Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [86]
“No,” he said. But as I’ve said, there were other veterans there who had heard of me and knew, among other things, that I had pitched a grenade into the mouth of a tunnel one time, and killed a woman, her mother, and her baby hiding from helicopter gunships which had strafed her village right before we got there.
Unforgettable.
You know who was the Ruling Class that time? Eugene Debs Hartke was the Ruling Class.
DOWN WITH THE Ruling Class!
JOHN DONNER WAS unhappy on our trip back to Scipio from the prison. I had landed a job, and he hadn’t. His son’s bicycle had been stolen in the prison parking lot.
The Mexicans have a favorite dish they call “twice-fried beans.” Thanks to me, although Donner never found out, that bicycle was now a twice-stolen bicycle. One week later, Donner and the boy dematerialized from this valley as mysteriously as they had materialized, leaving no forwarding address.
Somebody or something must have been catching up with them.
I PITIED THAT boy. But if he is still alive, he, like me, is a grownup now.
SOMEBODY WAS CATCHING up with me, too, but ever so slowly. I am talking about my illegitimate son out in Dubuque, Iowa. He was only 15 then. He didn’t even know my name yet. He had yet to do as much detective work to discover the name and location of his father as I have done to identify the murderer of Letitia Smiley, Tarkington College’s 1922 Lilac Queen.
I MADE THE acquaintance of his mother while sitting alone at a bar in Manila, soon after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Vietnam. I didn’t want to talk to anybody of either sex. I was fed up with the human race. I wanted nothing more than to be left strictly alone with my thoughts.
Add those to my growing collection of Famous Last Words.
THIS REASONABLY PRETTY but shopworn woman sat down on a stool next to mine. “Forgive my intrusion on your thoughts,” she said, “but somebody told me that you are the man they call ‘The Preacher.’ ” She pointed out a Master Sergeant in a booth with 2 prostitutes who could not have been much over 15 years of age.
“I don’t know him,” I said.
“He didn’t say he knew you,” she said. “He’s heard you speak. So have a lot of other soldiers I’ve talked to.”
“Somebody had to speak,” I said, “or we couldn’t have had a war.”
“Is that why they call you ‘The Preacher’?” she said.
“Who knows,” I said, “in a world as full of baloney as this 1 is?” I had been called that as far back as West Point because I never used profanity. During my first 2 years in Vietnam, when the only troops I gave pep talks to were those who served under me, I was called “The Preacher” because it sounded sinister, as though I were a puritanical angel of death. Which I was, I was.
“Would you rather I went away?” she said.
“No,” I said, “because I think there is every chance we could wind up in bed together tonight. You look intelligent, so you must be as blue as I am about our nation’s great unvictory. I worry about you. I’d like to cheer you up.”
What the heck.
It worked.
IF IT AIN’T broke, don’t fix it.
34
I WAS REASONABLY happy teaching at the prison. I raised the level of literacy by about 20 percent, with each newly literate person teaching yet another one. I wasn’t always happy with what they chose to read afterward.
One man told me that literacy made it a lot more fun for him to masturbate.
I DID NOT loaf. I like to teach.
I dared some of the more intelligent prisoners to prove to me that the World was round, to tell me the difference between noise and music, to tell me how physical traits were inherited, to tell me how to determine the height of a guard tower without climbing it, to tell me what was ridiculous about the Greek legend which said that a boy carried a calf around a barn every day, and pretty soon he was a man who could carry a bull around the barn every day, and so on.
I showed them a chart a fundamentalist preacher from downtown Scipio had passed out to Tarkington students at