Welcome to the Monkey House - Kurt Vonnegut [70]
The soldier handed the watch to him. "Here, Joe, you take it anyway. It’s yours." He walked away quickly.
"Man," somebody called after him, "you crazy? You paid fifty dollars for that watch. What business a little boy got with any fifty-dollar watch?"
"No—I ain’t crazy. Are you?"
"Naw, I ain’t crazy. Neither one of us crazy, I guess. Joe—want a knife? You got to promise to be careful with it, now. Always cut away from yourself. Hear? Lieutenant, when you get back, you tell him always cut away from hisself."
"I don’t want to go back. I want to stay with papa," said Joe tearfully.
"Soldiers can’t take little boys with them, Joe," said the lieutenant in German. "And we’re leaving early in the morning."
"Will you come back for me?" said Joe.
"We’ll come back if we can, Joe. Soldiers never know where they’ll be from one day to the next. We’ll come back for a visit, if we can."
"Can we give old Joe this case of D bars, lieutenant?" said a soldier carrying a cardboard carton of chocolate bars.
"Don’t ask me," said the lieutenant. "I don’t know anything about it. I never saw anything of any case of D bars, never heard anything about it."
"Yessir." The soldier laid his burden down on the jeep’s back seat.
"He ain’t gonna let go," said the sergeant miserably. "You drive, lieutenant, and me and Joe’ll sit over there."
The lieutenant and the sergeant changed places, and the jeep began to move.
" ’By, Joe!"
"You be a good boy, Joe!"
"Don’t you eat all that chocolate at once, you hear?"
"Don’t cry, Joe. Give us a smile."
"Wider, boy—that’s the stuff!"
"Joe, Joe, wake up, Joe." The voice was that of Peter, the oldest boy in the orphanage, and it echoed damply from the stone walls.
Joe sat up, startled. All around his cot were the other orphans, jostling one another for a glimpse of Joe and the treasures by his pillow.
"Where did you get the hat, Joe—and the watch, and knife?" said Peter. "And what’s in the box under your bed?"
Joe felt his head, and found a soldier’s wool knit cap there. "Papa," he mumbled sleepily.
"Papa!" mocked Peter, laughing.
"Yes," said Joe. "Last night I went to see my papa, Peter."
"Could he speak German, Joe?" said a little girl wonderingly.
"No, but his friend could," said Joe.
"He didn’t see his father," said Peter. "Your father is far, far away, and will never come back. He probably doesn’t even know you’re alive."
"What did he look like?" said the girl.
Joe glanced thoughtfully around the room. "Papa is as high as this ceiling," he said at last. "He is wider than that door." Triumphantly, he took a bar of chocolate from under his pillow. "And as brown as that!" He held out the bar to the others. "Go on, have some. There is plenty more."
"He doesn’t look anything like that, said Peter. "You aren’t telling the truth, Joe."
"My papa has a pistol as big as this bed, almost, Peter," said Joe happily, "and a cannon as big as this house. And there were hundreds and hundreds like him."
"Somebody played a joke on you, Joe," said Peter. "He wasn’t your father. How do you know he wasn’t fooling you?"
"Because he cried when he left me," said Joe simply. "And he promised to take me back home across the water as fast as he could." He smiled airily. "Not like the river, Peter— across more water than you’ve ever seen. He promised, and then I let him go."
(1953)
REPORT ON THE BARNHOUSE EFFECT
LET ME BEGIN by saying that I don’t know any more about where Professor Arthur Barnhouse is hiding than anyone else does. Save for one short, enigmatic message left in my mailbox on Christmas Eve, I have not heard from him since his disappearance a year and a half ago.
What’s more, readers of this article will be disappointed if they expect to learn how they can bring about the so-called "Barnhouse Effect." If I were able and willing to give away that secret, I would certainly be something more important than a psychology instructor.
I have been urged to write this report because I did research under the professor’s direction and because I was the first to learn of his astonishing