Girls (11 page)

The bomb scare was in the social sciences building, so I was outside with history professors and anthropologists and political scientists. They were very good about staying where I and the other security people and Elmo and his two deputies had put them. I noticed that about college people. They got pretty surly about parking regulations and running electric gizmos off too little wiring in their offices, but otherwise, when it came to standing in line, they tended to be obedient. I recognized the woman with the big mouth and nice nose. She was shivering and smiling at the same time, her arms crossed in front of her, mittens on her hands. Her lipstick was bright red and so was her stocking cap.

She said, “Hi. I thought of you when I was sliding backward down the hill again this morning. Do you know my name?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “You ought to call me if you have trouble on the road surface.”

“All right,” she said, looking at me steadily. “I’d need to know your name.” A couple of students were watching us, and so was the poet from the humanities building. He was standing behind her, with a bare finger touching the cloth of her coat. I wondered if she knew that. He saw me watching, and he brought the hand to near his lips and blew on the finger, as if her coat had heated it up.

“Just ask for Jack,” I said.

“My name’s Rosalie Piri,” she said. Her cheeks were bright from the cold. I thought it made sense, holding your hand out to her to get warm. I disliked that he had done it, though.

I said, “Professor Piri.”

“Rosalie,” she said.

Two state police cars pulled in, and a red-and-white car and truck from the sheriff’s department. A dog jumped down from the van, a giant black Labrador with a rolling, broad chest and thick forepaws. He seemed glad. They all went into the building. The new president of the college came up from his office, walking in clumsy steps in his thin rubber galoshes. Then his vice president for administrative services came over. A television truck with a minicam antenna rolled in. It was going to be a prank, of course, a false alarm. Nobody blew up college buildings anymore. There wasn’t enough at stake, now that the war was done, and the days of rage. If you were black, you might want to do it, I thought. Except they don’t bring that kind of black kid into these schools. They used to, but they’d stopped. Things were tidier now.

Though not, of course, in Janice Tanner’s life, and not in her parents’. Except for that, though, except for the screaming and screaming her parents wanted to do and she had maybe done or was doing, it was a calm time, and no one was political. The Vice President of the United States would be here in a month, and the campus cops would help to spy on the faculty and report curious characters and foreigners. Some feelings would be hurt; some people on certain
lists might be asked to get off campus by the Secret Service for the sake of the Vice President’s safety. But no one would be violent.

Except in Janice Tanner’s life.

Classes were canceled and the students were sent on their way. The professors waited for the bomb-sniffing dog to clear their offices so they could retrieve their work. Two of us stayed behind, and the rest of us left. The sky dropped before darkness fell, and then more snow came. I thought I saw, under the hood of a thick down-filled parka, the red hair of the girl who had tried to kill herself. But I remembered that her parents, at Archie’s suggestion, had kept her out on a leave of absence. I thought about Archie talking to people about my military record and our life and our child.

But he did it on account of the Tanners’ daughter, I thought. Sometimes you have to do it for the ones still alive. I ought to tell him I’d forgiven him. He’d know how angry I’d have been.

I drove off the campus in a borrowed security Jeep. The little clapped-out tan car of Professor Piri was ahead of me. She skidded, then obviously released the brakes and rolled until she gathered too much momentum for comfort, then braked and of course went into a skid. She seemed to go sideways as much as ahead. I followed her until she made it to the stop sign at the bottom of the hill where it joined Route 8, which was also the town’s main street. I felt a little bit like a shepherd, and when she turned onto the street, I stayed behind. Her car stopped some yards down, so I drove alongside her and leaned across to roll down my passenger-side window.

“You all right, Professor?”

“Rosalie. I thought you were escorting me home, Jack. It was very reassuring and then, when you stayed back there, not so reassuring.” Her car was a litter of books and papers and fast-food sacks. Her defroster made a very loud roar. Looking down from the Jeep into the squat car, I saw that her coat and skirt were pulled back for easier driving. I looked at her legs, then back to her face.

I said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to press you. I was worried about those tires. You really need to replace them.”

“And I am going to. I was going to ask with what?”

“With what?”

“Replace the tires with what?” She grinned widely, enjoying her joke.

“Other tires, I think. Newer ones.”

“Ah,” she said seriously, “other tires. Well, then, I will. Thank you, Jack.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Her face was solemn, and then the grin came back. “ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ ” she said. “Thank you for guarding me. Good night.”

She drove on slowly and unsteadily. I turned myself around and drove out of town toward the long, greasy hill that would end in Masonville. I didn’t know what I would look for and, a half an hour later, as I came in slowly, in four-wheel drive, down the long approach to the small business district a few streets beyond the squat cement buildings of the campus, I found myself turning my head a little quickly, looking for strange behavior, like someone on patrol. They had their own security force, of course, a lot larger than ours, and I ought to report to them. But this wasn’t college business. This was, as Randy Strodemaster would say, community business. There was gown and there was town, and this was town, he would say. I thought of his handsome face and his filthy bathrobe. I looked for anything and I found nothing. Snow blew across the streetlamps, and sparse traffic lit the dirty slush in the road. The windows of bars and a diner were fogged. People were in there, generating heat, and, according to Elmo St. John, Janice Tanner was under the ice of a lake somewhere, or stuffed in a barrel, wrapped in a sack.

He was right, I thought. He was probably right. I saw the oversized air scoop that ruined the profile of the Trans Am, and I pulled into the curb and parked and shut my lights off. I left the engine on to run the heater. He was probably right, but maybe she lived in spite of the FBI profile and the experience we all shared, which insisted that what these men are in love with is death. The suffering is incidental, much as they enjoy provoking it. The fear, much as they might relish it, was also incidental—no, it was secondary. What they loved was death, because what they feared was their deadness. And if you
can give death, you’re alive, you’re in power over who you’ve fastened to the tabletop or floor, you’re a little bit of a god.

