Hocus Pocus (29 page)

So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a “tempest in a tea-pot,” an expression the Atheist’s Bible tells us is proverbial.

 

 

I TOLD ALTON Darwin that if he and his people didn’t want to be bombed and didn’t want to return to the prison, they should take whatever food they could find and disperse to the north or west. I told him one thing he already knew, that the floor of the National Forest to the south and east was so dark and lifeless that anyone going in there would probably starve to death or go mad before he found his way back out of there. I told him another thing he already knew, that there would soon be all these white people to the west and north, having the times of their lives hunting escaped convicts instead of deer.

My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn’t have what they had, who didn’t look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a “Free Fire Zone.” You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

 

 

ALTON DARWIN HEARD me out. And then he told me that he thought I was right, that the prison probably would be bombed. But he guaranteed that Scipio would not be bombed, and that it would not be attacked on the ground, either, that the Government would have to keep its distance and respect the demands he meant to put to it.

“What makes you think that?” I said.

“We have captured a TV celebrity,” he said. “They won’t let anything happen to him. Too many people will be watching.”

“Who?” I said.

And he said, “Jason Wilder.”

 

 

THAT WAS THE first I heard that they had taken hostage not only Wilder but the whole Board of Trustees of Tarkington College. I now realize, too, that Alton Darwin would not have known that Wilder was a TV celebrity if old tapes of Wilder’s talk show hadn’t been run again and again at the prison across the lake. Poor people of any race on the outside never would have watched his show for long, since its basic message was that it was poor people who were making the lives of the rest of us so frightening.

“STAR WARS,” SAID Alton Darwin.

He was alluding to Ronald Reagan’s dream of having scientists build an invisible dome over this country, with electronics and lasers and so on, which no enemy plane or projectile could ever penetrate. Darwin believed that the social standing of his hostages was an invisible dome over Scipio.

I think he was right, although I have not been able to discover how seriously the Government considered bombing the whole valley back to the Stone Age. Years ago, I might have found out through the Freedom of Information Act. But the Supreme Court closed that peephole.

 

 

DARWIN AND HIS troops knew the lives of the hostages were valued highly by the Government. They didn’t know why, and I am not sure that I do, either. I think that the number of people with money and power had shrunk to the point where it felt like a family. For all the escaped convicts knew about them, they might as well have been aardvarks, or some other improbable animal they had never seen before.

Darwin regretted that I, too, was going to have to stay in Scipio. He couldn’t let me go, he said, because I knew too much about his defenses. There were none as far as I could see, but he sounded as though there were trenches and tank traps and mine fields all around us.

Even more hallucinatory was his vision of the future. He was going to restore this valley to its former economic vitality. It would become an all-Black Utopia. All Whites would be resettled elsewhere.

He was going to put glass back into the windows of the factories, and make their roofs weather-tight again. He would get the money to do this and so many other wonderful things by selling the precious hardwoods of the National Forest to the Japanese.

 

 

THAT MUCH OF his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday’s interest on the National Debt.

That last is a joke of mine. I have no idea if any money for the forest will go toward the National Debt, which, the last I heard, was greater than the value of all property in the Western Hemisphere, thanks to compound interest.

 

 

ALTON DARWIN LOOKED me up and down, and then he said with typical sociopathic impulsiveness, “Professor, I can’t let you go because I need you.”

“What for?” I said. I was scared to death that he was going to make me a General.

“To help with the plans,” he said.

“For what?” I said.

“For the glorious future,” he said. He told me to go to this library and write out detailed plans for making this valley into the envy of the World.

So that, in fact, is what I mainly did during most of the Battle of Scipio.

It was too dangerous to go outside anyway, with all the bullets flying around.

 

 

MY BEST UTOPIAN invention for the ideal Black Republic was “Freedom Fighter Beer.” They would get the old brewery going again, supposedly, and make beer pretty much like any other beer, except that it would be called Freedom Fighter Beer. If I say so myself, that is a magical name for beer. I envisioned a time when, all over the world, the bored and downtrodden and weary would be bucking themselves up at least a little bit with Freedom Fighter Beer.

 

 

BEER, OF COURSE, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

 

 

ALTON DARWIN WAS dead before I could complete my long-range plan. His dying words, as I’ve said, were, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.” But I showed it to the hostages.

“What is this supposed to mean?” said Jason Wilder.

“I want you to see what they’ve had me doing,” I said. “You keep talking as though I could turn you loose, if I wanted. I’m as much a prisoner as you are.”

He studied the prospectus, and then he said, “They actually expect to get away with this?”

“No,” I said. “They know this is their Alamo.”

He arched his famous eyebrows in clownish disbelief. He has always looked to me a lot like the incomparable comedian Stanley Laurel. “It would never have occurred to me to compare the rabid chimpanzees who hold us in durance vile with Davy Crockett and James Bowie and Tex Johnson’s great-great-grandfather,” he said.

“I was just talking about hopeless situations,” I said.

“I certainly hope so,” he said.

I might have added, but didn’t, that the martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn’t want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind.

I don’t think Wilder knew that. Not many people in this :ountry do. I certainly never heard that at the Academy. I wouldn’t have known that slavery was what the Alamo was all about if Professor Stern the unicyclist hadn’t told me so.

 

 

NO WONDER THERE were so few Black tourists at the Alamo!

