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BOOK SIXTEEN: AT WAR WITH THE BOZOS

132. Grace’s headache returned. . . .

            Grace’s headache returned with a vengeance on Tuesday; she spent the day in bed, eating up the last of my APC’s. I waited until Julia had gone out, then showered and put on my band outfit, topped by my Air Force flight jacket against the morning chill. I looked in on Grace—she lay twisted among the blankets, weeping with agony—and walked to the Student Union. There I read the newspapers and killed time until two o’clock, when one of L. D. Langdon’s bridge partners, a woman with a heart-shaped face and inward-slanted teeth, came by my table and swept me up on her way to her demonstration. They needed men, she said, to make it more convincing; she kept her hand on my elbow so I couldn’t run away.

            Since it was not intended to be strictly a campus demonstration, the women had gathered on the steps of the Historical Society for a straight march down 15th Street to the State Capitol. As we approached the crowd, I did indeed feel the urge to bolt. All my female problems (except for Grace, who had the courtesy to be sick) would be there to face me, including Barbara Justman, who might have something to say about the way I’d looted her house. Also, I felt nervous about joining a women’s demonstration; I thought the downtown executives, piloting their Chryslers up and down O Street between lucrative deals, would honk and make fun of me. “Relax,” my companion told me, taking a firmer grip on my arm. “Today we’re not thinking about you. This march is for ourselves.”

            Looking around, I saw few of the flamboyant leaders of the Vietnam marches. Ted Kemp was there, talking with Ray Moriarty at the sidelines, and Dexter Coffey had showed up to stand beside Julia, but Adrian Fisher was absent. A woman with an emphatic figure pushed a toddler in a stroller, and I went over to pat the red-cheeked wonder, a sturdy little porker with hair like his dad’s. “How you doing?” I asked under my breath when the rest of the child’s admirers had dispersed.

            “Hi, Jonas,” Toni McFerrin said. “Don’t blow my cover, OK?”

            “Mister Circumspect, that’s me. Is Dale here?”

            “Dale’s looking for you to beat you up,” she said. “He’s doing a punishment tour with the meter maids. It shows what the police department thinks of women.”

            “A punishment tour? For what?”

            “I’m sure he’ll be happy to tell you all about it,” she said. “Just don’t be doing anything illegal the next time he sees you.”

            I moved away from Toni, giving her room to work. She’d brought her camera bag in the stroller, and began fiddling with her lenses as soon as the child lost interest in the crowd and began to nod. Women continued to arrive from the direction of the campus, among them Barbara Justman and Selva Andersen, walking together. Selva was without the greasepaint mask that she wore for the anti-war protests; on seeing her, I felt desire and panic. My lips and fingertips began to tingle, and I grew dizzy with the urge to break into flight. Barbara Justman caught sight of me and coldly turned her gaze otherwhere; Selva gave me a pleading look, like Toni’s: Don’t blow my cover.

            My eyes suddenly stinging, I went over to where Julia and Dexter were standing; Ted Kemp had joined them. “Lovely day for a march,” I said hoarsely. “Anyway it’s not raining.”

            “Who’s staying with Grace?” Julia asked.

            “Nobody. She’ll be fine.”

            “That’s not what we decided.” Julia looked toward Toni McFerrin. “That woman you were speaking with just now,” she said. “I’ve seen her before. She’s always taking pictures.”

            “That’s my cousin’s wife,” I said. “Yeah, she’s a great photographer. I keep telling her she should sign up for a class at the Art Department. Did you see Jerome this morning?”

            “I saw him,” she said. “There’s no change. Warner is going to sue.”

            “Of course he is,” I said. “What’s forty per cent of a quarter of a million? A hundred thou. And it’s an open-and-shut case.”

            “He’s doing it on humanitarian grounds,” Julia said angrily. “He’s donating his time. Your view of human nature gets a little stale, Jonas.”

            “My view is the same as Dex’s.” I winked at Dexter Coffey and grinned. “Only, Dex has sense enough not to alienate his friends.” I looked around the crowd of women. “Speaking of alienation,” I said, “I don’t see Mattie Halliday. I was sure she’d be here.”

            “I hope she doesn’t come,” Julia said. “She scares me.”

            “She’s scary, all right,” I said. “Ted, do you know why she hasn’t been arrested for that fire?”

            “Maybe she didn’t set it,” Ted Kemp said blandly. “A number of people in Lincoln wanted to see the X-Cell Bookstore closed. Mattie has religious convictions about violence, you know.”

            “I know,” I said. “She’s convinced it’s a fine idea.”

            “That bookstore was never anything but a headache,” Julia said. “Jerome wouldn’t have gotten pneumonia if he hadn’t been starving to death in the first place.”

            “I thought his starvation diet was for health reasons,” I said.

            “It was just a rationalization,” Julia said. “He was living on pennies. Please, let’s not talk about it any more. The whole thing is just too sad.” Ted Kemp placed a hand on her shoulder; Dexter looked nonplused.

I turned to watch the leaders assemble the crowd. Mostly it was women I didn’t know. The exceptions were Selva and Barbara Justman, and the bridge-playing friend of L. D. Langdon’s who’d escorted me. I saw two women that I knew by sight from the back row of Larry Whyffe’s class, holding hands. There were a lot of granny-style dresses, and, among the leaders, a notable lack of what one might call “knockers-up” posture. No high heels. On the whole, it was a disappointing spectacle from a testosterone-driven point of view; nevertheless, there was a determined spirit about these oddly-dressed women that I liked. A surprising number of anti-demonstrators had turned out. Among these I saw Denny Deaner, carrying a crisply-lettered sign opposing abortion rights. I nudged Julia and pointed. “Look who’s not in his office today.”

            “My God,” she said. “He’ll have to make up two point five office hours.”

            The leaders moved off, with Selva and Barbara Justman together in the front row; the rest of us, aided by a couple of granny-dress-clad marshals, fell into a semblance of order behind them. The women chanted, the anti-demonstrators shouted slogans and insults, and car horns honked derisively. When we reached the Eagles Club building at P Street, a file of a half-dozen women approached our column. Among the anti-demonstrators, who were nearly all male, there was laughter and wolf-whistling, while a silence fell among the marchers. I glanced at Toni McFerrin; shoving her stroller along with her hips, she fumbled with her camera, hurrying to attach a telephoto lens.

The new contingent, from the Mary Moody Emerson Center, were dressed in togas except for one. Their leader, Mattie Halliday, wore sandals laced up the calves over metallic silver tights, a flowing blue cape, and a crested helmet ornamented with pheasant’s wings. She carried a Mustang wheel cover as a shield, also decorated with pheasant feathers, and a spear a foot taller than herself; she wore greaves on her wrists. Except for her cape and for the shield, which partially covered her, Mattie marched nude to the waist. She had dyed her hair bold red, closely matching Selva’s, and this color in conjunction with her exposed breasts stabbed me in my depths.

            Frowning fiercely, shoulders thrust back, her dyed hair wild, Mattie inserted her followers into the column just behind the leaders. The effect of Mattie’s presence on the event was palpable; there was less honking and heckling, but what shouting there was turned vicious. One portly, white-haired businessman got out of his Dodge to shake his fist, pressing the horn ring through the open window. A truckload of laborers yelled obscene invitations. The policemen who patrolled the intersections cast glances at Mattie, who responded by shaking her spear at them. The marching women resumed their chants and displayed their placards, but they now seemed less certain and more shrill.

            “Hey, you! Butt-face!”

On hearing the coarse familiar voice, I turned to see the ambulance driver from Bertie’s. “C’mere, I got something for ya!” He made as if to unbutton his fly. I smiled beatifically and offered him the peace sign, then folded my first finger and rotated my wrist, leaving the second finger standing. “Fucker!” he screamed. “Come back here!”

            A man I did not know restrained him, while Julia jerked my arm down. “Stop it!” she hissed. “This is not your show.”

            I turned to her, showing the ambulance driver my shoulder. “Looks like Mattie’s upstaged it,” I said. “Maybe you and Ted ought to slide on out of here. That spear is pretty convincing.”

            “It can’t be real,” Julia said. “Where would she get a spear? Anyway, I’m not leaving.”

            Past O Street, the march went along more rapidly. Toni McFerrin abandoned the sidewalk and moved her stroller into the street, joining our row on the outside; I walked to the right of her, then Julia, then Kemp, Dexter, and Ray Moriarty. The anti-demonstrators kept pace on our right side; on our left, the roaring ambulance driver dragged his friend along. “Hey, pussy!” he shouted. “Hey, you! Cunt-lips!”

            “That asshole is getting on my nerves,” I said to Julia.

            “Keep ignoring him,” she said. “Who is he, anyway?”

            “I don’t know his name. Dex and I beat him at a game of shuffleboard.”

            “Rough game, shuffleboard,” Dexter Coffey said.

133. Of course the cops knew Toni. . . .

            Of course the cops knew Toni, and a pair of them positioned themselves between the ambulance driver and our row of marchers. Screened by two uniformed men and by my sexy cousin handling her stroller, I gave my attention to the unfolding demonstration. It began with “We Shall Overcome” followed by a song about women’s rights that no one knew the words to, sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” A woman with a bullhorn gave an address, partially audible, and then passed the horn to someone else who used it with better effect. Barbara Justman was the third speaker; her talk, sprinkled with socialist jargon, elicited “right on”s from a few of the women and blank looks from rest.

            Up on the steps, below and to stage right of the leaders, Mattie Halliday faced the crowd with her scowl and spear and her lovely trembling freckle-bespeckled tits. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her dyed hair; I glanced anxiously from Mattie’s head to the back of Selva’s. As when I’d first seen Grace in Selva’s clothing, my body felt tricked, and a clatter of unfocused rage rattled its tin cup along the bars of my spine. The women in granny dresses were passing out pamphlets with the words to still more songs when I felt a gob of moisture strike my cheek. I wiped saliva from my beard and looked to my left. The ambulance driver grinned at me.

            “That does it.” I turned to confront him, finding Toni and the baby in my way. I moved left and encountered her blocking shoulder; I moved right and my shins struck the stroller. I gave the thing a kick, waking the baby, who began to scream. I was in the process of stepping across the stroller—there seemed to be no path around it—when the ambulance driver broke between the two cops, stepped forward, and punched me between the eyes. I went down on one knee, my hands on the stroller for support, and confronted my shrieking godson with my dazed and hairy face. First the two cops caught up with the driver and dragged him backward. Then the distance between us increased still more, as we were separated by a tide of singing women.

            I rose to my feet, my clenched fists at my sides. The women flowed between me and Toni, between Toni and the cops, between the cops and the angry driver. No one held me back, yet I did not move, nor was the other man able to approach me. He looked around him in confusion; the cops, too, seemed helpless and perplexed. The sound of female voices rose around us, carrying a foolish song of peace. The vacuous lyrics failed to annoy me. Instead, I felt my hot blood begin to calm.

            Looking around, I found Julia watching me intently, her lips moving in song; I could distinguish her deep voice anchoring the rest. I looked for Selva, for Mattie, for Barbara Justman; all were singing. Tears came to my eyes, and I stumbled through the crowd, away from the ambulance driver, away from Toni and Julia, past Dexter and Ted Kemp and the startled Denny Deaner holding aloft his sign. I got clear of the demonstration and sat down on the new grass, my head spinning. The women continued to sing; later, more of them gave speeches, a triumphant note in their voices now. Soon the demonstration began breaking up, and Julia came by to offer me a ride to the apartment. I shook my head.

            I caught sight of the cops who’d shielded me from the ambulance bozo. “Hey, man,” I called out to one of them. “What happened to us?”

            “I don’t know,” he said. He smiled. “Better get up. We wouldn’t want to have to bust you for loitering.”

            “OK.” I got to my feet; the other cop steadied me. “Where’d that character go?” I asked. “The one that spit on me?”

            “He’s there.” The cop pointed toward the Capitol steps with his nightstick. “Be careful, now.”

            “I just want to talk to him.” The ambulance driver was standing with his friend; when he saw me walking toward him, he held up his hand, palm outward, and began to move away. “Wait a sec,” I called out. “I only want—”

            He turned angrily to face me. “Don’t come over here,” he said. Then, with something like hurt in his voice, he continued:

            “I see you, out in the street with them University people. I see you and I know you. It makes no difference if you’re walking next to some high-class Jewish cunt. I see you. You got hands like potato-forks hanging off your wrists, and an ugly drunk construction-worker face, and you walk like a clodhopper. Look at your hands, man! Look at yourself. You don’t belong with them.

            “What’s your old man do? Is he a doctor, a professor? Like hell he is. You think them people want to help you? You think they love you cause you got a chain around your neck, and you’re hairy like an ape and sad as fucking Jesus? Don’t bet on it. You think you’ll marry a rich girl and be a teacher, let the younger generation hear what a lot you got to say. Know what? The younger generation don’t care what you got to say.  They’re going to look at them big soft fingers of yours—your fingers’ll get soft as canned peaches from doing nothing all day but stretching pussy—and they’ll say, ‘He don’t know nothin’. He had it easy. That big dumb fucker shoulda stuck to pourin’ concrete, ‘stead of wastin’ our time with his phony Marxist bullshit.’ And they’ll be right.

            “I’m not talkin’ to you, man. I don’t ever want to talk to you. You’re a traitor to your class.”

            The two men turned their backs and left me alone on the sidewalk. The ambulance driver’s words rang in my ears: Look at yourself. I held up my hands for inspection. They were big, all right. I thought of Denny Deaner’s hands, of Shemansky’s, of Julia’s. Mine did not look like they belonged to the same species.

            What did the size of hands have to do with anything? Wasn’t it brains that counted? I looked down the street at the back of the retreating driver. He was headed toward Bertie’s and the ambulance garage, probably going to work. The traffic on 16th Street was picking up; it was after four o’clock, a good time for wrecks.

The seat of my pants felt wet from sitting on the grass. Still angry, I zipped up my flight jacket. Many of the jubilant marchers would be celebrating in Casey’s. I did not feel like joining them, so I started walking homeward; it was only a few blocks. Grace had now been left alone for several hours, unguarded for the first time since she’d returned from Las Vegas. I hoped she needed comfort, and for that selfish reason, I hoped she’d been afraid.

