Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  13

  THE RED AND THE BLACK

  The work I did for Dooley was easy, photocopying handouts for class, mailing letters, ordering textbooks from the bookstore, so I found other things to do, dusting and sweeping (and more than once fixing a broken window shade), all of which he hated watching me do because he said it offended his senses to see manual labor done in his presence. But I liked going there and I liked having a job to do for money. It was quiet in the office. After years of working with Pop I’d learned to keep my mouth shut and to keep out of the hair of grown-ups, which Dooley seemed to appreciate.

  One morning when I came to work I heard a voice that wasn’t Dooley’s in his office. I didn’t open the door because I thought he might be holding a tutorial or something. The voice was loud and deep and was shouting, “What do we want from you? What do we want from you?” and a large form moved back and forth casting a shadow on the opaque glass of the door. Then I did go in because it sounded like somebody was shaking the professor down.

  The speaker was tall and fat, balding and bearded, and as such easily taken for older than he would turn out to be. My opening the door distracted him only slightly from the next sentence directed at Dooley behind his desk. “What we want from you is a letter.”

  “What sort of letter?” Dooley asked and, seeing me come in, nodded.

  “A letter of recommendation.” That from a second voice hidden behind the open door, this one higher than the fat man’s and asthmatic.

  Dooley laughed. “What could I say from experience to recommend you?”

  “That we’re cute,” a third voice, a girl’s, also hidden behind the door.

  One of the owners of the two unseen voices pushed the door shut, so that I now saw a skinny man with small round glasses and an uncombed tangle of blond hair on a head disappearing into a heavy trench coat, sitting on the edge of Dooley’s wide leather couch. Next to him, lying on her side on the remaining expanse of cushions, with her head propped on her palm, a girl.

  “Hi,” they said at once.

  Roy and Harold I’d seen before. Even on a campus of forty thousand there were faces you saw more than others and these were two of them. For one thing, they were always together, a mismatched pair. Roy wore old clothes: a fedora for his prematurely balding head and baggy trousers and suspenders to conceal his hemispheric belly—while Harold circled him like an electron, smoking and chattering constantly. For another, they were showmen. Wherever they went, they carried a lacquer suitcase and folding table, which they set up on the library mall, and sold various products they had invented.

  The girl I hadn’t seen before. She wore a black turtleneck, black pants, and the black canvas shoes that all the girls were wearing that year, the clothes and the dark shine of her hair making the skin of her face seem that much paler. She was, as she suggested to Dooley as a point of recommendation, cute.

  “What am I recommending you for?”

  I went to sit on the radiator. The heat burned through my jeans like an iron and the metal seared my palms. “Shit,” I yelled.

  Drucilla looked in my direction as though she’d heard a noise from far away. She spoke. “The Stovepipe Bequest.” Her voice was the voice of an actress, no doubt, as surely as Roy’s was the voice of a pitchman, and Harold’s was the voice of a killer.

  Dooley raised his eyebrows to show surprise. “Do you mean the Ebersol grant?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked,” Roy said.

  “Did you know Ebersol?” the girl, Drucilla, asked.

  “In passing. I replaced him. Of course, I should say ‘succeeded.’ He could never be replaced, an institution at this university for forty years. There is a story about him at the Alumni Ball”—he looked at them and then at me—“which is best told at another time. He belonged to a school of historical study of which he was the founder and sole adherent. He held that a man’s life could be reconstructed by documenting every scrap of paper he ever touched. His Lincoln, his key to all histories, occupies twelve volumes. It’s less a history than a compendium of litter.”

  “Yeah?” Roy said—he couldn’t have cared less—“well, he donated an annuity for which a student director is chosen every year to produce a play on the condition that whatever play gets produced must be about Lincoln. Which constrains things, as you might imagine.”

  “Because it has to be about Lincoln,” I said.

  He paused to look at me. “What did I just say?”

  “Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, Harold,” Dooley said.

  “Exactly right,” Roy answered for him. “The trick is to turn the idea on its ear. Is it ear or head?”

  “How do you do that?” I asked. I had no idea what they were talking about but I wanted to sound like I was keeping up.

  “I’m not sure how you do that. If you’re Harold you write a play about John Wilkes Booth. Harold says he’s been influenced by the French Romanticist school of play writing.”

  “What is that?” Dooley asked. “George Sand, Alfred de Musset?”

  “Exactly,” Harold said.

  “—founded in the belief,” Roy continued, “that plays are better read than acted. Harold chose a one-act because he says it’s the most odious theatrical form, which he believes is perfect for Booth, an odious figure in his own right, as well as a thespian of the nineteenth century—and all that that entails. If you ask me, I’m not sure he’s worked out the distinction between being bad for the sake of form and just being, well, bad.”

  Harold raised his hand to be heard. “I’m making progress there,” he said. “It’s not hopeless material; he wasn’t a bad actor, Booth—bit full of himself.”

