Cursed to Death

by Bill Crider

  “Okay, thanks,” Thomas said. “I’ll do that. I’ve got worse things to worry about, after all.” He turned away and started toward the Gymnasium (Hartley Gorman VI).

  “He’s right,” Burns said. “If the board does approve dropping the sports program, he’ll be out of a job.”

  “They’ll keep him on,” Tomlin said. “They’ll just cut his salary.”

  “Maybe so, but I’d hate to be the one to tell the players,” Burns said.

  “Me, too. I think I’ll take my own advice and go home,” Tomlin said. “See you Monday.”

  “Sure,” Burns said. “See you Monday.” He started back to Main, where his car was parked, thinking about Monday.

  Burns’s car, which he intended to keep forever, or as long as was humanly possible, was a 1967 Plymouth Fury III, the kind they didn’t make any more, a gas gobbler from the word go, in which eight adults could ride in comfort. Its only real drawback was the vinyl seats, which were hot in summer and, as they were now, cold in winter. But the car started immediately, and the heater would be warm in a minute. Burns headed for home.

  “Home” was three miles from the school in a nondescript tract house amid a hundred other tract houses built at a time when Pecan City had been going through a minor period of growth. Burns had gotten the house cheap, the previous owners having been transferred to another area and in dire need of capital. It was basic housing, and it suited Burns just fine. He knew his neighbors barely well enough to speak to, and he lived quietly in anonymous bachelorhood.

  Once inside, Burns poured himself a glass of grape juice, put a couple of Creedence Clearwater LPs on the turntable, and sat on the couch reading a new Hemingway biography. He found it difficult to concentrate on the book, however; thoughts of Elmore kept intruding.

  Elmore had always been Elmore, as far as Burns knew. He had been on the campus for several years before Burns had arrived and had already managed to alienate everyone who came in contact with him. At that time, though, he had been in the relatively harmless position of teaching biology. He had been filled even then with mad plans for the improvement of the school, but no one had taken him seriously, not even when he stood up in faculty meetings to explain his plans to the assembled multitude. When the position of academic dean had come open three years before, owing to the untimely demise of Dean Clark—a wise, respected, and even loved man—most people who knew that Elmore had applied for the job laughed openly. Most of them were now working elsewhere, and there was Elmore, dean indeed.

  No one was quite sure how it had happened. It was now harder to find a member of the selection committee who would admit voting for him than it was to find a registered voter who would admit that he voted for Richard Nixon in 1968. Apparently Rogers had taken a hand in things behind the scenes, but that, too, was kept very quiet. Maybe, thought Burns, Elmore really did have the goods on someone.

  Unable to read, Burns put down his book and went into the room he liked to call his library. Built-in shelves lined the walls of the room intended by the builder as a dining area. All the shelves were filled with books, not necessarily books that Burns would have wanted his students and colleagues to know that he read—mysteries, science fiction, horror, popular fiction of every stripe. It was Burns’s opinion that even an English teacher couldn’t read Faulkner all the time.

  In the middle of the room was a dilapidated desk, a far cry from the one Burns had at school. Burns sat down at the desk in a straight-backed wooden chair and opened the top drawer. Several sheets of paper were stacked neatly inside. Burns took out the top one and looked at the heading: The Ten Best Bad Movies of All Time. It was a list that had bothered him a little because it had two Viking movies on it, The Long Ships and The Vikings. He wasn’t quite sure it was fair to have two movies with the same sort of subject matter on such a short list. He looked at the list for almost five minutes. Then he drew a line through The Vikings. It took him most of the rest of the afternoon to decide to replace it with The Black Shield of Falworth.

  Burns liked to get to his office early. He liked to arrive at least an hour before classes began at eight o’clock so that he could read his newspaper, organize his thoughts, plan his day, or just generally goof around the office. He wasn’t one of those people who could drive into the parking lot at three minutes before the beginning of class, jog up the three flights of stairs, and begin lecturing.

  On Monday, however, he didn’t even get to finish his paper. Bunni walked into the office at seven-twenty. Right behind her was her boyfriend, George (“The Ghost”) Kaspar. George was a good example of what was wrong with Coach Thomas’s football team. He was five-eleven, fairly stocky, and weighed about one-eighty. Maybe one-ninety with all his gear on, suited up for the game. And George was the largest of Coach Thomas’s defensive tackles. Even the strong of stomach had to look away at times when the HGC Panthers attempted a pass rush. It often appeared that opposing passers had time to get a haircut and a manicure while looking for a receiver; it appeared that way because such was often the case.

  None of which was Coach Thomas’s fault, really. It isn’t easy to recruit the cream of the crop to play football at a tiny denominational school a hundred miles from the nearest major population center. Thomas had to take whatever was left over after the Southwest Conference and the larger schools got through.

  George had been in Burns’s American literature class the previous spring. He had been no genius, but he had tried hard and done fairly well. Burns liked him.

  “I hope it’s all right if we come in and talk to you,” Bunni said.

  Burns put down his newspaper and took his feet off the desk. “Sure,” he said. “Have a seat.”

  Bunni and George sat.

  “What can I do for you?” Burns asked. He had a pretty good idea what they wanted. Department heads were supposed to keep what transpired at the Friday meetings to themselves, but someone always talked, much to the chagrin of Dean Elmore, who had done everything but put a “Loose Lips Sink Ships” poster up in the faculty dining room.

  Bunni and George looked at each other. “We’ve heard a rumor,” Bunni said, apparently having been chosen as the spokesperson.

  “That’s not unusual around here,” Burns said, truthfully enough. Rumors at HGC were as common as prayer meetings. They had grown especially rife since Elmore had become dean.

  “This is a rumor about the sports program,” Bunni said.

