Fool on the Hill

by Matt Ruff

  “What . . .”

  “Good morning!” Lion-Heart greeted the Rhode Island Decadents in a strong, clear voice. The cyclists stopped circling, and all eyes turned to Bohemians. They were strung out across the street in a line, all on foot now with the exception of Ragnarok, who revved the throttle of his motorcycle patiently.

  Lion-Heart continued: “Any of you who don’t belong in this town should feel free to leave. Right now.”

  The Decadents looked at him in disbelief. Grumpy searched for an ethnic slur to use on him but couldn’t choose among the many possibilities. He finally came out with: “What the fuck did you say, asshole?”

  “GOOD MORNING!” Lion-Heart repeated, louder and slower this time, pronouncing each word carefully. Preacher and Z.Z. Top echoed his words in sign language for the benefit of the hearing impaired. “YOU CAN ALL GO NOW.”

  “Who the fuck are you?” In a burst of rage, Grumpy revved his cycle and accelerated down the street toward the Bohemians, swinging a chain.

  “Fuji,” Lion-Heart said calmly. Fujiko, who had taken a collapsible Lucite quarterstaff from her saddlebags and assembled it, stepped forward into the path of the biker. The Decadent came right at her, realizing too late that her reach was longer than his.

  The riderless motorcycle continued down Main Street almost fifty feet before crashing into a mailbox and stalling.

  “Who’s next?” Fujiko asked. She stood over the fallen Grumpy, who was trying to rub the bump on his head and the bump on his ass at the same time.

  “Holy goanna jism,” Sleazy whispered. “She took him down.”

  Both bear cubs threw themselves at the cage door just then. The padlocks gave completely, and Sleazy and Bashful were hurled to the ground.

  “Holy fuck!” Sleazy yelled. He rolled out of the way just in time to avoid being squashed by an escaping cub.

  Chaos resumed; the Bohemians broke formation and moved in, as did the three remaining cyclists. Sleazy and Bashful scrambled to get to their own bikes, while both Doc and the bear cubs seemed momentarily at a loss for what to do. The two unarmed hunters ran for the safety of the pickup truck, dragging Fred behind them.

  The mad tea party hit full stride:

  Two more cyclists charged Fujiko. One of them changed his mind at the last moment and swerved away; the other kept coming, hefting a long crowbar, planning to run Fujiko down. Lion-Heart came at him from the side, hauling him off his bike and body-slamming him before he knew what had hit him;

  Z.Z. Top, ignoring the melee around him, headed off to make the acquaintance of the bear cubs. He was halfway there when a biker turned and bore down on him. Almost casually, the Top picked up a chain that one of the other Decadents had dropped and threw it into the spokes of the biker’s front wheel, catapulting him head over heels onto the asphalt;

  Bashful ran for his cycle and came face to face with Myoko. Like all Grey Ladies she had an inner glow that made her beautiful, and in the roselight of early morning she looked angelic enough for Bashful to momentarily forget that they were on opposite sides. “Hello,” he breathed, fighting a blush. “Hello,” Myoko replied sweetly, and, like the angel in the Bible who wrestled with Jacob, she touched the hollow of his thigh and dislocated his left leg;

  With a Confederate yell another biker tried his luck against Fujiko, and lost;

  Constable Cyrus, revived at last from his faint, staggered onto the porch of the Canterbury Café and looked in disbelief at what was happening in his peaceful little town. The one sight that remained clearest in his mind years later was that of Z.Z. Top shambling up to the cubs with a big smile on his face. “Hello, bears,” he heard the Top say, and then the Top began to pet them;

  Sleazy, mounted and moving at a fair clip, was jumped simultaneously by Lion-Heart, Fujiko, and Preacher. The cycle and sidecar spun out of control and flipped over, spilling Fred’s trunk into the street. Mercifully, the trunk remained closed;

  The three hunters began to cheer from the cab of the pickup. At the same time, a number of Auk residents, some still dressed in their nightclothes, began drifting into the area to see what was going on. In the distance, the sound of approaching sirens could be heard;

  Finally, in desperation, Duke Doc of the Rhode Island Decadents—the only member of the gang still up and about—leapt to his cycle, planning to get the hell out. He raised his switchblade and waved it about as a warning to anyone who might try to stop him, but the Bohemians had cleared off the street.