 

 

UNITS OF THE 82nd Airborne, fresh from the South Bronx, had by then retaken the other side of the lake and herded the prisoners back inside the walls. A big problem over there was that almost every toilet in the prison had been smashed. Who knows why?

What was to be done with the huge quantities of excrement produced hour after hour, day after day, by all these burdens on Society?

We still had plenty of toilets on this side of the lake, which is why this place was made an auxiliary prison almost immediately. Time was of the essence, as the lawyers say.

 

 

IMAGINE THE SAME sort of thing happening on a huge rocket ship bound for Betelgeuse.

ON THE LAST afternoon of the siege, National Guard units relieved the
Airborne
troops across the lake. That night, undetected, the paratroops took up positions behind Musket Mountain. Two hours before the next dawn, they came quietly around either side of the mountain, captured the stable, freed the hostages, and then took possession of all of Scipio. They had to kill only 1 person, who was the guard dozing outside the stable. They strangled him with a standard piece of equipment. I had used one just like it in Vietnam. It was a meter of piano wire with a wooden handle at either end.

So that was that.

The defenders were out of ammunition. There were hardly any defenders left anyway. Maybe 10.

 

 

AGAIN, I DON’T believe there would have been such delicate microsurgery by the best ground troops available, if it hadn’t been for the social prominence of the Trustees.

They were helicoptered to Rochester, where they were shown on TV. They thanked God and the Army. They said they had never lost hope. They said they were tired but happy, and just wanted to get a hot bath and then sleep in a nice clean bed.

 

 

ALL NATIONAL GUARDSMEN who had been south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex during the siege got Combat Infantryman’s Badges. They were so pleased.

The paratroops already had theirs. When they dressed up for the victory parade, they wore campaign ribbons from Costa Rica and Bimini and El Paso and on and on, and from the Battle of the South Bronx, of course. That battle had had to keep on going without their help.

 

 

SEVERAL NOBODIES TRIED to get onto a helicopter with the Trustees. There was room. But the only people allowed aboard were on a list which had come all the way from the White House. I saw the list. Tex and Zuzu Johnson were the only locals named.

I watched the helicopters take off, the happy ending. I was up in the belfry, checking on the damage. I hadn’t dared to go up there earlier. Somebody might have taken a shot at me, and it could have been a beautiful shot.

And as the helicopters became specks to the north, I was startled to hear a woman speak. She was right behind me. She was small and was shod in white sneakers and had come up ever so quietly. I wasn’t expecting company.

She said, “I wondered what it was like up here. Sure is a mess, but the view is nice, if you like water and soldiers.” She sounded tired. We all did.

I turned to look at her. She was Black. I don’t mean she was so-called Black. Her skin was very dark. She may not have had any white blood whatsoever. If she had been a man at Athena, skin that color would have put her in the lowest social caste.

 

 

SHE WAS SO small and looked so young I mistook her for a Tarkington student, maybe the dyslexic daughter of some overthrown Caribbean or African dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation’s treasury.

Wrong again!

If the college GRIOT™ had still been working, I am sure it couldn’t have guessed what she was and what she was doing there. She had lived outside all the statistics on which GRIOT™ based its spookily canny guesses. When GRIOT™ was stumped by somebody who had given statistical expectations as wide a berth as she had, it just sat there and hummed. A little red light came on.

Her name was Helen Dole. She was 26. She was unmarried. She was born in South Korea, and had grown up in what was then West Berlin. She held a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin. Her father had been a Master Sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps of the Regular Army, serving in Korea and then in our Army of Occupation in Berlin. When her father retired after 30 years, to a nice enough little house in a nice enough little neighborhood in Cincinnati, and she saw the horrible squalor and hopelessness into which most black people were born there, she went back to what had become just plain Berlin and earned her Doctorate.

She was as badly treated by many people over there as she would have been over here, but at least she didn’t have to think every day about some nearby black ghetto where life expectancy was worse than that in what was said to be the poorest country on the planet, which was Bangladesh.

 

THIS DR. HELEN Dole had come to Scipio only the day before the prison break, to be interviewed by Tex and the Trustees for, of all things, my old job teaching Physics. She had seen the opening advertised in
The New York Times.
She had talked to Tex on the telephone before she came. She wanted to make sure he knew she was Black. Tex said that was fine, no problem. He said that the fact that she was both female and black, and held a Doctorate besides, was absolutely beautiful.

If she had landed the job and signed a contract before Tarkington ceased to be, that would have made her the last of a long succession of Tarkington Physics teachers, which included me.

But Dr. Dole had blown up at the Board of Trustees instead. They asked her to promise that she would never, whether in class or on social occasions, discuss politics or history or economics or sociology with students. She was to leave those subjects to the college’s experts in those fields.

“I plain blew up,” she said to me.

 

 

“ALL THEY ASKED of me,” she said, “was that I not be a human being.”

“I hope you gave it to them good,” I said.

“I did,” she said. “I called them a bunch of European planters.”

Lowell Chung’s mother was no longer on the Board, so all the faces Dr. Dole saw were indeed of European ancestry.

She asserted that Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other people’s land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves. She was taking a long view of history, of course. Tarkington’s Trustees certainly hadn’t roamed the world on ships, armed to the teeth and looking for lightly defended real estate. Her point was that they were heirs to the property of such robbers, and to their mode of thinking, even if they had been born poor and had only recently dismantled an essential industry, or cleaned out a savings bank, or earned big commissions by facilitating the sale of beloved American institutions or landmarks to foreigners.