Regina's Song (2 page)

The boss was squinting at the far wall. “When you get right down to it, Mark, you’ve already
got
a part-time job.”

“It’s
full
-time, isn’t it?” I replied.

“Of
course
it is,” he replied sardonically. “A guy who works by the hour paces himself to make the job fit the time. If you bear down, I’ll bet you could finish up in four or five hours a night, and if it starts to pile up, you could clear away the leftovers on Saturday.”

“And if you’re really serious about getting an education, you can live at home and commute to the university,” my mom added. “Your dad and I can’t send you to Harvard, but we
can
give you a place to live and regular meals. That way, you won’t have to rent an apartment or buy groceries.”

“Our big brother’s going to get away from us after all,” one of the twins lamented in mock sorrow.

“Nothing lasts forever, Twink,” I told her.

“Who’s going to tie our little shoes?” the other twin said.

“Or glove our little hands?” the first girl added.

“You’ll both survive,” I told them. “Be brave and strong and true, and you’ll get by.”

They stuck their tongues out at me in perfect unison.

“This
is
going to crowd you, Mark,” Les warned me. “You won’t have very much free time. Don’t make the same mistake
I
made when I went there. I managed to party my way onto the flunk-out list in just two years.”

“I’m not big on parties, boss,” I assured him. “Listening to a bunch of half-drunk guys ranting about who’s going to make it to the Rose Bowl doesn’t thrill me. We can give the university a try, I guess, and if it doesn’t work out—ah, well.”

I filled in the gaps on my transcript that summer, and on a bright September morning, I drove down to the University of Washington to register. After I’d plodded through all the bureaucratic nonsense, I wandered the beaten paths to knowledge for a while—
long
beaten paths, I might add, since the campus measures about a mile in every direction. I finally found Padelford Hall, home of the English Department. After I’d located my classrooms, I drove back to Everett to get to work.

I took a stab at the “full-bore” business the boss had mentioned, and I found that he was right. I cleared everything away in just under five hours. That made me feel better.

Classes began the following Monday, and my first class, American Literature, started at eight-thirty. There was a kind of stricken silence in the classroom when the instructor entered. “It’s Conrad!” I heard a strangled whisper just behind me.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the white-haired professor said crisply. “Your regularly scheduled instructor has recently undergone coronary bypass surgery, so I’ll be filling in for him this quarter. For those of you who don’t recognize me, I’m Dr. Ralph Conrad.” He looked round the classroom. “We will now pause to give the more timid time to beat an orderly retreat.”

Now,
that’s
an unusual way to start a class. I thought he was just kidding around, so I laughed.

“Was it something I said?” he asked me with one raised eyebrow.

“You startled me a bit, sir,” I replied. “Sorry.”

“Perfectly all right, young man,” he said benignly. “Laughter’s good for the soul. Enjoy it while you can.”

I glanced around and saw that fully half the students were grabbing up their books and darting for the door.

Professor Conrad looked at those of us who’d remained. “Brave souls,” he murmured. Then he looked directly at me. “Still with us, young man?” he asked mildly.

His superior attitude was starting to irritate me. “I’m here to learn, Dr. Conrad,” I told him. “I didn’t come here to party or chase girls. You throw, and I’ll catch, and I’ll still be here when the dust settles.”

What a dumb thing
that
was to say! I soon discovered just how tough he really was. He crowded me, I’ll admit that, but I stuck it out. He was obviously an old-timer who believed in the aristocracy of talent. He despised the term “postmodern,” and he viewed computers as instruments of the devil.

He had his mellower moments, though—fond reminiscences about “the good old days” when the English Department resided in the hallowed, though rickety, Parrington Hall and he was taking graduate courses from legendary professors such as Ebey, Sophus Winther, and E. E. Bostetter.

I maintained my “you throw it and I’ll catch it” pose, and that seemed to earn me a certain grudging respect from the terror of the department. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I aced the course, but I did manage to squeeze an A out of Dr. Conrad.

I was a bit startled at the beginning of winter quarter when I discovered that I’d been assigned to a new faculty advisor—at his request.

Guess who
that
was.

“You’ve managed to arouse my curiosity, Mr. Austin,” Dr. Conrad explained, after I rather bluntly asked him why he’d taken the trouble. “Students who work their way through college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in English?”

I shrugged. “I like to read, and if I can get paid for it, so much the better.”

