by John Barth
I returned his smile, addressing it to the bridge of his nose. “How do you do. Is this your motorcycle?”
He grinned farther yet. “You mean she ain’t yourn? Might of guessed, way you handled ’er.”
As there was no criticism in his tone, just frank amusement, I described the circumstances of my discovery and appropriation of the cycle. I had no mind to keep it, I explained: inasmuch as Mr. Maurice Stoker was an acquaintance of mine and his wife by way of being a particular friend, I was certain they’d not object to my borrowing their machine to reach Great Mall and—the pleasant notion occurred to me as I spoke—returning it to Mrs. Stoker at the Psych Clinic when I had done registering.
“I always did hear there was big goings-on at the Powerhouse this time of year,” the tall man said. “Don’t know Mr. Stoker my own self, but I bet half what they say about him isn’t so.” I recognized that he was being agreeable. He was, now I saw him close, less young than I’d supposed: more probably forty than twenty for all his boyishness of look and manner.
“Ha,” Max said, and showed no further interest. However, the stranger seemed not to notice his incordiality.
“Hey, that’s some darky you got there! You all been to a fancy dress party?”
As the term meant nothing to me, I identified Croaker, explained how he happened to be with us, and introduced Max and myself as well.
“My gracious sakes! Proud to meet you all!” Much impressed, he thrust out his hand first to Croaker. “Greene’s my name, Mr. Croaker.”
Croaker growled. “He doesn’t speak our language,” I said.
“Is that a fact! Won’t bite, will he?”
“You don’t try to lynch him he won’t,” Max said.
“Now hold on!” Greene’s protest was still good-natured, though I gathered he had grounds for feeling insulted. “Just because he’s a darky don’t mean I don’t admire his football-playing. I got nothing against darkies. I grew up with darkies.”
“Congratulations.”
Greene turned to me with a chuckle. “He’s a peppery one, ain’t he?” Then he reached his hand up to Max. “Peter Greene, sir, and proud to meet you. I read about you in the papers a long time ago.”
“You got nothing against Moishian Student-Unionists either?” Max asked sarcastically. But he didn’t refuse the handshake, and I saw a trace of a smile in his beard for the first time that day.
Peter Greene stoutly cocked his head. “I’m ready to riot against Nikolay College anytime the Chancellor says,” he declared with dignity. “But I got nothing against any man that’s got nothing against me. Darkies or Moishians, it don’t matter.”
“A liberal,” Max said.
“Call me what you want, I’m just Pete Greene.” He winked his right eye at me. “Nobody knows better’n me how the papers twist things ever whichaway. Don’t flunk me till you get to know me, and I’ll do you the same favor.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Greene,” I said when my turn came. And indeed I found his manner on the whole winning, though somewhat disconcerting.
“Pete,” he insisted. “Same here, Mr. George. I never did meet a Grand Tutor before.” I wondered that there was no trace in him of the skepticism I’d learned to expect upon identifying myself; only curiosity, which I was pleased enough to satisfy.
“How come you got to matriculate like everybody else?” he wanted to know. “Now you take me, that’s just a plain poor flunker like the next: all I can do is hope the good Founder may find it in His heart to pass me when the time comes. Which He sure ain’t passed me yet, evidently, much as I thought He had.”
I explained that while I was what I was in essence, as it were, I was not yet so in act, and would not be until I had passed my own Finals—just as a chancellor’s son, in the days of hereditary office, might become the lawful ruler of his college while still in his infancy, but would not exercise his powers in fact until he came of age.
“Well, I think it’s a wonderful line of work for a fellow to take up,” Peter Greene said stoutly, as if to encourage me. “You might not believe it to see me now, but when I was a boy I was president of the Junior Enochist League. Youngest president they ever had! More than once I’ve thought I should of took up Tutoring myself, instead of business engineering. But there wasn’t the profit in it then there is now.” He grinned and winked again, this time at Max. “Going to take you all a while to reach Commencement Gate on that!”
