Vineyard Fear (9 page)

The test would be in the town center. When I got there, nobody paid any attention to me. Was this a good sign or a bad one? I wondered if I would appear more professorial if I grew a beard. What kind? A little pointy one or a big bristly one? Maybe just a moustache.

I walked through the town center and slanted across the road to enter the college campus. There was a nondescript blue car quite a way up the street, but I had plenty of time to cross before he got there. When I was about halfway across I heard the roar of an engine behind me and a simultaneous scream from a girl on the sidewalk I was approaching.

“Look out!” she screamed, and put her hands up to her face.

I turned, saw the grill of the car filling my vision, and dived for the gutter. Something touched my foot and tumbled me, and John's briefcase went flying. Then I was on the pavement, rolling, and looking at the rear of the car as it careened on its way. I caught a glimpse of a youthful face glance back at me. The face wore dark glasses and was topped by a mass of yellow hair. Then I was rolling some more and hitting the curb.

The girl who had screamed came across the street and other people, students all, I guessed, came running.

“Are you all right?”

“I think so.”

“You're bleeding!”

True. Some skin was missing from my knees, calves, elbows, and hands. A shoulder hurt. I eased slowly up into a sitting position. I moved various parts of me. Everything functioned. “I'm okay,” I said.

“You're bleeding!”

“I need a couple of Band-Aids.”

“The infirmary is right over there,” said a young man. “Should you try to walk?”

I got up. The young man and a young woman put their hands out as though to catch me should I fall. “I think I'm fine,” I said. “Did that guy stop?”

There were confused replies.

“I thought it was a woman!”

“No, it was a guy with a weird wig. Or maybe hair down to here.”

“I never saw his face, but the son of a bitch kept going! We should call the cops! What an asshole!”

“You'll get no argument from me,” I said. “Would any of you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I'd recognize that wig!”

“It wasn't a wig, it was a woman!”

“No, it wasn't!”

“How about the car?” I asked. “The license plate?”

There were shakings of heads and angry noises.

“Here, sir. I think this is yours.” A boy handed me a Teva. The car had knocked it off my foot and he had found it down the street. I put it back on.

“Here. It didn't even open.” The girl who had screamed handed me John Skye's briefcase. She looked pale.

“You saved my life,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Oh, I was so scared!”

“You should go to the infirmary, sir,” said the young man who had pointed it out. “You should let them check you out and get some bandages on those abrasions. You're bleeding all over your clothes.”

True on all counts. I looked at the girl who had screamed. “What's your name?”

“Amy Jax.”

“You're a student here?”

“Yes.”

“Amy, you've already saved my life, but I want you to do me another favor.” I pointed to the building John Skye had entered. “I want you to take this briefcase through that door and give it to the secretary you'll find there. Tell her it's for Professor Skye.” I gave her the briefcase. “One more thing,” I said. “Lean forward.”

She leaned and I kissed her forehead. “Thanks again, Amy Jax.”

She actually blushed. Hands clapped approvingly around us. Amy went away with the briefcase and I allowed myself to be conducted to the infirmary by one of the young men who insisted on calling me “sir.” Zee would have
said I looked like another moped accident and she would have been right.

After I was bandaged up, I did the right thing. I went to the police station and reported the incident. The guy behind the desk wrote everything down and said they'd certainly look into the matter. I suspected that he was a townie who probably wasn't too sorry that an obviously academic type like me had gotten bunged up a bit. On the other hand, maybe he was an old Weststock grad who probably wasn't too sorry that an obvious townie like me had gotten bunged up a bit. In either case, I was more work for a department that probably already had enough to keep it busy.

I smiled at him and limped out.

When I left the police station, I barely had time to get home and change my clothes before John was scheduled to some strolling in. I put on socks and slacks and a long-sleeved shirt to cover various bandages and got myself a drink, which I downed while walking around John's fine old house. I was getting a little stiff in the joints and hurting in small ways I hadn't noticed earlier. My hands were sore and I was also feeling a bit ethereal and shaken, the way you sometimes do after the danger is over. America was as risky a place as I remembered it being.

