A Moveable Famine Read Online Free

infantrymen? How about tanks? A cannon?
    Pryor asked where I had gone to school. The name Fairfield was met with silence. Ridge interrupted. “Who cares where we came from?” he said. “Where are we going ?”
    McPeak straightened himself at Ridge’s wisdom, put his arm around me, and said, “The Deadwood.”
    Workshop orientation included a party for new MFA poetry students at The Mill, where we hoped to mingle with Lawson and meet Harvey Clay, the other permanent member of the poetry faculty. I had seen Harvey only once, wearing a turtleneck, flipping a quarter into the air and performing magic tricks with a kerchief in front of the bulletin board. He wore a goatee and was as garrulous as Lawson was removed, as stocky as Lawson was thin. Lawson had been Harvey’s teacher and had published two slender books of poems in rhyme and meter, a lean output that added to his stature as a perfectionist. Students revered him as a “great craftsman” who dissected their work with his razor intelligence. A telling difference between the two men was how students referred to them. Everyone called Harvey by his first name. Lawson was Lawson. No one called him Mitchell, and few called him Mitch.
    The day of the party, cold currents layered the afternoon breeze, and by evening it was frigid. My old Comet took a long time warming up, and I paged through the book of Shakespeare quotations Ridge left in the glove compartment for me to read while waiting. I drove the icy streets and parked across from The Mill. Lawson walked in, hands in both pockets, clearly a duty.
    Pryor leaned against the bar and waved. His five-foot frame was diminished further by his taller wife, Wendy, a pretty, freckled redhead. A rock band played, the singer exhorting people to dance. Pryor said they had just arrived, but it was enough time for him to have torn several cocktail napkins into heaps of confetti. The band’s name, The Sad Tantamounts, was scrawled in magic marker on a pizza box. I studied the bass player—a brown leather vest over a bright white T-shirt, a dark head of hair. It looked like Artie Barkhausen from the master’s program. I had met him at the Thompson party and remembered wondering if he was joking for calling Pound’s great work “The Santos.”
    “I know that guy playing bass,” I said to Wendy.
    “Is he a poet too?”
    The “too” surprised me. It was a title I didn’t give myself, but in Pryor’s household he was known as a poet.
    “I’m not sure,” I said. The bass player’s head hung down, hair in front of his eyes, his whole body vibrating like one of the thick strings.
    Lawson held a glass of Scotch and went from student to student, introducing himself, but the students were more interested in playing darts with Harvey, who was throwing with great accuracy from behind his back and in other contorted positions. I was surprised to see Ridge enter this party for newcomers. He went straight for the prettiest girl in the room.
    Lawson retreated to the bar, detached and wan. A drunk, sweet-faced student wearing a skimpy top grabbed his arm and tried to get him to dance. He pulled away, but she persisted. Two of her girlfriends tried to distract her, but she kept leaping onto Lawson’s back, palms on his shoulders. He turned and smiled, patting the next stool. Soon they pulled dollar bills lengthwise, playing liar’s poker.
    Pryor’s wife danced and danced. I stood next to him at the bar as he tore napkins and matchbooks. He said his latest project was a sonnet sequence about lightning.
    “Ever hear of ball lightning?” he asked.
    “Lucille Ball lightning?” It was Barkhausen. The band was taking a break.
    “Who’s this asshole?” Pryor asked me as Barkhausen laughed.
    I put out my hand. “Artie,” I said.
    “I’m starting the workshop,” he said. “Like the name of the band? I just invented it.”
    A faculty member with shoulder-length hair and a long mustache climbed on stage and banged the drums like a