Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [90]
If they hadn’t fired me, she probably would have left this valley, and would be alive today.
If they hadn’t fired me, I would probably be lying where she is, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
DWIGHT CASEY IS still alive, I think. His wife came into a great deal of money soon after he replaced me. He quit at the end of the academic year and moved to the south of France.
His wife’s family was big in the Mafia. She could have taught but didn’t. She had a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Rutgers. All he had was a BS in Hotel Management from Cornell.
THE BATTLE OF Scipio lasted 5 days. It lasted 2 days longer than the Battle of Gettysburg, at which Elias Tarkington was shot by a Confederate soldier who mistook him for Abraham Lincoln.
On the night of the prison break, I was as helpless a voyeur, once the attack had begun, as Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg or Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.
There was 1 shot fired by someone in Scipio. I will never know who did it. It was some night owl with a loaded gun in easy reach. Whoever did it must have been killed soon afterward, otherwise he would have bragged about what he had done so early in the game.
THOSE WERE GOOD soldiers who crossed the ice. Several of them had been in Vietnam, and so, like me, had had lessons in Military Science on full scholarships from the Government. Others had had plenty of experience with shooting and being shot at, often from early childhood on, and so found a single shot unremarkable. They saved their ammunition until they could see clearly what they were shooting at.
When those seasoned troops went ashore, that was when they commenced firing. They were stingy with their bullets. There would be a bang, and then silence for several minutes, and then, when another target appeared, maybe a bleary-eyed householder coming out his front door or peering out a window, with or without a weapon, there would be another bang or 2 or 3 bangs, and then silence again. The escaped convicts, or Freedom Fighters as they would soon call themselves, had to assume, after all, that many if not most households had firearms, and that their owners had long daydreamed of using them with deadly effect should precisely what was happening happen. The Freedom Fighters had no choice. I would have done the same thing, had I been in their situation.
Bang. Somebody else would jerk backward and downward, like a professional actor on a TV show.
THE BIGGEST FLURRY of shots came from what I guessed from afar to be the parking lot in back of the Black Cat Café, where the prostitutes parked their vans. The men who visited the vans that late at night had handguns with them, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
AND THEN I could tell from the sporadic firing that the Freedom Fighters had begun to climb the hill to the college, which was brightly lit all night every night to discourage anybody who might be tempted to do harm up here. From my point of view across the lake, Tarkington might have been mistaken for an emerald-studded Oz or City of God or Camelot.
YOU CAN BET I did not go back to sleep that night. I listened and listened for sirens, for helicopters, for the rumble of armored vehicles, for proofs that the forces of law and order would soon put a stop to the violence in the valley with even greater violence. At dawn the valley was as quiet as ever, and the red light on top of the water tower on the summit of Musket Mountain, as though nothing remarkable had happened over there, winked off and on, off and on.
I WENT NEXT door to the Warden’s house. I woke up his 3 servants. They had gone back to bed after the Warden charged up the hill in his Isuzu. These were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in