Sticks and Stones

by Janice Macdonald

  Whatever it was, I wasn’t exactly proud of it, and I was more than a little nervous. I figured I had till the early morning before hell broke loose. That is, if things were going to play out the way I was beginning to think they might.

  I could hardly sleep that night, which was just as well, since the nurses came in twice to see if I wanted anything to help me sleep. I decided against it, since I didn’t know how long those pills stayed in one’s system, and I wanted to be ­firing on all cylinders when the morning came.

  If pain keeps your head clear, I was incredibly cogent by morning. I was doing a breathing exercise my physiotherapist Louise had taught me to get above the pain, sort of a “modified Lamaze” as she’d called it. Hell, if childbirth was anything like breaking a leg, I had no idea why there was a population explosion.

  No one came into my room except the same nurses I’d seen for the last three-day shift. I had no idea if there really was a detective watching out for me. Steve had called me from Fort McMurray late the night before, and was really annoyed with what I’d done, even when I told him I’d spoken with Keller. I wasn’t sure whether it was me putting myself in danger that bugged him, or me poking my nose back into the case. Oh well, there would be time enough later to sort all that out. I hoped.

  I’d spent most of the night thinking who it was that would walk into my room in the morning. I had worked it out from piecing together things I’d been too involved to notice, coupled with things that Mark Paulson had told me the day before. When the door opened, I wasn’t surprised but a frisson of fear went up my back anyway. After all, this was the person who had pushed me down a set of stairs and left me to rot, who had trashed my office, who had incited riots and hate-mongering, who had set a fire to an office, and set a ­student up to be murdered. I wasn’t taking this lightly.

  “Hi, Arno,” I said with a false brightness even I could hear. “How nice of you to drop by.”

  He looked around the room, satisfying himself, I suppose, that there was no one waiting to ambush him. Eyeing all the equipment around, I suppose he realized that a microphone could have been hidden anywhere. He smiled condescendingly at me, and I wondered if he just thought me too stupid to have twigged to his involvement. How superior did he really think himself to mere women, anyhow?

  “Denise and Grace and Leo have been reporting to us on your progress, Randy. I thought you might be getting sort of stir-crazy by now, though. It’s a long time to be cooped up, isn’t it?”

  Maybe he did think me below deductive abilities. Whatever. We could play this scenario any way at all.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not the Ritz.” I shrugged. “But they have five different flavors of Jell-O!”

  Arno laughed. He sat on my visitor chair, and I felt as if I was looking into the python cage at the zoo. The same cold eyes were smiling back at me. Arno made a pretense of looking around at the various floral bouquets, and then his eyes fell on the exam box.

  “Don’t tell me you're actually marking while in this ­condition? Surely breaking your leg entitles you to a rest, no?”

  “McNeely allowed me a few days’ hiatus, but I have to get the marks posted, just like anyone else. When you’re a term employee, you can’t take any time off. Your next term’s employment depends on your last term’s record. Well, I guess you must feel much the same, with the tenure committee coming up, right?”

  Arno wasn’t smiling quite so brightly anymore, but his eyes were still fixed on me.

  “Of course, your upcoming tenure review mixed things up for me for a while. Every time I saw you with a new group, I just jumped to the conclusion that you were campaigning for their support. It kept me from questioning why you were certain places with certain people. You helped out with the vigil so you would know how to disrupt it the most effectively. The time I saw you with those undergrads, you weren’t trying to get them to nominate you for a teaching award, you were ­having an outing with your little cabal, right? Do they still call themselves the Party Animals, or was that just for pen pal ­purposes?”

  Arno’s lip had curled into a sneer by this time. I am sure he was considering the place to be bugged, so he was choosing his words very carefully.

  “Randy? I’m not sure what you’re alluding to. Perhaps your pain medication is playing games with your mind?”

  I smiled through my fear, his arrogance giving me enough anger to rise above my pain and fear. Louise would have been proud of me.

  “What really brought you here, Arno? Were you looking for the confessional exam? What would you do with it? Burn it?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, Randy, but I don’t intend to sit here and be tarred and feathered for something that doesn’t concern me in the least. Is this how you treat all your company? No wonder your policeman friend isn’t around anymore.”

  “Yes, you’re right. He got tired of me playing at getting myself killed. Not like Gwen, who really got herself killed. I can understand you hate women in general, Arno. But what did you have against Gwen in particular?”

  “What? I didn’t even know the woman. She was in your class, wasn’t she? How would I know her?”

  “That’s what I was wondering, but then I remembered, she transferred into my class, and her reasons were that she’d been placed in a class where a few of her residence underlings were as well. Yesterday I had the secretaries check which class that was. Guess whose class that was, Arno?”

  He shook his head, the way politicians do when they know you’ve caught them red-handed and they can’t find a way to admit it.

  “She was being diplomatic, wasn’t she, Arno? She was really trying to get out of your class, right? She’d just left a marriage with a wife-beater; she probably had your number the minute she walked into the class.”

