From Deconstruction Acres, a Novel

By Tim W. Brown
http://www.amazon.com/Deconstruction-Acres-Tim-W-Brown/dp/1886625034

The Local “Townie” Take on College Town Life

Underdog manages to get kicked out of Jasper College within two weeks of arriving.
Booted by his parents as well, he becomes a townie and gets a job at the campus copy shop.
He’s pursued by Judy Baine, the sexy daughter of his landlady, but he’s in love with the
beautiful, haunted Ione Twayblade. Things get sticky when Ione begins dating Race Fletcher,
celebrity professor and author of a best-selling book deconstructing the Green Acres TV
show. “Underdog’s struggle to defeat his hipper-than-thou nemesis and expose a financial
scandal involving the corrupt college president prompts many wry observations,” says The
New York Times Book Review. Best-selling author Wally Lamb calls Deconstruction Acres “a
hoot.”
Race Fletcher

Chapter from Deconstruction Acres, a Novel

By Tim W. Brown

William "Race" Fletcher moved to Jasper when he accepted an offer to fill the Edward

Abbey Chair in American Civilization at Jasper College. Not without controversy, the college

created this position upon the death of Osa Wallace, the sole remaining heir to the Wallace

barbed wire fortune. Although the endowment Mr. Wallace bestowed amounted to three

million dollars, part for capital improvements and part to endow the Abbey Chair, the school's

Board of Trustees declined to accept any monies from the estate, at least initially.

Jasper College president, Milton Flaghorn, objected to "endowing a chair named for a

radical who inflames our youth, whose writings advocate the destruction of property in a

dubious and misguided fight to protect the environment." To argue his position, he cited

Edward Abbey urging "gangs of saboteurs" to sneak onto government land and tamper with

nuclear missile silos; as well, he referred to instances where followers of Abbey's "monkey-

wrenching" philosophy hammered nails into trees to prevent loggers from sawing them down.

"When a power saw cuts into a tree thus doctored," he explained, "nails can rip through a

human body with the same devastating effect of shrapnel from a hand grenade." In short,

Milton Flaghorn steadfastly opposed any relationship between the college and "a man who

during his lifetime adopted a philosophy of violence, intimidation and disrespect for the law."

Other members of the Board recognized the serious contradiction in the college's

mission of training young adults to become responsible members of society, while at the

same time acknowledging the work of a man who labored to undermine the structures of that

same society. Moreover, all of them, at one time or another, had witnessed the antics of their

benefactor, Osa Wallace, and wondered what sort of example he himself would set. In

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particular, they discussed an incident the winter before when Mr. Wallace was apprehended

by sheriff's deputies at the end of a high-speed chase over half the county, after someone

witnessed him tossing a Molotov cocktail from atop his three-wheeled motorcycle through

the window of a fast food restaurant under construction on Highway 17. Finally cornered,

ironically enough, against a barbed wire fence by squad cars closing in, the old man, his

beard caked with icicles, looking like a scarecrow stuffed with yellow leaves from corn stalks

he cut a swath through, surrendered. Later, while giving his statement at the sheriff's office,

he complained of "all the damn burger joints and strip malls cropping up and spoiling the

view from my farm."

The fire he started quickly burned out, and damage to the restaurant was limited to a

broken window and a handful of melted floor tiles, but the sheriff, vowing to prosecute whom

everyone knew to be the richest man living in Jasper County, charged Mr. Wallace with a

total of fourteen violations, most of which involved breaking traffic laws. Being rich, Osa

Wallace easily bailed himself out of jail, handing over one thousand dollars culled from

various zippered pockets on his motorcycle jacket. Before his case came to trial in the Jasper

County Courthouse, however, he came to an untimely end through rounding a blind curve

and ramming his motorcycle into the back of a tractor pulling a trailer full of shelled corn.

