Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Sherwood Graves.”

  “Well, was there something more?”

  “Yes, Mr. Rickey. Let’s sit down.” Linda goes back in the house to bring coffee for Robert and Graves starts asking about Martha Yeats. Nothing like death to flush out interest in a person, nothing like murder to make someone more than what they were. She’s a hot topic: become a corpse and you’re the talk of the town. Graves takes Robert through the story. They met at graduate school in Michigan. He was in English, she was in history. They hook up, live together, get married, go on the job market. Rob’s transcript matches Martha’s, basically straight A’s, but Martha’s a woman in a hot field, gender and history. Publishers are interested in her thesis. No way Rob could compete with that. Then it kind of falls apart.

  “No fights, no broken dishes, no lipstick on the collar,” Robert tells Graves. “Nothing even close to that. No melodrama.”

  He takes a deep breath and for just a minute, he’s out of words, the ones he prepared ahead of time.

  “I’m sorry she’s dead,” he says. “We were finished a long time ago but it bothers me that she won’t be around doing Martha-type things...”

  “Could anything she did have...” Graves didn’t have a chance to finish.

  “I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her. Don’t waste your time on the faculty. Faculty don’t kill. Their main hobby is feeling badly treated. I’d put my money on a stranger.”

  “Until last night, I’d have agreed with you, Mr. Rickey,” Graves says. He stops, enjoying the moment. Robert has been in control until now. But Graves has something. He knows it. He leans across the picnic table. “I checked Martha Yeats’ hiring. The search. Nothing unusual. Nothing irregular. The circumstances at the time of her death, the scene of her death, her colleagues, her students. Nothing. I checked her love life...after you. Nothing.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Robert agrees. “Just this morning, I find that kind of sad.”

  “In the files, though, there was a name that Provost Ives didn’t mention. A candidate in a search that occurred before she became provost. Gerald Kurt Garner.”

  “Oh my God!” That’s Linda bursting out and regretting it right away, when we all turn towards her. “The G-Man,” she adds weakly, like a little girl, which it turns out she was, when she knew him.

  “Please...” Graves says. He’s surprised to hear from her but he recovers fast. “This isn’t...a trial.” Yeah sure, and he wasn’t a cop investigating a murder. He was just a connoisseur of people. “If there’s something...”

  “Puppy love,” she says after a while. Trying to sound light-hearted. “Big man on a small campus. He came from the south of the state, one of those Ohio River towns that are famous for football players. Full scholarship. He was something. He was blonde, and broad-shouldered and smart and not crazy and a smile that...” She stops. She can’t help picturing him. It takes her breath away. “He wore chinos and t-shirts and sneakers, same junk they wear today but then it was a sign of innocence, not indifference. A crewcut, would you believe, and oh what a smile. The world by the balls, without half trying, and my just-barely teenage heart in his hands.”

  She stops and she’s shaking, right on the edge of losing it and I’m standing there watching. Crying is something I’ve never seen her do.

  “I have no idea where he is or what he’s doing,” she says to Graves. “Excuse me. I feel like shit.”

  She walks away and the walk turns into a little bit of a run up the sidewalk, through the porch, the screen door slamming behind her.

  “Alright,” Graves says. “Mr. Rickey? Anything from Martha Yeats about Gerald Kurt Garner?”

  “No,” Rob says. “But I heard that Wright’s picked boy applied for a tenure-track position and Martha spiked it. Carried the whole department with her by sheer force of will.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “She fucked Wright’s wunderkind over, that’s for sure. Maybe you should go talk to Wright about it. It was all about him anyways. The kid got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Was Mr. Garner angry? Did you hear anything? Threats?”

