Page 18 - WTP VOl. XI #1

Exploitation (continued from preceding page)
There was no question which two lines stopped her cold. Even now, with the poem altered by the name-change, the dramatic advantage of those lines is unmistakable. No amount of additional detail in a dozen lines I cut would have provided enough context for those lines to lose their intent. Even if I had included who was driving or where she was sitting next to him in what was commonly called the death seat when the car had struck the bridge, the speed and angle perfectly aligned for ending her life. Even if I had managed to simply not type another word to her after my acknowledge- ment of guilt.
early, spilling us into the just-beginning snow two blocks from our Greek-lettered house, standing in front of the cheap apartments where locals lived as if he wanted that maintenance man to believe we were not the spoiled sons of distant fathers. And maybe, because Calvin kept repeating how well we’d cleaned, his bare hands gesturing in the flurries he was already enlisting, his war victim future so close I need his wife not to loathe that poem before I can celebrate our small, unimport- ant work.”
It has taken fourteen years for me to try to fully ad- dress that concern.
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Near the end of my first year of work at the Penn State branch campus, the National Guard shooting happened at Kent State, where I had begun tak-
ing classes part-time in order to attain a Ph.D. The shooting occurred about a hundred yards from where I’d attended a Faulkner seminar. I missed
all of it. Minutes before the shooting began, I had boarded a bus that took me to an off-campus park- ing lot where I retrieved my car for the seventy-five- mile trip home.
The following morning, the academic coordinator I reported to stood outside of his office as if he’d been expecting me to pass by. “So,” he said, “it fi- nally happened.”
Though there was no question what he meant, I said, “What’s that?”
“The protestors. Some of them got what was coming to them.”
I fingered the keys in my pocket like a blind man choosing the one that would make the best weapon. “They were murdered,” I said.
“Really?” he said. “What about the shots that were fired first at the National Guard?”
“That didn’t happen.”
“But you’d have to admit there’s another side of this story, wouldn’t you? I’m sure you’d agree there are a great many contradictions?”
“The killers are lying.”
He turned away. He paused and looked back as if he’d forgotten something. The campus didn’t close. My composition students struggled with argument and
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Despite my compromised admission of guilt, I nevertheless wrote about the email exchange incident as well, her husband’s name now altered in nonfiction as if that excused me. There would be only a slim chance that she or any of my old fraternity brothers would read what I’d written without the unlikely indirect help of a Google search of my name. The opening paragraphs, now fifteen years old, are as telltale as Mike Rogers’ sandpapered tattoo:
“This morning, as if the past had unwrapped its greasy sack of regret, a woman I haven’t seen for more than forty years tells me she’s read my poem that uses her dead husband’s name, making me expect her curses for describing how we worked as punishment, how, after we swept floors and hauled trash to give us humility we both needed, Calvin and I, sober on Saturday, were noisy with relief, and yes, pride that we’d finished ten hours for our case of petty, bad behavior.
"Because it was February, we’d worked something we called the 'light shift,' returning our tools in near-dark and standing, for once, among men who worked each weekend at jobs they’d never fore- seen as boys, laborers who did what was neces- sary, the work we wouldn’t be repeating, not if
we used our brains to earn the future’s comfort. Those men huddled inside cars they idled toward warmth, windshields clearing from the bottom
in rising moons. From the back of campus, it was sixteen blocks to where our friends were already lively with beer and music, and whether it was the twilight cold or the simple solidarity of work, one car door opened as 'Where to?' offer.
"The two of us crowded beside that man on a stiff bench seat, the heater full-blast on our feet while Calvin gave directions that stopped that driver
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