Purdue University President Mitch Daniels is coughing both from his morning workout and from his morning walk across campus. Normally he would pound his way up the stairs in Hovde Hall. This morning, he takes the elevator.
His determined stride across campus from the Co-Rec Gym is the usual display of fortitude with his book bag strapped across one shoulder and his gym bag across the other. Students are hurrying to their eight o’clock classes and pay him no attention. He prefers to blend in. Mitch Daniels needs to belong and he is quietly proud that Purdue has taken him in.
He worries that he had inhaled some quantity of ash. He has forgotten his face mask this morning. President Daniels has ordered the grounds crews to keep up with the ash fall throughout the event. They are not going to let it all accumulate and then try to do it all at once. This will be about morale. Appearances do count sometimes.
The grounds crews have done a good job pulling aerators across the lawns, driving the ash into the soil or breaking it up for the winds to carry off. Nonetheless, each morning they are greeted by a fresh inch on the grounds. It is worse farther west.
The normal high flavor of the return to campus to begin the Fall Semester has been subdued by the news reports. The ash had reached West Lafayette, Indiana on the day when most students were moving in. Everything got a good dusting. The University president had exhorted students and faculty to put up with the inconvenience cheerfully and to look at the bright side. Bad as it was, they had all been expecting much worse.
Alton Picke had e-mailed President Daniels the day before. He wanted to send in a crew for interviews and footage. Mitch Daniels was not going to miss an opportunity to add to Purdue’s visibility. The campus buzz was that they had upstaged Utah. Mitch would play those cards close to his vest. Although privately, he was ecstatic about it. One must remain statesman-like, he reflected, when besting a fellow university. They all competed for everything, while trying very hard not to draw attention to the fact.
When the elevator door opens, Mitch notes to himself that the hallway is empty. Then, as his walk down the hallway straightens, he notices a figure sitting on the floor, in the corner, by the stairwell door, across from the door to his office suite. She is in jeans and boots with a black and gold Purdue sweatshirt. The hood is up, as though she is a monk stealing a few minutes of meditation in a forgotten corridor. She waits until he has halved the distance and then rises, lifting a backpack and pulling back the hood. Her face is immediately recognizable. She has been the subject of one television interview after another since July of the previous year.
Mitch slows. She seems so calm. He feels the sputtering of a laugh of disbelief, but pushes it aside as inappropriate.
Such a quiet smile, he thinks. In person, she is even more beautiful than her photographs. He opens his mouth to speak, but it catches. Nothing comes out.
“President Daniels.” This is a plain greeting, stripped of any thought of seeking anything for itself.
“Dr. Cheviot.” He gasps.
She lifts her chin and smiles at that. Even yet, she has only heard that a few times. And now, from him, from the University President himself. Nice, she thinks, that he knows my name.
“Are you here to see me?”
“Yes. Do you have time?”
“Have time?” Mitch gasped. “I’ll make time. When did you get in?”
“About dawn. I brought the University’s truck back. Winds were low and so the ash was not too bad. I had an air filter pad under the grille. I changed it every time I stopped for gas. That’s it out front. Can you take care of the Purdue parking ticket on it?
Mitch laughs. “I think that might fall within the purview of the office of the University President, yes.”
They walk to his office door. He drops his bags to search out his keychain. As he unlocks his door, Claire reaches down for his book bag. She hoists it atop her shoulder while lifting her backpack.
“Thanks, much. Never enough hands, you know. Now you’re the one who needs a hand.”
Claire laughs. “You get used to it.”
Such a pretty laugh, Mitch notes to himself. He flicks on lights. He lays his bags in the corner. He motions to chairs by a window, “Please.” They sit. She stares at him with the calm of a Buddha.
“May we dispense with formalities?”
“Fine by me.”
“Then call me Mitch.”
“Hey, wait a minute. They just awarded me the doctorate. I am not tired yet of hearing “Dr. Cheviot.” But you can’t call me Dr. Cheviot if I get to call you Mitch.”
“I seem to have gotten us in a fine pickle already.”
“You certainly have, Mitch.” With that, they both laugh uproariously.
