Springheel Jack.
I saw those two words in the
paper this morning and my God, how they take me back. All that was eight years
ago, almost to the day. Once, while it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide
TV - the Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background
behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out right away. They called
long-distance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation; he was all bluff and
hearty and man-to-man. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want
to come home. I was enchanted.
Enchanted by that dark and
mist-blown strawberry spring, and by the shadow of violent death that walked
through it on those nights eight years ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack.
In New England they call it a
strawberry spring. No one knows why; it's just a phrase the old-timers use.
They say it happens once every eight or ten years. What happened at New Sharon
Teachers' College that particular strawberry spring. . . there may be a cycle
for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they've never said.
At New Sharon, the strawberry
spring began on 16 March 1968. The coldest winter in twenty years broke on that
day. It rained and you could smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches.
The snow, which had been thirty-five inches deep in places, began to melt and
the campus walks ran with slush. The Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had
been kept sharp and clear-cut for two months by the sub-zero temperatures, at
last began to sag and slouch. The caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the
Tep fraternity house cried melted tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall
lost its frozen feathers and its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in
places.
And when night came the fog came
with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and
thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked through it like counting fingers and
it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil
War cannons. It made things seem out of joint, strange, magical. The unwary
traveller would step out of the juke-thumping, brightly lit confusion of the
Grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and
instead he would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white
drifting fog, the only sound his own footsteps and the soft drip of water from
the ancient gutters. You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo and Sam go
hurrying past, or to turn and see that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced
by a foggy panorama of moors and yew trees and perhaps a Druid-circle or a
sparkling fairy ring.
The jukebox played 'Love Is Blue'
that year. It played 'Hey, Jude' endlessly, endlessly. It played 'Scarborough
Fair.
And at ten minutes after eleven
on that night a junior named John Dancey on his way back to his dormitory began
screaming into the fog, dropping books on and between the sprawled legs of the
dead girl lying in a shadowy corner of the Animal Sciences parking lot, her
throat cut from ear to ear but her eyes open and almost seeming to sparkle as
if she had just successfully pulled off the funniest joke of her young life -
Dancey, an education major and a speech minor, screamed and screamed and
screamed.
The next day was overcast and
sullen, and we went to classes with questions eager in our mouths - who? why?
when do you think they'll get him? And always the final thrilled question: Did
you know her? Did you know her?
Yes, I had an art class with her.
Yes, one of my room-mate 's
friends dated her last term.
Yes, she asked me for a light
once in the Grinder. She was at the next table.
Yes, Yes, I
Yes. . . yes. . . oh yes, I
We all knew her. Her name was
Gale Cerman (pronounced Kerr-man), and she was an art major. She wore granny
glasses and had a good figure. She was well liked but her room-mates had hated
her. She had never gone out much even though she was one of the most
promiscuous girls on campus. She was ugly but cute. She had been a vivacious
girl who talked little and smiled seldom. She had been pregnant and she had had
leukemia. She was a lesbian who had been murdered by her boy-friend. It was
strawberry spring, and on the morning of 17 March we all knew Gale Cerman.
Half a dozen State Police cars
crawled on to the campus, most of them parked in front of Judith Franklin Hall,
where the Cerman girl had lived. On my way past there to my ten o clock class I
was asked to show my student ID. I was clever. I showed him the one without the
fangs.
'Do you carry a knife?' the
policeman asked cunningly.
'Is it about Gale Cerman?' I
asked, after I told him that the most lethal thing on my person was a
rabbit's-foot key chain.
'What makes you ask?' He pounced.
I was five minutes late to class.
It was strawberry spring and no
one walked by themselves through the half-academical, half-fantastical campus
that night. The fog had come again, smelling of the sea, quiet and deep.
Around nine o'clock my room-mate
burst into our room, where I had been busting my brains on a Milton essay since
seven. 'They caught him,' he said. 'I heard it over at the Grinder.'
'From who?'
'I don't know. Some guy. Her
boy4riend did it. His name is Carl Amalara.'
I settled back, relieved and
disappointed. With a name like that it had to be true. A lethal and sordid
little crime of passion.
'Okay,' I said. 'That's good.'
