Chapter 27

Attention ladies and gentleman. 

Gavin closed his eyes, took deep breaths through his nose, tried to get his shit together.

Welcome to Garden City, Kansas, where the local time is eleven forty seven a.m.

Liam Stump. Twentieth Century literature.  (Whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean).  Focus!

Please remain in your seats until the captain turns off the fasten seatbelt sign.

He had boarded a plane at seven in the morning, one point five hours to his connector in Dallas, two hours wandering around the airport looking for an appetizing breakfast, finally settled on a Bloody Mary and a bowl of pretzels, another hour to Kansas.  All that time his mind had been flying, too, fast and high as a 747.  Not with thoughts of the job he was applying for, the interviews today and tomorrow, the talk he would be presenting for the second time in a month. 

No, he was thinking about his English 1A class and feeling fucking crappy. Rona Gomez was bothering him of course, but also, weirdly, DeJuan Miller.  Gavin knew his first and last name now, because he had received the email notification from Admissions and Records on Thursday: DeJuan Miller has withdrawn from your class.  

This was the most ridiculously massive failure of a semester ever.  World’s Worst Instructor Fucks one Student, Epically Fucks Over Another.   The movie was stuck on repeat: DeJuan’s eyes lighting up, crinkling into a smile. A real live football player who loved Liam Stump. My mind and my body are fighting all the time.  I thought it was pretty funny someone would write a whole book about that.  Glowing with the joy of self-recognition, the thrill of seeing an idea expressed, an idea you never realized was an idea, an idea that nevertheless you understood instantly and completely.  The love of literature.  It was something Gavin used to feel when he was in college, reading some experimental novel that blasted open his whole way of thinking about what a novel was. Or something really old like Moby Dick that sounded like the most boring thing ever but turned out to be so futuristic and weird that he’d stay up reading it all night, turn down his roommates’ invitation to a party, still be up, reading, when they stumbled in drunk at four in the morning. 

That feeling had set him on a life path as an English major, an English graduate student, a scholar devoted to the study of great books.  And now here he was, deboarding a 747 in Kansas, about to give a talk about aborted fetuses and the textual embodiment of the abject. 

What the fuck happened?

Walking down that shaky tunnel that connected the plane to the airport, he searched his memories forwards and backwards.  Through the tiny small-town terminal, so empty and grimy, carpet all stained like in his office, down to the luggage gate where he would pick up his suit bag and meet his ride.  Five years of teaching English 1A.  It had been exciting and stressful and kind of scary when he started. But sometime between then and now he had put the class on autopilot, and now he wasn’t sure where it had driven off to.

“Gavin.”   

Someone tapped him on the shoulder.  It was Lee Silber, a dark-haired guy, urban skinny with hunched posture and a bit of a gut.  He was the head of the hiring committee.  From the assertive way he extended his hand, Gavin braced for one of those something-to-prove manly handshakes, but no, his hand was soft like a floppy wash rag.

They drove fifty miles across the prairie in a yellow Mini Cooper with New York plates. Everything was flat, flat, flat.  Flatter than Indiana, which Gavin wouldn’t have thought was possible.  But Indiana always had some kind of monster factory or power plant looming near the horizon to break up the skyline.  All western Kansas seemed to have was fields and cows and pickup trucks.

“We’re meeting the department for lunch at the Barbecue Pit,” Lee said.  “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?”

Gavin shook his head.

“So, yeah, that’s good,” Lee said.  “They don’t really have vegetarian food out here.”

They passed fields, cows.  Rickety trucks with rusted paint.  Shiny new trucks, puffed up like roided-out body builders.  Barns.  One field of white sheep with black heads.  More cows.  The sky was surreal blue, with big puffy clouds that hung too low, like you could bang your head on them if you stood up straight.  They didn’t talk, mostly.  Gavin was glad.  What could you talk about when you were in the middle of so much enormous emptiness and the direction of your entire life was about to be decided?

“There’s a barbed-wire museum about half an hour that way, in LaCrosse.”  Lee pointed out Gavin’s window.  “A whole museum about barbed wire.”

Gavin stared at the field and tried to imagine a building back there somewhere, a town.  There was no way. Some kind of crop, corn probably, was poking through the ground, not high enough to block the view of land that stretched back and back until it reached the sky.  It looked like you could drive for days and never see anything but these same fields with these same corn sprouts.

