by John Barth
Now I had time to hear Max crying behind us, “Yi yi yi!” while from the shore ahead, where she flickered in the firelight, the bridge-girl resumed her call. And if it was G. Herrold’s ghost who bore me, death had worked alterations on him: the head I clutched was bald instead of woolly, he had grown a muscled paunch, and in general his body was huger and more gross. Then I heard him respond with his curious noise to the girl’s cry “Croaker,” and it struck me he did rather croak than grunt. I addressed him myself in that wise: sure enough, his grip tightened on my ankles, and he seemed to nod his head as he croaked acknowledgment. But all the while we were getting in deeper, until now the water rushed chest-high on him; little use learning his name if the brute meant to drown us after all.
“Gee-up, Croaker!” I therefore commanded, pounding on his skull for emphasis. “This way, flunk you!” I endeavored by grasping his ears to turn his head upstream; if I couldn’t face him round I hoped at least to work him up towards the bridge-piles, where with luck I might scramble free of him and wait for rescue. But the white-smocked Siren (how I loathed and feared her now, and saw the truth—too late as always—of Max’s warning!) she would call him to her, would bare again her firelit shame, which caught Croaker’s eye as it had G. Herrold’s and my own, and brought helmsmanship to naught. In a bitter clear flash I saw the source and pattern of my ruin: this it was had lost me Lady Creamhair, else my friend; the same had brought me to slaughter Redfearn’s Tom and smite dear Max! A wretched hanker was my curse and flunking—as doubtless my enemies had seen at once. What need of troll or dragon to undo me? Only hire some lady co-ed to hoist her shift, and for what’s poor sake I’d spoilt every decent bond with my fellow creatures—abused, assaulted, killed—I could be counted upon to forfeit not only my misbegotten life but the claim and mission of Grand-Tutorhood. The whole of studentdom might languish unCommencèd, even EAT itself alive, for all I’d ever put by prurience on principle’s behalf!
I could have wept for anger at myself. Indeed, tears came to my eyes, or else waterdrops from my dunking; in any case I rubbed them away, not to blur the image of my downfall thrusting on the shore. And I let go with Croaker’s ears all hope of saving myself. No longer fighting either him, the river, or ruinous desire, I let them take me where they would. We plunged into a central stretch much deeper than any the men in yellow could have forded: for some moments my bearer was submerged entirely, and for a dreadful instant I felt us floating free—but I wouldn’t hold my breath or even try to kick loose of him. And so far from commending my mind in extremis to the Founder, I gave self-spiteful lust its head and shouted, weeping, to the wench on the foreshore, “Bye-bye, ma’am! It was good to see you!”
Those were meant to be my last words on this campus. No sooner had I uttered them, however, than I felt Croaker’s feet strike bottom again, and, using the current to aid him, he soon got his head out on the downstream side of the deep. It became evident then that he had no mind to drown me after all; he had meant from the first to ferry me across, and by struggling against him I’d only made the task more difficult. Now we fairly raced along: there were fewer rocks on this farther reach, and the bottom seemed more firm; instead of opposing the current, which would surely have upset him, Croaker merely warped shorewards at a modest angle as it swept us with it. Very shortly we reached shallow water; still holding me atop him he waded ashore and trotted up to where his summoner awaited.
But an odd change seemed to come over her as we approached. No longer exposing herself, she stood demurely, even apprehensively, near the circle of yellow-robed men, who remained as oblivious to her and to us (their eyes in fact closed) as if we’d not been there. I could see her face now, large-eyed and nervous; when Croaker let go a plainly rutting croak she retreated a step or two towards the fire—despite herself, so it seemed to me—and I understood she was afraid. Of what, and why, after such provocation on her part, I couldn’t imagine, unless it was that she’d never meant us to reach the shore.
Croaker’s own intentions were clear: already at ten meters’ distance he’d released my ankles and was reaching out for her.
“He’ll stop if you tell him!” the girl cried suddenly. But at that moment he broke into a sprint, and I tumbled off his shoulders onto the sand, starting the foreseam of my wrapper.
