Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [76]
Rothko himself had long since committed suicide.
He had had enough.
He was out of here.
“SHE’S SO SHORT,” Muriel said to me. “I was so surprised how short she was.”
“Who’s so short?” I said.
“Gloria White,” she said.
I ASKED HER what she thought of Henry Kissinger. She said she loved his voice.
I had seen him up on the Quadrangle. Although I had been an instrument of his geopolitics, I felt no connection between him and me. His face was certainly familiar. He might have been, like Gloria White, somebody who had been in a lot of movies I had seen.
I dreamed about him once here in prison, though. He was a woman. He was a Gypsy fortune-teller who looked into her crystal ball but wouldn’t say anything.
I SAID TO Muriel, “You worry me.”
“I what?” she said.
“You look tired,” I said. “Do you get enough sleep?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
“Forgive me,” I said. “None of my business. It’s just that you were so full of life while you were talking about the motorcycle people. When you stopped, it was as though you took off a mask, and you seemed as though you were suddenly all wrung out.”
Muriel knew vaguely who I was. She had seen me with Margaret and Mildred in tow at least twice a week during the short time the ice cream parlor was in business. So I did not have to tell her that I, too, practically speaking, was without a mate. And she had seen with her own eyes how kind and patient I was with my worse than useless relatives.
So she was already favorably disposed to me. She trusted me, and responded with undisguised gratitude to my expressions of concern for her happiness.
“If you want to know the truth,” she said, “I hardly sleep at all, I worry so much about the children.” She had 2 of them. “The way things are going,” she said, “I don’t see how I can afford to send even 1 of them to college. I’m from a family where everybody went to college and never thought a thing about it. But that’s all over now. Neither 1 is an athlete.”
We might have become lovers that night, I think, instead of 2 weeks from then, if an ugly mountain of a man hadn’t entered raging, demanding to know, “All right, where is he? Where’s that kid?”
He was asking about the kid who worked at Tarkington’s stable after school, whose bicycle I had stolen. I had left the kid’s bike in plain view out front. Every other place of business on Clinton Street was boarded up, from the barge terminal to halfway up the hill. So the only place the boy could be, he thought, was inside the Black Cat Café or, worse, inside one of the vans out back in the parking lot.
I PLAYED DUMB.
We went outside with him to find out what bicycle he could possibly be talking about. I offered him the theory that the boy was a good boy, and nowhere near the Black Cat Café, and that some bad person had borrowed the bike and left it there. So he put the bike on the back of his beat-up pickup truck, and said he was late for an appointment for a job interview at the prison across the lake.
“What kind of a job?” I asked.
And he said, “They’re hiring teachers over there.”
I asked if I could come with him.
He said, “Not if you’re going to teach what I want to teach. What do you want to teach?”
“Anything you don’t want to teach,” I said.
“I want to teach shop,” he said. “You want to teach shop?”
“No,” I said.
“Word of honor?” he said.
“Word of honor,” I said.
“OK,” he said, “get in, get in.”
30
TO UNDERSTAND HOW the lower ranks of guards at Athena in those days felt about White people, and never mind Black people, you have to realize that most of them were recruited from Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. On Hokkaido the primitive natives, the Ainus, thought to be very ugly because they were so pallid and hairy, were White people. Genetically speaking, they are just as white as Nancy Reagan. Their ancestors long ago had made the error, when humiliated by superior Asiatic civilizations, of shambling north instead of west to Europe, and eventually, of course, to the Western Hemisphere.