Straight Man

There’s a bull market in young scholars.”
    “We’re tenured though,” I remind him. “Where do you think we found the courage to fall asleep in the first place and then to wake up pissed off?”
    “Enrollments are down,” he says cryptically, and if it weren’t Tony I’m talking to, I’d suspect he knows more than he’s saying. Maybe he’s stumbled across an old copy of the
Chronicle of Higher Education
in his dentist’s office. On the other hand, Tony’s a pretty shrewd observer of local campus politics, even though he doesn’t participate in its machinations. I consider seriously for the first time that maybe something
is
brewing. This very day Jacob Rose has told me in almost the same breath that we aren’t going to get the new department chair we’ve been promised and that he himself is interviewing for another job. These might well augur a sea change. Dickie Pope’s hiring two years ago as our campus executive officer also occasioned a wave of paranoia. His strengths were in the areas of budget and fund-raising, not academics, so a rumor quickly began to circulate that he’d been hired to presideover budget cuts and executions, though so far he’s done little more than absorb into his own budget academic positions freed up by retirements, a practice my colleagues in other institutions seem to regard as standard. As I’m considering these things, I’m conscious of something like a thrill, and I realize that my heart is racing faster than when Tony and I were playing racquetball. Also, I have neglected to pee after our match. I feel like I could arc my stream all the way into the campus pond, fifty yards away.
    When we arrive at the water’s edge, the ducks and geese are gathered along the bank, squawking loudly. A couple of guys from the TV station are tossing them popcorn. A camera with the station’s logo has been mounted on a tripod.
    A young woman I recognize from the eleven o’clock news is speaking into a microphone. Tony and I stop to watch, along with a handful of students getting out of late afternoon classes. “I’m standing on the future site of the new multimillion-dollar Technical Careers Complex here on the campus of Shit Bird State University …” The young woman repeats this same incomplete sentence four more times, switching the microphone from one hand to the other as she inspects the bottoms of her shoes for duck guano. It’s not the words, apparently, that matter. Her sound guy is watching arrows dance on a meter. “Okay?” she says, impatient, tired of her practiced lead-in.
    “I wonder if she would enjoy some fornication a little later in the evening,” Tony speculates.
    With anybody else I’d say, “Why don’t you ask her?” But in fact I’m distracted by another drama. The goose I dubbed Finny earlier in the day is angry. The popcorn is gone, a fact he holds against the man who’s been feeding it to him. He hisses first at the empty bag that the man has dropped to the ground and then at the hand that was holding it.
    “I can’t get a level with all this noise,” the soundman complains.
    When someone stamps a foot near the flock, several frightened mallards take crippled, awkward flight, but Finny holds his ground, hissing and honking with even greater vehemence.
    “Somebody want to lose the duck?” the young woman reporter says to no one in particular.
    “Goose,” Tony tells her. “The little black ones are ducks.”
    “I hate coming here,” the reporter says to her cameraman. Then to the boy who’d been feeding the ducks, “Jerry, go buy another bag of popcorn and lead the noisy bastards across the lake someplace.”
    “Pond,” Tony tells her. “The big ones are lakes. The little ones are ponds.”
    The young woman raises the microphone to her lips and speaks into it. “We’re here on the campus of Podunk College speaking with an authority on every goddamn thing. And what
is
your name, sir?”
    She holds the microphone out in our direction, and the camera swings around. I notice that the rolling light is on. Tony, to complete the jest, is hiding behind me, and when I turn around to locate him, Finny (the goose) is there. His long neck thrusts forward like a snake, nipping my pinkie, as if to say that he remembers me perfectly well from this morning. When I shove my hand into my jacket pocket to prevent a second attack, Finny follows suit, trying to get his bill into the pocket where my hand has disappeared and where he may