Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [42]
Cleveland Lawes was reading The Gulag Archipelago now, an account of the prison system in the Soviet Union by another former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
So there I was all alone on a bench in the middle of nowhere again. I entered a period of catatonia again—staring straight ahead at nothing, and every so often clapping my old hands three times.
If it had not been for that clapping, Cleveland Lawes tells me now, he would never have become curious about me.
But I became his business by clapping my hands. He had to find out why I did it.
Did I tell him the truth about the clapping? No. It was too complicated and silly. I told him that I had been daydreaming about the past, and that whenever I remembered an especially happy moment, I would lift my hands from my lap, and I would clap three times.
He offered me a ride into Atlanta.
And there I was now, after only half an hour of freedom, sitting in the front seat of a parked limousine. So far so good.
And if Cleveland Lawes had not offered me a ride into Atlanta, he would never have become what he is today, personnel director of the Transico Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. Transico has limousine services and taxicab fleets and car-rental agencies and parking lots and garages all over the Free World. You can even rent furniture from Transico. Many people do.
I asked him if he thought his passengers would mind my coming along to Atlanta.
He said that he had never seen them before, and that he never expected to see them again—that they did not work for RAMJAC. He added the piquant detail that he had not known that his chief passenger had been Virgil Greathouse until the arrival at the prison. Until that moment Greathouse had been disguised by a false beard.
I craned my neck for a look into the backseat, and there the beard was, with one of its wire earloops hooked over a door handle.
Cleveland Lawes said as a joke that he wasn’t sure Greathouse’s lawyers would come back out again. “When they were looking over the prison,” he said, “seemed to me they were trying it on for size.”
He asked me if I had ever ridden in a limousine before. For simplicity’s sake I told him, “No.” As a child of course, I had often ridden beside my father in the front seat of Alexander Hamilton McCone’s various limousines. In my youth, as I was preparing for Harvard, I had often ridden in the backseat with Mr. McCone, with a glass partition between myself and my father. The partition had not seemed strange or even suggestive to me at the time.
And when in Nuremberg I had been master of that grotesque Fafner of a Mercedes touring car. But it had been an open car, freakish even without the bullet holes in the trunk lid and the rear windshield. The status it gave me among the Bavarians was that of a pirate—in temporary possession of stolen goods that would certainly be restolen, again and again. But, sitting there outside the prison, I realized that I had not sat in a real limousine for perhaps forty-five years! As high as I had risen in public service, I had never been entitled to a limousine, had never been within three promotions of having one of my own or even the occasional use of one. Nor had I ever so beguiled a superior who had one that he had said to me, “Young man—I want to talk to you more about this. You come in my car with me.”
Leland Clewes, on the other hand, though not entitled to one of his own, was forever riding around in limousines with adoring old men.
No matter.
Calm down.
Cleveland Lawes commented that I sounded like an educated man to him.
I admitted to having gone to Harvard.
This allowed him to tell me about his having been a prisoner of the Chinese communists in North Korea, for the Chinese major in charge of his prison had been a Harvard man. The major would have been about my age, and possibly even a classmate, but I had never befriended