The Hanging Read online

  “You, uh, managing to get out some?”

  “Taking it slow,” I said. “I’ve been seeing someone recently. Nothing serious, but it is nice to be out there again.”

  He still had his hand looped in the crook of my elbow. “Good to hear that,” he said. “Good for you.”

  “Lew?” I put my free hand over his. “Why did you ask?”

  He laughed, a sudden nervous burst that scared a cat crossing the sidewalk in front of us.

  “I’m a normal guy, Maggie. Just a warm-blooded, normal guy. Can’t blame me for being interested.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Means a lot to me to hear that.”

  We walked the last block into the Village in a companionable silence.

  Funny, I thought, that Lew brought up Mike, my husband, because I had been thinking about him a lot lately, maybe because the anniversary of his death was approaching. Several people had told me that I shouldn’t make any major decisions until a full year had passed, one full cycle of holidays and seasons, birthdays and anniversaries without him. But life has a way of spinning along on its own course. My last year had been full of changes and challenges and decisions that had to be made, ready or not. Every time one arose, I wished for Mike’s counsel, but he simply was no longer there.

  I was grateful for Lew’s quiet company that morning.

  Rows of potted flowers in full bloom lined both sides of Main Street, bright color against the gray day. Anacapa Village, a two-block strip of restaurants and small stores, never looked prettier.

  The incorporated town of Anacapa sits on the far northwestern edge of Los Angeles County, the last stop before the Ventura County line. The site of old downtown had been, in succession, a Chumash Indian encampment, the center of a vast Spanish colonial rancho, then a Mexican farm. After the Yankees showed up halfway through the nineteenth century, a road was built through a pass in the Santa Monicas to connect inland farms with a seaport—which was never more than a boat landing—in what is now Malibu, and intensive commercial agriculture got under way. Anacapa, the town, grew up at the crossroads of the coast access road and El Camino Real, the original Spanish road that still runs, with interruptions, from Baja to San Francisco.

  I doubt that downtown Anacapa ever amounted to much more than a dry goods store, a feed mill, and a saloon or two until the suburban population boom hit the area after World War II. The route of El Camino Real became the 101 Freeway. As the freeway stretched north, like a flooding river pushing detritus downstream, layer after layer of new tract homes accompanied its flow. The new residents commuted to good jobs at the nearby Jet Propulsion Lab or the Howard Hughes Research Lab in Malibu Canyon, or into the entertainment production centers down the freeway in the San Fernando Valley.

  Old downtown died a natural death, largely out of lack of interest, as new malls opened. But recently, some enterprising souls had rechristened the retail strip along Main Street “The Village,” spruced up the sidewalks and façades, and attracted an interesting collection of pretty good restaurants and a couple of boutiques. For the college population, the restaurants along the quaint-ified two-block strip were a godsend, respite from grim cafeteria fare.

  As Lew and I walked past the family-run Italian trattoria that had been Mike’s favorite—they had catered Mike’s wake—I saw one of the owners, Roberta, setting up for the day. The restaurant wasn’t open yet, but when I rapped on the window and waved, Roberta came to the door.

  “Ciao, bella,” she greeted me, kissing me on both cheeks. “We’re not open yet. Half hour.”

  After some negotiations and a consultation with her brother Carlo, who was the chef, I ordered three large “everything” pizzas for Sly’s crew. Lew and I would pick them up after we had eaten our soup at the Vietnamese place next door. By the time we headed back to campus with three large pizza boxes neatly tied together, it was drizzling again.

  The phone in my pocket buzzed. I took it out to see who was calling. With my aging mother recovering from a knee replacement and my daughter, Casey, away at college, I always looked.

  “It’s Kate,” I told Lew, and answered the call when he nodded.

  “Is Lew Kaufman with you?” she asked.

  “We’re out here getting wet,” I told her.

  “If I hear thunder, should I come looking for you?”

  “Please.” I told her the street we were on. Hers wasn’t an idle offer, nor was my acceptance; I am pathologically afraid of thunder and lightning.

