Make Me Work (13 page)

“
You
teach at this college?” Russell had said that night as he shook my hand. He'd been playing cards for a few weeks with Sam and Max and some other profs, and I'd heard all about him—the big Oklahoman who was taking the faculty's money in any game they cared to name. “You're a philosophy professor?” Russell said, staring at me.

“I don't look the part, huh?”

“I guess the haircut fooled me, the little tail thing there in back. Or maybe it was the purple corduroy bedroom slippers.”

“Not the string tie?” I asked, fingering the state of Texas it had for a clasp.

“Yeah, that, too,” he said. “I'm from those parts, you know.”

“I've heard.”

“Damn, seeing you makes me think I could have been a professor, too.”

“Oh, you would have been good,” I said.

He seemed genuinely morose about it. “The things that pass you by in life ‘cause you just don't know.”

“You just nailed a major philosophical problem right there.”

“Damn,”
Russell said. “And I'll tell you another thing. I can sing about as good as Robert Goulet.”

“That's something I'd save for just the right time,” I said, and then, across Judith's living room jammed with dancers, I saw it happen—the instant she and Russell saw each other. Their attraction annihilated space and time. Instantly, Judith was at Russell's side. “Is this the gentleman from Oklahoma?” she said.

“Why, yes, ma'am, it is,” Russell replied, his voice gone slippery, his nostrils flaring, his cowboy boot pawing the ground. Apparently, his singing voice was the least of it.

“I need to borrow him,” Judith said to me, and danced Russell away.

It was two years later now, and we'd grown fond of Russell in the time he'd been orbiting Judith, roaring into town like a comet and flaming in our midst for two or three months at a time. Across Rafferty's mahogany bar, Max said, “There's something you don't know, mister.”

“Don't worry,” Russell answered. “I know it all. Inside out. Double.”

“No,” said Max. “You don't. Events have taken a sinister turn.”

Judith was an Argentine whose visa had expired more than a year before. Nobody knew why they kept turning her down, but her repeated applications for renewal had all been denied. We suspected the malignant influence of our provost. It was his job to plead Judith's case to the authorities, see to it that she be allowed to stay, yet just last week he'd called Max, not to report on his progress with the Feds, but to express the trustee position on tenuring unwed mothers. The provost liked to “ride herd” on the faculty. Still, we'd assumed the campus was consecrated corral. No cop had set foot on the grounds since 1972, when a mole exposed the student protesters' plan to blow up the cafeteria.

But this afternoon two federal agents had strolled right into the Humanities building with a warrant for our pregnant friend. Some students (who would later graduate with highest honors) saw them in the lobby, smelled a rat, and tipped us off. We hid Judith behind the mimeo machine in the supplies closet, locked the door, and took up lounging positions in our office doorways around the Humanities reception area.

The tired-looking men in bad suits came up the stairs. They flashed their IDs and asked us where Judith was.

“Judith,” Max said in Jack Webb's voice. He looked around at the rest of us. “Anybody got any information on Judith's whereabouts?” “Whereabouts” was one of Max's favorite words and he relished any opportunity to use it.

“She might be in New York,” I volunteered. “She likes to disco there.”

“The woman in question is an illegal alien,” one of the agents said.

Six or seven profs were standing in their doorways by now. We all acted stunned and amazed.

Max turned ceremoniously to our receptionist, the trusty Maria. “If anyone would know of Judith's whereabouts, it would be this lady right here.”

“Haven't seen her,” Maria said.

“Wish we could do more to help,” Max told the agents.

They saw how things stood and they went away. But they vowed to come back, and we believed they would. They were too dull to have been sent for show. No, Judith's manila folder had found its way down to the worker ants of the system, the bureaucratic plodders whose bland tenacity was a force of nature. Given enough time and brown shoe leather, they would create the Grand Canyon.

