"Why does he want to meet us in the middle of the woods?" Crodway asked, brushing back a branch in the dark.
"Obviously, there are a lot of eyes around. Once we get the pants, we just bring them home. No one can prove where we got them. No one can say shit," Laslow said.
Crodway was not assuaged. The forest was impenetrably dark save for the beams of their flashlights, and he suspected that Laslow didn't know where he was going.
"You'd better not get us lost in here. Coach has got Madford looking for us making sure we're not getting in trouble. This is definitely trouble."
"Relax," Laslow said. "We're almost at the clearing."
Crodway didn't answer. This whole thing was Laslow's idea. Sure, he could use some new pants. Laslow said they were rare and had never been seen in the United States before. That's what Mr. Gludcrul had told him. But he was out here mainly because Laslow would otherwise be out in the woods alone, and he was already dangerously close to the bench after throwing three picks in last week's game. Crodway, who already spent his Saturdays desperately trying to prevent opponents from hitting his quarterback, figured that he might as well try to stop him from getting completely lost in the woods.
"I don't see his car yet," Laslow said. "Dude, you should see this car," Laslow said. "Rolls. Phantom. He said he'd maybe let me take it for a spin if we get the win."
But they were at the clearing and there was no one there. It was eerily still, like the trees themselves were trying desperately to avoid detection. There was silence. Then a rustling. The sound seemed to come from behind them then from the left. But when they aimed their flashlights into the forest surrounding them, they saw nothing.
"Five minutes, Laslow, then we have to go," Crodway said.
There was nothing. And then there was something. Some formless shape seeming like it had materialized from the trees, something almost imperceptible but definitively there and something that was definitely moving towards them. They turned to run but no matter what direction they turned it was in front of them moving closer and closer.
-----------
Detective Carl Tratt was five minutes from the end of his shift when the call came in, five minutes from a warm house with a warm, brown bottle and instead he was squatting in the frost in a forest clearing looking at two bodies. A professor found them on what he told the officer was his "morning constitutional," which made Tratt dread having to the professor later on. He was told what he'd find when he'd come in but he was still not prepared for this. The bodies were desiccated, almost shriveled. Neither seemed to have much blood in them, but there was none at the scene.
"Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to them?" he asked the Paul Quatch, the medical examiner.
"I've never seen anything like it. No blood. No wounds. No trauma. I have no idea what the hell could have done this."
Tratt's phone rang. He listened for a few minutes and frowned, then hung up and paced around.
"Quatch, that was the office. Coach called in this morning. They've got two football players missing. One of the roommates saw them grab some flashlights on the way out. Says they were on the way to get some pants."
"Oh no," Quatch said.
"That's right," Tratt said, sighing. "They've already called in Duckett. He's on the train from Indianapolis."
"Well better get your cloak cleaned and your amulets shiny," Quatch said.
Tratt had never met the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett, but he heard about him. It was bound to happen when you worked in a college town. Most of the time, you would just hear about Duckett poking around in a trash can outside an athletic facility or harassing some big time booster at a country club. But Duckett was also an encyclopedia of college football's dark underbelly. He knew all of the secret deals, he knew the networks of people funneling money into the sport. It was rare that any of that dealing crossed from an NCAA infraction into the realm of an actual crime, but when it did he was a useful person to talk to. But no one on the force wanted to.
The fact is that any conversation with Buck Duckett could swerve in bizarre directions. The rumors were that Duckett believed in all sorts of strange, spooky stuff: monsters, spirits, demon cults, that sort of thing, and word spread among campus police that he could be found doing incantations or reading from scrolls. He creeped everyone out. Now, because some kid had mentioned pants to a detective, he was rolling up on Duckett's doorstep.
------------
"Chief, this is ridiculous. The guy's not even law enforcement. He gets people suspended for eating a burrito that someone else paid for," Tratt said. They were in the office, and the blinds were drawn.
"Tratt, my hands are tied. This is the only thread we have, and we're pulling on it," Chief Stunch said. "You know if these kids were looking for pants, he's the best shot at finding out who they were getting from and why they were in that clearing. If you have any better ideas, let me know."
Tratt fumed. He had nothing else. "Fine, I'll talk to him. But I can't investigate a murder and keep an eye on this guy. You know what he does. He slinks around. He talks to people. He hides in dumpsters and he has false mustaches. I can't watch him constantly," Tratt said.
"Well you'll have to keep him close to you, then. He's here," the Chief said. He picked up his phone. "Bring him in."
Duckett glided through the door. He was not what Tratt was expecting. He thought that Duckett would be wearing a cloak or at least some sort of skull necklace. He was expecting him to have a sack of poultices or amulets. But the man who walked in was dressed in a crisp suit with a tie and an anachronistic men's hat and carried a briefcase. If anything, this was more disconcerting. He looked like an FBI agent from the 1950s.
"Buck Duckett, NCAA," Duckett said.
"Carl Tratt," Tratt said. "We found two bodies in a clearing. Likely football players. Quarterback and a center. Seemed one of them might have had a line on some pants."
"Thanks for coming, Duckett," Chief Stunch said. "I'll leave you two to it. Tratt should have everything you need." He left the room.
"You know of anyone throwing money around who likes to do pants drops in the forest?" Tratt said. "Is that the MO of any operators?"
Duckett opened his briefcase and picked up a file folder and slapped it on the table. "Errol 'Jimmy' Budesnon III." He grabbed another one. "Bud 'Poke' Hanragason. Tad Hadley. Hudd 'Scrote' Thomas."
"That's a lot of pants guys," Tratt said.
"No, it's just one. I haven't figured out what his name is here yet."
"You're telling me there's a booster doling out pants and changing his name and no one has caught on yet?"
Duckett just stared at him. He closed the briefcase and removed his hat. A deep scar ran down his head parallel to the his scalp on the left side leaving a trench in a square buzzcut.
"You know who I am and what I do," Duckett said. "I know you don't want me here. I know you all think I'm a kook. I understand that. But I also know that this is the first time he's ever left the bodies like deflated sacks in the woods."
Tratt paused. He hadn't mentioned the state of the bodies or that the baffled medical examiner's office was already on the phone with some out-of-state experts.
"This booster is not just changing his name. When he leaves, it's as if he never existed. Just a disappeared athlete and what appears to be no memory. Holding galas for the coach and showering them with money and then he's gone. The locker room is renamed. You see that enough times and you start to believe there's something more sinister going on here than pants," Duckett said.
He took a large dusty book out of his briefcase. It took me sixteen years to find this thing and it damn near cost me my skull. I've been tracking this thing since those fullbacks disappeared. I think I know what we're dealing with. But I'm going to need your help. He opened the book. Lesser Pants Daemons.
Click for Table of Contents
Indiana Poetry Corner
In 1963, the Indiana state legislature selected Arthur Franklin Mapes's "Indiana" as its official state poem. In 2016, I was selected to review the Mapes papers for a forthcoming collection of some of his Hoosier-inspired works, where I was able to view the original manuscript for his poems. I arrived at the State Historical Society of Indiana in Indianapolis, where I quickly fell under the watchful eye of a librarian, whom I immediately understood was reporting directly to my arch-rival in Mapes scholarship, G. Murdiel Klackwell.
For those of you who do not know Klackwell, he is a middling critic who has nevertheless used his powers of bureaucratic maneuvering and sleazy politicking in order to keep Mapes scholarship within his ever-tightening grasp like an academic python. Klackwell's own efforts have kept my own dynamic and boundary-pushing Mapes scholarship out of the main Mapes journals, and Klackwell has refused to let anyone confront him with pointed more-of-a-comment-than-questions in Mapes conferences by recruiting a cadre of unusually burly graduate students. And yet, Professor Klackwell provides nothing but the most wafer-thin bromides while bulldozing over the subtleties and lyricism of Mapes. Instead, my new annotated version of "Indiana" will rescue the poem from Klackwellism and provide what I believe is a fuller and more nuanced explanation of what is going on behind the poem in a crackling counterpoint to Mapes's gorgeous melodies.
-L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis, 2001
INDIANA
by Arthur Franklin Mapes
God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it's paradise to me,
There's no haven quite as peaceful,
There's no place I'd rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on . . . through paradise.
Commentary
"God crowned her hills with beauty...setting for our dreams"
Mapes is clearly describing Indiana as an ideal place. These physical features and the state's crowning natural beauty are integral to his central ideas of the Hoosier state as an Edenic paradise. By looking through the Mapes papers, although he never stated it directly, it seems obvious to me that the emphasis on bucolic nature is used as a contrast to urban areas, particularly other Midwestern cities which were dens of vice, crime, and the illegal pants trade. Describing Indiana as the "setting for our dreams" clearly implies that he has a larger goal in mind for the state beyond just talking about hills and rivers. Of course, if you were to ask the Klackwell set about it, this profound layer of meaning is utterly lost to them, possibly because Klackwell himself was spending his time building up his power in the Mapes Association of the Great Lakes in order to wield it like a cudgel and keep superior scholars out of his fancy black tie Mapes Dinners.
"Lovely are her moonlit rivers...shadowed by the sycamores"
Notice the play of moonlight and shadow. This is a clear allusion to Operation: Sycamore, which would have been all over the news when Mapes was composing this poem. This famous operation involved the NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett disguising himself as "Mr. Pumpkin" in the Sycamore Pumpkin Festival in Sycamore, Illinois, a town close enough to De Kalb that allowed him to find nearly a dozen Northern Illinois football players accepting a cache of stylish pants and jackets that were cleverly conveyed to the school underneath a float for Kornazacki and Sons Hog Stranglers as an elder Kornazacki had lured several linemen to the school by offering free apparel and ham hocks to the twelve squarest-headed lads in the county. There is no doubt that Mapes had seen the plan to do the exchange at midnight, before Duckett intercepted them, as it was in the papers for weeks. Mapes's brilliant way of folding this event into a geographic depiction of Indiana indicates the subtle work of a master, the type of verses that led me to Mapes scholarship in the first place.
"I must roam these wooded hillsides...seems to answer to it all"
Notice the contrast of the "pagan voice" calling with the invocation of God in the first word of the poem, setting up Indiana as a land so holy it answers to multiple sets of divine rulers. This, along with the specific use of "roam" clearly alludes to the impermanent headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was, at the time, flitting between Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, cities where Buck Duckett's investigations were interfered with and hampered by organized crime, most notoriously the Chicago Pants Outfit led by "Pockets" Mike Popstakl and his enforcers who had the entire Illinois defensive line in customized golf pants and Duckett's most reliable informants shut up or disappeared into various meat lockers and municipal stadiums.
"I must walk where squirrels scamper"
An obvious reference to the time Buck Duckett disguised himself as an enormous squirrel in order to foil the delivery of a crate of custom athletic shorts to the Ohio State wrestling team.
"I must learn more of my homeland...there's no place I'd rather be"
Here Mapes's invocation of Indiana as a paradise clearly mirrors Buck Duckett's calls to move the NCAA headquarters to Indianapolis. Mapes would have certainly been aware of this after the NCCA's well-publicized failed raid on an Ames dockyard on the Skunk River where Duckett and his team had surrounded a riverboat carrying dozens of crates of illegal socks for the Iowa State chess team. What they did not know is that someone at the NCAA had tipped off Eddie Belch, a longtime associate of Pockets Mike (who would later turn on him and erupt in the bloody Chicago Pants War or 1967 which would end in dozens of mobsters strangled with their own pants and kept turning up in haberdasheries and department stores for months). Eddie Belch's men opened fire on the raid, wounding Buck Duckett, and escaping with the socks. While recovering, Duckett began to give interviews to magazines like Indiana Busybody suggesting a new site for the NCAA headquarters where his operations would not moved further away from midwestern pants gangs, and Mapes's language about Indiana clearly mirrors Duckett's invocations of it as a place where he and his teams could more effectively target the proliferation of illicit pants and pants-related activity throughout the region.
"Indiana is a garden...where the seeds of peace have sown"
Unfortunately, as Mapes knew, Buck Duckett was simply an investigator. While he had unparalleled skills tracking down clues and extracting information through pressure and the occasional slap to the head, he was not prepared for the type of bureaucratic infighting that he needed to convince the NCAA heads to move their headquarters. At this time, he was thwarted by his main rival Dreck Teckett, who Duckett suspected but was unable to conclusively prove was the key inside man for the Chicago and later Missouri Pants Outfits' operations within the NCAA. Teckett was only the deputy for the NCAA's physical facilities branch, but his superior Gave Ledbrent was a notorious drunkard, and Teckett ran the department like a warlord extracting tribute for parking passes and access to the facility's "good" cafeteria on brown meat Mondays. Duckett found his memos destroyed in garbage gondolas, his messages intercepted by Teckett's network of lackeys, and even his phone unable to dial internal lines which was a "maintenance problem" for months on end. Anyone who has ever been in a struggle with this sort of rat, like how Klackwell controls access to the unread Mapes papers by requiring you to grovel to him in his palatial office can attest how draining and impossible it is for men of more magisterial talents to waste time with these petty tyrants.
"Lovely are the fields and meadows...through paradise"
It is clear that Mapes has dedicated the final stanza of his poem to the future movement of the NCAA Headquarters to Indianapolis. This interpretation may flow over the head of lunkheads like Klackwell and his coterie of imbeciles but observe how Mapes ends the poem with the slant rhyme of "rise" with "paradise," a clear indication that the importance of conveying this subtle message took overruled his otherwise perfect rhyme scheme. Some scholars might reasonbly question that the invocation of the Wabash River since it does not flow through Indianapolis (that would be the White River), but this is a clear allusion to West Lafeyette, the city on the banks of the Wabash that was the site of Buck Duckett's largest operation. Operation: Wabash nearly shut down the entire Purdue basketball program when Duckett located and eventually destroyed a cache of the longest pants ever seized by the NCAA to accommodate Purdue's massive frontline of "Moose" Burton, "Moose" Jenkins, and "Big Moose" Kraboose, a 7'5" senior who dominated the Big Ten in the 1959 season despite being only able to briskly walk across the court.
It is in the interests of Klackwell and his academic henchmen to preserve the masterpiece "Indiana" as a sentimental poem about a state and cover up Mapes's intention to use the poem to pressure the NCAA to move its headquarters to Indianapolis and away from the influence of the notorious pants-gangs. That is why Klackwell personally intervened to prevent me from publishing a valedictory essay on this subject when the headquarters made its move in 1997 in Mapes Shapes the preeminent Mapes journal. Instead, I was forced to self-publish it and, while the essay itself is, I believe, a persuasive and perhaps even moving testimony to the power of Mapes's works and Buck Duckett's own tireless toil preventing athletes from receiving pants from miscreants, it largely went unread and unremarked upon by both Mapes scholars and the NCAA itself even after I handed it out at the 2000 Final Four held at the RCA Dome until I was bodily ushered off the premises by jackbooted police officers sent there, I presume, by Klackwell.
As I have prepared for this new edition of my commentary on "Indiana," I have grown increasingly alarmed that Klackwell has entrenched himself completely into Mapes papers. In fact, though Klackwell has claimed that he believes the words of Mapes are sacrosanct to the point where he has extensively noted any variations from the manuscript to the published version of his poems, I have come to believe that Klackwell will do anything to suppress the "Indiana" poem's true meaning including altering the manuscript or even have one his graduate students forge an alternate version.
For that reason, I have been forced to, in the dead of night and using a series of keys I have stolen and duplicated, temporarily removed the Mapes papers from the Indiana archives and will keep them with me while I finish off my commentary. It is obvious to me that Klackwell is in the employ of the remnants of the Chicago Pants Outfit and will try to alter or destroy the papers and have me garroted with my own sock garters. Fortunately, I traveled to Indianapolis with my own trunk of wigs, train conductor uniforms, false mustaches, and a giant squirrel costume. I suppose it should be obvious now that I have been using L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis as an assumed name and am the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett whose deeds Mr. Mapes has, for whatever reason, decided to memorialize in his poem. Even as we speak, the agents of Professor Klackwell and whatever so-called "law enforcement" that is in his employ are trying to track me down to allow him access to the papers and block this commentary that will scandalize the entire government of Indiana. But I am not intimidated by him or by the various pants-assassins who have been seeking me out for decades for simply doing the work of keeping college athletics free from the decadent influence of commerce. But there it is, the tell-tale rustling outside the safehouse and I must get my old NCAA service revolver and prepare to defend these papers one last time.
For those of you who do not know Klackwell, he is a middling critic who has nevertheless used his powers of bureaucratic maneuvering and sleazy politicking in order to keep Mapes scholarship within his ever-tightening grasp like an academic python. Klackwell's own efforts have kept my own dynamic and boundary-pushing Mapes scholarship out of the main Mapes journals, and Klackwell has refused to let anyone confront him with pointed more-of-a-comment-than-questions in Mapes conferences by recruiting a cadre of unusually burly graduate students. And yet, Professor Klackwell provides nothing but the most wafer-thin bromides while bulldozing over the subtleties and lyricism of Mapes. Instead, my new annotated version of "Indiana" will rescue the poem from Klackwellism and provide what I believe is a fuller and more nuanced explanation of what is going on behind the poem in a crackling counterpoint to Mapes's gorgeous melodies.
-L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis, 2001
INDIANA
by Arthur Franklin Mapes
God crowned her hills with beauty,
Gave her lakes and winding streams,
Then He edged them all with woodlands
As the setting for our dreams.
Lovely are her moonlit rivers,
Shadowed by the sycamores,
Where the fragrant winds of Summer
Play along the willowed shores.
I must roam those wooded hillsides,
I must heed the native call,
For a pagan voice within me
Seems to answer to it all.
I must walk where squirrels scamper
Down a rustic old rail fence,
Where a choir of birds is singing
In the woodland . . . green and dense.
I must learn more of my homeland
For it's paradise to me,
There's no haven quite as peaceful,
There's no place I'd rather be.
