Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [92]
I CROSSED THE lake that morning, as it happens, never to return, to deliver a particular message to the escaped convicts, with the idea of saving lives and property. I knew that the students were on vacation. That left nothing but social nobodies, in which category I surely include the college faculty, members of the Servant Class.
To me this low-grade social mix was ominous. In Vietnam, and then in later show-biz attacks on Tripoli and Panama City and so on, it had been perfectly ordinary for our Air Force to blow communities of nobodies, no matter whose side they were on, to Kingdom Come.
It seemed likely to me, should the Government decide to bomb Scipio, that it would be sensible to bomb the prison, too.
And everything would be taken care of, and no argument.
Next problem?
HOW MANY AMERICANS knew or cared anyway where or what the Mohiga Valley was, or Laos or Cambodia or Tripoli? Thanks to our great educational system and TV, half of them couldn’t even find their own country on a map of the world.
THREE-QUARTERS OF them couldn’t put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.
AS I EXPECTED, I was treated by Scipio’s conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me “The Preacher” or “The Professor,” just as they had on the other side.
I saw that many of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasn’t wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, “Where’s your uniform, Soldier?”
“Preacher,” he said, referring to his skin, “I was born in a uniform.”
ALTON DARWIN HAD set himself up in Tex Johnson’s office in Samoza Hall as President of a new nation. He had been drinking. I do not mean to present any of these escapees as rational or capable of redemption. They did not care if they lived or died. Alton Darwin was glad to see me. Then again, he was glad about everything.
I had to advise him, nonetheless, that he could expect to be bombed unless he and the rest of them got out of town right away. I said their best chance to survive was to go back to the prison and fly white flags everywhere. If they did that right away, they might claim that they had nothing to do with all the killings here. The number of people the escapees killed in Scipio, incidentally, was 5 less than the number I myself had killed single-handedly in the war in Vietnam.
So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a “tempest in a tea-pot,” an expression the Atheist’s Bible tells us is proverbial.
I TOLD ALTON Darwin that if he and his people didn’t want to be bombed and didn’t want to return to the prison, they should take whatever food they could find and disperse to the north or west. I told him one thing he already knew, that the floor of the National Forest to the south and east was so dark and lifeless that anyone going in there would probably starve to death or go mad before he found his way back out of there. I told him another thing he already knew, that there would soon be all these white people to the west and north, having the times of their lives hunting escaped convicts instead of deer.
My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn’t have what they had, who didn’t look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a “Free Fire Zone.” You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.
ALTON DARWIN HEARD me out. And then he told me that he thought I was right, that the prison probably would be bombed. But he guaranteed that Scipio would not be bombed, and that