“It’s Cindy Carlson. Candy’s sister,” the stranger says. She calls herself it. “You know. C.C,” it says.
“Yes?” Malcolm feels an imminent irritation.
He knows C.C. She’s one of the middle-aged locals they’ve rounded-up to enroll. She’s what they term a returnee. C.C is fifty-one and working on an undergraduate English degree. She’s been a sophomore for three years. They choose English because they suffer from the delusion that they speak the language. They believe it’s easier than that compendium of border wars called history. Or the math you need a protractor for. That’s called geometry. But they can read headlines in scandal sheets, recipes and satellite TV schedules. They assume Conrad and Melville will be similar. Words. More words. Many pages of words.
Obviously, C.C. sent her sister to deliver the inevitable excuse. She’s been in a car crash. A limb was unexpectedly amputated. Thieves stole her purse at gunpoint. As fate would have it, her final exam was in it. Or one of her wayward spawn is in an institution and the police, social workers and doctors have mandated her presence.
“She can’t come no more.” The woman takes a breath. “She got the pneumonia. Got put in the hospital.”
Malcolm McCarty must adjust his vision to clarify this current generation. He sorts through piercings and tattoos, noting how white they all are, the boys tall and the girls soft and heavy. They have pale skin like porcelain that accentuates their vicious out-breakings of acne. They wear the universal uniform of blue jeans and bulky navy sweatshirts with attached hoods concealing much of their faces.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm McCarty says. He leaves the office door wide open.
His secretary glances up from the computer she doesn’t know how to use. He spent six hundred dollars of his dwindling Visiting Lecturer funds to enroll this perpetual sophomore English major in computer classes and she can’t put headers on documents. Cut and paste is a dangerous wilderness she won’t enter. It’s her version of Hawthorne’s dark forest.
“Sit down.” Malcolm indicates the one chair in front of his desk. “Please.”
He remembers Candy Carlson. C.C. lives in Harmony Hollow. It’s six miles from campus as the crow flies. And that’s the one thing that does fly in Allegheny Hills.
He’d been there once before at the request of the enrollment committee and Women’s Club. Patricia had repeatedly requested he visit. Then finally and officially, in her capacity as secretary of Women’s Club, she had insisted. Patricia, liaison to the perpetually unfortunate.
His wife collects what crawls out of the hills and hollows — the disabled, amputees, women born with legs of different lengths, and schizophrenics. Her last project was an Iraq vet tractor repairman with a limp and stutter. Patty was stirred by the man’s momentary desire to acquire sufficient grammar to procure a contractor’s license.
“Is that a dream?” Malcolm inquired. “Do we differentiate inspiration from banal aspiration?” Not even an aspiration, he decided, but an impulse such as the severed arm feels. A few random neurons flicker and spasm, and his wife was sharpening pencils and baking pies, her face alert and prepared for her latest squalid enormity.
“Chris has PTSD,” Patty informed him.
The vet, in dirty jeans and a wildly stained Sex Pistols T-shirt, reveals a shabby impulse to improve the self he doesn’t have. He borrows money and doesn’t return it. He offers to do Patty’s grocery shopping in Wood’s End and skids into a ditch. One side of the car collapses like smashed tin and oak branches crack the windshield. He doesn’t call but hitchhikes home instead. He schedules lessons and doesn’t come. He has to bail out his ex-brother-in-law. His girlfriend’s in a diabetic coma. His grandfather has Parkinson’s. A horse stepped on his stepson’s foot.
Patricia waits with her posture adjusted, her hair just washed and brushed, and pencils ready. Malcolm assumes her tutoring missions will continue indefinitely. One summer night when rosehips have infiltrated the air with the unmistakable scent of cinnamon, Chris honks from a pick-up. He’s drunk and high on meth, and drives up and down Maple Ridge Road, shooting out their windows with a deer rifle.
Malcolm McCarty telephones Sherriff Murphy in Wood’s End. Patricia protests, pulls at his arms, moans and falls to the floor screaming, “Hang up. O god. Hang up.”
“She’s improving the world one hillbilly felon at a time,” Malcolm says.
The sheriff laughs. He’s amiable, a sturdy man, tan, with an athlete’s build. He moves with graceful assurance, comfortable within his body. Probably ex-military. Women are no doubt drawn to him. He has the quiet certainty of a man who has been tested and recognizes his capacities and limitations. A straight shooter, Malcolm decides, unhurried and attentive.
“Your wife’s a nice lady. But she can’t treat country folk same as faculty. They’re accustomed to abuse. If they don’t get it, they’re suspicious and resentful,” the sheriff explains.
Malcolm is surprised when the sheriff accepts tea in a floral porcelain cup. Patricia has gone to bed.
Sheriff Murphy, casually taking inventory of their living room — the piano with a silver candelabra Patricia found in the flea market at Clignancourt is beside a bluish art nouveau vase with yesterday’s roses. The walls are decorated with scrolls of muted Yangtze River landscapes — fishing boats, huts at the sides of rice paddies and bridges in fog.
The sheriff glances at the carpets. Malcolm carried the rugs back from Kashmir in rolls like twin boa constrictors around his neck. He went to the Philadelphia airport to retrieve the cobalt blue chandelier Patricia bought in Prague. It was rush hour and custom agents interrogated him for three hours and threatened a full body search. He brought the box home and the directions were in Russian. He remembers. It took him an entire weekend to hang it.
“This all insured?” Jim Murphy asks.
“Yes, of course,” Malcolm says.
Sheriff Murphy stands up. He’s wearing black polished boots. He takes a small notebook from his pocket. “Want to make a formal complaint?”
Malcolm says no.
“I’ll arrest him anyway,” the sheriff decides. Then he extends his card. “You may want to call me.”
“Why?” Malcolm is puzzled.
“Can’t insure the future,” Sheriff Murphy observes. “You might need a hand some time. I’m a good person to know.”
Malcolm McCarty entertains the notion that Jim Murphy is threatening him. Maybe it’s the prologue of a shakedown. There’s something wrong but he can’t quite determine what it is. He dismisses the idea and lets it drift into the night.
Patricia’s new project is a farmer’s wife who can’t read. She’s dyslexic and somewhat deaf. Her father considered her too retarded for school. Her stupidity enraged him and he took out her two front teeth. She’s been at River’s Nest Motel in Belleview since she was 11. She has attention deficit disorder and they make her do all the laundry. Patty lists a litany — misogamy, physical and verbal abuse, and predatory lawyers. Malcolm nods and excuses himself.
Her current pupil cancels lessons, naturally, claiming car problems. Her boyfriend demonstrates his rage at her uppity disrespect by breaking her arm in three places. But she’s persisted and become Patricia’s triumph. The woman can now awkwardly sound out rumors about movie stars with morning sickness and divorces.