Universe 15

by Terry Carr

  I hate crowds, and I have an absolute phobia of being jostled. So even though I knew a lot of the people at The Div, I didn’t try to mingle with them. I just got my beer and looked around for a place to drink it in peace.

  But there wasn’t a peaceful spot in the whole bar. The music was turned up loud and grated on my nerves. There were wall-to-wall legal secretaries and junior executive types all hunting at full bore. I could feel myself working up a good case of claustrophobia.

  I told myself I could always walk out the door and finish my beer in the parking lot. Braced by that reassurance, I strolled into the back room of The Div, where they had a few tables for people who wanted to eat as well as guzzle. I crossed my fingers, but it seemed I was out of luck there too. Every one of the tables was packed. I was just about to make for the parking lot when I saw Rod, the President of our company, tear out of the room with a look of fury on his face.

  Rod is short for Radhakrishnon. Our President is an engineer from M.I.T. who went on to the University of Texas to study petroleum engineering. He used a stake from his father in Calcutta to start up an oil company consulting business, and along the way he branched out into real estate development as well. Today Rod is a very rich man and, so I’m told, very much used to getting his own way.

  Apparently he hadn’t gotten his way tonight. I saw that there were a number of tables spaced along the far wall of the room, each shaded by a little canopy, and raised above the floor so you had to climb up several steps to get to them. At one of these sat Martha Carvajal, the newest Vice-President of our company, looking as if she’d like to shoot someone. As I watched, she glared at Rod’s retreating back, and then polished off the glass of white wine in front of her in one gulp.

  I was too tired to care what she thought of me; I just wanted to drink my beer and not be trampled. I went up to her table. “I’m Keith Morrow, Ms. Carvajal,” I said, “and I can’t seem to find a place to drink my beer. Would you mind if I shared your table? I promise I’m not trying to pick you up.”

  I thought she was going to say no. Actually, I thought she was going to tell me to get the hell out of there. She frowned—but then seemed to decide that one unpleasant scene a night was enough.

  “Go ahead,” she said, and looked sullenly at her empty glass.

  I thanked her and sat down. I sipped my beer and tried to project an amiable silence. Then the waitress came by, and I ordered another beer. Out of politeness, I looked at our Vice-President. “Ms. Carvajal? Another glass?” I asked.

  She hesitated, then nodded. “White wine,” she said. There followed a split-second pause, then she made a disgusted face and said, “No, wait. I really loathe white wine, but you’re expected to drink it, you know? Bring me a shot of tequila with salt and lime.”

  She thrust her glass at the waitress and sat back in her chair. When the drink arrived, she dipped the lime in salt, took a king-sized bite of it, and downed half the tequila. I decided I liked her, and that she might even be approachable.

  I’d glimpsed her at the company earlier in the day, and had thought her a striking woman. Now, looking at her close up, I was enthralled. It wasn’t that she was beautiful. In fact, as I sized her up, I thought she would have been downright plain except for the way she dressed, the way she carried herself, and something about her eyes. But she was one of those women for whom the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.

  She had olive skin as smooth as marble, and dark, penetrating eyes. Her hair was long, dark, expensively streaked, and pulled back in a woman executive’s bun. This set off her high, arched nose, so that the whole effect was regal, something like a haughty Spanish grande dame who had just walked straight out of a Velazquez. She was dressed in a dark suit, exquisitely tailored; even my unpracticed eye could see that it was the finest money could buy. In her ears she wore two diamond studs, and in the lapel of her suit a diamond stickpin; they were a full carat each if they were anything. I had no doubt whatsoever they were real.

  “What do you think of the company?” I asked. God, I thought to myself, how banal I sounded.

  “I can tell you what I think of its President,” she replied. “He’s a creep. Do you know what he did? Here it is, my first day on the job, and he invited me out for a drink and propositioned me.”

  “Looked to me like you put him in his place.”

  “I did,” she said. “What does he think I am, stupid or something? Why should I go to bed with him after I was hired?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “I told him it would take one hell of a promotion to get me interested. If he felt like making me President, I said, perhaps we could discuss it.”

  “Well. It seemed to shut him up.”

  She smiled, as if quite proud of herself. When the waitress sailed by, I ordered us another round. The beer began to warm my toes and loosen me up a bit, and I fervently hoped the tequila was having a similar effect on Martha. The more I looked at her, the more I was drawn to her, just like a fly in a spider’s web. She fascinated me. She spoke to forgotten memories and associations buried deep inside my brain; I wouldn’t have left the table for anything at that point.

  She was a hard drinker, with a far greater tolerance than mine. We kept each other company for another hour, downing beer and tequila, looking like we were together, so that no one came over to bother us. I sensed that the day had been hard on her; perhaps it had been some kind of personal turning point, and she had the shakes, so she wanted to get drunk and talk. That was fine with me—I wasn’t the type to go to singles bars and pick up women. I was a lot more comfortable, and a lot more interested, just talking and finding out who they were. Maybe it was my Sixties upbringing, maybe not, but that was my character.

  “What do you do at the company?” she asked.

  I looked down at my beer. “Nothing exciting. I’m a very minor wheel in the real estate section. I was an English major, you see; my skills are pretty limited.”

