43. L. D. and Julia did not return. . . .
L. D. and Julia did not return following the break. When class was finally over, after I lugged the tape player and phony tape up to my office, I made a second trip to get their books. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the correct tape—no sign of it, in either my desk or Shemansky’s—and put on my jacket and headed downtown to Casey’s, on foot as usual.
L. D. was already working the tables, and Julia was safely tucked into a booth, chewing on a Maraschino stem, with a half-empty Manhattan in front of her. I slid in opposite. “Julia, you were terrific,” I said, grinning my enthusiasm. “Why’d you run away?”
“Thank you, Mister Tact,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it. Do you have my books?”
“I took them to my office,” I said. “L. D.’s too. Listen, I owe you. You saved my ass tonight.”
“You’re still coming to dinner tomorrow, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am. But it should be me taking you out to dinner.”
“Wait and see. You may find out you’ve more than paid in full. What was on that tape, by the way?”
“I haven’t tried to listen to it yet,” I said. “It’s up in my office. We can play it when you and L. D. come to get your books.”
I felt a little bored with Julia, but I stayed and chatted away the evening, telling her about my home town. Julia could say things like, “I’m from Omaha; I’m not from Nebraska,” and was incredulous about some pretty basic facts, like the Palemon Panthers not having a swim team because we had no swimming pool. My graduating class in 1962 had been smaller than some of her science classes. I also found out I knew more about a certain side of Omaha than she did—the trucker’s view of the city, you might call it. Not all the trips I’d driven during my high school and college years had been in the company of my father; when I went with some of his other drivers, there had been eye-opening detours in the neighborhood of the slaughterhouses, so that my version of Omaha did not square perfectly with Julia’s version from around Peony Park. Without going into these details, I did try to insist that the economy of Omaha depended more on western Nebraska than she cared to admit; her response was a mockingly blank look: “You mean, like, cows?”
We closed down the place and waited out front in Julia’s station wagon while L. D. wiped the tables and turned out the lights. Then we all went to my office in Andrews and sipped a little from the pint of schnapps I kept in my desk while we listened to the junior geniuses’ tape. It consisted of clangorously bad blues music played on a harmonica and bass, interspersed with farts, belches, and Woody Woodpecker laughs. Five minutes would’ve been plenty, but we listened longer in hope of finding out where they’d gotten a blues recording of such amateurish quality. Finally I switched the machine off, and the two women gathered their books.
“Too bad,” L. D. said. “I had higher expectations. You’re sure who did this to you?”
“McKinley and Shemansky,” I said. “Shemansky had to be in on it because he’s got a key to this office. I left the tape in my desk.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Oh, I’ll think of something.” I grinned. “Since Julia saved me, maybe it won’t be the death penalty.”
There were a couple of after-hours places around Lincoln—the Kraal on the northwest side, and a place out in Emerald whose walls were made of stacked and stuccoed hay bales—but I was too tired to do any more celebrating, though the women were game. L. D. made Julia take me home first; I told her I’d see her the next day, and she promised to leave a map in my English Department mailbox, just in case we didn’t happen to get together before evening. After they dropped me off, I went downstairs and slept the sleep of the dead. I didn’t wake up at my usual five-thirty; in fact, I slept so late that I had to skip breakfast and run to make it in time to teach my class, the last before the two-week Christmas recess.
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