Indiana . . . is a garden
Where the seeds of peace have grown,
Where each tree, and vine, and flower
Has a beauty . . . all its own.
Lovely are the fields and meadows,
That reach out to hills that rise
Where the dreamy Wabash River
Wanders on . . . through paradise.
Commentary
"God crowned her hills with beauty...setting for our dreams"
Mapes is clearly describing Indiana as an ideal place. These physical features and the state's crowning natural beauty are integral to his central ideas of the Hoosier state as an Edenic paradise. By looking through the Mapes papers, although he never stated it directly, it seems obvious to me that the emphasis on bucolic nature is used as a contrast to urban areas, particularly other Midwestern cities which were dens of vice, crime, and the illegal pants trade. Describing Indiana as the "setting for our dreams" clearly implies that he has a larger goal in mind for the state beyond just talking about hills and rivers. Of course, if you were to ask the Klackwell set about it, this profound layer of meaning is utterly lost to them, possibly because Klackwell himself was spending his time building up his power in the Mapes Association of the Great Lakes in order to wield it like a cudgel and keep superior scholars out of his fancy black tie Mapes Dinners.
"Lovely are her moonlit rivers...shadowed by the sycamores"
Notice the play of moonlight and shadow. This is a clear allusion to Operation: Sycamore, which would have been all over the news when Mapes was composing this poem. This famous operation involved the NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett disguising himself as "Mr. Pumpkin" in the Sycamore Pumpkin Festival in Sycamore, Illinois, a town close enough to De Kalb that allowed him to find nearly a dozen Northern Illinois football players accepting a cache of stylish pants and jackets that were cleverly conveyed to the school underneath a float for Kornazacki and Sons Hog Stranglers as an elder Kornazacki had lured several linemen to the school by offering free apparel and ham hocks to the twelve squarest-headed lads in the county. There is no doubt that Mapes had seen the plan to do the exchange at midnight, before Duckett intercepted them, as it was in the papers for weeks. Mapes's brilliant way of folding this event into a geographic depiction of Indiana indicates the subtle work of a master, the type of verses that led me to Mapes scholarship in the first place.
"I must roam these wooded hillsides...seems to answer to it all"
Notice the contrast of the "pagan voice" calling with the invocation of God in the first word of the poem, setting up Indiana as a land so holy it answers to multiple sets of divine rulers. This, along with the specific use of "roam" clearly alludes to the impermanent headquarters of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. It was, at the time, flitting between Kansas City, Missouri and Chicago, cities where Buck Duckett's investigations were interfered with and hampered by organized crime, most notoriously the Chicago Pants Outfit led by "Pockets" Mike Popstakl and his enforcers who had the entire Illinois defensive line in customized golf pants and Duckett's most reliable informants shut up or disappeared into various meat lockers and municipal stadiums.
"I must walk where squirrels scamper"
An obvious reference to the time Buck Duckett disguised himself as an enormous squirrel in order to foil the delivery of a crate of custom athletic shorts to the Ohio State wrestling team.
"I must learn more of my homeland...there's no place I'd rather be"
Here Mapes's invocation of Indiana as a paradise clearly mirrors Buck Duckett's calls to move the NCAA headquarters to Indianapolis. Mapes would have certainly been aware of this after the NCCA's well-publicized failed raid on an Ames dockyard on the Skunk River where Duckett and his team had surrounded a riverboat carrying dozens of crates of illegal socks for the Iowa State chess team. What they did not know is that someone at the NCAA had tipped off Eddie Belch, a longtime associate of Pockets Mike (who would later turn on him and erupt in the bloody Chicago Pants War or 1967 which would end in dozens of mobsters strangled with their own pants and kept turning up in haberdasheries and department stores for months). Eddie Belch's men opened fire on the raid, wounding Buck Duckett, and escaping with the socks. While recovering, Duckett began to give interviews to magazines like Indiana Busybody suggesting a new site for the NCAA headquarters where his operations would not moved further away from midwestern pants gangs, and Mapes's language about Indiana clearly mirrors Duckett's invocations of it as a place where he and his teams could more effectively target the proliferation of illicit pants and pants-related activity throughout the region.
"Indiana is a garden...where the seeds of peace have sown"
Unfortunately, as Mapes knew, Buck Duckett was simply an investigator. While he had unparalleled skills tracking down clues and extracting information through pressure and the occasional slap to the head, he was not prepared for the type of bureaucratic infighting that he needed to convince the NCAA heads to move their headquarters. At this time, he was thwarted by his main rival Dreck Teckett, who Duckett suspected but was unable to conclusively prove was the key inside man for the Chicago and later Missouri Pants Outfits' operations within the NCAA. Teckett was only the deputy for the NCAA's physical facilities branch, but his superior Gave Ledbrent was a notorious drunkard, and Teckett ran the department like a warlord extracting tribute for parking passes and access to the facility's "good" cafeteria on brown meat Mondays. Duckett found his memos destroyed in garbage gondolas, his messages intercepted by Teckett's network of lackeys, and even his phone unable to dial internal lines which was a "maintenance problem" for months on end. Anyone who has ever been in a struggle with this sort of rat, like how Klackwell controls access to the unread Mapes papers by requiring you to grovel to him in his palatial office can attest how draining and impossible it is for men of more magisterial talents to waste time with these petty tyrants.
"Lovely are the fields and meadows...through paradise"
It is clear that Mapes has dedicated the final stanza of his poem to the future movement of the NCAA Headquarters to Indianapolis. This interpretation may flow over the head of lunkheads like Klackwell and his coterie of imbeciles but observe how Mapes ends the poem with the slant rhyme of "rise" with "paradise," a clear indication that the importance of conveying this subtle message took overruled his otherwise perfect rhyme scheme. Some scholars might reasonbly question that the invocation of the Wabash River since it does not flow through Indianapolis (that would be the White River), but this is a clear allusion to West Lafeyette, the city on the banks of the Wabash that was the site of Buck Duckett's largest operation. Operation: Wabash nearly shut down the entire Purdue basketball program when Duckett located and eventually destroyed a cache of the longest pants ever seized by the NCAA to accommodate Purdue's massive frontline of "Moose" Burton, "Moose" Jenkins, and "Big Moose" Kraboose, a 7'5" senior who dominated the Big Ten in the 1959 season despite being only able to briskly walk across the court.
It is in the interests of Klackwell and his academic henchmen to preserve the masterpiece "Indiana" as a sentimental poem about a state and cover up Mapes's intention to use the poem to pressure the NCAA to move its headquarters to Indianapolis and away from the influence of the notorious pants-gangs. That is why Klackwell personally intervened to prevent me from publishing a valedictory essay on this subject when the headquarters made its move in 1997 in Mapes Shapes the preeminent Mapes journal. Instead, I was forced to self-publish it and, while the essay itself is, I believe, a persuasive and perhaps even moving testimony to the power of Mapes's works and Buck Duckett's own tireless toil preventing athletes from receiving pants from miscreants, it largely went unread and unremarked upon by both Mapes scholars and the NCAA itself even after I handed it out at the 2000 Final Four held at the RCA Dome until I was bodily ushered off the premises by jackbooted police officers sent there, I presume, by Klackwell.
As I have prepared for this new edition of my commentary on "Indiana," I have grown increasingly alarmed that Klackwell has entrenched himself completely into Mapes papers. In fact, though Klackwell has claimed that he believes the words of Mapes are sacrosanct to the point where he has extensively noted any variations from the manuscript to the published version of his poems, I have come to believe that Klackwell will do anything to suppress the "Indiana" poem's true meaning including altering the manuscript or even have one his graduate students forge an alternate version.
For that reason, I have been forced to, in the dead of night and using a series of keys I have stolen and duplicated, temporarily removed the Mapes papers from the Indiana archives and will keep them with me while I finish off my commentary. It is obvious to me that Klackwell is in the employ of the remnants of the Chicago Pants Outfit and will try to alter or destroy the papers and have me garroted with my own sock garters. Fortunately, I traveled to Indianapolis with my own trunk of wigs, train conductor uniforms, false mustaches, and a giant squirrel costume. I suppose it should be obvious now that I have been using L.R.M. Mandis-Mampis as an assumed name and am the NCAA investigator Buck Duckett whose deeds Mr. Mapes has, for whatever reason, decided to memorialize in his poem. Even as we speak, the agents of Professor Klackwell and whatever so-called "law enforcement" that is in his employ are trying to track me down to allow him access to the papers and block this commentary that will scandalize the entire government of Indiana. But I am not intimidated by him or by the various pants-assassins who have been seeking me out for decades for simply doing the work of keeping college athletics free from the decadent influence of commerce. But there it is, the tell-tale rustling outside the safehouse and I must get my old NCAA service revolver and prepare to defend these papers one last time.
The Indianpolis Express
Hugh Millhew was not sure why he stopped the bus for the stooped, bearded man or why he decided to change course and ferry him to Indianapolis. He figured he had a bus now, and when he stopped the man tried to get on, and, after thinking about it for a few minutes he could not come up with a good reason not to go to Indianapolis.
Millhew hadn’t planned on driving a bus on this trip or at any point in his life. His problem was that he liked talking to people and, in this case specifically, people in a bar next to his motel. In this case that was M. Powell Straigthurt, the proprietor of Straithurt Motors on Route 19 who pulled up in a glistening Dodge and told Millhew he could have it for his old Buick plus $180. Millhew said he wasn’t a fool, he wanted to have a look at the thing first. He popped the hood right in the parking lot.
“This thing has a worn alternator, the tires are practically bald, and the radio only gets the bad religious station,” Millhew said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Clutch is sticky too.” Millhew also did not have $180 on him either, but he kept that to himself.
“Son, you drive a hard bargain, but I can tell you know your way around an automobile,” Straighthurt said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. How about a straight up swap? I could always use another Buick, even if it’s just for parts.”
That irked Millhew. Sure, the Buick needed some work, the fuel pump was nearly shot, and every four or five times it needed a kick in exactly the right place on the front fender in order to fully turn over, but he had kept it running all the way from Lubbock. But he couldn’t pass up a swap.
Straigthurt proposed doing the trade tonight. He said that did not want other customers seeing him give Millhew such a good deal and then demanding a nice Dodge for their own hunks of junk. Millhew was a little dubious, but he also noticed a flushed and swaying demeanor in the man and figured the rum cocktails he had seen Straighthurt downing one after the other could be playing a role here and it might be best to act before the man sobered up.
Millhew could tell Straighurt Motors was a major operation based on the billboard he saw with the M. Powell’s grinning face looking like the face of the moon and the fact that roof had an enormous inflatable gorilla ("Get yourself a deal that's INSANE!!!" the sign said, making the gorilla's presence somewhat of an enigma). Straighhurt took him to the business office in a trailer in the back of the lot. Millhew sat filling out dozens of forms. It seemed like every for paper he filled out, Straighthurt produced two more and as he attacked them, Straighthurt pounded addenda and clauses out on his typewriter, squinting through half-glasses. Finally he finished. Straighthurts produced a bottle of something brown and offered it to Millhew, but Millhew did not feel like celebrating.
“If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Straighthurt, I’d just like the Dodge and I’ll be on my way.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Straighthurt said. “We have a bit of a complication. You see, the Dodge, I just saw it is not available. Already sold to Mr. Lardner N. Wiltnoy. Taking delivery on the 24th. What a horrible oversight. My deepest apologies.”
“OK then, I’ll just take the Buick back,” Millhew said
“Well, I'm afraid I can’t do that. You see, you’ve just signed it over to Straighthurt Motors. Here it is, in triplicate. Why, I just saw you fill out the forms yourself.”
Millhew was furious. He cursed. He whirled around to get the police. But then he saw it: a whole wall of photos of Straighthurt grinning that billboard grin of his with every badge in the county. There was one with him and the police department softball team he sponsored. There was one directly behind his head with the sheriff. He was smiling the same smile as in the picture now.
“You’re welcome to talk to Sheriff Maughton. I’m sure he would be happy to take a look at the paperwork we’ve established here,” Straighthurt said. “Of course, I would never just take a car from someone like you. That would be fraudulent and you don’t get to be the sponsor of the sheriff’s bowling team with those sorts of lax attitudes towards the law and the constitution. I can’t get you the Dodge, but I’ve got just the vehicle for a youngster who knows his way around an engine block.”
Millhew had no choice and he followed him to the back of the lot. That’s where it was: an ancient, rusted bus. It still had “Billy’s Big Billy Boy’s Band, Brownsville” stenciled on the back. It smelled like it was leaking oil like a gutshot gunfighter.
“Look at this fine automobile. Been all over the country, all over the hemisphere. Still runs like a dream. Seems perfect for an itinerant man such as yourself in his journeys. Maybe meet a nice girl. Maybe meet a few nice girls. You’ve got the room in here.”
Millhew didn’t want the bus. But he also didn’t want to walk out of there and those were his only choices. He also noticed that Straighthurt had his hand grasping something in his pocket. He sighed and took the keys and the registration.
The plan had been to take the interstate out east and track down his friend Frad Croddle, but Frad had stopped answering the phone and the one time he tried to take the bus on the interstate it had moved so ponderously that multiple drivers threw hamburgers at him and he needed to stop and clean off the windshield. Millhew began meandering through backroads. That’s where he met Professor Huddry.
Millhew had noticed him at the Tri Booth Inn. An old man bearded man in a rumpled suit with threadbare elbow patches was hunched over a table sniffing the fumes from what looked like a cup of tea or whatever spices they managed to dump in a mug full of hot water for him. The old man was surrounded by decrepit cardboard boxes. The man looked at Millhew and introduced himself as Professor Huddry of the Huddry-Mantis Institute, but Millhew simply nodded and went out to the parking lot. He was done with conversations with eccentrics after the Straighthurt fiasco. But when he went to leave, there was Professor Huddry standing in front of the bus’s door like he was getting on the crosstown express.
“I noticed that were driving alone in this great big bus,” the man said.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” said Millhew.
“Well, if you’re heading east, I can use a ride to Indianapolis. My previous travel arrangements fell apart due to a small amount of treachery, leaving me to lug my books and articles and I can't find a single ride that does not appear to be a death trap. This must be the jalopy capital of the United States. I can contribute some gas money.”
Millhew thought about it. He was down to his last $25 or so, and while he had no intention of ever setting foot in Indianapolis, it was at least vaguely in the right direction. Besides, he figured he could kick this odd little man to the curb if he became too tedious. He told him he’d take him up on his offer and began loading the boxes into the bus. There were dozens of them and they had been water damaged by some rain or a puddle and barely held together. It seemed like they had books in them and it took some time to get everything loaded up.
“You don’t know it now, but you’re taking a step to save amateur athletics in this country,” the Huddry said.
"How about we save that first tank of gas,” Millhew said.
The first hours started in silence. Millhew blared the radio (it was the bad religious station, the one with a firebreathing preacher shrieking about his audience going to hell for embracing Satan’s radio) until it faded from the dial and that's when Huddry saw his opportunity to start talking.
“Have you heard of NIL?” the professor said.
“NIL? Is that some sort of chemical?” Millhew replied.
“No, it’s an acronym. That’s when you have letters that stand for words,” the professor said.
“I know that.” Millhew hissed.
“Name, image, likeness. Do you know that that means? Of course you don’t,” Hoddry said. “It means that crime is legal. It means that athletes are for sale. It means that a man’s integrity is on the open market like a hog’s carcass. Name, image, likeness. You’ve got college athletes getting paid now. And it’s all legal.”
Millhew was at a loss. “Why do you care if college athletes get paid?”
“That is just what I expect to hear from a nincompoop. It’s classic nincompoopery. Page 14. Habeas nincompooperus. Do you hear yourself? Do you understand integrity? Amateurism? The ideal of the scholar-athlete? Listen to yourself.”
“You better watch that nincompoop stuff or you can walk. Don’t forget this is my bus.”
“Of course. I apologize,” the professor said. “Not everyone has been exposed to the beauty of pure amateur athletics. You don’t strike me as a collegian.”
In fact Millhew had done one semester at State before both he and the administration came to a mutual understanding that he would no longer burden the faculty with his presence.
“This is exactly the type of situation that Duckett discusses in Chapter 15. I take it you have not heard of Buck Duckett?”
“No,” said Millhew. He pawed at the radio dial.
“Duckett is the foremost mind in amateur athletics. A guardian of sorts. An investigator for the NCAA. I assume you’ve never heard of the Tennessee Pants Bust of 1978. The author of In Cold Pants, a methodological guide to investigating illegal payments but, more than that, a metaphysical journey, a meditation on the soul of amateurism. The most profound sports text that has been written or will be written this century.”
The bus shuddered.
“I hope you don’t expect that I pay for repairs for this wretched wreck,” the professor said.
“The bus is fine. Just needs a little transmission fluid in a few miles,” Millhew said.
“The soul of amateurism,” Hoddry continued. “Do you know that Duckett once broke six ribs impersonating a scout team punter while discovering a ring of Tech players receiving free hoagies every single day from a devious sandwiches magnate?”
“I don’t know, those football players must get pretty hungry running around in the sun all day,” Millhew said.
“Of course they do,” said the professor. “But there are legal sandwiches and illegal– anyway the point seems to elude you. But what I hope is that it won’t elude the National Collegiate Athletics Association. As you can see I’ve prepared several proofs, mathematical proofs based on a numerological reading of In Cold Pants that I have written up so elegantly that it could get through to even the most thickheaded bureaucrat. I believe that once they are confronted with the texts from Duckett, Duckett scholars, and my own work showing that Chapter 13, the one where he details how he rigged up a crude funicular in order to sneak into a fraternity house and reconnoiter a set of golf clubs given to a point guard is actually, when run through a crude but effective cipher, a clear rebuke to the exact NIL code governing the NCAA rules, they will have no choice but to revoke the imbecilic law and stop this monstrous professionalization of football, darts, and croquet.”
