by Kluge, P. F.
“He’s been waiting forever to deliver that speech to someone. Anyone.”
“Just wanted to get it off his chest? I don’t think so. His son’s in trouble and he knows it.” Graves picked up the folder that we’d looked over. He gave the kid a hard stare, like he was turning him into a wanted poster. “That old man might get to know what it’s like to have a son in front of a real judge and jury.”
I let a few miles pass, wondering if this was the way it worked, rounding up the usual suspects. Graves wanted to be dropped off in Columbus, he said. Phone calls and paperwork and after that it was just a matter of time. I saw a Bob Evans restaurant coming up off an exit ramp and, without asking permission, I turned in.
“We need gas, Billy?”
“I need food,” I said. “Biscuits and gravy will get me through until supper.”
“Can’t you wait? I’ve got calls to make,” Now he was getting cranky. He could accept a car needing gas, not a driver getting hungry. “That warrant...I’ll have to find a judge...”
“No you won’t.” It was odd, how power shifted between us just then, like in the movie where some average taxi driver, say, pulls a gun and turns out to be a hit-man. Graves went along quietly on into Bob Evans, and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with milk.
“That kid isn’t our man, Mr. Graves,” I said, after a while. Eat first, then talk: my plate was mostly empty. “When I went to use the bathroom, there were a bunch of postcards and pictures in the hall, stuck into the corkboard. And our boy was there...”
“So...”
“In the uniform of the U.S. Marines.”
“They get leave after training, Billy. They get R and R.”
“They get assigned to Okinawa, Mr. Graves. APO address. I checked the dates. One of them was August. Another was September...”
He sat there a while, just sat. “I’ll have to check it out,” he admitted in a voice that was dead. It was just a reflex. He took a bite of the sandwich, not because he was hungry. It was something to do to buy time while he tried to cover up what he was feeling. When he put the sandwich down, he’d decided he was mad at me.
“Why’d you just sit there after you knew? You couldn’t have pulled me aside? Whispered something to me? Or...was it you liked the idea of knowing something I didn’t?”
“I sat there like you told me to sit, Mr. Graves. I kept my mouth shut. You told me my role was to smile, nod, and not be threatening. So you said. Well, I didn’t threaten anybody, now did I?”
He thought that over while the waitress asked was everything okay and when she finished pouring coffee a miracle occurred. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Billy, I suppose I had that coming,” he said. “I underestimated you...” He paused, letting his confession sink in. I can’t say I wasn’t enjoying myself. “I overestimated you as well. I assumed you would know enough...be enough of a professional...to share something like that with me.”
“I had expectations too,” I said. “Maybe we could both do better, Mr. Graves.”
“Let’s see if we can,” he said. “We can’t afford secrets from each other.”
He kept on like that, all the way back north. We were partners now. Two professionals, no secrets between us. I decided to try my luck.
“I was wondering,” I began, “about Garner. The G-Man.”
“Oh. Your wife’s old flame.”
“Could I look into him some? See what’s in the records?”
“He didn’t do it, Billy. Not after so long. People don’t come back like that.”
“You did,” I shot back and it was like I slapped him, what I said and how I said it so fast. He sat there, sizing me up, kind of surprised.
“So you heard about me?” He sounded offended, like he’d caught me reading his mail.
“You and your father,” I said.
“Who from?”
“Well, Hiram Wright mentioned something about your background when we went out to visit. He didn’t put me in the picture, though. Neither did you.”
“So...someone else...”
“Yes...someone else. Let’s just leave it at that, Mr. Graves. You’ve got your business, I’ve got mine.”
“Okay, Billy,” he said, but he stayed quiet for a while and I guessed he was thinking it over. I guessed we were done talking but then he surprised me.
“It’s nice to know people still remember my father,” he said. “That’s...” He didn’t finish that. He got quiet for a while. Then he stirred. “I’ll tell you something. I didn’t come back to kill anyone.” I nodded agreement though I could hear Tom saying, you didn’t come back to catch anyone either. “I’ll tell you something else. This boy down in Weirton? I never thought it was him. I knew it wasn’t.”
