It had turned him into a pariah overnight.
“Quite a name is right,” he said now. “I’m the man they love to hate. The whole damn ecology crowd sees me as a traitor to the cause. Yea, I am an abomination to mine own kind. Ever since Black February.”
“Black February?”
“The date of the piece in the Atlantic. February 2003. Before then, they loved me, couldn’t get enough of me. But now…” He trailed off, darkly shaking his head.
“I know the way it can be,” Gideon said. “We gentle academics can get pretty brutal when you step on our pet theories.”
“They actually hiss me at the meetings, did you know that? Can you imagine? At what are supposed to be scholarly conferences? Sometimes they walk out on my presentations.” Rudy had a rigid, skeletal grin on his face. “They wait until I get to the lectern, then get up and leave, all together, just in case I might miss the point.”
Gideon lifted his shoulders in sympathy. Over time, that kind of treatment alone would have been enough to sour Rudy, never mind losing Fran. “That sounds rough, Rudy. I don’t know if I agree altogether with your position, but I give you credit for sticking to it.”
“They’re in love with the notion of biodiversity,” Rudy said bitterly, mostly to himself. “It’s thought diversity they can’t stand.”
“Well…” Gideon said, searching for something to drop into the awkward pause, “… how’s your little girl doing?” He struggled to come up with her name. “Little Mary, although I suppose she’s not so little any more. She was only five or six the last time I saw her. I bet-”
But Rudy, festering over his treatment in academia, was jiggling the ice in his otherwise empty glass and looking longingly toward the bar.
“Well, look,” Gideon said, “why don’t we have a pint in town one of these days and catch up, just the two of us?”
“Sure, that’d be good,” Rudy said absently. “Well, then…” He smiled that lame, pathetic smile again and stalked off to the bar.
“Sad,” Gideon said. “Was he like that at the last meeting?”
“Oh, he lightened up about once every three days, but most of the time, yes. Not easy to get to know. I learned more about him these last five minutes than I did in a whole week last time. I never knew he had any children. I never even knew he’d been married.”
“Oh, yes, he and Fran were… well, the way you and I are. I envied them.” He shook his head and sighed. “Come on, I could use a drink myself.”
At the bar, drinks were being poured by two young women in decorous Ye Olde Tea Shoppe uniforms-shiny, black, mid-calf-length dresses with scalloped white collars, white buttons down the front, short sleeves with pointy, turned-up white cuffs, and little white headpieces to match. Julie took a glass of red wine from the row that had already been poured. Gideon asked for a Glenlivet single-malt Scotch served neat. At twenty dollars a day, he felt entitled to splurge. As they clinked glasses, Liz came up.
“I have to borrow your wife for a minute,” she said, drawing Julie off. “I need some advice. Girl stuff.”
Gideon raised his glass in acquiescence and took a sip, relishing the velvety, peaty flow that warmed him from gullet to stomach. “You like poker?” a voice said into his ear, Vasily Kozlov having sidled up to his elbow.
“Poker? Sure, sometimes.”
“Is old tradition here. Ten o’clock, in dining hall, every night. Last hand midnight, penny-ante, ten pence limit, three raises, just for fun, you know? Mens only. Shall you come?”
“I don’t know about every night, Vasily, but you bet, I’ll come by tonight. Thanks for asking me.”
“Bring plenty money,” Kozlov said with a twinkling leer as he threaded off through the crowd.
“I got invited to the poker game,” Gideon told Julie when she got back from whatever advice-giving Liz had needed.
“Ah, I thought he’d ask you. Are you going?”
“Tonight, anyway. I haven’t played poker in a long time; should be fun.”
“Are you good at it?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. I’m figuring on getting that twenty bucks back.”
“Good luck. They tell me Vasily turns into a shark when he gets behind a handful of cards.”
“So do I. Wait and see. I’ll buy you lunch tomorrow with my winnings.”
“I’ll look forward to it,” Julie said neutrally. “Oh, and here’s the last of our Fellows. Donald Pinckney, this is my husband, Gideon.”
“Happy to meet you, Donald.” Gideon stuck out his hand and smiled, but his heart sank: another guy wearing a button.
But this bright yellow one made him laugh. If we’re not supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?
Donald Pinckney, he remembered, was the pro-hunting voice at the consortium, but he looked about as much like Gideon’s idea of a hunter as Joey Dillard looked like an investigative reporter. A tall, balding, bookish man in a crisp blue linen sport coat and bow tie, with mild, seemingly myopic eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, he seemed like the last person in the world who would willingly be found crouching in a cold, wet duck blind at dawn, with a shotgun to his shoulder.
“And I you, Gideon,” he said. “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books, but-”
“What? You haven’t read A Structuro-Functional Approach to Pleistocene Hominid Phylogeny? I can hardly believe what I’m hearing.”
“I need hardly say, however, that it is quite naturally on my must-read list at present,” Pinckney said without missing a beat. “But what I was going to say was that I saw you on The Learning Channel not long ago and was extremely impressed by what you’re able to deduce from a few skeletal fragments.”
“Only if they’re the right fragments,” Gideon said modestly. “Fortunately, the TV people had the right fragments. I’ve read a few of your pieces, Donald, and I have to say you make a heck of a good case for hunting as a positive conservation measure; I’m almost convinced myself.”
“I’m gratified to hear it.”
“What’s your favorite game?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I was asking what kind of animals you like to hunt-deer, ducks, um…” What else did hunters go after? “… elk, geese, um…”
“What kind of-” Pinckney blinked at him, pained. “Are you serious? Do I look to you to be the sort of man who’d go around with a gun, shooting ducks and geese? Let alone gutting them and all the rest of it?” He gave a small shudder. “No, thank you.”
“But I thought-I mean, don’t you-”
“Donald is an advocate of ethical, environmentally sensitive hunting,” Julie said, enjoying this. “It doesn’t mean that he likes doing it himself.”
“Any more than I would enjoy electrocuting people, which I wouldn’t,” Pinckney explained, “just because I support capital punishment, which I do.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Gideon said, with enough doubt in his voice that Pinckney felt it necessary to expand.
“I was an administrator with the Pennsylvania Department of Fish and Wildlife for twenty-one years, Gideon, and in that time I moderated a good many meetings with various lobbying and pressure groups. Against my own instincts, I eventually concluded that, motives aside, the pro-hunting lobby had an extremely sound approach to wildlife conservation; a good deal sounder-and considerably less shrill-than the anti-hunting groups.” He directed a disparaging flick of his head in the direction of Joey Dillard, who was busy proselytizing a small, captive audience a few yards away. “I’ve been saying so ever since, that’s all.”
He looked again toward where Joey was holding forth. “Would you mind excusing me? I feel a strong need to go and correct whatever distortions of reality our earnest young friend is inflicting on those unfortunate people. I’m very happy to know you, Gideon.” He nodded briskly at Julie. “Julene.”