I got another drink and went into John's nice big library. Thousands of books, comfortable chairs with good reading lights, a worn oriental rug, a big, battered desk with a brand-new computer on it signifying that John was entering the twentieth century just as it was ending. I opened a book about Mencken and immediately read that
human existence is always irrational and often painful. Very Menckenish, but I didn't need to be told that because I'd just experienced the proof. I put the book back and tried a little John Gay. Gay, I learned, had written his own epitaph: “Life is a jest, and all things show it. I thought so once, and now I know it.”

Cute. A footnote informed me that Gay's monument was in Westminster Abbey and that the
Dictionary of National Biography
considered the words on it flippant. Irreverent to the last, eh, John? I read some more.

A bit later, the phone rang. It was John Skye again.

“Hope you weren't wondering where I've been. Damned meeting went on for hours. Just as well, because if we'd cut it short, we'd all have had to continue it tomorrow. This way, we're done today! I don't think I'll bother to come home right now. I could use a drink. Why don't you meet me down at the Duke?”

“Why not? See you there.”

I went out into the summer afternoon and walked downtown. The air seemed clean and good. I was very careful crossing streets. By the time I got to the Duke, I'd walked some of the stiffness out of my knees and hips. I knew that it would come back during the night, but I also knew that sooner or later it would go away for good.

It was about five o'clock. John was standing at the bar with a glass of dark beer in his hand. A tall, thin man was talking with him while nursing a glass of whiskey. He was one of those people who might be in his twenties or his forties. When I came up to them, the man looked at me with a gambler's deadpan eyes.

John smiled. “Lute, meet J. W. Jackson. J.W., meet Luther Martingale. Morey, a pint of bitter for Mr. Jackson!”

I shook Martingale's hand. It was smooth and strong. I wondered if he sanded his fingertips. Martingale placed a smile on his face. When he did, it made him look almost innocent.

“I've heard about you,” I said. “I've been advised not to get in any big pots with you.”

“My enemies are everywhere,” said Martingale. “Don't listen to them.”

“Part of that is true,” said John. “He does have enemies everywhere. Mostly people who still think the poker money he won from them is rightfully theirs. Some folks just can't get it through their heads that once they toss their money into the pot, it's not theirs any longer.”

“If it weren't for the lambs, the lions would starve,” said Martingale.

My beer arrived. Martingale lifted his glass. I got a whiff of its contents. Scotch. “To the lambs,” he said.

We drank.

People were beginning to fill the place.

“If we eat before the crowd gets here, we might even find a table,” said John.

“Another round first,” said Martingale. “On me.”

“What the devil did you do to your hands?” asked John, noticing my missing skin for the first time.

“A funny thing happened to me on the way to your office,” I said, and told them about my near miss on the street.

“Good God!” said John. “You really are all right?”

“Lost a little skin, is all.”

He shook his head. “Mattie says that'll happen to me someday if I don't pay more attention to traffic when I walk to the office or back home. She claims that I am a classic absentminded professor and that someday after a truck runs over me, my last words will be ‘Who was the Green Knight, really?' I think you deserve another drink, my boy. Morey! Another round!”

We drank to my survival. I was beginning to feel better. As the sign behind the bar said, Malt does more than Milton can, to justify God's ways to man.

Graduate students talking of things academic and otherwise continued to come into the bar. The noise level
gradually rose. John lifted a hand to someone across the room. I turned and saw Dr. Jack Scarlotti sitting at a table with the attractive young woman I'd seen with his group on Martha's Vineyard. Waitresses and waiters began to move among the tables. A second bartender appeared. We finished our round and found a table in a corner.

“Popular place,” I said.

“It's the beer,” said John. “Imported from Jolly Olde. Damned fine.”

