Fool on the Hill Read online

  “Jesus,” Woodstock moaned. Another victim.

  “Which?” the Top inquired, joining him on the floor.

  “Bacardi one fifty one,” said Woodstock. “Backgammon for flaming shots.”

  “I’m going to throw up,” Fujiko announced. She staggered into a toilet stall and began to do just that.

  “Who’s in the shower? asked the Top.

  “Jim Taber and Ben Hull,” Preacher told him. “Both of them a lot more lively than this Bohemian this morning, sounds like.”

  “It’s your choice of breakfast cereal,” suggested Woodstock.

  “What about the tub? Anybody using that?”

  “There’s a lemon tree in the tub,” Woodstock informed him. As if to prove the truth of his words, he produced a sickly-looking lemon from his bathrobe pocket and began sucking on it.

  “A lemon tree,” the Top repeated. “How did—”

  Preacher raised an eyebrow. “You really want to know?”

  “No. Fuck it. Hey, anybody got a beer?”

  IV.

  Monday, 11:15 A.M.

  “Heaven, did you say?”

  “—Gannett Medical Clinic, donated by the Gannett Foundation in honor of Frank E. Gannett, class of eighteen ninety-eight. Its main function is the prevention of unwanted human pregnancies. . . .”

  Luther, Blackjack, and a ragtag group of mongrels and Purebreds new to the University followed after a silver-furred tabby named Sable, who served as their tour guide. Already they had made their way up to the Agriculture Quad, across Fall Creek to North Campus, down and around Fraternity Row to the West Campus dorms, and up again through Collegetown. Now they padded along Central Avenue, headed back toward the Arts Quad.

  Sable dutifully reeled off the facts and dates concerning each building they passed, not really caring how much of it penetrated. In truth the dogs in the tour group did not pay much attention to what the puss was saying, preferring to either gape at their surroundings or talk among themselves. Only Blackjack remained attentive. He busily studied Sable, who earlier had informed him quite candidly that she would soon be going into heat.

  “. . . on our right is the Olin Hall of Engineering, financed by a gift from Frankin W. Olin, class of eighteen ninety-six. It opened in October of nineteen forty-two. . . .”

  “Yes, Heaven,” Luther responded to the mongrel beside him. “That is what this is. It has to be; it smells like Heaven, and besides, Blackjack and I traveled too far for it not to be.”

  “I don’t mean to argue with you, friend,” said the mongrel, whose name was Denmark, “but I traveled a long way to get here too. Only I didn’t come for angels, I came for knowledge. This is a learning-place, you see; special, but surely not Heaven. You must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

  “You must have taken the wrong turn,” Luther insisted.

  “Och, but I heard it was a learnin’-place too,” said Nessa, a Scottish Terrier bitch. “They’ve got a series of Questions, they do, that one has to answer. I suppose that means it’s like Heaven, in a manner of speakin’—the answerin’ of big Questions has a certain divine ring to it.”

  “Questions?” asked Luther.

  “. . . this huge building coming up on our left,” said Sable in the backround, “is Willard Straight Hall, opened in November of nineteen twenty-five, and dedicated to Willard Dickerman Straight of the class of nineteen oh one. The building is home to a number of human student organizations, and one of the University dining halls is located here. Dogs are not permitted in the dining area, and it isn’t a good place to beg for scraps anyway. . . .”

  “They got Five Questions,” said Joshua, another mongrel. “The dogs who run this place, that is. And before you go talking about ‘divine rings,’ you’d best check out exactly what those Questions are. The fourth one’s a long way from being Godly, for some of us.”

  “The Fourth Question?” Luther repeated. “I don’t understand any of this. This is Heaven. It’s got to be.”

  “Wait until the Convocation on Friday. Wait and see if you still feel the same way after that.”

  “. . . we now angle to the right, and as we do you can clearly see Sage Chapel just ahead of us. Humans gather in this edifice on Sunday mornings to waste time. . . .”

