Rook & Tooth and Claw

by Graham Masterton

  As Jim walked up toward the college building, he almost collided with Dr Ehrlichman, the principal, who was hurrying back to his office. Dr Ehrlichman was wearing an off-white seersucker suit and he looked as flustered as the White Rabbit in Alice.

  “Dr Ehrlichman? I’ve just heard what happened in the locker room.”

  “I’m sorry, Jim. No time. I have to take a VIP phone call.”

  “Ben Hunkus tells me you didn’t call the cops?”

  “I’d rather we carried out our own investigation first. God knows we’ve had the police around here enough times this semester. You have to think of our reputation.”

  “Yes, Dr Ehrlichman, I guess I do.”

  Jim pushed his way through the double doors that led to the boys’ locker room. A few students were still standing around outside, but the locker room itself was being guarded by the college security officer, Mr Wallechinsky, in his tight brown uniform, blocking the entrance with his beefy sun-reddened arms folded.

  “Mr Rook?”

  “How’s it going, Mr Wallechinsky? I just came to take a look.”

  “I warn you, Mr Rook. Your heart’s going to bleed.”

  “Don’t you have any idea how it happened?”

  Mr Wallechinsky shook his head. “Up until eleven o’clock, everything was fine. By half after, somebody had managed to turn the whole damn locker room into a disaster area.”

  “Nobody heard anything? It must have caused a hell of a racket.”

  “Nobody heard nothing. Nobody saw nothing. The last person that anybody saw near the locker room was that Red Indian student of yours.”

  “Native American, Mr Wallechinsky, if you don’t mind.”

  “Ah, come on, Mr Rook, what’s in a name? I’m a Polack, right? You can call me a Polack if you like. There’s no name never hurt me.”

  “All the same, Catherine White Bird is a Native American. Or a Navajo. You can call her either.” He paused, and then he said, “So what was she doing here? Did you ask her?”

  “Sure. She just came back to fetch Martin Amato’s wallet. I guess you know that she and Martin Amato have been dating.”

  Jim nodded. “Sure.” He always did his best to keep up with his students’ love lives. It often made it easier to understand why a particular student was depressed, or dreamy, or exceptionally touchy. And he wasn’t at all surprised that Catherine White Bird and Martin Amato had fallen for each other – they made a brilliantly attractive young couple. Jim could have fancied Catherine White Bird himself if he’d been fifteen years younger, and he hadn’t made it a cast-iron rule never to get involved with any of his female students. Apart from calling Dr Ehrlichman a bureaucratic pinhead, that was the quickest way for any teacher to find himself looking for work.

  “Catherine didn’t see anything either?”

  “Not a thing. And there’s no way she could have done anything like this herself.”

  “You’d better show me,” said Jim.

  Mr Wallechinsky opened the door of the locker room and let Jim inside. It was gloomy, because the fluorescent strip-lights had been shattered, and there was water hissing all over the floor from three basins which had been completely wrenched away from the wall. There were grey steel lockers lying on their sides, on their backs, and all kinds of angles. But they hadn’t just been pushed over: they had been bent and twisted, some of them almost in half. Three or four of them had been gouged and ripped, as if by the teeth of a mechanical excavator.

  Heaps of football uniforms were strewn around everywhere, and every one of them had been torn into shreds. West Grove’s bright new green-and-orange outfits had been donated by West Grove Screen & Window, at a cost of more than $3,500. Now they were reduced to slews of sodden rags. Even their shoulder armour was torn apart, and their green-and-orange helmets were split open. Jim bent down and picked up one helmet that was crushed like a trodden-on M&M. The mystery was, you couldn’t crush a helmet like this with a sledgehammer, or by driving a Jeep over it.

  The walls of the locker room were scarred, too. All across the far wall, the white porcelain tiles had been scratched right through to the clay. Jim walked across to the wall and ran his fingers down the grooves. There were five of them, in parallel, almost like clawmarks. Yet even a full-sized grizzly bear wasn’t capable of making deep scratches on high-glazed porcelain.

