Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

When I went to work at Athena, I hoped to find at least 1 of the 3 convicts who had seen Mildred and Margaret and me having a picnic so long ago. As I’ve said, I took 1 of them to be a White, or possibly Hispanic. So he would have been transferred to a White or Hispanic prison before I ever got there. The other 2 were clearly black, but I never found either of them. I would have liked to hear what we looked like to them, how contented we seemed to be.

They were probably dead. AIDS could have got them, or murder or suicide, or maybe tuberculosis. Every year, 30 inmates at Athena died for every student who was awarded an Associate in the Arts and Sciences Degree by Tarkington.

Parole.

If I had found a convict who had witnessed our picnic, we might have talked about the fish my mother-in-law hooked while he was watching. He saw her rod bend double, heard the reel scream like a little siren. But he never got to see the monster who had taken her bait and was headed south for Scipio. Before he could see it, he was back in darkness in another van.

It was heavy test line I had put on the reel. This was deep-sea stuff made for tuna and shark, although, as far as we knew, there was nothing in Lake Mohiga but eels and perch and little catfish. That was all Mildred had ever caught before.

One time, I remember, she caught a perch too little to keep. So I turned it loose, even though the barb of the hook had come out through one eye. A few minutes later she hooked that same perch again. We could tell by the mangled eye. Think about that. Miraculous eyes, and no brains whatsoever.

I put such heavy test line on Mildred’s reel so that nothing could ever get away from her. In Honduras 1 time I did the same thing for a 3-star General, whose aide I was.

Mildred’s fish couldn’t snap the line, and Mildred wouldn’t let go of the rod. She didn’t weigh anything, and the fish weighed a lot for a fish. Mildred went down on her knees in the water, laughing and crying.

I’ll never forget what she was saying: “It’s God! It’s God!”

I waded out to help her. She wouldn’t let go of the rod, so I grasped the line and began to haul it in, hand over hand.

How the water swirled and boiled out there!

When I got the fish into shallow water, it suddenly quit fighting. I guess it had used up every bit of its energy. That was that.

This fish, which I picked up by the gills and flung up on the bank, was an enormous pickerel. Margaret looked down at it in horror and said, “It’s a crocodile!”

I looked at the top of the bank to see what the convicts and guards thought of a fish that big. They were gone. There was nothing but the broken-down van up there. The little door to its steel box was wide open. Anybody was free to climb inside and close the door, in case he or she wondered what it felt like to be a prisoner.

To those fascinated by Forensic Medicine: The pickerel had not bitten on the worm on the hook. It had bitten on a perch which had bitten on the worm on the hook.

I thought that would be interesting to my mother-in-law during our trip back home in the new Mercedes. But she didn’t want to talk about the fish at all. It had scared the daylights out of her, and she wanted to forget it.

As the years went by, I would mention the fish from time to time without getting anything back from her but a stony silence. I concluded that she really had purged it from her memory.

But then, on the night of the prison break, when the 3 of us were living in an old house in the hamlet of Athena, down below the prison walls, there was this terrific explosion that woke us up.

If Jack Patton had been there with us, he might have said to me, “Gene! Gene! They’re playing our tune again.”

The explosion was in fact the demolition of Athena’s main gate from the outside, not the inside. The purported head of the Jamaican drug cartel, Jeffrey Turner, had been brought down to Athena in a steel box 6 months before, after a televised trial lasting a year and a half. He was given 25 consecutive life sentences, said to be a new record. Now a well-rehearsed force of his employees, variously estimated as being anything from a platoon to a company, had arrived outside the prison with explosives, a tank, and several half-tracks taken from the National Guard Armory about 10 kilometers south of Rochester, across the highway from the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. One of their number, it has since come out, moved to Rochester and joined the National Guard, swearing to defend the Constitution and all that, with the sole purpose of stealing the keys to the Armory.

The Japanese guards were wholly unprepared and unmotivated to resist such a force, especially since the attackers were all dressed in American Army uniforms and waving American flags. So they hid or put their hands up or ran off into the virgin forest. This wasn’t their country, and guarding prisoners wasn’t a sacred mission or anything like that. It was just a business.

The telephone and power lines were cut, so they couldn’t even call for help or blow the siren.

The assault lasted half an hour. When it was over, Jeffrey Turner was gone, and he hasn’t been seen since. The attackers also disappeared. Their uniforms and military vehicles were subsequently found at an abandoned dairy farm owned by German land speculators a kilometer north of the end of the lake. There were tire tracks of many automobiles, which led police to conclude that it was by means of unremarkable civilian vehicles, seemingly unrelated, and no doubt leaving the farm at timed intervals, that the lawless force had made its 100-percent-successful getaway.

Meanwhile, back at the prison, anyone who didn’t want to stay inside the walls anymore was free to walk out of there, first taking, if he was so inclined and got there early, a rifle or a shotgun or a pistol or a tear-gas grenade from the wide-open prison armory.

The police said, too, that the attackers of the prison obviously had had first-class military training somewhere, possibly at a private survival school somewhere in this country, or maybe in Bolivia or Colombia or Peru.

Anyway: Margaret and Mildred and I were awakened by the explosion, which demolished the main gate of the prison. There was no way we could have imagined what was really going on.

The 3 of us were sleeping in separate bedrooms. Margaret was on the first floor, Mildred and I were on the second floor. No sooner had I sat up, my ears ringing, than Mildred came into my room stark naked, her eyes open wide.

She spoke first. She used a slang word for hugeness I had never heard her speak before. It wasn’t slang of her generation or even mine. It was slang of my children’s generation. I guess she had heard it and liked it, and then held it in reserve for some really important occasion.

Here is what she said, as sporadic small-arms fire broke out at the prison: “Do you remember that humongous fish I caught?”

Atone time I fully expected to spend the rest of my life in this valley, but not in jail. I envisioned my mandatory retirement from Tarkington College in 2010. I would be modestly well-off with Social Security and a pension from the College. My mother-in-law would surely be dead by then, I thought, so I would have only Margaret to care for. I would rent a little house in the town below. There were plenty of empty ones.

But that dream would have been blasted even if there hadn’t been a prison break, even if the Social Security system hadn’t gone bust and the College Treasurer hadn’t run off with the pension funds and so on. For, as I’ve said before, in 1991 Tarkington College fired me.

There I was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic TV, with virtually no health services for the poor. Where to go? What to do?