John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

Angrily I shouted at the men in yellow to help me; as well apply to the rocks of the shore! I sprang onto Croaker's back, tried to throttle him, pounded at his head. The girl's eyes closed; distinctly I saw tears in their corners, for my face was as near now as Croaker's, and I hove willy-nilly with his heaving. Even so, when she bit my right arm (thinking I'm sure to bite Croaker's) I couldn't judge whether it was protest, pain, or passion in her teeth. In a trice the rape was done: the brute fell spent atop her and we three lay in a stilled heap. Without opening her eyes, the girl said, "He'll get up now if you tell him. But stay on his back."

I did as bid, amazed, only climbing to a steadier perch on his shoulders as, sure enough, Croaker came off her and squatted torpid, blinking. The girl got up with a shudder and brushed the sand from her shift. Clearly she was frightened no longer, only shocked; she drew her hair back from her eyes and began to fasten it with pins. I rubbed the bite on my wrist.

"Sorry I couldn't stop him, ma'am."

She shook her head. "You couldn't help it." And speaking sadly around the hairpins which she took one by one from between her lips, she explained that the brute called Croaker was a more or less uneducated student from one of the newly established colleges in dark Frumentius, visiting New Tammany under an official exchange program: as such he was immune to arrest, however contrary to West Campus law the customs of his native college or his personal behavior; the most his embarrassed hosts could do (not wanting for diplomatic reasons to offend the Frumentians by asking for his recall) was try to channel and appease his appetites. The task had turned out to be not difficult after all: the roommate assigned to him, happening to be paralytic, had one day tried riding pick-a-back to class on his unruly fellow, and discovered that with someone thus mounted on his shoulders Croaker was almost entirely governable. Things had gone well enough for some terms thereafter; indeed, the two had come quite to depend on each other — Croaker on his roommate for guidance and instruction, the roommate on Croaker for transport and menial services — until just a day or two since, when a third party had persuaded each to try to do without the other. It may have been that the interloper's motives were sincere (though the girl seemed not convinced of it); in any case the outcome was unfortunate. The roommate, Dr. Eierkopf — no need to say I started at her mention of this name! — languished in his quarters, afflicted with migraine and unable to attend his simplest needs, while Croaker, after assaulting two co-eds, a campus policeman, and a prize poodle belonging to the Chancellor's aunt, and eating raw three gibbons from the Department of Psychology, had disappeared into the forest, where it was feared he might wreak further outrage on undergraduates, among whom the woods were a popular trysting-place, or be shot in self-defense by some Forestry Ranger, to the Administration's embarrassment.

As she spoke of these things (more briefly and brokenly than I do here), the girl actually patted Croaker's head, evoking from him a guttural kind of purr. "Look, he's tame as can be with you on his back. I think he mistook you for his master when he noticed your limp. Poor thing, they mustn't hurt him, he doesn't know he's doing wrong."

I observed a ring upon one finger of her patting-hand and strove to recall what I had read of human marriage.

"Beg pardon, ma'am," I asked: "Is Croaker your husband?"

She put the same hand to her mouth and laughed — strange in one so roundly raped — then from her merry eyes more tears came, though she smiled still. "What an idea! My husband is Maurice Stoker."

The name conveyed nothing to me — remarking which fact, she looked at me curiously, seeming to see for the first time my wrapper and beard. She was more beautiful by far than Chickie; just the image, in fact, of those sweet distressed co-eds in the Tales, the illustrations whereof had formed my notions of human beauty. My heart stirred. To her inquiry, was I not an exchange student myself, from some foreign college, I began to reply that I was George, Grand Tutor to the Western Campus, formerly known as Billy Bocksfuss the Goat-Boy — but I remembered as I spoke that she was the agent of my enemies, and my voice grew stern.

"You know who I am without my telling you, Siren! You thought you could drown me like G. Herrold, so I'd never reach New Tammany — "

"Your poor friend!" she broke in. "Why did he wade out so far?" She reached out to touch me, but I snatched back my arm. "Oh dear, you're bleeding!"

Indeed, her teeth had broken the skin. "It's all right," I told her.

"It's not, either. Let me put something on it. I'm a nurse."

My wrist was bleeding more than I'd thought. Without ado the girl tore a strip from the hem of her shift — which was anyhow ruined from Croaker's assault — and having dipped it in the cold stream, commenced to wrap an expert bandage.

"I'm so sorry about this," she said. "Even when I hate what's happening, like a while ago — I have to bite!" She turned her dark eyes seriously up to me. "Do you think that's immoral? It worries me sometimes."

I answered frankly that I didn't know what to think — about the love-bite, the monstrous equivocal rape, her behavior on the bridge, G. Herrold's drowning, or any other of the evening's surprises — not least among which was her present calm. Why did she care about my bleeding arm, since she'd been sent to drown me? Why had she invited Croaker so, seeing she'd not relished the consequences: pled with me to save her, wept at his attack, and yet clasped to him all the brutal while? Whatever would her husband say (for I could not suppose such behavior was typical in marriage)? And finally, how on campus could such a splendid fair student lady girl lend herself to the forces of darkness, and turn her Founder-given charms to the end of flunking me, who meant to pass all studentdom? For never (here I waxed eloquent as I could in my ignorance of the forms of human compliment), never had such beauty been, not even in the goat-barn's fairest: Hedda of the Speckled Teats could boast no such limpidity of eye, such sharpness of tooth; my own Commencèd dam Mary Appenzeller, for all her miracle of milk, must yield in point of beauty to the rose-nippled darlings bared upon the bridge, whereof the sweet issue (all the preciouser, I daresaid, for its want of abundance) must be yogurts and cheeses and fudge of a heartbreaking fineness. Let that of muscle Lady Creamhair had been stronger, and Chickie of odor — longer-fleeced too the latter's lap and limbs — such virtues paled before the black-curled marvel which supply had beckoned, nay commanded, from over the torrent, so printing its image upon my soul that I saw it yet — in the pupils of her eyes, in the craters of the moon, in the dark-cornered flickers of the fire — and heard it calling to me, as it were, like some nightbird from its nest.

"What a strange way of talking you have!" she said. "I can't even follow you!" Yet she seemed not displeased. "There, that should do it." She gave a pat to the finished bandage. "What about your other friend, now? If you take Croaker up where it's shallower he could bring you both over. My husband will be along shortly — he's in charge of the search-party. We can give you a lift to wherever you were going."

She had by this time so won my trust that I attributed to Max all my former suspicions. I told her straight out who I was (she caught her breath at the mention of Max's name, then explained that of course she had heard of him, and even recalled being taken by her Uncle Ira to the goat-farm as a child, to see "the little boy who thought he was a goat"), but I judged it wiser to say nothing for the present about Grand-Tutorship or WESCAC's AIM. My intention, I declared, was to matriculate in New Tammany College as soon as I could, and I thanked her for her inadvertent aid in getting me over the river. As for Max's crossing by the same means, however, I doubted his willingness to, inasmuch as he thought her a flunkèd woman bent on luring me, if not to my death, at least to a breach of my virtue. Why else had she so exposed herself on the bridge? What did she think had led G. Herrold over his head, if not those wonders I had just done praising?