He sensed this woman was not afraid of anything. He wondered what she had been through. Mitch tried to explain how he felt. “I’ve been in meetings with Presidents, but I’ve never had a national hero in my office.”
Claire tried to correct his thinking, “Mitch, if I had died, I would have been a statistic. All I did was live through it.”
Mitch is uneasy with such a beautiful woman staring so pointedly. She is simply waiting. But for what? He braces himself. Mitch retreats into boilerplate.
“Everyone is so relieved that it was not any worse than it was.”
“I know,” She says, nodding and remembering the crumpled city blocks on the east side of West Yellowstone, and that on the west side the Ho-Hum bar rode it out okay.
“Purdue was deeply saddened by Jim Bennington’s death.”
Reflexively, Claire looked out through the window and sighed, “Yes, I know,” She says again.
“Weren’t you close to Dr. Bennington?”
She returned her gaze to him as calmly as a saint. “I was as close to Jim Bennington as any person ever born. But it wasn’t enough.”
An image of Claire in Bennington’s arms now flashes through Mitch’s mind. Mitch is not comfortable with this. He minimizes it. He had not known Bennington until the professor came back to campus from Yellowstone, after having discovered the volcano. Or, was it Claire Cheviot that discovered it? The news has not been clear on that point and Bennington had always breezed past it. Of course, Mitch had spoken to Bennington only for a few minutes on two occasions. He had assumed that leaving his grad-student back in Yellowstone to continue the research was good professor-ship and further established Purdue as the leading institution on the subject. But now, the politician in him made Mitch wonder if Bennington had left her in Wyoming to avoid a scandal.
Mitch remembers reflecting at the time on the fact that Bennington had seemed to be a rather charismatic figure, and a little too smooth for an academic. Even though a former governor of the state, Mitch was more like the professors. Professor Bennington seemed to have something of the game show host inside him.
But it was not sporting to be thinking such thoughts, and especially of someone who—so recently—had died so horribly. He dismissed these images from his thoughts.
Stirred now, Claire continues. “Mitch, back in English class, do you remember the example of “the tragic flaw?”
“Sure.”
“Well, Jim Bennington was born with one. He was too competitive, although he tried to hide it. When it came to something he thought of as his, he could become quite jealous. He was jealous of the volcano and jealous of me, but of the two, I think he loved the volcano more.
“Somewhere along the line, he got the idea that the world owed him something. It was like he was recapturing something glorious that he had lost.
“I heard they put me on the cover of Time Magazine.”
“Yes, I have copies. Would you like one?”
“No. I don’t care.” Claire crossed her long legs. “But that is what Jim wanted for himself. He was worried that I’d get it, or someone else at Yellowstone. But I didn’t care. That’s the thing. I didn’t care. And I still don’t care.
“That feeling of entitlement informed every move Jim ever made, including bedding down most of the attractive girls in the department.”
“I had no idea.”
“To quote Dickens, Jim Bennington became the hero of his own life. Every step was calibrated to inexorably move him closer to the cover of Time Magazine. A few more days and he would have made it. But he died and I lived.
“Jim had a lot of charisma, and brains, and he worked hard. But that one flaw always held him back.”
“Which was…?”
“I don’t know the name for it, but it had something to do with having your picture in the paper, or maybe a ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue—waving to the crowds from the back of a convertible. Some big public deal like that. It had something to do with the fact that his lecture hall classes could become public performances.”
The lady obviously had to get something out of her system. Mitch was not comfortable hearing this, but he never looked away. “The news media never said how he died. They just called it an accident.”
Claire shook her head slowly. Twice, she tried to speak. Then softly, “We never found Jim. He was seen the night before in town and then he was seen by workers four miles beneath the surface in the North Tunnel. No one ever saw him leave.” She seemed to drift. Mitch tried to change the subject.
“We’ll have a place for you in the department, you know.”
“I’m not staying.”
“Not staying!” Dismayed, Mitch had assumed that Purdue was a shoe-in. Claire would add luster to the faculty. “You drove all the way back here just to deliver our truck? Where are you going? What will you do?”
“I have to get back to Digger. He needs me.”
