Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
Only after the Vietnam War, with Jack long dead, did Margaret and I realize that she wanted nothing more to do with Peru because so many people there knew she came from a family famous for spawning lunatics. And then she got married, keeping her family’s terrifying history to herself, and she reproduced.
My own wife married and reproduced in all innocence of the danger she herself was in, and the risk she would pass on to our children.
OUR OWN CHILDREN, having grown up with a notoriously insane grandmother in the house, fled this valley as soon as they could, just as she had fled Peru. But they haven’t reproduced, and with their knowing what they do about their booby-trapped genes, I doubt that they ever will.
JACK PATTON NEVER married. He never said he wanted kids. That could be a clue that he did know about his crazy relatives in Peru, after all. But I don’t believe that. He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”
I myself, obviously, have finally come around to his point of view.
During our plebe year, I remember, Jack all of a sudden decided that he was going to be a cartoonist, although he had never thought of being that before. He was compulsive. I could imagine him back in high school in Wyoming, all of a sudden deciding to build an electric chair for rats.
The first cartoon he ever drew, and the last one, was of 2 rhinoceroses getting married. A regular human preacher in a church was saying to the congregation that anybody who knew any reason these 2 should not be joined together in holy matrimony should speak now or forever hold his peace.
This was long before I had even met his sister Margaret.
We were roommates, and would be for all 4 years. So he showed me the cartoon and said he bet he could sell it to Play-boy.
I asked him what was funny about it. He couldn’t draw for sour apples. He had to tell me that the bride and groom were rhinoceroses. I thought they were a couple of sofas maybe, or maybe a couple of smashed-up sedans. That would have been fairly funny, come to think of it: 2 smashed-up sedans taking wedding vows. They were going to settle down.
“What’s funny about it?” said Jack incredulously. “Where’s your sense of humor? If somebody doesn’t stop the wedding, those two will mate and have a baby rhinoceros.”
“Of course,” I said. “For Pete’s sake,” he said, “what could be uglier and dumber than a rhinoceros? Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce.”
I pointed out that to a rhinoceros another rhinoceros was wonderful.
“That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”
DURING JACK’S AND my cow year at the Point, I remember, which would have been our junior year at a regular college, we were ordered to walk a tour for 3 hours on the Quadrangle, in a military manner, as though on serious guard duty, in full uniform and carrying rifles. This was punishment for our having failed to report another cadet who had cheated on a final examination in Electrical Engineering. The Honor Code required not only that we never lie or cheat but that we snitch on anybody who had done those things.
We hadn’t seen the cadet cheat. We hadn’t even been in the same class with him. But we were with him, along with one other cadet, when he got drunk in Philadelphia after the Army-Navy game. He got so drunk he confessed that he had cheated on the exam the previous June. Jack and I told him to shut up, that we didn’t want to hear about it, and that we were going to forget about it, since it probably wasn’t true anyway.
But the other cadet, who would later be fragged in Vietnam, turned all of us