Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [68]
Crazy people lived in there.
I told him somebody was sick in there, and asked what I could do for him.
He said he had this big box for me from St. Louis, Missouri.
I SAID I didn’t know anybody in St. Louis, Missouri, and wasn’t expecting a big box from anywhere. But he proved to me that it was addressed to me all right, so I said, “OK, let’s see it.” It turned out to be my old footlocker from Vietnam, which I had left behind when the excrement hit the air-conditioning, when I was ordered to take charge of the evacuation from the roof of the embassy.
Its arrival was not a complete surprise. Several months earlier I had received a notice of its existence in a huge Army warehouse that was indeed on the edge of St. Louis, where all sorts of unclaimed personal property of soldiers was stored, stuff ditched on battlefields or whatever. Some idiot must have put my footlocker on one of the last American planes to flee Vietnam, thus depriving the enemy of my razor, my toothbrush, my socks and underwear, and, as it happened, the late Jack Patton’s final birthday present to me, a copy of Black Garterbelt. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, “Yes.” A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that.
So I had the UPS man help me lug it into the garage. It wasn’t very heavy. It was just unwieldy.
The Mercedes was parked out front. I hadn’t noticed yet that kids from the town had cored it again. All 4 tires were flat again.
COUGH, COUGH.
THE UPS MAN was really only a boy still. He was so childlike and new to his job that he had to ask me what was inside the box.
“If the Vietnam War was still going on,” I said, “it might have been you in there.” I meant he might have wound up in a casket.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Never mind,” I said. I knocked off the lock and hasp with a hammer. I lifted the lid of what was indeed a sort of casket to me. It contained the remains of the soldier I used to be. On top of everything else, lying flat and face up, was that copy of Black Garterbelt.
“Wow,” said the kid. He was awed by the woman on the magazine cover. He might have been an Astronaut on his first trip in space.
“Have you ever considered being a soldier?” I asked him. “I think you’d make a good one.”
I NEVER SAW him again. He could have been fired soon after that, and gone looking for work elsewhere. He certainly wasn’t going to last long as a UPS man if he was going to hang around like a kid on Christmas morning until he found out what was inside all the different packages.
I STAYED IN the garage. I didn’t want to go into the house. I didn’t want to go outdoors again, either. So I sat down on my footlocker and read “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore” in Black Garterbelt. It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of lightyears long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the title, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don’t blame him. I can’t think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete’s foot.
The Elders agreed at the meeting that the only practical way for life to travel great distances through space was in the form of extremely small and durable plants and animals hitching rides on meteors that ricocheted off their planets.
But no germs tough enough to survive a trip like that had yet evolved anywhere. Life was too easy for them. They were a bunch of creampuffs. Any creature they infected, chemically speaking, was as challenging as so much chicken soup.
THERE WERE PEOPLE on Earth at the time of the meeting, but they were just more hot slop for the germs to swim in. But they had extra-large brains, and some of them could talk. A few could even read and write!