The Cursed Canoe

by Frankie Bow

  “DiNapoli’s Italian,” she interrupted cheerfully. “Like you, right? Barda?”

  “Barda is actually an Albanian name."

  “Ohhh.” Sherry nodded knowingly. “Like Mother Teresa.”

  I was impressed Sherry knew this. People generally assume I’m Italian because of my last name, or Irish because of my first. The first time I met Pat’s mother, she had perked up when I introduced myself as Molly, and asked me what my last name was and where my people were from.

  “My people?” I’d asked, naively. “Albania, I guess, originally.”

  “Oh, no one knows what that is, dear.” Mrs. Flanagan immediately changed the subject to where we were going to have lunch. I had apparently made a good impression on her despite my obvious character flaw, not being Irish. Pat was kind enough to inform me that according to his mother, I was “really quite pretty, if you like that kind of thing.”

  “My Ma has a picture of Mother Teresa up in the living room,” Sherry said, “next to the Pope. Mother Teresa must’ve been a big deal at your house, Dr. B.”

  I glanced around the table to see if anyone else wanted to participate in the conversation. Sherry’s group members seemed content to watch.

  “We did admire Mother Teresa’s work with the poor,” I said.

  My parents knew who Mother Teresa was. She was a big deal at our church, no question. In private, though, my mother the obstetrician and my father the science teacher agreed Blessed Teresa of Calcutta could have done a lot more good by handing out free birth control. That’s the kind of Catholics we are. Practical.

  “Has any one of you ever searched for someone online?” I asked.

  “It was easy to Google you, Professor Barda," said one ponytailed young man, who I remembered was on exchange from Washington State. "I searched for the professors before I transferred over here. I read all the online reviews.”

  “And you still signed up for my class? That was brave of you.”

  “The thing about you being half human made me curious,” he said. “You seem pretty normal to me, though.”

  “Yes, well. I make an effort to blend in.”

  As the students packed up to leave, I erased the board, making sure to wipe away any stray mark. I wondered if I was the only one who cared about maintaining a clean learning environment. Rodge apparently didn’t think it was important to erase the board after class. Maybe I didn’t need to be so conscientious about it either. One of these days, I mused daringly, maybe after I get tenure, I might leave my notes up on the board and let Rodge erase them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  OVER AFTERNOON COFFEE, I vented to Pat and Emma about Rodge Cowper’s unsatisfactory whiteboard hygiene. Emma occupied my visitor chair. Pat was perched on the edge of my desk, his long legs almost reaching the wall of my tiny office. I used to have two chairs but the plastic one had cracked and finally split in two. I, of course, was enthroned on my fifteen dollar yoga ball from Galimba's Bargain Boyz.

  The dim fluorescent lighting made Pat and Emma look bilious. To save money on the electric bill, our administration had ordered half the light tubes removed from most of the buildings on campus. The effect is like one of those video games where you have to go into an abandoned warehouse and kill zombies.

  “Everyone knows Rodge does that,” Emma said. “You’re lucky it was just the whiteboard this time. Sometimes he writes off the edge onto the wall.”

  “You’d almost think Rodge is someone who doesn’t recognize boundaries,” Pat added.

  “How come you're worried about it now?” Emma asked. “Rodge has been writing all over the walls forever.”

  "Yeah, don't bite my head off for saying this, but you've been kind of irritable."

  I sighed. “You’re right. I haven't been sleeping well. I've been—I know this sounds ridiculous, but do you remember what Sherry’s boyfriend said? About death from bad vibes or whatever? I looked it up. There actually is something called psychogenic death. Also known as Voodoo death.”

  “You don't believe that.” Emma set down her coffee mug. “Where did you read this, anyway?”

  “Old anthropology journal.”

  “You know anthropology’s not an actual science, right?”

  “Not even going to dignify that, Emma. The thing is, I feel responsible for what happened to Kathy Banks."

