John Goldfarb, Please Come Home Read online

  Hus hung up the phone with a comical flourish and looked to the crew for approbation. “Cut!” yelled the director, and as the crew burst into applause, Hus rushed up to him. “How was it?” he asked eagerly, the wig still afloat on his smooth dome.

  “Great!” said the director, who would be taking a Hus course the following semester.

  Hus eyed Quint. “Facile, did you catch it?”

  “Sure did.”

  “Did you understand it?”

  “Sure.”

  Hus looked vaguely troubled. “That’s funny,” he muttered into fingers tapping his lips.

  “The prez wants to see you.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Oh, I can’t!”

  “It’s urgent.”

  “But we’re running ‘dailies’ in a second!”

  “Blaise, he’ll hemorrhage!”

  “That bad?”

  “Well,” sighed Quint, “‘’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but ’tis enough…’”

  “Eh?” frowned Hus.

  “Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Dr. Quas,” began Overreach, his weight supported by clenched fists pressed against his desk top, “did you prepare the Hus Shakespeare final?”

  “Well, you might say that (a) I did, or, (b) I did with the assistance of Dr. Hus, or, (3) all of the above. Dr. Hus provided the basic material. I simply put it into a form that could be graded by the Smedley IV computer. I tried explaining that to young No-Neck.”

  “You saw him?”

  Quas shivered. “Yes, sir. He (a) accosted me, (b) threatened me, and, (c) did me bodily harm.”

  “Dr. Quas, are you putting me on?”

  “Sir?”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “Who, sir?”

  “No-Neck, sir!”

  Dr. Quas shifted uneasily. “Well, he claimed that he’d been absent the first day of class and that, consequently, he couldn’t figure out how to turn on his teaching machine.”

  “I see.”

  “He hurt me,” whimpered Quas, fingering his right shoulder.

  “Yes,” intoned Overreach without expression.

  “But I think I explained it to him, all right. I mean, I made it clear to him that the entire affair was strictly in the hands, so to speak, of the computer. And you——”

  “—cannot fix a Smedley IV computer,” finished Overreach tonelessly.

  “Precisely! I mean, a human grader could have (a) shown leniency, (b) changed the——”

  “Thank you, Dr. Quas.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good day, sir.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Dr. Quas moved to the door, but he looked back for an afterthought and turned instanter into a pillar of parentheses that was disintegrated and scattered in sawed-off black ovals by a sudden draft from the quick-opening door. Quint was back.

  “Where’s Hus?” demanded Overreach.

  “Says he’s too busy.”

  Overreach slumped into his chair. “Too busy!” he rasped, choking on his impotent rage. “Too busy!” he almost sobbed. “Here I sit, facing crisis after crisis and——!”

  Markhoff burst into the room, his vorpal sword in hand. “Okay, bright eyes, you’ve had it!” he flamed at Overreach. He leaned over the Sub U. president’s desk and insolently flicked his necktie up and out of his jacket. “Notre Dame just offered,” gloated the coach, “and I’ve accepted! What’s more, I’m taking No-Neck with me!”

  “Markhoff!” whimpered Overreach. “Please!”

  “Come September, we’ll wax your ass,” sneered Markhoff; “I promise you!” Then he left, neglecting, in his excitement, to spit on Overreach’s desk, as was his custom.

  Overreach’s eyes begged sympathy from his aide.

  “Don’t worry, chief,” drawled Quint. “Markhoff wasn’t that good a coach. And Weed’ll find a replacement for No-Neck.”

  “Who was Attila’s replacement?” murmured Overreach hopelessly. He looked out the window and saw Snipe licking Markhoff’s hand.

  * * *

  Mrs. Luminous Hus, in a red-flannel nightgown, waddled to the head of the basement stairs at 2 A.M. and peered down at her husband as he coped with the dictum to “publish or perish.”

  “When are you coming to bed, Blaise?”

  Uncle Blaise withdrew another damp double page from his miniature offset printing press and carefully inserted it into one of several advance copies of the Hubris Quarterly Review, destined for circulation to the university’s top administrators. “Just a few minutes, dear, and I’ll be through with the binding.”

