The Paper Chase

by John Osborn

  Hart paused, then released the last digit of Susan’s number. The dial swung back, the phone connected, started to ring. He didn’t have anything to say; he shouldn’t be making the call; he hadn’t even thought about it….

  “Hello,” Susan said.

  “Susan, can I talk to you? Are you busy?” He could hear a record in the background. Were there voices?

  “Susan?”

  “I told you not to call.”

  “Listen….”

  The line went dead. “Good-bye,” Hart said into the deaf receiver and hung up. He went back to his room and lay down on his bed, waiting for his energy to rebuild. Finally, he sat up to unbutton his shirt. The movement revealed his watch: two minutes to twelve. He turned off the light and went to the window.

  In two minutes a shriek rattled the glass:

  “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH … EEEEEEEEEEEEE … AHHH….” He pressed his face against the pane, trying to spot the Screamer, the mad law student who screamed every Sunday and Friday night at exactly twelve. The first time, Hart had run out in the hall with the rest of the dorm but now he took it for granted.

  Maybe the guy uses amplification, Hart thought.

  He gave up watching. There was no sign of a shadow behind any of the dark windows, and in the lighted ones students were looking out through their own reflections.

  Halfway to Ford’s room, Hart saw a new addition to the hall: a poster of a nude teen-ager lying in a flower bed. He flicked the picture from the door. The paper glided into the middle of the hall and floated to the floor, landing face down. In two days tracked-in grit and snow would eradicate it.

  Ford’s room was empty. Hart looked twice, because there wasn’t a single other person in the dorm he could really talk with. He ate dinner with an assortment of students, said hi to a lot in the hall, but a real talk, lasting into the dawn, was different.

  The sheets of Ford’s bed were pulled off, crumpled and dirty. Above the desk, Ford’s Sierra Club calendar was two months behind. Hart lay down on the bed and closed his eyes.

  Huge, irrational, fuzzy visions formed on his eyelids. He saw Susan lying in her bed, the one set right down on the floor, someone calling to her from the next room. No. Hart tried to listen instead of think.

  Someone opened the door of the bathroom, walked down the hall whistling. Hart heard someone dialing the hall phone: low, murmuring voices. And then typing, muffled, like drips of water.

  After a while, the typing put him to sleep. He hadn’t wanted to sleep because he thought he would dream about Susan. Instead, he had a wild dream about Ford killing him. Blowing a huge hole in his stomach with a shotgun. A hole so big Hart could put his hand through it. He didn’t know how long he’d slept before Ford woke him up.

  24

  KEVIN WAS ON THE SIDEWALK, the snow falling on top of him, filling up his shirt collar and turning soggy when it made contact with his skin. He walked up the porch steps, shook himself off and pressed the bell with Hammer, Moss, and Foswhisher written above it. Nothing happened. Above him, he could hear laughing and a record player. He checked the name Mr. Shaw had written down and rang again. Like a dog peering around a corner, a crewcut head stuck out the door.

  “Yeah,” the head said.

  “I’m looking for James Moss,” Kevin said, not wanting to elaborate, to say that Mr. Shaw had sent him there for special help.

  “O.K.” The door opened full. The head was stuck on a big body, about six feet, dressed in jeans, with no shoes, the shirt open down to a dirty belly button, stuck down like an island in the white swaying fat. The beer belly yelled, “Moss-get your ass out here-some mother to see you.”

  Down the hall to the right, Kevin could see the living room. There were two other boys there, one on the floor fiddling with the record player and the other on a mangy mattress. The beer cans spread all around hadn’t been lying on the floor long; some were still leaking their last few drops into the rug.

  The record player hesitated and the guy on the mattress coaxed it, talking the record down the spindle. The needle lifted and the record hole seemed to open up. The set vibrated, the record dropped and the spindle poked straight up through the black plastic.

