by Kluge, P. F.
“...but if you do,” she continues, “just tell him... ‘Sangy-Girl’ was asking…”
“Asking what?” the sister horns in. “Asking, is he a murderer?”
“Asking for him,” she says. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, right,” Lisa says. “Bye, now.”
“Goodbye, sir,” she tells the old man. We head out off the porch and towards the truck.
“Hey, mister,” Lisa Garner calls out. From behind me, she’s leaning in the doorway, beckoning me back. Linda keeps walking, opens the door and climbs in my truck.
“Yeah,” I say. I’m standing in the yard. She’s up on the porch.
“Hiram Wright called yesterday,” she says. “Asking about the G-Man. Same as you. All those years go by and...bingo.”
“Was he worried about him? That why he called?”
“Yeah, sure, call it worried.”
“Well...”
“Listen,” she comes down the porch one step. “Maybe we’ll talk again sometime. Is that something you would like? Talking to me?”
“I’d like it.”
“It’s something you’d look forward to?”
“Yes, I guess.”
“Guess?”
“Definitely. I’d like it.” I’m ready to leave it like that. Up to her. Then I see Linda out in the truck, watching me, and I think about the way I always leave things up to her. Maybe this is when I should take things into my own hands. “Not this weekend,” I say. “I’m working. But the one after that. Homecoming, they call it.”
“I’ll remember that,” she says. She glances at her father, sitting on the porch, watching the river. “Homecoming.”
“Were we wasting our time today?” Linda asks. We’re headed back north.
“No.”
“We’ll hear from them?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What does that mean?”
“Could be we’ll hear from him,” I say. “Maybe they’re in touch with him. Or he’s in touch with them. Remember when she allowed he’d had a breakdown. She said ‘he’s doing better now.’”
“He could have been sitting right inside, listening to everything we said,” she says.
“Boo Radley? Could be. But I doubt it.”
It’s late afternoon and we’re back on Route 23, headed north towards home, a trip the G-Man must have made dozens of times, three hours and change, but worlds apart, that college on a hill and that washed-up riverbank town. A magic mountain, it must have seemed like, top of the world.
“You could have got laid back there,” Linda says. “That wasn’t a kid sister. That was a heat-seeking missile.”
Heat-seeking missile, I think. Hell, that might be my Homecoming date.
Chapter V
WARREN NILES
Night Thoughts of a College President
To say Martha Yeats’ violent and untimely death disturbed me is to pronounce a commonplace. I was—and am—disturbed. I worry about the college. The positioning of Martha’s body outside a fraternity lodge bothered me, even as I pictured old boy alums joking that they wish she’d been dumped in front of the Women’s Studies Cottage. Martha was displayed, shockingly, in a way that suggested her killer wanted to make a point. The killer was sending a message. He had other people in mind. Very likely he had me in mind. And so, as the weeks have gone by, our lovely autumn, our wisest-feeling season, my relief that nothing else has happened, my delight at our safe passage further into the semester, combines with something else. Call it panic. The kind of panic you feel at discovering an unexpected lump, death’s calling card in your throat or under your armpit.
“Asshole.” It’s not a word I use but it’s Anglo-Saxon at its sturdy best. A form of personification, more specifically, a synecdoche, using a part—the asshole, in this case—to characterize the whole, the president, that is. Now, a true night thought. As leaders, as normative figures, college presidents are a disappointing bunch. We head up processions, not causes. Civil rights, environment, Vietnam: can you name a college president who stuck his neck out, risked his career? I am part of that disappointing group. At least I can say that I have felt disappointment. And part of me has longed for a chance to do better, stand tall, play a part in a definitive movement.