  All except Ragnarok, who still sat patiently astride his own bike at the end of the block.

  “You get out of my way, now,” Doc said, a tremor in his voice. Ragnarok cooly removed his sunglasses, wiped them with a black handkerchief, and put them back on. Then he reached down to a small tubular rack on the side of his bike and took out a carved black rod. It looked like a scepter or a short cane, but served equally well as a mace.

  “Come and get me, partner,” Ragnarok said evenly.

  Doc thought it over for a minute. The growing noise of sirens decided him.

  “All right!” he snapped, laying one hand on the bike throttle and brandishing the switch with the other. “All right, here it comes for you, then!”

  They gunned their engines at the same time, flying down the street toward one another. As the gap closed, Doc began to smile, because he’d done this sort of thing before—in fact, he’d taken out the Second Lieutenant of the Firedrakes in just such a contest, in the days when the Decadents were still holding their own. Long before he reached him, he visualized in his mind how the knife would cut into Ragnarok’s coat and beneath it, sending him twisting and screaming off his cycle. Doc smiled with the satisfaction of it before it ever happened.

  He was still smiling when Ragnarok swung the mace up gracefully, catching him on the wrist and knocking the knife out and away. As the bikes passed parallel to each other, the Bohemian Minister of Defense kicked out with one black boot and struck Doc in the thigh, knocking him off balance.

  The Duke of the Rhode Island Decadents toppled off his motorcycle and bounced once, twice, three times. His bike slid, struck sparks against the ground, and came to rest beneath a NO PARKING sign.

  “Jesus H. Christ on a Yugoslavian water buffalo,” Constable Cyrus said, summing things up.

  Ragnarok slid his mace back into its holder as the first State Police car came into view. The trooper car was tooling along at a fair pace, and the screech of its brakes was very loud as it swerved to avoid a white Buick sedan that cut onto Main Street off a side road. A bumper sticker on the Buick’s front fender read: “WE ARE METHODISTS AND DAMN PROUD OF IT.”

  “What now?” Perry Bailey moaned, huddling by the Badewannes’ checker set.

  The sedan stopped short in front of the Café; three fishing rods fell off a rack on the back and clattered in the street.

  “It’s the damnedest thing!” the driver shouted at the Constable, squirming uncomfortably in his seat. “The damnedest goddamn thing!”

  “What is?” Constable Cyrus asked fearfully. But the answer was already in sight—a full-grown bear had appeared, coming from the same direction as the Buick, and was presently attacking the trooper car.

  “The den mother!” one of the hunters cried. Z.Z. Top moved hastily away from the cubs. The hunter tried to start the pickup to drive away, but the engine only wheezed and hitched.

  Constable Jed Cyrus looked over his shoulder at the clock in the Café. It was now 7:05. Half an hour ago he had been contentedly sipping his coffee.

  “Jesus Herbert,” he said, recapping his summary.

  “You OK, man?” someone asked. It was Preacher, walking up the steps of the porch.

  The Constable took one look at him, worked his jaw up and down a few times, and asked: “Who the hell are you people? Some kind of Lone Ranger outfit?”

  Preacher smiled innocently.

  “No sir,” he said. “We’re Bohemians.”

  A PEEK AT MR. SUNSHINE’S LIBRARY

  The
Library was, like Mr. Sunshine himself, a Greek Original. It stood on the top of a hill far taller than The Hill, a hill without rain, where the season was always summer and the time always just past noon on a Saturday, a good time for a bottle of retsina or perhaps some hemlock tea if you were in a more philosophical mood. A gentle breeze wafted the scent of laurel through the open windows of the Library, and from outside could be heard the lowing of cattle and the occasional chord from a distant lyre.

  Mr. Sunshine sat in the Library’s Composing Room, at his Writing Desk, laboring over his latest Manuscript, a Story tentatively entitled “Absolute Chaos in Chicago.” Despite the name, Mr. Sunshine’s Writing Desk was not at all similar to an ordinary writing desk; likewise, the Manuscript was unlike any manuscript that Stephen George had ever produced. Stephen George told lies for a living, but all of Mr. Sunshine’s fictions were true, and though he sometimes checked his spelling, his Stories were not Written on paper. The finished Volumes of his work were not bound like ordinary volumes; and the Books in the Library were not catalogued or shelved like ordinary books. It was all very abstract, but not really.

