Straight Man (47 page)

These are strange thoughts for a man to have in a Railton, Pennsylvania, jail cell at two in the morning, and if what’s written on the ceiling above me is any indication of the intellectual tenor of my cell’s former inhabitants, I’m the only one to concern myself with such issues. As I stare at the ceiling it occurs to me that this is the second time today I’ve been advised to eat shit. I close my eyes and fall asleep counting boxcars.

When I awake Tony Coniglia is standing over me. He looks like he might be having the kind of transcendent moment I foresaw last night.

“What I asked you to do was come and get me, not come and join me,” he gives me to understand.

“What are you talking about?” I say, propping myself up on one elbow.

“I used my one phone call last night to leave a message on your machine,” he explains.

I can’t help grinning at this. “I called you too,” I admit. “You weren’t in either.” I hand him the bottle of aspirin I always keep in the glove compartment of the Lincoln and was wise enough to bring in with me last night. He chews several tablets thoughtfully. When we compare notes, it turns out that we’ve been run in by the same young cop, that neither of us has been charged.

“He wanted to book me until I told him I was a professor,” Tony says. “Until I told him my name was Hank Devereaux.”

“He must have been pretty surprised to run into another one half an hour later.”

“Did you tell him your father was back in town?” Tony says. “Because that would explain it.”

I can’t remember mentioning my father’s return to Tony, but I must have, because he knows. I’m going to have to go see W.H.D., Sr., today, a duty I’ve been putting off. “When do you suppose they’ll let us out?” I wonder, swinging my feet onto the floor. Though today promises to be no more fun than yesterday, I would like, for some reason, to get on with it.

“When do you suppose they’ll serve breakfast?” is what the other Hank Devereaux in the cell would like to know.

After I retrieve my car from the railyard, I drive out to Allegheny Wells behind a news van that sports the logo of a Pittsburgh television station. When I ask myself what sort of story can have attracted a news team from so far away to this two-lane macadam blacktop that leads from Railton to Allegheny Wells, I don’t like the conclusion I come to. I like it even less when I get to Allegheny Estates, where there’s a cop directing traffic at the turnoff. Instead of turning left into Estates I, I turn right between the tilting stone pillars of Estates II and follow the road that leads up through the trees to Paul Rourke’s house, where I pull in and turn off the ignition. The second Mrs. R., in furry slippers, a flannel nightgown, and a winter coat, is seated in a deck chair eating Sugar Pops from a tall box. It’s still early. Twenty minutes to eight. Sunny and warming but still cold.

“Permission to come aboard?” I call up.

She’s looking down at me. “Wow,” she says dully. “I actually know something nobody else knows.”

Her husband’s voice, from somewhere inside the house, is heard. “Mark the calendar.”

I climb the stairs and join her. There are two folding chairs on the deck, which means we’re fine if her husband doesn’t join us. When she hands me the box of cereal, I take a handful. “Sugar Pops are tops,” I tell her, this slogan returning to me across the decades. If I’m not mistaken, the woman I’m speaking to may be hearing it for the first time. “What is it that you know that nobody else knows?” I ask her.

“Your whereabouts,” says her husband, coming out through the sliding glass door. He’s got two cups of coffee, one of which he hands to me. The second Mrs. R. looks at her husband to see if the other one might be for her. When he drinks from it, she gets up and goes inside. Rourke settles into the vacated chair. His hair is still shiny and wet from the shower. “I knew you’d come over to my side eventually,” he says, putting his feet up on the rail. They haven’t taken very good care of their deck. The wood is dry and splintering. Two or three boards have buckled, and some of the nails used to keep the others in place have begun to inch up dangerously.

“Pretty nice view,” I tell him. “No leaves to obstruct it.”

Actually, the trees over on this side of the road are budding, at least some of them. Whereas on the other side they are so thick we can see only occasional glints of metal and glass. Still, it’s clear that cars and vans line the entire winding road up through the trees, and if I’m not mistaken there’s a mobile satellite hookup being assembled atop a truck.

“A wild guess,” I say. “Another duck has died.”

“You just missed an interview with Lou Steinmetz on the local news. He claims they know the identity of the perpetrator.”

“He used the word
perpetrator
?”

