“Asshole!” a man shouted.
“What’s wrong with you?” a woman yelled.
By then he was going through the glass door of the coffee shop.
He didn’t see the metallic-tinted hair. Toward the back there were two restrooms — one for men, another for women.
A young, milk-chocolate-brown woman with a halo of curly, naturally red-brown hair stood at the women’s door. She was large but not fat, young but not a child. She noticed John looking.
“What?” she asked.
“Um, uh, nothing,” he said.
“Then why you lookin’?”
“My friend’s in there. I’m, um, waiting for her.”
The woman squinted and pushed her face forward.
“You’re that professor right?” she asked. “The one that used garbage to make a history lecture?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool.”
When the door to the toilet came open two tall and skinny blond girls came out.
John moved past them into the toilet and saw that it was empty.
“Hey, man, that’s the woman’s restroom,” the young black woman said.
John went past the men’s room through a door that opened onto the coffee shop’s parking lot.
There were seven cars parked out there.
“Mom?” John shouted. “Mom, it’s me, CC!”
But Lucia Napoli-Jones was nowhere to be seen.
At 7:57 that evening John approached room twenty-six of the Spark City Motel. She opened the door before he could knock.
“What’s wrong?” Senta Ray asked. She wore a simple and markedly unsexy maroon cotton dress that buttoned up the front and came down below her knees.
“Can I come in?”
“What is it, John?” she asked as he slumped into the chair at the little utility table. “Lou called me at my other job.”
“What other job?”
“I’m a sorter at the big Post Office facility outside Delby.”
“You work for the Post Office?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Health insurance.”
Grinning, John sat up straight.
“Join me,” he said, gesturing at the other chair.
“If I do are you going to talk to me?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Senta smirked and sat down.
“You’re a piece of work aren’t you, John Woman?”
“How many days a week do you work at the Post Office?”
“I do three twelve-hour shifts a week,” she said. “You told Lou it was an emergency.”
“I told him that it was important,” John corrected her.
“But he said there was a crazy look in your eye. He didn’t want me to come.”
“He thought I was going to hurt you?”
“I’m supposed to call him ten minutes after you get here or he’s gonna bust in with Big Ben.”
“Who’s that?”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Then you better call.”
Senta entered digits on her bright red cell phone while John watched. She reminded him of one of those few screen actresses who were pretty when they were young but beautiful in middle age. Her posture was easy, provocative and wholly unconscious.
“Lou?” she said. “Yeah. Yeah. No he’s okay. Something happened and he feels like I’m the only one he can talk to. No, baby, it’s just a onetime thing. Okay. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She disengaged the phone, put it into a blue purse on the bed then looked expectantly at her john.
“You and Lou have a thing?” he asked.
“Would that make you jealous?”
“I think I saw my mother today.”
“So?” Senta asked.
“My mother abandoned me and my father when I was a kid. She left town with this gangster guy when he got in trouble.”
“Where did you see her?”
“In Parsonsville.”
“What did she say?”
“There was traffic,” John explained. “I was across the street and by the time I got there she was gone.”
“Didn’t she see you?”
“Her head was turned away.”
Senta smiled.
“What?” John said.
“You’re still having the same troubles you did the last time you were here?”
“It was her. I know it was.”
“Okay,” Senta said, relenting only slightly. “Let’s say it was her. That sounds like a good thing. If she lives in the area you’ll probably see her again and you could look her up too.”
“My history talk didn’t go well,” John said looking down. “And, like I said before, I got bigger problems.”
“Legal problems?”
“Felony issues.”
“Then you need to get away from Arizona. You want me to give you a ride?”
“No thanks,” John said. “I would have already been gone if I hadn’t seen her head move and the way she put sugar in her coffee.”
“It could have been anybody,” Senta reasoned. “Maybe you just needed to see your mother right then.”
These words galvanized John. Suddenly he was certain. He looked up at Senta. Her eyes were hazel and she wore more makeup for the Post Office than she did as a prostitute.
“Your hair is different,” he said.
“I braid it when I’m at work.”
“Do you really have orgasms with me?”
“Sometimes.”
“Really?”
She nodded and smiled. “What are you going to do, John?”
“Sometimes...” he said. “Sometimes when I think about being with you I remember talking but I can’t recall what we said.”
“You get pretty drunk,” she agreed.
“What do we talk about?”
“You go on and on about what you call the idea of history.”
“Collingwood.”
“What?”
“Is that all?”
“Mostly.” Senta smiled. “Are we going to take off our clothes?”
“Retirement and health insurance, huh?”
“Yeah. A girl’s got to look out for her future.”
“Boys too.”
The next day, instead of taking a Greyhound to Los Angeles, John went to see Colin Luckfeld.
“Do you have an appointment?” tan, rattlesnake-eyed Bernice Whitman asked. That day the president’s sentry was wearing a big blue dress that would have looked good on her taller, fatter sister.
“I do not,” John stated.
“President Luckfeld is a very busy man.”
“Almost all men,” the professor opined, “even the busiest ones, fritter away most of their allotted hours.”
“Is that the kind of prattle you teach in your classes?”
“Call Colin and tell him I’m here.”
Mrs. Whitman flinched. John was sure that if they were at a cocktail party she would have splashed her martini in his face. She depressed a gray button on the phone and John wondered if some kind of security, maybe Mr. Gustav, would come to remove him.
“Yes?” Colin Luckfeld said over a small speaker.
“Professor Woman is here,” she said. “He doesn’t have an appointment.”
“That’s all right. Send him up.”
Whitman leveled her spiteful eyes at John. She couldn’t bring herself to speak.
“Professor,” President Luckfeld called from the opposite end of his huge office. He was on his feet, headed John’s way. “Wait there. We can meet in my little library.”
John went to sit on one of the facing yellow sofas. A minute later the president lowered onto the opposite couch.
“That was some speech you gave the other day,” Luckfeld said. “I mean I’ve never seen anything like it. Almost everything you said hit home.”
“That may be, Colin, but I don’t think my peers share the sentiment.”
“Oh no they don’t,” Luckfeld agreed energetically. “Eubanks and Carmody were here fifteen minutes after the talk was over. They say that the department voted telephonically to deny you tenure and request you be suspended from your post.”