Giles Goat Boy

by John Barth

  “I got no secrets,” Greene said stoutly. “I’ll lay my cards on the table. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers. My life is an open book. I’m okay.”

  I assured him that I’d read nothing about him in the newspapers, uncomplimentary or otherwise, not ever having read any newspapers, and that what I’d seen of his resourcefulness and gathered of his enterprise quite inclined me to assent to his okayness, whatever the term implied. That there was nothing hostile or even skeptical in my questions, but only the general curiosity of one who had the Finals still before him, and the special curiosity of one whose mission it was eventually to teach others the right Answers.

  He replied with a most-warm, open smile. “You’re okay too, George: I can tell by your face. Goat-boy or not, it don’t matter. I had a friend once name of George.”

  He volunteered to review for my benefit the aforementioned book of his life: a tome, he acknowledged, not without a dark page here and there, but which taken all in all was nothing shameful, by gosh. However, the afternoon was waning; there was an eating-place not far ahead where he would be pleased to grub-stake us in return for picking him up and hearing him out; his story would keep until we reached it. We had for some minutes been climbing a gentle rise behind which the ruddy sun had already descended. Before us now the woods stopped, where the road went over the ridge; the tree-limbs there were finely lit.

  “You never saw New Tammany proper before?” Greene asked. I shook my head. He topped the rise a few meters before me and, braking the cycle, called over his shoulder, “Well, there she sets, friend!” There was reverence in his voice; he had removed his fur cap, and his orange hair and outstretched hand gleamed like the tree-limbs in the light, which lit me too when Croaker came up beside him. “How ’bout that, now!”

  What had I imagined a great college would look like? I cannot remember. Photographs I had seen, descriptions I’d read, but with only the livestock-barns and the branch library for scale, I must have conceived the central campus of New Tammany as a slightly larger version of our stalls and pastures. Certainly I was not prepared for the spectacle before and beneath us. Sparkling in the purple dusk, it stretched out endlessly, endlessly. Avenues, towers, monuments; corridors of glass and steel; lakes and parks and marble colonnades; bridges and smokestacks, blinkers and beacons! Hundreds of messages flashed in every color, from here, from there, on roofs and cornices: FIND FACTS FAST—ENCYCLOPEDIA TAMMANICA; DON’T BE SAD—STUDY BUSINESS AD.; YOUR ROTC KEEPS THE RIOT QUIET; ALWAYS A HIT: Late-Medieval Lit. Thousands of motorcycles, bicycles, scooters swarmed along the boulevards, stopped at traffic signals, flowed into roundabouts, threaded into residential mazes; the mingled roar of horns and engines hung like a pall of smoke or the echo of a shout. In truth I could scarcely draw breath in face of such tremendousness; before the ignorance of what lay in store for me there and the knowledge that I would go down to meet it, my heart sank in my breast. And New Tammany was but one college of the many in West Campus, and West Campus far less than half the University—smaller both in area and population than its Eastern counterpart or the aggregate of “independent” colleges! And Max maintained—but how was one to swallow it?—that our whole University was but one among an infinitude of others, perhaps quite similar, perhaps utterly different, whose existence in the fenceless pastures of reality, while as yet unconfirmed, had perforce to be assumed. And those hundreds of thousands of human people below there, in New Tammany alone—each with his involvements and aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, past history and present problems—I was to be their Tutor, show them the way to Commencement Gate?

  “Fetches you up, now, don’t it?” Greene demanded proudly. I shook my head, couldn’t answer. He identified Tower Hall, its belfry floodlit in the distance, and pointed out the brilliant string of lights that followed the Power Line eastwards from that building to the Boundary and behind us to Founder’s Hill—the string whose other end I’d glimpsed from the Powerhouse. WESCAC was there—the storied Belly, the awful EATer; and there too, somewhere beneath that high-spired dome, was the fabled Central Library and a certain particular booklift where my journey had begun. The ambiguous thrill brought tears to my eyes; I leaned down and touched Max’s shoulder for comfort, and he briefly put his brooding by to share my feeling.

  “Twenty years since I went over this hill,” he said.

