Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [85]
I had to wait for Donner outside the Warden’s Office. He was my ticket back to civilization, to my home and family and copy of Black Garterbelt. I didn’t watch Howdy Doody on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him.
He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?”
THE 3 VIOLENT crimes that had gotten Abdullah into Athena were murders in drug wars. He himself would be shot dead with buckshot and slugs after the prison break, while carrying a flag of truce, by Whitey VanArsdale, the mechanic, and Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief.
“Excuse me,” I said to him, “but may I ask what you are reading?”
He displayed the book’s cover so I could read it for myself. The title was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Cough.
Abdullah was summoned to the Warden’s Office, incidentally, because he was 1 of several persons, guards as well as convicts, who claimed to have seen a castle flying over the prison. The Warden wanted to find out if some new hallucinatory drug had been smuggled in, or whether the whole place was finally going insane, or what on Earth was happening.
THE PROTOCOLS OF the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its title was parodied by the author of the story in Black Garterbelt, and its paranoia, too.
The great American inventor and industrialist Henry Ford thought it was a genuine document. He had it published in this country back when my father was a boy. Now here was a black convict in irons, who had the gift of literacy, who was taking it seriously. It would turn out that there were 100s of copies circulating in the prison, printed in Libya and passed out by the ruling gang at Athena, the Black Brothers of Islam.
THAT SUMMER I would start a literacy program in the prison, using people like Abdullah Akbahr as proselytizers for reading and writing, going from cell to cell and offering lessons. Thanks to me, 1,000s of former illiterates would be able to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the time of the prison break.
I denounced that book, but couldn’t keep it from circulating. Who was I to oppose the Black Brothers, who regularly exercised what the State would not, which was the death penalty.
ABDULLAH AKBAHR RATTLED and clinked his fetters. “This any way to treat a veteran?” he said.
He had been a Marine in Vietnam, so he never had to listen to one of my pep talks. I was strictly Army. I asked him if he had ever heard of an Army officer they called