NO CARS, FACULTY OR otherwise, were allowed onto the campus of Independence College; Members of the college who had cars had to park them in a lot high on a hill to the back of King’s Scaffold. Most of the faculty kept cars and complained about the inconvenience. Most students didn’t bother to keep cars. Jack Carroll did—a heavily used, religiously cared for, Volkswagen Beetle convertible—because he had a job at the Sunoco station in Belleville three days a week. Freshman year, he had tried getting there by bus. There was excellent bus service to Belleville, paid for by the college, for just such people as Jack Carroll, who had to work. Jack, however, liked to work late for the overtime, and he felt stupid working as a mechanic and not having a car of his own. He’d brought the Beetle up from home at the beginning of his sophomore year and kept it in the lot ever since. Sometimes, he thought about it enough to be grateful that Independence College was as isolated as it was. The Beetle was an antique. Kept at a city school, it would have been dead meat.
Now he shook his head at the tangle of wires under the Beetle’s hood, drew his head back into the air, and motioned to Ted Barrows, who had come up to help him, to follow him into the shed. The shed was really a shop, fully equipped. Anyone who knew how to fix his car himself could use the tools in there, or get a friend who knew to use them. Anyone who had to call a garage in Belleville could be assured that it wouldn’t need to be towed anywhere for anything less than a junking. It was a small concession on the part of the college, but it was an expensive one. Before he’d made up his mind to go to law school, Jack had thought hard and long about owning his own body shop. Then he’d checked into the costs of equipping one, and decided law school would be cheaper.
Over on King’s Scaffold, students dressed up as Frankenstein and Batman were dropping logs down the face against the side of the effigy. Jack was keeping his fingers crossed that they were doing it right. If they weren’t, he was going to have to go over there and straighten it out. Sometimes he thought he was nuts. His college education was being pieced together by four scholarships, two loans, and thirty hours a week in a grease pit. His law school education was going to be just as crushed. He didn’t have time to be President of Students, which he was. He just couldn’t seem to stop himself.
He let himself into the shed and headed for the soldering bench. Someone had been there before him, God only knew when, and left the solderer lying out. The solderer wasn’t clean, either. None of these academic types seemed to have the least respect for good tools.
Jack sat down and started to clean up. Ted Barrows came in from outside and stood beside him. Ted was from a very rich family on the Main Line, and he found the things Jack did with metals fascinating.
“So you see,” Ted said, continuing the conversation they had started outside, “the whole campus is in an uproar. I mean, the guy’s totally disappeared. Just totally. Freddie Murchison says somebody finally went and offed him.”
“I think a hell of a hangover finally went and caught up with him,” Jack said. “Just look at this crap. I can’t believe people do this to tools.”
Ted pulled at his scraggly little mustache, the one he’d been trying to grow for three years now. Jack had counted the hairs in it once. There were eight.
“You know,” Ted said, “I was in Liberty Hall? The old lady was on the phone to the other old lady and what she was saying was that Steele and Chessey—”
“I know where Chessey is,” Jack said.
“Well, I know you know. But let’s face it, Jack, he’s got practically the whole rest of the college thinking—”
“I know what he’s got them thinking. For Christ’s sake, Ted. What do you think I’m looking for the asshole for?”
“I know you’re supposed to be looking for him,” Ted said patiently, “what I’m trying to tell you is, the joke around campus right now is that you found him.”
“I wish I had.”
“Found him and stuffed his teeth down his throat and that’s why—”
Jack put the solderer down on the bench. His head hurt. It always did when he had to talk about Donegal Steele, especially about Donegal Steele and what he was doing to Chessey. For Jack Carroll, Chessey Flint was a kind of miracle. She had everything the girls who wouldn’t go out with him in high school had had, except the attitude. The girls who wouldn’t go out with him in high school had looked at his clothes, and at the tiny house his family had lived in, and at the used car that his father had to drive, and made up their minds right away: Jack Carroll wasn’t the kind of boy who was going anywhere. Chessey had looked at all the same things their freshman year, and decided Jack Carroll was the kind of boy who was. Add to that Chessey’s virginity—which Jack saw less as a miracle than as a crazy, wildly extravagant form of heroism—and the fact that Chessey Flint was in love with him often made Jack Carroll feel as if God had appointed him king of the world. It also went a long way to explaining why he did as much as he did. Without Chessey to show off for, Jack would probably have left extracurricular activities strictly alone.
He plugged the solderer into the wall socket to heat it up—the only way to get hardened solder off the tip—and said, “Look, I saw Steele last night, in the Beer Cellar. He was drinking himself silly, popping beers.”
“Popping beers in the Cellar? How did he get away with that?”
“He’s the Great Doctor Donegal Steele.” Jack shrugged. “It’s like that little guy says. Father Tibor Kasparian. Him. The Great Doctor Donegal Steele.”
“I don’t have Father Kasparian for anything,” Ted said. “Everybody tells me he’s good.”
The solderer was hotter than an electric range burner on high. Jack shook it a little, but the solder wasn’t soft enough yet.
“Steele was punching his holes in the bottom of his cans with an ice pick,” Jack said. “He must have got it from the bar. Then he’d stand up on a table, tilt his head back, pull the tab—”
“And a can of beer would go down his throat in thirty seconds. I know how to pop beers, Jack.”
“I wasn’t trying to tell you how to pop beers. I was trying to tell you Steele wasn’t making a secret of it. He was standing on tables, for God’s sake.”
“So?”
“So,” Jack said. The solder was finally off. Jack unplugged the solderer. “I was in there with Stevie and Chuck, in the back, and we heard him. He said he was warming up for a challenge.”
“A beer can challenge?”
“That’s what it sounded like. Christ, Ted, he must have popped five cans of beer while we watched him. Can you imagine what happened to him if he went off and took a challenge?”
“Maybe he cracked up his car somewhere,” Ted said. “Maybe he’s in a smash somewhere at the side of the road.”
“If he was, we’d have heard about it. There aren’t that many roads, and the cops around here don’t have anything else to do. Don’t be an ass. He passed out someplace, that’s all. He’s probably just coming to.”
“With a head the size of a watermelon.”
“Trite, but undoubtedly accurate. I just wish I knew who he had the challenge with. I’d just love to get that son of a bitch in a corner when he couldn’t fight back. Chessey can’t fight back.”
“I always think what you ought to do is kick him in the head with those climbing shoes of yours,” Ted said. “Those cleats would go right through his skull to his brain.”
“Right.” The solderer was clean. Jack got up and started looking through the boxes on the shelf above his head for something he could use for a speedometer cable.
The problem, as Jack saw it, was this: You could take the boy out of the grease pit, but not the grease pit out of the boy. Most of the time he was an ordinary college kid, polite, civilized, neat. Some of the time, what came up out of the core of him looked a lot more like his brother Dan. His brother Dan had committed his life to stomping butt from the time he reached six feet—when he was twelve—to the time he’d smashed his Ford Falcon into a concrete abutment out on Route 94. He’d had a passion for violence that was like something out of a Freddie movie, and all his friends had had it, too. So did all the guys Jack knew down at the Sunoco station, if they were young enough.
When Jack Carroll’s brother had smashed his Ford Falcon into that concrete abutment, he had not only killed himself, but his girlfriend, his best friend, and the twenty-dollar-an-hour whore his best friend had picked up for celebratory purposes in Allentown.
Sometimes, when Jack thought about Donegal Steele, what he saw was Steele’s body in that Falcon, crushed and crumpled and covered with blood.
Now he draped the cable he needed over his shoulder and headed for the shed’s door.
“Come on,” he told Ted Barrows. “Let’s not talk about Donegal Steele.”