I did the math in my head while the waitress brought our little blue teapots in for a landing. Gordon and Chick were both just a year older than me. In 1968 they would have been thirty-four. Penelope would have been just twenty or twenty-one. “And you were still with Chick in the summer of 1970?” I asked. “When the three of you went to Massachusetts to visit Kerouac’s grave?”
There was a residue of bitterness behind her smile. “He gave me the heave-ho a couple weeks after we got back,” she said. “Cleared the deck for the fall semester.”
“And you started seeing Gordon?”
“Not right away,” she said. “I went home to Mount Gilead for a few months, but missed the big wicked city.” We both laughed, as anyone who’d spent time in Hannawa would do. “Then I came back, got a crappy job, and eventually bumped into Gordon.”
I asked the obvious question: “It didn’t bother Chick that Gordon was dating his old girlfriend? Age of Aquarius notwithstanding?”
“It was a little weird-for all three of us. But by then Chick had another gullible undergraduate on the side. And Gordon and I were in love.”
Our Spam and eggs arrived. We started shoveling the fluffy eggs and little cubes of fried pork like a couple of lumberjacks. “Actually in love?” I asked. It came out a little more sarcastic than I wanted. But she was not offended.
“As much above the neck as below it, surprisingly,” she said.
Well, I sure wondered what she meant by that! As you know, my head was filled with all those suspicions about Gordon and Chick’s sexuality, and how their relationship, whatever it had been, might have something to do with Gordon’s murder. “Surprisingly, you say?”
I got the exact opposite answer I expected. “Naturally, I’d always found Gordon physically attractive,” she said. “But you know what an egghead he was. All those philosophical soliloquies that used to bore me to tears when I was with Chick were suddenly loosening me up better than a rum and Coke.”
That was enough sex talk for me. For the moment at least. “So what eventually happened between you and Gordon?”
“I moved in with him-that’s what happened. For three less-than-wonderful weeks.”
“Not the love nest you expected?”
“Not the pig sty I expected.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “You committed the cardinal sin of a new relationship. You cleaned his apartment.”
She nodded like a fisherman’s bobber. “And I threw out his damn pine cones.”
“You threw out his pine cones?”
“The ones Jack Kerouac gave him. It all seems so silly now.”
“Jack Kerouac gave Gordon pine cones?” I squeaked. We’d both finished our Spam and eggs and were down to nibbling on the decorative orange slices.
“Little baby pine cones. No bigger than the tip of your little finger. A cocoa can full of them.”
I almost jumped up on the table and tap danced. I was learning more during that breakfast with Penelope Yarrow than I’d learned all spring talking to my old beatnik friends. And while lots of intriguing little pieces were coming together in my mind, I had the good sense to play dumb. “So when you threw out his pine cones, Gordon popped his cork and threw you out?”
“Not right away. But when we couldn’t find them at the dump-”
“What dump was that, dear?” I asked.
“That one on Wooster Pike,” she said. “We crawled around in the snow for a week looking for those blessed pine cones.”
I wasn’t just puzzled. I was flat out thrown for a loop. I’d known Sweet Gordon for fifty years. I’d been one of the founding members of the Baked Bean Society. I’d been there when Jack Kerouac came to town. And I’d been there through a thousand wine-inspired reminiscences of that famous visit. But I never knew about those pine cones! The question for me now, of course, was why I never knew about them. And maybe more importantly, did any of my other old beatnik friends know about them? I talked Penelope into sharing a piece of carrot cake with me.
“Did you know they were Jack Kerouac’s pine cones when you threw them out?” I asked.
“Good Lord, no,” she said. “That cocoa can was just one more piece of junk gathering dust on his window sill. Along with the empty beer bottles and dried up violets.”
I’d only been married to Lawrence for six years. But it was long enough to know that when it comes to the perceptions of men and women, you’re dealing with two distinct species. Where a woman sees a window full of junk, a man sees a well-ordered shrine. “And just how did Gordon react to your overzealous housekeeping?”
Penelope had the little frosting carrot on the end of her fork, deciding if she should surrender to temptation and eat it, as if that tiny half-inch of green and orange sugar was a time bomb packed with ten thousand calories. “A lot of yelling and screaming at first,” she said. “Then he sort of went catatonic. He curled up on his couch and put a pillow on top of his head. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’ he kept asking. In a low whisper. Like a Hindu mantra. ‘Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?’”
If she wasn’t going to eat that damn carrot, I was. I scraped it off her fork with mine, and popped it in my mouth. She thanked me with a wide smile. I pressed on. “Do you remember much about the cocoa can?”
