Dying Voices

by Crider, Bill

  That was the theory at least. Unfortunately, most of the problems were purely imaginary, and the ones that weren't were not the kind that could be solved in advance. Nevertheless, it was a comfort to Burns just to have the list.

  Burns looked down at what he had written on the piece of paper. It was pretty straightforward:

  No one will want to read a paper.

  If anyone does want to read a paper, the papers won't be acceptable.

  We won't be able to get anyone to come to a seminar on such short notice.

  Street will hate the whole idea.

  No one in the department will want to work on the project.

  If we get the project off the ground, no one will show up for the seminar.

  People will want to come, but they won't be able to get here because Pecan City doesn't even have an airport.

  Miller won't be able to sell the idea to the faculty.

  There will be a lot of resentment against Street from some of the older faculty members.

  10. There won't be any publicity.

  Actually, even Burns had to admit, most of the problems weren't even real. There weren't many papers submitted, true, but those that came in were good. There might have been more had he been able to call for them sooner, like a year in advance, but the only weekend Street had open was the first one in September. So that was that.

  The faculty had been enthusiastic, and any old feuds or resentments, if there were any, had been buried deep, or at least well hidden. The English department had pitched in eagerly, even Miss Darling, who remembered Street as "a really dynamic young teacher." Of course, anyone under the age of seventy was regarded as young by Miss Darling.

  Street himself liked the idea. He had never returned to the HGC campus in the nearly twenty years since his leaving, and he was looking forward to being there again and visiting the few old acquaintances who still remained on the faculty.

  And Pecan City did have an airport of sorts, with regular shuttles to both Dallas/Ft. Worth and Houston.

  Even the news media were cooperating, though Burns had yet to see the notice Miller had hoped for in something like Time or Newsweek. Still, the seminar had been mentioned in one of the Dallas papers, which also planned to send a reporter. There was at least still a small chance that they would hit the big time.

  So Burns put the list back into his drawer, more or less satisfied.

  It never occurred to him to add an eleventh item to his list of worries, the item that would guarantee national publicity and insure that HGC would get its name in all the best papers and even on television.

  After all, he had no way of knowing that someone intended to kill Edward Street.

  Chapter 2

  He still had five minutes left before class began, so Burns decided to give Maintenance a call on the off chance that someone had gotten there early. He looked up the number in his campus directory and punched it on the new beige telephone that was installed in his office over the summer. No one in the administration was saying how much the up-to-date new and improved phone system had cost, but rumor (and HGC thrived on rumor) had it that it was the reason no one on the faculty had received a pay raise.

  After all, technology has its price.

  However, in spite of the lack of a raise, there was no question that the new system was capable of wonderful things. Both call-forwarding and call-waiting were available. You could transfer calls to other offices, and you could even have conference calls with people both inside and outside the system.

  Of course to do those things, you had to learn a complex system of "flash hooks" and symbol-punching that no one, with the possible exception of Franklin Miller's secretary, was going to take the trouble to learn. Anyone wanting a different office from the one he or she had gotten on the first try was just going to have to hang up and go back through the operator, and most people didn't want to be called if they weren't in their own offices, so the call-forwarding feature was worthless.

  So naturally there were some of what Dean Elmore, whose idea the new system had been, would have called "soreheads," who thought that it was an extravagance. But they would never have said so out loud. Not all fear of reprisal had died with the dean.

  The phone had rung five times, and Burns was just about to hang it up when he heard an answer.

  "Maint's."

  It was Clarice Bond, the Maintenance secretary. She had a beehive hairdo and wore glasses like the women in Gary Larson's cartoons. She also had a complete inability to speak many English words without omitting a number of vowels and consonants, and she was not much of a conversationalist. Burns didn't like to talk to her on the phone.

  "This is Carl Burns," he said. "I'm in my office in Main."

  There was silence on the other end of the line. Burns could hear a vague humming noise on the wire, but that was all.

  Burns plunged on. "There seem to be pigeons flying around in the attic over here."

  There was still no response.

  "And the smell is pretty bad. Do you think you could get someone to do something about it."

  "The smell or the p'jins?"

  "Uh . . . both," Burns said, hating himself for the use of vague pronoun reference.

  "I'll tell 'm."

  Burns heard a click and realized that the conversation was over. He had no idea whether it had done any good, but he guessed he would find out. Anyway, it was possible that as the air conditioning began to cool things off for the day, the smell would go away. Or that it would at least become less noticeable. To save money in the summer, there was no air conditioning in Main. It was old and poorly insulated, and it was easy enough to move classes to other buildings, so the heat and the smell had built up over the last three months.

  Burns gathered up the books and handouts for his class and wound his way through the maze-like halls, passing by the offices of Miss Darling and Clementine Nelson on the way.

  Miss Darling had surprised nearly everyone by announcing her retirement during the annual fall workshop. She would be retiring at the end of the spring semester, she said, and then asked about whether the school's hospitalization policy would cover flu shots. Most people had thought she would die in her classroom at HGC, but apparently she was going to disappoint them.

