Buckley Griffin statue

The Buckley Griffin statue is a gold, life-sized monument to Buckley’s mascot, a mythical creature with a lion’s body and an eagle’s head and wings. Set beside the koi pond in the library courtyard, it becomes the central object of a violent desecration just before school reopens. The damage transforms a familiar emblem of school identity into a crime scene—and into a test of whether Bret will make himself a witness.

Setting and Appearance

The statue stands on a raised base beside the koi pond, near the library in a courtyard enclosed by walnut trees and sycamores. A small waterfall feeds the pond, and date palms drape over the space. From his parked car beyond the school gates, Bret can see the courtyard only indirectly: on the night before classes resume, a flashlight moves through the dark, pauses, then shifts with apparent purpose. Its beam appears to settle on something in the courtyard, where the statue is one of several possible targets.

At first the beam’s movement offers no clear explanation. Bret wonders whether a night watchman is on duty, but the security booth appears empty; only a beige van is parked beside it. When coyotes howl on the distant hillsides, the flashlight swings toward the sound as if searching for its source. The uncertain sighting gives the statue’s later condition a troubling prehistory: the courtyard was not simply found disturbed in the morning; someone had been moving through it under cover of darkness.

The Desecration

On the first morning of school, Bret leaves class and approaches the courtyard by the library stairs. A sawhorse and two orange traffic cones block the path, and the library remains closed, although it is normally the campus’s first gathering place. Bret passes the barrier and finds the head of maintenance, Miguel, and the head of security, Angelo, conferring with two armed, uniformed policemen. They are waiting for a crime-scene photographer.

From a distance the arrangement initially looks to Bret like a prank, with tissue, red dye, and a wig. Closer inspection reveals that the statue has been smeared with blood brought from elsewhere, without any visible source at the scene. About twenty koi lie dead below it; they have been gutted and decapitated. Their heads have been attached to the statue in arrangements that turn the mascot into a grotesque, sexually suggestive figure. Fish entrails and synthetic blond wig material complete the display. The pond remains full of water, but the fish that once belonged to the courtyard have been converted into components of the desecration.

Miguel tells Bret to leave, and the adults present watch him as he backs away. Only then does he register the flies and gnats around the statue and the pools of blood. The scene’s effect depends on the collision between a carefully maintained school setting and the deliberate misuse of its landmark: the pond, waterfall, trees, and mascot remain recognizably part of campus, but the statue has become the focus of an intrusion that ordinary campus life cannot absorb.

Bret’s Sighting and Silence

The desecration makes Bret recognize that the flashlight he watched the previous night may have belonged to the person responsible. He remembers seeing it move across the courtyard and hillside from his car, but immediately decides that speaking to the police would complicate matters for him. He does not want to be a witness or become involved, and he chooses silence as the easiest course. His choice is consequential: he withholds information that could connect a person on the grounds to the damage, even as he privately links the sighting to the crime.

The statue also intensifies Bret’s feeling that he is being watched. As he returns to class, he imagines someone hidden in the surrounding hills observing him through binoculars, a long-lens camera, or a hunting rifle’s telescope. He describes becoming disoriented, as if dissolving and disappearing. The statue is therefore more than the object at the center of the crime scene: its desecration changes how Bret reads the landscape around the school and his own place within it.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

During the rest of the morning, Bret cannot concentrate. He asks Susan for medication but does not explain what has happened or tell her about the flashlight. He hopes that refusing to discuss the image will make it recede, yet the attempt to forget leaves him alone with it. The scene begins as a hidden act in a dark courtyard and continues as an unspoken secret carried back into the classroom.

In the following September, Bret constructs a less threatening account for himself: he tells himself the desecration was a prank that accidentally became gruesome and that the person with the flashlight regretted what had happened. He also tries to believe that the students remain innocent and protected by their privilege and status. Those reassurances coexist with his growing estrangement from Buckley and his sense that he is no longer a tangible participant in school or the outside world. The statue’s altered body thus marks a broader break in his relation to the institution: a symbol meant to embody school identity becomes evidence of violence, while Bret’s silence helps preserve the appearance of normality. Later, he becomes convinced that Robert Mallory was the person with the flashlight and the one who desecrated it, but the account presents this as Bret’s certainty without proof, not as an independently established identification.