Elbows in and hands folded, Driscoll perched on the edge of the platform and willed his skittering heart to slow, his trembling knees to still. He didn’t think he’d be able to maintain balance, if he stood.
The others had gone away, off to be with friends or family for a time before services. As they left, Elder Hallaway and that little Adams fellow had given him the eye, as if to say, “Do I know you?”
Truth be told, he’d surprised himself. His demands were spur-of-the-moment, a fevered response to his fears. He’d hoped Kovac would refuse to pay, would provide a reason to reject prying eyes and ears. Instead, the man agreed.
Driscoll found the notion of accepting payment repugnant, but he couldn’t retract his demand after Kovac had accepted his terms. He grimaced at the thought. “Oh, Lord, that professor and me, we’re both bull-headed fools.”
No answer. He hadn’t expected one. He sighed. There was just a single way out of this mess. Head-on and eyes open. God intended to call his bluff, just as Kovac had.
♦♦♦
“Young fellow don’t waste no time, does he?” Peter said.
Michael glanced across the parking lot, saw Wilson take the last of the equipment crates from a dark-haired man standing on the truck bed. Geoff Baxter. Michael hurried forward to greet his former student. “Afternoon, Geoff.”
“Hey, Michael.”
Geoff smiled. It didn’t do a thing to improve his appearance. He had to be the most unattractive man Michael had ever met. He looked older than his thirty years, stood four inches taller than Michael’s own six feet, weighed close to three hundred pounds.
Jet-black hair hung to his collar, shaggy and cow-licked, and covered the tips of his mismatched ears. His nose looked like a chunk of peeled potato, had the characteristic knots of multiple breaks. Acne cratered both cheeks. At Ohio State, his fellow students had called him Ogre.
Despite his monstrous appearance, Michael had found Geoff a gentle man, intelligent and generous and kind. And he had turned out to be an almost ideal assistant.
Geoff jumped from the truck, grabbed Michael’s outstretched hand in his own, working it up and down just as he would the handle of a cast-iron water pump. As they shook hands, Geoff reached up with his left hand to reposition his black horn-rimmed eyeglasses on the bridge of his twisted nose.
His eyes, even shrunken by the heavy lenses, were his sole attractive feature. A curious shade of blue, almost silver, lit by intelligence.
Michael nodded toward Wilson. “I see you’ve found my pack mule.”
“He doesn’t look worked to death yet. You’re getting soft in your old age.”
Michael laughed, as much at memories as at the joke. Geoff had been Michael’s first graduate field assistant, for the Amish enclave in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. They’d become friends as a result of that work, establishing a bond Michael had expected to evolve into a life-long professional relationship.
Then Geoff graduated in June 1953 and disappeared. In seven years, Michael had only received a single letter, postmarked here in West Virginia. It thanked Michael for all his kindnesses, but said Geoff wouldn’t be pursuing his PhD studies.
One day this past January, Michael’s office telephone rang. “It’s Geoff Baxter, Michael. I’m in town for the week with my wife. Can we meet for lunch? I’ve got an idea for a project.”
Instead, Michael invited them to dinner.
♦♦♦
The simple act of opening his glass-paneled front door left Michael speechless. A woman stood there, wrapped in wool against the January weather. Slim, with russet hair that fanned upon her coat collar and eyes the green of patent nostrum bottles, scrubbed clean and set in the sun to dry.
Geoff stood just behind the woman, in her shadow. He looked as he always had. “Hello, Michael,” he said. “This is Irene, my wife.”
Michael grasped Irene’s hand. A static charge raced along his fingers and up his arm. The flat crack of a slammed car door, somewhere along Neal Avenue. The blob of color next door sharpened into a pack of snow-suited children playing in the mounded snow. An icy wind bit at his cheeks.
He felt wrapped within the smell of her, a cloud of scents equal parts Ivory soap, talcum and cinnamon. The words of the nursery rhyme reminded Michael what God used to make little girls. He longed to touch more than her hand.
She smiled. “I’m pleased to meet you, Professor Michael. My husband’s told me so much about you.”
Her husband.
He returned the smile. “Please, call me Michael.”
She shook her head; a smile traced her lips. “No. With that chin, the moustache and those eyes you look like a Douglas, or an Errol, but not like any Michael I’ve ever seen.”
Flirting.
He understood that game. “Then how about Miska? It’s what my mother called me.”
“Miska.” She rolled the syllables on her tongue, tasting them. “That suits you. Call me Irene.”
♦♦♦
“Will that suit you, Professor?”
“What?”
“Can I leave the gear here until we eat?” Wilson asked. He stood near the truck, ignored.
Peter had disappeared, too, and Michael hadn’t even offered a “thank you” or “so long”. Bad manners. Not the way to start the week.
Geoff stepped close to Michael’s shoulder. “Never mind the gear, Michael. No one will touch it. I’ll help Wilson set it up before service starts.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
Geoff took Michael’s elbow, steered him from the truck and waved Wilson to follow. “I’m sure. Let’s go find my wife.”
Thanks, K.C. and Camille. I’m enjoying this serialization, but have to change my reading habits. Is anyone else also cutting and pasting into a doc so I can read longer pieces at one sitting?
It’s a sign of the times that technology dictates habits. I had to download the Kindle app to read Julie O’Yang’s “Butterfly” and read it on my desktop PC because Amazon won’t allow her a Nook or PDF download. Such is life on the digital highway.
All that cutting and pasting sounds like a lot of work, Walt!
As each new chapter is released, we link the bottom of the previous chapter to it, so for catch-up or extended reading you should be able to read down to the bottom of one chapter, click the link, and carry on at the top of the next one.
Or did you mean you were printing the chapters out to read offline? I’ll see if we can hook up a printable format for anyone who wants to print out their reading — great suggestion!