Second Chance (4 page)

He walked up the final few steps and paused before the thick wooden door, afraid to knock, afraid the door would open and Keith, long dead Keith, of whom only shreds had remained, would be standing there, that wry grin on his face, saying "Forgot your key again, asshole?" and would stand aside to let him enter the past.

Before he realized it, he was knocking firmly on the door, the chipped paint scraping his knuckles. Guiltily, he thrust the offending hand into the pocket of his brown leather jacket, and listened.

Footsteps crossed a floor, the doorknob turned, the latch bolt grated out of the plate (
God, that sound
), the door opened, and Woody Robinson was trapped.

"Yeah?"

The student was neatly dressed in a plaid shirt and khaki pants. His hair was styled short, and he was clean shaven. Woody kept his gaze on the boy's face, not daring to look past him into the room. "I, uh . . ." he said, feeling like kicking himself for his discomfort. "This is going to sound really strange . . ."

The boy looked at him noncommittally.

"I used to live here, and I was just wondering . . .”

The boy continued to stare.

“. . . who owns the place now?"

"Mr.
Parini
."

"Still, huh?" The boy shrugged. "Do you have his phone number? Or his address?"

"Yeah. I'll get them. You want to come in?"

"No," Woody said. "No, I'll wait."

Woody turned and looked out the stairway window again at the parking lot. He had thought he would want to go in, but now that he stood in the doorway, he didn't want to see the place filled with someone else's things, the belongings of another time.

"Here you go."

Woody turned around and took the slip of paper. "Thanks. By the way, how long has it been since the bookstore moved out?" The boy looked at him quizzically. "The store downstairs?"

"That was a bookstore? I don't know. Before I came here, and I'm a senior."

Woody nodded and started down the stairs, hearing the well remembered sound of the door closing behind him. He paused half way down, as a snatch of melody forced itself into his head. It was driving, and filled with youthful energy. He imprinted it upon his memory, and thought with grim satisfaction that if a tune came so quickly after just a glimpse of the apartment, he should be able to fill an album easily.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he realized that he was crying, and stood for a while, until he thought he heard the door upstairs open again. The boy, no doubt, curious about not hearing the outside door close.

But as Woody stepped out onto the sidewalk, it was a girl's voice he heard from the top from the stairs, and though the sound of a passing car drowned out most of the words, he thought the voice seemed familiar, like a voice in a movie seen years before, and he thought he heard the words, ". . . come back . . ." but did not heed them. Not just then. It was too soon. The time was not right.

But the voice had told him what he wanted to know, that by returning to the past, he might find more than just music.

Chapter 3

Woody discovered, on his visit to
Parini
Realty, that the Mr.
Parini
he had rented from had died four years before. But the old man's son was willing to rent Woody the apartment from the end of the spring semester through the start of summer sessions, two weeks during which the place would otherwise be vacant, and agreed to allow Woody to store things in the empty shop downstairs.

After settling with
Parini
, Woody drove to Sid's Salvage, where he and Frank had furnished the apartment for seventy dollars in 1968. From a back warehouse, Woody chose a worn couch with gray,
nubbly
upholstery, another of orange plastic that was ripped in several places, an old metal foot locker to serve as a coffee table, a metal table and chairs identical to those that had been in the apartment's dining room, three single beds with bedding, and two battered chests of drawers. The cost was two hundred dollars, but hauling the furniture to the empty bookstore doubled that amount.

That evening, after a deliciously greasy cheeseburger and two Iron City drafts at
Parini's
Bar, Woody walked out the back door into the parking lot by the apartment building. He looked up at the windows, but the squares were dark. He watched for a long time, wishing to see movement, a ghost, a memory, but there was none.

He got into the car and drove to campus, where he parked near the student union building and, by the gentle light of the tall outdoor lamps, took a walk around the hub of the college.

It had changed. New, square, soulless buildings heaved their bulks above the
crenelated
, Victorian towers of the earliest structures, whose gingerbread delicacy cowered before the weighty presence of the newcomers. But the grove was still intact, several acres of oak trees intersected by cement paths that led from one building to another. He walked through it, passing several groups of students joking, laughing, or discussing issues with the earnestness of youth.

Coming out from the cover of trees, Woody walked past the library, whose windows were brilliant with light, past the dark bricks of the administration building, and onto a bank that overlooked the tri-dorms, three women's dormitories that had been new when Woody started college. Tracy had lived in
Harre
Hall, the one on the left.

Woody walked down a stairway toward the dorms, turned left, and went down the street to where the original ROTC building had stood. He hadn't been there for over twenty years, and, after the explosion, he had taken roundabout routes to avoid walking past it. But it was time now, he thought. Twenty-four years ago. A long time.

And time had changed it. There was a new building there now.
The Richard K.
Eberly
Criminology Center
, Woody read above the main doors. He wondered if Richard K.
Eberly
, whoever he was, could have solved the mystery of the ROTC building's bombing any faster than the FBI did. It had taken them two weeks to sort through the rubble, to find the pieces of the detonator, the remnants of the clock, the body parts . . .

He pressed his eyes closed against the thought.

"Tracy," he whispered, and felt the wind take the word, blow it away, sweep him up as well, carry him back, remembering.

~*~

"Oh, that is fucking
stupid
, man."

Tracy and Frank and Keith and Woody on a Tuesday night, sitting in the living room. Tracy has come over to study, and they have for a while, sitting on opposite ends of the couch, books and spiral notebooks balanced precariously on the arms, until Keith and Frank's argument spills out of the dining room.