  “Lots of things have changed since then,” Greene said cheerfully. “They’re all the time tearing down old ones and putting up new.”

  Max pointed out the Lykeionian-revival porch of the Chancellor’s Mansion, the Remusian pilasters of the Old Armory, the flying buttresses of Enoch Hall. I inquired about what appeared to be, after the Stadium, the largest building of all, a floodlit multistoried cube of enormous dimension with a featureless limestone facade.

  “Military Science,” Max said grimly. “And out past Tower Hall, the last big building to the south—see those four turrets with the searchlights? That’s Main Detention, where I spent my last night before they sent me away.”

  “Ain’t it grand?” said Peter Greene. “We got the biggest detention-hall in the University!” What was more, he added, the clock-tower of Tower Hall was the tallest structure on the campus; and there were so many kilometers of hallway in the Military Science Cube that the professor-generals pedaled bicycles from office to office; and nine out of every ten NTC staff-members (and eleven out of every twelve students) owned his own motorbike—a ratio triple that of Nikolay College and well ahead of any of our West-Campus colleagues. The total power expended in a single day by all these engines equaled the energy of a hundred EAT-waves of the latest type …

  “And make the most important poison in the atmosphere,” Max added, “except for the drop-outs from EAT-wave testing.”

  “Say what you want,” Greene chuckled. “If it weren’t for all them drivers there wouldn’t be no drive-ins.”

  We came down then from the overlook into the stunning traffic of a main highway (“Hit ’em right at the evening rush,” Greene remarked—and hit them he very nearly did on a number of occasions, by driving through traffic lights at intersections or misjudging the distance of approaching headlamps. In addition to his color-blindness, it seemed, he was unable to perceive depth with his single eye; I was to learn later that he was subject to certain photisms, or optical hallucinations, as well, but fortunately was spared that extra cause for alarm during this first experience of vehicular traffic). The noise took my heart out; I was terrified by the rush and by the confusion of lights and signals. Arrows flashed this way and that; signs commanded one on every hand to stop, to go, to turn. I spurred tireless Croaker to his utmost gallop; even so the slowest of the vehicles sped past as if we stood still. Not the least of my astonishments was that we drew so little attention: horns would blow and insults be shouted if we strayed off the shoulder onto the pavement or trespassed inadvertently against the right-of-way; otherwise, however, young and old roared past without a curious glance—as if a fleecèd goat-boy, astride a black giant and accompanied by a bearded old Moishian, were to be seen at every interchange!

  Not until we turned from the highway onto the apron of the promised eating-place did anyone really notice us: the evening was warm, and a throng of young couples had drawn their machines up to the Pedal Inn, as the place was called. They laughed and slouched in their sidecars or at outdoor tables, in every kind of dress; some danced upon the asphalt to music that seemed to bleat from half a dozen floodlight poles; others smoked tobacco, furtively pawed one another’s bodies, or chewed upon victuals (meat, I fear) run out to them by white-frocked attendants. They greeted our approach with cries and whistles and claps of the hand; I distinguished Croaker’s name several times, and was pleased to see them give way. A number of the girls were not unattractive, by human standards, and it relieved me to see that Croaker was after all too fatigued by his final sprint to need restraining. It seemed to me a colorful and animated host; I took their merriment as an express
ion of goodwill and waved my hand cordially. They formed a large ring around us as Peter Greene parked, and those inside the glass-walled eating-place stared out. The jaws of most worked vigorously, as if upon a cud; some pared their nails with knives while they hooed and hollered; others combed and combed their hair.

  “Wonderful kids, aren’t they?” Greene exclaimed.

  Max muttered something unpleasant about a lynch-mob and asked whether Greene was sure the place would serve Frumentians, Moishians, and goat-boys.

  “They’ll dum well serve any friends of mine,” Greene laughed, and confessed to being part-owner of the establishment. The name Pedal Inn had occurred to him one day at lunch, and he’d built a chain of drive-in restaurants to bear it.

  2.

  “That was two-three years ago,” he said; “before things went kerflooey.”