  Sable led them between Sage Chapel and the Campus Store, toward a strange encampment behind the Day Hall administration building. Ducking out of the way of a pimply-faced Freshman who was in a big hurry to get somewhere, Sable purposefully brushed against Blackjack, stirring him. She was not in heat—not yet, not yet—but Blackjack might have tried something anyway if Luther had not broken off from his debate with Joshua and turned to them.

  “Hey,” said Luther to Sable, studying the haphazard collection of trenches and barbed wire just ahead of them. “What’s that?”

  “They call it Hooterville.”

  “Hooterville?” Luther could not help but be pleased by the sight of it. The trenches and scattered sandbag lean-tos had a desolate quality to them that reminded him of the burned-out buildings back home. “What’s a Hooterville?”

  “It’s part of an ongoing protest,” Sable explained. “Protesters are human beings who complain about the way things are so that other human beings can get annoyed and kill them without feeling too badly about it. Eventually the cause of justice is supposed to be served by this.”

  “Oh,” said Luther, without the slightest understanding. He paused to look at a sign at the edge of the encampment, made of warped plywood and painted with human words he could not read:

  WELCOME TO HOOTERVILLE!

  One of the last bastions of sanity in a world of crazed conservatism.

  We, the members of the Blue Zebra Hooter Patrol, Cornell’s only benign terrorist organization, believe in the principle of thought provocation through non-violent confrontation.

  To this end, we as a group provide a continual thorn-in-the-side to the Cornell administration, thus encouraging both the

  University staff and the student body to daily question the status quo.

  This Week’s Major Issues:

  1) Divestment from all companies doing business in racist South Africa.

  2) Affirmative action and increased minority admissions.

  3) Self-defense training for baby seals. (It can be done).

  GET IN GEAR AND THINK!!!

  V.

  Monday, 11:20 A.M.

  “Kind of lets you know you’re at Cornell, doesn’t it?” observed Z.Z. Top.

  “Can’t imagine it being anywhere else,” George agreed, taking another bite of his sandwich. The two sat with their backs against a cement bunker, surrounded by the gentle devastation of Hooterville. Fantasy Dreadlock, the leader of the Blue Zebras and a former Bohemian, had designed the encampment to represent all the world’s ugliness, while at the same time symbolizing the struggle to hold on and eventually set things right again. Three separate trenches gouged their way across what had once been green lawn and gravel walkway; blunted barbed wire was strewn around more or less at random. Set on a slight rise at the center of the camp was a spring-loaded cannon that aimed straight up, and which was capable at a moment’s notice of filling the air with propaganda leaflets or whatever else came to mind. Scattered throughout the area were the Blue Zebras, in their distinctive blue-and-white-striped jumpsuits, and with them other prominent members of the Cornell community: Joe Scandal, Resident Housing Director of the Africana dorm, Ujamaa, took lunch with Fantasy herself; the treasurer of Gay People At Cornell (Gay PAC) argued heatedly with Brian Garroway and one of the heads of Cornellians for Christ, while Aurora watched from the far side of a trench; the editorial staff of the Sun played stud poker in the shade of a sandbag wall. At the fringe of the encampment stood two officers of the Cornell Safety Division—watchdogs guarding against an unlikely peasant revolt—drinking coffee and exchanging jokes with the Zebras.

  The creation of Hooterville, a year and a half ago, had initially been approved by the administration duri
ng a period of student unrest. At the time it had seemed a small enough concession to appease a number of people; those in charge of the decision had also seen nothing wrong with concentrating the campus radicals in an area where they could be watched. The one thing no one in power had counted on, of course, was that it would last so long. Since its inception, however, Hooterville—not to mention the Zebras—had in some way figured into over three-quarters of the demonstrations, debates, and rallies on campus. And the Blue Zebras not only supported protests, they looked for them. Earnestly. Where the Bohemians preached the gospel of unorthodoxy, Fantasy and her Zebras spread the good word about conflict and dissent—much to the administration’s chagrin.

