C Corwin - The Cross Kisses Back

It was just about dark when we left the restaurant. The sidewalk was filled with old gays wearing pastel baseball caps and noisy college kids covered in tattoos and earrings. I remembered the days when be-bop jazz used to roll out of the bars and give the entire neighborhood a happy epileptic fit. Now the street throbbed like a toothache from that awful rap music. Eric was begging me to join them for cappuccinos at Starbucks when Aubrey spotted the red Taurus station wagon parked along the street just a block from our own cars. I don’t know if she was frightened, angry, or simply annoyed, but she began leaking four-letter words. Quite to my surprise, Eric began leaking them, too. Then he started running, right toward the Taurus, fists tucked under his chin like a boxer.

Aubrey and I both yelled for him to stop. But Eric was in protective boyfriend mode. When he got within fifty feet of the station wagon, the man inside jumped out and ran. Eric stayed with him. They crossed the street and ran another block before disappearing around the back of an apartment building.

Aubrey wanted to follow, but I locked my arms around her elbow to hold her back. “Eric couldn’t catch a cold,” I assured her.

After a minute or two, the man reappeared, trotting, arms wrapped around his face like a babushka. He jumped into his station wagon, backed into a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle, made a clumsy U-turn and sped away. Then we saw Eric, weaving slowly across the street, oblivious to the traffic.

Aubrey and I hurried to him. There was blood on his lip and the bridge of his nose. He was staring straight ahead, acting dopey. I fished in my purse for a Kleenex while Aubrey berated him for not getting the license plate number on the Taurus. “That’s all you needed to do,” she kept repeating. “That’s all you needed to do.”

I licked the Kleenex and started cleaning the blood off his face. “Good gravy, Aubrey. He’s just been beaten to a pulp.”

Actually he hadn’t been beaten to a pulp. He told us he’d tried to tackle the mysterious station-wagon man and missed, tumbling over the hood of a Yugo.

“Could you make the guy out?” Aubrey demanded. “White, black, young, old?”

Eric fought off my dabbing Kleenex. “Middle-aged white guy.” He swung his eyes across my worried face and stared into the black sky. “I think I’m going home now,” he said.

Aubrey followed him to his truck, begging for a better description of the man. He drove away without telling her anything.

I felt so sorry for Eric. He had tried to defend the woman he loved-at least loved to sleep with-only to make a fool of himself. I knew what that kind of embarrassment was like. I once went to Dale Marabout’s apartment with a chocolate cake, to rekindle our faltering affair. Instead of knocking, I used the key he’d given me. I found him naked on his living room floor with that kindergarten teacher.

A few days after that incident in Meri, Aubrey confided in me that Eric had stopped sleeping with her. “I guess flying over the hood of that Yugo he came to the conclusion I’m not worth dying for,” she said. She said it as if she didn’t care. But I could see she did care. For years, Dale Marabout and I assured each other we were just in it for the sex. We laughed and copulated like a couple of those chimpanzees in equatorial Africa, bonobos I think they’re called, who just mindlessly screw and screw and screw. After I found Dale on the floor with the kindergarten teacher, I pretended not to care. I went to their wedding and, of all things, gave them a set of fitted flannel sheets. But I cared. And Aubrey cared. She’d been using Eric, no doubt about that, but it was for more than sex.

Thursday, June 8

Thursday morning I went with Aubrey to Kent State University to see Dr. Howard Cooksey, a professor of television and radio news in the communications department. It would be a forty-minute drive across some of the most forgettable landscape in the state of Ohio.

“Were you still there when the black squirrels were poisoned?” I asked as Aubrey’s Ford Escort struggled up the long grade that divides the tiny towns of Richfield and Peninsula.

Her eyes widened. “How do you know about the squirrels?”

“Morgue Mama does not know all or see all,” I joked, “but Morgue Mama does remember all.” The fact was that after the eyebrow woman told us about students from the university working at the cathedral, I searched through the morgue’s Kent State files.

“That happened my senior year,” Aubrey said. “I covered it for the college paper.”

“So that was just three years ago.”

She played with the calendar in her mind. “Yeah.”

Kent is famous for its black squirrels and the poisonings shook the town and the campus to its roots, not as badly as the May 4, 1970 shootings, of course not, but it was amazing how worked up people became over the deaths of thirty-seven squirrels.

The black squirrel story actually began decades earlier, in the early Sixties, when the university’s grounds supervisor, a guy named Larry Woodell, went to Canada and brought back sixteen black squirrels. In Ohio you only see gray squirrels and red squirrels, so black squirrels popping across the lawns were quite a novelty, and the herd, whatever you call a group of squirrels, multiplied faster than rabbits. In 1982, the university held its first Black Squirrel Festival, complete with rock bands and a barbecue. The annual May 4 memorial commemoration and the Black Squirrel Festival in September are the yin and yang of campus life at Kent State, the sad and the silly if you will.

So, anyway, it caused quite a stir when people started finding the carcasses of black squirrels all over the place. The campus police called in the Kent city police, and the Kent city police called in the State Highway Patrol. “They never caught who did it?” I asked Aubrey.

“Nope. After thirty-seven squirrels it stopped. By Christmas break it was all over. But it was a cool story for awhile-you know what I mean by cool-it was actually pretty sickening.”

I did know what she meant by cool. Covering those squirrel poisonings when she was a senior journalism student at Kent was cool the same way covering the murder of that football coach was cool when she was a new reporter at The Gazette in Rush City, the same way that digging into the Buddy Wing murder now was cool. Big stories, no matter how tragic, are cool to cover. I’m sure that Aubrey’s stories on the squirrel poisonings for the college newspaper helped her get her first job in Rush City, and I know her football coach stories got her into the Herald-Union. Soldiers advance through the ranks by going to war. Reporters advance by covering cool stories. “How exactly were the squirrels poisoned?” I asked. “It wasn’t walnuts shot full of procaine, was it?”

She winced at my joke. “Ears of corn sprinkled with insecticide-as you well know.”

“Well, it’s still possible that’s it’s the same person, isn’t it? Psychopathic killers aren’t under any obligation to use the same poisons all the time, are they?”

Aubrey agreed that it was possible with an exaggerated, Oliver Hardy nod. “But think about the odds. In order for one of the television students to have poisoned both Buddy Wing and the squirrels, that student would’ve been at Kent three years ago, making him, at best, a sophomore when the squirrels were killed. I’ll admit that theoretically there might be a few sophomores capable of sprinkling poison on an ear of corn without poisoning themselves, but that still means there’s a three year-gap between crimes. Wouldn’t a wacko like that have moved up to a human victim right away?”

“Maybe there was someone in between,” I said.