There was only one thing left to do: get Judith married to a citizen of the United States. The father of her baby seemed the elegant, economical stroke. True, he was the worst husband material imaginable, but Judith persisted in liking him. She couldn't explain what it was about Russell, she said; he was just her type. Thus, we'd come to Rafferty's Bar like the Three Sisters of Fate to give Mr. Wrong his last chance to do the right thing. If he refused, we had an alternate plan: Max would marry Judith himself. Max and Judith already had what Max, a Marxist, called “history,” and this plan also satisfied his highly developed sense of duty to his staff, something we all cherished him for. It seemed rather too highly developed in this case, however, since I had volunteered to marry Judith first.

Our news about the Feds had flung Russell into a funk of gambler's superstition. He'd been less than a day away from making his escape, and now this. You could see what he was thinking—that he'd gotten jinxed somehow.

Sam handed over the key to the freight elevator up to his loft. “She's expecting you.”

Like a sleepwalker, Russell tried to hand the key back. “Sorry, fellas, I have to work,” he said.

“We're covering for you,” said Sam, leading him out from behind the bar and stepping in to take his place.

The sight of his own face in the big mirror seemed to wake Russell up. “I just want you guys to know something,” he said. “That baby was her idea. I was always against babies. This could have happened to you!”

He saw that we were the wrong audience for the distress signals of the cornered male. “I'm saying she tricked me into it!” he exclaimed, taking another tack, the appeal to reason and justice.

“Stole your sperms,” I said.

“That's right!” he replied.

Max joined me in examining the classic tin ceiling of Rafferty's place—stamped with an intricate filigreed relief and freshly painted a dill-pickle green—until Russell huffed off to the black front door. When he reached it, he spun around to face us again. “Every thing's a trick,” he said bitterly, and stepped backward into a lozenge of apricot-colored light.

“Indeed it is,” said Sam, who spent most of his life in pictorial space and who was now stacking a pyramid of shot glasses to do the one where you cascade the whisky by overpouring the uppermost glass. He flourished the bottle like a magic wand. “Bourbon is a witch,” he said. “I am a witch doctor.”

We had tended bar for a half hour when Rafferty showed up. He was a big pink-faced man who sold real estate and sang baritone with the local opera. The bar was a sideline.

“You look good back there,” he said to Sam. “I think you missed your calling. Johnnie on the rocks.”

Sam poured him a big one. Rafferty was already up to speed on Russell.

“The fantasies of grown men are the worst,” he said, sipping his Scotch. “Everybody knows you can't card-count in casinos anymore. They shuffle six decks together in the boot. It doesn't matter how good your memory is. The house wins.”

“And then there's the small matter of the baby, Raff,” I said.

“Yeah, and then he goes and knocks up this girl. The guy's a loser.”

We told Rafferty about Immigration. He jumped right off his bar stool in one motion. I couldn't believe he could do that. Realestate salesman or not, he was still an old Leftie. “No! Not federal agents on a college campus!”

“G-men,” Max said. “Two of 'em.”

“Big as life,” I said.

Max leaned into Rafferty's face. “Brown shoes,” he said significantly.

“Oh, that's no good,” Rafferty said, sitting back down. “That's bad.”

“Rafferty,” said Sam, “the girl has to get married, tomorrow, and the bum she's with doesn't even have a full-time job.”

“All right, all right,” Rafferty said. “I'll use him six nights. By himself except on weekends. He's a pain in the ass, but I think he keeps the damage down. The kids respect him.”

We all embraced the big man. “All right, all right,” he said.

“Let us buy you dinner at Stella's,” Max said.

“I can't eat at Stella's anymore,” said Rafferty. “You guys eat there?”

“Once in a while,” we said, backing away toward the door.

“Who's tending bar here?”

“Cover us for dinner, O.K.?” said Sam, as the door opened and the sunset hit our eyes, and we seemed, for a moment, to dematerialize into the pure manifestations of Being we had apparently devoted our lives to believing we were.