  “I never met the man. But let me speak for all the trailing, adjunct, part-time this or thats of the academic world. If I came out of the boondocks like some barefoot Buckeye Lincoln, if I got a scholarship to a college which not only educated me but persuaded me that I was the American-dream-come-true, if they were proud of me and I made them prouder by winning a Rhodes and if I packed off to England for three years and worked just like I did here and then I topped things off at graduate school and applied for a job at the very school that made me what I am, thank you very much, and my whole plan was to serve where I once had been served, to take the baton from Hiram Wright’s trembling liver-spotted hands, if I returned to the place that mattered most to me, if I came back home and found myself facing Martha Yeats, and if it all fell apart because of her, would I be pissed off? Hell, yeah, I’d be pissed off. But I don’t know about killing her. It’s been a while.”

  “So it has,” Graves agreed. “We’ll go now.”

  “Uh...could you give me a minute?” I asked, motioning towards the house. Linda was in there and I had to check on her before we went. Graves was annoyed, but he nodded yes. Then it came to me, I should ask Robert Rickey’s permission. “Okay if I go in for a minute?”

  “Hey, be my guest,” he said. “It’s your house.” There was another line hanging in the air between us. She’s your wife.

  Linda was at the sink, splashing water over her face, her eyes.

  “Don’t rub. They’ll turn red.”

  “Oh, hell, Billy,” she said.

  “He must have been quite a guy.” Meaning: you never cried for me. I never made you feel like shit. All of which she ignored. It wasn’t about me. It was this thing from years ago.

  “I was the kid behind the goal post, catching the extra points,” she said. “He was a quarterback, a fraternity president, valedictorian. He had it all down, that small college thing. He was the Sangy Man besides.”

  “The what?”

  “Sandwiches. Ham and cheese, bologna and lettuce. We made them in his room and then we drove around the dorms at night. ‘Sangy Man, Sangy Man,’ I’d shout, running up and down the halls and the students would come out of the rooms, like prisoners coming out of a row of cells. He was Sangy Man, I was Sangy Girl. Sometimes he took me into town for chili afterward. I had a crush on him and nothing happened...”

  She stopped and just sat there, not knowing how to end the sentence. I backed away, said I’d be checking on her. I guessed she heard me.

  “What do you think of the G-Man?” Graves asked, on the way home.

  “I don’t know who did it,” I said. “But I hope he didn’t.”

  “For your ex-wife’s sake?”

  “Everybody’s sake,” I said. “But what the hell do I know?”

  “You know something, Billy? You belong in the Guinness Book of Records for self deprecation. Putting yourself down.”

  “Well thanks a lot,” I said. “I had a lot of help along the way. It was a team effort. I’d like to thank my ex-wife, my uncle, my employer and the State Police of Ohio.”

  Graves didn’t respond to that. All he said was that he didn’t need me the next day. So I dropped him off at his motel and drove away wondering how a man who didn’t drive would spend his time, what he’d do in that motel room, where he’d find his meals, whether the fast food places up and down the road would be open on Labor Day. I thought about asking him to come with me, but there was no way he’d fit, where I was going.

  Next morning out in Millwood, six miles from campus, I turned off the main road onto a dirt track that took me past a row of mobile homes that weren’t so mobile and trailers that had come to the end of the trail and funky tar-paper-shingled cabins along a river which wasn’t what it used to be, especially at the end of summer when the current’s so slow, it could take years for a beer can
to float down to New Orleans. Tom and Marsha’s place was at the end of the road. Even before I saw the people I knew who was there by their trucks. Almost all of them college employees, one way or another. There’d be Harry Burmeister who worked on buildings and grounds and Bev Sanders who answered phones in maintenance and Woody Thomas who used to be a janitor until he retired but he still drove for the college, chauffeuring the president and visiting big shots and trustees between the college and the airport at Columbus. There was Eddie Duncan who worked for the food service, got laid off every summer and went on unemployment until they hired him again in the fall. These were the folks who watched me grow up, who’d help raise me. And this Labor Day picnic was a ceremony that went back forever.

  “Look, it’s the law,” someone said as I came walking around the back of the shack. “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” someone else sang out. I’d been through it all, the lines and jokes. “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” and “Go ahead, make my day.” Old stuff, all of it.

