Let's Get Criminal by Lev Raphael

Author:Lev Raphael [Raphael, Lev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: College teachers—Michigan—Fiction, Gay mystery, Literature teachers—Michigan—Fiction
Publisher: ReQueered Tales
Published: 2019-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

After class I headed for the gray steel and concrete Administration Building bridge, which seemed to be about twenty feet above the river. I wasn’t the only gawker. Dozens of people were on the bridge and at opposite ends pointing at a spot on the bank that looked as if it had been trampled by lots of feet. There wasn’t any yellow Police Line tape up anywhere, so you couldn’t really tell exactly where the body had been found.

I mingled with the crowd, looking for something that could explain what had happened—but it was impossible to concentrate. I wandered back a little off the bridge and sat on an empty bench, relaxing despite myself.

The terrace and banks right next to it formed one of the most popular areas on campus. For some people—like me—the river was a wonderful place to sit or nap by, a channel for dreams and canoeing, a quick and easy reminder that classes and exams and student loans and job hunting and promotions were ephemeral and even ugly. For others, I suppose it was a mirage of sorts, a false escape from the inevitable judgments, deadlines, pressures, fears that hung over every building on campus with the thickness and weight of the battered-looking weeping willows lining the riverbanks.

That place was sometimes a strange mix of the peaceful and violent. Students, faculty, alumni, parents, townspeople, came here on sunny days, on weekends, to watch and feed the ducks, to watch each other. You almost always found delighted toddlers not much bigger than the ducks they waved their arms at, chased, loved, possibly feared. People went through whole bags of stale bread, ripping and tossing. It was like a National Geographic special—intimate, exciting, a bit unnerving.

With just one piece of bread, you could wreak mayhem on the water, sending the fat glossy dark ducks into furies of diving and stealing. The flapping of wings, the splashing and quacking spiraled as more bread flew and sank, and some ducks were pecked, nearly trampled down into the water, while other smaller ones fled to quieter spots on the river, or waddled up the grassy sloping bank on the north side to lurk hopefully by picnic blankets. The softly besieged picnickers usually took pity until duck radar spread the alert that there was a new outpost for food, and the noisy demanding cloud shifted. It was sometimes funny, sometimes disquieting and cruel. So much commotion, so much transient violence, so much apparent hunger—though even the ducks found there in the height of winter when most of the river was frozen over never looked underfed.

Occasionally you saw pop cans, condoms, even SUM notebooks in the river.

I thought that Perry’s was probably the first body.

I was about to leave when a student hurrying by stopped and hissed my name: “Dr. Hoffman!”

It was Chad, who was on the SUM wrestling team. He had surprised me last semester by writing so maturely; his prose was as lean and powerful as he was.

He sidled over, looking uncustomarily furtive.

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