Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

See the Nigger fly the airplane?

To get back to Alton Darwin’s question about why Frank Sinatra deserved to win even though he didn’t know anything: I said, “I think he deserves to win because he is like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.” The Walt Disney movie about Davy Crockett had been shown

over and over again at the prison, so all the convicts knew who Davy Crockett was. And one thing it might be good to bring out at my trial is that I never told the convicts the Mexican General who besieged the Alamo was trying and failing to do what Abraham Lincoln would later do successfully, which was to hold his country together and outlaw slavery.

“How is Sinatra like Davy Crockett?” Alton Darwin asked me.

And I said, “His heart is pure.”

Yes, and there is more of my story to tell. But I have just received a piece of news from my lawyer that has knocked the wind out of me. After Vietnam, I thought there was nothing that could ever hit me that hard again. I thought I was used to dead bodies, no matter whose.

Wrong again.

Ah me!

If! tell now who it is that died, and how that person died, died only yesterday, that will seem to complete my story. From a reader’s point of view, there would be nothing more to say but this:

THE END

But there is more I want to tell. So I will carry on as though I hadn’t heard the news, albeit doggedly. And I write this:

The Lieutenant Colonel who led the assault on Scipio and then kept locals off the helicopters was also a graduate of the Academy, but maybe 2 score and 7 years younger than myself. When I told him my name and he

saw my class ring, he realized who I was and what I used to be. He exclaimed, “My Lord, it’s the Preacher!”

If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know what would have become of me. I guess I would have done what most of the other valley people did, which was to go to Rochester or Buffalo or beyond, looking for any kind of work, minimum wage for sure. The whole area south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex was and still is under Martial Law.

His name was Harley Wheelock III. He told me he and his wife were infertile, so they adopted twin girl orphans from Peru, South America, not Peru, Indiana. They were cute little Inca girls. But he hardly ever got home anymore, his Division was so busy. He was all set to go home on leave from the South Bronx when he was ordered here to put down the prison break and rescue the hostages.

His father Harley Wheelock II was 3 years ahead of me at the Academy, and died, I already knew, in some kind of accident in Germany, and so never served in Vietnam. I asked Harley III how exactly Harley II had died. He told me his father drowned while trying to rescue a Swedish woman who committed suicide by opening the windows of her Volvo and driving it off a dock and into the Ruhr River at Essen, home, as it happens, of that premier manufacturer of crematoria, A. J. Topf und Sohn.

Small World.

Now Harley III said to me, “You know anything about this excrement hole?” Of course, he himself didn’t say “excrement.” He had never heard of the Mohiga Valley before he was ordered here. Like most people, he

had heard of Athena and Tarkington but had no clear idea where they were.

I replied that the excrement hole was home to me, although I had been born in Delaware and raised in Ohio, and that I expected 1 day to be buried here.

“Where’s the Mayor?” he said.

“Dead,” I said, “and all the policemen, too, including the campus cops. And the Fire Chief.”

“So there isn’t any Government?” he said.

“I’d say you’re the Government,” I said.

He used the Name of Our Savior as an explosive expletive, and then added, “Wherever I go, all of a sudden I am the Government. I’m already the Government in the South Bronx, and I’ve got to get back there as quick as I can. So I hereby declare you the Mayor of this excrement hole.” This time he actually said, “excrement hole,” echoing me. “Go down to the City Hall, wherever that is, and start governing.”

He was so decisive! He was so loud!

As though the conversation weren’t weird enough, he was wearing one of those coal-scuttle helmets the Army started issuing after we lost the Vietnam War, maybe to change our luck.

Make Blacks, Jews, and everybody else look like Nazis, and see how that worked out.

“I can’t govern,” I protested. “Nobody would pay any attention to me. I would be a joke.”

“Good point!” he cried. So loud!

He got the Governor’s Office in Albany on the radio. The Governor himself was on his way to Rochester by helicopter, in order to go on TV with the freed hostages. The Governor’s Office managed to patch through Harley III’s call to the Governor up in the sky. Harley III

told the Governor who I was and what the situation was in Scipio.

It didn’t take long.

And then Harley III turned to me and said, “Congratulations! You are now a Brigadier General in the National Guard!”

“I’ve got a family on the other side of the lake,” I said. “I’ve got to go find out how they are.”

He was able to tell me how they were. He personally, the day before, had seen Margaret and Mildred loaded into the steel box on the back of a prison van, consigned to the Laughing Academy in Batavia.

“They’re fine!” he said. “Your country needs you more than they do now, so, General Hartke, strut your stuff!”

He was so full of energy! It was almost as though his coal-scuttle helmet contained a thunderstorm.

Never an idle moment! No sooner had he persuaded the Governor to make me a Brigadier than he was off to the stable, where captured Freedom Fighters were being forced to dig graves for all the bodies. The weary diggers had every reason to believe that they were digging their own graves. They had seen plenty of movies about the Finale Rack, in which soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets stood around while people in rags dug their own final resting places.

I heard Harley III barking orders at the diggers, telling them to dig deeper and make the sides straighter and so on. I had seen leadership of such a high order exercised in Vietnam, and I myself had exhibited it from time to time, so I am quite certain that Harley III had taken some sort of amphetamine.

There wasn’t much for me to govern at first. This place, which had been the sole remaining business of any size in the valley, stood vacant and seemed likely to remain so. Most locals had managed to run away after the prison break. When they came back, though, there was no way to make a living. Those who owned houses or places of business couldn’t find anybody to sell them to. They were wiped out.

So most of the civilians I might have governed had soon packed the best of their belongings into cars and trailers, and paid small fortunes to black marketeers for enough gasoline to get them the heck out of here.

I had no troops of my own. Those on my side of the lake were on loan from the commander of the National Guard Division, the 42nd Division, the “Rainbow Division,” Lucas Florio. He had his headquarters in Hiroshi Matsumoto’s old office at the prison. He wasn’t a graduate- of West Point, and he was too young to have fought in Vietnam, and his home was in Schenectady, so we had never met before. His troops were all White, with Orientals classified as Honorary White People. The same was true of the 82nd Airborne. There were also Black and Hispanic units somewhere, the theory being, as with the prisons, that people were always more comfortable with those of their own race.

This resegregation, although I never heard any public figure say so, also made the Armed Forces more like a set of golf clubs. You could use this battalion or that one, depending on what color people they were supposed to fight.