Nevertheless, despite their reservations about the characters of both Edward Abbey

and Osa Wallace, certain members of the Board saw their opportunity to retire some debts

incurred when adding on to the library several years before. They could tolerate the new chair

if it meant putting the college's finances back into the black. Thus emerged a split in the

Board, pitting the pragmatists, led by Ephraim Zimmer, against the rejectionists, led by

Milton Flaghorn. Counting Mr. Flaghorn's vote as the tie breaker in determining whether or

not to accept the money, the pragmatists lobbied hard to add an at-large member, drawn from

faculty ranks. After a bitter, six-month-long battle, the pragmatists prevailed in seating a

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professor of Russian history on the Board, and they persuaded one other Board member, who

previously sided with Mr. Flaghorn, to vote for accepting the money. Blaming his loss on the

recruitment of what he called a "Marxist dupe," Milton Flaghorn saw himself out-

maneuvered and out-voted.

In order to water down the message of the man for whom the chair was named, while

at the same time retaining a little of the spirit, the Board began to solicit candidates who held

populist, agrarian beliefs, scholars along the lines of writer Wendell Berry. Among the

mountains of curriculum vitae they received, there appeared one from William Fletcher.

Despite his youth (born June 15, 1954) and his relative inexperience (never held a full-time

teaching position), his application unquestionably looked the strongest: Ph.D. in American

studies from New York University; undergraduate work at a small, private college in the rural

Midwest (which presumably inculcated values desirable for this particular position); and

close to a dozen articles published in professional journals pertaining to American civiliza-

tion, including Popular Culture and American Quarterly. Where William Fletcher really

stood out, however, was in the title of his first published book, Deconstruction Acres:

Imploding the Myth of Rural Simplicity.

When questioning the English and history faculty about the applicants, the Board

found that if they were to hire Race Fletcher, they would catch themselves one of the biggest

fish swimming around the academic pond, for Deconstruction Acres was quickly revamping

the way scholars studied American culture. The book effectively shattered the bumpkin image

traditionally attached to inhabitants of rural America by showing how American

characteristics like self reliance, shrewdness and common sense had survived the onslaught

of urban culture insinuating itself, via the mass media, into the vast, underpopulated portions

of the continent. Indeed, through depicting displaced urbanites clashing with country folk, a

television show like Green Acres revealed city dwellers to be the true provincials.

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 In addition to being a critical success, attested to by favorable reviews in such high-

profile publications as The New York Review of Books and Harper's Magazine, the book was

a popular success, too. Originally written as a Ph.D. dissertation, it was first published by a

university press. After three printings numbering two thousand each, a mass market

publishing house bought the rights. With the addition of thirty-two stills from the Green

Acres TV show, the book was published under the title The Green Acres Story and promptly

became a surprise hit with the reading public, surging as high as number four on the New

York Times Bestseller List. Sales from the book had thus far earned Race Fletcher royalties of

over nine hundred thousand dollars. Fletcher looked doubly attractive to the Board, since the

college had a rule that stated a small percentage of any publishing profits earned by indi-

vidual faculty members would be paid to the university to further its collective mission.

For Race Fletcher's part, he wanted to live a life consistent with the themes expressed

in his book and was happy to relocate to Jasper. More than anything, he wanted to escape

New York City, his home since he began graduate school in 1977. In this, he resembled the

main character on the Green Acres show, Oliver Wendell Douglas, who sings during the

opening credits, "Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside."

The word "countryside" perhaps is a stretch; Race Fletcher didn't buy a farm, he

bought a place in town. But compared to his Greenwich Village residence, a walk-up building

with apartments so small it seemingly was built of several dozen stacked phone booths, his

spacious new house and one full acre of grounds appeared positively manor-like, in the old

English sense. Indeed, the design of his home fed this comparison, as it was built in the Tudor

style around 1890 by barbed wire baron Dempster Wallace, Osa's grandfather.

Referred to still as the "Wallace House," it had not belonged to anyone in the Wallace

family since the 1970s, when the dilapidated structure, vacant since the 1940s, was sold by

Osa Wallace to a couple who renovated it into a bed and breakfast. They re-plastered the

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crumbling walls, re-sealed the warped hardwood floors, re-stained the sun-faded interior

woodwork, repainted the peeling exterior siding, and replaced the drafty windows. They

furnished the house with antique beds, dressers, sofas, ottomans, chairs, lamps, rugs and

knick-knacks dating back to the turn of the century. They installed new plumbing fixtures,

including a whirlpool bath in the bridal suite. Unfortunately, they lost their shirts; despite

aggressive advertising in tourist publications and a feature article in B&B Magazine, there

was nothing to draw visitors, since, apart from the college, Jasper County possessed little in

the way of tourist attractions, like historic settlements, caves or fishable lakes.