  If you could take a peek at Mr. Sunshine at his Desk, and if your mind was such that you could comprehend his work, you would understand that “Composing” really meant “Meddling.” For a fictitious fiction story, the kind of lie that Stephen George told, requires the hard labor of its author to be completed; but a true fiction, such as those that Mr. Sunshine dealt in, will, like a watch already wound, tick along quite nicely by itself without any further help. Mr. Sunshine’s Storytelling, to extend the metaphor, consisted of occasionally—or more than occasionally—moving the hands of the watch, and seeing what interesting forms of mayhem this resulted in.

  Because his Stories went on without him, he could switch from one work in progress to another without falling behind in either of them. Those works he tired of for the time being he gave to the Monkeys.

  The Monkeys, all blind, deaf, and mute, yet dissimilar to any ordinary handicapped monkeys, were arrayed around Mr. Sunshine’s Writing Desk in vast (but not infinite) ranks. Each Monkey sat at a Typewriter, which was of course unlike any ordinary typewriter, and Meddled. Because they had not the slightest clue what was going on, however, the Meddling of the Monkeys was entirely random and generally meaningless. That was all right; the Stories went on regardless, and once in a while they did hit on something. A Monkey puttering over “The Life of Catherine the Great” had chanced to insert a bit about a horse that had put Mr. Sunshine in stitches for days, though Catherine herself probably did not find it nearly so funny.

  The Monkeys labored; the afternoon breeze wafted. Mr. Sunshine paused to check a word in his Dictionary, and then, suddenly remembering something, he set “Absolute Chaos in Chicago” aside for a moment. He got up from his Desk and strode out among the Monkeys, checking working Titles, searching for one in particular. In between “World War Three: The Prologue” and “The Life of Anita Bryant” he found it: “Fool on The Hill,” an odd piece he had started more than a century ago and whose Plot was finally starting to cook. There had been major Meddling already and more yet to be done—after which he might just go down and take a ringside seat to watch the climax—but for now, only a few touches were needed.

  First things first. “Taking the Monkey’s place at the Typewriter, Mr. Sunshine Wrote:

  A fine cottage awaits Her arrival; champagne & feta in fridge.

  And then:

  George bumps into Aurora early one morning. Wouldn’t they make a much nicer couple than Aurora and Brian?

  Satisfied, he let the Monkey take over again and returned to his Desk. Concentrating once more on Chicago, Mr. Sunshine took his Dictionary and flipped toward the back.

  “Let’s see now . . . T-R-I-S-K- . . .”

  AT HEAVEN’S GATE

  I.

  The first to return to Cornell, some as early as mid-August, are the Orientation Counselors and Residence Advisors, those whose job it is to make the army of newcomers feel at home and see them safely through their first year. Then on August twenty-third the dorms open, and the Freshmen begin to arrive, wide-eyed and unsuspecting. They have one free week in which to sample the pleasures of Ithaca—swimming in the gorges, hiking the countryside, drinking in the Collegetown bars if their phony I. D. is good enough, drinking in the dorms if it isn’t—and once again the brick and cinderblock of West Campus echo with the pitter-patter of little Nike-clad feet. On North Campus there is a smaller-scale parody of this, most of the noise coming from Mary Donlon and Clara Dickson Halls (and, of course, Risley, the Bohemian dorm).

  That August twenty-third, and the twenty-fourth and-fifth also, it rained hard most of the day, as if Ithaca were making a special effort to acquaint the Freshmen with its climate. During those three days, when the showers were interspersed with periods of heavy mist, Stephen George went for long walks in the town proper as well as on the campus. He sorted through the faces he passed, searching for old friends, making a few new ones. He flew his kite often, regardless of the weather, and only once did the wind fail him. That time, the early afternoon of the twenty-third, he gave up no more than ten minutes before a monster thunderstorm swept through the area. Two Ithaca men who had chosen the wrong day to go sailing were struck by lightning and killed on Cayuga Lake, but George was safely indoors, sipping tea in the Temple of Zeus in Goldwin-Smith Hall.

