Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [55]
“Can I make a guess?” said Kilgore Trout. “You saw through a time window.”
“A what?” said Valencia.
“He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?”
“No,” said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found the box containing the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia. He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was there to see.
“For me?” said Valencia.
“Yes.”
“Oh, my God,” she said. Then she said it louder, so other people heard. They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a star in it. “Oh, my God,” she said. She gave Billy a big kiss. She said, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
There was a lot of talk about what wonderful jewelry Billy had given to Valencia over the years. “My God—” said Maggie White, “she’s already got the biggest diamond I ever saw outside of a movie.” She was talking about the diamond Billy had brought back from the war.
The partial denture he had found inside his little impresario’s coat, incidentally, was in his cufflinks box in his dresser drawer. Billy had a wonderful collection of cufflinks. It was the custom of the family to give him cufflinks on every Father’s Day. He was wearing Father’s Day cufflinks now. They had cost over one hundred dollars. They were made out of ancient Roman coins. He had one pair of cufflinks upstairs which were little roulette wheels that really worked. He had another pair which had a real thermometer in one and a real compass in the other.
Billy now moved about the party—outwardly normal. Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things. Trout believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved.
“You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?” Trout asked Billy.
“No.”
“The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he’ll realize there’s nothing under him. He thinks he’s standing on thin air. He’ll jump a mile.”
“He will?”
“That’s how you looked—as though you all of a sudden realized you were standing on thin air.”
The barbershop quartet sang again. Billy was emotionally racked again. The experience was definitely associated with those four men and not what they sang.
Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:
’Leven cent cotton, forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Pray for the sunshine, ’cause it will rain.
Things gettin’ worse, drivin’ all insane;
Built a nice bar, painted it brown;
Lightnin’ came along and burnt it down:
No use talkin’, any man’s beat,
With ’leven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
’Leven cent cotton, a car-load of tax,
The load’s too heavy for our poor backs …
And so on.
Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home.
• • •
Trout would have come upstairs with him if Billy hadn’t told him not to. Then Billy went into the upstairs bathroom, which was dark. He closed and locked the door. He left it dark, and gradually became aware that he was not alone. His son was in there.
“Dad—?” his son said in the dark. Robert, the future Green Beret, was seventeen then. Billy liked him, but didn’t know him very well. Billy couldn’t help suspecting that there wasn’t much to know about Robert.
Billy flicked on the light. Robert was sitting on the toilet with his pajama bottoms around his ankles. He was wearing an electric guitar, slung around his neck on a strap. He had just bought the guitar that day. He couldn’t play it yet and, in fact, never learned to play it. It was a nacreous pink.
“Hello, son,” said Billy Pilgrim.
Billy went into his bedroom, even though there were guests to be entertained downstairs. He lay down on his bed, turned on the Magic Fingers. The mattress trembled, drove a dog out from under the bed. The dog was Spot. Good old Spot was still alive in those days. Spot lay down again in a corner.
Billy thought hard about the