Final Exam

by Kluge, P. F.

  “Did you know he was the killer?”

  “I wasn’t sure. There was all that talk about the G-Man. Evidence, too, I gathered. I thought it might be him. Or Tom. In either case, I couldn’t say. Understand? I could not say. Even if I knew, if I were sure, I could not say.” Then he recovered some. He faced me. “Billy? I wonder where Tom’s gone to. Can you say?”

  “I can’t say. Let’s just mark Tom missing. I like it better that way.”

  “Well, then,” he said. Another look, like we were partners. “So do I.” And it felt like the end of a session, some straight talk, some hints and nudges, an agreement to leave things be and to keep in touch. No meeting with me and Wright could end differently. But it was a little too soon.

  “Professor Wright,” I said. “I’m going to wheel you back to Stribling Hall and leave you there. And then I’ll drive home wondering about what you told me, running through it, studying. Close, careful reading like you require in class.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “I’d expect no less.”

  “And I’ll be asking myself how much you lied to me right now and wondering if I’ll ever know. Here, we’ve got Tom. Tom was bitter, Tom killed, and there was nothing you could do but sit, and suspect but not be sure, and anyway you were honor-bound or some such. And I’ll ask myself if there wasn’t more. I’ll wonder if Tom and you didn’t talk a lot more than you let on. You’d worked together before, setting up G-Man in that Columbus place, all quiet. I wonder if you didn’t take that anger of his and launch it. Could be you primed him, Professor. Could be you primed him like a pump.”

  He sat there and something came down over his face. Maybe he was angry at me. Maybe he was disappointed.

  “He wasn’t always bitter, Professor. He was a cheerful, joking kind of guy. He liked people, people liked him. Not just locals. Students, professors. All of a sudden he turns bitter. Goes on a killing spree. So I’m wondering...let me just wonder, aloud...”

  “Yes...”

  “…whether the bitterness wasn’t a lesson that you taught him...that’s what I keep asking myself. He wasn’t always the way he was the last time I saw him.”

  “The last time you saw him...” Wright said. “That’s a meeting I wonder about. The when and where and why of it.”

  “He was so bitter about Tony,” I said, brushing off the confession that he was waiting for me to make. “He built a shrine at his river house—the flag they wrapped around his coffin. Photographs—and then...” It came to me all of a sudden, one of those times something occurs to you while you’re talking, not later. “Professor, you just said Tony wasn’t college material.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I asked whether we didn’t have other kids here who were no better than him—who weren’t college material. And you said yes. You answered fast, you didn’t have to think one bit. And I said, well, that made it so much sadder...and we left it at that. Sad and sadder. But now I’m thinking that’s the kind of thing you were telling Tom. Educating my uncle. Priming him. Poisoning...”

  “Oh, Billy,” he said. “You think he needed to learn bitterness from me? That he couldn’t discover it on his own? Without my coaching? Do you think so little of him? Or yourself?”

  That stopped me. I wondered, was this what all his teaching came to, all that talk of standards and discipline and tradition and listening to the voices of the dead, about words carrying us across time zones and through time itself? Did he make Tom a murderer? Or was it all Tom?

  “I don’t know, Professor. I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to decide today, you know. Or tomorrow. But when you wonder, as you say you will, ask yourself what you would want that answer to be. That Tom was his own man? Or mine?”

  “They’ll blame Tom,” I continued. “Blame him for everything. Blame him forever. But I’ll be wondering about you.”

  “You have a lot on your mind,” he said. Which wasn’t an answer. I waited for more. But he was done with me. “Take me back now.”

  “One other thing, Professor, and then I’m done. That kid who got killed in the alley near Security had a note in his pocket. I wonder if you know what it said.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “‘Always do a little bit extra.’ The G-Man’s famous slogan.”

  “Tom...” he said. “It must have been. He knew I feared the G-Man.”

  “Oh, Tom again...”

  “You shouldn’t discount him.”

  “It couldn’t be, you told him to tuck that note in?”

  “Never,” he said. “Not that. Don’t think that. Please.”

