Читать книгу The Committee - Sterling Watson - Страница 7

ONE

It was a strange sound.

Not a scream, not a shout, not the squealing of brakes, neither obviously human nor clearly mechanical, at least not to Tom Stall’s ear.

At three o’clock on an August afternoon, the sound drifted through the open window of Stall’s University of Florida office as he sat preparing his recommendations to the English Department chairman for September’s graduate assistantships. He sat waiting, thinking the closest thing to that sound he had ever heard was the climactic cry of the French girl he had slept with in Paris, in 1945, his only wartime indiscretion. Such a similarity—the two sounds so much alike, the first imprinted on his memory forever, the second a mystery—struck him as not just strange but ill-omened. The sound resembled love, or if not that, at least passion, and later this seemed to Stall the supreme irony of a day that would change his life forever.

Then a girl screamed and Stall left the stuffy, cluttered office he had inherited when the department had made him assistant chairman and headed down the hall at a pace that would look determined but not hurried to anyone who noticed him. As he passed the offices whose doors were open to catch any breeze that might stir the ancient water oaks that lined both sides of Anderson Hall, he glimpsed the forms of his colleagues (those not traveling during the final days of summer) bent over the articles and books they hoped would get them tenure, or promotion, or the scholarly fame that had thus far fled them like the maiden on Keats’s Grecian urn. No one looked up from books, yellow legal pads, clacking typewriters. Apparently, no one but Stall had heard the strange sound. He was moving fast when he passed the office of Sophie Green, the new medievalist, the English graduate faculty’s first female professor. In a blue cotton skirt and a white blouse, she stood with her back to Stall, her slender fingers running along the spines of the books he had helped her carry up from a battered DeSoto with New York plates. She was pretty in the dark, intense way of actresses in movies who take off their glasses and shake out their hair declaring themselves not mere vessels of ideas, but human—human. She was Jewish, and she was brilliant. (Stall had read her work with what he had to admit was envy.) He considered stopping to ask her if she had heard anything, knew anything, but thought better of it. Better to keep moving.

* * *

The girl who had screamed had also vomited. Stall carefully placed his new blazer over the face of the man who lay dead on the sidewalk in front of Murphree Hall and went to the girl. He stood blocking her view of what she had already seen and looked down at the boxwood hedge behind her where her lunch of grilled cheese and french fries steamed into the hot afternoon. The smell of vomit and blood made Stall’s own stomach writhe. He patted the girl’s shoulder. She wore a sorority pin and seemed to him average for the type, in saddle oxfords, bobby socks, a short-sleeved white blouse, and a tartan skirt that covered her knees. A small crowd had gathered, and Stall thanked his stars for the thin summer-school enrollment. If Jack Leaf had fallen or jumped to his death from a third-floor classroom window a few weeks from now, fifty students might have seen him hit the pavement and a hundred more would have surrounded his broken body before anything could be done to keep them away.

A boy in the crowd looked older than most undergraduates. He wore a light sport coat with leathered elbows and was smoking a pipe. The boy’s flattop haircut and erect bearing told Stall he was probably a veteran. Stall guided the sobbing girl to the older boy and whispered, “Would you please take care of her. I’ve got to . . .” He wasn’t sure exactly what he had to do, but he was the only university official here now and had to do something. The boy slipped the pipe into the breast pocket of his sport coat and put his arm around the girl’s shoulders.

Tom Stall looked at the shocked faces of the students who had gathered and asked quietly, “Did any of you see him . . . fall?”

Two boys in khakis and button-down shirts shook their heads, unable to take their eyes from the pool of blood that spread from under the canopy of Stall’s blazer. Looking at the coat and the growing puddle and hearing the first fly buzz to the smell of blood, Stall thought, The coat should cover his hands. God, I wish it were big enough to cover his hands. There was something unbearably sad about Jack Leaf’s naked hands lying palms-up on the sidewalk. They were better cared for than most men’s hands; save for traces of white chalk dust, they were immaculate. On the third finger of his right hand was a gold ring with a black-and-white insignia. Because he and Jack Leaf had talked about the ring, Stall knew the insignia was the screaming eagle of the 101st Airborne Division. A girl in the circle that surrounded Jack Leaf said, “I, uh, I saw it. Him.”

