Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Why don’t you leave him the hell alone,” Linda said, when I’d asked her to come along. “He got fucked over once or twice already,” she said. I told her I hoped he was living happily ever after on the banks of the Ohio River. “Well,” she said, “so use a phone book. Call the sheriff down there, or the post office.” “I don’t want to spook him,” I said. “Oh, I get it,” she fired back. “You bring me along and when the police surround the house I’m the girl who says come out, we all love you, everything will be okay.” “Listen,” I said. “I only want to see him. Don’t you?” Now he’s an hour away from us, just down the road.

  “Did you love him?” I ask after twenty miles of comfortable silence. We’re on the other side of Columbus and she just gave up on finding anything on the radio.

  “Oh, for sure. He’s smart. When he’s really on, really on, he carries you along. And in a room full of people, he performs. He lights up. You never know what’s coming. He’s remarkable.”

  “Hey, Linda? The G-Man, I mean. Not Robert.”

  “Oh...” It’s as if she’d forgotten where we were going. Now, all of a sudden, the memory comes to life. A third passenger. Goosebumps. She closes her eyes and I’ll bet she’s picturing G-Man the way he looked back when he was a lead-pipe cinch for a Rhodes. Or maybe she’s wondering what he looks like now. What time does to golden boys. “Sure I loved him. I loved him like I loved nobody else.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I didn’t fuck him.”

  “I guessed.”

  “How about that,” she says. “The unconsummated love is the one that lasts.”

  “A lesson in there, I guess,” I say. She gives me this funny, puzzled look, like she’s heard something she didn’t expect to hear and, we’re both laughing. It feels good, being in the same car, headed the same way, deciding where to stop for lunch.

  “So how’s Robert?” I ask. This comes after I’ve finished my Italian sausage and peppers sandwich in three minutes. I don’t gulp or wolf my food—I’m very neat. I’m single minded. That’s what she called me. Sounds like simple-minded. One thing at a time. Like a tool. A simple tool. A vacuum cleaner at the dinner table, a jackhammer in bed. Even when I slept, I slept like I was curled up at the bottom of a deep well, out of range of dreams.

  “Want the short story or the novel?” she asks.

  “Short.”

  “Gone,” she says. “Short enough? He showed me his book.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. It’s a secret.”

  “Oh. You mean someone might beat him to the subject?”

  “I don’t think so,” she says, smothering a laugh. “Johnny Appleseed.”

  “Oh...”

  “Listen to this.” There are these guys sitting around an Ohio tavern, she tells me, one of those cross-sections of people you see in phone company ads, a white, a black, an Indian—no women—going on about America and the frontier, all in the course of telling stories and drinking, how they got to the heartland and what it means and where America is headed. Appleseed mostly just listens but you know his story is coming. Rob stops before Johnny gets his turn at the mike. He asks Linda what she thinks. She blew it, she guesses. Talking to a man about the most important thing in his life, she comes up with a phrase from Oprah. “A boy’s book.” But she wasn’t wrong, she tells me. It was a boy’s book not because it was male but because it was young. It was boyish. Boyish in the things it talked about and the way it talked about them, in the way it tackled big themes, more like a history pageant or a musical, something performed on state fairgrounds, where the town chiropractor is Johnny Appleseed and the high school basketball coach is Andrew Jackson and the college Spanish professor makes an okay Tecumseh. Something you sit through once a year, out-of-doors and if it rains that night, hey, that’s okay, better luck next year. So Robert goes to bed without saying goodnight. The next morning he leaves for New York to try and find an agent.

  “We’ll find the river at Portsmouth,” I say, when she finishes with Robert. “Then it’s ten miles.”

  “You think he’s there?”

  “Maybe not this minute. But it’s worth a look. He didn’t want the college to contact him, after he got screwed out of a job. That doesn’t mean he broke contact with the whole world. Not necessarily.”

  “Does it make sense,” she asks, “to come back and kill somebody years and years later because you didn’t get a job?”

  “It wasn’t a job,” I say. “It was a life.”

  So, those last miles, into Portsmouth and then, left and north, up along the Ohio, we’re all about G-Man. We’re in his territory, getting closer all the time. It’s as if we’ve picked up a station on the car radio at night, when transmissions bounce across the time zones, scraps of songs that come out of the static—clearer sounding the nearer you get. I tell her about the job interview that went sour, about G-Man and Professor Wright and about the do-not-contact in his file at the alumni office. I tell her how I called other members of the G-Man’s class, the senior president, his roommates all four years, the class agent.

  “I’ve got nothing,” I say. “No grounds at all. You know why I’m doing this? It’s not so much about what happened to Martha Yeats. It’s because I’m curious about this guy. Listen, if Graves thought we had something here, would he be letting me handle it? By myself? The likes of me?”

  “What’s that man doing?” Linda asked. “Six weeks, it’s been.”

  “That long, huh?”

  “Are there clues? Suspects?”

