Straight Man

laughing at this, though apparently I’m the only one who sees the humor. Herbert is wearing an injured expression. “Just tell me one thing, and then I’ll go away,” he says, struggling to his feet. “What have we done that’s so wrong? Could you explain that to me, because I’d like to understand it. What’s wrong with decent pay raises every year? What’s wrong with demanding a decent standard of living? What’s wrong with good faith negotiation? What’s wrong with a little security in life? Do you really want those heartless bastards to run roughshod?”
    “That’s not one thing, Herbert,” I remind him. “That’s a lot of things.”
    “I agree,” he says, like he’s made his point. And maybe he has. “Could I ask you to think about all those things?”
    “Sure, Herbert,” I tell him, also getting to my feet.
    “And could I ask you not to think too long?”
    “You could ask.”
    And that’s where we leave it. When we quit the study, there’s nobody in the living room. Rourke and the second Mrs. R. are back out on the deck. Occam, the traitor, is lounging happily between them, allowing himself to be scratched by the second Mrs. R. We go out through the sliding glass door and join them. The sun has come out again, and it’s a warm spring afternoon.
    “The trees have leaves over here,” the second Mrs. R. observes, and she’s right, there’s more green today than yesterday. In another three or four days, the foliage will be full blown.
    “Not over on your side?” I ask in mock surprise.
    “Lucky Hank,” her husband says.
    Herbert says he’ll be along presently, so Rourke and the second Mrs. R. plod down the steps and get into Rourke’s Camaro. When both car doors close, Herbert says, “I’m hopeful, Hank. I mean it. I just don’t see you playing ball with the likes of Dickie Pope. I don’t think you see it either.”
    I don’t know what makes me concede even this much to Herbert, but I do. “It’s true I’m not fond of Dickie.”
    Herbert offers to shake hands on that note, and while there may be reasons not to, they don’t seem sufficient at this moment in time.
    “Me?” Herbert says. “I got a year and a half till retirement. The worst they can do to me isn’t all that bad.”
    He sounds oddly sincere in this, sincere perhaps for the first time today.
    “This hasn’t been such a bad place for me,” he admits. “I’ve been decently paid. I’ve been treated well, all things considered. I wouldn’t mind giving something back to the institution. If I could piss on that little prick’s grave, I’d consider it my gift to higher education.”
    I can sympathize with this sentiment too, on several levels. I’d dearly love to take a good piss on someone’s grave, and I don’t really care whose. My groin is throbbing with pent-up desire.
    “You realize, don’t you, that all these grievances against you could just disappear?” Herbert says. Like his cynical blood brother, Dickie Pope, he has to offer an incentive. He knows better, but he can’t help himself.
    I can’t help myself either. I look him right in the eye. “What grievances?” I say.
    Herbert, who does not have a great sense of humor, laughs all the way down the steps. His car door closes on the sound, but I can see he’s still chuckling as he turns the key in the ignition and backs out around my car. He’s wedged in pretty good, so it takes him half a dozen tries before he’s able to extract himself. I offer to move the Lincoln, but Herbert declines. He wants to show me he can do this without my help. The symbolism is not lost on me. Even Occam, who watches nervously from the deck, where I’ve got him by the collar, seems to understand it.
    When Herbert and Paul Rourke and the second Mrs. R. have all disappeared among the trees, I feel pretty good. I know what they came for, and I know they left without it. Which means I’m still at large, still slippery.
    But for pure joy I can’t hold a candle to my dog, and when I let him go he does a dozen victory laps around the perimeter of the deck, the world’s smallest dog track, his nails clicking on the wood. It’s imagination, I know, that propels him. In Occam’s imagination he’s not the only dog doing laps on our deck. He’s just the fastest dog, the smartest dog, the bravest dog.
    “I know you are,” I assure him when his race is run and he sits panting before me, exhausted, pleased, optimistic about the future, about other races he