"All righty, no funny stuff, you hear?" said a nervous voice in the wagon. "Out you go!"
A moment later, Doctor Fred Garth, wearing a badly torn Blue Team shirt, unshaven, his eyes wide, emerged into the daylight, manacled and sneering.
Before Paul could believe in the senseless scene, his old tent- and teammate, his buddy, the man next in line for Pittsburgh, was inside.
Paul hurried around to the front, and back into the office where he'd filled out the papers and turned in his credentials.
The sergeant looked up at him superciliously. "Yes?"
"Doctor Garth - what's he doing here?" said Paul.
"Garth? We got no Garth here."
"I saw them bring him in the back door."
"Naah." The sergeant went back to his reading.
"Look - he's one of my best friends."
"Should of stuck with your dog and your mother," said the sergeant without looking up. "Beat it."
Bewildered, Paul wandered back to the street, left his old car parked in front of the station house, and walked up the hill to the main street of Homestead, to the saloon at the foot of the bridge.
The town hall clock struck four. It might have struck midnight or seven or one, for all the difference it made to Paul. He didn't have to be anywhere at any time any more - ever, he supposed. He made up his own reasons for going somewhere, or he went without reasons. Nobody had anything for him to do anywhere. The economy was no longer interested. His card was of interest now only to the police machines, who regarded him, the instant his card was introduced, with instinctive distrust.
The hydrant was going as usual, and Paul joined the crowd. He found himself soothed by the cool spray from the water. He waited with eagerness for the small boy to finish fashioning his paper boat, and enjoyed the craft's jolting progress toward certain destruction in the dark, gurgling unknown of the storm sewer.
"Interesting, Doc?"
Paul turned to find Alfy, the television shark, at his elbow. "Well! Thought you were at the Meadows."
"Thought you were. How's the lip?"
"Healing. Tender."
"If it's any consolation, Doc, the bartender's still sneezing."
"Good, wonderful. Did you get fired?"
"Didn't you know? Everybody got sacked, the whole service staff, after that tree business." He laughed. "They're doing their own cooking, making their own beds, raking the horseshoe pits, and all, all by theirselves."
"Everybody?"
"Everybody below works manager."
"They're cleaning their own latrines, too?"
"The dumb bunnies, Doc, with I.Q.'s under 140."
"What a thing. Still play games, do they?"
"Yep. Last I heard, Blue was way out ahead."
"You don't mean it!"
"Yeah, they were so ashamed of you, they just about killed theirselves to win."
"And Green?"
"Cellar."
"In spite of Shepherd?"
"You mean Jim Thorpe? Yeah, he entered everything, and tried to make every point."
"So -"
"So nobody made any points. Last I heard, his team was trying to convince him he had virus pneumonia and ought to spend a couple of days in the infirmary. He's got something, that's for sure." Alfy looked at his watch. "Say, there's some chamber music on channel seven. Care to play?"
"Not with you."
"Just for the hell of it. No money. I'm just getting checked out on chamber music. A whole new field. C'mon, Doc, we'll learn together. You watch the cello and bass, and I'll watch the viola and violin. O.K.? Then we'll compare notes and pool our knowledge."
"I'll buy you a beer. How's that?"
"That's good; that's very good."
In the bar's damp twilight, Paul saw a teen-ager looking at him hopefully from a booth. Before him, on the table top, were three rows of matches: three in the first row, five in the second, seven in the third.
"Hello," said the young man uneasily, hopefully. "Very interesting game here. The object of the game is to make the other guy take the last match. You can take as many or as few as you want from any given row at each turn."
"Well -" said Paul.
"Go ahead," said Alfy.
"For two dollars?" said the youngster nervously.
"All right, for two." Paul took a match from the longest row.
The youngster frowned and looked worried, and countered. Three moves later, Paul left him looking disconsolately at the last match. "Goddammit, Alfy," he said miserably, "look at that. I lost."
