Beet (8 page)

The indispensable piece of information conveyed on kaboom.com was that most of the ingredients could be obtained on Main Street in Beet for under $200. As soon as Akim amassed under $200, he'd be all set.

He and Professor Porterfield had gone about half a mile into the woods. Akim had very few extension cords left. He drabbled in a puddle and slipped down a muddy declivity. They stopped. Before them, like a giant's yawn, was Akim's cave, set in a massive granite wall. From the black hole came the grating of a sort of music.

“It's a Syrian love song,” said Akim. “I left my iPod on, in case I couldn't find the cave in the dark.”

“What's the song called?”

“It's called ‘Where Go My Sheep?' They're all called something like that. Would you like to hear it from the beginning?”

“I guess I'd better get back”—still not sure whether or not to knock the boy out and carry him to a doctor. “Don't you think you'd be more comfortable in your room?” Peace asked.

“One must make sacrifices for one's beliefs.”

“And what are the beliefs you're making sacrifices for?” Akim had to admit the professor had him there. “Well, good luck with your project.” Peace smiled.

Akim stiffened. “Oh, yes,” he said, relieved to realize which of his projects Peace was referring to. “I'll hack in sooner or later. You'll see.”

Peace bade him good night with some residual reluctance, but he had too many burdens of his own, and at least the boy didn't look as if he were about to harm himself. He turned to go back.

Akim screamed, “Yaah!”

“What is it?”

“It” was a pair of pink eyes about four inches apart and a foot and a half off the ground, glowing like rose-hued pencil flashlights from the center of the cave's blackness. There was a rapid rustling like paws scraping the earth. There was a low grunt. There was a louder grunt. And a snort and another grunt, followed by a phthisic wheeze.

Akim ran to Peace, who swept the boy behind him so that he could face the beast that now, very tentatively, emerged from the dark.

“Latin!” said Akim.

First came the snout, then the ears and eyes, then the hooves, then the whole white luminescent body and the ridiculous corkscrew tail.

“He must have escaped again,” said Akim. “Perhaps he was drawn to my cave by ‘Where Go My Sheep?'”

“Let's get him,” said Peace.

They dove for the frightened animal, which made a deft sidestep, leaving his pursuers prone on the turf. Even an ungreased pig can move, and Latin was about to make a panicky dash into the woods. Akim rolled in front of him and blocked his way, and Peace tackled him around his very hard midsection—the first tackle he'd made since his senior year at St. Paul's. Latin squealed and squirmed, but Peace and Akim hung on until the subdued mascot lay quavering in their arms, his heart thumping, and breathing hard in muf
fled snorts. They petted him till he was quieter, then all three rose, the men muddier than the pig.

Latin tried to bite Akim, but Peace smacked his snout.

“Thank you, Professor! You saved my life!”

“I don't think he was going to devour you. In any case, it would have been the first time treyf ate a Jew.”

The boy nearly smiled.

“Well, you won't believe this.” Peace called Livi to tell her the story of his evening walk. He'd returned to his office after half-dragging Latin back to his pen, and using one of Akim's extension cords as a leash. As a parting shot the prisoner took a leak on his captor's shoes. “I'd better spend the night here. It's too late to hitch a ride.”

“Sure,” said Livi. “You didn't hurt Latin, did you? He's my favorite member of the staff.”

“I've had enough of Latin's staff for one evening.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Furious. I hate women with minds of their own.”

“Me too,” said Livi. “Good night, sweetheart.”

Peace stretched out on the couch. God, am I wiped! he thought. Luckily he was about to get close to forty-five minutes' sleep.

MATHA POLITE HAD RETREATED FROM LAPHAM AS SOON AS
the standing ovation began to peter out. The Great had made an unsuccessful lunge for her from the lip of the stage, stubbing the big toe of his naked scarlet foot and nearly keeling over in the effort, and had shouted her a slurred and toothy invitation to accompany him to his room at the Pigs-in-Blankets Bed 'N Breakfast, to discuss the merits of her poems. Tempted as she might have been on another occasion, she declined. She had not brought any of her poems with her on that evening, thus any discussion of their merits might prove abstract. Also, photographer Sandy might burst in on the two of them during their abstract discussion and crown Matha with one of her catadioptric lenses.

But mainly Matha sought to elude The Great's grasp because she had bigger fish to fry. What had sailed over the heads of the audience at the reading was a particular and deliberately timed moment during her introductory remarks when she called for the resignation of President Huey. That exhortation was a signal to Betsy Betsy, Goldvasser, Bagtoothian, and Lattice to rise from their seats and leave the auditorium. About the time that Akim had begun his trek into the woods, they had proceeded under cloud cover and that of darkness to the New Pen and MacArthur House—the
building donated as the home of the Communications Arts Department by Arthur MacArthur, the gossip-newspaper publisher, and earmarked for the study of social life and celebrities in journalism. They jimmied the lock of the front door, and occupied the building. It was a test, a dry run to see how the administration and professors would react, and the first of the major disruptive incidents planned by the group. The occupation of Bacon Library, their main target, was on the calendar for seven weeks hence. The MacArthur takeover would also eat up more time, which was precious to “that shit-fucking CCR.”

