Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [87]
“Fuck you, Andromeda,” said Dwayne, and he wasn’t being coarse. He was echoing billboards and stickers all over town. Other signs said, “Andromeda, We Love You,” and “Earth Has the Hots for Andromeda,” and so on.
There was a knock on the door, and an old friend of the family, the County Sheriff, simultaneously let himself in. “How are you, you old motherfucker?” said Dwayne.
“Can’t complain, shitface,” said the sheriff, and they joshed back and forth like that for a while. Grace chuckled, enjoying their wit. She wouldn’t have chuckled so richly, however, if she had been a little more observant. She might have noticed that the sheriff’s jocularity was very much on the surface. Underneath, he had something troubling on his mind. She might have noticed, too, that he had legal papers in his hand.
“Sit down, you silly old fart,” said Dwayne, “and watch Andromeda get the surprise of her life.”
“The way I understand it,” the sheriff replied, “I’d have to sit there for more than two million years. My old lady might wonder what’s become of me.” He was a lot smarter than Dwayne. He had jizzum on the Arthur C. Clarke, and Dwayne didn’t. You had to have an I.Q. of over 115 to have your jizzum accepted. There were certain exceptions to this: if you were a good athlete or could play a musical instrument or paint pictures, but Dwayne didn’t qualify in any of those departments, either. He had hoped that birdhouse-makers might be entitled to special consideration, but this turned out not to be the case. The Director of the New York Philharmonic, on the other hand, was entitled to contribute a whole quart, if he wanted to. He was sixty-eight years old. Dwayne was forty-two.
There was an old astronaut on the television now. He was saying that he sure wished he could go where his jizzum was going. But he would sit at home instead, with his memories and a glass of Tang. Tang used to be the official drink of the astronauts. It was a freeze-dried orangeade.
“Maybe you haven’t got two million years,” said Dwayne, “but you’ve got at least five minutes. Sit thee doon.”
“What I’m here for—” said the sheriff, and he let his unhappiness show, “is something I customarily do standing up.”
Dwayne and Grace were sincerely puzzled. They didn’t have the least idea what was coming next. Here is what it was: the sheriff handed each one of them a subpoena, and he said, “It’s my sad duty to inform you that your daughter, Wanda June, has accused you of ruining her when she was a child.”
Dwayne and Grace were thunderstruck. They knew that Wanda June was twenty-one now, and entitled to sue, but they certainly hadn’t expected her to do so. She was in New York City, and when they congratulated her about her birthday on the telephone, in fact, one of the things Grace said was, “Well, you can sue us now, honeybunch, if you want to.” Grace was so sure she and Dwayne had been good parents that she could laugh when she went on, “If you want to, you can send your rotten old parents off to jail.”
Wanda June was an only child, incidentally. She had come close to having some siblings, but Grace had aborted them. Grace had taken three table lamps and a bathroom scale instead.
“What does she say we did wrong?” Grace asked the sheriff.
“There’s a separate list of charges inside each of your subpoenas,” he said. And he couldn’t look his wretched old friends in the eye, so he looked at the television instead. A scientist there was explaining why Andromeda had been selected as a target. There were at least eighty-seven chronosynclastic infundibulae, time warps, between Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy. If the Arthur C. Clarke passed through any one of them, the