“Oh?”
“Any more than it’s this G-Man fellow...”
“So...you know who it isn’t...”
“It isn’t a loner, somebody out of the past. I knew there’d be suspect individuals like that. The college graduates a few every year. The sooner we eliminate them, the better.”
“Then...what say I eliminate the G-Man?” I asked.
“You’re fascinated, aren’t you?” he asked.
I didn’t deny it.
“Alright,” he said. “Go ahead then. But Billy...”
“Yes?”
“Quietly. Discreetly.”
“Sure.”
“Think of it as a training exercise. Don’t get carried away.”
At 7:30 the next morning, a week after I found Martha Yeats sitting against a tree outside of the Psi U Lodge, I intercept Willard Thrush, the college’s development vice president as he walks up the steps to his office. Ordinarily, Thrush is outgoing and informal, the kind of guy who prides himself on being able to talk to anybody, high or low, the Queen of England or a little crippled news boy. Now, things are going to change.
“Hey, Billy,” he says.
“Hi, Mr. Thrush,” I swallow some but before I can speak, along comes a professor, heading over to the bookstore for the morning newspaper. This guy is famous. He walks along in a daze, never says hello, not to an administrator or a cop: we’re both the enemy.
“HELLO THERE!” Thrush shouts in a top-of-the-morning way. The professor shrugs and keeps walking. We watch him cross the street and stand in front of the bookstore, waiting for it to open at 7:30. “Some of us in the administration play this game,” Thrush says. “You name a faculty member. Any one. And ask, if that professor wasn’t a professor, if they had to earn a living some other way—a job, a marketable skill—what would they do? Factories? Farms? Can you picture them at the bank or the post office or the gas station? I don’t think so. Now look at the guy in front of the bookstore. You know what we do with him, Billy? We make him into a bicycle parking rack. That’s right. That’s his best and highest use. Throw him on his stomach, pull down his pants and park a ten-speed right in the crack of his ass.” I’m flabbergasted and then I wonder about a Schwinn, with those thick American tires and Thrush laughs back. That’s the way he is, always a laugh. Until now.
“I wanted to see you, Mr. Thrush,” I say. “I need to go looking through your alumni files.”
“You do? What for? Who for?”
“The Yeats investigation.”
“She didn’t graduate from here,” Thrush says. His eyes are sharper than his words.
“Yeah...”
“But maybe the killer did?” he asks himself. Again, I don’t answer. We’re on the same page. But it’s hard for him to get used to.
“Those files are privileged. Not the people. The information. Old stuff, most of it, but you never know. The more recent stuff—the donation record—is in the computer.”
“Yes, I know that,” I say. “I’ll be needing a look at that too.”
“Well...”
“And if there’s any problem, you should call Mr. Graves. Or President Niles. Or Provost Ives.”
“No problem,” Thrush says, but I can tell he’s bothered. Here I am, the guy who writ
es parking tickets at two bucks a throw that get tossed onto the street or—as a joke—shoved into the president’s hand at graduation, when he passes out diplomas.
“Okay.” He gives in. We walk inside the office, over to the file cabinets. “What’s the name?”
“No, Mr. Thrush. I can’t say.”
“Can’t blame me for trying.”
“I don’t.”
“Okay. I assume the person you’re looking for is a living graduate. If they’re dead, and we know about it, we send their files over to the archives. They’re not donor prospects anymore. Not crime suspects either, I suppose.”
Thrush points out an empty desk right around the corner from the last row of filing cabinets, where no one will bother me, and a Xerox machine I can make copies on. He says he’ll shows me how to get into the computer files, into the giving records. He sets me up, gets me seated, pats me on the back and walks away. Then he goes into his office and closes the door behind him. I see one of the lights on his secretary’s phone turn bright red. Somebody’s phone is ringing, over in Stribling Hall.