“Indeed.”

“Good food, too. Pub fare. Simple but filling.”

“And better than you get in most pubs in England,” said Martingale, surprising me since for some reason I'd never imagined him being in England. “You might go to Britain for the beer, but you'd never go there for the food.”

We ate chicken pies with fine crisp crusts, tossed salads with a nice house dressing, and bread that tasted homemade. Not bad. John and I washed ours down with beer. Martingale drank white German wine. He saw me looking at the bottle and smiled. “You don't go to Britain for the wine, either.”

He was hard to dislike, but hard to like, too. There was an elusive quality about him. He looked at John.

“You hear about Bernadette Orwell?”

John shook his head. “What about her?” He shoveled in a bite of salad.

“OD'd. Fatal. Just about the time you left for the Vineyard.”

John stopped chewing and looked at Martingale. Then he swallowed and put his napkin to his lips. “No. I knew she was a little flaky, but I didn't think she was that strung out. Too damned bad. Very bright girl. She was in one of my classes year before last. I liked her.”

Martingale nodded. “Rumor is that somebody dropped her. Hard. Unrequited love. Very sad, they say.”

John frowned at him. “Are you telling me that Bernie Orwell OD'd because somebody left her?”

Martingale lifted his wineglass. “No. I'm just passing on gossip. I like gossip.”

John dropped his eyes and stared at the table. “Well, damn,” he said after a moment. “I like gossip, too. Sorry to get this piece, though.”

I thought of Bernie Orwell's white powder and pills, and of her joy in Jonathan, who was beautiful and brilliant, and able to make her tremble at the very thought of his touch.

“I believe I just saw a couple of the lambs going upstairs,” said Martingale. “Shall we join them in a small game of chance?”

John finished his beer. “Yes. I was having a good day until a minute ago and I'd like to get back into it.”

We went upstairs to the Higher Realm. Three men and a woman were already seated at a table. There were poker chips in front of them and a few in the middle of the table. Five card stud seemed to be the game. I was feeling the drinks I'd had.

“Dealer's choice, nickel ante, two-bit limit,” said John. “You don't have to lose much, but you can drop a few bucks if you want to. Let's sit in.” We sat and John waved an arm around the table. “J.W., here are some of the great minds of the Western world. First names only, so you don't get confused. Tom, Mike, Dick, and Mary. This is J. W. Jackson, just up from the Vineyard and ready to have his features plucked.”

A waiter arrived, took orders, and went away. A bit later he came back with drinks. I stuck with the excellent bitter drawn from the cellar. I noticed that Lute Martingale shared one habit with me. We both folded early and often. Once I caught him looking at me as I tossed them in. A little smile played on his face.

My father had taught me a few simple rules for poker. Don't stay with less than openers, don't stay if you're
beaten on the board, lose now and then when it's cheap so people will think you're a bluffer, drive people out if you've got a so-so hand that can be beaten by a lucky draw, suck them in and then stick it to them when you've got the cards, but act surprised when you win. The math of poker is easy, he'd said, but the real players go beyond the math and play the players. In games played when I was in the service, I never lost a lot in any game and made money overall. Some other people made much more and a lot of other people lost much more. On balance, I didn't consider myself a real player.

When the jazz started downstairs, I was still holding my own, but finding it harder, thanks to several additional pints of beer. Martingale, John, and Mary had made some money and the other three were losing. I found myself yawning and then almost losing money in dumb ways. I pushed back my chair and stood up.

“Folks, I'm just a sleepy country boy and you city slickers are taking me for every dime. Stay right there, John. I expect you to win back my money for me. I'll see you in the morning.”

“You okay?” asked John. “You seem to be listing.”

“There are worse things than listing,” I said, straightening.

John looked at his cards. “Well, I must admit that these beauties make me want to stay a bit longer. We usually break up about eleven, so I'll be home then. You can find your way in the dark?”