Flowering Judas(85)

Suddenly, the woman’s head went up. She looked around, from one of the car’s windows to the next. Gregor stood very still, he wasn’t sure why. He must not have stood still enough. The woman put a stiff plastic card into the book she was reading and then put the book down on the dashboard. Then she leaned over and got something out of the glove compartment.

What happened next happened so fast that Gregor was never able to remember it properly, never mind explain it to anybody else. One moment, he was standing still next to a weak tree, thinking he was entirely invisible. The next, the door of the car popped open, the woman inside jumped out, and there was the clear backfire of a bullet going off in the air. Less than a second later, the bullet hit the ground near his feet, and he jumped.

“Damn,” he said.

“Who are you?” the woman said. “Come out of there. Come out where I can see you.”

Gregor thought that if he really had been a mugger, or a crazed homicidal maniac combing the bushes for his next serial kill, this woman would never have made it off this access road alive. She was holding the gun as if it were a Popsicle stick.

“Come out of there,” she said again. “Who are you? What do you want?”

Gregor swore under his breath, for real this time. “For God’s sake, stop shooting that thing,” he said, moving closer to her through what was still very tall grass. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Who are you?” the woman demanded again.

By now, Gregor was out on the access road proper. The woman had to be able to see that he was nearly as old as she was, and probably in far less good physical shape. She was squinting at him through the darkness.

“My name is Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said, “and—”

“Oh,” the woman said, letting the gun drop to her side. “Oh, my God. You are Gregor Demarkian. I’m so sorry. I could have hurt you. I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I have to be so careful, I mean out here, you know, you can never tell who’s going to come along, that’s why I got this thing, but I’ve never actually used it before, so—”

“I could tell you’d never actually used it before.”

“Oh, well. Actually. I did use it once. I took it to a firing range. You know. To see how it was. I fired it there.”

“Did you hit anything?”

“I think I hit the floor. I hurt my wrist.”

“Of course you did,” Gregor said. He got closer to the car and looked inside. Even without any lights at all, it was obvious that the car was loaded down with stuff. Clothes were piled high in the backseat. Books were everywhere. “My God,” Gregor said. “You’re living in this car.”

The woman was quiet for a long time. “Only temporarily,” she said finally. “Only until the cold weather hits. I’ve got almost enough money to rent a place for the entire winter. I only need a couple of more weeks.”

“A couple of more weeks,” Gregor said. “You’ve got a job?”

“Of course I’ve got a job,” the woman said. “I’ve got two of them. If I’ve got any luck, I’ll have three for the fall term. I teach English.”

“At a high school?”

“At Mattatuck–Harvey Community College,” the woman said. “Also at Pelham University. That’s a private place, down the road. It doesn’t pay nearly so well.”

“You’re a college teacher and you can’t afford to rent an apartment?”

“I’m an adjunct,” the woman said. “That means I’m only part time. Except with teaching it isn’t like part time is most places. They don’t divide your hours by the hours for full time and give you that percentage of a full-time salaray. I get paid forty-one hundred dollars to teach each course at Mattatuck–Harvey, and nineteen hundred to teach each course at Pelham—”

“That’s what? A week? A month?”

“That’s the course,” the woman said. “The entire course.”

“This Pelham University place pays you less than two thousand dollars to teach an entire course?” Gregor said. “Over, what is that, three months?”

“Fourteen weeks,” the woman said. “Three classes a week of an hour each, plus office hours every week, plus whatever it takes to do prep and correcting. At Mattatuck–Harvey, it’s sixteen weeks. It used to be all right, though, because I used to be able to teach three courses at Mattatuck–Harvey every term, and with the two at Pelham I’d just about make it. But there’s a union   at Mattatuck–Harvey, and they got a rule passed that nobody can teach more than two classes a term in the entire community college system, so I can’t even drive out to Binghamton and teach there. So I’m making some accommodations.”