Pistol Poets

by Victor Gischler

  “That’s way too shallow,” Ginny said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’m telling you it needs to be deeper. One good rain and up she comes. All that topsoil will wash right downhill.”

  Morgan sighed. He looked at the shovel, back at the hole. They kept digging.

  When Ginny was satisfied, they muscled Annie out of the trunk and dropped her facedown into the hole. Morgan thought she looked unreal in the plastic, a dime-store mannequin. He could still fish her out of the hole, unwrap her. He wasn’t too far into this yet. He could explain. Take her to the police or a hospital.

  But there would be questions. What had happened? Who had she been with and where? Morgan leaned on his shovel, eyes unfocused with thought.

  Ginny grabbed a shovel and started scooping in dirt.

  And it was as if his hands lifted the shovel on their own, scooped the dirt. It was the heaviest thing in the world. He tossed in the dirt, and it landed on Annie’s back. The second scoop was easier, then a third, his problem returning to the earth. He wondered how long it would take him to forget he’d done this thing, that he’d crossed some line from which there would be no return.

  Soon there was only the moist mound of fresh soil. Ginny flattened it down hard with the bottom of her shovel. Steam came off her.

  Morgan thought about Ginny. Jones had made it clear what he wanted done, but Morgan had no intention of killing the girl. But she was a time bomb. Morgan’s hand slipped into his pocket, fist closing over the revolver’s handle.

  Ginny turned, saw him watching her. “What is it?”

  “Just thinking.” He let go of the gun, put his hands on his hips.

  She searched his eyes, moved toward him. “I’m not going to say anything.”

  “I know.”

  She stood very close to Morgan, her erect nipples brushing his belly. “I want you to believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  Ginny shrugged, lowered her eyes. “Maybe we can seal the deal. Some kind of show of trust.”

  She unzipped his pants and reached in for him. He stiffened, and she stroked him, the cold air washing over his groin.

  Morgan cleared his throat. “I think we can work something out.”

  Her hands were very soft, her mouth warm.

  seven

  Harold Jenks got off the bus, took one look around, and said, “Fuck this.”

  What the hell was he doing in this one-horse, Okie shithole? He stood with his duffel over his shoulder, took another look up and down University Boulevard hoping it would seem better this time.

  It didn’t.

  Pickup trucks, flannel shirts, and feed caps. Redneck city. No place for a brother like Harold Jenks. He pulled his coat tighter around him. What was it, twenty degrees? Colder? Fumbee, Oklahoma, was the asshole of the planet.

  Maybe Spoon was right. Maybe his plan was insane in the head, and Jenks was just asking for an assload of trouble.

  Fuck that. Jenks could pull it off. Nobody else would dare.

  Jenks crossed the street to the campus. He pulled a folded wad of paper out of his back pocket and read until he saw what he needed. The administration building.

  He stopped a slender white girl with blond hair in the courtyard, asked her which way to Administration. She was polite, but took a step back, eyes wary. Like you never seen a black man before. She pointed down the sidewalk to a gray, domed building.

  “Thanks,” Jenks said.

  The girl frowned and walked away fast.

  At the main administration desk, Jenks was shuffled to the registrar. The gray-faced bureaucrat in that registrar’s office said that since he was a week late for classes, his schedule had been forwarded to the English Department.

  “Where’s that?” Jenks asked.

  The lady sighed, dramatic, shoulders slumped. She handed Jenks a folded map. “Albatross Hall,” she said. “Building 41 on the map.”

  “Thanks.” Bitch.

  He found Albatross Hall and ducked inside, stood a moment in the entrance letting himself get warm. A sign on the wall said ENGLISH DEPARTMENT and pointed him left. He followed the arrow.

  The English Department office was barren of life. Jenks stood in front of the outer desk and waited in case a secretary or someone official happened along. Nobody did. He shuffled loudly, dropped his duffel bag with a heavy whuff. Nobody heard. He looked for a bell to ring, or a sign-in sheet or anything. He didn’t have a clue.