134. That night, Julia. . . .

            That night, Julia did not return to my apartment. The next day, Wednesday, boredom drove me to leave Grace again. She remained in bed; having finisned my APCs, she now started working her way through my remaining supply of Darvons. I headed up toward campus a little before noon. Except for the Comp class I taught on Thursday night, I hadn’t set foot in a classroom in a week and a half. I had just stepped off the curb at P Street—I was crossing against the light, but no cars were coming—when I heard a furious wheet wheet wheet wheet like a referee’s whistle. I turned to see someone bulky getting out of a blue-and-white three-wheeler. It was my cop cousin. Dale strode up to me in a businesslike manner, ticket book in hand.

            “All right, you,” he said. “Back to the curb. I’m going to write you up for jaywalking.”

            “Hello, Dale,” I said. “I saw Toni at the women’s march. She said you were looking for me.”

            “Get out of the street, asshole,” he said. “You want me to nail you for resisting arrest?”

            “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, returning to the sidewalk. “Did she tell you about the fight?”

            “She said you pushed her. Name?”

            “You know my name: Jonas F. A. S. Smith.” Dale wore his regular uniform; I guessed that meant that he hadn’t been demoted to a cadet.

            “Got any I. D. on you, Jonas Smith?”

            “I do, but I’m not sure I want to show it to you. Am I under arrest?”

            Dale closed his ticket book with a snap. “Look,” he said. “Why don’t you just touch me or something, so I can whip your sorry butt without losing my job completely?”

            “She said you were pissed at me,” I replied. “Want to tell me what it’s about?”

            “You don’t know?” I shrugged. “You lying sack of goose crap,” he said. “What was in the bag?” I made no reply. “What was in the bag? And you’d better not say ‘What bag?’ or I will wipe the sidewalk with you.”

            “That’s the second time I’ve been asked that,” I said. “You cops seem to have already formed an opinion.”

            “Yeah, an opinion has been formed,” he said sourly. “Get in the scooter. I want to show you something.” I glanced distrustfully at the idling three-wheeler. “Get in!” he said.

            “I’m getting.” I slid in on the bench seat; Dale slid in beside me and revved the putting engine. We rode shoulder to shoulder in silence around the corner to O, turned right, then left down 9th in the direction of the new unfinished County-City Building.

            “Did you know we’re moving the cop shop?” Dale shouted in my ear. I nodded. “I want to show you my new locker,” he said. I rode along glumly and uncomfortably; the scooter’s small wheels seemed to find every crack in the pavement, and the noise was considerable. I was already tired of riding in it when we passed L Street and Dale swung into the fresh parking lot, empty except for a couple of police cars, and shut the little machine off. “God, I hate this thing,” he said.

            The new building loomed white and massive, built of concrete columns and slabs; it resembled the newer dormitories on the University campus. We entered the ground floor on the west and passed a desk, bare except for a TV monitor, that was guarded by a sleepy-looking police cadet. I followed Dale past vacant offices and a lounge with empty vending machines, to a long, gray, low-ceilinged room fitted out with lockers and benches. The locker room hadn’t come into full use yet; many of the locker doors were standing open, and few had padlocks. The place smelled of curing concrete.

            “Here’s mine,” he said. He stopped in front of one of the lockers. Taped to the door was the newspaper photograph of me coming out of the X-Cell wearing a bra, with Julia’s shopping bag in my hand. Dale seemed to be holding my elbow. Taped below the photograph was a hand-lettered caption; it read, in large block print, WHAT WAS IN THE BAG? It was underlined in two colors, red and black.

            “Good job lettering that sign,” I said appreciatively. “Somebody has a feel for letter spacing. Was it your boss?”

            “Unh unh,” he said. “The boss’s secretary.”

            “What I’m seeing here, without you telling me,” I said, “is that somewhere up the line the brass had reason to expect that when you searched Jerome’s bookstore, you would find something in it besides books. But nobody told the troops, so it would look like a legitimate search. Am I on the right track?” Dale stood, angry and impassive. “So when you didn’t find the thing you were supposed to find, whoever it was assumed I’d snuck it out in the shopping bag.”

            “Which you in fact did,” Dale said.

            “Which is why you’re driving a three-wheeler these days?”

            “You got it, coz. Jesus Christ, would I love to pound you!”

            “Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “A friend of mine was involved. Sometimes people do what they gotta do.”

            “So there was dope in it,” he said grimly.

             “You could search my apartment.” The two of us regarded one another.  Since the night we’d sold off Julia’s stash, I’d kept the place clean except for the carpet’s inevitable traces of twigs and seeds. “I thought you didn’t want to be a detective,” I said.

            “Now I do,” he said. “I want to catch you selling marijuana.”

            “Why don’t you arrest Mattie Halliday?” I asked. “She set the bookstore fire. She says you guys picked her up and questioned her. I bet she left fingerprints on the bottle that went through the window.”

            “There were a lot of different people’s fingerprints. And how did you know there was a bottle?”

            “It was a Jim Beam bottle,” I said. “Why don’t you arrest Don Stinns? He’s been stealing cars and dealing speed around Lincoln forever. He took Lewis Rey’s Cadillac out to Nevada and sent it off the dam with a naked man strapped in the seat. Go solve that one.”

            Dale pressed his hand to his eyes. “You don’t know that,” he said wearily.

            “I do know it. I can take you to a witness, five blocks from here.”

            “Fuck.” Dale studied me and chewed his lip. “There’s no charges against any of those people,” he said. “I can’t make an arrest without charges unless I see something happening. Why are you telling me this shit?”

            “I want that son of a bitch Don Stinns put in jail so my friend can go back to work.”

            “What friend are you talking about?” he asked. “Dan Kroger’s wife? The skinny one who hustles chess out at the truck stop?” It was my turn to be amazed; my cousin was better informed than I had thought. “You’re fooling with a time bomb there,” he said. “Maybe I won’t kill you after all. Maybe I’ll just let Dan take care of it.”

            “Who’s Dan Kroger?”

            “Hard to explain Dan,” Dale said. “You really should meet him. Come on, I’ll take you back to the University.”

            “Is he as bad as Stinns?”

            “It’s like the old joke,” my cousin said. “He’s not the meanest man in town. But the meanest man in town lets him alone.”

135. When I went into Grace’s room. . . .

            When I went into Grace’s room—formerly my bedroom—that evening, I found her sitting up watching television. “Where’s Julia?” she asked.

            “Last time I saw her, she was with a man named Kemp. They looked pretty friendly. How’s your headache?”

            “Better,” she said. “Do you want me out of the way so you can make love to her?”

            “Not especially.” I glanced at the TV. “How are the astronauts doing?”

            “Still alive,” she said. “They had to fire some rockets while they went behind the moon. I guess they timed it OK, so maybe they’ll get back.”

            “Man!” I said. “I wouldn’t care to be in their shoes. Gives me the shivers.” I went to the head of the bed and bent to kiss her lips. “Tell me about Dan Kroger,” I said. “Are you married to him?”

            “Sort of.”

            “What the hell does that mean, ‘sort of’? Either you’re fucking married or you’re fucking not.”

            “Don’t swear at me, Jonas,” Grace said. “I don’t appreciate it. We were married in church but without a license; there’s a branch of Dan’s religion that doesn’t believe in licenses. That was a long time ago. We haven’t lived as man and wife for about ten years, but Dan still thinks he owns me and has every right to dispose of anything I possess. He’s going to be angry when he finds out I’ve disappeared.”

            “What’ll he do?”

            “You can never tell what Dan will do,” she said. “He might come after me to kill me, and he might not bat an eye. It all depends on what the angels tell him.”

            “Dan talks to angels?”

            “Every day,” she said. “Sometimes he talks to God and Jesus, too.”

            “Where is he now?”

            “Viet Nam or Laos or Cambodia. Somewhere secret. I never ask him where he’s been.”

            “Killing people?”

            “As long as they’re not Christians,” she said, “he kills them like flies.”

            I sat silent for a minute; tiny images flickered on the foot-wide black-and-white screen. “Do you love him?” I asked.

            “No.”

            “Are you afraid of him?”

            “Not especially. Not since I met Charlie.”

            “What’s his hold on you?”

            Grace sighed. “I told you I was born in Poland,” she said. “My father and I came to Nebraska as ‘Displaced Persons.’ That was after we’d lived in England for six years.”

            “You told me,” I agreed. “Your father went back, didn’t he?”

            “And vanished,” she said. “They vanished him. Anyway, I never applied for U. S. citizenship. I’m an alien who happens to be a citizen of a Communist country.”

            “But you’re married to a citizen of the U. S., so you’re a citizen yourself. Or could be.”

            “That’s just it,” she said. “There’s no license. And what if he divorces me? I could be deported. Then maybe the Communists would vanish me, too.”

            “Is that what he tells you?” I asked. She shrugged. “Better talk with a lawyer,” I said. “Your marriage might not be legal.”

            “I don’t trust lawyers,” she said. “They cheat when they play Scrabble.” She glanced up at me. “I guess you would’ve told me if there was a letter from Charlie.”

            “I wouldn’t bet on hearing from Charlie,” I said. “He’s probably married, too.”

            “He says not,” Grace said simply. “I feel I can trust him.”

            “More than you’d say for me, eh?”

            “I trust you, Jonas,” she said. “I know you don’t have any deep commitment to me; I know you’re sheltering me mostly out of kindness. I suppose you’d lie if you wanted to have sex, but any man will do that. I trust you because I think I understand you, and because you’ve been good to me.”

            I flushed with shame at this character assessment. “I haven’t,” I said. “Just now you the same as said that you knew I was using you.”

            “But, Jonas,” she said, “you’ve no idea what my life’s been like up to now.” Grace placed her thin hot hand on mine. “No self-pity, please,” she said. “You’re a good man when you want to be.” She smiled; I smiled back. Then she broke into a happy grin. “Besides, now there’s Charlie.”

            I fixed us ham and scrambled eggs for supper, with mashed potatoes and Jello. Grace ate everything, even the ham, which I’d cut into tiny cubes so she could slip it between her wired jaws. She smiled as she handed me the empty plate. “Get enough?” I asked her. “Do you need anything else?”

            She nodded, her eyes sparkling. “You know what I need,” she said. “You need it, too.”

            “Sex? I’m ready! Oral, anal, or ordinary?”

            Grace laughed merrily at her own joke. “Not that. I meant ice cream.”

136. I didn’t see Julia. . . .

            I didn’t see Julia until the next night, following my Comp class; I waited outside the seminar room for her and Rey, to see if there was a reply to our get-well card. She came out along with McKinley, smelling of cigar smoke. “How’s Grace?” she asked.

            “She’s fine,” I said. “I’m having a hard time keeping her in the apartment.”

            “She’s probably going stir crazy,” Julia said. “I should take her shopping again.”

            Rey came out last, giving me a hostile nod. “Anything from Las Vegas?” I asked him. “Or from Green Bay, Wisconsin? We’re hoping for a letter.”

            “Don’t know,” he muttered. “Haven’t opened my mail.”

            “Maybe you could look?” Julia asked him. “It’s important to us.”

            Rey turned and walked away without a word. The three of us followed him upstairs to the English Department office, where he had his own personal Chair-of-the-Department cubicle. He let us in, set his books down on the desk, and reached deep into his wastebasket. “Here,” he said, straightening and handing Julia a fat blue envelope. “I’m not the fucking postal service.”

            “Thanks,” Julia said. She looked at me, her eyes big. “Gosh, it’s heavy, Jonas,” she said.

            “Get out,” Rey said. “I don’t want you in my office when you open that.”

            “We can’t open it,” Julia said. “It’s not addressed to us.”

            I could have taken the envelope to Grace myself, but Julia’s curiosity was aroused. She’d brought her car to campus and offered me a lift home. McKinley came along for the ride. We found Grace standing on a chair in the bedroom, looking out the window toward the street. “Hey,” I said to her. “Look who I brought home with me.”

            “Hi, Julia,” she said. “Hi, Mark. I heard some people talking out there. What’s going on?”

            “Just the neighbors. Something came for you,” Julia said. “It weighs a ton.”

            Grace turned pale, making the bruises around her eyes seem darker. She climbed unsteadily down from the chair. “Golly,” she said, her eyes shining. “Oh, gee.” Julia held out the envelope; Grace approached and stared at it, her hands clasped at her chest like a schoolgirl’s. “I’m scared to touch it,” she said.

            “Light’s better in the kitchen,” I said. “We’ll sit in here and have a seance if you want to be alone.”

            “No,” she said. “I need all the support I can get. I wish Sheila was here.”

            We hovered around her while she sat at the kitchen table and opened the thick blue packet with trembling hands. It contained three identical documents, each with its own label: “Grace Kuzak,” “John Doe,” and “To Be Deposited: Third Party.” Folded within these, there was an additional sealed white envelope, itself thicker than an ordinary letter, and a small rectangular box that did not rattle when she held it to her ear and shook it. Grace unfolded the document with her name clipped to it and began to read, while Julia, McKinley, and I peeked over her shoulder.

            The cover sheet was typed on stationery from a law firm in Las Vegas, Nevada. The first paragraph stated, among other things, that an additional copy of the enclosed document was on file at the law firm’s office, that a fifth copy was being forwarded to a law firm in Milwaukee, and that yet a sixth copy was stored at an undisclosed location, somewhere in Nevada. “Six copies!” McKinley said. “That’s almost a publication.” The rest of the cover sheet described the document’s contents, which were approximately as follows.

            First, a sworn affidavit by Charles Olson describing events of the night of March 31 and morning of April 1, 1970.

            Second, an affidavit by Dr. Alfred Senegal, M. D., emergency room physician.

            Third, an affidavit by James C. Potosi, M. D., attending physician.

            Fourth, an affidavit by Jim Sloan, Jr., M. D., orthopedic surgeon.

            And so on. There were affidavits by the officer investigating the “accident,” by the chief of detectives for the Las Vegas Police, by the insurance adjustor visiting the scene of the wreck on behalf of Rey’s insurance company, by the motel owner, by the manager of the hotel and gambling casino, and by someone whose vehicle had been stolen at the casino on the night in question and recovered in Omaha. Finally there was a copy of a warrant issued by the Court of Las Vegas County for the arrest of “John Doe” on charges of attempted homicide, criminal trespass, assault, defrauding an innkeeper, and burglary. “Defrauding an innkeeper!” Mark McKinley said. “That boy’s in a lotta trouble now!”

