Giles Goat Boy (97 page)

Greene blinked strongly. “By jimmy gumbo, George! Do you mean to stand there on your two hind legs and tell me—”

Thinking he saw what was afoot, Stoker joined in happily: “You didn’t think it was really
Stacey
you jumped on, did you? My wife’s a virgin, Greene!”

“
I
be durn,” Greene said stiffly. “You can’t fool me.”

“No, I swear it!” Stoker cried, and feigned a whisper. “I was born with no balls, see, and Stacey’s got a thing about dildos. Look, I’ll show you.” He seemed prepared to open his trousers for our inspection—whether in earnest or not I never learned, for Greene professed disbelief and disgust, at the same time blushing with hopeful doubt.

“You can’t tell
me
she’s a virgin!” he said. “Not after what I done to her!”

His tone implied that he could nonetheless entertain the fantastic idea of her having been unserviced thitherto—despite what he’d seen and heard! I considered suggesting that he himself had deflowered her in the alley. But I hesitated, uncertain whether that notion would please him or burden him with new guilt. Either way, I decided, the responsibility might involve him with My Ladyship in a manner not conducive to restoring his marriage, and my object was merely to revive his esteem for Anastasia, as for himself and the other things he’d valued in time past. While I considered the problem, Stoker solved it, thinking only to make further sport.

“I know you’re the Dunce’s own cocksman,” he said, “despite what Georgina tells me. But if you really believe it was Stacey in that alley, you’re blind as a bat.”

“Who was it then?” Greene said angrily. “And who was it owned up in court it was her own durn fault? Her twin sister?”

Stoker laughed. “Of course! Didn’t George think once that he and
Stacey were twins? Well she
did
have a twin, back in the Unwed Co-ed’s Hospital where Ira Hector got her; but it was a twin
sister …
”

Greene held his ears. “Y’all quit, now!” But Stoker, inspired, went on to declare that Anastasia and her twin sister, though alike in appearance as his right eye to his left, were of contrary dispositions, to My Ladyship’s frequent mortification. For while Anastasia was not only chaste but downright frigid—as Greene himself had observed, surely, by her demeanor in court and in the Visitation Room—her twin sister, raised in an orphanage, had early turned to vice, and was in fact a floozy!

“It’s the Founder’s truth,” he vowed with a grin. “She’s a hot one, that Lacey—Lacey’s what they call her, from her black lace drawers—”

“She weren’t wearing any drawers!” Greene cried—triumphantly but wretchedly, for despite his scorn he had begun to listen with a wincing care.

“Naturally she wasn’t,” Stoker replied, and as Leonid, Max, and I looked on astonished, he improvised a remarkable story: “Lacey’s” notorious promiscuity, he declared, was commonly attributed to resentment of her luckier twin, whose reputation had indeed been damaged by Lacey’s playing whore in her name. But in his own estimation—and he called on me, with a wink, to support his analysis—the unhappy girl’s motives were more complex: indeed, it seemed to him that “Lacey’s” wantonness but confirmed Anastasia’s virgin chastity, and he wondered (that is, pretended to wonder) whether the girl didn’t flunk herself deliberately—out of some hopeless love for her sister, say, or to set an instructive bad example.

I regarded Stoker sharply. “What a very curious idea. Like the Dean o’ Flunks, you mean?”

“In black panties!” Stoker laughed. “Except when she doesn’t wear any at all, to make Stacey look flunkèder.”

“Foolishnish!” Leonid shouted, who had heard enough. “Stop this!”

But Stoker maintained with the same earnestness that his wife, for all her protestations of contempt for “Lacey’s” misconduct, often took the blame for her errant twin—whether out of love, or guilt for her own comfortable childhood, or some perverse envy, he wouldn’t venture to say, though he inclined to the last hypothesis.

“Pass her heart!” Leonid cried, tearful himself now with compassion. “That Mrs. Anastasia, all the time takes blame! I love, George!”

I nodded approval. He shook his great fist then at Stoker. “Dog pig! And falsifer!” Max and me also he accused of exploiting Greene’s “stupihood,” and declared that my account of Anastasia’s behavior in
court was the only true thing we’d said to his blue-eyed friend. “All these mirror, and virginicy, and Lacey-pant—bah! Stop this sisterness!”

Greene rubbed his orange beard. “I don’t know, Leo. I don’t much trust a durn mirror, one-way or two-. And it
was
kind of dark there, back of the Old Chancellor’s Mansion …”

Leonid clutched him by the shirt-front. “Don’t believe, Peter Greene!
I
have done! What word? My own self … 
I
have love Mrs. Anastasia! No Lacey-pant!”

