The Undergrad
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About this ebook
In 1971, Parker was a freshman philosophy student forced to make a pledge of silence by a tyrannical and murderous professor. Twelve years later, his promise will cost him his life and leave three murdered coeds unavenged unless the first real love of his life, a charming, homespun police detective in Fort Worth can vindicate him or, and much more challenging, she can divine the philosphical arguement to release him from the pledge.
With a delicioulsly rich cast of characters, it's a tale of murder,of love,of discovery and of the binding force of honor. "A promise is a promise", for those whose intellect will not allow them to deny it.
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The Undergrad - Mark Fitzgerald
Chapter One: Rausch
Back in those days, you could smoke in a college classroom. Sharing a paired desk with a non-smoking classmate, even. No one complained. You ground it out on the vinyl floor tile, vinyl asbestos tile actually, when you were done. Same thing in theaters, in airplanes, at the grocery store. The entire world probably stank, the smokers couldn’t tell... and the non-smokers abided. At scarcely a dollar a pack, smoking was a lot of pacification for the price.
A university philosophy class, with all those young, bohemian minds, would be ablaze with the cigs and pipes of the enlightened. Ethics 201 was no exception. Everyone smoked at least one during a typical class; in that tiny windowless basement room where the smaller, esoteric classes convened. Cigs only for the undergrad; pipes were to be earned; reserved for graduate students and professors.
Parker didn’t smoke. But it didn’t matter; he had an immunity to it. So many years in a household of smokers. He could recall family outings to the drive-in theater and the heavy fog of smoke within the car. Didn’t bother him at all. He once took his war-surplus gas mask to the event on the pretext of putting it to purposeful use, but a clear image of the screen prevailed over the questionable effect of a filter-less war relic. With no filter cartridge, it would not have been effective. He was a kid, he knew nothing of filter cartridges. It was odd he didn’t smoke. His parents were very liberal about substance abuse. Probably, had he been close enough to at least one smoking peer he might have tried it and persisted in his efforts until he had mastered it and of course, he was mastered as well.
Rausch, with his trademark pipe, which was never ablaze, was casting his spell of profundity. Asking questions of his intellectually unhoned proteges that they had little chance of addressing with much intellect at this stage of their education. Setting them up for his performance... for the coup de grace
.
Professor Ryan Rausch was phenomena of a sort. He had perfected the persona of a brilliant mind, temporarily corporeal on this mortal coil, so that he could reveal the universe to those worthy enough to entreat him. He was 99 percent bullshit
and simultaneously 100 percent the real thing
.
Never had he been less than the smartest man in the room. Physically he was just as striking. Just short of six foot, he had a girth that was ... just short of excessive. Massive torso. Hirsute well beyond average. Full beard and mustache; always closely cropped. Thick head of dark wavy brown hair. Maybe it was black. Pale skin. Manicured hands, with dark hairs between each pair of knuckles and all the way up his arms . He dressed the part. Quality clothing, just a little bit frumpy, by choice. Generally good facial features. Perhaps his eyes were slighting bulging.
Rausch was not impressed by himself in these circumstances. It was easy to impress this crowd. But impressing this crowd had rewards other than affirming his own wit. He was after all only thirty five years old. Not tenured, but a full professor. He was godlike to students. That had advantages.
The girl in the corridor side
row, a couple of seats back from the front, always distracted Parker. His height; shortish… a quality that he liked in women. Pretty and blonde. But pretty and blonde in a special way. Her blonde was not sheeny clean
beach bunny blonde. Her’s was the kind he thought they might mean by dirty blonde
. But he wasn’t sure if that still applied if the hair was a genuine and consistent flax color. It was straight as any line defined by two points and reached virtually to the waist. No makeup, at least discernable makeup… perhaps a dollop of Clearasil here and there. Fine perfect features, so perfect that she almost lacked any semblance of character
.
Parker had noticed her immediately the first day of classes. Most notably the blackness... the black denim, the black leather boots to the knee. Always a blousy chemise that defied any speculation as to the nature of her bosom.
