I look up. Henry S is asking me a question, repeating a question, I think.“Reunion?” he says. “You had an argument at a family reunion? A class reunion?”
“No, not a reunion. I was thinking of something else. What argument are you talking about? What reunion?”
Henry S huffs a little to show his exasperation. He repeats his question to me in a clear, careful voice that I imagine he usually reserves for speaking to the mentally retarded. “Did you and the subject ever argue or have an altercation you would characterize as a ‘fight?’”
“No.” I paused. “No. We liked to discuss things, and Rose was pretty determined about her opinions--so am I, for that matter--but nothing I’d call a fight, really.” My answer doesn’t satisfy Henry S this time. This time, he doesn’t hurry to make his notes and get on to the next question. He looks at me directly, bobbing his head only a little, sensing something.
“Well,” I say finally, “we did argue some over graduate school. Rose was supposed to go to graduate school, but instead she took a job at the railroad.” Henry S is writing now, satisfied. I feel relieved, off the hook. “I always thought she wasted herself, wasted her talent,” I add. “She would have been a great teacher.”
I had a beer while I waited for Rose. She’d said she might be late getting off work. She was new on the job and had to finish up some of the scut work after everyone else left for the day. That’s partly what I wanted to talk to her about: her job. Her last year in the Art Department, her teachers had talked her into applying to graduate school to get her MFA, maybe even teach. Rose submitted several applications and art portfolios, and she got accepted at Kent State and a couple of other big schools back east. Tony and I got all excited, and the three of us would talk about which school was the best. I noticed that Rose seemed less enthusiastic than either of us, but I didn’t really think anything about it until May came, and Rose graduated, and she still didn’t say where she was going to go.
Then she got that job with the railroad, and every time I called her she was just getting home from work or just getting ready to go back or too tired to talk right then, and I saw that her job was starting to swallow her up. And it was just a job in the railroad yard! They moved her around, like they did all the new people, training her in all aspects of the yard--some security patrolling, some maintenance, all kinds of work. Whenever I asked her why she wanted to work there, she’d say something about the good money, but I couldn’t believe that was all there was to it.
In the year and a half since I’d met Rose, I’d really gotten my act together. I finished my GED and started talking college courses, including a couple of art classes. Joe and I still lived in the house on Fifth, and we got along pretty well together, although he refused to do much of what I was interested in, saying that he needed time by himself and besides practice and class and games during the season took all his energy. In many ways, that was okay with me, because I could spend as much time with Rose as I wanted. At least I could until she got the railroad job.
That day in Buddy’s, I was going to pin her down, make her explain to me what was going on with her, why she wasn’t making plans for graduate school or at least to do something more with her art.
The bartender cleared his throat to get my attention. “D’you wanna order something to eat?”
“Naw. I’ll wait ‘til my friend gets here.” I slid off my barstool and tugged a couple of quarters out of my pocket. I plugged them into the juke box in the corner and punched up some ELO and Ozark Mountain Daredevils, then climbed back on my stool and idly twisted back and forth with the music. Buddy’s was fairly crowded for a weeknight, but not with anyone I knew. When both songs ended, I got a fresh beer and wandered into the dining room, thinking I’d grab a table and, if Rose didn’t show up soon, go ahead and eat without her.
The dining room was crowded, too, so I leaned in the doorway, watching a waitress clear a table that three guys--jocks, they looked like--were leaving. The waitress was laughing, and I heard her say what sounded to me like “Fussarelli,” so I listened more closely to the end scraps of the conversation. I caught the words, “kicked them outta here,” and then, from one of the jocks, “nigger.” I was startled to hear this word, and I must have stopped listening for a few seconds, because the next thing I heard came from one of the guys as they passed me on their way toward the door. “Did her in the back room of the art gallery,” he said, and the others snickered lewdly.
They went on by, and I sort of stumbled over to their recently-vacated table. The waitress was wiping up the last of the crumbs and replacing them with fresh placemats and sets of silverware. She smiled at me and indicated that I should go ahead and sit down.
“Excuse me, but were you”--I waved toward the door and the jocks’ retreating backs--“were you talking about Joe Fussarelli? The ISU football player?”
The waitress, whose nametag read “Susie,” nodded in a friendly manner.
“And a woman named Rose?”
Her smile faded a bit, and she shrugged. “I don’t know what his girlfriend’s name was.”
I persisted. “But she was a black woman? Tall?” I held my hand an inch or so above my head.
Susie considered. “Yeah, pretty tall. Little bun on top of her head. D’you want to order now?”
“In a minute.” I pulled out the chair and sat down heavily. “When was this?”
She had started away from the table. “Beg pardon?”
“When were Joe Fussarelli and this woman in here?”
“How come? What were they doing?”
Susie slowly shook her head and laughed that “boys will be boys” way dads and businessmen do with their sons and young male customers. “They were sooo drunk. And making a lot of noise. And then, well, he got a little crude, and some of the other customers were getting annoyed, so Jeremy told them they’d have to leave if they couldn’t quiet down. And I know Jeremy was nervous, because Fussarelli is so much bigger than he is. But it was all right. They left okay. No problem.”
She looked at me as if to say Isn’t your curiosity satisfied yet? and I gestured at the menu. “Could I get a salad, please?”
“Sure,” said Susie. “And garlic bread?”
I nodded, and she moved away toward the kitchen. I sat there staring at my beer glass and thinking What the hell?