Unlike Bacon Library, MacArthur House was not acknowledged by the faculty as an intellectual center, and it certainly contained nothing as important as the Mayflower Compact. It was roundly looked down upon by the other departments, except on those occasions when the Communications Arts faculty threw a cocktail party that included people who appeared on television. Then everyone commented how indispensable Communications Arts was to the life of the mind. In making his gift, Arthur MacArthur expressed the hope that in addition to gossip, students would address the question: “With no other assets but money, how does one make it to a seat at the tables of power and influence?” It was the only question that interested Arthur, and the sort of problem MacArthur House was known to tackle.

“But it's perfect for us,” Matha had exulted. “The right size, the right location, and near the president's house—so even that brains-for-shit Louie Huey couldn't help but notice what we did.”

MacArthur was a clapboard structure no larger than a three-bedroom suburban home. Easily manageable for the occupiers, its entrance was also its exit, “so we can keep the ass shits out forever.” And it was where the Communications Arts Department stored its treasury of old newspapers with historically momentous headlines, as well as its library (a shelf, really) of books published by department members with titles like
Is the Media Fair?
and
Who Is Destroying the Media?
Its walls also displayed photographs of world leaders standing next to department members, and little framed notes of thanks from working journalists who visited Beet, including Con
nie Chung, Al Roker, Tim Russert, and Larry King. In short, everything Communications Arts most valued was housed in MacArthur, whatever others might think of it, or of Communications Arts itself. If the building were taken out of commission, reasoned the radical students—since Communications Arts brought in more tuition revenue than all the other departments combined—“there'll be a fuckstorm from the bean counters.”

When Matha approached the door of the building, her comrades had already tacked up a bedsheet on the outside wall with red lettering in poster paint reading, “Power to the People!” This and other slogans they picked up from history books about the 1960s, their principal sources for the symbols, language, and tactics of their protests. Matha knocked three times, then waited, then knocked twice more. The door opened cagily, like a speakeasy's. “It's me, you shithole,” she said.

“Password?” said Betsy Betsy. Matha had forgotten it. So had Betsy Betsy.

Matha shoved her way in. “Well!” she said to her little group. “We did it!”

“Fuckin' A!” said Bagtoothian. He looked up from his reading,
An Illustrated History of Sparta,
which he proceeded to grangerize.

They surveyed their conquest and fell into a silence. There were two reception rooms, one containing a cheap nineteenth-century American grandfather clock donated by the Classics Department to give the place, as the classicists told one another, “a touch of gravitas, but nothing meaningful,” along with the little library of books about journalism; another room that held the files of newspapers; a private dining room; and three offices for department members. A framed portrait in acrylics of Arthur MacArthur, a small man with an angry face, who wished to be immortalized as he played the oboe, hung in the vestibule.

Matha and her friends looked at everything, then at one another. They sat Indian-style in a circle on the floor of the main reception room and waited five minutes, ten, half an hour.

“Anyone hungry?” Matha asked. The others, not knowing how to respond, didn't.

In spite of herself, she suddenly felt the urge to bake pies. This happened from time to time, in situations that seemed to require a domestic touch, and the impulse terrified her even more than the fear of her fellow radicals discovering her true name. She believed—irrationally but deeply—that in some mystical process at her birth she had absorbed the characteristics of the woman her mother had admired on TV, the DNA passing from the
Today
show into her own baby body. And she recoiled at the vision that one day she would actually become Martha Stewart. Sometimes she had to quash the desire to decorate the margins of her poems with daisies and bluets, and, as in this instance, to bake pies, particularly peach.

“When do you suppose they will like come for us?” asked Goldvasser of Matha.

“Never. No one knows we're here,” said Betsy Betsy. All realized at once that their revolutionary gesture would remain unrecognized until daylight unless they did something to call attention to it.

“Maybe we should leave,” said Jamie Lattice meekly, as he said most things. He was afraid that if he were kicked out of college, no one in New York would invite him to a book party, which suggested how much he had to learn.

“I'll go outside and yell, ‘We've got MacArthur!' said Bagtoothian. “‘What are ya gonna do about it!'”

“To whom?” asked Betsy Betsy. “Everyone's gone home. Look out there. The students, the proctors, the administration, everyone's asleep.”

Matha reached into her backpack and produced a bullhorn. “Let's wake 'em up, then,” she said, and stuck the bullhorn out the front window. “Beet College!” she shouted, “We are the…” She turned back to the others. “Do we have a name?”

“The MacArthur Five,” said Goldvasser, who blushed at his own ingenuity.

Matha continued: “We are the MacArthur Five! We have taken over MacArthur House to express our frustration with the system.” She'd read that sixties students used the word
system
to mean
the enemy. “We will remain in this building until our demands are met! Join us, comrades!”

Startled out of his forty-three-minute slumber, Peace thought he'd been awakened by a nightmare. “Join us, comrades!” Where the hell was he? He went to his office window, peered into the night, but saw nothing. All had gone quiet again in MacArthur. He went back to the couch, but not to sleep. “Join us, comrades!” It
must
have been a nightmare.

