Hang Down Your Head

by Janice Macdonald

  Just then our food arrived and I busied myself trying to avoid wearing too much flaky phyllo pastry while devouring Marina’s husband’s spanokopita. It looked like Woody was enjoying his meal, too. We didn’t speak much for about ten minutes while we dug in to the food-laden plates in front of us.

  When I sat back for a breath and a drink of water, it occurred to me to ask Woody what he had meant by something he said to Dr. F earlier in the day.

  “What’s a pro from Dover?” I asked. Woody chuckled.

  “It’s a line from the novel M*A*S*H*,” he explained. “When Hawkeye was younger, he would play golf for free at various clubs by introducing himself as the pro from Dover. He would then be invited by the club pro to try the course gratis. So, in the midst of the war, he and Trapper John and some other character I can’t for the moment recall head off to a base hospital to cadge some equipment, and they refer to themselves as the pros from Dover. Miraculously, or because of their sheer nerviness, they walk out with what they need, no questions asked.”

  “So, are you faking your qualifications?”

  In answer, he pulled out his wallet from his back pocket, and produced both his driver’s licence and his Smithsonian picture ID. I picked up his driver’s licence. The picture was better than most. I noticed in the statistics that he was indeed six-foot-four, and he weighed two hundred and twenty-eight pounds. He must work out, because there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat obvious on him.

  “I think I used the term mainly because of the Smithsonian connection. Maybe you’d have to work there or at least hang out there a bit to get what I’m trying to say. It’s a huge place, and it’s the repository of the entire culture, classic and popular, of the United-States-of-America-of-thee-I-sing. Working there means that you validate that concept, whether it’s something like the front porch song collections of Alan Lomax, or Fonzie’s black leather jacket from Happy Days. For better or worse, the Smithsonian has it detailed and recorded. So, when it comes to venturing out as a rep of the Smithsonian, I feel as if I’ve become a representative of all that is both good and hokey, if not downright silly, in American culture.” He swirled the heel of wine left in his glass, and stared at it sparkling with the candlelight behind it. “I have to admit, it’s awful hard to be an American these days. At the same time as I am tremendously proud of so much of what has gone into the making of America, I am well aware that we have squandered bushels of good will and taste and potential in the last few years. We can’t figure out why the world hates us. Heck, we can’t figure out why the people living in our inner cities hate us. We spend more money on making one summer movie than most African countries put together have as a yearly budget. We claim to love nature and then we drive out to it in our SUVs and scrape it off our grilles on the way home.” He grinned a bit weakly. “You’ve uncovered my Achilles heel, Randy. I’m the pro from Dover, I guess, because I find the only way I can operate as a cultural representative of the greatest-country-in-the-world is ironically.”

  I nodded.

  “I can understand what you’re saying,” I said. “But there are a lot of wonderful things about the United States that people tend to forget about. Look at the Smithsonian as a case in point.” Woody toasted me with his glass, encouraging me to maunder on. I should know better than to have more than one glass of wine. “Look at the amazing art that has come from the US, as good as or better than anything else in the world. So much of the world’s art comes out of a cry of oppression. It’s fascinating to see where man can go when he’s not oppressed or hungry or in need. Citizen Kane. The Chrysler Building. Catcher in the Rye. The Golden Gate Bridge. Angels in America. The Sopranos. The geodesic dome. Love Medicine. Batman. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

  Woody smiled. “The thing is, you have to include Las Vegas, the Manhattan Project, Three’s Company, Milli Vanilli and Batman and Robin. Talk about cancelling out. You are very lucky to be Canadian. There are so many people down where I live who look up at y’all and wish they could be you. You are like the ideal American—all the potential realized without any of the bullshit associated.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “We’re not as great as we think we are. It’s only in comparison to you folks that we come out looking as peaceful and caring as we do. There are influential people here crying out to end all of our social safety programs. So, I’m not sure we either are or would care to be considered ideal Americans, if you take my point.”

