The Dragon and the George (2 page)

"I'm sorry, Angie," said Jim, contritely. "I had to sit through that class for a hour with nothing to do but look interested and think of what he's done to us; and by the time the bell rang, I didn't dare talk to him for fear I'd put one in his teeth when he turned me down again."

There was a moment's stark silence in the car as they drove along; then Jim, staring straight ahead out the windshield, felt his arm squeezed gently.

"That's all right," Angie told him. "If you felt like that, you did the right thing. You'll catch him sometime when you're able to talk calmly about it."

They drove on for a little while longer without talking.

"There it is," said Jim, nodding to the right, off the highway.

The Bellevue Trailer Court had not been laid out with an eye to attractiveness and none of its owners in the past twenty years had done anything to amend the oversight. Its present proprietor, in his fifties, was as tall and heavy as Jim Eckert, but his skin was now too large for his long face. The flesh had fallen into folds and creases, and the Prussian blue shirt he wore ballooned loosely about him. His faded maroon pants were drawn into deep puckers at his waist by a thin black belt. His breath smelled as if he had just been snacking on overripe cheese, and in the sun-hot interior of the empty mobile home he showed Jim and Angie this aspect of him was hard to ignore.

"Well," he said, waving at the mobile home walls about them, "this is it. I'll leave you to look it over. Just come back to the office when you're ready."

He took his breath outside, leaving the door open behind him. Jim looked at Angie, but she was running her fingers over the cracked varnish on one of the cupboard doors above the sink.

"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" Jim remarked.

It was. Obviously the mobile home was in the last stages of its life. The floor canted visibly behind Jim and as visibly canted toward the trailer's other end, where Angie now stood. The sink was stained and gritty, the dusty windows sat loosely in their framing, and the walls were too thin to give anything but minimum insulation.

"It'd be like camping out in the snow when winter comes," Jim said.

He thought of the ice-hard January of a Minnesota winter, both of them twenty-three miles from Riveroak College and the Gorp running on threadbare tires plus a worn-out motor. He thought of summer sessions at the college and the baking heat of a Minnesota July as they both sat in here with endless test papers to correct. But Angie did not answer.

She was opening and shutting the door to the trailer's shower-and-toilet stall. Or, trying to shut it. The door did not seem to latch very well. Her shoulders in the blue jacket were small and square. He thought of suggesting they give up, go back and check the listings at the Student Housing Bureau once more for an apartment around the college. But Angie would not admit defeat that easily. He knew her. Besides, she knew he knew it was hopeless, their trying to find anything the two of them could pay for close in.

Some of the dreary grittiness of the mobile home seemed to blow through his soul on a bleak wind of despair. For a moment he felt a sort of desperate hunger for the kind of life that had existed in the European Middle Ages of his medievalist studies. A time in which problems took the shapes of flesh-and-blood opponents, instead of impalpable situations arising out of academic cloak-and-dagger politics. A time when, if you ran across a Shorles, you could deal with him with a sword, instead of with words. It was unreal that they should be in this situation simply because of an economic situation and because Shorles did not want to disturb the political balance of his department.

"Come on, Angie," Jim said. "We can find something better than this."

She wheeled around. Under her dark hair, her brown eyes were grim.

"You said you'd leave it up to me, this last week."

"I know…"

"For two months we hunted around the campus, the way you wanted. Staff meetings for the fall semester start tomorrow. There isn't any more time."

"We could still look, nights."

"Not anymore. And I'm not going back to that coop. We're going to have a place of our own."

"But… look at this place, Angie!" he said. "And it's twenty-three miles from the campus. The Gorp could throw a rod tomorrow!"

"If he does, we'll fix him. And we'll fix up this place. You know we can do it if we want to!"

He yielded. They went back to the trailer park office and the manager.

"We'll take it," Angie told him.

"Thought you'd like it," said the manager, getting papers out of a drawer in his littered desk. "How'd you happen to hear about it, anyway? I haven't even advertised it yet."

