The old school had a standard oval layout, with eight buildings spread out like spokes from a once-proud library in the center. In front of the library, a state flag fluttered in the whipping winds under a tattered Old Glory. Most of the architecture was similar—circa 1910 or so—except for a disastrously ugly student center, a monument to the faux-optimistic Fountainhead-looking 1960s architecture that plagued so many institutions.
Patches of snow and ice dotted the oval. Numerous trees, all but a few stripped bare of their leaves by winter, were strategically placed alongside the cracked cement sidewalks. The occasional bench made pit stops around the diameter.
Pilate came across a bench with cracked slats that had a tarnished brass plaque on its back that read:
In Loving Memory of Dr. Gareth Kennedy
He took a seat on the rickety memorial and allowed his back to rest against the tarnished plaque. He sucked on the cigarette and squinted as the sun rose. It’s very quiet, this campus near the banks of the Missouri, he surmised as he thought back to the events of the morning.
Early that morning, he’d crossed a steel bridge that spanned over the river. Once he’d crossed it, he had pulled his truck over to smoke. Floes of ice had rushed past the frozen mud banks, and the smoke from his cigarette had followed the current as he exhaled.
Pilate closed his eyes and wondered how he had come to be here, hundreds of miles from home…and from her. His thoughts traveled as well to the specter that had visited him last night in the casino hotel room.
He had wanted to take not just one but two of his antidepressants before he hit the road, hoping they would forbid Simon from coming and going as he pleased. Of course, he was unable to afford those little gatekeepers, so he had not taken any for the past two weeks or so. He wished at that moment that he had prevailed on his parents for enough money to at least buy the drugs.
A sudden real sense of being very small and vulnerable washed over him like the icy river. The same voice that told him he was a fake and worthless was now telling him he was exposed, in danger out there on the prairie.
He imagined Simon sharing the bench with him, mocking him with words like, “But you have no support system here, no friends, not even cell phone service because this pathetic excuse for a town is too small and insignificant on the globe for a cellular tower.”
Pilate flicked his cigarette to the ground in disgust and frustration.
“Hey! Pick that up, mister.”
Pilate’s head jerked to his left, where he saw a clean-shaven, balding man of average height in his late fifties, clad in an elegant brown trench coat, striding very quickly toward him like a man on a mission. “Hmm?” Pilate said.
“I said pick up that cigarette,” he admonished. “This is a college, not a damned ashtray.”
“Oh, sorry.” Pilate looked down and picked up the butt.
By now the man was standing over him. “Are you a student here?”
“Um, no,” Pilate answered, suddenly feeling like a teenager who’d been caught with an illicit beer or a joint or making out with the preacher’s daughter in the back seat of a car.
“What business do you have here?” he had an authoritative, even menacing quality. His eyes were dark, cold, and resolute. In less than a minute he had firmly established an asshole vibe, that was for sure.
Pilate stood. “I work here,” he said, summoning his dignity. “Who are you?”
The man’s eyes closed into doubting slits. “Name’s Lindstrom. I’m no one special, just the school president.” His voice barely concealed his glee at Pilate’s faux pas. “Seems to me I ought to know who works for me…and who doesn’t.”
“Oh, Dr. Lindstrom! I’m sorry. I’m a new in—”
“Oh.” Lindstrom glared at Pilate. “You’re one of Trevathan’s new replacements, huh?” He looked Pilate up and down. “That explains it.”
“I just got to town, sir. I’m waiting for the Ad building to open so I can get my apartment keys.” Assuming I’m not fired, Pilate thought.
“The building opens at eight,” Lindstrom said. “I’d appreciate it if you were tidier about your smoking. This campus has enough blight. Don’t need trash everywhere. Smoking’s a nasty habit anyway, you know—for you and everyone around you who has to inhale that garbage.”
“Yes, sir,” Pilate said. He felt his ears reddening with embarrassment. “I, uh…I’m sorry if we got off on the wrong—”
By the time Pilate said “sir,” Lindstrom had turned and walked away toward the Ad building. He did say something over his shoulder, and while Pilate couldn’t be sure exactly what it was, he thought it sounded like, “That’s one.”
