Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

In the Mohiga Valley, their skin alone sufficed as a prison uniform.

About half of those who followed Darwin out onto the ice turned back before they reached Scipio. This was before they were fired upon and suffered their first casualty. One of those who went back to the prison told me that he was sickened when he realized how much murder and rape there would be when they reached the other side in just a few minutes.

“I thought about all the little children fast asleep in their beds,” he said. He had handed over the gun he had stolen from the prison armory to the man next to him, there in the middle of beautiful Lake Mohiga. “He didn’t have a gun,” he said, “until I gave him 1.”

“Did you wish each other good luck or anything like that?” I asked him.

“We didn’t say anything,” he told me. “Nobody was saying anything but the man in front.”

“And what was he saying?” I asked.

He replied with terrible emptiness, “‘Follow me, follow me, follow me.’”

“Life’s a bad dream,” he said. “Do you know that?”

Alton Darwin’s charismatic delusions of grandeur went on and on. He declared himself to be President of a new country. He set up his headquarters in the Board of Trustees Room of Samoza Hall, with the big long table for his desk.

I visited him there at high noon on the second day after the great escape. He told me that this new country of his was going to cut down the virgin forest on the other side of the lake and sell the wood to the Japanese. He would use the money to refurbish the abandoned industrial buildings in Scipio down below. He didn’t know yet what they would manufacture, but he was thinking hard about that. He would welcome any suggestions I might have.

Nobody would dare attack him, he said, for fear he would harm his hostages. He held the entire Board of Trustees captive, but not the College President, Henry “Tex” Johnson, nor his wife, Zuzu. I had come to ask Darwin if he had any idea what had become of Tex and Zuzu. He didn’t know.

Zuzu, it would turn out, had been killed by a person or persons unknown, possibly raped, possibly not. We will never know. It was not an ideal time for Forensic Medicine. Tex, meanwhile, was ascending the tower of the library here with a rifle and ammunition. He was going clear to the top, to turn the belfry itself into a sniper’s nest.

Alton Darwin was never worried, no matter how bad things got. He laughed when he heard that paratroops, advancing on foot, had surrounded the prison across the lake and, on our side, were digging in to the west and south of Scipio. State Police and vigilantes had already set up a roadblock at the head of the lake. Alton Darwin laughed as though he had achieved a great victory.

I knew people like that in Vietnam. Jack Patton had that sort of courage. I could be as brave as Jack over there. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was shot at more and killed more people. But I was worried sick most of the time. Jack never worried. He told me so.

I asked him how he could be that way. He said, “I think I must have a screw loose. I can’t care about what might happen next to me or anyone.”

Alton Darwin had the same untightened screw. He was a convicted mass murderer, but never showed any remorse that I could see.

During my last year in Vietnam, I, too, reacted at press briefings as though our defeats were victories. But I was under orders to do that. That wasn’t my natural disposition.

Alton Darwin, and this was true of Jack Patton, too, spoke of trivial and serious matters in the same tone of voice, with the same gestures and facial expressions. Nothing mattered more or less than anything else.

Alton Darwin, I remember, was talking to me with seemingly deep concern about how many of the convicts who had crossed the ice with him to Scipio were deserting, were going back across the ice to the prison, or turning themselves in at the roadblock at the head of the lake in hopes of amnesty. The deserters were worriers. They didn’t want to die, and they didn’t want to be held responsible, even though many of them were responsible, for the murders and rapes in Scipio.

So I was pondering the desertion problem when Alton Darwin said with exactly the same intensity, “I can skate on ice. Do you believe that?”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“I could always roller-skate,” he said. “But I never got a chance to ice-skate till this morning.”

That morning, with the phones dead and the electricity cut off, with unburied bodies everywhere, and with all the food in Scipio already consumed as though by a locust plague, he had gone up to Cohen Rink and put on ice skates for the first time in his life. After a few tottering steps, he had found himself gliding around and around, and around and around.

“Roller-skating and ice-skating are just about the very same thing!” he told me triumphantly, as though he had made a scientific discovery that was going to throw an entirely new light on what had seemed a hopeless situation. “Same muscles!” he said importantly.

That’s what he was doing when he was fatally shot about an hour later. He was out on the rink, gliding around and around, and around and around. I’d left him in his office, and I assumed that he was still up there. But there he was on the rink instead, going around and around, and around and around.

A shot rang out, and he fell down.

Several of his followers went to him, and he said something to them, and then he died.

It was a beautiful shot, if Darwin was really the man the College President was shooting at. He could have been shooting at me, since he knew I used to make love to his wife Zuzu when he was out of the house.

If he was shooting at Darwin instead of me, he solved one of the most difficult problems in marksmanship, the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target.

As I say, “Beautiful shot.”

I asked later what Alton Darwin’s last words had been, and was told that they made no sense. His last words had been, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”

Sometimes Alton Darwin would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. “Drugs were food,” he said. “I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they’re hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn’t mean people on other planets shouldn’t eat something else. On some planets I’m sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it’s time to eat stones again.”

I thought very little about the prison during the 15 years I was a teacher at Tarkington, as big and brutal as it was across the lake, and growing all the time. When we went picnicking at the head of the lake, or went up to Rochester on some errand or other, I saw plenty of blacked-out buses and steel boxes on the backs of trucks. Alton Darwin might have been in one of those boxes. Then again, since the steel boxes were also used to carry freight, there might have been nothing but Diet Pepsi and toilet paper in there.

Whatever was in there was none of my business until Tarkington fired me.

Sometimes when I was playing the bells and getting particularly loud echoes from the prison walls, usually in the dead of the wintertime, I would have the feeling that I was shelling the prison. In Vietnam, conversely, if I happened to be back with the artillery, and the guns were lobbing shells at who knows what in some jungle, it seemed very much like music, interesting noises for the sake of interesting noises, and nothing more.

During a summer field exercise when Jack Patton and I were still cadets, I remember, we were asleep in a tent and the artillery opened up nearby.