Millhew finally managed to find a radio station. It was a small station and it was playing something called the Symphony of Discordant Accordions but he would listen to hours of snoring or shrieking babies to avoid having to endure to more speeches about Buck Duckett and the NCAA. Eventually they decided to stop and get something to eat at a roadside diner. Duckett had hoped to sit alone at the counter but Hoddry motioned him into a booth, and Millhew's manners wouldn't allow him to abandon him.
“The key to understanding Buck Duckett is in line and page numbers, which is why you need the third edition. You see, the key does not work in the first or second editions quite well with the roman numeral introduction and the beastly fourth edition, with an entirely superfluous chapter about the various swashbuckling incidents Duckett endured while investigating fencing teams that was probably ghostwritten by some dullard publisher's assistant.”
A strange man sitting at the counter swiveled around his stool and stared at them. He was as tall as Hoddry was stooped, gangly, clean-shaven, with remarkable ears that drooped down across the length of his tiny face. Millhew was embarrassed because Hoddry was talking his nonsense loudly and occasionally gesturing with a fork. The man got up, seemingly unfolding himself from the stool and materialized next to them with impossibly long strides.
“What’s this Buck Duckett nonsense you’re raving about?” he said.
“Well, this is high-level theory and scholarship. I don’t have time to explain it to another thick-headed oaf. I’m a very busy man with business before the NCAA,” the professor replied.
“Buck Duckett is nonsense. That was debunked years ago. All tall tales from a sad man writing stories about busting water polo players. If you had simply read Pack Bracket, you would have no issues defending amateurism,” the man said.
“Pack Bracket? Pack Bracket? I should have been able to tell I was dealing with a Bracket Man by looking at the ridges on your skull. Look at his head,” Hoddry said turning to Millhew. “The classic shape of a cretin. It is a miracle this man is able to feed himself. Pack Bracket.” Now he looked up at the tall man looming over him. “You realize that it was Bracketism that led right to NIL? The Bracket Men’s texts were so harebrained that the NCAA laughed them out of the room. Or did you not see the issue of ‘Amateur Sports Theorems’ about it? Maybe there weren’t enough pictures.”
“That hearing was a damn stitch-up and you know it,” the tall man said. “The whole thing was already a joke when people started reading this fake detective talking about disguising himself as a waiter to catch Moose Caldwell accepting illegal fireworks when everyone knows Caldwell’s own uncle turned him in.”
“Please,” Hoddry said. “The Moose Caldwell Uncle theory is something I’ve easily debunked if you read chapters four and six of my manuscript. All of the evidence shows that Duckett not only intercepted the pants but also left a series of prophesies embedded by analyzing the sentence structure. But I wouldn’t expect a Bracketist to be able to follow such a basic line.”
“Then you haven’t read Nick Nacket. I have it right here.” The tall man ambled over to the corner of the diner where he had his own mess of cardboard boxes that seemed impossibly damp and began rooting through them.
“Let’s go. We can leave this deluded maniac to his scribblings. We have no time to waste,” the professor said as he gobbled up the remains of his meatloaf and stood up. But he was not fast enough. By the time he finished and paid the bill (the only reason Millhew had not left him at that gas station hours earlier when he got into a thirty minute argument with the attendant about Charleston Chew), the tall man had loped over to the parking lot and was already loading his boxes onto the bus.
“I ain’t letting you go to Indianapolis without at least reading Nick Nacket,” he said, waving a battered volume at the professor.
“Do you think I haven’t read it? Or at least sampled enough of his incoherent nonsense to understand the futility of this enterprise?” By now both men were on the bus pointing their arms at each other and taking turns rifling through boxes to shove documents at each other while invoking the names of Beckett Heck and Truck Van Truk.
Millhew quietly slipped out of the parking lot and onto the road and stuck out his thumb.
Millhew hadn’t planned on driving a bus on this trip or at any point in his life. His problem was that he liked talking to people and, in this case specifically, people in a bar next to his motel. In this case that was M. Powell Straigthurt, the proprietor of Straithurt Motors on Route 19 who pulled up in a glistening Dodge and told Millhew he could have it for his old Buick plus $180. Millhew said he wasn’t a fool, he wanted to have a look at the thing first. He popped the hood right in the parking lot.
“This thing has a worn alternator, the tires are practically bald, and the radio only gets the bad religious station,” Millhew said, trying to be as nonchalant as possible. “Clutch is sticky too.” Millhew also did not have $180 on him either, but he kept that to himself.
“Son, you drive a hard bargain, but I can tell you know your way around an automobile,” Straighthurt said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. How about a straight up swap? I could always use another Buick, even if it’s just for parts.”
That irked Millhew. Sure, the Buick needed some work, the fuel pump was nearly shot, and every four or five times it needed a kick in exactly the right place on the front fender in order to fully turn over, but he had kept it running all the way from Lubbock. But he couldn’t pass up a swap.
Straigthurt proposed doing the trade tonight. He said that did not want other customers seeing him give Millhew such a good deal and then demanding a nice Dodge for their own hunks of junk. Millhew was a little dubious, but he also noticed a flushed and swaying demeanor in the man and figured the rum cocktails he had seen Straighthurt downing one after the other could be playing a role here and it might be best to act before the man sobered up.
Millhew could tell Straighurt Motors was a major operation based on the billboard he saw with the M. Powell’s grinning face looking like the face of the moon and the fact that roof had an enormous inflatable gorilla ("Get yourself a deal that's INSANE!!!" the sign said, making the gorilla's presence somewhat of an enigma). Straighhurt took him to the business office in a trailer in the back of the lot. Millhew sat filling out dozens of forms. It seemed like every for paper he filled out, Straighthurt produced two more and as he attacked them, Straighthurt pounded addenda and clauses out on his typewriter, squinting through half-glasses. Finally he finished. Straighthurts produced a bottle of something brown and offered it to Millhew, but Millhew did not feel like celebrating.
“If it’s all the same to you, Mr. Straighthurt, I’d just like the Dodge and I’ll be on my way.”
“Well, I’ll be,” Straighthurt said. “We have a bit of a complication. You see, the Dodge, I just saw it is not available. Already sold to Mr. Lardner N. Wiltnoy. Taking delivery on the 24th. What a horrible oversight. My deepest apologies.”
“OK then, I’ll just take the Buick back,” Millhew said
“Well, I'm afraid I can’t do that. You see, you’ve just signed it over to Straighthurt Motors. Here it is, in triplicate. Why, I just saw you fill out the forms yourself.”
Millhew was furious. He cursed. He whirled around to get the police. But then he saw it: a whole wall of photos of Straighthurt grinning that billboard grin of his with every badge in the county. There was one with him and the police department softball team he sponsored. There was one directly behind his head with the sheriff. He was smiling the same smile as in the picture now.
“You’re welcome to talk to Sheriff Maughton. I’m sure he would be happy to take a look at the paperwork we’ve established here,” Straighthurt said. “Of course, I would never just take a car from someone like you. That would be fraudulent and you don’t get to be the sponsor of the sheriff’s bowling team with those sorts of lax attitudes towards the law and the constitution. I can’t get you the Dodge, but I’ve got just the vehicle for a youngster who knows his way around an engine block.”
Millhew had no choice and he followed him to the back of the lot. That’s where it was: an ancient, rusted bus. It still had “Billy’s Big Billy Boy’s Band, Brownsville” stenciled on the back. It smelled like it was leaking oil like a gutshot gunfighter.
“Look at this fine automobile. Been all over the country, all over the hemisphere. Still runs like a dream. Seems perfect for an itinerant man such as yourself in his journeys. Maybe meet a nice girl. Maybe meet a few nice girls. You’ve got the room in here.”
Millhew didn’t want the bus. But he also didn’t want to walk out of there and those were his only choices. He also noticed that Straighthurt had his hand grasping something in his pocket. He sighed and took the keys and the registration.
The plan had been to take the interstate out east and track down his friend Frad Croddle, but Frad had stopped answering the phone and the one time he tried to take the bus on the interstate it had moved so ponderously that multiple drivers threw hamburgers at him and he needed to stop and clean off the windshield. Millhew began meandering through backroads. That’s where he met Professor Huddry.
Millhew had noticed him at the Tri Booth Inn. An old man bearded man in a rumpled suit with threadbare elbow patches was hunched over a table sniffing the fumes from what looked like a cup of tea or whatever spices they managed to dump in a mug full of hot water for him. The old man was surrounded by decrepit cardboard boxes. The man looked at Millhew and introduced himself as Professor Huddry of the Huddry-Mantis Institute, but Millhew simply nodded and went out to the parking lot. He was done with conversations with eccentrics after the Straighthurt fiasco. But when he went to leave, there was Professor Huddry standing in front of the bus’s door like he was getting on the crosstown express.
“I noticed that were driving alone in this great big bus,” the man said.
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” said Millhew.
“Well, if you’re heading east, I can use a ride to Indianapolis. My previous travel arrangements fell apart due to a small amount of treachery, leaving me to lug my books and articles and I can't find a single ride that does not appear to be a death trap. This must be the jalopy capital of the United States. I can contribute some gas money.”
Millhew thought about it. He was down to his last $25 or so, and while he had no intention of ever setting foot in Indianapolis, it was at least vaguely in the right direction. Besides, he figured he could kick this odd little man to the curb if he became too tedious. He told him he’d take him up on his offer and began loading the boxes into the bus. There were dozens of them and they had been water damaged by some rain or a puddle and barely held together. It seemed like they had books in them and it took some time to get everything loaded up.
“You don’t know it now, but you’re taking a step to save amateur athletics in this country,” the Huddry said.
"How about we save that first tank of gas,” Millhew said.
The first hours started in silence. Millhew blared the radio (it was the bad religious station, the one with a firebreathing preacher shrieking about his audience going to hell for embracing Satan’s radio) until it faded from the dial and that's when Huddry saw his opportunity to start talking.
“Have you heard of NIL?” the professor said.
“NIL? Is that some sort of chemical?” Millhew replied.
“No, it’s an acronym. That’s when you have letters that stand for words,” the professor said.
“I know that.” Millhew hissed.
“Name, image, likeness. Do you know that that means? Of course you don’t,” Hoddry said. “It means that crime is legal. It means that athletes are for sale. It means that a man’s integrity is on the open market like a hog’s carcass. Name, image, likeness. You’ve got college athletes getting paid now. And it’s all legal.”
Millhew was at a loss. “Why do you care if college athletes get paid?”
“That is just what I expect to hear from a nincompoop. It’s classic nincompoopery. Page 14. Habeas nincompooperus. Do you hear yourself? Do you understand integrity? Amateurism? The ideal of the scholar-athlete? Listen to yourself.”
“You better watch that nincompoop stuff or you can walk. Don’t forget this is my bus.”
“Of course. I apologize,” the professor said. “Not everyone has been exposed to the beauty of pure amateur athletics. You don’t strike me as a collegian.”
In fact Millhew had done one semester at State before both he and the administration came to a mutual understanding that he would no longer burden the faculty with his presence.
“This is exactly the type of situation that Duckett discusses in Chapter 15. I take it you have not heard of Buck Duckett?”
“No,” said Millhew. He pawed at the radio dial.
“Duckett is the foremost mind in amateur athletics. A guardian of sorts. An investigator for the NCAA. I assume you’ve never heard of the Tennessee Pants Bust of 1978. The author of In Cold Pants, a methodological guide to investigating illegal payments but, more than that, a metaphysical journey, a meditation on the soul of amateurism. The most profound sports text that has been written or will be written this century.”
The bus shuddered.
“I hope you don’t expect that I pay for repairs for this wretched wreck,” the professor said.
“The bus is fine. Just needs a little transmission fluid in a few miles,” Millhew said.
“The soul of amateurism,” Hoddry continued. “Do you know that Duckett once broke six ribs impersonating a scout team punter while discovering a ring of Tech players receiving free hoagies every single day from a devious sandwiches magnate?”
“I don’t know, those football players must get pretty hungry running around in the sun all day,” Millhew said.
“Of course they do,” said the professor. “But there are legal sandwiches and illegal– anyway the point seems to elude you. But what I hope is that it won’t elude the National Collegiate Athletics Association. As you can see I’ve prepared several proofs, mathematical proofs based on a numerological reading of In Cold Pants that I have written up so elegantly that it could get through to even the most thickheaded bureaucrat. I believe that once they are confronted with the texts from Duckett, Duckett scholars, and my own work showing that Chapter 13, the one where he details how he rigged up a crude funicular in order to sneak into a fraternity house and reconnoiter a set of golf clubs given to a point guard is actually, when run through a crude but effective cipher, a clear rebuke to the exact NIL code governing the NCAA rules, they will have no choice but to revoke the imbecilic law and stop this monstrous professionalization of football, darts, and croquet.”
Millhew finally managed to find a radio station. It was a small station and it was playing something called the Symphony of Discordant Accordions but he would listen to hours of snoring or shrieking babies to avoid having to endure to more speeches about Buck Duckett and the NCAA. Eventually they decided to stop and get something to eat at a roadside diner. Duckett had hoped to sit alone at the counter but Hoddry motioned him into a booth, and Millhew's manners wouldn't allow him to abandon him.
“The key to understanding Buck Duckett is in line and page numbers, which is why you need the third edition. You see, the key does not work in the first or second editions quite well with the roman numeral introduction and the beastly fourth edition, with an entirely superfluous chapter about the various swashbuckling incidents Duckett endured while investigating fencing teams that was probably ghostwritten by some dullard publisher's assistant.”
A strange man sitting at the counter swiveled around his stool and stared at them. He was as tall as Hoddry was stooped, gangly, clean-shaven, with remarkable ears that drooped down across the length of his tiny face. Millhew was embarrassed because Hoddry was talking his nonsense loudly and occasionally gesturing with a fork. The man got up, seemingly unfolding himself from the stool and materialized next to them with impossibly long strides.
“What’s this Buck Duckett nonsense you’re raving about?” he said.
“Well, this is high-level theory and scholarship. I don’t have time to explain it to another thick-headed oaf. I’m a very busy man with business before the NCAA,” the professor replied.
“Buck Duckett is nonsense. That was debunked years ago. All tall tales from a sad man writing stories about busting water polo players. If you had simply read Pack Bracket, you would have no issues defending amateurism,” the man said.
“Pack Bracket? Pack Bracket? I should have been able to tell I was dealing with a Bracket Man by looking at the ridges on your skull. Look at his head,” Hoddry said turning to Millhew. “The classic shape of a cretin. It is a miracle this man is able to feed himself. Pack Bracket.” Now he looked up at the tall man looming over him. “You realize that it was Bracketism that led right to NIL? The Bracket Men’s texts were so harebrained that the NCAA laughed them out of the room. Or did you not see the issue of ‘Amateur Sports Theorems’ about it? Maybe there weren’t enough pictures.”
“That hearing was a damn stitch-up and you know it,” the tall man said. “The whole thing was already a joke when people started reading this fake detective talking about disguising himself as a waiter to catch Moose Caldwell accepting illegal fireworks when everyone knows Caldwell’s own uncle turned him in.”
“Please,” Hoddry said. “The Moose Caldwell Uncle theory is something I’ve easily debunked if you read chapters four and six of my manuscript. All of the evidence shows that Duckett not only intercepted the pants but also left a series of prophesies embedded by analyzing the sentence structure. But I wouldn’t expect a Bracketist to be able to follow such a basic line.”
“Then you haven’t read Nick Nacket. I have it right here.” The tall man ambled over to the corner of the diner where he had his own mess of cardboard boxes that seemed impossibly damp and began rooting through them.
“Let’s go. We can leave this deluded maniac to his scribblings. We have no time to waste,” the professor said as he gobbled up the remains of his meatloaf and stood up. But he was not fast enough. By the time he finished and paid the bill (the only reason Millhew had not left him at that gas station hours earlier when he got into a thirty minute argument with the attendant about Charleston Chew), the tall man had loped over to the parking lot and was already loading his boxes onto the bus.
“I ain’t letting you go to Indianapolis without at least reading Nick Nacket,” he said, waving a battered volume at the professor.
“Do you think I haven’t read it? Or at least sampled enough of his incoherent nonsense to understand the futility of this enterprise?” By now both men were on the bus pointing their arms at each other and taking turns rifling through boxes to shove documents at each other while invoking the names of Beckett Heck and Truck Van Truk.
Millhew quietly slipped out of the parking lot and onto the road and stuck out his thumb.
Buck Duckett's Last Pant
“People have a misunderstanding about this work,” the venerable NCAA Investigator Buck Duckett says to me over black coffee at a diner in a southern college town. “Most of what I do is just making phone calls or looking at computer records. I’m not rooting around in trashcans. I’m not following people. I’m not doing stakeouts in a goddamn car.”
Three hours later, we are staking out a fraternity house in a goddamn car, where Buck Duckett thinks a star tailback is about to take delivery of jewelry, video game systems, and expensive, stylish pants. We sit quietly. Every few minutes, Duckett releases a puff of vape smoke into the night air. Every time someone leaves the house or approaches it, we tense up and Duckett aims a long-lensed camera out of the driver’s side window. But after a few hours of waiting, nothing happens. “Maybe he was tipped off,” Duckett muses. “Or maybe he’s not hiding it at all. They'll show him picking up his stuff on the evening news.”
The National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibits its amateur athletes from receiving compensation. Or, at least, it had. By now three states have passed laws allowing college athletes from receiving money from their name, license, and image. These so-called NIL laws will allow athletes to endorse products and appear in commercials; they should break open the dam and allow essentially the payment of athletes. For many people disgusted by universities raking in billions of dollars through media rights deals while athletes work for free, this is a welcome change. For Buck Duckett, who has made his living busting athletes, boosters, and bag men in the illicit world of under-the-table payments, it is an existential crisis.
