by Kluge, P. F.
“Listen,” I said. “I blew it. I apologize. I’ll do better. I’ll make it up to the guy who wrote the letter. An independent study or something...”
My wife studied me a minute. Shrewd, professional appraisal. Then she glanced at Blair. One woman checking in with another, not a word said, but my fate being decided. A glance, a nod. An agreement. They made it in silence. Then they shared it with me.
“This is a place where we take chances on students,” My Wife, My Provost began. “We take chances on our professors, too. I’ve also heard that this is the sort of place where every professor has the chance to teach at least one bad course. Professor May? You’ve taught that bad course. You’ve used your chance. Do we understand each other?”
“I’ll do better.”
“Have I said anything you don’t understand?” she pressed. Nut-cutter. Inconceivable I’d ever be naked around her again.
“I said I’d do better,” I repeated. A few scraps of pride remained. “Not for your sake. Not for our sake. Not for my sake.”
“Your motives...” Now she was the one who bristled.
“It’s for the sake of the kid who wrote that letter,” I said, interrupting her interruption. This was sounding maudlin. I’d regret it. In a while, I’d be rationalizing. How many kids like that were here, anyway? How many hungry, earnest kids? Surely not a majority. And once the daily drudgery resumed, it was going to be easy to forget the appalled shudder that letter had produced. So I promised I’d remember. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, coming to a beautiful place in the middle of nowhere to profess literature, to make a life out of that. Then again, maybe it was a bad idea: complacent, elitist and, when you looked at the way the world was turning, doomed. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But I decided that this next year, I’d clean up my act and I wasn’t kidding, when I told my wife it wasn’t for her or me or us. That kid’s righteous anger had done it. So, alright, I’d clean up my act. And then I’d decide if the act was worth playing.
I decided, as part of my second-year reform, to hold evening office hours. I was hoping to encourage thoughtful student visitors, kids who’d talk about more than grades and deadlines. It worked too, it really did. Still, some nights, nobody needed me. That was alright too. I’d sit in my office listening to music, old stuff, Jussi Bjoerling to Tex Ritter, Buddy Holly to Marvin Gaye. What they were doing, reaching out across the years, was what books were supposed to do. Mine and other people’s. Anyway, Marvin was singing Sexual Healing, when I noticed the cops standing in my doorway, waiting for the song to end.
“I’m Sherwood Graves,” the tall one told me. “And this...” He gestured at the guy who’d driven me home drunk from the admissions luncheon.
“Hi, Billy,” I said. We’d gotten into the habit of talking, when we met. He liked talking to professors, the poor guy felt honored. I liked talking to people who weren’t professors. Perfect.
“We’d like to discuss Martha Yeats,” Graves said as they sat down.
“I hardly knew her,” I said. I told them about the faculty lunch. That was it, I said.
“Bear with me,” Graves said. “She annoyed a lot of people. As you know. But when we considered all her crusades, all we had was annoyance. Nothing more. Until we came to the fact that her killer deposited her in front of a fraternity lodge. Martha wanted fraternities out of here. Class, race, gender all came together for her in fraternities. She was death on fraternities.”
“So fraternities were the death of her?”
“Not that simple. There was a related campaign. Crimes against women, sexual assault, all that. She was a speaker, a counselor. A campaigner. She represented several victims...alleged victims...in proceedings against college men. Fraternity members. Against, among others...”
“Okay,” I said. “You can stop there. Now I know why you’re here.”
In that career suicide that was my first year here, this kid, this black kid, had sat in the back row of American Lit, just where football players are supposed to sit. He did enough to get by. He’d show up, he’d do some of the reading, scribble and doodle, and turn in a paper that didn’t go an inch beyond a recap of what was said in class. He’d get a B minus or a C plus back from me. That was the deal. There was more, though. He smiled at me across the trenches, even dropped by my office to talk. He was curious about what good work amounted to, even though he had no interest in attempting it. You sensed that later on, too late, maybe, he might get serious and accomplish something and maybe—I know this sounds wishful—remember something he’d heard in class. Meanwhile, he was skating. Skating and partying. No problem. My grade—his grade, that is—no problem. He liked to bring me tales of student parties, even invited me, but they all started at midnight. I knew that student parties would be the death of me. My Wife, My Provost wouldn’t stand for it. So I settled for yarns: the “caveman party,” the “pimps and hos” party, the “shock your mama” party.
In spring of his senior year he told me he’d been accused of sexual assault. “Date rape bullshit,” he called it. Something that happened two years before had worked its way to the surface. He’d be tried intramurally. He had a right to bring in a faculty member as a counselor. He wanted it to be me. “You’re my favorite professor,” he said. My degree wasn’t in law, I told him, or in counseling. But I said I’d do it.
When I walked into the designated classroom, that first of several nights, Martha Yeats was there with a woman student I didn’t know. There was a lot more I had to learn. Any crime victim had a right to go to the sheriff, the local district attorney, appear before local judge and jury. Or they could go to a college panel of faculty, administrator and students. In this case, the ultimate sanction was expulsion from college.