  Just left of the front desk was a door marked WHITTAKER. It also said ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CHAIR and was slightly ajar. He pushed it open, looked in.

  A big white guy with a heavy black beard stood wearing a woman’s hat and looking at himself in a hand mirror.

  “Aw shit.” Jenks stared, scratched his head.

  Whittaker glanced over his shoulder. “Who is it? Can I do something for you?” As he spoke, he turned back to the mirror, cocked the hat at a jaunty angle on his head.

  “I’m-” He almost said he was Harold Jenks. “I’m Sherman Ellis.”

  Whittaker put down the mirror, went to his desk, and began leafing through a stack of papers. “Ellis, Ellis, that name sounds familiar.”

  “I’m supposed to be paid for,” Jenks said. “My school is free.”

  “Yes.” Whittaker pulled a list from the stack. “Sherman Ellis. You have a graduate assistantship in the tutoring lab. You’re a week late.”

  Jenks didn’t say anything.

  “We thought maybe you’d forfeited the assistantship. We almost assigned it to someone else. The waiting list is pretty long.”

  “What about the free schooling?”

  Whittaker frowned, cleared his throat. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “And a place to stay,” Jenks said.

  “You’ll have to take that up with graduate housing. Their waitlist is even longer. Might be a problem.”

  “Hey, man. I got it right here I’m supposed to have a place to stay. For free.” He shook the letter in the air, one of the documents he’d taken off of Ellis. He’d get all up in this guy’s business about his rights and shit.

  The gun in his coat pocket hung heavy. A.32 revolver with a short barrel, the serial number filed off. Spoon had given it to him, told him the little heater would be easy to hide when he was on campus. The Glock was in the duffel. Harold Jenks wasn’t planning on letting any of these white college motherfuckers get over on him.

  Whittaker’s face hardened. “Nobody’s going to take away your entitlement, Mr. Ellis.” He said it through gritted teeth.

  “I’ll get a lawyer.” But Jenks took a half step back. The guy was big, lady’s hat or not, and Jenks saw he was getting mad. Jenks’s hand dug into his coat pocket, closed over the butt of the pistol. He didn’t like the way the dude’s face twitched when he said entitlement.

  “Here.” Whittaker handed Jenks a manila folder stuffed with paper. “You need to see Dr. Annette Grayson about your one-hour comp-rhet practicum. They’ll start you in the tutoring lab, I imagine. Pair you up with one of the veteran tutors until you learn the ropes. Your schedule’s in there as well. I’d find all of your professors soon, get syllabi, and find out what you’ve missed.”

  “Right.” Jenks had no fucking idea what he was talking about.

  “If you have any more questions, I suggest you talk to Professor Jay Morgan. He’s been assigned as your faculty advisor. Or ask Professor Grayson. You’ll be working closely with her too.”

  “What about the place to stay? I’m supposed to have a free place to live.”

  “The housing office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You have a campus map?”

  “Yeah.” He handed it to Whittaker.

  The dean unfolded it, squinted at the small print. “Building 9.” He gave the map back to Jenks.

  “Later.” Jenks left, grabbed his duffel on the way out.

  After Ellis left, Whittaker reminded himself that he was not a racist. But the sheer arrog
ance of these kids! Still, he’d have to tread lightly. The university was in a delicate position. He pulled the memo from his desk drawer, the one university president Lincoln Truman had sent directly concerning Sherman Ellis. He read it again.

  He did not need the brief overview of the university’s checkered past, but he read it anyway. Enrollment just fifteen years ago had been over twelve thousand. But bad choices and bad administration had caused the school to fall on hard times. At its worst, enrollment had fallen to a catastrophic thirty-two hundred students. Instructors had been laid off. Crusty, tenured professors had been strongly encouraged into retirement. Funds had been slashed in every department. The football team, the fighting Buffalo Skinners, had been reduced to a Division III joke.

  Indeed, the university had almost been closed altogether. There had been serious talk about turning it into a branch campus for OSU.

