College-Cut Kill

“It pleased me that you transfered here, Rod. I liked you when I first met you. I considered you to be a well-adjusted person with a pretty fair perspective.”

“Thanks.”

“Lately you’ve been disappointing me.”

“Indeed!” I made it chilly.

“This job I have is fairly thankless. I try to do my best. I could understand Brad Carroll when he tried to block me in my job. Brad was a professional malcontent. Not mean — just eager. You know what I mean?” He was bold. He half sat on the edge of his desk.

“I know what you mean.”

“When you try to operate in the same way, I fail to understand you, Rod. What have you got to gain? You’re only spending one year in this school. I want this chapter to run smoothly. The least thing we can have is unity among the members.”

“And you’re the great white father who’s going to give it to us.”

“Sarcasm always depresses me a little, Arlin.”

“Maybe you depress me a little. Maybe I think that if you can’t run the house right, a voting coalition should take the lead away from you.”

“Look, Arlin. You have your own place on the beach. You have a very pleasant girl to run around with. You have a full schedule of classes. If you still have too much energy left over, why don’t you try taking on a competitive sport?”

“Is it against the house rules to buck the pres?”

He sighed. “I didn’t want to say this. But you force me. You may have noticed that there is a certain coolness toward you among the membership.”

I nodded. I had noticed it.

“The membership feels that you are stirring up needless conflict among the more susceptible boys. We had a small closed meeting of the seniors the other day. It was resolved that I speak to you and tell you to cease and desist. If you had any chance of being successful, I wouldn’t speak to you this way. But you have no chance. You just do not have enough influence as a transfer.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then I can swing enough votes to deny the privileges of the house to you.”

“That takes a three-fourths majority.”

“I have more than that.”

I knew that he did. It was no bluff. I made my tone very casual. “Well, you’ve taken care of me a lot easier than some of the others.”

He took his pipe out of his mouth. “I don’t think I quite understand that, Rod.”

“Then we’ll drop it right there.” I stood up.

He put his hand out. “No hard feelings?”

I ignored his hand. “Isn’t that a little trite?”

He was good. He actually looked as though he wanted to weep. “That isn’t the Gamma U spirit, Arlin.”

“You take your job pretty seriously, Marris.”

“I do the best I know how.”

“What man could do more!” I said breathlessly. I turned and walked out.

Chapter Seven

Setting Up the Kill

Tilly had stayed up until three, she said, finishing a story for our mutual Friday class. She wanted me to read it. She had brought her carbon with her, in her purse.

“Right here?”

“No. The atmosphere has to be better than this, Joe. Wine, soft music.”

“At my place I can provide the wine and the soft music. Would you okay the background?”

“Look, I’m blushing about the story. I thought it was something I’d never try to put on paper. Maybe I don’t want you to read it.”

It was Friday afternoon. We went out to my place. I put on dark glasses and took the carbon out on the beach.

Tilly said, “One thing I’m not going to do is sit and watch you read it, Joe.” She walked down the beach away from me. I watched her walk away from me. No other girl had such a perfect line of back, concavity of slim waist, with the straightest of lines dropping from the armpits down to the in-curve of waist, then flaring, descending in a slanted curve to the pinched-in place of the knee, then sleekly curving again down the calf to the delicacy of ankle bone and the princess-narrow foot.

She turned and looked back and read my mind. “Hey, read the story,” she said.

I read it. She’d showed me other work and I’d been ruthless about too many adjectives, about stiltedness. This one was simple. A boy and a girl. The awkward poetry of a first love. The boy dies. Something in the girl dies. Forever, she thinks. She wants it to be forever. She never wants to feel again. But as she comes slowly back to life, she fights against it. In vain.

And one day she has flowered again into another love and she cannot fight any more — and then she knows that the bruised heart is the one that can feel the most pain and also the most joy. There was a sting at the corners of my eyes as I finished it.

“Come here,” I called. My voice was hoarse.

She came running. I held her by her sun-warm shoulders and kissed her. We both wept and it was a silly and precious thing.

“I do the writing in this family.” I said. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know. Now I don’t think so.”

“In this family? That is a phrase I leap upon, darling. That is a bone I take in my teeth and run with.”

“Trapped,” I said.

“I release you. I open the trap.”