A punishing breed, p.3
A Punishing Breed, page 3
Sitting in his office, Fern said, “I don’t understand why you gave me a C on my abstract.”
Most disturbing was the red ink scrawled across the first page. A massacre that bled through to innocent sheets below.
It was important for Fern to get an A on her paper.
“You’re not,” said Professor Bounty, “moving past your emotional response to the subject.”
Her paper focused on the role of war and culture in Etruscan art.
“You need to analyze, assess, and reconstruct.”
The starving Etruscans migrated to modern-day Tuscany. They waged war, but for a brief period their art flourished in colorful tomb paintings.
Professor Bounty walked behind her, retrieving something from a bookcase.
“Not simply react,” he said.
The Etruscan murals showed their obsession with fighting, death, and funereal scenes, rendered in saturated colors of saffron, blood red, cerulean blue. The palette is what resonated with Fern.
“You need to remove your emotional response to the drawings,” he said. “I don’t care how you feel. Tell me how the Etruscan’s warlike nature informed their art.”
Fern pulled at the necklace inherited from her grandmother, a gold oval with an ascending Virgin Mary on an iridescent sky.
Professor Bounty’s hand touched her shoulder.
“Why don’t you come by my house after dinner,” he said. “Bring your paper, and we’ll go through it point by point.”
“You mean slash by red slash.”
Fern sounded petulant even to herself.
“Is that how you prefer,” he asked, “to react?”
The professor’s posse of favorite students were occasionally invited into the inner sanctum of the Bounty home a few blocks from campus. Fern imaged herself in sweats and a tank top and Mrs. Bounty, a hip Lady Macbeth, flanking the professor as he attacked her prose and stripped each literary outburst from her paper.
“Professor,” she said, “I don’t want to disturb you and Mrs. Bounty.”
“Gabriel,” he said. “Call me Gabriel. Listen, Fern Lake, my wife is out of town. We’ll focus on your paper—get you moving in the right direction.”
Fern turned around to look at him. Her cheek brushed against his hand, still resting on her shoulder. He didn’t flinch. A warm flush spread from her cheek down to her neck and chest. Jeez, she was blushing.
Fern needed an A in his class to be in contention for a Fulbright.
“Okay,” she said. “That would be helpful. Thank you.”
Tonight, standing outside the circle of light from Bounty’s front porch, she could smell him on her fingers, patchouli and regret. She wiped her hands on her pants, but the remorse stayed with her.
“I can drive you to your dorm,” the professor had said as she buttoned her shirt over her grandmother’s necklace.
“I have my roommate’s car,” Fern lied.
“Okay,” he said quickly. His eyes flitted from her face to a spot six feet behind her. “I mean, if you’re sure.”
Fern realized that purging emotional responses wasn’t just about her paper, it was Professor Gabriel Bounty’s way of life.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”
“Take care, Fern Lake.”
He didn’t walk her to the door. She left without looking back.
Outside, Fern slung her backpack over her shoulder, turned away from his house, and walked down the street toward campus. She didn’t have a car or a roommate.
Leaves and debris tumbled in the Santa Anas. Suddenly an image of Fern’s father flickered in her mind. After her mother died, when neither of them could sleep, he would stay up late with her, reading the newspaper while Fern read her mom’s collection of Agatha Christie books. When the Santa Anas came, they would sit behind the screen door and watch the dry desert winds whip around the branches of birch trees that lined their street.
“Tipsy ballerinas,” her dad called them.
Fern was twelve, and from that point on it was just the two of them.
A gust of wind caught her from behind, blowing her hair above and around her face. Fern doubled over, a sudden pang in her belly, a nauseous sludge rising up her throat. She heaved, throwing up red wine.
Wiping her face on her sleeve, Fern straightened and assessed her surroundings. She was outside the old derelict house a block from campus. Her friends called it the haunted hole. Ivy and black branches of red bougainvillea climbed up brick and rotted shutters to the second floor. No light penetrated its shadows. She felt a quiver run down her back. Was someone watching her from the black windows?