I agreed that considering my skill as a driver and the condition of the vehicle it might be as well to walk—especially if the roads were busier near Great Mall—and invited him to join us. He accepted at once, declaring he abhorred above all things solitude, having spent his childhood in the College Forests; but he saw no reason to abandon the motorcycle, which it seemed to him could easily be made serviceable. With my permission he opened a leathern pouch on the rear wheel—I’d scarcely noticed it—and fished out an assortment of tools from which he chose two or three box-end wrenches and one with adjustable jaws.
“If it’s a thing I do love,” he declared, “it’s fooling with motors.”
I dismounted and watched him go to work on the machine. Heedless of his clothing and at home with the tools, he first unbolted the sidecar from the motorcycle proper, declaring it bent out of line past salvaging, and then availed himself of its perfectly sound wheel and tire to replace the ruined one on the front of the cycle. From the sidecar also he fetched a black canister, which he uncapped, sniffed, and poured from into a tank above the motor. The whole operation took no more than half an hour. Then he wiped his hands—blacker than Croaker’s now with engine-grease—on a clean linen handkerchief and powdered them with dust from the roadside. His suit and shirt-front were quite soiled.
“Now, by gosh!” He adjusted the throttle and other devices, kicked the starter, and produced at once a roar from the motor more hearty by far than any I’d managed. I insisted that he drive, since he was familiar with the controls and I had no notion how to balance upon two wheels. Further, I proposed that Max ride behind him on the saddle and I on Croaker’s shoulders, inasmuch as despite my greater weight I was a less fragile burden, who safely might be trotted instead of walked.
Max grunted and mounted the cycle. “You don’t mind chauffeuring a security risk?”
Greene shook his head agreeably. “Maybe you’re a risk, sir, and maybe you’re not.” He squinted his eye. “But you ain’t a traitor to your college like they said, I know that.”
“You know already? How do you know?”
“I can tell by looking,” Greene declared, and paraphrased a saying of Enos Enoch’s: “ ‘Tain’t the cut o’ your coat, but the cut o’ your jib.’ ”
Max scoffed. “Some eyes you got.” But he seemed not displeased. Greene replied, turning to the controls, that he had in fact but one good eye, his right, having lost the other in an accident years before—but he supposed there were some things he could see clearly enough. He frowned at the rear-view mirror on the handlebar.
“Speaking of eyeballs, if you and George don’t mind I’ll just take this thing off before we start …” He unscrewed it, with my consent, and pitched it into the weeds. “I got a thing about mirrors since my accident. You know? No sirree,” he went on energetically, testing the throttle and not pausing for reply or acknowledgment: “I’d know by looking if a fellow was a traitor to his college.” He turned to Max with an innocent frown. “New Tammany is your college, ain’t it?”
My advisor laughed aloud, and Greene joined blushing in, as did I when I saw the little joke. We started off then much more smartly than before: our new companion, an expert driver as well as a vigorous talker, held the cycle balanced and perfectly matched to Croaker’s trot, with a minimum of engine noise, at the same time remarking endlessly upon himself and the campus scene.
“Fact is, it’s still a free college,” he declared, adding though that it wouldn’t be for long if Tower Hall kept meddling with the School of Business. “And what I say, a
fellow’s got a right to whichever Answer strikes him best, I don’t care if it’s the Junior Enochist Pledge or the Student-Unionist Manifesto.” He nodded his head in forceful jerks as he talked, and blinked several times at every period. My impression was that he spoke less from conviction than from an earnest wish to be agreeable, which was at least a refreshment after Max’s attitude. “He ought to teach what he wants in the classroom too,” he went on. “But he better not force anybody to agree, by golly Jim! And if he don’t love his alma mater he should transfer out, that’s what I say! Now you take me—” He took himself with his left hand, throttling with his right. “Nothing red about old Pete but his head—”
“Maybe the neck too,” Max suggested.
“I swear it proudly,” blinked Mr. Greene, “and would take an oath upon it every morning of my mortal life: I’m a loyal New Tammanian. But much as I personally loathe and despise your Student-Unionism—”
“Max was never a Student-Unionist,” I put in, for it seemed to me that my advisor was somehow being flunked in his Commencement, as who should say to an innocent man, “I forgive you for the murder you committed.”
