Copyright © 2007 Mike Markel. All rights reserved.

After your life has been touched by violent death, it’s only natural to wonder whether there were signs you were too busy to see, clues you were too dull to decipher. For the better part of a year, I have thought hard about this. In my mind, I have painstakingly reconstructed the events that led to Rick’s death (I should point out that I am rather old-fashioned, believing that events can be reconstructed, that memory need not be fiction), and I conclude that the tragedy could have been neither foreseen nor prevented. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll let you make up your own mind. You will, anyway. Let’s begin.

"My name is Rick, and I’m a Bonehead."

I was apprehensive when I got to "Mathers, Richard." He was a large, thickset man, too big by half for the molded plastic chair with the attached desk. I put him at thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight, patches of scalp visible beneath the oily hair that hung like ribbons down the back of his pock-marked neck. His gray-flecked beard grew seamlessly into the chest hair visible through his tissue-thin T-shirt. The other students were giving him some room.

The front of his fatigue jacket wore a low sheen from what looked like years of food stains. His jeans were tattered, not the way kids and pop stars buy them, with neat little slits across the knees, bordered with pristine white threads. No, these jeans were experienced, the fabric scraped away, I imagine, by concrete floors, each thigh covered with a limited palette of black, brown, and green stains, probably motor oil and a half-dozen other engine fluids.

After a couple of decades in this job, I try not to draw conclusions. These shabby, busted-up older guys can’t disguise what’s become of them, but when you discover that they’ve endured more cruelty, neglect, abuse, bad luck, perversion, and violence than could fit in a good-sized novel, you’re surprised they look as together as they do. But wherever they are on Day One, that’s where I start. It’s their future I’m interested in, not their past.

"Rick."

"I’d just as soon we call it Developmental Writing, Rick."

His hand fluttered, the weary universal symbol for "whatever," accompanied by a thin smile, which, at the time, I took to signal friendliness. I try to see the best in people. Most adults who get put in Bonehead have been force-fed so much crap over the years that they’re past being offended. "I have to take Bonehead before you let me into regular English? All right, sign me up for Bonehead." Adults here in Montana know there are some fights you can win and some you can’t. Fights with the state, you can’t.

How do I feel about teaching what amounts to junior-high English? The answer’s not as complicated as you might imagine. True, I’m permanently perched on the lowest rung of the ladder here in the English Department, but in all honesty, the rungs don’t go up that high. I don’t say that to my colleagues who teach literature, of course, but the way I see it, Central Montana State was made for bad students. Every so often a few good ones slip through, mostly the placebound. (I hate that word, too, but picture Gulliver tied down in Lilliput; it disburses some of that bureaucratic Excel smell.) Most of the good high-school students in Montana wouldn’t even consider coming here; they go to the main campus if they can’t get a free ride at a better school in another state.

No, we specialize in the academic never-were’s. We’re the leading university for trailing students. We offer tomorrow’s services to students stuck in yesterday. We are the Bonehead Berkeley. If you were given 23 ugly red-brick buildings on a windswept winter plain so cold that every couple of years cattle freeze where they stand, you couldn’t populate them with worse students than those who mosey, stumble, or wheel into our classrooms.

My Bonehead kids are uppercase BAD, the never-did-good-in-school, got-myself-fired-from-Wal-Mart, can’t-figure-out-today’s-JUMBLE, how’d-she-get-knocked-up-the-first-time BAD. The students who don’t get put into Bonehead? They’re just lowercase inept, the kind who can’t remember what Poe’s Raven quoth, so on the midterm they furrow their brows, gaze at the ceiling, scratch their chins, then write "Polly want a cracker?" No, these boringly bland bad students might share a common ancestor with my students, but the two branches diverged a good couple thousand years ago.

