“Where were you going?”
“Everywhere. Anywhere. Sometimes I was flying through a hole at the South Pole, going into the center of the earth where there was a world full of dinosaurs and cavemen and beautiful women who couldn’t live without my intense manly loving.”
“We read the same books.”
“And played the same games,” I said.
“You played Tarzan,” Jimmy said. “Remember that? I had to be the monkey, and you were Tarzan. I don’t know how you worked that out, but that was the way it was. You remember.”
“I do,” I said. “I climbed up in that elm where Jazzy stays, in my underwear, and got the sunburn from hell.”
“You kept giving the cry of the bull ape, demanding all apes come to your aid. But none of them would.”
“The bastards.”
“But that didn’t stop you from calling. You called all day long, and Mom couldn’t get you to come down, and she called Daddy at work, and he said, he gets ready to come down he will, but it didn’t much look like you were gonna get ready. You called until your voice played out and you sounded less like a bull ape and more like a dying goose. And you had on those loose underwear and your balls hung out, and you got sunburned there. Remember?”
“How can I forget? I still have a scar from when the skin started peeling off. Wanna see?”
“No thanks. I’ll take your word for it.”
We moved around the room as we talked, kind of time traveling. Jimmy came to his frogs and rats, and a feeling of guilt ran through me. I had purposely pushed them over the other night, and I suppose if you were a Freudian, you could find some deeply disturbing reason for that.
“I ought to throw this crap away,” he said. “It really looks rough.”
He opened the drawers on his desk, looked at the contents. He shut the drawer, said, “It’s good to have you back in town, Cason.”
“Thanks.”
“The newspaper job is probably just the thing,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, my feelings are mixed about being back in town.”
“Gabby?”
“Part of it.”
“You know she called me about you. She said you keep sending her notes, calling. It upsets her.”
“It’s just that I find it hard to believe.”
Jimmy turned and looked at me as if he had just realized I had two heads. “Do you remember when we were kids, and you found out there was no Santa Claus?”
“Yeah.”
“Thing is, you wouldn’t accept it. You went for months believing it anyway. Persistent. You had fights with kids at school that told you there wasn’t any Santa Claus. Dad finally sat down and talked to you. So you know what you did?”
“I do, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“You thought you were being tested. That Dad had been told by Santa Claus to test your faith.”
“I remember quite clearly. And I hope this isn’t something you tell to the faculty at the university.”
“You believed this so much, you just wouldn’t accept there wasn’t a Santa Claus. You fixated on it. For you, January on until the next December, it was going to be all about Santa Claus and how you knew he existed and were going to prove it, and you could meet the challenge. No matter how many times you were told it wasn’t true, that there was no such thing, you would not fold. You hung in there, thinking, in the end, you would be especially rewarded for keeping the faith. And you know what? One day, about mid-June, you came in here, and you had all this stuff on Santa Claus, books, comics, I don’t remember. But all manner of stuff. And you put it all in a box and had Mom put it up in the attic for you. Remember?”
“I remember. I didn’t make it until December.”
“You were stubborn, you were obsessed with the idea that the truth was being thwarted, that Santa was testing you. You hung on to that past any time any reasonable person might. And then one day, you got it. You knew the truth. It wasn’t about hearing it. It wasn’t even about understanding it. It was about believing it.”
“I get the point.”
“Look at me, Cason. She doesn’t love you. I’m sorry. It’s sad. I like Gabby, and I love you, but she doesn’t. It’s time you took all the Gabby stuff, the memories, put it in a box and put it in the attic, so to speak. You have to put it out of your mind.”
“You make it sound easy.”
“I know it isn’t. The doctor, what did he say?”
“That I’m obsessed. That I have problems from the war. That and a buck fifty might get me a ride on the horsey out front of the Wal-Mart.”
“Knowing and believing is the way you solve it.”
“Sounds like a bumper sticker.”
“I suppose it does.”
Jimmy got up and went to the window and I sat down at my desk. We stayed like that for a long time. Finally, I said, “Thing I’m looking into at work, it sort of crosses with your life.”
He turned from the window, leaned against the wall. “How’s that?”
“A missing-person story. Probably a murder.”
“Oh.”
“Caroline Allison. She was a history major.”
Jimmy moved away from the wall and went to his old desk and sat down in his chair and picked up a pencil and used it to poke at his stuffed frogs and mice.
“What brought that up?” he said.
“The job,” I said. “Looking for a place to get started. Columns to write. The lady who was there before me picked it out. I looked it over, liked the idea of it. All she had were some notes. I’ve been looking up a few things. You must have known her, right?”
“Everyone in the department was very aware of her. She was quite beautiful.”
“I’ve seen her photographs. She was more than beautiful. She looks, or should I say looked, sort of otherworldly.”
“She did. Yes.” He pushed at the frog with the pencil until it fell over. I didn’t feel quite as bad for messing with his keepsakes.
“Maybe you know something I could put in the article. Something about her.”
“All I can tell you was she was gorgeous. Everyone in the department liked her. The guys anyway. I mean, you know how it is, good-looking girl and all. She was smart, and she was going to be a crack historian.”
“You said everyone in the department, the guys anyway, liked her. What about outside the department?”
“Her personal life?”
“What do you know of it?”
“Nothing really. She didn’t talk much about her life.”
“If the guys liked her, how did the women feel?”
“Jealous. They knew she was a force of nature though. If you’re getting at someone in the history department hating her enough to kidnap or kill her because she was a fox, I don’t think so.”
“A woman looked that way could drive someone crazy, even if she didn’t know them. Might make them do things they might not normally do.”
“So it’s her fault?” Jimmy said.
“I don’t mean it that way. Of course, whoever did what they did to her, they made the choice. Just saying, if there was someone out there two ounces short a pound, a woman like that, it could be the thing to set them off…Is this bothering you, Jimmy?”
He nodded. “She was a good kid. Just disappearing like that, it was painful. She’d been in a couple classes I
