Chapter 4
Four
In their third year at Rackham College, Arthur and Van had moved off campus and into a Colonial Revival, half a mile from
school. At some point in the seventies the house had been painted an unnatural shade of aqua green that looked like it should
glow in the dark and had been divided into a pair of student apartments, one unit upstairs, one down. Three girls had the
place above them. Early in the semester the girls had partied hard, blasting Frankie Goes to Hollywood loud enough to shake
the windows, jumping off the furniture while they screamed along. But by late September, the upstairs apartment exuded an
air of exhaustion and abandonment. One of the girls had tumbled out of a window at a campus rave, broken her back, and been
sent home. Another was dating a boy attending the University of Maine and was never around anymore. The third was majoring
in marine biology and spent three days of every four on a boat. Van said he missed them, that it was nice having loud, happy,
probably horny girls nearby; it stimulated the imagination and cheered the heart.
Arthur didn’t mind the new stillness, though, and when the phone rang he was taking advantage of the quiet to solve some riddles
in Old English. He loved it, had always loved it, the way an ancient word felt in the brain, in the mouth. Heartache was an okay word but bitre breostcaere—bitter breast-care—caught at something else, something more deeply felt, from a time when people lived in their bodies, not
in their heads. Sometimes, when he had been reading Old English for a while, he found himself thinking in it. He might’ve been a Dorset monk copying out a manuscript before vespers.
He reached for the phone, mounted on the wall above the kitchen table, and answered on the second ring. A girl with a stiff
Yankee accent spoke without preamble. “You want this hoodie back?”
He needed a moment to figure out who he was talking to and what they were talking about. “Biko?”
“I know who he is. Like from the Peter Gabriel song. I’m not stupid just because I’m a townie.”
“I never said—sorry. What’s your name again?”
“Tana Nighswander. You know where to find Shut-Up-And-Eat-It? It’s on the corner of McDonald and Lang. Come by around seven,
when I finish my shift. You can grab it then.”
“I guess I can do that.”
“You guess,” she said, with an inexplicable contempt. “If you didn’t lend me your sweatshirt, I wouldn’t’a got in to see my
mother. I can’t thank you enough. Tell you what, though. Dinner’s on me tonight.” She made it sound like a threat.
Shut-Up-And-Eat-It was a mile away, in Gogan, the next town over, but the late afternoon was so pleasant—splendid was the word that came to mind—Arthur decided to leave the Christmobile in the driveway and walk it. Those last days of September
lingered with one foot in summer and the other in autumn. In the early evening, the sunlight spilled across the face of the
earth in a warm, golden haze. The leaves were splashed with streaks of autumnal color and the air was as crisp and sweet as
a bite from a fresh-picked apple.
Arthur found Shut-Up-And-Eat-It in a strip mall between a check-cashing place and a liquor store. He pushed through a Plexiglas
door and into a long room, unromantically lit by fluorescent lights, pizzas turning on a stack of platters under heat lamps.
Ms. Pac-Man squawked against one wall. Tana Nighswander was on the till.
“Can I get a steak bomb, a large Coke, and a lightly worn Biko sweatshirt?” he asked.
He thought it was a pretty smooth line—he had practiced it on the walk over—but she just stoically punched in his order. “I’m
off in fifteen. Your hoodie’s in the car, out back. Grab it now if you want.”
He hung out long enough to collect his sandwich—when he offered a ten-dollar bill she shook her head—then followed a dimly lit hallway into the back, past a bathroom and a dark storeroom. He punched through a fire door and into the gravel parking lot out back.
Arthur hadn’t figured on company and was surprised to see Ronnie and Tana’s older sister, Jayne, hanging out by a Ford Ranchero.
Arthur recognized it at once from Black Cricket. no free rides—gas, grass, or ass. Ronnie had a cigarette between his lips and his head cocked back to blow smoke into the night. Jayne wore the Biko hoodie
unzipped over a clinging white tank top. She sat on the hood with a sweating bottle of beer between her thighs.
The two of them were passing Polaroids back and forth and it took a moment for them to acknowledge him.
“Oh hey! It’s Arthur Oakes! How they hangin’?” Ronnie asked him.
That surprised Arthur—he hadn’t given his full name to any of them. He still wasn’t sure how Tana had known who to call. He
nodded at Jayne. “Nice sweatshirt.”
“Yeah, it’s growing on me,” she said.
Arthur didn’t care if it was growing on her. He was more worried about what might be growing on it.