  She had not come in yet, her first class not beginning until ten, but Clem was there, just about to walk out the door. She looked even more severe than usual, her hair combed straight back, her face free of make-up, but Burns knew that she was one of the kindest, as well as one of the smartest, of HGC's faculty. She was old enough, and had been there long enough, to remember Street.

  "Good morning," Burns said. "Ready to greet the leaders of tomorrow one more time?"

  Clem smiled, looking less severe and showing straight, white teeth. "Lead on, MacDuff," she said, knowing that Burns would appreciate the slight misquotation. She collected the better examples of such things from her students' papers, and one of her favorites—as well as Burns's—had been written by one of her sophomores about Medea in Euripides's play of that name: "Hell hath no fury like a woman spermed."

  As far as Burns was concerned, that just about said it all. "I want to talk to you after class," Clem said as they walked toward the classrooms. "About one of the papers for the seminar."

  "Trouble?" Burns asked.

  "I don't think so. I've just been wondering about it." "I'll see you after class, then," Burns said. He hoped that she hadn't come up with something that would cause them, or himself, since he was the one to whom the dirty work would fall, to have to call the reader and say that they had rejected the paper at this late date. It was bad enough that they had only four.

  He went into the classroom at the head of the stairs. He always assigned himself that particular room because it was large, had windows on two sides, and seemed to have the best air conditioning of any on the floor. He was the chairman of the department, and rank had its privileges, though very damned few of them.

  There were thirty-four s
tudents scheduled for the class, and Burns found that only one was absent when he called the roll. That was a good sign.

  He carefully explained all the items on the handout and then asked if there were any questions, an empty formality if there ever was one. There were never any questions.

  He looked at his watch. He had used precisely forty-five minutes. Good enough.

  "That's it, then," he said. "You have your assignment sheets, so you may now go buy your books and get started on the reading. See you all tomorrow."

  The ones who hadn't closed their notebooks ten minutes before, only a few, did so now, and the class broke up. It was only the first day, so there was not the great rush there would be later in the semester when anyone pausing in the doorway was quite likely to be trampled.

  Burns waited until everyone had left before making his own exit, just in case a question had occurred to someone.

  It hadn't.

  He walked around to Clem's office and waited for her. She was much better at keeping her classes the whole time on the first day than he was. She had a lot more experience.

  The office was furnished with a blonde desk and chair that really didn't look very good with the institutional green of the walls, but then neither did any of the other office furniture in the department, all of which was a dark mahogany. Burns had no idea where the blonde furniture had come from. For all he knew, Clem might own it.

  There was also a blonde captain's chair, which Burns sat in to wait, and a blonde wooden filing cabinet. Burns's own filing cabinets were gray steel, and he wondered how Clem rated a wooden one. Maybe she did own the stuff.

  Clem came in right after the bell rang to signal the official end of class. Burns got up so that she could get by him to her desk. The office was so small that there was hardly room for him, her, and the blonde furniture.

  Clem put her books down and they both sat.

  "What's the problem?" Burns asked.

  "It's that paper by Melinda Land," Clem said. "The one called 'Dying Voices: Art or Artifact?'"

  "Oh," Burns said. "That one." To tell the truth, it had worried him, too. A little. Land was a professor at the University of Houston at Clear Lake, an upper-division and graduate school near NASA, and she had obviously done quite a bit of study on Street's work. Her title referred to the question of whether Street's poetry was really poetry (in the literary sense) or merely a form of popular verse that would be forgotten within a few years after its creator died, like most of the work of certain other poets who were lauded in their own lifetimes. Longfellow, for instance.

  "You think she was too hard on the book?" he asked. The professor did ask some hard questions, but her conclusion was that the poems stood up to most of the tests for good, if not great poetry, and would quite possibly outlive their creator. There was a certain irony in that, which Burns could not appreciate until later.

  "No," Clem said. "I was wondering if she was too easy on it."

  Uh-oh, Burns thought. Clem could be as tenacious as a pit bull if she believed a matter of principle was involved. "Too easy?" he said.

  "I was wondering if she came down on Street's side just so she could read her paper. There's a lot of pressure on those people at big schools to read papers. They need to do it for tenure. Maybe she really thinks Street's poems are inferior verse. There's at least a hint of that in her paper."

  "Let's give her the benefit of the doubt," Burns said. "Did you bring this up because you think the poetry's no good?"

  "I don't know," Clem said. "I have to admit that there were times when her arguments against the poetry seemed stronger than the ones in favor of it."

  "Do you think Street will be offended?"

  "Probably not, if he was willing to come back here in the first place. He ought to expect a little bit of a tough time."

  Burns had talked to Clem over the course of the summer about Street's tenure at HGC. Although she had not really gone into detail about it, she had never indicated anything that would have led him to doubt that Street's time there had been anything but happy. He began to think about the list in his desk drawer.

  "Why should he expect a tough time?" he said.