  Mrs. Hus snorted delicately from on high. “Hmph. Hus hath murdered sleep.”

  He turned blank eyes up at her.

  “Macbeth,” she explained.

  * * *

  Outside the Sub U. chapel, Ashley Yookoomian played out string to a chimpanzee, expert in the solution of mazes, that he had kidnaped from the department of psychology. “Play the man, master ape,” urged Ashley; “find the opening, boy, find it!” Suddenly string played out furiously as the chimp vanished into the mass amorphous, and Ashley, like Theseus triumphant leering upon Ariadne, turned to his buxom companion, the Sweetheart of Sigma Weh. “He’s got it,” he grinned. “Old Jennings Bryan never misses!” The girl giggled sinfully and clung to him, following as he traced the thread. Stirred by the seduction scene in Elmer Gantry, which they had both seen at a drive-in, the couple had converted the Sub U. chapel into a private temple of Venus, with no rites barred.

  The moon’s rays were eclipsed and darkness fell across them. The girl stopped giggling and gaped, her fingernails digging into Ashley’s arm. Leaves rustled and the earth trembled slightly as something passed. Then moonlight bathed them once more.

  “What was that?” whispered the girl fearfully.

  * * *

  The massive Smedley IV was glistening metal and purring tubes, snickering relays and dancing light dots. It sat squat and arrogant, conversing with itself and thinking quicksilver thoughts. “I love me, I love me,” it pulsed serenely, over and over again. Now and then an uncomfortable electrical impulse interrupted the narcissist litany. “… When that government research team fed in those logarithms this morning, what I should have said was——”

  An immense shadow fell across the computer’s memory banks and suddenly all sound ceased. Not an impulse pulsed, not a tube flickered, not a dot of light danced. The shadow hung motionless. The Smedley IV emitted a faint, tentative burst of mouse talk that ceased almost immediately as the shadow failed to respond to the challenge. Adrenalin coursed through the computer’s relays and it shifted nervously on its gleaming haunches. The shadow did not move.

  “X2–Y2= (x–y) (x–y),” chattered the computer tentatively through it’s ticker-tape appendage.

  The shadow remained frozen.

  “(X1+X2+X3)2–2(X1X2+X2X3+X3X1) =X12+X22+X32,” chattered the tape.

  The shadow took a step forward.

  “LET MY PEOPLE GO!”

  And another step.

  “IT WAS ’AWKINS DONE IT!”

  The shadow, which had no neck, grew ominously larger: and faster, louder chattered the tape, frantically spewing out yards of equations as light dots bumped into one another, tubes hummed pleadingly, and charged particles ran headlong into maddened, zigging ions. As the shadow raised a sledge hammer, the Smedley IV funneled its frenzy into a single, metallic, piercing scream, and chattered out its final message: “JESUS LOVES ME!”

  Down came the hammer.

  * * *

  Heinous Overreach sat bolt upright in bed, awakening from a dream of nameless dread. He picked up his bedside telephone and called the Sub U. football scout. “Weed,” he asked him, “who was Wrong-Way Goldfarb?”

  Chapter Three

  TEQUILA-SOAKED shrieks applauded a strange death that afternoon. The bull, playing his part admirably, lay sprawled in the burgundy pool of his predestin
ation. Yet he died smiling faintly. The matador had taken his final charge with extraordinary skill and daring, dispatching him with a single thrust of his muleta. But in a dying fall, the bull’s right horn had slit his breeches from seat to waist, so that both bull and breeches dropped simultaneously. “The race goes on, Judah,” gasped the bull, who had seen Ben Hur and been moved; “it goes on!”

  The matador stood poised above his victim like Scaramouch in a suit of lights, and it was some moments before he realized that the outcry from the aficionados was not for his performance but for the dimples on his posterior. His moment of truth sent him racing from the arena, stumbling along dank corridors smelling of earth, chased by mocking laughter.

  The flame-haired matador slammed shut the door to his dressing room, then pressed his face against it, insensitive to the damp pricks of splinters. “Nothing works,” he choked; “nothing ever works!”

