So. How to cope? His first thought was that as an unknown someone had put Turkott in his trunk, he could simply pass the corpse along. Wouldn’t the Late Unlamented be better foisted off on some graduate student of unblemished record? Some sunny personality without death feuds or recent threats of bodily violence — although how anyone could take words in a literary critical context as a viable threat was beyond Wallace’s imagination.
Find a car with a trunk that was unlocked, that was the thing. His own car was new and modern and needed the key, which raised questions of expertise and of the provenance of Turkott’s remains, questions to be explored in some leisure hour. For now, Wallace went up and down the rows, discreetly trying the latches on hatchbacks and sedans, clunkers, and SUVs, and even a handsome black Mercedes that was far too good for Turkott.
The one and only possibility was a little white Hyundai. Wallace hustled back to his car, reversed out at top speed, pulled up behind his target, and flipped up its trunk. He was ready to make the transfer when, foul luck, he saw a line of students converging on the lot. No time. Wallace slammed the trunk closed, slid back into his car, and took off.
The dashboard clock read six fifty p.m. — unbelievably only fifteen minutes had passed since his whole life was upended. Where to go with Turkott was the question: the mall was too busy; the dump, barred and locked; the parks, snowbound and mostly closed for the season. What about that excavation on campus, the foundation for the new classroom building? Fenced and patrolled, and in any case, campus was a bad idea, suggesting academics, students, intellectuals with bitter conceptual differences. All undesirable.
Wallace settled finally on the provost’s open house, but not, alas, as a solution for Turkott. He realized that he couldn’t miss the party, because first, he’d promised Morgan to stop in, “soon as my seminar’s over,” and second, he was aware that any deviation from routine might be suspicious. Just the same, when he pulled over on the narrow road up to the provost’s, he checked twice that his trunk was locked, like some nervous nelly.
Outside was bad; inside was worse. Though exchanging little witticisms and interdepartment gossip was normally a pleasure, the party was torture. Eating the provost’s elegant canapés, drinking the quite good wine, badgering the dean — he of the basilisk eyes and the noncommittal stare — about the upcoming budget cuts, even flirting discreetly with the provost’s young, vain, and influential wife, Wallace kept seeing Turkott lying in his blue tarp in the back of the BMW.
If only he could go out and lift the trunk and find Turkott gone. Or if only he could concentrate on a clever solution, despite the wandering modern jazz the provost favored and the laughter and the sallies of competitive intellects all round him. Couldn’t Turkott be digested in some strange agricultural lagoon or incinerated in one of the bio labs? Didn’t the sciences provide useful services like that? I should have paid more attention to such things, Wallace thought. He kept looking covertly at his watch, wishing it were time to make a graceful exit yet irrationally hoping that he could delay a decision.
Finally, he was at the door, shaking hands with Morgan and his misses, who got a quick kiss. “Wonderful party, as always. You’ve spoiled us forever,” the usual persiflage. Then out into the storm, for while they had amused themselves inside, the straggling flakes of snow had regrouped into a thick white shower. Wallace struggled to get the BMW out while his colleagues rushed to be first away, pulling out without looking and accelerating down the narrow road as if they all had corpses in their trunks and the big decisions to make.
Wallace knew that he had to act fast because he couldn’t take forever to get home. He’d been careful to check the handsome grandfather clock in the provost’s hall. It was probably inaccurate, but none the worse for his purposes. I left at quarter of eight; I remember the clock was striking. He could say that if asked, but, of course, he wouldn’t be; it wouldn’t come to that because he’d think of something.
He considered the mall again, with its dumpsters and trash barrels and rows of cars, and he was headed that way on the reservoir road with black water on either side of him and empty road behind and before, when he slammed on the brakes and cut his lights. Enough! He jumped from the car, unlocked the trunk, grabbed Turkott, and with one giant heave, got him from the car to the pavement and then, one step, two, three, to the guard rail and over.
A splash down below; thankfully, the water wasn’t frozen. Wallace stood panting and wet with sweat in the white swirling flakes, until he thought he heard a car. He slammed the trunk shut, slid into the BMW, put it in gear, and roared away. He was at the main road, having almost slid out several times in his haste, before he remembered his seat belt. Fasten it, because everything has to be as usual.
Irene was waiting with dinner for him, and though the provost’s fancy canapés were not sitting any too well, he sat down to pot roast and did his best with it. “Wonderful,” he said.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” said Irene.
Had he been too fulsome? Had he eaten enough? Wallace realized that for the foreseeable future his every action would be problematic. He invented a headache and went up to read in bed, saying that he had an early morning meeting with one of his doctoral students.
“I’ll get the car filled afterwards,” he told Irene, though he realized as soon as he spoke that he had no reason to mention it and that the big station on the highway was not on his normal route.
“Pick up some eggs at the supermarket,” she said.
He stopped himself just in time from saying that he wasn’t going that way and, instead, made much of writing himself a note. This was going to be a wearying business. Even in his afterlife, Turkott was proving a nuisance, and Wallace realized that he would have to be on his mettle.
The next morning, he forced himself to be very bright and helpful with his student, though the chapter du jour was on Conrad’s Nostromo, which Wallace thought singularly ill chosen with its theft and concealments and hidden motives and hidden treasure. He profoundly wished that it was a lighter full of silver that he’d hidden instead of Turkott.
Finally, after two good hours of conscientious toil, with the rough spots of the chapter polished, the assumptions clarified, and the structure, sound, Wallace was able to drive off toward the reservoir. He expected to see police vans and an ambulance and streamers of yellow tape against the snow. Despite his exemplary self-control, his heart was pounding as he entered the strip of forest along the reservoir.
The pines and hemlocks were frosted with globs of snow like whipped cream and a deep blue burned in the sunny sky. Wallace noticed none of this, just the unbroken whiteness of the reservoir on both sides. He almost went off the road in surprise. The black water of the previous night had been replaced by a pure white sheet, and Turkott, who’d bobbed up persistently in his dreams, was locked somewhere under the ice. Eventually, there would be spring, maybe even a January thaw, but not yet, and the delay would produce confusion. Wallace couldn’t help smiling.
At the gas station, he filled the car, ran it through the self-serve car wash, and paid the skinny, shiftless-looking detailer to go over the inside. “One picks up so much sand,” Wallace said, being friendly, making conversation.
The guy grunted and started up his vacuum, whisking away, Wallace hoped, all traces of Turkott and his blue tarp. When the cleaning was finished, he parted with a modest tip and drove back to campus. He arrived, light of heart, to collect the gossip of the day, the absence of Peter Havermeyer Turkott III. Wallace was all ears and properly goggle eyed with surprise.