Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [84]
“Nobody on this side of the lake believes there is such a thing in this miserable country,” he said.
“Such a thing as what, sir?” I said.
And he said, “Leadership.” As for my sexual irregularities, he said, they seemed to be uniformly heterosexual, and there were no women on his side of the lake. He himself was a bachelor, and members of his staff were not allowed to bring their wives with them, if they had them. “So over here,” he said, “you would truly be Don Juan in Hell. Do you think that you could stand that?”
I said I could, so he offered me a job on a trial basis. I would start work as soon as possible, offering general education mostly on the primary-school level, not all that different from what I had done at Tarkington. An immediate problem was housing. His staff lived in barracks in the shadows of the prison walls, and he himself had a renovated house down by the water and was the only inhabitant of the ghost town, a ghost hamlet, actually, after which the prison was named: Athena.
IF I DIDN’T work out for some reason, he said, he would still need a teacher on the property, who would surely not want to live in the barracks. So he was having another old house in the ghost town made livable, right next to his own. But it wouldn’t be ready for occupancy until August. “Do you think the college will let you stay where you are until then, and meanwhile you could commute to work from over there? You have a car?”
“A Mercedes,” I said.
“Excellent!” he said. “That will give you something in common with the inmates right away.”
“How so?” I said.
“They’re practically all former Mercedes owners,” he said. This was only a slight exaggeration. He told the truth when he said, “We have one man in here who bought his first Mercedes when he was 15 years old.” That was Alton Darwin, whose dying words on the skating rink after the prison break would be, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”
SO THE COLLEGE did let us stay in the Scipio house over the summer. There was no summer session at Tarkington. Who would have come to one? And I commuted to the prison every day.
In the old days, before the Japanese took over Athena, the whole staff was commuters from Scipio and Rochester. They were unionized, and it was their unceasing demands for more and more pay and fringe benefits, including compensation for their travel to and from work, that made the State decide to sell the whole shebang to the Japanese.
MY SALARY WAS what I had been paid by Tarkington. I could keep our Blue Cross—Blue Shield, since the corporation that owned the prison also owned Blue Cross—Blue Shield. No problem!
Cough.
THAT IS ANOTHER thing the prison break cost me: our Blue Cross—Blue Shield.
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IT WOULD WORK out well. When I moved Margaret and Mildred into our new home in the ghost town and pulled down the blinds, it was to them as though we had never left Scipio. There was a surprise present for me on our freshly sodded front lawn, a rowboat. The Warden had found an old boat that had been lying in the weeds behind the ruins of the old Athena Post Office since before I was born, quite possibly. He had had some of his guards fiberglass the outside of it, making it watertight again after all these years.
It looked a lot like the hide-covered Eskimo umiak that used to be in the rotunda outside the Dean of Women’s Office here, with the outlines of the ribs showing through the fiberglass.
I know what happened to a lot of college property after the prison break, the GRIOT™ and so on, but I haven’t a clue what became of that umiak.
If it hadn’t been on display in the rotunda, I and hundreds of Tarkington students and their parents would have gone all the way through life without ever seeing a genuine Eskimo umiak.
I MADE LOVE to Muriel Peck in that boat. I lay on the bottom, and she sat upright, holding my mother-in-law’s fishing rod, pretending to be a perfect lady and all alone.
That was my idea. What a good sport she was!
I DON’T KNOW what became