Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [77]
Those White people on Hokkaido had sure missed a lot. They were way behind practically everybody. And when the man who wanted to teach shop and I presented ourselves at the gate to the road that led through the National Forest to the prison, the 2 guards on duty there were fresh from Hokkaido. For all the respect our being Whites inspired in them, we might as well have been a couple of drunk and disorderly Arapahos.
THE MAN WHO wanted to teach shop said his name was John Donner. On the way over he asked me if I had seen him on the Phil Donahue show on TV. That was a 1-hour show every weekday afternoon, which featured a small group of real people, not actors, who had had the same sort of bad thing happen to them, and had triumphed over it or were barely coping or whatever. There were 2 very similar programs in competition with Donahue, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.
I asked him why he did that. He said he didn’t want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.
I TOLD JOHN Donner that, unfortunately, I couldn’t watch any of those shows, since I taught Music Appreciation in the afternoon, and then Martial Arts after that. I asked him what his particular Donahue show had been about.
“People who were raised in foster homes and got beat up all the time,” he said.
I WOULD SEE plenty of Donahue reruns at the prison, but not Donner’s. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid.
I didn’t see Donner on TV over there, but I did see myself a couple of times, or somebody who looked a whole lot like me in the distance, on old footage of the Vietnam War.
I even yelled 1 time at the prison, “There I am! There I am!”
Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, “Where? Where? Where?”
But they were too late. I was gone again.
Where did I go?
Here I am.
31
JOHN DONNER COULD have been a pathological liar. He could have made that up about being on Donahue. There was something very fishy about him. Then again, he could have been living under the Federal Witness Protection Program, with a new name and a fake biography GRIOT™ had written out for him. Statistically speaking, GRIOT™ would have to put it into a biography every so often, I suppose, that the fictitious subject was on Donahue.
He claimed that the boy he lived with was his son. But he could have kidnapped that kid whose bike I stole. They had come to town only about 18 months before, and kept to themselves.
I AM SURE his last name wasn’t Donner. I have known several Donners. One was a year behind me at the Academy. Two were unrelated Tarkingtonians. One was a First Sergeant in Vietnam who had his arm blown off by a little boy with a homemade handgrenade. Every one of those Donners knew the story of the infamous Donner Party, which got caught in a blizzard back in 1846 while trying to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains in wagons to get to California. Their wagons were very likely made right here in Scipio.
I have just looked up the details in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Chicago and owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland. Rule Britannia!
Those who survived the blizzard did so by becoming cannibals. The final tally, and several women and children were eaten, was 47 survivors out of 87 people who had begun the trip.
Now there’s a subject for Donahue: people who have eaten people.
People who can eat people are the luckiest people in the world.
But when I asked the man who claimed his last name was Donner if he was any relation to the man who led the Donner Party, he didn’t know what I was talking about.
WHOEVER HE REALLY was, he and I wound up side by side on a hard bench in the waiting room outside the office of Athena’s Warden, Hiroshi Matsumoto.
While we sat there, incidentally, some supplier to the prison was stealing the bicycle from the back of Donner’s pickup truck.
A mere detail!