He
thought it would be like a string of Black Cats, exploding furiously until the
final crack and the lights went out. But it wasn’t like that at all. Instead, Gus
Thorp’s life was unraveling like an old, frayed rope, the barely visible
strands stretching and stretching, until, one by one, they quietly
snapped.
There was usual stuff – papers to
grade, students whining about their grades, harassment calls from his editor.
He hadn’t talked to his quasi-girlfriend in two weeks, and his adult children barely
tolerated him. But now life had taken a nasty turn. His ex-wife, whom he
recognized less and less with each plastic surgery, was suing him again, and
his 78-year-old mother probably had Alzheimer’s. The prospect of this last
worry was doubly problematic, because he knew it would do nothing to prevent
his father from treating her like shit.
Between sessions with students,
there were phone calls to lawyers and doctors and nursing homes. While talking
to these people, Gus was distracted by a growing stack of insurance forms and
nursing-home applications.
But these problems were merely
priming the pump. The real unraveling started one hot afternoon in May, toward
the end of the semester, when Gus was climbing the hill, heading back to his
office after swimming laps at the natatorium. Only swimming and weightlifting,
in addition to alcohol, helped him cope with his problems. They satisfied his
particular strain of masochism.
The thing that disturbed him most
and made him immediately defensive – both of which he admitted to the dean of
students, the university chief of police, and the chancellor – was that he hadn’t
even heard the truck coming. As he approached the end of the sidewalk, he
looked to his right and saw nothing. While turning the other way, he started to
step off the curb – again, because he did not hear anyone coming – but immediately
jumped back when he saw a large black Chevy Silverado bearing down on him like a
drone on the Taliban.
When the truck passed, its tires
brushed against the curb, and the enormous side mirror jutted out so far that
it nearly clipped Gus’s nose. When he reared back to avoid getting hit, he saw
inside the cab. The driver was looking at his cell phone.
Gus yelled but the truck’s stereo
was turned up so loud that the driver did not hear him. Distracted by music and
phone, the young man didn’t appear to even notice Gus was there. Which
explained why he was so surprised when Gus confronted him after he parked the truck
in a small gravel lot between two houses on fraternity row.
“Turn that shit down,” said Gus.
The young man frowned, as if Gus’s
presence was an inconvenience.
“Turn it down!” yelled Gus.
The driver ignored him and looked
at his phone. The stereo blared bad gangsta rap, the kind suburban white boys
listen to.
Gus reached up into the truck. When
he grabbed the driver’s shoulder, the young man flinched, causing him to fumble
the phone and drop it. Gus had a handful of the young man’s light blue polo
shirt, and he held on, pulling it toward him until he could let go and grab
something else. When he did this, he got a hold of the driver’s collar and yanked
him to the side, ramming his head into the doorframe.
“What the fuck?” said he driver, squealing,
almost crying.
“You almost hit me back there,”
said Gus. He opened the door and dragged the stunned driver out of the vehicle.
The kid was confused and distracted, still looking for his cell phone.
“What?” he said. “Where?”
“Up there,” said Gus.
But the young man could not see
where Gus was pointing, because his head was facing the ground, as Gus whipped
him back and forth like a roped calf. Gus was so angry he thought he would slap
the man’s head and probably would have had it not been for three people
standing on the same sidewalk he had just climbed. When he looked up, after
shouting angry epithets into driver ’s ear, he saw three fraternity brothers
staring back at him in utter astonishment.
Gus let go, and the young man fell
to his hands and knees. As he walked up the hill, Gus heard complaining, the
grumbling of vague threats, but they did not pursue him.
An
hour later, a university police officer showed up at his office. The cop
knocked gently, as if he were a timid student.
“Door’s open,” growled Gus.
The officer poked his head into the
room. He did not say anything.
“I don’t hate rap music,” said Gus, rising from his chair and walking toward the door. “I want it on the record that I do not hate rap music.”
“I don’t hate rap music,” said Gus, rising from his chair and walking toward the door. “I want it on the record that I do not hate rap music.”
“Okay,” said the officer, rolling
his eyes. He and Gus walked in silence to the administration building.