"Your former tenant was the sister-in-law of a friend of mine," Jim answered, "guy I play volleyball with. When she had to move to Missouri, he told us her mobile home was available."

The manager nodded.

"Well, you can count yourself lucky." He pushed the papers across to them. "I think you told me you both teach at the college?"

"That's right," said Angie.

"Then, if you'll just fill in a few lines on these forms and sign them. You married?"

"We're going to be," said Jim, "by the time we move in here."

"Well, if you aren't married yet, you've either got to both sign or one of you has to be listed as subrenting. It's easier if you both sign. Then that'll be two months rent, the first and the last, as a deposit against damage. Two hundred and eighty dollars."

Angie and Jim both stopped handling the papers.

"Two-eighty?" Angie asked. "Danny Cerdak's sister-in-law was paying a hundred and ten a month. We happen to know."

"Right. I had to raise it."

"Thirty dollars more a month?" said Jim. "For that?"

"You don't like it," said the manager, straightening up, "you don't have to rent it."

"Of course," Angie said, "we can understand you might have to raise the rent a bit, the way prices are going up everywhere. But we just can't pay a hundred and forty a month."

"That's too bad. Sorry. But that's what it costs now. I'm not the owner, you know. I just follow orders."

Well, that was that. Back in the Gorp once more, they rolled down the windows and Jim turned the key in the ignition. The Gorp gorped rustily to life. They headed back down the highway toward the college.

They did not talk much on the way back in.

"It's all right, though," Angie said as Jim pulled into the parking lot next to their co-op and they went in together to lunch. "We'll find something. This chance opened up all of a sudden. Something else is bound to. We'll just keep looking until it does."

"Uh-huh," said Jim.

They cheered up a little over lunch.

"In a way," Angie explained, "it was our own fault. We got to counting on that mobile home too much, just because we'd been the first ones to hear about it being vacant. From now on, I'm not going to count on anything until we've moved into it."

"You and me both."

By the time they had eaten, little time was left. Jim drove back to Stoddard Hall and let Angie out.

"You'll be through at three?" he asked. "You won't let him keep you overtime?"

"No," she said, closing the car door and talking to him through the open window. Her voice softened. "Not today. I'll be out here when you pull up."

"Good," he said; and watched her go up the steps and vanish through one of the big doors.

Putting the Gorp in gear, he pulled away and around to the other side of the campus to park in his usual space behind the History Building. He had said nothing to Angie, but over lunch a decision had crystallized inside him. He was going to confront Shorles with the demand that he give him his instructorship without any further delay—by the end of spring quarter and the beginning of the first summer session at latest. He ran up the three flights of the back set of stairs and came out into the long, marble floor corridor where most of the top staff members in the department had their offices.

Shorles was one step above anyone else in the department. He had a secretary in his outer office, who doubled as secretary to the department itself. Jim came through the door now and found her retyping something that looked suspiciously like the manuscript of Shorles's latest paper on the Etruscan roots of modern civilization.

"Hi, Marge," Jim said. "Is he in?"

Jim glanced toward the door leading to Shorles's separate office as he spoke, and saw it closed. So he knew Marge's answer almost before she gave it.

"Not just now," said Marge, a tall, sandy-haired girl in her mid-thirties. "Ted Jellamine's with him. They shouldn't be more than a little while, though. Do you want to wait?"

"Yes."

He took one of the hard seats for visitors in the outer office; and, at her desk, Marge resumed typing.

The minutes crawled slowly by. Another half-hour passed and another quarter-hour on top of that. Suddenly the door burst open and out came Shorles, carrying his ample belly energetically before him and closely followed by Ted Jellamine in cowboy boots and a checkered houndstooth jacket. As they headed for the outer door without pausing, Shorles spoke to his secretary.

"Marge, I won't be back this afternoon. We're headed for the Faculty Club. If my wife calls, she can find me there."