  But superadministrator and divine savior Lincoln Truman had turned the school around. Enrollment had been up the last four years in a row, and the student body was now a healthy 6,857 students. Eastern Oklahoma University was entering a glorious new renaissance.

  In only one area was the school drastically behind the rest of the nation. Diversity.

  They weren’t. Diverse. At all.

  Out of nearly seven thousand students only forty-one were Native American, the school’s largest minority. Twenty-three were Hispanic.

  Eastern Oklahoma had only five African-American students. Now six with Sherman Ellis.

  Granted, it had been hard to attract black students after the lynching. But that was nearly ten years ago. Still, Lincoln Truman had vowed to erase the university’s stained reputation as a “Klan Kollege” as one muckraking newspaper had put it.

  Whittaker pulled Ellis’s file. His grades were solid. His GRE scores were through the roof. He returned the file to the cabinet.

  Okay. A smart kid with a bad attitude. Whittaker had seen it before. Once Ellis realized he was among people who wanted to see him succeed, he’d ease off the tough-guy routine.

  If not, well, Whittaker was known to be rather a tough cookie himself. He picked up the hand mirror again and went back to adjusting the hat.

  “I’ve told you already,” said the woman at the housing office. “We didn’t think you were coming. We gave the room away to somebody else.”

  “I’m supposed to get a free place.” Jenks waved the letters like a magic wand.

  “But there’s simply no place we can-”

  “I’m black,” Jenks said.

  The woman’s shoulders slumped, and she picked up the phone.

  eight

  After Morgan dropped Ginny at her apartment, she thought about him all night. The next morning she found herself getting into her car, driving toward the professor’s house as if she were hypnotized. Not that Morgan mesmerized her, not completely. She was in love with the scheme developing in her head.

  Ginny determined that she would weasel her way into the professor’s life whatever it took. He was the most interesting thing to happen to her in a long time.

  It rained hard, the sky black with fat clouds. The slap of the windshield wipers contributed to her hypnotized feeling.

  Morgan was a real writer. Just a poet, sure, but a published writer. Not like the pussy posers in her fiction-writing classes. Morgan knew publishers, editors. He could help her launch a real career, guide her past pitfalls, introduce her into the right literary circles.

  She parked in front of his house, ran through the downpour to his front porch. Her knock was almost lost amid the thunder and sheets of cold rain that pelted Morgan’s tin roof. He opened the door, ushered her in, and shut it again quickly against the wind.

  “I didn’t expect you,” Morgan said.

  “Is it okay?” She shivered, stood dripping in his living room, shrugged out of her coat, the thin fabric of her blouse clinging to hard, thimble-sized nipples.

  “You’re soaked.” Morgan found towels, brought them to her. She dried her hair.

  “Your clothes.”

  “I need to take them off,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She peeled off the blouse in front of him, slithered out of the wet jeans.

  Morgan put his arms around her, and she stood on tiptoe, forced her open mouth over his. She was eager and hungry and they tripped and tumbled into the bedroom, fell in a grabbing, rolling pile. She pulled off his pants, took him in her mouth briefly before climbing on top.

  She rode him during the lightning, the flashes making her pale skin blue. His hands sank into her round softness. She was warm and deep and she covered him with herself, back arched, mouth open.

  Thunder crashed. Rain fell. The storm swallowed their moans.

  Morgan didn’t know what to think of her.

  “I came back to tell you it will be okay,” she said.

  She sprawled across the bed, trying, Morgan supposed, to spread herself over every possible square inch. A leg and an arm draped over him too.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “That I won’t say anything. I thought you might be worried. I know you and that girl-”

  “I wasn’t worried.” Yes he had been. Someone would miss Annie Walsh sooner or later, come asking hard questions. And what about Ginny? Strange, soft, bouncy, eager Ginny. Was this some kind of kick for her, bury a body and bed a professor? Yeah, he knew women like that. You could find them at writers’ conferences, chasing after the latest young, hot novelist. Flavor of the month.

