Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [60]
“I don’t even think about it anymore,” I said. “The most likely thing is that somebody else found it. It could have been a bunch of kids. It could have been somebody working on the house. Whoever it was sure isn’t going to say so.”
We were talking about $45,000 and change.
“I know I should give a darn, but somehow I can’t give a darn,” I said.
“The war did that to you,” she said.
“Who knows?” I said.
AS WE CHATTED in the sunshine, a powerful motorcycle came to life with a roar in the valley, in the region of the Black Cat Café. Then another one spoke, and yet another.
“Hell’s Angels?” she said. “You mean it’s really going to happen?”
The joke was that Tex Johnson, the College President, having seen one too many motorcycle movies, believed that the campus might actually be assaulted by Hell’s Angels someday. This fantasy was so real to him that he had bought an Israeli sniper’s rifle, complete with a telescopic sight, and ammunition for it from a drugstore in Portland, Oregon. He and Zuzu were visiting Zuzu’s half sister. That was the same weapon which would eventually get him crucified.
But now Tex’s anticipation of an assault by Hell’s Angels didn’t seem so comical after all. A mighty doomsday chorus of basso profundo 2-wheelers was growing louder and louder and coming closer and closer. There could be no doubt about it! Whoever it was, whatever it was, its destination could only be Tarkington!
23
IT WASN’T HELL’S Angels.
It wasn’t lower-class people of any kind.
It was a motorcade of highly successful Americans, most on motorcycles, but some in limousines, led by Arthur Clarke, the fun-loving billionaire. He himself was on a motorcycle, and on the saddle behind him, holding on for dear life, her skirt hiked up to her crotch, was Gloria White, the 60-year-old lifelong movie star!
Bringing up the rear were a sound truck and a flatbed carrying a deflated hot-air balloon. When the balloon was inflated at the center of the Quadrangle it would turn out to be shaped like a castle Clarke owned in Ireland!
COUGH, COUGH. SILENCE. Two more: Cough, cough. There, I’m OK now. Cough. That’s it. I really am OK now. Peace.
THIS WASN’T ARTHUR C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who wrote all the books about humanity’s destiny in other parts of the Universe. This was Arthur K. Clarke, the billionaire speculator and publisher of magazines and books about high finance.
COUGH. I BEG your pardon. A little blood this time. In the immortal words of the Bard of Avon:
“Out, damned spot! out, I say! One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Amen. And especial thanks to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
I READ A lot of science fiction when I was in the Army, including Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which I thought was a masterpiece. He was best known for the movie 2001, the very year in which I am writing and coughing now.
I saw 2001 twice in Vietnam. I remember 2 wounded soldiers in wheelchairs in the front row at 1 of those showings. The whole front row was wheelchairs. The 2 soldiers had had their feet wrecked some way, but seemed to be OK from the knees on up, and they weren’t in any pain. They were awaiting transportation back to the States, I guess, where they could be fitted with prostheses. I don’t think either of them was older than 18. One was black and 1 was white.
After the lights went up, I heard the black one say to the white one, “You tell me: What was that all about?”
The white one said, “I dunno, I dunno. I’ll be happy if I can just get back to Cairo, Illinois.”
He didn’t pronounce it “ky-roe.” He pronounced it “kayroe.”
My mother-in-law from Peru, Indiana, pronounces the name of her hometown “pee-roo,