said.
Chick grandly gestured for me to sit at the small wicker table. He poured two goblets of white wine and then trotted off to the kitchen. He returned with a huge bowl of tossed salad, heavy on the croutons, black olives and feta cheese. A second trip produced a pair of chilled plates, fancy silverware wrapped in cloth napkins, and four bottles of Kraft dressing to choose from. A third trip produced a pair of huge sourdough rolls stuffed with tuna salad. “Oh my,” I said. Maybe Chick wasn’t much of a housekeeper, but he’d certainly acquired some skills in the kitchen.
At first we talked about my life: How long I’d been at the paper and exactly what I did there; just where in Hannawa I lived and how I’d managed to stay unmarried after giving Lawrence the heave ho. Then we talked about his life: How he’d survived his two marriages and two divorces; what his three kids were doing; why he was still teaching at the rickety age of sixty-eight. To that last subject he said this: “A lot of that had to do with Gordon. If he wasn’t taking the last train to Retirementville, why should I?”
“I’m not the retiring type either,” I said. I told him about Editor Bob Averill’s many failed attempts to show me the door.
“Anyway,” he said, suddenly morose, “what would I do if I wasn’t teaching?”
It was the opening I was hoping for. “What about your poetry? I simply loved that poem you read at Gordon’s service.”
“Really?” His mood brightened as suddenly as it had dimmed. “Did I give you a copy?”
“Yes you did,” I said, cracking a crouton between my molars like one of those chipmunks that have turned my backyard into Swiss cheese. “I’ve read it a dozen times. Not that I understand it any better.”
Chick fell into that trap just as easily as the first. “What didn’t you understand?”
I squashed the sourdough roll down with the palm of my hand, so I could get the end of it in my mouth. I paraphrased his poem: “That weighty question that split you and Gordon asunder like Ti-Jean and the Howler- whoever or whatever they are.”
My ignorance simply thrilled him. “Don’t you remember? Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.”
“We called them that?”
“Everybody called them that, Maddy. Allen was the Howler, because of that famous book of his, Howl. And Jack, of course, was Ti-Jean.”
“Of course.”
“It’s the nickname his mother gave him when he was a kid. It’s French for Little John.”
“Of course.”
Chick pranced from the solarium like a barefoot boy running across a gravel driveway. I could hear his feet thumping up the stairs. Squeak across the ceiling. He returned out of breath with a photograph in a cheap wooden frame. “I keep it in my upstairs office,” he said.
I licked the tuna salad off my fingers and took the photograph. It was a black and white glossy, an 8? by 11, the kind someone who’d had a photography class or two would take. It showed a much younger Chick and Gordon sitting back-to-back behind a granite gravestone laid flush to the ground. They were both sporting grim, artistic faces. The inscription on the stone was large enough to read:
“Ti-Jean”
John L. Kerouac
March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969
He Honored Life
Chick took the photograph back and cradled it in his lap. He smiled at it like it was a newborn baby. “Gordon and I visited his grave in the summer of 1970. The Edson Catholic Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts. We always talked about going back sometime.”
Maybe I hadn’t remembered their nicknames-assuming I’d ever known them-but I did remember a thing or two about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. They’d started the beat movement in the late 1940s, when they were students at Columbia University in New York, along with William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and a troupe of other tortured souls. They bummed around the world together. They became living legends together. “So Kerouac and Ginsberg had some kind of falling out?” I asked Chick.
“Oh yes, a very famous falling out. Allen always thought Jack turned his back on the beat movement. And of course he did.”
I got to the nub of my visit. “And apparently there was also some kind of weighty question between you and Gordon?”
Chick’s face went pink with embarrassment. “Not all that weighty. We stayed friends right to-”
“The bitter end?”
Chick was suddenly interested in his sandwich and his salad, taking big mouthfuls of both. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.
He softened the food in his mouth with a long drink of wine and swallowed. “Like I said in the poem, it really didn’t amount to anything.”
“Enough for you to write a poem about it,” I said, trying not to sound as interested as I was. “And then recite it at his memorial service-wearing that ridiculous beret.”
Chick rubbed the bump on his cockatoo nose. “I’d forgotten what a pit bull you are.”
“Too many people do,” I said.
He leaned forward on his elbows, dug his fingers into the thick white hair hanging over his ears. An explanation was coming. “I guess you remember when Jack came to the college-”
“You and Gordon met him that summer in San Francisco at some poetry festival, and invited him.”
“That’s right. He stayed in Gordon’s apartment. The one he had above the dry cleaning shop on Light Street.”
“The one with the refrigerator in the living room?”
“That’s the one. The night Jack left for New York, Gordon and I got carryout from Mopey’s. You remember Mopey’s-”
“It’s a parking lot now, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “And all three of us ordered cheeseburgers. Except that Gordon insists-insisted-that Jack had a plain burger. But it was a cheeseburger. He wanted it smothered with mustard and piled high with pickle chips.”
I waited for the rest of the story. But no more was coming. “That’s it? That’s the weighty question that split you asunder so un-copectically?”
“For forty-five years.”
“But you remained friends.”
“The best of friends. But it was always there. A tiny sore that wouldn’t heal. Me insisting it was a cheeseburger, Gordon insisting it was a plain burger.” He shook his head. “Sometimes we really got into it. It was all so damn silly.”
“What do you mean by into it?”
His face turned even pinker than before. “The usual stuff grown men do. Yelling. Swearing. Making fun of the courses the other one taught.”
“Like Garbology?”
He laughed. “Like the Forgotten Novelists of Western Indiana.”
I laughed even harder. “You used to teach a course on the forgotten novelists of Indiana?”
“Western Indiana. I still do.”
We concentrated on our salads and our sandwiches and the rain that was now rattling his rose of Sharon bushes. Then I brought up Gordon’s murder. “Did you have any sense of his being worried about something? Or afraid?”
Chick refilled his wine goblet and tried to refill mine. I waved him off. “He was happy as a clam. Spring was coming. He had big plans for his summer dig.”
“At the Wooster Pike landfill?”
I thought he was going to take a bite out of his goblet. Instead he took a long, noisy sip. “That God-damned worthless dump.”
“Worthless?”
