Straight Man (13 page)

Rather than contemplate the return of W.H.D., Sr., I pick up and begin to read Leo’s latest effort, with which I have to be at least marginally conversant by this afternoon’s workshop. His new story appears to be cinematically inspired—that is, uninspired. It’s about the ghost of a long dead murderer who returns at twenty-year intervals to terrorize the same small town, graphically executing the descendants of the original townsfolk who hanged him in the previous century. The final scene of the story is climactic merely in the sense that after slaughtering a young woman character whose only crime seems to have been cock-teasing, the ghost murderer rapes her corpse. The murder itself is accomplished in a single well-developed paragraph, the rape in the following single-spaced page and a half. In a handwritten note appended to the story and addressed to me, Leo expresses one or two slight misgivings. He wonders if the rape scene is overdone. And he wants to assure me that the narrative is not finished. Originally, he’d thought of it as a short story, but now he suspects it may be a novel. Next to his query concerning the rape scene, I write: “Always understate necrophilia.” Then at the bottom of the final page, “Let’s talk.”

“Okay, let’s,” says a voice at my shoulder, and when I look up I see it’s Billy Quigley’s daughter Meg.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I say, motioning for her to join me. It’s true, too. Neither Billy Quigley nor his long-suffering wife would appear to have many genetic gifts to bequeath their offspring, but all of their girls are beautiful. Meg’s beauty is almost breathtaking, and, in
the manner of most truly beautiful women, she reminds you of no one but herself, whereas her other sisters all resemble each other, like young soap opera actresses. Meg has a face you wouldn’t expect to see again this century.

She pulls out the chair opposite mine. She has a steaming cup of tea and a lumpy brown paper sack that looks like it may contain a tennis ball. “I didn’t know there were any hard and fast rules governing the aesthetics of necrophilia.”

I lean back and study her. What’s in the bag is a peach. “I just ran into your old man,” I say. “He didn’t look so hot.”

“I give him a year,” Meg says. On the subject of her father, Meg’s talk is always hard, casual. The two of them fight tough, cruel battles. Meg’s public stance is that her father is a moron. I suspect that her private stance is pretty different. She’s been married, once, to a man who didn’t measure up to Billy. Now she’s playing the field, trying to find a man who might and not having much luck, at least in Railton. Her behavior is one of the things she and her father fight about. Late one afternoon in the middle of the fall semester I got a call at the department from a man looking for her father. Meg had passed out drunk at a pub downtown, and the man wanted Billy to come fetch her. Because Billy was in class and because it was the sort of thing he could live without knowing, I drove over myself, loaded Meg into the backseat of my Lincoln, and took her back to her apartment, depositing her on the sofa in the front room and beating a hasty retreat when she woke up enough to ask me to undress her and put her to bed.

“In that case I’d try to make things up with him,” I suggest. “You’re his favorite.”

Meg shakes her head. “It makes me crazy to go over there. I can’t even describe what it’s like in that house.”

I can imagine though. Over the years the Quigley house has gone into the same serious decline as the rest of the neighborhood, its paint peeling, its porch rotting, its tiny lawn, even its sidewalk, given over to weeds. When Lily and I first moved to Railton, Billy’s had been a respectable lower-middle-class neighborhood, home to several junior faculty from the university. Now it’s the domain of demoralized Con-rail workers who have gone from unemployment to subsistence checks from the government, whose marauding kids roam the streets at night,
neglecting the homework my wife has assigned them, marking time until they’ll be old enough to acquire the fake ID’s that will allow them to climb onto barstools next to their sad parents in seedy neighborhood taverns that sport out-of-date beer signs in their dark windows.

“He could use a little moral support is all I’m saying.”

“Couldn’t we all,” she says, toughness falling away for an instant, then returning almost immediately. “It’s not easy knowing you owe your very existence to other people’s stupidity.”