  “Pass this to Lew,” she said. “We have a meeting scheduled with Holloway, his conference room, at one. You, Lew, me, and Joan Givens from Foundation.”

  “Fast work,” I said.

  “Holloway balked a bit at first. But when I dropped your Uncle Max’s name, mentioned something about the mother of all lawsuits, he suddenly saw the light.”

  “I wonder if simply dropping Max’s name qualifies as a billable hour.”

  “He’ll earn several today,” she said. “I was about to say, Max will be at the meeting, too.”

  “How did you manage that?” I asked her.

  “I promised him dinner at my house, tomorrow. My mother-in-law is taking the last of the Christmas tamales out of the freezer. Linda wants you to come, too. She said we had so much fun making the tamales together that you should be there to help finish them off. And please bring your mother.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said. “But Jean-Paul invited Mom and me to a reception tomorrow for a touring French pianist. One event a day is about all she’s up for.”

  “Uh-oh, the beau finally meets Mom,” she said, sounding like the teenage roommate she had once been. I know I blushed.

  “Too soon to call him that,” I said sternly.

  “Have fun.” And then, in parting, added, “Tell your mom I’ll call her first thing Sunday morning to get all the details.”

  I had no doubt she would.

  By the time we got the pizzas delivered to Sly’s work crew, they were cold. But no one seemed to care, the appetites of youth being boundless.

  Sly was quiet when we took him aside and told him that Holloway was meeting with us and that he shouldn’t worry about his sculpture being taken down in a year. Accustomed to disappointment, he never dared to hope for anything good.

  “Should I go talk to him?” he asked. “Just to make sure?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said. “But it isn’t necessary. What Holloway tried to do was personal to you, Sly, but the issues involved were larger than how long your piece hangs in the lobby. The college president tried to bypass the legal decision-making processes of the college, so the Academic Senate stepped in. I think that, after some chest-beating, Holloway will understand why he cannot do what he said he would.”

  Looking at the floor, he shrugged. “If you say so.”

  I punched his shoulder gently, and he looked up.

  “How was your pizza?”

  Finally, he smiled his crooked, wiseass smile. “Thanks for not ordering broccoli on it like you used to. Casey and I hated the broccoli. Even your mangy dog Bowser wouldn’t eat it.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  He nodded as he looked around, seeing his crew slowly going back to their work.

  “Lew will let you know what happens at the meeting,” I told him.

  As Sly walked across the gallery to resume whatever we had interrupted, Lew turned to me.

  “You’re welcome to hang around here until it’s time for the meeting,” he said. “There’s a rally scheduled on the quad for about twelve-thirty before folks head off to the big budget-cuts demonstration. It might be tough getting through them for our meeting.”

  “Thanks, but I have film projects to grade,” I said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  As I opened the door to leave, Sly called my name. I looked over at him.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if I just put a twelve-bore to Holloway’s head?”

  “Be careful what you s
ay,” I cautioned him. “Words like that could come back and haunt you.”

  Chapter 3

  “Grab a picket sign, ladies.”

  Before I could tell the woman holding the clipboard—I think her name was Sophia and I think she taught in the English Department—that we would not be joining the protestors, Kate nudged me to be quiet, picked up two signs from the pile and handed me one.

  “Tees are on a table in front of the bookstore,” the woman, maybe Sophia, continued. “Sorry, there are only extra-larges left, but hell, they’ll make good sleep shirts when this is over.”

  “Déjà vu,” I said to Kate as I looked at the sign in my hands: UNPAID FURLOUGHS = PAY CUTS!!! Kate’s said SAVE OUR CLASSES.

  “What déjà vu?” She surveyed the crowd with an expression of pure disdain. “What are you thinking, Sproul Plaza?”

  I nodded, remembering demonstrations at Cal, the University of California, Berkeley, when we were students there together.

