Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Think out loud,” I tell her. “If you like.”

  “My brother’s four years older. He was a good brother. You saw what Daddy wrote. He made us proud, everything he ever did.”

  “Yeah...I believe it. I went through the records. He was something else, alright. A star. I had a cousin like that—Tony, my uncle’s boy. Another wonder-kid.”

  “What happened?”

  “Died in Vietnam.”

  “Well...” Now the silence isn’t so comfortable. My cousin got killed. End of story. But her brother is still out there and what’s he been up to? I’m not exactly asking and she isn’t saying but the question’s in the air. “I guess we’re what’s left,” she says.

  “You ever come up here with him?”

  “Dance weekends, two or three times, he brought me up here. I was a high school kid and not college material, no sir. But...it was magic alright...all those parties...in lounges and lodges and the dance in the big hall...and the dawn milk-punch party down on the trestle...staying up all night and going into town for breakfast and falling in love with half a dozen guys who’d never touch me because I was a no-no, the G-Man’s sister and so there I’d be...I shouldn’t say this...standing with some of G-Man’s buddies outside a door while my own brother was inside with a woman who was...you know...kind of a screamer. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he came out and saw me there! Never did see him that upset...me standing in this crowd, everybody laughing and razzing...there was even a security guard there...and G-Man just grabs my hand and yanks me down the stairs onto the campus. ‘I can’t believe this,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe what you did!’ We walk some more. ‘You can’t believe what I did?’ I say. ‘Seems to me you were the one who did the doing.’ A few steps later, he says, oh, hell, Lisa, something like that and puts his arms around me and we were close again, because we knew that whatever he did, it wouldn’t come between us.”

  She turns away from me so I wouldn’t see her face, but her voice still finds me. “He was supposed to keep on going. What happened?”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” I say.

  “I know, every year, some magazine’ll do a gallery of burn-outs. Child actors and singers with one hit. But this isn’t about drugs or bad marriages. G-Man didn’t make mistakes like that. He did what he was supposed to do. He did it well. And you know his slogan? Always do a little bit extra.”

  Right then, I know it’s there for me, there for the taking: everything she can tell me about her brother, every downward step. And I don’t go for it. Maybe she’s testing me, dangling information. So when I don’t bite, and after we’ve sat a while longer, she nods her head, like she’d decided something in my favor and we stroll onto the campus, the church on one side, the president’s cottage on the other, walking side by side, then between the library and Stribling Hall, between the science building and the humanities, down to the old part of campus, where dorms are all lit up and noisy, open windows, people leaning out and shouting, different kinds of music coming out of rooms, like a jukebox playing a dozen selections at the same time.

  “His room was over there,” she says, gesturing to one of the dorms. “At the top, the room with the round window.”

  “The bull’s eye.”

  “The G-spot, they called it.”

  We walk to the front of where G-Man lived and look up. I’ve been around enough reunion weekends to know what it’s like to come back here, after years away. I’ve seen how big shots succumb. I talk about it with Lisa. There are a lot of places you go back to that don’t hit you the way this one does, making millionaires weak and sad. I wonder why that is. Is it the river, the hill, the path, the trees, the buildings? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s any one thing and I don’t think it’s all of them put together either. It’s being old where you were young and had the world in front of you, I guess. The thinning in the ranks, that must get you too, the counting down to one or none, so that the freshman class of fifty years ago, newer than new, comes down to a half dozen geezers, half of them in wheelchairs. That’s all part of it. But I don’t think that I have the whole answer. I’m working on it, I tell her, but I’m not there yet.

  “You love this place, don’t you?” she says. “They treat you like a servant, pay you hamburger wages and you love it.”

  “I guess I do. Does that make me a chump?”

  “Yeah, it does,” she says. She has this way of changing character, she can do it in a wink. One minute she’s tough and wised up and sexy, the way I saw her the first time. Now she’s a wide-eyed kid, innocent and easy to hurt, even when she’s putting me down. “A nice chump, though,” she adds, slipping her hand around my arm and walking with me, just like we were a couple, down the college path at dusk, walking along while the wind knocked the last leaves out of the trees. I reached out and caught one out of the air and told her it meant good luck was coming.