I thought of Mrs. Tanner. Whoever took Janice had a different notion of gods.

Power, I thought. I had to remember that and ask Elmo and maybe Fanny, though I didn’t think she could talk about this a lot. It was power, and then the child was dead and the power was gone and you had, after some time, to start again. That was for the cops, I thought. All I wanted was Janice Tanner back, I told myself, and I knew it wasn’t true.

William Franklin’s car, parked around the corner of a long clapboard bar, wasn’t empty like I’d thought. A head moved up in the front seat, on the passenger’s side, and then what I’d thought was a headrest began to move on the driver’s side. They had been engaging in recreation, and their posture suggested what it was. I felt a little jump in my own body. The doors opened and a short girl walked around the car to the driver’s side. Franklin got out and they embraced, leaning against the door he’d closed.

I had no authority to follow him or roust him, and I thought he’d come after me if I beat on him in front of his girlfriend. Then the local cops would come, and the state police, and I’d be in the shit, with nothing learned. I’d known this in advance, hadn’t I? So why, on a night so terrible for driving, had I driven here?

“You don’t know that,” I said, “you’re stupider than I thought.”

And because of the eyes in the wallpaper, Jack. I leaned forward to turn on my lights and shift into first, and my body ached like I’d been beaten by the kid I was about to start roughing up. Go home, I told myself, thinking about the wallpaper. You go home and go upstairs and you look back at them.

The dog and I were outside next morning, and as I watched him roll on his back, grinding at a piece of rabbit several decades old that he’d brought back as a trophy, Fanny wobbled over the crisp ice to park
her car. He was up and waiting, paws on the door, his big brush of a tail wagging. I thought of the Labrador sniffing for the bomb they hadn’t found. There was this optimism in dogs. They got up and charged into the day with a confidence I wanted to have. Looking at the rabbit haunch, I was grateful my nostrils were sealed by the cold.

Fanny’s, apparently, weren’t. She held her nose.

“I think it goes back to Lyndon Johnson’s administration.”

With her hand away from her face, she said, “All those presidents smell the same to me.”

We stood in the deep cold and nodded in agreement.

“I have to go soon,” I said. “I’ve been getting in later and later, and I believe I’m going to be reprimanded. I needed to talk to you. Have you got a minute?”

“Have I got a minute,” she said. “You and I spend a dozen hours a day chasing after strangers to mop their blood up and rescue their vehicles and generally smooth the way—”

“Smoothing the way. That’s good.”

“That’s what we do. We’re utilities. Like electricity.”

“Smoothing the way. I can’t think of anything rough I’ve turned smooth.”

“Like goddamned sandpaper,” she said.

“The tears will freeze on your eyes,” I said.

“Except I’m not crying,” she said. “Come inside. Have I got a minute. God, Jack.” She was inside the door, reaching back to hold it open for me. The dog went in, and I followed. She stood in the mudroom with her coat halfway off her shoulders. “Have I got a minute. And we’re passing each other, going back and forth like little ferries. Where was it, before you reported to Fort Leonard Wood, and we got a week—where did we go, where the ferries kept going there and back, there and back?”

“Seattle.”

“Vashon-Seattle, Seattle-Vashon. They were going to Canada, right?”

“We stayed in a hotel you said didn’t have mice or rats because the boa constrictors ate them.”

She let her coat slide down her arms and back. It pooled on the floor around her feet. I picked it up.

“Jack. Yes. I’ve got a minute.” She stood in front of me with her arms hanging, her shoulders sloped. It was a perfect picture of exhaustion. I think she could have slept standing before me. I knew it wasn’t only fatigue from work. We were grinding each other away with a kind of friction that didn’t involve our touching each other.

I said, “You know the little kid who disappeared? The one they’re offering a reward on?”

“I see her face all day. Everyplace. It’s a terrible little face. It’s so open.”

“One of the professors hooked her parents up with me. He was talking to Archie Halpern and I guess Archie said something about me and the MPs and some of the work I did, so this professor decided he needed my help. The Tanners asked me to do something. I don’t know what to do.”

“Just talking to them is something. You’re doing it, I assume.”

“I don’t know. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“You know how they feel.”

“No, it isn’t the same.”

“It isn’t the
same.
But you know how they feel.”

I nodded, and I could swear she knew I was going to drop on her, because I heard her feet move, as if she had set them. I leaned over onto her. I let my head fall onto her shoulder where it runs up into the neck. It must have hurt. She winced. But I felt, all of a sudden, the way she had looked a moment before. I thought my bones couldn’t hold me anymore. We got locked up like that, my empty left hand and my right still holding her coat in a fist, both of them behind her now, one of her arms around the small of my back, the other on my arm, and each of us at the same time trying to let our weight go and hold each other up.

The dog heard her sniff, and he thumped his tail. It hit the washing machine behind her and made a resonating noise. He did it again.

I said, “Oh boy.”

He probably thought I said, “Good boy,” because he slammed his tail against the washer.

Fanny said, “Poor, poor people.”

“Poor people,” I said.

Fanny said, “I was referring to us.”

She stepped out from under me, and I moved away. We avoided each other’s eyes.

“Listen,” I said. “A thing happened yesterday. Did you hear about the runaway girl?”

“They brought her over for a physical. They were sending her home. Yonkers, New York. She’d been gone for months, and then she lost some diddly job she shouldn’t have been given in the first place and she ended up here.”