  “Who are you playing, Randy? Nancy Drew? All this is, of course, conjecture. You are building a huge house of cards on a very few disparate factoids. Yes, Ms Devlin was for a short time in my class. I had forgotten, to tell you the truth. I am sure you are correct, though, because I do know that several of those unfortunate boys who allowed their drunken sport to get out of hand are in my freshman class. Therefore, she likely was trying to remove herself from being too often in their presence. I can see that ringing true. However, there’s one thing you may have to back down on; since several of those boys are in my class, how is it that the newspaper this morning reports that confessional exams are being written in your class? You can have the facts one way or another, Ms Craig, but not, I would suggest, both ways.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to smile at him anymore."Why did you change the letter to Gwen? Was it even a death threat before?”

  “What, for argument’s sake, makes you think the letter to the Journal was not the one Ms Devlin received?” Arno was still eyeing my exams; I was willing to bet he hadn’t managed to corral all the Party Animals in his class. It made me shudder to think that I’d been teaching all term to someone who despised me for my gender. If I lived through this, I’d ferret out the little weasel and … what? Deprogram him.

  “Well, for one thing, Paulson didn’t receive the letter from Gwen herself, he got it in an anonymous press package. For another thing, the wording was nothing a freshman would be playing with. The other letters were pornographic, but in a pedestrian way.” In a flash of insight that had nothing to do with proof, and everything to do with men and women, I crowed at him. “You asked her out, didn’t you? After one of your rabble-rousing lectures against educating women? Or did she actually go out with you before figuring you out? Did you know you were setting her up to die, or were you just lashing out at her rejecting you?”

  Arno had lost all semblance of civility by now, and I could tell it was all he could do to keep from screaming at me. Instead, he did something far worse. I am not sure what he intended to do, besides silence me. I shudder to think, now. His hand went for the pillow my leg was resting on; in one tug he yanked it out and had it halfway to my mouth. Maybe he was going to smo
ther me while murmuring polite chit-chat for whatever microphone he deemed hidden in the room, and then let himself out and hope for a head start before the next nursing shift came to check on me. He ­needn’t have bothered worrying; my throat was parched with fear. I couldn’t make a sound as I watched the pillow come for my face.

  He should have gone with Macbeth instead of Othello, because dislodging my broken foot was all it took for my lungs to regain power and then some. I screamed with all the terror and pain and sheer non-codeined agony that was bundled up inside. Arno was startled enough to stop, pillow raised. I kept screaming.

  Just then both the door from the hall and the bathroom door burst open. My guard, dressed as a hospital janitor, was in the washroom doorway, gun pointed at Arno. Two more cops were coming in the hall door, screaming at him to freeze. I wish he’d listened. He pivoted on one foot, and lost his balance, falling backwards. Onto my broken foot.

  48

  ALL IN ALL, I WAS GETTING MIGHTILY TIRED OF HOSPITALS.

  They had reset my foot, after pulling one of the mending pins out of a ligament where it had been sent piercing from the weight of Arno Maltzan. I was back in physio and at almost the same place I’d been healing-wise when he’d managed to drop in for his visit. Luckily, second term didn’t start for another week.

  Speaking of visits, I was bored. Christmas was over, and I was feeling melancholy for having missed it and petty for feeling melancholy. People had been very kind, but I’d been anticipating romance and eggnog, not visiting hours and IVs. All I had to look forward to was limping home to a dead tree, or maybe a stick in a bucket with a pile of needles at its base. A person can watch only so much daytime TV, and I had passed my limit at about the beginning of the week. On impulse, I picked up the phone and called Steve.

  I could tell he was busy from the slightly distracted tone in his voice, but I figured that having been the actual bait in a major case gave me a bit of leeway.

  “Will you have time to come over today?” Hospital stay had stripped me of any overt sense of pride; I was a sniveling whine when it came to visitors.

  “I think I can be there just after lunch.”

  “Do you want me to save you my Jell-O?” I asked, trying to sound light-hearted, although I still felt strange about the loss of the guard.

  “Well, there’s always room for Jell-O,” Steve parried, and we left it at that. I clumped over to my locker in the corner of the room, and pulled on my grey sweat shorts and top, which did a bit to make me feel less vulnerable. While I was still upright, I hobbled down to the nursing station to ask if anyone had a newspaper. A nurse offered to carry it back for me, but I figured I’d have to start acclimatizing to my situation, and tucked it under my chin, which made me feel like a clumsy St. Bernard.

  I scanned the paper when I got back to my room. There was another article about Arno Maltzan, written by Mark Paulson, tucked into the third page.

  Paulson had done some background research on Maltzan, giving highlights from his CV which weren’t too shabby, but not enough to grant him tenure, it seemed. There was a quote from McNeely about the dismay felt by the department and the responsibility for professors not to indoctrinate their ­students. It was obvious they were cutting Maltzan loose. I wondered how much of his exploits would stick to the department in the long run.

  Lunch came and went. Steve didn’t. Dr. Stelfox came by and pronounced me well enough to leave the next morning. I called Denise to see if she could pick me up. Although my apartment is only three blocks from the hospital, they’re long blocks, and I didn’t want to try out my crutching skills on slippery winter sidewalks.