I scrambled to my knees and shouted, “Stop, Croaker!” But the Siren was mistaken, my command went unheeded, and dearly she paid for her misjudgment if she had counted on my word to save her. Yet it was most strange, for she neither fled nor fought, as Lady Creamhair had. She groaned when the great fellow beached her, and turned her face from his slavering—but herself drew up her shift, and dutifully, as it seemed, raised knees to his unimaginable tup!
I stood perplexed beside them—on all fours, for want of my stick. Had she not been the death of G. Herrold, and meant to have been mine as well? Oughtn’t I to rejoice in her downfall, whom my foes had set to be the instrument of mine? But when she looked to me in dumb appeal from beneath her ravisher (at the same time clasping him round the neck!), I did my best after all to drag him off her. In vain, of course; he was unbudgeable. Even as I tugged at his arm—huge and hard as a locust post—he struck his mark with a shock that sent one white sandal flying.
Angrily I shouted at the men in yellow to help me; as well apply to the rocks of the shore! I sprang onto Croaker’s back, tried to throttle him, pounded at his head. The girl’s eyes closed; distinctly I saw tears in their corners, for my face was as near now as Croaker’s, and I hove willy-nilly with his heaving. Even so, when she bit my right arm (thinking I’m sure to bite Croaker’s) I couldn’t judge whether it was protest, pain, or passion in her teeth. In a trice the rape was done: the brute fell spent atop her and we three lay in a stillèd heap. Without opening her eyes, the girl said, “He’ll get up now if you tell him. But stay on his back.”
I did as bid, amazed, only climbing to a steadier perch on his shoulders as, sure enough, Croaker came off her and squatted torpid, blinking. The girl got up with a shudder and brushed the sand from her shift. Clearly she was frightened no longer, only shocked; she drew her hair back from her eyes and began to fasten it with pins. I rubbed the bite on my wrist.
“Sorry I couldn’t stop him, ma’am.”
She shook her head. “You couldn’t help it.” And speaking sadly around the hairpins which she took one by one from between her lips, she explained that the brute called Croaker was a more or less uneducated student from one of the newly established colleges in dark Frumentius, visiting New Tammany under an official exchange program: as such he was immune to arrest, however contrary to West Campus law the customs of his native college or his personal behavior; the most his embarrassed hosts could do (not wanting for diplomatic reasons to offend the Frumentians by asking for his recall) was try to channel and appease his appetites. The task had turned out to be not difficult after all: the roommate assigned to him, happening to be paralytic, had one day tried riding pick-a-back to class on his unruly fellow, and discovered that with someone thus mounted on his shoulders Croaker was almost entirely governable. Things had gone well enough for some terms thereafter; indeed, the two had come quite to depend on each other—Croaker on his roommate for guidance and instruction, the roommate on Croaker for transport and menial services—until just a day or two since, when a third party had persuaded each to try to do without the other. It may have been that the interloper’s motives were sincere (though the girl seemed not convinced of it); in any case the outcome was unfortunate. The roommate, Dr. Eierkopf—no need to say I started at her mention of this name!—languished in his quarters, afflicted with migraine and unable to attend his simplest needs, while Croaker, after assaulting two co-eds, a campus policeman, and a prize poodle belonging to the Chancellor’s aunt, and eating raw three gibbons from the Department of Psychology, had disappeared into the forest, where it was feared he might wreak further outrage on undergraduates, among whom the woods were a popular trysting-place, or be shot
in self-defense by some Forestry Ranger, to the Administration’s embarrassment.
As she spoke of these things (more briefly and brokenly than I do here), the girl actually patted Croaker’s head, evoking from him a guttural kind of purr. “Look, he’s tame as can be with you on his back. I think he mistook you for his master when he noticed your limp. Poor thing, they mustn’t hurt him, he doesn’t know he’s doing wrong.”
I observed a ring upon one finger of her patting-hand and strove to recall what I had read of human marriage.
“Beg pardon, ma’am,” I asked: “Is Croaker your husband?”
She put the same hand to her mouth and laughed—strange in one so roundly raped—then from her merry eyes more tears came, though she smiled still. “What an idea! My husband is Maurice Stoker.”