  She nuzzled closer, ran fingers through his chest hair.

  His skin got hot and sweaty where her heavy arm and leg pressed against him. He tried to squirm out from under her.

  She looked up. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.” He sank back into the pillow.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you do.” She curled into a ball, sighed, rolled off the bed, and went into the living room.

  “Your clothes are still wet,” he called after her.

  She plucked them from the floor, squeezed. “Just a little damp.” She shrugged into her bra. “I’d better get going.”

  Morgan watched her dress through the bedroom door and was certain he was supposed to stop her. She was expecting some word from him, the big callback where he asked where she was off to. He’d pull her back into bed, drag her beneath the silky, intimate prison of the sheets. It’s what she expected.

  But he could not quite summon the energy. Appropriate words refused to form. He watched her button the blouse, zip jeans, slip her bare feet into squeaky leather hiking boots. And even when he heard his front door open and close, he couldn’t quite make himself tell her to stop, couldn’t think of a single thing that didn’t sound trite and placating.

  He heard her engine start over the patter of rain, heard the car fade down the lane.

  Thank God.

  He’d been unable to resist her fleshy immediacy. This sort of thing had always been his problem.

  But in the sticky, hot, awkward after-tangle of limbs and linen, he could only believe he was repeating the same sort of behavior which had landed him in this shit-pie of a situation in the first place. He did not know Ginny Conrad very well. Sure, he knew her taste and her feel and the breathless, urgent whine that squeezed out of her just before orgasm. But he didn’t know what she’d do. What was her temperament? For all Morgan knew, Ginny was a walking mouth ready to gossip away any hope he ever had of steady employment.

  He swung his feet over the bed, stood with a low groan. A twinge in his lower back. Ginny had ridden him long and hard, almost shaking apart the bed frame. He was getting too old for this. And too fat. He reminded himself about joining a gym.

  He grabbed his pants off the floor, and something tumbled out of the pocket, landed hard and sharp on the top of his bare foot. Cold and metal.

  “Goddammit!” He hopped, gritted his teeth, rubbed the foot. “Son of a bitch.” He looked at his foot, r
ed and swelling fast. He had the kind of skin that bruised easily purple and ugly green.

  He scanned the floor to see what had bashed him.

  The gun.

  It lay on the hardwood floor daring him to pick it up.

  He didn’t want to bend over the way his back felt, so he nudged it with a toe, metal heavy and cold. Shoved it slowly under the bed. It made a scraping noise on the wood, like a murdered tin man being dragged into the gutter. Good, leave it there. Morgan could climb under the bed for it some other time.

  He stepped into his pants, foot still throbbing, back complaining. His head hurt too. Stress.

  He stepped into his slippers and grabbed a green flannel shirt off the doorknob on his way to the kitchen. He found a bottle of aspirin. Empty.

  “Goddammit.” He shook his head at his own stupidity, putting the aspirin bottle back empty. He always did that sort of thing, milk jugs and pie pans. It made girlfriends crazy, probably why he hadn’t lived with anyone in five years.

  The phone rang.

  Morgan glared at it, willed it to shut up. It rang again.

  He picked it up. “Hello?”

  “It’s Jones.” The old man’s voice rattled on the other end like a bad stereo speaker.

  Hell and damnation. He must’ve wanted his gun back. Or maybe there’d been trouble with Annie, the body discovered, police on their way to slap him in cuffs. Morgan went chill and damp under the armpits, felt dread swell in his belly. Oh, God, that’s it, isn’t it? It was all blowing up in his face.

  “You look at them poems yet?” Jones asked.

  “Uh…” What?

  “I don’t have formal education like you, but I want to make them good. You told me you was going to read them.”

  “Yes. But I’ve only just started.” Lies. “I need more time to really go over them carefully- Mr. Jones, is everything, I mean, it’s all okay, right? You’re only calling about the poems?”

  “I helped you with your little problem,” Jones said. “Should be fine. Now, I think maybe I should come over there.”

  “Why?”

  “We can talk about the poems.”