“Obviously, the question of how NIL payments will fall under NCAA sanctions is very fluid at the moment,” Brett Dreebin, author of “Dollars and Sacks: A Study of Under The Table Recruiting Payments” tells me. “It is unclear whether there will be a role for investigations and enforcement in the NCAA at all.” An NCAA investigator who asked to remain anonymous had a shorter assessment. “Well we’re fucked,” the investigator said.
***********
There are depictions on 10,000 year old cave paintings of sports: wrestling, footraces, archery. As early as 3,000 years ago, we have records of sports organized into formal competitions as they became increasingly abstracted from skills required in hunting and warfare. By 2,000 years ago, civilizations from Mesoamerica to Ancient Egypt to Ireland had begun captivating spectators with the games involving balls.
It would take several thousand more years for humans to come up with the idea of professional sports. Professional sports leagues began forming in the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players formed in 1871 with a league that could formally pay players after accusations that teams were secretly funneling money to so-called amateur players. By the 1880s, professionalism had been codified into soccer in England and Scotland.
Professional sports were the inevitable result of money and prestige in amateur competitions; once these stakes were established, it became virtually impossible for teams to resist luring the best competitors through underhanded payments. In England, for example, teams loaded up with Scottish players known as “Professors of Football” who moved to England and played for various payments designed to be called anything but wages. In cricket, “shamateur” players were not paid directly by clubs but were enticed to play there by other means. For example, W.G. Grace, the great nineteenth-century cricketer who won matches by intimidating opponents with the thickness and lustrousness of his beard, drew lavish reimbursements for travel and accommodation that dwarfed payments received by actual professionals. In virtually every case, sports leagues founded on an ideal of gentlemanly amateur play yielded to the temptations to recruit the best players, and the only way to do so was with cash.
There is one major exception. The American college sports apparatus has clung violently to its ideal of amateurism. Even as college sports went from a collection of rowdy amateurs playing games that barely had rules as a cover for organized thrashing to a multi-billion dollar television product, the NCAA has rigorously done all it can to prevent that money from trickling down to “student-athletes,” whom the association likes to think of as ordinary students doing an extracurricular activity that in certain cases happens to be broadcast to millions of people and allows the schools to spend tens of millions of dollars on coaches and hundreds of millions of dollars on lavish athletic training facilities that bear the name of a billionaire donor who in turn gets to call the coach at four AM and scream that they ought to run the dang option. And it is these boosters whose underlings or sleazy brothers-in-law who have been driving around the country since time immemorial with sacks full of cash, deeds to cars in players’ grandmothers’ names, and the gaudiest pantaloons ever knitted by human hands.
The NCAA’s attempts to police amateurism have been a history o bumbling officials trying to bail out the Titanic with a water bucket. They could never stop everyone from getting paid or even most people. But they stopped quite a few, and when they did it was often because of Buck Duckett. 1978, his first big case, “Big” Walt Nexus, $2,300 in a Sesame Street lunch box given to his kid brother. 1984, Maxwell Rictus, thirteen gold chains, a Dodge Challenger, pants on the table. 1992, “Lucifer” Nick Lufus caught bragging about $68,000 and a pair of hammer pants overlaid in gold lamé in the lyrics to an obscure song on his cousin’s label that Duckett tracked down in a swap meet and spent four days with a Dictionary of American Rap Lingo in order to decipher that the NCAA ruled as “compelling evidence” to suspend Lufus the night before the Muskie Bowl. 1996, “Wet” Steve Jason got a 38 dollar lunch comped at a local burrito restaurant.
Duckett tells me that his busts came about from patience and a boring willingness to follow facts, trace receipts, and talk to sources. His colleagues paint a far more colorful picture. Bill Maceman– now retired from the NCAA and working private security at a minigolf and go-kart emporium where he keeps a dossier of teenagers banned for petty theft, pirate vandalism, and mooning– tells me that Duckett once slept in a dumpster for three nights in order to catch Moose Manjagt accepting a Member’s Only Jacket from local jute magnate Moose Dugan. Other Duckett stories seem to have become legends. I heard several versions of a story about Duckett seizing a set of golf clubs and rare Vicuña wool golf pants from the power forward Ralph Van Prigg by alternatingly posing as a caddy or burying himself in a sand trap. In one version, he disguised himself as an alligator lounging in a water hazard in order to scare away the other golfers and isolate Van Prigg’s party and then having to dodge multiple rounds when Van Prigg’s policeman uncle produced a service revolver and began firing at him (Duckett cryptically asks me if I thought he’d disguise himself as an alligator when I asked him about it but did not specifically deny it).
One thing that is nearly impossible to nail Duckett down on is the extent to which he believes in amateurism in sports and the effects of new NIL policies. Every time I press him on this, he simply says “I don’t make the rules.” Duckett says he is simply doing a job, just as he would be following company rules if he was investigating insurance claims or selling time shares. But his enthusiasm for the bust tells me otherwise. It is hard to believe Duckett would be working so hard to nab players getting payment if this was simply a job. Quadd Hatcher, a newspaper columnist who crossed paths with Duckett while defending the suspended tight end Owen Groud after Duckett caught him with a cash sack told me “Duckett wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t care about players getting paid because this job is so self-evidently stupid.”
It is hard to see why Duckett would be so attached to amateurism in college sports. He was not a college athlete. In fact, he put himself through school partially as a professional boxer, a wiry lightweight under the name “Gentleman Buck” whose 6-13 record allowed him to graduate in three years with degrees in criminology and pants. Duckett came onto the NCAA’s radar when he was working as an assistant private investigator under the legendary Ike Dreighto. He was shadowing Bike Branton, the heir to Indianapolis concrete magnate Michael Branton III, during his scandalous affair with the famous saloon ventriloquist Margaret Walross when he accidentally discovered that Indiana quarterback Moose Hatton was receiving shipments of custom suit pants from the Brantons hidden in cement mixers. The NCAA appreciated the tip and eventually approached him for a job. Within a year he was wearing a false mustache and running sting operations as a disc jockey named Larry Groove giving away free records to athletes.
It remains impossible to see why Buck Duckett is continuing to work cases. Other NCAA investigators are quietly shelving their records and waiting for a new assignment or perhaps a buyout. Duckett’s office is fully operational. Loose papers encroach on his desk like foliage reclaiming an abandoned boomtown. Each wall contains a large corkboard with red string mapping out baroque links between athletes, bagmen, and boosters with spokes veering off into incomprehensible directions (one says “Auntie Annie’s King of Prussia– ask for Pissed Dave”).
And yet Buck Duckett keeps on investigating. He says he will keep doing so until they tell him to stop. All he knows how to do is to keep disguising himself as a mime and secretly taking pictures of a banned cash transaction while pretending to fight against the wind. He does not need to pretend anymore. The wind is here.
Three hours later, we are staking out a fraternity house in a goddamn car, where Buck Duckett thinks a star tailback is about to take delivery of jewelry, video game systems, and expensive, stylish pants. We sit quietly. Every few minutes, Duckett releases a puff of vape smoke into the night air. Every time someone leaves the house or approaches it, we tense up and Duckett aims a long-lensed camera out of the driver’s side window. But after a few hours of waiting, nothing happens. “Maybe he was tipped off,” Duckett muses. “Or maybe he’s not hiding it at all. They'll show him picking up his stuff on the evening news.”
The National Collegiate Athletic Association prohibits its amateur athletes from receiving compensation. Or, at least, it had. By now three states have passed laws allowing college athletes from receiving money from their name, license, and image. These so-called NIL laws will allow athletes to endorse products and appear in commercials; they should break open the dam and allow essentially the payment of athletes. For many people disgusted by universities raking in billions of dollars through media rights deals while athletes work for free, this is a welcome change. For Buck Duckett, who has made his living busting athletes, boosters, and bag men in the illicit world of under-the-table payments, it is an existential crisis.
“Obviously, the question of how NIL payments will fall under NCAA sanctions is very fluid at the moment,” Brett Dreebin, author of “Dollars and Sacks: A Study of Under The Table Recruiting Payments” tells me. “It is unclear whether there will be a role for investigations and enforcement in the NCAA at all.” An NCAA investigator who asked to remain anonymous had a shorter assessment. “Well we’re fucked,” the investigator said.
***********
There are depictions on 10,000 year old cave paintings of sports: wrestling, footraces, archery. As early as 3,000 years ago, we have records of sports organized into formal competitions as they became increasingly abstracted from skills required in hunting and warfare. By 2,000 years ago, civilizations from Mesoamerica to Ancient Egypt to Ireland had begun captivating spectators with the games involving balls.
It would take several thousand more years for humans to come up with the idea of professional sports. Professional sports leagues began forming in the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players formed in 1871 with a league that could formally pay players after accusations that teams were secretly funneling money to so-called amateur players. By the 1880s, professionalism had been codified into soccer in England and Scotland.
Professional sports were the inevitable result of money and prestige in amateur competitions; once these stakes were established, it became virtually impossible for teams to resist luring the best competitors through underhanded payments. In England, for example, teams loaded up with Scottish players known as “Professors of Football” who moved to England and played for various payments designed to be called anything but wages. In cricket, “shamateur” players were not paid directly by clubs but were enticed to play there by other means. For example, W.G. Grace, the great nineteenth-century cricketer who won matches by intimidating opponents with the thickness and lustrousness of his beard, drew lavish reimbursements for travel and accommodation that dwarfed payments received by actual professionals. In virtually every case, sports leagues founded on an ideal of gentlemanly amateur play yielded to the temptations to recruit the best players, and the only way to do so was with cash.
There is one major exception. The American college sports apparatus has clung violently to its ideal of amateurism. Even as college sports went from a collection of rowdy amateurs playing games that barely had rules as a cover for organized thrashing to a multi-billion dollar television product, the NCAA has rigorously done all it can to prevent that money from trickling down to “student-athletes,” whom the association likes to think of as ordinary students doing an extracurricular activity that in certain cases happens to be broadcast to millions of people and allows the schools to spend tens of millions of dollars on coaches and hundreds of millions of dollars on lavish athletic training facilities that bear the name of a billionaire donor who in turn gets to call the coach at four AM and scream that they ought to run the dang option. And it is these boosters whose underlings or sleazy brothers-in-law who have been driving around the country since time immemorial with sacks full of cash, deeds to cars in players’ grandmothers’ names, and the gaudiest pantaloons ever knitted by human hands.
The NCAA’s attempts to police amateurism have been a history o bumbling officials trying to bail out the Titanic with a water bucket. They could never stop everyone from getting paid or even most people. But they stopped quite a few, and when they did it was often because of Buck Duckett. 1978, his first big case, “Big” Walt Nexus, $2,300 in a Sesame Street lunch box given to his kid brother. 1984, Maxwell Rictus, thirteen gold chains, a Dodge Challenger, pants on the table. 1992, “Lucifer” Nick Lufus caught bragging about $68,000 and a pair of hammer pants overlaid in gold lamé in the lyrics to an obscure song on his cousin’s label that Duckett tracked down in a swap meet and spent four days with a Dictionary of American Rap Lingo in order to decipher that the NCAA ruled as “compelling evidence” to suspend Lufus the night before the Muskie Bowl. 1996, “Wet” Steve Jason got a 38 dollar lunch comped at a local burrito restaurant.
Duckett tells me that his busts came about from patience and a boring willingness to follow facts, trace receipts, and talk to sources. His colleagues paint a far more colorful picture. Bill Maceman– now retired from the NCAA and working private security at a minigolf and go-kart emporium where he keeps a dossier of teenagers banned for petty theft, pirate vandalism, and mooning– tells me that Duckett once slept in a dumpster for three nights in order to catch Moose Manjagt accepting a Member’s Only Jacket from local jute magnate Moose Dugan. Other Duckett stories seem to have become legends. I heard several versions of a story about Duckett seizing a set of golf clubs and rare Vicuña wool golf pants from the power forward Ralph Van Prigg by alternatingly posing as a caddy or burying himself in a sand trap. In one version, he disguised himself as an alligator lounging in a water hazard in order to scare away the other golfers and isolate Van Prigg’s party and then having to dodge multiple rounds when Van Prigg’s policeman uncle produced a service revolver and began firing at him (Duckett cryptically asks me if I thought he’d disguise himself as an alligator when I asked him about it but did not specifically deny it).
One thing that is nearly impossible to nail Duckett down on is the extent to which he believes in amateurism in sports and the effects of new NIL policies. Every time I press him on this, he simply says “I don’t make the rules.” Duckett says he is simply doing a job, just as he would be following company rules if he was investigating insurance claims or selling time shares. But his enthusiasm for the bust tells me otherwise. It is hard to believe Duckett would be working so hard to nab players getting payment if this was simply a job. Quadd Hatcher, a newspaper columnist who crossed paths with Duckett while defending the suspended tight end Owen Groud after Duckett caught him with a cash sack told me “Duckett wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t care about players getting paid because this job is so self-evidently stupid.”
It is hard to see why Duckett would be so attached to amateurism in college sports. He was not a college athlete. In fact, he put himself through school partially as a professional boxer, a wiry lightweight under the name “Gentleman Buck” whose 6-13 record allowed him to graduate in three years with degrees in criminology and pants. Duckett came onto the NCAA’s radar when he was working as an assistant private investigator under the legendary Ike Dreighto. He was shadowing Bike Branton, the heir to Indianapolis concrete magnate Michael Branton III, during his scandalous affair with the famous saloon ventriloquist Margaret Walross when he accidentally discovered that Indiana quarterback Moose Hatton was receiving shipments of custom suit pants from the Brantons hidden in cement mixers. The NCAA appreciated the tip and eventually approached him for a job. Within a year he was wearing a false mustache and running sting operations as a disc jockey named Larry Groove giving away free records to athletes.
It remains impossible to see why Buck Duckett is continuing to work cases. Other NCAA investigators are quietly shelving their records and waiting for a new assignment or perhaps a buyout. Duckett’s office is fully operational. Loose papers encroach on his desk like foliage reclaiming an abandoned boomtown. Each wall contains a large corkboard with red string mapping out baroque links between athletes, bagmen, and boosters with spokes veering off into incomprehensible directions (one says “Auntie Annie’s King of Prussia– ask for Pissed Dave”).
And yet Buck Duckett keeps on investigating. He says he will keep doing so until they tell him to stop. All he knows how to do is to keep disguising himself as a mime and secretly taking pictures of a banned cash transaction while pretending to fight against the wind. He does not need to pretend anymore. The wind is here.
The Evening Tree, by An Anonymous Author
The delivery was not going to be for another hour, but Buck Duckett was already lying in the cold field under a pile of moss. The grass was chilly and the dew was already soaking into his coat, but he didn't mind; he thought it would hide him better. There were no voices yet, no lights, no cartons of pants changing hands, and all that existed were the shadows of trees. Dark forests represent something frightening to us, echoing something buried deep in human psyche. It might contain wolves or bears or something else-- the fact that our minds are capable of conjuring stories has allowed us to create a foreboding roster of fictitious beasts and monsters lurking there. There was something primeval about these fears. Buck Duckett, though, was not thinking about those things. He was contemplating the trees and the concept of eternity. It was a comfort for him to think about the almost unimaginably long life span of the trees surrounding him standing as sentinels over this athletic practice field as he waited for the Colonel to arrive with his shipment of trousers, before he would have to stop contemplating and return to the his own mundane business.
This is all I managed to write. Several weeks ago, I logged onto the web and got an e-mail soliciting a story about a pants detective for a minor college football website and I had declined because I did not know what any of those words meant and I was working on a book of essays about the objects in my bathroom and what they said about my deepest fears and insecurities. But the e-mails kept coming every day. They became more insistent, almost hectoring and more and more cryptic. Why a pants detective? Apparently, more than a decade ago an athlete got in some sort of trouble for selling autographed football pants and a perverse and psychologically damaged website editor thinks this is still funny. This assignment was nonsensical and insulting, but I was stuck on an essay about how the rubber ducky represented the unpredictable tyranny from my volatile father that I was desperate to avoid passing onto my own children, and a creditor was calling me every day demanding payment one of the houses I had purchased on a small, bleak island where I could pace and smoke, so eventually I gave in. I hoped that no one I respected would see it.
Apparently in United States college athletics there are, or were, rigid codes about amateurism policed by a small cadre of investigators that would allow the institution to punish athletes or institutions for paying players. This system could not be more alien to me. I am told that college sports there are big businesses, and the teams play in enormous stadiums. I went on the web and looked at some videos and the spectacle was impossibly lavish. This is a very different situation then sports here, when my friend Geir got a chance to try out for the Fløy football team at 17 and was sent a bus ticket and paid 3,700 kroner for his trouble before getting unceremoniously cut. We all got extremely drunk that night and he turned his ankle badly getting chased by a neighbor who had caught us urinating in his garden, and Geir had to write to Gjøvik-Lyn and Tromsdalen telling them he was on crutches and could no longer make their try-outs.
The short story assignment felt like a straight jacket. No matter how much I walked around the forest path smoking and brooding or drinking fifteen cups of coffee and staring at my computer, I could not even begin to think about how to write about something as profoundly stupid as a man who investigates pants. When I asked for more details, the editor told me that recently the college athlete association had changed the law making it legal for students to advertise products and get paid and hypothetically could, under certain arrangements, receive an unlimited number of free pants without consequence. This made the idea not only stupid but impossible. But in a moment of weakness I had signed a contract, and the threat of entering into international legal conflict over a story about a pants detective became so onerous and miserable that I sat down to write. Buck Duckett. What an idiotic name.
I sent an e-mail to my friend Per, who had experience teaching at an American university in order to see if he could offer some insight into the profound quagmire I had found myself in. He told me that my assignment had nothing to do with American sports and had been conjured up by a madman. "I do not want to alarm you, but I would check to see if you are the victim of a prank. Do you remember, for example, when the Paris Review got Coetzee to cover an entire season of arena league football and he embedded himself with the Chicago Bruisers? When he found out it was a jape, he got so enraged that he tried to fly to New York to bludgeon Plimpton with a dial-a-down but they would not let him on the plane with it." But after checking with my American agents, I sadly found that the Buck Duckett enterprise was too real and evidently inescapable.
