Lookaway, Lookaway

by Barnhardt, Wilton

  She would have a private word with Corinne, their chapter president.

  * * *

  Joey D’s many-times-removed cousin Ryan met them at the Sheep Research Center and hopped into the back of the van, directing them to a parking place near the animal pens. Ryan was a thickset country boy, dark gold frizzy hair stuffed under a farmer’s cap; he scratched continually at his goatee, smoothing the beard to a point. Ryan led Joey D, Skip, and Justin to a low-lying brick building with classrooms on the first floor, and animal pens in the basement.

  “Hold it,” Ryan said on the stairs, fairly certain any involvement with his cousin was trouble. “We’ll go in the stall, you can take your pictures, and then we got to go.”

  Skip said, “Yeah, we really appreciate it.”

  Justin tried to assure Ryan that they weren’t going to do anything weird with the sheep, just a photo.

  Ryan: “I don’t need or want to know what you’re doing—I can imagine.”

  Joey D: “Oh yeah, cuz? Just what is it you can imagine?”

  “Some frat boy shit. You pretending to screw the sheep or something for some dumb initiation.”

  Joey D was getting hot, but he couldn’t blow the arrangement this close to completion.

  “Heck,” Ryan went on, “I’d do the sheep before some of y’all’s sorority girls. Probably far fewer venereal diseases.”

  “Just let us see the sheep,” Joey D said, barely audible.

  Ryan used his key to open the basement door between the stairway and the sheep pens. There was a clean hallway with twelve sheep pens in a row against one wall. Third one down was Ryan’s pen; a clipboard chart was hung on a hook showing feedings and shearings. A removable cardstock label declared this was the pen of FURBALL.

  Ryan: “Now take your picture and then get gone. We’re already breaking a hundred rules being here.”

  Joey D now saw the difficulty of escaping with Furball. “Uh, could you give us some privacy?”

  Ryan stared at them. “You really gonna screw my sheep?”

  Skip Baylor cleared his throat. “It’s supposed to be an embarrassing photo. Like you said, a fraternity initiation stunt. You know, our mascot at Carolina is Rameses, a big, um, sheep.”

  Ryan mumbled, “Your mascot is a horned Dorset, this is a polled Dorset. Does that matter?”

  “Sheep’s a fucking sheep,” said Joey D. “No offense.”

  Ryan frowned, then turned and walked to the stairwell … before turning back. “But none of y’all are pledges. So who exactly is being initiated?”

  Joey D smiled. “Skip here. He was sick last year when he pledged so we don’t want anybody missing out on the sheep-photo fun.”

  Ryan frowned again. “Furball is my—and about five other people’s—senior project, Joseph. Nothing better happen to her or I can promise you a righteous shitstorm of biblical retribution. Can’t y’all just drink each other’s piss or spank each other in wet underwear or the usual stuff?”

  Skip and Justin hunkered down, waiting for the explosive Joey D response, but their Northern brother remained all smiles. “If you just give us ten minutes or so, Ryan. C’mon Skip, down with the pants…”

  Ryan crossed his arms. Skip, smiling weakly, began to undo his belt.

  “What?” Joey D asked his cousin. “You wanna see him in his underwear?”

  Ryan narrowed his eyes to a squint then left them to it. “I’ll be back in ten minutes,” he mumbled. “Try not to give my sheep genital herpes.”

  After Ryan was out of earshot, Skip whispered, “We’re never going to get her out of here—”

  “We’ll take her out that door. Grab her by the collar.” Joey D headed to the emergency exit, which promised loud fire alarms if opened.

  Justin pushed and Skip pulled on the collar, but Furball wasn’t budging.

  Joey D told Justin to run back to the parking lot and bring the van around to the emergency door; if he sees Ryan tell him, Joey said, “that you need some fresh air.”

  Skip had an idea. He got a handful of the green feed pellets from the pen’s trough and tried to lure Furball toward the emergency door. Furball happily ate what was held out to her. “It tickles,” Skip giggled, as Furball grazed from his palm. “I wish you could get a picture of this! Joey, look! She’s eating from my hand!”

  “Yeah, it’s an Animal Planet moment right there—look, I’m all teary.”

