Giles Goat Boy (40 page)

“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 “All righty then, I’m out of date, but I believe in the Founder Almighty and New Tammany College—whether or not!”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 G
OAT-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 D
ON
’
T
P
LAY WITH
F
IRE
; on the other, K
EEP
O
UR
F
ORESTS
G
REENE
. 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 before. “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?”

“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: F
IND
F
ACTS
F
AST
—E
NCYCLOPEDIA
T
AMMANICA
; D
ON
’
T
B
E
S
AD
—S
TUDY
B
USINESS
A
D.
; Y
OUR
ROTC K
EEPS THE
R
IOT
Q
UIET
; A
LWAYS A
H
IT
: L
ate-
M
edieval
L
it
. 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.