Moo (21 page)

As she said to Martha, “You wonder what there is about the place that is even worth saving. You wonder, why not just let them stumble around the way they seem intent upon doing. But it offends me. It’s too disorderly. And in the end, all that disorder would land right in my lap. That, I am too old for now.”

While it was too soon to act, Mrs. Walker did suggest to Ivar that
he hadn’t staved off the Arlen Martin threat. Ivar said, “Well, he has a lot of money.”

“Do you mean that he carries a big stick, or that he carries a big carrot?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, none, I suppose, since they both make me angry.”

“We’ll see.”

“We’ll see?” She expressed pointed disbelief.

“I’ll talk to some people.”

“That will be an interesting first step.”

“There’s not a lot we can do.”

“Academic freedom?”

“Well, of course.”

She could see that he was defeated already. She said, “I thought you should know.”

“Thank you.”

She turned briskly and strode out of the office, clearly communicating disagreement. As soon as she sat down at her desk, though, her phone rang. It was Ivar. He said, “Mrs. Walker, I know you’ll be careful in all matters.”

She said, “Well, of course.”

And she was.

All she did, when she had time to do it, was access the Poultry Science files for recent outgoing communications having to do with unorthodox (what, anymore, though, could be unorthodox?) poultry feeding systems. Or poultry breeding systems. Or chicken processing systems. There was nothing. You could say, she thought, that the files were clean as a whistle, or you could say that poultry processing had devolved as far as technologically and humanly possible, and therefore no longer interested Arlen Martin. Mrs. Walker herself always bought local free-range chickens from a farmwife co-op in the next county, so when she accessed some data about potential links between growth hormones in factory chickens and the early onset of menarche in selected populations of American girls, her interest was fairly abstract.

Anyway, chickens were the leading edge of the past. She had accessed chickens mostly for tidiness’ sake, so that she couldn’t accuse herself of overlooking the obvious. But there was no activity in poultry.

Under her own version of Ivar’s signature, Mrs. Walker had, over
the years, authorized the library to buy as many available databases as they could. She had actually transferred funds out of the athletic budget into the library budget from time to time, possibly her most dangerous covert action. The result was, though, that she could now, bit by bit, during breaks and minutes of free time, track Arlen Martin and the TransNationalAmerica Corporation through the
Wall Street Journal
index,
Facts on File, Commercial and Industrial
blah-blah,
Acquisitions and Mergers International
, etc. There were plenty of articles about Martin. He had allowed himself to be interviewed by everyone from USAir’s in-flight magazine to
Life
magazine to
Business Week
to a weekly newspaper from the suburbs of Amarillo, Texas, to
Der Spiegel
and British
Vogue
. At the same time, his holdings were a secretive and complex web of interlocking companies, some apparently just names and boards of directors, others actual businesses. Tracing his ownership and influence amounted, at first, to recognizing recurrent names, then intuiting relationships and duties from the positions and companies attached to them. After a while, she could track his restless interests. One of them, and an odd one compared to the others, she thought, was mining. Around Christmas, the TransNationalAmerica Corporation, through two intermediaries, had acquired the Seven Stones Mining Corporation, home office, Denver, Colorado. And Martin had paid a lot for it. She turned back to the
Wall Street Journal
index, and found an article headlined “Once Powerful Enough to Topple Governments: Mineral Industry Now in Doldrums.” She transferred herself to university E-mail, and left a note for Library Media: “Please send a copy of the following article to provost’s office.” She cited the article. Her instincts, which were not only naturally good, but muscular from use, told her that, speaking of mining, she had found a very productive seam. She logged off and stood up. Out in the living room, the clock read 1:24 and Martha had fallen asleep on the couch. Loraine stood her up and guided her into the bedroom.