  Joey D’s cell phone rang; it was Ryan. “Y’all about done with your unnatural acts?”

  “Two more pictures, thanks!” Joey D sang out, while thrusting his middle finger at the phone.

  “I don’t wanna be washing y’all’s bodily fluids out of the wool tomorrow.”

  “Hey Ryan, fuck you, you know? I ask for a simple favor, cousin to cousin—”

  “Yeah, like that simple favor I asked for, that I come over to Chapel Hill for one little party? And you told me—what was it?—the girls would smell the barnyard on me.”

  “Hey, cuz, that’s true, isn’t it?” He hung up on Ryan.

  There was the honk of the Suburban from outside. Furball started bleating, barely allowing herself to be dragged, trotters skittering on the smooth industrial floor. They came to the emergency door with its dire red warnings. Joey with one hand banged the emergency exit panel and held Furball’s collar tight with the other. Whoop-whoop-whoop-whoop … Now that’s a really loud alarm, Skip thought.

  “All right,” Joey D cried out, wrestling with the back half of the animal, “you bag of sheepshit, you’re coming to a party in Chapel Hill, okay? That’s a good girl…”

  Justin jumped down from the driver’s seat to help, his mom’s van idling in position with its tailgate down, ready for loading. “I scraped the exhaust pipe,” he whined, rubbing the scratch with a licked finger. “I backed it up over the curb onto the sidewalk here—oh shit, you can really see this scrape. What is my mom gonna say?”

  Joey D screamed in profanities violent and volcanic that Justin and Skip should participate more helpfully in getting the sheep into the back of the van.

  Ryan arrived in time to see the emergency door ajar to the outside; he staggered back to the pen … no Furball. He ran through the emergency door in time to observe the van, tires spinning in the grass, pull away, divotting up mud, and speeding directly into a metal pole atop which was a purple martin birdhouse. The pole swayed and the birdhouse came loose and landed with a smash onto the windshield, shattering both objects … The van then backed up quickly, straight into the fenced outdoor daytime enclosure, putting out a taillight, before speeding away … but not back toward the highway but rather deeper into the meadow, bouncing out of sight with a spiraling-free hubcap catching a gleam from the streetlight before the van disappeared.

  Ryan squeezed his cell phone … then hesitated.

  He had let them in the building, he had let them in the sheep pens. He would surely get in trouble with the rest of them if he called the campus police. He called his cousin’s cell, but Joey D didn’t pick up so Ryan left a message:

  “Of course, I’m gonna beat your smug-Carolina-bastard face in. That goes without saying. My friends and I will be at your gayboy frat house in an hour and I want my sheep back.”

  * * *

  Jerilyn nervously tailed along behind Corinne, the president, hoping to speak to her alone. It was eight P.M. and they were due to arrive at the Zipperhaus around nine. Corinne was in high makeup, formfitting designer jeans and a floppy silken top with a plunging neckline that would have revealed all, had she bent forward. Corinne explained that this was the first full-on party of the year and it was a tradition the Sigma Kappa Nus would be in super-slut mode, flash a little bosom, laugh, flirt, and then get out “at maximum tease,” right as the boys were panting and desperate. “This is the time for you new girls to show your wares,” Corinne chirped. “If they want you, then we want you!”

  Some of the older sisters were chiding the pledges on looking like Library Science majors. Jerilyn figured she d
idn’t have one dress in her entire closet that was right for this sort of gathering. She settled for her tightest jeans—not so much tight in a designer way as they were outgrown from high school—and a midriff-baring top … But anyway, she had to talk to Corinne. She thought she finally had her alone when there was a knock at the door.

  “God, what now?” Corinne said.

  One of the workmen who had been digging up the front yard throughout the day was standing on the Sigmahouse porch.

  “Yes?” Corinne hissed, as the older man in the blue workman’s clothes towered before her. “If you’re trying to get a free peek at all the girls, fella, I’ll call your boss and have a few words.”

  “I am my boss,” said the man, “and we can talk about the plumbing situation here or inside.”