“It was a cocoa can.”
Since buying all those cans from Mickey Gitlin, I’d had Eric do a little research for me. “Was it a Hershey’s can? There were lots of different brands in those days. But Hershey’s is what most people bought.”
Penelope grinned with embarrassment. “In my mind I see it as a Hershey’s can-those silver letters on the brown background-but that was a long time ago.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Wait until you’re my age. You won’t be able to trust half your memories. But for the sake of discussion we’ll have to assume your mind is telling you the truth. Now, was it a real old can? An antique?”
Her eyes went back and forth like one of those Krazy Kat clocks. “I think it was just a regular cocoa can. I doubt I would’ve thrown it out if it looked real old or valuable.”
“That’s a good point,” I said. “Can you remember if it was made out of tin or cardboard?”
“Tin I guess. Why?”
“For a couple reasons,” I said. “First, it would help date the can. The real old cocoa cans were made out of tin. Then during World War II when metal was scarce the sides of the can were made out of cardboard, with a tin top and bottom. And it easily could have been one of those World War II cans. According to what Gordon told you, Kerouac found it in 1956. Just eleven years after the war ended. That’s not a long time for a can to be in a kitchen cupboard, let alone in a fire tower in the middle of nowhere. So if it was cardboard, it could have rotted in the dump along with the pine cones inside.” Now I contradicted myself. “Of course from what Gordon’s graduate assistant tells me, under the right conditions things made out of paper can survive underground for years and years.”
Surprisingly, Penelope was following me. “So even if it was a cardboard can, Gordon still might have hoped to find it intact thirty years after I threw it out?”
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “Anyway, Hershey went back to the all-tin cans in 1947. Other companies about that time, too. Everything’s made out of plastic now, of course.”
Penelope suppressed a yawn. “So it was probably an all-tin can, but it could have been part cardboard? But either way Gordon must have figured he had a good chance of finding it?”
“That’s right. Now, did it have one of those oval snap-in lids?”
She answered quickly. “I’m sure it did.”
I asked my next question slowly. “Did you bother looking inside the can before you threw it out?”
Now she suppressed a flash of anger. “That’s exactly what Gordon asked me. Only he was screaming at the time. And the truth is, yes, I did look inside. If there was cocoa inside I was going to put it back in the kitchen.”
“So you saw the pine cones?”
“I saw them.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe he wanted them?” I asked.
The anger on her face was now directed toward herself. “I know I should have-but I was in a cleaning frenzy. Gordon had junk everywhere and I was going to get rid of it. To make him love me more. Consider me for a wife I suppose. God, I don’t know how many bags I carried out to the trash.”
The story Penelope told me that morning at Speckley’s-as bizarre as it sounded-nevertheless jelled with my own research into Jack Kerouac’s life. Or should I say Eric’s research. Earlier that spring he’d Googled up all sorts of interesting stuff for me. Anyway, it boiled down to this:
In June of 1956, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked from San Francisco to the Mt. Baker National Forest in Washington State. He worked as a fire lookout for 63 days, perched alone in a tower, atop a mountain, watching the horizon for wisps of smoke, bored to near insanity by the desolation of the place. Each night, to mark the passing of another interminable shift, he placed a tiny pine cone in an old cocoa can he found amongst the tower’s clutter. When he began working his way east at the end of the summer, he took that can of pine cones with him, as a souvenir of his foolishly spent summer. In November he dropped in on Gordon and Chick here in Hannawa. And before leaving for New York, he gave his pine cones to Gordon.
According to what Gordon told Penelope fifteen years later, the gift had been “purely a materialistic one.” Gordon had given Kerouac several bottles of cold Schlitz beer for the bus trip and he simply had to make room in his duffel bag. “Why don’t you hold onto these for me, good daddy?” he said to Gordon.
I’m sure Gordon fantasized about Kerouac coming back for his can of pine cones some day. I’m sure he fantasized how Kerouac, overcome with gratitude, would invite him to join his inner circle. To wander America’s back roads with him, hobnobbing with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Larry Ferlinghetti and Lucien Carr. I bet he even fantasized how Kerouac would make him a character in one of his novels.
Jack Kerouac never came back for his pine cones. But that apparently did not diminish their value to Gordon. I can only imagine how precious they became when Kerouac published Desolation Angels in 1965. In that novel, Kerouac described his 63 days on Desolation Peak as a fire watcher. He described how his alter ego, Jack Dulouz, each night dropped a new little pine cone into an old cocoa can, to mark the end of another excruciating day. When Gordon read that, I’d venture to say he pretty much figured he had the beatnik version of the Holy Grail in his possession.