Greene choked and flung himself away. “Dog
gone
you! You watch how you talk, now, Alexandrov!”

But Leonid pointed with great emotion to his trouserfly and said distinctly: “I have
screw
Mrs. Anastasia my own self! Passèdness her! Flunkhood me!”

Greene leaped at him with a groan and they wrestled to the floor, Leonid cursing Greene for a blindness fool and Greene Leonid for a patch-eyed liar, nose-on-his-facewise. In vain Max and I hauled at them, lest they carry their new Tutoring too far; despite his recent fat and sloth Greene was formidably strong, as was his adversary. By the time Stoker unlocked the cell and nonchalantly fired his pistol near their heads, each had a thumb at the other’s good eye.

“No-good Student-Unionist!” Greene muttered as we drew them apart. “Telling filthy lies about the sweetest gal in New Tammany College!”

“Oy,” Max said.

“Blind other eye!” Leonid jeered. “Can’t see anyhow!”

“You’re the one’s blind,” Greene retorted. “Can’t tell a virgin from a flunking floozy!”

They would have set to again, but Stoker and I got between them and pushed Greene into the aisleway. Not that he gave a flunk which fool killed which, Stoker assured them; but he thought it a pity to waste the spectacle on so small an audience. “It’s time I threw another party at the Powerhouse,” he said. “I’ll let you fellows entertain us with an eye-gouging contest. Winner gets Stacey, loser gets Lacey.”

“He couldn’t tell the difference nowhow!” Greene said. “I wish I could
give
him my gosh-durn eyeball, let him see how blind he is!”

Leonid glared from the cell. “Me too you, if George didn’t say selfish like Ira Hector.”

“Say what you want!” Greene shouted. “Anyhow he’s not a Founderless Student-Unionist. Ira’s okay, when all’s said and done!”

“Like you, hah?”

“When you come right down to it! What the heck anyhow!”

“Goodbye, Georgie,” Max interrupted, and I realized that the cell was relocked, with only him and Leonid inside. “Founder help you, you should pass all now and don’t fail anything.”

I pressed the hand that fetched my purse and stick to me, urged him to remember that Failure and Passage were inseparable and equally unreal, and exhorted him to choose between the Shaft and freedom without considering the purity of his motives. Leonid too, his quick wrath gone, I shook warm hands with, and repeated my advice to him.

“All confuse,” he sighed. “But I ask Dr. Spielman. Good luck you, Goat-Boy!”

Stoker acted surprised. “Did you think you were going somewhere, George?”

I smiled. “I’m going to visit your brother Lucky, among other things, to show him how to pass. Will you drive me to the Light House?”

Stoker threw his head back to hoot as in term past, but his laugh, owing perhaps to the iron acoustics, rang shrill. And he strode off, Greene trudging after, without attempting to rejail me. I wished Max and Leonid final peace of mind, and requested of them also that they do what they could to curb Croaker’s appetites, either by instruction or by directly intercepting his food. For I saw the error of my flunking the “Eierkopf” in him and the “Croaker” in Eierkopf—as if the seamless University knew aught of such distinctions!—and therefore I would that he embrace and affirm what I’d bade him suppress, if he could be taught to.

“Yes, well,” Max said dryly. “I think of something. I got a whole day.”

“Want me to stick him in Solitary on bread and water?” Stoker had come part-way back after all, smirking, to hear me. I waved bye-bye to my cellmates and walked past him towards Peter Greene, who waited in the open gate at the end of the aisle.

“That’s not a bad idea,” I said over my shoulder. “But
you
shouldn’t do it.” In fact, I added lightly when he overtook me, he should rather try to thwart my plans for Croaker than further them, just as he should refuse the embrace which I hoped the Chancellor would soon proffer him.

“You don’t need a pardon,” Stoker said. “You need a strait-jacket, like Heddy Sear’s!”

I smiled. “You shouldn’t even drive me to the Light House, actually. Pete can do it. Anyhow, your brother will come to
you
, if he takes my advice.”

Greene allowed as how he’d count it an honor to chauffeur me, I’d so eased his mind; but he begged leave to seek out Anastasia first and apologize for having confused her with her flunkèd twin. As for Georgina—

“Bugger Georgina!” Stoker said impatiently.