She looked at Stall now as though he should prompt her. Help her tell whatever story she had to offer. The words official of the university occurred to Stall again, and he said to her gently, “What did you see?”

“I heard the window go up.” Everyone in the crowd looked up at the open third-floor window. The sash had been thrown up all the way and the hole in the building gaped like a wound. The girl, tall and thin with big dark eyes, said, “It was loud. He opened it hard, so I . . . had to look up there. He didn’t look down. He looked . . . out that way.” She pointed east toward the pine forests where the relentless kudzu vines crept toward University City, gaining a few feet every day. “He stepped out onto the ledge and stood there holding on, and then he just stepped out into the air.” The girl’s voice diminished to a whisper. “Like he was going for a walk.” She peered at Stall, who nodded to encourage her. “And he never did look down. I turned away before he . . . hit. But the sound was . . .” Through wracking sobs the girl said, “It was horrible! He made this noise . . . just before he . . .”

Stall had to ask the next question: “Did you see anybody else up there?”

The girl shook her head and then put her hand over her mouth.

“Did he . . . say anything?”

She shook her head again, swinging the auburn hair at her cheeks. From under the tent of hair, “Can I please go?”

May, Stall thought, may I go, but he said, “Please, stay a little while longer until . . .”

And there he came, Ed McPhail, a campus policeman jogging toward them. McPhail directed traffic at the city’s main intersection on football weekends. He was a local character. Ballet with a Billy Club. That was what the campus newspaper had called McPhail’s gesturing and pirouetting as he guided onrushing steel and rubber to the stadium parking lot for the awesome rite of tailgating. McPhail was anything but balletic now. He had obviously run some distance, and his epauletted white shirt had come loose from his black trousers, revealing a pink rind of belly. He pulled a pad and pencil from his belt and tried to catch his breath. Stall felt his own breathing settle to something approaching normal. His job now was to make sure that the girl who had seen Jack Leaf take his walk into the air gave her name to Ed McPhail.

Stall was passing the baton to a policeman. He was becoming what life had taught him he wanted to be—a spectator. It was a lesson neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It simply was. And Tom Stall would have bet that most men in his profession, whether veterans of the late World War or spectators to it, would agree with him if they were honest about it. What was an English professor if not a spectator?

McPhail went around the circle writing down names and asking questions. Only the tall girl had seen Jack Leaf fall. The others had happened upon Leaf after he had ended his walk in the air, or gravity had ended it for him. But one boy said, “I saw these two guys.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Ed McPhail said, writing.

Tom Stall took back the baton. “Guys?” He moved to the boy, stood in front of him, waited until the boy looked into his face. “What guys? Students?”

McPhail stopped writing and watched Stall.

“No,” the boy said. “Men, you know, in suits. One guy had a briefcase. The other one had . . . I think maybe a badge.” The boy touched the front of his shirt. “Here, on his coat pocket.”

Stall looked at Ed McPhail, who was writing it down.

“A briefcase and a badge, anything else?”

The boy shuffled his feet and squared the slide rule at his belt. An engineer in the making, Stall thought, or a kid who would fail at the mysteries of aeronautical science and end up haunting the hallways of the English Department. “Yeah,” the kid said.

Stall frowned at Yeah. It was rude.

The kid said, “I mean, yes sir. They both wore suits and ties, one brown, one blue—”

“You mean the suits, not the ties.”

“Yes sir, the suits. Brown and dark blue. I saw them leave Murphree Hall by that door.” The boy pointed at the south end of the building about fifty yards from where Stall and the others stood watching flies settle to the pool of Jack Leaf’s blood. The insects seemed to skate on the crimson surface, fattening themselves and occasionally stopping to stretch out their wings. The fingers of Leaf’s hands had curled a little as though from wherever Leaf was now, he was trying to make fists. Jack Leaf had been a fighter, Stall was certain of that. He had been to parties at Leaf’s house and seen in the man’s study three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star. And Leaf had been other things that Tom Stall had not understood.

Ed McPhail said, “These two men. Where did they go when they left the building?”

