Fool on the Hill (14 page)

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—”

“That’s been your problem ail along, you know,” Hamlet interrupted him. “You’ve been suffering from a serious thinking shortage. I never understood what you saw in Saffron Dey in the first place.”

“I’ll give you two large and firm guesses.”

Hamlet nodded. “Granted,” he said, “that good cleavage doesn’t grow on
trees, I still don’t see the sense in it. Zephyr’s shape isn’t as exaggerated as Saffron’s, but it’s a nice shape all the same. And lest you forget, my friend, Zephyr has a personality. Saffron’s is as shallow as the dimples on a golf ball.”

“That’s all true,” Puck admitted.

“Then why’d you do it?”

“Look, it’s not like Zephyr and I had a firm commitment. . . .”

“That,” said Hamlet, “is one of the two dumbest statements made by males on this planet, be they sprite or human.”

“I had
urges,
all right?”

“And that takes care of the other.”

Puck twiddled his thumbs self-consciously, not sure what to say next. “By the way,” Hamlet went on, “what in God’s name possessed you to invite Saffron on the Raid, especially when you were trying to patch things up with Zephyr?”

“I didn’t invite her. She’s Cobweb’s date, officially. I guess he liked what he saw when he was watching us go at it in the display case.”

“Did you try telling Zephyr that?”

“She didn’t believe me.”

“Hmm. I guess that’s not surprising, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” Puck said gloomily. “But what am I supposed to
do,
Hamlet? I don’t want her to go on hating me forever.”

“I doubt she hates you. Oh, she’s not too pleased with you right now, obviously. And as to whether she’ll ever trust you again, well, that’s a toss-up . . . I’m afraid I don’t have any simple solution for you, Puck. The consequences of chauvinism, as they say, aren’t easy to undo.”

“And there’s nothing I can do?”

“Nothing honest I can think of offhand. You could always try using another series of lies to repair the damage from the first series, but that usually has mixed results. I’d say your best bet is just to keep on being nice to her and pray that things work out. Or chuck her and go after a different sprite entirely.”

“I can’t do that, Hamlet.”

“Well then, I guess you’ll have to depend on Fate to see you through. Who knows, maybe—”

He broke off as there was a sudden splash in the water off to their right. It was followed by three others, as unseen objects plunked into the lake.

“What is it?” said Hamlet, preparing for evasive action.

“There.” Puck pointed. “On the shore.”

Four young boys, humans, stood on the shore, approximately twenty yards away from the battleship. They were throwing rocks, and as Puck watched them, one produced a slingshot from his back pocket.

“How’d they spot us?” Puck wondered aloud.

“Children are good at noticing things that others would ignore,” Hamlet
reminded him. “And this boat isn't tiny, either. I've had trouble a few times before. Hang on.”

The battleship’s starboard side faced the boys. Now Hamlet accelerated and began to turn toward them.

“Wait a minute,” said Puck. “Shouldn’t we be retreating?”

“Not to worry,” Hamlet replied, throwing a switch. A panel opened near the bow and a catapult-like contraption rose up to the level of the deck.

“Holy shitmoley!” cried the smallest of the boys. “Its comin’ for us! It’s comin’ for us!”

“Shut up, Mikey,” suggested the slingshot wielder. He took careful aim and fired a shot that passed right above the catapult and thudded clumsily off the outer shell of the bridge.

Puck stared at the rock, which weighed nearly as much as he did.

“This is one of those times,’ he said, “when I almost wish I weren’t invisible.”

“What makes you think they’d stop if they could see us?” asked Hamlet. “Have you ever seen what they do to chipmunks? Now, pray for good aim!”

He threw another switch and the catapult lobbed an egg-shaped object into the air. In fact it was an egg, one that had been drained of its yolk and refilled. It flew in a high are and burst on the forehead of the smallest boy—Mikey—who proceeded to scream as if mortally wounded.

“Hamlet!” Puck cried. “What was in that—”

“Child repellent,” Hamlet told him. “Don’t worry, the effects are temporary.”

Mikey began to swipe at his head now, staggering blindly back and forth and wailing pitifully. The other children ceased their rock barrage and gathered around to see if he would drop dead, or what.

“Care for some tea?” Hamlet asked, bringing the ship around and heading once more toward his island home. “Macduff got me a really special blend. Says he liberated it from one of the dorms. It’s part Earl Grey and part Colombian Red.”

“Sounds good,” said Puck. “Who knows, maybe it’ll give me some inspiration about what I should do.”