…A Dangerous Thing

by Crider, Bill

  Burns himself, when he was very much younger, had once recited a few lines of the same poem to a young woman of his acquaintance, and the effect had been quite satisfactory. But that had been in another country; he didn't know what had happened to the wench (and what a politically incorrect term that was), but he certainly hoped that she wasn't dead.

  "Bunni didn't appreciate your recitation?" he said.

  "She sure didn't. She said all I thought about was the way she looked and that I didn't care anything about her 'inner beauty.'"

  This didn't look good. Burns asked if George had affirmed Bunni's inner beauty.

  George gave a glum nod. "I told her I thought she was sweet."

  Burns felt a little sorry for George, who was probably a lot more at home on the football field than in trying to deal with a young woman who has suddenly discovered sexism.

  "Sweet probably wasn't the right word to pick," he said.

  "No," George said. "It sure wasn't. "It just made her madder."

  He sighed and stared at the worn carpet. Burns couldn't think of anything comforting to say, so he didn't say anything at all. After a minute or so of gloomy silence, George looked up.

  "She's going to bring charges against me," he said.

  "Charges?" Burns found that hard to believe. "Did you do something stupid, George? Besides reciting the poem, I mean."

  But George hadn't done anything stupid. "Not charges like the police arrest you for. She's taking me to the student court for 'lookism,' whatever that is."

  Burns groaned inwardly. "Lookism" had been the subject of one of Dean Partridge's memos, in which she had discussed the evils of basing an opinion of a person on that person's appearance. Most frequently, lookism took the form of liking a person for his or her personal beauty.

  "But I don't see anything wrong with that," George said after Burns had explained it to him. "How else are you going to get an opinion of someone you don't know? You kind of like their looks, don't you? That's what makes you want to get to know them better."

  "I suppose it works that way sometimes," Burns said, thinking of Elaine Tanner. He had wanted to get to know her better as soon as he saw her. Boss Napier had wanted to get to know her better, too, but Burns wasn't going to dwell on that topic.

  "Then later on you find out stuff about them," George said. "Maybe you find out they're selfish or something like that and you don't ask them out again. But that's not the way it worked with Bunni."

  "You found out she was sweet."

  "Sure. But that just made me like her even more. I don't get it, Dr. Burns. What's wrong with being pretty and sweet?"

  "Nothing," Burns said, but he wasn't sure that he was right.

  The world he was living in wasn't at all like the world he had grown up in and grown more or less familiar with. Women these days didn't seem to want to be pretty and sweet. They wanted to be autonomous and tough. Or maybe not. Burns was clearly out of his depth. He felt the way a semi-intelligent dinosaur might have felt while studying the first mammals.

  "Are you sure Bunni's going to bring this up before the student court?" he asked.

  "Yes. Just like I was caught cheating on a test or something. I've never cheated at anything in my life, Dr. Burns."

  "I'm sure you haven't. Maybe we could get someone to talk to Bunni about this. I think you're willing to try to understand her point of view, aren't you?"

  "I guess so," George said. "If I can."

  "Good. Then she should certainly be willing to do the same for you."

  Burns tried to think of someone that Bunni might talk to. Miss Darling was still in her office, but Burns was pretty sure that Miss Darling wouldn't have any more of a clue to what was going on than he did. Clem might, but she had already gone home.

  Dawn Melling was still in the counseling office, however. Burns didn't have much confidence in her advice, but she was a certified counselor.

  "We'll ask Bunni to talk to Ms. Melling," he said. "Do you know where she is right now?"

  "I think it's too late for that," George said. "She's already talking to somebody."

  Uh-oh. "Who?" Burns asked.

  "Miss Tanner."

  Burns groaned again. This time he did it aloud.

  "Bunni's right, you know," Elaine Tanner said. She was sitting at her desk, surrounded by her trophies.

  "Maybe," Burns said. If he got into an argument with Elaine, he didn't want it to be about Bunni and George.

  "There's not really any maybe about it. Do you see all these trophies?"

  Burns thought about saying that, no, he didn't see any trophies. Were there supposed to be trophies around? But Boss Napier had already caught him using sarcasm.

  "I see them."

  "And I told you why I have them, didn't I?"

  "To increase your self-esteem, you said."

  "That's right. And why do you think I might need to do that?"

  Since Burns had only recently been wondering the same thing, he said, "I have no idea."

  "You wouldn't." Elaine looked at him with something like pity. "That's because you're a man."

  "I don't see why being a man has anything to do with it."

  "Naturally. That's because you've never had to prove that you're something more than a pretty face. You've never sat in a class without being called on because you were a cute redhead that the professor thought was dumb as a post without ever having spoken a word to you."

  Burns would have liked to dwell on the fact that Elaine had more or less admitted that she was a cute redhead, but he didn't think that would be smart.

  "I try to call on everyone in my classes," he said. "I probably go out of my way to call on the women."

  "I believe you."

  There was some comfort in that, at least, but there was no consolation in what Elaine had to say next.

  "I suppose you realize that calling on the women as often as the men makes you an exception. Studies have shown that even female teachers don't call on women nearly as often as they call on the males in the class."

