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“Modern American literature.”
“There hasn’t been much of that lately,” he suggested. “But then times are a changin’. When I was at Stanford, there were no women on the campus, even at night.”
Kelley was surprised that John had been to Stanford. “What degree did you take, sir?”
“John,” he insisted. “It’s bad enough being old, without being reminded of the fact by a young woman.” She laughed. “I studied English literature, like you. Mark Twain, Herman Melville, James Thurber, Longfellow, but I’m afraid I flunked out. Never took my degree, which I still bitterly regret.”
Kelley gave him another look and wondered if the car would ever move out of third gear. She was just about to ask why he flunked out, when he said, “And who are now considered to be the modern giants of American literature, dare I ask?”
“Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, and Faulkner,” she replied.
“Do you have a favorite?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the road ahead.
“Yes I do. I read The Grapes of Wrath when I was twelve years old, and I consider it to be one of the great novels of the twentieth century. ‘And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.’”
“I’m impressed,” he said. “Although my favorite will always be Of Mice and Men.”
“‘Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella,’” said Kelley, “‘Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.’”
“I don’t think you’ll be flunking your exams,” said John with a chuckle, which gave Kelley the opportunity to begin her interrogation.
“So what did you do after you left Stanford?”
“My father wanted me to work on his farm back in Monterey, which I managed for a couple of years, but it just wasn’t me, so I rebelled and got a job as a tour guide at Lake Tahoe.”
“That must have been fun.”
“Sure was. Lots of dames, but the pay was lousy. So my friend Ed and I decided to travel up and down the California coast collecting biological specimens, but that didn’t turn out to be very lucrative either.”
“Did you try and look for something more permanent after that?” asked Kelley.
“No, can’t pretend I did. Well, at least not until war broke out, when I got a job as a war correspondent on the Herald Tribune.”
“Wow, that must have been exciting,” said Kelley. “Right there among the action, and then reporting everything you’d seen to the folks back home.”
“That was the problem. I got too close to the action and ended up with a whole barrel of shotgun up my backside, and had to be shipped back to the States. So I lost my job at the Trib, along with my first wife.”
“Your first wife?”
“Did I forget to mention Carol?” he said. “She lasted thirteen years before she was replaced by Gwyn, who only managed five. But to do her justice, which is quite difficult, she gave me two great sons.”
“So what happened once you’d fully recovered from your wounds?”
“I began working with some of the immigrants who were flooding into California after the war. I’m from German stock myself, so I knew what they were going through, and felt a lot of sympathy for them.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing ever since?”
“No, no. When Johnson decided to invade Vietnam, the Trib offered me my old job back. Seems they couldn’t find too many people who considered being shipped off to ’Nam a good career move.”
Kelley laughed. “But at least this time you survived.”
“Well, I would have done if the CIA hadn’t asked me to work for them at the same time.”
“Am I allowed to ask what you did for them?” she said, looking more closely at the old man.
“Wrote one version of what was going on in ’Nam for the Trib, while letting the CIA know what was really happening. But then I had an advantage over my colleagues that only the CIA knew about.”
Kelley would have asked how come, but John answered her question before she could speak.