The comrades regrouped and sat in their circle. The grandfather clock ticked away.

“Matha?” asked Betsy Betsy, after a while. “What
are
our demands?”

“You're right,” said Matha. “We don't have any. Let's make some up.”

They huddled for a few minutes and came up with a list, but it wasn't easy. Since the sixties, all the conventional demands made by erupting college students had been acceded to, indeed anticipated, not only at Beet, but at practically every institution of higher learning in America. The MacArthur Five could not think of a single ethnic or gender or sexual orientation studies program to ask for that was not already in place. In some instances, the college had come up with a course of study based on a group that did not yet indicate its existence in, much less its anger at, the wider society. The most recent was a lecture series on the Boopa, a stationary race of Bolivian pygmies who have no words for hello or good-bye.

In contemplating their list of demands, the student radicals supposed they could always call for a reversal of contemporary trends and demand a return to the traditional dead-white-males curricula of the 1950s, but they knew that the faculty—many of whom had been students in the 1960s—would accept the revisionist program at once because it represented a usurpation of the current curricula and would sound revolutionary. What good are demands, the students asked themselves, if they are readily met?

“Does Beet have like ROTC?” asked Goldvasser. “What
is
ROTC, anyway?”

They could always protest the presence of the U.S. military on campus, an evergreen of campus disruptions for forty years. But here again such a demand would be difficult. For one thing, there was no such presence to speak of, on Beet's campus or anyone else's, except for the service academies. (Oddly, a few antimilitary protests had occurred at those institutions, but they met with scant success.) The draft was history. And there was the other impediment regarding this issue—that more than a few students actually wanted to enlist these days, going so far as to say that serving in Iraq might be preferable to sitting through another two years of classes on Latina pride (mainly a complaint of Latino students).

“How about demanding they get rid of the Old Masters in the college museum?” said Betsy Betsy.

“Why do that?” asked Lattice, who was paying more attention to an open window.

“Because they're all men,” said Betsy. “Where are the Old Mistresses?” Bagtoothian asked Matha if he could kill her.

As for siding with the workers—another ripe issue of the sixties—there simply weren't all that many workers around Beet. The town was principally composed of professionals who provided employment for other professionals, of retirees, and of bored people, who covered all the strata, and who counted upon the college to relieve their monotony. The only involvement they sought from Beet College were the adult learning courses, and for the older male adults, the sight of girls in short skirts about whom they could daydream of leading new lives in seaside shacks on the Maine coast. This is not to say there were no workers around at all. Last year Goldvasser tried to unionize two plumbers who worked in the college maintenance department. He was wearing a hard hat at the time, which the plumbers offered to drive straight up his ass.

Making a list of demands in the contemporary world, the MacArthur Five determined, was not what it used to be. But then, as Matha reminded them, their goals had changed as well. They wanted to close the college, bring it down so they could party day and night, and for as long as possible avoid seeking the jobs un
available to them anyway. Ideally, the demands they came up with would be so out of reach for the administration and the faculty, they would never be considered seriously. When that happened, they reckoned, the rest of the students would get angry and stand with them out of the usual undergraduate ennui and a mounting contempt for their elders brought on by their excessive attention to the students' wishes. And this marshaling of support would be essential, because at present the student radicals at Beet constituted 0.27 percent of the undergraduate population of 1,800, which is to say, five.

So the band of revolutionaries finally produced the sort of demands they knew no one at Beet would accept. They were:

1. Buy back the Henry Moore! Pay higher than the selling price if necessary, but get it back! [Bollovate and the trustees would never go for that.]
   
2. Fire Louie! [They would not do that either. Huey was the perfect titular leader for the trustees' purposes—though equally servile and incompetent, he could be difficult to replace.]
   
3. Fire Bollovate! [Out of the question.]
   
4. No more pigs-in-blankets in the school cafeteria! We're sick of them! Off the pigs! [A deliberately madcap demand to appeal to campus libertines.]
   
5. Dissolve the CCR! [Matha feared it might actually do something under Professor Porterfield. It had to go before it saved the college.]
   
6. [And consequently] Fire Porterfield! [Their ace in the hole, because they knew it could never happen.]
   

The list was completed at dawn. Matha moved to the window again and read the demands in an overexcited southern accent that made them sound more like a schedule of playtime activities announced by a games steward on a cruise ship. She waited and watched. At first, not a single Beet student emerged from the dorms. Then from out of the woods an Arab figure ran toward
them, shouting ecstatically. “I shall join you, brothers and sisters! Let us destroy this house of Satan!”

Matha opened the door a crack, saw who it was, said, “Not you, Akim. We only take earthlings,” and slammed the door shut. Akim sat on the cold grass in front of MacArthur, attempted to face Mecca, eventually gave up, and slunk back to his cave.

In his room, Ferritt Lawrence toyed with the idea of infiltrating the group so that he could report the takeover firsthand. He could be embedded with them—yes, embedded. But then, realizing he would be more like a real journalist if he reported the event as he reacted to it emotionally, he stayed put. The other students waited for Matha to finish reciting the demands and returned to sleep.