"This is your first day!" said Alfy sharply. "Don't get discouraged. All right, so you lost. So you're just starting out." Alfy clapped the boy on the shoulder. "Doc, this is my kid brother, Joe. He's just starting out. The Army and the Reeks and Wrecks are hot for his body, but I'm trying to set him up in business for hisself instead. We'll see how this match business works out, and if it doesn't, we'll think of something else."
"I used to play it in college," said Paul apologetically. "I've had a lot of experience."
"College!" said Joe, awed, and he smiled and seemed to feel better. "Jesus, no wonder." He sighed and sat back, depressed again. "But I don't know, Alfy - I'm about ready to throw in the towel. Let's face it, I haven't got the brains." He lined up the matches again, and picked at them, playing a game with himself. "I work at it, and I just don't seem to get any better at it."
"Sure you work!" said Alfy. "Everybody works at something. Getting out of bed's work! Getting food off your plate and into your mouth's work! But there's two kinds of work, kid, work and hard work. If you want to stand out, have something to sell, you got to do hard work. Pick out something impossible and do it, or be a bum the rest of your life. Sure, everybody worked in George Washington's time, but George Washington worked hard. Everybody worked in Shakespeare's time, but Shakespeare worked hard. I'm who I am because I work hard."
"O.K., O.K., O.K.," said Joe. "Me, Alfy, I haven't got the brains, the eye, the push. Maybe I better go down to the Army."
"You can change your name before you do, kid, and don't bother me again," said Alfy tensely. "Anybody by the name of Tucci stands on his own two feet. It's always been that way, and that's the way it's always going to be."
"O.K.," said Joe, coloring. "Awri. So I give it a try for a couple more days."
"O.K.!" said Alfy. "See that you do."
As Alfy hurried to the television set, Paul stayed at his side. "Listen, do you happen to know who Fred Garth is?"
"Garth?" He laughed. "I didn't at first, but I sure as hell do now. He's the one that ringbarked the oak."
"No!"
"Yep. And they never even thought of questioning him. He was on the committee that was supposed to do the questioning."
"How'd they catch him?"
"Gave hisself away. When the tree surgeon got there to patch up the tree, Garth tossed his tools in the drink."
"Alfy!" said the bartender. "You missed the first number."
Alfy pulled up a bar stool.
Paul sat down next to him and engaged the bartender in conversation. Their talk was disjointed, as Alfy kept the man busy twisting the television set's volume knob.
"Ever see Finnerty around?" said Paul.
"The piano player?"
"Yeah."
"What if I have?"
"I'd just like to see him, is all. A friend of mine."
"Lot's of people'd like to see Finnerty these days."
"Uh-huh. Where's he keep himself?"
The bartender looked at him appraisingly. "Nobody sees Finnerty these days."
"Oh? He's not living with Lasher any more?"
"Full of questions today, aren't you? Nobody sees Lasher these days."
"I see." Paul didn't. "They leave town?"
"Who knows? Come on, I haven't got all day. What'll it be?"
"Bourbon and water."
The bartender mixed the drink, set it before Paul, and turned his back.
Paul drank the health of his hos
tile or apathetic companions in the new life he'd chosen, coughed, smiled, smacked his lips judiciously, trying to determine what wasn't quite right about the drink, and fell senseless from the barstool.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
"From Blue Cayuga," piped the young voices in the autumn evening -
"From hill and dell,
Far rings the story of the glory of Cornell -"
Doctor Harold Roseberry, PE-002, laid two documents side by side on the naked, waxy expanse of the top of his rosewood desk. The desk, big enough for a helicopter to land on, was a gift from the Cornell alumni, and a silver plate on one corner said so. Justification of the lavish gift was inlaid in precious woods on the desk top: the football scores run up by the Big Red during the past five seasons. The why and wherefore of this object, at least, would leave no questions in the minds of future archæologists.
