Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  The further irony was that on the plane, in the office of his agent, across the table at the City Cafe from the Little, Brown editor, he could summon up even less feeling for his own little book, less feeling, in fact, than the editor, who was surprisingly enthusiastic and whose idea of “drastic” was scandalously respectful. Tim agreed to the changes without any sense of self-betrayal. Was that the final irony, and the final proof of everything Cecelia had said?

  No, the final irony was when the editor said, “Well, I think we have a deal. I’ll mention some numbers to your agent,” Tim thought, Well, that’s nice.

  WHAT INTERESTED Loren Stroop about the fall of Communism in Europe were the pictures they had once in a while of farmers in their fields, with their hoes and shovels and half-broken wheelbarrows. Few of Loren’s new companions at the rehab facility showed even that much curiosity. He would sit with them in the lounge, one of a semicircle of damaged people in chairs and wheelchairs drawn up around the screaming television, and sometimes he would look at them instead of the television, slumped down in their seats in spite of the straps, many of their faces (like his, he knew) oddly skewed by their “brain attacks,” and almost all of them much farther down in the percentile rankings than he was. That woman was there, the one his doctor had always talked about, but young as she was, she never appeared in the lounge, she wasn’t up to even that. If it hadn’t been for his plans about revolutionizing American agriculture, Loren would have regretted how the chips had fallen, him so old, and with so much potential. Her so young, with kids and everything, and without much of a future at all.

  On the television was Eastern Europe, especially since Loren himself was mobile enough to change the channel and nobody else seemed to care. He used to like those quiz shows, “Wheel of Fortune” and them, but no more. Now he sat willingly through the business reports and the “Hollywood Minutes” and the sports updates, just waiting for a glimpse, not of buildings or happy faces, but of fields, animals, and machines. He didn’t mind what sort of machines—cars, factory equipment, levers, pulleys, wedges, tractors. It was like looking far far into his youth, when he himself had been surrounded by such machines, before everything was sleek and painted bright colors. Looking at the machines was how he understood how old he was. He actually was eighty now, seven years older than the Soviet Union, thirty-five years older than the Eastern European Communism that was falling apart to such fanfare. He was old, old, old. When he was discouraged, it seemed like he was too old, no matter what, to revolutionize American agriculture. But when those machines came on the screen, those farmers who farmed with shovels and hoes, it seemed like they were calling out to him, telling him that his real destiny, if only he could find his tongue, was to revolutionize world agriculture, and that the CIA and the FBI and the big ag companies would never stop him, and he opened his mouth and spoke back to those people, trying with all his might to mold his mooing into words, until the nurses came and begged him to be quiet.

  ONE THING Dr. Bo Jones knew about hogs was that the chances of their still living as their ancestors had lived were far greater in Asia, and even in places like Hungary, than they were anywhere in the West. Therefore he was more excited about the fall of European Communism than he had been about anything in years. He wrote letters to every conceivable ministry in Russia and Eastern Europe and Washington, begging for visas, begging for permissions, begging for information. Decades seemed to fall away, and he was thirty years old again, planning treks into a wilderness that part of him knew was as vanished as his youth. But only part of him. Every letter he wrote evoked scenes in his own mind that were irresistible—a native companion, some dogs, the glimpse of a boar flashing through the underbrush—a lean boar, black, bristly, fast, and mean. Upthrusting tusks, rippling shoulders, as ugly as a hog should be. And then there was himself pressing onward—no shortage of breath, no aching in the joints, no fatigue, the native companion barely able to keep up. Every letter he wrote convinced him that these possibilities had not been lost, that history hadn’t actually claimed his youth and strength, or the habitats of the boars and sows. Even as he typed Earl’s statistics into his computer, he was beginning to lose interest in the experiment, and he found less and less reason to go over there, lean on the fence, and dote. Of course, the hog was in good hands with that Bob fellow—Dr. Bo had no qualms on that score. Really, it was marvelous that politics had moved aside just at this moment, almost a miracle, really, almost divine intervention. Dr. Bo Jones licked his lips and started another letter, this one to Cabela’s, ordering some gear—and that would be something, too, to bring back a trophy boar from central Asia. The boar would be stuffed just as its head lowered and its eyes focused on the quarry and all its fury flowed forth, and the little plaque would say, “Donated by Dr. Bo Jones.”

  DR. CATES WASN’T nearly as interested in the fall of Eastern European Communism as his wife was. What she did was, she sat there in front of the news, and she nodded and said, “Ah. Ah. Ah.” Or she shook her head over the newspaper and made a sound in the back of her throat that her mother and sisters back in Ghana made when they were deploring something.

  Cates himself didn’t really see what there was to deplore. Although you probably couldn’t rely 100 percent on their findings, there would soon be new scientific hypotheses and theories to consider that had been secret for many years. New minds would come into the field, with new perspectives and maybe even some new methods. That could only be to the good. Dr. Cates didn’t see how science could fail to benefit from the fall of Eastern European Communism, but his wife kept nodding and shaking her head and making little noises and deploring.

