Straight Man

workshop?”
    “What sort of food do they serve at a sexual harassment lunch?” it occurs to me to ask.
    “Nouvelle cuisine?” she suggests. Near as I can remember, this is the first joke Rachel’s ever made around me.
    “It’s come to this,” I tell her. “Now I’m playing straight man to my own secretary.”
    “You’re really going to write another book?”
    The idea seems to have completely dissipated. “Probably not,” I admit, adding, before she can object, “Is that thunder we’re hearing?”
    “Asbestos removal.”
    Relieved to discover that my external reality matches Rachel’s, at least in this one respect, I study the ceiling tiles, which
are
vibrating, damn them.
    “It’s our turn? They’re detoxing the whole building?”
    “God,” I say. “Animal rights thugs guarding the pond, sexual harassment lunches, the detoxing of Modern Languages. Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”
    Ambient crackling from the intercom. Indicating what? Puzzlement at my Buffalo Springfield allusion? It’s true what they say. Ours is a fragmented culture. If I wrote another book, who would read it?
    In the outer office, I hear the phone ring, hear Rachel answer. Then she returns to the intercom. “Professor Schonberg’s on his way up?” she says. “I’d hurry? I’d take the south stairs?”
    I do as I’m instructed, but only after I’ve made a place for young Hal on my crowded bookcase. There isn’t much room, even for such a slender fellow, so I have to wedge him in pretty tight. Speaking of tight, I just make it through the double doors at the south end of the corridor when I hear the doors at the north end clang open. I don’t hear my name. I don’t look back.

CHAPTER
17
    The Railton Campus has a rear entrance that’s seldom used because the road is treacherous in winter, winding and full of potholes in all seasons, and because it doesn’t go much of anywhere but Allegheny Wells, the hard way, over the mountain. The only other reason to head out that direction is to go to the county’s one notorious bar, a roadhouse called The Circle, which sits just outside the city limits and the short arm of Railton law. The Circle offers free pool on Tuesdays, free darts on Wednesdays, wet T-shirt contests on Thursdays, and dances with live country-western bands on Friday and Saturday nights, during which half a dozen fights usually break out in its huge dirt parking lot. If
The Rear View
is to be believed, the occasional knife is pulled out there in the dark, but weapons more lethal than the pointed toe of a cowboy boot are frowned upon. Lose a fight outside The Circle on a weekend night and chances are you’ve been stomped, not knifed or shot. Saturday morning finds you in the hospital with cracked ribs and mashed cheekbones. You’re probably coughing up blood, but youaren’t dead. The Circle is one of the Railton area bars that Billy Quigley wishes his daughter Meg would spend less time in, the one I fetched her from earlier in the year.
    I’m nearing The Circle when I become aware that I’m being tailgated by a big, shiny, red pickup truck whose driver is honking his horn and making a gesture which, seen in my rearview mirror, may or may not be obscene. My first thought is that the driver of this vehicle is Rachel’s husband, Cal, who’s found a way to eavesdrop on our intercom conversations and become confused by our conversational intimacy, her sexual harassment lunch. But this is a far better-looking truck than I suspect Cal drives. And besides, it can’t very well be Rachel’s husband if it’s Mr. Purty, and that’s who it is, now that I have a chance to look twice. I’m only mildly disappointed. Had I been pulled out of my car and beaten up by a jealous husband who has nothing to be jealous about, I’d be pretty much in the right. Even Bodie Pie’s Bitch Gulch crew would be on my side. Maybe even the majority of my own department would sympathize.
    I pull into The Circle’s lot and park beneath the big sign that announces Friday night’s dance, music to be provided by Waylon’s Country Cousins. Mr. Purty, a small man, gives an agile hop down from the cab of the truck, adjusts his hearing aid, and flashes me a grin. “What do you think?” he wants to know.
    I whistle. “New?”
    “Practically. Fifteen thousand miles, is all. Cherry. The dee-lux model. Three-fifty engine. Tow a U-Haul easy. Room for three in the front seat,” Mr. Purty