A insane amount of this is true, though nobody died…

November 10, 1979

Indiana State University

Terre Haute

When a poet laureate comes to town, folks just by god gotta know about it.

OK, so it was the poet laureate of Illinois, a few miles on the wrong side of the Wabash. But Gwendoline Brooks had been named to Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the National Agenda for the Eighties (get mugged, call a cop; need a little vision for what promised to be a letdown decade, you want somebody who knows their Modernist verse). Besides, this was a university, so all poets welcome even without a hook, long as they’re willing to take potluck with the campus rag.

Ms. Brooks cheerfully indulged my half-assed inquiries about poet-ing and the quirks of my aging Radio Shack recorder. The Chicago poetess once taught writing to the Blackstone Rangers -- one of Chicago’s more incorrigible gangs -- so dealing with a technosocially awkward Hoosier boy was about as daunting as rhyming “cat.”

I was no Gwendoline Brooks, and was struggling for a lead when I spotted Warner Barnett heading for my desk, sans Tab. The little prof usually had a magenta can screwed into his paw whenever he drifted through the newsroom running deadline traps. Unless he’d read the most recent research on saccharin and bladder cancer, Warner likely had something specific in mind.

“You’ve been a busy man, Michael.” A manila folder was where the Tab should have been. “No complaints – you’ve really been cranking out the good stuff this semester – but this is the first time I’ve been able to catch you since Dr. Lloyd told me you wouldn’t be returning after the break.”

“I’m not dropping out,” I managed. “I started electives my senior year at South – you know I’m a hometown guy. Thing is, I’m one course short – I screwed up on math credits, and I’m doing it by extension.”

“You already have something lined up?” Warner asked.

“Uh, no. I’m putting out feelers, and I feel like I oughtta stick around home.”

“Well, I hope maybe this might help.” Warner dropped the folder next to the video display terminal that had replaced my typewriter. I peeked inside, and he grinned as I looked up. “You have a real knack for this. I’m here for any help you might need. Well. I’ll let you get back to it. We’ll talk.”

I waited until Warner returned to his office to review the letter. “…Over the past two years, Dodge has shown true diligence, resourcefulness, and objectivity in discharging any assignment offered him. His writing is polished, and he is doggedly dedicated to reportorial accuracy...”

So empowered, I took a bracing slug of orange Nehi and returned to my MDT. Stopping only as I heard the nauseating sound of my Radio Shack chowing down on cheap cassette tape. Glancing at Warner’s closed door, I yanked open my center drawer, located a No. 1 Ticonderoga Yellow, and fled to the men’s room to restore the Brooks Tape and examine the envelope I’d dislodged from under the desk.

**

“So there was an envelope within an envelope,” Craig frowned. I flipped open the pizza box as the end credits rolled.

Craig’s apartment was mid-point between campus and the home I currently shared with an older couple who’d conceived me some 21 years before. We’d hit up a nerdy friendship junior year, and a couple times a week, I’d pop in for a large with pepperoni, the 3:30 Bob Newhart rerun, and some shared anxieties to fuel or destroy my appetite for dinner with the folks.

“An empty envelope,” I amended. “Looks old. And get this.”

I handed him the larger manila envelope, cheap with virgin mucilage, yellowing Scotch tape still clinging to the corners. A blonde hair trapped under one broken strip.

“5D5-68,” Craig muttered, squinting at the red inscription on the left-hand corner through his wire-rims. He shooed the burly black cat I’d never come to know by name. “Is that a serial number? Maybe some kinda government file number?”

“Maybe,” I said, squeezing open the smaller white envelope. “There’s a faint circle inside with some flecks of black ink. Like the letter or something left an impression, and the ink was so heavy it pulled away when Cassie or whoever took it out. Like a logo or a crest. Yeah, see – you can see ridges or points or something around the circle. Like an agency seal.”