Word spread quickly about the
incident. By the time Gus and the officer reached Epson Hall, a dozen students
had lined up along the sidewalk. Gus recognized three as his own. The students
cheered as Gus and the officer approached the administration building. One of
the students, a bearded, long-haired kid in blue jeans and a filthy shirt,
raised his clenched fist in a mock demonstration of solidarity. To show that he
understood the gravity of his predicament, Gus frowned at the students and
shook his head.
In
her dark office, Chancellor Ophelia Jensen, a Classics scholar, was sitting
behind her massive cherry desk. Her glasses were pulled down to the tip of her
nose. She was using them to read a transcript given to her by Mike Emery,
university police chief. Emery and Danny Sutton, dean of students, were sitting
in armchairs, next to each other, opposite the chancellor.
Jensen did not look up when Gus and
the officer entered the room. They walked toward the desk and stood next to
Emery and Sutton. Emery nodded at the officer, who stepped back and then left
the room. Jensen finished reading the transcript and flipped it over. She
leaned back in her chair and sighed deeply.
“Gus,” she said. “What the hell’s
wrong with you?”
Gus smiled. He knew Jensen had been
a close friend of Jay Goddard, the venerable newspaper editor and journalism
professor who died of a heart attack two years ago. Gus had worked for Goddard
for many years. He was the reason Gus was at the university.
“Somebody’s gotta stop these
maniacs,” said Gus.
Jensen sighed and shook her head.
She leaned forward, setting her elbows on the desk and removing the glasses. She
started to speak but looked at Emery instead.
“I can arrest you right now,” Emery
said. “For assault.”
Gus laughed. He and Emery had some
history.
“You think I’m kidding?”
“No, Mike, I don’t,” said Gus. “But
let me ask you something. When are you gonna crack down on these fuckers? They’re
gonna kill someone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve almost been run over by
one of these assholes checking Facebook or whatever while driving across campus.”
“Gus,” said Jensen. “Please.”
“I didn’t hurt that kid,” Gus said.
“That punk got what he deserved.”
“His family could sue the university,“ said Emery.
“His family could sue the university,“ said Emery.
Gus laughed again. He started to
argue, but Jensen cut him off by raising her hand.
“Listen,” she said. “Do you want to
work here? Because I could fire you before Mike arrests you. I think I would if
these… ‘punks,’ as you so affectionately refer to them, didn’t like you so
much.”
“My students aren’t punks,” said Gus.
“My students are going write the great American novel and keep us from turning
this planet in an oven.”
Jensen sighed again. “Be that as it
may…” she said.
“Right,” interrupted Emery. “And
you’re sure your students aren’t
texting and driving.”
Gus backed down. He did want to
work at the university. Sometimes it felt like that was all he had. He answered
Jensen’s question by agreeing to apologize to the student.
Gus
avoided most of his colleagues and loathed a good many. Although he enjoyed his
work and was tacitly grateful that anyone would pay him to do what he did, he
never felt totally comfortable among his peers. They all had advanced degrees
and talked skillfully, sometimes eloquently, about complex subjects. He, on the
other hand, had barely managed to finish college. There were always too many
distractions back then.
Despite this ill-formed, ironic and
yet innate contempt of higher education, Gus had fallen in with a cadre of
colleagues from the university, most of whom shared his cynical view of the
human race. This group included an angry sculptor who reminded him of Jackson
Pollock, a criminologist who studied domestic terrorism, two history
professors, one of whom was Russian and drank more vodka than Gus, an assistant
swim coach and a balding math professor who smoked more pot than his students.
There were others too, Goddard before he died, a carpenter who had done home
repair for several in the group, and always one or two hacks from the local
newspaper.
Gus liked these folks just fine. They
played poker on Wednesday nights and drank at Exene’s on the weekends. Sometimes
they canoed together in the summer and, depending on the season, attended the
occasional ad hoc event, such as a football game or holiday party.
It was at one of these parties,
last December, that Gus met Carrie. Gus had consumed a prodigious volume of
Gray Goose, as he always felt obligated to do at such events, and he flirted with
Carrie after catching her looking at him from across the kitchen. She laughed at
his sarcastic jokes and helped him poke fun at the pretentious people
surrounding them. Gus liked her, and the next day, while nursing an equally
prodigious hangover, he silently cursed himself for forgetting her name.