He left the room to spread the
news down the hall. I reread my Milton essay, couldn't figure out what I had
been trying to say, tore it up and started again.
It was in the papers the next
day. There was an incongruously neat picture of Amalara - probably a
high-school graduation picture - and it showed a rather sad-looking boy with an
olive complexion and dark eyes and pockmarks on his nose. The boy had not
confessed yet, but the evidence against him was strong. He and Gale Cerman had
argued a great deal in the last month or so, and had broken up the week before.
Amalara's roomie said he had been 'despondent'. In a footlocker under his bed,
police had found a seven-inch hunting knife from L. L. Bean's and a picture of
the girl that had apparently been cut up with a pair of shears.
Beside Amalara's picture was one
of Gale Cerman. It blurrily showed a dog, a peeling lawn flamingo, and a rather
mousy blonde girl wearing spectacles. An uncomfortable smile had turned her
lips up and her eyes were squinted. One hand was on the dog's head. It was true
then. It had to be true.
The fog came again that night,
not on little cat's feet but in an improper silent sprawl. I walked that night.
I had a headache and I walked for air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the
spring that was slowly wiping away the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches
of last year's grass bare and uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother.
For me, that was one of the most
beautiful nights I can remember. The people I passed under the haloed
streetlights were murmuring shadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers,
walking with hands and eyes linked. The melting snow dripped and ran, dripped
and ran, and from every dark storm drain the sound of the sea drifted up, a
dark winter sea now strongly ebbing.
I walked until nearly midnight,
until I was thoroughly mildewed, and I passed many shadows, heard many
footfalls clicking dreamily off down the winding paths. Who is to say that one
of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as
Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no
faces.
The next morning the clamour in
the hall woke me. I blundered out to see who had been drafted, combing my hair
with both hands and running the fuzzy caterpillar that had craftily replaced my
tongue across the dry roof of my mouth.
'He got another one,' someone
said to me, his face pallid with excitement. 'They had to let him go.'
'Who go?'
'Amalara!' someone else said
gleefully. 'He was sitting in jail when it happened.
When what happened?' I asked
patiently. Sooner or later I would get it. I was sure of that.
'The guy killed somebody else
last night. And now they're hunting all over for it.'
'For what?'
The pallid face wavered in front
of me again. 'Her head. Whoever killed her took her head with him.'
New Sharon isn't a big school
now, and was even smaller then - the kind of institution the public relations
people chummily refer to as a 'community college'. And it really was like a
small community, at least in those days; between you and your friends, you
probably had at least a nodding acquaintance with everybody else and their
friends. Gale
Cerman had been the type of girl
you just nodded to, thinking vaguely that you had seen her around.
We all knew Ann Bray. She had
been the first runner-up in the Miss New England pageant the year before, her talent
performance consisting of twirling a flaming baton to the tune of 'Hey, Look Me
Over'. She was brainy, too; until the time of her death she had been editor of
the school newspaper (a once-weekly rag with a lot of political cartoons and
bombastic letters), a member of the student dramatics society, and president of
the National Service Sorority, New Sharon Branch. In the hot, fierce bubblings
of my freshman youth I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a
date - turned down on both counts.
And now she was dead. . . worse
than dead.
I walked to my afternoon classes
like everyone else, nodding to people I knew and saying hi with a little more
force than usual, as if that would make up for the close way I studied their
faces. Which was the same way they were studying mine. There was someone dark
among us, as dark as the paths which twisted across the mall or wound among the
hundred-year-old oaks on the quad in back of the gymnasium. As dark as the
hulking Civil War cannons seen through a drifting membrane of fog. We looked
into each other's faces and tried to read the darkness behind one of them.
This time the police arrested no
one. The blue beetles patrolled the campus ceaselessly on the foggy spring
nights of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth, and spotlights stabbed in
to dark nooks and crannies with erratic eagerness. The administration imposed a
mandatory nine o'clock curfew. A foolhardy couple discovered necking in the
landscaped bushes north of the Tate Alumni Building were taken to the New
Sharon police station and grilled unmercifully for three hours.