Imagine...a worse confession...my disappointment as the autumn rolls along quite normally, when all our bellwether issues, our evergreen complaints reassert themselves, when what threatened to afflict the college like an Ebola virus turns out to be a passing cold. There’s something oddly flattering in having caught the attention of a killer. A stranger—one hesitates to say a perfect stranger—has noticed me. Entered my house. Started a correspondence. Someone cares enough to hate me. Will I ever know who? I would feel cheated if the whole mystery dribbled away, though that would be in the best interests of the college. I confess: I picture a meeting—I walk along the path at night. A figure passes briskly by, heading in the other direction. Then I hear a voice behind me. “Asshole.” It’s not an insult anymore, it’s a code name, a password that will take me someplace I have never been.
In the meantime, what do I do? I preside over weekly meetings of the college’s senior staff. We converge in a decorous, dark-paneled room with oils of college benefactors on the walls. The metal labels have rusted: I cannot read their names. They are most noticed once a year, on the “Day Without Art,” an anti-AIDS initiative, when students drape them with black cloth. A Martha Yeats initiative, as I recall. And now she is similarly shrouded, someplace. Every day. And now, in the very Fuhrerbunker of my administration, we discuss admissions. So many applications, so many acceptances, so much yield. We feel like automobile salesmen on a slow day, no customers on the lot, prices chalked on windshields, plastic flags flapping in the wind. We discuss scholarships, which are our benefaction, our investment, our potential bankruptcy. Scholarships for bright poor students, for bright students—merit scholars—who aren’t particularly poor, for students black and Latino who aren’t especially bright and, just lately, discounts—awards for students who want us to match a deal they’ve gotten someplace else. My mind wanders. I recall what it feels like when I’m traveling on college business, reconnoitering the moneyed suburbs so many of our students come from. From a descending plane, I scan horse farms, black painted fences, backyard swimming pools, gazebos. I picture perfect lawns, freshly sprinkled and dandelion-free, colonial doorways with antique brass eagle knockers. A salesman sizing up the territory, a salesman-stalker for the liberal arts, a big-ticket item if ever there were one, a vanity buy, an impulse purchase, a perfect match of leisure time and disposable income. I wonder how many of these crystal-chandeliered houses will continue to afford what we sell. I see businessmen in bathrobes, sitting at Sunday breakfast tables, balancing budgets and saying to their wives, no more, enough’s enough, and that will be the end of us.
“Well, I’ve got a problem this morning,” Willard Thrush announces. I bestir myself to listen. “Anybody here ever know of Duncan Kerstetter, Class of 1975?”
There are shrugs around the table. Shrugs from the Admissions, Development, Business, Provost, Library, Dean of Students. Thrush prolongs the moment.
“No one?”
Senior staffers contemplate the remnants of their dining service breakfast: eggs, unapologetically greasy bacon, par-boiled potatoes, English muffins saturated with margarine, all of which they deprecate but I notice that not many bother to eat virtuously at home beforehand.
“Well, Duncan Kerstetter passed through here quietly,” Thrush says. “Pre-med. No fraternity. No activities. I called up his class agent. He says Kerstetter is a dweeb. Pocket saver, slide rule club. I bet you can guess the rest of the story.”
“Let me try,” I say, determined to move things along. This is something you can do, when you’ve been president a while. “Kerstetter has made a fortune in kitty litter and now, it’s look homeward, angel. He wants respect that he didn’t get the first time he was here, he wants to outshine the classm
ates who regarded him so lightly. He’s anxious to tell us how much the college mattered to him, this or that professor. Then again, perhaps he wants us to hear how little it meant, how he prospered in spite of us. Alright, Willard. What’s this about?”
“Mortuaries! Not kitty litter. A whole chain of mortuaries, hooked up to centralized processing plants.”
“Didn’t you say he was pre-med?
“Yes. A respected cardiologist.”
“Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” asks Caroline Ives. “Mortuaries?”
“I’d call it a win-win situation,” Thrush responds.
“What does he have in mind?” I ask.
“Three to five million,” Thrush answers. “That’s what we have in mind. That would put him among the top five donors this college ever had.”
“Sounds like an honorary degree,” I said.
“I’d hate to write that citation,” Caroline Ives said. “To the Colonel Sanders of the corpse trade...”