She wiped her mouth again and quickly moved on.
Students were cautioned not to walk in the neighborhood alone late at night. Each year a few student muggings occurred. Fern couldn’t call Campus Safety; her cell phone had died along with her decision-making prowess.
Fern walked along the perimeter of Hesperia College, past the football stadium and a squat stucco building tucked between overgrown shrubs; the rat lab, where she had struggled through her psychology class.
She finally reached the west gates of campus and immediately felt safe. Newman Hall was on her left, where she had lived as a first-year student. She had dated a cute guy named Jonah. But he was obsessed with video games and pot. It didn’t last.
She met Jim Singer, the center for the basketball team, in her psychology lab her sophomore year. He was from the East Coast, smart and handsome. Their relationship burned hot for two years before cooling over the long summer break. He returned from a semester in South America questioning everything, including the relevance of their relationship. He broke up with her two months ago.
Fern focused on her schoolwork, pretending she wasn’t devastated. She had applied for a Fulbright, a year in England where she could figure out the rest of her life. Sleeping with a professor, and a married man to boot, was not in her plans.
Earlier that evening, drinking a third glass of wine Professor Bounty poured for her, he pulled at her grandmother’s necklace, his fingers brushed her neck.
He studied the Virgin Mary on her pendant.
“You’re a believer?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, I want to believe in something.”
Gabriel Bounty pulled Fern closer.
“Your eyes,” he said, “are an unusual color.”
“They’re amber.” That’s what her dad said anyway. The room began to spin. “I mean, thank you. I’m feeling woozy.” She was close enough to smell his patchouli oil and see a cut on his chin from shaving.
“Hey, lean back, just relax,” he said.
She touched the wound on his chin with her finger.
Right after that, Fern broke a Commandment; the one about adultery.
Fern gazed up at the scaly limbs of tall eucalyptus trees lining the road on Hesperia campus. Across the way, a grove of olive trees populated the hill leading to upper campus, where her dorm, Ramble Hall, and bed waited for her. There was an old asphalt shortcut through the trees, used by students who didn’t want to spend an extra ten or fifteen minutes taking the three vertical staircases on the other side of campus near the Sliming Administration Center.
She headed up the hill through the canopy of branches. There was a full moon. Shadows scattered in the wind, making it difficult to see. Fern took out her phone to use the light before remembering it was dead.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered. Add swearing to tonight’s list of sins.
She heard something rustle behind her.
“Hello,” Fern said, turning around.
Nothing. She almost tripped but caught herself, then continued onward.
She heard it again; something moving through the branches.
Fern walked faster up the path and to the edge of a clearing dead center in the grove.
Here the asphalt path ended in a treeless open space dotted with a few large boulders before a short rougher trail continued up the hill through the brush. She’d heard a rumor that a student Wicca group practiced rituals here. The moon and wind cast dancing black shadows across the clearing. Tonight, Fern would have welcomed the Wiccans’ presence.
A group of female students to light the way.
“Is anyone there?”
Wind whistled through the branches, whipping her long hair across her face. She thought of her father’s wayward ballerinas and laughed uneasily. She sounded like a frightened little girl, even to herself.
A dust devil wound its way across the clearing toward her.
She caught a stink from the breeze; dense, sickly sweet.
A faint drumbeat came from the trees to the east.
She stood, listening, unable to move.
The drumbeat grew louder. And another sound . . . a tearing, a breaking of twigs.
The stink closer . . . dense, dark. Familiar.
Footsteps sluicing branches.
She recognized the smell from that terrible day her childhood ended; her mother’s aneurysm. Hot, copper, and cloying like blood.
Fern tried to run, but her legs felt like cement. She stumbled, hit the ground. Pain exploded in her knee.
A high-pitched scream pricked her hearing.
Black filled the sky as a wet heavy shroud covered her face and arms. A weight pressed down on her trunk, pinning her arms, her legs.