  To date, none of the many attempts to remove Hooterville had been even partially successful. The original permit for the encampment had included no expiration date, a critical oversight. The site could not be condemned as a fire hazard because it contained no flammable materials other than the plywood sign; likewise, since the installation of a sanitary outhouse (the cement bunker), there were no qualms from the Health Department. A final clincher against administrative interference had come from a Sixties-alumnus-turned-corporation-owner, who had offered the University a five-million-dollar grant on condition that the ‘Ville be left unmolested; this same alumnus had also posted a five-thousand-dollar bond against eventual relandscaping needed to fill in the trenches, should that ever become necessary.

  “Pretty,” Z.Z. Top observed, startling George out of his reverie. He had begun to drift, daydreaming about the political significance of Hooterville. When the Top saw the confused look on his face, he pointed across the trenches at Aurora.

  “Oh,” said George. “She’s pretty enough.”

  “What’s she like to talk to? You know her, right?”

  “I know her. She’s nice. Good person.”

  “Thought she might be,” the Top admitted, and caught George totally off guard by adding: “You ought to steal her away from that guy she’s with.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Weil if you don’t mind my saying, I’ve seen the two of them around before, last year, and they just don’t strike me as the peaches and cream couple of the century.”

  “What are you getting at?” George asked. He thought of Wax, at the McDonald’s down on The Commons. “You’re saying Aurora and Brian don’t look like a good match?”

  “Only a hunch. He has that look, you know, that Mr. Overbearing-type face. Not quite Hitler Youth but you catch my drift. And I know, I know, the lady looks pretty happy from here, but maybe if she got tight with an alternative sort of guy, a kind of left-wing fiction writer, say . . .”

  “All right, Top.” George scrutinized him carefully. “Who signed you up as matchmaker?”

  Z.Z. Top studied the sky. “Oh . . . Lion-Heart might have told some of us to keep an eye and an ear open for you.”

  This brought another laugh. “That’s perfect!” George said good-naturedly. “Just what I need: the bunch of you running around trying to fix me up.”

  “Don’t knock it, George. You could do lots worse. Romeo didn’t even have one Bohemian on his side, and look what happened to him.”

  “I know that. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it, either. It’s just that I don’t think it’s going to happen for me that way.”

  “Could be,” the Top said honestly. “Lot of people, you can’t put the fix in, they just have to wait till the penny drops on its own. But there’s no sin in looking around while you wait.”

  “I’m looking,” George said. “Finding—that’s the problem.”

  Without warning the cannon at the center of the encampment fired, spraying an amazing shower of white roses into the air. They fell in a twenty-five-foot circle, startling a number of the Blue Zebras and getting a jump out of Fantasy Dreadlock, who had ordered no such barrage.

  The Top was laughing. “Oh man, George, oh man. Speak of the fucking devil, baby.”

  One of the roses had landed squarely in George’s lap, as if precisely aimed. Tied to the stern of the rose with a thread—a scarlet thread—was a small note. Against all decent laws of probability, the outside of the note was addressed TO THE DAYDREAMER. Within were three more words: I LOVE YOU. The note was not signed.

  “This is impossible.” George said matter-of-factly. “This can’t be especially for me.” Not even the wind could have carried the rose from the cannon to him with certainty.

  Somewhere near, a dog began to bark.

  VI.

  Monday, 11:25 A.M.

  “Luther!” called Blackjack. “Luther, what the hell’s gotten into you? Luther!”

  Luther, transfixed and barking like a hound close on a trail, made no reply. He bounded past the plywood sign into Hooterville proper, drawn on by a tantalizing smell the breeze had brought him.

  “Luther!”

  The head of Cornellians for Christ was very nearly bowled over as the mongrel brushed past him. Luther paused briefly to sniff at Aurora’s legs, then dove into a trench, tripping up no less than three Blue Zebras as he charged along its length. He came up again near the cement bunker, downwind of George and the Top.

  George, who had begun to stand up, was knocked back on his ass and pinned against the bunker as the dog leapt into his arms. If it had been an attack, George’s career as a writer—and a human being—might have ended right there. But Luther intended only the greatest affection, and in demonstrating this he licked George’s face like a Tootsie Pop holding great secrets at its center.

