Chapter Three
Nick and Earl walked down the corridor toward the parking lot where they had parked Nick’s car. “I can’t believe,” he said, “that you brought up the Tokyo trains where women are fondled.”
Earl looked taken aback. “Why? Shouldn’t I? Is it a big secret since they’ve even made movies about it?”
“Not a . . . secret, exactly.”
“She didn’t seem upset about it. And you brought up the part about a girl in the Philippines maybe getting turned on rubbing her pussy against your knee.”
Nick pushed open the doors to take them out into the sunlight. “Only after you brought up the train bit.”
“Well . . . I don’t think she only wants to do the Freudian stuff. . . not just about our mother.”
Nick removed his wrap-around dark glasses from his right pants pocket of his denim shorts and slipped the thick stems over his ear. He suddenly thought of how many dreams he had experienced when he had been searching everywhere for where he had parked his car. He had many dreams like that. Searching for something – his parked car, the building where he had an office as a teacher, even the classroom where he was supposed to teach. In one dream, he had even been unable to find an assignment for the students while they waited for him in the class. Why always searching for something? he wondered. “I’ve had dreams about her?”
“Who? Mother?”
“Well. Her too, sometimes, but I was speaking of Misato.”
Suddenly, Earl’s facial expression suggested that a light had switched on in his brain. “Oh. So, you… oh, no. Not her too. Don’t tell me. Her too?”
Nick swept across the gravel-covered parking lot until he, unlike in his dreams, spotted his car. “What about her?”
“Misato is a sweet lady. But she’s married.”
“I know that. I just get the feeling that she’s not happy with her husband.”
“What are you, some fuck-minded teenager? You’re lucky if your dick doesn’t fall off.”
Nick fished out his car keys. “Why? Do you think I have that many lady friends?”
“You carry around a mental grocery list. A lady says one wrong thing, and wham! You two are off to the races.”
Nick unlocked the door on the passenger side before walking around the front to the driver’s side. “And you. You never think of sex. You’re mama’s innocent boy.”
Earl slid into the passenger seat, the shotgun seat as some people still called it. “Heck yeah, Bro.” He then laughed.
“Mom,” Nick said as he positioned himself under the steering wheel, “made Dad into a wuss. But you were her golden child. You inherited a lot from her, including her temper.”
“Woooo, Bro.”
Nick laughed. “Nice rhyme.”
“One time though, our sister Marilyn said something that made fun of you, and Mother jumped all over her case. The rest of us just looked at each other, shocked shitless.”
“Shitless?” Nick inserted the key into the ignition. “For all of you, that must have been one hell of a shock.”
***
Douglas Barnes stood in the center of the art room in the basement of Marvin Green College, rubbing his protruding belly.
“On an all-night radio program,” Nick said, “I heard about shadow people being seen. Even shadow animals.”
“I remember that. But I’m not talking just about shadows. Once when I was driving through West Virginia, I saw this huge human-like bird stare at me before flying across the road in front of me.”
Nick nodded.
Doug, after all, had been the first person to mention suspicions about the chem trails in the sky. Nick did not argue because he had never seen such phenomena when teaching overseas.
I believe you, Nick thought. Even though few other people would.
Doug spoke another two sentences about the bird man and then switched the topic to his architectural works.
It was a shame that Doug and the art professor were given such a small and gloomy space on campus, a shame but not surprising. The college had a bad reputation, at least among faculty members, for mismanaging finances and had, recently, asked that they be forgiven their massive debt. A well-known auditing company had sent a team of experts to the campus, but even they had been unable to follow the paper trail.
The former president had even received tuition grants for students who ended up not coming to the college. It was not surprising that Marvin Green’s accreditation was threatened because of this as well as academic problems. Classrooms had an insufficient number of student desks and were usually lacking air conditioning while administration offices were completely cooled. Some faculty members had to bring their own toilet paper, chalk, copy paper for student handouts, and even light bulbs for the restrooms.
Nick has once given Doug a list that he and his own students of classroom problems, a list which he had to keep giving copies to Doug several times because he misplaced them in his cluttered room. He didn’t know, even to this day, what changes had been made as a result of the list.
“This is like how a dysfunctional family holds together,” Doug had once told him. He knew this directly because of the times that he had written grants for Title III funds to have their computers repaired. “I met with the Title III Coordinator, Jane Tipple, a couple of days ago, and she wasn’t going to allow any of my requisitions to go through.”
“It’s not their money,” Nick had responded.
“No. It’s not their money.”
“So, what can you do?”
“Well,” Doug had blinked. “It’s federal money. It’s money from taxpayers. And this is something that has been approved. I mean, I wrote the grant. You must write a year in advance on how you’re going to spend it. Basically, I have accomplished everything I said I was going to do. But Jane told me that I could not accomplish everything I said I was going to do.”
“And what’s her opinion based on?” Nick had asked.
“Well, uh, the fact that I haven’t had a chance to get those computers working. The school screwed around with my money and kept me from getting them serviced and repaired. So, I put in $900 to get them going. But she still told me: ‘No. I’m not going to do it.’
“When I asked her how I am going to get those computers working, she said: ‘Well. You haven’t demonstrated to me that you know what you’re doing. So, if I gave you this money, we’d be having this conversation again in the fall. There ‘d be something else that went wrong.’”
“Good God, man.”
“I was up till 3:00 that next morning, steamed, y’ know. And I asked her, ‘What’re you going to do with my money?’ And she said: ‘Give it to the president. I’m taking it from you and giving it to the president.’”
“So,” Nick had said. “The president is under the belief that any money that they don’t spend is his to do with as he chooses.”
“Yes. His inaugural was put on with Title III money.”
“Really? They didn’t say that.”