Greene drew a pill from his jeans, swallowed it with dignity, and replied that he was happy he’d not sunk to such unnatural practices, nor for that matter succumbed in any other wise to the carnal blandishments of O.B.G.’s naughty daughter, since he knew it to be written somewhere in
the Old or New Syllabus that whites and blacks belonged in different classes. Did we suppose he could look his Sally Ann straight in the eye, reconciliationwise, or salute the College pennant at the next Junior Enochist cookout, if his conscience weren’t clean as a hound’s tooth? Sure, he’d raised his share of heck, as what fellow hadn’t, but—

Stoker fired a bullet into the air (we were crossing now the twilit exercise-yard) and promised to put another between Greene’s eyes should he not at once close his mouth and vanish. He then reminded me—as Greene sprinted zigzag toward the main gate—that he himself was neither blind like Gynander nor half-blind and half-witted like my former cellmates; he saw quite clearly what my game was and had no mind to play it.

I wiped my stick-mirror clean with the sleeve of my detention-coat and pretended to hide a smile. “You mean my playing Dean o’ Flunks with you back in March? I didn’t expect that old trick to work
once
, much less twice.” I took him to mean that I was advising him not to chauffeur me to Great Mall in order to tempt him, Dean-o’-Flunks-like, to
do
it, since to follow my counsel would pass him, presumably, and I knew he wished to flunk. No such idea had in fact occurred to me; but once he suggested it I decided to pretend I’d done the like (that is, the opposite) in my earlier “Tutorship”—as truly I had, but by no means a-purpose.

Guards opened the gate for us, and I prickled with joy to step outside the walls, for the first time in I knew not yet how long. Greene’s motorcycle roared from a row of parked ones and up the road—in what seemed to me the wrong direction, though I couldn’t read the roadsign in the dim light.

Stoker squinted. “You’re telling me you tricked me before so I’ll think you didn’t,” he said carefully. “But the joke’s on you.”

“Oh?”

“I knew all along that Pass and Fail aren’t opposites—didn’t I tell you Passage is Failure?—but I also knew you knew I’d try to trick you into flunking. So I told you they were the same so you’d believe I thought they were different and come to think so yourself. Why else do you think I pretended to take your advice?”

“I know why you took it,” I replied, and grinned, hoping to confuse him with inversions-of-inversions long enough to work out the right ones for myself. “What
you
don’t know, when I tell you
Failure is Passage
, is whether I want you to believe it is because it isn’t or isn’t because it is.”

Stoker grinned also—not easily, it seemed to me—and added as though carelessly: “—or is because it is, eh? Or isn’t because it isn’t …”

I perspired, and he exploited his advantage at once. “Don’t forget, boy: whichever you believe, you may believe because I tricked you into it.”

Grimly I retorted: “And if you did, the joke may be on you.” But it was not a confident
riposte
, and I could only hope he’d think its lameness deliberately feigned.

“Always assuming I don’t
want
the joke to be on me,” he mocked. I’d have lost my hold entirely at this point had it not swept suddenly, bracingly through me, like the frigid breeze we stood in, that if
Failure
and
Passage
was in truth a false distinction, as I’d come to believe, then it made no difference whether that belief was true or false, as either way it was neither. How hopelessly innocent I’d used to be! Instead of trying to outwit Stoker, therefore—by replying “Exactly,” for example—I resolved to outwit him by
not
trying to. I paused beside the first parked motorcycle and said without expression or emotion: “Take me to Great Mall.”

He hesitated for the briefest moment—during which, I imagined, a herd of pluses and minuses locked horns—then he mounted the cycle, started the engine … and surprised me after all by moving off, not only impassively but without a word! In a cold sweat of doubt I sprang on behind him, and desperately bet everything on candor.

“You’ve got me so mixed up I’m sweating!” I called as we throttled away. He said nothing. But a few seconds later I smelled another sweat besides my own.

The air was freezing, the campus brown and bare; I shivered for want of fleece. I’d thought it dusk, but a pale day dawned as we raced along: a winter’s morning, then, and Max had thirty-six hours of life unless he defected. Had I been three seasons in Main Detention, or three-years-and-three? An hour we rode, without a word, through fallow research-arable and shuttered residential quads. Few people were about. Preoccupied with wondering whether I was headed for Great Mall or being taken deliberately out of my way, I gave no thought to any order of business until a familiar scene surprised me: under a great bare elm sat The Living Sakhyan, oblivious to the weather, looking for all the campus as though He’d not moved since the day of my fiasco. And a few trees on, a black-furred man upon a bench alternately cowered and shook his thin fist at a gang of male students, who pressed about him in sheepfleece coats and belabored him with placards stuck on sticks.