Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “That you?”

  “Yes.” In front of me, I sensed a hand rising, pointing. A flashlight, shining right in my eyes. I was a deer in the headlights, Tom would say, dead meat. I put my hand over my eyes, then dropped it and looked away to the side to avoid the glare. It was like that night, with Lisa, when she inspected me as I undressed. A kind of family thing, that led to sex, in her case. Where G-Man was headed, I wasn’t sure.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s rude. But you’re a sort of cop and Lisa says you’ve been looking for me.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  “You want to see what you’ve found?” he asked. “Here.” He tossed the flashlight my way. I caught it and turned it back on him. I found the top of his head, light brown hair, then a face that hadn’t changed much from what I’d seen in the college yearbook. Or, if it had changed, like his classmate had told me, now it had changed back to what it was when he left there. Bright, trustworthy. Smiling at me in a Will Rogers kind of way. He was sitting in a wheelchair, I saw now. It was impolite, like staring at a scar, but I ran a flashlight down his chest, his stomach, over his legs.

  “I got hit by a drunk near Newport, Kentucky. Uninsured. I’ve been learning how to walk. Takes time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ve got motel receipts. I’ve got medical records. Where I’ve been.”

  “Forget about it,” I said. “You’re off the hook.” He could forget, alright. I couldn’t. Somebody had tried to hook him. That blood-soaked note: ALWAYS DO A LITTLE BIT EXTRA. We were both in trouble. But he had an alibi. I didn’t.

  “G-Man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Could I just shake your hand?” I held the flashlight at my side and walked towards him. “Billy Hoover,” I said. Then I started pushing his wheelchair out the far end of the field, up towards the parking lot.

  “You don’t hate this place?” I asked. We were sitting at the only restaurant in town that was still open, eating pretty good chili and drinking watery coffee.

  “Hate it?” G-Man asked. “I loved it! They took a kid from...you know where. And they made me something special. You might say, well, it might have happened anywhere. I’m not so sure...”

  “But after you didn’t get that job.”

  “That was tough, finding out what you always thought was meant to be...wasn’t in the cards. There were years, I thought I’d never come back up here. Then I started sneaking back, like some guy who drives past his old girlfriend’s house. I guess you didn’t know that...”

  After he got shot down by Martha Yeats, he took lots of fill-in teaching jobs where they expect you to be bad, feel threatened when you’re good. Then he knocked around for a few years as a book jobber, one of those guys who goes around faculty offices, buying text books that publishers send out to professors, free samples, working out of a van, moving from college to college. That was his job in “publishing.” He’d been back to this college lots of times, he said, walking the same campus where he’d been a star, poking his head into faculty offices. It was like he’d never been a student here. No one knew him. Then his luck got worse: a highway accident, broken leg, shattered kneecap. He was getting better but he’d never play football again. He wouldn’t go around buying books either. He’d written one. While he was recovering, he started writing a collection of stuff, just for the fun of it. He wrote it for himself, killing time in therapy. He couldn’t imagine anyone would pay money to read it but it turned out a publisher was willing to bet on a book of sketches that reminded them of Blue Highways and Travels with Charley, only smarter.

  “Why didn’t you call us, when you heard we were looking for you? ‘I’ve been in a car accident...’”

  “She told me not to,” G-Man said, indicating Lisa.

  “Not so fast,” Lisa said. She nodded at her brother. “Tell him the rest.”

  “I said some unkind things to Hiram Wright, way back,” G-Man said. “After the job fell through. I hit bottom after that. And worked my way further down. Then he heard about me. Set me up in this cottage he owns. On one condition. We wouldn’t communicate directly. A third party, if I had problems.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The guy who gave me the keys. Tom Hoover,” he answered. “Kin of yours, I guess.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Kin.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to get in touch until I’d done something we’d both be proud of. That seemed fair.”

  “Billy,” Lisa said. “He wants to see Hiram Wright.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Now...”

  “Let’s do it.”

  In a minute we were driving out to River Road, the headlights poking into empty cornfields as we took a curve. It’s amazing, how all that winter mud and stubble comes up green and tall each year. Then we pulled into Wright’s driveway and I got out, opening the door for G-Man.

  “You know something?” G-Man asked. “I’m nervous. He always scared me. Lisa says you’re in his class. Is he still scary?”

  “He’s still scary, alright.”

  “It’s as if he knows you better than you know yourself. Sees into you. Not just what you are but what you ought to be. The whole rest of your life, you feel him watching you. It’s spooky.”

  There was a light inside the house, the professor’s reading lamp and, on the porch, that night’s sentry stood up and watched us come, one of the River Road neighbors keeping watch. Scraps of sad-assed country music marked our path, growing louder the nearer we got. Inside, I could see Wright hoist himself out of his chair and lumber towards the door. I headed towards the house. Behind me, Lisa handed her brother a pair of crutches.

  “Hello, Billy Hoover,” Wright said. Then he saw G-Man coming along behind me but he couldn’t recognize him.