            “You’re not kidding,” I said. “Remember who owns the hotels in Las Vegas.” The last item on the list was a letter to “John Doe,” detailing what further steps might be taken should any harm come to Grace Kuzak or in case of her disappearance. They included notifying the Nebraska authorities of his actions in Nevada. “You know what this whole thing is,” I said to Grace. “It’s a safe-conduct pass. You can wave it under Don’s nose and go anywhere you want.”

            “You wave it under his nose,” Grace said. “I’ve got two black eyes already.”

            “Save the waving,” Julia said. “We’re waiting to see what’s in the other letter and the little box.”

            The white envelope contained a personal letter and airline tickets; we allowed Grace to read the letter while we appropriated the tickets for examination. “Hey!” Mark McKinley said. “These are for Monday.”

            “This coming Monday? Let me see,” Julia said. We crowded beneath the ceiling fixture to look at them. “One way, first class,” Julia said. “Lincoln, Omaha, Denver, Las Vegas.”

            We looked down at Grace; she had folded the letter and was caressing the fold, her eyes moist. “What a brave little man,” she said softly.

            “You mean, to challenge Don?” I asked.

            “No,” she said. “To offer to marry someone when you’ve known them for only a week.”

            Julia was the first to react. She moved beside Grace and carefully hugged her shoulders. “Honey,” she said, “I’m so happy for you.”

            “I can’t, of course,” Grace said.

            “WHAT?” We all shouted in unison. “Dear, you’re out of your mind,” Mark McKinley said. “Of course you can marry him. You have to marry him. You will marry him.”

            “But— I’m married now,” Grace said humbly.

            “Sweetheart, let me tell you something,” Julia said. “This is America. You don’t have to stay married to someone you don’t like. In Las Vegas, Nevada, you can get a divorce in forty-five minutes and be married the next day.”

            “I don’t have a wedding dress,” Grace whispered.

            “Oy!” Julia said energetically. “Honey, in Vegas, they rent them by the hour.”

            “Jonas,” Grace asked me, “do you think I should marry him?”

            “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t met the fellow, but it sounds like he’s a better man than me. Think about it: what have you got to lose?”

            “Not much,” Grace said. “My life and his, that’s all.”

            We fell silent. “You’re worried about your husband, not about Don,” I said. “Am I right?” The others stared at me.

            Grace nodded. “If he wants me, he’ll find me,” she said.

            “I thought this John Doe creep was your husband,” Julia said.

            “Nah,” Grace said, making a distasteful face. “My husband’s worse. He’s smarter.”

            “Does Charlie Olson know the risk?” I asked. She nodded again. “Then marry him,” I said. “Your other choice is to live in fear the rest of your life.”

            “Bravo, Jonas!” Julia said. “That was nobly spoken. Of course, it’s not your life.”

            “Yeah, Jonas,” Mark McKinley said. “It isn’t you who’s likely to get killed, unfortunately.”

            Suddenly Julia gasped. “Oh my God!” she said.

            “What?” We all looked at her.

            “I know what’s going to be inside the little box!”

137. Now that Grace had a diamond. . . .

            Now that Grace had a diamond and a future, we raised our vigilance over her to its earlier level. This entailed taking her with us to the Green Frog again, but because she’d sold off Julia’s grass as Mavis and the cops might know—I hadn’t asked Julia where she bought the brick, but from what Dale had let slip, it appeared that she and Jerome had been set up for a bust—I insisted we should banish Mavis to Chicago permanently. This left us without ideas until Julia happened to look at Robert Shemansky. “His clothes will fit,” she remarked.

            “Mine?” Shemansky said. “Not mine. I need my clothes.”

            “His pants will be too loose,” I objected. “She’ll need suspenders.”

            “No, she won’t,” Julia said. “Robert, take off your pants.”

            I got my bathrobe—we were in my apartment following Friday’s rehearsal—and tossed it to Shemansky. “Let’s see those pants,” I said. “We’ll give ‘em back to you. We won’t make you blow harmonica in a dress.”

            Outvoted, Shemansky went into the bedroom and came back out with his trousers in his hand. “These are my favorite,” he said. “My favorite pair of slacks.” Grace took them and disappeared; we were about to send Julia looking for her when she came back out wearing Shemansky’s trousers and one of my shirts. The shirt fit her like a collapsed tent, but the pants were tight enough at the beltline; they rode low on her hips and loose in the crotch. She didn’t look too much like a girl in them.

            “So far so good,” Julia said dubiously. “What do you think, Mark?”

            “Robert’s sleeves will be too short,” Mark McKinley said. “One of my shirts might fit her, though.”

            “We still have to do something about the hair,” I said. “The hair and the chest. It’s obviously a woman’s chest, whatever else you might say about it.”

            “As always, your tact astonishes us, Mr. Smith,” Julia said. “In fact, it’s so astonishing that I think you should leave while we do this. You could go pick up some Chinese takeout or something.”

            “That’s an idea,” I said. “This week she could be Chinese.”

            “I don’t think so,” Julia said. “Now go and get us some food. We’ll meet you at eight o’clock or so at the Frog.”

            That night we dedicated our show to “The Juniors:” James A. Lovell, Jr., John L. Swigert, Jr., and Fred W. Haise, Jr., the successfully returned astronauts of Apollo 13. Grace looked better than Shemansky in Shemansky’s wardrobe. She wore an Oxford shirt with a striped necktie and a tweed jacket that smelled of tobacco. With her hair slicked back and her skin slightly darkened and the fuzz on her upper lip exaggerated with mascara, she looked like a Fullbright scholar from Madagascar who’d suffered a disagreement with American rednecks. During the course of the evening, a number of women tried to buy her drinks, but she refused and pled her wired jaw to keep from talking with them. Afterward we had breakfast at the Village Inn, not wishing to try our luck at Lederer’s again. Dexter Coffey refused to accompany us. I suspected that he was upset with Julia for moving in with Kemp.

            As we were leaving the Village Inn, Grace happened to put her arm around me. I looked up to see the psychiatrist from the VA watching us. “How you doing?” I said to him. “Looks like you’re having a late night, too.”

            “That’s right,” he said. He looked hard at Grace. “No more fires, now.”

            “What?” I replied.

            “Fires,” he said. “No more fires.”

            “Was he talking to me?” Grace asked once we had gone outside.

            “Maybe he was,” I said. “I guess he thinks you’re Mattie Halliday.”

            On Saturday night at the Green Frog, while Julia covered “Piece of my Heart,” I stepped from behind the drums and had my final dance with Grace, mascara moustache and all; on Sunday Julia took her to Omaha one last time. Her jaw remained wired, her teeth unrepaired. Sunday night she was frantic, trying on one outfit after another while Julia and I drank whiskey until it was time for Julia to go to Kemp’s. On Monday a delegation of early risers gathered at the airport to put her on the plane: me, Mark McKinley, Dexter Coffey, and Grace’s friend Sheila, who clearly put the blame for her departure on us. Grace embraced Sheila and then came up to me for a kiss, wearing the shortest pair of short-shorts I’d seen in my life. “Goodbye,” I said. “You’re going to freeze to death on that plane.”

            “Goodbye, Jonas,” she said. “Take care of Julia.”

            “Kemp is handling that,” I said. The flight was boarding. “What about your car?”

            “You can have it,” she said. She went through her purse and handed me the keys. “Be sure Don isn’t there when you pick it up.”

            “Have you got the title?”

            “I haven’t got anything. Goodbye!” She showed her boarding pass to the agent at the door and was sucked away by the transportation industry. The four of us—Sheila at a distance—gazed out through the glass of the modest terminal; though the airliner sat at the gate for another ten minutes, we did not see Grace again. Finally McKinley, Dexter, and I turned to look at one another. “That’s one gritty chick,” Dexter Coffey said.

            Dexter and Mark McKinley had driven to the airport together. I got in my truck alone and waited ten more minutes, while the airplane taxied to the runway, tested its engines, and took off. I suffered a pang of sentiment as the thing rose noisily, tucked away its wheels, and banked toward Omaha against a robin’s-egg sky. The pang lasted all of fifteen seconds. I put the truck in gear and turned to my obsession with Selva Andersen.

138. Whyffe’s classroom looked. . . .

            Whyffe’s classroom looked as if a bomb had struck, killing off two-thirds of his students. I gazed around in puzzlement at the empty seats; the only students left were undergraduates taking the course by special permission, and some Education Department grad students who equated attendance with Christian works and wouldn’t have missed a day if they’d been told they had cancer. I guessed that the Department’s most radical professor had said or done something that cost him his female following. Whyffe came bobbing in with his old amphetamine stride, his eyeballs showing a lot of white. He glanced at my desk, taking in the absence of text and notebooks. “Are you back to stay,” he asked sarcastically, “or just visiting?”

            “I didn’t see you at the Women’s March the other day,” I replied.

            “Those bitches,” he said, grinding his teeth. He went ahead with the class, working his Marxist routine on those few daisy-faced do-gooders left in his audience. As faithful pupils, they tried hard to criticise themselves, but they couldn’t find many thoughts of any kind to question. What he really needed was a steely-eyed sinner like myself, but unfortunately my mind was on the empty seat beside me. Or it was on the damp and unathletic little body that had filled that seat, that had once in darkness—darkness, be my pillow—shared my bed.

            “It seems that our comrade Mr. Smith didn’t bring his notebook—”

            “Not your fucking comrade,” I said softly.

            “What?” Whyffe gaped at me as if I’d threatened to frag him. “What did you say?”

            “I said I wonder if your self-criticism notebook makes mention of the fact that you’re in Lincoln, Nebraska? Because you can say ‘cocksucker,’ you can say ‘cornhole,’ and you can say ‘coprophilia’ here in Lincoln, but if you call a person ‘comrade’ you’re likely to get run out of town.”

            Whyffe sucked in a noseful of air. “I’ll say what I want, I believe,” he said haughtily. “Here or anywhere.”

            “That’s fine with me,” I said, “but don’t expect to get tenure. I’m just telling you the facts,” I added. “It’s nothing to me if you want to be a comrade, but include me out. It just isn’t practical.”

            “Practical?” Whyffe’s nostrils fluttered hungrily. “Why are you in this class?”

            “It was what I could get at eight o’clock,” I said. “I’m an early riser.”

            “So practicality is your criterion, even in your choice of classes. Very well. Would you call colonialism practical?” he asked. “Would you call the expansion of the economy of a tenth of the world’s population at the cost of throwing the other nine-tenths into poverty practical? Would you call the nuclear arms race practical, or our systematic disregard for the environmental effects of industrial processes? What about the production of radioactive waste that may need supervised containment for a thousand years? What about the elimination of species? Is any of this practical?” I remained silent. “What about the Vietnam War?” he asked. “Is it practical?”

            “One can become involved in something,” I said, “on the basis of pragmatism, even when the thing itself is not practical in a larger sense. For instance, your students—” I gestured behind me— “are Marxists for practical purposes while they’re sitting here, even though Marxism is not a practical strategy in the Nebraska job market.”

            “I was hired because I’m a Marxist critic,” he said.

            “It’s practical for you,” I said, “but not for them.”

            “As a matter of pragmatism,” he said, “maybe you should leave. You haven’t turned in any work, I notice.” I thought you were my friend, his injured tone said.

            I stood up slowly amid a general silence. “You are an autocratic Marxist,” I said. “There have been others. It seems to be a flaw that runs throughout that system.”

            “You are disruptive,” he said. “Come back when you feel ready to rejoin the consensus.”

            “There is no consensus,” I said. “The consensus is an illusion generated for your benefit. It is based on pragmatism.” As I left the room, I felt sorry for Whyffe, who would now have no one left to talk to other than his little row of chipmunks. For myself, for flunking the course, I felt no loss, since Selva was no longer attending. I wondered what the tenure committee would say when they found out he’d had to either flunk or drop all of his best students. Some decisions that were taken within the Department tended to be practical.

            When I went up to my office, Shemansky was there. “What’s with Whyffe?” I asked him. “It looks like all the hairy-legs have dropped his course.”

            Shemansky puffed thoughtfully while my eyes watered. “I heard he read something about miniskirts from his notebook and they all left. You could ask Julia. Did she make it to the airport this morning?”

            “You know Julia can’t get up before ten o’clock.”

            “Selva Andersen,” Shemansky said.

            “What?” My ears perked up.

            “It was Selva Andersen’s miniskirt that caused the trouble,” he said. “It was Selva who stood up and left the class. The rest followed her.”

            “Good,” I said. “Maybe I’ll score some points with Selva. I just got asked to leave his class myself.”

            “Did you? Did it have something to do with miniskirts?”

            “Nothing, since I don’t happen to be wearing one.”

            “How was your friend this morning?” he asked, switching abruptly back to the former subject.

            “Nervous as a cat up a phone pole,” I said. “Who wouldn’t be? I don’t think she’d ever been on an airplane.”

            “Will you miss her?” he asked.

            “Miss her? What the hell for? I’ll be glad to be sleeping in my own damn bed for a change.”

            He sucked his pipe and examined me curiously. “But you were her lover,” he said. “She was your lady friend.”

            “Not lately.” I turned to look out the window. Shemansky, as usual, was getting on my nerves. The sunny April morning did not match my mood. The Sower on the Capitol Building reached into his enormous scrotum.

            “I’ll miss her,” he said. “She was funny.”

            “Grace?” The times I remembered Grace being a joker all happened in bed. It surprised me that Shemansky would know about that side of her nature.

            “Puns,” he said. “She was always making puns. Don’t you remember?”

            “I’ll be damned,” I said tiredly. “Must be a different woman.” I turned to my desk, rustling through the pile of papers there that looked even more alien to me than they had a week earlier. “I don’t even recognize half this shit,” I complained. “Are you sure you didn’t put some of your stuff over here?”

            “Is my name on any of it?” he asked.

            “Don’t guess so.”

            “Then I didn’t put it there.”

            Each student paper I picked up weighed as much as a hand grenade. I read through a couple of them, trying to deduce what my assignment had been; apparently I’d asked them to look up something at the library. Thinking of the library, I remembered In Parenthisis and Leonard’s stash of books now liberated, and dug down through the midden until I found the list. Not that I still expected to finish my paper on David Jones. No, I was only curious; I wanted to understand the poem’s allusions for myself.