  "I've read about that. But how does it explain the trophies?"

  "No one ever called on me, even when I knew the answers. And I always knew the answers, which is more than I can say for most of the people, the male people, who did get called on. And that didn't do a lot for my self-esteem. By the end of my undergraduate academic career, I needed more than just a bunch of guys calling me for dates to boost my ego."

  "There were a bunch of guys calling you for dates?"

  Elaine waved a hand, dismissing all the calls. "Yes. But that doesn't have anything to do with it. Later on, when I went to library school, the majority of students were women. I got called on a lot more often. But it was too late; the damage was already done."

  Burns was beginning to catch on. "You started buying the trophies about then, I suppose."

  "That's right. I needed something to affirm my self-worth, and I thought having the tangible signs of success around might help, even if I hadn't really earned them myself."

  "The Cowardly Lion," Burns said.

  Elaine smiled. "Leave it to an English teacher to relate everything to literature."

  "Not everyone would consider The Wizard of Oz to be literature," Burns said. He was thinking that Eric Holt would, maybe, except that Frank L. Baum had the misfortune to have been a white male.

  "That's their misfortune, then. I think it's a wonderful story. But we're getting off the subject, aren't we?"

  Burns supposed that they were, but they hadn't drifted too far. "So you think Bunni, having been judged on her appearance, is going to suffer like you did?"

  "I would say that it's possible."

  "But this is different. It doesn't have anything to do with her classes, and George said that her appearance was important to him only at first. After he got to know Bunni, he began to appreciate her better qualities."

  "She told me. He thinks she's sweet."

  "Is there something wrong with that?" Burns knew what he t
hought. He wanted to hear Elaine's views on the subject.

  "Maybe not, if there's more to it. But if that's all George sees, he's guilty."

  "Guilty of lookism?"

  "Of more than that, whatever it is. He's guilty of looking for June Cleaver and Harriet Nelson instead of a real person."

  "And I don't suppose women are looking for Ward or Ozzie, either."

  "Not most women."

  Burns thought that was too bad. Ozzie and Ward seemed to him to represent ideal husbands. He'd always hoped that if he ever got married and had a family, he could be like either man, both of whom always seemed to be available and able to solve any family crisis with a short man-to-man talk with the kids, none of whom, come to think of it, had been daughters. Now it seemed that Burns had adopted the wrong role models.

  But then he'd always suspected that. The unmarried women in movies and on TV never went for the clean-cut guys who followed the rules. They always went for James Dean or his latest wannabe. Luke Perry, lately.

  It was the same in fiction. Sid Sawyer could never be the hero of a novel, though Tom could. And Huck Finn was even better.

  "You don't think Bunni will change her mind?" Burns asked.

  "Are you asking me to help her change it?"

  While Burns might have had that in the back of his mind earlier, he knew better than to admit it. "I just thought someone might help her to see George's point of view."

  "I don't think I can do that. I'm afraid I believe George's point of view is based pretty much on what Bunni says it is."

  "Would it help if you talked to George?"

  "I don't think so. You've explained his views very well."

  Burns didn't remember having explained George's views at all, but he could hear a bugle in the back of his head blowing retreat. So he got out of there.

  Chapter Ten

  The next day was HGC's annual "Spring Frolic." There were a few people who thought that having a frolic only two days after the murder of a long-time faculty member was just a little bit tacky, but Dean Partridge wasn't one of them.

  Her memo on the subject said:

  Inasmuch as the students will need something to relieve their minds in the current gloomy circumstances, it seems appropriate to continue with the Spring Frolic as scheduled. Samantha Henderson has expressed her personal wish that everything at HGC continue in as routine a fashion as possible.

  The memo reminded Burns of a couple of things. One was that he hated the Spring Frolic, and every year he tried to avoid as many of its activities as possible. The other was that he still hadn't paid a call on Henderson's wife. He didn't like doing things like that, though he considered it more or less a duty, and he would have to do something about it.

  As he sat in his office looking out over the campus, he thought about Tom Henderson and the Spring Frolic. As a matter of actual fact, Henderson hadn't liked the Frolic any better than Burns did. The two of them had occasionally stood in Henderson's office and watched the yearly Mud Tug, commenting sarcastically on the participants.

  Henderson's window looked out over not only the sidewalk where he had fallen to his death but also over the patch of ground where the Mud Tug took place. Burns, who would never have dreamed of taking part, nevertheless wasn't averse to watching others make fools of themselves, especially if two of the potential fools were Tomlin and Fox.

  It had always surprised Burns that those two would willingly take part in something like the Mud Tug, which was simply a tug-of-war between the freshmen (or, as they were now called, thanks to Dean Partridge, the "first year students") and the faculty, or at least those faculty who were willing to risk being dragged through ten yards of slimy muck.

  Early in the morning of the Frolic, the maintenance crew would quite thoroughly wet down the turf in the middle of the patch of ground overlooked by Henderson's window. Then, during the hour scheduled for Assembly, the faculty and first year students would gather around opposite ends of the thick rope that the maintenance workers had left lying across the sludge they had created earlier. At a signal from the college president, who also, had declined to participate more directly, as had been the tradition with HGC presidents from the first right down to the present one, the participants would grab hold of the rope and begin to pull.