  “Beats me,” I said, sounding stupid. “Listen, the Sheriff did all the police work, the garden variety stuff, in the first couple of days. The crime scene, the ballistics, Martha’s neighbors, friends, enemies, lovers, partners, whatever-the-hell. All that stuff. Mostly, as far as I can see, Graves is studying the college...the power, the money, the politics. Tom thinks Graves is taking his time because he enjoys seeing the College squirm. You know about his father?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Rudy Graves. Nice old man, I always thought. Great house to go to on Halloween. The rest of the faculty had apples and pears. He gave out as many chocolate bars as we could get our hand around...”

  “So it’s a homecoming, that’s what Tom thinks. A dream come true. A dream case, kind of. He doesn’t even care if he solves it.”

  “What about this little road trip? Does he know about this?”

  “I mentioned it.”

  “And?”

  “He didn’t say no.”

  “So...is this police business?”

  “I’ll put in for mileage. Five cents a mile. They pay me back, it’s police business.”

  “Pathetic,” she says.

  We pass through one river town after another. You wonder what people live off of, what they’ve got that the world needs. They live off each other, I guess—they cut hair, deliver mail, I don’t know. Go to yard sales on weekends. And the river, the Ohio River, has something to do with it. Live on the ocean, you know you’re hooked into the whole world. The tide goes in, the tide goes out. Here, the river just moves in one direction, which is away.

  “There’s one little something,” I say. “I got a call from the class agent...”

  “The what?”

  “That’s the guy in your class you send news to after you graduate, marriage and promotions and that stuff. This guy remembered someone who said he sighted G-man. So I gave this other one a call. This is a lawyer in Connecticut. And, at the start, it was dodgy, I don’t mind saying.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, he’s a lawyer for one thing and just basically a prick. He doesn’t want to give, he wants to trade. Wants to know my position at the college, why I’m looking for the G-Man.”

  “You told him?”

  “I danced around it. I said I was a student.”

  “A what?”

  “A student of Hiram Wright’s, alright? And that the President asked me to get in contact
with Gerald Kurt Garner, who was a Wright student. That the college records were incomplete...see...not a lie...any of it.”

  She’s impressed, I can tell. She thought I was too honest to lie, or not bright enough. “Did he buy it?”

  “Sort of. But there’s still this thing that gets into all their voices when they hear about the G-Man. Swear to God. They’re horny for news. High or low. Nothing in the middle. They want extremes. It’s like the whole bunch of them agreed that whatever happened, he shouldn’t turn out like them.”

  “So?”

  “This lawyer was traveling around with his daughter, shopping for colleges like they do. He wants her to go to our place but he doesn’t want to push it. So they visit a lot of places, including Marietta. This is maybe five years back. He’s sitting around outside while his kid is having a chat with the nice people in admissions. Anyway, there he sees someone come walking by he thinks he recognizes. The guy is bulkier than he remembers and kind of disorderly, mussed up, untogether. But he tries his luck. ‘G-Man?’ He half expects whoever it is to just keep walking, no harm done. Which he does, two or three steps. And stops. And turns. It’s the G-Man. So, this lawyer tries to bore in a little. How are you doing, G-Man? What are you up to? Been wondering about you, all of us have, you should hear us talk about you at reunions. He sees G-Man flinch. Doing fine, he says, better all the time, got sidetracked for a while but, hey, watch out, I’m on the right track now. Watch my dust. You’ll be hearing about the G-Man, sure as shooting.”

  “Sure as shooting? He said that?”

  “It’s an expression, not a confession.”

  “I guess...” she says, but she’s not convinced and neither am I.

  “He said he was in the book business. That’s what he told this guy. That’s all. The lawyer’s impression is, he wanted to be gone. ‘Will I see you at the next reunion?’ he shouts it out as G-Man walks away. No answer.”

  “What was he doing there? Did anybody know him?”

  “I called. The dean of faculty. The personnel office. They never heard of him. I called the library. Nobody knew him.”

  “He doesn’t sound like a winner,” she says.

  “He doesn’t sound like a murderer either.”

  By now we’re in River View, which is a block of buildings just up from the river, where a rickety landing sank into the water and took an old ferry with it, a double drowning that looks like one of those beachheads from World War II. There used to be a movie house here, a hardware store and barber shop, gone now along with some empty places I couldn’t be sure about. This is the kind of town you see in newsreels, citizens waving at TV helicopters from rooftops, after it rains a lot. Thirty-five Bank Street is part bungalow, part shack, with bare dirt in front and bug-chewed hollyhocks nesting inside white-painted tires. There are car seats on the front porch and an old man sits in one of them, watching us. He’s got a piece of cloth over the front of his throat, like a curtain over a window.

  “Good morning, sir,” I say. He doesn’t answer but there’s a kind of nod. “Okay if we come up on the porch?” Another nod. The boards creak and sag beneath us. “Pardon me. Is this the Garner residence?”

  “You got it,” someone says. Not the old man. A woman is standing behind the screen door, as if photographed through a grainy filter. “The old man got his larynx cut on. He doesn’t talk much.”

  Now the screen door opens and slams shut and the woman is in focus: country-western and poor, with a kind of raw-boned been-around-the-block sexiness that she’s well aware of, plus she’s built and she knows that too. Hungry and hurt and tough: we don’t see many people like her on campus. Well-fed but fragile is more our speed.