  Woody grimaced and nodded. “Far be it from me to paint y’all as the fifty-first state! Well, I figure we’ve saved the world enough for one night. Shall I get the check and you can lead me back to where it is I live?” We tussled a bit over who should pay, but Woody’s claim that he had a daily stipend for meals that exceeded what both meals combined cost, and that he intended to get in some groceries to his suite and therefore keep the meal cost down throughout the trip mollified me, and I was happy to watch him charge it on a platinum-coloured charge card. For all my talk about socialism and need, it was always extremely nice to go out to a lovely restaurant and have my way paid to boot.

  We headed out into a pleasantly warm summer evening. It was still daylight, of course, as our concept of twilight is dusk falling around ten o’clock. Short but intense summers, that’s what we’re famous for. And we make the most of it. Woody and I watched a bunch of teenaged girls in short shorts wheeling down the street on in-line skates, and a group of people stopped ahead, listening to a busker playing classical guitar.

  It took us a bit longer to walk back home than to the restaurant, but that’s usually the way of things when you’re satisfyingly full and having a pleasant conversation. Woody demurred when I offered to walk him all the way back to his hotel, saying that he could almost see it from the sidewalk in front of my apartment, and that he wouldn’t be likely to get lost walking in a straight line.

  “Thanks, Randy, for a lovely evening. You’ve proved that the whole tradition of Western hospitality is alive and well. I’ll see you in the morning.” With that, he squeezed my upper arm with one large hand and loped off into the dimming light. I stood there and watched him go. At the end of the first block, he turned and waved, as if he knew I’d be watching.

  14

  ~

  There was no message from Steve on my machine when I got home from my dinner with Woody. I went to bed and dreamed about US–Canadian relations in one form or another. While I didn’t recall my dreams in detail, there was enough residual heat to make me feel a bit guilty.

  I showered and dressed with a bit of care, given that I’d apparently be representing my country as well as doing my job. A pink cotton blouse tucked into a clean pair of pale blue jeans was the best I could manage. The pink pom-poms on my ankle socks sticking out over top of my white sneakers tied the ensemble together, as far as I was concerned.

  After rubbing moisturizer into my face and sliding mascara over the tips of my eyelashes, I braided my hair and stared at myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Did I really want to analyze why I seemed to be taking extra care getting ready this morning? My reflection shook her head at me, so I decided to follow her advice and just get on with the day.

  Just in case I was surprised by visitors again, I rinsed out my breakfast bowl before heading out the door. You just never knew. I grabbed up the bills I needed to mail, hefted my backpack onto my shoulder, and set off for work.

  The weather that had been so oppressive the week before was now mild and beautiful. The air had the smell of damp dirt and big trees that I’ve always associated with summer camp time by the lake. The oddest thing was that, while it struck me that this was the calmest time of year on campus, it was always the most productive for me. The only rival times I could think of were those moments in the fall when you could discern the scent of the previous evening’s bonfire on the air; that to me was the palpable smell of kilts and knee socks and new pencil crayons.

  I wondered if anyone else connected times to smells as much as I did. I know that psycho
logists have determined that smell is the most important sense for memory, but for me there’s a real connection between things and smells that actually don’t emanate from the things themselves. Plastic binders smell to me like Christmas, calamine lotion recalls canoe trips; peanut butter is the scent of my old tree house, and the smell of tangerines reminds me of hair salons. I supposed I was lucky. My mother had next to no sense of smell at all. If she was cooking dinner, she had to remain in the kitchen or the beans would be burned to the bottom of the saucepan in no time. While it qualified her as the person least likely to mind cleaning out the fridge, her inability to discern whether the broccoli was turning was usually what made the fridge need cleaning in the first place.

  The Fine Arts Building smelled ancient, which was odd, since it couldn’t have been more than about thirty years old. There were plenty of older buildings on campus that didn’t have that scent o’ crypt about them. It probably had something to do with FAB having hardly any windows. Or maybe it was the colour of the bricks. The Law Building was nearly the same vintage, as far as I could tell, and it had a far livelier sensibility to it. Of course, it seemed to have more ambient light, too.