  “I brought you some company, Professor,” I said. Then I just watched. I watched G-Man slowly make his way across the lawn, a man who was learning to walk again approaching a man who was less able to walk each day. Two damaged generations; it wasn’t like passing a baton in a relay race, it was a lot shakier than that. G-Man got to the steps, which were going to be a problem. I offered him a hand. He shook me off. He lifted his right leg onto the first step, pulled it up, working hard, then the left leg. It was an effort, his head was down, watching what he was doing, careful not to lose it. It wasn’t until he reached the top that he looked up at Wright and Wright knew who was standing in front of him.

  “Hello, Professor,” G-Man said. And then, well, I shouldn’t have been there but I’m glad I was, seeing something I’d never seen before and would never forget. First a look of panic and shock, almost fear. And then—more of a surprise—the old man’s eyes watering, hands trembling, like you would if you came across somebody you never expected to see again, the kind of feeling I had when I saw my father in my dreams and tried to talk to him but the words caught in my throat and by the time they came out they were sobs, not words. Then Wright moved forward to where G-Man was standing and hugged him, the kind of hug that moves past the look in someone’s eyes or the expression on their face and it’s all about contact, pure touch, two people holding on. After a long moment, Wright recovered a little. Still holding onto G-Man, he saw me and nodded as if he were saying it was alright, my being there, seeing this and hearing his first words to G-Man, to both of us maybe.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  We sat out on Wright’s porch, listening to him and G-Man talk. You know how it is, some people can sit down after years apart and pick up right where they’d left off. Books and ideas, stuff that was always there for them. They’d go until dawn, I supposed, knowing how Wright felt about going to sleep. After a while, we just excused ourselves. They wouldn’t miss us.

  “Hey, Billy Hoover, you there?” It was Dottie, back at the switchboard.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  “Doing what? Tom was just asking. He phoned in.”

  “That flat tire got complicated. I’m running peo
ple around all over. It’ll take a while yet. Got to take the driver home.” Lisa put her hand on my leg when she heard that and gave me this look that said, good answer, Billy.

  “Okay,” Dottie said. “I’ll let him know you’re tied up. Sounds beyond the call of duty.”

  “We aim to please,” I said and cleared the channel. Then I turned to Lisa. “Let’s go.”

  The trailer camp was crazy, like it gets some nights, cars and trucks jammed up against trailers, no room to park except way down at the end. As we walked back, we couldn’t avoid looking into a world where every meal was macaroni and cheese, all clothing got washed in laundromats and television sets got turned on the day they were bought and played until they died. “We won’t be here much longer,” I said when we came to my place. “Who’s we?” she asked. But I guessed she knew what I meant. So now we were sitting in back of the trailer, bundled up against the cold. We could see our breath in the air. The stars were bright. We sat close together, letting Sappho bring the ball back from the Animal Shelter fence.

  “I’ve got to ask,” I said, “why you made it so hard on me. Why you couldn’t just have...you know...confided.”

  “My fault,” she said. “It’s how I am. The more I like a guy, the harder I make it for him...”

  “Well...in that case...”

  “I liked you plenty. There. See? I’m confiding.” She took the ball that Sappho brought her—the two were right—and tossed it against the fence. “You’re just what I want in a man. You’re quiet and decent and loyal. And smarter than you let folks know. And I been looking forward to tonight an awful lot, I’m warning you.”

  “That another test? I thought you tested me last time.”

  “That?” She got up off the bench, turned and sat on me, her legs over mine, her body against my chest, her breasts against my face, her lips in my ear. “That was a pop quiz. True and false. Tonight’s harder. Multiple choice.”

  Right then Sappho started barking. Out of jealousy, I thought. But it had a different sound, watch-doggy. And then I heard what set Sappho off, the kind of pinging that came from Tom’s truck. And a door closing. And the creak of the gate in my metal fence, opening and closing quietly.

  “He’s got keys,” I said. “He’s going inside.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Tom.” I had to see him. To know, not guess—to find, not lose. “You stay here.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  We walked to the back door. I turned the knob and like that I was in the trailer which, except for the bathroom, is one big room. I saw him standing with his back to me, fussing at my dresser.

  “Hi, Tom,” I said, switching on the lights. He didn’t spin around the way people do when you surprise them. He turned around, real leisurely.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, nodding hello at Lisa. “On duty, my ass.”

  “That’s my dresser there,” I said. “T-shirts in the bottom, socks in the middle, underwear at the top. Boxers, just like you wear.”

  He smiled at that, at least he gestured in the direction of a memory: jockey shorts, he told me, were for kids in gym glass. Men wore boxers. “I taught you to keep a neat house,” he said.

  “Right. Looking for a change of underwear?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” I asked. He didn’t even try to conceal it, a plastic bag with a drawstring that the college bookstore uses, with a college seal on the outside.

  “I think you know,” Tom said.

  “Smith and Wesson .38?”

  “Bingo,” said Tom. “You guessed right. And there’s a silencer that I made myself, with a beer can, some steel wool and a few inches of plastic pipe. Hell, murder’s one thing. Disturbing the peace...that’s something else again.”

  “So...” My voice was breaking. “It’s you.”