  “I’m Billy Hoover and this is Linda Thorne,” I tell her. “We’re from up in Knox County. That’s north of Columbus. There’s a little college up there that I work for.”

  It changes. The woman goes from curiosity to wariness. And the old man isn’t just sitting there, killing time. He’s alert too.

  “We’re looking to get in touch with a fellow, went to college up there.”

  “My brother,” the woman says. She looks down at the old man, who has a dog-eared notebook in one hand and a stubby pencil in the other, a thick-tipped pencil like the kind that carpenters use to draw lines on boards, showing where to saw. He’s commencing to write. She steps over and pats his head. “I’ll take care of this,” she says.

  “Well, then,” I say. “Looks like we found the right place.” I sound cheerful and phony, but G-Man’s sister doesn’t look so tickled, that we found our way here.

  “I guess you can sit,” she says, making it sound like a real close call. I take a folding chair and Linda finds a place at the edge of the car seat, sitting next to the old man.

  “The thing of it is, we’re looking...that’s the folks at the college...are looking for Mr. Garner. It’s been a while, since they’ve heard from him. It’s been years.”

  “Just what do you do at the college, Mr. Hoover?” the woman asks. “Don’t bullshit me, mister.”

  “Alright, no bullshit, I do what they tell me to,” I answer. “I’m a campus cop. I write tickets for snot-nose rich kids. I ask them nicely to please turn down their stereos and put away their open containers. I run errands, on account I’m an errand boy. This is an errand.”

  “What do you want my brother for?” the woman asks.

  “A couple of weeks ago, somebody came onto campus and shot a history professor named Martha Yeats.”

  “Killed her?”

  “Dead,” I say. “I’m the guy who found her.”

  “And now you need my brother?”

  “He came back a few years after he graduated. He applied for a job. Lots of people thought it was a cinch. But he didn’t get it. He was sponsored by his old professor, Hiram Wright. Maybe that was the problem. Wright had enemies.”

  “Good old Wright,” the woman says. She knows the name. She knows a lot. God, these women are something. It’s like they reverse the lesson of the three monkeys, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil, hear-no-evil. They’ve seen, heard, said it all. And done a lot besides.

  “Ring a bell? That name?”

  “Sure. Heard it for years, while my brother was up there. Do the Wright thing. Making out all Wright. It was a joke in our family. Remember, Pop? Professor Wright?” The old man nods.

  “The professor who got killed?” I say. “She was the one who kept your brother from getting the job.”

  “Oh, now I get it. And this is the part where you ask, have I seen my brother lately and I say no, I tell you to fuck off, and you wonder if I’m lying and pass over your card and ask me to call if I change my mind. And then you leave. Could we get to that part now?”

  “I don’t have a business card,” I say. “And, lady, I’d be tickled if you told me he’s having a great life in California or someplace far.” Then I surprise myself. I get off my chair and approach this woman whose name I still don’t know and stand right up close to her, like we’re about to seriously slow dance. I’m not like this, I’m really not. I’m the kind of guy who backs away, who doesn’t push things, who takes no for a final answer. “Just look me in the eyes and tell me that he’s okay someplace, happy and harmless. No address, no phone number, I’ll take your word for it and leave, like you want me to.”

  She backs away, glances down, can’t look me in the eyes and lie. So she looks away, and lies.

  “I got no idea,” she says.

  “What became of your brother, miss...”

  “Lisa,” she says. Then she gets her wind back up. “They made a lot of him at college, Wright and the rest of them. He wanted to go back there. He could have gone most anywhere, but he said, that’s where I belong. Only he didn’t. Then he started having trouble.”

  “Like...”

  “He’s better now.” She’s said more than she meant to say. So she puts on her shrewd look. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore. And you can’t make me. You’re not a cop. You chalk tires
.”

  “Yeah. And sometimes I find a dead professor when I’m out for a walk.”

  “Well, she sounds like a bitch to me.”

  “Only say good things about the dead.”

  “She’s dead,” Lisa says with a nasty smile. “That’s good.”

  “I guess we’ll go now,” I say, but I’m closer to her, like when you’re on a dance floor and the music stops. It takes a tapping sound to break the spell, the G-Man’s father knocking his pencil against the chair, gesturing with a piece of paper he gives to me.

  He never did anything I wasn’t proud of, I read aloud. “Thank you, sir.” I start to leave, Linda gets up to follow, changes her mind.

  “Not yet,” Linda says. She turns to the old man, because there’s no point contending with the honky-tonk siren. “Sir, I don’t work for the college. My daddy did, but he’s been dead a while now. I came down here because I was a little kid on campus and I adored your son...”

  She goes on, telling what she remembers, like she’s flipping through a pile of old photos: G-Man on the football field, on the dance floor, G-Man and her driving around at night selling sandwiches in dorms, “Sangy-Man,” and “Sangy-Girl.” It was puppy love, she tells them, but it meant a lot to the puppy. The old man reaches over and pats her hand.

  “Maybe you hear from him and maybe you don’t,” she says, “but if you do...”

  “We don’t,” Lisa interrupts. “Okay?”