I’d driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I’d wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily’s plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago-what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn’t even played fair and told Robert of the ring’s switch to invisibility. I wondered if he’d discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they’d seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there’d been anything to see until he’d smashed to pieces on the embankment.
For so long I’d thought Abraham’s legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life’s real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play. But here I’d catapulted across the country in an airplane seat, a deranged arrow-man of pure intention, to uncover Mingus and Robert at Watertown-they hadn’t asked me to come. Maybe I’d underrated the Rachel in me, the Running Crab ready to destroy and bolt, to overturn lives and go on the lam.
So now I had to move on the ground, touch the earth. I needed to follow her crab footprints exactly, make no mistake in whom I was tracking this time. I drove just over the limit, anonymous in the flow, but inside the space of the car I was a vigilante, a low rider. I drove without music, my CD wallet on the backseat, untouched-no soundtrack to prettify the ugly scene of me. I stopped only to stretch my legs, gas up, and piss, and to make a handful of calls, letting Abraham and Francesca know I wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn, contacting the airline to cancel a ticket and the rental office to say I’d be returning the car to Berkeley in a few days, not La Guardia tomorrow. No one was pleased, but I didn’t give anyone a choice in the matter. I didn’t call Abby, because I didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.
I lost my wits on the road at around three. The sporadic lights coming the other way seemed always about to veer into mine, despite the wide grassy divider between us. I found a Howard Johnson’s then, at the entrance to Ohio, and slept for a few queasy hours, showered, hit the road again. I made Indiana by midmorning-a left turn at Indianapolis, past Larry Bird’s auto dealership, south to Bloomington. Campus parking was a bitch, so I settled for a faculty spot. I’d killed a man last night-I could stand a campus parking ticket.
At a terminal in the library I made my discovery: my quarry not only still lived in Bloomington, he worked on campus. I wouldn’t even have to repark my car. The researcher at Zelmo Swift’s law firm had traced Running Crab’s last known address to Bloomington, 1975, before she’d dropped off the map after bail flight in Lexington, Kentucky. But Abraham had refused even to look inside Zelmo’s manila folder of “This Is Your Life!” data, and neither Zelmo Swift nor Francesca Cassini could have known, as I did, another name to use to pick up the Bloomington trail.
The Archives of Traditional Music and the Carmichael Collection shared Morrison Hall with a portion of IU’s English and psych departments, and with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which occupied two of the hall’s upper floors. It was at the Kinsey Institute that I’d located Croft Vendle. He worked in their Office of Public Affairs. I called him from a phone in the library, and he told me to come by.
When I arrived, the Kinsey secretary explained that Croft was on a call. So I sat in a waiting room and read brochures. From the evidence, the institute was still struggling to defend its first, half-refused gift of knowledge to the American mind, and teetering always on the brink of exile from the campus by Indiana’s priggish legislature. The walls around me held the single biggest repository of “erotic materials” in the world, Alfred Kinsey having forged deals with police departments all over the country to quietly cart away seized materials, sparing the expense of their storage or destruction. For all this, the offices were homey, walls lined with neat-framed fifties-vintage smut, black-and-white photos as sunny as Topps baseball-card photography. Beside the receptionist’s desk hung an honorific row of studio portraits of past directors, beginning with bow-tied Alfred himself, and continuing through a charming sequence, leading to the present day, of thoughtful eyeglass-frame-gnawing psychologists, gentle stewards of freaky reality.
Croft was a man I barely recognized, in a rust corduroy two-piece, maroon tie, and milk-chocolate Earth shoes. His ruddy features swarmed with wiry silver beard, all trimmed to an exact length, even where it sprouted from his ears. He resembled a diet or exercise guru, someone usually seen only in running shorts but temporarily got up in a suit for a book-plugging appearance on Today. It was a shock. In my mind’s eye only Abraham aged; Rachel and her lover were still verdant, in 1974 bodies forever.
“I’ve got this call on hold,” Croft said apologetically, gesturing back toward his office. His voice was helium-high, another thing I didn’t remember. He seemed to take my appearance more in stride, despite my hints of road-weary desperado: three-day beard and sunburned forearm, Vietnam-vet walleye. Perhaps he’d been expecting me for years. “It’s this wealthy gay collector in Los Angeles, he’s been dangling this donation for months, a stash of Japanese erotica, thousands of pieces. I’ve got him on the brink, but it’s taking some real hand-holding.”
“No problem,” I said. “I can wait.” I wondered if Erlan Hagopian’s Rachel-paintings would find their way here someday. Maybe they already had.
“I was thinking if you’re free you’d come out to the farm for dinner,” he said. “So we can talk.”
“Number 1, Rural Route 8?” I asked.
Croft’s eyes widened. “We call it Watermelon Sugar Farm, but yeah. Bring your car out front at five and I’ll lead you. Place can be difficult to find-kind of a backroads, no-map-to-the-territory deal.”
“Okay.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’d better get back to this call. If you’re just killing the afternoon I could get Susie, she’s our intern, to give you the full Kinsey tour.”
“That’s okay.”
I’d noted the Hoagy option on the way through Morrison’s lobby, and suspected that better fit my mood. So Croft went to his phone call, I to “March of the Hooligans.”