Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [67]
25
MY LAWYER FOUND only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.
The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.
THE CONVICTS DIDN’T create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they weren’t against America. He said, “We are America.”
SO I TOOK my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.
It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadn’t realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.
But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasn’t talented, frightened the old novelist.
SLAZINGER WAS NO prize himself, of course.
AFTER THE PRISON break, I told the GRIOT™ here all I knew about Pamela, and asked it to guess what might become of her after her breakup with Paul Slazinger. GRIOT™ had her die of cirrhosis of the liver. I gave the machine the same set of facts a second time, and it had her freezing to death in a doorway in Chicago.
The prognosis was not good.
AFTER LEAVING PAMELA, whose basic problem wasn’t me but alcohol, I started to climb Musket Mountain, intending to think things out under the water tower. But I was met by Zuzu Jack-son, who was coming down. She said she had been under the water tower for hours, trying to think up dreams to replace those we had had of running off to Venice.
She said that maybe she would run off to Venice alone, and take Polaroid pictures of tourists getting in and out of gondolas.
The prognosis for her was a lot better than for Pamela, short-term anyway. At least she wasn’t an addict, and at least she wasn’t all alone in the world, even if all she had was Tex. And at least she hadn’t been held up as an object of public ridicule from coast to coast.
And she could see the humorous side of things. She said, I remember, that the loss of the Venice dream had left her a walking corpse, but that a zombie was an ideal mate for a College President.
She went on like that for a little while, but she didn’t cry, and she ran out of steam pretty quick. The last thing she said was that she didn’t blame me. “I take full responsibility,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked away, “for falling in love with such an obvious jerk.”
Fair enough!
I DECIDED NOT to climb Musket Mountain after all. I went home instead. It would be wiser to think things out in my garage, where other loose cannons from my past were unlikely to interrupt me. But when I got there I found a man from United Parcel Service ringing the bell. I didn’t know him. He was new to town, or he wouldn’t have asked why all the blinds were drawn. Anybody who had been in Scipio any length of time knew why