orders for us. I’m not sure whether she’s humoring me, like people do, when they know you’re from the country and they wonder about watching corn grow and riding into town on Saturdays to watch haircuts, but there’s such a thing as having a home
and when the home is a farm the stakes get larger, it’s double or nothing in your heart, and when the farm goes back a hundred years, the stakes get doubled again, all that land and all that time.
If she’d only just walk around the place with me, I say, maybe she’d get it. I don’t want to build it up too much but there’s four hundred acres, almost half in woods and half of those woods were never cut, oaks and ash and sycamore and walnut, not just maples, and a stream, actually two streams that we call runs that meet and go down to the Kokosing River where there’s a quarter mile of frontage and sure, nobody gets rich farming, but if you own the place to start and have a day job to give you some kind of salary and medical, you can make a little money in corn and soya plus there were possibilities I’d explored, sitting in my trailer, Christmas trees and u-pick raspberries, and a couple fishing cabins I could put along the river and rent or maybe loan to friends, not just friends but strangers who might like to come. Take it all together, I have to admit, it could never match what I’d make selling to Averill Hayes, who was always telling me what this or that Florida-bound neighbor had sold out for, $2,000 to $6,000 per acre. Hayes had always had an eye for land. “Just let me be the first one you talk to, whenever you’re ready,” he said.
“And there’s the college, too,” I say. “That’s extra. I’m sitting in on Hiram Wright now and then and he says he’ll tutor me all I want, long as I like and set me up with other courses, maybe scholarship aid too.”
“You’re going to be a college guy?”
“Not like most,” I say, thinking of the college kids I dealt with, before the murders. “I’m too old. Too poor. But there’s a place for people like me who come out of nowhere and don’t count for much...There’s a place.”
“God, Billy,” she says, shuddering. “You sound like my brother.”
I just nod. Her brother’s off-limits, those are the rules.
“They built him up,” she says. She’s like one of those people you see on television, in a documentary, reflecting on someone famous they used to know, famous and dead, James Dean or somebody. “And they brought him down. I can’t forget that.”
“Can he?”
“Could you?”
We step outside into a chilly autumn weather, good sleeping weather, people say, but I doubt I’ll be getting much sleep tonight and I’m up for it, not only because I want it but because I’m curious, whether I’d get a replay of her first night, fine by me, or something different, a tad kinky. The deep end of the pool, she called it. We walk home slow and quiet, a respectable couple on an old fashioned street, lights shining on cobblestone, wind kicking up leaves, arm in arm, all the way to the little toy house she’s staying in.
“This is where we say goodnight,” she announces.
“I can’t come in?”
“No, Billy, not tonight,” she says, her lips on my ears, like she was whispering some sweet nothing, not bye-bye.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, then.” A sad step at a time, I walk away from her, back away actually, seeing her in her raincoat, reaching under the doormat for her keys. Not much of a hiding place.
“Hey, Billy.” When I turn she’s standing in front of the door, which she’d unlocked and just barely opened. “Come on back a sec.”
About face. A replay of our first meeting, down on the Ohio River, standing behind that ripped screen door, tempting as could be. Now she was a demure lady in a raincoat. But it was the same pattern: hook the guy, reel him back in. Catch and release. For now.
“I think it’s time for you to meet my brother. If that’s what you want. Do you want it?”
“Yes, I sure do,” I say. But it comes out sounding queer, like I was on a stage, playing to an audience I couldn’t see. And, I swear to God, I wondered if the whole night, the walk, the dinner and all hasn’t been leading to this minute.
“Alright, then. Maybe you should get to know him. You’ll get a call. You won’t tell anyone. And you’ll come alone. That’s the deal, Billy.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
We worked on Sundays because it was supposed to be an emergency; no telling when the killer would strike again, but Wesley Coward would have worked anyway. The computer spy had nothing else to do, not here, not anywhere, it was all the same to him, no roots in the community, as the parole officers say. He could sit in his chair with a Bob Evans biscuit-and-gravy special congealing on the floor, a Domino’s pizza, a Long John Silver fish and chips, but he’d be sailing into a courthouse somewhere, or motor vehicles, into your bank account, your will, your insurance records.
“Yo, Billy,” he said when I came in, friendly enough but all attention on his screen.
“Wesley, I got a question. Maybe you can answer it, maybe you can’t.”
“You want somebody?”
“How’d you know?”
“People always ask me. They see one of those ads on TV, these places that say they’ll find somebody, run a search. Army buddy, schoolyard buddy, lost love, where are they now? Just wondering, they say, don’t get me wrong, nothing kinky, this isn’t Fatal Attraction. I’m just...you know...keeping in touch. So who is it?”
