Moo (12 page)

“Technology transfer,” murmured Elaine.

“You don’t have to convince me of general principles, Mr. Martin.”

The door opened, and Mrs. Walker brought in a tray of coffee and cookies. She set it in front of Elaine. There was silence until she left the room.

“Call me Arlen.”

“Arlen.”

“Well, there you go.”

“Arlen, let me speak frankly. The principles you speak of are generally agreed upon, but your particular history with this university is a more significant factor in the equation. I don’t know that the faculty would allow such an association even now, given the heat of opinion ten years ago.”

“It’s up to you to explain reality to them, then. Jobs. Cutbacks, that sort of thing. Besides, I can understand my own mistakes. I’ve made plenty of them. I’m not so hotheaded as I used to be. TransNational
casts a wider and more diversified net than Martin’s Flavorbest did. I say, invest everything in chickens and pretty soon you’re thinking like a chicken. You know how chickens think? I do, because I raised chickens as a boy. Chickens are always looking for little bits of things in the dirt. They don’t conceptualize on a higher plane. You step back from chickens and you start conceptualizing on a higher plane. That’s my philosophy.”

“Even so.”

“We got a lot to offer one another.”

Elaine nodded vigorously, then said, “Ivar, I don’t think you should overestimate the sort of punctilious view that the faculty is going to take. My own personal sense of things is that bygones CAN be bygones if your office and my office handle things properly. But Mr. Martin has too much to offer this university, ANY university. I’m sure he knows that any research funded by his group of companies must be done according to academic standards of disinterestedness. I’m sure we can rely on that.” She beamed. Her shining eyes caught the electric blue of her suit and promised the end to all difficulties. The President, a newcomer of some two years’ standing, she knew was on her side, even though at his last dinner party, he’d talked to Jack Parker for seventeen minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and to herself for only twelve minutes and three seconds.

Ivar said, “Well, specific proposals carry the most weight.”

Arlen said, “The whole faculty doesn’t know, as a rule, about any individual project or grant?”

“No, they don’t,” said Elaine.

“There you go,” said Arlen.

Ivar’s heart sank. For a few minutes, the three of them sat thoughtfully, sipping coffee. Finally, Arlen stood up. Elaine immediately popped out of her chair. Arlen said, “We’ll talk again.”

“Yes,” said Ivar. “Elaine, I need to speak to you for just a moment about another matter.”

“I don’t think—” said Elaine.

“Only a second.”

“Go ahead,” said Arlen. “Don’t stand on ceremony with me.” He went out. In the office, Mrs. Walker was just beginning her mail routine for the morning. She was the last to glance up when he entered. She pointed to the hard wooden chair beside her desk, the chair where students with appeals, complaints, and problems always sat. She said, “You may sit there.”

“That’s all right, ma’am, I’ll stand.”

She said, “Sit.”

He sat. He put his ankle up on his knee and jiggled his leg. She said, “Don’t do that.”

He stopped.

She read through her mail deliberately. Of course, she clearly remembered the TransNationalAmerica letter she had thrown away without opening, but she did not intend to waste her time in fruitless regret.

He thought of offering her an extremely well-paid job, just on the basis of her authoritative manner.

Elaine emerged, and said, “Oh! I’m sorry there isn’t a more comfortable chair for you, sir.”

Mrs. Walker glanced at her.

They left rather hurriedly.

Mrs. Walker picked up her phone and buzzed Ivar, who was waiting to hear from her. She said, “I have three words for you, Ivar.”

“And they are?”

“Bovine Spungiform Encephalopathy.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Let’s say that my sheep has a brain disease called scrapie, and that I send my sheep to a rendering plant where his or her remains are rendered into cattle feed, and then my cow begins to stagger around and fall down, and when I autopsy my cow I discover holes in her brain like the holes in a sponge—”

“Spungiform?”

“Exactly. I have not been careful in my feeding practices. I have encouraged a strange and terrifying disease to cross species boundaries. I am continuing to sell my beef and milk, though.”