If Gerald Kurt Garner is dead, the college doesn’t know about it. He’s still a donor prospect, his file jammed tightly among others, so tight I have to pull hard to get it out and when it comes, it carries three others with it, like bodyguards and hangers-on. The first thing is his college application. There’s a photo attached, which looks like it was taken for his high school yearbook: him, in a sport coat, a white shirt a black knit tie. A face that could have been my cousin Tony Hoover, the kind of guy you picture as a newspaper delivery boy. Father a post office employee, mother a housewife. A home address in River View, Ohio. His essay, handwritten, in ink: I’m a team player. I work with others...If I ever become a leader, it will be because first I learned to follow. No one has gone to college before me, not in my family, not on this street, not as far as I know, in this whole little town. To me, that makes college a privilege and a responsibility...A small liberal arts college like yours seems right to me. But I should tell you that my parents aren’t able to afford a place like yours. Sir or madam, I love your college already. I will do my best there and have been brought up to always do “a little bit extra.” But without scholarship aid from you, I will have to try my best someplace else.
After the application, there are clips and pictures from the college newspaper, that I don’t bother copying: football games, student elections, and a spring humor issue with a cartoon that shows him on a sort of throne, the floor littered with books and beer cans, admiring professors on one hand, adoring women on the other. G-Man Rules! Then, in his senior year, there are these press releases about a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, awarded and declined, and the mighty Rhodes, awarded and accepted. That got plenty of attention. He showed up in the college news letter and the “Alumni Bulletin.” I still could see the Ohio River kid in the application snapshot, but now there was a difference. The high school kid was asking to be helped. The Rhodes scholar was waiting to be noticed.
Those first few years at Oxford and later on, at Tufts, Garner kept in touch. And the college was happy to hear from him. His doings were posted in the year-by-year class notes in the back of the alumni magazine. He traveled to Morocco and Tunisia and the college heard all about it in chatty, friendly messages, look-ma-no-hands, having fun, wish you were here. Several years out, and the college was still his audience, it was easy to see. But then, it stopped. It stopped so suddenly, I went back to check whether I’d missed a second file. The last clipping was that he’d completed and “successfully defended” his Ph.D. thesis.
I go to Thrush’s office when I’m done at the copy machine, wanting him to check me out on the computer so I can get into the next chapter of Garner’s life. By now, I’d be interested even if his name hadn’t popped up in a murder investigation. Here’s why: I couldn’t think of Garner without my cousin Tony coming to mind. They were two of a kind: Great damn expectations. Well, I know what happened to Tony: a sniper laid him out on the deck of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta. He’s dead. The G-Man is missing in action. He’s a mystery. And I’m a mystery too. To myself. Mr. Withdrew Incomplete.
“Listen, Billy, you’re one of us,” Thrush says, inviting me to sit down. “We’re on the same team here.” Now here’s a Kodak moment. Tom goes to the library every year and looks at the college income tax return, which includes the salary of the top five highest-paid employees. Warren Niles heads the list but Willard Thrush is in there too, nicely into six figures. So it’s kind of special when he tells a guy who lives in a trailer and gets paid by the hour, we’re on the same team. “I just want you to remember something. The places we compete with have two hundred, three hundred, four hundred million dollar endowments. We’ve got less than seventy-five. What we do have is a reputation. Word of mouth, will of the wisp, about twenty years out of date, perfume on a corpse, but there you have it. Reputation. Wright and Stribling and some others. We get the wrong publicity, that reputation is shot. We’re killer campus. We’re bloody ivy. Be careful...”
I agree how sensitive this all is and nobody wants to hurt the college, which sounds a little odd to both of us, once I say it. We both know better. Anyway, we let it pass and in a minute I’m at the computer. There’s only one Garner. No dynasty here, no legacy. Home address the same as on his application. Still living at home? Using his folks to collect his mail? How old would they be now? College stuff, graduate school, everything that I already knew. Then it stops. No new address, no marriage, no current employer. Small contributions from graduation in 1978 until 1985, when he finished graduate school and applied to the college for a job. After that, nothing. One minute it’s a television show, the next minute it’s a blank screen.
