Dr. Rusk’s office door had a nonconducting rubberized sheath on the knob, and Dr. Rusk’s name and degrees and title, and a needlepoint sampler with a little heart inside a big heart and a cursive exhortation to Champion An Inner Child Today, which the little kids at E.T.A. find puzzling and upsetting. Pemulis, pausing by habit first at the silent locked infirmary door and then Rusk’s bottom-crack-lit door on his way across the Comm.-Ad. lobby, was wearing the most insolent ensemble he could throw together. He wore maroon paratrooper’s pants with green stovepipe stripes down the sides. The pants’ cuffs were tucked into fuchsia socks above ancient and radically uncool Clark’s Wallabies with dirty soles of eraserish gum. He wore an orange fake-silk turtleneck under an English-cut sportcoat in a purple-and-tan windowpane check. He wore naval shoulder-braid at the level of ensign. He wore his yachting cap, but with the bill bent up at a bumpkinish angle. He looked less insolent than just extremely poorly dressed, really. Dr. Rusk’s door was cool against his ear. Jim Troeltsch had been coming down B’s hall just as Pemulis was leaving and said Pemulis looked like a hangover. Through the door, Rusk was urging Stice to name his anger and Stice was proposing to name his anger Horace after his old man’s late pointer that had got into some coyote bait when The Darkness was nine and was much missed by the whole Stice brood, back in Kansas. The old Wallabies were from Pemulis’s older brother’s incomplete public-school career and had boogerish little greebles of dirty gum all around the soles’ perimeter. The socks belonged to Jennie Bash and she made it explicit she wanted them back laundered. The sportcoat’s checked arms were several cm. too short and exposed ribbed cuffs of shiny orange acetate esters.
The Community & Administration Bldg.’s downstairs was real quiet. It was like 2100h., supposedly mandatory Study Period, and Harde’s crew had gone home but the custodial graveyard shift hadn’t come on yet. Pemulis moved noiselessly NE-SW across the lobby’s shag. Except for lines of lamplight from under a couple doors the E.T.A. lobby was pitch-black, and the outer Academy doors locked. There was an odd vehicular shape near the north wall’s trophy case that Pemulis didn’t pause to investigate. He lifted up slightly to keep the little SW hall’s door from squeaking as he opened it and entered the administrative reception area, snapping his fingers softly to himself. A loose music played in his head. Tavis’s reception area was empty and dim, the wallpaper’s clouds now stormy-dark. It wasn’t totally quiet. Light came from Mrs. Inc’s doorway and from the crack under Tavis’s inner door. Lateral Alice Moore had gone home. Pemulis activated her Third Rail and played with her chair as he made a very quick survey of the material on her desk. Activating the P.A. mike was out of all question. Two of her five drawers were still locked. Pemulis scanned behind him and popped another breath mint and sat quietly for a moment as Moore’s chair slid back and forth along the rail, his fingers in a steeple under his nose, considering.
Light shone from the crack of Tavis’s inner door because the outer door stood open. Pemulis didn’t even have to put any kind of ear to the wood of the inside door. He could hear the hiss and high-speed grind of Ta vis’s Stairßlaster, and Ta vis’s breathless recessive voice. You could tell there was nobody else in there. You could tell Tavis had no shirt on and an E.T.A. towel around his neck and his hair a sweaty curtain down one side of his little head as he ran to keep up with what reminded everybody of a Satanishly-possessed Filene’s escalator. He was exhorting himself in a kind of fast rhythmic chant that sounded to Pemulis like either Total worry total worry’ or ‘No don’t worry no don’t worry’ and c. Pemulis could envision Tavis’s round belly and little titties of fat bouncing with the action of the Stairßlaster. You could hear the sudden muffling when he probably brought the towel up to dab at his slanted mustache. Tavis’s doorknob had no insulating rubber sheath, Pemulis noticed.
Pemulis’s ensemble’s belt was a plastic thing with chintzy fake-Navajo beading, purchased by little Chip Sweeny at one of last fall’s Whataßurger’s souvenir stands and subsequently transferred to Pemulis during a Big Buddy tennis-as-game-of-chance exercise. The beading-patterns were in Gila-monster orange and black, the orange a different shade than Pemulis’s tur-tleneck.
He could never resist biting down once a mint’d melted to a certain size and texture.
The doorless Dean of Academic Affairs’s office was a blazing rectangle of light. The light didn’t spill very far into the reception area, however. At close-range, sounds issued from the office, but not exactly words. Pemulis checked his fly and snapped his fingers under his own nose and assumed a businesslike stride and rapped firmly on the doorless jamb without breaking stride. The heavier blue shag of the office itself slowed him down a bit. He stopped once he was all the way in. 18-A John Wayne and Hal’s Mumsly-Wumsly were both in the front of the office. They were about maybe two meters apart. The room was lit overhead and by four standing lamps. The seminar table and chairs cast a complicated shadow. Two homemade pompoms of shredded paper and what looked like the amputated handles of wooden tennis racquets were on the seminar table, which was otherwise bare. John Wayne wore a football helmet and light shoulderpads and a Russell athletic supporter and socks and shoes and nothing else. He was down in the classic three-point stance of U.S. football. Inc’s incredibly tall and well-preserved mother Dr. Avril Incandenza wore a little green-and-white cheerleader’s outfit and had one of deLint’s big brass whistles hanging around her neck. She was blowing on the whistle, which appeared to be minus the little inside pellet because no whistling sound resulted. She was about two meters from Wayne, facing him, doing near-splits on the heavy shag, one arm up and pretending to blow the whistle while Wayne produced the classic low-register growling sounds of U.S. football. Pemulis made rather a show of pushing the bumpkin-billed yachting hat back to scratch his head, blinking. Mrs. Inc was the only one looking at him.
‘I probably won’t even waste everybody’s time asking if I’m interrupting,’ Pemulis said.
Mrs. Inc seemed frozen in place. Her one hand was still up in the air, fine fingers splayed. Wayne craned his neck to look over at Pemulis from under his helmet without changing his three-point stance. The football-noises trailed off. Wayne’s got a narrow nose and close-set witchy eyes. He wore a plastic mouthguard. The musculature of his legs and buttocks was clearly outlined as he squatted forward with his weight on his knuckles. There was way less time passing in the office than there seemed to be.
‘Hoping for a second of your time,’ Pemulis told Mrs. Inc. He was standing schoolboy-straight, hands clasped demurely over his fly, which on Pemulis this posture did look insolent.
Wayne straightened up and moved toward his clothing with no little dignity. His sweats were neatly folded on the Dean’s desk at the rear of the office. The mouthguard was attached to the facemask and hung from it when removed. The chin strap had several snaps Wayne had to undo.
‘Nice-looking helmet,’ Pemulis told him.
Wayne, pulling hard on his sweatpants’ cuffs to fit them over a shoe, didn’t reply. He was so fit that his supporter’s straps didn’t even dent his buttocks.
Mrs. Incandenza removed the mute whistle. She was still split down on the floor. Pemulis made rather a show of not looking south of her face. She pursed her lips to chuff hair out of her eyes.
‘I predict this’ll take about two minutes at most,’ Pemulis said, smiling.