  Corinne pursed her lips and stepped out. Jerilyn stood in the doorway, sort of curious. Now the smell of sewage was everywhere. “I’m gagging,” Corinne said, her neck pulsing. “God, how could you guys do this to us? We’re trying to convince thirty young ladies to call this house home and every day they have to walk through this torn-up front yard and the smell of septic tanks and shit everywhere! I thought this was going to be done two weeks ago!”

  “Miss, you need everything replaced,” the man said somberly.

  “Oh what a fucking shakedown. You dig everything up and now we have to pay big money to get our yard back to normal.”

  “I’m telling you what every plumber in town would tell you. You have got blockages in three pipes and the septic is not breaking down the waste matter.”

  “For God’s sake, just fix it, fix it already!”

  “You have to…” The man, who could be anybody’s grandfather, looked concerned, perhaps for the plumbing, not so much for the girls. “You have to … You have to chew your food, miss. Get the girls to digest their food. You can’t just swallow it for a little while and throw it up into the toilet. It—”

  “Look, we’ll do in our toilets whatever we want to do in our toilets—they’re our toilets!”

  “Just telling you what the problem is, miss.”

  “Fix it, whatever the bill is, then give it to me, and I promise you, Mister … Mister Old Plumber Guy, that the Greeks in Chapel Hill will boycott you and I will see to it that you will never have another bit of business from any sorority in this town.”

  Corinne stormed away, pushing past Jerilyn.

  The man returned to his van and Jerilyn stood out on the porch for a moment and gazed across the street to Thetahouse, having some kind of do tonight. A small limousine pulled up in front and six men and six women got out, all dressed in formal wear, beautiful. Jerilyn watched a man in a dinner jacket put an arm around the lower back of his date, and escort her lovingly up the walk. Jerilyn was already feeling chilly in her skintight jeans and bikini top.

  Layla appeared beside her on the porch. “They think they can see my tits through this top but they can’t … see?” Layla was exhibiting herself under the porchlight. Her gauzy Kleenex-thin skirt barely made it over her privates. She had Carolina Blue pumps that added three inches to her height. “Want to feel good?” she asked, and Jerilyn understood there was more coke to be sniffed on some surface somewhere inside.

  “I like feeling good,” she said, following her friend.

  * * *

  Five of the pledges, wearing only a jockstrap, were marched into the television room, all dark except for the TV, tuned to a static channel and muted.

  Cory and Kevin bade them stand at attention against the wall. The boy christened Smegma (their pledge names were written on their foreheads in permanent marker) was shivering. “The Pledgemaster will be here shortly,” Cory said gravely.

  Kevin added, “You must do as he says or you’ll never be a Zipperman.”

  The pledge christened Scrotum mumbled, “Better not be any gay stuff…” There were frats that filmed their hazing rituals—unending hours of nudity and homoerotic dares and things inserted places—and then sold the videos to hazehim.com—again, for a bit of spring break money.

  “You’ll do whatever the Pledgemaster demands!” Cory barked.

  There was noise and the sound of, maybe, a chair being overturned, some muffled cursing … Then Skip was present, holding one end of a dog leash, lingering in the shadows. Kevin and Cory stood on either side of the doorway, affecting dire solemnity. Joey D slowly, as if marching in a funeral cortege, stepped into the TV room with his long black robe with its Death cowl, a costume rented and never returned for a Halloween some years ago.

  “Within the brotherhood of Zeta Pi,” Joey D intoned, “there is a more ancient and secret society going back to the days of the fraternity’s founding in Tulane in the 1800s, when French aristocrats, uh, you know, down in Louisiana where they’re French—French aristocrats laid out the initiation rites that we practice today and have practiced through the centuries. A society with a special name and coat of arms and, um, the seal of Côte d’Agneau…”

  Scrotum was sniggering, trying to hide it.

  “Something funny there?” Joey squinted to read the name on the sweaty forehead. “Scrotum. Something strike you as amusing?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Assistant Pledgemaster Baylor!” Joey D called out, surprising Skip who wasn’t aware he had a title. “Bring forward Shelly.”

  The pledges exchanged anxious glances.