  “That’ll be a stretch for you, Harold,” Dooley said.

  “This is the closest we’ve been to getting our hands on the means of production,” Roy said.

  “We don’t have to tell you how important that could be,” Drucilla said.

  Dooley studied a stack of papers on his desk. “And I don’t have to tell you that you can expect a certain amount of attention from the administration.”

  Roy said, “That’s half the point. We view this as an opportunity for redemption.”

  Dooley raised his cup to his lips.

  “You know what we’re capable of,” Roy said. and Dooley choked, spitting tea across the blotter on his desk.

  “Oh yes, I do know that,” Dooley said. I guessed he was referring to their peddling of what they called the infamous “Endtime Elixir,” a performance I’d witnessed the first week of the semester. I’d run into them outside the library where they’d attracted a crowd.

  “Friends,” said Harold, wearing a straw hat and swinging a bamboo cane, “are you going to wake up in your shelters on the day after the Big One drops with bad morning breath and a bottomless sense of remorse for the annihilation of humanity? Well now you don’t have to.”

  “Will it sterilize radiation burns?” a man—obviously a plant—asked from the front row.

  “I’m glad you ask. Of course, it will. Why, sir, if ingested in sufficient doses, it will sterilize you.”

  The man handed over a buck. “That’s right. One dollar. Who’s next?” As he was speaking Roy appeared, wearing a dirty bed sheet. His face smeared with ashes, he carried a sign that said, “The End Is Near.” There were giggles from the crowd as he hobbled up to the table.

  “Here you are, my good man,” his partner said, handing over a bottle. The prophet Roy emptied the contents in one swallow, smacked his lips, and continued on his way.

  “There you are, ladies and gentlemen, you’re not going to get a truer testimonial than that. Step on up. Plenty for everyone. That’s right, a dollar—”

  The people surged forward, waving dollar bills above their heads. I joined them, made my way to the front of the line, handed over my money and the short one slapped a bottle into my hand. The words “Endtime Elixir” were written on a hand-glued label in an Old West script. Below them was a photograph,
cut and pasted from two fifties-vintage snapshots: one a family picnic in which a mother reclines on a plaid blanket, the children toss a ball, and the father lifts a glass, while a superimposed mushroom cloud swells on the horizon. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It tasted like mouthwash and had a kick to it that took my breath away.

  When Crowder and Sing, charged with violating academic rules against bootlegging, had defended themselves to the dean of students, they insisted that they had made no false claims about the contents of the elixir. In fact, they had made none at all. The dean, according to the article in the Daily Cardinal, had reminded them that selling bottled alcohol without a tax seal was a federal offense. They were put on probation and warned “not to do anything like that again.” Of course, by then they’d become celebrities and the bottles of elixir (most of which were swallowed by their owners once the contents were published) became collector’s items.

  “I’m not sure how producing a deliberately tedious play about a loathed historical figure presents an opportunity for redemption,” Dooley said.

  “That’s our challenge,” Drucilla said.

  “What assurances do I have that you’ll behave yourselves?” Dooley asked.

  Crowder lifted his fedora from the chair where it sat. He spun it on his finger and lowered it onto his massive head. “None whatsoever.”

  “Fair enough,” Dooley said.

  “Well,” Harold said, slapping his knees with his palms and standing, “we’ll wait to hear from you.”

  Drucilla uncoiled from the couch and put her black shoes on the floor. “But we won’t wait too long,” she said.

  “You shall hear when it is time for you to hear.”

  I watched them walk to the door. I wanted the girl to look at me and, as the door was shutting on her, she did, bending her head back through the doorway, just long enough to say, “See ya.”

  Elise Winters sat at her desk in a narrow corner of the observatory surrounded by a horseshoe of scattered paper. The window was open a crack and cold air blew in with the early dark of a fall afternoon. She pulled her sweater tighter around her neck.

  “You cold?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “A little but it keeps me awake. I need to finish this.”

  I picked up one of the papers. “What is it?”

  “Radio contour images.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “This.” She pointed to a fried egg configuration of concentric lines on a page of graph paper.

  “What for?”

  “I’m comparing this point to its previous plot to see if it moved in relation to this object.”

  “Why would it move?”

  “First we see if it moved, then we ask why.”

  “How come you want to know?”

  “It’s something to know.”

  “I mean what good will it do to know?”

  She tilted her head back and tapped her pencil on her chin. “None maybe. We can’t choose what we’re curious about.”

  This was how our conversations usually went. I’d come back to the observatory when it was dark out and stood in line with a bunch of kids to look at Mars and the rings of Saturn through the telescope. On that visit, I’d seen where her office was. Sometimes I would stop by on my way home from campus when I saw her light on. I liked her because she had a chain on her glasses to keep her from losing them and because she was smart in the way Dooley was smart without being stuck up about what she knew. I’d tell her about school and ask her about what she did when she was new at school and she told me about the all-girls college she went to in California and what they did for fun, which was basically nothing that I thought of as fun. I didn’t tell her about meeting Drucilla. I told her instead about how Fräulein Menendez, my German instructor from Buenos Aires, had gone ahead and given us a quiz even though she had forgotten to warn us that it was coming.