139. The stairways. . . .

            The stairways of the public part of Love Library are beautiful, broad structures with granite banisters and tiled steps. People love to meet and talk at the landings; any subject might be discussed, from global economics to the legislature to the state of the rest rooms. Back in the low-ceilinged stacks, the narrow stairs that go between floors—the ratio is seven floors of stacks to four in the main part of the library—are made of steel; their poorly-lit steps are covered with asphalt tile and painted a dull Army green. I was ascending these stairs between the sixth and seventh levels when I encountered Selva Andersen coming down, carrying an armload of books. Her pinned-up hair had loose strands sticking out; she had phlegm in the corners of her eyes and smelled like a Dutch cheese. I gave a little moan, cast my arms about her hips, and took her where she was, spreading her pale legs on those cold rough steps amid the spines and rattling pages of her cargo. Afterward, as she was stuffing her panty-hose into her book bag—they’d been torn in the scuffle—she said, “Jesus, Jonas, I didn’t expect to be raped on the goddam stairs.”

            Something in the way she said this caused me to burst into tears. “S-sorry,” I blubbered; I was helpless, and eventually she had to go. It was all I could do to get my shirt tucked in before the Campus Police showed up. They asked to see my I. D.—they must’ve thought I was a drifter—and escorted me to the front desk, where I met Barbara Justman. “Yes, we know Mr. Smith,” she said to them. “You can leave him with us. I’ve been wishing to speak with him anyway.”

            Barbara Justman led the way behind the desk, to a room full of shelves where newly-returned books were filed. Off this room was a small, utilitarian office, and we went in there. She closed the door and turned to me. “Mr. Smith,” she said, “when are you going to quit terrorizing my husband?”

            “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry about the rug. I’d have apologized sooner, but I was too embarrassed to face you. Unraveling it was stupid.”

            She waved her hand dismissively. “The rug was nothing,” she said. “His collarbone will heal; you couldn’t have anticipated that. I’m talking about more important things. There’s apparently some sort of incident with a tape—” she looked at me quizzically— “and we also think we may have suffered a break-in.”

            “Tape?” I thought for a second. “Last semester I made a tape of some blues singers for Leonard’s class. It got stolen on the night I intended to use it, and just recently it reappeared in my mailbox. Is that the tape you mean?”

            “I don’t know,” she said. “Dr. Strange seems to feel that he’s been caught in some kind of ethical misdemeanor, and that you’re holding evidence that might be used against him. He keeps muttering about a tape.”

            “A couple of my friends stole that tape,” I said. “After they brought it back to me, I thought the case was closed. Are you telling me that Leonard was involved?”

            “I’m telling you that my husband is in a state,” she said. “It would help him to know that you aren’t planning some kind of ethics charges. This may seem like a joke to you, Mr. Smith, but in academia, a professor’s reputation is his livelihood.”

            “Please reassure Dr. Strange that I have no notion whatever of pursuing any ethics charges,” I said. “I’m surprised he was in on their prank. He’s not noted for his sense of humor, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”

            “I remind you that you don’t know Dr. Strange very well,” Barbara Justman said crisply. “Now, about the break-in. We suspect that a burglar broke into our house and stole some books. Do you know something about this?”

            It had not occurred to me that Leonard would turn the dismantled rug and the missing books into two separate incidents. “Burglars don’t usually take books, do they?” I replied. “Were the books valuable?”

            “Not especially,” she said, “but they weren’t ours. They belonged to the University. That’s what makes it disturbing.”

            “Hmm,” I said. “What were the titles?”

            “It’s a little hard to reconstruct,” she said. “My husband tends to use the books themselves as a form of notes. Because he relies on his memory of what is in them, his records are incomplete.”

            So, the great scholar Dr. Leonard Strange was guilty of poor research technique. I glanced at the three books I held in my left hand (I’d had them in my grip when I met Selva on the stairs and by miracle still carried them with me; or, perhaps the Campus Cops had brought them as far as the desk.) “Can’t help you,” I said. “I’m not a burglar. Maybe he checked them in and doesn’t remember.”

            “That’s unlikely,” she said. “Well, Mr. Smith, I think a little better of you. How is your flirtation with Selva Andersen proceeding?”

            I almost dropped the books. My dick still felt moist, and it was likely that I smelled of sperm. “It’s hardly a flirtation,” I replied. “It’s not proceeding worth shit.”

            “It isn’t necessary to use such language, Mr. Smith.”

            “In the case you mention, it is.”

140. Suppose Selva. . . .

            Suppose Selva, instead of accommodating me, had called for help? Suppose Barbara Justman had glimpsed the titles of the books I carried? I felt lucky to escape from the library with my freedom. The two Campus Cops waited beside the entrance; they waved to me as I went out, smiling to let me know they didn’t like me. I felt too numb to respond, gutted by my most recent sex with the object of my hopeless erotic dreams.

Unfortunately it was 9:30 a.m., too early to start drinking. I had two more classes to attend, or not. It was a decision worth thinking about; it was conceivable that I could pull out of the steep dive I was in, that by working hard, with Grace and Julia out of my hair, I could still make Bs in my courses, even in Whyffe’s. I would have to stay out of the bars, and I would have to put off finishing Leonard’s Incomplete until summer. On the other hand—

            On the other hand, Lewis Rey had already told me I was finished. Leonard Strange wasn’t likely to forgive me for whatever he decided I had done to him. Denny Deaner would see that I didn’t get another assistantship, and Selva Andersen would now be more wary of me than ever. I needed to discover whether I had enough malice in me to go forward and try to succeed in spite of them all.

I made a right turn and headed for the Student Union to look for L. D. Langdon. I found Dexter Coffey instead. He was working on a piece of writing whose lines didn’t go all the way to the right-hand margin; he put it out of sight as I came up. “Hey, Dex,” I said. “Where’s the Queen of Insults?”

            “She’s changed her life,” he said. “No more bridge. What’s up?”

            “Not much,” I said. “I’m thinking of dropping out; I came here hoping for some free counseling. What’s happening with you?”

            “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I seem to be getting older. This disturbs me.”

            “How old are you, anyway?”

            “Thirty-eight,” he said. “The woman I love is sixteen years younger than I am.”

            “You should be glad you’re not my age, then,” I said. “You could go to jail.” I put down my hot tea, a banana, and a wedge of pie. Dex eyed the food gloomily. “You need something?” I asked him. “I could spot you a cup of coffee. I could loan you a few bucks.”

            “No, thanks,” he said. “Deprivation builds character. I’ll watch you stuff yourself and imagine what you’re doing to your arteries.”

            “How about hot chocolate?” I suggested. “In exchange, you can advise me on my academic career.”

            “Make it a hot chocolate and two glazed donuts,” he said.

            “Done.” I handed over two dollars, and Dex went to get his breakfast. He’d returned and was biting into his second donut when I said, “OK, here’s the deal. I could do one of two things. I could just say ‘fuck it’ and blow off the rest of the semester, or I could start going to class again and try to pull out passing grades. Now, you ask me some questions so I can decide which.”

            “How many do I have to ask in return for one cup of chocolate and two glazed donuts?”

            “Five,” I said. “That one doesn’t count, either. I’ve dealt with you diabolical types before.”

            “Number One,” he said. “What else would you do with your time, now that Grace is gone?”

            “I could jerk off,” I said. “I could play one-handed Scrabble. I could practice my drum licks. I could take the Vietnam-vet image seriously and start shooting heroin.”

            “Not good enough,” he said. “You need an occupation so you won’t turn into a derelict like my father. Number Two. Consider the end result: supposing everything went well for you, and you graduated with honors. Do you see yourself as an English professor when you’re my age?”

            I looked hard at Dex; I thought of Lewis Rey, the nearest approximation to my own interests and personality in the Department. “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Maybe not.”

            “Number three,” he said. “Do you have a passion for scholarship?”

            “No,” I said. “I want to find out some things, but I couldn’t honestly call it passion.”

            “Number four,” he said. “Do you aspire to be a writer, by any chance?”

            “No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”

            “Hmm,” he said. “Once I’ve given you your money’s worth, I might like to know why you’re so certain, but that would only be for my own information. Let’s see. Number five. What would you ask for if I said you could have any one thing you wanted?”

            “That’s easy,” I said. “I want for Selva Andersen to fall in love with me.”

            “Yes, but what then?”

            “What do you mean, ‘what then?’” I said angrily. “That’s six questions.”

            “No, it isn’t,” he said. “What if she wanted to marry you? Are you ready to quit smoking dope and drinking and get a job? Or she might love you but hide her feelings and take no action. That’s not what you want, obviously.”

            “OK, then,” I said. “I want to eat her pussy and not come up for air for 300 years. How’s that?”

            “Most charitable of you,” he said. “It would be a fine answer if I believed it. If you were actually to do that, I think a career in teaching would be difficult for you. It would be hard to read student papers in that position, not to mention giving lectures.”

            “Shit,” I said. “You’re a terrible counselor. Talking to you makes me wish I was in class. You remind me of Julia.”

            “Which takes us back to Question Number One,” he said mildly. “What have you got to lose?”

            I got up and left the Student Union in a snit; I strode toward Andrews Hall with the goal of proving everyone there wrong about me. I attended my ten-o’clock class, arriving late, and took notes furiously. I began the eleven-o’clock class in the same spirit, but halfway through, I put down my pen and looked out the window. A robin in a budding maple tree chirruped brainlessly, and girls walked by on the sidewalk with the soft breeze playing in their hair. I rose, picked up my pen and note pad, and gathered my flight jacket from the back of the chair. As I turned to go, I glanced apologetically at the professor. His pink face showed regret but no surprise.

141. I sat crosswise. . . .

            I sat crosswise in a booth at Casey’s, sipping a beer and pondering what to do with my life. There was talk of an oil pipeline in Alaska; surely they’d need pilots, particularly those with experience in getting heavy loads off short runways. The southern border of the U. S. was awash with dollars and opportunities, and as far back as flight training, I’d known pilots who talked of big money to be made flying drugs across. But the truth was that I did not love flying as I once had. It was a bit too close to driving a semi, and pilots, like truck drivers, tended to talk about things like engine horsepower and where to get tight pussy in Timbuktu. One pilot expressed this mindset when he told me confidently that “if I can’t eat it, fuck it, smoke it, drink it, or sit in it and make it do aerobatics, it’s not real.” No, flying was my past—recent, but past—and my future lay somewhere other than the University. Where? I had nothing in the world to do but go and look for it. I thought of Grace, who’d boarded an airliner to come down in another dimension. Of course, the person who landed there would still be Grace with her ice-cream appetite and bad hair. If it was me, for starters, I’d still be hung up on Selva Andersen.

Vi, the old waitress, came toddling toward me with the cheeseburger and fries I’d ordered. “Here you go, Ace,” she said. “Eat and be happy, stead of sittin’ there scowlin’ like the wrath a God.”

            “I’m planning a search for my future, Vi,” I told her. “If you were going to look for the future, where would you start?”

            “I ain’t lookin’ for no future, Bub,” she growled. “If the future is lookin’ for me, it knows where to find me.”

            I thought of my buddy Stuart Miller, tricked by a little ounce of shrapnel, Siamese twin to the one I carried. Stuart had had a dream: law school and a career of fighting injustice. I could pick up his future and try to carry it for him. I thought of Jerome and his dream of a bookstore, his dream now ashes, the future no more to him than flowing water to a minnow. I’d be lucky if his books didn’t all end up in my furnace room. I could begin with Jerome’s dirty books and start a legitimate bookstore. What then? Adopt a cat? Every bookstore needs a cat.

            Jerome and my dislike of cats brought pregnant Julia to mind. Talk about the future looking for you. Julia was going to get an abortion if I had to stand on her neck on the operating table. Not that the kid was mine—it had to be Jerome’s—but, still. It was a matter of principle. She had too much going for her to spend the next two years changing diapers. Brenda would hold me accountable for every minute sunk in grad-school poverty. I’d probably end up driving for Alex, delivering plumbing supplies out of the back of a three-ton van.

            My glass was empty. I waved to Vi and signaled for a pitcher.

142. The following afternoon, Julia caught up with me. . . .

            The following afternoon, Julia caught up with me at The Outpost, a cheap bar on the southern outskirts of Lincoln. From the front window you could see the state penitentiary. “Greetings,” I said, raising my glass. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

            “Al Foonts said it was worth a try,” she replied. “He knows your taste, apparently.”

            “Can I get you something?”

            “No. Jonas, what are you doing?”

            “Drinking,” I said. “Getting drunk. Er. Have yourself a seat.”

            Julia brushed away imaginary cockroach hulls and sat across from me at the slanted little table. “Someone said you walked out in the middle of class yesterday,” she said. “I assume that means you’re quitting the University.”

            “My,” I said. “Is it yesterday already?”

            “Don’t give me a lot of crap,” she said. “Is it true? Are you quitting?”

            I picked up my glass. The beer was warm and flat. “What if I am?” I said.

            “Oh, Jonas!” She shook her hair angrily. “Such a waste!”

            “Yeah, well.” I took another sip of the filthy beer; Schlitz, probably. “Want to help me steal a car?” Julia’s hair was long and black and coarse. Slipping through the fingers, it felt a little bit like horsehair.

            “Jonas!” She was close to tears. “Is stealing cars your next step on the road to fortune?”

            “It was Grace’s car,” I said. “She gave me the keys before she left town. I don’t want that asshole Stinns to have it. I’ll sell it to a junkyard and give some wino the money.”

            “Shouldn’t you wait till you’re sober?”

            “If I’m sober, I’ll know better than to go out there.” I took the Falcon’s keys from my pocket and focused on them. Cheap keys, stamped out of tinny metal. Lightweight keys for a lightweight car. “What did you do with Charlie Olson’s affidavits?” I asked her. “Did you give them to Warner?”

            “Yeah,” she said. “That won’t keep her gorilla boyfriend from beating the snot out of you, though.”

            “Don Stinns is not her boyfriend.” I pocketed the keys. “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “I’m halfway kidding. I don’t really know whether I have the guts to steal that car.”

            “I wouldn’t want you to be hurt.”

            “Believe me, you being there won’t keep me from getting hurt,” I said. “Stinns is bigger and stronger than both of us put together. I do need someone to shuttle me out there. It’s too far to walk.”

            “If you’re going, I’ll go with you,” Julia said. “How can you sell her car once you’ve stolen it? Did she leave you the title?”

            “I can sell it,” I said. “Al Foonts will help me. But we have to get it first.”

