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  They reach him, their fallen friend. Bud performs CPR, knowing that the mayor is gone, and yet still here, and so deserving of their best efforts. Llewellyn would have done the same for any of them. They could all tell a different story about a time they watched Dr. Jones labor over the body of some poor soul who had clearly passed on—and saw the look on his face when he couldn’t postpone that passage.

  Owen Lloyd has finished his phone call and hurries outside—as best he can, with one good leg and one prosthetic one. He has remembered to bring a blanket.

  These living men, fathers all, cover their friend, standing guard over him in the pelting hail, the pouring rain. They stand: waiting, witnessing. From town comes the sound of the firehouse siren. The volunteer firefighters, who they’ve known for years, known by their first and middle and last names, are on the way.

  The storm subsides, passes. The air is cooling. Bud stops giving CPR. They might as well carry Llewellyn inside.

  The babies fall into a tear-stained slumber, so exhausted that they may even bless their frazzled mothers by sleeping through the night. In the bodies of the teenage girls who are not yet mothers the blood arrives. One native son sneezes, another has an orgasm. A teenage boy pops a pimple. A toenail falls off. The carpenter slides the board into place. In Miss Hazel Williams’s parlor, the piano student strikes a B-natural. At St. David’s, Eustace Craven finally succeeds in moving his bowels.

  The dead sigh and look to the place where Llewellyn will be buried, right over there, next to the unoccupied bit of earth that has been reserved for his wife. Cenotaphs are such a waste of real estate.

  The rain comes and soaks the ground. Cool and clean, it is a great relief to all concerned. The dead get back to work. They barely registered Hope’s presence, so few of them notice that she has already, once again, gone missing.

  And above the field that has been in Llewellyn Dewey Jones’s family for over a century, three birds, all native to Nebraska but of disparate species, are traveling earthward on a cold downdraft. After uttering a few words to one another—too quickly for the dead ornithologist fathers to translate—they fly off in different directions.

  No one notices Llewellyn’s Titleist 100, bearing a crescent-shaped cut on one side, looking like a partially peeled exotic fruit. It continues to arc up into the sky until it disappears.

  It does not come down.

  Chapter 2

  The Professor and

  the Weatherman TGIF

  It is the last day of the summer term. Exams are done, papers are graded. All that stands between Larken Jones, BA, MA, PhD, and a two-week hiatus is a bit of paperwork and a conference with one of her grad students, Misty Ariel Kroeger. It has become university policy that academic failure not come as a rude surprise; the bad news must be delivered in person. Every effort must be made to coddle the slacker.

  “Hello, Misty. Come in.”

  Larken sits behind her desk in the basement of one of the oldest buildings on campus. Her office is not a reflective or spacious one. A euphonic description would include the words penumbral and cloistered, words she habitually uses when describing Joseph’s woodshop as depicted in the Mérode Altarpiece, ten-dollar words used with intent, to help her sort the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, among her Art History 101 undergrads. There is one north-facing-daylight basement-type window, the room is slightly bigger than a walk-in closet, but she shares it with no one. It is all hers.

  Larken doesn’t look up; ostensibly, she is scrutinizing the set of student papers and attendance records arrayed in front of her. She works her mouth in a way suggesting solemnity, a judicial concentration that is the preface to some wise, weighty, and well-articulated utterance. In fact, she is trying to dissolve the last remnants of two Reese’s peanut butter cups, one cadged expertly in each cheek.

  “Please sit down.” Larken has developed an ability to articulate clearly, like Diosthenes with his pebbles, while surreptitiously holding all manner of sustenance in her mouth. Her ability to maintain an unmoving jaw as she speaks only adds to the overall impression that she is indomitable. Larken has overheard students refer to her as General Jones—some with obvious fondness, some with trepidation, others with disdain. Aside from its asexuality and implied hawkishness, the moniker pleases her.