But this problem was solved when,
three days after the party, he received an e-mail from Carrie while he was
straining to understand just exactly what a freshman was trying to say in a
nearly unreadable essay on gun control.
“Hey Gus,” the e-mail stated. “As
you might expect, I think you’re probably an asshole, but I had fun talking to
you the other night. Let me know if you’d like to hang out sometime or get your
ass kicked at racquetball.”
Gus remembered they had talked
about sports, racquetball specifically. Now that right there, he said to
himself, is a woman who knows how to communicate.
Gus and Carrie saw a lot of each
other after that. If it hadn’t been for the sex, one might describe their
relationship as platonic. They shared a bed occasionally, but they didn’t touch
otherwise, and they didn’t go out on dates. Nor did they talk about feelings or
their respective families, although Gus knew that Carrie had a seven-year-old
son, only because she mentioned him one evening when she couldn’t come up with
a good excuse for why she couldn’t see Gus.
They played racquetball and tennis,
and she even talked him into rock-climbing, which they did once. Gus thought it
was okay, even though he was feeling too old for it, a fact he’d never admit to
her.
Which is to say that relations
between them were light and easy, never any complications. Except for the one
time when Gus was coming out of the bathroom, after they had had sex in his
apartment, and he heard her on the phone in the kitchen. She was arguing with
someone. When he came into the room, she hurried off the phone.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“Nobody,” she said.
“Okay,” said Gus, shrugging. “Is
everything okay.”
“Yep,” said Carrie.
“Yep,” said Carrie.
Two
years ago, shortly after Goddard died, the peace and ease of hanging out with
his friends was disrupted when one of Gus’s colleagues introduced a new member
to the group. At first, Jarod Thoma seemed like a decent guy, interesting at
least. As a graduate student at Yale, he had studied under a renowned
archeologist who had discovered several small but important sites in the Middle
East. In archeology circles, Thoma himself had become somewhat of a name, by
proxy more than production, but he had led a few of his mentor’s digs and
subsequently authored articles about them. Now Thoma was at the university to
make a name for himself, to try to get out from under his mentor’s shadow.
Gus had talked to Thoma a few times
and thought he was aloof, except when he was talking about himself and his
experiences in the Middle East. Thoma had interesting things to share, but Gus
noticed that as soon as someone else tried to insert something, Thoma always
brought the conversation back to himself. First it was Yale this and Yale that,
and then it was a series of dramatic stories about running into heavily armed soldiers
while trying get to a dig in a remote corner of Syria. The soldiers spoke
fiercely and gestured wildly, waving their weapons around, Thoma said, but that
didn’t stop him and the others from reaching the site and finding important
artifacts.
For several months, Gus wasn’t more
than mildly annoyed by Thoma. He generally avoided him, but occasionally they
occupied the same room. With each encounter, Gus became increasingly intolerant
of the younger man, especially since Thoma had shifted his focus from grandiose
stories about adventures overseas to near-constant whining about the “podunk”
place they lived in. As if someone had forced him to accept the job at the
university. When Thoma did this, when he ridiculed the dialect of locals or
complained that he couldn’t find a decent bagel in town, most of Gus’s friends
laughed politely, but Gus, who had grown up only seventy miles to the north,
wouldn’t play along. He never laughed and usually didn’t say anything, but sometimes
he responded with a playfully snide comment about how they all couldn’t be as
sophisticated as “you god-damned Yankees.”
A month after the incident with the student and the truck, Gus was drinking at Exene’s. He got there early, around 4:30 p.m., and found his favorite seat at the bar. He was vaguely aware that there was supposed be a party there later that night for a colleague who had taken a job and was moving out of state. But that wasn’t why Gus was there. Earlier that day, he’d had an argument with his son, during which he’d said a few regretful things, and now he was at the bar to do one thing: Drink.
As the hours passed, friends
trickled in. Most of them said a quick hello or nodded at Gus and then walked
past him to one of the pool tables at the end of the bar. Others joined a group
at a long table behind Gus’s barstool. Eventually, as the night wore on, Gus’s
initial one-man party blended in with the increasingly raucous gathering going
on behind him.
