Chapter 66: Clearing the Decks

Wednesday, December 18, 1985

Things felt like they were winding down. After today, all I had left was Computer Organization on Friday. Tomorrow was, for pretty much all purposes, a free day. As for Computer Organization, I could have taught a more rigorous version than this class had turned out to be. If I couldn’t ace the final, there was something seriously wrong going on.

I wouldn’t actually ace it, though. One or two questions slightly wrong would fit. I had a high A in the class, but wasn’t the top student, and I didn’t want to change that.

I planned to spend tomorrow packing for the holidays, wrapping gifts, perhaps shopping again for Mom and Dad and Camille and Francis (though their primary presents were again going to be photo albums), and so forth.

With the wacky schedule of finals week, I was home at times I wouldn’t normally be home. Thus, I was there to answer the phone when it rang. It would otherwise have gone to the answering machine.

“Hello?” I said.

A deep voice said, “Hello. I was calling for Steve Marshall or Cammie Clarke.”

A minor alarm went off. Nothing bad, but...

I said, “This is Steve.”

“Hello, Mister Marshall,” he said. “This is Chief Palko of the College Station Police Department.”

“Hello, Chief Palko,” I said. “And call me Steve, please.”

“Call me Bob,” he said. “First of all, I wanted to extend a sincere and deep apology for the things that happened to you and Miss Clarke. The buck stops with me, and it’s on me to make this right. I’m not about to dance around the issue and pretend this wasn’t a serious failure on my part. We owe it to you to make it right and to do better, and we will.”

“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “That means a lot to me, and I’m pretty sure it will for Cammie as well. We’re generally not hard to get along with unless things go seriously sideways.”

He chuckled a bit and said, “Both of you have reputations that precede you. The knuckleheads who did this couldn’t have picked a worse set of targets, and I’m trying to make sure they know it.”

“I’m glad of that.”

He cleared his throat, then said, “I was hoping you and Miss Clarke might be able to come by the station in the next day or two. I know it’s your finals week, but that also means you will be leaving town and ... it would be nice to clear the decks a bit.”

“We should be able to, and I would like that, too,” I said. “I’ll check with Cammie, but I think our schedule tomorrow is fairly open.”

“I’m here all day,” he said. “If you would, give me an hour or two’s warning. You don’t need to worry. I just have some other city people who would like to say hello and offer their apologies. As you might imagine, this whole mess has not gone over well with the brass above me.”

“That makes sense.”

“You don’t need your lawyer, but go ahead and bring him. We won’t be able to get too nuts-and-bolts tomorrow. The wheels of city government grind slowly, alas, particularly in December. We’ve already got two key people out of state on vacation.”

“Let’s not ruin their vacations,” I said. “This can wait. We want this resolved, but I think, from our perspective, the most important part already is.”

“It had better be, or heads are going to roll.”

“I’ll give you, or your office, a call as soon as we have a time.”

“Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate your being reasonable about this. Let me just say that your Houston attorney is someone we really do not want to rile up. Nothing against Ken Albright, but by comparison, I’ll talk to him all week.”

I chuckled at that.

“Kyle’s a great guy, and I’m lucky to have him on my team.”

“Honestly ... it says a great deal about you that you do,” he said. “Good things, all of them.”

“We’ll talk soon.”

“I’m looking forward to it!”

I hung up and chuckled to myself a bit. Chief Palko had just enough folksy, ‘good old boy’ charm to make it in mid-sized-city internal politics, clearly, and relate to his officers, but I could hear the serious guy under the voice. He wasn’t reading from a statement when he apologized. It came from the heart, I was pretty sure.

Cammie came in just as I was going out. We talked briefly and set a meeting time for one in the afternoon tomorrow, subject to Ken being available. A quick call to his office confirmed that he would be there. His receptionist suggested arriving about fifteen minutes early so we could talk briefly. That sounded good to us.

I would update Kyle later, but this felt good. Having it hanging out there over the holidays wasn’t ideal, but an agreement in principle would be good enough.

Cammie and I also agreed: we would almost certainly not accept any money (or, perhaps better, would donate it back), but that probably wasn’t part of tomorrow’s discussion. The one exception was Ken’s fees (and Kyle’s, but there wasn’t much there). It didn’t feel right to us to have to pay them, so we might let the CSPD pay, then donate the rest back.

Ken was our only real expense. Oh, the camera trap cost something, and so did repainting, but that was on the teenage idiot. I suspected Chief Palko could ‘convince’ whoever that idiot’s father was to cough up some cash himself, and that would solve that.

Heck, maybe Officer Michaelson would pay for Ken’s fees. It could happen. Might not be exactly what the police union would like, but I could see some backdoor negotiation: make it right and it’s only three years writing tickets downwind of the pig barns instead of four, for instance. Maybe Fridays off for good behavior, too.

I called the CSPD offices and let them know the schedule tomorrow. The receptionist promised that Chief Palko would be there and would be happy to see us. I suspected he actually would be happy, too.

It was just Cammie, Ken, and me going. None of the others wanted to head into the lion’s den, and it didn’t make a lot of sense for them to, either.

I headed over to Hullabaloo Cafe, arriving just a bit after six. Amy came out about five minutes later and made a beeline to me, hugging me right away.

“I’m very happy to see you!” she said.

“And I am very happy to see you.”

“What shall we have for dinner?” she said.

“Well...” I said, smiling. “Are we on a date, or are we just having dinner and talking?”

She cocked her head a little, thinking about it, and said, “We’re on a date that involves just having dinner and talking.”

“I like that,” I said, chuckling. “There’s a new pizza place up on Northgate that I haven’t tried but sounds like fun. Maybe that?”

