Moo (25 page)

He did not doubt that the big ag companies, the CIA, and the FBI had introduced some sort of selective brain poison into his water supply in order to disable or, more probably, kill him. He did not doubt that he was lucky to be alive. He did not doubt that he would overcome this mooing problem and prevail in the end. But it seemed unfair, after a life of hard work and patience, that they would get him at last.

The Millers came before lunch. They brought a sack of apples, their Haralsons that he liked so much. They sat on the right side of the bed, and the nurse told them he had walked four circuits of the hospital today. They were thrilled. Sally did most of the talking. She and Mary Hutton had been over to his place, cleaning. Mary’s dad, Line, had had a little accident with his truck, but Line had beaten the dent in the hood out with a hammer and it looked as good as new.
Mary wasn’t speaking to her sister in Chicago, still. Sally’s own girls were back on the basketball team at school. Practices had just started. Weren’t the apples good-looking this year? And crisp! Just wait until he tried them. Sally smiled and smiled, and stroked his right hand so that he didn’t want to pull it away even though he did want to find each of the girls a dime.

While Sally talked, he stared meaningfully at Joe, until finally Joe said, “Well, I told you about how we sold your beans? Got a good price on them, too.”

Loren shook his head. That news was weeks old.

Joe went on uncertainly, “Corn’s in the bin. It had about seventeen percent moisture. Pretty good, I thought. We dried it down to about fourteen. Just waiting for the price to go up a bit to sell it. That’s what I’m doing with my own.”

Loren shook his head. Though Joe would have been dumbstruck by the thought, Loren didn’t care at all about the corn.

Loren looked at Sally, who fell silent. After a bit, she said, “You want to tell us something?”

He nodded.

“Not about the corn or the beans or the dogs? The dogs went over to the Christensens. You mind about that? They like dogs.”

Loren shook his head.

“The house?”

Loren shook his head, though doing so made his worlds, the known and the unknown, swirl painfully together. Nothing quite took it out of him like shaking his head.

Joe said, “The machinery? Lyle Hutton and I put it away in the machine shed the other day.”

Loren shook his head.

Joe said, “Now, we ain’t been in the barn except to turn out the lights. I know that’s your secret place, and we don’t want to get into that, so your secret is safe. We haven’t been a bit nosy, if you’re worried about that.”

“That’s right,” said Sally. “You can count on us. We stopped the mail at the post office and had the phone turned off, but we thought it was better to leave the electric on, and some lights on in the house. But believe me, we haven’t gone into your private things.”

Loren nodded vigorously, to indicate that they COULD go into the barn, they COULD investigate his private things, because he was convinced that if Joe did that, he would be impressed enough with
the machine that he would take care of it, preserve it. Preservation would be, well, might be, enough. Somewhere, a few points up in the percentile rankings, he would find language again. The mooing would turn into persuasion, and there he would be, back in the office of his dean, showing his plans; there his dean would be, out in the barn marvelling at his revolutionary machine, and that would be IT for the CIA, the FBI, and the big ag companies.

But the Millers interpreted his nods as approval, and assured him again that they wouldn’t get into his private things, and pretty soon they had told him the rest of the gossip and gone home to their dinner. His own dinner was meat loaf, which he ate because there was nothing else to do, and then he turned his good side up and tried to doze off in spite of the sense he had of the strange unknown place beneath him, over which he lay suspended. He substituted knowledge for feeling, making himself think, over and over, I’m just in bed, I’m just in bed, I’m just in bed, but the fact was, if you went with that, substituting knowledge for feeling, then you had to admit that, maybe, probably, that machine would never get out of his barn and those plans would languish at the copy place until after he was dead, and then they would throw them out. If you substituted knowledge for feeling, then you had to admit that the FBI and the CIA and the big ag companies, especially them, were likely to have their way, with him, Loren Stroop, as with everything else.

T
HE PERPLEXITY
of Mrs. Loraine Walker at the acquisition of the Seven Stones Mining Corporation by TransNational turned out to be shared by the
Wall Street Journal
. Although the
Journal
devoted to Seven Stones only a single paragraph toward the end of a long article about the decline of the great mining corporations, that paragraph made some interesting observations, in Mrs. Walker’s view. Previously, as noted by the running-dog-lackey-of-the-imperialist-class writer, TransNational had been known for acquiring small companies just as, or just before, its innovative techniques or products gained general corporate acceptance—TransNational owned more than twice the number of patents owned by the average conglomerate of the same size. Arlen Martin was well known for his disdain of “stumbling white elephants,” into which category he consigned every company from Exxon and IBM to Reynolds Tobacco and General Foods. He had been quoted as disdaining someone he knew who ran Jell-O. “There’s a guy,” he had said, “who spends his time thinking up salad recipes and telling folks that canned pineapple in green Jell-O won’t kill them. Me, I’m not in the maintenance business. I’m in the revolution business.” But the Seven Stones Mining Corporation was an old and top-heavy company, doggedly working nearly played-out seams in the teeth of declining, you could say collapsing, profits. Its main feature of interest, detailed by the writer with typical
Journal
-style covert admiration, was a colorful history of stealing land, buying elections, possibly arranging the death of a UMW official, intimidating government inspectors and agents, and resisting mandated safety measures.

In addition, according to the rest of the article, there wasn’t much of a future in mining, at least in the U.S. The Mesabi Range, the Upper Peninsula, the Mother Lode country, Wyoming, Montana, what with reduce, reuse, recycle, even the biggest companies were saying, “Why bother?”

