Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [45]
“When he was down here,” said Lawes, “Mr. Leen told me this was going to happen. It was the catfood company he wanted—not The New York Times.”
The two lawyers got into the backseat of the limousine. They weren’t subdued at all. They were laughing about the guard who looked like the President of the United States. “I felt like saying to him,” said one, “‘Mr. President, why don’t you just pardon him right here and now? He’s suffered enough, and he could get in some good golf this afternoon.’”
One of them tried on the false beard, and the other one said he looked like Karl Marx. And so on. They were incurious about me. Cleveland Lawes told them that I had been visiting my son. They asked me what my son was in for and I said, “Mail fraud.” That was the end of the conversation.
So off we went to Atlanta. There was a curious object stuck by means of a suction cup to the glove compartment in front of me, I remember. Coming out of the cup and aimed at my breastbone was what looked like about a foot of green garden hose. At the end of the shaft was a white plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate. Once we got going, the wheel began to hypnotize me, bobbing up and down when we went over bumps, swaying this way and then that way as we went around curves.
So I asked about it. It was a toy steering wheel, it turned out. Lawes had a seven-year-old son he sometimes took with him on trips. The little boy could pretend to be steering the limousine with the plastic wheel. There had been no such toy when my own son was little. Then again, he wouldn’t have enjoyed it much. Even at seven, young Walter hated to go anywhere with his mother and me.
I said it was a clever toy.
Lawes said it could be an exciting one, too, especially if the person with the real steering wheel was drunk and having close shaves with oncoming trucks and sideswiping parked cars and so on. He said that the President of the United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer.
He let me off at the airport.
The planes to New York City were all overbooked, it turned out. I did not get out of Atlanta until five o’clock that afternoon. That was all right with me. I skipped lunch, having no appetite. I found a paperback book in a toilet stall, so I read that for a while. It was about a man who, through ruthlessness, became the head of a big international conglomerate. Women were crazy about him. He treated them like dirt, but they just came back for more. His son was a drug addict and his daughter was a nymphomaniac.
My reading was interrupted once by a Frenchman who spoke to me in French and pointed to my left lapel. I thought at first that I had set myself on fire again, even though I didn’t smoke anymore. Then I realized that I was still wearing the narrow red ribbon that identified me as a chevalier in the French Légion d’honneur. Pathetically enough, I had worn it all through my trial, and all the way to prison, too.
I told him in English that it had come with the suit, which I had bought secondhand, and that I had no idea what it was supposed to represent.
He became very icy, “Permettez-moi, monsieur,” he said, and he deftly plucked the ribbon from my lapel as though it had been an insect there.
“Merci,” I said, and I returned to my book.
When there was at last an airplane seat for me, my name was broadcast over the public-address system several times: “Mr. Walter F. Starbuck, Mr. Walter F. Starbuck …”It had been such a notorious name at one time; but I could not now catch sight of anyone who seemed to recognize it, who raised his or her eyebrows in lewd surmise.
Two and a half hours later I was on the island of Manhattan, wearing my trenchcoat to keep out the evening chill. The sun was down. I was staring at an animated display in the window of a store that sold nothing but toy trains.
It was not as though I had no place to go. I was close to where I was going. I had written ahead. I had reserved a room without bath or television for