Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  “Randy.” We hugged, and then pulled back to get a look at each other. She looked tired, but happy. I assumed her research had gone well. Sometimes I really envied Denise her certainty of direction. She was so clearly meant for academe, and so talented in her approach. There never seemed to be any doubts to snag her up or stall her. She knew exactly what she wanted from her span on earth, and was determined to get there. Only her love life was disorganized; when I thought about all the various men she had dated since I’d known her, the organizing principle was less obvious than a patchwork quilt. Every man who fell for Denise, and most did, was totally devoted to her. She, on the other hand, seemed to collect them like other women collect shoes. I watched her wax and wane over a reporter, an engineering prof, a millionaire, and a jazz pianist in the last few years. The amazing thing is that she managed somehow to retain the friendship of every man she dated, so there was never anyone looking daggers across a restaurant toward Denise and her latest swain. I swear, if I didn’t know that it cost her at least a hundred bucks a month to keep her hair looking that good, I’d want to trade places with my best friend. As it was, I was perfectly happy to share space.

  We nattered about inconsequential things as we moved through the buffet line to collect soup and salads. Denise signed a chit and led me toward a table in the windowed area. Neither of us wanted to sit outside, although there were several people dotted around the grilling area, and a sous chef out there turning silver-wrapped potatoes and taking steak orders. Denise made a mock flourish of setting her napkin on her lap, and then smiled full focus toward me.

  “So, what’s up? I hear there’s trouble brewing over at your end of campus.” It always amazed me how quickly Denise could get up to speed with gossip. We in the Centre for Ethnomusicology may have only recently learned of the identity of our anonymous benefactor, but she was back a day and already knew of our connection to the latest murder in town. Of course, perhaps the entire campus already knew.

  Although I was so used to not discussing case-specific things with Steve, it felt like floodgates opening to know I could talk to Denise. For one thing, I’d see how an outsider would view the events connected to the Centre. Maybe I was too close to the situation, but I couldn’t see any other possibility than what Steve and his bunch seem focused on—that David Finster was somehow killed because of a link to the Folkways collection. Maybe there was another way of looking at the whole thing.

  I laid out the general story for Denise, not bothering to emphasize how driven-snow-white I was in the matter. That’s another beauty of best friends; I didn’t need to justify myself to Denise. She would automatically assume I was innocent, and if it turned out I had done it, then she would assume I had a pretty good reason for doing so.

  “So that’s the only reason they have for aiming at you? The posing of the body after death to look like a line from ‘Tom Dooley’ and irritation at his mother’s fondness for musicians? That seems like they’re really stretching things. After all, he might have been killed because of a shady business dealing, or by a competitor in the construction business. He may have been killed because of a family squabble. Was he married; did he have children? He might have been killed by people driven mad by the LRT warning bells dinging in their back lane, for God’s sake. So why are they assuming you would kill to keep a contract job?” Denise took a sip of iced tea and pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, if they’re looking at people who would be worried about their jobs because of the Folkways bequest, what about all the university projects that rely on undirected bequests? Maybe someone whose funding was running out saw the chance to scupper the Folkways collection’s windfall.”

  “What do you mean?” This was the sort of Machiavellian thinking that I was no good at and at which Denise excelled. It was probably all that study of revenge tragedies.

  “Think of it. If Finster and his sister made enough of a stink about the folk connection, maybe the university would cave to the point that they’d pull the directive for use, and settle the bequest into the general coffers. That way some of the programs that are timing out, or just not sexy and new, would have access to some of the money. If they could smear the Centre and make the administration uncomfortable, then who knows? If I were you, I’d make a list of all the humanities-based special projects. Forget the sciences; their funding is usually pretty secure, or they’re tied to business connections.” Denise grinned. “In fact, I’d stick Mary Montgomery from the Orlando Project right at the top of the list. She was the one who told me about the murder when I went in to get my mail yesterday.”

  “Is the Orlando Project in need of funding?” I asked.

  “Everything is in need of funding, especially projects that have been going a long time. Once the glow is off the new aspect of things, it’s a fight to keep above water. If you can’t show some constant progress, if it’s just more of the same, no matter how useful and of long-term benefit, the university admin will find other ways to spend the money. That’s the thing that science departments understand, which we in the humanities are just getting the hang of. You have to constantly sell the project and it has to look new and different enough each time you go back to the trough. The science trick is to build a project in seven or eight levels, and sell each one as a separate chapter. That way, each time you go to the cookie jar, you’re asking for something new. The moneymen see that as progress, and a useful way to spend money. If you go back year after year to ask for more money to fund an ongoing project to put biographies of all the marginalized writers of feminist literature online, eventually they’re going to ask, hasn’t this all been done before?”

  I sat back, thinking that Denise was depressingly pragmatic. Lucky for the world she was on the side of the angels. She had recently managed to inject new cash into the beleaguered writer-in-residence program and tied it to a long-term investment that would provide a yearly stipend for an invited writer to the campus. Now, all the department had to do was provide an office and advertising, so the program seemed on much more secure footing.