  The lights were on, and so was Paul’s computer when I got to the Centre. I couldn’t spot Paul, though. I went behind the counter to see if he’d also had the good sense to begin the coffee. No such luck. I was thinking of dropping my backpack at my carrel and popping over to Java Jive when I noticed that Dr. F’s office door was ajar and the lights were on there, too. That was unusual. Planning to ask her if she’d like a cup of coffee, I moved toward the office. As I got closer I noticed something else odd on the floor in the doorway.

  I think we’re just hardwired not to understand visions of violence. It took me what seemed like forever to puzzle out what it was I was looking at. Why on earth would I be seeing the bottoms of Paul’s boots staring back at me? I finally realized it was because they were still attached to Paul and he was lying still, stretched out on his stomach in the middle of Dr. F’s office, his head in a pool of blood.

  15

  ~

  I couldn’t have been frozen there too long before calling 911, because the police and paramedics arrived in what turned out to be only about half an hour after I’d left my apartment. By the time Steve and Iain began to question me, I was no longer standing in the doorway, but sitting at the library table once more, in the middle of the Centre. Paul, by this time, was being whisked through the emergency ward at the University Hospital and Dr. F was heading in to the Centre after being called by the police.

  She wasn’t going to like what she saw in her office, I knew that for sure. It had been royally trashed. Madeleine Williams, the forensics specialist, was going over it while I sat there, numbly listening to Steve speak to me from the far end of a long, long tunnel. It took a great deal of effort to focus on what he was saying. I figured out from the inflection of his voice that he was asking me a question. So what else was new? I made an effort to pay closer attention, and he repeated himself.

  “Do you think Paul was looking for something in the office and was surprised by an intruder, or was it the other way around?”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “It’s hard to say, Randy. It sounds like he took a pretty hard blow to the head, we’re not sure with what yet. Lucky for him, you got here shortly after it must have happened. Lucky for you, you didn’t get here any sooner than you did. I don’t think you missed seeing the assailant by much, kiddo.”

  I shivered. This was reminding me too forcefully of the time my old office had been trashed, only a couple of blocks from where we were now standing. While it had been those events that had resulted in my meeting Steve, it wasn’t something I wanted repeated. It was just my dumb luck that it took acts of extreme violence and prejudice to bring interesting men into my life. That suddenly reminded me.

  “Woody!” I exclaimed. Steve looked quizzical.

  I filled him in on the arrival of the “pro” from Washington who had breezed in with such aplomb yesterday to work on liaising with taping for folkwaysAlive! at the Folk Fest next month. While I didn’t think Woody had anything to do with the events this morning (after all, why would he?), it occurred to me that not only did he need to know about the situation, but that his arrival may have had something to do with this focus on the Centre. Steve agreed that I should call him at his hotel and have him come over.

  Woody’s warm greeting on the phone turned businesslike immediately when he heard about Paul. I tried to be as discreet as possible on the phone, and he agreed to head over to the Centre right away. He arrived in five minutes .

  I introduced him to Steve. Iain was helping the forensics woman measure angles from the doorjamb, and a uniformed officer was spreading grey powder all over papers on Dr. F’s desk. I hoped the fingerprinting powder didn’t get into any tape boxes or adversely affect the CDs piled on the shelf behind the desk. I also hoped that someone else would be buttonholed to clean up the mess the police would leave behind. It was bad enough that I was going to have to wash the fingerprint ink from my cuticles several times before it disappeared. I have had my prints taken for “elimination purposes” in the past, and knew it had to be done, but it still felt invasive and awkward.

  It’s bad enough that criminals trash things. When the police arrive and cover the scene with powder and chemicals and yellow tape and plastic, they just add to the mess. There’s probably a real growth market in cleaning up after crime scenes. Not that I’d want to branch out into it. I have enough trouble cleaning out the tub drain after a shower, let alone sticking my hands into the effluvia of dead strangers.

  Steve was writing down Woody’s particulars and studying his identification around the time Dr. Fuller burst in. I expected her to take one look at her office and burst into tears, but she was made of sterner stuff. She stood in the middle of all that scrambled evidence of work, and shook her head in disgust.