When it came Rick’s turn to introduce himself, he began, as I said, "My name is Rick, and I’m a Bonehead." A few of the older students understood his reference. Most of the kids looked creeped out and confused. "Not that much to say. Went from high school to stripping beef carcasses in Nebraska. That didn’t do it for me, so then into the army, then to the Gulf War. Worked in Ordnance, cut my arm up a little when we were cleaning out an Iraqi tank we’d popped, which wouldn’t’a been a big deal ’cept that it was full of Depleted Uranium from the shell we used, and now I got me a little case of shaky hands and I don’t walk so good and, come to think of it, I don’t think that good, either, anymore." The other students were wide-eyed.

"Long story short, spent a little time on heroin, cooked up some crystal, then three years enjoying the state’s hospitality. Now the Army’s giving me my tuition money, even though they ain’t giving me the disability they owe me because they say what I got is an ‘unexplained illness’ and I don’t qualify." He laughed scornfully, as if he had just unlocked the Mystery of Life: things happen to you, and they’re probably bad.

You might think Rick’s sour stroll down memory lane was meant to scare the kids or impress a girl or intimidate me. Day One, it was too early to tell, but my experience is that if a general rant ends with a specific complaint, as it usually does, the guy isn’t putting on a show. If he were able to think about anyone other than himself, he would realize that he’s painting "Loser" in Day-Glo on his forehead. But that’s one of the first things a Loser loses: the ability to see what he looks like. With a dead-ender like Rick, the emotion is up so close to the surface, he can’t lock it down. He starts to talk, and out it comes. The words just speak themselves. That’s what I thought, then.

I wanted to get past it quickly. "Wow, Rick, that’s quite a story. What are you going to major in here, Rick?"

He laughed again, more like a little snort. Shaking his head, he said, "No idea whatsoever."

I turned to the next student, relieved to see an eighteen-year-old boy with acne, platinum hair, and a World Wrestling Federation T-shirt. The air was still vibrating from Rick’s story time when the boy began his two-minute salute to um, uh, like, and you know. I enjoyed the down time.

I make them write on Day One, and they write for at least fifteen minutes every class. We start with slo-pitch autobiographical topics, big arcing prompts like "describe the room in which you grew up as a child." What’s the point? Before they can write something interesting, they have to believe they can write at all, and the last thing they need is the fear that they don’t know anything to write about. Most of these students have been informed so often by every authority figure in their lives (often beginning with one or both of their Dear Olds) that they don’t know anything, they believe it, just like they believe it will get dark tonight, then light tomorrow morning. They hear it so much, they supply their own subtext: that they’re so stupid it’s quite unlikely they ever will know anything. Before we can start to build something in my course, we have to dismantle a few things. I understand the architecture of failure, and I know how to deconstruct it.

So step one is to get them to put words on paper. They have to believe that it’s possible that they can use a pen or a computer to communicate. They need to know that writing is not an unnatural act for which they will be arrested and prosecuted by the language cops. I don’t mark any of this writing. No grades, no negative comments. They give me 200 words, I give them praise. "That’s a really vivid description of your grandmother, Jacky. Excellent work." "Really interesting story about life on the cattle ranch, Bill. Keep up the good work." If I can identify the language as English and discover a topic, I applaud the effort. Even if I can’t, I graciously offer my congratulations: "Excellent work, Tiffany. Thank you!"

In the first few weeks, I seemed to be connecting with Rick. His words flowed, they poured, they cascaded, they flooded the levees, overflowed the dams. I asked for 200 words, I got 2,000. You know that lyric, "Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen"? By the end of Week Two, I knew all the trouble Rick had seen: parents who never loved him, girls who never understood him, teachers who never respected him, bosses who never trusted him, CO’s who never appreciated him. The result: here he sat, middle aged, no income, high risk, zero prospects, half nuts. The total package.

