Nightmare Carnival

“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.

Her colleagues are moving with surprising speed; even Green huffs along behind, like a rhino escaped from its pen.

“Hey,” Jalena says, trying a laugh.

“Come on.” Frazee has Jalena by the arm. “Let’s get this over with. Maybe we need this.”

Jalena doesn’t know what this is, exactly, or who we are, for that matter. And she trusts Frazee less than she thought, doesn’t like everyone closed around her, sweeping her along. The Great Plains moon blazes too bright, as usual, and too low on the horizon, like a searchlight on a prison tower. Apropos of nothing, she thinks of her drunken mother — dead before Jalena even got the scholarship that freed her from the Piedmont — hanging sheets outside their glorified shack. Up on the splintering, nail-spiked wooden boards that pass for a porch sits Jalena’s drunken, unemployed ex-poet father, who will die in a drunken car wreck hours before he was meant to hop the train Jalena had paid for to come see her graduate magna cum laude. He’s clicking discarded oyster shells in time to the Jessie Mae Hemphill groove on his one-speaker boom box. She can hear that groove, still, and those clicking shells. In a way, she supposes she misses those sounds. It has never before occurred to her that she could miss one single thing about South Carolina.

Not until they’re all the way across the quad and have reached the edge of East A Faculty Lot do Parrott and Rogan step aside and allow Jalena to see where they’re going. Bemis has already reached his truck and opened the back of the bed. In disbelief, Jalena watches Parrott—Doctor Darlene Parrott, ten-petal evening star cultivator, closet Rex Stout fanatic, sound-poet scholar, poster professor for academic spinsterhood — crawl right up and settle against the steel siding and hunch into her coat. Her thin, birdlike face disappears into her cat scarf too quickly for Jalena to see if she’s smiling.

“You’re kidding. Right? We’re riding in that?”

“Like the football team,” Frazee says. “Cruising the strip.”

“Like the whole badass front line.” Rogan’s whoop sounds almost strangled through the mask. She half helps, half drags Jalena up into the bed.

Turning, wondering vaguely how they’re going to manage, Jalena starts to offer Green her hand. But of course, Green won’t be riding back here; he’s already clambering up in the cab next to Bemis.

Eastern Montana. Where even academic men think they’re men.