Slaughterhouse-Five (10 page)

The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary’s hip pocket. “What a lucky pony, eh?” he said. “Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don’t you wish you were that pony?” He handed
the picture to the other old man. “Spoils of war! It’s yours, all yours, you lucky lad.”

Then he made Weary sit down in the snow and take off his combat boots, which he gave to the beautiful boy. He gave Weary the boy’s clogs. So Weary and Billy were both without decent military footwear now, and they had to walk for miles and miles, with Weary’s clogs clacking, with Billy bobbing up-and-down, up-and-down, crashing into Weary from time to time.

“Excuse me,” Billy would say, or “I beg your pardon.”

They were brought at last to a stone cottage at a fork in the road. It was a collecting point for prisoners of war. Billy and Weary were taken inside, where it was warm and smoky. There was a fire sizzling and popping in the fireplace. The fuel was furniture. There were about twenty other Americans in there, sitting on the floor with their backs to the wall, staring into the flames—thinking whatever there was to think, which was zero.

Nobody talked. Nobody had any good war stories to tell.

Billy and Weary found places for themselves, and Billy went to sleep with his head on the shoulder
of an unprotesting captain. The captain was a chaplain. He was a rabbi. He had been shot through the hand.

Billy traveled in time, opened his eyes, found himself staring into the glass eyes of a jade green mechanical owl. The owl was hanging upside down from a rod of stainless steel. The owl was Billy’s optometer in his office in Ilium. An optometer is an instrument for measuring refractive errors in eyes—in order that corrective lenses may be prescribed.

Billy had fallen asleep while examining a female patient who was in a chair on the other side of the owl. He had fallen asleep at work before. It had been funny at first. Now Billy was starting to get worried about it, about his mind in general. He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t. He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either.

“Doctor—” said the patient tentatively.

“Hm?” he said.

“You’re so quiet.”

“Sorry.”

“You were talking away there—and then you got so quiet.”

“Um.”

“You see something terrible?”

“Terrible?”

“Some disease in my eyes?”

“No, no,” said Billy, wanting to doze again. “Your eyes are fine. You just need glasses for reading.” He told her to go across the corridor—to see the wide selection of frames there.

When she was gone, Billy opened the drapes and was no wiser as to what was outside. The view was still blocked by a venetian blind, which he hoisted clatteringly. Bright sunlight came crashing in. There were thousands of parked automobiles out there, twinkling on a vast lake of blacktop. Billy’s office was part of a suburban shopping center.

Right outside the window was Billy’s own Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. He read the stickers on the bumper. “Visit Ausable Chasm,” said one. “Support Your Police Department,” said another. There was a third. “Impeach Earl Warren,” it said. The stickers about the police and Earl Warren were gifts from Billy’s father-in-law, a member of the John Birch Society. The date on the license plate was 1967, which would make Billy Pilgrim
forty-four years old. He asked himself this: “Where have all the years gone?”

Billy turned his attention to his desk. There was an open copy of
The Review of Optometry
there. It was opened to an editorial, which Billy now read, his lips moving slightly.

What happens in 1968 will rule the fate of European optometrists for at least 50 years!
Billy read
. With this warning, Jean Thiriart, Secretary of the National Union of Belgium Opticians, is pressing for formation of a “European Optometry Society.” The alternatives, he says, will be the obtaining of professional status, or, by 1971, reduction to the role of spectacle-sellers
.

Billy Pilgrim tried hard to care.

A siren went off, scared the hell out of him. He was expecting World War Three at any time. The siren was simply announcing high noon. It was housed in a cupola atop a firehouse across the street from Billy’s office.

Billy closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was back in World War Two again. His head was on the wounded rabbi’s shoulder. A German was kicking his feet, telling him to wake up, that it was time to move on.

•  •  •

The Americans, with Billy among them, formed a fools’ parade on the road outside.

There was a photographer present, a German war correspondent with a Leica. He took pictures of Billy’s and Roland Weary’s feet. The picture was widely published two days later as heartening evidence of how miserably equipped the American Army often was, despite its reputation for being rich.

The photographer wanted something more lively, though, a picture of an actual capture. So the guards staged one for him. They threw Billy into shrubbery. When Billy came out of the shrubbery, his face wreathed in goofy good will, they menaced him with their machine pistols, as though they were capturing him then.

Billy’s smile as he came out of the shrubbery was at least as peculiar as Mona Lisa’s, for he was simultaneously on foot in Germany in 1944 and riding his Cadillac in 1967. Germany dropped away, and 1967 became bright and clear, free of interference from any other time. Billy was on his way to a Lions Club luncheon meeting. It was a
hot August, but Billy’s car was air-conditioned. He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they’d wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and halftracks had been.

“Blood brother,” said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.

There was a tap on Billy’s car window. A black man was out there. He wanted to talk about something. The light had changed. Billy did the simplest thing. He drove on.

Billy drove through a scene of even greater desolation. It looked like Dresden after it was fire-bombed—like the surface of the moon. The house where Billy had grown up used to be somewhere in what was so empty now. This was urban renewal. A new Ilium Government Center and a Pavilion of the
Arts and a Peace Lagoon and high-rise apartment buildings were going up here soon.

That was all right with Billy Pilgrim.

The speaker at the Lions Club meeting was a major in the Marines. He said that Americans had no choice but to keep fighting in Vietnam until they achieved victory or until the Communists realized that they could not force their way of life on weak countries. The major had been there on two separate tours of duty. He told of many terrible and many wonderful things he had seen. He was in favor of increased bombings, of bombing North Vietnam back into the Stone Age, if it refused to see reason.

Billy was not moved to protest the bombing of North Vietnam, did not shudder about the hideous things he himself had seen bombing do. He was simply having lunch with the Lions Club, of which he was past president now.