“That won’t do the trick,” Thrush said. “Listen. Kerstetter was a biology major. Pre-med. Lived in the lab. Well, I guess he noticed these other buildings, classrooms full of kids reading paperback novels. ‘I couldn’t believe they were getting credit for stuff like that,’ he tells me, ‘figuring out whether something was ironic.’ Then, too, he heard about the famous English department. So he washes the formaldehyde off and takes a course with the man himself. Harry Stribling. And it changed his life, of course.”
“Of course,” I say, expecting to hear how the liberal arts produced a haiku-writing rocket scientist. If only I could fast-forward all these meetings! “We change lives all the time.”
“You bet,” Willard said. “He hated it. He says Stribling discriminated against him, that he had a bias against science and scientists. Their approach to reasoning, their kind of knowledge, their use of language. The C he got from Stribling prevented Duncan Kerstetter from graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. So he wants the grade changed.”
“Now!?” Dean Carstairs asks. “This is sick.”
“Certifiable,” Caroline Ives agrees. “Anybody would have to say...get a life.”
“He has a life,” Thrush counters. “And three to five million, now. More later... maybe. Morticians die too, you know.”
“The faculty would have to vote on it,” Caroline Ives reminded us. “Even then...”
“You’ll propose it?” Thrush pressed. “You’ll endorse it?”
“I’m just trying to think it through,” the provost demurred.
“Would two endowed chairs assist your thinking?” Thrush pressed.
“I wonder...I just wonder...” Caroline Ives said.
“I wish I could see a way out of this,” I say. Our appetite for money is infinite. Aggressively as we try to raise it, our best efforts only keep us in step with other colleges who are also, always, raising money. Wabash got pharmaceutical money: Eli Lilly. Earlham was blessed by a stock market trader: Warren Buffet. What angel comes knocking at our door? The father of the human processing plant.
“He proposes coming back...after all these years?”
“He’s been back,” Thrush responds. “Right at the start of the year. He was on a kind of mid-life road trip. Blue Highways kind of thing. He came through here and got thoughtful. Let me just say this. Duncan Kerstetter is a huge opportunity for this college. The kind of gift that changes things. He’s a big fish and he’s already hooked, begging to be boated. Understand, kids? Not a trout, not a catfish. This is a yellow fin tuna, three hundred pounds of sashimi. And what’s he asking for? A changed grade is all!”
“If we set a precedent...” I began. But Willard interrupted me.
“Sorry, Warren. Excuse me. Duncan Kerstetter is a huge chance for a place that doesn’t get many...any...like this. I’ve been raising money around here for years. I know what’s out there. And there’s no one like him. He’s huge. He’s also an asshole. Okay? But my point is, we deal with assholes all the time...”
He stopped, ran his hand over his face, through his hair, the way he always did when his bottom-line corporate approach ran up against our nuanced, pettifogging academic ways. We sat in silence. Asshole. There it was again. The word was all around me, bouncing off the walls. Had some Chinese calendar turned my way? Was this the Year of the Asshole?
“No way,” Martin Summers, the chair of the faculty, says. Martin’s a chemist, a pleasure to work with, as a rule. Just as the years have taught me to expect better manners from the far right than from the far left—which may just be another way of saying better table manners from the well-fed than from the recently hungry—so too they’ve taught me that the most rabid feuding is in the soft sciences and the humanities. The hard sciences are progressive, measurable. Their proprietors are calm in possession of their knowledge, slow to anger, and...in Martin’s case...boring. That made his outburst decisive.
“What Kerstetter is suggesting is obscene,” Martin said. “What are we going to do? Give him a make-up exam? Because he’s loaded? And if we let students come back at us, does that mean we can come back at students? Award Rutherford B. Hayes A’s in all of his courses because he became a president? If a Phi Beta Kappa becomes a serial killer, do we strip him of his diploma on the way to the gas chamber? Do we start to act like one of those German universities? Hitler came to power, they revoked degrees earned by Jews.”