  “Molly, that’s idiotic.” Emma glanced at the wall separating my office from Rodge Cowper’s, and lowered her voice. “You never killed Kathy Banks. Even if your stupid Voodoo death thing was true, which it’s not, there’s a lot of people who hated her worse than you did, so if you want to take the blame, you’re gonna hafta to get in line.”

  “So maybe I just laid on the last straw. With my bad juju or whatever, I don’t know. Ow!”

  I clapped my hand over my aching right eye.

  “What you’re describing isn’t anything magical, Molly,” Pat said. “Peoples’ own minds exact the punishment they think they deserve. It’s the same thing as when you get those eyeball headaches whenever you’re feeling guilty about something. By the way, what happened when you saw the...” Pat lowered his voice. “with your appointment?”

  “Oh, the psychiatrist?” I said.

  “You went to a psychiatrist?” Emma asked. “Good for you, Molly.”

  “I thought you said psychiatry was all tommyrot and balderdash, Emma."

  “Nah. You’re thinking of psychology,” Emma said. “Psychiatrists are real doctors. They can get you the good drugs.”

  “Well, I did keep my appointment. I’m not sure it did much good. There are people out there in the world who are genuinely sick, and here I wasted the doctor’s time, not to mention mine, just because I’ve been kind of stressed out.”

  Emma raised her eyebrows. “Kind of stressed out?”

  “You can actually see hairline cracks forming at your temples,” Pat added.

  “Oh, and, by the way, the receptionist was one of my former students. As was the pharmacist. So that was fun.”

  “Well, what happened?” Pat seemed to have a proprietary interest in my experience with mental health services.

  “I don’t know. Some glassy-eyed guy with a scraggly ponytail twirled around in his chair a couple of times like the Mad Hatter, stuffed a bunch of pills into my hand and pushed me out the door.”

  “Didn’t he even give you any follow-up instructions or anything?” Pat asked.

  “No. Oh, wait, he handed me this printed form with my discharge papers. It had some kind of boilerplate with a lot of stuff about ‘eat right, avoid alcohol and caffeine, get regular exercise,’ all that kind of quackery.”

  “Molly, come with me to the gym later. I’m doing one last upper body workout before the race. You can keep me company, and you might get inspired to do a few deadlifts or something. Pat, you wanna come too?”

  “Much as I’d love to, I have a lead on this alumni thing. I’m going to have a chance to meet some of our high-earning graduates.”

  “So Molly, you’re coming then.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I still have all this paperwork I have to do for the Student Retention Office—”

  “Put it off. I’ll come by your house and get you after dinner.”

  “The gym?” I protested. “But I...”

  “I’ll be there at seven. Try not to eat too much for dinner.”

  “Wait a minute. Pat, did you say high-earning graduates? Where are our graduates working that they’re making all this money?”

  Pat laughed.

  “Good catch, Molly. Would you believe the library?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE STUDENT GYM IS open 24 hours a day. Like the Student Retention Office complex, the student gym is gleaming and well-appointed. In fact, the SRO helped to fund its construction. Students and their guests can use it for free. After faculty and staff raised a stink, it was decided we would be allowed to use the facility too. During certain hours. For a fee.

  It was already after
nine at night when we arrived. We walked in past the juice bar, paid our admission to the sullen student worker, and entered a warehouse-sized room ringing with metallic clanging and crowd noise. Despite the crush of sweaty bodies, the state-of-the-art climate control was keeping the air fresh and chilled. The SRO funding had also provided recessed halogen lighting and polished hardwood floors.

  “It’d be nice if we could get some of this lighting in my lab,” Emma said. “Or at least put back the lights they took away.”

  “They can’t use the SRO grant for general maintenance,” I said. “Believe me, I’ve asked about it.”

  When the facilities crew came through my office to remove two of my four fluorescent light tubes, they accidentally broke the plastic diffuser cover. They apologized good-naturedly and explained that replacing it wasn’t in the budget. Pat thinks the bare fluorescent tubing has a stylish industrial look. Emma says the exposed fixture makes my office look like a Kuewa meth garage. I don’t want to pay for a replacement light cover, so I’m siding with Pat.