“Where am I doing this?”

“England, my old stamping ground.”

He said, “The source of your information, Mrs. Walker?”

“My friend Mrs. Lake subscribes to the Sunday
Times
of London. Just by chance.”

“No. You’re right. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She hung up her phone and picked up her campus mail.

O
NE OF THE
Christian acts Marly Hellmich had set herself was to behave in a kindly fashion toward all members of the church, and so, for five years, she had behaved in a kindly fashion toward Nils Harstad, and he had received her kindness more or less as she expected—he was polite in return and he got along well with her and the others. This strategy of low voices and turning aside from anger had worked well for ten years to prevent the sort of acrimonious split that had divided the congregation at the end of the seventies, resulting in the establishment of a splinter church on the north side of town that still harbored fifty or sixty misguided souls, including Marly’s own brother and sister, though her father, uncle, two aunts, and all the cousins had stayed on this side of town. The rift ran so deep that there were plenty on both sides of town that were still not speaking to one another. She had heard that the north-siders continued to cherish contentiousness in their hearts, which proved that they always had done so, but the south-siders were as smooth and easy among themselves as passionate believers could be; their strategy had served them well. All you had to do whenever it became too strenuous was offer the effort up to the Lord, and that seemed to work well enough.

It ran through her mind that something had changed with Nils Harstad, but what with preparing for the service, then serving the church supper afterward (a Wednesday night tradition), and cleaning up from that, and listening to Marge Overbeck’s story of her kidney stone, she didn’t think much else about it until she was leaving and Nils Harstad asked if he could walk her home.

“Well, Nils, I have my car, but if you need a ride, I can easily give you one.”

“No. I have my car.”

“Oh, well, then—” She was confused, unsuspecting.

“How about a stroll around the block?”

The most she thought, the absolute most, was that he might ask her out to a movie, but actually, he was too old for her. He would
be in his fifties, and she was only thirty-five. She preferred men, when she got the chance (which wasn’t often with her job and Father to take care of), younger, darker, and from out of town. Certainly from beyond the surveillance of the church. She said, “I’m a little late tonight—”

And he said, no kidding, “How about getting married?”

Marly had to admit that this made her mad. She had not pegged Nils Harstad as a ridiculer of women, but she had been wrong before. Looking at him, she felt a powerful annoyance overcome her, but she spoke softly and turned away from anger. “Don’t you think this is sudden, Nils? Our friendship in the church isn’t accompanied by any special friendship just between us, do you think?” She had found with her father that asking questions was much more productive than making statements.

Nils cleared his throat. “Many cultures find that a preexisting friendship between the parties to an engagement isn’t necessary to marital concord.”

“Pardon me?”

“I’ve seen you. I’ve watched you. I think the Lord has made his wishes known to me.”

Well, if he put it that way. That way of putting it gave Marly pause. She said, “I need to pray over this and think about it. I need to listen to what the Lord says to me.”

“I certainly honor that.”

“Fine, then.”

He took the casserole dish that she was carrying out of her hands and accompanied her to her car. By this time, his car was the only other vehicle in the parking lot. It was a Lincoln, about a year old. She got into her own eight-year-old Dodge Omni with a new self-consciousness, especially when he opened the door for her and said, “I don’t do things lightly, Marly. I know my own wishes.”

The only thing to do was to pray about it, even if it took all night to get some kind of sign, so after carefully brushing her teeth, she knelt beside her bed and fixed her attention. When she got up an hour later, she knew what the Lord wanted her to do, and in the morning she still knew it, so she called in sick and set about following His orders.

First, she went to the university library and checked the budget book out at the reserve desk. She noted that Nils Harstad, dean of extension and professor of agronomy, earned $121,000 a year.

Second, she looked Nils up in the phone book and drove past his house. It was large, probably four or five bedrooms, brick, and surrounded by expensive plantings.