I logged onto the web and clicked the link the editor had sent me to look at other Buck Duckett entries. What I saw was appalling. It was all third-rate detective nonsense and shoddy, almost illiterate parodies, and the other authors had been able to submit them anonymously to protect their literary reputations, if they had any. When I was fourteen years old, I was working at my school's literary magazine called Det Alvorlig. I published a poem in nearly every edition, but the editor, a boy a year older named Espen, had clearly set himself up to the be star. At every one of our parties in the woods while the rest of us would be drinking ourselves into oblivion with the reckless enthusiasm of young people who had just discovered getting drunk, Espen would be lounging on a log issuing his literary pronouncements, damning the literary establishment, and (this infuriated me) surrounded by girls. Espen had always been kind to me, welcoming me to the magazine, publishing my work, and being gently encouraging and because of that I despised him. In retrospect I wanted him to hate me, to fear me as a rival who would take control of the magazine through the superiority of my work, and I took his kindness as a condescension but at the time I only felt sourness and fury. I felt that his poems were mediocre and derivative. We were teenagers, and all of our poems were mediocre and derivative at best; the work we churned out that was wholly original was embarrassing (I published a poem from the point of view of a train engine that had very strong right-wing political convictions and quarreled with his communist caboose). By the spring, I had decided that I could no longer bear his literary swashbuckling and needed to destroy him. As a young teenager, it is very difficult to engineer a rival's literary destruction. I know this from fending off numerous attacks from a Swedish memoirist who published a nine-volume account of observations about his own life cheekily titled "The Little Red Book," and who remains beneath mention. I had lodged in my brain that Espen's poems were largely derivative of the early twentieth-century poet Olaf Bull. Not only were they essentially plagiarized, as far as I was concerned, they were also anachronistic, the themes and language plundered and thrust haphazardly into a more contemporary style. The previous summer, at my summer literary magazine independent from the school magazine, another student had told me that I was badly regurgitating Tarjei Vessas, and the experience had been utterly crushing, a blow that still reverberates in me every time I publish anything, an icy fear in my spine that a critic will rise up and blast me with the Vessas smear.
I biked to the library and searched and searched until I found a book bearing the logo of the Olaf Bull Society and then I tucked it into my shirt, took out a pair of meat shears that I had found in the kitchen, and neatly removed the logo. I pasted it to a paper and then used the magazine's mimeograph machine to make it appear like crude letterhead. Then I began typing. The letter accused Espen of "gross misappropriation" of Bull's prose and said it was "perverse and disgusting" how he had "warped it and inserted contemporary cultural references like one of those surrealist faeces paintings." I used the phrase "literary disfigurement." The letter contained a shockingly long and detailed set of decreasingly plausible thefts that I kept adding because I believed that the letter had to have heft in order to land with the most devastating effect. It had not occurred to me in the frenzy of my hatred that the idea of a literary society viciously attacking a teenager publishing in a student literary magazine was so implausible and insane that it could not possibly be real; I had instead focused on making my accusations seem more literary and became proud of how incisive my critiques had been. It did not occur to me, at least, until several seconds after I loosed the letter into the post addressed to the student magazine, when the ridiculousness of the letter, its pettiness, and its obvious path to my hand exploded in my brain like a detective solving a mystery, like perhaps this idiotic Duckett character finding a pair of fucking pants, and it was too late. I tried using a branch and a piece of chewed gum to try fishing out every letter in the box one by one until I could find mine (surely the fattest envelope) and destroy it, but people kept coming by and I had to pretend that I was not trying to break into a mailbox and was merely loitering near it with a disgusting stick and gum apparatus like it was some sort of new youth trend that I had seen in a magazine. When the letter arrived, I was ridiculed. I had tried saying it was just a silly prank, but the savagery of the barbs and self-seriousness of the letter contained no whimsy and just venom. I was cast out of the magazine and its woods parties. Three weeks later, Espen was hit by a train and everyone was so wracked with grief that the letter largely went forgotten or unremarked upon. We all had been so aged by loss and shock that it seemed impossible to remember anything so childish had happened.
I looked over my Buck Duckett paragraph and could not summon the dignity to actually finish it. The entire episode was too sordid, and I was prepared to endure a lawsuit and sell two or three of my other rustic smoking cabins to compensate. I invite the editors of this horrible blog to do their worst.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Pants
Duckett was not sure if the three-eyed mutants in the mall stalls of New Indianapolis could tell the future when they went into their trance or if they were just bilking tourists but he had no interest in either outcome. He usually just hurried by them as quickly on the way to NCAA headquarters, coat buttoned up against the elements and against the crowds of hustlers, unlicensed augmentors, and thieves. He knew these alleys, and he knew what was waiting for him. "It's Duckett," he said to the NCAA guards who never remembered who he was and how many pairs of pants he had confiscated in one legendary raid. He even forgot, sometimes.
"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall. To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.
"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said. Duckett hadn't noticed anything. He generally kept his head down these days. There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.
"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.
"You didn't see the decks last night? They got 'em. They say they do. Brutal Bolus. All hell's breaking loose."
"Damn."
Brutal Bolus. The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back. At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.
"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.
Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around. He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns. He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts.
The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore. Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash. The NCAA was now issued in augmentors. Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow. In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs. But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like. These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable. The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories. The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.
Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore. Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews. Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests. Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one. For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season. They gave him the Ramper test. They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox. It did not matter. He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw. The NCAA made him his top target.
"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said. He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to. The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.
"Don't know yet," Crandall said.
"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him. No one had called down here before. He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else. But there was no mistaking that voice. It was Lauck, the Subdirector. Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs. "On my way," Duckett said.
The NCAA offices were in chaos. Chairs were strewn everywhere. Analysis stations had dent in them. It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them. The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around. The lucky ones were getting bandages. The unlucky ones were getting sheets. It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.
Lauck looked banged up. He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his. You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.
"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.
"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett. "Crandall told me you got him?"
"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said. Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands. Bolus was dead. Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here. The mercury drained from his spine.
"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said. "Bolus is in there, what's left of him. Whatever augments he had are now gone. No one we know about is capable of anything like his. But when we got him we did manage to salvage these." He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out. Duckett leaned over. It was a pair of pants. Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut. He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.
"Look closer, Duckett." Duckett leaned in. The pants were moving. It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it. It was like a breathing motion. Duckett looked at Lauck.
"Is that a living tissue? You found these on Bolus? What's going on here, Lauck? What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.
"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.
"Hell, it's cold out there," Duckett said, settling into the dingy basement office he shared with Crandall. To get there, he had to go through three checkpoints across rows of auditing machines and past the authenticators that now took up most of the investigations department and down four flights of stairs to a subbasement now mainly used for storage.
"What's going on up there, three ring circus?" Crandall said. Duckett hadn't noticed anything. He generally kept his head down these days. There was very little pants-related activity, and no one up there wanted to hear from him.
"No, what's going on?" Duckett said.
"You didn't see the decks last night? They got 'em. They say they do. Brutal Bolus. All hell's breaking loose."
"Damn."
Brutal Bolus. The top basketball player in the country, and he was augmented to hell and back. At least, that was what the NCAA thought, although Bolus had passed every test they made him take for three years, even when he blasted Laser State's entire roster of forwards with his forehead cannon.
"And no one bothered to ask me about his socks," Duckett said. Crandall couldn't smile, but he managed a jocular grimace.
Duckett was not sure why the NCAA kept him around. He was their most senior investigator but that had happened largely by default after the Meltdowns. He served at first largely as a symbol that the NCAA still had a mission and still cared about amateurism even after basketball stopped becoming recognizable and became a violent basketball-related spectacle that evolved from a four-volume Codex of Futuristic Violent Basketball Rules invented by Bill Laimbeer that also had full color illustrations about speculative haircuts.
The NCAA was not interested in pants anymore. Nor was it interested in shoes, cars, or even cash. The NCAA was now issued in augmentors. Every college basketball player these days was augmented somehow. In the early days, they had their arms replaced with cannons or grappling hooks fused to their backs. But soon players began to show up with strange abilities, eerie abilities to float slightly longer in the air than they should, abilities to move the ball around without touching it, slightly different cannons grafted onto their arms that the NCAA didn't like. These augments were sophisticated and increasingly undetectable. The players were rumored to come from vats and then show up at AAU tournaments with unconvincing backstories and the same few dozen memories. The NCAA's investigations department shifted to unearth these illegal augmentors and ban them from college basketball.
Duckett used to sleep in cars and in fetid piles of laundry in frat houses to catch an illegal pants transaction, but that was not how the NCAA worked anymore. Its analysts monitored patterns: patterns of how players moved, how they bludgeoned, how they spoke in interviews. Players suspected of illegal augments could be seized, and investigators subjected them to a series of cognitive tests. Even the augments from big time programs who had been coached to pass would eventually crack, except for one. For three years, Brutal Bolus had been called in multiple times a season. They gave him the Ramper test. They subjected him to Graschman's Paradox. It did not matter. He passed with ease, he smiled, and then he went out and put his forehead through a point guard ineffectively menacing him with a chainsaw. The NCAA made him his top target.
"How did they finally get him?" Duckett said. He didn't really understand the new methods and did not particularly want to. The whole enterprise seemed sort of grotesque to him, and the new analysts were blank and busy in a way he did not understand.
"Don't know yet," Crandall said.
"Duckett up here. Now." The call on the old deck in the office startled him. No one had called down here before. He did not even realize it was connected to anything and thought it was a piece of junk like everything else. But there was no mistaking that voice. It was Lauck, the Subdirector. Until that second, he would have bet that Lauck had no idea he was still here or even alive, but now he was summoned upstairs. "On my way," Duckett said.
The NCAA offices were in chaos. Chairs were strewn everywhere. Analysis stations had dent in them. It was eerily empty, and he had no idea where everyone was until he found them. The hallway to Lauck's office looked like a field hospital, and analysts and other NCAA personnel lay around. The lucky ones were getting bandages. The unlucky ones were getting sheets. It looked like when they tried to bring Bolus in, he had other ideas.
Lauck looked banged up. He had blood on his sleeve, but it wasn't his. You could fit a change of socks into the bags under his eyes.
"Duckett, how familiar are you with the Bolus case?" Lauck said.
"Just what's on the deck," said Duckett. "Crandall told me you got him?"
"Got him is one way to put it," Lauck said. Duckett realized now that they had a much bigger problem than eligibility on their hands. Bolus was dead. Bolus was dead and Duckett was up here. The mercury drained from his spine.
"You're probably wondering why I asked for you," Lauck said. "Bolus is in there, what's left of him. Whatever augments he had are now gone. No one we know about is capable of anything like his. But when we got him we did manage to salvage these." He opened a biohazard crate and steam hissed out. Duckett leaned over. It was a pair of pants. Pretty standard model, decent stitching, athletic cut. He reached out to feel them but Lauck grabbed his arm.
"Look closer, Duckett." Duckett leaned in. The pants were moving. It was subtle, small undulation, almost impossible to spot without staring at it. It was like a breathing motion. Duckett looked at Lauck.
"Is that a living tissue? You found these on Bolus? What's going on here, Lauck? What the hell kind of pants are those?" Duckett said.
"That's what I want you to find out," Lauck said.
The Long Leg of the Law
The gentlemen were still recovering from the previous night's Necktie Olympics at the Musth Club, an exercise that resulted in two whiplashes, one half-garroting, and a widespread plague of laryngitis when Barney Post-Duvet started leafing through the sporting news.
"I say," said Post-Duvet, did you see that you could have gone in thirteen to one on Bruntingham defeating Grossharbor 28 nil? What a spot of business that would have been."
"Do not say NIL in my company," said Rumpo Plainmash-Dorofice before storming out of the club. When he got up we saw he was wearing the most preposterous trousers any of us had ever seen with an elaborate series of check marks and plaids that were so gigantic he was practically swimming in them.
In order to understand Runpo's distress, you should know that he has just returned from East Lansing, where his aunt Probity has a small cottage and likes to attend the autumn leaf season. Rumpo generally tries to wriggle out of these outings when possible, often explaining to his aunt that the fall foliage tends to turn his nose into a plant producing sneezes and elaborate mucuses, although in general his greatest allergy involves missing the Plentham Stakes and old Pitney Pluvatt's annual ball where the boisterous attendees are regularly chased down from the chandeliers. This year, though, no amount of elaborate sneezing into handkerchiefs or notes from his friend Monty Manto who took several courses in chicken physiognomy and practically make him a physician that explain the dire effect of the leaves on poor Rumpo's health could dissuade her from demanding his presence. So Rumpo went out to East Lansing prepared to subject himself to endless amounts of lectures on the flora and fauna from his aunt's roster of irrepressible bores.
But once he arrived in Michigan, Rumpo had a welcome surprise when he spotted his old school friend Gorge Blabbitt at an interminable lecture about saps at his aunt's country house. Gorge, whose parents are on numerous boards and in too many societies to count, had become somewhat of an expert in being able to find some sort of amusement in these types of residencies; for Rumpo it was like being thrown into prison with a chap who is expecting the delivery of a file baked into a loaf of bread. Gorge immediately motioned him to a side room where he pulled a small bottle that had been hidden in a bust of Earvin "Magic" Johnson.
While Rumpo was a man with a large amount of sporting blood, Gorge was practically oozing the stuff. This sometimes landed him in spots of trouble. Rumpo had not, in fact, seen Gorge for several years. It was rumored around the club that Gorge had tried to play the Yearwood Gang against Gramps Fester's operation but when Piper Puffer fell down in the third leg of the Welmingstor Stakes, both outfits began a friendly contest to capture Gorge and have him stuffed. Rumpo had heard that Gorge took the opportunity to take a long holiday in areas of the world where they look down on taxidermy.
"Rumpo, it may look like we are trapped in an awful dungeon of nature walks," Gorge said, but I have found as sure of a money-maker than shaking a revolver at a bank teller. They have college football here."
"College football? Is that the sport where the large lads have the thrashing pads and the bashing helmets?" Rumpo replied.
"Precisely. And there is a mint to be made wagering on it," Gorge said.
"Well I enjoy shaking some notes in front of a blood sport as well as anyone, but I couldn't tell you a single thrashman from a bashing outfit. How am I supposed to bet on a game I don't understand?" said Rumpo.
"It is simple enough when you know that regardless of what happens you will have the top players that make the other squad look like anaemic weaklings that could barely lift their arms for a smashing." Gorge said.
Gorge explained that he had gotten involved with a local booster named A. Pudrington Flost who scours the nation for the stoutest lads at the eating clubs and on the train-lifting circuit and invites them to play at this university. Unfortunately, there are rival universities attempting to lure these giants into their own teams, and so Mr. Flost has devised a plan simply offer them incentives for their clobberous services.
"Do you mean you are part of a bribery scheme to lure youngsters with overstimulated pituitaries to your stadium?" Rumpo asked
"Preposterous," Gorge said. "We are not doing anything as gauche as luring them here with bundles of notes. We are simply offering to outfit these gentlemen with such rare and unfortunate proportions with a well-fitting and stylish trouser as a courtesy for representing the old alma mater," Gorge said.
"This all seems a little bit rum, Gorge," said Rumpo. "Is this, strictly speaking, legal?"
"The law?" Gorge replied. "Well not any law on the books in the United States of America." Gorge did mention that the trouser scheme did not technically adhere to a code that the university mandated in order to preserve the athletes' amateur status, but no one is particularly exercised about that. He told Rumpo that he he was going to a deliver some trousers that afternoon to "Moose" Maszer and his steel biting club that afternoon under the guise of going to a conifer identification seminar and invited Rumpo along. Rumpo, afraid that if he heard one more word about cartenoids he would have to hurl himself into the nearest creek, agreed to accompany him.
The two of them pulled up to the Greater Lansing Squashing and Thumping Club with a squeal of tires and a festive tooting of the klaxon and four of the largest people Rump had ever seen clambered out one by one ducking under the door to meet them. Each was bigger than the next, with rectangular heads and shoulders that started around their ears and ended somewhere near their midriff. They blotted out the sun. The biggest one, whom Rumpo took to be Moose, frowned.
"You can't make all of this noise you blockhead. I've heard Duckett is nosing around here."
Buck Duckett, Gorge quickly explained, was a sort of detective in the employ of the athletic association who was forever trying to foil illicit trouser transactions and had become a pest to Gorge and his associates. Duckett was the zealous type, always prowling around in ditches or popping up unexpectedly from trees and once had been known to sleep for a week in a zoo enclosure with the facility's most ornery rhinoceros in order to prevent a cycling team from getting a haul of long underpants for free.
"Don't worry about Duckett," Gorge said. "This oaf would get hopelessly lost trying to find his own moustache."
"Is that so?" said one of the large men. Rumpo noticed that he had looked less sturdy than the others, not more robust, but swaying and with a rubbery quality about him that Rumpo had assumed came from the diet of meats and tires that he must eat to keep up his mountainous physique. But then his skin began to quiver and split. A smaller man emerged as his bulk deflated and fell to the ground. This wiry man slick with perspiration stood before them standing in front of what appeared to be a discarded rubber apparatus that made him look like a much larger fellow. He ripped off a wig covering a bald head an then tore off a false mustache that had been concealing a smaller and more officious mustache.
"What appears to be going on here is a clear violation of NCAA trouser protocols," the man said. It was the famous investigator Buck Duckett. Moose stared at him and his mouth drooped open to resemble the approximate shape of a cave that Rumpo had been forced to enter at the behest of his aunt to study a bat habitat. "I'm sorry Mr. Maszer. I needed to do a spot of undercover work here as Caboose Cudlow in order to infiltrate your syndicate. I assure that those tender things you said to me about your mother will remain in confidence."