  Several hundred souls milled about on the campus quad, faculty, support staff and students, all garbed in California-poppy-orange T-shirts, Anacapa College’s school color, waiting to board a trio of chartered buses for the forty-mile freeway trip to downtown Los Angeles. There was to be a region-wide demonstration that afternoon in front of the state building to protest funding cuts to education, and the crowd should have been full of eager energy, all prepped to get The Man. But they were very quiet.

  The sun was trying to come out; weathercasters promised the storm would blow over by evening. In the meantime, it was chilly, breezy. But few seemed to be aware of anything that was more than two feet beyond the ends of their noses. A few older folks, faculty probably, clustered in small groups and engaged in face-to-face conversations, while the youth tweeted, texted, chatted, listened to music and played games on electronic devices we used to call mobile telephones. But no one seemed to be fired up over the issues in which they were investing their time on this blustery day.

  “Looks more like kids going off to summer camp than warriors heading off to do battle for a cause,” Kate said, the deep crease between her brows an indication of the depths of her displeasure. “One thing we learned at Berkeley, Mags, was the art of righteous demonstration. The organizers have a bullhorn. Why aren’t they using it to exhort and rabble-rouse? Bunch of pussies.”

  “Maybe they need a tutorial,” I said, although knowing better than to encourage her.

  She grabbed my arm. “Come on roomie, let’s show them how it’s done.”

  Déjà vu indeed; she raised my sign-holding arm and waved it as she pushed through the crowd, dragging me along with her, headed for the man at the center of the quad who held a shiny yellow bullhorn cradled in his arms as if he were protecting it. He was a tall, bespectacled, rumpled, nearly bald guy, probably in his fifties, clearly faculty, and clearly at a loss about what he needed to be doing.

  A student looked up from his snazzy phone at Kate when she accidentally bumped his shoulder. “Hey, Professor, you coming with us?”

  “Some fun, huh?” she said in response. “Better than studying for mid-terms, Josh.”

  I laughed. I remembered Kate gearing up for plenty of demonstrations, though I had to think for a moment about what the causes were back then. But I remembered her more clearly with her dark head bent over piles of books and notes, cramming for exams, writing papers.

  Serious, pretty Kate, was one of my oldest and dearest friends. As I told Lew, she was first my roommate at the convent school on the San Francisco Peninsula where our parents parked us for high school, and again, later, at Cal.

  After college we went in very different directions, Kate to graduate school and then on to a career teaching history at the college level, and me into the inane world of television newscasting. But we stayed in touch, stayed close. When I lost my husband, Mike, almost a year ago, it was Kate I called first, after the police left.

  And it was Kate who talked me into accepting a one-semester teaching gig at Anacapa. Adjunct professor pay was pathetic, but teaching turned out to be a wonderful diversion. Harder work than I expected, certainly, and more rewarding.

  We reached the man cradling the bullhorn.

  “Damn thing’s warm enough, George,” she said, taking the horn out of his arms. “Time to put it to work.”

  “Uh.” His hands followed the horn and I wondered if he would grab it back. “Kate?”

  First thing she did to get the crowd’s attention was to turn up the volume all the way and then snap the On switch, sending out a squealing blast of static that sounded something like amplified fingernails scraping on a blackboard; some skills, once learned, we never lose.

  With the volume somewhat lower, she began to exhort and rabble-rouse.

  “Good morning, Anacapa.” Heads turned toward her. “I said, good morning.”

  There was a pallid refrain of Good-mornings in response.

  “I can’t hear you,” she shouted into the bullhorn. “And I’m standing right next to you. If I can’t hear you, then the governor can’t hear you and the legislature sure as hell can’t hear you. I said, Good morning.”

  “Good morning!” resounded across the quad.

  She dropped the horn to her side and asked George, “When do the buses leave?”

  He was grinning now. “Ten minutes. I was just going to announce that it’s time to board.”

  Bullhorn up again, Kate asked the crowd, “Hey, people of Anacapa College, are you fed up with fee increases?”

  When the chorus of “Yes” died down, she shouted, “Don’t tell me, tell the governor: What do you want?”