Gus hadn’t even seen Thoma enter
Exene’s. But at some point, when he was still facing the big mirror behind the
bar, Gus heard Thoma’s voice carry over the din. He looked up and saw a
reflection of Thoma standing on the far side of the table behind him. Thoma was
wearing a black leather coat and waving a heavy mug of beer across the table as
he talked too loudly about something Gus was sure he didn’t give a shit about. Thoma
had a look on his face like he expected the attention of everyone and knew they
would be fascinated by what he had to say.
It was at this this moment – sullen
Gus weaving slightly on a barstool, nursing grudges, pissed that he’d had to
apologize to the frat dick and trying hard forget mistakes with his son and
other loved ones, while observing the obnoxious behavior by someone he felt
nothing but contempt for – that Gus should have slid off the barstool and gone
home. But he didn’t. He looked away from the image of Thoma, and he ordered
another drink.
He stayed there like that, planted
on the barstool, getting up only to go to the restroom, for another hour,
during which Thoma continued to talk loudly, spouting his worldview and
complaining about everything from public transportation to the lack of organic
produce at the local grocery. Nothing met his high standards for how a
community should operate or how an individual should live a virtuous life.
So Gus had already heard enough
when Thoma and another colleague, an equally loud, loquacious guy named Harrison
Moore, made their way to the bar and wedged themselves between two stools next to
Gus. They had come over to order another pitcher of beer, but the bartender –
there was only one working that night – was busy and hadn’t taken their order
yet. The two men were tight and boisterous, talking loudly and laughing at
every stupid comment each of them made. They had entered that stage of
drunkenness when a man isn’t fully aware of his body and crashes into things
and people without realizing it. Moore’s fat ass had bumped into Gus three
times before he turned around and realized who he was.
“Gus!” slobbered Moore, slapping Gus
on the back. “What do you think? We’re trying to talk Thoma here into running
for mayor.”
Gus lifted his pint glass and moved
it toward his mouth. But he stopped about halfway between the bar and his lips.
“You don’t want to know what I
think,” he said.
Thoma heard him and leaned across
Moore. “Yeah?” he said. “Come on Gus, tell me what you think. I’m a big boy. I
can handle it.”
“All right,” said Gus, setting the
glass on the bar. “I think you oughtta shut the fuck up or get the fuck out.”
Thoma tried to act cool. He nodded
and squinted and twisted his mouth as if he were thinking, working out a complex
multiplication problem without a calculator. But he was clearly agitated, his
shoulders and chest twitching enough to make Moore feel crowded and
uncomfortable. When Moore shoved his stool back away from the bar, Thoma
stepped in between him and the cushioned edge of the bar. He was now closer to Gus,
who was looking straight ahead, right into the mirror’s image of his own
swollen red face.
“Fair enough,” said Thoma, nodding,
pointing his finger at Gus. “Now let me tell you what I think.”
Gus lifted his brow and took a
drink. “All right,” he said.
Thoma dropped his hand but moved in
even closer to Gus’s head. “I think you oughtta stop fucking my wife,” he said.
Gus’s brow rose again as he tipped
his head back and finished off the beer. He looked surprised but not as
surprised as one might think. After this day, after the shitty things he’d said
to his son, after thinking again about all the crap he’d put that kid’s mother
through, nothing could surprise him.
Gus set the glass down on the bar
and slid off the stool, opposite Thoma. When he was steady on his feet, as
steady as he could be, he turned and looked at Thoma, who appeared disappointed
rather than hostile. His head was tilted, and he was staring back at Gus with
an apprehensive grimace, as if he felt sorry for him or perhaps was reminded of
some of his own regrets. Gus nodded at Thoma and then squeezed past him and
walked outside into the darkness of his life.
Matt McGowan has a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in journalism, both from the University of Missouri. He was a newspaper reporter, and for many years now he has been a working as a science and research writer at the University of Arkansas. Recently, his stories have appeared in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Open Road Review, Danse Macabre and Indiana Voice Journal.