  Ben Hunkus came in and stood beside him. “Pretty damned tragic, isn’t it?” he said.

  “No question about it, I think we should call the cops,” said Jim. “Whoever did this was totally berserk. Apart from that, he must have had some kind of pick or farm implement that could pierce right through the sides of these lockers. Imagine what could have happened if somebody had disturbed him.”

  He dropped the smashed helmet onto the floor. “What I can’t understand is, why would anybody want to bust up a college locker room? I mean, what the hell for?”

  “Maybe somebody from Chabot wanted to make sure that West Grove would lose.”

  “Are you kidding me? Chabot could flatten The Fumblers with shopping bags over their heads. They wouldn’t have to do anything like this.”

  “Listen, Jim, West Grove have a pretty good chance of winning this game. Or at least of not losing by very much.”

  “Sure, Ben. I’m sorry. But I don’t understand this at all.”

  While Ben tried to heave up some of the fallen lockers, Jim stood in the middle of the room looking around. He was sure that he could sense something, and he wasn’t at all sure what it was. It was as strong as that feeling you get when you walk into a room crowded with unwelcoming strangers. It was a deep hostility – almost a rage.

  “Do you feel something?” he asked Ben.

  Ben was struggling, red-faced, with an overturned bench. “I feel good and mad, I can tell you that.”

  “I know. But can you feel something, here in this room?”

  Ben stopped struggling and looked around. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Hm. I’m not sure that I do, either. Do you want a hand with that?”

  Ben didn’t answer. He was too busy rattling a locker door that had been twisted into the shape of a huge grey bowtie.

  He left Ben to his clearing-up and walked back down to the football field. It was a perfect October day – clear and cool, with a light breeze to make the college pennants snap. The West Grove band was playing 99 Red Balloons for the seventh time, with all the off-key enthusiasm of a Mexican street orchestra. The cheerleaders were strutting up and down in their short pleated skirts and waving their green-and-orange pom-poms. If there was one thing that West Grove could boast, it was the prettiest girls. Prancing in front of them was one of Jim’s class, Sue-Robin Caufield, whirling her baton like a helicopter rotor. Jim gave her a smile and a wave and she gave him a winning smile in return. God, he thought, if only that girl could read and write the way she can prance.

  He found Martin Amato again, down by the 20-yard line. Catherine White Bird was with him.

  “Hi, Mr Rook. What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I think I’m going to persuade Dr Ehrlichman to call the police. Meanwhile, tell all of your team to keep on the lookout. We could be looking for nothing more than somebody who gets a kick out of trashing locker rooms. But on the other hand there might be some psycho around who’s got some kind of a grudge against you.”

  “A grudge? Who has a grudge against a college football team?”

  “People have had stranger grudges than that,” Jim told him. “There was a woman who lived next door to me who used to have a grudge against Lou Costello. She sent him hate mail till the day she died.”

  Catherine White Bird said, “It couldn’t be a student, could it, Mr Rook?”

  Catherine had only just joined Special Class II. Up until three months ago, she had lived on the Navajo reservation at Window Rock, close to the border between Arizona and New Mexico, and studied at the Navajo Community College. But her father had won a leading role in a new TV series abo
ut the Navajo police, Blood Brothers, and she and her two brothers had taken the opportunity to join him in Los Angeles.

  Her mother had died when she was fifteen, but one of the first things that she had said when she introduced herself to the class had been, “I look just like my mother. I am my mother.” In which case, her mother must have been very tall, over 5ft 10ins, with long black hair that fell almost as far as her waist. Catherine had high cheekbones and slanting brown eyes and full, slightly pouting lips. She was big-breasted and long-legged, and today she was wearing a blue checkered shirt and skintight jeans. Around her neck was a silver necklace with an enamel eagle on it.

  Jim said, “If it is a student, then believe me we’ll find out who it is and we’ll use his guts for guitar strings.”

  “My grandmother had a way of finding people who caused trouble,” Catherine told him. “She used to have magic bones which pointed them out.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to need any magic bones to find this guy,” said Martin. “He’s probably bright green, with burst-apart clothes.”

