Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [102]
He said in his lecture that if the fences and gallows and gas chambers were removed from the tidy, tidy checkerboard of streets and old stucco two-story shotgun buildings, it might have made a nice enough junior college for low-income or underachieving people in the area. The buildings had been put up years before World War I, he said, as a comfortable outpost for soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the many titles of that Emperor, he said, was Duke of Auschwitz.
WHAT GENERAL FLORIO was after on our side of the lake was our sanitary facilities. The prisoners were to use buckets in their tents for toilets, but then these could be emptied into toilets in the surrounding buildings and flushed from there into Scipio’s state-of-the-art sewage-disposal plant. Across the lake they were having to bury everything.
And no showers.
We had plenty of showers.
One touching rather than horrible thing about the siege, surely, was how little damage the escaped convicts did to this campus. It was as though they really believed that it was going to be theirs for generations.
This brings to mind another of Damon Stern’s lectures, which was about how the brutalized and starving poor people of Petrograd in Russia behaved after they broke into the palace of the Czars in 1917. They got to see for the first time all the treasures inside the palace, and they were so outraged they wanted to wreck them.
But then one man got their attention by firing a gun at the ceiling, and he said, “Comrades! Comrades! This is all ours now! Don’t hurt anything!”
THEY RENAMED PETROGRAD “Leningrad.” Now it’s Petrograd again.
IN A WAY, the escaped convicts were like a neutron bomb. They had no compassion for living things, but they did surprisingly little damage to property.
Damon Stern the unicyclist, on the other hand, laid down his life for living things. They weren’t even human beings. They were horses. They weren’t even his horses.
His wife and kids got away, and, last I heard, were living in Lackawanna, where they have relatives. That’s nice when people have relatives they can run away to.
But Damon Stern is buried deep and close to where he fell, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
HIS WIFE WANDA June came back here after the siege in a pickup truck she said belonged to her half brother. She paid a fortune for enough gas to get here from Lackawanna. I asked her what she was doing for money, and she said she and Damon had put away a lot of Yen in their freezer in a box marked “Brussels sprouts.”
Damon woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to get into the Volkswagen with the kids and take off for Rochester with the headlights off. He had heard the explosion across the lake, and seen the silent army crossing the ice to Scipio. The last thing he ever did with Wanda June was hand her the box marked “Brussels sprouts.”
DAMON HIMSELF, OVER his wife’s objections, stayed behind to spread the alarm. He said he would be along later, by hitching a ride in somebody else’s car, or by walking all the way to Rochester on back roads he knew, if he had to. It isn’t clear what happened after that. He probably called the local police, although none of them lived to say so. He woke up a lot of people in the immediate neighborhood.
The best conjecture is that he heard gunfire inside the stable and unwisely went to investigate. A Freedom Fighter with an AK-47 was gut-shooting horses for the fun of it. He didn’t shoot them in the head.
Damon must have asked him to stop, so the Freedom Fighter shot him, too.
HIS WIFE DIDN’T want his body. She said the happiest years of his life had been spent here, so he should stay buried here.
She found all 4 of the family unicycles. That was