“It’s a house, actually. A small one, more like a bungalow. Down in Columbus. If I give you the address can you find out who lives in it now? And...if you can...who owns it? Is that sort of thing possible?”
He sat there, shaking his head as if to say, now I know I’m really in the country.
“Billy,” he said. “You’re taking me back to Ding Dong School.”
“Here’s the address,” I said, handing him the place that Lisa Garner was staying.
“Old girlfriend?”
“New girlfriend.”
“Piece of cake,” he said. And he got to it. Sometimes, just showing off, he hit the keys of the computer like he was playing a piano, Van Cliburn or somebody. He’d raise his hands up high, he’d look out the windows. I watched over his shoulder, watched him find the neighborhood, sail through property tax records, utility bills. I got more than I expected. The place belonged to Hiram Wright, since the 1960’s. The current occupant? Gerald Kurt Garner. When Lisa and I were outside there, saying goodnight, he could have been standing there, just inside the door, listening to me say that when she called me, I would come.
The college was dead, not the way a bar is dead on a slow night, stools empty and the bartender by himself, watching TV and polishing glasses. More like dead dead: the bar is closed, the bottles are gone, the chairs are up on the table, and there’s a UPS notice tucked in the door, that nobody cares about. But the lights were on down along the river. No students around Wright’s place this late but he wasn’t alone. There were always river people around, hanging around the porch, in the kitchen. Down there, what with odd jobs, odd shifts, you could count on one thing. Anytime, day or night, someone would be sleeping and someone would be awake.
“You missed class this morning,” Wright said, first thing. Sitting on the porch, a blanket wrapped around him, to protect against the cold.
“Sorry. I can’t always be there...”
“That’s not what you came about,” he said.
“No sir. There’s a little house you own in Columbus.”
“So I do, Billy.”
“Well, I have an idea who lives there. Not that he’s there much, lately. I don’t know where he is. Not there.”
“No, I don’t suppose he’s much at home these days,” Wright said. “You want to know about the house? I’ve owned it for thirty years. I haven’t set foot in the place for fifteen. But there were times before...”
“Kind of a getaway?”
“You could say that, yes. I don’t need it much anymore. I’m beyond getting away. And, to answer your question, Garner was in distress some years ago, after Martha Yeats spiked his candidacy here. He needed a place to stay. I let him have the cottage.”
“Did he ask you for it?”
“No, not in so many words.”
“Did he thank you for it?�
�
“No.”
“Has he visited you here?” Another no. “Have you visited him there?” No again. “Why’d you give him the house?”
“I gave him the house out of friendship. Respect. Guilt. Disappointment. Because I helped create him and I stood by while others destroyed him. Because I missed him. Because I never wanted to see him again.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“Yes and no.”
“Give me a break, Professor Wright.”
“Sorry.” He fell silent. I could have nudged him along but he was still my professor and my father’s old friend and when he looked up at me again, he nodded as if to thank me for holding my tongue. “There hasn’t been a day in the last dozen years, I haven’t wondered about him coming back here. I used to worry more but only because I was younger. Now, at my age, it doesn’t matter much. It hardly matters at all. What am I protecting? A matter of months?”
“What you’re saying...you’re saying you’re worried he would come back and kill someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Why me, of course,” Wright said, a little annoyed. “Who else? You don’t think I was losing sleep on Martha Yeats’ behalf?”
After that, it was time to go. He hooked his hand into my arm and walked me towards the door. “There’s something you should know.”
Down on the river bank, one of his neighbors slouched in a seat that somebody had taken out of a truck. He was listening to country music on the radio, Hank Williams or someone just like him, singing “Hey, Good Lookin’!”
“I’m not asking for it,” Wright said. “But if G-Man comes, I’m ready. I still can’t believe the rest of my life will pass, without our meeting one more time.”
Chapter IX
WARREN NILES
Night Thoughts of a College President
I didn’t know either dead student, so the prospect of attending their funerals made me feel like a hired mourner. In the end, I called both families and asked if there were any particular professors whose names had turned up in phone calls and letters home. And so it came to pass, as they say, that I attended funerals at the Ethical Culture Society on Manhattan’s Central Park West and the Founders Methodist in Sherman Courthouse, Ohio, in the company of Mark May. Well, odd things happen on a small campus and even the most obnoxious professor develops a cultish following. Try denying tenure and you’ll see. There he was, neatly dressed and apparently sober, in the college car that took us to the airport, then beside me in the plane. I’d expected him to wallop down Bloody Marys on the flight to Newark. He abstained. Polite, reticent, speaking when spoken to. And when necessary. At the funeral service, there was an awkward moment when struck-by-lightning mourners were invited to stand up and remember Amy Plimpton aloud. I looked at him, he looked at me. I nodded and crossed my fingers.