“What’s happening?” Fear ricocheted through her mind, her body.
Fern struggled to breathe, to free her limbs.
She gulped for air.
Something grabbed her from behind, pulling at her backpack. Blackness turned sideways, the wet thing peeled away, the night sky reappeared, North Star burning bright.
“Run!” screeched a high-pitched voice with a commanding push to her back.
Fern scrambled to her feet, ran for her life up the hill. She didn’t know if anyone or anything still followed her. She scurried through brush until she reached the paved road that circled the campus, then sprinted until the lights ringing the perimeter of Ramble Hall came into view.
A boy she knew, not well, was smoking pot on the bench near the front door. He looked up, obviously stoned, and walked away in the opposite direction.
“Thanks for your help, asshole,” Fern screamed. Soaked with sweat, she turned back and saw the road behind her was empty. She stepped into the lighted entrance and pulled off her backpack to grab her key card. That’s when she saw it. She wasn’t soaked in sweat. She was covered in blood.
CHAPTER 6
The Poet’s Wife
Ema Treet began her shift at three thirty Friday morning in the Sliming Administration Center. She wore the cleaning crew uniform of scarlet pants and jumper. Unlike her colleagues, Ema wasn’t Latina and didn’t speak Spanish. Her family had emigrated from the former Czechoslovakia, and she had a year of community college under her belt, which didn’t count for much in Hesperia-land. She had met her husband, Marco Treet, in a creative writing class at Highland Community College. Marco was a poet.
Ema was recently promoted to the early morning shift in Sliming. “In early, out early,” the Facilities director, Jerome Blight, assured her. Being moved to an early shift isolated her from colleagues who tried to teach Ema Spanish and put some meat on her bones with homemade tamales and refried beans. Her body and language skills remained resolutely thin.
Sliming had three floors. Ema worked from the top down. The third floor housed the president’s office—William “Just call me Bill” Reese—twelfth president of Hesperia. President Bill was a minimalist, his office, the largest, was sleek and tidy. The dean of the college and the vice president of Finance’s offices were also clear of clutter. Ema zipped through these offices, vacuuming, dusting, and emptying the trash. She carefully maneuvered through the assistants’ cubicles, careful not to disturb the overflowing stacks of paperwork crowding their work areas. She also tidied the kitchen, bathrooms, and third-floor conference room.
Ema called the middle floor “The Terrarium.” Sliming’s main entrance was a three-sided lobby of glass anchored by a gray marble floor. A wooden wall made up the north side. Three steps led up to a conference room used quarterly by trustees, an elevator, and an emergency stairwell. Dead center in the lobby, a wide circular stairway wound down to the bottom floor of Sliming, home to financial aid, the Office of the Registrar, and the Fundraising Department.
Ema spent about twenty minutes on the lobby—running a mop across the marble floor. Though the glass walls were too high for her to clean, she wiped down the fingerprints and smudges at eye level with Windex. As she cleaned the windows, her reflection floated in the glass.
Ema was suddenly seated back in her high school English class. Her teacher was named Mrs. Monserrat. Ema believed her teacher had wandered into her inner-city high school from the moors. Mrs. Monserrat had a meager and head-forward frame as if all extraneous bits of flesh had been scoured away and she had staked her body to the earth in defiance of ferocious headwinds. Her brow was furrowed and marionette lines ran from her nose down to her prominent jawline. She read poetry to the class. No one but Ema paid attention. It was Mrs. Monserrat’s eyes that Ema couldn’t forget and now saw in her own reflection. They were pale blue, as if life had bleached them of color. Mrs. Monserrat’s eyes clenched open and shut as they searched the classroom, astonished that she had somehow ended up at such a god-awful place. “My husband is a poet,” the teacher had announced on the first day of class.
Ema sprayed the Windex again and breathed in its scent. She wiped at her reflection in the window and moved on.
She sent the cleaning cart down to the first floor on the elevator as she walked toward the circular stairway in the center of the lobby. It was 5:15 a.m.