“Five-D-Five -- sounds like a spy thing,” Craig ventured as his disgruntled feline abandoned the pizza for a fuzzy pink mouse. Cat squeaked the toy in protest. “Why you think somebody hid it under your desk?”

“Cause it wasn’t always my desk.”    

**                                                                                                                                               

Six things happened on March 26, 1979.

1)     I had an evening shift at the Honey Creek Mall theater – The China Syndrome was still holding its own after a couple weeks, though Hair had opened just OK over the weekend. Hippies were passé, while nuclear plant sitings were up, but it was Monday nonetheless, and

2)     Nobody was going to the movies, anyway, because the Big Show was tonight. The 41st NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship matchup between ISU and Michigan State. In Terre Haute in the late ‘70s, that meant Larry Bird. Larry Bird v. a kid named Magic Johnson, no less. A victory parade was taking shape downtown in anticipation of our boys bringing home the prize. However,

3)     They didn’t, and Hell reigned on Wabash Avenue that night. The victory procession kicked off with the lead cop fleeing the scene as a throng of disappointed Hauteans performed a synchronized stomp on the hood of his patrol car. Windows shattered from Schultz’s and Baskin Robbins to The Gift Shoppe and the Fannie Mae, and a bonfire sprouted in the center of the parade route as the local rock station’s van blasted whatever went great with chaos. Meanwhile,

4)     Indiana froze over while Hell chilled downtown. Temps plunged into the negatives in a drunkard’s line from Indy to Louisville and from Ohio to the Banks of the Wabash, where Sycamore boosters were wreaking retail havoc over 11 lousy points and I watched with mounting panic as ice rimed and then framed and then laminated the plate glass flanking the box office. Because

5)     I had probably killed Woody and Bernie Barnett. At about 4, I’d released said golden retrievers into the fenced side yard of Warner’s snazzy south-side home, after witnessing a disgusting display of kibble-wolfing. I did a touchless tour of the premises, including Warner’s knotty-pined den, lined with photos of Warner with Cronkite and Huntley with Brinkley and other journalistic icons. I stumbled over a well-gnawed rubber Snoopy next to his desk, setting off a shrill squeak and upsetting a wastebasket full of dead Tabs and a stray Diet Rite (an at-home taste test?). I fled the scene even though Warner wouldn’t be back from his Indianapolis conference until Tuesday p.m.

Roughly seven hours later, I ushered the last (and only) loser out into the parking lot and fishtailed into the night. I burst into Warner’s casa, and rushed to the now opaque patio slider, nearly dislocating my shoulder in the effort to ascertain canine mortality.

“Fuck, fuck,” I chanted as I rocked the door, listened for Woody’s hypothermic whimpers, for Bernie’s desperate clawings. I scampered outside, ripping my General Cinemas blazer in a driveway move that raised a mean gluteal bruise. “Fuck, fuck,” I wept as I came up against the solid 10-foot fence that completely encircled Woody and Bernie’s icy graveyard.

Back inside, I nuked a Tupperware bowl of water and located a Bic lighter next to the sink. Working the lock, the recess where aluminum met steel, I pled obscenely with the gods of lost hope. I heard a pop and jerked the handle, landing on my bruised ass as a wall of subarctic air took my breath. 

Two shapes emerged from the darkness, racing about the yard in mutual pursuit. The first one knocked me back on my battered rump, and the second joined him lavishing on the stranger who’d dispensed Purina a few hours back. Then, Woody or Bernie plunged back into the night.

“Get the fuck in here!” I bellowed.

He trotted back into the house, a black-and-white object in his jaws. He dropped his rubber beagle at my feet. I reached for the toy, but Bernie or Woody snatched it away and disappeared back though the door. Grief and relief gave way to semi-coherent swearing.

**

I didn’t find out about the seventh thing until the following afternoon.

“They found her off the side of 63 just north of town, in a ditch,” Barry Hoffman noted glumly as he liberated a Grape Nehi from the Statesman’s ancient machine. “Car was about a quarter mile down the road -- they think it broke down and she was trying to walk back to the 41 ramp.”