She was the quintessence of the brainy college girl to him. Not the post beatnik
radicals of his high school years. She had an air of confidence that he could not imagine in a woman; let alone a young woman. He thought maybe it was conferred upon her by the black boots. He wanted to inhale her if he could get close enough… to know the real scent of a woman. He suspected it might be other than fruity fresh; something leathery perhaps.
Taking philosophy seemed to him the ultimate collegiate pursuit. A bona fide
of his eventual ascension to the upper tier of the learned. His was the realm of the mind; not be hindered by corporeal pursuits. Being a geek was not anathema to a being a philosophy student. He wasn’t a geek, though. But nor was he the antithesis, a jock. He was certainly smart enough to realize there was no real continuum between geekiness and jockishness, but he was still too insecure to not fear that that his prowess and disinterest in sport and athletics, did make him a geek by default.
Philosophy was far more interesting than that he had anticipated. No, that is not correct. He assumed it was interesting, he just had absolutely no prior knowledge of it. It sounded like a really cool thing to study. Just like Modern Revolutionary Ideologies
and Mathematics and the Real World
; both of which bore fruit. A week into Introduction to Archeaology
he had some misgivings about that discipline.
Philosophy was cool. In the short span of a few classes in ethics, he had come to realize just how nebulous were all his beliefs; beliefs he had passively absorbed from his lineage of earnest and ignorant kin back in Wyoming.
Greeley, Wyoming. A point along the north/south highway that highway traffic passing through would always find humor in. You smelled Greeley ten miles in advance. Cow manure; one of those curiously stout odors that are somehow not really offensive. Almost having an atavistic appeal. Like all farm smells. Wet hay.
Inured to the smell of Greeley and to that of tobacco smoke, Parker might have considered that at least one of his senses was impaired.
He grew up on a ranch. Well, that sounded too archaic and heroic. He actually grew up like virtually any American kid in the sixties. It was just that his house sat on the corner of an thousand acre parcel of land on the edge of town, instead of a quarter acre in a suburb. Other than that, he took the bus to school every day, like most kids, ate lunch in the cafeteria, rode the bus home and killed time until supper watching tv. And then watched every show interesting to his age until the crap
came on.
His father never really called upon him to intern
as a cowboy. It was sufficient that he knew the basics and he did. His dad was intent that his son become educated and considered a full day at school to be enough of a contribution to the collective goals of the family to release him from arduous rural chores.
So he watched tv. Living on the edge of town, he didn’t have friends to consort with after school or in the later evening. When tv sucked he read. Reading, by itself had, assured him a 1554 SAT score. And a 1554 had gotten him a nearly full ride to the University of Oklahoma.
His courage had grown over the last month. He realized that he really understood the issues, at least, though he had not as yet mastered any single one of them. He wanted to be a part of it all. His listened intently to Rausch each class and completed the reading assignment the evening of the day they were assigned. He was having an epiphany of sorts. He was realizing that he could think
. In high school he didn’t think
. There he learned and when required, gave evidence of his earning.
Something Rausch has said in Monday’s class had jostled something in him. The entire course was about ethics. He was also taking the freshman Introduction to Philosophy
taught by a doctoral candidate, a skinny Jewish guy, with an air of disdain for level of erudition he was being constrained to. The ethics class was open to all students, regardless of major, but it was not intended as a primer to philosophy. It was not patronized by the disinterested and only interesting to those who paid attention.
A dozen times before he had felt he had a point to make, and had come perilously close to raising his hand. Sometimes he regretted his timidity, when another student or Rausch himself made the same point. But just as many times, a few moments more reflection and discovering he was mistaken or the evisceration of another hasty student by Rausch had made him thankful for his less assertive nature.
Parker raised his hand and Rausch, with a regal gesture of the hand, the consented.
Trying very hard not to stutter, Parker spoke aloud. I can’t see how a little crime can be deemed equivalent to a gross misdeed. Surely, consequences are important. Is this not just utilitarianism in reverse?
A deed is only as evil as its outcome? Surely, some sins are greater than others.
Parker held his breath.
Rausch enjoyed this part. He loved the rhetorical