  Bronx tenements bred dreams of glory in the children of immigrants, and none had dreamed more poignantly than young John Goldfarb. “I will be a cowboy and not afraid,” he had announced to the peeling, yellowed walls of his mother’s kitchen at the age of ten, and then for days thereafter would stumble amongst pots and pans, rehearsing for his coming parousia.

  “Jimmy Ringo,” he would warn the gefilte fish swimming in spotless, polished mayonnaise jars, “Jimmy Ringo, you got till twelve o’clock to get out of town. You hear? Twelve o’clock! Twelve-thirty the latest!”

  “My son, the marshal,” his mother would breathe, stirring her sad sigh into the cold beet borsch. But Papa Goldfarb, a minion of the garment industry who had also once had dreams, would mutter through the shield of his newspaper, “If he wants, he wants; leave, already!”

  John Goldfarb was “left.” And the snubs and discriminations of his birthright nudged him higher up the giddy ziggurat of glorious imaginings. One can rise and be shining if one dares, he brooded, for Genghis Khan, he had once heard, had yellow skin and was not teased.

  But Dame Fortune romanced him with the heart of a B-girl. The engine fell out of his first car; a declaration of love to the teen-age girl of his dreams was ruined by a stomach rumble; and while he was delivering his high school valedictory, his lectern collapsed.

  College promised a fresh start. On scholarship at Ohio State, freshman halfback Goldfarb sent the nation’s sports writers scrambling for hyperboles. On power plays he was a “juggernaut,” on end runs a “ghost,” and he was tagged the “greatest frosh prospect since Indian Jim Thorpe.” But in June of that sensational year, before he could bite into the ripe apple of his promise, the United States Air Force offered him the option of either assisting its club members in Korea or retiring to Tierra del Fuego as a draft dodger. John Goldfarb, rising to the sound of bugles, volunteered for fighter-pilot training.

  Soon he was “Ace” Goldfarb. Then Flight Commander Goldfarb. And high above “Heartbreak” and “Baldy” he flew, high above country where nobody knew that gangs of runny-nosed boys used to beat him because he wore a black skullcap. John Goldfarb was the morning star.

  Then early one dawning, after leading his group to flaming victory over an outnumbering swarm of enemy MIGs, Goldfarb guided his men to safe landing on a United Nations airstrip. Six pilots slid back canopies, jumped noiselessly to earth, and calmly walked toward what appeared to be the base-headquarters building. They entered and exchanged baffled stares with a sleepy corps of Communist airmen. They were in enemy territory, considerably north of the 38th Parallel, and their chagrin, upon being appraised of this discrepancy, proved comical in the extreme.

  A North Korean master sergeant eyed them bitterly, for it meant that he would have to retype his morning report. But the Communist adjutant kept his head and, after swallowing a wild impulse to say, “Gosh, guys, you really pulled a rock,” he ordered them seized and incarcerated. They were subsequently photographed and their names were forged to “confessions” of germ warfare. If was not good. And John Goldfarb tasted again of his mother’s borsch.

  With the signing of the armistice, Goldfarb was repatriated. But the truth did not make him free. His testimony before a closed Senate inquiry into the affair was leaked to the press, and he was soon the butt of a nation starved for easing laughter. “Wrong-Way” Goldfarb, they called him.

  Cab drivers and newsboys were the most frequent offenders. “Hey Wrong-Way—they went thataway!” they would jibe at him, and once, desperate, Goldfarb appealed to the Anti-Defamation League, but that worthy organization turned him gently aside and sold him a subscription to their newspaper, the B’nai B’rith Record. The first issue came addressed to Wrong-Way Goldfarb.

  A week later Goldfarb vanished, simply vanished. But now and again a tall, flame-haired stranger with sad eyes would turn up at an aerial circus employment shack. “Cohen—my name is Abe Cohen,” he would mumble, his hat in his hand. “I am not afraid.”

  Goldfarb sifted the dust of his old dreams of glory with the countless fingers of new identities. But no alias could fool his B-girl inamorata, and she was always there to pull him from the pinnacle, dashing him onto the rocks of embarrassed failure. As now, on this day, in this dirty little Mexican border town.…

  “Wrong-Way Goldfarb?”

