Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

After that: thin air.

A dentist would be no help in identifying the skull, since whoever owned it never had so much as a single cavity to be filled. Whoever it was had perfect teeth. Who is alive today who could tell us whether or not Letitia Smiley, who herself would be 100 years old now, in the year 2001, had perfect teeth?

That was how a lot of the more mutilated bodies of soldiers in Vietnam were positively identified, by their imperfect teeth.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, the most terrible crime of all, they say. But how old would her killer be by now? If he was who I think he was, he would be 135. I think he was none other than Kensington Barber, the Provost of Tarkington College at the time. He would spend his last days in the State Hospital for the Insane up in Batavia. I think it was he, empowered to make bed checks in both the women’s and the men’s dormitories, who made the dummy whose head was a football.

I think Letitia Smiley was dead by then.

And it was a matter of public record that it was the Provost who found the dummy.

The medical examiner from the State Police said it was odd that there was no hair still stuck to the skull. He thought it might have been scalped or boiled before it was buried, to make it that much harder to identify. And what have I discovered? That Letitia was famous in her short life for her long golden hair. The newspaper description of the race she won goes on and on about her golden hair.

Yes, and the same story gives Kensington Barber as the sole source of the assertion that Letitia had been deeply troubled by a stormy romance with a much older man down in Scipio. The Provost wished that he or somebody knew the name of the man, so that the police could question him.

In another story, Barber told a reporter that he had planned to take his family to Europe that summer but would stay in Scipio instead, in order to do all he could to clear up the mystery of what had become of Letitia Smiley. Such dedication to duty!

He had a wife and 2 kids, and he sent them to Europe without him. Since the campus was virtually deserted in the summertime, except for the maintenance staff, which took orders from him, he could easily have ensured his own privacy by sending the workmen to an-other part of the campus while he buried small parts of Letitia, possibly using a posthole digger.

I have to wonder, too, in light of my own experiences in public-relations hocus pocus and the recent history of my Government, if there weren’t a lot of people back in 1922 who could put 2 and 2 together as easily as I have now. For the sake of the reputation of what had become Scipio’s principal business, the college, there could have been a massive cover-up.

Kensington Barber would have a nervous breakdown at the end of the summer, and be committed, as I’ve said, to Batavia. The President of Tarkington at that time, who was Herbert Van Arsdale, no relation to Whitey VanArsdale, the dishonest mechanic, ascribed the Provost’s crackup to exhaustion brought on by his tireless efforts to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the golden-haired Lilac Queen.

My lawyer found only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.

The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.

The convicts didn’t create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they weren’t against America. He said, “We are America.”

So 1 took my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.

It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadn’t realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.

But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasn’t talented, frightened the old novelist.

Slazinger was no prize himself, of course.

After the prison break, I told the GR1OT~ here all I knew about Pamela, and asked it to guess what might become of her after her breakup with Paul Slazinger. GRIOT™ had her die of cirrhosis of the liver. I gave the machine the same set of facts a second time, and it had her freezing to death in a doorway in Chicago.

The prognosis was not good.

After leaving Pamela, whose basic problem wasn’t me but alcohol, I started to climb Musket Mountain, intending to think things out under the water tower. But I was met by Zuzu Jackson, who was coming down. She said she had been under the water tower for hours, trying to think up dreams to replace those we had had of running off to Venice.

She said that maybe she would run off to Venice alone, and take Polaroid pictures of tourists getting in and out of gondolas.

The prognosis for her was a lot better than for Pamela, short-term anyway. At least she wasn’t an addict, and at least she wasn’t all alone in the world, even if all she had was Tex. And at least she hadn’t been held up as an object of public ridicule from coast to coast.

And she could see the humorous side of things. She said, I remember, that the loss of the Venice dream had left her a walking corpse, but that a zombie was an ideal mate for a College President.

She went on like that for a little while, but she didn’t cry, and she ran out of steam pretty quick. The last thing she said was that she didn’t blame me. “I take full responsibility,” she said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked away, “for falling in love with such an obvious jerk.”

Fair enough!

I decided not to climb Musket Mountain after all. I went home instead. It would be wiser to think things out in my garage, where other loose cannons from my past were unlikely to interrupt me. But when I got there I found a man from United Parcel Service ringing the bell. I didn’t know him. He was new to town, or he wouldn’t have asked why all the blinds were drawn. Anybody who had been in Scipio any length of time knew why the blinds were drawn.

Crazy people lived in there.

I told him somebody was sick in there, and asked what I could do for him.

He said he had this big box for me from St. Louis, Missouri.

I said I didn’t know anybody in St. Louis, Missouri, and wasn’t expecting a big box from anywhere. But he proved to me that it was addressed to me all right, so I said, “OK, let’s see it.” It turned out to be my old footlocker from Vietnam, which I had left behind when the excrement hit the air-conditioning, when I was ordered to take charge of the evacuation from the roof of the embassy.

Its arrival was not a complete surprise. Several months earlier I had received a notice of its existence in a huge Army warehouse that was indeed on the edge of St. Louis, where all sorts of unclaimed personal property of soldiers was stored, stuff ditched on battlefields or whatever. Some idiot must have put my footlocker on one of the last American planes to flee Vietnam, thus depriving the enemy of my razor, my toothbrush, my socks and underwear, and, as it happened, the late Jack Patton’s final birthday present to me, a copy of Black Garterbelt. A mere 14 years later, the Army said they had it, and asked me if I wanted it. I said, “Yes.” A mere 2 years more went by, and then, suddenly, here it was at my doorstep. Some glaciers move faster than that.