…A Dangerous Thing

by Crider, Bill

  "There you go," Holt said. He leaned back in the uncomfortable chair that Burns had provided him, perfectly at ease, almost smug. "Did you hear what you said? 'Their cultural heritage.' But it isn't, you see."

  "Of course it is," Burns said, wishing that he felt as comfortable in the conversation as Holt appeared to be.

  "No it isn't," Holt said. "You have quite a few people of color enrolled here: A number of Mexican-Americans. A few African Americans and Asians. These works aren't their heritage."

  Burns wanted to argue that all the students Holt had mentioned, with the probable exception of the Asians, were probably at least second generation U. S. residents and that the works in the text were as relevant to them as they were to anyone at the school.

  But he didn't. He said, "So you're suggesting that we substitute other works, even if they haven't been proved to be of lasting significance?"

  Holt didn't sneer. Not quite. He said, "You've heard of deconstructionist theory, I hope?"

  "Yes," Burns said, experiencing a sinking feeling. "I guess you're going to tell me is that what it boils down to is that you can't really say that one literary work is superior to another."

  "Very good," Holt said. "So let's give these students something they need and want. For your traditional students, there are Louis L'Amour and Sue Grafton. For the others, there are books by Black Elk, Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday, Thomas Sanchez. And you need many more stories by women. Alice Munro. Joyce Carol Oates. Bobbie Ann Mason. Amy Tan."

  Burns had nothing at all against any of those writers. In fact he had read and enjoyed all of them. But he thought that students might read them on their own, outside of class, and that a foundation in the more traditionally accepted classics might be in order in a college curriculum.

  "Multiculturalism, Burns, that's the key," Holt said. "You're too whitebread."

  "Don't blame me," Burns said. "Blame my heredity and environment."

  Holt laughed. At least he had a sense of humor. Burns went on to say that he thought the HGC curriculum did teach about other cultures, the culture of the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, the Italians of the Renaissance to name a few.

  Holt didn't agree, and neither did Dean Partridge. Those cultures might have been different, but they weren't the correct ones. So when the semester began, Holt was teaching three sections of a "special studies" survey of literature. The enrollment was small, but Holt and Partridge were sure it would grow as soon as other students found out about it.

  Burns was sure the enrollment would grow, too. In addition to teaching a sort of "lit lite" course, Holt required no papers and gave no tests.

  "What really matters is the reader's response to the readings," he said. "I grade very heavily on class participation."

  "I see," Burns said, wondering when the smoldering resentment among the rest of his faculty members would burst into open rebellion.

  Bunni, Burns's student secretary was taking one of Holt's classes, and she talked to Burns about it one day.

  "That Dr. Holt is really smart," she said. "I never realized how oppressed we women were until he explained things to us."

  George (The Ghost) Caspar, Bunni's boyfriend, was with her. He didn't look especially happy with what Bunni was discovering about oppression.

  "Have you been oppressing Bunni?" Burns asked him.

  "No," George said. "Or at least I don't think so. But Dr. Holt says I've been oppressing lots of other people."

  "Who?" Burns asked, genuinely curious. He would not have guessed that George was the type to oppress anyone.

  "Well," George said, looking at the worn grayish-green carpet that covered the floor, "gays."

  Burns hadn't known there were any gays at HGC, and he wondered how George had found opportunity to oppress any. So he asked.

  "That's just it," George said. "See? You're doing it, too."

  "I am?" Burns said. "How?"

  "By assuming that everyone else is straight just because you are. When you do that, you oppress others."

  "Oh," Burns said, mentally bracing himself for the student and parent complaints that were sure to come as a result of such radical ideas being spread across the HGC campus.

  His only comfort, and it was small comfort indeed, was that Earl Fox was being threatened with a new faculty member of his own for the fall semester.

  "It seems that we don't teach history properly," Fox said, jabbing the air with another of Tomlin's Merits.

  Little puffs of smoke came off the end of the cigarette with each jab and floated toward the light. He had once burned a hole in the headliner of his car jabbing a cigarette like that. Fox had told his wife that Mal Tomlin did it.

  "We have entirely the wrong perspective on things," Fox went on. "There's not enough in the text we use about the white man's vile treatment of the Native Americans or the Puritan's rape of the New England environment. And that's just for starters."

  "Hippies," Tomlin said darkly. As chairman of the Education Department, he would be the next one threatened. "I think we ought to find out a little more about Partridge and Holt. What do we really know about them, after all? Did anybody call the schools where they came from to find out what was behind those good letters of recommendation?"

  "President Miller did," Fox said. "Nobody had anything but good to say about Dr. Partridge."

  "Well, they wouldn't," Tomlin said. "Probably glad to be rid of her."

  Fox took a drag of the Merit and said, "Tom Henderson told me the other day that he thought Holt looked familiar. Thought he might have known him. You think that's possible?"

  Henderson taught sociology and psychology. He had been at HGC for a long time, having come there directly from graduate school.

  "They're about the same age," Burns said. "But I don't know when Henderson would have known him. And I don't see what difference it makes."