The kid turned and pointed at the quadrangle whose green expanse ended at the steps of the university library. “That way.”

“They went into the library?”

The boy shrugged, shook his head.

When the ambulance bumped awkwardly over the curb and rolled across the summer grass to the sidewalk, Tom Stall stepped back to the outer edge of the circle. The rear doors swung open and a man in a white coat and carrying a doctor’s satchel hurried out. He ran only a few steps before slowing to a thoughtful amble. The look on his face said it all. It said, Again I arrive too late. It said, I have seen this too many times before. Tom Stall stayed until Jack Leaf had been carried to the ambulance. He suppressed the impulse, surprisingly strong at the last minute, to grasp the hand that wore the Screaming Eagle ring. To give the man one final press of living flesh.

When Jack Leaf was gone and the students had drifted away murmuring and hugging one another, and the older boy who smoked a pipe had walked away with his arm around the sorority girl, the two talking in a confiding way, Tom Stall and Ed McPhail stood looking at Stall’s blazer wadded in the pool of blood. The blood was hard and black now on the hot sidewalk.

Stall said, “Who cleans this up?”

McPhail showed Stall his radio. “I’ll get somebody.”

“Soon?”

“Yeah.” McPhail sighed. “Poor guy. You knew him?”

“I knew him.” A little, Stall thought. Too well or not well enough. It was a mystery.

McPhail touched the sleeve of Stall’s blazer with the toe of his shoe. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, maybe a dry cleaner . . . ?”

“No.” Stall picked up the coat by the back of the collar and dropped it into the nearest trash can.

* * *

Tom Stall didn’t want to go back to work, and he didn’t want to go home—though he was already framing the words of the story he would tell Maureen over their first martini. He needed to clear his mind, to think—he wasn’t sure about what. He retraced his steps to Anderson Hall, skirted the front entrance, and slipped down the alley between the old redbrick building and Matherly Hall, a newer sandstone structure that housed the College of Business Administration. Across the busy four-lane that divided the campus from the town was a restaurant and general hangout known as the College Inn, CI for short.

Traffic was light in August. In two weeks, it would increase to a temporary madness when hordes of parents arrived to help their sons and daughters carry the trunks and suitcases, the freshly laundered clothes and the desk lamps and electric fans and boxes of books and hotplates and coffee pots for the long nights of cramming that would come in cold November. Stall was in the middle of the street waiting for a Merita Bread truck to pass when he saw the two men come out of the CI. A brown suit and a dark-blue one. No badge that he could see, but the taller man carried a worn brown leather satchel. It was four fifteen and the lowering sun poured its hot light down University Avenue, which ran east and west as true as the flight of a bullet.

The two men stood talking on the sidewalk in front of the CI, only two lanes away from Stall. For some reason, Stall could not make himself walk toward them. He stood on the two yellow lines, a few inches of safety in the middle of the street, watching them until they noticed him. The man in the blue suit, the taller of the two, a man with an athletic build, short blond hair, and a handsome face that reminded Stall of the actor Alan Ladd, nodded to Stall. Then the two men walked east toward the intersection of University Avenue and 13th Street, where the citizens of Gainesville crossed from the town to the campus. University was an avenue of clothing stores, restaurants, bars, and theaters that gave way eventually to the old downtown and the buildings that housed justice, religion, and commerce. Crossing the remaining two lanes in long strides, Stall watched the men go. Before he entered the College Inn, one of the few air-conditioned buildings in the town, he looked down at his shirtsleeves and remembered pulling on the new blazer that morning.

Stall was alone in the place except for the counterman who was stacking silverware in racks for the coming dinner rush. The coffee Stall ordered was a gooey reduction that had sat thickening since lunch. He thought with longing of the glittering bottles that lined the bar at the Gold Coast next door and then noticed the phone booth in the corner. Should he call Amos Harding? Harding, the aging department chairman, was Stall’s boss and the man he hoped to replace someday. In late August, Harding vacationed in the mountains of North Carolina, a place he loved for the isolation and the trout fishing, and for the absence of his wife who stayed in Gainesville with her sister. Why bother the old man with bad news? He’ll be back soon . . . soon enough to hear of death.