Flings: Stories

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Percy took Intro to US Labor History for an elective in the spring of his sophomore year. The professor’s name was Leon Pitzer, an embittered pinko genius with an august limp. In him Percy knew he had finally found the father surrogate he’d been searching for since arriving at Schmall, a semielite liberal arts college in a town of the same name in the heart of the heart of Ohio. Percy changed his major from English to history, and over the following three semesters took every course Pitzer offered. Pitzer directed Percy’s senior thesis, an inspired treatise on the American government’s illegal 1921 deployment of the Air Force to bomb striking mine workers at Blair Mountain, West Virginia. The SEIU invited Percy to come to Chicago and work on a hotel campaign. He talked to Kat about his decision. They both cried, but later, recounting the story to his best friend, Danny, on the porch over nightcap beers while Kat slept, Percy tried to make it sound as if only Kat had cried. Danny knew the truth because his bedroom was across the hall from Kat’s and he’d been listening in. “I don’t get what the whole big deal is,” he said to Rachel about it. “So he loves her, too. So what? Why is that some disaster? And what century does he live in where a man’s not allowed to cry?”

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