Player Piano (36 page)

“How’d they catch him?”

“Gave hisself away. When the tree surgeon got there to patch up the tree, Garth tossed his tools in the drink.”

“Alfy!” said the bartender. “You missed the first number.”

Alfy pulled up a bar stool.

Paul sat down next to him and engaged the bartender in conversation. Their talk was disjointed, as Alfy kept the man busy twisting the television set’s volume knob.

“Ever see Finnerty around?” said Paul.

“The piano player?”

“Yeah.”

“What if I have?”

“I’d just like to see him, is all. A friend of mine.”

“Lot’s of people’d like to see Finnerty these days.”

“Uh-huh. Where’s he keep himself?”

The bartender looked at him appraisingly. “Nobody sees Finnerty these days.”

“Oh? He’s not living with Lasher any more?”

“Full of questions today, aren’t you? Nobody sees Lasher these days.”

“I see.” Paul didn’t. “They leave town?”

“Who knows? Come on, I haven’t got all day. What’ll it be?”

“Bourbon and water.”

The bartender mixed the drink, set it before Paul, and turned his back.

Paul drank the health of his hostile or apathetic companions in the new life he’d chosen, coughed, smiled, smacked his lips judiciously, trying to determine what wasn’t quite right about the drink, and fell senseless from the bar-stool.

“F
ROM
B
LUE
C
AYUGA
,” piped the young voices in the autumn evening—

Doctor Harold Roseberry, PE-002, laid two documents side by side on the naked, waxy expanse of the top of his rosewood desk. The desk, big enough for a helicopter to land on, was a gift from the Cornell alumni, and a silver plate on one corner said so. Justification of the lavish gift was inlaid in precious woods on the desk top: the football scores run up by the Big Red during the past five seasons. The why and wherefore of this object, at least, would leave no questions in the minds of future archaeologists.

“From East and West the crashing echoes answering call,” cried the young voices, and Doctor Roseberry found it extremely difficult to concentrate on the two documents before him: a memo from the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, a quaint, antique man in a quaint, antique part of the university; and a five-year-old letter from a carping alumnus who objected to the deportment of the team when off the playing field. The memo from the dean said that a Mr. Ewing J. Halyard had arrived in town in order to show the university to the Shah of Bratpuhr, and, incidentally, to make up a seventeen-year-old credit deficiency in physical education. The memo asked that Doctor Roseberry assign one of his staff to the chore of giving Halyard the final physical-education tests the next morning.

came the voices.

Doctor Roseberry was inclined to react ironically to the last line of the song. “Certainly, victorious last year, four years afore that,” he muttered in his pregnant solitude. But here was another year that might not look so hot inlaid in rosewood. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” he said wearily. Every coach in the Ivy League was out to knock him down to a PE-003 again, and two losses would do it. Yale and Penn were loaded. Yale had floated a bond to buy the whole Texas A&M backfield, and Penn had bought Breslaw from Wisconsin for $43,000.

Roseberry groaned. “How the hell long they think a man can play college football?” he wanted to know. Six years before, Cornell had bought him from Wabash College, and asked him to list his idea of a dream team. Then, by God they’d bought it for him.

“But what the hell they think they bought?” he asked himself. “Sumpin’ made outa steel and see-ment? Supposed to last a lifetime, is it?” They hadn’t bought him so much as a water boy since, and the average age of the Big Red was now close to thirty-one.

came the voices.

“Certainly it’s glorious,” said Doctor Roseberry. “Who the hell you figure paid for it?” In its first two years the football team had paid for itself. In the next three, it had paid for a new chemistry building, a heat and power laboratory, a new administration building for the Agricultural Engineering
Department, and four new professorial chairs: the Philosophy of Creative Engineering, Creative Engineering History, Creative Public Relations for Engineers, and Creative Engineering and the Captive Consumer.

Roseberry, who wasn’t expected to pay any attention to the academic side of the university, had nonetheless kept a careful accounting of all these improvements, glorious to view, that had been added since he and his football team had arrived far above Cayuga’s waters. In anticipation of a poor season, he was roughing out in his mind a polemic letter to the alumni, in which the academic expenditures would figure prominently. He had the first line of the letter, following the salutation, “Sportsmen,” already perfected, and enjoyed imagining it written out in capitals:

“IS THE FOOTBALL BUSINESS AT CORNELL GOING TO BE RUN ON A BUSINESS-LIKE BASIS, OR IS THE BIG RED GOING TO BE BLED WHITE?”

And then the next sentence sprang inspirationally to mind:
“IN THE PAST FIVE YEARS, NOT ONE CENT HAS BEEN REINVESTED IN THE BUSINESS, NOT ONE CENT LAID ASIDE FOR DEPRECIATION!”

He saw now that the whole thing would have to be in caps. The situation called for a letter with real punch.

The telephone rang.

“Doctor Roseberry speakin’.”

“This is Buck Young, Doc. Note here says you wanted me to call.” The husky voice was tinged with uneasiness, just as Roseberry had hoped it would be. He could imagine that Buck had sat by the phone with the note in his hand for several minutes before he’d dialed. Now that Buck had gone this far, Roseberry told himself, he’d go the rest of the way too.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Roseberry, smiling captivatingly. “Bucky boy, how are you?”

“Fine. What’s on your mind?”

“Maybe I should ask what’s on yours.”

“Thermodynamics. Stress analysis. Fluid flow. Differential equations.”

“Aaah,” said Roseberry, “why’n’t you loosen up and have a beer with me down at The Dutch? You hear the news I got, I think maybe you’ll get something else on your mind.”

sang the voices, and Doctor Roseberry waited impatiently for the racket to stop. If they had to have a football rally, he wished they’d hold it somewhere where it wouldn’t bother him and his team. That was another thing: Cornell was so cheap, they quartered their athletes on the campus rather than setting up a separate establishment away from all the student racket. “Wait’ll they shut up, Bucky boy, and I can hear myself think.”