The name conveyed nothing to me—remarking which fact, she looked at me curiously, seeming to see for the first time my wrapper and beard. She was more beautiful by far than Chickie; just the image, in fact, of those sweet distressèd co-eds in the Tales, the illustrations whereof had formed my notions of human beauty. My heart stirred. To her inquiry, was I not an exchange student myself, from some foreign college, I began to reply that I was George, Grand Tutor to the Western Campus, formerly known as Billy Bocksfuss the Goat-Boy—but I remembered as I spoke that she was the agent of my enemies, and my voice grew stern.
“You know who I am without my telling you, Siren! You thought you could drown me like G. Herrold, so I’d never reach New Tammany—”
“Your poor friend!” she broke in. “Why did he wade out so far?” She reached out to touch me, but I snatched back my arm. “Oh dear, you’re bleeding!”
Indeed, her teeth had broken the skin. “It’s all right,” I told her.
“It’s not, either. Let me put something on it. I’m a nurse.”
My wrist was bleeding more than I’d thought. Without ado the girl tore a strip from the hem of her shift—which was anyhow ruined from Croaker’s assault—and having dipped it in the cold stream, commenced to wrap an expert bandage.
“I’m so sorry about this,” she said. “Even when I hate what’s happening, like a while ago—I have to bite!” She turned her dark eyes seriously up to me. “Do you think that’s immoral? It worries me sometimes.”
I answered frankly that I didn’t know what to think—about the love-bite, the monstrous equivocal rape, her behavior on the bridge, G. Herrold’s drowning, or any other of the evening’s surprises—not least among which was her present calm. Why did she care about my bleeding arm, since she’d been sent to drown me? Why had she invited Croaker so, seeing she’d not relished the consequences: pled with me to save her, wept at his attack, and yet clasped to him all the brutal while? Whatever would her husband say (for I could not suppose such behavior was typical in marriage)? And finally, how on campus could such a splendid fair student lady girl lend herself to the forces of darkness, and turn her Founder-given charms to the end of flunking me, who meant to pass all studentdom? For never (here I waxed eloquent as I could in my ignorance of the forms of human compliment), never had such beauty been, not even in the goat-barn’s fairest: Hedda of the Speckled Teats could boast no such limpidity of eye, such sharpness of tooth; my own Commenced dam Mary Appenzeller, for all her miracle of milk, must yield in point of beauty to the rose-nippled darlings bared upon the bridge, whereof the sweet issue (all the preciouser, I daresaid, for its want of abundance) must be yogurts and cheeses and fudge of a heartbreaking fineness. Let that of muscle Lady Creamhair had been stronger, and Chickie of odor—longer-fleeced too the latter’s lap and limbs—such virtues paled before the black-curled marvel which supply had beckoned, nay commanded, from over the torrent, so printing its image upon my soul that I saw it yet—in the pupils of her eyes, in the craters of the moon, in the dark-cornered flickers of the fire—and heard it calling to me, as it were, like some nightbird from its nest.
“What a strange way of talking you have!” she said. “I can’t even follow you!” Yet she seemed not displeased. “There, that should do it.” She gave a pat to the finished bandage. “What about your other friend, now? If you take Croaker up where it’s shallower he could bring you both over. My husband will be along shortly—he’s in charge of the search-party. We can give you a lift to wherever you were going.”
She had by this time so won my trust that I attributed to Max all my former suspicions. I told her straight out who I was (she caught her breath at the mention of Max’s name, then explained that of course she had heard of him, and even recalled being taken by her Uncle Ira to the goat-farm as a child, to see “the little boy who thought he was a goat”), but I judged it wiser to say nothing for the present about Grand-Tutorship or WESCAC’s AIM. My intention, I declared, was to matriculate in New Tammany College as soon as I could, and I thanked her for her inadvertent aid in getting me over the river. As for Max’s crossing by the same means, however, I doubted his willingness to, inasmuch as he thought her a flunkèd woman bent on luring me, if not to my death, at least to a breach of my virtue. Why else had she so exposed herself on the bridge? What did she think had led G. Herrold over his head, if not those wonders I had just done praising?