Third, she called a realtor and told him she was new in town, come from California, and looking for a big traditional brick house in the best neighborhood. What should she expect to pay? “Weeeeelllll,” he said, “IF one should come on the market, which doesn’t happen very often, you’d be looking at a quarter million, depending on the shape it’s in. Can I take your name?” She hung up.

Fourth, she meditated over the entry in the phone book. Apart from Ivar, who lived at the same address, there were no other Harstads in the phone book and no teen-line, which meant either young children (unlikely) or married children or none.

Fifth, she looked around the two-bedroom bungalow she shared with her father, and at her most recent pay stub from the university. She gazed upon the photo of her boyfriend, Travis, who was a long-distance trucker with a wife and small children in Pennsylvania, and she looked in the mirror. She knew she was plain and that she didn’t know how to dress. She recognized that kindliness and turning away from anger, two of her real virtues, had never carried her so far before, not once in ten years.

She stood up and turned a sober pirouette, then leaned close to the mirror. She whispered a word. The word was “Cinderella.”

W
HEN
E
ARL
B
UTZ
leaned his bulk against the bars of his pen to better meet up with and enjoy the scratching he was getting from Bob, the orange steel bars bowed slightly outward, but Bob, whose life since meeting Diane had been a whirlwind of new experiences, didn’t notice. He just scratched and scratched. Earl, for whom being scratched was a major source of pleasure, was asking no questions. If Bob wanted to stand there with his elbow on the pen and his chin in his hand and scratch and scratch and scratch, Earl’s only responsibility was to stand there likewise and enjoy it. Nevertheless, the bars of the pen showed what the charts also showed but what Bob was too preoccupied to notice—Earl Butz was getting monstrous big.

Earl himself felt it in the effort it took him to heave himself to his trotters in the morning, in his increasing desire to lie around and have things, like cooling baths, brought to him, rather than going out to receive them. There was a suspicious bulge toward the center of the pen in the shape of Earl’s toileting area—his characteristic fastidiousness was beginning to disappear. He still worked hard at his main occupation of eating. He couldn’t help that, it was bred into him; but like any variety of genius, appetite was beginning to overshadow other, more individual traits of his personality. He no longer played with his toys, for example, though he often contemplated them from a recumbent position. And he did not only feel his growing bulk spiritually, he felt it physically, in the form of migrating pains in his legs and trotters. There was no persistent lameness—a limp would have revealed that to Bob and he would have noticed, he wasn’t completely dazed, after all—no, the pains were sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes sharp and sometimes mild, but never, anymore, absent. He could avoid them by lying down in his pile of straw, and so that’s what he did whenever he wasn’t hard at the trough.

For his part, Bob saw Earl so frequently that these signs of decline, if that’s what they were, were hidden from him. In addition to that, he was remarkably fond of Earl—of his friendly, willing nature and
the philosophical way that he made the best of his incarceration—and so he was not inclined to notice evidence of pain that would only give him pain, too. Whatever stirrings of unease that some subrational apprehension of Earl, some bodily response that came from a life of knowing hogs, might give him had not yet surfaced, and certainly would have a hard time doing so amidst the storm of feelings he now entertained for Diane Peterson, the girl he had met at the party.

In Bob’s former opinion, girls had been generally unremarkable. Some future one had your name on her, but her likeness to your sisters or aunts or mother was major, and reassuring. He had long assumed a relationship to the whole realm of girls that was very similar to his father’s relationship to his mother—respectful, with much understood, little actually declared. He had been subtly warned against anything else, for one thing. His father and grandfather spoke disapprovingly about boys and men who followed their dicks around; his mother and aunts reserved their most puzzled scorn for girls and women who didn’t fit in, didn’t ask for recipes, and thought themselves better than other people. It was easy to see the rational basis for all of this disapproval, too—that kind of man and those kinds of women made no one happy, least of all themselves.

Nevertheless, now there was Diane. All judgments he might have made about her character, all predictions he might have based on those judgments, were blasted away by her own sense of her future. “Make the best of it,” his father’s commonest and sagest advice, didn’t even occupy a niche in Diane’s brain.