I know better than to disagree, unless I want to be drawn into a serious quarrel right here in the student center. Meg’s feelings on the subject of her parents’ strict Catholicism are intense. After delivering the tenth little Quigley (there’d been three miscarriages as well), their family doctor had told Meg’s mother that if she had another she’d be risking her life, but even then birth control had been unthinkable until a young parish priest, new in Railton, had taken her aside and told her that she’d done her part, that God expected no more. Meg was the fifth of the ten kids, and she always maintained that if her parents had possessed a brain between them they’d have stopped at four. It’s one of the things I like about Meg. Most human beings want the door to swing shut behind them.

Since I’ve been a good boy and not started an argument, Meg offers me a bite of her peach.

“Do I dare?” I say.

“That’s the question all right,” she agrees.

In truth, I don’t, though the issue may not be the daring. Meg has been flirting with me ever since I declined to undress her and put her to bed, and I’ve been flirting back, perhaps because we both seem to understand that it’s just flirting. My cowardice is always understood to be the only impediment to our becoming lovers. Which will make a man my age curious. Almost curious enough to find out for sure, if it weren’t for the suspicion that Meg enjoys watching me squirm more than she’d enjoy the sex. Squirming, I think I’d enjoy the sex more.

“Nope,” she says after a moment. “It took you too long to decide.”

When she finishes the peach, she hands me the pit. “See?” she grins. “All gone.”

“There are other peaches,” I can’t help pointing out.

“Not like that one,” she insists. “That was the best one ever.”

Regrets, I have a few.

She gets up. “I’ve got a class. Will I be teaching in the fall?”

“I hope so,” I tell her, as I told her father. “I’ll try.”

“You should let us adjuncts into your union.”

“You have my vote.”

She smirks, as if my promises are not something she places a lot of stock in. She may even know something about my standing in the union. “You know what my moron father wants me to do now?”

“No, what?”

“Go back for my Ph.D.,” she says. “He’s offered to pay for it.”

“What a jerk,” I say, deciding to play along.

Her face clouds over. “Watch yourself, bozo. This is my old man we’re talking about.”

The campus is on the outskirts of town, five or ten minutes from the business district, depending on whether you catch the two traffic lights or miss them. I’m to meet Jacob Rose at Keglers, downtown, at noon. The food on campus is unworthy of a dean. Therefore, we will dine at a bowling alley. Keglers is on the other side of the tracks which divide the town neatly in half. There is no bad side of the tracks in Railton. Also no good side. The rule is, the closer you get to the tracks, the worse. Back in the town’s heyday, when all the trains passed through on their way to Chicago and points west, one right after the other, the only way to escape the dirt and soot was to live up the slope, above where the ash settled. Houses in the lower elevations grew epidermal layers of gray film. Now, though the railroad is all but dead, what remains of the business district is so sooty and gray that a month of rains couldn’t cleanse it, and the town is such a blight that local and state politicians have been working overtime to locate funds to complete a spur of north-south four-lane divided highway that will bypass
it. The construction will mean jobs for Railton’s chronically unemployed railroad workers and will make life easier on the truckers who now clog the narrow streets of downtown Railton. In this way the highway is being touted as an economic boon for the region, but when it’s completed, the four-lane will be the final step in Railton’s ostracism, officially excusing travelers from stopping, or even slowing down.

I arrive early, but Jacob Rose is already there. In fact, he’s halfway through his corned beef sandwich. “Sorry,” he says when I pull out a chair. “I had to wedge in an appointment at twelve-thirty, which means I’ve got to eat and run. Try the corned beef.”

The lounge overlooks the bowling alley below, only two of its twenty-two lanes in use. A sloppy, slow-moving fellow in low-slung, baggy jeans leaves an ugly split and bellows, “You cocksucker!”

“Is it the corned beef that you like here or the ambience?” I ask Jacob Rose.

“There’s no such thing as ambience in Railton,” he says. “Nice nose.”

“Thanks.”

“I hear Gracie did it,” he says. “You must have been protecting your groin.”

In fact, the corned beef looks pretty good. I check around for a waitress. There’s apparently only one, and she’s across the room flirting with the bartender.

“Not a bad strategy,” the dean admits. “With Gracie you’re always wise to guard against the low blow.” An observation born of personal experience, I know.

“Leaves the rest pretty wide open, though.”

