The Mentor (38 page)

“Fine,
fine
,”
she said and straightened her sweater lapels, another quick glance at her
coworkers.  She didn’t see it but from my vantage point, I could see one
of them trying to hide a smile.  “I can’t give you access to Professor
Jepson’s records.  Just your own.  That is just not done, Mr. Mister.”

Pavan
shuffled behind me, letting out a long, slow breath.  Behind her,
somewhere, a file fell from someone’s desk.

“Ma’am,” I
said, then looked down at her name plaque, “Ms. Leonard, I’m not looking for
his bank records or driving record or lab results.  Just a phone number or
an address.”

“I can’t do
that.”

“Jeez, can
you maybe give him my number?  Then urge him to call me?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No, I'm
sorry.  We're not
Facebook
now, Mr. Mister.  We don't make 'connections'
or whatever it is you all do with it.”

This time
Pavan let out a strange whistle-whimper.  He mumbled something and I heard his
faint, strained voice half-say and half-sing: "
Take!
"

In the
back, a pencil or pen holder tipped over, somewhere behind the stacks of paper,
loudly scattering to the floor.

I pushed my
adversary, despite the brick wall she was throwing up.  It seemed she had her
little piece of power, her modicum of authority in this world and by-god she
was going to
wield
it.

“I know
this is an office brimming with Respect, capital ‘R’," I said.  "But
I’m having a hard time believing you are being fair now.  It’s important,
like earth-shatteringly important, that I speak with him!”

Ms. Leonard
touched something in her hair, at the scalp and stiffened.  She started to
say something, and then stopped.

“I can’t
help you, Mr. Mister.”

He couldn’t
hold it in anymore: Pavan broke.  He barked out, “
Take!"

Turning to
leave, I said: “Don’t mind him.”

"These
broken wings!!
”

“It’s time
for his afternoon coffee enema,” I said, pushing the door open, waving my
friend out.  “He gets like this.”

“
And
learn to fllyyyy again!
”

Before the
door closed behind us, we both heard one of the giant stacks of paper collapse
with a crash and scatter to the floor.

Once out of
earshot, we both howled with laughter as we crossed the campus to the Chemistry
building.  Pavan punched the air, still laughing, which drew a frown from
a small group of students who clutched their books as they slid by.

"You're
a fucked up dude, Dexter, and I love ya for it!"

"Well,
it's nice to be appreciated."

The sun was
starting to dip and the temperature felt like it had dropped ten degrees since
we’d gone into the administration building.  Picking up the pace a little,
I felt myself move more confidentially.  My strides felt more sure and I needed
the map less, as if I'd settled into a shallow, invisible groove that had been carved
by my own footballs, years earlier, and hundreds of times before.

I was
remembering.

Inside the
Chem building, there were a few scattered students, perched on the ledges of
the giant dusty widows that capped the staircases on each of the structure’s
three floors.

Jepson’s
old classroom was on the second floor.  It seemed fruitless to even bother
seeking it out, he was no longer there, but now that my mental spillway was
breached, the sight of the classroom might force a crack or fissure and help me
better remember the man.

Sure, it
was all I really had, but the
feeling
my answers would come from my old
professor was tangible, even tactile, like I could reach out and grab it.

The door
was locked and the light was off but there was enough sun still streaming in
that Pavan and I could see most of the classroom through the skinny window in
the door.

My friend
asked about the class, what it was like, where I sat.  This, so far,
escaped me.

“You forget
something inside?”

Looking
over my shoulder, I saw a man in his fifties, graying at the temples but
sporting an impressive,
huge
, jet black mustache.  He smiled and
tapped some keys at his belt-line.

“I’ve got a
key to all the rooms on this floor.  You leave something on your desk?”

Choosing
not to concoct a big story because, in part, it takes so much to maintain
whopper lies like that, I explained this had been my old classroom.

Mustache-man
popped open the door and hit the lights.

The moment
I was inside, the soft lines around the room hardened, as information about
this room, the students, course materials, drizzled back into their empty
slots.

Pavan
asked, “You okay, man?”  

Looking
down, I saw my fingertips pressing against one of the desks, as I steadied
myself a little.

One,
two, three...

“There,” I
said and smiled, letting him know I was all right.  “I sat there.”

The man
who'd let us in the room introduced himself as Professor Marsh.  He walked up
next to me.

“Couldn’t
have been too long ago,” Marsh said.  “I thought you guys were both students.
 When did you go to the school?”

“About six
years ago, now.”

Wow,
I thought.
 Has it been six
years!

Pavan said:
“I didn’t go here.  Me, I’m still undeclared, yet.  Still looking for
the right fit, you know?”

“Sure,
naturally," Marsh said.  "Do you know you have staples in your hair?”

“Yes, I
do.”

Sitting
down in my old desk, I could almost see my old professor at the front of the
class.  Most of the class was lecture-- he’d been notorious for
not
writing things down so note taking was a must for just about every student.

Within the
first week of class, he'd singled me out having noticed I wasn't actually
taking notes.  I'd been writing in my notebook, but mostly it was random,
abstract doodling.

This had
initially drawn a scowl from him.  After peppering me with questions for about
fifteen minutes-- everyone in class slowly realizing that I'd done something to
incur the professor's apparent wrath-- he finally stopped, nodded.

"Good,"
was all he'd said, then smiled.  When
some kid from Texas asked what
"that was all about"
, Professor
Jepson shrugged and said every student should be expected to know the material,
at all times.  He cast a quick, private glance at me and nodded and,
surprisingly, he made no mention of what had triggered our little
tete-a-tete
. 