  It took the hospital until ten-thirty a.m. to finish the paperwork necessary to unleash me on the world. Denise wheeled me to the sub-basement, where she’d parked the car close enough for me to hobble from the sliding doors, leaving the wheelchair behind. Denise said all the right things about my prowess with the crutches, even though I almost managed to blacken her eye with the arm rest end of one when pulling them into her car.

  Once we got to my place and Denise had done the ­requisite fussing, she seemed to think invalidism required—which included setting me up with a foot stool and books and putting the tea on to boil—things began to start to feel back to normal. As soon as we were equipped with tea, the conversation turned immediately to Arno Maltzan and the buzz around the department.

  While I had thought he should be charged for accessory to murder for the letter incident, he was getting attempted murder for pushing me down the stairs. His fingerprints had been discovered on a fuse tossed into the backyard of the House. How they found it in the snowdrift was beyond me, but I have the greatest respect for our police force.

  It was common knowledge that Arno had goaded his Party Animals, a disaffected group of freshman in General Studies, into writing the initial letters and disrupting the vigil. They had also been charged for the graffiti incident, since an examination of their wardrobes had discovered some red paint on clothing—in the lining of a jacket pocket, and on the tongue of a track shoe, just under the lace holes.

  The biggest question, which still hadn’t been answered to my satisfaction, was why Maltzan had targeted me and my office. Denise had some ideas on that score.

  “Now that he’s been arrested, and it’s no longer cool to know him, a few of the kids he was Svengali-ing have begun to come forward. Apparently, it was considered important to get a journal from your office, because you push journal ­writing in your classes. According to scuttlebutt, some of your students work on their journals after class time and get rather involved in the contents.”

  “I’ve never noticed it,” I commented drily. “But I still can’t figure out why Arno would target me for any of this. It’s not as if I’m the most obvious threat.”

  “No, but you were Gwen’s teacher; you were discussing anonymous letters in Twelfth Night; and you spent some class time discussing the graffiti? Did McNeely know about that one?”

  “No,” I answered, “And I hope he doesn’t hear about it, either.”

  “Well, anyhow, Arno likely decided to check out how much Gwen might have said about him in that journal. You were right, by the way, he did date her at least once. Mark found his name in the registration book at Fraser linked to hers as her guest. According to Mark, Arno’s not saying too much, but I’m betting he was under the impression that you knew something. He probably had your office trashed to find anything you might have written. You do go on about the power of journals, you know.” Denise grinned and poured us some more tea.

  “Steve told me that they found her journal in his office. The exam was likely grabbed to cover tracks. You know, that’s almost as irritating as him breaking my leg twice. I had to ­create a whole new exam.”

  “Well, he’s going to get punished a lot more for breaking your leg than for lifting your exam, or for setting up Gwen, or for any of the other shit he stirred up.

  “To use your position as a lecturer to proselytize is un­conscionable,” Denise went on. “He should be held responsible for all the actions of hatred regardless of who actually performed the deeds. I take it he was the phone caller, though.”

  I sank back on my pillows to think about Maltzan and his manifest hatred. I agreed with Denise and have always striven to keep my politics and personal biases out of my in-class ­discussions. But how much of my own biases had I disseminated to my students along with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? How did one keep personal feelings out of ­presentation?

  What Maltzan had done was horrific. He deserved everything the law threw at him. It was funny, in a way. He’d ­probably be punished more severely for pushing me down the stairs than for any of the malevolence he’d stirred up on campus, and yet I was of the mind that his physical actions were less problematic.

  That’s why I’ve always maintained that Lady MacBeth and Iago are far worse villains in Shakespeare than, say Goneril or Caliban. Insidious manipulation frightens me. It’s so hard to pinpoint
or prove, and yet it shimmers all around, like glossy oil puddles in the alley.

  Denise broke into my reverie with more tea, and chocolate biscotti. “Grace can’t believe it. Apparently Arno had done some editing for HYSTERICAL in the past. He helped out in organizing the vigil, too; probably to get inside information for the hooligans. She won’t listen to that, though. Grace is so ready to believe the best in everybody. Leo tried to point out to her that Arno had probably personally started the fire in her office, and she just shut down on him.”

  “She’s in denial,” I offered, thinking we probably all were.

  Denise nodded. “It’s certainly making me look twice at people, and think twice before I say anything. The safety has gone out of the ivory tower, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Perhaps we’ve been too complacent, thinking that just because we’re smart enough to disseminate literature, we’re clever enough to see through all human foibles? Isn’t that the work for the writers of literature, rather than the teachers of literature?”

  Denise stretched out her legs, making me wish I could. It was getting to be time for my pills.

  “Could be,” she said, “although it hurts to think that human beings can’t operate at a higher level given the proper stimulus and environment.”

  “So Arno was supposed to be a saint just because he was well-read? I disagree, not that I in any way want to exonerate Arno’s actions. What he did was horrid and unforgivable, but not necessarily unbelievable.”

  Our conversation eventually moved on to other things, and after agreeing to drop by the next morning on her way into the department, Denise finally left me to myself.

  It was just as well. I had some thinking of my own to do.