“There now!” Greene jerked his head affirmatively. “I knew it from his face he weren’t! Gosh darn newspapers! Even if he was, though, what the heck: he could preach it in my ear all he wanted, long’s he didn’t shove it down my throat. Now then, sir!”
“Ach,” Max said.
“Well, I’m just a dumb forester that’s behind the times,” Greene said, in a voice that turned old for the space of two sentences. “All righty then, I’m out of date, but I believe in the Founder Almighty and New Tammany College—whether or not!”
Whether or not what, I wanted to know; but Max was saying, “Too old you aren’t. Too young is what.”
This observation moved our new friend to a truly boyish, Dunce-may-care laughter. “Say what you want, say what you want,” he invited us, shaking his head as if helpless before Max’s wit. “I’m a slow hand in the classroom, but put me in the woods I can show you a thing or two!”
I wondered that Max contemned with a sniff what seemed to me a sturdy enough set of Answers, worthy at least of reasonable debate. I was about to inquire further into them, but we rounded a bend and were faced with so startling a spectacle that all else was forgot. A sign it was, on the edge of a pine-woods—but no ordinary notice like GOAT-FARM #1 above the door at home or the direction-signs we’d passed by the way. This hoarding itself was big as a barn-wall, so big that the trees pictured on it were larger than those it hid. On one side, in taller letters than a man, was spelt the injunction DON’T PLAY WITH FIRE; on the other, KEEP OUR FORESTS GREENE. The messages flashed, first this then that, in bright orange light, bedazzling the eye. Yet scarcely had I grasped their wonder when I was horrified to see that just between them, in the center of the sign, no other disaster than the one they warned of had befallen them! A fire of painted logs was there, amid the picture-pines—but real smoke issued from it, that blackly rolled upon itself and skywards.
“Giddap!” I ordered Croaker, and bade the others follow. I thought perhaps we had water enough, in the shophar and our four bladders, to check the blaze before it spread past managing. To this end I laid the buckhorn on, then sprang to a narrow platform built before the sign and made the accuratest water I could into an orifice from which the smoke came. Croaker stood by perplexed, who might have drowned what I could but add steam to; I lacked a right command and had no time to search my stick for a micturating figure.
“Whoa!” cried Greene, more amused than not. “You’ll ruin my good signboard!”
I was with difficulty persuaded that there was no danger; that the smoke came cold from a machine designed to produce it behind the billboard; that its whole intent was to draw the traveler’s eye to the pair of messages, which were blazoned on similar hoardings the length and breadth of New Tammany College. He was astonished, Greene professed, that I had never seen one, goat-boy or no goat-boy, as he thought he’d had the college “blanketed,” in his term, and the goat-farms were unequivocally a part of NTC. By jiminy he would take the matter up with his “P.R. boys”—whoever they were—and that heads would roll, I could bet my boots. Not the least remarkable thing about Greene’s explanation was the manner of its delivery: there was a new hardness in his tone and something impersonally baleful in his swagger.
“Got the idea when my ROTC outfit was across the Pond in C. R. Two,” he told me proudly; we stepped behind the billboard to inspect the smoke-machine for water-damage, and he tinkered with its pumps and valves as ably as he’d dealt with the damaged motorcycle. “Saw the way Siggy’d built his gun-towers, one in sight of the other, so no matter where you stood you could see two or three of them around the horizon …” It did not occur to me at once that by “Siggy” he meant no person, but the Siegfrieder Military Academy in general. “Well, sir, when we rang the curtain on the big show over there, I says to my P.R. team, ‘Let’s toss this one over the old plate and see who swings at it.’ ”
“Ah,” I said.
“Yessirree George!” Greene nodded. “Tower Hall was talking Public Lands again, don’t you know, and College Forests, and Conservation, and it seemed to me it was time to blow the whistle on Creeping Student-Unionism. ‘Light up the watchfires,’ I said to P.R.; ‘Smoke the pink profs out of Tower Hall!’ So we put a task-force on it and came up with these billboards, on every highway and byway, and we placed the smoke-boxes so no matter where you stood in good old NTC you’d see the Signal-Fires of Freedom burning somewhere …”
“Signal-Fires of Freedom?”