Of course there was Kennicott. Mrs. Walker’s lips thinned to a
disapproving line. Digging a lead mine in Wisconsin. Hmm. Right on the Flambeau River. Hmm. Though Mrs. Walker had spent her childhood rather east of there, outside of Shawano, she knew the Flambeau River, the pristine, immaculate, one-of-a-kind, dark deep teeming chill delicious avenue through the forest Flambeau River. Lead was something Mrs. Walker preferred bound up in ore, safe in the ground. She didn’t like it in paint, in trash, in soil, in the air. She certainly did not like it seeping into the Flambeau River. Kennicott. Her eyebrows lowered and approached each other. She made a note to call one of her cousins, who still lived on the reservation.

But the riddle at hand was Arlen Martin. She accessed the computer files of the geology department. She found no outgoing correspondence addressed to any of Martin’s companies, no reference at all to Seven Stones Mining. With some reluctance she admitted that she was, at least for the time being, stumped. To console herself, since it had taken so long for the library to find and print out her article, she accessed the athletic budget and transferred enough money out of there to the library budget to pay for two more two-thirds-time work-study students in Reference.

A
S HE FINISHED
up his report for the TransNationalAmerica Corporation (he always got down to contracted tasks right away, another of his virtues), Dr. Lionel Gift reflected upon how satisfying it was, once again, to do a good job for a good cause. Of course the report, as Dr. Gift well knew, was only one of the services he had contracted for. They would hardly have approached a man of his intellectual and moral stature for a mere report. Once he was finished with the report, then the real work of wheedling, persuading, and setting a good economic example for his friends and admirers in the Costa Rican government would begin. And it would have to begin soon. Seven Stones Mining was toppling faster than Martin had foreseen, and it was costing the other branches of TransNational a fortune to keep it out of bankruptcy. Martin had a thing about bankruptcy, one of those unsophisticated Depression-boyhood things that Dr. Lionel Gift found poignant and vulnerable in the man. And anyway, he was right that if the banks took hold, there was plenty of costly equipment that Martin might not be able to transport out of the country to, say, Costa Rica.

And if you wanted to dig a gold mine under the hemisphere’s last primeval cloud forest, you couldn’t do it without costly equipment.

In Dr. Gift’s considered opinion, there was no rational case to be made AGAINST such a gold mine, and a significant case to be made in its favor. He had spent the last two weeks accumulating that case grain by grain, point by point, and as a result, he himself was convinced. It was a pleasant feeling.

On the other hand, Dr. Gift had weaknesses of character just like any other man, and he knew that one of these was that he could not have made so persuasive a case for, say, a molybdenum mine, a cobalt mine, a manganese mine. Even a silver mine. Precious as these minerals were to the world of modern technology that Dr. Gift revered, what had sustained him through the composition of his report was the thought of that hidden thread, that filament of sunshine and prosperity
running through the lightless depths of ore—GOLD! It reminded him of the universe, how rare and priceless light was in that vast blackness, how humans, who lived upon that light, had to seek it or die. Now geologists at Seven Stones Mining had discovered a golden seam at the very top of the South American granodiorite intrusions, an unlikely and unlooked-for offshoot of those legendary lodes now dug up and abandoned. The land around the cloud forest that International Cattle, another TransNational subsidiary, had quietly bought up surrounded the seam but did not contain it. This ray of light and life ran under the forest, rising to the surface here and there, producing for the birds and monkeys and snakes golden-flecked streams, sparkling soils, glittering motes on the floor of the forest. It was inspiring in a painful, anxiety-making way, the thought of that gold going unclaimed, unpossessed. It mocked consumer insatiability. Dr. Lionel Gift couldn’t stand contemplating it for very long. Neither could Arlen Martin. It was a bond between them. Better not to know about it.

But they DID know about it, and knowledge demanded action.

It was also better that no one else know about it. The deposits contained duller metals, molybdenum, for one, and the forest, of course, had other profit potential in its medicinal plants, wood products, and tourist allure. For the preservation of these, sound management demanded that the sort of low-level rush of individuals possessed of an insatiable but inconvenient desire for gold, as well as of sieves and pickaxes, etc., that California and Alaska had seen be avoided at all costs. As a man of the nineties, Dr. Gift made these environmental points a prominent part of his report.

In fact, very few persons were on a need-to-know basis in regard to Dr. Gift’s report. The grant money, of which the university would get half (10 percent less than the university’s usual take, a perk that recognized Dr. Gift’s unusual contribution to university life), would go through Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s office directly into Dr. Gift’s G-account. Had he written this report as a paid consultant rather than a grantee, Dr. Gift would have received more money, but, of course, it was Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek who had set them up and circumvented Ivar (Dr. Gift perfectly remembered the chicken feed controversy). Dr. Gift would never cheat a middleman or middlewoman. The market, in fact, the divine market, was the inspired creation of middlepersons everywhere who had nothing to offer but reliable intuition about
what prolific producer needed what insatiable consumer and vice versa.

Nevertheless, as a grantee, Dr. Gift had to supply a copy of his report (and later a summary of his persuasive activities, especially if he planned to travel on the university expense account, which he did) to Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek’s office. The importance of secrecy was great enough, Dr. Gift felt, that once he had composed it on his word processor, once he had printed out three copies—one for himself, one for Martin, and one for Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek—he erased the file (what a chill that gave him!) and stored the copies in his fire-proof, theft-proof, tornado-proof, and flood-proof household safe. It was scary, in a way, having only printed copies. It reminded him of ephemerality, human mortality, the transience of objects. How quickly he had gotten used to the safety of storing his documents all over the campus—in the computer archives, on his own hard disks at the office and at home, on a backup disk, as printout, and, finally, in journal articles. Storage itself enhanced the perceived value of information, didn’t it?