  "There's something going on," Tomlin said. "Has to be. Why else would Partridge bring him here? Those two knew each other somehow. You can count on it. I think you ought to talk to Henderson, Burns, see what you can find out."

  "Why me?" Burns said.

  "Because you're the one who can find things out," Tomlin said. "Whenever there's a mystery, we can count on you."

  "He's right," Fox said. "Even the chief of police knows how good you are at solving things."

  Burns wasn't so sure that Boss Napier, chief of the Pecan City Police Department, would have agreed with that statement, but he could see that it wouldn't do any good to argue.

  "All right," he said. "I'll talk to Henderson, but I don't expect anything to come of it."

  "If it doesn't, we still have hope," Tomlin said. "Holt is tied to the new dean, and she'll never last, not if she keeps those goats."

  "Right," Fox said. "So maybe we'd better just leave well enough alone. You know what happened the last time Burns got involved with a dean."

  "Aw, come on," Tomlin said. "This could never be like that. After all, what are the odds of two deans getting murdered at a college as small as this one?"

  "You're right," Fox said. "I was just trying to make a little joke."

  "Well, it wasn't a very good one," Tomlin said. "Look at Burns. He's turned pale as a ghost."

  "Must be the smoke getting to me," Burns said, waving a hand in front of his face.

  "That's what you get for quitting," Tomlin said.

  Burns smiled weakly, but he knew the smoke wasn't really the problem. For some strange reason, he'd felt a sudden chill when Tomlin had mentioned murder.

  It's a good thing I don't believe in premonitions, he thought. Then the bell rang, and he forgot all about it.

  Chapter Two

  Burns, Fox, and Tomlin had been taking their usual break while the students were in Assembly, which had been known as Chapel until the majority of the programs started featuring country and western musicians and secular speakers and therefore became too worldly for its original title in the judgment of HGC officials. Few faculty members attended Assem
bly, preferring instead to use the time for grading or, as in the case of Burns and his friends, relaxing.

  Tomlin and Fox both had classes immediately after Assembly, but Burns did not. He walked back upstairs to his office, which was directly above the History lounge, to grade some of the papers from his remedial writing class.

  Not that it was called a remedial class. At least the English Department was politically correct to that degree. It would never do to tell a group of entering college freshmen that they were writing on approximately the third grade level. The course was instead called "developmental writing."

  Reading the papers was infinitely depressing work, and Burns vowed that if he ever taught the course again he would never assign a topic like "My Goals for the Future."

  He knew that he should never—would never—tell his students that their goals were unattainable. He didn't want to discourage them, and besides, that was another politically incorrect idea. All students were supposed to be capable of becoming anything they wanted to become, no matter what their apparent limitations.

  He looked at the first sentence of the paper he was holding, written in a nearly illegible scrawl by one Randy Randall:

  Im goin too get my english grad up wile Im hear at Hortley

  Groman Collage and wen I get it up Im goin too majer in

  goverment, then Im goin too be a lowyer, have lots of money,

  nice car like a Mursades a big house and etc.

  Burns sighed. OK, so it was early in the semester. Only three weeks gone so far. Twelve to go. But just how realistic was it to think that he could help a student like Randy Randall raise his writing ability to anywhere near the level he would need to succeed in a regular undergraduate class, much less in law school? Maybe if he had fifteen years rather than fifteen weeks, he could do something, but would even that be enough?

  Burns laid the paper on his desk. Maybe Eric Holt was right, though for the wrong reasons. Maybe it was pointless to try teaching Shakespeare to classes full of people who were only marginally better writers than Randy Randall. Maybe Louis L'Amour was more appropriate.

  Burns took the second paper, by Tammi Sliger, from the stack and started reading.

  My goal is to get out of this dumb class and into a real

  class I don't belong in this class I always made good

  grades in high school I am real good in English.

  Burns wondered where Tammi had gone to high school, but at least she could spell, even if she didn't have a particularly good grasp of proper sentence structure. Or maybe it was simply punctuation she didn't understand. If she paid any attention at all in class, she might actually learn enough to help her write a passable paper.

  The "if" was what bothered Burns. There was more than one student in the developmental class who seemed to regard being there as more of a punishment than an opportunity to learn anything. Those students retained the same bad habits that had doomed them to a developmental class in the first place. They stared out the windows, doodled in their notebooks, worked on their math assignments, even put their heads down and slept, openmouthed and drooling, on their desks. Burns heard one of the latter explain his drowsiness to a friend as they were leaving class one day: "Hey, I was up till four o'clock playing Nintendo. I was lucky to get here at all."

  Burns wondered briefly if maybe he should have gone into administration, after all. He shoved the papers aside and stood up. He needed a break. He thought it might be a good idea to go to the library.

  He wasn't going to check out a book. He was going to check out the librarian.

  In his estimation, one of the best things that had happened to Hartley Gorman College in years was Elaine Tanner, the new librarian, who had arrived at the beginning of the fall semester. She was quite pretty, with honey-colored hair and green eyes. And she spent her time dealing with books. What more could an English teacher ask for?