Jim had got to his feet automatically as the door opened and taken half a step in pursuit of the two men as they snailed through the room. Noticing him now, Shorles gave him a cheerful wave of a hand.

"Marvelous news, Jim!" he said. "Ted, here, is going to stay on another year!"

The door slammed behind both men. Jim stared at it, stunned, then turned to Marge, who looked back at him with sympathy.

"He just wasn't thinking. That's why he broke the news to you that way," she said.

"Ha!" said Jim. "He was gloating and you know it!"

"No," Marge shook her head. "No, really, you're wrong. He and Ted have been close friends for years; and Ted's been under pressure to retire early. But we're a private college with no automatic cost-of-living increases in the pensions, and with this inflation Ted wants to hang on to his job for the present if he still can. He really was just happy for Ted, when it turned out Ted could stay on; and he just didn't think of what that meant to you."

"Mmph!" said Jim, and stalked out.

He was all the way back to his parking spot before he calmed down long enough to check his watch. It was almost two-thirty. He had to pick up Angie again in half an hour. He had no time to do much of anything before then, either on his essay, or in the way of his duties as assistant to Shorles—not that he felt overwhelmingly like doing work for Shorles right now. He got into the Gorp, slammed the door and drove off, hardly caring where he went as long as it was away from the campus.

He turned left on High Street, turned left again on Wallace Drive, and emerged a few minutes later on the Old River Road alongside the Ealing River: two-lane asphalt strip that had been the old route to the neighboring town of Bixley, before Highway Five had been laid over the rolling farmland on a parallel route.

The old road was normally free of traffic and today was no exception. It was even relatively free from houses and plowed fields, since most of the ground was lowlying and inclined to be marshy. Jim drove along with no particular destination in sight or mind, and gradually the peace of the riverside area through which he was passing began to bring him back to some coolness of mind.

Gradually he brought himself to consider that possibly Marge had been right and that Ted Jellamine might in his own way have been as concerned about
his
future and
his
livelihood as Jim was himself. It was a relief to come around to this point of view, because Ted Jellamine was the one other member of the History Department whom Jim liked personally. Like Jim, he was an individualist. It was only the factors of their situation that made them competitors.

But, outside of this crumb of comfort, Jim gleaned little happiness out of this new development. Perhaps it was not Ted who was to blame, but the tight economic situation which squeezed them all. Nonetheless, once again Jim caught himself wishing that life and the problems it produced were more concrete and in a position to be attacked more directly.

He glanced at his watch. It was fifteen minutes till three. Time to head back to Angie. He found a crossroad, turned the Gorp around and drove back toward the campus. Luckily, he had been driving slowly along the river road and was not that far from town. It would not do to have her standing and waiting for him, after all his insistence that she not let Grottwold keep her overtime and make him wait outside.

He pulled up in front of Stoddard Hall, actually with a couple of minutes to spare. Turning off the motor, he waited. As he sat, he put his mind to work to decide on the best way of breaking the news of his latest blow to Angie. To come up with news of this kind on the same day their hopes of renting the mobile home had been dashed was the worst possible timing. For a short while he played with the notion of simply not saying anything about it today at all. But of course that would never work. She would want to know why he had not told her immediately; and she would be quite right in asking. They would get nowhere if they fell into the habit of hiding bad news from each other out of a mistaken idea of kindness.

Jim glanced at his watch and was startled to see that while he had been sitting thinking, nearly ten minutes had gone by. Angie was staying overtime, after all.

Something popped inside Jim. Suddenly he was completely angry—cold angry. Grottwold had pulled his delaying tactics once too often. Jim got out of the Gorp, closed the door and headed up the front steps to the Hall. Inside the big double doors was the main staircase, its shallow stair treads capped with gray granite which had been worn into hollows by student's feet over a number of years. Jim went up them two at a time.

Three stories up and thirty feet down the hall on the right was the frosted-glass door to the laboratory section in which Grottwold had a ten-foot-square cubicle. Jim went through, saw the door to the cubicle was closed and strode in without knocking.