Hocus Pocus (27 page)

SOMEBODY WAS CATCHING up with me, too, but ever so slowly. I am talking about my illegitimate son out in Dubuque, Iowa. He was only 15 then. He didn’t even know my name yet. He had yet to do as much detective work to discover the name and location of his father as I have done to identify the murderer of Letitia Smiley, Tarkington College’s 1922 Lilac Queen.

 

 

I MADE THE acquaintance of his mother while sitting alone at a bar in Manila, soon after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Vietnam. I didn’t want to talk to anybody of either sex. I was fed up with the human race. I wanted nothing more than to be left strictly alone with my thoughts.

Add those to my growing collection of Famous Last Words.

 

 

THIS REASONABLY PRETTY but shopworn woman sat down on a stool next to mine. “Forgive my intrusion on your thoughts,” she said, “but somebody told me that you are the man they call ‘The Preacher.’ ” She pointed out a Master Sergeant in a booth with 2 prostitutes who could not have been much over 15 years of age.

“I don’t know him,” I said.

“He didn’t say he knew you,” she said. “He’s heard you speak. So have a lot of other soldiers I’ve talked to.”

“Somebody had to speak,” I said, “or we couldn’t have had a war.”

“Is that why they call you ‘The Preacher’?” she said.

“Who knows,” I said, “in a world as full of baloney as this 1 is?” I had been called that as far back as West Point because I never used profanity. During my first 2 years in Vietnam, when the only troops I gave pep talks to were those who served under me, I was called “The Preacher” because it sounded sinister, as though I were a puritanical angel of death. Which I was, I was.

“Would you rather I went away?” she said.

“No,” I said, “because I think there is every chance we could wind up in bed together tonight. You look intelligent, so you must be as blue as I am about our nation’s great unvictory. I worry about you. I’d like to cheer you up.”

What the heck.

It worked.

 

 

IF IT AIN’T broke, don’t fix it.

I WAS REASONABLY happy teaching at the prison. I raised the level of literacy by about 20 percent, with each newly literate person teaching yet another one. I wasn’t always happy with what they chose to read afterward.

One man told me that literacy made it a lot more fun for him to masturbate.

 

 

I DID NOT loaf. I like to teach.

I dared some of the more intelligent prisoners to prove to me that the World was round, to tell me the difference between noise and music, to tell me how physical traits were inherited, to tell me how to determine the height of a guard tower without climbing it, to tell me what was ridiculous about the Greek legend which said that a boy carried a calf around a barn every day, and pretty soon he was a man who could carry a bull around the barn every day, and so on.

I showed them a chart a fundamentalist preacher from downtown Scipio had passed out to Tarkington students at the Pavilion one afternoon. I asked them to examine it for examples of facts tailored to fit a thesis.

Across the top the chart named the leaders of warring nations during the Finale Rack, during World War II. Then, under each name was the leader’s birthdate and how many years he lived and when he took office and how many years he served, and then the total of all those numbers, which in each case turned out to be 3,888.

It looked like this:

 

CHURCHILL HITLER ROOSEVELT IL DUCE STALIN TOJO

As I say, every column adds up to 3,888.

Whoever invented the chart then pointed out that half that number was 1944, the year the war ended, and that the first letters of the names of the war’s leaders spelled the name of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.

 

 

THE DUMBER ONES, like the dumber ones at Tarkington, used me as an ambulatory
Guinness Book of World Records,
asking me who the oldest person in the world was, the richest one, the woman who had had the most babies, and so on. By the time of the prison break, I think, 98 percent of the inmates at Athena knew that the greatest age ever attained by a human being whose birthdate was well documented was about 121 years, and that this incomparable survivor, like the Warden and the guards, had been Japanese. Actually, he had fallen 128 days short of reaching 121. His record was a natural foundation for all sorts of jokes at Athena, since so many of the inmates were serving life sentences, or even 2 or 3 life sentences either superimposed or laid end to end.

They knew that the richest man in the world was also Japanese and that, about a century before the college and the prison were founded across the lake from each other, a woman in Russia was giving birth to the last of her 69 children.

 

 

THE RUSSIAN WOMAN who had more babies than anyone gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. They all survived, which is more than you can say for the Donner Party.

 

 

HIROSHI MATSUMOTO WAS the only member of the prison staff with a college education. He did not socialize with the others, and he took his off-duty meals alone and hiked alone and fished alone and sailed alone. Neither did he avail himself of the Japanese clubs in Rochester and Buffalo, or of the lavish rest-and-recuperation facilities maintained in Manhattan by the Japanese Army of Occupation in Business Suits. He had made so much money for his corporation in Louisville and then Athena, and was so brilliant in his understanding of American business psychology, that I am sure he could have asked for and gotten an executive job in the home office. He may have known more about American black people than anybody else in Japan, thanks to Athena, and more and more of the businesses his corporation was buying here were dependent on black labor or at least the goodwill of black neighborhoods. Again thanks to Athena, he probably knew more than any other Japanese about the largest industry by far in this country, which was the procurement and distribution of chemicals that, when introduced into the bloodstream in one way or another, gave anybody who could afford them undeserved feelings of purpose and accomplishment.

Only 1 of these chemicals was legal, of course, and was the basis of the fortune of the family that gave Tarkington its band uniforms, and the water tower atop Musket Mountain, and an endowed chair in Business Law, and I don’t know what all else.

That mind-bender was alcohol.

 

 

IN THE 8 years we lived next door to him in the ghost town down by the lake, he never once indicated that he longed to be back in his homeland. The closest he came to doing that was when he told me 1 night that the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake, with huge timbers and boulders tumbled this way and that, might have been the creation of a great Japanese gardener.

In the Japanese Army of Occupation he was a high-ranking officer, the civilian peer of a Brigadier, maybe, or even a Major General. But he reminded me of several old Master Sergeants I had known in Vietnam. They would say worse things about the Army and the war and the Vietnamese than anybody. But I would go away for a couple of years, and then come back, and they were all still there, crabbing away. They wouldn’t leave until the Vietnamese either killed them or kicked them out of there.

How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.

 

 

HIROSHI MATSUMOTO CALLED this valley a “hellhole” and the “anus of the Universe.” But he didn’t leave it until he was kicked out of here.

I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn’t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: “What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?”

 

 

THE LAST TIME I saw him was on the night of the prison break. We had been awakened by the racket of the Jamaicans’ assault on the prison. We both came running out onto the street in front of our houses barefoot and in our nightclothes, although the temperature must have been minus 10 degrees centigrade.

The name of our main street in the ghost town was Clinton Street, the name of the main street in Scipio. Can you imagine that: two communities so close geographically, and yet in olden times so separate socially and economically that, with all the street names they might have chosen, they both named their main street Clinton Street?

 

 

THE WARDEN TRIED to reach the prison on a cordless telephone. He got no answer. His 3 house servants were looking out at us from upstairs windows. They were convicts over 70 years old, serving life sentences without hope of parole, long forgotten by the outside world, and coked to the gills on Thor-azine.

My mother-in-law came out on our porch. She called to me, “Tell him about the fish I caught! Tell him about that fish I caught!”

The Warden said to me that a boiler up at the prison must have blown, or maybe the crematorium. It sounded to me like military weaponry, whose voices he had never heard. He hadn’t even heard the atomic bomb go off. He had only felt the hot whoosh afterward.

And then all the lights on our side of the lake went off. And then we heard the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” floating down from the blacked-out penitentiary.

 

 

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.