I wasn’t sure Rick was a diamond in the rough, but I was certain he was at least some sort of semi-precious stone, not merely a clod of dirt. Just between you and me, most of my kids are all rough edges, with nothing in the center, like those starburst fireworks that leave no trace as they float to the ground. Yes, some of my students can’t write because they don’t know how to put one word after another to make an idea. More often, the problem is that their brains have never hosted an idea big enough to fill up the hole in the letter o. And it’s not that I make them write about "academic" subjects. I’m fine with "me so horny" (one of the great themes of literature, after all), but if those three words constitute the beginning, middle, and end of their thoughts on the subject, I’m not completely confident I can help them make that leap to the boardroom.

But Rick sponged up my praise, the approval nourishing his long-desiccated soul. When I returned his assignments, I glimpsed his thin smile out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be getting more relaxed, less insistent on letting me and everyone else know that he had gotten the short end of every one of life’s sticks. After each class, he waited until the other students had left the room, extracted himself from his chair, gripped his cane, and slowly walked by my desk, saying "Good job, Mr. Williams."

I excuse such rhetorical indiscretions. I couldn’t expect him to know that I received my doctorate from Chapel Hill, back in the days when you had to write a real dissertation, such as my own Levels of Irony in Macbeth, rather than faddish foolishness like Prefigurations of Postmodern Despair in Victorian Garden Parties. And how was he to know that he hadn’t earned the right to evaluate my performance, that his compliments would be appropriate only if he and I were equals in talent, accomplishment, and position, a situation that, if not completely unimaginable, wasn’t likely to materialize near term?

No, I welcome words of praise from anyone about anything. Rick’s compliments were my cue to praise his latest writing. Rick required more than generic generosity, and I delivered. He and I were clicking. We were on course, in sync, on task, in the zone, on the same page. I was certain I was going to make a big difference in his life.

Alas, as in most areas of life, it’s not up to me. For one thing, instructors are required to give students grades early enough in the semester so they can bail out of the course before they get sucked down the drain. For another, students need to bulk up to work for the Man, and he wants it done fast and well. (You would think that since he almost never gets it done both fast and well, he would get over it and move on, but the Man isn’t all that bright.)

No student likes timed, graded writing, and Rick was no exception. What was exceptional about Rick was his expertise in bending and twisting life’s raw material into a raw deal. When we started timed, graded writing, I carefully explained why it was good for them, how to do it successfully, and what improvements they would see over the semester as they became more comfortable with it. I even threw in the always-popular drop-your-lowest-grade concession. For Rick, however, every turn of events was a screw job.

Take the first assignment. I asked the students to spend 50 minutes writing a 300-word essay responding to the following prompt: "Describe your best or worst experience writing. This experience could have taken place in school or out of school. It could have been writing that you were required to do or writing that you chose to do. It could have occurred yesterday or years ago. Using specific details, explain why the writing experience was a positive or negative one for you, and explain how this experience affected your attitude about yourself as a writer."

Admittedly, this topic is unlikely to set off an e-mail flurry among the folks who hand out the MacArthur genius grants. But in a cinder-block bunker filled with frightened semi-literates, it works. Of course, it’s a trick question. None of my students has ever written about a positive experience; if these kids had ever had a positive experience involving a pen and a piece of paper, they wouldn’t be stopping by every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 50 minutes. No, I knew exactly what I was going to get. Every last lost soul in the class has had plenty of bad experiences writing, and even though they can’t remember the difference between it’s and its. They remember with pellucid clarity every detail of each word-based humiliation.

For this assignment, most of the kids chose to write about a rough run-in with an essay question on a high-school test. It was a really important test, blah blah. Got so nervous I could barely hold the pen, shake shake. Felt the perspiration running down my back, drip, drip. Got a low grade, boo hoo. But I guess I’ll have just have to learn how to do better, ta da! The sun will come up tomorrow! About half of the students wrote that this course will help them meet this challenge, has already helped them "a lot."

Now, Rick’s essay was a little different. What was his best or worst experience writing? "Writing this stupid essay is easily the worst experience Ive ever had as a writer. Why? Because its a stupid topic. Every other time I had to write I had a real topic and something to say. Like the time I had to write a letter to the parents of my buddy Granger, who got half his head tore off when some dumbass artillery spotter entered the wrong coordinates and we caught some 105 mm steel rain. That was a topic. This is just stupid.