  Finally, one night after their son had gone to bed, and they were sitting in front of the late news, he said, “What’s wrong with this? We won. We’re closer to peace than ever before in my lifetime.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  She smiled.

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged.

  “You’ve been muttering about this for weeks.”

  “Well, now, you see, John, all the tribes will get themselves stirred up now.”

  “What tribes? You mean in West Africa?”

  She shook her head, gestured toward the screen. “Those Czechs,” she said. “Those Slovaks. Now they can fight. Now they can turn to their neighbors they’ve been living beside for years and say, ‘I want what you have. I want you out of here.’ ”

  “Why should they do that?”

  She threw her head back and laughed out loud. She said, “Because they are people. People are all the same. You give them a little of what they want, and then all they do is want, and all they see, they want. And some of them, who don’t have much to do, they want to fight, just to fight, so they bring everything else into the fighting.”

  “Well, maybe.”

  She laughed again. She said, “You white people”—Cates shifted in his chair; he knew she meant, You Americans, but he didn’t correct her—“are the only people in the world who are surprised when people are people.”

  40

  Dissemination

  THE BOX that said “UARCO Trimedge@” sat next to Mrs. Loraine Walker’s desk for two days after it came up from the copy center, a bit of disorder that the other women in the office knew Mrs. Walker wouldn’t tolerate from them or from Ivar. It therefore aroused curiosity, but it took Mrs. Walker’s colleagues a while to overcome their respect for her privacy and ask what was in it.

  She was surprisingly forthcoming. She opened the box right away, saying, “Oh, you might be interested in this. I thought it was quite something.” She handed a copy to anyone who asked, suggested only that when they had finished with it, they hand it on to someone else who might be interested.

  Otherwise, she spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Patty Malone in Personnel, arranging Alison Thomas’ transfer from the development office to another part of the campus. In this she was more prudent than Alison herself. Whereas A
lison said, “Anywhere,” Mrs. Walker said to Patty, “As far as possible from Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s chain of command, preferably with someone predisposed against her.”

  “How about the horse barns?” said Patty.

  Mrs. Walker felt that she herself had served as Alison’s inspiration, and took some pride in the way Alison had marched into Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s office and said, “Pardon me, but I’ve had it.” When Elaine, startled and offended, looked up, Alison had smacked her hand on the desk and said, “My files are a mess. Every drawer has a substantial number of folders missing part or all of their contents.” She raised her voice authoritatively. “We can’t work like this. You have to go home right now and find everything that’s been lost in your house and bring it back to the office.”

  “I have a meeting—”

  “I cancelled it. You have three hours. I will keep cancelling things until you do this.”

  “Now just a minute—”

  “Fine.” Alison Thomas turned on her heel and started out of the office.

  “Well. Well, all right. I suppose it’s about time.” And Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek put on her cashmere coat and her alpaca scarf and went out. Two hours later, she returned, saying, “Someone’s going to have to help me carry this stuff from the car.”

  Alison continued to sit in her seat, continued to work at her computer. Without even glancing up, she said, “There’s a dolly in that closet.”

  She found the report for Mrs. Walker an hour later, far down in the mess, held together with a bobby pin and smudged with what looked like foundation. She carried it over to Lafayette Hall herself.

  Well, it was a good story, thought Mrs. Walker, and a good omen for Alison’s future, but when the report got out, and a stir was created, no amount of personal power would protect Alison Thomas from Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek. She herself was not wholly safe. Truth to tell, it was one of those moments. Invigorating. She shook herself energetically, and said to Patty, “Where is that man now, the one who’s been so much trouble, what’s his name, Bartle? William Bartle?”

  “The one who won’t do anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s in Fred Raymond’s office.”

  Fred Raymond was the university lawyer. Mrs. Walker said, “They’ve put up with him long enough. Why don’t you switch them?”

  “I’ll see. He might prefer not to move.”

  “Do what you can.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Meanwhile, Mrs. Walker left a copy of the report on Ivar’s desk, right where he couldn’t miss it. But so far, he hadn’t said anything about it.

  Martha, though, had plenty to say. The first thing she said, after reading the very first page and then holding the report away from her and turning it over the way you would turn over a piece of tainted fish, was “Who is this guy?”

  “He’s an economist. Quite famous, actually. He’s won two teaching awards and he’s the highest-paid faculty member. He goes to Washington all the time.”

  Martha read on.

  After a few minutes, she said, “But he’s promoting digging some gold mine under the largest remaining virgin forest in Central America.”

  “I saw that.”

  Martha read on.

  She said, “This is crazy.”

  She said, “I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  She said, “What is he thinking of?”

  She said, “Listen to this, ‘While gold mining is admittedly stressful to the environment in a number of ways, it is the opinion of this writer that environmental impact assessments will show that it should take a hundred years or less for the area in question to recover from the necessary impacts of mining, especially if the historically disruptive migrations of peoples to areas where gold has been discovered are prevented by adequate security. While such security precautions may be out of the financial reach of the Costa Rican government at this point, there are alternative avenues for meeting this expense, possibly through public moneys raised in the U.S. as a result of lobbying Congress to prevent the dissolution of Seven Stones Mining, which employs a substantial number of people in areas already economically depressed. Such a lobbying effort on the part of Chrysler Motors had a very favorable result in———.’ My God!”

