It could be said we'd got off to a good start -- up to this point.

Special permission was obtained from Tumsaw’s Town Administrator to have Art de Languroc buried right there on school grounds. Near a hundred students and a dozen teachers showed up for the funeral. Roger Shepperton delivered the eulogy. From him we learned Art had been an orphan, city-born and country-bred. His father, a Seattle, Washington insurance salesman, had died uninsured at a young age. His mother had remarried and then died. Art had been raised by total strangers in Eugene, Oregon. Before coming to Wyoming’s Two-Top Mountain, he’d played washboard in a jug-band. Contrary to certain boastful claims made by him in applying to the school, he’d never worked in a library in his life, nor had he attended any classes in electrical engineering in high school. He’d pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

The death of Art was a huge setback for the school. State officials, investigators, and news reporters poured in to try to ascertain the cause. Their conclusions almost brought the school to a shutdown. In the end, cooler heads prevailed. Opening Day was pushed back to October 10th. All the wiring on the campus was brought up to code. MacDougall and I and numerous other students got our electrical connections installed or re-installed by outside professionals. Our cabin got fresh wainscoating and a new refrigerator -- also a new overhead light, front door, and verandah. A bunch of new signs were posted all around the electrical tower and the power plant. That was basically the extent of repercussions.

October came in windy, brisk, and exhilarating with the hillsides blazing in crimson, gold, and green. MacDougall took to taking lone, long walks or riding Art’s bike. He devoured this new world of woods, hills, valleys, canyons, and mountains, following all the many ways and paths and roads, crossing bridges over countless creeks and brooks and streams. He painted these.

He painted mysterious mountains, moonlight, and voluptuous nymphs. His favorite model was Jake and Edith Farber's daughter Lizzie. With her modeling for him came his season of luscious still lifes -- fruits, flowers, and gleaming berries intimating breasts and nipples. I thought of Gustave Courbet. Of all painters, MacDougall admired most Vermeer, VanGogh, Degas, and Courbet.

Courbet had loved the tactile sensation of things. He’d worked over rocks, trees, and waves until the paint itself had come to almost embody the sensuality of his looking at the world. His realism, his looking honestly at the world, ultimately was very disturbing. At the end of his life, it seemed like only sex came out -- oozed out. Believing darkness was feminine, he painted dark, narrow rivers flooding rock-lined banks, out of control. He looked in dark caves and found the origins of his art -- and the source of life.

Like Courbet, MacDougall was melancholy, passionate, and hardly able to compromise. He was constantly probing his inner experience, producing insightful psychological portraits. He prepared his compositions, his paintings, with numerous drawings -- working in the academic traditions -- in the manner of the old masters. He created small wax figures that he could warm in hot water and mold into poses, then study them in various lights. He made eroticism one of his major themes. His female nudes were frankly erotic.

He painted young Lizzie with a strangely disproportionate body. He portrayed her as vulnerable, yes -- but also accessible, unsettling, seductive. The Lizzie on his canvases had enormous, unwieldy breasts and nipples -- also with broad hips and a huge butt -- also soft, with her contours painted lovingly in golden, glowing hues. Invariably, she lifted her blouse to observe her own extraordinary terrain. MacDougall surrounded and encased her, in each picture, with elaborate ornamentation.

I figured it was best to let him go his own way. At least he had not succumbed to melancholy! And I could see that Lizzie was full of joy, her being the source and center of this delight and this attention. I knew she was safe in his company. So, as for me, I had other lives to lead. I went out on the town, renewing old contacts.

I took to visiting the Horsehair Inn, joined by fellow Two-Top student Paul Kegan, a tranquil, amiable wunderkind with freckles and abundant yellow hair who’d later became a world-class bald composer of symphonies. In those days, at the Inn, Paul just blew across the top of a brown ceramic jug, accompanying me on mandolin. It was great. The place was alive with dancing, laughter, feasting.

One night I sank low. I got so caught up in the mirth I stood up on a table and betook myself to orate darkly, “Death to the greed of devouring peaks and valleys.” I regretted it at once. It hit me how I’d lost track of MacDougall -- him of furrowed brows and mad upspringing hair. I got down from the table and excused myself to Paul and the bartender, Joe Horsehair, and I walked back to the campus, to our cabin.

