John Barth - Giles Goat-Boy

"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 flunkèd 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 "All righty then, I'm out of date, but I believe in the Founder Almighty and New Tammany College — whether or not!"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," 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 GOAT 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 DON'T PLAY WITH FIRE; on the other, KEEP OUR FORESTS GREENE. 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 suggestion 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 colorblind 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…"