            We took Julia’s station wagon. It was a dirty April afternoon, with low clouds and intermittent mist; cars threw up a sticky spray, so that Julia had to use the wipers periodically. I focused on the telephone poles to gauge my level of drunkenness. Disappointing, after all that had gone down my throat. To carry it further, I’d have to switch to hard liquor or supplement the booze with downers. I directed her west on A Street, watching for the turnoff into Grace’s yard; I had her go on past and pull off onto a farm road, half a field away. “What kind of shoes are you wearing?” I asked.

            “All you have to do is look at me, Jonas,” she replied. “Why don’t you ever want to look at me?”

            “I only asked because they’ll get muddy,” I said. “We’re going to sneak up the back way, through the weeds.”

            “I’m not wearing high heels, if that’s what you mean,” she said.

            I got out of the car and went down into the borrow-ditch to puke. “Well, that’s better,” I said, coming back up onto the road with muck on my knees. “That’s a load off my mind. Let’s go.” I led the way among last year’s corn rows toward a line of brushy elms that screened the trailer compound from the west; Julia followed, kvetching bitterly about the clay that stuck to our feet. “You don’t have to go with me,” I said again. “In fact, I’d prefer you didn’t.”

            “You’re such an idiot,” she replied. “No way am I going to let you do this by yourself.”

            “Well, keep quiet, then,” I said. “We’re getting to the tricky part.” As we approached the edge of the property—we were fully visible from A Street, but I didn’t worry about The Goon coming from the west—I signaled with my palm for Julia to crouch lower. I folded myself into a bent-double posture. The exertion of walking in this manner brought the alcohol fumes rising in my esophagus, but I told myself there was nothing in my stomach left to empty and crept ahead, low to the ground and moving more and more slowly. Finally I stopped behind a fallen cottonwood log, the trailer still completely hidden on the other side.

            “What are we stopping here for?” Julia whispered. I placed my finger against her lips and, seeing that she was about to pop up for a look around, grabbed her shoulder and held her forcefully down. I pulled her close to me and placed my lips right against her ear.

            “This is not funny,” I said. “Remember, this is the man who beat up Grace. Do not move suddenly. Do not speak. Do not look over this log. If someone comes after you, run like hell for the street and hope that he doesn’t want an audience. I am going to do a little investigating.” Trying not to make a noise or to disturb the brittle weedstalks that rose above us, I backed away from Julia and crawled on my belly to a spot near one end of the log, where I could peek with one eye past the broken wood. It was good that the people Grace had lived with didn’t own a dog. We were very near the trailer, a matter of thirty or forty feet; Grace’s Falcon now sat over next to the hay shed, a hundred yards off. Stinns’s pickup and a white car that looked like a rental were parked near the steps. I backed away from the log and crept up beside Julia. “He’s here,” I whispered. “The raid is canceled. Stay low. Leave quietly.”

            “I want to see,” she said.

            “There’s no point,” I said. “It’s dangerous. We need to get out of here.”

            “No. I came all this way,” she insisted. “I’ll be careful. I watched how you did it.” Before I could stop her, she backed away from the log and slithered quickly toward the end; I watched nervously, terrified she’d betray herself. She brushed her long dark hair out of her eyes and looked carefully past the end of the log. At first she seemed to see nothing, just the empty yard. Then there was a slamming noise within the trailer. I hugged the ground, certain we’d been seen.

            “Shit!” I tensed my muscles, prepared to spring to my feet and make a run for it; Julia held her hand out, palm down, and patted the air. More slams came from within the trailer, along with a man’s shout: fucker! Julia turned to me, repeated the palm-down motion, and then beckoned with her finger for me to come and look. I backed away from my hiding place and crept up beside her, my body partly covering hers so that we could share the ragged notch at the end of the log.

            A crash: the trailer seemed to shake. Then the aluminum door burst open and a man came flying out, head first. He lit on his hands, tucked his head under, and rolled like an acrobat. It was no one I knew. The man got to his feet—he was a stumpy character, wide as he was tall—shook his head, and dropped into a karate stance. Stinns showed at the door, grinning nastily down at the smaller man, and then leaped abruptly toward him, launching himself in a flying kick. The other dodged the blow and whirled to face him as Stinns landed on his back, momentarily discomposed.

            “It’s him!” Julia whispered; I felt her tremble. “Oh my God!” I clapped my hand over her mouth as Stinns bounced quickly to his feet and the two men faced each other in the little yard.

            “Him who?” I whispered.

            She withdrew behind the log and looked at me, her face ashen. “The big one. He sold me that pound of dope.”

            I held my lips to her ear again. “Congratulations, idiot,” I said. “You bought from a narc.”

            We heard the ripping of cloth and the sound of blows. When I looked again, I saw that the smaller man was bleeding at the lip, while Stinns was missing part of his shirt. His mighty chest heaved as he circled his opponent, watching for an opening like a Great Dane circling a badger. I hoped that the small man would get in a lick or two before he was crushed and pounded. I noticed, though, that of the two men’s faces, his seemed the more calm, almost serene. Suddenly Stinns lunged, swinging his fist. There was a flurry of thumps and the big man stepped back, panting harder. After a moment, he began his circling again.

            I studied the smaller man with new respect. He was as blond as Stinns, good-looking in a broad-jawed sort of way. He held himself ramrod-straight, his bandy legs working efficiently to keep him squarely confronting his giant adversary. The next time Stinns swung at him, the angle was better and I could see the smaller man land three or four body blows. Stinns’s haymaker went wide.

            The end happened so quickly that I almost missed it. Stinns, in his circling, stepped on a twig and turned his ankle slightly. In the instant it took him to recover, the shorter man moved forward, gripped him at the thigh and collar, lifted him bodily overhead, and slammed him on his back against the concrete step. Stinns slowly slid and tumbled down the step; the parts of his body moved disjointedly, like a bag of steaks.

            The smaller man watched him narrowly, not relaxing his stance. Satisfied, he retrieved the fragment of Stinns’s shirt and used it to wipe his bleeding face. He examined the blood, then raked his butter-colored hair with his fingers and got into the white car. He checked the mirror carefully, glanced around the yard, and started the car and drove away.

            Julia rolled beneath me, so that I was looking down at her, straddling her leg. I kissed her open-mouthed, my hand on her breast. “Oh, God,” she said, her pupils widening. “Oh, God!” I kissed her again, her lips soft and unresisting; I tongued her and thrust my hand deep in her pants. “You can’t!” she said. “We can’t—”

            “Yes,” I said. “We can.” My finger found her cunt; it was wide as a barn door and wet, her clit already distended. “Shhh,” I said. “Slip a leg out of your jeans and unbutton me.”

            “I won’t,” she whispered as she fumbled to comply. “This is psychotic!”

            “Just don’t yell too much when you come,” I said. “There might still be somebody in the trailer.”

            I nudged her up against the log, not minding the broken weeds; I slipped a hand under her bra as I felt her eagerly guiding me into her. I began humping her hard, coming right away and going on for seconds without a gasp or pause. Julia was slower but just as wild, and when I licked my finger and found her knob, she went into orbit and nearly upset the log. I got my second set of spasms at about the same time; we pulled back a little and stared at one another, shocked.

            “Well!” Julia whispered hoarsely. “Now I know why women go to boxing matches.”

            “Hush,” I replied. “We’d better see if Stinns is breathing.” I waited a bit—Julia was as wet as a beaver dam, and I hated to quit just then—pulled out of her, and turned on my back and began rearranging my clothes. “More proof, if any were needed,” I said, “that the human species is sickeningly perverse.”

            “I wonder who he was,” Julia said. “Did you ever see him before?”

            “No idea,” I said. “I’d like to give him a medal, though.”

            The instant I spoke the word medal, I knew his name. “Jonas, all of a sudden you look pale,” Julia said. “Are you all right?”

            I sat up for a frank look at the yard. Stinns lay where he’d fallen. “Get yourself together,” I said quietly. “It’s not safe here.”

            “Jonas? Are you not going to take the car?”

            “Forget the fucking car. That was Dan Kroger, Grace’s husband. You could be looking at a dead man.”

            “Are you talking about the giant Norwegian narc person?”

            “No, Julia,” I said. “I’m talking about me.”

We walked back to the car along the shoulder of A Street, a muddy couple afoot in a world of wheels; the Lincoln-bound traffic swerved to give us a lane to ourselves. I felt sober and chilled. “Take me back to my truck,” I said to Julia. “I’m going to stock up on groceries. I’ll stay in my apartment until Kroger finds me.”

            “I’ll stay with you,” Julia said.

            “Like hell you will.”

            “Why not drive up to Palemon, then?”

            “I don’t want my old man involved in this,” I said. “He’d shoot the creep, and Pop’s too old to go to prison.”

            “Is your father a violent person?”

            “He’s the nicest man in the universe,” I said. “He’s my father, and he owns a deer rifle. What would yours do?”

            “He’d call the police, of course,” Julia said. “This is America, Jonas. It isn’t the Wild West. That was only in the movies.”

            “You don’t know the same America I do,” I said.

            In the parking lot at the Outpost, I bent to kiss her through the car window; she embraced me, almost dislocating my neck. “See you Friday if I’m alive,” I said. “Give my regards to Ted.” She gave me a hurt look and drove off without looking back. I grasped the door handle of my pickup and hoisted myself into the seat. While the noisy engine warmed up, I gave myself a minute or two to think. Julia’s advice to leave town had been basically sound; another thing I could do would be to pee on a cop’s leg and get myself incarcerated. But something compelled me to go home and wait. Kroger would find me if he wanted me, and whatever I did to make it difficult would come back to haunt me. On the other hand, I didn’t have the courage to confront him on my own initiative.

            My insomnia the previous night had been complete; now, in the middle of the afternoon, I felt an overpowering urge to sleep. I drove home and put my sorry self to bed, leaving the victualling of my apartment for another time.

143. I went out that evening. . . .

            I went out that evening to look for Selva Andersen. I took my usual place in the shadows at Barrymore’s, and after an interval she came over to wait on me. “You can’t rape me here, Jonas,” she said coldly. “I’ll lose my job.”

            “I apologize for what I did,” I said. “I’m crazy about you. Crazy is the operative word.”

            “You’re not the first.” She sighed and her shoulders relaxed. “It was a unique experience. Something to tell my grandkids. I’m sorry it made you cry, though.”

            “It wasn’t only you,” I said. “It was a lot of things. Can you take a break?”

            “Not right now,” she said. “In a few minutes, maybe. If you think you can maintain, I’ll come and talk to you.”

            “I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m not feeling too aberrant just now.”

            “Hold that thought,” she said. “Don’t frighten the customers. Do you need a drink?”

            “Club soda,” I said. “Please. Thank you.”

            I sat quietly watching Selva as she slipped between the tables. Her looks, her body, her movements seemed at home among these moneyed customers. I would not have believed, if someone else had told me, that she grew up banging her knees in an airplane junkyard. I guessed that was the point of all those acting classes. She smiled at the well-dressed males as if she really liked them, and for all I knew, maybe she did. (Selva practically never smiled at me. Even in our closest moments, she watched me the way a cat would watch a wolf.) Amazingly, these same men treated her as part of the furniture. There it is, I thought: indifference, the icy sword with which rare beauty is slain.

            I myself was indifferent toward Julia. Ted Kemp treated Mattie with a philosophic blandness that had driven her right over the edge of sanity. America greeted her returning GIs with indifference to whatever crimes we might have performed, which made our nighttime horrors vivid and compelling. Selva Andersen was not indifferent—in part, she loathed me—so maybe I was doing better than some. I watched her glide among the rich men’s tables, and felt as poor as Lazarus.

            Selva soon brought a club soda for me and a Tom Collins for herself, and slipped off her shoes immediately as she sat down. The leathery fish odor of sweaty female feet stirred all the devils. “Whew,” she said. “How I hate this job, Jonas. You can’t imagine.”

            “I’m surprised,” I said. “I wouldn’t have guessed from watching you.”

            “That’s part of the job,” she said. “Why did you want to see me?”

            “I wanted to warn you that someone will be looking for me,” I said. “He’s not a pleasant person, but I want him to find me anyway. Do you remember exactly where I live?”

            “You brought me there after our trip,” Selva said. “You had evil intentions, but someone else was there. Yes, I remember.”

            “Well, here’s the thing. This man who’s looking for me, I don’t think you can lie to him. So, if he asks you, you’d better tell him exactly. But don’t go anywhere with him, not even two steps down the hallway. He’s driving a white rental car. Do not get into the car.”

            “What does this dangerous person look like,” Selva asked, “and what does he want with you?”

            “Wide, not tall,” I said. “Yellow hair. Looks like he might be a Baptist minister, but in fact he’s a Special Ops dude, what we call a snake eater. Square-built but there’s no fat on him. How’s your radar working? Not too well, if you ever thought I was an infiltrator.”

            “It works,” she said. “I’ll spot him. What makes you think he might come looking for me?”

            “I helped a woman get away from him. He’ll try to find another woman to make things even.”

            “Nobody knows I went up to Dune County with you,” Selva said. “At least, I haven’t told anyone.”

            “People will have noticed the way I look at you,” I said. “Not just recently.”

            “I can’t take you seriously, Jonas. We don’t know one another. Besides, I’m engaged to be married.”

            My heart sank into the table. “I’ve loved you since I first saw you. It was some kind of protest march. It was raining, and your hair looked like red spaghetti.”

            “Was I wearing greasepaint?”

            “Yes.”

            “You couldn’t have really seen me, then. This is something you’ve worked up in your imagination. It’s the kind of thing women like me have to learn to beware of.”

            “I love you.”

            “Yeah,” she said. “Well, there’s your free drink.” I was glumly silent. “Are you quitting school for real?” she asked.

            “Nothing there for me,” I said.

            “Too bad.”

            I wondered what had made me think I needed to talk to this woman. I sipped the soda, wishing I’d asked for a Black Russian instead. “I’m sorry I attacked you on Monday,” I said finally. “That won’t happen again. It was some kind of fluke. I really do have more self-control than that.”

            “You didn’t hear me screaming for help, did you?” she replied. “Actually, I went home later and got Adrian to make love to me on the stairs. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was something.”

            I put down my soda, suddenly nauseous. “Why tell me that?”

            “Jonas,” she said, “what I feel for you is what I feel. It’ll never be what people call love. Do you want me to ask you to keep away from me completely?”

            “I couldn’t stand it.”

            “You may have to,” she said. “This isn’t fun. I think I’d better go.”

            “Don’t worry, I won’t start blubbering again.”

            “I’m not worried,” she said, bending to tug her shoes back on. “It just isn’t fun, that’s all.”

