We passed groups of middle-aged white men in blue thermal jumpsuits, their faces pink with cold. They smoked in tight huddles, avoiding the icicle-laden eaves of buildings whose names had been sandblasted off. Branner Hall was now named G-4, and Peterson Auditorium, where all the seniors of Parkton College had graduated, was simply H-l. Yulia and Ivan probably met at a school like this, an unadorned bunker of a campus, an institution where people studied radiation technology and weapons development.
Outside the Warden’s Residence was a winterized rose garden that resembled, on a smaller scale, the President’s Promenade at USSD — beds of frozen, thorny stalks were surrounded by heaps of mulch and burlap, all ringed by circles of brightly colored rocks. One stone I recognized as obsidian. When we got closer, I saw that there were large pieces of quartz and feldspar. Stacked at the foot of an irrigation box were chunks of Siberian marble — mint-green shot through with pearl. Suddenly I realized these stones were mineral samples, commandeered from the college’s old geologic collection, which had been housed in display cases in the library’s concourse.
Gerry stopped and checked his watch again.
“So this tenure thing,” he said. “What about sleeping with a student? Does tenure let you do that?”
“Do you mean a student, or my student?”
“What’s the difference?” Gerry asked.
“Well, the practice, in general, is frowned upon.”
“So you’ve done it.”
“They weren’t my students,” I said. “I’m not proud of it.”
Gerry shook his head. “Pitiful,” he said. “What a shameful abuse of power. That’s twenty.”
I didn’t argue. I knelt in the snow and began my pushups, though I could barely do any, especially staring at what was once a college’s prized geological cache. Before me were amethyst clusters and batholite cores. There were azurite, fluorspar, and bitumen. Oh, what a Clovis wouldn’t give. Straining on rubbery arms, I realized I was staring directly at a meteorite, an escapee from the very ovens of creation, an object marooned on our planet after being orphaned by some ancient star extinction or distant galactic collision.
I did a handful of push-ups, leaving a face print in the snow, and then we pressed on down the hill, to the old industrial-arts building, its aged brick façade reminiscent of times when hands-on manufacturing was a proper university subject. At the door, we could hear the muted whine of machinery.
“Wait here,” Gerry said, and disappeared inside.
I danced in place for a little bit, clapping my hands to keep them warm, but then my curiosity took over, and I slipped inside to see what was happening. The door opened into a dark work area filled with idle industrial-arts equipment. It was empty except for four preadolescent children running power tools by the glow of a single droplight. Shop-goggled and saw-dusted, they were hard at work: one fed wood into the whiny teeth of the bandsaw, while another stabbed the lathe with a spoon chisel that spit wood shavings directly into his face. A third child was precariously perched atop a stool that allowed his short arms to feed strips of lumber all the way through the ripsaw in a single swipe. The last boy ran a drum sander that turned at such revolutions that it burned the wood, sending up curls of cedar smoke, a spicy smell, thick with resin, that instantly cleared my sinuses.
Gerry approached them and began sorting through what looked like a pile of miniature wooden skis the kids had made. He picked up one of the tiny skis, sighted down its crown. This he repeated several times. Then he lifted a finger to his throat and mimed, Cut. One by one, the kids shut down their machines and lifted their goggles, revealing pale skin and rabbity, bloodshot eyes.
“These are all lefts,” Gerry said. “Tell me you’ve been making the rights, too.”
The kids looked from one to another. Slobbers of glue had dried in their hair, on their cut-off shirts. Bursts of blue-and-red marking powder splotched their arms and backs, so you could tell there had been some pitched battles earlier with glue guns and chalk boxes. Now, however, none of them spoke.
Gerry asked them, “What will happen if you only make left skis?”
His voice sounded more instructional than angry, though the kids looked used to being punished. They stepped from behind their machines, reluctantly, and lined up as if it was an old drill. Side by side, the boys looked like quadruplets, with a couple of inches in height the only thing separating them. How could they all look eleven? Who could ever tell them apart?
Gerry asked, “Won’t left skis make everything go in circles?”
The kids were wearing prison-issue visitor name-tags clipped to their cut-off shirts, and I watched as Dana looked to Kelly, who looked to Rene. Standing at the end, a hair shorter than the rest, was Pat.
The biggest one, Dana, said, “We figured it would be faster to cut all the lefts first and then cut all the rights. That way we don’t have to adjust the saw blade after every cut.”
“Right,” Gerry said. “Okay. Good idea.”
Pat pointed my way. He asked, “Who’s that guy?”
Gerry looked over and noticed me for the first time since I’d entered.
“That,” Gerry said, “is the man who murdered Spark.”
I suddenly realized that the bigger boy still held a glue gun. The second wielded a rat-tail file. “That,” Gerry continued, “is what happens when you horse around too much and don’t listen to directions. He’s what happens when you think you’re better than the other kids in school, when you hide in the restroom to gang up on them. This man is what you get when you won’t stop pestering people about your mom.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked Gerry.
Little Pat approached me, cautiously, with sidesteps. His lower lip was downturned in anger. When Pat was a couple paces from me, he threw a handful of sawdust in my face and ran.
My eyes, my nostrils!
Gerry turned to the boys. “See how he cowers? This is the kind of man who hurts animals. Go ahead, ask him how many push-ups he can do. Let’s see how tough the animal abuser is.”
The kids all took a step forward. I tried not to show any fear.
“Please,” I said, “I won’t even dignify that.”
Gerry looked at the boys, as if to say, What are you waiting for?
All four of them hit the deck and began banging out pushups at a feverish pace, their noses making greasy dabs on the dusty floor.
Watching them exercise, Gerry suddenly seemed overtaken with pride. He leaned toward me as though we were confidants, as though he hadn’t just insulted me seven different ways. “You know, they’ve never had any discipline,” he said. “Last week, when I picked them up — Jesus, it was like that movie Lord of the Flies. I opened the trailer door, and it was like Indians had attacked. The furniture was stacked up in fortresses, and the twins had raided all the food. Nobody was getting past Kelly to the bathroom. Little Pat was sleeping with a sharp stick at night. Now look at them.”
The boys pumped in unison. They all had that same rail-thin body, the same wiry biceps and pointy elbows. They all sported identical mullet haircuts, dustbin-blond, and they even wore matching silver studs in their right ears. Later, I was to learn that these kids could run for days on end through unpacked snow. And eventually I would discover they weren’t even all boys.