  I wondered if the Orlando Project people honestly wanted me to take the rap for murder to keep their funding coming in. It sounded absurd, but of course I’d been hearing absurd theories for the last few days; what was one more in the mix? And come to that, Mary Montgomery sort of scared me at the best of times. I told Denise I’d pass her thoughts on to Steve, and we moved on to discuss her research in Stratford.

  “It was such fun. I was trying to work out some dates for modernizations of Shakespeare, to see if I could make some correlations between the choices of layover message to the new works happening in theatre. I started out with playbills, but the real joy was in going through the costume sketch archives. You could see at a glance what the director was aiming for, and some of the sketches are so beautiful—I swear, there’s a fund-raising opportunity going to waste. They should be reprinting some of those sketches and selling the art prints as Festival souvenirs. Anyhow, it was lovely to interview some of the costume designers and builders, who’ve been there for years and years. That’s the amazing thing about Stratford, the longevity and close community of it. Actors, designers, directors—they just buy a house and become part of the community. Once Stratford bites you, I think you’d need to be bitten by something as big as The Sound of Music to budge you out of there.”

  Her not-so-veiled reference to Christopher Plummer made me jump tracks into basic curiosity. “Did you meet any stars? Did you see Donald Sutherland? Did you meet Paul Gross?” Denise began to grin. “Oh Lord, you did, didn’t you?”

  The rest of lunch was taken up in Canadian theatre gossip, which sounded like a real puppy-eat-puppy world when it came down to it. Denise and I tidied ourselves up in the ladies’ room before heading back into the hot afternoon. We opted to walk along Saskatchewan Drive back to the Humanities Building, where Denise’s office was located. It didn’t escape my notice that we were basically following the high-road version of my stroll the day of the
murder. Across the road, and down the bush-choked cliff to the edge of the riverbank, to be specific. It was impossible to see for all the foliage. The denizens of Saskatchewan Drive had a better view in the winter, once the leaves had fallen. I doubted any of them wished the summer gone for all that. Moreover, I was sure that no one walking up here would have been able to spot me down there, giving me any kind of alibi.

  Denise was talking about attending a campus film series at the Tory Turtle on Monday evenings. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get to all of them, but I figured Denise wouldn’t have any trouble giving my ticket away any given Monday, so I agreed to go. Actually, it sounded sort of interesting, music biographies in the movies. There were a couple I’d seen already, but some of the others seemed as if they’d fit right in with my research: Bound for Glory and Coal Miner’s Daughter, for sure. I’d seen Shine, Ray, Walk the Line, The Glenn Miller Story, La Bamba and The Buddy Holly Story already, but I loved the music in them. I always meant to see Bird, Selena and Immortal Beloved, and I had never caught Jessica Lange’s version of Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams. I figured Dr. F would approve of my leisure-time choices.

  I walked Denise to the midway door of the Humanities Building, but decided not to head up to the HUB passageway. I hugged her goodbye and passed straight through and across the hall to the access to the parking lot. My carrel was waiting for me across the breadth of two parking lots. I wandered alongside HUB mall, in the shade of the long building. It was so good to have Denise back in town. I hadn’t realized how lonely it felt not to have her around while all this had been happening.

  It was about two-thirty when I pushed the Centre door open to return to my work. Thinking of watching the Woody Guthrie story made me want to listen to some of his music, so I pulled This Land Is Your Land from the shelf beside my carrel instead of cueing up the next cut on the Dock Boggs CD I’d been listening to before lunch. Something I’d read in Pete Seeger’s collection of writings, The Incompleat Folksinger, had really struck me; Woody Guthrie may well be the only modern songwriter whose songs would live on past more than one century. I guess when you have the talent to write over a thousand songs, you have a fair shot at immortality. I wondered how many one-hit wonders ever looked at “This Land Is Your Land” and deflated their collective egos.

  I was making putt-putt noises along to “The Car Song,” which I’d always known as “Take Me Riding in the Car-car,” when the door blew back on its hinges. I pulled off my headphones, and I saw Paul stand to attention behind the counter. We both focused on the tall man standing in the doorway, grinning at us.

  “Hey, y’all,” said the stranger, dropping a leather satchel suitcase inside the doorway, “I’m Woody.”

  13

  ~

  I know it had a lot to do with what I’d been listening to and thinking about just prior to his arrival, but there was something about Woody Dowling that I was predisposed to like from the start. While Paul was busy trying to locate Dr. Fuller to let her know that a specialist from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage had arrived, I was roped into showing him around the Centre and taking him across the street to check him in to a suite at the Campus Tower Hotel.

  I offered to wait in the lobby for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it, insisting that I come up to the tenth-floor suite with him, to inspect and approve it.

  “After all, how would I know whether I was getting the works unless someone from hereabouts looks out for me?” He had a point. Besides, there was something so outrageously larger than life about Woody that I just moved in some sort of magnetic orbit behind him toward the elevator. Part of me flashed on Edith Wharton warnings from House of Mirth, but this was the twenty-first century, after all. Popping up unchaperoned to a man’s hotel suite wasn’t grounds for suicide anymore.

