Hocus Pocus

33

It would work out well. When I moved Margaret and Mildred into our new home in the ghost town and pulled down the blinds, it was to them as though we had never left Scipio. There was a surprise present for me on our freshly sodded front lawn, a rowboat. The Warden had found an old boat that had been lying in the weeds behind the ruins of the old Athena Post Office since before I was born, quite possibly. He had had some of his guards fiberglass the outside of it, making it watertight again after all these years.

It looked a lot like the hide-covered Eskimo uiniak that used to be in the rotunda outside the Dean of Women’s Office here, with the outlines of the ribs showing through the fiberglass.

I know what happened to a lot of college property after the prison break, the GRIOT™ and so on, but I haven’t a clue what became of that umiak.

If it hadn’t been on display in the rotunda, I and hundreds of Tarkington students and their parents would have gone all the way through life without ever seeing a genuine Eskimo umiak.

I made love to Muriel Peck in that boat. I lay on the bottom, and she sat upright, holding my mother-in-law’s fishing rod, pretending to be a perfect lady and all alone.

That was my idea. What a good sport she was!

I don’t know what became of the man who claimed his name was John Donner, who wanted to teach shop at Athena, 8 years before the prison break. I do know that the Warden gave him very short shrift during his job interview, since the last things the prison needed inside its walls were chisels and screwdrivers and hacksaws and band saws and ball-peen hammers and so on.

I had to wait for Donner outside the Warden’s Office. He was my ticket back to civilization, to my home and family and copy of Black Garterbelt. I didn’t watch Howdy Doody on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him.

He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?”

The 3 violent crimes that had gotten Abdullah into Athena were murders in drug wars. He himself would be shot dead with buckshot and slugs after the prison break, while carrying a flag of truce, by Whitey VanArsdale, the mechanic, and Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief.

“Excuse me,” I said to him, “but may I ask what you are reading?”

He displayed the book’s cover so I could read it for myself. The title was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Cough.

Abdullah was summoned to the Warden’s Office, incidentally, because he was 1 of several persons, guards as well as convicts, who claimed to have seen a castle flying over the prison. The Warden wanted to find out if some new hallucinatory drug had been smuggled in, or whether the whole place was finally going insane, or what on Earth was happening.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its title was parodied by the author of the story in Black Garterbelt, and its paranoia, too.

The great American inventor and industrialist Henry Ford thought it was a genuine document. He had it published in this country back when my father was a boy. Now here was a black convict in irons, who had the gift of literacy, who was taking it seriously. It would turn out that there were lOOs of copies circulating in the prison, printed in Libya and passed out by the ruling gang at Athena, the Black Brothers of Islam.

That summer I would start a literacy program in the prison, using people like Abdullah Akbahr as proselytizers for reading and writing, going from cell to cell and offering lessons. Thanks to me, l,000s of former illiterates would be able to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the time of the prison break.

I denounced that book, but couldn’t keep it from circulating. Who was I to oppose the Black Brothers, who regularly exercised what the State would not, which was the death penalty.

Abdullah Akbahr rattled and clinked his fetters. “This any way to treat a veteran?” he said.

He had been a Marine in Vietnam, so he never had to listen to one of my pep talks. I was strictly Army. I asked him if he had ever heard of an Army officer they called “The Preacher,” who was me, of course. I was curious as to how far my fame had spread.

“No,” he said. But as I’ve said, there were other veterans there who had heard of me and knew, among other things, that I had pitched a grenade into the mouth of a tunnel one time, and killed a woman, her mother, and her baby hiding from helicopter gunships which had strafed her village right before we got there.

Unforgettable.

You know who was the Ruling Class that time? Eugene Debs Hartke was the Ruling Class.

Down with the Ruling Class!

John Donner was unhappy on our trip back to Scipio from the prison. I had landed a job, and he hadn’t. His son’s bicycle had been stolen in the prison parking lot.

The Mexicans have a favorite dish they call “twice-fried beans.” Thanks to me, although Donner never found out, that bicycle was now a twice-stolen bicycle. One week later, Donner and the boy dematerialized from this valley as mysteriously as they had materialized, leaving no forwarding address.

Somebody or something must have been catching up with them.

I pitied that boy. But if he is still alive, he, like me, is a grownup now.

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.