Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [101]
THE TANK WAS full because there was only one diesel automobile in Scipio when the diaspora began. It was a Cadillac General Motors put on the market about the time we got kicked out of Vietnam. It is still here. It was such a lemon that you might as well have tried to go on a Sunday spin in an Egyptian pyramid.
It used to belong to a Tarkington parent. He was coming to his daughter’s graduation when it broke down in front of the Black Cat Café. It had already stopped of its own accord many times between here and New York City. So he went to the hardware store and bought yellow paint and a brush and painted big lemons all over it, and sold it to Lyle Hooper for a dollar.
This was a man who was on the Board of Directors of General Motors!
DURING THE BRIEF time the bodies were all above-ground again, a person showed up with a Toyota hearse and an undertaker from Rochester to claim 1. That was Dr. Charlton Hooper, who had been invited to try out for the New York Knickerbockers basketball team but had chosen to become a Physicist instead. As I’ve said, he was 2 meters tall.
That’s tall!
I asked the undertaker where he had found the gasoline for the trip.
He wouldn’t tell me at first, but I kept after him. He finally said, “Try the crematorium in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. Ask for Guido.”
I ASKED CHARLTON if he had come all the way from Waxahachie, Texas. The last I’d heard, he was running experiments with the enormous atom-smasher, the Supercollider, down there. He said the funds for the Supercollider had dried up, so he had moved to Geneva, New York, not that far away. He was teaching Freshman Physics at Hobart College.
I asked him if there was any way the Supercollider could be turned into a prison.
He said he guessed they could put a bunch of bad guys in there, and throw the switch, and make their hair stand on end and raise their temperatures a couple of degrees centigrade.
ABOUT A WEEK after Charlton took his father’s body away and we reburied all the others to a legal depth with the backhoe, I was awakened 1 afternoon by a terrible uproar in what had been such a peaceful town. I was living down in the Town Hall back then, and often took naps in the afternoon.
The noise was coming from up here. Chain saws were snarling. There was hammering. It sounded like an army. As far as I knew, there were supposed to be only 4 Guardsmen up here, keeping a fire watch.
The soldier who was stationed in my reception room, to wake me up in case there was something important for me to do, had vanished. He had gone up the hill to discover what on Earth was happening. There had been no warning of any special activity.
So I trudged up Clinton Street all alone. I was wearing civilian shoes and a camouflage suit General Florio had given me, along with 1 of his own stars on each shoulder. That was all I had for a uniform.
When I got to the top of Clinton Street, I found General Florio directing soldiers brought over from his side of the lake. They were turning the Quadrangle into a city of tents. Others constructed a barbed-wire fence around it.
I did not have to ask the meaning of all this. It was obvious that Tarkington College, which had stayed small as the prison across the lake had grown and grown, was itself a prison now.
General Florio turned to me and smiled. “Hello, Warden Hartke,” he said.
ONCE ALL THOSE 10-man tents, which were brought down from the Armory across the highway from the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, were set up on the Quadrangle as though on a checkerboard, it seemed so logical. The surrounding buildings, Samoza Hall, this library, the bookstore, the Pavilion, and so on, with machine-gunners at various windows and doorways, and with barbed wire between them and the tents, served well enough as prison walls.
General Florio said to me, “Company’s coming.”
I REMEMBER A lecture Damon Stern gave about his visit with several Tarkington students to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp in Poland during the Finale Rack. Stern used to make extra money taking trips to Europe