Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash. “God be with you, boys!” he said, and that echoed and echoed. And then he said, “If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming, just ask for Wild Bob!”
I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare.
Billy Pilgrim was packed into a boxcar with many other privates. He and Roland Weary were separated. Weary was packed into another car in the same train.
There were narrow ventilators at the corners of the car, under the eaves. Billy stood by one of these, and, as the crowd pressed against him, he climbed part way up a diagonal corner brace to make more room. This placed his eyes on a level with the ventilator, so he could see another train about ten yards away.
Germans were writing on the cars with blue chalk—the number of persons in each car, their rank, their nationality, the date on which they had been put aboard. Other Germans were securing the hasps on the car doors with wire and spikes and other trackside trash. Billy could hear somebody writing on his car, too, but he couldn’t see who was doing it.
Most of the privates on Billy’s car were very young—at the end of childhood. But crammed into the corner with Billy was a former hobo who was forty years old.
“I been hungrier than this,” the hobo told Billy. “I been in worse places than this. This ain’t so bad.”
A man in a boxcar across the way called out through the ventilator that a man had just died in there. So it goes. There were four guards who heard him. They weren’t excited by the news.
“Yo, yo,” said one, nodding dreamily. “Yo, yo.”
And the guards didn’t open the car with the dead man in it. They opened the next car instead, and Billy Pilgrim was enchanted by what was in there. It was like heaven. There was candlelight, and there were bunks with quilts and blankets heaped on them. There was a cannonball stove with a steaming coffeepot on top. There was a table with a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and a sausage on it. There were four bowls of soup.
There were pictures of castles and lakes and pretty girls on the walls. This was the rolling home of the railroad guards, men whose business it was to be forever guarding freight rolling from here to there. The four guards went inside and closed the door.
A little while later they came out smoking cigars, talking contentedly in the mellow lower register of the German language. One of them saw Billy’s face at the ventilator. He wagged a finger at him in affectionate warning, telling him to be a good boy.
The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on their car. The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened the dead man’s car and went inside. The dead man’s car wasn’t crowded at all. There were just six live colonels in there—and one dead one.
The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob. So it goes.
During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for air-planes—that it was carrying prisoners of war.
• • •
The war was nearly over. The locomotives began to move east in late December. The war would end in May. German prisons everywhere were absolutely full, and there was no longer any food for the prisoners to eat, and no longer any fuel to keep them warm. And yet—here came more prisoners.
Billy Pilgrim’s train, the longest train of all, did not move for two days.
“This ain’t bad,” the hobo told Billy on the second day. “This ain’t nothing at all.”
Billy