Admittedly, Rick’s response was a little disappointing, but I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Rick’s like the guy who’s afraid of getting hurt by a girlfriend, so he does something cruel to sabotage the relationship. That’s understandable. He fears that the new element of grades will upset our successful pen-pal relationship. Therefore he destroys the relationship to fulfill his worst expectations. The story ends badly, like all his stories do, but at least he knew what was going to happen, so he’s really the smart one, and he made it happen, so he’s the one in control.

Of course, Rick could have been trying to manipulate me through insult, knowing that I couldn’t give his writing the low grade it deserves because I would appear to be avenging his insolence, a cowardly move that would only confirm his judgment. Everybody would win: Rick would get a decent grade, and I would get to demonstrate my superior breeding by overlooking his taunts. (On an hourly basis, my salary is slightly higher than a secretary’s, somewhat lower than a unionized grocery clerk’s, but they don’t get to flaunt their savior faire several times a week. That’s worth something, isn’t it?)

I did the responsible thing: I critiqued the writing. In copious comments that ate up the margins, I explained his failure to develop his ideas, to provide the sort of detail that we had been working on for a good month. His argument spat and sputtered down the page, instead of calmly articulating a reasonable viewpoint, then supporting it with detailed evidence that would lead the reader to agree with his point. I applauded his reference to the letter he wrote to his dead buddy’s family, adding a few sentences explaining how he might have developed that incident into an idea that responded to the prompt. I ended my comments as writing teachers should: with an invitation for Rick to come see me and talk about my comments. Then, I wrote the academic scarlet letter: "C."

Usually, when writing teachers invite students to come see them to discuss their work, they fervently hope that the student will decline the invitation. But with Rick, I was sincere. I was hoping that his flame-out on this assignment was a case of nerves that inexplicably fired all at once, creating a paralyzing electrical short that left him unable to do the high-quality work that he had been doing for four weeks.

He never did stop by, even though I’m in my office nine to five, and my office is about 30 feet from our classroom. I was starting to become concerned. My instinct told me that we were at a crossroads, not only in the course, but in his development as a writer and, by extension, as a student. I didn’t know how far his talent could bring him, but obviously he was brainy enough to be king of the academic lump here on the plains of central Montana. If he wanted me to keep seeing him as a talented guy, however, he would have to refrain from jabbing me in the eye with a dirty pencil.

I decided to speak with him after the next class, to make clear that we could get past this incident. But he didn’t linger until the other students had left, didn’t thank me, didn’t wait for any words of encouragement and support. I told myself that he was embarrassed, that in a few days he would come around and we would slip back into our old roles.

He didn’t come around. He wouldn’t make eye contact in class, wouldn’t contribute to the classroom discussions. He had broken off all diplomatic relations. In his mind, I had initiated hostilities by giving him that "C," and he was imposing the only sanction truly appropriate to a writing teacher: silence. Could any statement be more clear or more eloquent?

He shuffled back in, however, when he appeared for the next in-class writing assignment. It was a simple assignment: a brief essay about something important you have learned in your first six weeks of the semester, such as how to use the online registration system or the library catalog, how to reduce stress, how to study for an exam, how to choose a major. At the end of the 50 minutes, after the other students had handed in their papers and left the room, I walked over to Rick. I noticed his page was blank.

"Rick, is there some kind of problem?"

He stared straight ahead, pausing a few beats before turning his head in my direction. "I should have more time than the other students."

I sat on a nearby desk. "Why is that, Rick?"

"My disability."

"Rick, you write ten times faster than any other student in the class. What disability are you referring to?"

"I told you the first day: radiation poisoning. From the Gulf War, the first one."