Greene blinked proudly. “First we thought of Smokescreens for Security, but when we played that on the old kazoo it sounded like we were hiding something, you know? Flames of Free Research looked big for a while too, very big, but finally we decided it would give us a black eye imagewise—cross up the Keep-Our-Forests-Greene bit, I mean.” That latter slogan, he acknowledged, was his own, and all boasting aside, he deemed it punwisely so felicitous a merger of the Conservation and Private-Research bits that upon devising it he’d dismissed his entire staff of advertising consultants—“Sent the whole team to the showers”—and taken the field himself in his own behalf: on behalf, that is, of Greene Timber and Plastics, of which concern he was Board Chairman. Indeed, when treading musewise on the heels of Keep Our Forests Greene came Signal-Fires of Freedom—with its suggestions at once of non-destructive vigil, of summons to a common cause, and of the red-skinned preschoolists who first inhabited the NTC campus—he had devoted less time every year to his manufacturing interests and more to promotion and packaging: the locomotive and caboose, raison-d’êtrewise, of his train of thought.
We had come back to the roadside to contemplate the huge advertisement while Greene discoursed upon its history.
“Yi,” Max groaned. “Max Spielman on the same motorcycle with Greene Timber and Plastics!”
Reverting to his earlier manner, Greene winked and grinned. “I reckon I can bear it if you can, sir. I’m right color-blind myself, but they do say red and green balance out.”
Max was not amused. “The blight and flunking of this college, George,” he said. I could not discern whether it was the sign or the man he pointed to, but in either case his judgment struck me as extreme. I myself found the advertisement, like its creator, more diverting than appalling; indeed I could have stood agape before the flashing lights and rolling smoke for a great while longer, and left only because the afternoon pressed on. As before, Peter Greene was undismayed by the criticism: his “feedin’-hand,” he declared, was “pert’ near tooth-proof” from having been “bit so durn reg’lar.” I was hard put to it to follow his shifting lingo, but the dispute between him and Max, which went on until dinnertime, was of interest to me, for it had to do with the virtues and failings of what Greene called “the New Tammany Way.”
“Now you take me,” he invited us again above the engine-noise, and grasped his own shirt-front as befor
e. “Me, I’m no smarter nor stupider than the next fellow; I had to work hard for everything I got—”
“Which is plenty,” Max put in. Peter Greene agreed with a laugh that he was not the poorest man on the campus, yet denied he was the richest, that distinction belonging to Ira Hector—for whom, when all was said and done, he had a grudging admiration. “Despite some say he’s a Moishian …”
“Mr. Greene!” I protested.
He winked and cocked his head. “Now, don’t get het up; I don’t hold it against him if he is! And I guess I think Reggie Hector’s about the greatest man in New Tammany.”
Max closed his eyes.
“But what I was saying,” Greene went on, “I don’t mean to boast, now, but what I figure—By jingo, I’m okay!” He bobbed his head sharply. “When all’s said and done! If I do say so myself!”
I begged his pardon.
“I figure I’m passed because good old NTC is passed,” he said. “The passèdest doggone college in the doggone University!”
“You’ve taken the Finals, then?” I asked with interest. It occurred to me that I ought to have been asking that question of everyone—of Anastasia, of Maurice Stoker, of Dr. Sear, of Max himself. Why had he not advised me to?
“When they call me flunked,” Greene declared, “they call the whole darn college flunked, that’s what I’m getting at. And any man that’s willing to flunk his own alma mater—well, he’s a pretty poor New Tammanian!”
He thrust forth his chin and opened the throttle wider, perhaps without realizing it, so that I had to urge Croaker to a swifter trot. Max I observed had drawn a hand over his face before this curious logic, which even I saw the several flaws in, or else had turned to brooding upon other matters. He was not the Max of yesterday!
“Well, are you a Graduate, or not?” I insisted. “What were the Finals like? Why are you going back to register again?”