  “Did you start work for the company right after college?”

  “No,” I said, and sighed in spite of myself. “I got a Master’s. William Butler Yeats. Now I’m thirty-three, and I work for a corporation.”

  “I’m thirty-three also,” said Martha.

  “And look at you! A Vice-President already. Someday you’ll run this company.”

  Her eyes flashed. “This company, or another. I’ll be President.”

  I felt suddenly uncomfortable, as if a cold wind had entered the bar through an open window. But Martha gave me a quick smile, a most charming smile, and said, “I’d like very much to get out of this city tonight. Will you take me somewhere?”

  “What?” I floundered, searching for words. “Where?”

  “Out of town.” She looked at me, eyes dancing. “Did you go to the University in Austin?”

  “Yes, for my Master’s.”

  “Let’s go there. Do you remember that little cafe next to campus, the one called Les Frères?”

  I nodded.

  “It doesn’t close until two in the morning. We can be there in three hours. We can sit in the patio under the stars, and look up at the Tower. It will be all lighted up, you know. I think the moon is even out tonight. We can order hot spiced wine and remember how much fun it was to be students.”

  “You’re not talking much like a Vice-President,” I said uncertainly. She smiled. “I’m not a Vice-President again till Monday. Let’s go.”

  “Done,” I said. I was a little drunk by then. I pulled out some money, put it on the table, and took her arm. We hurried out to the parking lot, almost perfect strangers, and I led her to my car.

  “Oh, my,” said Martha when she caught sight of it, “the company’s not doing right by you.”

  “This is Robert,” I said. “I will never give him up. He is a 1968 Datsun and he has never once broken down on me. Though I live to afford a Porsche, I will never forsake Robert. I will restore him, and put him out to pasture in the backyard.”

  “Execut
ives don’t have backyards,” she replied, “they have condos.”

  “But I’m not an executive. At least, not much of one. I’m different.” I put her in Robert’s passenger seat, got in behind the steering wheel, and fired him up. “Goodbye, Houston,” I said, “goodbye, petrochemicals.”

  “Amen,” said Martha.

  I turned on the headlights and tore out of the parking lot. “I’m setting the chronometer for 1968, ladies and gentlemen. The voyage will take approximately three hours; please relax and enjoy your trip.”

  “I haven’t heard anyone talk like that since I left school,” she said, smiling at me from her side of the car. “You’re so much fun.”

  I felt warm all over. Expansive—here was this compelling woman, sitting beside me in my beat-up old car, drawing words out of me with her smile. I felt wonderful.

  “I haven’t talked to anyone with imagination since I got my M.B.A.,” Martha continued, “and that was eight years ago. I’ve done nothing but climb the ladder ever since.”

  “Climb the ladder?” I repeated. “That could be taken a number of ways. What way did you mean it?”

  “Why, I meant climbing the corporate ladder, I guess. Getting ahead in life. Achieving. What else could I mean?”

  “Climbing the ladder of life. The Ladder.”

  Martha was silent for a moment. “I can tell we’re going to have one of those delightful collegiate conversations,” she said at length. “Do go on.” I steered the car onto Highway 290, toward Austin, youth, and adventure. I pushed hard on the accelerator, got old Robert up to sixty, and kept him there.

  “Let me tell you a funny story,” I said. “One day about twenty years ago my father was browsing through an old thrift shop in Mineral Wells, where I grew up. He came upon a pile of scrapbooks someone had kept, about an eccentric Texas oilman named J. Edgar Davis. He’d been a big gun in the Twenties, and had spent a million dollars to keep a play on Broadway called The Ladder. It was about reincarnation.”

  I heard Martha draw in her breath suddenly. “And?”

  The lights of Houston dimmed behind us. I sat back in my seat, wishing Robert had cruise control, and contemplated the next three hours with great relish. “Davis was my kind of guy,” I said. “He really believed in that play, even though nobody went to it. It was free, you see—he wanted to get the message across that bad. But even so, hardly anybody went to it.”

  “Do you believe in reincarnation?” There was a sharp note to Martha’s question; she was not just making conversation.

  “Oh, it’s fun to think about,” I said. “Do you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I glanced over at her. One thing was very clear: she had said she wasn’t sure in the exact tone of voice of one who is very sure—but is afraid to admit it.

  “You want to hear a story?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said quickly. She flashed those eyes at me again, and I practically fell over myself getting the words out of my mouth.

  “This happened to me in college. It just about made me believe in reincarnation—in fact, I think that’s the only explanation for what happened.”

  “Tell,” said Martha, her voice soft and caressing, and I launched into my tale.

  The story takes place in a town called Burwell. It’s in North Texas just a few miles shy of the Oklahoma border, too far from Dallas for much civilization to rub off. At one time, however, it was called “The Athens of Texas.”

  I went to a little college there, one founded just after the Civil War, named Barker College. It was what passed for snooty in North Texas. Barker was the place rich people sent their kids to keep them from running wild at the University down in Austin. Consequently, if you weren’t rich you didn’t count at Barker, even if you went there on scholarship the way I did.