"Oh, I remember, the Depleted Uranium, the tank. Yes, well," I said, having delivered this little explanation a couple dozen times over the past few years, "you need to get in touch with the Office of Student Affairs and have them get me a statement about how your medical situation justifies extra time. They might want you to have the Veterans Coordinator get in touch with them."

"Not gonna work," he said, shaking his head. "I told you, the Army’s dodging any responsibility for what happened to me."

"That’s going to be a problem, Rick. For me to treat you any differently from the other students, I need authorization. I can’t just give you more time on these assignments. How about this: I give you another half hour now, and you work on getting authorization before the next in-class essay?" He started to write. I waited for him to say thanks or okay, maybe just nod in my direction, but he was done with me. I turned and left the room.

An hour later, when I checked my mailbox, I saw that he had submitted his essay. I hurried back to my office to read it. It was clear as a May Montana morning: an explanation of how to log on to and use the university’s databases from the computer labs. If the paper had come from any other student, I would have been shocked, not only by its quality but by its subject. Unless someone’s holding a gun to their heads, our students don’t go logging on to databases.

I allowed myself a few moments of relief. Maybe this meant that my stubborn prodigal student had done a 180 and decided to come home. It would be unreasonable for me to expect that Rick would afford me the pleasure of a formal reconciliation scene, but at least he was going to do the work, get the A for which he was eminently qualified, and move on to the next phase of his life. I had gotten through to him after all.

Rick still wouldn’t participate in class, but I had reconciled myself to that. It was regrettable: he could have helped our discussions. By default, a heavily tattooed, droopy-eyed dolt named Travis had assumed the leadership role among the students. Travis began every statement with "It seems to me...," as if the surest sign that an idea was True, Sensible, or Profound was that it seemed to him. If Rick chose to remain silent, we were all fated to hear several times per hour about Life According to Travis.

At the next in-class writing, I noticed that I was distracted. I kept glancing in Rick’s direction. He was statue still. His hands were folded on his desk, his gaze fixed on the blackboard. I strolled casually around the perimeter of the room, as instructors do during tests, to give students the vague sense that an authority figure is on duty. I got no sense that Rick was looking at me or even aware of my presence, but when I got beyond his peripheral vision, I glanced at his paper. I was dismayed. Just like last time, he hadn’t written anything.

I walked casually to the door and out into the hall. The perspiration was beading up on my forehead and upper lip. I played back exactly how I had left it with Rick after his previous sit-down strike: I had given him extra time to write, and he was going to get official permission for me to do so in the future. But I realized that I had received no such authorization. I rushed to the English Department office, hoping to see an interoffice envelope in my mailbox. The box was empty.

I composed myself, blotted the perspiration with my handkerchief, walked back to my classroom. I sat down at the instructor’s desk, and tried to grade some papers from another section. Every few seconds, I found myself glancing up to see that Rick had not started to write.

At the end of the 50 minutes, the other students had all gathered their belongings, placed their papers on my desk, and left the room. It was just Rick and I. He was staring straight ahead, his fingers intertwined as his hands rested on his desk. I sat on the front of my desk, my legs crossed, my hands in my lap. He would not meet my gaze.

"Rick, are you done?" I said, hoping he did not catch the waver in my voice.

"I told you before, I need more time."

"I thought we agreed that you were going to have the Dean of Students get me a disability authorization."

"I went to his office. He okayed it."

"I haven’t received any notification from him. I checked just a few seconds ago." I realized I shouldn’t have added that detail: I wasn’t the one who needed to provide evidence.

"He said he was kinda busy. He’d get it to you when he could."

I paused and took a deep breath. "I’m sorry, Rick, I can’t give you extra time until I get that form from the Dean."

"I just told you. He said it was okay." He picked up his pen and turned his attention to the paper.

I began to speak, the sounds coming out raspy and high. "Rick, you have to submit your paper now. I can’t give you more time." He didn’t stop writing, didn’t even look up. "Rick, I’m leaving the room now. If you don’t hand in your paper right now, I won’t be able to accept it." He kept writing. I turned and left the room. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him hard at work on his paper about how an important place in his life had changed over the years.