  Joey D explained that the University of North Carolina has a mascot ram and Zeta Pi has Shelly, a ewe, hence the Society of Ram and Ewe. Skip pulled the sheep into the room, its four legs rigid and stationary, its hooves sliding evenly over the linoleum. Shelly, née Furball, having shed itself in the back of Justin’s mom’s van of every fluid and solid a sheep could manufacture, was remarkably passive after its being fed a ground-up Valium in a bowl of water. It stared at them unblinking and the pledges could have been forgiven for wondering if Shelly was stuffed.

  “Blindfold these gaylords,” Joey D continued, as Kevin and Cory obeyed. “Everyone has, in the Zeta Pi archives, an incriminating photo which is your passage into the Society of Ram and Ewe.” Joey D, who had taken a Valium himself, after a six-pack and two Red Bulls, was having trouble focusing. He had thought of making everyone bestialize the sheep or having green feed pellets eaten by the sheep from their buttcrack but Skip reminded him that a simple nude photo, with the sheep tactically placed to cover the genitals, was traditional and incriminating enough. If anyone ever betrayed the Society of Ram and Ewe, this picture would then haunt them for eternity.

  Scrotum cleared his throat and announced his jockstrap was not coming off, he was going into pre-Law and might run for office one day and he was not interested in this photo being sold to The National Enquirer and then shown on CNN.

  “Assistant Pledgemasters!” Joey D screamed, not used to being defied. “Take Scrotum away and begin the ceremony of … of depledgerization!” Scrotum was shuffled away, mumbling, “You can’t throw me out. My dad paid for the building of this house.”

  And then two others said they also did not want a picture with Shelly. “Okay, you pieces of shit, there’s the door! You see it? You walk out that door and … you walk out and there will never—don’t you go and think that—there will be another…”

  They were walking out the door.

  “Does nobody,” screamed Joey D, “wish to be part of the fraternity’s most sacred obligation, the Society of Ram and Ewe?”

  “Sir yes sir!”

  “Drop that jockstrap, Smegma!”

  “Sir yes sir!”

  “You wanna be a Zipperman, don’t you?”

  Skip was laughing and he could barely hold the camera.

  “Sir yes sir!”

  Now Joey D noticed, too, that the pledge was completely aroused.

  * * *

  The party upstairs was in full tilt. At least two hundred people spilling out on porches, verandahs, in the back by the pool, crammed into every room, with music loud enough to shake the foundations of the whole
edifice.

  At first Jerilyn was a little shocked to see the pledges running around in jockstraps with matted hair and other caked-on indignities, but then she got used to it. Layla had shared a line of cocaine and, eased by several beers, she was, as promised, feeling good about everything, as her eyes followed two strapping pledges’ bare rear ends down the hall to the kitchen where other Zetas and Sigmas were filling a giant industrial-sized trashcan with every liquor known to man—cheap vodka, cheap gin, cheap tequila, 7UP, Hawaiian Punch, box wine. A frat guy, bellowing some rock-song chorus, held aloft an emptying bottle of Everclear over the trashcan while the girls brayed in mock-horror, Oh no you didn’t! Cortney dunked her cup beneath the surface to fill it, then sampled. “Ellch. Needs something sweet,” she called out, as someone went looking for where she had set down the discount-brand triple sec she had brought.

  “Jerilyn!” It was Skip, with his trademark drunken-red face. “I was hoping you’d be here. You know, I told Corinne and Layla, hey, if Jerilyn isn’t going to be a Skank, then I may have to change fraternities.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “We’ll figure out some way you can pay me back,” he said. Then suddenly he was tongue-kissing her. She pulled back.

  “Caught me off guard,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. She looked at the floor, and by the time she looked up, Skip was off down the main hall of Zipperhaus, towel-whipping the buttocks of some passing pledges.

  Back in the kitchen, the trashcan had nearly brimmed thanks to what some guy promised was a gallon of moonshine.

  Overheard, from two of the Sigmas:

  “My dad can get rid of all of that upper-arm fat,” Georgina said, volunteering her father’s plastic surgery practice for a Sigma Kappa Nu discount. “Not to mention up your cup size.”

  “Puh-leeease tell me,” Cortney said, “that your own dad didn’t do your boob job.”

  Georgina straightened her posture and let the kitchen admire her newly titanic prominence. “You better believe he did them—so they’d be done right. It’s all like working with meat to him; he doesn’t think about these as boobs.”