T
HE THING
that Keri had noticed over the last seven weeks in Dr. Lionel Gift’s beginning economics lecture class was how happy he seemed. He bounced around the podium, full of high spirits; his smile beamed everywhere in the large room, as if his teeth were strangely iridescent. He made lots of jokes, most of them not that funny, but he was in such a good mood that the students laughed along with him anyway. The students were mostly boys, and they seemed to enjoy classes very much. Keri felt more at a remove. She felt, in fact, as if Dr. Gift were telling rollicking tales about an entirely alien planet, the Bizarro Planet, home of Bizarro Superman. She also felt that today, with “Midterm Review” on the syllabus, was her last chance to assimilate Bizarro World and thereby pass her midterm. She came into the hall and set out her pens and pencils, her notebook. She WOULD write everything down, and if she couldn’t understand it, she would memorize it.

The usual glances from the mostly male lecture audience followed her entrance. In fact, it was she who put most of them into a receptive frame of mind. Gift presented the task, but Keri, the life-size Barbie with a voice like the reassuring low hum of insects on a summer night, represented the reward. Sometimes, one or the other of them offered to help her with her homework, but she shook her head. Reassuringly like every dream-girl, she acted self-contained and remote, bestowing smiles and friendly nods out of a sort of impersonal good cheer, clearly signalling that she had no preferences of her own—the best candidate would win the prize, and his very accomplishment would be enough for her. In the words of Dr. Gift, “pure competition would lead to an optimal allocation of resources.” The boys, who in economics classes tended to be self-confident and to look forward to lives of wealth and power, licked their lips at the thought. It all agreed reassuringly with every myth and fairy tale. Reality-girls might have preferences—that was a result of their fallen natures, as represented
by their imperfect looks and unpredictable demands. But if you could get beyond THEM to THIS one, well, every vibration of every boy’s desiring soul promised him a paradise of total love, respect, and acceptance.

Nor did it occur to any boy to empathize with the desire of any of the other boys. Dr. Gift said not to, said, in fact, that such empathy was impossible and even sympathy was an illusion. The only possible response to any other individual’s good or bad fortune, according to Dr. Gift, was indifference. To feel this indifference, or even to cultivate it as a way of avoiding illusions of sympathy or envy, was every individual’s duty toward the truth. And it was true that cultivating indifference was a reassuring discipline against the envy that seemed to the boys to have plagued them all their lives.

Just to show them who they were, early in every semester, Dr. Gift administered a test. He gave them all tokens worth $100 to an investing individual, but returning $220 when invested as a part of the group, though that larger sum had to be divided by all members of the group, with individuals who did not invest receiving as much as individuals who did. The investors could also choose to invest as individuals, in which case the return would be more modest—only $110 per $100—but the sum would not have to be shared out among the group (which would also include noninvestors). Dr. Gift made clear to all, even the most confused, that an individual’s greatest return would be on the group investment, IF the entire group chose to invest with the group. Then he polled them—how would they invest? Almost uniformly over the years, 20 percent of them chose to invest for the group, 80 percent chose to invest for themselves. When he announced the results of the tests, they looked around. It was pretty clear who was in the minority—students who weren’t doing very well in economics.

Dr. Gift, himself, had noticed the correlation between doing well in economics classes and choosing, even hypothetically, to maximize one’s own profits at the expense of the group. Just another piece of evidence, he thought, about the nature of success.

Keri knew she was one of those who fell into both undesirable categories—not doing well in economics and choosing to invest for the group. It had seemed so clear to her on the day of the test—if they all invested for the group, everyone’s return would be 120 percent greater. If even one more than half invested with the group, they’d
get more than they would as individuals. The math seemed to be absolutely clear—she was convinced she had grasped something and the conviction bolstered her confidence. When Gift announced the results, smiling as always, the Bizarro Planet seemed to float completely out of her ken, and she was embarrassed, to boot. She had blushed. All the boys around her thought it was charming.

The midterm review was mostly of relevant mathematical models, which Keri understood fairly well. As with all mathematical models, the sides of the equations balanced each other, and therefore seemed pure and true, irrefutable. She wrote them down carefully.

