“Panties! Panties! Panties!” The word, still as inflammatory for them as college students as it had been at the onset of puberty, constituted the whole of the cheer exultantly repeated from below, while up in the rooms of the female students the several scores of drunken boys, their garments, their hands, their crew-cut hair, their faces smeared blue-black with ink and crimson with blood and dripping with beer and melted snow, reenacted en masse what an inspired Flusser had done all on his own in my little room under the eaves at Neil. Not all of them, by no means anywhere close to all of them, just the most notable blockheads among them — three altogether, two freshmen and one sophomore, all of whom were among the first to be expelled the next day — masturbated into pairs of stolen panties, masturbated just about as quickly as you could snap your fingers, before each hurled the deflowered panties, wet and fragrant with ejaculate, down into the upraised hands of the jubilant gathering of red-cheeked, snow-capped upperclassmen breathing steam like dragons and egging them on from below.
Occasionally a single deep male voice, articulating in behalf of all those there unable to comply any longer with the prevailing system of moral discipline, baldly bellowed out the truth of it—“We want girls!”—but in the main it was a mob willing to settle for panties, panties that any number of them soon took to drawing down over their hair like caps or to pulling on up past their overshoes so as to sport the intimate apparel of the other gender atop their trousers as though they had dressed inside out. Among the myriad objects seen dropping from the open windows that night were brassieres, girdles, sanitary napkins, ointment tubes, lipsticks, slips and half slips, nighties, a few handbags, some U.S. currency, and a collection of prettily ornamented hats. Meanwhile, in the quadrangle yard, a large, breasted snowwoman had been built and bedecked in lingerie, a tampon planted jauntily in her lipsticked mouth like a white cigar, and finished off with a beautiful Easter bonnet arest atop a hairdo contrived from a handful of damp dollar bills.
Probably none of this would have happened had the cops been able to get to the campus before the innocuous snowballing out front of Jenkins had begun to veer out of control. But the Winesburg streets and the college paths wouldn’t start to be cleared until the snowfall stopped, so neither the officers in the three squad cars belonging to the town nor the guards in the two campus security cars belonging to the college were able to make headway other than on foot. And by the time they reached the women’s quad, the residences were a wreck and the mayhem was well beyond containment.
It took Dean Caudwell to stop some other, more grotesque outrage from occurring — Dean Caudwell standing six feet four inches tall on the front porch of Dowland Hall in his overcoat and muffler and calling through a bullhorn he grasped in his ungloved hand, “Winesburgians, Winesburgians, return to your rooms! Return immediately or risk expulsion!” It took that dire warning from the college’s most revered and senior dean (and the fact that the draft was gobbling up eighteen-and-a-half-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds without college deferments) to begin to dispel the cheering mob of male students packed together into the women’s quad and get them heading as quickly as they could back to wherever they’d come from. As for those inside the women’s dorms still foraging through the dresser drawers, only when the town and the campus police entered and began hunting them down room by room did the last of the panties cease to drop from the windows — from windows all still wide open despite a nighttime temperature of twenty degrees — and only then did the invaders themselves begin to leap out the windows of the lower floors of Dowland, Koons, and Fleming into the cushion of deep snow accumulated below and, if they didn’t break a limb in attempting their escape — as did two of them — to head for the Hill.
Later that night, Elwyn Ayers was killed. Being Elwyn, he’d had nothing to do with the panty raid, but after finishing his homework, he had (according to testimony provided by some half dozen of his fraternity brothers) spent the remainder of the evening back of the fraternity house, camped in his LaSalle, running the engine to keep it warm, and getting out only to sweep off the snow that rapidly settled on the roof, the hood, and the trunk and then to spade it away from the four wheels so he could attach a brand-new set of winter chains to the tires. For the sake of the automotive adventure, to see how well the powerful 1940 four-door Touring Sedan with the lengthened wheelbase and the larger carburetor and the 130 horsepower, the last of the prestigious cars named for the French explorer that GM would ever manufacture, could perform in the high-piled snow of the Winesburg streets, he decided to take it for a test spin. Downtown, where the railroad tracks had been kept clear by the stationmaster and his assistant throughout the storm, Elwyn attempted apparently to outrace the midnight freight train to the level crossing that separated Main Street from Lower Main, and the LaSalle, skidding out of control, spun twice around on the tracks and was struck head-on by the snowplow of the locomotive bound from points east to Akron. The car in which I had taken Olivia to dinner and then out to the cemetery — a historic vehicle, even a monument of sorts, in the history of fellatio’s advent onto the Winesburg campus in the second half of the twentieth century — went careening off to the side and turned end-over-end down Lower Main until it exploded in flames, and Elwyn Ayers Jr. was killed, apparently on impact, and then quickly burned up in the wreckage of the car that he had cared for above all else in life and loved in lieu of men or women.
As it turned out, Elwyn was not the first, or even the second, but the third Winesburg senior who over the years since the introduction of the automobile into American life had failed to graduate because of having lost out in his attempt to outrace that midnight freight train. But he had taken the heavy snowfall for a challenge worthy of him and the LaSalle, and so, like me, my ex-roommate entered the realm of eternal recollection instead of the tugboat business, and here he will have forever to think about the fun of driving that great car. In my mind’s eye I kept imagining the moment of impact, when Elwyn’s pumpkin-shaped head crashed against the windshield and splattered very like a pumpkin into a hundred chunky pieces of flesh and bone and brain and blood. We had slept in the same room and studied together — and now he was dead at twenty-one. He had called Olivia a cunt — and now he was dead at twenty-one. My first thought on hearing of Elwyn’s fatal accident was that I would never have moved had I known beforehand that he was going to die. Up until then, the only people I knew who had died were my two older cousins who’d been killed in the war. Elwyn was the first person who died that I hated. Must I now stop hating him to begin mourning him? Must I now start pretending that I was sorry to hear that he was dead, and horrified to hear how he had died? Must I put on a long face and go to the memorial service at his fraternity house and express condolences to his fraternity brothers, many of whom I knew as drunks who whistled through their fingers at me and called me something sounding suspiciously like “Jew” when they wanted service at the inn? Or should I try to reclaim residence in the room in Jenkins Hall before it wound up being assigned to somebody else?