  “It beats me that nobody saw anything,” said Jim. “Whoever did it must have been carrying an axe or something like that. And the noise must have been awesome. All those lockers being knocked over.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said Catherine. “And I mean, I can practically hear the grass grow.”

  Russell said, “That thing that Indians do in movies, when they put their ear down to the ground and say ‘heap plenty horses coming this way’, can you do that?”

  “Russell,” Jim warned him. “I’ve told you before about racial stereotypes.”

  “I don’t mind,” Catherine smiled. “Just don’t let my brothers hear you talking like that, that’s all.”

  “Yes, Russell,” said Martin. “You’ll end up bristling with arrows.”

  Bristling, thought Jim. That was the word his grandfather had used. ‘It’s dark, and it’s very old, and it kind of bristles, if you get my meaning.’ The truth was, he hadn’t got his grandfather’s meaning, not really, but he hadn’t been able to persuade him to elaborate any further. All he had said was ‘you’ll see.’

  Yet there was something about what had happened today, and the strange hostile sensation that he had experienced in the locker room, that made him think again about his grandfather’s warning. Maybe this dark, old, bristling menace had come around the curve quicker than he had expected.

  The football game started at a quarter after three. Jim sat on the bleachers on the north side of the field with George Babouris, the physics lecturer, and Susan Randall, the head of geography. George was big and bearded and devouring Greek kebabs as if he hadn’t eaten for three weeks. Susan was looking as fresh and pretty as a girl in a Norman Rockwell painting: bobbed brunette hair, rosy cheeks, and a red skinny-rib sweater and turned-up jeans. He and Susan had been having an on-off kind of relationship for the past two months. The reality was that they were completely unsuited. Susan was seriously into step aerobics, aromatherapy and ancient maps, while Jim was seriously into Chinese take-out and Bruce Willis movies. But Susan was attracted by Jim’s undernourished, dishevelled looks, his scruffy dark hair and his eyes the color of green bottle-glass. She loved the way he pressed two finger-tips to his forehead and squeezed his eyes tight when he was trying to think, and he always made her laugh. She also knew that he was totally dedicated to his students. Once she had sat in back of Special Class II and listened to a tall black youth with dreadlocks reciting Speaking of Poetry by John Peale Bishop:

  “Traditional, with all its symbols

  ancient as the metaphors in dreams;

  strange, with never before heard music; continuous

  until the torches deaden at the bedroom door.”

  The youth himself had been awed by what he was saying, and Susan had found it hard to keep back her tears, particularly since he had started in Special Class II as one of the most aggressive and disruptive of students, with a vocabulary that was nothing but a mangled mixture of street-talk and f-words.

  “ ‘Never before heard music,’ ” the youth had said, after he had finished, pointing his finger at every member of the class, one by one. “You think what that means, ‘never before heard music.’ Shit, you don’t know how much I love those words.”

  Susan turned and laid her hand on Jim’s knee. He glanced at her and gave her a tight smile.

  “You’re looking worried,” she said.

  Jim shrugged. “West Grove is losing about eight-and-a-half billion to nothing. What do you expect?”

  “You’re not worried about that, Jim. We usually lose by much more than that.”

  “I don’t know … it’s this business in the locker room. It gives me a bad feeling, that’s all.”

  “Come on, relax. The police will find out who did it.”

  “I’m not so sure.” He couldn’t tell her that his grandfather had appeared to him today, and what his grandfather had said. She just wouldn’t believe him. Christ, he could hardly believe it himself – even though he was gradually getting used to the idea that he was able to see visions and visitations that most people couldn’t. At the age of ten he had almost died from pneumonia, and his near-death experience had given him the facility to see the spirits that still walk among the living, whether they came to comfort, to protect, or to seek their revenge.

  “Do you know something about this?” asked Susan. “I get the feeling you know something about this.”

  Jim shook his head. “Just like I said, it gives me a bad feeling, that’s all.”