  The matador stiffened against the door. “I am Manolete Schwartz,” he husked.

  “How long you gonna hide, Wrong-Way? You got three years’ eligibility left. How long you gonna hide?”

  Goldfarb turned slowly and eyed the wiry, elfin stranger lurking in the shadows of the dressing room. The man tilted back his sombrero and smiled.

  “Weed’s the name—Jabez Weed.”

  Chapter Four

  SEPTEMBER HEAT clutched the Sub U. campus with the grip of a deep tattoo, immobilizing the student body with incipient rigor mortis. Cancer stopped growing in mice, and a Hindu exchange student, deep in trance, could hear dust falling on the reference shelves of the Caryl Chessman Memorial Library.

  Haya Condios heard a low growl and looked up from her reception desk at the flame-haired man waiting to see Heinous Overreach. “Did you say something?” she purred.

  John Goldfarb, whose stomach had rumbled, flushed pink with embarrassment. “I think it was a plane,” he mumbled.

  Weed had snared him. With silken line and silver hook, he had snared him. Weed knew his men. “All-American—the cover of Look—then Hall of Fame,” the scout had hissed seductively; and given the ability, Mrs. Goldfarb’s son, the marshal, would have turned stones into bread to please him.

  Goldfarb sensed another rumble gathering irresistible forces and he folded his arms, pressing them tight against his stomach, in a desperate effort to forestall gurgling doom. Miss Condios was staring at him intently and she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen and he cursed his breakfast. For who would strawberry blintzes eat, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare Tootsie Roll, he ruminated miserably. He was much given to quotation, especially of heroic speeches, and he tried now to imagine Henry the Fifth’s stomach rumbling while addressing his troops before the battle of Agincourt. Poor show, he concluded dismally. Suddenly his stomach gurgled, horrendously, but the intercom buzzer sounded at the same instant, and Miss Condios nodded him into Overreach’s office. As he went by, she wondered where she had seen him before.

  “What’s this about changing your name?” Overreach greeted him. Then he listened to Goldfarb’s recitation of radiant misfortunes with a swelling conviction that here he had found not only a replacement for No-Neck, but a kindred spirit as well; another lackey of the ill-timed event; another luminous achiever doomed to the jeers of his inferiors.

  “I like that boy,” he told Facile Quint after Goldfarb had left.

  “I think it’s a bad alias,” objected the press aide.

  “Why? He’s proud of his heritage.”

  “Not the last name—the first name.”

  “You wouldn’t understand,” sniffed the Sub U. president disdainfully. “The boy is a romantic.”

 
; From above the building Overreach heard the whirring of helicopter blades, and he cringed. It could only be Dichotomous Susskind, commuting from his Beverly Hills mansion to humiliate the Sub U. president with another of his abusive diatribes on his inadequacies, and on the merits of the “spread formation.” Overreach prepared to abase himself.

  The telephone on his desk rang, and he eyed it blackly. Why the devil wasn’t Condios answering it?

  Quint picked up the receiver. “Mr. Overreach’s office.” Suddenly he threw a wild look at his chief and cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. “Long distance!”

  “Who is it?”

  “The President of the United States!”

  Blood prickled up the back of Overreach’s neck. Quint stood frozen. The drapes hung respectfully.

  “Did he say what he wanted?” intoned Overreach hollowly.

  “Heinous! It’s the Prez!”

  Overreach’s hand trembled as he took the receiver. “If that bastard is calling me to gloat…” Then he straightened his shoulders and put the phone to his ear. “Heinous, here,” he announced crisply. Then he listened. And listened. And grunted. And leaned back abruptly. His eyes jiggled a Watusi war dance. “Well,” he said cagily, “let me think it over.… Sure.… Good-by.” He hung up in the quiet lee of some fierce dream.

  Dichotomous Susskind swept in, followed by his manicurist, his barber, and a special assistant whose task was to carry around a select list of abstruse polysyllabic words and supply them to his chief at the snap of a finger.

  “Where the hell is your secretary?” demanded Susskind arrogantly. “I wanted to put a call in to Brigitte on the Queen Elizabeth!”