Any thought that Gorge had of smiling at that remark retreated when Moose looked like he was about to crack his skull in between the folds of his brow.
"Mr. Duckett, I believe you are misinformed," Gorge said. My friend and I were simply coming by to show our chums the new style of trousers that we had purchased. We were not going to hand them over. As you can tell, these gentlemen are connoisseurs of the latest sartorial styles."
"If that is the case, let's see them on you," Duckett said. Gorge and Rumpo looked at each other and began to put on the trousers. They were enormous. Each of them could probably fit entirely within a single leg with room for an umbrella. The two of them stood desperately clinging to the enormous and garish garments scarcely able to move without causing them to fall down or allow an enterprising squirrel or forest pest to leap into them and rummage around for roughage.
"As you can see, the new style demands a bit of bagginess in the waist," Gorge said. "Much like the Fabulous Five wore their short pants in their netball championships."
"The fact is there is nothing I can do for you ruffians," Duckett said. "But this is all highly suspect. Moose, I am afraid the NCAA is not going to allow you to play any football this season until we can get to the bottom of all of this."
Moose started to stomp towards Gorge and Rumpo. It looked like he had been devising some rigorous new exercises that required the bending and stretching of human beings into new and anatomically impossible configurations.
"Well, if that's about it, I suppose we should be going. Moose, Mr. Duckett, good luck on the investigation and all of that," Gorge said as and Rumpo leaped into the automobile and sped away to get out of Michigan without any of their baggage.
At first when Rumpo returned to the club, he had been thankful to escape without his extremities used as an exercise apparatus, even if he had left all of his trousers behind and was forced to mince around in the gigantic footballer's slacks. But his mood quickly darkened. It appeared that the day after he had left, the athletic association had decided that football players like Moose and his prodigious ilk could accept all of the trousers they had liked as long as they were performing some sort of advertising. This policy had been called name, image, and likeness or NIL He also got a cable from his aunt saying that she had called him to Michigan in order to give him a tidy some of monies she needed to dispose of for tax purposes that would have kept him in the black through the West Manglian Stakes, but due to his abrupt departure that had caused so much embarrassment in front of Professor Yorpling she had decided instead to donate it to a wolverine sanctuary. His bank account was now close to nil as well.
"I say," said Post-Duvet, did you see that you could have gone in thirteen to one on Bruntingham defeating Grossharbor 28 nil? What a spot of business that would have been."
"Do not say NIL in my company," said Rumpo Plainmash-Dorofice before storming out of the club. When he got up we saw he was wearing the most preposterous trousers any of us had ever seen with an elaborate series of check marks and plaids that were so gigantic he was practically swimming in them.
In order to understand Runpo's distress, you should know that he has just returned from East Lansing, where his aunt Probity has a small cottage and likes to attend the autumn leaf season. Rumpo generally tries to wriggle out of these outings when possible, often explaining to his aunt that the fall foliage tends to turn his nose into a plant producing sneezes and elaborate mucuses, although in general his greatest allergy involves missing the Plentham Stakes and old Pitney Pluvatt's annual ball where the boisterous attendees are regularly chased down from the chandeliers. This year, though, no amount of elaborate sneezing into handkerchiefs or notes from his friend Monty Manto who took several courses in chicken physiognomy and practically make him a physician that explain the dire effect of the leaves on poor Rumpo's health could dissuade her from demanding his presence. So Rumpo went out to East Lansing prepared to subject himself to endless amounts of lectures on the flora and fauna from his aunt's roster of irrepressible bores.
But once he arrived in Michigan, Rumpo had a welcome surprise when he spotted his old school friend Gorge Blabbitt at an interminable lecture about saps at his aunt's country house. Gorge, whose parents are on numerous boards and in too many societies to count, had become somewhat of an expert in being able to find some sort of amusement in these types of residencies; for Rumpo it was like being thrown into prison with a chap who is expecting the delivery of a file baked into a loaf of bread. Gorge immediately motioned him to a side room where he pulled a small bottle that had been hidden in a bust of Earvin "Magic" Johnson.
While Rumpo was a man with a large amount of sporting blood, Gorge was practically oozing the stuff. This sometimes landed him in spots of trouble. Rumpo had not, in fact, seen Gorge for several years. It was rumored around the club that Gorge had tried to play the Yearwood Gang against Gramps Fester's operation but when Piper Puffer fell down in the third leg of the Welmingstor Stakes, both outfits began a friendly contest to capture Gorge and have him stuffed. Rumpo had heard that Gorge took the opportunity to take a long holiday in areas of the world where they look down on taxidermy.
"Rumpo, it may look like we are trapped in an awful dungeon of nature walks," Gorge said, but I have found as sure of a money-maker than shaking a revolver at a bank teller. They have college football here."
"College football? Is that the sport where the large lads have the thrashing pads and the bashing helmets?" Rumpo replied.
"Precisely. And there is a mint to be made wagering on it," Gorge said.
"Well I enjoy shaking some notes in front of a blood sport as well as anyone, but I couldn't tell you a single thrashman from a bashing outfit. How am I supposed to bet on a game I don't understand?" said Rumpo.
"It is simple enough when you know that regardless of what happens you will have the top players that make the other squad look like anaemic weaklings that could barely lift their arms for a smashing." Gorge said.
Gorge explained that he had gotten involved with a local booster named A. Pudrington Flost who scours the nation for the stoutest lads at the eating clubs and on the train-lifting circuit and invites them to play at this university. Unfortunately, there are rival universities attempting to lure these giants into their own teams, and so Mr. Flost has devised a plan simply offer them incentives for their clobberous services.
"Do you mean you are part of a bribery scheme to lure youngsters with overstimulated pituitaries to your stadium?" Rumpo asked
"Preposterous," Gorge said. "We are not doing anything as gauche as luring them here with bundles of notes. We are simply offering to outfit these gentlemen with such rare and unfortunate proportions with a well-fitting and stylish trouser as a courtesy for representing the old alma mater," Gorge said.
"This all seems a little bit rum, Gorge," said Rumpo. "Is this, strictly speaking, legal?"
"The law?" Gorge replied. "Well not any law on the books in the United States of America." Gorge did mention that the trouser scheme did not technically adhere to a code that the university mandated in order to preserve the athletes' amateur status, but no one is particularly exercised about that. He told Rumpo that he he was going to a deliver some trousers that afternoon to "Moose" Maszer and his steel biting club that afternoon under the guise of going to a conifer identification seminar and invited Rumpo along. Rumpo, afraid that if he heard one more word about cartenoids he would have to hurl himself into the nearest creek, agreed to accompany him.
The two of them pulled up to the Greater Lansing Squashing and Thumping Club with a squeal of tires and a festive tooting of the klaxon and four of the largest people Rump had ever seen clambered out one by one ducking under the door to meet them. Each was bigger than the next, with rectangular heads and shoulders that started around their ears and ended somewhere near their midriff. They blotted out the sun. The biggest one, whom Rumpo took to be Moose, frowned.
"You can't make all of this noise you blockhead. I've heard Duckett is nosing around here."
Buck Duckett, Gorge quickly explained, was a sort of detective in the employ of the athletic association who was forever trying to foil illicit trouser transactions and had become a pest to Gorge and his associates. Duckett was the zealous type, always prowling around in ditches or popping up unexpectedly from trees and once had been known to sleep for a week in a zoo enclosure with the facility's most ornery rhinoceros in order to prevent a cycling team from getting a haul of long underpants for free.
"Don't worry about Duckett," Gorge said. "This oaf would get hopelessly lost trying to find his own moustache."
"Is that so?" said one of the large men. Rumpo noticed that he had looked less sturdy than the others, not more robust, but swaying and with a rubbery quality about him that Rumpo had assumed came from the diet of meats and tires that he must eat to keep up his mountainous physique. But then his skin began to quiver and split. A smaller man emerged as his bulk deflated and fell to the ground. This wiry man slick with perspiration stood before them standing in front of what appeared to be a discarded rubber apparatus that made him look like a much larger fellow. He ripped off a wig covering a bald head an then tore off a false mustache that had been concealing a smaller and more officious mustache.
"What appears to be going on here is a clear violation of NCAA trouser protocols," the man said. It was the famous investigator Buck Duckett. Moose stared at him and his mouth drooped open to resemble the approximate shape of a cave that Rumpo had been forced to enter at the behest of his aunt to study a bat habitat. "I'm sorry Mr. Maszer. I needed to do a spot of undercover work here as Caboose Cudlow in order to infiltrate your syndicate. I assure that those tender things you said to me about your mother will remain in confidence."
Any thought that Gorge had of smiling at that remark retreated when Moose looked like he was about to crack his skull in between the folds of his brow.
"Mr. Duckett, I believe you are misinformed," Gorge said. My friend and I were simply coming by to show our chums the new style of trousers that we had purchased. We were not going to hand them over. As you can tell, these gentlemen are connoisseurs of the latest sartorial styles."
"If that is the case, let's see them on you," Duckett said. Gorge and Rumpo looked at each other and began to put on the trousers. They were enormous. Each of them could probably fit entirely within a single leg with room for an umbrella. The two of them stood desperately clinging to the enormous and garish garments scarcely able to move without causing them to fall down or allow an enterprising squirrel or forest pest to leap into them and rummage around for roughage.
"As you can see, the new style demands a bit of bagginess in the waist," Gorge said. "Much like the Fabulous Five wore their short pants in their netball championships."
"The fact is there is nothing I can do for you ruffians," Duckett said. "But this is all highly suspect. Moose, I am afraid the NCAA is not going to allow you to play any football this season until we can get to the bottom of all of this."
Moose started to stomp towards Gorge and Rumpo. It looked like he had been devising some rigorous new exercises that required the bending and stretching of human beings into new and anatomically impossible configurations.
"Well, if that's about it, I suppose we should be going. Moose, Mr. Duckett, good luck on the investigation and all of that," Gorge said as and Rumpo leaped into the automobile and sped away to get out of Michigan without any of their baggage.
At first when Rumpo returned to the club, he had been thankful to escape without his extremities used as an exercise apparatus, even if he had left all of his trousers behind and was forced to mince around in the gigantic footballer's slacks. But his mood quickly darkened. It appeared that the day after he had left, the athletic association had decided that football players like Moose and his prodigious ilk could accept all of the trousers they had liked as long as they were performing some sort of advertising. This policy had been called name, image, and likeness or NIL He also got a cable from his aunt saying that she had called him to Michigan in order to give him a tidy some of monies she needed to dispose of for tax purposes that would have kept him in the black through the West Manglian Stakes, but due to his abrupt departure that had caused so much embarrassment in front of Professor Yorpling she had decided instead to donate it to a wolverine sanctuary. His bank account was now close to nil as well.
At NCAA Headquarters
1.
There was not a lot of shade by the shuttle stop outside NCAA Headquarters and by the time the bus came, the official NCAA track suit I had that was issued to all employees was soaked. It was supposed to wick away sweat, but it was outwicked, and my hair, which was recently trimmed to NCAA specifications, was not stopping it from trickling into my eyes and around my lips. When the shuttle finally came, it felt like I had been thrown into a meat freezer. This was around '18, back before the Reorganization.(1)
The orientation process had been a blur. They flashed pictures of athletes wearing different pairs of pants at us and we had three seconds to determine if they were legal, illegal, or suspect. They did not tell us how we did, but after four hours of this, about two-thirds of us were summoned into a room and told to gather our things and get on the bus to Plainfield.
The NCAA's Pants, Shoes, and Apparel Processing Facility was temporarily located in Plainfield after the Tattoo, Jewelry, and Automobile section expanded. It was a converted warehouse, and they had just screwed cubicles into the ground. Everything echoed. There was a single phone connected to the Section Head, Lynn Mealer who never stopped scowling about the relocation, and when it rang it sound like a piercing wail.
Our job was simple, Mealer said to us, her voice booming like an offstage deity in a play. We do not investigate. We do not even try to investigate. The Investigation Section back in Indy did all of the stakeouts, the following, the disguises, the shootouts on the docks. We just watched. All of us had a monitor and all day we looked at pictures and video of players' pants(2) and tried to determine if something seemed off. If it was, we'd flag it and it would go to investigations for a second look. At 9 AM you got your first feed. No music, no radio, no conversation except for designated break areas. You will learn how to differentiate brands and cuts of pants and you will know how much they cost and you will memorize the Pants Cost Matrix in the third tab of your binder, and if you start flagging too many normal pants, the investigators will come down here. You don't want to see Duckett or talk to him, believe me. You're the tip of the spear, she said. When she was done, I asked to call my probation officer.
My parents really wanted me to be good at football. My father was all state in Ohio, my mom's brother's played DII ball, and I was good at running kids over in peewee football. But I hated the game. I hated the practice, I hated hitting people, I hated my dad, and I hated how Coach Tremppo told me I was lousy player and lousy kid and I was only on the team because he needed someone on the team to get shoved around. What football did get me was access to players, and get me close to Price Glauker, who got me into pants. Glauker's uncle was a booster with a pants warehouse. Pretty soon, we had the whole team outfitted illegally and were moving onto the junior college the next town over. The summer of my senior year, I spent the entire time driving from college town to college town giving away bags of pants and shorts to recruits and anyone on the teams who would take them, even the punters. It was a punter that got me. I didn't know he had washed out the team and got picked up the The A.(3) The NCAA judge told me if I wanted to go to college I would be sentenced to working for the NCAA(4).
We all coped with the processing differently. I started to see pants every time I closed my eyes. Every time I left the Facility, I was immediately scanning everyone's pants and making notes. At least four times, someone threatened to hit me, and that's when I generally stopped leaving the apartment complex. Gerry Wicks stopped wearing them altogether. Even in the dead of winter, he was in shorts. He was standing in a shin-high snow drift waiting for the shuttle from our Plainfield apartment complex, the Lamplighter, shivering, his legs turning red and raw but he would not put on a single pant, not even after a series of memos then meetings, then threatened legal action and counter-action. Harry Denn was the only one who wanted to be there and he only talked about pants. He checked into his station with a crisp pencil, he talked about pants on breaks, he talked about pants at lunch; I once saw him looking at pants Perry Crossing with a weird little smile on his face, his eyeballs sort of rolled up into his head. It was like that for weeks before no one would talk to him anymore. We just could not bear it. He seemed to understand that, that his life would consist finding the exact amount of pants conversation anyone could bear before being relegated to his odd little world. He would hit the buttons on his Feed with his eyes blissfully closed, and we could never figure out how he did it. He hit the button and took small, strangled breaths.
2.
The phone rang buzzed in the car. Duckett still had a flip phone and the NCAA made him turn it on but he could not answer it. He was motionless under a blanket and wide receiver Darryl Mant was about to get some pants from a booster from the trunk, but it did not have any pants, but had Buck Duckett ready to spring into action. The phone buzzed again, but there was also a crack of daylight.
It was another meeting he had missed. Duckett knew that he could not avoid the Reorganization forever by hiding out in the field, but he was going to try as hard as he could. Duckett's section chief Ed Nackro had been telling him that things were coming crashing down. "Duckett, it's over for pants," Nackro said to him. But Nackro had been saying that since '05, when they moved Pants over to that warehouse in Plainfield, and here they were still reeling in busts and suspensions and vacating basketball games.(5)
Duckett had tried to get out of pants once. He wanted cars. Everyone in the entire section wanted cars. He put his head down and did his best with pants. The Deputy Vice President of Investigations cited him for his "dogged pursuit of pants violators." And when they announced the promotions to Automobiles the next year, he was still in pants. Instead, the promotion went to Phil Prompt, who made fewer busts but was at more meetings. Prompt was great in meetings. He always wanted to add technology; Prompt actually created the idea of Processing. Processing produced few leads, that is far fewer than Duckett's network of pants informants in athletic departments and malls, but the NCAA wanted to move towards computers while Duckett was still filing reports in carbon. After that, he got put on another reorganization committee, but he could not stand the endless power points and the meetings, the whole time there were pipelines of pants shooting through underground networks while they talked about more efficient ways to fill out forms.(6)
Now, though, Duckett had heard that they were going to legalize it all. Duckett could not think about it. He came in every day and looked at his corkboards, and talked to his informants. His sources did not have much to say anymore other than questions about why he was still doing this. Every day, ominous memos about The Reorganization piled up on his desk.
1. The Reorganization was a massive reallocation of NCAA resources away from its Invetigations and Processing sections to its Sponsorships and Marketing sections. In one stroke of a pen, 14 section heads were merged into other departments, 13 were bought out, and one, the Tattoos Investigation Section head Luther Varnich, disappeared completely with a briefcase of sensitive documents which were later recovered at the crash site outside a regional airport in Honduras.
2. The Feed was introduced in 2005 as a more efficient way to monitor athletes and prevent costly and dangerous undercover missions. It came as a result of a bureaucratic war that saw Investigations Deputy Section Head Walt Malt arrested after trying to sabotage the Feed servers with homemade explosives. The explosion took head of Feed Security Irving Luarent's right hand, which he replaced with a menacing but useless claw.
3. Employess of the NCAA referred to it at the time as "The A."
4. The case was the first known attempt by a judge to sentence a defendant to work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This judge, A. Barbara Three, had run on a reelection platform of cracking down on pants. The next time she tried it, it resulted in the landmark case NCAA vs. Oprock, which got all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled 9-0 that this kind of sentencing was impossible and absurd. The judge resigned. Jimmy Oprock had lawyers and not parents who just told him to sign whatever they put in front of him. Oprock later sued and won $468,000 for his trouble. By this time, I had been finished with the Processing Facility for six years.
5. Buck Duckett's massive bust of the A&M Ring caused the school to vacate 22 wins in the season and take down an NIT Participant banner. They gave Duckett a replica banner to hang in his office, but he never put it up. It was the largest pants bust in NCAA history, with 75 pairs of illegal pants displayed for the TV cameras and Duckett grimacing through a press conference where he refused to speak.