  “My field tent in Kenya was once scuttled, we think by stampeding water buffalo, and it was neater than this,” she remarked drily. “At least the animals had no vested interest in our culture. This, on the other hand …”

  “With the attack on Paul Calihoo, this is officially a crime scene, Dr. Fuller,” Steve said, breaking in on her vision of a lengthy cleanup. “I’m afraid we have to ask you not to touch anything. If you could, though, eyeball the area and see if there’s anything missing? That would help us determine if this was a robbery that became an attack, or an attack that turned into an act of vandalism.”

  “Right,” she said. “How is Paul? Has there been any word?”

  “Intensive care,” answered Detective McCorquodale. Dr. F sucked her lips inward over her teeth, and bit down, obviously willing herself to remain businesslike and not break down.

  “We’ll have to contact his family. Has anyone called Laura, his wife?”

  I hadn’t even thought of doing so. I told her I would get right on it, and went to the front desk phone. There were ten programmable numbers per phone in the Centre, and I checked each out by pressing the corresponding number. The call display area announced whose number was chosen. Laura’s work number was #4. I clicked the Dial button and waited through several rings. I was just about to give up when a very professional voice answered, “Nojack Press, Laura speaking.”

  “Hi Laura, this is Randy Craig calling from the Centre.”

  “Hi?” She sounded puzzled and cautious, since I doubt in a million years she’d ever expected to speak to me on the phone. We’d met only once, in a movie lineup about two weeks after I’d been hired.

  “I’m calling to let you know that it seems like Paul surprised a burglar here in Dr. Fuller’s office, and he’s been taken to the emergency at the U of A. Apparently he’s in intensive care.”

  “Oh my God. Is he okay? I’ll be right there, I mean the hospital.” She hung up on me, which is probably how I’d have reacted under the same circumstances. I moved back to Dr. F’s office in time
to hear her say, “I’m quite certain they were here. I wouldn’t have left them out in the general room of the Centre.” Iain edged the office door closed so that I couldn’t figure out by body language what she had been referring to. She didn’t sound too happy, though.

  Maybe it was a robbery. Campuses make a pretty easy target, all in all, especially in the summer months when most of the renovations happen. There are work crews unfamiliar to the security staff everywhere you look, and much less in the way of hallway traffic. I had heard that the overhead DVD/video projectors, newly installed in many of the classrooms in Grant ­MacEwan’s South Campus, had been stolen within three weeks. Now the replacement machines sat in welded cages cobbled together by Facilities personnel.

  It would be good if it had been a random robbery and not a personal attack on Paul Calihoo. I couldn’t imagine Paul generating enough antagonism in anyone to warrant that being the objective of the attack. I was sure he had surprised someone who had then hit him to keep him from stopping or catching the unknown assailant. Likely it was someone who figured the Centre had some form of petty cash that could be easily lifted. Why they thought petty cash would be in Dr. F’s office was beyond me, though.

  I must have been looking particularly blank, for me, because both Steve and Woody approached me with concern on their respective faces.

  “Randy? Are you going to be okay?” Steve cupped a steadying hand on my elbow, and it felt as if his strength was the only thing actually keeping me standing. “Maybe you should go home. There’s not going to be much peace around here to work today. Can you make it home on your own?”

  “I could walk her there,” offered Woody, “unless you still require me for the moment. I’ll get you settled with a cup of tea and then head back here.” Steve took a bit more of a look at Woody than he actually needed to, but agreed that it would be a good idea to have me ferried home like a semi-invalid. He told me he’d call in on me later, and then to my great surprise he kissed me on the forehead, in front of his crime scene cronies. Woody lifted his left eyebrow just slightly, but bobbed his head to Steve as he took my arm. I had the presence of mind to grab my backpack by the counter where I must have dropped it when originally spotting Paul. Out we went, back the same way I had walked what now seemed like hours ago. When we got outside, I was surprised to realize it was still morning, quite early out.