God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [57]
Charley's famous secretary was on an errand. The only other person there when Eliot walked in was Noyes Finnerty, who was sweeping the floor. Noyes had been the center of the immortal Noah Rosewater Memorial High School Basketball Team which went undefeated in 1933. In 1934, Noyes strangled his sixteen-year-old wife for notorious infidelity, went to prison for life. Now he was paroled, thanks to Eliot. He was fifty-one. He had no friends, no relatives. Eliot found out about his being in prison by accident, while leafing through old copies of The Rosewater County Clarion Call, made it his business to get him paroled.
Noyes was a quiet, cynical, resentful man. He had never thanked Eliot for anything. Eliot was neither hurt nor startled. He was used to ingratitude. One of his favorite Kilgore Trout books dealt with ingratitude and nothing else. It was called, The First District Court of Thankyou, which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn't been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.
Noyes was a lot faster than Charley in perceiving that Eliot was far from well. He stopped sweeping, watched acutely. He was a mean voyeur. Charley, enchanted by memories of so many fires at which he and Eliot had behaved so well, did not become suspicious until Eliot congratulated him on having just won an award which he had in fact won three years before.
"Eliot—are you kidding?"
"Why would I kid you? I think it's a wonderful honor." They were discussing the Young Hoosier Horatio Alger Award for 1962, awarded to Charley by the Indiana Federation of Conservative Young Republican Businessmen's Clubs.
"Eliot—" said Charley wincingly, "that was three years ago."
"It was?"
Charley arose from his desk. "And you and I sat up in your office, and we decided to send the damn plaque back."
"We did?"
"We went over the history of the thing, and we decided it was the kiss of death."
"Why would we decide that?"
"You were the one who dug up the history, Eliot."
Eliot frowned ever so slightly. "I've forgotten." The little frown was a formality. The forgetting didn't really bother him.
"They started giving the thing in 1945. They'd given it sixteen times before I won it. Don't you remember now?"
"No."
"Out of sixteen winners of the Young Hoosier Horatio Alger Award, six were behind bars for fraud or income-tax evasion, four were under indictment for one thing or another, two had falsified their war records, and one actually went to the electric chair."
"Eliot—" said Charley with mounting anxiety, "did you hear what I just said?"
"Yes," said Eliot.
"What did I just say?"
"I forget."
"You just said you heard me."
Noyes Finnerty spoke up. "All he hears is the big click." He came forward for a closer examination of Eliot. His approach was not sympathetic. It was clinical. Eliot's response was clinical, too, as though a nice doctor were shining a bright light in his eyes, looking for something. "He heard that click, man. Man, did he ever hear that click."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Charley asked him.
"It's a thing you learn to listen for in prison."
"We're not in prison now."
"It ain't a thing that happens just in prison. In prison, though, you get to listening for things more and more. You stay there long enough, you go blind, you're all ears. The click is one thing you listen for. You two—you think you're mighty close? If you were really close—and that don't mean you have to like him, just know him—you would have heard that click of his a mile away. You get to know a man, and down deep there's something bothering him bad, and maybe you never find out what it is,