Max Collins - The first quarry

I had to go on by him and glimpsed him, hunkered over the wheel, crying.

Poor bastard.

I waited for an opening, then cut across the main drag into the parking lot of a medical clinic and waited there for the green GTO to appear at the mouth of Country Vista. Within minutes, it did, Tommy getting himself under control enough to drive, and I fell in behind him. His car had Illinois license plates; interesting. Also, a PEACE NOW bumper sticker, the O of NOW the familiar peace symbol; a second sticker said, REMEMBER KENT STATE.

They didn’t make frat boys like they used to.

Before long I had followed Tom into the Iowa City business district, a ghost town on this Sunday afternoon; parking places were usually at a premium, but neither Tom nor I had trouble finding one. This was Clinton Street and the buildings of the university sprawled to my right, as I sat in my rental, and a street of bookstores, boutiques and bars was at my left. I watched Tom angle across to the Airliner, a long-in-the-tooth brick-fronted establishment whose sign bragged about its 1944 origin. Customers were sitting in a big front window eating slices of pizza and drinking beer and looking across at the snowy campus as if something were going on.

After five minutes, I cut across the barely existent traffic and entered the bar, which didn’t seem to have been remodeled since 1944, either. The pizza smell was inviting, though, and I would have taken a booth and burrowed in with a small pie if I hadn’t noticed Tom sitting at the bar in his fleece-lined jacket. Most of the stools were open, so plopping down next to him and getting friendly might have been read wrong.

So I left a stool between us and ordered a beer and asked the bartender if I could eat at the bar and he said sure. I ordered a small pepperoni and, my beer not here yet, turned toward Tom and said, “I hope the pizza is as good as it smells.”

Slouched over the bar, Tom gave me a “huh” look-he already had his beer, and most of it was gone-and then forced a smile and said, “It is good.”

“You’re from here?”

He shook his head. I was getting a better look at him now but he was just another of these semi-longhaired college kids with mustaches and fetus faces. “I go to Northwestern,” he said. “Evanston?”

That explained the Illinois license plates.

I said, “I’m starting here, second semester. What’s your major?”

“I’m in pre-law.”

Tom wasn’t unfriendly but neither was he interested, so I cut if off there. I sipped my beer, Tom ordered a second one. We did not speak again until my pizza arrived. The bartender, God bless him, placed it on the bar next to me, in front of the empty stool that separated Tom and me.

“Hey,” I said to Tom. “This is more than I can handle. Help yourself to a few slices.”

Tom frowned at me, then smiled. “That’s nice, brother, but…I’m not that hungry.”

“Come on. Why let it go to waste? Consider it a late Christmas present.”

He thought about that, shrugged, and moved over a seat.

The pie was in fact excellent, a thin crust with a lot of tomato sauce and just the right amount of mozzarella and seemed to me just about the best pizza ever, although you should factor in that I’d been living on Slim Jims, beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes.

I kept the conversation casual. “You got folks in Iowa City?”

“No,” he said. He was finished with his second beer and I called the bartender over and ordered us both another. Tom thanked me and said, “My girlfriend lives here.”

“Really? Local gal?”

“No. Actually, she’s from Chicago, too. She’s a little older than me, but we’ve gone together since high school.”

“How much older?”

He shrugged. “Just a year. But she’s in grad school now. That’s why she’s at Iowa.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah-Writers’ Workshop? Really famous writers’ school. Lots of big deal literary lights teach here. Kurt Vonnegut. Richard Yates. Phillip Roth.”

I’d read Vonnegut.

I said, “Yeah, I know all about that. I’m going to be in the Workshop myself.”

His eyebrows went up. “No kidding. Nice going- tough to get in. My girlfriend has been winning writing awards since she was in grade school.”

“What’s her name?”

“Annette Girard.”

“Speaking of which…my name’s Jack.” I wiped pizza sauce off my hand and extended it to him and grinned. “Jack Harper.”

“Tom Keenan,” he said, and we shook.

“So,” I said, “why are you sitting with some doofus in a bar, eating pizza and drinking beer, if your girl’s in town?”

“She is, but…man, can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“It’s the kind of question you can only ask some doofus…some other doofus…in a bar.” He laughed humorlessly. “Are all women untrustworthy little bitches?”

I shrugged. “Not all.”

“Really?”

“Well…none that aren’t come to mind.” I smiled. “But you’d figure there’d have to be some of ‘em out there who wouldn’t cheat on your ass.”

He grunted. “You been there, then?”

“Listen, let me tell you. I did a tour in Nam.”

His eyebrows went up. “Really?”

“Yeah. And when I came home, guess where I found my honeybun?”

“In bed with a guy?”

“In bed with a guy.”

We toasted beers.

“So what now, Tom? You gonna go talk sense to the little lady? Try to win her back?”

He sighed and shook his head. “Naw. She’s really… really not a bad girl, Jack. She’s smart and ambitious and talented and smart.” He was on his fourth beer. “But her parents, her father particularly, spoiled the shit out of her. So she’s used to getting her own way.”

“Is she cute?”

“Cute ain’t half of it! She looks like she walked out of a Penthouse centerspread.”

Particularly on your fourth beer, when you could get the soft focus just right.

“Then,” I said, “if I were you, I would forgive her lovely ass, no matter what she did to me.”

He laughed. Actually laughed. “Yeah. And some day I may get her back. But right now? This prick has filled her head with all kinds of garbage.”

“What prick? What kind of garbage?”

“Well, it’s this goddamn professor.” He sneered, shook his head. “Her fucking literary guru. Hell, he may wind up your teacher, Jack, in the Workshop!”

“Yeah? What’s his name?”

“Byron. Some initials in front of that, but I forget what the fuck they are.”

I was nodding. “Yeah, I know who you mean. He had a bestseller a while back, but he’s sure as hell no Vonnegut.”

“That’s for fuckin’ A sure. But she’s been working on this book, this novel…actually, she says it’s a non-fiction novel-you know, like In Cold Blood?”

“What’s it about?”

He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know. Probably her father.”

“Why her father?”

He just waved that off. I was already getting more out of him than a doofus in a bar had any right.

“But this Byron asshole,” Tom said, “he’s an expert at this stuff. That bestseller of his, it was one of these non-fiction novel deals.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. Anyway, she’s under his spell. But it’ll only be temporary. If I go off and live my life for a while, and fuck me a few honeys back in Evanston, maybe I can forget her for now, and then, down the road a ways, we can start back up again, with a clean slate.”

“The professor’s just a fling?”

“Yeah, but it’s Annette who’s gettin’ flung. This prof, he’s a well-known horndog. I asked around about him. He’s been at three colleges in six years, a dirty old man playing Mick Jagger to lit — rah-chure groupies.”