144. I lay in bed. . . .

            I lay in bed all day Wednesday, wishing I hadn’t swept the place so squeaky-clean of dope. Toward evening I tired of waiting for Kroger’s footstep on the stairs and went out to buy myself a newspaper. If I wished to avoid moving back to Palemon, I needed to find a job, and the want-ads were as good a place as any to start. As I pulled into the parking lot of the little supermarket, I saw that Mattie’s VW microvan was sitting next to the dumpster again. Instead of going directly into the store, I walked over toward the Volkswagen. “Hello the campfire,” I called out softly. “Don’t shoot, I’m not a cattle rustler.”

            Mattie Halliday’s scowling face, surrounded by a thatch of newly-red hair, appeared in the side window of the van. “Hey, Mattie,” I said cheerfully. “You look like someone speaking out of a burning bush. How are you?”

            “Are you drunk?” she asked me. “You look drunk. I don’t allow drunks to insult me.”

            “I’m OK,” I said. “Hey, I thought your Queen-of-the-Amazons outfit was nifty. You sure got everyone’s attention.”

            “I was trying to make a serious statement,” she said. “It didn’t help to have people brawling on the sidelines.”

            “It’s not my fault if someone spit on me,” I said. “Listen, I was just going in the store. Do you need anything?”

            “My needs are being met, thank you very much, Mr. Wise Guy.”

            “How long’s it been since you had a juicy steak? Speaking of cattle rustling.”

            Mattie got a hungry gleam in her eye. “I no longer eat meat,” she said primly.

            “Amazon warriors live on meat,” I assured her. “They like nothing better than to feast on the testicles of their enemies.”

            “I couldn’t cook it,” she said. “My little stove is running low on propane.”

            “We’ll eat at my place,” I said. “While you’re there, you can take a shower.”

            “I’ve been showering at the Y. W. C. A.,” she said. “You won’t have to hold your nose, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

            “I was only offering,” I said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Is there anything else you’d like?”

            “Cranberries,” she said. “I’ve had such a craving for cranberries.”

            I bought cranberries, beets, tomatoes, and the steak; it would be a meal to satisfy the bloodiest appetite. I bought a jug of Burgundy as well, though I didn’t know if Mattie was still drinking. She followed me in her van to my apartment. I scouted the street for any sign of a rental car, but there was none, so I parked at the curb and led the way inside.

            “Where are all your sluts?” Mattie asked. The place indeed looked empty without Julia’s things scattered everywhere. Julia was a woman who liked to take up lots of room.

            “Grace went to Las Vegas to be married,” I said. “Julia Stein moved out. I’ve got the place to myself.”

            “Julia Stein moved out? Where did she go?”

            “You know where she went,” I said. “Unless your surveillance is slipping.” Mattie kept her back to me. I started to unload the grocery sack. “What about that shower?” I suggested. “Unless you actually prefer the Y.”

            “Am I that bad?” she asked. “Do I look dirty?”

            “No,” I said. “I thought you’d like a little privacy. These beets will take about an hour to cook. Are you drinking anything these days?”

            “I can drink beer or wine,” she said. “I have to stay away from hard liquor.”

            “I’ll pour you a glass of wine,” I said. “You can sip it in the shower while I read the newspaper.”

            Before bathing, Mattie allowed me to brush the snarls out of her hair. It would have been like old times, except that the red dye had done something to her hair. It behaved as if she’d been washing it with laundry soap. “You’ve got to get conditioner on this,” I said. “Maybe Julia left some.”

            “I wouldn’t touch her conditioner,” Mattie said. “It might have maggots.”

            After Mattie showered, she brought in laundry; we ate supper to the thumping of the machines. The steaks were tough but flavorful. I cooked them rare, and with the juice from the beets they made a satisfying slaughter on our plates. We pushed back from the table and eyed one another. “No dessert,” I said. “We can have more cranberries.”

            “I’m full,” she said. “I need to lie down. Don’t bother me if you value your life.”

            Mattie slept on the couch for three hours. I put her second load of clothes in the dryer and washed a few of my own. I cleared the dishes and studied the newspaper; there was a new soybean-processing outfit going up on the northeast edge of Lincoln, and it looked as if they were hiring. I decided I’d check into it if I survived the week.

145. Headlights followed me. . . .

            Headlights followed me as I walked back to my apartment following my Comp class Thursday evening. When I turned back to face the way I’d come, the white car veered off onto a side street. Similarly, when I drove home after the band gig on Friday night, I was followed, but nothing further happened. Either it was a war of nerves or—this possibility dawned slowly—Grace’s letter hadn’t reached Don Stinns, Sheila hadn’t cracked, and the two of them, Stinns and Kroger, were waiting for me to reveal where Grace was hiding. With this in mind, I lay down at 2 p.m. on Saturday for a nap. At 5 I got up, filled my truck with gas, and went home and ate a hearty meal and made a thermos of coffee. Before going downtown for my band gig, I stopped at the market and loaded the cab with various cookies and chips. I made sure I included an empty jar so I could take a rolling piss. That night, after we had finished playing, I explained to Julia that I was going out of town. I hit the bathroom a final time, got into my truck, and headed for Kansas City.

            Although the home of Joe Turner and Count Basie lay only about two and a half hours southeast of Lincoln, people from Lincoln rarely went there to hear live music. Far safer and more convenient to visit a place like the Green Frog and hear blues performed by white college students. Well, we gave our best, and Julia’s voice was almost the real thing, but the fact remained that we were doing time, not life. I drove east toward the town of Beatrice after 1 a.m., satisfied to see that a pair of headlights followed half a mile back. I changed my speed a couple of times, just to make sure.

            I crossed the big river at Beatrice and headed south on the Iowa side. The lonely moonlit drive brought to mind my trip to Palemon with Selva, and I lit into the snacks to comfort myself. I compared the remembered dread of riding through the dark on the blind bat-wings of love to my present fear of being executed in a cornfield, and found the latter to be less taxing. What Kroger and Stinns might do to me would at least, I hoped, be quick. I led them southward past St. Joe, Missouri, the route familiar from my truck-driving teens. Soon the lights of the fabled city appeared on the horizon.

            I led that pair of small-town hoods on a tour of some districts of Kansas City that are not included on any Chamber of Commerce guides. With all the stoplights, it didn’t take long to lose them; I wasn’t even aware when it happened. When I crossed over the bridge into Kansas, sometime after 4 a.m., I was alone, and I drove west to Marysville, the home of three-two beer, and stopped at an all-night truck stop to have breakfast. Then I headed north to Nebraska. I completed the circle as the sun was coming up, parked the pickup in front of my apartment, and went inside to sleep it off, pleased with my night’s work.

            When I woke up Sunday afternoon and went outdoors, I was less pleased. The headlights and windshield of my truck had been smashed. When the engine would not turn over, I opened the hood to find that the battery had been broken open, so that all the acid had leaked. I made certain there was no marijuana in the truck and called the cops, who examined the damage with bored and patient smiles. They promised me the L. P. D. would get right on the case.

I didn’t inform the police their pal Stinns had probably done it. I just wanted to be sure they knew where I lived.

146. Kroger would have gotten. . . .

            Kroger would have gotten a two-week leave. That meant my time was running out. I’d messed with his head, and he’d make me pay for that, at least, before he left Lincoln. I wished I had Grace to tell me what his next move would be.

I rarely left my apartment in the next few days, showing up on campus only to check my mail. On Wednesday I found an envelope from Grace Kuzak. It contained a wedding photograph, with a note on the reverse; this is what the note said, in full: “Here we are! Guess what, my neck is broken. Not broken broken, but. You see the collar. Thanks for everything. Tell Don no hard feelings (you won’t believe that.) I have written my former h. he’d better keep away from me. The police in Green Bay have his name and description. Thanks for everything. Guess I said that! Good luck to you. I won’t see you again. Love, Grace.”

            I flipped the thing over and glanced at the photo; it showed two bruised and skinny people wearing neck braces, holding a sticky knife above a cake and looking goofy with gratification. Behind them, the decor was American Motel Restaurant, with two-man crosscut saws on the wall and wagon-wheel chandeliers. Grace’s hair had recovered its inverted-basket shape, and trinkety earrings dangled to her bare shoulders. I pocketed it and went to look for Julia; I found her in the lounge, sans clove aroma. “Look at this,” I said, handing her the photograph. “Grace is married.”

            Julia studied it on both sides. “That’s her, all right,” she said. “I hope he’s a good person. He has a sort of doggy look about him.” She handed it back to me. “I have some news,” she said, lowering her voice. “I told Ted I was pregnant.”

            “What did you do that for?” I asked indignantly. “I mean, when you already know you’re going to get a—”

            “Shh!” Julia whispered. “This isn’t the place to scream at me, Jonas. What’s the matter with you?” She opened her purse to look for a cigarette, then closed it again. “Don’t you even want to know what he said?” she asked me.

            “It doesn’t matter what he said. It’s none of his fucking business. If you’re going to smoke, let me have one, will you?”

            “I’ve quit,” Julia said. “He said that if I decide to have the baby—I only said if, you don’t need to have a seizure—I can stay with him until it’s over. Isn’t that generous? Jonas? Are you all right? Say something.”

            “‘If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.’ That’s what they taught me in Sunday school,” I replied. “That interfering asshole needs to have his butt kicked. What does he think he means, ‘until it’s over?’ When did you first come up with this cockamamie scheme, anyway?”

            “Jonas,” she said, “you’re hyperventilating. It’s not a scheme. I’m considering my options, that’s all.”

            “You’re not supposed to be considering your options,” I said. “You’re supposed to be finding a clinic in New York and booking an airline reservation. It’s what we decided.”

            “That’s what you decided,” Julia said. “There’s someone else involved here. Two other people, really.”

            “Three counting Ted,” I said. “Four counting Brenda. Why not include Alex and— What’s her name, your horny little sister—”

            “Stop it!” Julia hissed. “Just stop it. This is neither the time nor the place. I just thought you’d like to hear I’m getting a little support, that’s all. You know, in my hour of crisis? Do you think this is all a piece of cake for me, Jonas? Just because my parents have money? Really, in your way you’re the biggest snob I’ve seen. You should be hugging me and patting me on the back, instead of looming over me and breathing like a walrus. After all,” she said, lowering her voice still further, “this could be yours.”

            “That, my dear,” I said calmly, “is precisely the point.” I spun on my heel and marched up to my office, where I threw open both windows and leaned out into the spore-filled air. Above the city and a dozen blocks away, the broadcasting Sower stood poised on the Capitol dome, gleaming like a bronzed pair of baby shoes. “Brainless fucker,” I said to him, “why don’t you ever wear a raincoat?”

147. On Thursday, April 30th, 1970. . . .

            On Thursday, April 30th, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon ordered U. S. ground troops to invade Cambodia. In so doing, he triggered a massive series of campus protests. It is possible that he also saved my life, because he made Dan Kroger anxious to get back to the war.

            I spent Thursday morning in my apartment reading the Mort D’Arthur. After fixing myself lunch, I walked to campus to prepare to teach my Thursday night class. In the library I encountered Barbara Justman, who informed me that Selva Andersen had hoped to see me, but that she’d gone to the Student Union to watch TV; I thought this so unaccountable (I did not yet know about the invasion) that I simply left a message with Barbara that I’d be in my office until 5:30, and went across to Andrews Hall to mark and grade student papers.

            Andrews Hall sat abandoned; even Shemansky was elsewhere. I toiled at my desk in an immobile flutter, trying to focus on thesis statements and topic sentences while anticipating Selva Andersen’s possible arrival. I had no idea what I might say to her, but I remembered that oral sex was something we hadn’t tried. As the afternoon wore on and she failed to show, I got more and more work done, though the papers I graded toward the end suffered from my irritation. Finally I shoved them all aside, grabbed my jacket, and headed for the Student Union to get supper.

            The lounge area of the Student Union was packed with longhairs, and every face was intent on the TV. I saw the shadowed jaw of our zombie President as he opened and closed his mouth in righteous belligerence, and that was the first I knew that something was afoot. It didn’t concern me much—I was out of the war—and Selva’s face was not among the crowd, so I continued to the cafeteria to take on calories. Afterward, though, curiosity got the better of me, and I hung around the fringes long enough to learn exactly what it was that the execrable shit Nixon had done. Once again, when I found out, I felt that it didn’t concern me. I had known about operations in Cambodia that involved ground troops, in fact I had flown support on them, so I didn’t see right away why it was a big deal.

            Back in Andrews Hall, I checked my mailbox for a message from Selva. Nothing. I went upstairs to review my notes before class. I felt a tingle throughout my body, and a puckery sensation in my forebrain as if I were about to pass out, but my thoughts about my lecture that evening were unusually clear. I planned to talk about topic sentences and to try once again—triumph of hope over experience—to get across the notion that a claim, once made, must be supported by facts, even if those facts had to be improvised a la William F. Buckley.

            This mundane program escaped me somehow. Once I got up in front of the class, once I saw them looking back at me like rabbits in hutches eyeing a fox outside their pen, the tingle in my skin increased to an almost-audible buzz. Something snapped, and I started talking about the war. I told them the usual anti-war stuff—about free-fire zones, for instance, where anything that moved was a legitimate target; about the way napalm was formulated to cling to human skin, about the way the shock wave of a 20-millimeter projectile causes the human body to pop—but I also told them about my friend Stuart Miller, about Tom Tex LeTourneau who got sent home for crying, and about myself. I told them that if they wanted to see a lot more miserable wrecks like me on campus, then they should go right out and vigorously support their President.

            This argument is, for Christ’s sake, about something, I told them; there’s something at stake here. That’s why you need the goddam facts, and that’s why facts are so goddam hard to get sometimes. That’s why a fact is a valuable thing, and why if you have one you ought not to waste it. You’ve got to pack it with other facts in the body of a paragraph, light the fuse of a topic sentence, and toss it smoldering among a crowd of idiots. Maybe one or two of them will get the bloody point.

            Then I handed back their essays for in-class revision.

            It was my crowning moment as a teacher. I got a taste of what it was like to be a real professor, to be passionate and committed and to care what students learned and how they learned it. I got a sense of what it cost, physically and emotionally; I was so excited that I forgot to take a break, and I got through two and a half hours without giving a thought to Selva Andersen or to the cold little slit between Selva Andersen’s legs. When the clock wound around to a quarter to ten, I was empty of words and repeating myself, so I gave them an assignment and told them to go home.

