Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [98]
See the Nigger fly the airplane?
TO GET BACK to Alton Darwin’s question about why Frank Sinatra deserved to win even though he didn’t know anything: I said, “I think he deserves to win because he is like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” The Walt Disney movie about Davy Crockett had been shown over and over again at the prison, so all the convicts knew who Davy Crockett was. And one thing it might be good to bring out at my trial is that I never told the convicts the Mexican General who besieged the Alamo was trying and failing to do what Abraham Lincoln would later do successfully, which was to hold his country together and outlaw slavery.
“How is Sinatra like Davy Crockett?” Alton Darwin asked me.
And I said, “His heart is pure.”
YES, AND THERE is more of my story to tell. But I have just received a piece of news from my lawyer that has knocked the wind out of me. After Vietnam, I thought there was nothing that could ever hit me that hard again. I thought I was used to dead bodies, no matter whose.
Wrong again.
Ah me!
If I tell now who it is that died, and how that person died, died only yesterday, that will seem to complete my story. From a reader’s point of view, there would be nothing more to say but this:
THE END
BUT THERE IS more I want to tell. So I will carry on as though I hadn’t heard the news, albeit doggedly. And I write this:
The Lieutenant Colonel who led the assault on Scipio and then kept locals off the helicopters was also a graduate of the Academy, but maybe 2 score and 7 years younger than myself. When I told him my name and he saw my class ring, he realized who I was and what I used to be. He exclaimed, “My Lord, it’s the Preacher!”
If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know what would have become of me. I guess I would have done what most of the other valley people did, which was to go to Rochester or Buffalo or beyond, looking for any kind of work, minimum wage for sure. The whole area south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex was and still is under Martial Law.
His name was Harley Wheelock III. He told me he and his wife were infertile, so they adopted twin girl orphans from Peru, South America, not Peru, Indiana. They were cute little Inca girls. But he hardly ever got home anymore, his Division was so busy. He was all set to go home on leave from the South Bronx when he was ordered here to put down the prison break and rescue the hostages.
HIS FATHER HARLEY Wheelock II was 3 years ahead of me at the Academy, and died, I already knew, in some kind of accident in Germany, and so never served in Vietnam. I asked Harley III how exactly Harley II had died. He told me his father drowned while trying to rescue a Swedish woman who committed suicide by opening the windows of her Volvo and driving it off a dock and into the Ruhr River at Essen, home, as it happens, of that premier manufacturer of crematoria, A. J. Topf und Sohn.
Small World.
NOW HARLEY III said to me, “You know anything about this excrement hole?” Of course, he himself didn’t say “excrement.” He had never heard of the Mohiga Valley before he was ordered here. Like most people, he had heard of Athena and Tarkington but had no clear idea where they were.
I replied that the excrement hole was home to me, although I had been born in Delaware and raised in Ohio, and that I expected 1 day to be buried here.
“Where’s the Mayor?” he said.
“Dead,” I said, “and all the policemen, too, including the campus cops. And the Fire Chief.”
“So there isn’t any Government?” he said.
“I’d say you’re the Government,” I said.
He used the Name of Our Savior as an explosive expletive, and then added, “Wherever I go, all of a sudden I am the Government. I’m already the Government in the South Bronx, and I’ve got to get back there as quick as I can. So I hereby declare you the Mayor of this excrement hole.” This time he actually said, “excrement hole,” echoing me. “Go down to the City Hall, wherever that is, and start governing.”
He was so decisive! He was so loud!
As though the conversation