  “I know that already,” she says.

  “Why’d you want to come back up here?” I ask.

  “This place...scared me...I watched those college girls come in on those big weekends carrying suitcases into a professor’s house. I studied those college girls real close, the polite way they acted around the professors early in the evening and later, how they drank and got drunk, the ones who handled it cool and the ones who got lost, bird dogged, damn near swinging from chandeliers, you’d see them walking around crying or vomiting in stairwells.”

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Drunken kids, loud parties. You can do better than that. That’s not what brought you back here.”

  “You think it was you?”

  It’s a challenge. We’re right on the edge of an argument, if I want it.

  “No,” I say. “Not me. No way.” I give in so quickly, she turns soft.

  “He loved this place so much,” she says. “He lived and breathed it. I never saw anyone so taken over by love. I wondered what it would be like to feel that way. About a person, about a place. And you...you feel that way too. I can tell. And what are you?”

  “What you see. A campus lawman, your friendly tour guide.”

  “Right. Officer, you nervous?”

  “About what?”

  “Me. Do I make you nervous?”

  “Thirsty.”

  “Good answer,” she says. So we go into one of the college bars, a pizza place, and my uncle’s sitting there, sitting at the end of the bar with a couple of other security guys. They stare when we come in. A lot of people think I’m a nice guy but basically a loser and here I am with a woman like Lisa. We barely order a pitcher of beer and pizza before Tom comes over. It’s going to be awkward. We don’t talk much these days. Graves thinks Tom is “a sieve.” He doesn’t want our business out on the street.

  “I’ll need to see your ID, boy,” Tom says. “And yours, ma’am.”

  “Don’t give it to him,” I say. “He just wants your address. Besides, he’s my uncle.”

  “Tom Hoover,” he says, jamming his way into the booth. “What’s your name, darlin’?”

  “Lisa Garner,” she says. Something registers right away, in Tom’s face. But he’s smart, he bides his time. “Well, it’s nice to meet you. I about brought this guy up, such as he is.”

  “You did okay.”

  “There’s a limit to what an uncle can do, though.” He chugs some of the coffee he brought over with him. He likes his coffee scalding hot, emptying his cup the way college kids wallop down their beer. “My nephew can be a kind of a mope. Anything you could do, we’d all of us be grateful.”

  “We aim to please,” Lisa answers right back to him, leaning forward to make the point, while her hand brushes the top of my leg, sort of by accident, and stays there, at home, on purpose.

  “Where do you come from?” Tom asks.

  “Down south of here.”

  “Cincinnati, you mean?”

  “No. On the other side.”

  “You
got a view of West Virginia across the water?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lisa says. Tom has her now. He’s been working around the college for a long time. He doesn’t bother asking how we met. Or why. He knows all that. He knows more than I want him to know.

  “We had a Garner up here, years ago,” he says. “Gerald Kurt Garner. Everybody called him the G-Man.”

  “My brother.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. He was a hell of a kid. Good at everything he did. Everything. ‘Always do a little bit extra,’ he said. Nowadays, it’s do as little as possible. And get away with as much as you can.” He gives her a long look, nothing shy about the way he stares. He doesn’t bother asking how G-Man is doing these days, other than being investigated by a low-rent cop who isn’t so busy, or so professional, he couldn’t split a pizza with the suspect’s sister. “Your brother was something. I expected he’d be president or something. Billy, this Garner guy about ran the place. He could be anything he chose.” Lisa stays quiet. “Well, say hello to him. If and when...”

  “Nice seeing you,” Lisa says. “Again.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I said nice seeing you again,” Lisa repeats.

  “We met before?”

  “Outside the G-Man’s room. On a dance weekend. Listening to the action from inside.”

  “Well then...” The thing is, Tom doesn’t deny it. He blushes but he doesn’t deny it. “Those were different times, weren’t they?”

