Even Parrott lets a smile — or a reflection of everyone else’s smiles — flicker on her pale face.
“Any kids out there yet, Darlene?” Frazee calls, snatching the gin bottle out of Bemis’s hand. She pours Jalena some in one of Green’s moose-head shot glasses.
Parrott leans between the curtains again, peering down at the entrance to the Humanities building, where the MFA students none of them teach — this being the Lit and Comp end of the hall, where the rhetoricians and studiers of story lurk in their quieter offices, as far as they can get from the tellers of story — have constructed their contribution to the annual Clarkston, Montana festival of haunted houses. All they’ve managed is a thatched hut this year, draped in black crepe paper and black paint. Inside, grad students in black sweatshirts and face paint have tucked themselves among the shadows, waiting to slither up from the floors or climb down off the walls, whisper in a little kid’s ear, maybe cop a feel from a classmate.
Before she came to Clarkston, Jalena had heard tales of this day in this place, had been told it was a reason for staying, cause for celebration that she’d won her first tenure-track posting on the northern plains instead of the Texas Panhandle or southern Indiana industrial wasteland. But her Montana Halloweens have proven a disappointment, to the town even more than to her, as far as she can tell. There are fewer haunted houses every fall, more evangelical Christian postings decrying the holiday. More frat parties where obsessively ripped boys in Tarzan loincloths swing out of their reeking rooms to sweep up drunk coeds in nurse or hot-witch costumes.
“Fewer little ones every year,” Parrott says, the tenor of her voice even flatter and sadder than the one she uses in conversation or class. “Where do they go?”
“Have Stanton’s grandkids been by, at least?” says Green, through a mouthful of the Saltines he keeps next to his gin in the bottom drawer of his desk. According to Frazee, he’s also got a box of photographs in there that he has never let any of them see. There are no pictures on his desk or the walls.
“Dean Emeritus Stanton?” Jalena asks.
When Frazee laughs, her arms jangle, and her gypsy scarves ripple atop her dark curls like light on a night river. She is the happiest compositionist Jalena has ever met.
“Don’t look so shocked, Professor Russell. The man was Halloween hardcore.”
“I heard he hates this place.”
Bemis stirs enough to reclaim his gin bottle. “He hates the university. The glorified vocational school our budget cuts have left us with. Not Clarkston.”
“Clarkston, too,” says Green, cracker chunks spilling down and into his flannel shirt front. “Now, anyway. Without the university, what’s to like about Clarkston?”
Frazee puts an arm around Jalena’s waist, the gesture casual and easy, and again, Jalena wonders how and where and when people learn to do that.
“Back in the day?” Frazee says. “When the whole town did this holiday right? So long ago that Dean Emeritus Stanton could still bend down with both knees? He and his wife constructed this huge maze every year in their front yard.”
“Made of straw.” Rogan sounds angry, as usual, though she appears to be smiling under the mask. “A crawling maze. I used to go through it scared to death.”
“It was full of centipedes and spiders. Real ones.”
“I hate spiders,” says Jalena.
Frazee just smiles wider, which seems wrong, somehow, not like her, though Jalena couldn’t have said why.
“Yeah, well, I told you. Hardcore.”
It’s Green, this year, who does the honors, bangs his glass down on his desk and splashes gin all over his Faulkners. His white, flabby wrists squeeze through the buttoned cuffs of his shirt like toothpaste through crumpled tubes.
“To David,” he says, “wherever he is.”
“To David,” the rest of them echo, the rhythm precise, practiced, instinctive, even Rogan answering right on cue, though she generally makes it a point of honor to respond to nothing else Green ever says.
It’s like the Lit and Comp program fight song, Jalena thinks, even as she raises her glass along with them, feels her mouth move over the name of this person she knows nothing about except that he vanished, years ago.
“To David,” Parrott says, just after the rest. Then they’re all knocking back gin, except Frazee, who can no longer drink. She sips her seltzer, lets the smile fade off her face.
“Wherever he is,” she says.
“Such beautiful inflections,” Jalena says, quietly. “Or are they innuendoes?”
“Hey, hey!” Bemis perks up, refilling his glass just so he can tip it at her. “No wonder we gave you tenure. I told you you’d come around to Wallace Stevens. I could tell the moment we hired you that you were a woman of taste.”
At the desk, Green half groans, half burps, like a bullfrog. “Lord Christ. That’s all we need. Our Africanist’s ways of looking at a blackbird.”
“One of us,” Frazee starts again, adding a halfhearted zombie arm wave, and stops. “Very possibly the last of us.”
That is all too true, Jalena knows. For once, EMU — Great Plains seems determined to get ahead of an educational movement: the one to end tenure. And that makes it all the more likely that for better or worse, and for the foreseeable future, she’s staying here, now. One of them: these people she’d been sure would finally be her people. Her friends, colleagues. Lovers, maybe. What, in any English department she’d ever seen or been part of, had led her to believe that?
“Wait, that’s right,” she says abruptly, and puts down her glass. The gin tastes foul in her mouth, burnt cinnamon over old flowers. “I’m tenured. I’m official. And that means—”
“That you’re officially fucked,” Rogan mutters. Her mask flutters with the force of her breath.
“—that you have to tell me,” Jalena finishes.
For a second, they look baffled.
“The David Roemer story,” she reminds them. “You told me, on my very first Halloween here, that when and if I got tenured, you’d. ”
What stops her? Not the look on any of their faces, but the way they exchange the look, passing it around just ahead of her gaze like something they’re hiding behind their backs.
“She’s right,” Rogan finally says.
“She is,” Green agrees.
Green and Rogan. agreeing?
But Frazee steps forward, bracelets jingling, right to Jalena’s side. As though shielding her?
“Jalena neither wants nor needs to hear that story. Ever.”
“Don’t speak for me,” Jalena can’t keep from snapping, despite the fact that she trusts Frazee, or almost does. “And yes I do.”
“You don’t,” says Parrott.
Amazingly, Bemis has come off the wall, and he’s almost steady on his feet. His smirk seems to be for Frazee, though he doesn’t quite look at her. “Of course she does, Alexa. Who wouldn’t, after all?” Already, he’s shrugging into his overcoat, the only one Jalena has ever seen him wear, with the lining leaning out of the filthy green fabric as though peering between buttons. “It’s time, after all. We did promise.”
“Goddamn it,” says Frazee, “this isn’t funny.”
“We’ll take my truck,” says Bemis, pulling on gloves, and he’s gone from the office.
With startling speed — so quickly that Jalena hardly has time to process that it’s happening — they’ve all donned their coats and scarves and moved across the English hallway, down the linoleum steps under the bare-bulb lights, and out onto the quad. Her colleagues have formed a sort of phalanx around her, are hustling her into the night, which is warm for the end of October. Snow swirls around their uncovered heads but vanishes before it hits the ground. Firefly snow. They pass the haunted MFA hut. Inside it, some kid — a little girl, judging by the voice, too young to be in there, and Jalena wonders what her parents could be thinking? — lets out a shriek, then a laugh. The grass all over campus is dead and brittle from yet another summer of lots of lightning and no rain, and it crackles under Jalena’s boots. The buildings are utilitarian concrete blocks, haphazard in their very occasional architectural filigrees — Doric columns outside Business-Econ, a flashing light sculpture by the student union — and about as college classic as parking garages. And yet, this place feels closer to home than anywhere she has lived since she left South Carolina for college. Maybe anywhere, ever.