The walls were covered with MacDougall's paintings of Lizzie. The overhead light was blazing. MacDougall was busy adding vibrant colors to an erotic portrait. He didn't even notice that I had entered the room. I went over and sat down next to him. I didn’t say anything at first, but just put my arm around his shoulders. “Are you hungry?” I asked him. “We’ve got plenty fresh rations in our new fridge.”

That evening I became our in-house cook. I learned how to make Colcannon stew, slumgullion, and my own varying concoctions of salads and vegetable casseroles -- going light on the garlic but heavy on the pinto beans. After the meals, MacDougall did the washing up. That first night, when I’d left the Horsehair Inn and run back to the campus to see if I could somehow be of service to MacDougall, I served spaghetti and followed that up with bowls of caramel-topped yogurt for dessert. Then I asked him if he wanted to play checkers. he didn't, but I insisted. I got out the board and disks from my rucksack. As it turned out, he did enjoy this. We played checkers every evening that week, right up to the day the school opened on the tenth.

It was strange how that worked out. Playing checkers, as it happened, was a major bigtime pivotal activity at the Two-Top Mountain school -- an adapated version of checkers, anyway -- and who could have guessed?

In preparation for the school’s Opening Day festivities, a huge yellow-striped temporary tent had been put up just off center from the middle of the quad. Students began arriving early in the morning, with or without their parents, going to the tables outside the tent to verify that their registration papers were in order and that they’d got into at least some of the classes they’d signed up for. Inside the tent were several rows of joined long tables lined with a couple hundred folding chairs. A printed brochure telling of the school had been placed on every seat.

Also under the tent, at the middle the row of tables directly in front of an onstage podium and microphone, sat Arlen Townsend, teaching students his version of the checkers game called “Taps” which, according to the official brochure, Townsend had distilled from the “primitive” game checkers (which the Brits called draughts) only seven years before. Before him were twenty-four wooden playing disks, twelve of dark mahogany and twelve of white pine. Each piece was carved with one of the twenty-four characters of the Teutonic Runic alphabet, or Futhark. The assorted relationships occurring among the pieces in the course of a Taps game were, as the pamphlet illuminated, “revelatory,” as with the coins or sticks tossed for the ancient oriental I Ching game (or, as was printed in the brochure, “fateful oracle”), over which Tzu Jan Chi had claim to mastery. As with the I Ching coins or sticks, the Taps pieces were said to reveal auguries, fortunes, coded prophecies – in any case, suggestions. Possible ways to go. Directions to look in. Things to watch out for. Taps was played according to the strictest rules and it required (and here I quote Townsend himself) “innate concentration, learned virtuosity, and a marked tendency to insights.”

It now dawned on me, the irony at Art de Languroc’s funeral. There a fellow with a trumpet had played Taps -- but that Taps wasn’t this Taps, and de Languroc had been, in fact, I found out, wretched at playing Townsend’s Taps, the draughts or chess game or discipline or whatever it was, and had he spent more time learning the proper ways and rules of the thing, he would still be among the living, some said. It was the smoking gun, some said: Art hadn’t shown enough innate concentration or learned virtuosity, nor had he been significantly inclined toward appropriate insights -- Pfttt!

Arlen Townsend, who in those days liked to be addressed by his nickname, the Tapster, surely was a sight to see that day. He had on the same blue jeans and checkered blue and russet flannel shirt he’d been wearing the day we'd met. Instead of bedroom slippers, he now had on dark brown cowboy boots. And since we’d last seen him it looked like long, yellow cat or catfish whiskers had sprung from his matted golden eyebrows. On the table, by his right hand, was a big, golden Stetson hat. I guess he must have felt my gaze on him, for he turned suddenly and pierced me with his glance. I saw the skin around his left eye jump. He waved me over. “Hey there, you -- Wiley Chrysostrom!”

Roger Shepperton stepped up to the microphone. “Lower your voice now, Arlen,” he scolded him over the loudspeakers in a low, deadpan tone. Everybody laughed. “You all know me,” he began. Apparently they did. A huge round of applause went up for him. People began stomping their feet. “Speech, speech, speech!” they called to him. But Shepperton put his hands up in the air as if to dampen down the uproar, and said he might be saying a word or two more later, but for now he just wanted to introduce his “best friend in the world” (“Sorry, Arlen”) and co-director of the school (“let’s give him a big round of applause”), Tzu Jan Chi.

