Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [121]
The more we think about it, the more we’re sure it was meant to be. I never got it straight in my mind about religion in Russia. You don’t mention it. Anyway, we are religious, and we think God singled out Bud and your boy, too, to die in a special way for a special reason. When everybody was asking, "How is it going to end?"—well, maybe this is how God meant for it to end. I don’t see how it can keep on.
Mr. Ivankov, one thing that threw me as much as anything was the way Mr. Koshevoi kept telling the U.N. that Bud was a killer. He called Bud a mad dog and a gangster. I’m glad you don’t feel that way, because that’s the wrong way to feel about Bud. It was flying and not killing he liked. Mr. Koshevoi made a big thing out of how cultured and educated and all your boy was, and how wild and ignorant mine was. He made it sound as though a juvenile delinquent had murdered a college professor.
Bud never was in any trouble with the police, and he didn’t have a cruel streak. He never went hunting, for instance, and he never drove like a crazy man, and he got drunk only one time I know of, and that was an experiment. He was proud of his reflexes, see? His health was on his mind all the time, because he had to be healthy to be a great flyer. I keep looking around for the right word for Bud, and I guess the one Hazel suggested is the best one. It sounded kind of stuffed-up to me at first, but now I’m used to it, and it sounds right. Hazel says Bud was dignified. Man and boy, that’s what he was—straight and serious and polite and pretty much alone.
I think he knew he was going to die young. That one time he got drunk, just to find out what alcohol was, he talked to me more than he’d ever talked before. He was nineteen then. And then was the only time he let me know he knew death was all balled up in what he wanted to do with his life. It wasn’t other people’s deaths he was talking about, Mr. Ivankov. It was his own. "One nice thing about flying," he said to me that night. "What’s that?" I said. "You never know how bad it is till it’s too late," he said, "and when it happens, it happens so fast you never know what hit you."
That was death he was talking about, and a special, dignified, honorable kind of death. You say you were in the war and had a hard time. Same here, so I guess we both know about what kind of death it was that Bud had in mind. It was a soldier’s death.
We got the news he was dead three days after the big rocket went up across the water. The telegram said he had died on a secret mission, and we couldn’t have any details. We had our Congressman, Earl Waterman, find out what he could about Bud. Mr. Waterman came and talked to us personally, and he looked like he had seen God. He said he couldn’t tell us what Bud had done, but it was one of the most heroic things in United States history.
The word they put out on the big rocket we saw launched was that the firing was satisfactory, the knowledge gained was something wonderful, and the missile had been blown up over the ocean somewhere. That was that.
Then the word came that the man in the Russian baby moon was dead. I tell you honestly, Mr. Ivankov, that was good news to us, because that man sailing way up there with all those instruments meant just one thing, and that was a terrible weapon of war.
Then we heard the Russian baby moon had turned into a bunch of baby moons, all spreading apart. Then, this last month, the cat was out of the bag. Two of the baby moons were men. One was your boy, the other was mine.
I’m crying now, Mr. Ivankov. I hope some good comes of the death of our two boys. I guess that’s what millions of fathers have hoped for as long as there have been people. There in the U.N. they’re still arguing about what happened way up in the sky. I’m glad they’ve got around to where everybody, including your Mr. Koshevoi, agrees it was an accident. Bud was up there to get pictures of what your boy was riding in, and to show off for the United States some. He got too close. I like to think they lived a little while after the crash, and tried