  Out on the field, Russell had spent most of the game lumbering in unsuccessful pursuit of Chabot’s star players. But as the game came to a close, and Chabot’s captain Wayne Dooly came sprinting toward the line for a last-minute touchdown, Russell stepped out directly in front of him. Dooly was running too fast to sidestep. He tripped, missed his footing, and collided with Russell with an echoing crash of flesh and body armour. Dooly stood upright for a moment, swaying. Then – as the final whistle blew – he fell flat on his back on the turf. West Grove’s supporters cheered and ran out onto the field. They hoisted Russell up on their shoulders, although it took six of them to do it, and they paraded him around the touchline. Jim stood up and applauded. He had never seen Russell look so happy in the whole time that he had been at West Grove.

  Martin came off the field and Jim and Susan went over to commiserate. “It could have been worse,” Jim told him. “You did good, considering that you lost all of your uniforms.”

  “Sure, and considering I’ve got the slowest, clumsiest team in the entire history of college football. To think – perfectly innocent pigs were killed so that these idiots could kick their skins the wrong way down the field.”

  Catherine put her arm around him, kissed his cheek and held him close. “You’re still my hero,” she smiled, and blew him a kiss.

  “What are you guys doing now?” Jim asked them. “I gather there’s some kind of party in the gym.”

  “It’s a Disaster Party,” said Martin. “We’re celebrating the longest unbroken run of defeats in community college history.”

  “No, we’re not,” said Catherine. “We’re going to celebrate the very last game we lose. Next time we’re going to win, aren’t we? And we’re going to go on winning, even if I have to use my grandmother’s magic to make it happen!”

  “Your grandmother sounds like quite a woman,” said Jim.

  “Oh, she was,” said Catherine. “She could make dead cicadas dance; and she could make it rain. She could walk through a meadow and all the wild flowers would spring up after her.”

  Jim caught her eye for a moment and she caught his: and in that moment he knew that she wasn’t telling him lies – that the stories she had told about her grandmother weren’t just pretty stories, they were true. And she knew that he knew. Magic people do.

  “Come on,” said Martin. “I’m going to have to take a shower. Then we can get down to some serious celebrating.�
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  “We’ve arranged for you to use the girls’ showers,” said Ben. “Mr Wallechinsky is going to be on patrol, just to make sure that you behave yourselves. Like, no using the girls’ shampoo, or wearing their panties afterward. I don’t want a transvestism situation here, to add to everything else.”

  Russell came up, red-faced and sweating, but infinitely happy. Jim gave him a high five and said, “Well done, Russell. You may have lost the game but you sure made your mark.”

  Russell said, “ ‘History to the defeated, may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ ”

  Jim was taken aback. “That’s WH Auden. Who taught you that?”

  “You did, sir.”

  “Did I?”

  “It was one of the things that made me train for the team. It was one of the things that made me try to stop eating all the goddamned time.”

  Jim looked at Russell and saw him for the first time not as a fat, clowning, overweight student, but as a man. He laid his hand on Russell’s armoured shoulder and nodded, and that was all he had to do. He didn’t smile for very long. A black Firebird had drawn up in the visitors’ parking lot, its engine burbling, and two tall young men climbed out. They came walking across the grass with all the purpose of people who have a serious score to settle.

  Jim recognized them at once. They were Catherine’s older brothers, Paul and Grey Cloud. They came to collect Catherine every day after college, and the only time that Jim had seen Catherine out of college, on the boardwalk at Venice Beach, her brothers had flanked her like bodyguards, conspicuously grim-faced among the smiling roller-bladers and bikini-clad cyclists. This afternoon Paul was wearing a charcoal-grey suit and a black turtle-neck, while Grey Cloud wore a black double breasted coat and jeans. Grey Cloud’s hair was tied back in a long ponytail and he wore Navajo jewelry around his neck. Both of them wore impenetrable black sunglasses.

  “You’re late,” Grey Cloud told Catherine. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “The game started late,” Martin put in. “Somebody vandalized our locker room.”