no,” exclaimed Mrs. Kills Horses, her long earrings swinging with her side-to-side headshake. “Just if you are working a job, you know, like waitressing or something.”
“I wouldn’t know how to do that,” Cash said. She was already out the door.
“See you Friday! 6:30,” Mrs. Kills Horses called after her.
Cash walked quickly out of the administration building and took a big gulp of fall air. Being in the brick school buildings, sitting in the classrooms, even those with large windows where she could watch the clouds move across the sky, left Cash short of breath, edgy. She took another deep breath before heading resolutely across campus to Weld Hall.
Cash paused before knocking at the oak door of Professor LeRoy. She didn’t know what to say to most of the people here on campus. They talked a lot, mostly about nothing. She was used to men who knew what kind of fertilizer to put on a corn field or whose main conversation was about when to spread manure on the plowed fields. And, always, the price of grain on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. The men she knew spent little time talking and a lot of time working. The men here on campus, their work was to talk about books, authors, ideas. But rather than talk about the day’s assigned reading material, class discussions often veered off into anti-war discussions or debates about civil rights. Cash wasn’t sure what either of them had to do with her.
Just as she raised her fist to knock on the door, a short bearded man wearing tortoise-shell glasses opened it. Cash stepped back.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Professor LeRoy said, speaking with a rapid cadence, with an accent Cash had never heard before. “Come in, come in. I saw the shadow of your feet under the door. That’s how I knew you were there. I don’t have you in a class. Are you a freshman? Take a seat. What can I help you with?”
Without giving Cash a chance to answer, Professor LeRoy plowed on. “Great weather we’re having, isn’t it? When I moved here from New York everyone told me to appreciate the fall, that the winters would be real kickers. They weren’t kidding. Just a matter of time before the snow falls, right? So what can I do for you? You want to drop your class? Switch teachers? In my experience, one teacher is as good as the next, present company exempted. Ha.” He took a breath while shuffling papers on his desk from one pile to another.
In that space Cash blurted out, “I want to test out of English 101.”
Professor LeRoy stopped shuffling papers mid-air and stared at her.
“I’m a straight-A student.”
“College is a little different than high school. I’ve been teaching here for fifteen years, and the English teachers at these farm schools have barely heard of Shakespeare, let alone Tennessee Williams or Truman Capote. Even with straight A’s, I don’t know how you can expect to pass a college-level test without taking the course.”
“I can do it.”
“Who is your teacher this quarter?”
“Mr. Horace.”
“You don’t like him? Other students love having him. He grades on the curve. Makes it easy to pass. You don’t want to get up that early, is that it?”
“I was told students had the option to test out if they wanted. I want to test out.”
LeRoy shuffled more papers. Cash watched him silently. She wondered to herself what it was about her request that was driving Mrs. Kills Horses and now Professor LeRoy crazy.
“Most of the students who make this request were the top of their high school classes.”
More silence. More shuffling of papers.
Cash lit up a Marlboro. LeRoy pushed a green glass ashtray across his desk. Smoke filled the air. Some of the anxiety left Cash’s chest.
“You’re a freshman?”
“Yes. Do I have to fill out some papers or something to take the test?”
“Well.” He moved more papers around, pulled a drawer open and brought more papers out. “This is the form to request the test.”
Cash reached for the paper. Dean LeRoy put it down on his desk. “You sure you want to do this?”
“What happens if I fail it?” Cash asked.
“You would have to continue in Mr. Horace’s class. Did you talk to him about this? Does he know you want to test out?”
“No. I talked to Mrs. Kills Horses. She gave me your name and sent me over here.”
“Well, I don’t know that it’s such a good idea, but if you have your mind set on it, I suppose you can give it a try. You can fill out the form and then schedule a time to take the test. You would have to sit in my classroom and take it. Take it under observation.”
“Today?”
“No, no, no. Fill out the form, sleep on it. Come back tomorrow and let me know if you still want to do it.”
Cash put out her cigarette and reached across his desk for the form. She picked a pen up off his desk and began to fill it out. LeRoy stood up and opened the window behind his desk to let some of the smoke out. He sat back down and shuffled more papers. Cash pushed the filled-out form toward him. “I’ll stop back tomorrow for you to tell me what day I can take the test.” She turned and almost ran out of the building, taking big gulps of air.
She walked at a fast clip all the way to her Ranchero three blocks away. She jumped in, turned the key in the ignition and drove away. She used the cigarette lighter to light up. She drove straight to the Casbah, her home away from home. It was too early in the day for the brothers, Ole and Carl, to be there. None of the other regulars were there either, except ol’ man Willie.
Cash realized she had never been at the bar in the morning. She usually arrived later in the evening when Willie, more often than not, was passed out in the farthest back oak booth. This early in the morning, he was sitting up at the bar, hunched over a glass of 3.2 tap beer. He looked at Cash, tipped his glass at her and said, “Oh, what is the world coming to when the young ones show up for breakfast?” He took a big gulp.
Shorty Nelson, owner and bartender, stood behind the bar, a white towel slung over his shoulder. His shirt actually looked ironed. He looked neat and put together. Not how he normally looked at the end of the night. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you s’posed to be in school?”
“Give me a Bud.” Cash pushed money across the polished counter. “Those folks drive me crazy.”
“You drive me crazy,” Willie slurred, wrapping a gray-haired arm around Cash’s waist and pulling her against his side. The smell of stale armpits mixed with morning-after beer almost made Cash gag as she pushed away and jerked out of his arms.
“Creep!”
Willie rubbed his thigh, close to his crotch, with the hand that wasn’t holding his beer glass. He grinned, yellow tobacco-stained teeth appeared beneath his Hitler-style mustache. For a split second Cash wondered how, in his constantly drunken state, he managed to maintain the perfect square above his upper lip, but then an involuntary shudder shook her body as she noticed the bulge in his pants, the pants still stained from last