“Fucking hell,” Pilate said under his breath, grasping the cigarette butt. Can I screw up any worse? And I just fucking got here.
Simon laughed behind Pilate’s eyes.
Morgan Scovill looked down at the out-of-state license tag on the black Pontiac. The trunk was open, as was the door to the faculty apartment. Scovill spat out the cinnamon toothpick he’d been rolling around his mouth since after lunch. Approaching the door, he heard the alien notes of jazz. He leaned his head inside the door. “Anybody home?” he said. Something crashed to the floor in the small kitchen, and Scovill stopped inside the doorway as Pilate came into view.
Pilate, wearing a stained, ripped Pink Floyd t-shirt, saw the six- two, 280-pound frame of Sheriff Morgan Scovill obliterating the doorway. The middle-aged peace officer’s hand casually rested on the butt of his holstered Glock semi-automatic. “Uh…hi,” Pilate said.
“Hello,” Scovill said. His right eye seemed like it was on permanent squint and his left betrayed what could be good humor.
“Um…” Pilate looked at the sheriff’s firearm, then the small stereo that blared Miles Davis’s “So What.” He turned the volume down. “Too loud?”
Scovill didn’t move. “Nah. Just doing the welcome wagon thing, you know? What with ya being new here and all.”
Pilate gestured at the couch that came with the apartment. “Care to sit?”
Scovill eyed the tattered sofa with his squint. “No thanks. Listen, name’s Scovill. I’m sheriff around here.”
“I see. John Pilate.” He extended his hand.
Scovill took off his hat, revealing thinning sandy blond hair with silver strands that matched his neatly trimmed beard. In a move he’d done a thousand times, Scovill wiped away the nonexistent perspiration along the rim of the felt hat with two fingers. “Well, Dr. Pilate—” he began.
“Mister. I’m not a PhD, so it’s just Mr. Pilate. Actually, John will do just fine, Sheriff,” Pilate said, lowering his hand.
Scovill looked annoyed. “Okay then. Mr. Pilate let me just say welcome to Cross. Besides being your local sheriff, I’m de facto head of security of this campus. We run a quiet place here—not much in the way of partying or drugs—and we wanna keep it that way. We don’t need any outsiders coming in here…” Trailing off, Scovill glanced at the poster-sized framed black and white photo of a nude woman reclining on a rock; it set on the floor beside a suitcase, awaiting John to decide which wall would be its fate. “Anyhoo, we don’t need nobody coming around here giving anybody any wild and fantastic ideas. Let me remind you that faculty housing is for faculty only, no students. No special tutoring, if ya know what I mean,” he said, placing air quotations in the right places. “There’s to be no dinners, no parties, no nothin’ with students here. You got that?”
“Um, okay,” Pilate stammered, feeling like he’d been pulled over for speeding in a school zone while wearing a t-shirt that read, “I got some candy, little girl.”
“You’re a young man, and Lord knows a man has appetites, but be advised you cannot and will not satisfy any such urges with any of the students who attend school here.”
“Sheriff, I can assure you I have no intention of—”
“Good. Road to hell and all. If you mind these simple rules, you and I’ll get along just fine.”
Pilate look
ed around at the open cardboard boxes, then back at Scovill. His squinty eye seemed to be scanning every inch of him, as if committing Pilate to memory or making a decision.
“Yup,” Scovill said, turning on his boot heel. “See you around campus, Mr. Pilate.”
Pilate stood motionless for a moment, then nodded.
Scovill poked his head back inside the door. “Oh, and a word to the wise.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t go throwing your cigarette butts on the ground around here, especially in front of the president. Pisses him off, and we sure as hell don’t need that.”
Pilate watched the sheriff walk out the door and through the breezeway and then get into his SUV.
“Bad cop. No doughnut.”
Night fell, and Pilate had not yet ventured any further than his apartment. Though hungry, he was too tired to search for food in the wilds of Cross Township. He rustled through a box and found a half-eaten bag of Doritos and washed them down with a tepid, flat Coke. Outside, it was pitch black, and it was only seven o’clock.