  On the morning of the twenty-fourth he wandered down to The Ithaca Commons at the foot of The Hill and stopped for breakfast at McDonald’s. While he sat in meditation over three pancakes in a beige styrofoam tray, a grizzled old man with an Eddie Bauer T-shirt came into the restaurant. The old man was obviously a McDonald’s regular whose name, it quickly became apparent, was Wax. The women behind the counter nearly fell over themselves greeting him and presenting, with much fanfare, “Wax’s morning coffee.” George craned his neck to see if the coffee were black or with cream (for as a writer, such minor details held great significance for him). Wax accepted the styrofoam cup, bowed deeply, and found a seat alongside a chubby woman who looked to be in her seventies.

  “Howdy,” he said to the woman, who was a librarian in decline. “My name’s Wax. Know why they call me that? ‘Cause I’m so slick . . .”

  Two minutes and he had her giggling like a schoolgirl. Three minutes and they were sharing hotcakes and sausage.

  True love, George thought, and caught sight of a familiar face two booths down from where Wax was putting on his moves. “Stay here,” he told his pancakes, and went over to say hello.

  “Hey, lady.” Aurora Smith looked up and smiled as George slid into the booth.

  “Hi, George,” Aurora returned the greeting. They had met two years earlier on the Arts Quad, George literally knocking Aurora off her feet as he moved to avoid a Bohemian on a runaway mare, and become good friends. They got along well, although George had never been completely comfortable with Aurora’s boyfriend. “How was summer? Write any more stories for strangers?”

  “One,” George admitted. “I whomped something up for my landlord’s daughter, of all people. Short novella. The editor of a fiction magazine over in Vermont wants me to make a serial out of it. Oh, and then there’s this.”

  “What is it?” Aurora asked, as George took a folded envelope out of his pocket.

  “Claims to be from a professor of Eugenics at the University of Iowa. She liked my first novel and wants to breed me with some of the women from the Writers’ Workshop there.”

  Aurora laughed, louder than she might have in the presence of her boyfriend. “Are you going to take her up on it?”

  “Nah.” George shook his head. “I’m too much of a wimp. No stamina. U. of Iowa has a big Writers’ Workshop. Maybe if I had Mormon blood . . . Anyway, how about you? I low was your summer?”

  “Oh, you know . . .” she trailed off, shrugging. It was a common gesture with her; George got it almost every time he asked her something even remotely personal. “Life is good. I’
m happy.”

  “Yeah?” George said

  “Yes, really . . . hey, I finally read one of your books!” She brightened. “The Knight of the White Roses. I found a copy of it in a Milwaukee bookstore when we drove up there in July.”

  “What’d you think of it?”

  “I loved it,” she told him honestly. “How did you ever come up with the idea for th—”

  “What are we all talking about?” said Brian Garroway, appearing suddenly. The McDonald’s men’s room was located in the darkest reaches of the building, and Brian, so to speak, had been on safari.

  “My action-packed literary career,” George replied, as Brian sat down beside Aurora and put an arm around her. “Aurora was just telling me about how she read one of my books.”

  “The Knight of the White Roses?"

  “That’s the one. You read it, Brian?”

  “I skimmed it.”

  “And what’d you think?”

  “You have a fair writing style,” Brian granted him. “It’s good in an unpolished sort of way. Other than that I thought your entire premise was far-fetched—a New Wave Camelot?—and there was way too much profanity. The whole thing struck me as being too romantic, too, by the way.”

  George was impressed. “All that from just a skimming? You missed your calling, Brian. You should have been an English major.” He looked at Aurora. “Did you think it was overly romantic?”

  “Well . . .” Aurora said. She shrugged automatically, inadvertently throwing off Brian’s arm. “Not really. It was all supposed to be a little exaggerated like that, right?”

  She shrugged again, then went back to picking at her hash browns. Brian laid a hand lightly on the back of her neck. A moment later he said:

  “You about ready to go? I’m supposed to be up at Dickson pretty soon to talk to Michael Krist.”