  "Well, when he was here, not everyone thought he was quite as wonderful as he thought he was. He always had an exaggerated idea of his own importance, or it seemed exaggerated at the time. I suppose that he turned out to be pretty important after all, but those of us who were here then remember him as a little bit of a blowhard. And not all the reviewers had been kind to his work."

  "Miss Darling liked him."

  "That's the way she remembers it now."

  Burns tried to draw her out, but that was all he was going to get. Clem didn't like to gossip.

  "It wouldn't really be gossiping," he said. "I need to know things like that. What if I seat him next to the wrong person at the banquet?"

  "I'm sure that won't happen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to be going to class."

  Sure enough, as she stood up, books in hand, the bell for the nine o'clock class rang.

  Burns stood and let her by, then followed her into the hall. He didn't try to persuade her to say any more. He had enough things on his mind, and maybe there was really nothing to worry about. No one had indicated any hard feelings in the planning sessions.

  He took his books and papers to his office and dumped them on his desk. It was time to head down to the History lounge.

  Burns, Tomlin, and Earl Fox, chairman of the History Department, had arranged their schedules so that they would all have a free period at nine. They planned to meet at that time on the second floor in the small room that they had claimed for their lounge.

  They didn't have much of a claim, but then they didn't need one. No one else wanted the room, which had not been remodeled along with the rest of the building in the early nineteen-seventies.

  It still had an eighteen-foot ceiling, and the single light hung down on a frayed fabric cord. The old card table and folding chairs were still the only furniture, and the walls had not been painted since the early years of the century.

  There was one new decorating touch this year, however. Earl Fox, who could not stay away from a garage sale any more than Bugs Bunny could avoid Elmer Fudd's garden, had somewhere located a cheap plastic imitation of a Tiffany shade. He had gotten a stepladder from the utility closet on the first floor and attached the shade to the dangling light cord, giving the room the appearance of the waiting room of the cheapest whorehouse in the world.

  The room was already filled with smoke when Burns entered without knocking, scaring Fox into tossing his cigarette to the floor. Fox loved to smoke, and he loved to try a different brand with every pack he bought, but he didn't want anyone in the HGC administration to know that he smoked. He thought that by throwing the cigarette to the floor and ignoring it, he could fool anyone who happened to catch him at it.

  Today he was smoking Cost Cutters from Kroger; the yellow and white pack was lying on the card table's peeling top. He picked up his cigarette when he saw that the intruder was only Burns.

  "I wish you wouldn't do that," he said, knocking imaginary—or possibly not-so-imaginary—dirt off his cigarette. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt that looked like one of Thomas Magnum's cast-offs, a pair of greenish double knit slacks, and Reebok running shoes that looked as if they had been run in for about five thousand miles. Burns had always suspected Fox of buying his clothes at the same sales where he found such irresistible bargains as the Tiffany shade.

  Burns sat in one of the folding chairs. He sat carefully, just in case the chair decided to collapse under him, but it held his weight without a tremor.

  "Want a smoke?" Fox said.

  "I quit over the summer," Burns said.

  "That's what I told him," Mal Tomlin said. He was also seated at the table, but he had continued to smoke calmly when Burns entered. He didn't care who knew he smoked. "I told him about the pigeons, too."

  "If it's not rats, it's pigeon shit," Fox said, fl
icking ashes in the general direction of the center of the card table. "I don't know what this place is coming to."

  It was then that Burns noticed another new decorator touch—an immense purple glass ashtray in the shape of a leaf. Or maybe it was a flower.

  "Nice," Burns said, indicating the ashtray.

  "Yeah," Fox said. "Thought I'd try to class up the place a little bit, give it that homey touch. I was tired of the alligator one."

  "You did good," Tomlin said. "About those rats, by the way. I haven't seen any hint of them since the last one. I kind of miss it. Gave the place character."

  The rat to which he referred had become known as The Rat. It had died the previous year in the men's room gasping its last between a board and the stone wall behind the toilet. Only its tail and feet had hung down, causing consternation to both Fox and the building's maid, Rose, who had refused to remove it.

  "I guess they poisoned all of them," Fox said. "I'm glad to be rid of them, myself."

  Burns thought about the poisoned rats. He wondered what Maintenance would do about the pigeons. Not poison, surely.

  "Speaking of poison," Tomlin said, taking a puff on his Merit, "how's the Street seminar coming along? You got everything under control?"

  "I suppose so," Burns said. "Why'd you bring it up in connection with poison?"

  "Free association, I guess. I overheard somebody at the workshop talking about Street and saying that his name was still 'poison' in some quarters around here."

  Burns felt a prickle of cold sweat pop out on his back. Suddenly he wanted a cigarette very much. But he resisted the urge.

  "Who said that?" he asked.

  "I don't remember. It was just something I heard in passing. You know, I was passing by a bunch of people and somebody said it."

  "Nobody said anything like that to me," Burns protested. "Everyone I've asked has been very helpful about the seminar." He was thinking of what Clem had just told him, however. It was beginning to appear that not everyone had been exactly truthful.