  Martha read on.

  She said, “This guy goes on the assassination list.”

  Mrs. Walker said, “It isn’t his idea. It’s Arlen Martin’s idea. Gift is just fleshing it out for him.”

  Martha read on.

  She said, “I can’t read any more. It’s giving me a stroke.”

  Mrs. Walker took the report out of her hands. She turned to the last page. She said, “Well, just listen to this. ‘Gold, even more than petroleum, holds a hallowed place in the human psyche. It is both useful and beautiful. It could perhaps be said that the search for new sources of this precious life substance has fueled human history and the rise of civilization itself. As the old sources are played out, few new ones have been found. Does this eventuality define the end of human civilization, perhaps the end of human history? While such speculations may seem far-fetched at this point, it is well to weigh in the balance the meaning of this ever-precious, ever-vanishing source of human wealth against the readily renewable, not to say relentlessly burgeoning, natural abundance of the forest.

  “ ‘One could also speculate that now that gold has been found in the forest, the SAFEST thing to do is to remove it with the best possible methods, thus forestalling future uncontrolled depredations. It would perhaps have been better that the gold deposits had not been found, but now that they have, it is the opinion of this writer that the findings are best acted upon.’ ”

  Martha fell back on the couch.

  “And listen to this,” said Loraine. “I called a guy in the geology department, and said, ‘What’s the latest, most state-of-the-art way of extracting gold from ore?’ and he said, ‘There is no state-of-the-art way. You dig it out, crush it to powder, treat it chemically so that the invisible flecks of gold concentrate into a solution and run out of the ore, then you neutralize the solvent. Of course, a fraction of the solvent always escapes. That can be a problem.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘Well, you know, the solvent is a cyanide compound. You don’t want that to get in the groundwater, but of course it does. And then there are these enormous mounds of powdered ore, because the highest-grade ore still only carries one ounce of gold per one ton of ore. Then the ore oxidizes and sulfur compounds dissolve into sulfuric acid, and THAT runs into the groundwater. Very problematic.’ ”

  “Lord, I guess.”

  “I said, ‘What would be state-of-the-art?’ and he said, ‘Well, maybe to stuff that powdered ore back down the mine shaft to keep it from collapsing. Some states require that. That’s why a lot of mining companies are moving to the Third World. They don’t have to adhere to so many environmental regulations.’ ”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘I’m sending you a document through campus mail that I think you’ll find very interesting.’ ”

  Martha smiled. Alone of all their acquaintances, she found Loraine hilarious.

  The next day, Mrs. Walker called Ivar into her office when the rest of the staff was on break, and she said, “Did you read that document I gave you?”

  “Mrs. Walker, I am not going to ask you how you came to have that document.”

  “But did you read it?”

  “I did.”

  “It is my personal opinion that something should be done about the contents of that document.”

  “Dr. Gift was consulted as to his views on the project. If those are his views, then there’s nothing the university can do about them.”

  They looked at each other. Ivar saw Mrs. Walker’s face settle into her most disapproving and impenetrable Menominee visage, and he wondered if she would actually quit over a matter of extremely, in his view, abstract principle. It made him nervous. Mrs. Walker saw Ivar’s countenance turn pale and stubborn, a
mask of apparent blandness that deflected her most resolute determination. Simultaneously, they said, “Academic freedom.” Ivar then said, “Well, yes. It would be very dangerous for the university to act. Or,” he pressed on, in the teeth of his growing nervousness, “for anyone in this office to act. No one in this office acts solely in his or her own behalf, but always as a representative of this office.” Now he could barely utter the words, but he forced out, “I do hope you understand that, Mrs. Walker.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He knew she understood.

  He also knew that wouldn’t necessarily make any difference.

  He should have taken control years ago.

  She had her hands on the keys of her, their, computer. He would never have control now. He went back into his office and sat down in the desk chair.

  As the door to his office closed, the door to the hallway opened, and Just Plain Brown glided in on a smear of eternal congeniality. “Ah, Mrs. Walker,” he said. “Just who I’m looking for!” He glanced down at the “UARCO Trimedge@” box with evident delight. “Here they are! May I?”

  He bent down just a fraction of a second before she nodded, and lifted up one of the reports with apparent reverence. Their eyes met. He leaned over the desk, turning the full force of his good will upon her, and said, “Thank you for this!” A second later he was gone.

  In his office, reading reports from the promotion and tenure committee, Ivar noticed when Mrs. Walker’s extension lit up. Very carefully, he picked up the receiver. She was saying, “Hello, Dorothy. This is Mrs. Walker. Would you transfer me to Professor Levy, please?” Moments later, Helen’s warm, loved tones announced, “This is Helen Levy, hello?” Ivar carefully replaced the phone, and smiled.

  41

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