Straight Man

from the one we know is thoroughly dispelled, though it is this
other
world we yearn for.
    I lie down on a cot across the cell from Tony’s and consider the future. By the time William of Occam was my age, he’d been excommunicated and was on the run, ecclesiastically speaking, from a vengeful pope, whose authority he continued to question in a series of inflammatory pamphlets, sort of op-ed pieces, with a distribution smaller than that of the Railton
Rear View
. There was, of course, no middle class to write for, and William, long banished from the university, would in any case have perceived a different academic mission from mine at West Central Pennsylvania University. He’d probably have felt a greater kinship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who always imagined himself speaking to an elite few colleagues and graduate students, the modern-day equivalent of the medieval scholastics, bearers of learning and arbiters of secular taste. At my age, fifty, William of Occam still had fourteen more years to live, and sixty-four was a ripe old age in the fourteenth century. Best of all, his life didn’t leak out of him gradually, like a tire with a tiny puncture. He died of the Black Death, and he never saw it coming until it was upon him, a dirty, brutish, democratic foe who argued with William in precise, elegant syllogisms, defeating all the philosopher’s logic and unifying in swift death, as life never could, the conflicting impulses of reason and faith that had shaped his life.
    These are strange thoughts for a man to have in a Railton, Pennsylvania, jail cell at two in the morning, and if what’s written on the ceiling above me is any indication of the intellectual tenor of my cell’s former inhabitants, I’m the only one to concern myself with such issues. As I stare at the ceiling it occurs to me that this is the second time today I’ve been advised to eat shit. I close my eyes and fall asleep counting boxcars.
    When I awake Tony Coniglia is standing over me. He looks like he might be having the kind of transcendent moment I foresaw last night.
    “What I asked you to do was come and get me, not come and join me,” he gives me to understand.
    “What are you talking about?” I say, propping myself up on one elbow.
    “I used my one phone call last night to leave a message on your machine,” he explains.
    I can’t help grinning at this. “I called you too,” I admit. “You weren’t in either.” I hand him the bottle of aspirin I always keep in the glove compartment of the Lincoln and was wise enough to bring in with me last night. He chews several tablets thoughtfully. When we compare notes, it turns out that we’ve been run in by the same young cop, that neither of us has been charged.
    “He wanted to book me until I told him I was a professor,” Tony says. “Until I told him my name was Hank Devereaux.”
    “He must have been pretty surprised to run into another one half an hour later.”
    “Did you tell him your father was back in town?” Tony says. “Because that would explain it.”
    I can’t remember mentioning my father’s return to Tony, but I must have, because he knows. I’m going to have to go see W.H.D., Sr., today, a duty I’ve been putting off. “When do you suppose they’ll let us out?” I wonder, swinging my feet onto the floor. Though today promises to be no more fun than yesterday, I would like, for some reason, to get on with it.
    “When do you suppose they’ll serve breakfast?” is what the other Hank Devereaux in the cell would like to know.

CHAPTER
32
    After I retrieve my car from the railyard, I drive out to Allegheny Wells behind a news van that sports the logo of a Pittsburgh television station. When I ask myself what sort of story can have attracted a news team from so far away to this two-lane macadam blacktop that leads from Railton to Allegheny Wells, I don’t like the conclusion I come to. I like it even less when I get to Allegheny Estates, where there’s a cop directing traffic at the turnoff. Instead of turning left into Estates I, I turn right between the tilting stone pillars of Estates II and follow the road that leads up through the trees to Paul Rourke’s house, where I pull in and turn off the ignition. The second Mrs. R., in furry slippers, a flannel nightgown, and a winter coat, is seated in a deck chair eating Sugar Pops from a tall box. It’s still early. Twenty minutes to eight. Sunny and warming but still cold.
    “Permission to