  I took some macaroni salad, a corn dog and a handful of potato chips, filled a plastic glass full of no-name cola out of a jumbo sized plastic bottle the size of a gasoline can. Then, like I always did, I sat at the edge of the crowd and let the talk wash over me.

  Come-and-get-it-day was the topic. Come-and-get-it-day happened every May. The thing is, the students empty out the freshman dorms one weekend and the next weekend they’ve got families of graduating seniors staying in those same rooms, which have got to be cleaned in the meantime. Did I say cleaned? I meant scrubbed, deodorized, disinfected, damn near sandblasted. So Tom’s wife, Marsha and some other local women would go walking into the valley of death with mops and buckets and toxic chemicals, working their way up the corridors room by room. And loving it. Incredible, the stuff those students left behind. Money, first. All the women carried purses for the change they found, dusty coins on bookshelves, under beds, at the back of closets, not just pennies and nickels either, all this money the students didn’t bother picking up, and enough pens and papers to write a book, t-shirts and sweatshirts and socks, unwashed or washed the wrong way, bleached and shrunk and wasted. It’s like a movie where a sudden plague kills off everyone, maybe a neutron bomb, and a handful of survivors, hicks who live in the woods, come into town and pick through what got left behind. Marsha’s got Alzheimer’s now. She’s in a care center. Tom goes every day to feed her, even though she doesn’t know him. “Like putting a coin in a vending machine and getting nothing back,” he says. “No change, no coke.”

  Across all this talk about what they’d come across—shirts never worn, running shoes lightly used, a lifetime supply of tennis balls, an abandoned $300 mountain bike—I see Tom looking at me, looking hard. He points his finger at the inside of the trailer. He gets up and I follow. By the time I come through the door, he’s stretched out in his Lazy Boy. I sit in a chair that’s so old, I can remember picking loose change out from under the seat cushion when I was a kid.

  “Look at them,” Tom says, pointing through the screen door. Where we sit is dark, and out there, the picnic is in bright summer light, a little sad and smoky from the barbecue, so it’s like I’m looking at my old friends from a distance, through wisps of clouds that smell like hot dogs. They’re growing old, that’s what I think. The picnic stays the same but folks drop off, down to Florida or the old folks places. Or they die.

  “They’re like house servants on some old plantation,” Tom says. “We lock the doors and mow the grass. We pick up the bloody knife, the broken glass, the dirty laundry and act like Christmas when they let our women clean out the dorms.”

  “I guess,” I say. “But they look happy to me.”

  “Happiness isn’t everything,” Tom says. He groans and gets out of the Lazy-Boy, which groans along with him. He walks over to a table with some shelves above it and turns on a lamp that’s no brighter than a candle. None of what I see was here last year. It’s a shrine to his son, Tony. I barely remember the guy. When I picture him I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is something I saw myself or part of a picture, like the ones in front of me now: Tony on the football field, Tony in cap and gown, Tony in uniform. He was a super kid, they say, the best pure athlete they’ve ever had around here. But it was Vietnam and Tony joined the Marines and you know how the story ends. The flag that draped his coffin is pinned to the wall behind the pictures. Like I say, I hardly remember him. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering what all he would have amounted to, whether he would have gone from failing farm to shutting down factory to working for the college just like me. I spot a photo of Tony out on the railroad trestle next to our place, pointing a gun at the sky. Same trestle, same river, I could even recognize some of the trees, a shoal of sand and logs that’s still there in the middle of the river. Everything still there but his son is gone forever. And his wife’s as good as gone, too. All he’s got to look at is me and himself in the mirror. And I don’t think he cares much for what he sees.

  “Know something?” Tom says behind me. “Time doesn’t heal jack. You stop crying. You can’t cry every day. But inside, you’re screaming. And this...”

  He gestures at the shrine he made, then sits back down. “It’s bullshit! I know it. I thought I was keeping him alive. But he’s always the same in the photos. And the photos get old...”

  “Come on, Tom,” I say. It’s hard for me, putting a hand on his shoulder. Usually it’s the other way around. He shrugged me right off.