Once his position was finalized, Race Fletcher purchased himself a fully appointed

home for a quarter-million in cash. Soon thereafter, he captured the entire town's attention for

two reasons: his Range Rover, the only one most Jasperites had ever seen, and a rumor,

whose source was a secretary in the English Department named Janet, which engulfed the

town like a prairie fire, prompting everyone to ask each other for an entire week if they had

heard about Race Fletcher's collection of two hundred animal skulls displayed in every corner

of his home.

When he finished with the board of directors document, Underdog brought it to the

print shop, where he handed it to Ron Sullivan for check-in, who returned it to Underdog to

photocopy immediately and take back in a special trip, because when the President said jump,

you jumped. The task was a simple matter of punching in a few numbers; entering a collate

command; then pushing the big green Start button. He waited as the photocopier kicked out

stapled sets of minutes, although he made sure to look away from the bursts of light that

clicked forty times a minute, because he recently noticed nasty purple blotches in his

peripheral vision. He hoped exposure to xerographic rays wasn't robbing him of his eyesight.

After a few minutes, he looked at the gauge and noticed it was approaching 480, the

total count. Hardly anything could tire this machine out; until it stopped it huffed and puffed

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rhythmically, performing its calisthenics without exhaustion. Like pulling dried clothes off a

line, he gathered paper stacks out of the rotary collator and boxed them.

At the direction of Sharon, Milton Flaghorn's secretary, he placed the booklets on a

walnut counter outside the president's office. "Interesting reading," he said to her.

"You don't mean to say that you read it?" she barked, like she had a loudspeaker sewn

inside her throat. Sharon had close-cropped red hair and a face full of red freckles; she was

tall and built like a pear. Underdog had the impression that she could beat the shit out of him

anytime she chose.

"No, I didn't. Just trying to get your goat," he said, thinking that this was an

appropriate remark, given her goat face.

"There better not be any stray marks. You wiped the glass, I hope." She thumbed each

booklet, carefully eyeing each page with the expression of a drill sergeant checking how

tightly beds were made.

"You know I did," he said, leaving the office and wondering if, at the end of the work

day, Sharon changed out of the flats she wore and into combat boots for the journey home.

Before returning to the print shop, he stopped at an out-of-the-way sculpture located

in the southeastern corner of the college, where campus gave way to recently harvested corn-

field. Constructed of welded steel plates, it was an exact replica of a picnic table. Neatly

etched across the table top were two-word phrases, like "Art/Society," "Action/Reaction,"

"Love/Hate" and "Life/Death." It was accompanied by two young trees with skinny trunks

and not much cover, planted there to someday create a park-like setting. He reflected awhile

on Judy and Ione, felt spasms of danger, pangs of guilt, aches of lust, waves of sexual relief.

All day, he was mindful of Judy's smell wafting up from his chest, remnant of their

rendezvous the previous night. As well, he was unsure all day where to take Ione for their

upcoming date. He was afraid they would have to settle for either Roger's Bar, where you had

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to shout over crappy country rock bands, or the Black Angus Restaurant, reputed to serve the

best food in Jasper, but where Underdog knew otherwise, from eating mealy shrimp there

once.

Cutting through the student union on his way back to the print shop, a flyer tacked to

a student activities kiosk caught his attention. It pictured Race Fletcher and the English

Department secretary posed like the American Gothic couple. Underdog read the text below

the photograph.

GREEN ACRES VIDEO FESTIVAL

Thursday, Sept. 24, 1992, 7:00 p.m.

Little Theater, Jasper College

Three Classic Episodes
Will Be Shown

Introduction by William Fletcher,

Abbey Chair Prof. of Amer. Civ.

Reception Sponsored
by Art Department

"Bingo!" thought Underdog, pleased that an event where he could take Ione finally presented

itself, scheduled on the correct day and everything. She might think it awfully corny, and it

probably was, but it was something different than what passed for fun in Jasper, like a hay

ride sponsored by the Elks Club. Besides, he wanted to meet this William Fletcher. He

sounded like a cool guy.