  Emma pointed out a couple of her students from her introductory biology class. They were shirtless, sweaty, grunting and utterly focused on working the leg press machines.

  “At least I know they’re capable of expending effort on something,” Emma said. “Even if it’s not biology class.”

  “Great example of contextual motivation,” I observed.

  “Hey, look,” Emma nudged me. “There’s Glenn.”

  “Who’s Glenn? Oh. Sherry’s boyfriend Glenn.”

  He was enmeshed in an elaborate contraption that would have filled a small room. If I didn’t know he was in that machine voluntarily, I would have guessed he was being subjected to some kind of high-tech torture. He spotted us and smiled, and extricated himself from the machine as Emma and I approached. He was wearing a black fishnet tank top, shiny black leggings, red and black wrestling shoes, and fingerless red weightlifting gloves. A lacquered yin/yang symbol hung from a black leather choker. In the warm lighting of the workout room, his orangey tan made him look like a human Creamsicle.

  “Hey, Glenn,” Emma bustled over to his machine as I struggled to keep up with her. Emma’s short legs moved quickly, covering a surprising amount of ground. “Where’s Sherry?”

  “She’s out back, having a smoke—Oh.” He grinned, realizing he had just ratted out Sherry to her paddling coach. His teeth were so white, they were almost blue. “She totally wants to quit. She’s trying, I swear.”

  “It’s okay,” Emma assured him. “I know all about it. She says it helps to keep her weight under control. It’s killing her endurance, though.”

  I noticed that the black netting of Glenn’s shirt had caught on his nipple ring. I winced and folded my arms tightly.

  “I’m trying to help her cut down.” Glenn shook his highlighted hair out of his face, misting all three of us with his sweat. I noticed he’d had his hair redone, luminous gold and caramel streaking from his no-longer-grey roots to his perfectly tousled tips. I wondered what color my hair would be if I stopped getting it dyed. I hadn’t seen my natural color in over a decade.

  “But you can’t make Sherry do anything she doesn’t want to,” Glenn was saying. “I gotta tell you, she’s really looking forward to the race. I mean, she was sad about what happened to that lady on your team, her friend, what was her name? Karen?”

  “Kathy,” Emma corrected him.

  “Oh yeah, Kathy. Anyway, Sherry’s super excited now she knows she’ll have a seat in the boat for sure.”

  “Sherry and Kathy were good friends?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Now Glenn was going to tell Sherry, my student, that I was asking nosy questions about her. Or worse, that I suspected she had a role in Kathy’s death. Which, I suddenly realized, was not such a far-fetched idea.

  Kathy and Sherry had been the two slowest paddlers on the crew, and Emma was only going to pick one of them to paddle in the Labor Day race. Kathy had been the one thing standing between Sherry and a spot in the team canoe.

  Fortunately, Glenn didn’t seem to find anything strange about my question.

  “Oh, yeah!” he said. “I mean, the whole crew was pretty close. You know, Sherry’s kinda competitive, but yeah, they were pretty tight. They were all doing that weird diet together.”

  I glanced at myself in the wall mirror. “So how does that diet work again?” I asked.

  “It's kinda hardcore,” he said. “Only five hundred calories a day.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Never mind.”

  “And Sherry has to inject herself with this stuff at the same time every day. It’s called human, uh...”

  “Human chorionic gonadotropin,” Emma said.

  “Uh, yeah, thanks, Emma. Yeah. It’s hard for Sherry, cause her diabetes? She’s gotta take insulin, and it’s got these little bitty needles, exactly like the, uh...”

  He gestured, searching for the words.

  “Human chorionic gonadotropin,” Emma repeated. “You can just call it HCG.”

  “Cool, thanks, Emma. Yeah, the HCG. Those little needles look exactly the same, so Sherry has to be super careful not to get them mixed up. She told me it would be bad if she took two doses of insulin by mistake.”

  Glenn shook his layered hair again. This time, I stepped back to avoid the sweat spray.

  “That diet sounds complicated,” I said.