There was a hysterical false
alarm on the twentieth when a boy was found unconscious in the same parking lot
where the body of Gale Cerman had been found. A gibbering campus cop loaded him
into the back of his cruiser and put a map of the county over his face without
bothering to hunt for a pulse and started towards the local hospital, siren
wailing across the deserted campus like a seminar of banshees.
Halfway there the corpse in the
back seat had risen and asked hollowly, 'Where the hell am I?' The cop shrieked
and ran off the road. The corpse turned out to be an undergrad named Donald
Morris who had been in bed the last two days with a pretty lively case of flu -
was it Asian last year? I can't remember. Anyway, he fainted in the parking lot
on his way to the Grinder for a bowl of soup and some toast.
The days continued warm and
overcast. People clustered in small groups that had a tendency to break up and
re-form with surprising speed. Looking at the same set of faces for too long
gave you funny ideas about some of them. And the speed with which rumours swept
from one end of the campus to the other began to approach the speed of light; a
well-liked history professor had been overheard laughing and weeping down by
the small bridge; Gale Cerman had left a cryptic two-word message written in
her own blood on the blacktop of the Animal Sciences parking lot; both murders
were actually political crimes, ritual murders that had been performed by an
offshoot of the SDS to protest the war. This was really laughable. The New
Sharon SDS had seven members. One fair-sized offshoot would have bankrupted the
whole organization. This fact brought an even more sinister embellishment from
the campus rightwingers: outside agitators. So during those queer, warm days we
all kept our eyes peeled for them.
The press, always fickle, ignored
the strong resemblance our murderer bore to Jack the Ripper and dug further
back - all the way to 1819. Ann Bray had been found on a soggy path of ground
some twelve feet from the nearest sidewalk, and yet there were no footprints,
not even her own. An enterprising New Hampshire newsman with a passion for the
arcane christened the killer Springheel Jack, after the infamous Dr John
Hawkins of Bristol, who did five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceutical
knick-knacks. And the name, probably because of that soggy yet unmarked ground,
stuck.
On the twenty-first it rained
again, and the mall and quadrangle became quagmires. The police announced that
they were salting plainclothes detectives, men and women, about, and took half
the police cars off duty.
The campus newspaper published a
strongly indignant, if slightly incoherent, editorial protesting this. The
upshot of it seemed to be that, with all sorts of cops masquerading as
students, it would be impossible to tell a real outside agitator from a false
one.
Twilight came and the fog with
it, drifting up the tree-lined avenues slowly, almost thoughtfully, blotting
out the buildings one by one. It was soft, insubstantial stuff, but somehow
implacable and frightening. Springheel Jack was a man, no one seemed to doubt
that, but the fog was his accomplice and it was female. . . or so it seemed to
me. If was as if our little school was caught between them, squeezed in some
crazy lover's embrace, part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood. I
sat and smoked and watched the lights come on in the growing darkness and
wondered if it was all over. My room-mate came in and shut the door quietly
behind him.
'It's going to snow soon,' he
said.
I turned around and looked at
him. 'Does the radio say that?'
'No,' he said. 'Who needs a
weatherman? Have you ever heard of strawberry spring?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'A long time
ago. Something grandmothers talk about, isn't it?'
He stood beside me, looking out
at the creeping dark.
'Strawberry spring is like Indian
summer,' he said, 'only much more rare. You get a good Indian summer in this
part of the country once every two or three years. A spell of weather like
we've been having is supposed to come only every eight or ten. It's a false
spring, a lying spring, like Indian summer is a false summer. My own
grandmother used to say strawberry spring means the worst norther of the winter
is still on the way - and the longer this lasts, the harder the storm.
'Folk tales,' I said. 'Never
believe a word.' I looked at him. But I'm nervous. Are you?'
He smiled benevolently and stole
one of my cigarettes from the open pack on the window ledge. 'I suspect
everyone but me. and thee,' he said, and then the smile faded a little. 'And
sometimes I wonder about thee. Want to go over to the Union and shoot some
eight-ball? I'll spot you ten.'
'Trig prelim next week. I'm going
to settle down with a magic marker and a hot pile of notes.'
For a long time after he was
gone, I could only look out the window. And even after I had opened my book and
started in, part of me was still out there, walking in the shadows where
something dark was now in charge.
