Jailbird - Kurt Vonnegut [69]
“I had to make up a lot of memories,” she went on, “just to fill up all the empty spaces. There had been a war, I knew, and I remembered how much you hated fascism. I saw you on a beach somewhere—on your back, in a uniform, with a rifle, and with the water washing gently around you. Your eyes were wide open, Walter, because you were dead. You were staring straight up at the sun.”
We were silent for a moment. A yellow bird far above us warbled as though its heart would break. The song of a prothonotary warbler is notoriously monotonous, as I am the first to admit. I am not about to risk the credibility of my entire tale by claiming that prothonotary warblers rival the Boston Pops Orchestra with their songs. Still—they are capable of expressing heartbreak—within strict limits, of course.
“I’ve had the same dream of myself,” I said. “Many’s the time, Mary Kathleen, that I’ve wished it were true.”
“No! No! No!” she protested. “Thank God you’re still alive! Thank God there’s somebody still alive who cares what happens to this country. I thought maybe I was the last one. I’ve wandered this city for years now, Walter, saying to myself, ‘They’ve all died off, the ones who cared.’ And then there you were.”
“Mary Kathleen,” I said, “you should know that I just got out of prison.”
“Of course you did!” she said. “All the good people go to prison all the time. Oh; thank God you’re still alive! We will remake this country and then the world. I couldn’t do it by myself, Walter.”
“No—I wouldn’t think so,” I said.
“I’ve just been hanging on for dear life,” she said. “I haven’t been able to do anything but survive. That’s how alone I’ve been. I don’t need much help, but I do need some.”
“I know the problem,” I said.
“I can still see enough to write, if I write big,” she said, “but I can’t read the stories in newspapers anymore. My eyes—” She said she sneaked into bars and department stores and motel lobbies to listen to the news on television, but that the sets were almost never tuned to the news. Sometimes she would hear a snatch of news on somebody’s portable radio, but the person owning it usually switched to music as soon as the news began.
Remembering the news I had heard that morning, about the police dog that ate a baby, I told her that she wasn’t really missing much.
“How can I make sensible plans,” she said, “if I don’t know what’s going on?”
“You can’t,” I said.
“How can you base a revolution on Lawrence Welk and Sesame Street and All in the Family?” she said. All these shows were sponsored by RAMJAC.
“You can’t,” I said.
“I need solid information,” she said.
“Of course you do,” I said. “We all do.”
“It’s all such crap,” she said. “I find this magazine called People in garbage cans,” she said, “but it isn’t about people. It’s about crap.”
This all seemed so pathetic to me: that a shopping-bag lady hoped to plan her scuttlings about the city and her snoozes among ash cans on the basis of what publications and radio and television could tell her about what was really going on.
It seemed pathetic to her, too. “Jackie Onassis and Frank Sinatra and the Cookie Monster and Archie Bunker make their moves,” she said, “and then I study what they have done, and then I decide what Mary Kathleen O’Looney had better do.
“But now I have you,” she said. “You can be my eyes—and my brains!”
“Your eyes, maybe,” I said. “I haven’t distinguished myself in the brains department recently.”
“Oh—if only Kenneth Whistler were alive, too,” she said.
She might as well have said, “If only Donald Duck were alive, too.” Kenneth Whistler was a labor organizer who had been my idol in the old days—but I felt nothing about him now, had not thought about him for years.
“What a trio we would make,” she went on. “You and me and Kenneth Whistler!”
Whistler would have been a bum, too, by now, I supposed—if he hadn’t died in a Kentucky mine disaster in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-one. He had insisted on being a worker as well as a labor organizer, and would have found modern