"From East and West the crashing echoes answering call," cried the young voices, and Doctor Roseberry found it extremely difficult to concentrate on the two documents before him: a memo from the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, a quaint, antique man in a quaint, antique part of the university; and a five-year-old letter from a carping alumnus who objected to the deportment of the team when off the playing field. The memo from the dean said that a Mr. Ewing J. Halyard had arrived in town in order to show the university to the Shah of Bratpuhr, and, incidentally, to make up a seventeen-year-old credit deficiency in physical education. The memo asked that Doctor Roseberry assign one of his staff to the chore of giving Halyard the final physical-education tests the next morning.
"Cornell victorious!
The champions of all!"
came the voices.
Doctor Roseberry was inclined to react ironically to the last line of the song. "Certainly, victorious last year, four years afore that," he muttered in his pregnant solitude. But here was another year that might not look so hot inlaid in rosewood. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," he said wearily. Every coach in the Ivy League was out to knock him down to a PE-003 again, and two losses would do it. Yale and Penn were loaded. Yale had floated a bond to buy the whole Texas A&M backfield, and Penn had bought Breslaw from Wisconsin for $43,000.
Roseberry groaned. "How the hell long they think a man can play college football?" he wanted to know. Six years before, Cornell had bought him from Wabash College, and asked him to list his idea of a dream team. Then, by God they'd bought it for him.
"But what the hell they think they bought?" he asked himself. "Sumpin' made outa steel and see-ment? Supposed to last a lifetime, is it?" They hadn't bought him so much as a water boy since, and the average age of the Big Red was now close to thirty-one.
"Far above Cayuga's waters,
With its waves of blue,
Stands our noble Alma Mater,
Glorious to view -"
came the voices.
"Certainly it's glorious," said Doctor Roseberry. "Who the hell you figure paid for it?" In its first two years the football team had paid for itself. In the next three, it had paid for a new chemistry building, a heat and power laboratory, a new administration building for the Agricultural Engineering Department, and four new professorial chairs: the Philosophy of Creative Engineering, Creative Engineering History, Creative Public Relations for Engineers, and Creative Engineering and the Captive Consumer.
Roseberry, who wasn't expected to pay any attention to the academic side of the university, had nonetheless kept a careful accounting of all these improvements, glorious to view, that had been added since he and his football team had arrived far above Cayuga's waters. In anticipation of a poor season, he was roughing out in his mind a polemic letter to the alumni, in which the academic expenditures would figure prominently. He had the first line of the letter, following the salutation, "Sportsmen," already perfected, and enjoyed imagining it written out in capitals:
"IS THE FOOTBALL BUSINESS AT CORNELL GOING TO BE RUN ON A BUSINESS-LIKE BASIS, OR IS THE BIG RED GOING TO BE BLED WHITE?"
And then the next sentence sprang inspirationally to mind: "IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS, NOT ONE CENT HAS BEEN REINVESTED IN THE BUSINESS, NOT ONE CENT LAID ASIDE FOR DEPRECIATION!"
He saw now that the whole thing would have to be in caps. The situation called for a letter with real punch.
The telephone rang.
"Doctor Roseberry speakin'."
"This is Buck Young, Doc. Note here says you wanted me to call." The husky voice was tinged with uneasiness, just as Roseberry had hoped it would be. He could imagine that Buck had sat by the phone with the note in his hand for several minutes before he'd dialed. Now that Buck had gone this far, Roseberry told himself, he'd go the rest of the way too.
"Yeah, yeah," said Roseberry, smiling captivatingly. "Bucky boy, how are you?"
"Fine. What's on your mind?"
"Maybe I should ask what's on yours."
"Thermodynamics. Stress analysis. Fluid flow. Differential equations."
"Aaah," said Roseberry, "why'n't you loosen up and have a beer with me down at The Dutch? You hear the news I got, I think maybe you'll get something else on your mind."
"Cheer, cheer, here we are again
To cheer with all our might -"
sang the voices, and Doctor Roseberry waited impatiently for the racket to stop. If they had to have a football rally, he wished they'd hold it somewhere where it wouldn't bother him and his team. That was another thing: Cornell was so cheap, they quartered their athletes on the campus rather than setting up a separate establishment away from all the student racket. "Wait'll they shut up, Bucky boy, and I can hear myself think."
