Tenure Track (27 page)

He also flipped through his mother’s old copy of the
Living Bible,
whose once-modern language had not aged as well as the
King James
Shakespearean prose. Yet he enjoyed thumbing through this version, mainly to read the underlined passages and copious notes his mother had made in the margins. One passage he remembered well, as she quoted it to him whenever they moved to a new community. “I want to go wherever you go, and to live wherever you live.” He found the rest of the passage highlighted in the book of his mother’s namesake. Lewis thought about how much his mother was a like the Biblical Ruth—devoted to family, willing to follow wherever his dad got the crazy notion to go. As long as the family was together, Ruth Burns believed, all would be well. Lewis wished he had inherited her optimism.

Setting the Bible down, he spied another item he had not examined for a long time. His mother had kept a scrapbook for each child, reflecting not only the life experiences, but also the personalities, of each boy. Lewis’s book opened with an image of the entire family taken just before he left for college. Flipping through the pages brought back a flood of memories, both good and bad. Lewis had many conflicted feelings about his parents. On the one hand, he admired their independence and willingness to stick up for their ideals. However, growing up he had felt unnecessarily deprived of a normal life, especially when he realized how much untapped wealth the family had. By the time he was a teenager, he insisted that he would never drag his children around or treat them like lab rats in some social experiment, as he sometimes felt his parents did.

Once ensconced in college, Lewis had gone through a bit of a rebellious period, saying some things that he regretted after their deaths. Among the worst was accusing them of being white liberal racists who stereotyped the “Noble Red Man” through their fascination with Native American culture and embarrassing insistence on living in the most deprived conditions out of some mocking need to be “one” with the Navajo. He remembered spitting out the words with the typical arrogance of a college student who had read just enough to think he knew better than his elders. Looking back through the prism of time, he now understood how unfair he had been, but he never got the chance to apologize. Death takes away such opportunities.

Thumbing through the scrapbook, Lewis recalled how many good things he did have as a child, such as abundant love and exposure to facets of life that he would never have experienced in a “normal” suburban upbringing among those as wealthy as his family. He now understood that his parents did not really see the children as lab rats in an experiment. They saw life as vagabond Donnie did: a voyage of exploration. They just insisted on bringing children along for the journey. And whatever their motives, from everything that people on the reservation told him, his parents’ foundation had helped many people. Lorena’s parents were among the many adults who learned to read through their program, offering a type of freedom greater than money alone could buy.

Looking back through the veil of age and nostalgia, Lewis realized that the happiest times in his life had been those threadbare days on the reservation, when books, nature, family and friends were the major comforts of life. Like many parents, his had guided him on a journey that he was only just beginning to understand. He wished that he had been able to tell them how much he appreciated the ride before they died.

The scrapbook ended with photos and letters from his freshman year in college, followed by unfilled pages reflecting the archivist’s abrupt end. Lewis had been 20 years old on that horrible day, yet from the moment he heard the word “dead” coming from Ben’s atypically emotional voice, he was an orphan. For reasons he still did not fully comprehend, the Burns brothers quickly drifted away from one another after settling the estate. Lewis had spent the years since then wandering as much as Donnie, seeking to recreate the happiest period of his life—but the efforts never fully sustained him. First, he had tried to recreate his happy memories through his studies, which provided an excuse to retain a link to the reservation, although he knew he could never truly be "of the rez.” He was just a white guy fascinated by the community, more akin to the type of person he had once bitterly accused his parents of being.

He had tried to recreate a family through his marriage. But within the seemingly perfect, stable life that Laura offered was a trade-off, a well-crafted perfection that never allowed his home to match the warmth of his mother’s chaotic abode, nor even that of his childhood friend. Lorena had one of those homes in which anyone was welcome, never fussing about what the place looked like or what the hoards of visitors might do to the furniture. Whenever he visited Lorena, she treated him less like her peer and more like one of her kids’ friends, offering open arms, hot food and a corner in which to sleep.

In Lorena’s home, the orphaned part of him was temporarily pacified in a way it never was in his own house with Laura. He had never taken Laura to the rez, thinking she could never truly appreciate it. Perhaps that realization was the real reason he had been somewhat ambivalent about having children. He questioned whether he could give his children as much love as his parents had given him. He wondered if he was capable of giving anyone that much of himself.

These pages reminded him that he had once been able to both give and receive unconditional love. He had once been . . . happy. If only he could ever figure out how to recapture that moment and give permanent refuge to his lost orphan child.

That evening he sent an e-mail to each of his brothers. Not the typical mass e-mailing or forwarded joke he usually posted, but a personal, heartfelt letter to each one. Then Lewis set the scrapbook in a box with the books he was loaning to Mandy.

Too anxious to wait until Monday morning to see her, Lewis decided to take a Saturday afternoon jaunt to Mandy’s home to drop off the books. Pretty soon he found himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood searching for the address he had looked up in the student directory. It was a house number on the eastside of town in one of those gentrified neighborhoods, a collection of older homes that had been revitalized into rental property.

The street on which Mandy lived was a series of such older, run-down homes. As Lewis slowed down near what he thought was the correct address, he began to wonder if he indeed had the right neighborhood. On the front porch of the once-stylish 1940s house with peeling white paint stood four Hispanic males, most in their late teens, wearing black T-shirts and blue jeans.