“I like pizza,” she said. “In that way, at least, I am a perfectly normal college student. I was afraid that selling it all day might make me dislike it, but it has not.”

“Let’s do that, then,” I said.

Her hand found mine, and we headed up to the crowded Northgate area. Finals or not (and perhaps because of finals), places like the Dixie Chicken were crowded. Some people found alcohol to be their path through finals, and I couldn’t necessarily fault them. I’d known one friend in my first life who swore he never passed a final in which he wasn’t at least buzzed, but failed five cold sober. I was pretty sure he wasn’t lying, either.

That’s not even entirely unlikely. Research shows that people remember things better when they are in the same mental state as when they learned it. Study to music, and recall is faster and better when one listens to music while taking the test. Study while somewhat inebriated, and — strange as it might be — perhaps the same was true.

Amy and I didn’t talk a lot during the walk, just held hands and enjoyed the not overly cold December night. She must have been considerably colder than I was, both having less mass and having bare thighs, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Girls seem paradoxical that way. Many were cold in rooms I found to be quite pleasant or even warm, yet they routinely endured going outside in clothing that did far less to cover them than anything a man would wear.

The things we do for fashion, perhaps.

We were heading to the ‘The Flying Tomato Brothers’ restaurant, which promised pan pizza, beer, salad, and more. Oddly or not, I had learned during graduate school that what was ‘The Flying Tomato Brothers’ in Texas had been ‘Garcias’ in the Midwest. Perhaps they thought it might be misconstrued as a Mexican restaurant down here? If I wanted to, perhaps I could find out this time. The combined chain had shut down before I ever had the chance to ask anyone who knew during my first life.

So, in a way, this was not my first time eating their pizza, but in another, it clearly was. In any case, I had never been in this location, which featured an interesting split-level seating configuration with plenty of cozy nooks to hang out in. Amy and I both ordered (one slice for her, two for me, with diet sodas for each of us — a bit of caffeine wouldn’t kill me!), then took our food to a little nook on the second floor near a window.

“This is cool,” she said. “I like pizza by the slice, and it looks like pretty good stuff.”

“It does,” I said.

She clearly wanted to talk, so talk we did, nibbling as we did so.

“The first thing is ... and ... I am sure of the answer ... just ... I feel as if I must ask,” she said.

“Go right ahead. Please.”

“We will do more of this in the spring?” she asked. Surprisingly, there was no visible shyness there, but I was certain she would be crushed by anything other than a positive answer.

“I would very much like to continue dating,” I said.

“I would, too,” she said. “Very much so. I feel relaxed with you in a way that I never have with a man. Or many women, either. A few, but ... perhaps Claire being one of them should have been a sign that you were a better man than I let myself believe at first.”

She reached over and squeezed my hand as she said that.

I squeezed her hand back, then said, “It startled me at the time, but I’m glad you said what you said. It led to our first date, after all.”

She smiled and squeezed my hand again.

“That is a good thing, yes.”

“And ... I became upset when you said it.”

She tried to speak, but I made a ‘shush’ sound, then said, “That’s my problem, not yours. I need to understand it. It’s something to talk with my therapist about. And knowing that ... honestly, it’s good that I do. Because I wouldn’t have addressed it without knowing it was there.”

She looked at me quickly, obviously not expecting that.

“You have a therapist?”

“Four and a half years, now, depending on exactly how you count it.”

“I am surprised,” she said. “I have seen a therapist, occasionally, but that seems ... easier to guess.”

“A friend of mine had ... issues. Serious ones. She had to go to therapy. Her therapist wanted to talk to Angie and me because we had insights others did not. After some conversations, we figured out that we had issues, too. Angie with her birth mother, some parts of how she came to live here, and so forth. Me with some things in my past, plus the pressure and stress of overachieving. We just kept with it. It is ... in some ways, perhaps, it fills the role confession does for Catholics, if nothing else. I’m not a Catholic, although Jasmine is, or was, at least nominally, so I don’t understand it fully, but ... having someone to talk to, who you can say anything to, who will keep it confidential and give you honest feedback, is valuable.”

“That’s how I feel. I am not sure if it ‘helped’ me in the way my parents wanted. They want me to be ‘normal,’ while my therapist wanted me to be the best ‘me’ I could be.”

“If you’re not a danger to yourself or others, that’s mostly their role,” I said.

“Indeed.”

“And it’s good life advice. Trying to be ‘normal’ is seldom to your advantage, I think. It’s a moving target, and it makes you bland. Being able to play normal is good, but that’s different. Being the best you that you can be feels like the ideal. Obviously, that’s got limitations — ‘best’ being one of them, since it’s a word that might be twisted into meaning something I don’t mean — but ... well, heck. Look at my house. Six of the girls don’t count as ‘normal’ by many people’s standards. The seventh doesn’t really, either. And, once you scratch the surface, neither do I.”

She nodded.

“That threw me off. You look ‘normal,’ and sound ‘normal,’ and it was easy to believe you were normal. Not that I am saying that cheating is ‘normal’ — and mostly I didn’t even mean that — but I have known a lot of normal men, and part of their being normal is that women with purple hair, studded cuffs, Doc Marten shoes, and so forth are not part of their life. Because ... I am clearly not ‘normal.’”

“No, you’re not. You are an individual. That takes guts. It makes you interesting, but that’s an open door, nothing more.”

She nodded again, and said, “Because I might have been a lot of other things.”

“You could have had all of the attitude in the world,” I said. “You call yourself prickly, and in some ways you probably are, but not in the way I would normally mean.”