"It isn't stupid," Keith says, punctuating the words with a jab of his cigarette. "They won't get the hell off campus when we
ask
, so we've got to
push
them off."

"Look, you can't justify violence," Frank says, calmly and reasonably, and Woody can see he's trying to calm Keith.

"Yes you can. Violence is acceptable when it brings attention to just grievances, and if this isn't just, I don't know what is."

Tracy nods her head. "Yeah, ROTC isn't an academic course, and the instructors don't have any academic credentials, so there's no reason it should be on campus."

"Let alone compulsory," Woody adds. "I mean, did you guys learn anything when we had to take it?"

"I learned how to clean an M-1," Frank says bitterly.

"I didn't," Keith says, smiling. "I paid a guy a buck to clean mine each week." His face gets serious. "It's worthless, man. I say take it down."

Frank hisses in contempt. "Sure. You and what army?”

“Doesn't take an army. Just somebody with some balls.”

“And some dynamite," Woody says with a smile, thinking it all a word game. "Where you gonna get that? Riley downstairs carry some old Nazi explosives?"

"I know some people, man. At Pitt. Weathermen."

"And suppose somebody gets killed?" Frank asks.

Keith shrugs. "Then somebody gets killed. The end justifies the means."

"Somebody innocent?" Frank presses. "Like a mother wheeling a little kid past the building when it goes up?"

"It's unfortunate," Keith says with a wolfish smile. "But if it happens, it happens."

And Woody shivers, thinking of that night several weeks ago when Keith came back late, his clothes dirty, a dark stain on the sleeve of his jacket. While he washed it in the sink, he told Woody he was in a fight with some frat rats. But the next day, when Woody dumped the trash, he found a pair of pantyhose, and a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves with dried blood on their yellow surface. That same day he heard that the Student Commander of the Pershing Rifles had been jumped from behind, then kicked as he lay semi-conscious. He was in the hospital, unable to identify his assailant, who he said was masked. Despite the gloves and the pantyhose, despite Keith's ruthless words, Woody refuses to believe it could be Keith.

"Nobody has to get hurt," Tracy says. "You do it at night. Nobody's there at night."

"Great," Woody says. "Now
you're
in on this."

"What, you think I couldn't?"

"I think you could—I hope you won't." He says it with a smile, not wanting her to take a dare.

"Shit," says Frank, "you'd probably both blow yourselves up."

Woody knows it is the worst thing he could say. A look passes between Tracy and Keith. He sees the look, but does not realize the bond is formed, the challenge is accepted. And in that moment, in that look, both his friend and his lover are condemned. They die three weeks later.

~*~

Woody looked at the clean lines of the criminology building and still saw the rubble where, twenty-four years before, investigators had found the remains of two bodies. Only pieces of jewelry—Tracy's crushed earrings and Keith's twisted and melted class ring—had made identification possible.

~*~

The explosion occurs early on a Monday morning, and the blast, eight blocks away, wakes up Woody and Frank. Keith is not in his bed, and when they go into the living room and he is not there, they know that he has done what he said he would. Woody calls Tracy's floor in
Harre
Hall, to find that her name is on the sign-in sheet, but she is not in her room. When he hangs up the phone and the sirens start to howl, he knows she is dead.

They dress and go to the east end of the campus. But where the back end of the ROTC building once was is now a crater. The remaining part of the building smolders where the firemen's hoses have soaked it. Woody and Frank say nothing to anyone, and decide to wait until Keith and Tracy reappear. They do not.

The next morning
some body
fragments have been found, and Frank insists that he and Woody tell the police what they know. The local police are more sympathetic than Woody and Frank have imagined, and believe them when Frank tells the truth—that Keith mentioned blowing up the building, but they never took him seriously, and that he had never brought explosives into the apartment.

The police search the apartment and find nothing. At the same time, Keith's car is found parked near the ROTC building. The trunk contains wire, blasting caps, and a box in which dynamite has been stored. Under the front seat is Tracy's purse.

When the FBI agents arrive that afternoon, they are tougher in their questioning, but bring no charges against Woody and Frank.

And the years pass.

~*~

"Stupid," Woody whispered to the night. "Stupid, stupid, stupid." Why didn't she tell him? Why did she go? She was always so damned headstrong, taking acid when he had been afraid to, then having the gall to have a fantastic trip, while every moment Woody was tense with fear that she would think she was a bird and jump out the window.

The connection made sense. She was so much like a bird, flighty, mercurial, with a soul that could soar, a spirit that captured his own and took it with her to wonderful places, so that he had
noticed
things when he was with her, all those dopey clichés that came to mind when people got nostalgic about the sixties, the things of Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins songs. The sky seemed bluer, clouds seemed like pillows. Her face was a never ending source of fascination to him, and he felt as if he could have traced the curve of her cheek with his fingertips for hours on end. She had been exciting and alive and impetuous. And that impetuosity had been her fatal flaw.

"Stupid," he said again, and felt a chill on his cheek, and realized that his eyes were dropping tears. He wiped them away as if they were traitors, and that night he dreamed many dreams.

Chapter 4

Dear Diane and Alan
,

So how are things in D.C.? Is Alan still peddling nicotine to Congress while Diane makes up for his sins by teaching the youth of America to just say no? Dirty job, Alan. Way to go, Diane!

Consider this an invitation to the Twilight Zone. I've been getting nostalgic lately, missing a lot of people from school and all, and I thought it would be neat to do something about it. So I'm having a party at the apartment . . .