  The student facing her now is lithe and naturally beautiful, but has chosen to sully her looks with excessive eye makeup, filthy dyed dreadlocks, and numerous piercings. She is the sort of girl who invests in a radical outward appearance rather than develop her intellect, creative vision, or technique. Misty’s work as an artist, which Larken saw in the spring student show, bears the particular blend of personal polemics and bad technique that seems to be more and more common among the grad students these days: Frida Kahlo wannabes; collages of trite images, done-to-death symbols, and personal writings; studied attempts at a primitive style that is really only primitive. Larken hates this stuff, but many of her departmental colleagues seem to encourage it.

  “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” Larken asks, looking up from Misty’s essay exams, quizzes, and the record of her class (non)attendance.

  Misty shifts in her chair, causing it to creak daintily.

  “I suppose you’re gonna tell me that I didn’t do that well.”

  Larken works her tongue behind one of her wisdom teeth and dislodges a small fragment of chocolate. “You failed the course, Misty. You have to know that.”

  Misty’s eyes widen in a pathetic effort to indicate shock. “You’re kidding!”

  Larken adjusts her glasses and works up enough saliva to flood her mouth with a last dilute taste of the peanut butter cups. “You missed several classes. You got a D on the exam. And your essay …” Larken indicates Misty’s paper on the table in front of her. It’s fiercely handwritten, barely legible, full of spelling errors.

  “What about it?” Misty asks, defensively.

  Larken wonders if it would be possible to sneak the last pair of peanut butter cups into her mouth; they’re just down there, in the open desk drawer to the right, invitingly unwrapped, nestled in their tiny pleated papers. It would be easy. She slides the course requirement sheet across the desk, pointing with her pen as she enumerates Misty’s infractions.

  “You’ve had several unexcused absences, missed quizzes … You didn’t take advantage of the extra-credit opportunities, nor did you make up late or missed assignments even when I allowed you to do so … You basically violated every condition of the class contract. How can I possibly give you a passing grade?” Larken keeps her voice even. It’s important in cases like this to maintain one’s civility. “You’re a first-year graduate student, Misty. I wouldn’t even allow this kind of performance at the undergrad level.”

  “But I really need this credit!”

  But I really need this credit—uttered in the desperately plaintive way Misty has just demonstrated—is the statement Professor Jones hears almost as much as Do we have to know this for the test?

  “You should have thought of that before you missed seven classes and turned in unacceptable work.”

  Misty, predictably, starts chewing her pierced lip and working up a dewiness around her heavily made-up eyes. “I didn’t skip. I had a personal emergency.”

  I broke up with my boyfriend/girlfriend. I broke my wrist. My cat died. I couldn’t pay the rent. My parents disowned me. My computer crashed.

  Misty is looking skyward, as if seeking divine intervention. She launches into a well-embroidered fabrication involving distant family members and vague, life-threatening medical conditions. Larken steals looks at the clock above the door. It’s almost noon.

  “… so I had to get back to Ogallala to see my cousin every weekend all summer, and it’s like a two-hour drive each way.”

  Professor Jones, who does not travel by plane, has made several car trips across America over the years; she happens to know that getting to Ogallala from Lincoln—even on Interstate 80, even exceeding the speed limit—ta
kes at least four and a half hours. “If you had told me about it I would have been happy to make special allowances.”

  “But I turned in my paper!” Misty has now passed into the next phase of slacker student protestation. Like patients receiving a terminal diagnosis, students who have failed a class go through a predictable range of phases: rage, denial, bargaining, acceptance, etc. “I worked really hard on it!”

  “Misty, it’s not even typed.”

  “The library computers were all down and my roommate left already with her computer.”

  Larken reads from Misty’s paper, circling misspelled words as she goes. “‘The Mérode Alterpiece is a prime example of the historical artistic subjegation of women. It has no legitmate place in a post-femnist approach to art history.’ You can’t make an incendiary statement like that without offering proof, without providing more scholarly evidence to uphold that statement.”

