“Of course.”
“It’s the nickname his mother gave him when he was a kid. It’s French for Little John.”
“Of course.”
Chick pranced from the solarium like a barefoot boy running across a gravel driveway. I could hear his feet thumping up the stairs. Squeak across the ceiling. He returned out of breath with a photograph in a cheap wooden frame. “I keep it in my upstairs office,” he said.
I licked the tuna salad off my fingers and took the photograph. It was a black and white glossy, an 8? by 11, the kind someone who’d had a photography class or two would take. It showed a much younger Chick and Gordon sitting back-to-back behind a granite gravestone laid flush to the ground. They were both sporting grim, artistic faces. The inscription on the stone was large enough to read:
“Ti-Jean”
John L. Kerouac
March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969
He Honored Life
Chick took the photograph back and cradled it in his lap. He smiled at it like it was a newborn baby. “Gordon and I visited his grave in the summer of 1970. The Edson Catholic Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts. We always talked about going back sometime.”
Maybe I hadn’t remembered their nicknames-assuming I’d ever known them-but I did remember a thing or two about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. They’d started the beat movement in the late 1940s, when they were students at Columbia University in New York, along with William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and a troupe of other tortured souls. They bummed around the world together. They became living legends together. “So Kerouac and Ginsberg had some kind of falling out?” I asked Chick.
“Oh yes, a very famous falling out. Allen always thought Jack turned his back on the beat movement. And of course he did.”
I got to the nub of my visit. “And apparently there was also some kind of weighty question between you and Gordon?”
Chick’s face went pink with embarrassment. “Not all that weighty. We stayed friends right to-”
“The bitter end?”
Chick was suddenly interested in his sandwich and his salad, taking big mouthfuls of both. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.
He softened the food in his mouth with a long drink of wine and swallowed. “Like I said in the poem, it really didn’t amount to anything.”
“Enough for you to write a poem about it,” I said, trying not to sound as interested as I was. “And then recite it at his memorial service-wearing that ridiculous beret.”
Chick rubbed the bump on his cockatoo nose. “I’d forgotten what a pit bull you are.”
“Too many people do,” I said.
He leaned forward on his elbows, dug his fingers into the thick white hair hanging over his ears. An explanation was coming. “I guess you remember when Jack came to the college-”
“You and Gordon met him that summer in San Francisco at some poetry festival, and invited him.”
“That’s right. He stayed in Gordon’s apartment. The one he had above the dry cleaning shop on Light Street.”
“The one with the refrigerator in the living room?”
“That’s the one. The night Jack left for New York, Gordon and I got carryout from Mopey’s. You remember Mopey’s-”
“It’s a parking lot now, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “And all three of us ordered cheeseburgers. Except that Gordon insists-insisted-that Jack had a plain burger. But it was a cheeseburger. He wanted it smothered with mustard and piled high with pickle chips.”
I waited for the rest of the story. But no more was coming. “That’s it? That’s the weighty question that split you asunder so un-copectically?”
“For forty-five years.”
“But you remained friends.”
“The best of friends. But it was always there. A tiny sore that wouldn’t heal. Me insisting it was a cheeseburger, Gordon insisting it was a plain burger.” He shook his head. “Sometimes we really got into it. It was all so damn silly.”
“What do you mean by into it?”
His face turned even pinker than before. “The usual stuff grown men do. Yelling. Swearing. Making fun of the courses the other one taught.”
“Like Garbology?”
He laughed. “Like the Forgotten Novelists of Western Indiana.”
I laughed even harder. “You used to teach a course on the forgotten novelists of Indiana?”
“Western Indiana. I still do.”
We concentrated on our salads and our sandwiches and the rain that was now rattling his rose of Sharon bushes. Then I brought up Gordon’s murder. “Did you have any sense of his being worried about something? Or afraid?”
Chick refilled his wine goblet and tried to refill mine. I waved him off. “He was happy as a clam. Spring was coming. He had big plans for his summer dig.”
“At the Wooster Pike landfill?”
I thought he was going to take a bite out of his goblet. Instead he took a long, noisy sip. “That God-damned worthless dump.”
“Worthless?”
“I didn’t mean worthless, Maddy. That garbology project was important to him. And important academically. But he was a wee bit obsessed.”
“Obsessed?”
“It sounds selfish. But we used to travel together. Every July. Wonderful road trips all over the country. Wherever there were old ruins for him to crawl around on, and bookstores where I could buy the horrible, self-published novels of frustrated local writers. But the last few years, since he got permission to dig out there, he just couldn’t pull himself away.”
For twenty minutes Chick bored my pants off with their summer road trips. Halfway through an especially mind-numbing account of their drive across western Kansas, I changed the subject and asked him about the Kerouac Thing just three days before Gordon’s body was found. “Just who was there, anyway?” I asked.
“The usual suspects,” he said. “Me and Gordon, Effie and the Moffitt-Stumpfs. Other professors. Grad students.”
“Shaka Bop?”
Chick used Shaka’s real name, the name we all knew him by in the fifties, before his Black Panther days. “Sidney? No, Sidney wasn’t there. He usually is though.”
“And Gordon was okay that night?”
“Oh yeah. Of course he and I got into it about the cheeseburger. But we always did that.” Chick finished his second goblet of wine and poured a third. He spoke derisively of himself in the third person: “What would a Kerouac Thing be without that crazy asshole Chidsey Glass having a nervous breakdown over some lousy four-inch square of American cheese?”
Chapter 5
Tuesday, March 20
That morning I did something I hadn’t done in thirty years. I called in sick. I didn’t pretend to have a sore throat or the flu. I just called the newsroom secretary and said, “Morning Suzie, this is Maddy Sprowls. I’m taking a sick day.” Suzie said “Okey-dokey” and that was that.
Then after a nice long breakfast while I watched Regis and Kelly, I drove to Hemphill College for my appointment with Andrew J. Holloway III, Gordon’s graduate assistant, the young man who’d not only found Gordon’s body at the landfill, but also his car, fifteen miles away.
To tell you the truth, I was more than a little surprised when Andrew agreed to take me to the landfill. He didn’t know me from Adam. And to some degree or the other he was a suspect in Gordon’s murder. I’m sure if I’d been up front about my motives, he would have treated me like one of those annoying telemarketers that call at suppertime-he would have slammed down the phone like he was dispatching a cockroach. Instead I’d gone on and on about how close Gordon and I had been in college-which was true enough-and how it would do an old lady good if I could see for myself the place that not only meant so much to his life, but also unfortunately meant something to his death. I think I even may have used that icky word closure, if you can imagine that.
So, Andrew agreed to show me the landfill and I felt just awful about my-what’s that word Big Daddy used for it in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? -my mendacity!