Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [43]
“Yes, sir, it is,” he said. He had been maintaining it single-handedly for the past two years. His mechanics had wandered off one-by-one.
“Young man,” I said, “I’m going to give you a medal for this.” I took a button from my own tattered lapel, and I pinned it to his.
It said this, of course:
42
THE FRONTIERSMAN refused a similar decoration. He asked for food, instead—to sustain him on his long trip back to his native mountains.
We gave him what we had, which was all the hardtack and canned smoked oysters his saddlebags would hold.
• • •
Yes, and Captain Bernard O’Hare and Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio and I took off from the silo on the following dawn. It was a day of such salubrious gravity, that our helicopter expended no more energy than would have an airborne milkweed seed.
As we fluttered over the White House, I waved to it.
“Goodbye,” I said.
• • •
My plan was to fly first to Indianapolis, which had become densely populated with Daffodils. They had been flocking there from everywhere.
We would leave Carlos there, to be cared for by his artificial relatives during his sunset years. I was glad to be getting rid of him. He bored me to tears.
• • •
We would go next to Urbana, I told Captain O’Hare—and then to my childhood home in Vermont.
“After that,” I promised, “the helicopter is yours, Captain. You can fly like a bird wherever you wish. But you’re going to have a rotten time of it, if you don’t give yourself a good middle name.”
“You’re the President,” he said. “You give me a name.”
“I dub thee ‘Eagle-1,’” I said.
He was awfully pleased. He loved the medal, too.
• • •
Yes, and I still had a little tri-benzo-Deportamil left, and I was so delighted to be going simply anywhere, after having been cooped up in Washington, D.C. so long, that I heard myself singing for the first time in years.
I remember the song I sang, too. It was one Eliza and I used to sing a lot in secret, back when we were still believed to be idiots. We would sing it where nobody could hear us—in the mausoleum of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.
And I think now that I will teach it to Melody and Isadore at my birthday party. It is such a good song for them to sing when they set out for new adventures on the Island of Death.
It goes like this:
“Oh, we’re off to see the Wizard,
“The wonderful Wizard of Oz.
“If ever a whiz of a Wiz there was,
“It was the Wizard of Oz.”*
• • •
And so on.
• • •
Hi ho.
* Copyright © 1939, renewed 1966 Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y.
43
MELODY AND ISADORE went down to Wall Street today—to visit Isadore’s large family, the Raspberries. I was invited to become a Raspberry at one time. So was Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa. We both declined.
Yes, and I took a walk of my own—up to the baby’s pyramid at Broadway and Forty-second, then across Forty-third Street to the old Daffodil Club, to what had been the Century Association before that; and then eastward across Forty-eighth Street to the townhouse which was slave quarters for Vera’s farm, which at one time had been my parent’s home.
I encountered Vera herself on the steps of the townhouse. Her slaves were all over in what used to be United Nations Park, planting watermelons and corn and sunflowers. I could hear them singing “Ol’ Man River.” They were so happy all the time. They considered themselves very lucky to be slaves.
They were all Chipmunk-5’s, and about two-thirds of them were former Raspberries. People who wished to become slaves of Vera had to change their middle names to Chipmunk-5.
Hi ho.
• • •
Vera usually labored right along with her slaves. She loved hard work. But now I caught her tinkering idly with a beautiful Zeiss microscope, which one of her slaves had unearthed in the ruins of a hospital only the day before. It had been protected all through the years by its original factory packing case.
Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with childlike seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before.