  The girls laughed. Three girls with their shoes off. One was strutting around the room, her breasts poking out of the top of her blouse. She walked by the guy fiddling with the record player and he pulled on her arm. She collapsed on him, laughing and kicking. Kevin felt like he had when he was little and used to sneak out his father’s magazines, searching through the fishing and hunting stories until he found the ones about girls hitchhiking.

  The beer belly walked down the hall and stood just behind the brown-haired girl, who was leaning forward trying to pull down her short skirt. As she bent forward, the beer belly reached down under her skirt, grabbed both sides of her rear and pulled up. She howled and fell forward into the arms of the guy on the mattress.

  “Don’t mind them-I’m their manager.”

  The guy holding Kevin’s arm was wiry, thin and quick, wearing slippers and real slacks, with his shirt untucked but buttoned all the way to the top.

  “I’m so used to them, I don’t really see them. I’m Jim Moss. “He talked fast, faster than anything Kevin had ever heard. But his words were sure, each one cut off from the rest, as if he’d prepared all his sentences in advance.

  They walked down to a messy room, with bookcases on every wall, books sprawled on the floor, bed and chairs.

  “It’s all right for them. They have me to pull them through.” Moss threw a book off the desk chair. “I wouldn’t recommend it for you though.”

  Kevin sat on the bed on top of Black’s Law Dictionary. He unwound his fingers from his briefcase handle and unbuttoned his coat. An electric heater whirred behind the desk.

  “What do you mean, they have me to get them through?” Kevin said.

  “They pay the bills and I do the studying.” Moss searched around in the papers on the desk. “It’s as simple as that. They almost flunked out their first year-I don’t think it’s too hard to see why-and I moved in. They’ve done all right ever since. Nothing spectacular, but passable. Anyway, they certainly will graduate.” Kevin poked his tongue around the inside of his mouth.

  “No cheating of course,” Moss added. “I give them a lecture before each exam, and they go and take it on their own. They remember most things for a day or two. They’re not stupid.”

  On the wall a picture of round faces, smiling in contentment, hung over golden letters that said, HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Kevin couldn’t keep his eyes off the letters.

  He’d seen them coming out of their white frame house, joking and talking with each other. He’d seen the way ordinary law students walked around the house looking in, wondering, wishing they had the courage to go right up to the window. The way ordinary law students tried to look like they weren’t looking at all, and how that made them seem all the more intent.

  “Are you really on the Law Review?” It spurted out of Kevin.

  Moss’s pencil hung between his thin fingers. “Not really, anymore. I don’t actively participate. A pompous organization. You might say, I never really belonged. But don’t study because of the Law Review. It’ll make you too tense. ”

  He held up a paper, tapped it lightly with the pencil.

  “It says here you flunked every one of your practice exams.” Kevin winced. “Defeating at first glance. I suppose that’s what most people would say. But to the more trained eye, there’s a certain ray of hope in it. You see, Kevin, it’s against all the odds to flunk every practice exam. Even if you had done no work, at least you would have gotten a D minus from Horne. He never gives an F. Very rare. Sheer stupidity generates sympathy and is usually good for a D. No, on the whole, I’d think you made one error, the same error, on each exam. ”

  Kevin stared at the floor, twitching.

  “My God, man,” Moss said, “don’t look that way. You’re going to be saved. I’m your ace in the hole. I can’t m
ake a Learned Hand out of you, but I can make you pass. Do you have samples of your work?”

  “I’ve got my notes,” Kevin said slowly.

  “No, no, no,” Moss said. “I meant an exam. But it doesn’t matter.” He rolled back, looking at the ceiling. “Ready?” Kevin nodded. He had his notebook open on his lap.

  “Imagine an old woman comes to dinner with you,” Moss said. “While you’re mixing her drink, she slips on an ice cube, skates across the room, smashing your new breakfast table, demolishing it and killing herself. Got that? After you’ve cleaned her off the floor, you discover a statute saying homeowners must keep their land free of dangerous ice, especially, but not exclusively, ice on their sidewalks. You also find out the old woman suffered from dropsy, a falling sickness.” Moss paused; he’d chewed through his pencil.

