Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

There was no way that the Warden and I, even with massive doses of LSD, could have imagined what was going on up there. We were faulted afterward for not having alerted Scipio. As far as that goes, Scipio, hearing the explosion and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all the rest of it across the frozen lake, might have been expected to take some defensive action. But it did not.

Survivors over there I talked to afterward said they had just pulled the covers over their heads and gone to sleep again. What could be more human?

What was happening up there, as I’ve already said, was a stunningly successful attack on the prison by Jamaicans wearing National Guard uniforms and waving American flags. They had a public-address system mounted atop an armored personnel carrier and were playing the National Anthem. Most of them probably weren’t even American citizens!

But what Japanese farm boy, serving a 6-month tour of duty on a dark continent, would be crazy enough to open fire on seeming natives in full battle dress, who were waving flags and playing their hellish music?

No such boy existed. Not that night.

If the Japanese had started shooting, they would have lost their lives like the defenders of the Alamo. And for what?

For Sony?

Hiroshi Matsumoto threw on some clothes! He drove up the hill in his Isuzu jeep!

He was fired upon by the Jamaicans!

He bailed out of his Isuzu! He ran into the National Forest!

He got lost in the pitch blackness. He was wearing sandals and no socks.

It took him 2 days to find his way back out of the forest, which was almost as dark in the daytime as it was at night.

Yes. And gangrene was feasting on his frostbitten feet.

I myself stayed down by the lake.

I sent Mildred and Margaret back to bed.

I heard what must have been the Jamaicans’ shots at the Isuzu. Those were their parting shots. After that came silence.

My brain came up with this scenario: An attempted escape had been thwarted, possibly with some loss of life. The explosion at the beginning had been a bomb made by the convicts from nail parings or playing cards or who knows what?

They could make bombs and alcohol out of anything, usually in a toilet.

I misread the silence as good news.

I dreaded a continuation of the shooting, which

would have meant to me that the Japanese farm boys had developed a taste for killing with guns, which can suddenly become, for the uninitiated, easy and fun.

I envisioned convicts, in or out of their cells, becoming ducks in a shooting gallery.

I imagined, now that there was silence, that order had been restored, and that an English-speaking Japanese was notifying the Scipio Police Department and the State Police and the County Sheriff about the squashed escape attempt, and probably asking for doctors and ambulances.

Whereas the Japanese had been bamboozled and overwhelmed so quickly that their telephone lines were cut and their radio was smashed before they could get in touch with anyone.

There was a full moon that night, but its rays could not reach the floor of the National Forest.

The Japanese were not hurt. The Jamaicans disarmed them and sent them up the moonlit road to the head of the lake. They told them not to stop running until they got all the way back to Tokyo.

Most of them had never seen Tokyo.

And they did not arrive at the head of the lake hollering bloody murder and flagging down passing cars. They hid up there. If the United States was against them, who could be for them?

I had no gun.

If a few convicts had broken out and were still at large, I thought, and they came down into our ghost town, they would know me and think well of me. I

would give them whatever they wanted, food, money, bandages, clothes, the Mercedes.

No matter what I gave them, I thought, since they were color-coded, they would never escape from this valley, from this lily-white cul-de-sac.

There was nothing but White people all the way to Rochester’s city-limits sign.

I went to my rowboat, which I had turned upside down for the wintertime. I sat down astride its slick and glossy bow, which was aimed at the old barge terminal of Scipio.

They still had lights over in Scipio, which was a nice boost for my complacency.

There wasn’t any excitement over there, despite the noise at the prison. The lights in several houses went off. None went on. Only 1 car was moving. It was going slowly down Clinton Street. It stopped and turned off its lights in the parking lot behind the Black Cat Café.

The little red light atop the water tower on the summit of Musket Mountain winked off and on, off and on. It became a sort of mantra for me, so that I sank even deeper into thoughtless meditation, as though scuba diving in lukewarm bouillon.

Off and on that little light winked, off and on, off and

on.

How long did it give me rapture from so far away? Three minutes? Ten minutes? Hard to say.

I was brought back to full wakefulness by a strange transformation in the appearance of the frozen lake to the north of me. It had come alive somehow, but noiselessly.

And then I realized that I was watching lOOs of men

engaged in a sort of project which I myself had planned and led many times in Vietnam, which was a surprise attack.

It was I who broke the silence. A name tore itself from my lips before I could stop it.

The name? “Muriel!”

Muriel Peck wasn’t a barmaid anymore. She was a Full Professor of English at Tarkington, making good use of her Swarthmore education. She was asleep at the time of the surprise attack, all alone in faculty housing, a vine-covered cottage at the top of Clinton Street. Like me, she had sent her 2 kids to expensive boarding schools.

I asked her one time if she ever thought of marrying again. She said, “Didn’t you notice? I married you.”

She wouldn’t have gotten a job at Tarkington if the Trustees hadn’t fired me. An English teacher named Dwight Casey hated the head of his department so much that he asked for my old job just to get away from him. So that created a vacancy for Muriel.

If they hadn’t fired me, she probably would have left this valley, and would be alive today.

If they hadn’t fired me, I would probably be lying where she is, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

Dwight Casey is still alive, I think. His wife caine into a great deal of money soon after he replaced me. He quit at the end of the academic year and moved to the south of France.

His wife’s family was big in the Mafia. She could have taught but didn’t. She had a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Rutgers. All he had was a BS in Hotel Management from Cornell.

The Battle of Scipio lasted 5 days. It lasted 2 days longer than the Battle of Gettysburg, at which Elias Tarkington was shot by a Confederate soldier who mistook him for Abraham Lincoln.

On the night of the prison break, I was as helpless a voyeur, once the attack had begun, as Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg or Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.

There was 1 shot fired by someone in Scipio. I will never know who did it. It was some night owl with a loaded gun in easy reach. Whoever did it must have been killed soon afterward, otherwise he would have bragged about what he had done so early in the game.

Those were good soldiers who crossed the ice. Several of them had been in Vietnam, and so, like me, had had lessons in Military Science on full scholarships from the Government. Others had had plenty of experience with shooting and being shot at, often from early childhood on, and so found a single shot unremarkable. They saved their ammunition until they could see clearly what they were shooting at.