He put on his coat and stepped onto the breezeway porch he shared with yet-unmet neighbors. Puffing on a cigarette, he leaned against the brick wall. He casually looked up as he exhaled, then gasped. Stars rioted in the sky. Thousands of pinpoints of light populated the heavens with twinkling indifference to his wonder. “My…God.” Pilate said, taking it in. He’d never really had a chance to gaze at the stars without the light pollution haze of a much bigger city, and he was taken in by nature’s spectacle. Pilate obsessively attempted to count the stars between puffs off his cigarette; after about forty he gave up.
He stretched and looked to the south, viewing the pale glow of the campus. There were no students scampering about just yet; they would arrive next week.
Pilate had another day before he had to report to work. Trevathan, the dean who’d hired him over the phone, was expecting him at lunch the next day.
He crushed out the cigarette on the side of the apartment, sparks hitting his fingers, then flicked the spent butt into a nearby snowdrift. “Oops.”
He wanted to spend some more time admiring Mother Nature’s little fireworks show, but it was chilly, and he had things to do. The stars would have to wait.
CHAPTER FIVE
Pictures were hung, books shelved, clothes stowed, and everything situated. His television picked up the dorm cable channels, all twenty of them, including a hunting channel that featured local deer trackers striking bizarre poses with their bloodied, vacant-eyed kills, bragging about the number of points on the antlers the animals would never be able to use again. He also stumbled across a porn channel, apparently a bootlegged one. The audio was bad, but the important
part—the video—was pretty good.
He tried out the shower, an ancient affair with cracked tile and lukewarm brownish-colored water. He had been warned by a blasé, lisping housing manager named Larry that the water in Cross was a “tad cloudy“ at times, and now that he was seeing it for himself, he realized that little weather prediction was a tad sugarcoated. “Delightful,” Pilate said, ruefully recalling the comparatively opulent bathroom of the casino hotel, which would have been perfect, if not for Simon’s presence. He sighed, reminding himself that it could be worse.
Seconds later, a cockroach reclining on his toothbrush challenged that notion. Dropping the insect into the toilet and the toothbrush into the cardboard box he was using as a makeshift trashcan, Pilate swilled some mouthwash, dressed, and drove into town.
“Town,” as it was euphemistically called, consisted of a small convenience store-sized grocery; a two-pump gas station with a messy, greasy repair bay staffed by even messier, greasier mechanics; a bank; a post office; a bar; and a brightly-painted greasy spoon cafe. A small clapboard house had been converted into a Veterans of Foreign Wars headquarters alongside an impecunious bait shop that boasted of sales on beer and night crawlers.
An old Chevy with a snow blade labored to clear drifts from the post office frontage as Pilate went inside to open a mailbox account.
The postmaster was a polite, fifty-something woman who asked him no questions about where he was from or what he was doing in Cross. She did have his box application form ready when he walked in, however.
Pilate smiled at the woman, eliciting a forced grin. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, no matter where you go, he considered. He also found out that he could return his rented truck at the local gas station, known as Jimmy’s. He decided he’d drive the truck back later and walk back home since it was only about a half-mile and would be a welcomed reprieve after driving all that way.
In the cramped grocery store, he maneuvered the narrow aisles with a small, squeaky-wheeled shopping cart; the left front wheel didn’t make contact with the linoleum at all and just spun in a haphazard circle as he walked. He loaded the cart with a new toothbrush, canned soup, crackers, lunchmeat, bread, and other bachelor staples. His preferred angel hair pasta was absent, so he had to settle for thin spaghetti, and as an accompaniment to the exorbitant pasta feast, he selected a generic canned spaghetti sauce labeled “with meat“ and some Parmesan cheese; it was the ghastly stuff in the familiar green canister, and it smelled like feet, but there wasn’t a lot of fresh fromage from which to choose. Comfort food was the order of the day: 2 percent milk, Coke, Doritos, Oreos, cigarettes, and a lottery scratch card. Casino winnings in hand, Pilate splurged and added a small plastic bottle of vodka.