I walked back to my office and sat down in my chair. Normally I would seek out one of my two or three friends from the department and meet them in the conference room for our bag lunches. Today I had no appetite for my usual tuna-fish sandwich, can of diet soda, and small plastic bag of baby carrots. I got up from my chair, closed and locked my office door, and turned off the light. I sat back down. After 57 minutes, I stood, collected my books, and headed down the hall to my next class.

By the end of my last class, I had forgotten about my latest Rick row. Fatigue, like time, heals all wounds, or at least distracts you from them. I was back in my office, trying to make a dent in the stack of 120 ruminations on how a holiday hadn’t turned out as the writer had hoped. Some of our less-gifted state legislators are fond of commenting that professors get a mighty generous salary, considering they work only 12 or 15 hours a week. They’re right, of course, except for the other 40 or so other hours it takes to read about 250 papers each week and write something both critically astute and psychologically encouraging on each one. Admittedly, I do take a 20-minute break every two or three hours to slam dunk a couple of ibuprofen to take the edge off the migraine that grabs and squeezes my head after a particularly fiery episode of page rage.

Rick turned my doorknob forcefully, stepped in, and walked past the chair set up for students, right up to my desk. Looking down on me, he held his wooden cane in both hands, then let it fall with a crack onto the edge of my desk. He pulled his paper from his backpack and shoved it toward me. "You weren’t in your office when I came by earlier," he said, inaccurately.

Taking his paper, I said, "I’m happy to read and comment on your paper, Rick, but you understand that I can’t give you a grade for it."

He paused, his expression growing dark. "Why is that?"

"Well, as I said to you in class, it was submitted late. I gave you several opportunities to submit it, but you declined to do so."

"You know I’m on vet’s benefits, right?"

"No, I didn’t know that," I said, a little calmer now, hopeful that his need to introduce a new fact would somehow give me the rhetorical edge. I’m reasonably confident that if I can engage a student in a back-and-forth, I can break through the hostility and negotiate some sort of understanding.

"I am. I need to keep a 2.0 GPA to keep my benefits. And I need to stay in school to keep my housing."

"I told you: he okayed it." He paused. "I don’t like it when people don’t believe me."

I don’t like it when people say "I don’t like it when...," but I was willing to interpret Rick’s construction as merely awkward, not threatening. "It isn’t about my believing you," I said. "It’s simply that I need that authorization. Can you try the Dean of Students again, and this time wait for him to fill out the form?"

I wanted to get Rick to slow down. He seemed to be packing up his rhetorical tools without having finished the spade work of his argument. "I’m confused, Rick. You understand my situation, don’t you? Basic fairness dictates that I treat all of my students the same. Everyone should have the same amount of time to do the assignments. Now, if you have a medical situation that requires special consideration, I’m more than happy to cooperate. But you need to understand that I can’t make that decision on my own."

"There’s only one thing you need to understand." I was chagrined by his use of that expression, which signaled that he was appropriating the power position that was rightfully mine. He paused, then continued, "Bad things will happen if I lose my vet’s benefits."

As he picked up his cane, his gaze fixed on a miniature plaster bust of Socrates that I keep on the corner of the desk. Sometimes students ask about it. Most of them have heard of him, and a few can identify him as an ancient Greek philosopher. I like to tell my students about his statement that he was the wisest man in Athens because he knew that he didn’t know anything. Although that’s a real head-scratcher for many of my kids, it has sparked a few dozen productive chats over the years.

With the tip of his cane, Rick slowly and deliberately slid the bust across the desk, until its base jutted out over the edge. I was frozen in my chair, unable to leap up and push the cane away or even tell him to stop. Rick tapped the bust gently, sending it over the edge. It hit the floor with a high-pitched clink, the head breaking off from the base.