Rourke nods. “He didn’t mention you by name though.”

What’s occurred to me is that the second Mrs. R. has not returned with her coffee. I’ve been prepared to offer her my chair. Rourke notices me glancing over at the sliding door. “Don’t worry about her,” he says. “She’s off smoking her first joint of the day.”

“No kidding?”

“She hasn’t been anything but stoned since we got married.”

“Huh.”

He nods. “I’ve pretty much had to quit. I think it may be responsible for my blackouts.”

“I never knew you smoked.”

“How do you think I’ve kept from coming after you with a baseball bat?”

“Then you shouldn’t stop,” I say.

He snorts. “Just do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody you came over here. I’ve been promising people for years that if you ever did I’d throw you off this deck for the pleasure of watching you roll all the way down to the road.”

I know my role in this drama. I stand up halfway and peer over the side, showing the requisite respect for his fantasy. It’s a hell of a drop, too. Unless he hit a tree head-on, a tumbling man wouldn’t stop until he reached the pavement.

“Not that you’re interested, but I got a call from that schmuck Herbert this morning,” Rourke says. “The union’s managed to get its hands on a copy of the list.”

I study him for a moment before I say anything. “I was under the impression you believed me when I told you there wasn’t one.”

“Not exactly,” he corrects me. “You told me you didn’t make one. That I believed.”

“But now you say there’s a list.”

“For every department.”

“Including English?”

“Including English.”

I consider this. “I’m touched, Reverend,” I tell him, and it’s the truth, I am.

Now it’s his turn to study me. “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“You’re always accusing me of lying.”

“You always are.”

“And yet you believe me now.”

He shrugs. “Just this once.”

We’re quiet for a minute. “I guess you better tell me who. I’ll go see Jacob.”

“Fucking Jacob.”

In fact, when I said Jacob’s name, I was myself visited by an ugly thought.

“Call Herbert,” Rourke says wearily. “Let him tell you. Or Teddy. I’m sure that little gossipmonger knows by now. Three of the four were predictable anyway.”

“Orshee?”

“That’s one.”

“Finny?”

“Two.”

I take a deep breath. “Don’t tell me Billy Quigley?”

“You’re three for three.”

“And someone I wouldn’t guess?”

He shrugs, studying me. “You might. I wouldn’t have.”

The glass door slides open then, and the second Mrs. R. comes back out with a third deck chair. Her face is beet red, and she emits the kind of snorting sound pot smokers make when they can’t hold it in any longer. Rourke studies his wife impassively while she sets up her chair on the other side of the deck. “Life always pays you back,” he remarks. And you don’t have to know him all that well to know he’s thinking about his first wife, a lovely, unintellectual woman he belittled into leaving him, thus creating space for the second Mrs. R. I slide back my deck chair and stand.

“By the way, is that mutt of yours loose?”

“Occam? No. He’s in the house.”

“I thought I saw him in Charlene’s garden earlier. There must be another white shepherd around. How the hell did you slip past all the reporters?”

“You know me, Reverend,” I tell him. “Just when you think I’m cornered …”

He nods, as if to suggest he knows all too well how slippery I can be. “Herbert’s calling for a strike vote this afternoon.”

“With a week left in the term?”

“To prevent the seniors from graduating,” he explains. “That’s as close to real political clout as we can muster.”

“Herbert on his department’s list?”

“So he says.”

I nod, risk a grin. “Not a bad list, sounds like.”

I’m standing next to the railing, the long drop to the road behind me, so I’m glad when he smiles back. “I thought it was excellent, top to bottom. I could almost vote for it, in fact.”

Another snort from the second Mrs. R. A thin trail of marijuana smoke is tracking upward from her corner of the deck.

When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I call back up. “Hey?” From where I stand, I can see only my colleague’s feet up on the railing. “I have this idea that maybe the fourth is one of us two?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” the voice of my old enemy condescends. “You’ll luck out some way.”

“What are you in such a good mood about?” my daughter wants to know when I turn up at her kitchen door as she’s about to leave for work.

“Who?”

“You,” she explains. “You’re grinning.”