“It was like 20 below,” I breathed. “The hell was she thinking?”

The assistant editor shrugged – he was a man of few words, and had seemingly run through his morning allocation. He had to save a few for Cassie Cheatham’s obituary.

I didn’t know Cassie all that well. She was very serious, and back then, serious people had very little truck with me. She’d sat next to me in Ethics of Journalism a semester prior, and we’d split the cost of a ream of yellow dog paper only the week before.

I settled in at my desk, which was clear save my big green Selectric, my trusty Radio Shack and a stack of bargain cassettes, three or four stacks of very loosely related documentation, and the Robert B. Parker paperbacks I’d received gratis as The Summer Statesman’s default book critic.

“Thing is.” Barry had followed me, and apparently was working on his word count. “Cassie left a message. Things got pretty fucked up last night, you know? Lisa came in out of the crazy to crash in her office, and it was on her desk. Cops got it now, but she wanted to show it to me and Barnett, soooo...”

Phones were only for phoning at that point, and photos were made the old-fashioned way, with light and chemicals and time. Barry passed me a freshly developed 8X10 of a typewritten note.

Lisa;

I’m heading home, and I won’t be back. Something happened downtown, and between the frat boys and jocks, stressing about finals, and the general insanity, I just can’t take it. Give Mike D. the story on the new bio lab – he’s good at that stuff. Sorry.

Cassie

I glanced at Cassie’s desk, where a half-inch of pulpy yellow stock was stacked tidily next to her typewriter. I still had two-thirds of my supply. Barry gently tugged the photo back and retreated to Paste-Up.

I was about 300 words into my own piece on freshman depression in when Lisa Stutz appeared at my shoulder. “Hey, Mike, you pretty free right now? Guess you know about Cassie, and Barnett’s got me covering all that shit that came down last night.”

“Hey, whatever you need,” I said, too hastily. “You OK?”

Lisa shrugged – the emotional currency of a New Generation. She synopsized the bio lab assignment, and handed me Cheatham’s first draft for a second story, to “clean up.”

“Only three things seem certain in life – taxes, death and finals. Several students offered The Statesman tips for surviving the pressures of the late fall crunch…”

Nobody was winning a laureate this week, though Cassie’s final story possessed a chilling irony on several levels.

**

And then, eight months later, Craig’s cat caught the proverbial mouse, and I pondered the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. Quoting Sherlock Holmes was just one piece of the 500-piece puzzle that was my persistent celibacy.

**

Warner Barnett smiled, loafers propped on his blotter. It was time for that talk he’d promised, but not the one he expected. “The what?”

“‘The Adventure of the Silver Blaze’ -- one of the first mysteries I ever read. Remember the night of the NCAA finals, the night of the Big Freeze, the night you were at that conference in Indy? There was a curious canine incident that night.”

“Something happen with the boys?”

“Not Woodward or Bernstein. Snoopy,” I clarified. “After I let the guys out for the evening, I tripped over Bernie’s squeak toy. Ah, in your den.”

Warner blinked, but that was all. And enough.

“So around midnight, I raced over to let Woody and Bernie back in. Had a problem with the patio door, but they were fine. In fact, Bernie ran back outside to retrieve his toy Snoopy. Which I’d locked inside the house about eight hours earlier. Somebody’d been there while I was at work. Somebody who cared enough to bring the dogs inside to warm up, but who knew I was coming back later. The Monday cold snap came up suddenly, so it makes sense you might have come back from Indy to spend the night in your own bed. But, then, why not call me at the theater?”

Warner templed his fingers like I was pitching a story on counterfeit parking decals.

“Maybe,” I stammered, “because you were going to come home all along. Why sneak into your own house? Maybe cause you were meeting somebody there. Cassie.”

“That’s a leap,” the professor chided.