  We sat inside, in a stall with benches, and dined on cheeseburgers and fried potatoes. I could not of course stomach the meat and so made do with the buns and onions and a sheaf of paper napkins, which I found piquant with tomato catsup. Croaker on the other hand squatted on the floor and ate his raw; Max declared he had no appetite, though he’d eaten little all day, and remarked besides that Moishian custom forbade meat and dairy produce at the same board—a rule I’d never heard him invoke before. He contented himself with occasional sips of sarsaparilla. After the original stir of our entrance, though they came to the window now and then to stare, most of the young people returned to their former pursuits, and I was able to listen undistracted except by the overwhelming novelty of the surroundings.

  “Kerflooey?” I said.

  Greene tisked and nodded. “Used to be, I was sitting pretty. I liked people; people liked me. Business doing fine. Married to the prettiest gal in my neck of the woods: sweet as apple cider; pure as pure. Then all of a sudden, kerflooey, the whole durn thing. I swear to Pete.”

  The kerflooiness of things, it developed, had a bearing upon Mr. Greene’s return to Great Mall, and consisted of reverses both professional and domestic. He had in fact put home and business behind, and had now to choose whether to return or make the breach final. Yet things had not after all gone kerflooey in an instant of time: rather they had slipped into that condition by degrees, over a period of many semesters.

  “I wonder sometimes if I ain’t one of them drop-outs from the EAT-wave tests, you know? Things ain’t been the same at all since I come home from the Riot and set up in the plastic and promotion way.”

  I inquired whether Mrs. Greene was also a Graduate.

  “I should hope to kiss a pig!” Greene cried, and though the phrase itself conveyed to me no certain answer, its tone and context suggested affirmation. “I guess she was the smartest little gal I ever did run across, was Sally Ann—till things went kerflooey. When she’d call on a fellow to recite his lessen, he’d better know it right by heart, don’t she’d fetch out that ruler of hers and crack him a daisy! Fellows twice her own size, that could break a redskin in two or lick their weight in wildcats!”

  From this I inferred that in her youth Mrs. Greene had been some sort of pedagogue in the wilder reaches of the NTC Forestry Preserve, and that it was the idiom of that place and time into which her mate now slipped as he recalled it.

  “I was a wild ’un back then,” he confessed with a grin. “No flannel pants in them days! And no time for lallygaggin’ round no drive-ins, like young ’uns in this Present Modern College of Today.”

  He seemed now altogether scornful of the students roundabout, whom he’d lately been praising. About his own childhood I found him similarly of two minds, declaring on the one hand his intention to see to it that his children enjoyed all the privileges himself had never known, and on the other that the modern generation was plumb spoilt by the luxuries of life in present-day NTC and would amount to nothing for want of such rigor as had been his lot.

  “I run away from home at the age of fourteen,” he said proudly. “Not that it was much of a home, with Paw a-drinkin’ and Maw forever a-layin’ the Good Book on me.” The actual nature and location of his birthplace I could not discern: sometimes it appeared to have been the meanest hovel, sometimes a place of ancient grandeur. In any case he’d abandoned it, his parents, and his patrimony and hied him into wilderness departments, to live off the land. His motives, as he characterized them, were praiseworthy: the pursuit of independence and escape from the debilitating influence of corrupt tradition. “My folks and me, we come to a fork in the road,” he said: “they had their notions and I had mine, that’s everything there was to it.”

  But Max questioned this assertion. “Yes, well, the way I read once, you were hooky-playing from school always, ja? And making trouble till they ran you out?”

  Greene reckoned cheerfully that he’d made his share of mischief now and again, and acknowledged further that on his voyage into the wild, in a homemade vessel, he’d been accompanied by another fugitive, a Frumentian from a South-Quad chain-gang; that they’d saved each other’s lives more than once, and had become fast friends despite their difference in race.

  “But that’s all we ever was, was pals,” he insisted. “Old Black George and me (I used to call him Old Black George, despite he weren’t old), we went through thick and thin together ’fore we parted company. I guess no boy ever had a better pal: that’s why I bust out laughin’ when they say I don’t like darkies! But friends is all, and them smart-alecks that claim we was funny for each other—I’d like to horsewhip ’em!”