  “Yes,” she said. “You have to expect that from your professors. It’s not like high school. Here, the professors have their own work to think about, and anything you ask of them is asking too much.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.

  She lifted her glasses to her mouth and chewed on the end, smiling, kind of. “Why would you ask me that just then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feeling I had made a big mistake. “Just popped into my head.”

  “Well,” she said, smiling more now, “I guess it’s a fair question among friends. No,” she said, “no boyfriend.”

  I pointed at the diagram in front of her again. “What is this we’re watching move?”

  “It’s a quasar in the constellation Lyra.”

  “Why not look at it in the telescope?”

  “It’s too far away.”

  “But this doesn’t look like anything.”

  She put her glasses back on and arranged the papers before her, which I took as a sign that I should go. “Never underestimate the importance of looking at an old thing in a new way.”

  Ship made a face. “Who’d you say it was?”

  “Drucilla.”

  “Drucilla what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  He was sitting on his desk with his feet on a chair, paring his fingernails with a chrome clipper from a leather manicure case his parents gave him when he moved in. “How come you want to know?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You want to get in her pants.”

  “Jesus, Ship. No one says that anymore.”

  He slid the clipper into the case and zipped it. “Turn your back,” he said. Ship kept the key to his desk hidden in a coffee mug on his bookshelf. I knew where it was and he knew I knew, but we both pretended. After I heard the drawer slide shut I turned to see him pulling a pencil out of the spiral binding of a small, black notebook. He flipped to a blank page and licked the pencil tip.

  “She’s a theater major?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. Could be theater, could be history.”

  “What’s she look like?”

  “About five feet.”

  “Wow, short. Hair color?”

  “Brown,” I said. “Dark brown, maybe black.”

  “Long or short?”

  “Short.”

  He made a face.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?”

  “Well, did you ever think about it? Short girl, short hair, theater major?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He put up a hand to shut me up and asked, “What about boobs?”

  “What about them?”

  “Does she have any?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Big or little?”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said.

  “You didn’t notice?”

  “No, I didn’t notice. How’s that going to help, anyway?”

  He mumbled something like, “If you didn’t notice …” and wrote in the book. Then he held it at arm’s length and studied the page. “Not much to go on, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ship had to act like I was putting him out to obscure the truth, which was that he lived to do favors for me—for me or for anyone who asked. It is how the Ships of the world get by. In exchange, we tell them things. I told him things. I told him things I never would have told anyone else because I felt like I owed it to him. He called anyone he even vaguely knew “a good friend” and never worried about how many would have said the same about him. A friend in Ship’s mind was a friend, indeed. He counted me as his friend, as his best friend on campus, and he paid for the privilege.

  When I turned my back again so he could hide his drawer key, I noticed a slip of paper on the edge of my desk. I picked it up and read, “Dear Dennis Shipman—”

  “Here, this is yours,” I said.

  “What is it?”

  “How should I know?”

&nb
sp; He looked. “Oh, did I leave that over there?”

  “I guess,” I said and tried to hand it to him.

  “You didn’t read it, did you?”

  “No, why should I?”

  He smiled broadly. “Well, I guess there’s no harm in you knowing, although the announcement won’t be made for another week. I’ve been chosen one of the Faces of the Future.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well,” he said, studying my expression as though he was going to give me bad news, “there’s a calendar.”

  I laughed. “Oh my God, are you naked?”

  “Come on, it’s not like that. I’m February.”

  “That’s the shortest month.”

  Ship snatched the letter from me. “You shouldn’t make fun. It’s for charity.”

  In the days that followed, I watched for Drucilla wherever I went. I was obsessed. I scanned the faces I passed between classes, in the lecture halls, and at the free movies on the commons. It was ten days before I saw her again. I was climbing the broad concrete stairway that led from Van Hise to Van Vleck Hall and picked her out of the crowd coming down. She sported a leather motorcycle jacket with silver studs and had a green army satchel slung over her shoulder. Somehow she managed to read from the paperback book in her hand as she descended the steep flight of stairs. For a second I wondered if this was actually her (there’d been a lot of false alarms), until her bangs fell into her eyes and I knew for certain. As I watched her walk by, I tripped and landed hard on the concrete.

  “Walk much?” a voice behind me asked.

  Dooley was taking the teakettle off his hot plate by the window when I went to his office. He glanced up from his tea bag as I slouched into the armchair beside his desk. He stuffed his shirttail back into his corduroy trousers. He was always stuffing his shirttail into his corduroy trousers. In five minutes it would be hanging loose again. “What?”

  “I’m in love, I think.”

  Running his fingers through his hair, he set the steaming cup down on the blotter on his desk. “Oh, Heaven pity us.”