Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [28]
We awoke. Jack said to me, “They’re playing our tune, Gene. They’re playing our tune.”
BEFORE I WENT to work at Athena, I had seen only 3 convicts anywhere in the valley. Most people in Scipio hadn’t seen even 1. I wouldn’t have seen even 1, either, if a truck with a steel box in back hadn’t broken down at the head of the lake. I was picnicking there, near the water, with Margaret, my wife, and Mildred, my mother-in-law. Mildred was crazy as a bedbug by then, but Margaret was still sane, and there seemed a good chance that she always would be.
I was only 45, foolishly confident that I would go on teaching here until I reached the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 2010, 9 years from now. What in fact will happen to me in 9 more years? That is like worrying about a cheese spoiling if you don’t put it in the refrigerator. What can happen to a pricelessly stinky cheese that hasn’t already happened to it?
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, NO danger to herself or anyone else, adored fishing. I had put a worm on her hook for her and pitched it out to a spot that looked promising. She gripped the rod with both hands, sure as always that something miraculous was about to happen.
She was right this time.
I looked up at the top of the bank, and there was a prison truck with smoke pouring out of its engine compartment. There were only 2 guards on board, and 1 of them was the driver. They bailed out. They had already radioed the prison for help. They were both white. This was before the Japanese took over Athena as a business proposition, before the road signs all the way from Rochester were in both English and Japanese.
It looked as though the truck might catch fire, so the 2 guards unlocked the little door in the back of the steel box and told the prisoners to come out. And then they backed off and waited with sawed-off automatic shotguns leveled at the little door.
Out the prisoners came. There were only 3 of them, clumsy in leg irons, and their handcuffs were shackled to chains around their waists. Two were black and 1 was white, or possibly a light Hispanic. This was before the Supreme Court confirmed that it was indeed cruel and inhuman punishment to confine a person in a place where his or her race was greatly outnumbered by another 1.
The races were still mixed in prisons throughout the country. When I later went to work at Athena, though, there was nothing but people who had been classified as Black in there.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW DID not turn around to see the smoking van and all. She was obsessed by what might happen at any moment at the other end of her fishline. But Margaret and I gawked. For us back then, prisoners were like pornography, common things nice people shouldn’t want to see, even though the biggest industry by far in this valley was punishment.
When Margaret and I talked about it later, she didn’t say it was like pornography. She said it was like seeing animals on their way to a slaughterhouse.
WE, IN TURN, must have looked to those convicts like people in Paradise. It was a balmy day in the springtime. A sailboat race was going on to the south of us. The college had just been given 30 little sloops by a grateful parent who had cleaned out the biggest savings and loan bank in California.
Our brand-new Mercedes sedan was parked on the beach nearby. It cost more than my annual salary at Tarkington. The car was a gift from the mother of a student of mine named Pierre LeGrand. His maternal grandfather had been dictator of Haiti, and had taken the treasury of that country with him when he was overthrown. That was why Pierre’s mother was so rich. He was very unpopular. He tried to win friends by making expensive gifts to them, but that didn’t work, so he tried to hang himself from a girder of the water tower on top of Musket Mountain. I happened to be up there, in the bushes with the wife of the coach of the Tennis Team.
So I cut him down with my Swiss Army knife. That was how I got the Mercedes.