  Misty is giving Larken a slack-jawed, baffled look. “Incendiary?”

  “Inflammatory. Fiery. Seditionist. Controversial.”

  “Well,” Misty counters meekly, “it’s true.”

  Larken sighs. The class Misty is about to fail—a special topics class, Feminist Perspectives on Pre-Renaissance Art—always attracts the immature, the strident. Young women who seem to feel that, by virtue of their in-your-face fashion and political attitudes, they’re guaranteed an instant rapport with Professor Jones and an unqualified A, when in fact Larken is hard-pressed not to apply an unfairly rigorous standard where they’re concerned. She compensates for this by swinging to the other extreme, giving them every opportunity to succeed, even when, as in this situation, it’s hopeless.

  “All right, Misty, why don’t you elaborate on your theory.”

  Larken makes a show of readjusting herself, rotating and leaning her body slightly so that she can dangle her arm into the bottom-right desk drawer, within range of the peanut butter cups; she brings her left hand to the front of her face, forming a kind of low-hanging awning over her mouth. While Misty regurgitates a predictable barrage of generalist postfeminist slop she’s undoubtedly plagiarized, Larken delicately fingers the peanut butter cups out of their wrappers.

  “… blatantly subservient position of the Virgin!” Misty is ranting, not even looking in Larken’s direction. “Predatory Peeping Tom presence of the male patron! …”

  Larken palms the first peanut butter cup and, with one flowing movement, brings it to her mouth. She leans on both her hands now and lets the candy warm and soften, enjoying the way the delicately corrugated ridges on the side of the peanut butter cup contrast with its smooth top and bottom.

  “… the murder of female sexuality!” Misty continues, fervently. “A forced union with a man old enough to be her grandfather!”

  It’s almost as though these young women have undergone some form of mind control, causing them to spew the same speech. Faking a sniffle, Larken plucks a tissue and swipes at her nose, then leans down to toss the tissue in the wastebasket. On the way up she grabs the second peanut butter cup and slides it into her mouth.

  Misty riffs on and on (all she needs is a bass player and bongo drums) about the absurdity of studying the religious painting of the pre-Renaissance Flemish masters—which happens to be Professor Jones’s area of expertise and the center of her life’s work. Postmodernism is all that matters, Misty insists, these are not the influences on her generation; being required to take this class is a waste of time and money. And after all, who’s paying for her education anyway?

  That’s what I’d like to know, Larken wonders. She’s sucked off all the chocolate and is savoring the slightly granular texture of the peanut butter heart.

  Misty winds down. “So,” she says, looking up at Larken with appealing coyness. Many of Professor Jones’s students believe she is gay. Misty herself might be gay. “Is there anything I can do to get a better grade?”

  Larken swallows the last of the candy and clears her throat. A positive by-product of chocolate consumption is the way it affects Larken’s already-distinctive voice: Something about the combination of emulsified and hydrogenated oils and cocoa lends it a sage, gravelly resonance that is very impressive.

  “Rewrite the paper. Type it. Elaborate in writing on the points you just presented, turn it in via an e-mail attachment by the end of the day—no later than four o’clock—and I’ll consider giving you a D.”

  “What?” Misty looks incensed.

  “That’s the best I can do.”

  “Fuckin’ bitch.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Misty stands up suddenly, dreadlocks flying, all pretense of weepiness cast off. Here comes the acceptance phase.

  “You’re a fuckin’ FAT DYKE BITCH and I hope you die!”

  Misty storms out, slamming the office door behind her, no doubt feeling that she’s left Professor Jones decimated in the wake of this dramatic exit line. The truth is it’s highly unoriginal, just like Misty’s ersatz Frida Kahlo art.

  Larken has an impulse to crumple Misty’s essay into a ball and eat it. Instead, she uses a red Sharpie to draw a thick line down the entire left margin of the page, another across the top, and a third halfway across the middle: a big, bleeding F.