  I remarked that I too had been fortunate enough to have a Frumentian friend by the name of George. Max considered his sarsaparilla.

  Equally libelous, Greene assured us, was the gossip that he’d taken a daughter of his fellow-fugitive into the bush for immoral purposes: the truth was that an influential white lady had arranged to have Old Black George paroled into the custody of his family, all of whom were domestic workers in the boarding-school she operated; only his parole hinged on the condition that this particular daughter, who had taken to a lewd course of life, leave the premises. “O.B.G.,” as Greene was wont to call his friend, had at first been reluctant, but upon Greene’s offering secretly to take the girl with him and look after her, he accepted the condition.

  “ ’Tweren’t my fault she turned out bad,” he said. “I had my hands full clearin’ land and huntin’ meat and buildin’ shelters and chasin’ off redskins; I couldn’t watch no sassy little pickaninny every minute.”

  “But you never touched her yourself?” Max demanded.

  “Me touch her!” Greene grinned. “It was her pesterin’ me all the time! And a-teasin’! And a-beggin’!” His eyes hardened. “And declarin’ she’d tell Miss Sally Ann if I didn’t watch out.”

  As best I could fathom it, he had permitted the Frumentian girl to share his sleeping bag, cook and wash for him, and mate with certain redskins. It was possible even to infer that his life had been preserved by those same aboriginals at her behest, but the story was vague. In any case, despite her inclination, if not positive passion, he had seldom actually serviced her, he vowed—perhaps never at all—for the reason that it “weren’t decent.” In the meanwhile, other adventurers had followed Greene’s lead until at length a small quadrangle was established in the wilds; New Tammany College annexed the territory, and Tower Hall dispatched ROTC units to subdue the redskins, and schoolteachers to educate the settlers. Greene himself, from established habit, had declined formal schooling; but he taught himself reading, writing, and arithmetic—with no other light than the fire on his hearth, no other texts than the Old and New Syllabi, no other materials than a clean pine board and a stick of charcoal. And if his manners and speech were untutored, his courage, high spirits, and intelligence must have made up for them, for he wooed and won the pretty schoolmistress herself—Miss Sally Ann from back in the East Quads, whose mother was the boarding-school directress mentioned before.

  “You can talk about your Grand Tutors,” he sighed, and set his jaw; “Miss Sally Ann wa
s Enos Enoch and His Twelve Trustees as far as I was concerned, and her word was the pure and simple Answer. Wasn’t for her, I’d of been a beast of the woods: the way she prettied up the cabin and the schoolhouse was a wonder! And talk about your Finals: when Sally Ann got done with me I could recite you the Founder’s Scroll backwards or forwards.”

  “Is that how to pass the Finals!” I exclaimed with a frown.

  “Pfui,” Max said. “It’s how to flunk a whole college.”

  But Greene insisted that Miss Sally Ann was Founder and chancellor and Examiners too, to his mind, and had besides the prettiest face and figure in the entire territory, durned if she didn’t. She herself was the Answer: she had rescued him from the clutches of the Dean o’ Flunks, from the way to failure, and he would let no vileness near her. It was chiefly for her sake, to provide her with every comfort known to studentdom, that when not yet twenty he claimed squatter’s rights to vast tracts of virgin timber, formed his own Sub-Department of Lumbering and Paper Manufacture, built sawmills and factories, laid waste the wilderness, dammed the watersheds, spoiled the streams, and became a power in the School of Business and an influence in Tower Hall. For her sake too (though it wasn’t clear whether she demanded these things or he volunteered them) he eschewed liquor and tobacco, and forbade them to others; left off cursing, gambling, and fist-fighting, of which he’d been fond; and had Old Black George’s daughter committed to Main Detention as a common prostitute. By discharging in his office the energies previously wasted on idle pursuits, he grew at an early age more affluent than his neighbors. Yet though he swore by his union and career as by Commencement itself, he showed signs of restlessness: he began playing truant from his office, as formerly from the classroom; spent more time on the golf-links than at the mills; became a collector of famous paintings, expensive books, antique motorcycles, pornography, and big-game trophies. And he welcomed the chance to fight for New Tammany as an officer of infantry in Campus Riot II.