“You plan to teach, then?”

“Probably so—unless I decide to write the Great American Novel.”

“I’ve read your papers, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “You’ve got a long way to go if that’s your goal.”

“It beats the hell out of pulling chain, Dr. Conrad.”

“Pulling chain?”

I explained it, and he seemed just a bit awed. “Are you saying that people still
do
that sort of thing?”

“It’s called ‘working for a living.’ I came here because I don’t wanna do that no more.”

He winced at my double negative.

“Just kidding, boss,” I told him. And I don’t think anybody’d ever called him “boss” before, because he didn’t seem to know how to handle it.

By the end of winter quarter that year I’d pretty well settled into the routine of being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep, but I could usually catch up on weekends.

I finished up the spring quarter of ’94 and spent the summer working at the door factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few times that year.

The Twinkie Twins were high-school juniors now, and they’d definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it seemed—chemically modified, no doubt—and their eyes were an intense blue. They’d also developed some other attributes that attracted
lots
of attention from their male classmates.

Looking back, I’m sometimes puzzled by my lack of “those kinds of thoughts” about the twins. They
were
moderately gorgeous, after all—tall, blond, well built, and with strangely compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind they were never individuals. I thought of them as “they,” but never “she.”

From what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn’t have that problem, and the twins were very popular. The only complaint seemed to be that nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.

It was during my senior year at U.W. that I finally came face to face with
Moby Dick
. The opening line, “Call me Ishmael” and the climactic, “I only am escaped to tell thee” set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed me. You don’t want to mess around with a guy who could say, “I’d smite the sun if it offended me.” And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.

Moby Dick
has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.

Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing
Billy Budd
, he kept borrowing Milton’s
Paradise Regained
from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.

Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”

“Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.

“You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.

“Bippie?”

“Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.

I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.

I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths.
Her
father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about
one
thing. There
are
real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let
anything
get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.

This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that’s not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights, and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into their new Pontiac—a graduation present from their folks—and started back to Everett.

Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata had her driver’s license, but she almost never took the wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting zoo where they had a flat tire.

As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while, then went looking for her sister.

The next morning the twins were discovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with something that wasn’t very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.

The authorities—assorted cops, detectives, the coroner, and so on—questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf extensively, but they didn’t learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered and even in the best of times, they couldn’t translate the girls’ private language—they couldn’t even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they
assumed
that it’d been Regina who’d been murdered and Renata who’d gone bonkers.

But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was most likely Regina, but logic wasn’t good enough for filling out forms.

Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an “unidentified female” in official reports.

The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their surviving daughter as Renata—but
they
couldn’t prove it either.

The murder remained unsolved.

My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that “closure” social workers babble about, because we couldn’t be certain
which
girl we were burying.

We didn’t see very much of the boss at the door factory that summer. Before he’d lost his daughters, he’d usually come strolling through the yard a couple of times a day. After the funeral, he stayed pretty much holed up in his office.

In August of that year that I had an even more personal tragedy. My folks had visited the Greenleafs one Friday evening, and as they were on their way home, they encountered what the cops refer to as a “high-speed chase.” A local drunk who’d had his driver’s license revoked after repeated arrests for “driving while intoxicated” got himself all liquored up in a downtown bar, and the cops spotted his car wandering around on both sides of Colby Avenue, one of the main streets in Everett. When the lush heard the siren and saw the red light flashing behind him, he evidently remembered the judge’s warning when his license had been lifted. The prospect of twenty years in the slammer evidently scared the hell out of him, so he stomped on his gas pedal. The cops gave chase, of course, and it was estimated that the drunk was going about ninety when he ran a red light and plowed into my folks. All three of them died in the crash.

I was completely out of it for a week or so, and Les Greenleaf took over making the funeral arrangements, attending to legal matters, and dealing with a couple of insurance companies.

I’d already enrolled for my first quarter of grad school that fall, but I called Dr. Conrad and asked him to put me on hold until winter quarter. My dad had been shrewd enough to buy mortgage insurance, so our modest home in north Everett was now mine, free and clear, and the life insurance policies covering both of my parents gave me a chunk of cash. Les Greenleaf suggested some investments, and I suddenly became a capitalist. I don’t imagine that I made Bill Gates very nervous, but at least I’d be able to get through graduate school without working for a living at the same time.