“Well, that settles it, I suppose,” I conceded. I leaned back in my chair, shut my eyes a moment, and pictured dollar bills flying overhead, south, to more congenial climes.
“I’d like to revisit this,” Caroline Ives popped up. My heart leaped! Clever, clever woman!
“I think it’s settled,” Martin Summers objected but he’d had his turn. Will the scientist please sit down?
“There’s no harm in reconsidering this,” I declared. “Even if our decision remains the same—which it may well—there’s no need to give an answer today.”
“I’d just like to think about this a little more,” said Caroline, flashing Martin a smile that was almost an apology. “Meanwhile, there’s something else. People are talking about the murder.”
“What are they saying?”
“They’re saying this isn’t like any investigation anyone’s ever seen or heard about. Normally, there’s a crime, there’s a crime scene. They search the area, they talk to people in the neighborhood, check the victim’s habits, background, record...”
“All that’s been done. You know that.”
“Precisely. And then they leave. Don’t they?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But not here. Not yet.”
“It’s become a joke. ‘Is Sherwood Graves up for tenure?’ What is he doing? Graves and that Billy fellow?”
“Hoover,” I say. “He researches college records. So Willard tells me. He’s been in development, alumni affairs, human resources, the archives...”
“Maybe he’s just going through the motions,” Willard Thrush suggests. “A paper chase. That’s alright with me. From where I sit, we’ve gotten all the investigation we need and just the man to man it. What do you want? Arrests? Line ups? More headlines? We’ve got a dweeb in charge. Sooner or later, he’ll go away. Fine. We’ll never know who killed Martha Yeats. That’s okay with me.”
“But what I don’t understand...” Caroline began. She turned to me and, from the look on her face, I could tell something had occurred to her that wasn’t shrewd or ingratiating. Something she almost couldn’t say.
“He’s waiting for something, isn’t he?” she said. “What is he...what could he be waiting for?”
The next moment was strange. Intimate, almost. Caroline was a brisk, ambitious woman. So it was that much more remarkable, when I saw her shudder. She was frightened, suddenly and so was I. It happened to us at the same time, our realization. We both knew what Graves was waiting for.
Part Two
Homecoming
Chapter VI
BILLY HOOVER
The G-Ma
n’s sister. All that next week I wondered, what was I doing? Was I such a studly catch, were my wallets so deep, my tongue so sharp, my looks so fine, that someone might drive across Ohio to visit me? Earth to Billy: call home. This is over your head. Call Sherwood Graves. Call the sheriff. Call your uncle. Yeah, right. I called no one. I was at my desk, Saturday night of Homecoming Weekend, waiting for her call, which I only half-believed would come, but it did.
“Hey, Billy,” she says from her cell phone. “You’ve got a package at the post office.”
There’s a car with a downstate license plate in front of the post office, a late model Ford Wagoneer like what parents give their kids to play with at college, but this says Portsmouth Pharmacy on the side. She’s come a long way. The vehicle’s empty but I can see her sitting on a bench over on the path, just opposite the grocery store. We haven’t lost daylight savings time yet and we’re on the far side of the eastern time zone, so days are long here and, though the sun’s long gone, the sky’s lit up with orange and purple and I know it’s her alright and I can feel the tension building, in my legs, in the palms of my hands as I walk towards her. She’s dressed in a light brown suede jacket with a yellow blouse beneath and black slacks and dressy little boots.
“Hey there, Billy,” she says.
“Hi,” I say. I sit down beside her. I almost ask, did you find your way alright but I hold my tongue and just let us sit there, taking in the Saturday night. It’s early yet. Campus parties don’t crank up until past eleven o’clock but there’s a lot of traffic up and down the sidewalk because it’s homecoming, when the graduates of last year and fifty years ago return to take their place alongside today’s students and it’s as though all the generations are lined up and touching each other, from today back to the 1920s. We sit quietly, watching the kids, and it feels comfortable.
“This all takes me back,” she says after a while. “Gets me thinking.”