  “I’ve got no control what I think about.”

  “Take me back now,” he repeated and this time I got behind the wheelchair and started pushing him down the path.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What you did, whatever you did, you did it for love, I guess. Still, four people dead. A professor and two students and some poor high school kid who never got as far as freshmen orientation. Four people dead. That is something I can’t get past. I can’t get past. That’s huge.”

  “Four?” he said. “Why not six, counting your parents? And why not seven?” There it was again. Tom. He knew. He didn’t have to say it. Tom was the seventh. “I’ve killed no one,” Wright said. As if he were thinking aloud, trying out a speech in front of a camera. “I’ve ordered no one killed, the courts would find me an arresting figure, tragically flawed but hardly culpable. An elderly professor, rallying to the defense of his college, even though coerced and threatened by the instrument of its undoing. If I were looking for Tom, I’d check your property, Billy. If I were looking for the murder weapon...”

  His voice trailed off, as if he were tired of talking about it. He thought I’d killed Tom, I saw that now. I was ready to correct him, to protest my innocence. But then I decided to leave it between us, let it stand. I hadn’t killed Tom. But I had the body, I had the weapon. That was close enough.

  “Never mind, Billy,” he said. “Our guilts are private. We carry them inside us, we contend with them each day. We’re our own prosecutors and our own judges, if it comes to that, our own executioners. But consider this. Consider the return of the G-Man, an instructor in the history department next year. Building a house on your property. And there’s you, out of the trailer, back onto your farm, living with the G-Man’s sister. Promoted a notch, enrolled half-time in the fall. And what about the College? That’s what matters most. Think of it, Billy. A chance to build a great college. Here. Now. A faculty of great teachers, original thinkers. A curriculum that gives students what they need, not what they feel like taking and professors feel like teaching. Promotions that are based on merit, not habit. Scholarships that are based on ability and need. Grades that are honest, transcripts that aren’t funny money, diplomas that the world respects. It’s up to you son, whether or not that happens.” That seemed like a stretch, I said. “You have the same power over me that Tom had. If you ask me, or ask anyone else to ask me, I will tell them what I told you and what happens, happens. It’s up to you.”

  So there I sat, in the Security Office, staring at the telephone. One call to Lingenfelter and it would all start over. One call to Sherwood Graves and we’d be famous once again. I couldn’t picture it. I was in an odd spot, no doubt about it. I had scary knowledge in me and terrible power. I had dead people living in me and a murderer’s weapon in my dresser, under my boxer shorts, and if I said the word, I could crack this college wide open. Wright knew it and I knew it. I could tell whenever our eyes met, his wheelchair speeches, that great voice of his echoing off the buildings, an audience of students and parents all before him, all confident this is a place that’s not like any other and though I was on the sidelines, keeping order, waiting to be of assistance if anybody fainted from heat, I believed the same thing. Our eyes met. Anytime, he said to me, anytime you choose. And I looked back at him—a security guy answering a provost. Not today was my response. Not yet. I wasn’t sure how much to believe h
is story about Tom, Tom just going off on a killing spree and him, sitting home, not able to do anything. I wondered whether, over all the years, he hadn’t been preparing Tom for this, coaching, hinting. Teaching, even. Who was the organ grinder, who was the monkey? I’ll never know for sure. They’re both gone now, anyway. A few days after that late August graduation, they took Hiram Wright to the hospital. A coma. At the end, death cheated him, sneaking in by the back door, knocking him over the head, hanging him out in limbo for a week. When he died, we were in the papers all over again. Willard Thrush was busy raising money, Harry Carstairs was snowed under applications, Warren Niles conducted a memorial service that got televised. Then, there comes a morning, I walk to classes, text and notebook in my hands, I enter Ascension Hall, go up those creaking steps, into those rooms that smell of wood and stone in late summer heat and I sit back, in the middle of kids who wonder what I’m doing there. That’s alright. And I have no doubts about belonging here. I know where the bodies are buried and where the gun is hidden. The people around here need me, more than they know.