When Penelope told me about the pine cones that morning at Speckley’s, I simply could not believe that Gordon could have had such a treasure in his possession and not told anyone. Only after a long afternoon at Ike’s, rattling his patient eardrums with my cockamamie theories, did Gordon’s secretiveness begin to make sense to me: Jack Kerouac had given those pine cones to him. And the fact he didn’t tell anybody underscored just how deeply it had touched his young bohemian soul. So much that he created a secret shrine to Kerouac’s gift on his window sill-a shrine that included beer bottles that just maybe touched Kerouac’s lips, and pots of violets that, despite his good intentions, he forgot to water.
“Now wait a minute,” Ike objected when I explained all this to him. “I can understand why the professor didn’t tell you about those pine cones. And maybe some of those other crazy folks. But I can’t believe he wouldn’t have been tempted to rub Chick Glass’ nose in them. Considering how those two carried on over that cheeseburger all those years.”
I was nodding, watching the dribble of traffic outside his coffee shop. “I think maybe it just comes down to the kind of guy Gordon was,” I said. “He knew those pine cones would trump what the great Jack Kerouac had or didn’t have for lunch. He knew it would make him Kerouac’s undisputed apostle at Hemphill College, and not Chick. He also knew it would destroy their friendship.” It was six o’clock. Ike got up with a long, Saturday afternoon groan. He flipped the sign on the door over to CLOSED. I kept talking. “And so for fifteen years Sweet Gordon kept that cocoa can of pine cones to himself. A literary artifact of immeasurable value. Until his new girlfriend in a fit of love-induced tidiness threw them out.”
Ike returned to the table with a handful of Ghirardelli chocolates from the counter. “So how does all that help you find Gordon’s murderer?”
I popped one of the balls of chocolate into my mouth and attempted to answer. “Who the hell knows? But I am certain about one thing, Ike. Gordon was not out there digging for drums of toluene, or the weapon used to kill David Delarosa, or even a restaurant receipt from Mopey’s. He was digging for that cocoa can of pine cones.”
Ike had a ball of chocolate in his mouth, too. “Sounds reasonable. Crazy as shit-but reasonable.”
Ike was right on both counts.
According to Penelope, she and Gordon spent several nights in a row out at the Wooster Pike dump, on their hands and knees, looking for that cocoa can in a week’s worth of God’s snow and Hannawa’s garbage. Only when the city bulldozed a fresh layer of trash over the top did Gordon give up. Penelope, of course, was quickly out of the picture. When Gordon tossed her out, she traded her crappy job in Hannawa for a good one in Toledo. She eventually met her Lebanese dentist and put her bohemian years behind her. Until one Dolly Madison Sprowls gave her a jingle.
Ike and I said goodnight on the sidewalk and I drove home to James. I knew I had nothing more to fear from Kenneth Kingzette, but I left my booby traps in place. I curled up in bed with a notepad and my television remote. Hannawa’s local PBS station was doing a fund drive featuring the pop songs of the fifties. Patty Paige. Mel Torme. Perry Como. The McGuire Sisters. Half of the singers they were remembering were dead. The other half were older than Methuselah’s mother.
I didn’t make a lot of notes that night, but what I did write guided me through the rest of my investigation, inspiration-wise at least:
You can be almost certain that Gordon was only digging for his can of pine cones out there. For years he’d given up any hope of ever recovering them. Every week they were somewhere under another week’s worth of trash. And then when the city built the new adjoining landfill, they covered the entire old dump with three feet of dirt. But those pine cones certainly stayed in Gordon’s brain, and in his heart, and years later when Dr. William Rathje of the University of Arizona started the whole garbology movement, Gordon saw an opportunity to reclaim his secret treasure.
Gordon’s dig wasn’t completely selfish. Above all, Gordon was a teacher. A dedicated teacher. Yes, he was looking for a can of pine cones. But he was also doing important academic work. His students were learning how to be good archeologists. How to patiently pursue the truth.
Gordon also subliminally instructed his students to be on the lookout for cocoa cans: “Anything interesting today, boys and girls?” he’d regularly ask. “Old soda pop bottles? Betsy Wetsy dolls? Perhaps an old cocoa can or two?” Over the years he’d collected a whole shelf full of cocoa cans. But apparently not the one he was looking for. All of the cans I’d bought from his nephew were as empty as the feeling I’m sure Gordon felt when he opened them.
So, if Gordon was murdered because of what he was looking for, then what he was looking for was not what the murderer thought he was looking for! And Gordon was murdered for nothing!