Either Cornell was going to get progressive, or they could find themselves another coach, Roseberry told himself. Now, Tennessee—there
was
a progressive setup.
They
kept
their
team in Miami Beach, and no wonder Milankowitz went there for $35,000, after he turned down Chicago for $40,000. “O.K., Bucky, I can hear again. What about I meet you down at The Dutch for a couple of quick ones in fifteen minutes?”

The voice was faint, reluctant. “Just for half an hour.”

Doctor Roseberry climbed into his black convertible in the team parking lot, and drove over to the Delta Upsilon fraternity house, on whose lawn he’d first spotted Buck Young playing interfraternity football. There, Young had done things for Delta Upsilon for nothing that any college in the country would have considered a steal at $50,000 a year.

That had been last fall, and D.U. had eked out the interfraternity football championship with 450 points to their opponents’ six. Young had scored 390 of the points, and had thrown the passes for the other 54, the remaining touchdown being accounted for by a George Ward, whose name had somehow burned itself into Roseberry’s memory along with all of the other statistics.

But Young had said firmly, when Roseberry had approached him, that he played football for fun, and that he wanted to be an engineer. A year ago, with the Big Red by far the biggest thing in the East, with the Yale and Penn alumni still to mobilize their economic resources, Roseberry could afford to be amused by Young’s preference for a career in engineering. Now nothing was amusing, and Roseberry saw Young as his one chance to remain a PE-002 under the fouled-up Cornell football economics. He would sell a couple of supernatural linemen to Harvard, who would buy anything that was cheap, and use the proceeds to buy himself the services of Young at far below their value on the open market.

The Dutch, its paneling antiqued by the condensation from breaths of generations of adolescent alcoholics, was packed and noisy, and in almost every hand was the drink fashionable that season, benedictine and Pluto water, with a sprig of mint.

Doctor Roseberry was cheered and toasted by the children as he entered. He grinned, and colored becomingly, and inwardly demanded of himself and history, “What the hell these baby engineers got to do’th me, for chrissakes?” He pushed his way through the crowd, which claimed him for reasons not at all clear, to a dark corner booth, where Purdy and McCloud, the linemen whom he intended to sell to Harvard, were nursing the one beer a night apiece permitted during training. They were talking quietly, but darkly, and, as Doctor Roseberry approached, they looked up, but didn’t smile.

“Evenin’ boys,” said Doctor Roseberry, sitting down on the small ledge not occupied by McCloud’s backside, and keeping his eyes on the door through which Buck Young would be coming.

They nodded, and went on with their conversation. “No reason,” said McCloud, “why a man can’t play college ball till he’s forty, if he takes good care of hisself ” McCloud was thirty-six.

“Sure,” said Purdy gravely, “a older man’s got a certain matoority you don’t find in the young ones.” Purdy was thirty-seven.

“Look at Moskowitz,” said McCloud.

“Yup. Forty-three, and still goin’ strong. No reason why he shou’n’t keep goin’ until he’s fifty. No reason why most men shou’n’t.”

“Bet I could go to the Reeks and Wrecks now and put together a Ivy League championship team out of guys past forty who’re s’posed to be through.”

“Planck,” said Purdy. “Poznitsky.”

“McCarren,” said McCloud, “Mirro, Mellon. Ain’t that right, Doc?” McCloud asked Roseberry the question casually.

“Yup, guess so. Hope so. Better. Kind of outfit I’ve got to work with.”

“Urn,” said McCloud. He stared down into his beer, finished it off with a flourish, and looked plaintively at Roseberry. “O.K. if I have one more short one tonight?”

“Sure—why the hell not?” said Roseberry. “I’ll even buy it.”

McCloud and Purdy looked distressed at this, and both, on second thought, figured they’d better keep in good shape for the important Big Red season ahead.

Roseberry offered no reply to this clumsy gambit.

“Better not hit that stuff too hard,” said a leering student, pointing to the two bottles of beer. “Not if Cornell’s going to go on ruling the Ivy League, you better not, boys.”

Purdy glowered at him, and the youngster retreated into the crowd. “One minute, they ask you should go out and bust both arms and legs so’s they can say how tough Cornell is. Then the next minute, they want you should live like a goddam missionary,” said Purdy bitterly.

“Like in the Army,” said McCloud.

The subject reminded Doctor Roseberry of the letter and the memo he’d been reading in his office, and he patted his breast pocket to make sure he still had them.

“Like in the Army,” said Purdy, “only no pension.”

“Sure, give the best years of your life to some college, and what the hell they do when you’re through? Toss you right into the Reeks and Wrecks. The hell with
you
, buddy.”

“Look at Kisco,” said Purdy.

“Died for dear old Rutgers, and his widow’s got what?”

“Nuttin’! Nuttin’ but a chenille
R
she can use as a bath mat, and a government pension.”

“Shoulda saved his money!” said Doctor Roseberry impatiently. “He was makin’ more’n the college president. How come he was so poor? Whose fault that?”

Purdy and McCloud looked down at their big hands and fidgeted. Both of them, in their prime, had made as much as the late Buddy Kisco, who had actually died for Rutgers. But both were likewise broke—forever broke, building flamboyant mansions in Cayuga Heights, buying new cars every six months, dressing expensively….

“That’s the thing,” said McCloud plaintively. “A athalete has to keep up appearances. Sure, people think a athalete makes plenty, and he do on paper. But people never stop to think he’s allus gotta keep up a expensive front.”

Purdy leaned forward in excited agreement. “For who?” he demanded rhetorically. “For the athalete?”