Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [88]
How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.
HIROSHI MATSUMOTO CALLED this valley a “hellhole” and the “anus of the Universe.” But he didn’t leave it until he was kicked out of here.
I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn’t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: “What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?”
THE LAST TIME I saw him was on the night of the prison break. We had been awakened by the racket of the Jamaicans’ assault on the prison. We both came running out onto the street in front of our houses barefoot and in our nightclothes, although the temperature must have been minus 10 degrees centigrade.
The name of our main street in the ghost town was Clinton Street, the name of the main street in Scipio. Can you imagine that: two communities so close geographically, and yet in olden times so separate socially and economically that, with all the street names they might have chosen, they both named their main street Clinton Street?
THE WARDEN TRIED to reach the prison on a cordless telephone. He got no answer. His 3 house servants were looking out at us from upstairs windows. They were convicts over 70 years old, serving life sentences without hope of parole, long forgotten by the outside world, and coked to the gills on Thor-azine.
My mother-in-law came out on our porch. She called to me, “Tell him about the fish I caught! Tell him about that fish I caught!”
The Warden said to me that a boiler up at the prison must have blown, or maybe the crematorium. It sounded to me like military weaponry, whose voices he had never heard. He hadn’t even heard the atomic bomb go off. He had only felt the hot whoosh afterward.
And then all the lights on our side of the lake went off. And then we heard the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” floating down from the blacked-out penitentiary.
THERE WAS NO way that the Warden and I, even with massive doses of LSD, could have imagined what was going on up there. We were faulted afterward for not having alerted Scipio. As far as that goes, Scipio, hearing the explosion and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all the rest of it across the frozen lake, might have been expected to take some defensive action. But it did not.
Survivors over there I talked to afterward said they had just pulled the covers over their heads and gone to sleep again. What could be more human?
WHAT WAS HAPPENING up there, as I’ve already said, was a stunningly successful attack on the prison by Jamaicans wearing National Guard uniforms and waving American flags. They had a public-address system mounted atop an armored personnel carrier and were playing the National Anthem. Most of them probably weren’t even American citizens!
But what Japanese farm boy, serving a 6-month tour of duty on a dark continent, would be crazy enough to open fire on seeming natives in full battle dress, who were waving flags and playing their hellish music?
No such boy existed. Not that night.
IF THE JAPANESE had started shooting, they would have lost their lives like the defenders of the Alamo. And for what?
FOR SONY?
HIROSHI MATSUMOTO THREW on some clothes! He drove up the hill in his Isuzu jeep!
He was fired upon by the Jamaicans!
He bailed out of his Isuzu! He ran into the National Forest!
He got lost in the pitch blackness. He was wearing sandals and no socks.
It took him 2 days to find his way back out of the forest, which was almost as dark in the daytime as it was at night.
Yes. And gangrene was feasting on his frostbitten feet.
I MYSELF STAYED down by the lake.
I sent