Dr. Lionel Gift was well aware that he could teach this class, and even entertain and please the customers, with no thought whatsoever. What he was saying to them now was like a television program on another channel that he could switch to whenever he wanted, just to see that it was still on, just to see that he, the talking head, was still adhering to the script. Somewhat more often, he checked the audience. Heads down, pencils moving, the occasional nod, all the way back to the last rows. It touched him, it really did, the imparting of knowledge, the initiation of a whole new group of customers into the domain of truth.

The enlargement of his class in the spring by three times was satisfying for so many reasons. In the first place, market demand had been recognized, even by the bureaucrats in the administration. In the second place, the larger amount of tuition money soon to be flowing in his direction would be good grounds for a raise, no matter what the legislature decided to do for the faculty at large (as a matter of principle, Dr. Gift was indifferent to their concerns). And in the third place, there was this intangible. As little attention as he liked to pay to intangibles, this sense in the room of knowledge pouring out of his mouth and being soaked up by their eyes and ears and note-taking hands was intoxicating. How much more intoxicating, how loaves-and-fishes-like it would be when the same amount of knowledge poured out and was soaked up by three times as many customers! The thought brought him right back to that nagging question of the value of information. Once he had his report done about the Arlen Martin plan, he would get back to the joy of that sort of pure economics.

Every class period, Keri discovered that willpower was not enough to keep her attention fixed on the material Dr. Gift was delivering.
Her own experience in economics, extensive and gained on her father’s farm through the farm crises of the eighties, did not, for example, teach her that the workings of the market unerringly produced the general good. When her uncle Jack, having done well in hogs, bought out her uncle Dwight at a farm auction when Keri was in sixth grade, and then farmed the land himself rather than giving it or renting it to Dwight (“He owes a lot on a new combine,
he says
,” said the relatives), forcing Dwight to commute to a chicken processing job two hundred miles away, Keri’s father, Sam, had been caught in the middle, as had her grandparents—her grandfather sided with Jack and admired his success, her grandmother sided with Dwight and said that it was just like Jack, always had been, he had no more family feeling than a cat. Jack and Dwight were certain never to speak until they died, every family holiday was wrecked, her cousins lived on hand-me-downs and envied everything Keri had or did, her father, once playful and fun, now hardly ever spoke at all, her mother said he was impossible to live with (and Keri knew what that could portend), the whole township knew their family business and had an opinion of it. She did not understand what general good Dr. Gift was smiling about.

Nor did her experience teach her to value consumer insatiability above all other virtues. She clearly remembered from her early childhood what life on the farm had been like when her grandfather and father and uncles were farming together on the original 400 acres. They farmed and fished and farmed and hunted and farmed and went to the state fair. Half her relatives sat on the PTA and were hand in glove with her teachers. Her father played Hank Williams songs on the guitar, and her mother sang, and her grandfather played the harmonica. Someone was always available to help with the 4-H projects—even the worthless pony and those crazy goats. Later, when her grandfather farmed the original 400 by himself, her father had 600 of his own, and Jack, the most insatiable member of the family, farmed his and Dwight’s 780, they were in the fields day and night, every planting season and harvest was a nightmare, the family debt load soared to astounding proportions, all the money from the farm went back into the farm, and her mother and grandmother had to get work in town to pay for food. Her grandmother would say, “If this is success, you can have it.”

It
was
true, as Dr. Gift said, that the land itself had no value except as a market commodity, but that fact did not cause Keri the mirth
and good cheer that it seemed to cause her professor. The rocketing and plummeting of land prices that she had known as long as she had known her name had meant unexpected and mysterious indoor weather, unmanageable cycles of surprise and anxiety, constant repetition of one ritualistic phrase, “the bank, the bank, the bank,” year after year. Then there was the valueless land itself. Her father fretted about it as if it
did
have value, as if he cared whether he planted on steep slopes, as if corn after corn after corn in the same fields was actually bad, as if he cared about cutting down windbreaks and filling in stream courses, as if he didn’t know about land the very thing that so thrilled Dr. Gift—that land was inexhaustible, and fertility was, too.