I’m done, that’s for sure. I push the print button and watch the pages come out, like the G-Man’s sticking out his tongue at me. I count to see that they’re all here, pages one, two and three. Then I notice something I missed on the screen, right at the bottom of the third and last page. It jumps out at me. It scares me. DO NOT CONTACT, it says. I head back to Thrush.
“It can mean all sorts of things,” he says. “Don’t phone me. We do phonathons, a room full of students dialing numbers. Some people like to hear from them, some don’t. Or it could mean don’t send any mail, so it’s about junk mail. But there are more serious cases. Got your attention now?”
“You already had it.”
“Okay. Say some graduates come back and raise hell. Get drunk, vandalize property, bother women, sell drugs. We put ‘do not contact’ next to their names. That’s from us to them. Sometimes, it’s from them to us: it’s because they’re pissed off about fraternities or women or compulsory chapel or gender studies or sociology. Sometimes, ‘do not contact’ can mean, please contact. Make me feel better. Stroke me. I got this letter, begins ‘Apart from the minor inconvenience of revising my will, the college’s recent policy on fraternity housing causes me no particular problem...’ So I call and make it better.”
“Is there any way of telling what kind of ‘do not contact’ it is?”
“You’d have to give me the name.” He waits for me to take the bait. Then he smiles, gets out of his chair and walks me to the door.
“Not everybody loves this place,” he says. Outside, the college is living up to its brochures. The road divides as it runs through the college, two lanes on either side of a gravel path, which is lined by maples that have ivy around their trunks and flowers around their roots, tulips in springtime, chrysanthemums in fall. Every hour or so, on Monday-Wednesday-Friday, every eighty minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you see students marching that path, coming to and from classes, a walk they take a thousand times and the last is when they graduate. This was the path Garner walked. Where had it taken him?
“Not everybody,” Thrush repeats. “Would you believe it? On a day like this, what’s not to love?”
“Good morning,” Professor Hiram Wright says a half hour after I leave Thrush. “This is History 63. This i
s not Bitches, Snitches, Witches: Women in the Middle Ages. This is American History: Writing and Rewriting. And I am not Professor Martha Yeats. My name is Hiram Wright.”
A hand pops up right off, a woman in the front row, wearing a Hard Rock t-shirt and these jeans that students torture, poking holes in both knees.
“I think we should start with a moment of silence for Professor Yeats,” she says.
“A moment of silence?” Wright asks. “We’ll be having more than our share of those.” Then he thinks it over. “Fine. A moment of silence then.”
The old guy stands at the podium in Philomathesian Hall, which is one of the classiest rooms on campus, with polished wood all around and a pair of stained glass windows that catch the late morning light. Other windows, leaded glass, are wide open so you can see outside, out onto the farms east of here. It’s what you think of when you picture a classroom, or a classroom used to be, before they installed audio-visual aids, television monitors and projection booths, blackboards that roll up into the ceiling, screens that roll down. And Wright is what you picture a professor used to look like. These days, they mostly dress in jeans and wrinkles, no different from the students. But Wright looks like a worn-out but still dignified diplomat from a country that just lost a war.
During the moment of silence—he’s timing it on his pocket watch—late students come walking into class, the door slamming behind them. The floor is old. It creaks when they walk. Spiky hair, and baseball hats turned backwards, shirts hanging out over baggy trousers, they look around at Wright and wonder, who is this guy? Whatever. It’s the first day of class and they come in tired. As soon as they sit, they slouch, like they’ve been in their seat for hours.
“Time’s up,” Wright says. “My name...again...is Hiram Wright. And the first thing it occurs to me to tell you is that, in addition to requiring faithful attendance—which I demand on the grounds that you cannot prosper in a class you do not attend...”
I see the looks going around. Who is this guy? Is this a Twilight Zone episode, something about time travel? Where’s the usual stuff about a note from the doctor, the coach, the dean of students? What’s class participation worth? What about the final exam?