            Half my students had left. I was gathering my papers and dealing with some last-minute questions when I glanced up. Stinns and Kroger stood just inside the door, wearing ties and sport jackets and beaming away like lighthouses. They looked for all the world like FBI agents. “All right, kids,” I said. “Gotta go. Just in case you never see me again, take a good look at these two thugs. They’ll have something to do with it.” Everyone took this as a joke except for Stinns and Kroger. They remained silent, smiled like cherubs, and stood aside for the last of my departing freshmen.

            My weariness left me; I felt the chill of adrenalin. “Hello,” I said, going up to them on watery legs. “I’ve been expecting you.” Kroger held out his hand for a handshake; I looked at his stubby fingers and kept my right hand to myself. “What do you want to do?”

            “This way.” Kroger tipped his head toward the door, continuing to smile even though no students remained. His face was handsome enough—he was blond but not as good-looking as Stinns—although his head, with its flattened haircut and heavy jaw, had the turret shape of a cartoon robot’s head, a cylinder that broadened toward the neck. The trunk of his body was also cylindrical, though no one looking at him would have guessed his strength. The most striking thing about him was his hypnotic eyes, their pale-brown irises flecked with gold and bounded with crisp black rings. They had intensity and a weird innocence; I mentally compared them with Wide Load Wilson’s eyes. The scowling proprietor of the Three-Legged Dog had the eyes of an old boss lion, one who was unafraid but not especially hungry. Kroger’s were the eyes of a prophet who’d been living on locusts. He had practiced a gaze that seemed to look beyond mortal things.

            Down the hall, Rey’s seminar was letting out. As we passed, I glanced at Julia, whose eyebrows shot up in alarm. She made a motion with her finger as if dialing a phone; I shook my head in the negative. My sense of Kroger was that he wanted something from me that could not be gotten from a dead man. Once he’d extracted it, though, what then? I would play for time and hope to see the morning.

            “That fat girl,” Kroger said as we left the building. “She’s the one you fucked behind the log.” I said nothing. “She’s a Jew, isn’t she?” There was disdain in his voice, a kind of spinsterly disapproval. The two of them, I noted, had stopped smiling.

            “We saw your fight,” I said. “Some fight.”

            “Certain things have to be reestablished from time to time,” Kroger said. “Isn’t that right, Don?”

            “Yeah.” The Goon’s sullen voice came from above me and to my right. We were moving quickly, in and out of the shadows along the walk that skirted Love Library. I wondered if Selva had made any further attempt to contact me.

            I licked my dry lips. “Those people we passed in the hall,” I said. “Most of them know me. They’ll remember seeing me with you.”

            “You seem uneasy about your health,” Kroger replied. “There’s no need. I only want to talk business with you.” He turned to offer me a stern look. “Business and redemption.”

            My heart sank. The man was a nut. There would be no reliable way to deal with him short of a bullet, and even then you wouldn’t want to merely wound him. My estimated odds of survival fell; I figured it was now about a forty-sixty proposition.

            The white car was parked across the street from the Music Building. I got in on the passenger side, and The Goon lowered his bulk into the back seat. Kroger drove. We went south on 9th and turned right on A Street. I felt my stock rising again, since we were headed for Grace’s trailer and Julia knew its location. Then I glanced across at Kroger, who wore a smile on his face something like a North Dakota Boy Scout leader who’d been suddenly put in charge of a troop from East St. Louis. I kept a lid on my optimism. After years of practicing routine murder in Southeast Asia, he could very well have forgotten there were laws against it.

            The trailer was dark when we pulled into the compound, and the only cars were Grace’s Falcon and The Goon’s pickup. Grace’s former roommate, I concluded, had cleared out. This impression was confirmed when Kroger led the way inside. The jungle mural that had adorned the living room had been stripped off, the furniture had been removed—all except the television—and there was a little platform at one end and a row of metal folding chairs at the other. The walls had been painted the color of cream that has been allowed to sit. There was a cross and a reproduced painting of a hugely muscular crucified Jesus.

            “Looks homey,” I said. “Where is everybody?” The Goon gave me a sour look. Kroger took off his sport jacket and tie and went to turn on the TV; the last of the ten-o’clock news was on, and he watched the President’s speech and some footage of GIs in troop carriers passing a billboard. I heard a noise in the back—someone was there, after all—and Stinns stepped quietly back into one of the bedrooms. After a while he emerged, ducking his head to clear the doorway, and went into the little kitchen to make himself some coffee.

            “Well!” Kroger said, snapping off the TV and rubbing his hands. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s see what the unbaptized person has got in its pockets.” He came up to me, and without a word I began shelling out my possessions, putting everything on a little table beside the door. I put down billfold, loose change, car keys—mine and Grace’s—a tiny pocket-knife, my checkbook, and an unpaid bill from the phone company. Grace’s wedding picture was still in my shirt pocket, and as I took it out I handed it to him. He examined both sides carefully and laid it on the table. “Why does she have two black eyes?” he asked me.

            “You might want to discuss that with your associate,” I said, glancing at Stinns. “He could also account for the groom’s injuries.”

            “Were you there?” Kroger asked me. I shook my head. “Then you only have half the story,” he said. “Grace has always resisted me. Me and Christ Jesus. The two of us have that much in common.”

            “Then you’re not angry, now that she’s left you?”

            He shrugged. “I don’t get angry,” he said. “Anyway it’s you I’m interested in. Sit down.”

            I took a seat on one of the folding chairs, while Kroger methodically went through my stuff. In particular he examined my draft card and my Air Force vaccination record; he also riffled my checkbook, on which I’d kept an accurate balance. It showed all my savings from my tour in Nam—Julia’s abortion money. He dangled Grace’s keys and turned to me. “You came to get the car,” he said. “You and that Jew girl. That was why you walked across the cornfield.” I made no sign. “Then you fucked,” he said. “You committed the sin of fornication.”

            “Not for the first time,” I said. “You were gone by then. You couldn’t have seen us.”

            “God saw you,” he said. “He showed me where to look for your filthy traces.” He put down the keys, placed another folding chair across from my own, and sat down so that our knees touched. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior?” he asked.

            “No, thank you. Not right now,” I said. “Try me when I’m on my deathbed.”

            “You may die unexpectedly,” he said. “Life is not given to the unbaptized; it is merely lent.” He rose and retrieved a well-thumbed Bible; he also produced a baggie of white powder, which Stinns eyed enviously. He placed these on a second chair beside him and sat down again. “Now,” he said, “we are going to do a little Bible study. You may speak at any time, but because we’re in the presence of the Lord—” he glanced at the beefy picture—”I demand that you answer respectfully.”

            “You can dip me in dogshit if I don’t,” I replied. “Lead off, General Custer. Go for it; there aren’t any Indians down there.”

            So began the strangest night of my life. Kroger, dipping into his white powder occasionally for a little sniff, roved back and forth in the Bible, quoting passages and “explaining” them in a quiet, reasoning voice; all the while, his weird eyes pried into my own. The gist of it was that while any particular passage could mean anything at all—whatever the Lord told him it meant—the whole thing in its entirety must be taken as true, as if God were incapable of employing fiction or of using a metaphor. I felt grateful for every tedious mile I’d driven, for every unmarked hectare of jungle I’d flown over, for every interminable mind-numbing Leonard Strange lecture. It took these resources and more to cope with his lunacy.

            Finally, near the end of my endurance, I brought up the matter of emerods. God, in helping the Israelites take possession of their Promised Land, more than once afflicted the natives with a plague of “emerods,” which, on further study, turns out to mean “hemorrhoids.” Wasn’t this, I asked Kroger, evidence of a divine sense of scatological humor? He blinked.

            “Well?”

            “God does not make jokes,” he said.

            “If He doesn’t,” I said with finality, “then piss on Him.”

            Kroger merely looked at me, the mad fire in his eyes dying back to embers. He closed his Bible and stood up stiffly. “One more thing,” he said. He went toward the back of the trailer and entered the room Stinns had visited when we’d first come in. I heard a muffled yelp; the voice was female. Kroger emerged, carefully closed the door behind him, and approached my chair, twining something around his finger. He showed it to me, a strand of fox-red hair.

            I was up off my chair in an instant. I shoved him back—it was like shoving a hog—into the counter that separated the front room and the kitchen, and set off down the hallway. I didn’t get far before I was tackled and my face shoved into the carpet, but I got far enough to hear two questioning syllables that sounded like my name. No wonder I hadn’t seen Selva! They had her back there, tied up and gagged. I fought them, but I might as well have been fighting gorillas. “Scummy bastards,” I said to them as they dragged me back to my chair. “Slime-maggots. Shit-flies. You assholes don’t know what you’re doing. Her fiancée is rich. You’ll have the rich people down on you. You’ll have the cops, too. Julia knows this trailer; she saw both of you here. I bet the police know this place already. He—” I glanced toward Stinns— “is only free on parole or probation. You can’t get away with this.”

            The Goon was busy tying me in the chair. Kroger sat down across from me again. “The laws of Caesar don’t concern me overmuch,” he said. “I carry out the Lord’s desires, and He protects me.”

            “All right, dickbreath,” I said. “What is it the Lord wants me to do for you?”

            “Be baptized,” he said.

            “How? Where?”

            “Right here.”

            “Is that all?” I relaxed a little. “Then you’ll let her go?”

            “She’ll go with you,” he said, smiling sanctimoniously. I mistrusted him more than ever.

            “First you let her go,” I said. “Then I’ll be baptized.”

            “No.”

            I glanced up at The Goon. He looked bored; he looked like he could use a drink. “What guarantee do I have?” I asked.

            “My word as a Christian minister.”

            “That’s not worth crap,” I said.

            “Otherwise we kill you both in a sinful state,” he said. “Your souls go to Hell for eternity.”

            I believed him, at least about the killing part. He truly didn’t care about the law. That, or else he figured Stinns would get the rap; his snake-eater buddies would vouch that he was in Cambodia the whole time. I guessed he’d traveled and rented the car under a phony name, probably using some dead GI’s driver’s license. I licked my lips. “What do I have to do?” I asked.

            “Don,” he said triumphantly, turning to The Goon with a tight little smile, “run this poor sinner a tub of water. Make it cold, and put some ice cubes in it.”

            “Why the ice cubes?” I asked. “In fact, why the tub of water? Why don’t you just use a fanny paddle, like the boys on Fraternity Row?”

            Kroger slapped me. It felt exactly like being struck on the face with a board.

148. I told myself I would go through anything. . . .

            I told myself I would go through anything to save Selva’s life. But when I saw ice floating in that bathtub—the enamel a sickening salmon color, a tint of the 50s—I drew back. A fuse flared in some blind circuit of my brain, and I clawed and kicked like a terrified animal. I don’t even know what I did to them; I’m sure I bit. A nurse once told me that it takes four adults to immobilize a child. I believe it because, strong as those two were, they failed to get me into the tub of water.

            After many minutes of desperate fighting, after the sink had been torn off the wall and Stinns had used his bare fingers to fold the spraying pipes, after the three of us were spattered with blood, not all of it mine, they released me. I fell to the floor, sobbing, certain I was going to be killed. I would die with Selva in some muddy ditch, yet I knew one thing, and that was that I couldn’t go near that bathtub. Slumped outside the door of the bathroom, half dead with bruises and weariness, I heard the television set come on again. Some bright-voiced dickhead was predicting the day’s weather. It was morning.

            I heard Kroger’s step in the hallway and looked up. He was buttoning his sport coat. He gazed down at me in wonder and disgust. “I wash my hands of you,” he said. “Write me a check for four thousand dollars. Then you can go.” I glanced piteously toward the bedroom. “Her, too,” he said. “The slut can go, too.”

            I pushed myself to my knees, then, unsteadily, to my feet. The muscle in one of my calves felt mashed, as if my leg had been run over. Both of my hands, I saw, were bleeding, and the nail was torn completely off my left thumb. I followed Kroger into the front room. In the kitchen, Stinns was washing his face in the sink. I made my way to the table and opened my checkbook clumsily. “Gimme pen,” I said through a hoarse voice-box; in the struggle, one of them had tried to choke me down. Kroger watched as I wrote out the check and handed it to him.

            “You know not to try to stop payment on this,” he said. I nodded. “That’s for my wife,” he said. “A virtuous woman’s price is beyond rubies. Four thousand is about what Grace is worth.”

            “You leave Grace alone,” I said. “You’ve done enough to her.”

            “I will,” he said. “I’m glad you feel she still has value, because Mr. Stinns, here, is your new business partner. He thinks his share is worth four thousand, too.”

            I glanced with horror at The Goon, who leered back at me. “If you’re leaving, take him with you,” I said to Kroger. “Right now, I need safe passage for myself and the girl. I’ll have to get his money later.”

            Kroger looked from me to Stinns. “Fair enough,” he said. “He knows where you live. That’s where we found her; she was waiting for you.” Selva, waiting for me! The thought of it broke my heart. Kroger tossed his shoulders, settling the jacket into place. “Let’s go, Don.”

            “Four thousand, buttface,” The Goon said to me. “When will you have my money?”

            “He’s cleaned me out,” I said. “I’ll have to sell my truck. You need to give me until next Monday at the earliest.”

            “Sunday.” Stinns ducked to follow Kroger through the narrow door. “I’ll come on Sunday.”

            At last they were gone. I waited until I heard two vehicles drive away, then hobbled over and clicked off the TV. I looked around at the silent living room with its musclebound Jesus and gray steel chairs. What I wanted was a soft place to lie down. “Selva,” I muttered. “Gotta get Selva.” I limped back along the corridor, supporting myself against the wall; I reached the bedroom, turned the knob, and hurled the door open.

            A red-haired woman faced me with terrified eyes. She was bound to a metal chair with duct tape, and her mouth was taped as well. It was Mattie Halliday. “Mattie!” I stood there, gazing blankly at her red-dyed hair. “Where is Selva? What have those bastards done with Selva?”

            “Mnnnn.” Nothing. Only then did I get it through my reeling head that it was Mattie, not Selva, who’d been waiting for me in my apartment. I felt like turning and leaving her taped to the chair, but when I saw the panic rising in her I stepped forward.

            It took me a long time to unstick her because my missing thumbnail made my left hand useless. Once I freed her hands, she tore away the gag. “Hurry!” she said, quaking with outrage. “After them! They mustn’t get away!”