That night Adelle Parkins was
killed. Six police cars and seventeen collegiate-looking plain clothes men
(eight of them were women imported all the way from Boston) patrolled the
campus. But Springheel Jack killed her just the same, going unerringly for one
of our own. The false spring, the lying spring, aided and abetted him - he
killed her and left her propped behind the wheel of her 1964 Dodge to be found
the next morning and they found part of her in the back seat and part of her in
the trunk. And written in blood on the windshield - this time fact instead of
rumour - were two words: HA! HA!
The campus went slightly mad
after that; all of us and none of us had known Adelle Parkins. She was one of those
nameless, harried women who worked the break-back shift in the Grinder from six
to eleven at night, facing hordes of hamburger-happy students on study break
from the library across the way. She must have had it relatively easy those
last three foggy nights of her life; the curfew was 'being rigidly observed,
and after nine the Grinder's only patrons were hungry cops and happy janitors -
the empty buildings had improved their habitual bad temper considerably.
There is little left to tell. The
police, as prone to hysteria as any of us and driven against the wall, arrested
an innocuous homosexual sociology graduate student named Hanson Gray, who
claimed he 'could not remember' where he had spent several of the lethal
evenings. They charged him, arraigned him, and let him go to scamper hurriedly
back to his native New Hampshire town after the last unspeakable night of
strawberry spring when Marsha Curran was slaughtered on the mall.
Why she had been out and alone is
forever beyond knowing - she was a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an
apartment in town with three other girls. She had slipped on campus as silently
and as easily as Springheel Jack himself. What brought her? Perhaps her need
was as deep and as ungovernable as her killer's, and just as far beyond
understanding. Maybe a need for one desperate and passionate romance with the
warm night, the warm fog, the smell of the sea, and the cold knife.
That was on the twenty-third. On
the twenty-fourth the president of the college announced that spring break
would be moved up a week, and we scattered, not joyfully but like frightened
sheep before a storm, leaving the campus empty and haunted by the police and
one dark spectre.
I had my own car on campus, and I
took six people downstate with me, their luggage crammed in helter-skelter. It
wasn't a pleasant ride. For all any of us knew, Springheel Jack might have been
in the car with us.
That night the thermometer
dropped fifteen degrees, and the whole northern New England area was belted by
a shrieking norther that began in sleet and ended in a foot of snow. The usual
number of old duffers had heart attacks shovelling it away - and then, like
magic, it was April. Clean showers and starry nights.
They called it strawberry spring,
God knows why, and it's an evil, lying time that only comes once every eight or
ten years. Springheel Jack left with the fog, and by early June, campus
conversation had turned to a series of draft protests and a sit-in at the
building where a well-known napalm manufacturer was holding job interviews. By
June, the subject of Springheel Jack was almost unanimously avoided - at least
aloud. I suspect there were many who turned it over and over privately, looking
for the one crack in the seemless egg of madness that would make sense of it
all.
That was the year I graduated,
and the next year was the year I married. A good job in a local publishing
house. In 1971 we had a child, and now he's almost school age. A fine and
questing boy with my eyes and her mouth.
Then, today's paper.
Of course I knew it was here. I
knew it yesterday morning when I got up and heard the mysterious sound of
snowmelt running down the gutters, and smelled the salt tang of the ocean from
our front porch, nine miles from the nearest beach. I knew strawberry spring
had come again when I started home from work last night and had to turn on my
headlights against the mist that was already beginning to creep out of the
fields and hollows, blurring the lines of the buildings and putting fairy
haloes around the street lamps.
This morning's paper says a girl
was killed on the New Sharon campus near the Civil War cannons. She was killed
last night and found in a melting snowbank. She was not she was not all there.
My wife is upset. She wants to
know where I was last night. I can't tell her because I don't remember. I
remember starting home from work, and I remember putting my headlights on to
search my way through the lovely creeping fog, but that's all I remember.
I've been thinking about that
foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely
shadows without shape or substance. And I've been thinking about the trunk of
my car - such an ugly word, trunk -and wondering why in the world I should be
afraid to open it.
I can hear my wife as I write
this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.
And oh dear God, I think so too.