“I’ve been excommunicated. The pope and his Vatican goons are hot on my trail. Find me a fast horse and saddle it up. Meanwhile, I need to borrow your shower,” I tell her, pausing to look her over, this kid whose diapers I used to change. She looks like she’s passed a dark, thoughtful night and emerged from the experience in better shape than she’d have predicted.

“Go ahead,” she says. “You paid for it.”

“I did?”

Julie nods sheepishly. “The money you and Mom loaned us? So we could finish the kitchen and master bath? Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

“I’m not sure I ever knew.”

She studies me knowingly. If she’s spent the night trying to figure things out, at least she’s succeeded in pegging me. “That’s one of your great fictions, isn’t it? That Mom never tells you anything. That way you can pretend there are things going on behind your back, things you don’t approve of.”

“There
are
things going on I don’t approve of,” I tell her.

“Right,” she says. “Like you wouldn’t have loaned us the money when we needed it. Like you’re too reasonable, too logical. Like Mom’s the one with the heart and you’re the one with the brain. That’s your public posture. Except everybody knows better. Remember the day I fell off my bike when I was little? Remember how you cried?”

“How
you
cried, you mean.”

She shakes her head. “This is exactly what I’m talking about. Why can’t you admit you cried? You
cried
, Daddy.”

“Well,” I admit.

“I only cried until it stopped hurting,” she reminds me. “
You
couldn’t stop. I was afraid to look in the mirror when I got home. I thought it must be horrible. I expected to see half my face gone. I kept looking in the mirror for the part that made you cry.”

“You were my daughter,” I remind her.

“I know,” she says. “I understand. It’s just …”

I wait for her, wishing I could help out, but in truth I feel as helpless now as I felt then when her back wheel slid in the gravel, then caught, and she flew over her handlebars. Was that how my mother felt there on the cellar stairs, when she pulled me to her and told me we would forget? At the time it felt like the opposite, to me. Until now it hasn’t occurred to me to imagine what it felt like to her.

“I left you a message yesterday.”

“I got it,” I tell my daughter. It’s not easy, but I meet her eyes. “You left it for the wrong person, though. Russell’s ready to shoulder most of the blame, you know. Why not talk to him?”

“Because I’m too much like you. I have a public posture to preserve. I changed the locks. Now
I’m
the one who can’t get
out
. Funny how that works, huh?”

“Maybe if somebody explained that to him?”

“Will you see him?”

“I might.” I still have the number he gave me, though for some reason I don’t tell her this.

“So how come you need to shower over here?” it finally occurs to her to ask, and I can’t help smiling at her. Even as a child, Julie was essentially uncurious. You could walk in the door with an aardvark on a leash and she wouldn’t ask why, and I suspect this lack of curiosity was, more than anything else, the reason Julie was never much of a student. Ninety percent of answering questions is anticipating which ones will be asked, having a sense of what’s important, being interested enough in something to pose the questions for yourself in advance. Julie, I would guess, has never guessed a test question in her life.

And I know what Lily would say if she were here. She would remind me that Julie is a product of her experience. In the world we
provided her, she felt safe and protected. She knew we wouldn’t ask her any trick questions or make unreasonable demands. She didn’t have to peer nervously around corners, or check constantly over her shoulder. If her mother or I came in with an aardvark on a leash, she could rest assured there was a reason, and this certainty made the explanation unnecessary. Julie, my wife would insist, is living evidence of our skill in parenting, that rare adult who doesn’t see the world as a dangerous, treacherous place. She expects to be loved, to be rewarded for her efforts, to be treated generously. She had tenure as a child and now expects it as an adult. Until this thing with Russell, she’s been optimistic. Her optimism has been tested of late, by their not having enough money and probably by other things too, but it hasn’t occurred to her until recently that things might not work out.

“Julie,” I say. To this little girl. To this novice adult.

When I’ve showered, I locate a pair of Russell’s undershorts and some socks. I also swipe his one blue, button-down oxford dress shirt. It’s a bit big in the torso, short in the sleeve, but it will look fine beneath my tweed coat. I also find a new disposable razor, forgotten in the back of the medicine cabinet, and a bottle of Christmas gift aftershave. I have always liked Russell and sometimes even felt more instinctive understanding of him than of my own daughter. We’re a lot alike, is what I’m thinking, dressed as I am in his clothes.