Some things were clear. Plaintiff and accused had gone to a party, sophomore year. They had gotten drunk, slow dancing, kissing, grabbing ass. They adjourned to a bathroom, locking the door behind them. They had sex a couple of times, a couple of ways. When they emerged, they hugged, kissed and parted. All that was stipulated. After that, it was up for grabs, what happened in that room, which was like no rape I’d ever heard of, also like no love affair. The woman was game, willing, wanton. Or cornered, terrified, silently screaming, breaking up inside. The guy was a coercive, abusive prick. Or a good kid who thought he’d gotten lucky. I’ll never know who was harmed most, the man or the woman, or whether the harm done that night matched the harm that was done when they found my guy guilty and the president predictably blew off my e-mail, denied me a personal appointment and upheld the decision that obliged the kid to leave college eight weeks before he was supposed to walk across the stage and receive a diploma in front of his pleased-as-punch parents. I’ll never know the truth of it. Not that night and not the night Graves and Billy Hoover came to talk about it.
“What about Martha Yeats?” Graves asked.
“She was there. She was sitting across from me, next to the woman. The victim.”
“What was that like?”
“They were close, you could see that. I wouldn’t say Martha was coaching. Not exactly. But close to it.”
“Did she ever talk to you?”
“No. She smiled, kind of, the first time she saw me. It was as though it amused her...that I was the best this guy could come up with.”
“Did Professor Yeats participate in the proceedings?”
“No. She whispered to the girl sometimes. Held her, hugged her during breaks. And she nodded a lot when she liked what she was hearing, rolled her eyes when she disagreed. The way the women do now on those Washington talk shows. She seemed familiar with the process, I’ll say that. She’d been there before, I gathered.”
“Did your student ever express any anger, any feelings at all, about Professor Yeats?”
“No,” I said. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“When we walked out of the room that last time, he looked over at the two of them. The two women. ‘Thanks for the memories,’ he said. I thought he
was talking to the girl. Maybe Martha Yeats was included.”
“Maybe,” Graves said.
Chapter IV
BILLY HOOVER
Two of the three guys named in sexual assault cases that Martha Yeats had been involved in were off the hook. One of them worked for a rental car company in Phoenix, Arizona, the other was on the staff of a Washington congressman. Our calls confirmed that they’d been at work when Martha Yeats wound up in front of the Psi U lodge. That left the kid Mark May had talked to us about, the black. He was different. The other two had gotten in trouble more than once, looking for love in all the wrong places. Our man today was a first-time offender and—from what Mark May had said—a little more innocent than the others. Maybe a lot more innocent. Anyway, worth checking on. His name was Dante Gibbins.
We were off the interstate, headed into Weirton, West Virginia, before Graves opened his mouth, but only to give directions. He had one of those computer printouts, where you punch in the address where you’re going and they tell you every turn you make. But they don’t show what it’s like, when you arrive. On both sides of the street were rows of attached brick houses, each with a porch and a tiny yard along a broke-up crazy-angled sidewalk that would give your baby whiplash, if you took her out there in a carriage.
“Stop here a minute,” Graves said. We were at the end of the last street, ready to start checking numbers. I pulled over to the side. He took a folder and looked it over, close enough so that I could see a student photo. A good-looking kid with a student council smile, not that hooded, hostile look you saw on some black students.
“Remember this,” Graves said. “This isn’t about what he did to her or she did to him. They’ll want to talk about what a raw deal it was and we’ll sit through it. But his guilt or innocence in that case doesn’t matter in the least. Where he was when Martha was murdered, that’s all we care about. And...Billy?”
“Yes?”
“Your role in this is to nod and smile and not be threatening. Don’t ask anything, even if it seems perfectly reasonable. My questions are thought-through, arranged from first to last. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Whoever we find here is a hostile witness,” he said. “Do you understand that? They may glad hand us and smile, offer coffee, but it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Even if they’re innocent?”
“No one’s innocent. It’s just a question of whether they’re guilty of what we want them for.”
So here we were at this kid’s house. Were we going to pretend that we cared about the kid, that the college was worried about his kicked-out ass? Did we begin by saying we were here about some library fines or unpaid parking tickets? Or did we spring Martha Yeats right on him, maybe get him to tell us the first thing that popped into his mind when we mentioned her name?
We stepped through the screen door and onto the porch. Glancing left and right, I could sight down the porches, like looking down a row of receding mirrors, going away forever. I wondered what it was like, living here—what people missed, if they got homesick.
“Yes?” A thin, light-skinned man opened the door. He had greenish eyes and freckles and salt and pepper hair that he didn’t fuss with. He was in a bathrobe at two in the afternoon and he had a book in his hand, The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw. I studied him while Graves went into something about how we were working for the college and there was some trouble up there we needed help on. I was wondering how long it would take before the guy started shouting, rousing the neighborhood. But I was wrong.
“I know that place well,” the man said. “I’ve been there many times.”
“Well then,” Graves said, as if it was time he invited us in.
“Dropping my son off at the start of the freshmen year. Before the start. Orientation, I believe they call it. Picking him up at the end. Before the end. Expulsion, I believe they call it...”
