Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [74]
AS I UNDERSTAND it, the scientists down there forced invisible particles to reveal their secrets by making them go splat on photographic plates. That isn’t all that different from the way we treated suspected enemy agents in Vietnam sometimes.
Have I already said that I threw one out of a helicopter?
THE TOWNIES DIDN’T have to protect the sensibilities of Lyle’s wife by never saying why the Black Cat Café was so prosperous. She had left him. She discovered in midlife that she was a lesbian, and ran off with the high school’s girls’ gym teacher to Bermuda, where they gave and probably still give sailing lessons.
I made a pass at her one time at an Annual Town-and-Gown Mixer up on the hill. I knew she was a lesbian before she did.
AT THE VERY end of his life 2 years ago, though, when Lyle Hooper was a prisoner of the escaped convicts up in the bell tower, he was addressed by his captors as “Pimp.” It was, “Hey, Pimp, how you like the view?” and “What you think we ought to do with you, Pimp?” and so on. It was cold and wet up there. Snow or rain blown into the belfry fell down through a myriad of bullet holes in the ceiling. Those had been made from below by escaped convicts when they realized that a sniper was up there among the bells.
There was no electricity. All electric and telephone service had been shut off. When I visited Lyle up there, he knew the story of those holes, knew the sniper had been crucified in the stable loft. He knew that the escaped convicts hadn’t decided yet what to do with him. He knew that he had committed what was in their eyes murder pure and simple. He and Whitey VanArsdale had ambushed and killed 3 escaped convicts who were on their way up the old towpath to the head of the lake, to negotiate with the police and politicians and soldiers at the roadblock there. The would-be negotiators were carrying flags of truce, white pillowcases on broomsticks, when Lyle Hooper and Whitey VanArsdale shot them dead.
And then Whitey was himself shot dead almost immediately, but Lyle was taken prisoner.
But what bothered Hooper most when I talked to him up in the bell tower was that his captors called him nothing but “Pimp.”
AT THIS POINT in my story, and in order to simplify the telling, and not to make any political point, let me from now on call the escaped convicts in Scipio what they called themselves, which was “Freedom Fighters.”
SO LYLE HOOPER was without question responsible for the death of 3 Freedom Fighters carrying flags of truce. The Freedom Fighter who was guarding him in the tower when I came to see him, moreover, was the half brother and former partner in the crack business, along with their grandmother, of 1 of the Freedom Fighters he or Whitey had killed.
But all Lyle could talk about was the pain of being called a pimp. To many if not most of the Freedom Fighters, of course, it was no particular insult to call someone a pimp.
LYLE TOLD ME that he had been raised by his paternal grandmother, who made him promise to leave the world a better place than when he found it. He said, “Have I done that, Gene?”
I said he had. Since he was facing execution, I certainly wasn’t going to tell him that, in my experience anyway, ambushes made the world seem an even worse place than it was before.
“I ran a nice, clean place, raised a wonderful son,” he said. “Put out a lot of fires.”
IT WAS THE Trustees who told the Freedom Fighters that Lyle ran a whorehouse. Otherwise they would have thought he was just a restaurateur and Fire Chief.
LYLE HOOPER’S MOOD up there in the bell tower reminded me of my father’s mood after he was let go by Barrytron, and he went on a cruise down the Inland Waterway on the East Coast, from City Island in New York City to Palm Beach, Florida. This was on a motor yacht owned by his old college