Antrim, Donald - Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

“Hi, guys,” followed by handshakes all around:

“Pete.”

“Tom.”

“Teach, how’re you doing?”

“Okay, Bill. You?”

“Fair enough.”

“Hello, Jerry.”

“Mr. Scrivener, good to see you.”

“You too. How’s Rita?”

“Rita’s doing fine.”

“Say hi for me.”

“Will do.”

“Hi, Abe.”

“Almost clocked you there, Pete.” Abe offered me a strip of white sheeting. “Put this around your arm. It identifies you as a neutral party.”

I tied on the armband as Jerry explained the procedure: “Okay, first one of us throws his book, and the others try to get theirs close to that one, like in horseshoes. We want to saturate any area where a mine might be planted. We cover some territory, collect the books, and move on in a straight line. Slow and safe, no one gets hurt. Got it?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Yeah, sure.”

Abe, crouching among the scattered A — O pages of the OED, shoveling up a thick handful of unglued papers, said to Tom, “Tom, my man, this one’s shot.”

Tom lowered his pack, reached inside, and brought out a Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Mythology. He handed it to Abe and reached in again, this time bringing out a Roget’s Thesaurus, which he offered my way. “Pete?”

“I could use another brew,” Bill said.

These, as well, were in the backpack. I took the Roget’s Thesaurus from Tom, who dispensed a round of semicold ones. In unison we pulled back our pop tabs, a chorus of fizzing metallic clicks echoing like strange insects in the birdless forest silence. We raised our cans to our mouths and drank. The beer tasted wonderful to me, numbing my throat and warming my heart. Abe said, “Why don’t you give that thesaurus the heave-ho, Pete.”

“Me?”

“Show us your arm.”

“It’s not much of an arm, I’m afraid.”

“Send it over there, Pete,” suggested Bill, gesturing vaguely with his beer can.

Was this something I could reasonably do? Throw a book at potential oblivion? I know it had been my idea, I was responsible for all this. But I never actually believed, back at the Clam Castle town meeting, that anything like it would ever come to pass. It was one of those ideas designed to lead to a modified version of itself. Ideally we’d be hurling something like those miniature bowling balls found at certain lanes, the kind of ball you hold in your palm. These books were valuable. Maybe not the Roget’s. I generally warn the kids away from the thesaurus because I believe they become reliant on it, when they should be working to build their own vocabularies through memorization. The Roget’s Thesaurus could, in all fairness, go.

“Where?” I inquired.

“Wherever,” answered Bill, raising and spreading his arms in a grand gesture of encompassment, taking in the world. He was crocked. He crumpled his can in his meaty hand and dropped it to the forest floor, then went immediately for another in Tom’s backpack as Jerry, ever the diplomat, added, “We were headed south toward the gazebo. How about over by that big old oak, Pete.”

I wasn’t sure I could pitch a thesaurus, even an abridged version, which this was, all the way to the oak tree.

“Hold it like this,” said Abe. The tall, bearded tax consultant clasped his Crowell’s Handbook by the boards, fingers spread for good grip, palm over page fronts rather than the spine. “If you grip it by the spine it’ll come open and you’ll get a lot of drag.” Abe feinted back and raised his arm, cocking for the throw like a pro quarterback; he let fly and the volume spun upward without opening or fluttering, the literary equivalent of a perfect spiral. As if on cue, we all hunkered down, backs to the possible blast. But the Handbook of Classical Mythology landed without event in a patch of wildflowers twenty yards away.

My turn. Abe’s toss would be hard to beat. I faded back, set my feet, and let go with everything I had. The thesaurus flapped open, caught wind, and dropped like a shot bird. Ten yards.

“Nice try, Pete. You’ll get the hang of it.” Jerry smiled encouragement, pitched his book. The real estate developer threw sidearm, a modified discus-style spin toss using a full-revolution windup, complete with manly grunt at the instant of release, sending the great blue lexicon a surprisingly long way — short of Abe’s, but not by much — thumping dully into the weeds. Next up was Tom, also hurling sidearm, though minus Jerry’s grace. It was clear who’d been on the track squad. Still, Tom’s OED Supplement toss was respectable, particularly compared to Bill’s overhand Birds of Prey Illustrated “fastball pitch,” which rocketed wild and crashed into a clump of aloe plants. “Fuck,” Nixon said as Abe came up and made it look so very easy, lofting another of his beautiful play-action “long ball” heaves into the trees. Then it was my turn again, this time with a bound volume of a year’s worth of experimental sociology abstracts. The abstracts were incredibly heavy. I said, “Tom, may I?” and fished around in the backpack for something lighter and not so fat, coming up, after much testing of bulks and widths, with Biological Aspects of Mental Disorder. There were many books in Tom’s backpack, and one by one we delivered them all into the dirt and the grass, each time exclaiming things like “Looking good, looking good,” or “Too high, too high,” before ducking and bracing for the thud of an explosion. Between tosses Jerry filled me in on the direct-hit detonations back around the boathouse, the various types of trees and shrubs decimated, radii and depths of crater holes, pages flying like parade confetti. One blast, Jerry claimed — and this was verified by the others — one blast left a perfect, minute, cannonball aperture in the center of The Darwin Reader.

Now no explosion came. We tiptoed to our torn books, gathered them up, and threw again.

Later, at the gazebo, we reclined on cast-iron deck chairs and sipped the last of the beers. The chairs were straight and hard as church pews, arranged in a permanent circle, legs bolted into metal plates sunk into the wide gray floorboards. I sat facing Tom, with Jerry to my right and Bill and Abe to my left. An assortment of recently thrown books (the last no-hit salvo at the gazebo steps), and the backpack bearing more books and the beers, rested in the center of the circle, near our feet, within easy reach. The gazebo was an open, airy octagon, built of whitewashed wood and roofed in copper, and decked out in cornice-level gingerbread that threw intricate shadow patterns over the floor and our bodies. Past Tom’s head I could see untended lawn bordered by tall pines draped in crawlers and epiphytes that bloomed lavender and white. A cracked plaster birdbath was entirely overgrown, consumed by creeping vines. And bugs were everywhere, getting in our faces, hovering and landing on sticky metal surfaces of empty, set-aside beer cans.

“I do enjoy the way The Riverside Shakespeare rides the wind on a long toss,” sighed Tom.

“ The Riverside Shakespeare does seem to float,” agreed Abe, taking a swig from his beer. What kind of animal would Abe be? Something furbearing and immense and ferocious, obviously, yet with the potential for softness, and a warmhearted, friendly aspect: a walrus, a bear.

Bill said, “For hang time, give me The Poetry of Robert Frost any day.” No telling about this guy. Bill Nixon could be any number of species of diverse phyla. Today he wore a sagging, unhappy face. Slouching in his gazebo chair, clutching his nth beer, he looked fungal.

Jerry swatted at a bee — several were circling in the air above our heads. Tom said, “Hey, Jerry, don’t piss them off, okay?” and got up and placed his beer can on the floor a few feet away. He called out, “Here, bees. Here, bees.” Sure enough, the bees descended, buzzing and congregating on the can’s silver metal lip.