“Oh yes, Dr. O’Dell. How is he doing?”
“Maybe he has some of that post-whatever-they-call-it.”
“Post traumatic stress?”
“That’s it. Of course, it has only been a few days. So, he may snap out of it, but he’s been having trouble sleeping. And the army doctors think he needs surgery on his feet. I’m going where he goes, until he throws me out.”
“Well, that would never happen!”
“Actually, I think I’ve got a touch of that post traumatic stuff too.”
“My goodness, yes. You were there when it erupted, weren’t you?
“Yeah, I was right there on the volcano, up about 500 feet on the west flank taking Helium-3 readings like the most clueless nit-wit that ever walked. I just keep seeing it and hearing it, over and over. I just keep hearing the dogs barking.”
“Claire, I’ll make a place for BOTH OF YOU right here at Purdue.”
“I’ll tell him, but that’s up to Digger. Here’s the truck keys.”
“When are you leaving?”
“In a few minutes.”
“Already? How will you get back?”
“I’ll take the footbridge across the Wabash to the Amtrak station. I hear they are running their first train west this evening—the first since the eruption. I have called the Army to pull some strings with Amtrak. I’ll get on.
“Anyway, with just one connection in Chicago and another in Pasco, Washington, I can get as close to Yellowstone as Pocatello, Idaho. There’s a helicopter pilot out of Bozeman who says she will pick me up. Bozeman is about as far east as you can fly right now, until the ash cloud settles out. Digger and I have been staying with her. She was a part of all of this too. Her name is Cherry Brady.”
He marvels, “Yes, I’ve seen her on PBS. What a spectacular woman!”
“You have no idea. And so that’s good. Maybe the publicity will keep her flying. Not many tourists out there. Only survivors.”
President Daniels marvels, “And you came all the way back here just to deliver the truck.”
“Yes, that, and one little thing more, actually.” Claire reaches for her backpack. Claire fishes down through her clothes. She brings up the bundle that she and Jim had tied up with twine that first May at the campsite. Claire pulls a hunting knife from the backpack and cuts the strings. She has not seen it for 16 months.
“My goodness. What do we have here?”
“Rhodochrosite.”
Mitch carefully repeats, “Rho-do-chro-site.”
“The world’s largest specimen. They call this the ‘blood of the Inca kings.’”
Mitch repeats again, “’The blood of the Inca kings.’ My goodness. This is stunning. Is it valuable?”
“It’s worth millions. Jim thought that this would attract those out-of-state tuition dollars.”
“Got to love that!” Mitch was clearly excited.
“These crystals were made inside a volcanic gas bubble through the slow accretion of the minerals in geothermal ground water. This is Jim’s gift to Purdue.”
“This is spectacular. But surely you must have had a hand in this too. I’m certain.”
Claire now seems lost in thought as she remembers that morning last year when she and Jim both dug it out of the hillside together. “Mitch. It is important that this gift comes ONLY from Jim. I don’t know a thing about it.”
“That is very unselfish of you, Claire.”
“No. It’s not about ego or generosity. Mitch, dead men tell no tales. No questions, please. Where will you put this?”
“I know just the place. We’ll display it in the lobby of Bennington Hall.”
“Oh. Mitch. Jim did it. He finally did do it.” Claire raised her hands to her mouth. “Oh my god. Jim would be so proud. He always said that the ancient Egyptians claimed that a man would live forever if only his name was inscribed some place.”
“Then consider it done. We’re renaming Hampton Hall for Professor Bennington. He is our first professor killed in the line of duty, so to speak. But Claire, I simply must know the story of this Rho-do-chro-site.”
She wiped her tears and sniffed. “Time for me to go, Mitch. Keep watching PBS.”
They stand. “But, can I at least drop you off at the train station?”
“No. I want to walk across campus. And this way I can stop off at Triple-XXX for breakfast.”
“You can’t travel to Purdue and miss the Triple-XXX!”
“Best biscuits and gravy in America. When it’s my turn to go, you can re-name the root beer stand for me.”
“You see, Claire? There are all kinds of reasons to come back home to Purdue.”