As if understanding for the first time, she put her hands to her checks: her eyes widened, and she shook her head.
“Is that what you thought!” she cried, and put her hand on my arm to halt me. “I’m so ashamed!” It took her some moments to overcome her plain mortification. Then she said most earnestly, but scarcely able to look me in the face for embarrassment, “You mustn’t think those terrible things! If I’d suspected for a moment … and Dr. Spielman, of all people …” She began again, more calmly: “My name is Anastasia Stoker (people call me Stacey) and I’m a nurse in the New Tammany Psych Clinic; that’s why I knew about Croaker and Dr. Eierkopf and all. In fact it was my husband—he runs the Power Plant, and he’s a very … unusual man, you’ll see—he’s the one who talked the Chief Psychiatrist into separating them, for their own good, or for experimental reasons or something, just to see what would happen. I guess that’s why I felt responsible, in a way, when the trouble started. Those poor girls he attacked, and that dear little poodle, and we didn’t know what he might do next! We knew he’d gone out towards the river, and Chancellor Rexford was especially worried because a famous Grand Tutor was on his way to the College and was supposed to be somewhere in this neighborhood—”
“So they did know ahead of time!”
“Of course: it was in all the papers. Didn’t you see it?”
I explained that no newspapers were delivered to the goat-barn, and pressed her for more details, hoping thus to gauge the reception awaiting me at NTC. “Did they say what his name is, or what he looks like? What’s he coming to the College for?”
“Shush,” she warned merrily, “they might understand English!” She glanced back at the yellow-robed men, who of course paid no heed. “That’s Him in the middle: the fat one. The others are Tutees or something. They wouldn’t let the Chancellor send anybody to meet them, and they sit like that most of the time.”
I pointed incredulously. “You think he’s the Grand Tutor? When he wouldn’t lift a finger to help you or G. Herrold?”
She wrinkled her brow at my ignorance. “Not our Grand Tutor, George! You have been in the country, haven’t you? He’s what they call The Living Sakhyan, from Outer T’ang College or somewhere over there. He’s supposed to be descended from the original Sakhyan, and when the Student-Unionists took over His college, Chancellor Rexford invited Him here to tutor the Sakhyan refugees on West Campus. Think what the Student-Unionists would have said if Croaker had attacked Him!”
I could by no means share her alarm at this prospect, but I gathered with some satisfaction that no threat to me was implied by the newspapers she referred to, at least, and no competition of the sort I’d first imagined by the fat chap’s being regarded as a species of Grand Tutor. Anastasia went on with her story:
“From wha
t I knew about Croaker, I didn’t think they’d ever be able to catch him without hurting him or getting hurt themselves, and in the meantime no telling how many girls he’d bother! Mr. Rexford was so upset at Maurice, he was talking about firing him, and I thought the best way to save the situation was to lure Croaker back somehow to Dr. Eierkopf. But Maurice (that’s my husband) said the only way to do that would be to line up a lot of co-eds between the woods and Dr. Eierkopf’s room—he’s always saying naughty things. Anyway I knew Croaker liked me all right: every time they came by the Clinic he used to sort of purr, you know, like a friendly bear. It was so cute, and I don’t believe there was anything bad in it at all, the way Maurice pretended; I’d just let him touch me or lick my hand or something, and then Dr. Eierkopf could usually move him along without any more bother …
“So I came along with the search party and got Maurice to let me come out on the bridge while they waited out of sight. I thought if Croaker was anywhere in the gorge he’d see me there and come when I called, and then maybe I could calm him down or draw him back to where the others were—they have something to put him to sleep with. Maurice said silly things the way he always does, about my knowing what would happen and actually wanting it to; but I learned a long time ago not to mind what he says. Besides, if it turned out I couldn’t control Croaker, or the men didn’t get there in time, it didn’t seem to me it could be much worse than some other things I’d been through, and as long as it was me it wouldn’t be some poor co-ed ruined for life.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, but she clutched her arms across her breasts and sighed. “Which is how it turned out.”
