Straight Man

he says. “Sunday afternoon. Council of war. And we’re going to be way behind. Finny’s been on the phone all afternoon. He’s got everybody all worked up.”
    “They believe Finny?” I say. It’s a silly question, of course. My colleagues are academics. They indulge paranoid fantasies for the same reason dogs lick their own testicles. “They believe a man who’d kill a duck for them would turn around and sell them out?”
    “They don’t believe you’d kill a duck, Hank,” Teddy says. “You’re going to have to get on the phone and convince the few that will listen. The department operating paper requires a two-thirds majority, and Finny thinks he’s got several votes to spare. June thinks he’s right.”
    “Then he is,” I concede. After all, nobody in the department counts better than June, who predicted her own husband’s fall from grace by one vote a year ago. “Let’s save ourselves the effort.”
    “This is crazy,” Teddy says. “We’ve come up with eleventh-hour strategies before. We’ve made careers out of thwarting Finny.”
    “True, but it’s not much of an ambition,” I feel compelled to point out.
    “Losing to him would be better?”
    “The sad, fucking truth, Teddy, is that it probably matters far less than either of us imagines.”
    Even as I say this, however, I know it makes a difference. If Finny can manage my ouster as chair, he could well end up advising Dickie Pope, as Dickie himself warned me. And I know I’d be on Finny’s list.
    I glance around my office to ascertain whether there is anything within these walls that I might miss. The man sitting across from me has missed this office, is missing it still, even though it’s now occupied by a friend, so I suppose it’s possible that I could miss it too, especially if it were occupied by an enemy. In truth I have enjoyed making mischief from this chair, and while I remain confident of my ability to stir things up from any position on the game board, I’m not sure I’d be able to goad Gracie into mutilating me on a more level playing field. No, if I lose this chair, I will have peaked. My short tenure as chair—I smile to think of it—will be remembered as rule by exasperation. A decade from now, our young colleagues yet to be hired will be stunned to learn that William Henry Devereaux, Jr., was ever chair, however briefly. Teddy, who can’t tell a story, will be the historian who tells mine. Remember the day Hank Devereaux got Gracie to gig him through the nose with her spiral notebook ring? Or. Remember the day Hank went on TV and threatened to kill a duck a day until he got a budget? Ineptly as he’ll tell these stories, everyone will laugh except Paul Rourke, true to his promise. And me. If I’m still unlucky enough to be wandering these halls, I suspect I won’t be laughing.
    Back home, I find Julie is asleep on the bed in the guest room, and I’m glad, because in truth I look like hell, both eyes swollen almost completely shut. In the kitchen I take a couple antihistamines and decide to go to bed myself. I’m too exhausted even to stop in the bathroom to pee. The message light on the answering machine is blinking. I’m pretty sure I don’t want my messages, but I hit play anyway and am rewarded by a split-second rewind, probably a hang-up. But then I hear a voice I recognize as Billy Quigley’s. “You Judas Peckerwood” is his message in its entirety.
    Upstairs, I lie down, allow my eyes to close. Judas Peckerwood, I say aloud. In my head I’ve been composing mental lists ever since I leftDickie Pope’s office, so maybe it’s not unfair for Billy Quigley and the others to have leapt to the conclusion that I have betrayed them. Getting rid of the worst of our teachers isn’t such a bad idea. There’s no excuse for Finny, and his name belongs right at the top of the first mental list I composed. The trouble is that using bad teaching as a criterion would require that I follow Finny’s name on the list rather closely with Teddy Barnes’s and those of one or two other people I’m fond of. Other criteria are similarly problematic. We could ax those people who have never published a word or given a paper or attended a conference. Who have, as it were, no academic pulse. Such a net would again gather up Finny but also Billy Quigley and several other exhausted ex-high school teachers with M.A.’s, recruited thirty years ago, when the campus expanded. Try as I might, I can’t come up with a