“We know there was a problem up there.”
“Problem? Is that what you call it?”
“If we could step inside, just a minute,” Graves said, like a salesman with his foot just barely in the door.
“On one condition, sir,” the man said. “You go when I tell you to go.”
“Of course...”
One side of the living room was all plants—Christmas cactus, crown of thorns, African violets, the sorts of plants you associated with old folks. That must be the woman’s side I guessed, because the other wall was books, paperback and hard-cover, lots of titles about the war. After he gestured us onto a sofa and offered us some tea, the man returned to where he must’ve been sitting before we came, a worn-out comfortable looking easy chair with a reading lamp overhead and a hassock where he could put up his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Graves said. “You’re his dad?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I’m senior. He’s junior.”
“Day off from work?”
“I’m retired now. I was a teacher. Principal, at the end.”
“Do you miss it?”
He sat there, like maybe he was preparing a speech about the challenge of teaching, molding young lives and all, it gets in your blood, once a teacher, always a teacher. But that’s not what was coming.
“I wonder why you’re pretending...”
“Pretending?”
“Pretending you care one bit about me. Why don’t you just get to it? I’m really wondering what you’re doing here. Or do you have another woman up there, thinking she got raped?”
“We’ve got a woman up there, alright. A professor who was killed.”
“Oh. I see. I get it now. Makes sense. Must’ve been my boy who did it.” He was getting angry now and Graves couldn’t stop him. And it was the worst kind of anger, fueled by pain. And controlled by intelligence. I could see that, too, the way he watched us, measuring us while he talked. He was in control and somebody needed to call time out.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could I use your bathroom?”
The man was annoyed. So was Graves.
“I shotgunned some coffee on the way down,” I explained.
“Well, you came a long way to take a piss. It’s back through the kitchen.”
I found the bathroom and, across from it, a bedroom that must be, or have been, his son’s. I poked my head inside. There were shelves and plaques and trophies. The wall was covered with photos...team portraits, prom nights...and laminated newspaper clippings, plus certificates from Kiwanis Key Club and Boys State. Incredibly, our college pennant above the bed. Back in the hall, I saw something more recent, something that I studied carefully, a photo thumbtacked to a workboard, a couple of postcards around it. I pulled a few out of the board, careful not to drop the thumbtacks on the floor. I checked dates and postmarks but barely glanced at the message. It was like snooping in someone’s medicine cabinet. Enough was enough.
Behind me, I heard Graves trying to get down to business. Martha’s name and what a controversial person she was. Sentence fragments came to me as I stood there peeing, banking off the upper part of the bowl so there’d be no sound of splashing. And then, after I flushed, while I washed and wiped my hands on a towel, I heard silence. No more talking out there. Senior had stopped running his mouth. And Graves was quiet too, all out of careful thought-through questions.
“I wanted you to hear this, sir,” the old man said when I returned. “We were waiting for you.”
“Well, thanks, I’m ready now,” I answered, trying to sound cheerful.
“My son messed up at college. He drank too much. He partied plenty. He chased women...and they chased him. Are you with me? Both of you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He let us down. His mother and me. She’s working. You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you. At the Ramada, in the office. And the reason she works...we both did...was so our son could get the chance he got...and blew. But we love him. We’ll work it out. We’ll get through it and move on. But what I can’t let go of is what you did to my boy up there.”
He leaned forward now, fire in his eyes, some for Graves—being a state employee didn’t exempt him—and plenty left for me.
“Sexual assault. Deans, students, professors making like a court of law. You listen. If there’s a real crime committed, get a real cop, a real lawyer, a real judge and jury. And see how far that girl gets, when she tells folks she was under-age and she was drinking and she went into a bathroom and locked a door and got laid where most folks take a shit. Try calling that a crime anywhere off campus. How in the hell did a college get into that business in the first place? Do you think you’re good at it? Do you care? Do you think you owe it to the parents? The students? Yourselves? Who are you protecting?”
“I can’t defend...” Graves began. But he didn’t get far.
“Listen. My son—a black man accused of rape by a white woman—would’ve had a better chance with an all-white, all-farmer, country-boy coon-hunting jury than he had with your extra-curricular, semi-pro, student-faculty court. Since when do colleges have their own courts? Ohio law not good enough? Is that place an embassy or something? From what country? Suburban Connecticut?”
He sat back in his chair, closed his eyes, tried catching his breath. Emphysema, I bet. That or lung cancer.
“Now you come tip-toeing in, chatting up, pussy footing around, listening to me talk like I’m the most fascinating man in the world, all the time you’re waiting to ask if my boy is home, which he isn’t, and if I’ll tell you where he is, which I won’t. You’re wondering if he went after that professor, which he didn’t. And you want to ask if you could just have an address, a phone number, a place of employment, so you can cross him off the list, like you’re doing us all a favor. But I don’t want you calling his boss, his neighbors, the people he works with, a cop asking them to verify he wasn’t off murdering somebody. You expelled him from college. Well, okay, consider him expelled. And now you can both go expel yourselves out of here...”
“Well, what do you think?” Graves asked, no sooner than we were in the car.