  “So what’s the rumor?” Burns asked.

  “That there won’t be a sports program,” Bunni said. Her eyes were wide with the enormity of it all. “That football and basketball and . . . and everything will just be . . . gone!”

  “You can’t be sure about rumors like that,” Burns said, feeling like a slimy worm. “Something like that couldn’t happen just over the weekend. Something like that would take board approval.” He stopped. He didn’t know what else to say.

  George decided it was time to speak up. “We heard that Dean Elmore is going to take the idea to the board and tell them that the school can save a lot of money if we do away with sports.”

  The kid had a pretty good source of information, Burns had to admit. “Taking it to them and getting their approval are two different things,” he said. “I imagine some of the board members are old football players themselves, and most of them probably like coming to the homecoming games. Elmore won’t have an easy time of it. Assuming, of course, that what you heard is true.”

  “It’s true, all right,” Bunni said. She clenched her fists on her nicely rounded thighs. “I really do hate that Dean Elmore.”

  Burns was surprised. He’d certainly never seen Bunni express so much emotion before, not even when they’d discussed Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in the American literature class.

  “Is there anything we can do, Dr. Burns?” George asked.

  Burns sat silently for a minute. If he did anything at all to help these students, he would get in serious trouble if Elmo
re found out. But what the hell. “Write this down, Bunni,” he said. “I’m going to give you a list.”

  Burns and Earl Fox were sitting in the history lounge, smoking L & Ms, when Dorinda Edgely opened the door and walked in.

  She looked like a pig.

  It wasn’t her figure, though the orange and black polyester pants she wore, and probably had been wearing since about 1974, were stuffed to the bursting point with her bountiful self.

  It wasn’t the fact that her blonde hair seemed to have been styled by the very man who created Miss Piggy’s “do” for “The Muppets.”

  It wasn’t the rosy pinkness of the flesh of her chubby face and double chins.

  No, it was none of those things.

  It was the snout.

  Dorinda Edgely was wearing a snout, which would have been right at home on the Practical Pig in the Disney cartoon. It was pink and wrinkled, and it had two black nostrils painted on. It was attached to Dorinda’s face by a thin black stretch band, like the kind that Burns had once used on Halloween to hold his Lone Ranger mask.

  Around Dorinda’s neck was a piece of white string, from which a sign was hanging. The sign said HELP ME KISS A PIG in purple block letters.

  Dorinda held a tin can from which the label had been removed. She rattled it at Burns and Fox. Burns could hear the sound of coins clattering around inside the can. He took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew out a puff of smoke.

  Fox, meanwhile, had dropped his cigarette to the floor as soon as the door had begun to open. It had rolled aside a few feet, and Fox completely ignored the fact that it was there at all, even though it was sending up a steady stream of smoke. “Hi, Dorinda,” he said. “You’re looking great!”

  Dorinda stopped shaking the can.

  “I mean, you’ve got on a great get-up! Doesn’t she Carl? Isn’t that great? It’s great! What’s it for?”

  “The contest,” Dorinda said. “Surely you’re aware of the contest?”

  “Oh, sure!” Fox said. “The contest. We know about the contest, don’t we, Carl?”

  As a matter of fact, Burns did know about the contest. Every year a member of the faculty got to kiss a pig in the student dining room at noon on a Thursday. For this privilege, the faculty member had to raise more money than any other faculty member entered in the contest. Though the money went to a scholarship fund, Burns had always declined the honor of entering. Kissing a pig in front of the students was not his idea of a good time.

  “Sure,” Burns said. “We know about the contest. How much money have you collected, Dorinda?”

  “I haven’t counted it,” she said. “But I hope to have a little more when I get out of here.” She looked pointedly at the cigarette burning on the floor.

  “Absolutely!” Fox said, fumbling in the back pocket of his faded bell-bottom jeans for his billfold. He pulled it out, looked inside, and extracted a wrinkled dollar bill. “Here,” he said, extending it toward Dorinda.

  Dorinda took the bill and looked expectantly at Burns, who took another defiant drag on his L & M. “Is Dean Elmore entered this year?” he asked.

  “Why?” Dorinda countered.

  “Don’t worry,” Burns said. “I’m going to give my money to you, not to him. I was just wondering.”

  “All right then,” Dorinda said. “He’s entered. He beat me last year, but I plan to beat him this year.” She held her can out toward Burns.

  Burns dug in his pocket for some change and came up with two quarters and a penny. He dropped them in the can. “Good luck, Dorinda. I really hope you win.”

  “Thanks,” she said. Having gotten what she came for, she left the history lounge, not even bothering to shut the door.

  Burns got up and closed the door himself, giving Fox time to step on his still-smoldering cigarette butt. “You’ve got to get a lock for this thing,” Burns said.

  “That woman has no respect,” Fox said. “All I can say is that I feel sorry for the pig if she wins.”

  “And what if Elmore wins?”

  “Then the SPCA will descend on us in all its fury, and rightfully so,” Fox said. “Because the pig would probably die instantly. Can you believe what he did to Thomas last Friday?”

  “After a few years at this place, I’m no longer surprised by anything at all,” Burns said, “but that did seem particularly brutal.” He dropped his butt into the Diet Coke can, which by now was beginning to get quite full. “Time to get a new ashtray. And speaking of last Friday, has anyone been called in for a conference with Elmore? I’m interested to find out what his ‘secret plan’ is.”

  “Ah,” Fox said, reaching for the L & M pack. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask. I had my conference this morning. I expect that you’ll be called in pretty soon. I know the whole thing, and I think it just may be the one thing that will surprise you, even after all these years.”

  “So tell me.”

  Fox lit the cigarette and took a drag. “Well,” he said, “it’s like this . . .”

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