Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [30]
They were probably dead. AIDS could have got them, or murder or suicide, or maybe tuberculosis. Every year, 30 inmates at Athena died for every student who was awarded an Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree by Tarkington.
PAROLE.
IF I HAD found a convict who had witnessed our picnic, we might have talked about the fish my mother-in-law hooked while he was watching. He saw her rod bend double, heard the reel scream like a little siren. But he never got to see the monster who had taken her bait and was headed south for Scipio. Before he could see it, he was back in darkness in another van.
IT WAS HEAVY test line I had put on the reel. This was deep-sea stuff made for tuna and shark, although, as far as we knew, there was nothing in Lake Mohiga but eels and perch and little catfish. That was all Mildred had ever caught before.
One time, I remember, she caught a perch too little to keep. So I turned it loose, even though the barb of the hook had come out through one eye. A few minutes later she hooked that same perch again. We could tell by the mangled eye. Think about that. Miraculous eyes, and no brains whatsoever.
I PUT SUCH heavy test line on Mildred’s reel so that nothing could ever get away from her. In Honduras 1 time I did the same thing for a 3-star General, whose aide I was.
Mildred’s fish couldn’t snap the line, and Mildred wouldn’t let go of the rod. She didn’t weigh anything, and the fish weighed a lot for a fish. Mildred went down on her knees in the water, laughing and crying.
I’ll never forget what she was saying: “It’s God! It’s God!”
I WADED OUT to help her. She wouldn’t let go of the rod, so I grasped the line and began to haul it in, hand over hand.
How the water swirled and boiled out there!
When I got the fish into shallow water, it suddenly quit fighting. I guess it had used up every bit of its energy. That was that.
This fish, which I picked up by the gills and flung up on the bank, was an enormous pickerel. Margaret looked down at it in horror and said, “It’s a crocodile!”
I looked at the top of the bank to see what the convicts and guards thought of a fish that big. They were gone. There was nothing but the broken-down van up there. The little door to its steel box was wide open. Anybody was free to climb inside and close the door, in case he or she wondered what it felt like to be a prisoner.
TO THOSE FASCINATED by Forensic Medicine: The pickerel had not bitten on the worm on the hook. It had bitten on a perch which had bitten on the worm on the hook.
I thought that would be interesting to my mother-in-law during our trip back home in the new Mercedes. But she didn’t want to talk about the fish at all. It had scared the daylights out of her, and she wanted to forget it.
As the years went by, I would mention the fish from time to time without getting anything back from her but a stony silence. I concluded that she really had purged it from her memory.
But then, on the night of the prison break, when the 3 of us were living in an old house in the hamlet of Athena, down below the prison walls, there was this terrific explosion that woke us up.
If Jack Patton had been there with us, he might have said to me, “Gene! Gene! They’re playing our tune again.”
The explosion was in fact the demolition of Athena’s main gate from the outside, not the inside. The purported head of the Jamaican drug cartel, Jeffrey Turner, had been brought down to Athena in a steel box 6 months before, after a televised trial lasting a year and a half. He was given 25 consecutive life sentences, said to be a new record. Now a well-rehearsed force of his employees, variously estimated as being anything