At six, fellow cleaning woman Maria Lorena would start working on the far side of Sliming, the portion of the odd-shaped building where the lower floor extended underground on the opposite side of the courtyard. Ema tried to avoid Maria and her constant barrage of chatter she didn’t understand or have the energy to return.
Ema doused her dust cloth with lemon oil and wiped down the long curved wooden banister of the circular stairway, descending the marble steps to Sliming’s first floor.
Without overhead lights, the basement lobby was pitch-black. Even during the day, the only natural lobby light came from the dribs and drabs of sunlight that slipped down the massive stairway. Ema switched on the auxiliary lights. They cast a sickly yellow glow on the circle of marble floor that mirrored the bottom of the stairs.
She retrieved her cleaning cart from the elevator and wheeled it toward the fundraising suite of offices directly opposite the stairs. She mopped the pockmarked floor around the stairs, which was bordered by a worn blue-and-gray paisley carpet. Something dark like chocolate had dripped on the marble, then disappeared into the old carpet. Ema had to scrub hard to clean up the mess.
The entire first floor had been divided into a maze of ill-conceived offices.
It was almost impossible to clean them all, even with Maria Lorena’s efforts, before the staff began to arrive at eight.
Ema began with Will Bloom’s office, the largest in the suite. She knocked hard. No answer. During the past six months, Ema had found whiskey bottles under Mr. Bloom’s desk, a pair of woman’s high heels, a lacy black thong, a red bra, and other unmentionables on the floor. Recently, she discovered a jaggedly opened box of Trojan double-ring condoms. All of these items she had collected wearing rubber gloves, tucking them inside the credenza. She knocked again. No answer. Ema listened as the building creaked and settled itself.
She opened the unlocked door. Inside the dark office, Ema saw a sliver of the inner courtyard through the open exterior door. Cold air ruffled her hair.
From the glare of yellow lobby lights, one side of the room was visible. A riot of papers, books, and a fossilized elk hoof sat on the credenza. The right wall was bare. Yesterday, a long Japanese blade had hung on a dark wood plaque alongside a framed degree from Notre Dame. The breeze from the courtyard door scattered bits of debris across the floor like frightened mice.
Ema turned on the office light.
Will Bloom was sprawled halfway across an oval conference table, arms stretched out in front of him, hands rigid on its rim, pants pooled around his ankles. His head, cocked back like an animal roaring in pain, listed to the left, his dead eyes were open in horror and shock. The missing sword protruded from his back, pinioning him to the table.
Ema quickly switched off the light. Her hands went cold, then her feet, as if she might turn to ice, beginning with her extremities. She tried to scream, but her voice failed her.
She backed out of the room and outer office into the sickly yellow light and heavy scent of Pine-Sol in the lobby.
Bending over, she heaved and threw up, with regret, on her freshly mopped floor.
CHAPTER 7
Cold in California
Danny Mendoza drove the cart to Sliming Administration Center to begin his second day of work in the courtyard. Cold crept inside his jacket and work uniform as he stood outside the lower east entrance. His memory crept back to frigid mornings in Chino’s prison yard as he shifted from foot to foot waiting for the head count. It was California cold, a chill born between mountains and sea that seeped into his bones, lingering until the midday sun warmed his scalp, face, and forearms.
Danny unloaded the gravel, shovel, and pickax from the cart. None of the office workers came in this early, before 6:00 a.m. It lessened the chance Danny would run into folks he wanted to avoid. Those who remembered his mother and the younger, more promising version of Danny Mendoza.
Carrying heavy bags of gravel across the hall, through the Finance office, into the courtyard was a pain, but tending the cactus and cleaning up gravel pathways was mindless work. His favorite kind.
Danny unlocked the exterior door of lower Sliming with the override key and a twenty-five-pound bag of gravel on one shoulder and headed inside. The moment he stepped into the corridor, he knew something was wrong. He had developed a visceral ESP for danger at Chino; an electric current originating in his cervical spine that barreled into his sphincter muscle.