6. To be more specific, the NCAA Investigation Section Reporting Meeting Series from April 2007 to February 2008 met to determine whether they should switch from the standard V-238 Violations Form for student-athletes caught with contraband which was then filed in a database to a V-500 Series report that was on a newer system and allowed tracking from other departments, which could be cross referenced into larger investigations and flagged for the Special Section, which would allow for much larger investigations and possible activation of the armed Enforcement Section. The issue was whether the increased efficiency would be counterbalanced by the need to retrain all Investigation Sections and whether the availability of information would allow for investigations to be compromised. This was not a concern when the Meeting Series was initiated in 2005, but in the next year, an internal NCAA mole connected to a powerful sports agency destroyed 38 active shoe investigations before the mole was chased onto the Chase Tower and he plummeted to his death.
There was not a lot of shade by the shuttle stop outside NCAA Headquarters and by the time the bus came, the official NCAA track suit I had that was issued to all employees was soaked. It was supposed to wick away sweat, but it was outwicked, and my hair, which was recently trimmed to NCAA specifications, was not stopping it from trickling into my eyes and around my lips. When the shuttle finally came, it felt like I had been thrown into a meat freezer. This was around '18, back before the Reorganization.(1)
The orientation process had been a blur. They flashed pictures of athletes wearing different pairs of pants at us and we had three seconds to determine if they were legal, illegal, or suspect. They did not tell us how we did, but after four hours of this, about two-thirds of us were summoned into a room and told to gather our things and get on the bus to Plainfield.
The NCAA's Pants, Shoes, and Apparel Processing Facility was temporarily located in Plainfield after the Tattoo, Jewelry, and Automobile section expanded. It was a converted warehouse, and they had just screwed cubicles into the ground. Everything echoed. There was a single phone connected to the Section Head, Lynn Mealer who never stopped scowling about the relocation, and when it rang it sound like a piercing wail.
Our job was simple, Mealer said to us, her voice booming like an offstage deity in a play. We do not investigate. We do not even try to investigate. The Investigation Section back in Indy did all of the stakeouts, the following, the disguises, the shootouts on the docks. We just watched. All of us had a monitor and all day we looked at pictures and video of players' pants(2) and tried to determine if something seemed off. If it was, we'd flag it and it would go to investigations for a second look. At 9 AM you got your first feed. No music, no radio, no conversation except for designated break areas. You will learn how to differentiate brands and cuts of pants and you will know how much they cost and you will memorize the Pants Cost Matrix in the third tab of your binder, and if you start flagging too many normal pants, the investigators will come down here. You don't want to see Duckett or talk to him, believe me. You're the tip of the spear, she said. When she was done, I asked to call my probation officer.
My parents really wanted me to be good at football. My father was all state in Ohio, my mom's brother's played DII ball, and I was good at running kids over in peewee football. But I hated the game. I hated the practice, I hated hitting people, I hated my dad, and I hated how Coach Tremppo told me I was lousy player and lousy kid and I was only on the team because he needed someone on the team to get shoved around. What football did get me was access to players, and get me close to Price Glauker, who got me into pants. Glauker's uncle was a booster with a pants warehouse. Pretty soon, we had the whole team outfitted illegally and were moving onto the junior college the next town over. The summer of my senior year, I spent the entire time driving from college town to college town giving away bags of pants and shorts to recruits and anyone on the teams who would take them, even the punters. It was a punter that got me. I didn't know he had washed out the team and got picked up the The A.(3) The NCAA judge told me if I wanted to go to college I would be sentenced to working for the NCAA(4).
We all coped with the processing differently. I started to see pants every time I closed my eyes. Every time I left the Facility, I was immediately scanning everyone's pants and making notes. At least four times, someone threatened to hit me, and that's when I generally stopped leaving the apartment complex. Gerry Wicks stopped wearing them altogether. Even in the dead of winter, he was in shorts. He was standing in a shin-high snow drift waiting for the shuttle from our Plainfield apartment complex, the Lamplighter, shivering, his legs turning red and raw but he would not put on a single pant, not even after a series of memos then meetings, then threatened legal action and counter-action. Harry Denn was the only one who wanted to be there and he only talked about pants. He checked into his station with a crisp pencil, he talked about pants on breaks, he talked about pants at lunch; I once saw him looking at pants Perry Crossing with a weird little smile on his face, his eyeballs sort of rolled up into his head. It was like that for weeks before no one would talk to him anymore. We just could not bear it. He seemed to understand that, that his life would consist finding the exact amount of pants conversation anyone could bear before being relegated to his odd little world. He would hit the buttons on his Feed with his eyes blissfully closed, and we could never figure out how he did it. He hit the button and took small, strangled breaths.
2.
The phone rang buzzed in the car. Duckett still had a flip phone and the NCAA made him turn it on but he could not answer it. He was motionless under a blanket and wide receiver Darryl Mant was about to get some pants from a booster from the trunk, but it did not have any pants, but had Buck Duckett ready to spring into action. The phone buzzed again, but there was also a crack of daylight.
It was another meeting he had missed. Duckett knew that he could not avoid the Reorganization forever by hiding out in the field, but he was going to try as hard as he could. Duckett's section chief Ed Nackro had been telling him that things were coming crashing down. "Duckett, it's over for pants," Nackro said to him. But Nackro had been saying that since '05, when they moved Pants over to that warehouse in Plainfield, and here they were still reeling in busts and suspensions and vacating basketball games.(5)
Duckett had tried to get out of pants once. He wanted cars. Everyone in the entire section wanted cars. He put his head down and did his best with pants. The Deputy Vice President of Investigations cited him for his "dogged pursuit of pants violators." And when they announced the promotions to Automobiles the next year, he was still in pants. Instead, the promotion went to Phil Prompt, who made fewer busts but was at more meetings. Prompt was great in meetings. He always wanted to add technology; Prompt actually created the idea of Processing. Processing produced few leads, that is far fewer than Duckett's network of pants informants in athletic departments and malls, but the NCAA wanted to move towards computers while Duckett was still filing reports in carbon. After that, he got put on another reorganization committee, but he could not stand the endless power points and the meetings, the whole time there were pipelines of pants shooting through underground networks while they talked about more efficient ways to fill out forms.(6)
Now, though, Duckett had heard that they were going to legalize it all. Duckett could not think about it. He came in every day and looked at his corkboards, and talked to his informants. His sources did not have much to say anymore other than questions about why he was still doing this. Every day, ominous memos about The Reorganization piled up on his desk.
1. The Reorganization was a massive reallocation of NCAA resources away from its Invetigations and Processing sections to its Sponsorships and Marketing sections. In one stroke of a pen, 14 section heads were merged into other departments, 13 were bought out, and one, the Tattoos Investigation Section head Luther Varnich, disappeared completely with a briefcase of sensitive documents which were later recovered at the crash site outside a regional airport in Honduras.
2. The Feed was introduced in 2005 as a more efficient way to monitor athletes and prevent costly and dangerous undercover missions. It came as a result of a bureaucratic war that saw Investigations Deputy Section Head Walt Malt arrested after trying to sabotage the Feed servers with homemade explosives. The explosion took head of Feed Security Irving Luarent's right hand, which he replaced with a menacing but useless claw.
3. Employess of the NCAA referred to it at the time as "The A."
4. The case was the first known attempt by a judge to sentence a defendant to work for the National Collegiate Athletic Association. This judge, A. Barbara Three, had run on a reelection platform of cracking down on pants. The next time she tried it, it resulted in the landmark case NCAA vs. Oprock, which got all the way to the Supreme Court where the justices ruled 9-0 that this kind of sentencing was impossible and absurd. The judge resigned. Jimmy Oprock had lawyers and not parents who just told him to sign whatever they put in front of him. Oprock later sued and won $468,000 for his trouble. By this time, I had been finished with the Processing Facility for six years.
5. Buck Duckett's massive bust of the A&M Ring caused the school to vacate 22 wins in the season and take down an NIT Participant banner. They gave Duckett a replica banner to hang in his office, but he never put it up. It was the largest pants bust in NCAA history, with 75 pairs of illegal pants displayed for the TV cameras and Duckett grimacing through a press conference where he refused to speak.
6. To be more specific, the NCAA Investigation Section Reporting Meeting Series from April 2007 to February 2008 met to determine whether they should switch from the standard V-238 Violations Form for student-athletes caught with contraband which was then filed in a database to a V-500 Series report that was on a newer system and allowed tracking from other departments, which could be cross referenced into larger investigations and flagged for the Special Section, which would allow for much larger investigations and possible activation of the armed Enforcement Section. The issue was whether the increased efficiency would be counterbalanced by the need to retrain all Investigation Sections and whether the availability of information would allow for investigations to be compromised. This was not a concern when the Meeting Series was initiated in 2005, but in the next year, an internal NCAA mole connected to a powerful sports agency destroyed 38 active shoe investigations before the mole was chased onto the Chase Tower and he plummeted to his death.
The Adventures of the Speckled Hem
Of the many cases and adventures on which I have accompanied my friend Buck Duckett, there are few I can recall that vexed him and tested him as arduously of the matter involving “Clump” Hardley and his trouser predicament that scandalized the entire country. The features of this particular situation were so shocking and so outré that it would be irresponsible of me not to chronicle Buck Duckett’s methods and my own small contributions that led to the astonishing revelations that had gripped the papers for months.
It was a languid autumn afternoon when I found myself near the flat I used to share with Buck Duckett. My medical slapping practice had been growing and I spent most of my days whacking people with Railway Spine and headbutting sufferers of various Suppressed Gouts, the result of which was that I had seen far less of Duckett than I cared to. A fortuitous housecall to kick a man in the spleen took me back to the old neighborhood in Indianapolis’s Fog District, and I decided to call on my old friend.
When I arrived, Buck Duckett was sitting on a couch, his brow furrowed, staring at a pair of trousers with a curious design riding up the hem. “Ah, Pladd, it is good for you to look in on me after vigorously kicking that rheumy man with the cat over on St. Gabbert’s street. I see that the practice is doing well, although you do not seem to believe it yourself. You also left your copy of The Medical Pugilist at Mr Dunnet’s shop,” he said. Even though I had lived with Duckett and saw his methods amaze and stupefy his callers, it was still mystifying when he turned his attention to me, and, despite my attempt to reign in my look of befuddlement, he still whirled on me and began his instruction.
“Pladd surely by now you are familiar with the processes and the simple logic that reveals everything to me with a quick glance at your trousers,” Duckett said. “The seams on your bottom are strained in a way that only comes from vigorous kicking, which I understand is still the latest treatment for rheumatisms. And surely you can see your legs are covered in cat hairs, while you would never keep such an animal at home. The bottoms of your cuffs are stained with gravel that you only see from public works projects, precisely like the one that has the footpaths on St. Gabbert street in a rough condition,” he said, while loading up his lip with mouth tobacco.
“As for the state of your practice,” he continued, “it’s all written there on your slacks.” The backs of your legs, where one expects to see an indication from a hard cab bench, are smooth, which means that you can afford the more expensive, plusher cabs. And your trousers have been let out some, which suggests that you are prospering. But on the other hand, you have not replaced them. In fact, I see numerous small repairs that show that you have kept them, which indicates that you don’t trust your successes and are reluctant to spend money on new clothes.”
“Remarkable,” I said. “But how could you know about the periodical?”
“That is simple,” he said, before spitting a long spray of oral tobaccular juice into a filthy jug he kept for this purpose. “Your pocket reveals the unmistakable shape of Dr Wedcrumb’s Pipe Tobacco, which was featured in an advertisement as the most health-ful pipe tobacco for the vigorous-lunged man in the Medical Pugilist, which I can tell from the protrusion and the small ink stain that you had been carrying around in your right rear pocket. You certainly consulted it when you stopped at the only tobacconist you would visit in this neighborhood, which would undoubtedly be Mr Dunnet. It is all clear from your trousers. You can read them like a newspaper. I believe that the key to understanding a man is in Gluteal Phrenology, the study of the ridges and dimples in his buttocks, but it is nearly impossible to examine a live subject this way. Therefore one must turn to the trousers. In fact, I have written a monograph on it.”
A sudden rasp at the door interrupted the conversation. “Oh, that must be Inspector Fistclough.”
Inspector Fistclough of the N.C.A.A. had worked there with Duckett until Duckett, dissatisfied with the organization’s unscientific method and the new name, image, and likeness policies, left to work as a consultant to pursue trouser related intrigues. But from time to time, Fistclough still asked for Duckett’s advice on more peculiar matters.
Firstclough was a tall, gangly man whose scalp, despite his young age, was advancing on all fronts against his hair and had two tufts pinned into a defensive position just above the ears. Normally a robust man who was all too eager to throw about ruffians who had run afoul of N.C.A.A. policies– he once chased an entire triangular weightlifting team who had been accepting free single-strap singlets into the side of a train– but today he stood before Duckett as a pale and ghostly spectre.
“Have you seen anything in those trousers, Mr Duckett?” Fistclough said, rubbing his arm.
“I do believe these trousers reveal some points of interest, but perhaps some fresh details will come to light if you recite the tale again, this time to Dr Pladd,” Duckett said.
“It is still the most puzzling thing I have ever seen,” said Inspector Fistclough. Now he began rubbing his leg. “We were down on the docks. You see, Dr Pladd, since the new policy, the athletes are now allowed to sell and receive shipments of trousers, short pants, breeches, and pantaloons, but the N.C.A.A. inspects processes, and stamps each article to make everything is above board. No more chasing croquet teams getting free trews into the moors. Two days ago, we received a shipment of trousers. Ordinary, except for a strange stripe along the hemline. They were for the great rugbyist 'Clump' Hardley.”
“The one who broke the record for most bashings in a single thrashing?” I asked. His feats had been featured in all of the papers.
“The very same, Dr Pladd,” the inspector said. “The records all appeared to be in order, so we quickly checked to see if the trousers were concealing anything.”
“And what sorts of objects to you suspect may be secreted within the them?” Duckett asked.
“We see all various manner of things,” Inspector Fistclough said. “Precious stones, curios, notes. Once we found entire sets of illegal trousers sewn into the very slacks we were inspecting.”
“We moved the crates to a staging area behind the docks and fitted with a paper seal. That is standard procedure. The area remains under constant watch.”
“But not constant this time,” Duckett said.
The inspector lowered his head. “No I am afraid not this time. I called Sergeant Bithe off his post. In one of the crates, the trousers seemed to be moving oddly, nearly writhing. I was afraid that they could be concealing snakes. This had happened several weeks ago. A junior inspector had been badly squeezed and we needed our top bludgeoning unit to free him. I needed all available men with sticks.”
“But you did not find any snakes,” Duckett said.
“No sir,” replied Fistclough. There appeared to be some sort of machinery manipulating the trousers to make it seem like it could be snakes. Bithe was gone for maybe three minutes at most. The rest of the time the crate of trousers was under his watch. But when we went to move them later, the crates were light. We opened them and they were gone. Every last pair.”
“As you can see, Dr Pladd, a very curious set of circumstances,” Duckett said.
“Mr Duckett, please tell me you have unearthed some sort of clue to retrieve these trousers," the Inspector said, scratching at his face.
“Inspector Fistclough, there are certain points of interest in this case that I believe may lend themselves to a scientific explanation. There is only one person I believe fiendish and daring enough to have seized this shipment in this way, one person cunning enough to make a mockery of the entire N.C.A.A. and Mr “Clump” Hardley. Dr Pladd, I believe this may be the work of Jacopo Manheaven. The Napoleon of Pants."
It was a languid autumn afternoon when I found myself near the flat I used to share with Buck Duckett. My medical slapping practice had been growing and I spent most of my days whacking people with Railway Spine and headbutting sufferers of various Suppressed Gouts, the result of which was that I had seen far less of Duckett than I cared to. A fortuitous housecall to kick a man in the spleen took me back to the old neighborhood in Indianapolis’s Fog District, and I decided to call on my old friend.
When I arrived, Buck Duckett was sitting on a couch, his brow furrowed, staring at a pair of trousers with a curious design riding up the hem. “Ah, Pladd, it is good for you to look in on me after vigorously kicking that rheumy man with the cat over on St. Gabbert’s street. I see that the practice is doing well, although you do not seem to believe it yourself. You also left your copy of The Medical Pugilist at Mr Dunnet’s shop,” he said. Even though I had lived with Duckett and saw his methods amaze and stupefy his callers, it was still mystifying when he turned his attention to me, and, despite my attempt to reign in my look of befuddlement, he still whirled on me and began his instruction.
“Pladd surely by now you are familiar with the processes and the simple logic that reveals everything to me with a quick glance at your trousers,” Duckett said. “The seams on your bottom are strained in a way that only comes from vigorous kicking, which I understand is still the latest treatment for rheumatisms. And surely you can see your legs are covered in cat hairs, while you would never keep such an animal at home. The bottoms of your cuffs are stained with gravel that you only see from public works projects, precisely like the one that has the footpaths on St. Gabbert street in a rough condition,” he said, while loading up his lip with mouth tobacco.
“As for the state of your practice,” he continued, “it’s all written there on your slacks.” The backs of your legs, where one expects to see an indication from a hard cab bench, are smooth, which means that you can afford the more expensive, plusher cabs. And your trousers have been let out some, which suggests that you are prospering. But on the other hand, you have not replaced them. In fact, I see numerous small repairs that show that you have kept them, which indicates that you don’t trust your successes and are reluctant to spend money on new clothes.”
“Remarkable,” I said. “But how could you know about the periodical?”
