Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [94]
BEER, OF COURSE, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
ALTON DARWIN WAS dead before I could complete my long-range plan. His dying words, as I’ve said, were, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.” But I showed it to the hostages.
“What is this supposed to mean?” said Jason Wilder.
“I want you to see what they’ve had me doing,” I said. “You keep talking as though I could turn you loose, if I wanted. I’m as much a prisoner as you are.”
He studied the prospectus, and then he said, “They actually expect to get away with this?”
“No,” I said. “They know this is their Alamo.”
He arched his famous eyebrows in clownish disbelief. He has always looked to me a lot like the incomparable comedian Stanley Laurel. “It would never have occurred to me to compare the rabid chimpanzees who hold us in durance vile with Davy Crockett and James Bowie and Tex Johnson’s great-great-grandfather,” he said.
“I was just talking about hopeless situations,” I said.
“I certainly hope so,” he said.
I might have added, but didn’t, that the martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn’t want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind.
I don’t think Wilder knew that. Not many people in this :ountry do. I certainly never heard that at the Academy. I wouldn’t have known that slavery was what the Alamo was all about if Professor Stern the unicyclist hadn’t told me so.
NO WONDER THERE were so few Black tourists at the Alamo!
UNITS OF THE 82nd Airborne, fresh from the South Bronx, had by then retaken the other side of the lake and herded the prisoners back inside the walls. A big problem over there was that almost every toilet in the prison had been smashed. Who knows why?
What was to be done with the huge quantities of excrement produced hour after hour, day after day, by all these burdens on Society?
We still had plenty of toilets on this side of the lake, which is why this place was made an auxiliary prison almost immediately. Time was of the essence, as the lawyers say.
IMAGINE THE SAME sort of thing happening on a huge rocket ship bound for Betelgeuse.
37
ON THE LAST afternoon of the siege, National Guard units relieved the Airborne troops across the lake. That night, undetected, the paratroops took up positions behind Musket Mountain. Two hours before the next dawn, they came quietly around either side of the mountain, captured the stable, freed the hostages, and then took possession of all of Scipio. They had to kill only 1 person, who was the guard dozing outside the stable. They strangled him with a standard piece of equipment. I had used one just like it in Vietnam. It was a meter of piano wire with a wooden handle at either end.
So that was that.
The defenders were out of ammunition. There were hardly any defenders left anyway. Maybe 10.
AGAIN, I DON’T believe there would have been such delicate microsurgery by the best ground troops available, if it hadn’t been for the social prominence of the Trustees.
They were helicoptered to Rochester, where they were shown on TV. They thanked God and the Army. They said they had never lost hope. They said they were tired but happy, and just wanted to get a hot bath and then sleep in a nice clean bed.
ALL NATIONAL GUARDSMEN who had been south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex during the siege got Combat Infantryman’s Badges. They were so pleased.
The paratroops already had theirs. When they dressed up for the victory parade, they wore campaign ribbons from Costa Rica and Bimini and El Paso and on and on, and from the Battle of the South Bronx, of course. That battle had had to keep on going without their help.
SEVERAL NOBODIES TRIED to get onto a helicopter with the Trustees. There was room. But the only people allowed aboard were on a list which had come all the way from the White House. I saw the list. Tex and Zuzu Johnson were the only locals named.
I watched the