"Cheer, cheer, here we are again,
To cheer for the Red and White!"
Either Cornell was going to get progressive, or they could find themselves another coach, Roseberry told himself. Now, Tennessee - there was a progressive setup. They kept their team in Miami Beach, and no wonder Milankowitz went there for $35,000, after he turned down Chicago for $40,000. "O.K., Bucky, I can hear again. What about I meet you down at The Dutch for a couple of quick ones in fifteen minutes?"
The voice was faint, reluctant. "Just for half an hour."
Doctor Roseberry climbed into his black convertible in the team parking lot, and drove over to the Delta Upsilon fraternity house, on whose lawn he'd first spotted Buck Young playing interfraternity football. There, Young had done things for Delta Upsilon for nothing that any college in the country would have considered a steal at $50,000 a year.
That had been last fall, and D.U. had eked out the interfraternity football championship with 450 points to their opponents' six. Young had scored 390 of the points, and had thrown the passes for the other 54, the remaining touchdown being accounted for by a George Ward, whose name had somehow burned itself into Roseberry's memory along with all of the other statistics.
But Young had said firmly, when Roseberry had approached him, that he played football for fun, and that he wanted to be an engineer. A year ago, with the Big Red by far the biggest thing in the East, with the Yale and Penn alumni still to mobilize their economic resources, Roseberry could afford to be amused by Young's preference for a career in engineering. Now nothing was amusing, and Roseberry saw Young as his one chance to remain a PE-002 under the fouled-up Cornell football economics. He would sell a couple of supernatural linemen to Harvard, who would buy anything that was cheap, and use the proceeds to buy himself the services of Young at far below their value on the open market.
The Dutch, its paneling antiqued by the condensation from breaths of generations of adolescent alcoholics, was packed and noisy, and in almost every hand was the drink fashionable that season, benedictine and Pluto water, with a sprig of mint.
Doctor Roseberry was cheered and toasted by the children as he entered. He grinned, and colored becomingly, and inwardly demanded of himself and history, "What the hell these baby engineers got to do'th me, for chrissakes?" He pushed his way through the crowd, which claimed him for reasons not at all clear, to a dark
corner booth, where Purdy and McCloud, the linemen whom he intended to sell to Harvard, were nursing the one beer a night apiece permitted during training. They were talking quietly, but darkly, and, as Doctor Roseberry approached, they looked up, but didn't smile.
"Evenin' boys," said Doctor Roseberry, sitting down on the small ledge not occupied by McCloud's backside, and keeping his eyes on the door through which Buck Young would be coming.
They nodded, and went on with their conversation. "No reason," said McCloud, "why a man can't play college ball till he's forty, if he takes good care of hisself." McCloud was thirty-six.
"Sure," said Purdy gravely, "a older man's got a certain matoority you don't find in the young ones." Purdy was thirty-seven.
"Look at Moskowitz," said McCloud.
"Yup. Forty-three, and still goin' strong. No reason why he shou'n't keep goin' until he's fifty. No reason why most men shou'n't."
"Bet I could go to the Reeks and Wrecks now and put together a Ivy League championship team out of guys past forty who're s'posed to be through."
"Planck," said Purdy. "Poznitsky."
"McCarren," said McCloud, "Mirro, Mellon. Ain't that right, Doc?" McCloud asked Roseberry the question casually.
"Yup, guess so. Hope so. Better. Kind of outfit I've got to work with."
"Um," said McCloud. He stared down into his beer, finished it off with a flourish, and looked plaintively at Roseberry. "O.K. if I have one more short one tonight?"
"Sure - why the hell not?" said Roseberry. "I'll even buy it."
McCloud and Purdy looked distressed at this, and both, on second thought, figured they'd better keep in good shape for the important Big Red season ahead.
Roseberry offered no reply to this clumsy gambit.
"Better not hit that stuff too hard," said a leering student, pointing to the two bottles of beer. "Not if Cornell's going to go on ruling the Ivy League, you better not, boys."
Vonnegut, Kurt - Player Piano (v5.0) Page 26