“Fortunately, leaving himself wide open is Hank Devereaux’s trademark,” Jacob reminds me.

I wave at the waitress, who is still unaware of my presence. She pivots on an ample hip and settles onto a stool at the bar.

“I hate to add to your difficulties …,” the dean continues.

“Then don’t, for Christ’s sake,” I tell him, stealing one of his fries.

“This might not be such bad news, actually,” he says, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin, pushing his chair back an inch or so from the table. “The English department’s review has been moved up. Internal will begin its part in September. External will follow in October. If
you’re owed any favors at other institutions, now’s the time to call in the markers.”

I run my fingers through my hair. “That’s crazy,” I tell him. “We’re in transition. We’re hiring a new chair.”

“Strictly a money decision,” Jacob says. “The external team is doing Eastern and Northern also. This way all three get reviewed at once and the boys at the main campus get to promote the idea that we’re all one university, geographically dispersed, as they’re so fond of saying.”

“Ideologically dispersed, you mean. Philosophically. Demographically. Economically.”

“Be that as it may. And don’t worry about being in transition. Because the funding isn’t going to come through for your chair search. That’s strictly between us. It’ll be next week before you’re told officially.”

“Would it do any good to ask why?”

Jacob shrugs. “You could ask. I could tell you. But it would just piss you off. You wouldn’t enjoy your lunch. Why don’t you order something?” He glances over his shoulder and effortlessly catches the eye of the waitress who’s been ignoring me. She slides off her stool and comes over. “How’s everything?” she wants to know.

“Terrific,” he assures her. “I’d like some coffee though.”

When the girl makes to depart, he adds, “Don’t you want anything, Hank?”

The girl stares at me in surprise, as if I’ve just materialized at the table. “Oh!” she exclaims. “Hi there!”

I order a corned beef sandwich. She writes this down, gets the dean’s coffee, then returns to her barstool.

“Off the record, nobody’s convinced that bringing in someone from outside will cure the English department’s ailments,” Jacob says.

“That was my original position, if you recall.”

“Well then, you got your way, for once,” Jacob grins. “Which reminds me. Finny asked me for a ruling on procedure. He doesn’t want you to conduct the on-campus interviews. He says since you weren’t in favor of an outside search in the first place, you shouldn’t be in charge. Since there won’t be any on-campus interviews anyway, I’m going to rule in his favor. Let him feel good about something.”

“I bet you can trace your lineage all the way back to Solomon.”

“He’s also threatening litigation if you don’t stop harassing him about his degree from the Ventura Boulevard Burrito Palace and School for the Arts. According to university counsel, there isn’t much we can do. If Finny wants to embarrass himself by listing a degree from an unaccredited institution, it’s his business. We can’t humiliate him without embarrassing ourselves in the process. If he ever goes up for full professor, we can chop his biscuits, but until then …”

“That’s fine,” I assure him. “I don’t want him fired. I’d just like to control the damage he does.”

“That’s where we’re different,” Jacob says, his voice full of good-natured resignation, pushing his coffee cup toward the center of the table. “I’d like to fire the bastard. Anyway, I gotta go.”

“Listen,” I say. “Before you do your vanishing act, tell me when I’m going to get my soft money.”

He gives me a look that says I know better than to ask this. Which I do. “When I get mine.”

“Not good enough,” I tell him.

“I know. What can I say?”

“Make me a promise. Let me make a few promises. The money always comes through. Why not give our adjunct faculty a little peace of mind? Call it an early Christmas present.”

“You’re forgetting your audience.”

“Okay, call it a Yom Kippur present.”

“Call it Ramadan, for all I care. I can’t give you money I don’t have. If I promise and the appropriation doesn’t come through, who benefits? We go through this shit every year. The troops all know the drill.”

“Knowing the drill doesn’t make it a good drill,” I point out uselessly. “You could make an issue of this if you were properly motivated. You could do the right thing for once, just for the hell of it.”

Jacob now assumes the weary expression he dons when I’ve gone too far, traded on the fact that we were both once mortal, played ball together, were even denied tenure. “Don’t you ever get nosebleeds up there on the high moral ground?”

I smile innocently. “This nose?”