  “Me,” he said, smiling, studying me, the way an eye-doctor watches a nearsighted customer read a chart.

  “Why?”

  “Hell, son. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Little bit at a time then. Begins with, you get old, you look back on account there’s more behind you than you can see in front. I looked back and—hell, we even talked about it—I wanted to make a mark. Settle accounts. For what happened to Tony, dying while they partied and protested. What they did to me and your old man...”

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “You don’t even know. Hell, you don’t even realize what they’re doing to you. What they’ve done. Maybe old Hiram can turn on the lights for you. I sure can’t...”

  “Tom...” The feeling surged up in my throat, choking. “A professor. Two students. Good, good kids. And that poor high school kid, setting foot here for the first time.”

  “Hey,” he said glancing over at Lisa. “‘Always do a little bit extra.’”

  “Why’d you bring my brother into it?” she said. “What did he ever do to you?”

  “That was a side deal,” he said, waving her off. “‘Always do a little bit extra.’”

  “And why shoot out my windows?” I asked.

  “Like the man said...a little bit extra,” Tom answered. “Anyway, I wanted that wife of yours off your farm. Never liked her.”

  “So now,” I said, “you drop the gun off so that it’ll be resting in my underwear when Lingenfelter shows up with a search warrant. Tomorrow, is it?”

  He laughed at that a little, shook his head some, like he used to do, whenever he taught me something. “Thing about you, Billy, is you always try your honest best and you always get it wrong. I wasn’t dropping the gun off. It’s been dropped off, sitting there all along. I was picking it up...”

  “Picking it up?” I asked. “Because...you’re not done?”

  “Not quite, son,” he said. “Listen, it’ll be over in a jiffy. The next one won’t hurt anybody...no loss at all. Painless, practically.”

  “Why’d you leave that thing in here in the first place? You want to get me for this? Frame me?” My voice cracked like a kid’s. I couldn’t believe he wanted to hurt me that bad.

  “No,” he said. “I wanted you to find it someday...and have it. From me to you...Someday you’d come across it and...you’d know...something in common. Because we’re connected.”

  He stood there, waiting for an answer that wasn’t in me. He was right. We were connected.

  “I wonder how long it would of took,” he said, scratching his head like he was puzzled, “for you to work your way to the bottom of the underwear.”

  “I wash all the time,” I said. “Same three pairs off the top of the pile. Never get to the bottom of it.”

  “I figured that,” Tom said. “Well, damn, this is all fascinating, but I’m going now.”

  “Leave the gun, Tom. Please...”

  “I got more use for it. Thing is, you do something you want people to know you did it. You want credit. Anonymous donor don’t make it. No point in hiding your light under a bushel.”

  He was talking fast, like a performer at the end of his act, working towards a big closing, heading off stage.

  “You gonna stop me, Billy? This is the part where you tackle me, you and your girlfriend? We struggle, all in a pile, a shot goes off and the audience doesn’t know...”

  “I won’t fire it,” I said. “Not at you.”

  “You sure?” he said. He held the bag out to me, offered it, dared me. “You want it?”

  “I got no use for it,” I said. “Oh hell, Tom.”

  He walked past me and I let him go. He paused, though, right in the doorway, and looked back at me. “You know where I’m going.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You do.”

  I stood there, watching him cut across the yard, Sappho barking, him shaking his head.

  “Aren’t you ever going to train that dog?” he called back. Then he climbed in his truck, drove down among the trailers, turned and passed by on the way out a
nd my throat was tight, watching him.

  “Billy,” Lisa came up behind me, “you let him go.”

  “It’s alright.”

  “With a gun. He could kill somebody!”

  “It’s alright,” I said.

  “Where’s he going?”

  “Wait,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  We drove slowly through Mount Vernon, headed east, talking along the way. How Tom wanted credit for what he’d done, wanted to make a name for himself and leave a mark behind and not be forgotten. A monument. And it was going to happen. He’d be a name that people whispered, that kids scared each other with. He wasn’t going to go to prison. He’d gone off to kill himself. No need to leave a note. Whoever found him would find the Smith and Wesson, which would be as good as a confession, once they ran a ballistic test.

  “So where are we going?” she asked.

  “Where his brother died,” I said. “My father. That’s my guess.”

  “He said the college did something to your father. What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet.”

  So we came to Millwood, where the river runs deep. Not as deep as it used to, but deep enough. I parked near the trestle, looked around for Tom’s truck, stepped out onto the bridge. No one was there. No Tom, no truck. There was a rope tied to the trestle, swinging back and forth, just above the water. That’s when I knew I was wrong. That’s when I remembered another place. Home. And another death.

  Tom’s truck was parked in the driveway, next to what was left of my father’s truck. Two brothers who worked for the college, loyal, life-long employees. “You don’t have to come with me,” I told Lisa.

  “You telling me to stay?” she asked.

  “No...”

  “Then I’ll come.”

  “This is my farm, by the way,” I said. “It’s not the way I wanted you to see it, the first time.”

  “It’s okay, Billy.”

  “I pictured us walking hand in hand,” I said. “Another time, I guess.”

  “Take my hand now.”