"Your Socrates is broke," he said, turning and walking out of my office.

Rick and I seemed to have entered a new phase in our relationship.

As I stood up from my chair and leaned down to retrieve the pieces of my statue, I noticed that my hands were shaking. I collapsed back into my chair. I held the head of Socrates in my hand, hoping that by touching him I could somehow absorb his wisdom through my fingertips. Obviously, the first, most important thing for me was to avoid panic. I realized that in a situation like this a certain amount of fear is unavoidable, can even help me define the magnitude of the threat. But once I determined its nature and extent, I needed to apply reason to consider my options and take appropriate action.

Yes, I had successfully deduced what Rick was going through, how the threadbare threads of his story had brought him to his current ragged existence. I was confident that I had discovered the pathetic place Rick was coming from. As I gazed at Socrates, I felt in control, confident, knowing that he would applaud my reasoning. After all, the only thing I’ve lost is an inconsequential little statue, whereas Socrates made the ultimate sacrifice when he willingly drank the hemlock to affirm his faith in reason.

However, I still needed to plan my next move. I could, of course, take direct disciplinary action by reporting the incident. The university has an office of the wigged out; I could give them a buzz and, five minutes later, Rick would be escorted out of class by two armed officers from Campus Police. Yet such an action was unwarranted. Rick’s statement that bad things will happen if he loses his veteran’s benefits wasn’t a specific threat. In my decades in the classroom, I’ve heard students say many things that could be interpreted as threatening, but they were always the result of jitters, sleep deprivation, or run-of-the-mill verbal ineptitude. As for breaking the statue, that was probably a mere physical counterpart to the verbal slip. In fact, I couldn’t even be sure that he meant to break it.

One of the things you learn if you make it to my age is that if you’re not certain what to do next, you should seriously consider doing nothing. I decided to take no action regarding Rick. I was tired of playing man-on-man. I resolved to switch to a flexible zone defense. If he took another provocative action, I would respond to it by applying my new understanding of his needs. I graded some papers, went home and cooked an overpriced, undersized lamb chop, graded some more papers, prepared for the next day, checked in with Ted Koppel, and went to bed. I had a good life. If it was somewhat anemic in drama, it was full blooded in purpose and achievement. I needed to focus on that: almost all my students were making measurable progress in their writing ability and their self-image, and a healthy minority were making excellent progress. I was proud of that, and if I intended to continue pushing that boulder up the hill, I couldn’t let myself be distracted by a toe stub like Rick.

I taught my classes. Each meeting, Rick was doing his statue impression when I entered the room, and he stayed in place until after I was gone. If fact, for all I know, he might have sat there motionless 24/7, the night janitor hovering around him. (With Rick, the clothing didn’t change from day to day; you couldn’t count on his appearance to signal the passage of time.) The important thing was that I had figured him out and devised an appropriate course of action that was fair and reasonable to everyone: myself, Rick, and my other students. I was at peace.

At the next graded writing assignment, he sat there for the 50 minutes. The other students left. He sat there. I asked if there were any other papers. He sat there. I left the room, ate lunch with a couple of my friends, taught my other sections, and went back to my office to grade the latest batch.

I heard the sharp metallic jangle and saw the doorknob twist rapidly. Rick marched into my office, right up to my desk, the metal zipper of his fatigue jacket clicking against the metal desk apron. He was holding his cane like a baseball bat. I put my pen down and rose out of my chair.

"I want you to leave," I said, my voice somewhat shrill but not loud enough to be heard by either of my colleagues through the thin walls.

"Sit down," Rick said, slowly. I didn’t. "I said sit down," he repeated, the rubber tip on the cane coming down in a blur and jabbing me in the sternum, sending me stumbling back into my chair. "I thought we had an understanding about this," he said, the words coming out slowly, over articulated through his tight jaws.

"I don’t know what you’re referring to," I said, awkwardly looking up at him as he loomed over my desk.

