“No more digging after July?”
“Nope.”
I wanted to find the nearest fast-food drive-thru window and order the biggest hamburger and French fries combo they had. But while I was at the college there was one more stop I had to make: the offices of the campus newspaper, the Hemphill Harbinger.
I knew The Harbinger was now housed in one of the massive old Victorians on the eastern edge of the campus. But I did not know which massive old Victorian. There were oodles of them. So I headed in that general direction, on foot, hoping I could get directions along the way. The first three students I stopped didn’t have the foggiest idea. The fourth knew precisely where it was. Naturally she was yakking on her cell phone at the time. Without the slightest break in her important conversation-“That is so gross…That is so fantastic…How gross is that?”-she swung her index finger off her phone and pointed at the house right in front of us.
She walked on before I could thank her. I heard her mumble into her little phone, “Just some old woman who doesn’t know where she’s going.”
I barked after her: “You’re sure right about that, honey!”
I followed the uneven slate walk to the porch and climbed the lopsided steps. The door opened like an out-of-tune bassoon. I poked my head into the living room. It was a maze of messy desks and empty chairs. A real newsroom. Behind a huge, bright blue computer monitor I spotted a tiny girl with short, spiky, lemon-lime hair. She had two silver rings in each nostril. “I’m looking for the editor,” I said.
She was feisty but friendly. “No-you’re looking at the editor.”
I told her who I was.
She’d heard of me. “Oh. My. Gawd! The same Dolly Madison Sprowls who found Buddy Wing’s real killer? Oh. My. Gawd!”
“In the wrinkled flesh,” I said.
She apparently liked the way I’d poked fun at my advanced age. Her eyes got dreamy. She reached out and shook my hand like a lumberjack. She told me her name was Gabriella Nash. She brought me a chair. She microwaved a mug of hot water for me and gave me a bowl of tea bags to choose from. She told me about her future career in journalism without stopping to think that I might be there for a reason.
“Well, I’m sure you’re going to have a terrific career,” I said. “In the meantime I was wondering if you’d let me look at some of your old morgue files.”
She sprang out of her chair dutifully, as though I was Queen Elizabeth asking for another crumpet. “Is there a specific story you’re looking for?”
I stood up slowly. “Well, it’s a silly thing,” I said. “I graduated from Hemphill College back in 1957-”
“Yes, I know.”
“And so did my late husband. Lawrence Sprowls. He was a journalism major.”
She tipped her head like a lop-eared puppy. “Oh-I’m so sorry.”
I pawed the air. “He’s been dead for fourteen years and we were divorced twenty-eight years before that,” I said. “But I guess I’ve reached that age when a person gets the biological urge to reminisce. I was hoping I could rummage around a little. Maybe Xerox a few things.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You know we had a fire, don’t you?”
At first I thought she was talking about a recent fire. Then it hit me she must be talking about the fire in 1968 that destroyed the building that once housed the journalism department. It was one of five old wooden barracks built for soldiers on the GI bill after World War II. In April 1968, one night after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., those five old barracks, as well as a dozen run-down houses near the campus, were burned by students, both black and white, whose belief in nonviolence was blown to smithereens by their overwhelming anger. “Don’t tell me all the old files were lost.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You’re sure? It happened before you were born.”
“I know about a lot of things that happened before I was born.” She said it with a smile but I could tell from the way her cheeks were quivering that I’d insulted her.
“I’m sorry-I guess I’m just disappointed.”
She accepted my apology. “The fire’s sort of a legend around here.” She led me into the once-magnificent dining room. There was a row of battered filing cabinets along the wall. She pulled out a file and showed me a story published in The Harbinger two weeks after the fire. Said the headline:
FIFTY YEARS of history go up in ANGRY smoke
“That’s the oldest story we have,” she said.
“What about the college library?” I asked.
“They don’t even have this one,” she said.
I drove back to work, right past a Burger King and a McDonald’s and two Wendy’s. I was feeling much too empty to eat.
What had I hoped to find in The Harbinger ’s old files?
For one thing, I wanted to see how they’d covered David Delarosa’s murder. If they’d uncovered some interesting little morsel The Herald-Union hadn’t. For another, I wanted to see if something else had happened back then, something that I’d forgotten about, or never knew about, that Gordon might have known about and might have remembered.
And, to tell you the truth, I also wanted to splash around in my own past a bit, just like I’d told Gabriella Nash that afternoon. Hemphill College was an important part of my life. I’d grown up there. Blossomed there. Lost all of my small-town virginities there. When you reach my age you’re no longer interested in reliving your youth, but you do like to visit it occasionally.
I left the morgue right at five. Not to forage through my files in the basement. To pick up James’ winter poop in the backyard, before the grass started growing in earnest.
James is my neighbor Jocelyn Coopersmith’s American water spaniel. Of all the backyards in the neighborhood, James, for reasons only a dog could appreciate, likes to poop in mine the most. Even in the winter when the snow’s a foot high he waddles back there to do his business.
I put on my worst pair of khaki slacks and an old sweatshirt that, if worse came to worst, I could deposit right in the trash can. I got my biggest garden trowel and a plastic garbage bag, wiggled my fingers into a pair of yellow kitchen gloves, and headed for the backyard.
I don’t have much of a front yard-but boy do I have a backyard. It’s as big as a football field. My bungalow was built in the late forties, when young newly married couples were leaving the inner city neighborhoods for, quite literally, greener pastures. The old houses in the city were huge but they had very small yards. The new houses being built on farmland at the edge of the city were just the opposite. To make them affordable, the houses were no bigger than a shoebox. To make them attractive to couples bent on producing a gaggle of antsy kids, the backyards were enormous. Lawrence and I bought my bungalow in 1963, four years after we were married. We planned to fill our backyard with antsy kids, too. But then Lawrence got that job doing PR for the autoworkers’ union. A secretary with irresistible tits came with the job. His preoccupation with those irresistible tits put an end to our procreation plans. We divorced. Lawrence got the secretary. I got the bungalow. Which turned out to be the better long-term investment. Lawrence would marry three more times before he died.
I started at the back of the yard and worked forward. For a while I worked alone. Then Jocelyn let James out the back door. He came running, with all the grace of a duck learning to roller skate.
James is never going to win the Westminster. He’s covered with wild brown curls. His sides stick out like he’s swallowed a beach ball. His front legs are shorter than his back, so he’s always going downhill. His ears dangle like ping-pong paddles and his tail looks like it was transplanted from an opossum. His tongue flops over his gums like a big, pink slice of Easter ham. He also has the most beautiful brown eyes you’ve ever seen. And I just love him to death. “Good afternoon, Mr. Coopersmith!” I sang out.