            “Mattie, are you crazy?” I said, kneeling. “They’ll kill us. Hold still while I get your feet loose.”

            “You’re too slow,” she said. “I’ll call Ted. He should know about this. That man was an agent of the CIA.”

            “I don’t think so,” I said. “There; can you stand up?”

            She stood, and fell on top of me. “Ouch,” she said. “The circulation. My legs are numb. Can you help me?”

            “Not right now,” I said, pushing her up and away. She sat down hard on the floor; I rose and sat on the bed, my head spinning. “I thought you were Selva Andersen. I almost let them baptize me because I thought you were Selva Andersen. I don’t believe it.”

            “You put up a terrific fight,” Mattie said. “I heard you. It sounded like you wrecked the place.”

            “The bathroom is broken,” I admitted. “I bet you’re going to need it, too.”

            “You’re a mess,” she observed. “Someone pulled out half of your beard.”

            “Yeah, well,” I said. “You don’t look so glamorous yourself.” I gazed stupidly at her hair; now that I could study it, it didn’t look at all like Selva’s. “I am so boneheaded,” I mourned aloud. “I am so easily fooled.”

            “What would they have done?” she asked. “What if that short one hadn’t been eager to get back to Viet Nam? Kidnapping is a felony. They could both do prison time.”

            “They would have done away with us,” I said. “They would’ve dumped our bodies in Salt Creek. Then that Kroger creep would have said a prayer.”

            “That big one isn’t such a nice guy either,” she said. “He reminds me of my father, except my father is smart.” She looked down sadly, rubbing her numbed wrists. I could see the crazy person beginning to come out in her.

            “Come on. Let’s try moving.” I hauled myself achingly to my feet. “We’d better get out of here before Stinns comes back. He might regret not killing us.”

            “Aren’t you going to call the police?”

            “You call them,” I said. “The police don’t like me.”

            “You said you had a cousin on the force.”

            “Give me your hand.” I braced my left forearm against the wall and helped Mattie up from the floor.

            “I’ll call Ted,” she said in a childlike voice. “Ted will tell me what to do.” She took time to primly dust off the seat of her pants.

            “Call whomever you like, but not from here,” I said. “Me, I’m going home and putting myself to bed.”

149. Mattie and I took Grace’s. . . .

            Mattie and I took Grace’s car and drove it into town. Glancing across, I had a stop-action movie of the tide of alienation rising in her. Her eyes became blank, her expression more wooden; her dyed hair seemed to bristle. Her posture lost its queenliness. “Mattie,” I said, “you ought to see a doctor. Maybe you could get something to help you relax.”

            She turned to me resentfully. “There you go, telling me what to do again.”

            “I wasn’t,” I said. “It was only a suggestion. You’ve had a rough night.”

            “It’s none of your business what kind of night I’ve had.”

            “Fine. You’re right. It’s none of my business.” Cars lined the street in front of my apartment; besides Mattie’s van, I recognized Julia’s station wagon and one or two others. “Looks like a party,” I said. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

            “I don’t want any people,” Mattie said. “I’m not dressed.”

            “You could come in and take a shower,” I offered.

            “No way,” she said coldly. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going in there after what you did to me last night.”

            “Mattie,” I said, “it wasn’t me, OK? You got caught in the crossfire.”

            “You said I could use your shower and then you sent those two men to catch me.”

            “I’m sorry you think that,” I said. “That wasn’t how it was.”

            I let Mattie off at her van; she stepped in quickly and locked the door, and by the time I got Grace’s Falcon parked—I had to leave it a half block down the street—she was already driving away. I climbed out stiffly, pocketing Grace’s keys, and limped across the lawn, the morning air stinging the tip of my naked thumb. I felt sore in every joint from my fight with the bozos, and my heart was deeply saddened at the loss of four thousand dollars. I clumped downstairs in a gloomy funk, intending to kick everyone out and go straight to bed. But when Julia saw me—she and Ted Kemp were dozing on the couch—the glad light in her eyes made me grin back at her. “Jonas!” she shouted. “Our hero!” She jumped up and grabbed me around the ribs, bruising me in a couple of places Kroger and Stinns had missed.

            “Hey,” I said. “The only person I saved is Mattie Halliday, and she’ll probably spend the rest of her life pushing a shopping cart up and down O Street.”

            The apartment came alive with people. Dexter Coffey and Mark McKinley emerged from the bedroom, followed by L. D. Langdon and her husband. When I peeked in the door, I saw little Venus Langdon still asleep at one end of the bed, my office-mate Shemansky at the other. A couple came out of the furnace room; the female reporter I’d locked horns with a time or two emerged from somewhere. Coffee was made and a wine bottle was re-opened. A joint was passed. The door of my refrigerator stood open, and vapor and smoke ascended from the stove. Someone turned on the TV. A parade began in and out of the bathroom.

            I told and re-told the story of my night. Everyone wanted to look at my damaged thumb, everyone smiled at my torn beard. I began to feel that I’d come out a winner—I was alive, after all, Grace was free, and Kroger had gone back to Southeast Asia—and after a sip or two of wine and a puff of weed I forgot about my aches and bruises. But on my third pass through the narrative of events, when I got to the part about the woman’s voice and the strand of red hair from the back room, Julia interrupted. “That reminds me,” she said.

            I put down my plate of scrambled eggs. “Reminds you of what?”

            “Selva Andersen was here last night,” she said. “I guess she wanted to talk to you. She said she’d be in Larry Whyffe’s class this morning.”

            “Fuck! What time is it? Somebody give me a ride uptown. McKinley?”

            “I don’t have a car,” Mark McKinley said.

            “I’ve got one, already warmed up,” I said. “Hurry.” I ran out the door with my flight jacket in my hand, McKinley pounding up the stairs after me. I got behind the wheel of Grace’s Falcon, gunning the motor impatiently while McKinley inserted himself on the passenger side, and then made a U-turn in the middle of the block and tore north toward campus. I pulled up into the lot behind the Administration building and jumped out. “Drive it home and park it down the block,” I said to McKinley, “so the cops don’t find it right in front of my apartment. Knowing the people I got it from, it’s probably stolen.” I hurried toward Andrews Hall, my stepped-on leg threatening to cramp up; the scrambled eggs began churning in my stomach, and I took a deep breath and forced myself to slow down. A few students were emerging from campus buildings, and as I approached Andrews Hall the trickle became a flood, so that I had to shoulder my way against a stream of young bodies. Their heads turned as I passed them by with all the night’s terror and the strain of the moment showing on my face.

            I found Whyffe’s classroom empty. A note had been chalked on the board: “English 492 Suspended Until U. S. Troops Out of Cambodia.” I looked around for messages, slips of paper, graffiti, carrier pigeons, St. Bernards carrying flasks of brandy, smoke puffs rising from distant buttes. I looked out the window; the Sower atop the State Capitol made no sign.

            “Selva,” I said. There was no one to hear me. I would’ve taken her in my arms, kissed her cold lips with passion, told her of my fear for her safety. Now, what was there to do? All my hurts came back to me. I suddenly felt so weary that I envied the dead.

(blank line)

150. We played our gig as usual. . . .

            We played our gig as usual that night, all four of us somewhat the worse for lack of sleep. The Green Frog was packed; the crowd was electric. A feeling of solidarity permeated the smoky air. Nixon’s move into Cambodia had united the sentiments of college students, working-class parents, and bums off the street. We played to our mixed group of addicts and amateurs, hippies and housewives with a new ferocity. Julia sang the “Bourgeois Blues” to cheers from bourgeoises and bourgeoisettes. When it came time for my drum solo, I did a frantic machine-gun number during which I got so carried away that McKinley had to come back and stop me.

            Saturday night was about the same. The intervening news wasn’t good; the governor of Ohio had made threatening noises, and demonstrations in other states had spiraled out of control. College campuses had mostly closed for the weekend, but trouble was expected once they re-opened on Monday. Nixon and his clan of thieves remained truculent, while anti-war forces, seeing an opportunity, made a now-or-never effort to organize marches and student strikes. From the opposite side of the divide, there was backlash in the atmosphere; angry faces could be seen behind the windshields of downtown Cadillacs. Scowls were exchanged between knobby cement-truck drivers and out-of-shape longhairs walking the streets.

            As I unkeyed the drums after midnight and last call, I felt and resented a deep loneliness. Kemp had come down to pick up Julia; McKinley and Shemansky were off to an all-night meeting, representing their co-op in planning the week’s events. I had volunteered to move the band equipment by myself, making up for the dozen times I’d shirked setting it up. One by one I loaded the pieces into my truck, with Dex holding the door of the Frog and watching out for vandals. I said good night to him—he, too, had somewhere else to go—and drove to my apartment. There was no point in going out to Lederer’s.

            Except for the ticking of the furnace, the basement was quiet. All TV stations were off the air. I missed my little fling at polygamy; there was no denying that Grace and Julia made the place more cheerful, even when they weren’t cheerful themselves. Most of all, though, I felt blue about Selva. I couldn’t help wondering what she was doing, what she had wanted to say to me. I went to bed with the blues and dreamed of rockets shrieking above the University. When I woke, it was after ten a.m.

            I made myself beer pancakes for breakfast, and got out my old copy of the Mort D’Arthu. I had lost myself in the final battle—Mordred’s forces seemed victorious, Launcelot led another charge—when I heard a heavy step on the stairs, coming down in a hurry. I put the book down as Julia burst in the door. “Hide me, Jonas!” she gasped. “For God’s sake, hide me!”

            I got to my feet and closed the door. She was white and shaking, with a scratch on her forehead and a scrape along one cheek. “Hey, calm yourself,” I said. “It’s OK. What’s the matter?”

            “It’s not OK, Jonas,” she said, shrinking from me and glancing toward the street. “She shot Ted. I think she killed him. Now she’s after me!”

            “Mattie?” Julia nodded. “Babes, this is the first place she’ll come,” I said sadly. “You’d better hide yourself fast. I’ll call the police.” Julia ran into the bedroom, and I soon heard a lot of thumping in the closet; apparently she was trying to cover herself with my shoes. I opened the phone book and got the cops’ number and had begun dialing when I heard someone else coming down. I put away the phone and went to the door. It was Mattie Halliday.

            She was dressed as she’d been at the Strange-Justman party, wearing the same shimmery turqoise blouse and wool skirt. She wore chrome jewelry that matched the chrome .38 she held; she stood with her head lowered and her arms crossed, the shiny revolver in her right hand. Her blouse was bloody, as if she’d been carrying a roast against her breast.

            “Mattie!” I said. “What have you done?”

            “Shut up, shut up,” she said with tears in her voice. Her big purse hung from her shoulder; she entered, sat down, and got out her hairbrush. “Here,” she said, offering it handle-first. “Help me.”

            I took the brush from her. “Your hair is sticky,” I said. “Let me get some water.” There was a thump in the bedroom closet, but Mattie didn’t look up. I ran a saucepan of cold water and began dipping the brush in it and pulling at her hair, moistening the bloody tangles. “You’ll need a shampoo,” I said, “once we get this straightened out.” She offered no comment.

            “You know what,” I said. “My cousin was supposed to come over. Maybe I’d better call him.” I moved the brush to my thumbnailless left hand and picked up the phone, and tucked it under my ear. I dialed the McFerrins’ number.

            “Hello?” It was Toni’s voice.

            “This is Jonas,” I said. “Toni, tell Dale not to come and pick me up. I’ve got company.”

            “What?” Come on, I thought. You’ve got a fast brain; use it.

            “Tell him not to come over,” I repeated. “I have an unexpected guest. I can’t see you guys today.” I hung up the phone. “Relatives,” I said. “They wanted to feed me dinner and show me pictures of the Ozarks.”

            “I know what you did,” Mattie said quietly.

            I changed the brush back to my right hand and continued brushing; Mattie cradled the .38 in her lap and began to cry. I painstakingly worked out the tangles as the water in the saucepan turned pink with philosopher’s blood. I got a towel for her shoulders and took my time. Finally—it seemed an eternity—there was a man’s step on the stairs and a heavy knock at the door. I had expected Mattie to remain passive, but she swept me aside and stood, knocking the saucepan to the floor.

            “Open up!” a voice commanded. “I hear you in there! Open the door!”

            “Get back, Dale!” I shouted. “She has a gun!” Mattie leveled the revolver at the door, chest high.

            A fist came crashing through the flimsy panel. Mattie fired through the door and the fist withdrew; I did not think it was Dale’s. Mattie’s head drooped, and the revolver sagged in her hand. I took it from her and pushed the door open, my ears ringing like a carillon. The bottom of the door struck something; I shoved harder, and put my head out for a look.

            The door was hitting a size-fifteen boot. Don Stinns lay crumpled against the opposite wall, blinking up at me, his hand to his midriff; the bullet that would’ve struck a normal man in the chest had taken him in the territory of the liver. I felt a thrill of triumph, and my blood ran cold. I shoved Don’s boot aside and stepped out into the hallway. Mattie’s gun was double-action and didn’t need cocking, but I held it aside and thumbed the hammer back so that Stinns could see what was coming. “Good night, asshole,” I said. I’d been deafened by Mattie’s shot, so that my own voice sounded like someone calling from a distant well. I aimed the .38 at his face, then at the center of his chest. I tensed my finger on the trigger.

            Stinns glanced to my right, but I was not about to fall for his shopworn trick. Then some disturbance in the light made me look up. On the steps stood my cousin Dale in plain clothes with two other cops in uniform; all three of them had their guns drawn. I saw Dale’s lips move. “Hi, cuz,” I squeaked; my voice quavered and an uncontrolled grin distorted my mouth. “You’re in time to see me ship one goon back to the factory.”

            Dale’s lips formed two clipped syllables; he raised his gun until it pointed directly at my forehead. I saw that my cousin would shoot me. Incredulous at first, then galled with frustration, I slowly lowered my arm; I bent down reluctantly and laid the heavy revolver on cold concrete. As I straightened and raised both hands, two leather-clad shoulders slammed into me, and I was knocked to the floor, pinned and cuffed in less time than it takes two men to throw a week-old calf for branding.

            Dale jerked me roughly to my feet. By looking carefully at his mouth and listening hard, I could make out what he was saying. “You’re under arrest— Have the right to remain silent— An attorney— Anything you say can be held against you.”

            “This is no way to treat a veteran!” I burst into ragged tears. “You people can fuck yourselves. I’m moving to Canada.”