"What I’m referring to is I need high grades to keep my benefits and my housing, and you keep giving me zeros on my essays. I made it clear that if I didn’t get high grades, bad things will happen."

"Bad things will happen to whom, Rick?"

"First they’ll happen to me. Then they’ll happen to you."

"All right, Rick, I’ve taken all I’m going to take from you. I must insist that you leave my office this minute. If you don’t, I will notify Campus Police."

He smiled his thin smile. "How long do you think Campus Police will need to get here?"

I picked up the handset on my desk phone. "I’m calling Campus Police now," and I began to dial 911 with trembling fingers.

He slammed the cane down on my desk, cracking it in two, the bottom half whizzing past my head. The handset flew out of my hand. "You really don’t want to do that," he shouted.

Looking back on it some months later, I believe he was right. I wanted to resolve the situation calmly and peacefully, and had done everything I could to accomplish that objective. But what I apparently wanted to do at that exact moment, at least to the extent that we can extrapolate our desires from our actions, was reach my hand down and open the top drawer on the right side of my desk. I gripped the handle of my revolver and pulled it from the drawer in a steady movement that was too quick for him to comprehend. I saw him freeze, his eyes white with terror, as he saw the barrel of my revolver swing into position and heard the explosion echoing in my tiny office.

The bullet entered his chest, knocking him backward. His arms flew up, his cane stump flying out of his right hand as he fell against the bookcase next to my office door. He crumpled to the floor. The bullet must have severed the aorta or some other large vein or artery. At least that was my inference, given the amount of blood spurting from the front of Rick’s T-shirt. By the time my colleague Larry burst into the office, two or three seconds after the shot, Rick was motionless, his eyes glazed and lifeless.

The Campus Police arrived in five minutes, the town police in ten. As I sat in my chair, waiting for the police, the air thick with blue gray smoke and the acrid smell of cordite, I was dimly aware of various faculty and office staff rushing in and out of my office, some screaming, others with their palms to their cheeks. My revolver was on the desk, alongside several stacks of student papers, the top ones streaked with large droplets of blood. I remember noticing that four or five of the papers would be difficult to grade.

I was suspended, with pay, for the rest of the semester while the prosecutor decided whether to charge me with a crime. My position was that I feared for my life when Rick attacked me, and that in shooting him I was acting instinctively, in self defense. The shattered cane on the floor was persuasive evidence supporting my contention.

The investigation revealed that, in all my dealings with Rick, I had acted with complete professionalism, a conclusion corroborated by the lengthy e-mails I sent myself after each of my confrontations with him. My case was further buttressed when the Dean of Students gave a formal statement that I had in fact met with him, at which meeting he told me that Rick Mathers had never come to him to seek formal medical authorization. As for my revolver in my desk, state law allows for properly registered firearms to be carried on campus. As you might imagine, my revolver, which I had purchased soon after the problems with Rick began, was properly registered.

The prosecutor concluded that, although the incident was a terrible tragedy, I had acted in self defense and that there were no grounds for prosecution. I had done everything humanly possible to prevent the tragedy. I had treated Rick Mathers with respect and shown him the dignity he deserved. I was not to be faulted for having prepared for the tragedy (prepare being a fine old Latin word meaning "to make ready").

I am back in the classroom again. I regret that my replacement that semester, a retired girls’ high-school basketball coach who taught a few sections of English during the Nixon years, was unable to inspire some of my needier students to sustain the considerable progress they were making before what I refer to as "the incident" took me out of the classroom. The incident was quite the buzz for months, but none of my current students has inquired about it or mentioned it in class or in a paper. Today’s kids aren’t into history.

I am proud that my students maintain a higher retention rate in college, and a higher GPA, than the non-developmental students. I teach my kids how to write and, in so doing, how to achieve the dignity that so few of them have achieved. I ask only that they treat me with a proper ration of respect, which, this semester, they do. I am pleased to report that I have no discipline problems in any of my five sections of Developmental English.