Chi stepped up to the microphone which, when Shepperton fumbled with it, attempting to lower it several inches, fell hard on the stage platform. Chi stepped down stage right from the microphone and bowed graciously. In the huge brown coat he had on, he looked even smaller than he was. When Shepperton got the microphone set right, Chi stepped back up to it and said, slowly and quietly, “Mister Roger Shepperton, he is teacher of philosophy, mythology, Greek, and Germanic languages. I am Tzu Jan Chi, teacher of calligraphy, eastern arts, and eastern religions.”

Chi introduced further of his colleagues. “Mister Herb Lachman, will you stand please?” (He stood. He looked distinguished, silver haired but with abrown and blonde goatee.) “Mister Lachman is teaching Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Russian. Mister Stan Kummern?” (He stood. He raised his arms. He had no hands.The rumor was, he’d lost his hands in a jeep accident in one of the local canyons.) Mister Kummern is teaching Music -- voice, piano, strings, percussion, horns. And next, Mister Squinter Jeno, a teacher of Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, and Art History. Professor Jeno, please stand." (Six-foot-four, black as a Congo bushman with a crown of mushrooming, tangled hair, the earnest man rose vertically from his little folding chair like some monument of glistening ebony, then took his seat again.)

Chi went on like that, introducing Arlen Townsend (Geology, Geography, Astronomy, and Taps); Adrian van Galloween (assorted sciences; he also managed the school Cafeteria); Benny Chourira (Math, Astrology, Hatha Yoga); Vassily Stolovitch (Anthropology, World Culture, Basket Weaving); Ned Johnson (Architecture and Manuscript Illumination); John Green (Horticulture and Parapsychology); Ketil Fish (Creative Writing, Signing, and Morse Code); Jack Otis (Engineering and Agriculture); Anton Dupré (Accounting, Drama, and Dairy Farming); Zeke Carraway (Psychology and Dance; also he was in charge of the school Bakery); Hugo Stephens (The Art of War), Nathaniel Nestor (Advertising and Design), and on and on.

At the conclusion of Chi’s introductions, Professor Shepperton again took control of the microphone. People were whispering among themselves. Shepperton put his hands in the air. Silence fell -- a heavy lull. “You women out there,” he said. “Mothers of our students! While the Two-Top Mountain Schools have traditionally been open only to young men, this year we’ve accepted our first young women -- seven of them on this campus. We are neither for nor against women. We are neither for nor against men. We’re here for all the world. This is an academy, not a monastery. If you thought you were sending your boy to a monastery, you can take him back home with you now.” Shepperton paused. Three mothers stood, clasped their red-faced boys by the shoulders, and led them out into the dazzling autumn morning sunlight -- away from the tent.

“Okay!” Shepperton said. “Arlen Townsend! -- do you have a few words for us today?”

Putting on his gold ten-gallon hat, bowlegged Townsend leapt onto the stage, thanked his esteemed colleague (pounding heartily Shepperton’s broad back), and roared into the microphone, “Greeeeee-tings!”

A terrible feedback squeal cut through the hushed crowd like a mammoth fingernail scratching down a colossal chalkboard. Backbones cringed, goosebumps rose, a buzz went up. A sound technician leapt toward his many-buttoned panel and fine-tuned the system quickly. I stood on my tiptoes and strained my neck to try to see out over the assembled sea of wincing heads for any sign of MacDougall. Caterers were busy setting out pans of salads, noodles, rolls, and drinks for lunch. To brace myself, I put my hands on the shoulders belonging to the head directly in front of me. The head turned and the face looked up and, behold, it was MacDougall’s alabaster, solemn, puzzled face. He’d actually combed his insane hair.

“Greeeeee-tings!” Townsend called out once more.

“Greeeeee-tings!” the crowd called back.

“Hello boys, girls, moms, dads, trustees, town officials, investigative reporters, rumor mongers, and bystanders," Townsend began again, triggering a wave of chuckling and guffawing. “It’s a glorious day,” he said, further milking the crowd. “Welcome to Two-Top Mountain West, where we leave the mad, bad world outside. These kids know too much of heartbreak, headaches, broken homes, delinquency, famine, violence, human trafficking, politics, prisons, crimes, and wars -- hard words,” Townsend harped sardonically. “Hard words all. What these kids ought to get is a good education!” he cried out. He accepted the applause that followed like warm rain on his head. You could see how he loved it.

“And that’s what we’re good at,” he finished. “Let the games begin!” Balloons of all colors went up behind the wooden grandstand. The crowd roared.