  “I guess so,” Lisa says. Tom nods and leaves. He still has us, no doubt. But Lisa had gotten on the scoreboard too. “I never forget a face,” she says, watching Tom walk away. “Hey, let’s go now.”

  I signal for the bill, and while we wait, she studies me with this smile on her face, like she knows something I don’t. She knows more about me than I know about her. And now we’re getting into a part of the evening that she controls. We step out into a light rain which has slicked everything down, a kind of warm rain that lovers walk through in movies. Every now and then nature plays along with you.

  “Your uncle,” she says.

  “Yeah?”

  “He got one thing right. You are a kind of mope. A nice mope, but still...”

  “What makes a mope?”

  “You expect the least of what’s good and the most of what’s worst.”

  “I guess,” I say. We’re at her car, outside the post office. Inside, a band is playing, loud. The lobby’s open twenty-four hours so students use it to rehearse in front of an audience of wanted posters. “I’m doing better now,” I say, looking at Lisa.

  “Glad to hear it,” she says. And all of a sudden we’re at a moment that I guess everybody goes through in high school but in my case, I go through it still: standing across from a woman at the end of an evening, standing on a doorstep or in a parking lot or here in front of the post office, no idea what’s next, nice evening, thank you or something else. I’m looking for a sign I’m scared to give and that’s when she steps close to me.

  “Start your car...” she says. “I’ll follow you home.”

  I’m dumbstruck.

  “Am I invited?” she adds.

  “Yeah, you are,” I said. “I mean...please. Yes. Thanks. All of that.”

  She steps into her drugstore S.U.V., I walk back to my truck and pull out in front of her. She follows me down the hill, onto the highway into town. Sure, I wonder what I’m getting into and what it will cost me. That’s Billy the mope. But another Billy doesn’t care. We leave the prime neighborhoods behind, the showplace houses with garages out back that used to be stables, then we pass homes with garages at the side, then these little bungalows with no garages and just cars parked out front, not all of them working, and that isn’t the end of it. Where I live is the end: a trailer court where what you rode in and what you lived in were pretty much the same. I pull in front and walk over to where Lisa is parking.

  “Look,” I say, “could I just say something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m sorry about this. I let Linda have the farm.”

  “Forever? To keep?”

  “Till she gets her life together.”

  “It’s your farm though. And what about your life?”

  “Guess I thought that if one of us was going to end up in a place like this, it might as well be me. I’m the one who can take a hit.” I check out the row of trailers. A place like this, you lived much closer together than other people do and there was no pretending anybody was better than you. We were all in the same shit. “Anyway,” I say, “I’m sorry.”

  “Billy,” she says, “I’m not here on a beautiful homes tour. Can we go inside?”

  “Sure.” We walk across to the fence gate and this yelping animal comes running towards me, more than happy to bite the hand that feeds it.

  “Who’s this?” Lisa asks.

  “I guess it’s a pet,” I say. After thinking it over for a while, I’d retrieved Martha Yeats’ dog from the pound two days after the murder. Sappho wasn’t my type. I wasn’t hers. But now she’s running around in circles, all excited. Maybe she misses having a female around, I don’t know, but this is a bigger welcome than I ever get.

  “Her name’s Sappho,” I say, deciding not to tell her who Sappho belonged to. I go inside, grab a couple beers and pass one to Lisa, who’s sitting on a bench at a picnic table, with a postcard view of the dog pound. I toss a tennis ball against the fence.

  “It took me forever to teach that dog how to fetch. Specially from over there. The other side is death row. I think she knows it.” I chuck the ball again. We sit quiet but there is noise all around us, music and television from half a dozen places. No fights tonight, not yet. After a few more tosses Sappho brings the ball back and just sits down with it.

  “I guess we can go in now,” I say, standing up. “She’s done.”

  “Hey mister,” she says. She comes close to me, right up against me and there is no screen door between us like before. “Girls need a little encouragement.”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m way out of practice.” I put my hands on her waist and pull her towards me.

  “Foreplay, it’s called.”