  Woody dumped his suitcase in the bedroom and bounded across to see the view from the west window. His suite was on a corner, so he got a nice view all the way out to the mall, and from the north-facing bedroom window he had a view all the way to the river valley. Bits of the Legislature Building could be seen peeking through the trees. It was a shame they didn’t light ours up with fairy lights like they did in Victoria. I turned back from the bedroom doorway as Woody called out, “Catch!”

  He already had the complimentary fruit basket unwrapped and tossed me a huge Gala apple. I caught it instinctively, and Woody whistled appreciatively. “‘Okay, some of them are going home!’ You know, you looked like Geena Davis in A League of Their Own just then. Do you play ball?”

  I laughed, I couldn’t help myself. So far I had known the man for three-quarters of an hour, and already he’d covered his allergies, his reverence for Thomas Pynchon, the state of the bathrooms on the airplane he’d been on, whether e-learning was ever going to be appreciated by institutes of higher learning, the new paint colours of his office at the Smithsonian, whether or not ceramic tiles were the best thing for kitchen floors and the genesis of his name.

  “Everyone I meet through work figures I was named for Woody Guthrie, of course, but my name is actually Sherwood, and not for any high cultural reason like being named after Sherwood Anderson. No, my mother was a real Errol Flynn fan, especially Errol Flynn in tights. I think my father vetoed her first choice of Robin as being too girlie for his tastes. So, she called me Sherwood for Sherwood Forest. It got shortened to Woody when I was in kindergarten, and pretty soon I learned that the best way to avoid any joking about my name was to head ’er off at the pass.” Out of the blue, he rattled off a perfect imitation of Woody Woodpecker’s signature giggles. “I’ll bet you got teased about your name, too, right? Matter of fact, probably the same sort of teasing as me.” To his credit, he didn’t stop to take in my blush, but had turned to unpack his computer from his bag and plug it into the cable line indicated on the wall of the living room area of the suite.

  “I just have to check in with my bosses, let them know I’m here safe and sound, and then I’m all yours. Well, as long as you give me five minutes to splash some water on me.”

  He rattled a quick e-mail and hit the Send button with what I was beginning to recognize as a characteristic flourish.

  “I swear I won’t be five minutes. Help yourself to the fruit. In fact, you can take those kiwis with you, if you want. I’m allergic to them, too.”

  I sat down on the sofa and decided to place a call to the Centre just to let them know that I hadn’t lost the Smithsonian guy on the way over. Paul put me through almost immediately to Dr. Fuller, whom he’d called away from a tutorial to meet up with a Woody who wasn’t there when she reached the Centre. She didn’t sound too happy about things. I told her we’d be back in a few minutes and that he was just freshening up from his trip. I cupped the speaker of the phone close to me, because I suddenly realized that the background sound I was trying to speak over was Woody yodelling in the shower. The man was having a shower, obviously with the bathroom door wide open, while I was sitting there in his hotel suite! I stammered something unintelligible to my boss and hung up the phone as quickly as I could. Then I stood up and tried to find the most innocuous place, barring standing outside in the hallway, that I could wait for a now presumably naked man to get dressed and reappear.

  Just thinking about him being naked in the other room was a bit over-stimulating. The man, after all, was somewhat dishy by anybody’s standards. He must have been at least six-foot-four, unless he wore heels, since he towered over me, and I’m no slouch in the height department. He had the kinetic grace of Hugh Jackman, the frame of Tim Robbins, and the eyes of Joseph Fiennes. All that would have been easy to deal with if it hadn’t been mixed in with what could only be described as charisma. He had that star quality you see in certain politicians and movie stars, the sort that you might not notice on TV, but which startles you on the street or in airports when you run into them unexpectedly.

  Oh God, and he had the abs of Kenneth Branagh in Frankenstein, I realized as he wandered into the living room with only
a towel wrapped around his nethers. I leaned back against a wall, which was several inches further away than I had calculated. Attempting to appear as if I had meant to do a backward press-up against the wall occupied my urge to babble, and I managed not to embarrass myself too much as he smiled at me and headed back into the bathroom with his shaving kit in one hand and a pile of clothing balanced on the other.

  “Five minutes, I swear,” he sang to me, and this time, closed the door to the bedroom. I sank down on the closest chair, and took a few deep breaths. I had the feeling this was going to be a complication I could certainly do without.

  He was true to his word. A scant ten minutes later we were crossing 87th Avenue, back toward the Timms Centre and the Fine Arts Building. Woody was appropriately appreciative of the Timms’ architecture, and raised a quizzical eyebrow as we reached the Fine Arts Building.

  “I know,” I said. “I think maybe it was an attempt to be so neutral that any student piece created here would shine in relief.” We swooped into the building on the force of Woody’s laughter.

  It was obvious within minutes that Dr. Fuller was just as susceptible to Woody’s charms as I was. I reluctantly pulled away from the discussion when it veered from specifics to the Centre for Ethnomusicology in general. I figured they’d get back to me when they needed me. It took about half an hour.

  “Randy,” Dr. F leaned on the top of my carrel, “would you come with us to the mall for coffee? Woody thinks we should discuss the implications of this terrible situation for the collection, and I think you should be privy to all this.”