Our little town had one of everything—one Chinese place, one steak place, one Bar-B-Q, one avocado-and-sprout—except for sub shops and bars, of which it had about fifty apiece. Stella's was the Italian place. This dinner was probably my five-hundredth there. Sam and Max, both long ago tenured and left for dead, must have been well into four figures at Stella's by then. It was an old shoe of a restaurant with homey food served in a decor so red you seemed to be dining inside a living heart. Personally, I could have gone for a steak, but steak was out on the bypass at the Chanticleer Grill, and from a window table at Stella's downtown we could keep an eye on Sam's second-floor loft, kitty-corner across the street.

“I hate the idea of spying on people,” said Max, once we had our antipasto and our first carafe of local red wine. His doctorate was in ethics and he was always saying things like that. We'd been staring across the street like people at a drive-in movie, watching the large industrial windows above the furniture store. Sam had the whole second floor of the building—one huge open space except for his bathroom in back, all of it painted hospital white. He did his pictures in front, at the wall of windows filled by a perfect view of the lake.

“Is it spying if you can't see anything?” Sam asked.

“This is not seeing anything?” said Max. He turned to me. “How many times have you given the Plato's Cave lecture?”

“And now I'm seeing it. Just the way Plato described it.”

What we could see, from our seats at street level, was the top half of a wall and a large swatch of Sam's ceiling. It was dusk now, and Russell and Judith had all the lamps blazing in the loft. As they moved around, gigantic shadow-forms of a man and a woman hurtled across the open space like Mr. and Mrs. Frankenstein. They were either dancing or duking it out; nothing else could account for the titanic story we saw enacted on the wall. Every now and then the people themselves strayed close enough to the windows to pop into view, just the tops of their heads lit from below, and it was shocking to see them appear that way, so 3-D and so small, like seed kernels released by the great, dark creatures to propagate shadow-beings throughout the world.

We were almost finished eating when Russell suddenly burst from Sam's street door and hurried off down the sidewalk. Max went to call Judith from the old wooden phone booth in back. Her giant shadow answered the phone. Max gesticulated in the rear of Stella's restaurant, and then, across the street, Judith's shadow gesticulated up in Sam's loft.

“So what happened?” we asked when Max got back.

“They danced for a while and then they had a fight.”

On account of Sam, I was looking forward to getting old. He had many winters on his hoary head, and their snow had leveled out life's hills and valleys for him. All things of the world delighted Sam equally now, even the spectacle of his town's demise. He'd come there forty years before, when it was still considered the most beautiful spot in the state and our two-lane road was the big highway. People from everywhere stopped to see the summer houses and eat lunch by the lake. Then somebody decided to build the Thruway seven long miles north of town, and now only the college and the army base stood between us and nothingness.

Our search for Russell took us past many old landmarks, and Sam remembered some of them for Max and me—the boarded-up ballroom on Exchange where throngs once danced to the Dorsey band, the big theater on Market where Sinatra once sang. Our own Rafferty sang there now. We stopped in the sad Greyhound station that was once a whorehouse, and verified that Russell had not boarded any buses for anywhere. We checked all the joints we'd ever seen him in, right down to the tiny one near the tracks whose sign merely said “Bar.” We checked all the addresses where Russell had ever crashed. Even in a town so small, it took a while. Nobody had seen him anywhere. Max was looking more and more like a married man with a kid on the way when—at ten o'clock, to be absolutely sure—we finished up with a swing down by the water.

We found the usual hot cars in the lot at the head of the lake, local kids drinking beer and listening to brain damage on their tape machines. They hooted at Max's little Toyota. Farther around the big asphalt crescent of the lot, where the streetlights stopped and the sandy beach became a long plain of shiny stones, we saw Russell and a woman sitting on the bumper of a snow-white Jeep. Max pulled up and parked nearby. Russell saw who it was and wearily pushed off from the woman's car. He walked out on the stones, all the way out to where the water began, lit a cigarette and smoked with his back to us, looking across the lake at the string of mercury lamps lighting the bypass running south out of town.

The woman was holding a joint and looking at us with alarm.

“Hi there, Leslie,” I called out to her.

She looked me up and down for a second and then she smiled. “Hey, it's you,” she said. “You remembered my name.”