“That is simple,” he said, before spitting a long spray of oral tobaccular juice into a filthy jug he kept for this purpose. “Your pocket reveals the unmistakable shape of Dr Wedcrumb’s Pipe Tobacco, which was featured in an advertisement as the most health-ful pipe tobacco for the vigorous-lunged man in the Medical Pugilist, which I can tell from the protrusion and the small ink stain that you had been carrying around in your right rear pocket. You certainly consulted it when you stopped at the only tobacconist you would visit in this neighborhood, which would undoubtedly be Mr Dunnet. It is all clear from your trousers. You can read them like a newspaper. I believe that the key to understanding a man is in Gluteal Phrenology, the study of the ridges and dimples in his buttocks, but it is nearly impossible to examine a live subject this way. Therefore one must turn to the trousers. In fact, I have written a monograph on it.”
A sudden rasp at the door interrupted the conversation. “Oh, that must be Inspector Fistclough.”
Inspector Fistclough of the N.C.A.A. had worked there with Duckett until Duckett, dissatisfied with the organization’s unscientific method and the new name, image, and likeness policies, left to work as a consultant to pursue trouser related intrigues. But from time to time, Fistclough still asked for Duckett’s advice on more peculiar matters.
Firstclough was a tall, gangly man whose scalp, despite his young age, was advancing on all fronts against his hair and had two tufts pinned into a defensive position just above the ears. Normally a robust man who was all too eager to throw about ruffians who had run afoul of N.C.A.A. policies– he once chased an entire triangular weightlifting team who had been accepting free single-strap singlets into the side of a train– but today he stood before Duckett as a pale and ghostly spectre.
“Have you seen anything in those trousers, Mr Duckett?” Fistclough said, rubbing his arm.
“I do believe these trousers reveal some points of interest, but perhaps some fresh details will come to light if you recite the tale again, this time to Dr Pladd,” Duckett said.
“It is still the most puzzling thing I have ever seen,” said Inspector Fistclough. Now he began rubbing his leg. “We were down on the docks. You see, Dr Pladd, since the new policy, the athletes are now allowed to sell and receive shipments of trousers, short pants, breeches, and pantaloons, but the N.C.A.A. inspects processes, and stamps each article to make everything is above board. No more chasing croquet teams getting free trews into the moors. Two days ago, we received a shipment of trousers. Ordinary, except for a strange stripe along the hemline. They were for the great rugbyist 'Clump' Hardley.”
“The one who broke the record for most bashings in a single thrashing?” I asked. His feats had been featured in all of the papers.
“The very same, Dr Pladd,” the inspector said. “The records all appeared to be in order, so we quickly checked to see if the trousers were concealing anything.”
“And what sorts of objects to you suspect may be secreted within the them?” Duckett asked.
“We see all various manner of things,” Inspector Fistclough said. “Precious stones, curios, notes. Once we found entire sets of illegal trousers sewn into the very slacks we were inspecting.”
“We moved the crates to a staging area behind the docks and fitted with a paper seal. That is standard procedure. The area remains under constant watch.”
“But not constant this time,” Duckett said.
The inspector lowered his head. “No I am afraid not this time. I called Sergeant Bithe off his post. In one of the crates, the trousers seemed to be moving oddly, nearly writhing. I was afraid that they could be concealing snakes. This had happened several weeks ago. A junior inspector had been badly squeezed and we needed our top bludgeoning unit to free him. I needed all available men with sticks.”
“But you did not find any snakes,” Duckett said.
“No sir,” replied Fistclough. There appeared to be some sort of machinery manipulating the trousers to make it seem like it could be snakes. Bithe was gone for maybe three minutes at most. The rest of the time the crate of trousers was under his watch. But when we went to move them later, the crates were light. We opened them and they were gone. Every last pair.”
“As you can see, Dr Pladd, a very curious set of circumstances,” Duckett said.
“Mr Duckett, please tell me you have unearthed some sort of clue to retrieve these trousers," the Inspector said, scratching at his face.
“Inspector Fistclough, there are certain points of interest in this case that I believe may lend themselves to a scientific explanation. There is only one person I believe fiendish and daring enough to have seized this shipment in this way, one person cunning enough to make a mockery of the entire N.C.A.A. and Mr “Clump” Hardley. Dr Pladd, I believe this may be the work of Jacopo Manheaven. The Napoleon of Pants."
Enter The Serpent's Maw: A Buck Ducket Novel
THE YACHT "LADY OF NUTZ"
THE DALMATIAN COAST
"You don't have to go to all this trouble, Belly," the man in the shiny suit said, gesturing to a lavish spread of caviars and fancy cheeses in the grand ballroom of the Lady of Nutz, a 148-foot yacht anchored in the Adriatic.
"This isn't for you, Jan," H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Jr. said. Belly was for his buddies, but not for Jan. "I have guests. And I told you I don't want you hanging around."
"And here I thought we were becoming such good friends," Jan said, putting his feet up on a table that cost more than his house. He had immaculately groomed stubble and an untraceable accent. "Very well, we talk business first."
"Let me see the stuff," Waynesneed said.
"I think you will find the merchandise is top quality." Jan opened a briefcase. Inside was a pair of almost impossibly fancy pants. "What you're looking at is the ultimate in luxury trouser. Fabrics so fine they are illegal in your country. Top designers. Hand-stitched. These are clean. No serial numbers, no factory labels. Untraceable."
"And you have them ready to go for the whole team? I sent you those measurements."
"To the inch. Even the... what do you call it, the kicker." Jan smiled. "You know in my country they are all the kicker."
Waynesneed handed him a steel briefcase. "You're one slippery son-of-a-bitch, I'll give you that."
Jan opened it and smiled. "May I?" he said, but he was already wrist deep in rocquefort. A shadow moved over his face from another ship gliding into the harbor.
"You make me sick," Waynesneed said. "Take the money and get the hell off my ship." The faint sound of thumping music began to oontz-oontz its way through the walls. "Sounds like my guests are here. Beat it."
The other ship started to slowly turn to face the Lady of Nutz.
"Next time it's double," Jan said, wiping off his hand. "Pants scene is getting more dangerous every day. I nearly lost my own, you know what you put on the truck..."
"I don't care what kind of sick shit you to do get me the pants. I told you I don't want to know details. I pay you for the pants... and the discretion."
Suddenly, a klaxon blared throughout the shit. "Goddamn it, I told the captain I wanted that damn aoogah horn disabled. I'm not here to get aoogahed on my own damn..."
The captain burst in. "Signore!" he said. "Signore, we need to..."
"Goddamn it I told you for the last time..." Waynesneed said, before the captain cut him off.
"Signore, it's a torped..."
NCAA HEADQUARTERS
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
"Duckett, my office." It was Quinn Chavous, the head of Duckett's N.P.I.S. (NCAA Pants Investigator Service), part of the NCAA's larger I.B.I.B. (Illegal Benefits Investigation Bureau) as part of the Joint P.T.S.J. Taskforce investigating pants, tattoos, shoes, and jewelry. Chavous answered only to bureau chief Jeff van Steve, and he only answered to Mark Emmert who only answered to God.
"I got the State Department breathing down my neck wanting to know how a goddamn NCAA asset-- your asset, by the way-- got torpedoed off the coast of Croatia," he said. "Goddammit."
Henry Smorris Belton Waynesneed, Jr. was the president of the nation's top artificial truck testicle company. It now controlled 97 percent of the artificial truck testicle market after brutally crushing or acquiring three competitors and a breakaway novelty "only the shaft" company during a decades-long war in the truck testicle industry that had cost two executives their lives and one CEO his actual testicles. But that had been H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Sr.'s war. The younger Waynensneed was raised in luxury and installed in the top job after his father's fifth heart attack. Waynesneed, Jr. at first attacked his position with the raw ambition of youth, but after a disastrous and expensive attempt to market various truck testicle characters as part of a Saturday morning cartoon and merchandise empire nearly plunged the company into bankruptcy, he was encouraged to step into a more ceremonial role while the board took over the company's everyday operations. Waynesneed, Jr. was fine with that. It left him more time for his true priority: football.
Over the past several years, Waynesneed, Jr. leveraged his enormous fortune and endless appetite for football into a position as the most powerful booster at his alma mater. And soon he found that it wasn't enough for the practice field to bear his name or for him to have a private suite with a personal touchdown bell that only he was allowed to ring. No, he wanted the players to look good. That's when he got into pants. Deep into pants.
Two years ago, Waynesneed, Jr. found himself in a steamy warehouse negotiating the sale of 109 pairs of satin lounging slacks to a mysterious, Brezhnev-eyebrowed international pants broker he only knew as Tench. That broker was actually Buck Duckett. The eyebrows were fake. They made a deal. Duckett would not report the transaction and the team would not have to vacate their win in the Online Boner Pills Sent In Discreet Packaging Bowl, but Waynesneed, Jr. would need to start getting Duckett to the source of the pants. And now he and whatever information he had was at the bottom of the Adriatic with a cache of slacks almost to sumptuous to behold.
"Duckett, I need that B.S.V.D. on my desk right now as in before I finish this goddamn sentence," Chavous said.
The Booster Source Vetting Document consisted of a folder bulging with press clippings, interviews, and a complete psychological dossier. It was currently spread out in his office as he had been staring at it all night since the news came in.
"I've seen them shot, garroted, and dropped into rotating helicopter blades, but torpedoed is a first." That was Shane Schenk, from Duckett's unit. He grinned and handed him a coffee. "Congratulations."
Schenk and Duckett met at the I.B.I.B. academy and went through Pants School together, where Duckett graduated at the top of his class, Shenk near the bottom. But Schenk knew every top booster at every program from the biggest SEC school to some NAIA powerhouses. He partied with them at their ranches and boats. He knew their biggest secrets. He slept with several of their wives.
"You want us to go out there and crack some skulls?" asked the Pordon "Backhoe" Valence as he squeezed his enormous frame into the office. Valence, a former all-American fullback and member of the NCAA's elite combat unit known as the Rhinoceros has officially killed 38 men. No one has beaten his Rhinoceros record for breaking fifteen bricks with a single headbutt. He earned a commendation for unusual valor in thirteen of the NCAA's most dangerous operations and an eye patch for a desperate scythe fight with the Wisconsin offensive line after catching them accepting an illegal crate of wheely shoes on a dock at Lake Mendota.
"We can cross-reference all apparel-related torpedo attacks in Western Europe with unsual activity from known pants hot spots," said another team member Muriel Utrecht, a woman.
Duckett looked at his team. "This is not an ordinary pants assassination," he said. "I didn't want to tell you this before because it seemed ridiculous or even impossible, but something has been gnawing at me with Waynesneed and it won't go away. I don't think he was taking us to a normal pants supplier. I think he was in something much deeper."
"What do you mean, Duckett?" Schenk said. "Shorts? Maybe even a capri?"
"Jesus christ, that sick bastard would try something like that," Valence said.
"No, I don't think this has to do with manufacturing or distribution at all," Duckett said gravely. "I think whoever it was that torpedoed Waynesneed is not after some nickel-and-dime shorts operation. I think whoever did this is trying to transform how college athletes are compensated." He swung around a whiteboard that he had been hiding in a corner. It said "N.I.L." Duckett put down his coffee and leaned forward on his desk. "I think they're trying to legalize pants."
THE DALMATIAN COAST
"You don't have to go to all this trouble, Belly," the man in the shiny suit said, gesturing to a lavish spread of caviars and fancy cheeses in the grand ballroom of the Lady of Nutz, a 148-foot yacht anchored in the Adriatic.
"This isn't for you, Jan," H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Jr. said. Belly was for his buddies, but not for Jan. "I have guests. And I told you I don't want you hanging around."
"And here I thought we were becoming such good friends," Jan said, putting his feet up on a table that cost more than his house. He had immaculately groomed stubble and an untraceable accent. "Very well, we talk business first."
"Let me see the stuff," Waynesneed said.
"I think you will find the merchandise is top quality." Jan opened a briefcase. Inside was a pair of almost impossibly fancy pants. "What you're looking at is the ultimate in luxury trouser. Fabrics so fine they are illegal in your country. Top designers. Hand-stitched. These are clean. No serial numbers, no factory labels. Untraceable."
"And you have them ready to go for the whole team? I sent you those measurements."
"To the inch. Even the... what do you call it, the kicker." Jan smiled. "You know in my country they are all the kicker."
Waynesneed handed him a steel briefcase. "You're one slippery son-of-a-bitch, I'll give you that."
Jan opened it and smiled. "May I?" he said, but he was already wrist deep in rocquefort. A shadow moved over his face from another ship gliding into the harbor.
"You make me sick," Waynesneed said. "Take the money and get the hell off my ship." The faint sound of thumping music began to oontz-oontz its way through the walls. "Sounds like my guests are here. Beat it."
The other ship started to slowly turn to face the Lady of Nutz.
"Next time it's double," Jan said, wiping off his hand. "Pants scene is getting more dangerous every day. I nearly lost my own, you know what you put on the truck..."
"I don't care what kind of sick shit you to do get me the pants. I told you I don't want to know details. I pay you for the pants... and the discretion."
Suddenly, a klaxon blared throughout the shit. "Goddamn it, I told the captain I wanted that damn aoogah horn disabled. I'm not here to get aoogahed on my own damn..."
The captain burst in. "Signore!" he said. "Signore, we need to..."
"Goddamn it I told you for the last time..." Waynesneed said, before the captain cut him off.
"Signore, it's a torped..."
NCAA HEADQUARTERS
INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
"Duckett, my office." It was Quinn Chavous, the head of Duckett's N.P.I.S. (NCAA Pants Investigator Service), part of the NCAA's larger I.B.I.B. (Illegal Benefits Investigation Bureau) as part of the Joint P.T.S.J. Taskforce investigating pants, tattoos, shoes, and jewelry. Chavous answered only to bureau chief Jeff van Steve, and he only answered to Mark Emmert who only answered to God.
"I got the State Department breathing down my neck wanting to know how a goddamn NCAA asset-- your asset, by the way-- got torpedoed off the coast of Croatia," he said. "Goddammit."
Henry Smorris Belton Waynesneed, Jr. was the president of the nation's top artificial truck testicle company. It now controlled 97 percent of the artificial truck testicle market after brutally crushing or acquiring three competitors and a breakaway novelty "only the shaft" company during a decades-long war in the truck testicle industry that had cost two executives their lives and one CEO his actual testicles. But that had been H.S. Belton Waynesneed, Sr.'s war. The younger Waynensneed was raised in luxury and installed in the top job after his father's fifth heart attack. Waynesneed, Jr. at first attacked his position with the raw ambition of youth, but after a disastrous and expensive attempt to market various truck testicle characters as part of a Saturday morning cartoon and merchandise empire nearly plunged the company into bankruptcy, he was encouraged to step into a more ceremonial role while the board took over the company's everyday operations. Waynesneed, Jr. was fine with that. It left him more time for his true priority: football.
Over the past several years, Waynesneed, Jr. leveraged his enormous fortune and endless appetite for football into a position as the most powerful booster at his alma mater. And soon he found that it wasn't enough for the practice field to bear his name or for him to have a private suite with a personal touchdown bell that only he was allowed to ring. No, he wanted the players to look good. That's when he got into pants. Deep into pants.
Two years ago, Waynesneed, Jr. found himself in a steamy warehouse negotiating the sale of 109 pairs of satin lounging slacks to a mysterious, Brezhnev-eyebrowed international pants broker he only knew as Tench. That broker was actually Buck Duckett. The eyebrows were fake. They made a deal. Duckett would not report the transaction and the team would not have to vacate their win in the Online Boner Pills Sent In Discreet Packaging Bowl, but Waynesneed, Jr. would need to start getting Duckett to the source of the pants. And now he and whatever information he had was at the bottom of the Adriatic with a cache of slacks almost to sumptuous to behold.
"Duckett, I need that B.S.V.D. on my desk right now as in before I finish this goddamn sentence," Chavous said.
The Booster Source Vetting Document consisted of a folder bulging with press clippings, interviews, and a complete psychological dossier. It was currently spread out in his office as he had been staring at it all night since the news came in.
"I've seen them shot, garroted, and dropped into rotating helicopter blades, but torpedoed is a first." That was Shane Schenk, from Duckett's unit. He grinned and handed him a coffee. "Congratulations."
Schenk and Duckett met at the I.B.I.B. academy and went through Pants School together, where Duckett graduated at the top of his class, Shenk near the bottom. But Schenk knew every top booster at every program from the biggest SEC school to some NAIA powerhouses. He partied with them at their ranches and boats. He knew their biggest secrets. He slept with several of their wives.
"You want us to go out there and crack some skulls?" asked the Pordon "Backhoe" Valence as he squeezed his enormous frame into the office. Valence, a former all-American fullback and member of the NCAA's elite combat unit known as the Rhinoceros has officially killed 38 men. No one has beaten his Rhinoceros record for breaking fifteen bricks with a single headbutt. He earned a commendation for unusual valor in thirteen of the NCAA's most dangerous operations and an eye patch for a desperate scythe fight with the Wisconsin offensive line after catching them accepting an illegal crate of wheely shoes on a dock at Lake Mendota.
"We can cross-reference all apparel-related torpedo attacks in Western Europe with unsual activity from known pants hot spots," said another team member Muriel Utrecht, a woman.
Duckett looked at his team. "This is not an ordinary pants assassination," he said. "I didn't want to tell you this before because it seemed ridiculous or even impossible, but something has been gnawing at me with Waynesneed and it won't go away. I don't think he was taking us to a normal pants supplier. I think he was in something much deeper."
"What do you mean, Duckett?" Schenk said. "Shorts? Maybe even a capri?"
"Jesus christ, that sick bastard would try something like that," Valence said.
"No, I don't think this has to do with manufacturing or distribution at all," Duckett said gravely. "I think whoever it was that torpedoed Waynesneed is not after some nickel-and-dime shorts operation. I think whoever did this is trying to transform how college athletes are compensated." He swung around a whiteboard that he had been hiding in a corner. It said "N.I.L." Duckett put down his coffee and leaned forward on his desk. "I think they're trying to legalize pants."
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