Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird

What a time to be alive!

So there I was marching as purposefully as anybody toward Fifth Avenue. According to plan, I began to study the faces coming at me, looking for a familiar one that might be of some use to me. I was prepared to be patient. It would be like panning for gold, I thought, like looking for a glint of the precious in a dish of sand.

When I had got no farther than the curb at Fifth Avenue, though, my warning systems went off earsplittingly: "Beep, beep, beep! Honk, honk, honk! Rowrr, rowrr, rowrr!"

Positive identification had been made!

Coming right at me was the husk of the man who had stolen Sarah Wyatt from me, the man I had ruined back in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. He had not seen me yet. He was Leland Clewes!

He had lost all his hair, and his feet were capsizing in broken shoes, and the cuffs of his trousers were frayed, and his right arm appeared to have died. Dangling at the end of it was a battered sample case. Clewes had become an unsuccessful salesman, as I would find out later, of advertising matchbooks and calendars.

He is nowadays, incidentally, a vice-president in the Diamond Match Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

In spite of all that had happened to him, though, his face, as he came toward me, was illuminated as always with an adolescent, goofy good will. He had worn that expression even in a photograph of his entering prison in Georgia, with the warden looking up at him as the secretary of state used to do. When Clewes was young, older men were always looking up at him as though to say, "That's my boy."

Now he saw me!

The eye-contact nearly electrocuted me. I might as well have stuck my nose into a lamp socket!

I went right past him and in the opposite direction. I had nothing to say to him, and no wish to stand and listen to all the terrible things he was entitled to say to me.

When I gained the curb, though, and the lights changed, and we were separated by moving cars, I dared to look back at him.

Clewes was facing me. Plainly, he had not yet come up with a name for me. He pointed at me with his free hand, indicating that he knew I had figured in his life in some way. And then he made that finger twitch like a metronome, ticking off possible names for me. This was fun for him. His feet were apart, his knees were bent, and his expression said that he remembered this much, anyway: We had been involved years ago in some sort of wildness, in a boyish prank of some kind.

I was hypnotized.

As luck would have it, there were religious fanatics behind him, barefoot and chanting and dancing in saffron robes. Thus did he appear to be a leading man in a musical comedy.

Nor was I without my own supporting cast. Willy-nilly, I had placed myself between a man wearing sandwich boards and a top hat, and a little old woman who had no home, who carried all her possessions in shopping bags. She wore enormous purple-and-black basketball shoes. They were so out of scale with the rest of her that she looked like a kangaroo.

My companions were both speaking to passers-by. The man in the sandwich boards was saying such things as "Put women back in the kitchen," and "God never meant women to be the equals of men," and so on. The shopping-bag lady seemed to be scolding strangers for their obesity, calling them, as I understood her, "stuck-up fats," and "rich fats," and "snooty fats," and "fats" of a hundred other varieties.

The thing was: I had been away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so long that I could no longer detect that she was calling people "farts" in the accent of the Cambridge working class.

And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!

Good God! What a reaper and binder life can be sometimes!

When Leland Clewes, on the other side of Fifth Avenue, realized who I was, he formed his mouth into a perfect "O." I could not hear his saying "Oh," but I could see his saying; "Oh." He was making fun of our encounter after all these years, overacting his surprise and dismay like an actor in a silent movie.

Plainly, he was going to come back across the street as soon, as the lights changed. Meanwhile, all those fake Hindu imbeciles in saffron robes continued to chant and dance behind him.

There was still time for me to flee. What made me hold my ground, I think, was this: the need to prove myself a gentleman. During the bad old days, when I had testified against him, people who wrote about us, speculating as to who was telling the truth and who was not, concluded for the most part that he was a real gentleman, descended from a long line of gentlemen, and that I was a person of Slavic background only pretending to be a gentleman. Honor and bravery and truthfulness, then, would mean everything to him and very little to me.

Other contrasts were pointed out, certainly. With every new edition of the papers and news magazines, seemingly, I became shorter and he became taller. My poor wife became more gross and foreign, and his wife became more of an American golden girl. His friends became more numerous and respectable, and mine couldn't even be found under damp rocks anymore. But what troubled me most in my very bones was the idea that he was honorable and I was not. Thus, twenty-six years later, did this little Slavic jailbird hold his ground.

Across the avenue he came, the former Anglo-Saxon champion, a happy, ramshackle scarecrow now.

I was bewildered by his happiness. "What," I asked myself, "can this wreck have to be so happy about?"

So there we were reunited, with the shopping-bag lady looking on and listening. He put down his sample case and he extended his right hand. He made a joke, echoing the meeting of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in Darkest Africa: "Walter F. Starbuck, I presume."

And we might as well have been in Darkest Africa, for all anybody knew or cared about us anymore. Most people, if they remembered us at all, believed us dead, I suppose. And we had never been as significant in American history as we had sometimes thought we were. We were, if I may be forgiven, farts in a windstorm — or, as the shopping-bag lady would have called us, "fats in a windstorm."

Did I harbor any bitterness against him for having stolen my girl so long ago? No. Sarah and I had loved each other, but we would never have been happy as man and wife. We could never have gotten a sex life going. I had never persuaded her to take sex seriously. Leland Clewes had succeeded, where I had failed — much to her grateful amazement, I am sure.

What tender memories did I have of Sarah? Much talk about human suffering and what could be done about it — and then infantile silliness for relief. We collected jokes for each other, to use when it was time for relief. We became addicted to talking to each other on the telephone for hours. Those talks were the most agreeable narcotic I have ever known. We became disembodied — like free-floating souls on the planet

Vicuna. If there was a long silence, one or the other of us would end it with the start of a joke.

"What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?" she might ask me.

"I don't know," I would say.

"You can't hear an enzyme," she would say, and the silly jokes would go on and on — even though she had probably seen something horrible at the hospital that day.

I was about to say to him gravely, watchfully but sincerely, "How are you, Leland? It is good to see you again."

But I never got to say it. The shopping-bag lady, whose voice was loud and piercing, cried out, "Oh, my God! Walter F. Starbuck! Is that really you?" I do not intend to reproduce her accent on the printed page.

I thought she was crazy. I thought that she would have parroted any name Clewes chose to hang on me. If he had called me "Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle," I thought, she would have cried, "Oh, my God! Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle! Is that really you?"