They passed a particularly crowded pen of cows, a field of sprouting plants that didn’t look like corn, turned right, and they were at the Barbecue Hut.

“We’re here?” Gavin had kind of figured they would come into a town as they got close to the university.  This was just a low, barn-looking building surrounded by a parking lot and a field.

“Yup, this is it.  Fancy, Kansas, home of the Aggies.”

The inside was decorated like a backyard, with picnic benches and planters full of plastic grass.  It wasn't full but there were some families having lunch, kids running around and lots of yelling.  Gavin scanned the room for a big group of English professors, but it turned out it was just the other two members of the hiring committee. They were Paula Bray, a plump middle-aged lady with beauty pageant hair, and Jomo Abasi, from Kenya, who was probably the tallest, darkest guy Gavin had ever met in real life.  

The waitress came by in a checkered dress and apron that made Gavin think of the Wizard of Oz, though maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe that was just how people dressed in Kansas. There wasn’t a lot of choice on the laminated menu: hot links, chicken, tri-tip, pulled pork.  No salads, but they did have corn on the cob with butter and deep-fried mushrooms.  Lee and Paula both ordered the hot link so Gavin got that, too.  Jomo ordered chicken.

“And a diet Sprite," Paula said. "Gavin, do you want a soda or anything?” 

A Coke sounded awesome, actually, but he’d read something online about etiquette at job interview luncheons.  Water or coffee only.  Sugary drinks made you look undisciplined.  Of course it also said you should never order anything heavy or messy, but that probably wasn’t possible at the Barbecue Hut. 

In about three minutes the food was out, all of it swimming in oily red sauce, even the chicken. The hotlinks were forearm-sized and encased in giant fluffy buns.  Gavin stared at his for a while, trying to figure out some kind of dignified way to eat it.  Paula just picked hers up in two hands and wrapped her frosted pink lips around it, so Gavin did the same.  It was some work to get a bite out of it, but once he did it tasted really good, great in fact, like the salt and fat were restoring vital nourishment to his organs and cells.  

“How many people are in the department?” He gulped plain water from a waxed cup and wished it was fizzy and sweet.

“Just us,” Paula said. “I’m Middle English and Renaissance.  Jomo’s Seventeenth to Nineteenth, and you’d be the Modernist.  Lee teaches classical lit and runs the writing center.”

She was dabbing her mouth with a paper napkin like every fifteen seconds.  Lee had taken his hot link out of its roll and was cutting it up with plastic utensils, awkward, but more dignified than getting your face covered with barbecue sauce.  Jomo wasn’t really eating his chicken, just pushing the sauce around with his fork.

“There aren’t any English majors,” Paula said.  “Mostly Agribusiness, Animal Science, Dairy.  It’s really a great school.  And you’ll love the town.  It’s quiet and extremely safe.”  She took a swig of soda and wiped her mouth again.  Luckily they had a napkin dispenser right on the table.  “Do you have children?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” Lee said through a mouthful of sausage.

“No,” Gavin said.

“Of course, you’re so young.  But when you’re ready, Shady Ranch Elementary down the road is a really good school.  Both my kids went there.  ”

Lee was shaking his head, looking at Jomo.

“Paula has been at the university for many years,” Jomo said.  He had a deep voice and one of those clipped African accents that sounded kind of British.

She nodded.  “Seventeen.”

“And she has seen a lot of people come and go.  So her interest in the longevity of our hire is understandable. But—” He gestured with his fork, complete with a bite-sized piece of chicken. “That cannot be part of the hiring decision  We will hire solely on the merit of the candidate.” 

“Well of course.” Paula frowned, and her forehead turned the same color as her carefully rouged cheeks. “I mean, of course we’d love someone who would stay around for the rest of their career, but that doesn't mean.”  She stopped, thought, turned her shadowed eyes up towards her big hair. “I hope that’s not how I came across.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Gavin said.

“Yes, actually it was,” Jomo said, putting the chicken-laden fork down on his greasy plate, next to the otherwise untouched chicken breast. “Mr. Cheng-Johnson is too polite to say it.”

Gavin popped the last bite of hotlink into his mouth.  It didn’t taste good anymore, just oily and spongy. He moved it away from his tongue and worked his jaw—chew, chew—grinding it up until he could swallow it. 

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