Lewis began jotting mental details about the group, in case he saw this gang on a future crime watchers bulletin. There was one with spiky hair and double earrings; one with long, straight hair down to his back, a wispy goatee and dragon tattoo on one forearm; another rather burly, with a buzz cut, thin moustache and pierced nose. In the center of the group, calmly smoking a cigarette as he leaned against a post, was the most distinctive of them all. The way the younger three stood around him listening intently and occasionally laughing, Lewis could tell that he was their leader. The center man looked slightly older, very muscular in a grey wifebeater that revealed a large eagle tattoo on his left shoulder and a set of dog tags hanging around his neck. He wore his jet black hair closely shorn to the head, a pair of mirrored Ray Bans concealing his eyes. Even from the car Lewis could see that the leader’s right shoulder and arm were severely scarred, indicating a violent past. On that same side of his body, where his supportive appendage should have been, hung an empty trouser leg.

After Lewis sat there for several minutes taking notes for his future police statement, the group noticed him staring. They stared back for a few seconds, until the leader grabbed a set of crutches and started hobbling over to Lewis’s car. The professor’s initial inclination was to gun the engine and get moving. Instead, he sat frozen, as the gang leader approached his Prius and motioned for him to roll down the passenger’s window.

“
Hey, Dude, lookin’ for somethin’?” he asked, not sounding particularly threatening, although the gnarly scars that Lewis could now see running all the way up the right side of his neck and smattering a portion of his profile made the professor’s body shudder involuntarily.

“
Uh, no, sorry. Wrong address,” Lewis responded, pressing his foot on the accelerator to escape the impending threat.

A few blocks away, Lewis looked again at the address he had copied from the online student directory. That was the one. He thought that Mandy must have moved and the address was out of date. Well, at least it gave him an excuse to call her. She answered as if she was surprised, but glad, to hear from him. “I just wanted to drop off the books and needed to double-check your address. I don’t think I wrote it down correctly,” he said, trying to strike an innocent tone.

She offered very thorough directions, leading right up to the doorfront of the gangbanger crew he had identified earlier. He momentarily wondered if she was playing a joke on him. “Uh huh,” he replied coolly. “Ya know, it’s the weirdest thing. I thought that was the address and since I was near that way today I thought I’d drop off the books. And, um, all I saw was this rundown house with a bunch of guys hanging out in front of it. It . . . it didn’t look like someplace you’d live.”

He waited a beat before hearing cackling laughter on the other end of the telephone. Now he really began to think that he had become the butt of a joke. She quizzed through her chuckles, “How many of them were there?”

Not quite expecting this response, he recalled the information he had memorized
.
“Four, all young Hispanic males,” he said in a “just the facts” tone.

“
Mhmm,” she responded, knowingly. “By any chance did one of those guys have a bunch of scars and a fake leg?”

Now the eerie feeling that he had been caught in a “gotcha” moment was coming over him. “Uhm, well, it wasn’t fake. It was just . . . missing. He used crutches.”

“
Mhmm,” she responded again. “That was Gus.”

“
Gus.” Lewis repeated.

“
Mhmm, Gus Gomez, my housemate. Remember?”

Oh yeah, the one she accurately described as “intimidating.”

“
The other guys are his younger brother and bandmates. They’re stayin’ with us this week ‘cause they’ve got a gig in town. What? Didya think I lived in a crackhouse guarded by a bunch of gangbangers?” she asked, clearly amused by his confusion.

Lewis began to feel like Alice after she had taken the Wonderland pill to make her very small. He hesitated to admit that he
had
jumped to that bigoted conclusion.

“
And our house may be old, but it’s not
that
bad,” she chided.

He tried to apologize, but she just dismissed it with a laugh. Something told him he was not going to live down this moment very easily.

“
And ya better be nice to Gus,” she told him. “He’s our protector.” She did not explain her housemate’s scars or missing leg. Feeling much more like a student than a mentor, Lewis knew he had no right to pry.

Lewis and Mandy managed to avoid one another for the next two weeks, corresponding only through their ongoing message dialogue about the project. Feeling as if he had overstepped his bounds by trying to deliver the books to her home, he merely left a note for her to retrieve them from Isobel. Still, he had left the scrapbook in the box, which Mandy quickly discovered. As intended, it offered new insights into the life of her boss: the classic middle child, overshadowed by the outsized personalities of his elder and younger siblings, as well as his somewhat eccentric parents. She realized the album stopped at almost the precise place in his academic career where she currently stood. Her mind wondered how much he had changed since then.
Would I have liked him as a college sophomore? Would we have been friends?
. . .
Lovers?
She tried to shake this last thought from her mind, but another encounter made the conjecture impossible to ignore.

One Friday afternoon, as Lewis stepped onto the gym floor for his regular basketball game and pulled off his outer sweatshirt, he glanced up and saw a familiar face. Mandy was in the alcove, pedaling on a bike, but too preoccupied with her MP3 player and a magazine to notice his presence. He kept looking up as he stretched out, hoping to catch her eye. Finally seeing her glance up from the magazine, he waved. She did a double take before returning the gesture. Even from this distance he could tell that she must have been working out awhile. Her hair, pulled back into a ponytail, and face were covered in sweat. She was wearing only running shorts and a sports bra, with a ring of sweat around the neckline and into her jiggling cleavage.

He was pleased to realize that Mandy’s shape was quite real. Lewis could always tell fake breasts, which had become much more common on campus in recent years, from the real thing. A noticeable lack of natural movement gave away the store-bought endowments. Lewis was one of those rare men who had never been impressed by such fakery, finding the soft, bouncy curves of real breasts much more attractive. He tried not to stare as he contemplated the natural curves of his assistant exercising above him.

“
Hey, Dr. Burns!” Kyle yelled, breaking into Lewis’s thoughts. “Tip-off!”

The faculty team was in poor shape this week, with two of their best players recovering from injuries. Except for Lewis and one Sociology professor, everyone on their side today was over age 50. But Lewis was determined to impress his audience. As if to make up for the deficiencies of his teammates, he handled the ball on every offensive play and managed several excellent steals. His teammates had to remind him to take a break and let others rotate in.