Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [31]
The Japanese guards were wholly unprepared and unmotivated to resist such a force, especially since the attackers were all dressed in American Army uniforms and waving American flags. So they hid or put their hands up or ran off into the virgin forest. This wasn’t their country, and guarding prisoners wasn’t a sacred mission or anything like that. It was just a business.
The telephone and power lines were cut, so they couldn’t even call for help or blow the siren.
The assault lasted half an hour. When it was over, Jeffrey Turner was gone, and he hasn’t been seen since. The attackers also disappeared. Their uniforms and military vehicles were subsequently found at an abandoned dairy farm owned by German land speculators a kilometer north of the end of the lake. There were tire tracks of many automobiles, which led police to conclude that it was by means of unremarkable civilian vehicles, seemingly unrelated, and no doubt leaving the farm at timed intervals, that the lawless force had made its 100-percent-successful getaway.
Meanwhile, back at the prison, anyone who didn’t want to stay inside the walls anymore was free to walk out of there, first taking, if he was so inclined and got there early, a rifle or a shotgun or a pistol or a tear-gas grenade from the wide-open prison armory.
THE POLICE SAID, too, that the attackers of the prison obviously had had first-class military training somewhere, possibly at a private survival school somewhere in this country, or maybe in Bolivia or Colombia or Peru.
ANYWAY: MARGARET AND Mildred and I were awakened by the explosion, which demolished the main gate of the prison. There was no way we could have imagined what was really going on.
The 3 of us were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Margaret was on the first floor, Mildred and I were on the second floor. No sooner had I sat up, my ears ringing, than Mildred came into my room stark naked, her eyes open wide.
She spoke first. She used a slang word for hugeness I had never heard her speak before. It wasn’t slang of her generation or even mine. It was slang of my children’s generation. I guess she had heard it and liked it, and then held it in reserve for some really important occasion.
Here is what she said, as sporadic small-arms fire broke out at the prison: “Do you remember that humongous fish I caught?”
11
AT ONE TIME I fully expected to spend the rest of my life in this valley, but not in jail. I envisioned my mandatory retirement from Tarkington College in 2010. I would be modestly well-off with Social Security and a pension from the College. My mother-in-law would surely be dead by then, I thought, so I would have only Margaret to care for. I would rent a little house in the town below. There were plenty of empty ones.
But that dream would have been blasted even if there hadn’t been a prison break, even if the Social Security system hadn’t gone bust and the College Treasurer hadn’t run off with the pension funds and so on. For, as I’ve said before, in 1991 Tarkington College fired me.
There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?
THE MAN WHO got me fired was Jason Wilder, the celebrated Conservative newspaper columnist, lecturer, and television talk-show host. He saved my life by doing that. If it weren’t for him, I would have been on the Scipio side of the lake instead of the Athena side during the prison break.
I would have