  She then scoops up a handful of change from her middle desk drawer and pockets it. She pushes herself out of her chair and heads for the vending machines—conveniently located just around the corner.

  Larken has been in the basement for eighteen years, since she herself was a grad student and teaching assistant. She could move into a different office anytime she wants, a more spacious and well-lit one, an aboveground office befitting her rank as a tenured professor and doctor of letters. She’s been offered a change of venue often enough. But she prefers it here, in the basement. The proximity of the vending machines is only one reason; it’s always cool (woe to the Midwesterner without summer access to a poured concrete basement), usually quiet (hardly anyone comes down here except the photography students, and they are generally nocturnal), and if all that weren’t enough, there are the decades-old yellow-and-black signs guaranteeing shelter from atomic fallout in the event of nuclear war.

  When Larken assumes the mantle of department chairman—and it’s not unreasonable to imagine that she’ll be rewarded with that academic pinnacle soon—she’ll be delighted to relocate aboveground. Until then, she’s staying down here.

  Larken starts loading coins into the machine, pausing after each deposit of change to make sure no one is coming. Over the years, Larken has developed her own rulebook governing professorial conduct; one rule states: It is unseemly for a tenured professor to be caught in the act of buying food from a vending-machine.

  As she struggles to define what she’s craving, she hears someone approaching. Sidestepping smoothly to the beverage machine, she takes another handful of coins and deposits them, so that by the time the department’s star undergrad photography student rounds the corner (“Hi Professor,” he says amiably—Larken loves this about him, that he addresses her as professor), she is retrieving a bottle of spring water, innocent and noncaloric as a celery stick.

  “Hello, Mr. McNeely.” Drew McNeely is one of Larken’s rare A students. “Shouldn’t you be making your escape from this gulag?”

  He laughs. “Pretty soon, I hope. Just finishing up some prints.”

  “Will I be seeing you next term?”

  “I’ll be in your Northern Renaissance class.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “Take care, Professor.”

  After the last echoes of Drew’s footsteps have faded and the basement is silent, Larken makes her selection, returns to her office, closes the door, and locks it. She is expecting no more visitors, and if someone comes by she’ll pretend she isn’t here. There’s still work to do, and she wants to get out of here no later than 1:30.

  Larken lays a square of paper towel on her desk. She opens and shakes out two bags of Corn Nuts, being careful to contain everything in a loose pyramidal
construction within the paper towel’s perimeters.

  She then starts to reexamine the evidentiary record of Misty’s performance one last time. Flunking a student in these whiny, litigious times—even a nonscholarship student attending a state-funded university—is a bold step, and Professor Jones is one of the few faculty members who still invokes her right to do so. Since Misty is exactly the kind of student who’d be likely to lodge an official protest with admin, Larken has to make sure she’s scrupulous in her documentation.

  Yep, she concludes. The girl really went out of her way to fuck up.

  Pinching a handful of Corn Nuts out of the pile, Larken starts double-checking all her students’ final grades. It’s exacting, tiring work—Professor Jones’s combined teaching roster contains well over two hundred names—but the repetitive hand-to-mouth motion, oral exertions and percussive sound track keep her focused. Now and then she rests her eyes and replenishes her spirit by gazing at a framed full-sized reproduction of a Flemish triptych that hangs on the wall opposite her desk.

  It is a small work—surprisingly small given its significance. Taken as a whole, the three panels of the Mérode Altarpiece measure only about three feet by two feet. It is attributed to a man named Robert Campin, but most historians believe that one of his unnamed assistants did much of the work.

  Larken first saw the Mérode in the fall of her freshman year; it was projected in slide form on a screen at the front of a huge lecture hall, where—slouching in a chair in the back row, chewing her fingernails, watching the clock, and desperate for her next cigarette—she was one of a hundred students who’d randomly chosen Art History 101 as an elective.

  “And here we have The Annunciation Tryptych by Robert Campin,” Professor Arthur Collins intoned, “one of the most radical works of art ever produced.”