  “And when I’m gone somebody’ll come into this place and ask who’s the kid in all these pictures? And then, it’ll be who was that kid, who’s old stuff was that? And it’ll go from someone knowing to sort of knowing, to not knowing and not giving a shit. Get it?”

  I nod. I wonder the same thing some time, what it would take to make people remember, not someone famous, but one of us. What was a true memorial for the likes of us?

  “So how’s it going?” Tom asks.

  “I got a question for you.”

  “Well...shoot.”

  “Why’d you take me to that meeting? The one with the cops and the big shots? They didn’t need me to be there.”

  “Right. They didn’t need you to be there. You needed to be there.”

  “I did?”

  “For your own good. Teach you a lesson. I want you to see that college from the inside. Not keep walking around the place like a servant.”

  “But that’s what we are.”

  “That’s what you are,” he fired back.

  “Driving Sherwood Graves around is going to change that? Shutting up while I’m behind the wheel, so he can get a chance to think?”

  “Maybe it’ll rub off. Let’s try. What do you think?”

  “Of Graves?”

  “Yeah. Your new boss.”

  “I think...” I sit there, forced to put it together, things that came to me here and there. “I think we’re learning about the college and how it works and all. And we’re learning about Martha Yeats. But we don’t know anything about who killed her.”

  Tom nods. Maybe I said the right thing after all. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I don’t know what we’re looking for. Or how. What Graves’ game is. He gives out information on a need-to-know basis and I don’t need to know nothing, it seems like. And...” This next wouldn’t have come back to me if Tom hadn’t pressed me, made me think. “We were out at Hiram Wright’s place...”

  “‘The smartest man for miles around,’” he says, remembering my father’s phrase.

  “Yeah. And Wright made a fuss about meeting me. About Dad. And then Wright looks at Graves and says ‘I know you too.’ What was that about? Is Graves that famous?”

  “Well,” Tom says. “You learned a lot.” He got quiet, the way he did when he was about to teach me something. It’s like he enjoyed the fact that what came next, what I learned from him, was going to change me. “Graves is the son of Rudolph Graves. That name doesn’t mean a thing these days. Rudolph was
a professor here, back in the fifties. Philosophy or some such. He was kind of outspoken. A red, they said...a communist. They ran him out of here. You should ask Ave Hayes about it. He was around back then...”

  “Was he guilty?”

  “Shit. No revolutions around this part of Ohio. If I wanted to make a revolution, I wouldn’t come here to start one and I sure as hell wouldn’t start at this particular college. But if I wanted a good living talking about it, that’s different. He ran his mouth like they all do.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Rudolph the Red. He stayed around, believe it or not. Took an apartment in town, on the square. Drank. Became a local character. Died a few years later. Don’t suppose he knew his son too well. His ex-wife was raising him someplace else, I remember. Bottom line is, his son is back. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “You think before you’re sure. That’s what thinking does. It makes you sure. So think about this. He’s coming back to the college where his father got destroyed. I think it’s his dream come true. He doesn’t look it, but the man is loving every minute. You wonder that he’s taking his time? No particular target? No special rush?”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” I say, but know it doesn’t matter, what I hope. He gets up and we walk outside and before long Tom’s joking about the time he took Warren Niles to the annual raccoon dinner in Danville, back in the early years, before Warren gave up on being a regular guy. When I leave, the men are playing horseshoes. I look back and maybe it’s just the mood I’m in, but it feels like they’re all part of a photograph that’s twenty years old, Tom and his dead son Tony, me and my parents, those horseshoe-playing men, those women who warn you to leave room for pie, slipping away from me. That’s what I’m thinking, something like that, and wondering what Tom was wondering, what it would take for the likes of us to be remembered. I get home and the phone’s ringing inside my trailer. “Buy an answering machine,” Sherwood Graves says. “Happy Labor Day,” I respond. Then he tells me to come pick him up right away. He wants us to find a professor named Mark May.