John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Our progress, however, with Tommy's Tommy's Tom in tow, proved poor. I was obliged at length to hogtie him — revolting term — with the tether and truss him behind me athwart the fender, much as I sympathized with his fright. By this arrangement, though his bleats would have moved to pity Ira Hector himself, we tripled our speed; once past the Gorge and crossroads, moreover, Anastasia displayed a skill at short-cuts equal to her husband's, and a truly Stokerish capacity for the speed that had so alarmed her as his passenger. The sun hung still a fair half-hour from the horizon when we hove in sight of Founder's Hill.

Set free but for a leash wrapped thrice about my wrist, Triple-T opened us a walkway through the crowd. On every slope they'd gathered through the day — students, professors, administrators, trustees, groundskeepers, clerks, all wearing holiday best. Despite the gravity of the occasion (Shafting had only recently been made public again — by Rexfordian liberals, interestingly enough, who hoped thereby to shock the student body into abolishing capital punishment) there was excitement in the air, even a certain festivity. As the execution happened to coincide with other ceremonies and observances traditionally scheduled for that day of week and time of year, Founder's Hill had been a busy place since morning. A kind of intermission seemed now in progress: martial music could be heard from loudspeakers, and strolling vendors offered food, drink, pennants, and large white flowers to the crowd. Newspaper extras were being hawked around; the one I fed to T.T.T. bore headlines about Bray's promised wonders, the full restoration of WESCAC's strength under Dr. Eierkopf's supervision from the Powerhouse Control Room, the apparent disappearance of Classmate X, the expected resumption of the Boundary Dispute on last term's terms. On all the front pages were photographs of Lucius Rexford embracing his wife in the Chancellory sidecar and winking, so it seemed, at the camera, as if to indicate that all was in hand at home as well as abroad. Indeed, despite the seriousness of the varsity situation and the great disruptions of normalcy that still prevailed in New Tammany, the captions were optimistic: LUCKY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN; "LIGHT LIGHTS," LAUGHS LUCKY. Roving photojournalism-majors prowled with cameras and Telerama-packs, interviewing the student-in-the-path and campus celebrities on such topics as capital punishment, Grand-Tutorial impostors, and what they called the "new look" of the Rexford administration. Me too they would approach for a statement, and Anastasia, when we left the motorcycle and started up: they trotted about, asking what I thought of Bray's mid-day "miracles" on the Hilltop, and whether I intended to "top his performance" or "have it out" with him. But thanks to the plunging horns and knife-edged hooves of Tommy's Tommy's Tom, they kept their distance, as did hecklers, applauders, and the hosts of the indifferent, through whose ranks we made our way.

Towards the summit, where the rocky hill flattened into a kind of park around the Shaft, the crowd was thinner; Stoker's guards had erected a great circle of barriers, several hundred meters across, past which none but high officials and their guests were permitted. Stoker himself stalked the far perimeter all ascowl, threatening would-be gate-crashers with his billy and passing upon credentials: some he admitted whose ID-cards showed them to be nobodies; others he refused whose eminence entitled them to pass. At the consequent uproar he laughed — a harsh echo of his old hilarity. Anastasia was admitted at once by the guard at our barrier, who recognized her with a lick of his lips, and at her coax he reholstered his pistol instead of shooting Triple-T. Espying us from several meters off, Stoker shouted an obscenity and ordered the guard to refuse me admittance. People in the dignitaries' stands near the Shaft turned to look.

"Go to him now," I bade My Ladyship. I might have added certain further directions, thanking her too for having fetched me where I had to go; but she agreed this time so readily, and with so knowing a smile, I said no more. Triple-T, once out of the crowd, browsed placidly; I handed his leash to Anastasia and stepped past the guard.

"Achtung, Stinkkäfer!" he cried. He referred of course to the goat-dip on me, mighty indeed the perfume whereof; but his epithet was so exactly inapposite, I laughed aloud. He swung his billy; I parried with my stick and hoofed him a clean one in the balls. Before he could let go of himself to shoot, a pair of white helmets came over from the dignitaries' stand. One intervened in the names of the Chancellor and Harold Bray, both of whom he declared had authorized my admission — murmurs went through the near bystanders at this news, and the fallen guard put by his pistol with a curse.

"You call that Grand-Tutoring?" Stoker shouted. He had started for My Ladyship, but paused when T.'s T.'s Tom bucked at him. Anastasia too seemed shocked by my deed. "Violence!" Stoker appealed to the crowd. "No respect for law and order!" People stirred; even White-helmet, though he'd come between us in my behalf, bent to assist his sooted comrade and grumbled that the man had after all been simply doing his duty.

"Tomorrow the Revised New Syllabus," I said to My Ladyship. "Today the stick."

The other white helmet now escorted to me Hedwig Sear — at her request, it turned out, who had observed from the viewing-stand my entry. She was gowned in black, her face veiled; Anastasia hurried to her, and they wept together as Three-T grazed. The shock of Croaker's assault, it seemed, had cleared Hedwig's mind; she spoke lucidly and quietly, impeded only by her grief at the critical condition of her husband. Dr. Sear lay in the Infirmary, she told me, at the point of death. Her one wish was to join him, but she'd come to Founder's Hill at his request in order to honor Max and give me a message. The circumstances of her attack she recounted with extraordinary calm — despite the fact that Croaker, with Dr. Eierkopf aboard, was present in the visitors' stand. She could even smile, mournfully enough, at the irony of her rape: that when she'd tried to provoke him to it once before, in the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, he had rejected her in favor of an automatic soft-drink dispenser. There had followed her return to childishness, of which I'd heard, and when Croaker's path and hers had crossed again, following their separate releases in yesterday's amnesty, she had fled him with the fright of a five-year-old girl.

"Which is just what turned him on," she said ruefully. "He couldn't help it; he was just being Croaker. But poor Kennard — " She chuckled and wept. "In the old days he'd have taken pictures, and I'd have been showing Croaker naughty tricks. But Kennard's changed, too, since last spring — the different things you've told him, and his cancer and all…" She blew her nose. Perhaps it was no more than a metastasis of the cancer to his brain, she said; in any case, he'd been escorting her from the Asylum to Great Mall (so he told her afterwards) to get a taxi to the Honeymoon Lodge Motel, not this time to mount her in Position One as the consummate perversion, but to come to her in simple love, in hope (her voice grew awed even now at the notion; she doubted I would believe her) that he could leave a child behind him upon his death! The rest I had witnessed from my noose: how, seeing her attacked, Dr. Sear had leaped — spontaneously, instantly, one could only say heroically — to her defense, and been felled by Croaker with a backhand smite. The blow had struck his bandaged tumor; though entirely blind now and basically, mercifully unconscious, he still had moments of lucidity, during which, in the night just past, she'd told him of her own astonishing recovery, begged his forgiveness for her part in their sorry past, professed her devotion to him, and announced her intention to undergo surgical curettage, against the unlikely chance that Croaker had accomplished what her husband had aspired to.