Jepson
never exposed my secret to the other class members.

“He used to
walk between the door and his desk,” I said and raised a hand toward where the
American flag was hanging.  “It used to be over there.”

“Who was
your teacher?”

“Professor
Jepson.  He’d walk between the desk and the door like he was stalking his
prey,” I said and Marsh smiled.  “A lion in a tweed jacket and elbow
patches hunting our imagination.  He loved to really get us going.”

“Students
still talk about him,” he said, grinning again. “He was only here a few short
years but, no question; he left his mark on this place.  A good one, too.”

Marsh
perked up suddenly and he walked over to a long table, covered with books, and
knickknacks.  Scanning the table, he said, “I came here shortly after he
left-- in fact, I had to pick up a couple of his classes that were left without
a teacher.  Ah!  You'll love this!”

Carefully,
Marsh lifted a figure about the side of his forearm from the table.  Wire
glasses, pot belly and one of the likely only two shirts and tie combos
Professor Jepson ever wore.

“You
remember this?”  Funny question but Marsh didn’t know it.  I hadn’t
told him about the accident or the holes in my past.

Pavan was
trying to reassemble a model of a molecule he’d managed to take apart farther
down the table and looked up.  He said, “Wow, voo-doo cool!”

I said, “Ha!
That looks like him, too.” 

It was a
papier-mâché likeness of Jepson.  Not bad either.  Holding it, it
seemed unnaturally weighted for papier-mâché.

“Heavy.”

“Oh, shoot.
 Forgot,” he said and pointed to an indentation in the doll’s back.
 “He had a good sense of humor about himself, obviously, because he
recorded that for a student.  Hit the button, there.”

The soft
patch of paper moved down about a half inch, and I felt it click.

“
I am
prepared and I am armed with chalkboard erasers, students.  Are you ready
for this?
”

Marsh said,
“A senior explained it to me and said Jepson was known for nailing sleeping
students with er-- are you okay?”

In the
distance, I heard Pavan’s voice: “Hey, man.  Dex!”

What had
been a trickle of memories earlier was now a flood.

My vision
went black.  

The roar in
my head, louder and louder and more gritty the longer it went on and the
sensation of falling, nothing beneath my feet.

Flash, a
bolt of lightning.

Images and
sound and words and colors and light came at me so fast, it was too much and I
struggled to suck in a breath, filling instead with sights and smells and,
especially, the music of some coked out, incoherent symphony that scratched and
banged against their instruments, playing no music but this
throbbing
chaos.

Laughing at
a coffee shop, throwing a football on a wide expanse of grass, jumping into the
Chattahoochee, so much movement and noise, and it kept coming and coming at me.

“
Dexter!
”

It felt as
though my brain was melting, gushing out my ears.

Images
whirled by, one encouraged by the next,
I know the way
, flooding back to
me.

“
I am
prepared and I am armed with chalkboard erasers, students.  Are you ready
for this?
”

Jepson’s
voice rattled around my head and I looked down to the wheel, gripping it, white
knuckled with one hand.  

"Are
you ready..?"

My other,
pressing something against my head.  Was I bleeding?

In the
mirror, I saw my eyes, wide, crazed and beyond that, the windshield flooded by
the downpour.

Suddenly, I
was driving again, all those years ago.

Into the mobile
phone at my ear, I shout, “Professor?  I can’t-- I can’t talk right now
the storm--”

“Dexter,
there’s no time,” he says, and sound and light split the sky, I feel like I’d
been electrocuted.  “They... damn, they’ve found me, Dexter.”

I blink
away the rain.  “What?  Who found you, Professor?”

“It
shouldn’t be this way,” he yells over the storm, as fire-red taillights blaze
across the glass in front of me.

“Sir, I
can’t... I need to call you when we’re off the interstate, it’s too--”

“Dexter,
listen!”  I’ve never heard him yell.  And, more terrifying, I’ve
never heard that tone before in his voice.  He's scared.  “They’re
here for it, but they won’t find it.  They’ll never find it.  But
that doesn’t mean the rest of the world shouldn’t know it.  It’s... it
should be for the world, not for them!”

A truck
blasts its air horn at someone to my left.  I can't see either vehicle.

“Professor?
 What’s-- what’s wrong?”

There is a
crack
again but this time it was tinny, thinner than I’d remembered when the dream
had come before.  

“Christ,
they’re shooting out the lock.”

“What??”  I
swerve to avoid a truck and its wandering trailer.  "Who's shooting?

Another
crack and he says: “No time.  Dexter, you told me what you can do and...
it shouldn’t be this way!  But, I have no choice.  It can’t be lost
forever.”

“Professor!
 Professor, who’s shooting at you?”

“No.
 Dexter, please.  This is all that matters: please listen closely.”

For the
next half minute, half decade, or half century, I'm listening-- real time,
hyperaware and in the moment, taking it all in, as strange as it was, I'm
listening intently-- but most of the words that he wants me to hear do not entirely
make sense. A jumble of phrases that,
wait!
, sound like--

That’s when
the crash came.

Reds and
silvers and, then, black darker than the void of space and cracks of light that
splintered glass into my mind.  

I heard the
scream.

It wasn’t
the Professors.  It wasn't mine.

I heard my
sister Ruthie.  I heard Ruthie's terrible, terrible scream.