“So I see,” I said. “I’m sorry about that, too.” He gave me the little smile again.
A crowd numbering a hundred or more had gathered at the edge of the protest, and the TV crew was dutifully capturing their images as well. Some were mere onlookers, but I recognized most of them as my forensic anthropology students. I checked my watch; it read 10:59, and I had always drilled punctuality into my students. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Bryan,” I said. “I have a class to teach.” I stepped forward, toward the museum, toward the protesters. I hadn’t gone more than ten feet when I heard Bryan call from behind me, “Here he is!”
Every head, every camera, swiveled in my direction. I kept walking, closing the distance. When I was perhaps twenty feet away, the protester in the gorilla suit began screeching like a chimp. It must have been a prearranged signal, because when he did, his comrades reached into pockets and bags and fished out overripe bananas, which they began lobbing at me. Most of them missed, but a few caught me on the shoulders and chest, and one splatted open on my head. Banana mash dripped down my face and into my collar. My feet had stopped moving when the banana barrage began; I felt rooted to the spot. Someone in the crowd of picketers produced a cream pie from somewhere and handed it to Gorilla Man; he scampered forward, monkey-style, and ground it into my face. It, too, was banana, and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t half bad.
As I took out a handkerchief and wiped pie from my eyes, I saw the UT police officers racing toward me. They formed a circle with their backs to me, their arms and hands outstretched. The TV cameraman scrambled to the edge of the circle, zooming in on my dripping face. I looked at the protesters, their expressions a mixture of joy and hatred, and then I looked at the crowd of spectators and students, who now far outnumbered the picketers. Suddenly a young woman pushed through the crowd and jogged toward me, holding a crudely made sign high over her head. It was Miranda Lovelady, and the sign bore a hand-drawn image I recognized from a bumper sticker on her car: a stylized fish, its body filled with the word DARWIN; below the body, the fish had sprouted legs.
A cheer erupted from the students, and they fell in behind Miranda. The officers fanned out into a wedge, and we walked forward-the police, the students, and I-through the picket line and into the building.
I made a quick stop in the restroom to clean the pie off my face and neck. Then, for the next ninety minutes, I taught, and I’d never felt prouder or more privileged to be a teacher.
CHAPTER 18
MY PHONE RANG JUST as I was getting into bed. It was my son Jeff. “Turn on Channel 4,” he said.
“Why? What’s on?”
“Local news. The tease, just before they went to a commercial, mentioned you, creationism, and a mouthwatering controversy, whatever that means. Did you go looking for trouble today?”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “no, trouble came looking for me. Sort of. I guess you might say I did some pot-stirring last week. But not enough to justify what happened today.”
“Yikes,” he said. “Sounds serious. Call me back after the story airs.” With that, he clicked off.
I pulled a bathrobe over my boxers and made my way into the darkness of the living room, where I switched on the floor lamp beside the recliner. The remote was, as always, on the arm of the chair. I settled heavily into the leather, leaned halfway back, and switched on the television. I caught a loud local spot for a group of car dealerships out by the airport calling themselves the “Airport Motor Mile,” followed by an equally noisy ad for a wholesale furniture ware house, then the newscast resumed.
Characteristically, though, they didn’t start out with the story about the protest. It was one of the things that annoyed me most about television news: the way they’d repeatedly tease a story they figured lots of people would stick around to watch-something involving cute animals or slapstick comedy or a racy scandal-and not show it until the very end of the newscast. I chafed through weather, sports, and, oddly, a reprise of the weather (which I tuned out the second time as well) before the announcer-who tended to look cheery even when relating the death of a child-assumed a concerned expression and asked, “Is Tennessee headed for another monkey trial?” The picture then switched to a full-screen close-up of the guy in the gorilla suit, followed by a series of shots of other protesters, singly and in twos and threes and sixes. The way they strung the images together, without zooming out to show the group as a whole, made it appear as if scores, maybe even hundreds of people were wielding picket signs, rather than the dozen or so that had actually picketed. The reporter played up the “controversy,” splicing in angry accusations by protesters; he mentioned “an angry counterprotest” as the camera showed Miranda arriving with her DARWIN sign.
Then came something I didn’t expect. During a series of short interviews with bystanders, Jess Carter’s face flashed onto the screen, with her name and title superimposed as well. I hadn’t even known she was there today. “These people are a small minority of small-minded, self-righteous busybodies,” Jess said directly to the camera lens. “If they want to check their brains at the door, fine, but they shouldn’t be trying to force other people to do that, too. Dr. Brockton does more good in the world than this whole group of anti-intellectual protesters put together. They need to get back on the bus they rode in on and head back to what ever Kansas backwater they crawled out of.” I smiled at her feisty eloquence and her defense of me, but at the same time I winced, and hoped she didn’t get tangled up in this mess along with me. In the background, over her left shoulder, I could see Jennings Bryan, the lawyer who was orchestrating the event. For the most part, his face was an expressionless mask, but I saw his eyes lash with anger as she spoke. Bryan’s sound bite, which followed hers, decried the co-opting of public education by soulless intellectuals and secular humanists whose chief aim was persecuting people of faith. Damn, I thought again, me and my big mouth. But then I thought, No, I’ve got nothing against faith-just against willful, bullying ignorance.
The story’s final shot, played in excruciating slow motion, showed a screen-filling cream pie arcing toward my face and then smashing into it. Filling slowly radiated from the edges of the pan; streams of yellow and white dripped lazily from my nose and chin. The picture froze at the moment I wiped my eyes and blinked out through the mess. The announcer came back on-screen, his earlier look of concern now replaced by merriment. “If the protesters have their way,” he said, “Professor Brockton, whose classroom comments set off the controversy, might soon be eating his words, too.” His eyes twinkled. “That’s it for this edition of Nightwatch. Good night-and good eating!”
I clicked off the television in disgust and called Jeff. “Not exactly a shining moment for higher education, was it?” I said.
He laughed. “Well, no, but at least you’re not getting burned at the stake, like Copernicus.”
“Not yet, anyhow,” I said. “But that wasn’t Copernicus. Copernicus died quietly in his sleep, I think. It was Bruno who got toasted for spelling out the implications of the Copernican theory-for speculating that there might be other worlds, orbiting other stars, inhabited by other, more intelligent beings.” I sighed. “Sometimes we don’t look like particularly stiff competition.”
“But hey,” said Jeff, “that Dr. Carter-she seems pretty bright. Leapt to your defense mighty strongly, too. Isn’t she the one you were planning to bring with you to my house for dinner a few months ago?”