  I started there in 1970, when we had about a dozen hard-core hippies on campus. They made life bearable to me, since I wasn’t about to pledge one of the local frats. My friends and I were very close—we studied together, ate together, did everything together. Outside our group, we had no friends at Barker.

  To give you an idea what the place was like, chapel was still mandatory on Sundays when I went there. No alcohol was allowed, and sex on campus was strictly forbidden. If you got caught, the boy was suspended for a week and the girl was expelled for good. Even so, people tried it—once they even caught a couple going at it in the chapel, and after that, some other people in a tree outside the choir robing room. I thought it was pretty repressive, but most of the students were pretty repressed, and didn’t find it so unreasonable at all.

  There was a rule you had to live on campus, but my friends and I were pretty resourceful. Most of us found sympathetic doctors and told them about the college busting the couple having sex in the tree. After that, the doctors would write the college a letter telling them why we couldn’t deal with living on campus in a dorm—for medical reasons, of course. At that point, we pooled our money and looked around town for a house to rent.

  We finally lucked into a house just a few blocks from campus. It was the old Cavender house, built around the turn of the century by a man who had been President of the college from 1910 until 1930. He’d left it to his daughter, a maiden lady who had died the past summer, and the house was finally up for rent.

  It had fifteen rooms, and we got it for the grand total of one hundred and twenty dollars per month. We got it so cheap for two reasons, one of which was that the real estate management company had no intention of fixing it up, since they wanted to sell it off as quickly as possible. However, the second reason was downright sinister, and we only found out about it after we’d moved into the house.

  In 1930, Burwell was the scene of one of the last lynchings in Texas. Even in the Seventies Burwell was a tiny, narrow-minded, shuttered sort of town—you can imagine what it was like in the early part of the century. I never figured out what the hell it was doing in Texas. It wasn’t a frontier town; it was southern Gothic, straight out of the backwoods of Louisiana or Alabama. Even by the Sixties, the blacks still lived on one side of town and stayed poor, while the whites lived on the other side and pretended they didn’t exist.

  Well, in 1930, as I said, there was a lynching in Burwell. It took place May 10, and made the New York Times and the London Daily Mail A black man named George Hughes was accused of attacking a white woman and imprisoned in a steel-and-cement vault in the county courthouse while awaiting trial. A rumor got out that he had been spirited away and taken to the county jail, and a mob then formed and attacked the jail. When they found Hughes was not there, they advanced on the courthouse. They dynamited the walls, and used acetylene torches and even more dynamite to shatter the steel vault to get Hughes. This was all in spite of the National Guard, the Texas Rangers, and miscellaneous state troops. Around midnight they got into the vault, tied Hughes up, and put him in the back of a pickup truck. Then they had a parade. They drove all over the town, passed through the Negro quarter, and strung Hughes up in a tree in front of the Cavender house. When he was dead, they returned to the quarter and burned all the stores and homes in a three-block radius.

  Why the Cavender house? Well, the local men and women disliked and distrusted the college—that’s common enough. But Cavender, the President, was a man with beliefs years ahead of his time. He was a very humane sort of man—liberal, dignified, one of those nineteenth-century Americans who spoke out for his fellow man, in this case his fellow black man. The locals hated Cavender in particular, and so they fixed him, by leaving Hughes’s body strung up in his front yard.

  “Is this true?” Martha demanded. “I’ve never heard a whisper of this story, and I’ve lived in this state all my life.”

  The lights of a car whizzed past us; I kept Robert going sixty, heading west. “It’s all true,” I replied. “Now, understand one thing. I’m not saying every white person in Burwell was evil, nor every black man a saint. I’m not even saying that no black man from Burwell ever attacked a white
woman. But one thing was true: in those days if you were black, and you got caught in a dubious-looking situation, no one stopped to ask questions. You had to have a death wish to so much as speak ugly to a white woman. In George’s case, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with the wrong white man for a friend. I happen to know he didn’t do it.”

  “How?”

  “I heard him say so.” I stretched, settled back in the car seat, and went on with the story.

  So all of us moved into the Cavender house, which we got for cheap because no one local wanted to live in it. There were at least a dozen of us, but the only one of my friends you should know about was Mike Donnell.

  Mike was what people meant by white trash—or he should have been. He came from Texarkana, from nowhere, and had no family except for a father who was a drunk. Mike mentioned his father three times in the years I knew him, each time with loathing.

  Mike was tall, skinny, and had a chest caved in like a cereal bowl. His face was sort of pinched, and there was a sickly white cast to his skin, as if he’d never gotten much to eat besides biscuits and grits when he was a kid. He came from the kind of people who are bigots because, that way, they have somebody to look down on—otherwise they’d be on the bottom of the heap.

  But Mike wasn’t like that. He got through high school in Texarkana with pretty decent grades. Right after, he enlisted and went to Vietnam. He survived that, too, and used to make people real mad by saying it was because he didn’t get stoned all the time he was over there. When his army time was up, he came back to the States and took his college boards. To everyone’s surprise, he scored very high, and when he applied to Barker they accepted him. He got money from the government, as well as a soldier’s scholarship from some super-patriotic Barker alum, and so he managed to scrape by and get through college.