LITMIR.BIZ

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asked him why he’d taken the trouble. “Students who work their way through college tend to take career-oriented classes. What possessed you to major in English?”

      I shrugged. “I like to read, and if I can get paid for it, so much the better.”

      “You plan to teach, then?”

      “Probably so—unless I decide to write the Great American Novel.”

      “I’ve read your papers, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “You’ve got a long way to go if that’s your goal.”

      “It beats the hell out of pulling chain, Dr. Conrad.”

      “Pulling chain?”

      I explained it, and he seemed just a bit awed. “Are you saying that people still do that sort of thing?”

      “It’s called ‘working for a living.’ I came here because I don’t wanna do that no more.”

      He winced at my double negative.

      “Just kidding, boss,” I told him. And I don’t think anybody’d ever called him “boss” before, because he didn’t seem to know how to handle it.

      By the end of winter quarter that year I’d pretty well settled into the routine of being a working student. There were times when I ran a little short on sleep, but I could usually catch up on weekends.

      I finished up the spring quarter of ‘94 and spent the summer working at the door factory to build up a backlog of cash. Things had been a little tight a few times that year.

      The Twinkie Twins were high-school juniors now, and they’d definitely blossomed. Their hair had grown blonder, it seemed—chemically modified, no doubt—and their eyes were an intense blue. They’d also developed some other attributes that attracted lots of attention from their male classmates.

      Looking back, I’m sometimes puzzled by my lack of “those kinds of thoughts” about the twins. They were moderately gorgeous, after all—tall, blond, well built, and with strangely compelling eyes. It was probably their plurality that put me off. In my mind they were never individuals. I thought of them as “they,” but never “she.”

      From what I heard, though, the young fellows at their high school didn’t have that problem, and the twins were very popular. The only complaint seemed to be that nobody could ever get one of them off by herself.

      It was during my senior year at U.W. that I finally came face to face with Moby Dick. The opening line, “Call me Ishmael” and the climactic, “I only am escaped to tell thee” set off all sorts of bells in my head. Captain Ahab awed me. You don’t want to mess around with a guy who could say, “I’d smite the sun if it offended me.” And his obsessive need to avenge himself on the white whale put him in the same class with Hamlet and Othello.

      Moby Dick has been plowed and planted over and over by generations of scholars much better than I, though, and I didn’t really feel like chewing old soup for my paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor, naturally, and I was fairly certain that he’d take a rehash of previous examinations of the book as a personal insult.

      Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept borrowing Milton’s Paradise Regained from the New York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.

      Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. “I wouldn’t hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin,” he advised, “but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it.”

      “Am I going for an MA, boss?” I asked him.

      “You bet your bippie you are,” he told me bluntly.

      “Bippie?”

      “Isn’t it time for you to get back to Everett and make more doors?” he asked irritably.

      I considered the notion of graduate school while I was trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less inevitable—an English major without an advanced degree was still only about two steps away from the green chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job at a community college—a distinct advantage, since the idea of teaching high school didn’t wind my watch very tight.

      I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in school. I guess she’d been listening to the ghostly sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that she didn’t understand certain ugly truths. Her father was a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff in Everett. I don’t want to sound Marxist here, but old Karl was right about one thing. There are real differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn’t have to take his education too seriously, because there are all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class kid usually only has one shot at education, and he doesn’t dare let anything get in his way, and that includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first child almost always means that he’ll spend the rest of his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly, sometimes.

      This is very painful for me, so I’ll keep it short. In the spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those “kegger parties” on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett. I’m not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but that’s not really important. The kids built the customary bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them, and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for all they were worth. Along toward midnight, things started to get physical. There were a few drunken fights, and a fair number of boys and girls were slipping off into the darkness for assorted boy-girl entertainments. At that point Regina and Renata decided that it was time to leave. They slipped away from the party, hopped into their new Pontiac—a graduation present from their folks—and started back to Everett.

      Regina, the dominant twin, probably drove. Renata had her driver’s license, but she almost never took the wheel. They took the usual shortcut that winds up through Forest Park. It was in the vicinity of the petting zoo where they had a flat tire.

      As best the authorities were able to reconstruct what happened, Regina left the car and walked to the zoo to find a phone. Renata stayed with the Pontiac for a while, then went looking for her sister.

      The next morning the twins were discovered near the zoo. One was dead, raped and then hacked to death with something that wasn’t very sharp. The other twin was sitting beside the body with a look of total incomprehension on her face. When the authorities tried to question her, she replied in a language that nobody could understand.

      The authorities—assorted cops, detectives, the coroner, and so on—questioned Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf extensively, but they didn’t learn much: the boss and the missus were shattered and even in the best of times, they couldn’t translate the girls’ private language—they couldn’t even tell the girls apart. So after the cops discovered that Regina was the dominant twin, they assumed that it’d been Regina who’d been murdered and Renata who’d gone bonkers.

      But nobody could prove it. The footprints routinely taken of all newborns turned out to be missing from the records at Everett General Hospital, and identical twins have identical DNA. Logic said that the dead girl was most likely Regina, but logic wasn’t good enough for filling out forms.

      Les Greenleaf nearly flipped when he saw his daughter listed as an “unidentified female” in official reports.

      The surviving twin continued to answer all questions in twin-speak, and so the Greenleafs had no choice but to put her in a private sanitarium in the hope that the headshrinkers could wake up her mind. They had to fill out papers, of course, and they arbitrarily listed their surviving daughter as Renata—but they couldn’t prove it either.

      The murder remained unsolved.

      My folks and I attended the funeral, of course, but there was no sense of that “closure” social workers babble about, because we couldn’t be certain which girl we were burying.

      We

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