  “Seriously,” he agreed. “But she’s totally into it. I told her I think she’s already skinny enough, but she wants you guys to do good at the Labor Day race and she says she doesn’t want to slow the team down. Sherry’s totally, I don’t know what the word is, but when she wants something, she gets it.” Glenn flashed a flawless blue-white smile. “I kinda dig that about her.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I HAD A LATE LUNCH date with Donnie. He works through the lunch rush at the Drive-Inn, so he doesn’t take his lunch break until around two. The timing meant I was going to miss an important meeting. At one-thirty, my faculty colleagues were convening to forge a sternly worded resolution concerning the Student Retention Office’s “streamlining” of our curriculum (that is, removing the history requirement).

  The real reason for my absence wasn’t simply a schedule conflict. It was pure, self-serving cowardice. Attending the meeting would be tantamount to opposing the Student Retention Office publicly. I would have to be out of my mind to do such a thing, especially before I had tenure. It was better for me to be off-campus entirely while the meeting was going on.

  The aroma of garlicky puttanesca sauce tickled my nose as I approached the front door. Donnie makes his puttanesca with plenty of green and Kalamata olives, goes light on the capers, and serves a generous helping over perfectly al dente linguine. I reached for the doorbell but paused when I heard my stomach growling. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, and I was starving. Once the visceral clamor had subsided, I rang the bell.

  Donnie greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

  “I have to show you something.” He took me by the hand and started to lead me down the hallway. Where the bedrooms were, or so I remembered from the one time he’d given me a full tour of his house. Donnie’s master bedroom, I recalled, was as elegant as the rest of his place. A low slung platform squatted on the luminous, perfectly inlaid maple floor. Three framed lithographs by a local artist depicted the Hawaiian creation story in sepia ink on cream paper.

  Was he actually planning on our rumpling those raw silk sheets while puttanesca sauce bubbled away on the stovetop? This was so oddly out of character for him that I wasn’t sure how to react. Should I feel flattered? Annoyed? Concerned?

  We paused at a closed door, and he released my hand. As it turned out, I wasn’t going to see the master bedroom today.

  “Do you remember Davison’s room?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “This used to be a little boy’s room. Now Davison’s a grown man, the bunk bed and posters, all those little-boy things, those aren’t quite a
ppropriate anymore. I thought I should buy him some grown up furniture.”

  “To mark his being an independent adult,” I said.

  “Exactly. I have a furniture wholesaler in L.A. I like. I sent Davison a catalog and let him pick out the bedroom set he wanted. And he did, all by himself.”

  “You must be very proud of him."

  “You’ll appreciate this, Molly. He chose something from the ‘Italian Classic Bedroom’ collection. It’s called Barocco.”

  Had I ever mentioned to Donnie that I’m not actually Italian? I couldn’t remember. It would seem petty to bring it up now.

  “Davison told me he liked this bedroom set because it reminded him of his truck.”

  “His truck? How does a bedroom set remind someone of a truck?”

  “It’s black with a lot of silver trim. It took a while to get everything shipped in and set up, but it’s finally done.”

  Donnie swung the door open with a flourish.

  I gasped.

  The hulking bed had a headboard and footboard of rococo silver leaf, set off with tufted black leather insets. Like Davison’s truck, it was massive and black and gaudy. At least I didn’t see a “Power Stroke Turbo” badge anywhere. The matching dresser was black lacquer, festooned with some kind of curly silver trim and topped with a smoked, silver-veined mirror. A gold-framed print of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus hung over the headboard.

  “Oh my goodness," I stammered, grasping for something nice to say. "Is that a, uh, heart shape in the trim on the headboard?” The headboard design only vaguely resembled a heart. What it really looked like was an angry little fat face, with two hostile button eyes.

  “I didn’t see that before. It’s sweet that you noticed, Molly.” How could Donnie look at this and sound so happy?

  “Didn't this room used to have a hardwood floor? Like the rest of the house?” I asked, poking a tentative toe at the plush carpet. “The red color is definitely striking. Have you read The Masque of the Red Death by any chance?”