  “I suppose that’s enough. You’re sued on two theories, one relying on the statute and the other ordinary negligence. Can they recover from you for causing the old lady’s death? Can you recover the price of the breakfast table from the old bag’s estate?”

  Moss started to rise. “Write out an answer to that,” he added. “Take about half an hour on it. Any sample will do. Bring it back a month or so before exams and we’ll go over it together. Don’t bother to call; just drop over.”

  Moss backed Kevin to the door and extended a hand. “Don’t worry, there’s no possibility of error in my analysis,” he said as he closed the door.

  Kevin walked out in the hall. The party was still going strong in the living room. When he got to the door, he saw it was two against one. One of the guys held a girl’s arms and another poured beer into her mouth. It slopped down her cheeks, down her neck and into her cleavage, catching in her bra and oozing out in a dark circle over her breasts. Her skirt had ridden up over her undies as she squirmed and thrashed. Her thighs squeaked as they rubbed together. It was a clean sound like hair that’s just been washed. The sweat made her bare legs shine. One of the guys reached his hand down on her stomach, right down on the panties above the crotch. She stopped laughing. Her thrashing began to have a purpose.

  The beer belly knelt down beside her, grabbed her panties and started to pull them off, taking a long time, not because it was difficult, but to taunt her. The other girls were standing over him pushing on his back, telling him to go ahead. The beer belly laughed, threw his head back and saw Kevin.

  “Hey, you motherfucker,” he said, “get the hell out of here.”

  25

  AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK, Mrs. Weasal, the guardian of the Treasure Room, went to the bathroom as she’d done every night for twenty years. No one ever used the Treasure Room and there weren’t any guests or tours late at night so she was able to hold to her routine steadily, through all seasons.

  She looked around the room once before she pushed through the doors, then pulled her tweed suit straight because it always made her nervous to walk past the students. She noticed that the boy who’d asked her about Kingsfield’s notes was sitting at the first table, but she didn’t give it much thought. Anyway, he was gone when she came back.

  At quarter to twelve, she put her things in her pocketbook, took one last look in the mirror and then made a thorough inspection of the room. One of the name tags on the major display case had fallen down. She picked her keys off her desk, opened the case and adjusted the card.

  By the time she’d finished, it was twelve and she packed up and left, being sure to lock the door.

  At one o’clock a flashlight beam ran out from under the major display case. It fluttered like a butterfly across the room and then started to run over the walls, searching among the books on the left side of the room.

  “None of those books are red,” Ford said. The beam turned and started across the wall facing the glass doors, working down from the top quickly.

  “And they’re not red, either,” Ford whispered. “Maybe it’s just called the Red Set; maybe it’s not red at all.”

  The light snapped off and the room was dark again.

  “Let me think,” Hart said. “Let me think.”

  In his mind, he tried to reconstruct the entire room; he couldn’t remember any set of red books. But it wouldn’t be called the Red Set unless it was red. Maybe they’re being bound, he thought, and cursed.

  Then he remembered the door on the far side of the room. A door that grew out of the oak paneling. It wasn’t a secret door; you could see the outlines.

  “Wait for me,” Hart said. “If I find them, I’ll whistle. All right?”

  “Oh sure,” Ford said, “I’m just going to sit here, under the first edition of The Common Law and wait for you to whistle? Great.”

  Hart had already slid off into the dark, crawling across the floor in case there were guards patrolling the library reading room.

  When he reached the far wall, he felt along it and found the door crack. He rose to a kneeling position and pushed. The door had no lock; it swung creaking, revealing a black void beyond. Hart whistled and shone the flashlight back over the floor so that Ford could follow.

  Ford ran bent over, zigzagging between the reading tables.

  “Christ’s sake,” Hart said. “Someone might see you. Keep down.”

  “I zigged,” Ford said, “to avoid the bullets.”