He knew they were waiting for him to ask what they were looking at and he didn’t feel like playing along. He didn’t feel like
asking for the sweatshirt either. Asking for anything felt as if he would be placing himself at their mercy. His appetite
had gone, but he unwrapped his sandwich and had a bite anyway.
Jayne said, “Hey, man, wanna see a hot piece of ass? Check it out.”
She frisbeed a Polaroid at him. He clapped it to his chest with one hand. His mouth was caked and dry, even before he looked
at it.
It was a poorly lit shot. He was looking at a woman’s round rear end in a pair of white cotton panties. Someone held the handle
of a spoon into the frame, just barely poking one buttock with the tip. That end of the spoon had been scraped and burned
to a blackened point. Arthur’s single bite of sandwich sat in his stomach, a gluey, indigestible lump of paste.
“Your mom got a sweet little can, huh?” Jayne asked. “I know she’s a woman of the cloth, but you see a rump like that, hard not to dwell on sinful thoughts.”
He wanted to throw it back at her. Instead, he stood there, holding the photo and staring stupidly at Ronnie and Jayne.
“Maybe you don’t think that’s really her. I guess I’d be worried about you if you could recognize your mom from a glance at
her ass. Here. You can see her face in this one.”
She set her bottle of Coors aside and slid off the hood to offer him another Polaroid. He took one corner of it. She held
on to the other while he peered down at it.
In this photograph, his mother was on her side, eyes shut, head crushed into her thin pillow. Someone’s hand extended into
the shot, holding the spoon-handle shiv. The tip was directly below her right eyeball.
Jayne snapped the Polaroid away from him. Arthur stared at her, feeling hot in the face, as if he had been slapped.
Ronnie said, “Whoo! He angry now. Boy! Look at him.”
“He ain’t angry. He gonna cry,” Jayne said. “That right, Artie? You gonna cry?”
“You’re making a big fucking mistake,” he said, but the mistake was his, speaking at all. His voice came out in such a thin,
strangled squeak that Jayne and Ronnie disintegrated into laughter. Jayne laughed so hard she lost her balance and had to
steady herself against the hood of the Ranchero.
She wiped her streaming eyes on the sleeve of his Biko sweatshirt. “Oh, Artie. That’s funny. That’s so funny.”
“If your mother goes anywhere near my mom—” Arthur began, but Jayne cut him off.
“No fear of that. My mother caught a month in solitary ’cause you had to pull your white knight act. She’s got lights shining
on her twenty-four hours a day. She takes a shit, someone’s watching her through a camera.” Jayne gestured with the Polaroid.
“This ain’t my mother with the knife. Daphne Nighswander hasn’t gone anywhere near your mom and doesn’t need to.
See, unlike your mother, Daphne’s got friends.
My mother isn’t a condescending college bitch, thinks she smarter than everyone else.
My mother doesn’t start book clubs. She was doin’ her time and you made sure she can kiss her first shot at parole goodbye.
But it’s all right! We ain’t the kind of people to hold a grudge.
You know what my mother says? Every problem is an opportunity. ”
“Hey,” Ronnie said. “You going to eat that?” He pointed at Arthur’s steak bomb.
Arthur shook his head, afraid to speak, afraid he might start making Alvin and the Chipmunk noises again. Ronnie eased the
cheesesteak out of his hands.
“Deep breaths, Artie,” Jayne said. “No one’s hurt your mommy. She don’t know a thing about this and she don’t need to. But
you want her to cruise through the rest of her days inside, you gotta work with us.”
She pushed her hand into one pocket of the Biko hoodie and produced a folded sheet of newsprint. She unfolded it and narrowed
her eyes to read.
“‘The future comes to Rackham College,’” she read, and Arthur’s dread intensified into something like horror. She turned the
sheet of newspaper around so he could see the photo that accompanied the piece. Mr. Meckfessel, the head librarian of the
Brooks Library, had one hand on the monitor of their new IBM, patting it like it was the head of a small and obedient child.
Several of the student librarians stood behind him, smiling for the camera. Arthur was the most prominent of them, waiting
with arms crossed, chin lifted, hint of a smile, looking every inch the nerd in his Mister Rogers sweater. “Were you gonna
show your momma how you got your face in the paper? That’s cute. Says here you’re the head student librarian. Says here you
got access to what you call a special collection, because you’re doing an in-ven-tory, putting it all in a computer. Is it true they got a first edition of Huckleberry Finn in that room? How much is something like that worth, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur said. His insides felt cramped and sick. “Probably not much. There’s a lot of them out there.”