Hocus Pocus (30 page)

 

 

SHE TOLD THE Trustees, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people’s becoming slaves in their own country.

This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.

He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.

He was told that of course there were.

In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn’t want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.

 

 

SHE TOLD THEM about Indonesian women who threw their jewelry to Dutch sailors coming ashore with firearms, in the hopes that they would be satisfied by such easily won wealth and go away again.

But the Dutch wanted their land and labor, too.

And they got them, which they called a plantation.

I had heard about that from Damon Stern.

 

“NOW,” SHE SAID to them, “you are selling this plantation because the soil is exhausted, and the natives are getting sicker and hungrier every day, begging for food and medicine and shelter, all of which are very expensive. The water mains are breaking. The bridges are falling down. So you are taking all your money and getting out of here.”

One Trustee, she didn’t know which, except that it wasn’t Wilder, said that he intended to spend the rest of his life in the United States.

“Even if you stay,” she said, “you and your money and your soul are getting out of here.”

 

 

SO SHE AND I, working independently, had noticed the same thing: That even our natives, if they had reached the top or been born at the top, regarded Americans as foreigners. That seems to have been true, too, of people at the top in what used to be the Soviet Union: to them their own ordinary people weren’t the kinds of people they understood and liked very much.

“What did Jason Wilder say to that?” I asked her. On TV he was always so quick to snatch any idea tossed his way, cover it with spit, so to speak, and throw it back with a crazy spin which made it uncatchable.

“He just let it lie there for a while,” she said.

I could see how he might have been flummoxed by this little black woman who spoke many more languages than he did, who knew 1,000 times more science than he did, and at least as much history and literature and music and art. He had never had anybody like that on his talk show. He may never have had to debate with a person whose destiny GRIOT™ would have described as unpredictable.

He said at last, “I am an American, not a European.”

And she said to him, “Then why don’t you act like one?”

YES, AND NOW the Japanese are pulling out. Their Army of Occupation in Business Suits is going home. The prison break at Athena was the straw that broke the camel’s back, I think, but they were already abandoning properties, simply walking away from them, before that expensive catastrophe.

Why they ever wanted to own a country in such an advanced state of physical and spiritual and intellectual dilapidation is a mystery. Maybe they thought that would be a good way to get revenge for our having dropped not 1 but 2 atomic bombs on them.

So that makes two groups so far who have given up on owning this country of their own free will, mainly, I think, because so many unhappy and increasingly lawless people of all races, who don’t own anything, turn out to come along with the properties.

 

IT LOOKS LIKE they will keep Oahu as a sort of memento of their empire’s high-water mark, just as the British have kept Bermuda.

 

 

SPEAKING OF UNHAPPY poor people of all races, I have often wondered how the Tarkington Board of Trustees would have been treated if Athena had been a White prison instead of a Black one. I think Hispanic convicts would have regarded them as the Blacks did, as aardvarks, as exotic creatures who had nothing to do with life as they had experienced it.

It seems to me that White convicts, though, might have wanted to kill them or at least beat them up for not caring what became of them any more than they cared what became of Blacks and Hispanics.

 

 

DR. DOLE WENT back to Berlin. At least that is where she said she was going.

I asked her where she had hidden during the siege. She said she had crawled into the firebox under an old boiler in the basement of this library. It hadn’t been used since before I taught here, but it would have cost a lot of money to move. The school hated to spend money on improvements that didn’t show.

 

 

SO DURING THE siege she was only a few meters away from me while I sat up here and engaged in the wonderful new science of Futurology.

 

DR. DOLE SURE didn’t think much of her own country. She ranted on about its sky-high rates of murder and suicide and drug addiction and infant mortality, its low rate of literacy, the fact that it had a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country except for Haiti and South Africa, and didn’t know how to manufacture anything anymore, and put less money into research and primary education than Japan or Korea or any country in East or West Europe, and on and on.

“At least we still have freedom of speech,” I said.

And she said, “That isn’t something somebody else gives you. That’s something you have to give yourself.”

 

 

BEFORE I FORGET: During her job interview, she asked Jason Wilder where he had gone to college.

He said, “Yale.”

“You know what they ought to call that place?” she said.

“No,” he said.

And she said, “Plantation Owners’ Tech.”

 

 

WHEN SHE WAS living in Berlin, she told me, she had been appalled by how ignorant so many American tourists and soldiers were of geography and history, and the languages and customs of other countries. She asked me, “What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming.”

I had been asked the same general question by Alton Darwin when I was working at Athena. A World War II movie was being shown on all the TVs over there. Frank Sinatra had been captured by the Germans, and he was being interrogated by an SS Major who spoke English at least as well as Sinatra, and who played the cello and painted watercolors in his spare time, and who told Sinatra how much he looked forward to getting back, when the war was over, to his first love, which was lepidopterology.

Sinatra didn’t know what lepidopterology was. It is the study of moths and butterflies. That had to be explained to him.

And Alton Darwin asked me, “How come in all these movies the Germans and the Japanese are always the smart ones, and the Americans are the dumb ones, and still the Americans win the war?”

 

 

DARWIN DIDN’T FEEL personally involved. The American combat soldiers in the movie were all White. That wasn’t just White propaganda. That happened to be historically accurate. During the Finale Rack, American military units were segregated according to race. The feeling back then was that Whites would feel like garbage if they had to share quarters and dining facilities and so on with Blacks. That went for civilian life, too. The Black people had their own schools, and they were excluded from most hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment, except onstage, and polling booths.

They were also strung up or burned alive or whatever from time to time, as reminders that their place was at the very bottom of Society. They were thought, when they were given soldier suits, to be lacking in determination and initiative in battle. So they were employed mostly as common laborers or truck drivers behind the Duke Waynes and Frank Sinatras, who did the fearless stuff.

There was one all-Black fighter squadron. To the surprise of many it did quite well.

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 I 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:

 

 

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.