“He said it was from an outside source. He made it sound like it was wonderful alumni contributions, but it was $30,000 of Title III used to put on that inaugural. So, I was supposed to get $50,000 of that Title III money, and they took thirty of that exactly right off the top?”
“Is that legal?” Nick had inquired.
“No, it’s not legal?”
“What c’n you do?”
“Well, I’m going to go to the Dean first because this is an academic program that is being impacted by this kind of behavior. I was pretty upset about it.”
“As well you might be. Who else can you go to, anyone in the government?”
“Right,” Doug had said. “That’s pretty . . .umm . . .I’d really have to have my . . . uhm . . . I’d have to be ready for the worst then. But, yeah, this is the stunt they have been pulling on me. I’ve talked to some people, and they told me that I should watch out for this stuff because I’ve written these requisitions, so my name is on them. So, they appear to take that money out of my account. The printouts will say – for example, I want a photocopier for $4000 – I put in a requisition for that. $4000 is taken out of my account, but I don’t get it.”
“So, what can you do besides talk about it?”
“Well, I, uh, you know . . ..”
“I was on the committee for Financial Accountability,” Nick had told him. “And we discovered that premiums had not been paid to the insurance company, even though deductions had been made from our paychecks.”
“Your name was chosen by a committee to be the chair of your department, but the VP didn’t like that, so she disbanded the committee.”
“So, Doug. We now have a chairman who was not even a member of our department.”
“That’s how it works here. And we’re not supposed to complain about the students, even though some walked across the stage on Commencement Day who had failed one of our classes.”
“One student,” Nick huffed, “failed two of my classes, and she walked across the stage.” When Nick has said something about this to his colleague sitting next to him, a well-groomed, well-dressed African American man had turned in the seat in front of them and glared back at him. He was undoubtedly a member of the school board. He did not say a word, but his displeasure was apparent in his expression. That was why Nick considered the day that he had driven out of the campus parking lot for the last time one of the better days of his life.
***
Doug Barnes was humming along the highway at 55mph, thinking about his discussion with Nick Sterns about the flying creature.
Nick had not mentioned it, but Doug had read about some sort of birdman or moth-like creature in the Midwest. Many had been spotted in West Virginia back in the 1960’s and later in Chicago, Illinois.
Suddenly, the terrain ahead of Doug seemed to disappear. Headlights still came at him from the opposite direction but fewer of them than moments before. He kept the GPS turned on out of habit when he drove at night. but he hardly listened to the woman’s voice anymore. So, when she said, “Turn right approximately a half mile ahead,” he was jolted into a stiffer sitting position at the steering wheel. A half mile?
Why?
To go where?
Was he wrong about the highway that he was on, the route that he thought he knew so well here in Gwinnett County?
He lifted his foot from the accelerator and let the vehicle begin to decrease speed on its own. Right turn?
What the fuck!
An army of thoughts assaulted the citadel of his brain.
Short-cut? New route?
If so, why he not taken it before?
Why had the lady on the GPS system not let him in on her secret before?
When he reached the road and readied to turn, he searched for a road sign. Only one bent metal sign was posted on a slightly leaning pole, but the lettering was obscured by shadows.
Doug straightened out his car as he found his position on the right side of the road. Only two lanes. Not a four-lane highway. A short-cut?
Somebody has got to be kidding.
“What’s wrong with you, Sweetheart?” he said to the GPS monitor. Seeing that the road was straight and entirely visible in his headlights, he again picked up speed. Fifty-five mph. Straight on through to….
“To where, GPS Baby?”
She remained mute.
“Okay,” he said to her after another mile at this speed. “Leave me on my own then.”
Not another car came toward him from the opposite direction. Nor did any come up from behind him. He was alone here.
Need some music here.
Doug leaned slightly to the side and touched the knob to click on the radio. Scratchy sounds. He slowed the vehicle for a moment to adjust the stations knob. Nothing but interference. So much for AM. FM would be better. He flicked the selection knob.
But before he could tune in a station, he heard a knock on his car window.
What?
A knocking sound. But where?
He was going fifty-five. Rear window. Back seat window. Something striking under the vehicle.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
To his right. The passenger window. No one was riding with him, so who could be knocking on that window?
Again. Three loud knocks.
Look and see. Turn your head slightly to the right to see.
No. He could not.
He froze. Turn and look!
No. The chills erupted through his system like a flooding of ice water. Nerves electrified. It was as if he had just been struck by lightning from somewhere beyond his viewing range.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
From the edge of his vision, the corner of his right eye, he saw what looked like a shadow of a human being with glowing red eyes.
But at this speed?
He gripped the wheel tighter and searched with his foot to find the brake.
Ahead, through the windshield, he saw that he now traveled on a blacktop highway with only one lane, not two. He continued at about forty mph.
After about two miles – what felt like two miles – the road beneath him was suddenly a gravel road. Small gravel pieces connected with his underside, back near the rear wheels.
He slowed again but still was afraid to crawl. It was too bad that the GPS lady companion had abandoned him.
No more knocking on the window, but the road looked perilous. It was narrowing down to a path. Trees were closing in on each side; underbrush scratched the car doors on both sides. Limbs resembling skeletal hands began clawing at his windshield.
The path became unruly. No longer any kind of road, it was just a path that continued like a pale naked arm to carry him along into a wilderness. “What am I doing here?” he said aloud. “Just what am I doing or where am I going?”
The car slowed on its own. He dreaded to stop but knew not what else to do.
Finally, he saw ahead of him what he had not expected to find out here – a bluff that angled off into nowhere. Beyond his headlights was a valley or abyss, and, even at a slow speed, he sailed off into a black nothingness.
* * *
This has been Chapter Three. What has happened to our friend Doug?