  “Heard of that,” I say. My hands come down around her ass and, grown-up as you’re supposed to be, there’s a point at which you half-expect to get slapped. When she doesn’t do that, when she moves in closer, fitting herself right up against me, I realize that I’m not going to get slapped, and right then there are about a dozen places I want to put my hands.

  “At this point,” Lisa Garner says, “a kiss wouldn’t hurt. Could you manage that?”

  “Let’s see,” I say. “I was never much of a good kisser. I wind up with a mouthful of nose or an eyebrow, when I fly in the dark.”

  “No problem,” she says. “Start from wherever you land, Billy, and just work your way to where you want your mouth to go.”

  She lifts up on her toes, moving upwards against me, the whole package rubbing close and I lean down and, sure as shooting, my lips land on her eyebrow and I can feel her laugh and so do I, because no map I’ve ever seen shows that an eyebrow is an erotic area. But I remember what she said and I find her mouth and it’s waiting for me, alright, wet and open.

  “That’s better,” she says. “Another wouldn’t hurt.”

  Now I’m into it, into her, truly, and when we finally break away, we’re both kind of shaking, trembling, and this is where, as my wife always told me, I fucked like I ate, fast and furious, finishing what was on my plate in a jiffy, and if I went for seconds, it was over just as quickly then.

  “Could we go inside now?” she asks. Side by side, we walk to the back door, which I unlock. We step inside and I turn on the ceiling light. Set foot in a trailer where a guy lives alone, you expect something like a student’s room out at the college, dirty laundry, beer cans, pizza boxes and—added attraction—a sinkful of dirty dishes, plus a crud-colored bathroom and ten kinds of mold from toilet to towels. But I keep a neat place. The bed is made
, the sink is clean, the carpet vacuumed. Where I live, things get put away.

  “I’m impressed,” she says, moving in for more, not wanting to break contact for long because we’re on a definite roll now. “But it’s too bright. Turn off that light.” The way she says it, she’s like a polite girl asking me to turn down a radio, roll up a car window, please. But when I look at her, she’s no kid at all, she’s a woman taking charge, who knows exactly how she wants things to be. And what she knows is what I’m only just discovering.

  I do what she said and we’re back together in the middle of the room. In the old days, by this time, Linda and me, one of us would have been in the bathroom and the other reaching for a cigarette.

  “Now it’s too dark. I like to see what I’m up to. Don’t you? Open those windows some, Billy.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I step over to the blinds and turn them so that more light comes in from the outside, a mix of TVs and lamps and now and then some headlights off the road.

  “How’s that?” I ask.

  “A little more.”

  “Now?”

  “Good,” she says. “Come back here.” I obey and we’re together again. I like coming at her, between chores. It feels better, every time.

  “What’s next?”

  “We’re definitely getting there. You don’t mind my being bossy?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Good. What I’d like you to do now is go over to your dresser and take your clothes off.”

  “Everything?”

  “No way around it, Billy. No getting away from it.”

  “What’ll you be doing?”

  “Watching.”

  “Okay.” I step over to the dresser and take off my shirt and I bend down to pull off my shoes.

  “Slowly,” she says. “I’m enjoying myself.”

  Alright, I say to myself. I untie my shoes. I’m just going to bed, I tell myself, trying not to get excited. I’ve had a long day and now it’s over. I put my shoes next to each other, take my socks and chuck them into a laundry bag, along with my shirt. I got up early, and I drove Graves up to Wooster, God knows why. She’s watching me and that makes me notice the way the light crosses my body, streaks of light created by the blinds. I unbuckle my pants and slip them down over my feet. She’s having it both ways, I guess. She’s a spy and a peeping Tom, looking in from outside, getting off on that, before stepping into the scene. I step over to the closet and hang up my pants on a hook that’s in back of the door. I slip off my boxers and toss them into the hamper. Then I turn towards her, just standing there, facing her. The light that’s on me is in back of her so I can’t see the look on her face, in her eyes. She’s in the dark, fully dressed. I’m buck naked in the light. It feels unfair. Like a police line up. I walk towards her. She can see I’m excited. There’s no hiding that: my thing feels like a divining rod in search of an underground spring.