  The object of the exercise, of course, was for one side to pull the other through the gummy slime, while at the same time relaxing just enough at the end to give the losers hope that they might be able to return the favor. But as soon as the losers got back to more solid footing, the stronger team would always drag them right back into the ooze.

  Burns couldn't think of anything he would rather do less than slop around in the mud, but Fox and Tomlin had never seemed to mind. They defended the activity as good for the morale of the students, but Burns told them that while that might be true, getting slimed wouldn't be good for his morale.

  So there he was, sitting alone in his office in the deserted building while practically everyone else was out to frolic in the mud.

  Well, that wasn't exactly true. Miss Darling certainly wasn't going to get into the act, nor was Clem. But they were outside to watch, ready to cheer on the certain-to-be-overmatched faculty. Holt, who preferred afternoon classes, wasn't around yet, and Burns didn't know him well enough to predict whether he would be pulling or cheering had he been there.

  Burns stood up and walked around his desk. He couldn't see the Mud Tug from where he was, and while he didn't want to go outside, he would have liked to see if just for once the faculty could win the annual battle.

  Maybe Tom Henderson's office would be open.

  Burns made his way through the deserted corridors, the old boards beneath the carpet creaking under his feet. He went down the stairs to the second floor.

  There was no one there, either, and Burns went on back to Henderson's office.

  The office was locked, which was certainly not surprising. And there was a yellow plastic ribbon stretched across the doorway. The ribbon said that this was a line Burns should not cross, but he didn't take the warning seriously. After all, who was going to find out?

  The locked door didn't pose any problems. As Burns had reason to know, it was quite easy to slide a credit card between the door and the frame and slip the lock. He pulled out his wallet and extracted his Visa card.

  The door to Henderson's office fit the frame a little more tightly than Burns had expected, but he had it open in less than a minute. He replaced his plastic, ducked under the ribbon, and went inside, pulling the door shut behind him.

  The office was darker than it would normally have been because the window through which Henderson had crashed was now covered with cardboard held in place with silver duct tape. There was another window, over Henderson's desk, and Burns could see outside without standing too close to it. If anyone happened to look up, Burns wouldn't be seen.

  Or if he were seen, he would appear as nothing more than a shadow, the same kind of shadow that Burns had noticed the evening of Henderson's fall.

  The Frolic was in full swing down below, and Burns could hear the cheering of the first year students as well as the faculty.

  Burns risked a peek.

  The students were winning the Mud Tug easily, with the faculty forces being drawn inexorably toward the mire. In only a matter of seconds, it would be all over. Fox and Tomlin were near the end of the rope, so they would be the last ones in the mud, but they would be in it nevertheless. Burns smiled to himself.

  And then he saw that Elaine Tanner was on the rope.

  He stopped smiling.

  He suddenly wished he were down there with everyone else, and a brief but entertaining fantasy of mud-wrestling with the librarian raced through his brain.

  He shook his head to clear it. If that wasn't sexism, nothing was. Next he would be snorting and oinking and rooting for acorns.

  He knew that he hadn't really come to Henderson's office to watch the Frolic and the Mud Tug, anyway. He had come to look around.
>
  He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, true, but whatever it was, it wouldn't be outside. It would be in there with him.

  He tore his gaze from the outside, thinking of his visit to Henderson earlier in the semester, trying to remember how the office had looked and what had been in it.

  It was just an ordinary office, with bookshelves, two chairs (one for the professor, one for visitors), a desk, and a typing table on which there was an old IBM electric. Most of HGC's faculty hadn't entered the computer era as yet. There was a gray plastic dust cover on the typewriter.

  Burns lifted the dust cover. There was nothing rolled into the typewriter. No suicide note that the police had overlooked, no forgotten assignment sheet. Burns hadn't really expected that there would be.

  He looked at the bookshelves. Plenty of out-of-date psychology textbooks, some biographies, some books of theory. There was even a book on suicide, but Burns was pretty sure that meant nothing.

  Burns turned toward the desk. He had saved it for last because he remembered it best. If there were any clues to be found, they would be there on the desk. He had already noticed several obvious differences in its appearance.

  The desk calendar was still there, though the page hadn't been turned for today, and there was also an old college yearbook from Henderson's alma mater lying out in plain sight. That had certainly not been there on Burns's last visit. He picked it up and flipped through the pages, looking at the photos.

  He paused when he came to a very young Thomas E. Henderson. There was no sign of the baldness that had begun to afflict Henderson in later life. The young man's hair was long and shaggy, hanging down over his ears. His face was, if anything, thinner than it had been in later life.

  Burns wondered whether Henderson had simply been engaged in nostalgia for his lost youth or whether he had been looking at the yearbook for some other reason. A sudden nostalgia attack seemed unlikely, and Burns began to pay close attention to the photos of the other students.

  There were a lot of pictures, though they represented only a fraction of the student body. Most people didn't bother to have photos made.