The single checkout lane was clerked by yet another polite woman in her fifties; Pilate surmised in a grossly unfair, superior way that she had never ventured out of the county. She took his money, handed him his change, and said, “Welcome to Cross, Mr. Pilate.”
“Uh, how do you know who I am?” he asked, baffled since he’d paid cash.
She snorted. “You can’t fart in this town without someone smelling it.”
“I see,” Pilate said. “Well, thanks. I’ll be seeing you.” “Yup,” she said with a smile.
Now the town knows I eat junk food, smoke Marlboro Ultra Lights, and chase cheap pasta with cheap vodka, Pilate thought as he loaded his car trunk. When he shut it, he was instantly startled by a young girl of about six, standing beside him.
“You dropped this, mister,” she said, gleaming at him with large brown eyes and the sun glistening off her blonde locks as she held the lottery scratch-off up to him.
“Oh, thank you, young lady,” Pilate said. “That’s most kind of you.”
“You’re welcome,” she said, turning away and running up the slushy sidewalk to a woman’s side; the girl’s mother was about thirty, with slightly darker hair, large eyes, and a wary, yet strangely disarming smile.
Pilate waved at the pair.
The woman smiled again with a little more enthusiasm and turned away. She wore a powder-blue ski jacket, a red scarf, and tight Levi’s that hugged her in all the right places. Pilate decided she had quite a nice rear-end to complement her smile.
The nice-assed woman with the interesting smile took the child’s hand and walked away, and he watched the pair as they disappeared behind the post office.
In his car, Pilate scratched the ticket. “Ha! I can’t lose,” he said, looking into the rearview mirror as he backed up his car and wondering what that two bucks could buy him in the tiny little grocery store.
The sinister face of Simon peered back at him from the mirror. “Oh really?” he mocked. “Seems to me you’ve proven that theory wrong many times.”
Ignoring Simon’s taunts, Pilate turned onto the red brick road. He returned the rented truck and trudged home, taking in the Americana. His evening was much like the first. The porno channel, accompanied by music from his stereo (which clearly had to be better than amateur movie scripts or cheesy porno music) served as a diversion as he puttered away, arranging items in his cramped living room. He enjoyed a hearty meal of spaghetti, accompanied by vodka and two cigarettes. Feeling almost lachrymose from the vodka and starchy meal, he dozed until
eleven. He smoked again, ventured outside to count more stars, then tottered off to his twin-sized rented bed.
The morning was announced by the school carillon, which played “If I Were a Rich Man,” from Fiddler on the Roof.
Pilate rolled over twice before he came to the agonizing realization that he had to get out of bed. Either his alarm clock had failed him or he had turned it off in his sleep, because it was already 10:35 a.m., and he was due in the dean’s office at 11:00. “Shit!“ he screamed at the digital red numbers that seemed to be mocking his misfortune.
He showered, dressed, and sprinted to campus. He found the arts and sciences hall and presented himself to the dean’s secretary. She eyed him with either contempt or disappointment; he wasn’t sure. It was at that point that Pilate realized he had not shaved and wasn’t sporting the most wrinkle-free of clothing. Three-day beard growth, tousled hair (and not the sexy kind), and the appearance of generally not giving a damn was no way to meet his new boss, and he knew it. Maybe I should tap ashes on his floor too.
“John?” said a voice in an accent reminiscent of North Dakota.
Or is it Minnesota? Pilate tried to determine as he turned to face Dr. Peter Trevathan, who stood in the doorway. He wore a tweed jacket, bolo tie, close-cropped steel-gray hair, and a world- weary expression. His shiny glass eye gaped at the secretary, while his good eye took in Pilate’s shabby appearance.
“Dr. Trevathan? A pleasure,” said Pilate, extending his hand. For the third time since he’d arrived in Cross, John Pilate’s offer of a handshake went ignored.
Trevathan grunted, obviously not impressed with the near tardiness or the lackluster get-up. “Follow me,” he sighed.
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