“When I tripped over Snoopy, I knocked over your wastebasket. Which had three or four empty Tab cans in it. And one Diet Rite. I thought you’d heard about the Tab cancer thing, but I’ve never seen you drink anything but since. But if you were just going to have a girl over, why me for an alibi? Because something bigger was going on. Something that wound up with Cassie dead in a ditch.”

“She left a letter,” Warner noted. “She was heading home.”

“You know about the Oxford comma, right? People like you use a comma to separate all items in a sentence. In your letter of reference for me, you talked about my ‘true diligence, resourcefulness, OXFORD COMMA and objectivity.’ Cassie wasn’t an Oxford comma gal. Lemme read you an excerpt from her last Statesman story. Only three things seem certain in life – taxes, death NO COMMA and finals. And a passage from Cassie Cheatham’s farewell letter to Lisa: Between the frat boys and jocks, stressing about finals and finding a job, and the general insanity around here, OXFORD COMMA I just can’t take it. I think you came over here in Cassie’s car, typed that goodbye note, then dumped her. You weren’t far off the 41 exit, so you hiked back to the hotel at the bottom of the ramp. Then called a cab the next day in time to ‘get home.’”

Warner reached for a pink can. “That’s four Ws and an H. Now, why?”

I brought out the manila envelope, explained its provenance. “How’d it start? Cassie pitch some story on the old campus protest movement? Where are they now kinda thing? You turned her down, she wondered why?”

Warner drained his saccharine bomb, and smiled sadly. “Never tell a reporter no.”

I tapped the lower corner of the envelope. “I wondered about this blond hair trapped under the tape. I wasn’t your first dogsitter, was I? What did Cassie do? Poke around your den, find the letter? Then, what, blackmail you?”

Warner grimaced. “She wanted an interview.”

That sat in the air for a moment. “And when she wouldn’t give it up, you canceled your conference plans, invited her to the house when you knew I was at work, and…”

“Offered her a couple semesters’ tuition to drop things. She had the original letter and…”

“The manuscript? Cassie’d gone halfsies on a ream of yellow dog a week before she died, but she went through hers a lot quicker than me. It would’ve made a great book, much better than ruining you in the campus paper.”

“She wouldn’t take the money,” he answered, deflating.

“I guess you taught her too well.”

**

Warner stuck around town after the cops tracked down his Indianapolis hotel forfeiture and put him at the Wabash Stay Inn Monday night. He opted to spend the rest of his tenure at the Terre Haute pen over chancing freedom as a traitor.

I never found out precisely what was in his FBI letter, but a day at the campus library, cranking through The Statesman’s 1968-70 archive and stalking the history stacks filled most of the gaps. Warner’d celebrated his 10th anniversary at the university in ‘78, and the campus Students for a Democratic Society suffered key setbacks as the ‘60s took its tie-dyed bow — I suspected amid Hoover’s whackadoodle infiltration of the SDS and its long-haired comrades. SDS-68, not 5D5. Might even have been Cassie’s working title.

As J. Ed might have put it, get mugged, call a hippie; want a rat, trap one, grant it immunity, and release it into a nest of idealistic, naive J-school kids.

Gwendoline Brooks capped our interview those 45 years ago with a bit of doggerel that didn’t make it into the Sycamore. It wasn’t her own, but instead, the creation of one Smokey Robinson.

“You want to hear the shortest poem I know?” Illinois’ Poet Laureate inquired with a conspiratorial smile. “Yes, no, maybe so.”

Mr. Robinson was simply tapping into those dual adolescent neuroses -- love and uncertainty. I’d realize eventually Ms. Brooks was talking a different kind of passion, that priceless uncertainty that would sustain and plague me over the next 31 years, on and off “the beat.”

After all, she was a teacher first, doing what she did instinctively on a Cabrini Green stoop or a university stage or a second-floor bench in Dreiser Hall.

Did I ultimately make the grade? Maybe so.