Cadillac Cathedral by Jack Hodgins Page A

referred to as “that balk-eyed simpleton camped in my sewing room.” Herbie should have got out here for his own safety but was probably too terrified to think straight.
    And why had he agreed to wait? He felt the fool, sitting here like this, a prisoner to Peterson’s whim, Peterson’s poor judgement. He should have gone on without him.
    He started the engine but turned it off immediately and sat where he was for long enough to watch a pair of yellow kayaks slide past: two women, both with long pale hair, one working a little harder than the other. He could hear their voices even for a while after they’d slipped out of sight beyond a rocky point.
    He must have driven past this spot a hundred times in all the years since he’d last stopped on this gravel lot. This had been immediately after high school. He’d paused here to debate with himself about continuing south to the city’s vocational school for a year-long course in auto-mechanics. It was his father’s idea. “If you have to end up working for the goddam logging outfit I don’t want you up in the woods where you’ll get yourself killed. Get some skill with machines and you’ll have a chance at a job in the shop. Mechanics don’t get killed by widow-makers falling on their heads.”
    He hadn’t reminded his father that Bobby O’Hara had died after being pinned beneath a truck that slipped off the hoist.
    Still, he’d convinced himself to give vocational school a try.
    Along with the practical courses in mechanics, he’d had no choice but to take an “English” course, presumably so that he could read directions attached to new parts he would be installing in trucks. But they were expected to read books. Forced to. There was no James Lee Burke on the course. Well, Burke would have been only a young fellow himself at the time. There were no crime novels of any sort assigned, unless you included the story of a sailor deserting a sinking ship to save his own neck when he ought to have stayed to help passengers escape. Difficult, meaty stuff. He’d got through it, but what he remembered best was the depth of the young man’s guilt. “Why did Jim jump?” the teacher wanted to know. They were all capable of answering that one: to avoid drowning when the ship went down . But — was it cowardice or only good sense? Apparently it was the youngman’s job to go down with the ship. Of course answering the tougher exam questions meant having to read to the end.
    Unlike Lord Jim and the other books he was required to read, the mechanics courses turned out to be, for him, almost as straightforward and simple as the arithmetic and basic science he’d learned in elementary school. Even so, he might have jumped ship himself and dropped out in the midst of the fall term if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of Myrtle Birdsong in the cafeteria, and learned from others that she was taking a secretarial course. Probably so she could work for her father’s business. Whenever he’d seen her after that, she’d been with a clutch of other girls, probably all taking the same courses. He’d worked up the courage to approach her once, but had backed out at the last minute. She’d peered at him as though she suspected there was something familiar about him. There was some giggling behind him as he hurried away.
    He’d wondered if the secretarial girls had been required to read the same books as he had. He’d imagined that he and Myrtle could have talked about Jim. She might have had less trouble keeping track of the last half of the book, or understanding why the young hero had more or less asked to be executed at the end. But someone had probably decided that boys learning to take cars apart and put them back together would enjoy a story of adventure on the high seas — however dense — more than they’d enjoy the books given to the secretarial girls to read.
    Unfortunately, the next time he’d caught sight of her he’d been crossing the parking lot with a group of