  “I can feel it,” Hart said, “I can feel the Red Set. I know it’s here, right here.”

  He flicked on the light.

  Around him, in neat little volumes, all red leather, were rows of books, so close he and Ford instinctively drew back, sucked in their breath and held it.

  Hart closed the door behind them and searched until he found the Kingsfield volumes. He took the first and opened to the title page: “Notes on Contracts, 1928, in a course of contracts given by Professor Williston.”

  “Jesus,” Ford said. “The unbroken chain, the ageless passing on of wisdom, ashes to ashes, but knowledge goes on. Let’s split. Now you’ve seen it.”

  Hart sat on the floor cross legged, held the book in his lap and started turning the pages. There were dates, just like the dates in his notes and there were headings, just like his. He didn’t read the words; he watched the flow of the pen over the pages. They fell on each other softly, each page knowing the idiosyncrasies of the other.

  “Well,” Ford said. “All right, how is it? What does it do to you?”

  Hart looked up from the book, closed it and handed it up to Ford, who put it on the shelf.

  “They’re just notes,” Hart said. “They even look like ours. I guess it was a waste of time. I don’t know, I expected something more.”

  “Does that bother you? I mean, what did you expect?” Ford said.

  “I guess nothing,” Hart said. “I just thought it would be different, but I didn’t know what. I wondered if he was like us.”

  They turned off the light and crossed the Treasure Room, figuring any watchman would be asleep by two. The doors were locked but they could open them from the inside.

  “We can’t leave them open,” Ford said. “They’ll know someone was here.”

  But they did leave them open because they couldn’t figure out any way to close them.

  “Good night, Oliver Wendell Holmes,” Ford said back into the Treasure Room as they left. “Sleep well.”

  26

  “I’D LIKE TO SEND some flowers,” Hart told the man. “How do I do it?”

  It was easier than he thought. He picked roses because he couldn’t remember the name of any other flowers. The only difficult part was the card. He thought about it for a long time, until the shopkeeper began to look him over suspiciously. Finally, he just wrote, “Why?”

  During my sophomore year in college, I wore a lumberman’s shirt like Pete Seeger’s and listened to Joan Baez records. When the school year ended, I went South and worked for SNCC. No one tried to kill me; no one even spit on me. I was in Mississippi. I tried to learn how to play the banjo.

  I lost thirty pounds in Mississippi; I was scared all the time. I was s
o scared I couldn’t walk the right way. Mississippi made me walk with a funny little jerk and now, five years later, I’m just beginning to walk right.

  During my second year at law school we had the Harvard strike. A lot of law students came up to me during the strike and asked where the college was. I told them but I don’t know if they went over.

  We had some meetings at the law school during the strike. All the law professors came and talked. They talked and talked. They’d sit right down in the middle of the meetings and then raise their hands and talk. They talked for hours.

  After the professors had finished talking, no one would have anything else to say and the meeting would end. We applauded the law professors after they finished talking.

  Yesterday I was walking along the third floor of the new faculty office building. I was minding my own business. The Vice Dean was going back to his office. ‘Who are you looking for?” he yelled. I mean he yelled. I probably jumped three feet. I said I was looking for a certain professor. “He’s on the fourth floor,” the Vice Dean screamed. Then he shook his head and slammed the door to his office.

  I thought of all the neat things I could have said. “Get fucked,” or, “It’s none of your business,” or, “Why are you screaming at me?”

  You’ve got to think fast to say things like that, to think of them at the time. I guess the only way to do it is to make a conscious choice and just say “Get fucked” every time the Vice Dean talks to you.

  27

  “I DIDN’T WANT to knock,” the boy said, standing in the door of Hart’s room and looking at Hart and Ford sprawled out, drunk. “I thought you might be asleep.”

  “What time is it?” Ford mumbled.

  “Two.” The boy paused, waiting for their attention. “You’re both on my list. Two things. First, would you help with the mixer? Second, would you contribute to Vorgan Temby’s birthday party?”