  “Hi, dog,” Z.Z. Top said casually, as George went down under a barrage of slurps. The smell that had been ingrained in George and his clothing during a long Ithaca residence—the smell of hills and rain—sent Luther into a near frenzy.

  “Whoah!” George protested, gasping for air. “Whoah, calm down! I can’t breathe, all right?”

  He managed to pet the dog and shove it back a few paces in the same motion. As Luther began nipping affectionately at his hand, George scanned the encampment for a particular pair of eyes. Just before Luther’s arrival, he had been looking around to see who might have tossed the rose to him under cover of the cannon shot, and for a moment he thought he had seen a face peering at him from behind a pile of sandbags. But she was gone now, if she had ever been.

  “Thanks a lot,” George said to the dog, trying to sound stern. But he could not help smiling: Luther’s front paws, jammed into his abdomen, were tickling him. At any rate the mongrel could not understand his words, and at the moment was too overjoyed to sense George’s disappointment. For George was permeated with the Heaven scent, and for a while, at least, Luther was convinced that he had made his first contact with a genuinely divine being, the canine equivalent of a cherub or seraph . . . or a saint.

  VII.

  Tuesday, 4:00 P.M.

  Puck lay stretched out on the deck of a battleship as it moved off from the shore of Beebe Lake. It was a small battleship, only eight-and-a-half feet long, and its hull was high-impact plastic rather than steel, but it was still an impressive thing.

  The battleship belonged to Hamlet, one of Puck’s best friends. Hamlet had spent weeks assembling the craft from an Aurora model kit, then modifying it and installing a generator so that it could actually be used rather than just looked at. The ship had a whopping top speed of three knots, and was sufficiently well armed to repel almost any animal threat, either swimming or flying. The ship’s name was Prospero, and Hamlet was quite rightfully proud of it.

  “But what are you going to do when winter comes?” Puck asked as they steered toward Hamlet’s home, a small island in the middle of the lake. The island was overgrown with reeds and had no suitable area that could be used as a runway; Puck’s biplane was hidden among the brush on the lake shore.

  “You mean when the lake freezes over?” Hamlet replied from the bridge, a partially covered area in mid-deck. “I hadn’t given it much thought. Guess I’ll have to dry dock her somehow Or maybe I can put ski foils on her, turn her
into an ice boat.”

  “Probably skate her right over the dam and down the falls,” Puck said ominously.

  “Where you’ll no doubt join me when your wings ice up. But at least I won’t have as long a drop.”

  Hamlet began to pull the ship up alongside the island, but Puck sat up and said: “Hey, would you mind if we just floated around for a while?”

  “Not at all,” said Hamlet, veering out toward the center of the lake. “If you trust me not to go over the falls by accident. Something on your mind?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Is it sort of about Zephyr?”

  “Who else?”

  “I take it you haven’t been too successful at trying to make up with her?”

  “Well,” said Puck, “for a while it looked like I was making progress. Even though she’s still hooked on that George character . . .”

  “George the human being?”

  “George the blowhard,” Puck replied sullenly.

  “There, there, my friend,” Hamlet cautioned. “A human being who happens to be on intimate terms with the wind is no one to trifle with.”

  “So what if he’s a human being? Calling the wind is nothing so special. Hell, Zephyr can do it just as well as he can.”

  “Yes,” Hamlet agreed. “And you trifled with her too, didn’t you?”

  “We-e-ell . . . well look, regardless of how this whole problem got started, the point is she was finally coming around again, beginning to see the light about what a perfect couple we are.”

  “What a perfect couple,” Hamlet repeated.

  “That’s right: We were made for each other. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to. And Zephyr was just getting ready to forgive me for what happened when she found out that Saffron Dey is going with us on the Raid. Now she’s back to not speaking to me again.”

  “Who let the news drop about Saffron?”

  “I guess I did. How was I supposed to know that Zephyr would react that way? I never thought—”