  As Burns descended the stairway in Main, he looked down at the worn and frayed carpet that covered the steps. There were places where it was worn through to the pad, and now even the pad was disintegrating. Burns remembered when the carpet had been new, a thought that vaguely depressed him, so he pushed it aside. Maybe now that the enrollment was on the rise, the carpet would be replaced. He hoped so.

  He pushed open the doors on the east side of the building and went out. The sky was infinitely blue, and the sun threw crisp shadows on the brown grass, giving the day a spring-like appearance that was seriously misleading. The temperature was in the low thirties, and the wind was swooshing straight down from the polar ice cap. It lifted Burns's short brown hair and flapped the tails of his wool sport coat.

  When he got to the library, the building blocked off most of the wind, and he paused for a moment to reflect on his pleasure that Dr. Partridge had abandoned the practice of referring to all the campus buildings by number. Formerly, the library had been "Hartley Gorman III" and had to be given its proper title in all memos and documents. Burns had hated the idea, and he was glad to see that Dr. Partridge seemed to think it was silly, too.

  He entered the building through the E. R. Memorial doors and went past the circulation desk to Elaine's office. She was there, surrounded by trophies of all kinds.

  There was a trophy for finishing in first place in the Pecan City Fun Run in 1979. There was a trophy for "Prize Bull" in the 1968 Youth Fair. There was one for baking, and there were several for baton twirling. There was one from a bowling league, and one from a chili cook-off. There was even one for catching the big bass in a fishing tournament.

  There were short trophies and tall ones. There were trophies sitting on bases of fake marble and trophies with elaborate stands of red, white, and blue. There were trophies surmounted by statuettes of Winged Victory and trophies topped by straining sprinters.

  There were trophies on the desk, on the bookshelves, and on the floor.

  Anyone entering the office might get the idea that Elaine Tanner was a woman of many accomplishments, and that might even be true. But the fact was that she had earned none of the trophies herself.

  She had bought them at flea markets, thrift shops, and garage sales.

  As she explained it to Burns, she bought them because being surrounded by symbols of accomplishment increased her self-esteem. And she didn't tell just everyone that she hadn't won the trophies herself.

  Burns couldn't understand why a woman as good-looking as Elaine Tanner would need to increase her self-esteem, unless it had something to do with those big round glasses she wore, which as far as Burns was concerned simply emphasized her eyes and didn't make her one bit less attractive. But if she wanted to buy trophies, there was nothing wrong with that. It seemed like a harmless enough eccentricity.

  "Good morning," she said when he came through her open door. She had a low, husky voice that always made Burns's stomach flutter. "And how's your semester going?"

  Burns moved a calf-roping trophy out of a chair and sat down. "Not so well," he said. He brought her up to date on his discussion with Fox and Tomlin.

  She did not seem especially concerned. "There's nothing wrong with being politically correct," she said when he was finished. "This place could do with a little more of that sort of thing."

  Burns ran a hand through his hair, hoping that it would lie flat. "For example?" he asked.

  "All right. Let's start with you. Do you think of yourself as a department chairman?"

  "Uh-oh," Burns said. Of course he did. For that matter, he thought of Faye Smith, of the math and science department, as a chairman, even though she was definitely a woman. True, she wore cowboy boots, jeans, and western shirts to teach in, but there was no mistaking her sex.

  "And I've noticed your use of pronouns, too," Elaine said. "You say things like 'The student left his book in the car.'"

  That was true. Burns had to admit it. He found saying something like 'The student left his or her book in the car' awkward and silly. Of course you could get out of situations like that by rephrasing th
e sentence, but who had time to think of rephrasing sentences in the course of ordinary conversation?

  "And another thing," Elaine went on. "You--"

  "Never mind," Burns said, holding up a hand. "I get the idea. And you're right. I'll try to reform, but don't expect me to spell women 'w-o-m-y-n.' Or to say that Earl Fox teaches 'herstory.'"

  Elaine laughed. "All right, I won't. Now what else is bothering you?"

  "Is it that obvious?" Burns asked. He told her about the papers he had been reading.

  "That's more serious," she said. She looked around her office, as if thinking about giving Burns one of her trophies. Or maybe she was thinking about giving them to his students.

  "It's not that they're stupid, either," Burns said. "I'm sure that some of them, maybe most of them, are quite good at any number of things."

  "But not writing," Elaine said.

  "Definitely not writing."

  "Do you encourage them, give them lots of positive feedback?"

  Burns was usually suspicious of phrases like "positive feedback," but not when Elaine used them. "Sure I do," he said. "I try to be as positive as possible."

  For some reason, one of Mal Tomlin's favorite stories popped into his mind; the punchline was, "For a fat woman, you sure don't sweat much." Burns supposed you couldn't joke about fat people any more. "Calorically challenged" maybe.

  "Well, I know you're a good teacher, so that can't be the problem," Elaine said.

  She didn't really have any way to judge how good a teacher he was, but Burns appreciated the compliment anyway.

  "I don't know," he said. "Sometimes I don't think I'm doing such a good job. Maybe I should have considered taking the dean's position."