  “No more fees.”

  “Louder, let the legislature hear you, too. What do you want?”

  As I listened to the shouted refrain, I looked across the crowd. The only mobile phones I saw now were being held aloft to take pictures or to allow the person on the other end to hear the commotion.

  “Tell me this,” Kate shouted next. “If they cancel any more classes, will you be able to graduate on time?”

  A thunder of “No!” George now waved his arms at the crowd like a cheerleader, finally exhorting and rabble-rousing, telling them to get louder.

  “Then you go get on those buses,” Kate yelled, “and you go tell the governor. You go tell the legislature. You tell them you have had enough. You tell them you can’t pay higher fees. You tell them you won’t tolerate any more canceled classes. You go tell those fat butts who hide out in Sacramento that you have had enough.” She demanded, “What have you had?”

  “Enough. Enough. Enough.”

  “That’s right. But the governor isn’t all that bright. You have to tell him in terms he can understand. You go tell him: Two, four, six, eight, hey Gov, let me graduate.”

  The crowd began to chant, Two, four, six, eight....

  “Now go get on those buses, and go tell them. And when you get downtown, what are you going to say?”

  “Two, four, six, eight, hey Gov, let me graduate.”

  Cheered on by Kate, the mob kept up the chant as they surged toward the parking lot behind the library where the buses waited, idling their engines.

  Kate flipped off the bullhorn and handed it back to George.

  “You math guys... Got it now? You know what to do when you get off the bus?”

  “Got it.” His cheeks glowed pink and his eyes sparkled. “Thanks, Kate. You coming?”

  “No.” She canted her head toward the administration building. “Need to go set the prez straight about something.”

  He raised a fist. “May the Force be with you.”

  “You math guys,” shaking her head. But smiling affectionately at her colleague, she gripped him by the shoulders and turned him toward the buses. “Go get ’em, George.”

  As we watched him stride away, he flipped on the bullhorn and picked up the chant. Kate nudged me.

  “There, now that makes me think of Sproul Plaza, roomie.”

  Grinning, I said, “Hell no, we won�
�t go ....” And started to laugh.

  She nudged me again. “Hey, this is serious business.”

  “You should be going with them.”

  She shook her head, smiles gone. “What we have to do here is serious business, too. If Park Holloway gets away with this stunt, we might as well lock the doors and go home.”

  As we started to walk on, she turned, and took a last look at the people moving toward the buses. They no longer milled about like a slowly undulating sea of orange T-shirts. Instead, waving their picket signs and chanting, they looked and sounded like a roiling, tempestuous storm.

  “The thing is,” she said, turning her pale gray eyes on me, “Park Holloway should have been the one with the bullhorn giving his best stump speech, inspiring his people to go tackle the legislature.

  “Jeez, Mags, he’s an old pol, served twenty years in Congress before he burrowed himself in here. He knows how to energize a crowd. Instead, he’s sequestered in his posh office.”

  When I glanced up at the administration building where we were to meet Holloway, I saw someone duck away from a second-floor window. Was it Holloway, watching the demonstrators?

  It was Friday. Very few classes were offered on Fridays, especially after noon, so it was rare to see so many students or faculty around. Most of the support staff of administrative assistants, clerks, janitors, and technicians had been cut to a four-day work week—Friday Furloughs. So once the demonstrators got on their buses and drove away, the campus would be the usual Friday ghost town. I thought that Park Holloway was probably rattling around all but alone inside his confection of an office building.

  “Taj Ma’Holloway,” the students called the new administration building, and not without a tinge of bitterness. It was indeed an extravagant structure for a public college and made a dandy symbol for angry students and staff trying to gut their way through the strictures of a crappy economy. Tough to explain, when they faced ever-increasing fees, cancelled classes, wage cuts, lowered benefits and layoffs, that construction was funded out of one pocket—public bond money—and instruction out of another—the state’s general budget—and that money could not legally pass from one pocket to the other.