Hocus Pocus

35

Muriel Peck wasn’t a barmaid anymore. She was a Full Professor of English at Tarkington, making good use of her Swarthmore education. She was asleep at the time of the surprise attack, all alone in faculty housing, a vine-covered cottage at the top of Clinton Street. Like me, she had sent her 2 kids to expensive boarding schools.

I asked her one time if she ever thought of marrying again. She said, “Didn’t you notice? I married you.”

She wouldn’t have gotten a job at Tarkington if the Trustees hadn’t fired me. An English teacher named Dwight Casey hated the head of his department so much that he asked for my old job just to get away from him. So that created a vacancy for Muriel.

If they hadn’t fired me, she probably would have left this valley, and would be alive today.

If they hadn’t fired me, I would probably be lying where she is, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

Dwight Casey is still alive, I think. His wife caine into a great deal of money soon after he replaced me. He quit at the end of the academic year and moved to the south of France.

His wife’s family was big in the Mafia. She could have taught but didn’t. She had a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Rutgers. All he had was a BS in Hotel Management from Cornell.

The Battle of Scipio lasted 5 days. It lasted 2 days longer than the Battle of Gettysburg, at which Elias Tarkington was shot by a Confederate soldier who mistook him for Abraham Lincoln.

On the night of the prison break, I was as helpless a voyeur, once the attack had begun, as Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg or Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo.

There was 1 shot fired by someone in Scipio. I will never know who did it. It was some night owl with a loaded gun in easy reach. Whoever did it must have been killed soon afterward, otherwise he would have bragged about what he had done so early in the game.

Those were good soldiers who crossed the ice. Several of them had been in Vietnam, and so, like me, had had lessons in Military Science on full scholarships from the Government. Others had had plenty of experience with shooting and being shot at, often from early childhood on, and so found a single shot unremarkable. They saved their ammunition until they could see clearly what they were shooting at.

When those seasoned troops went ashore, that was when they commenced firing. They were stingy with their bullets. There would be a bang, and then silence

for several minutes, and then, when another target appeared, maybe a bleary-eyed householder coming out his front door or peering out a window, with or without a weapon, there would be another bang or 2 or 3 bangs, and then silence again. The escaped convicts, or Freedom Fighters as they would soon call themselves, had to assume, after all, that many if not most households had firearms, and that their owners had long daydreamed of using them with deadly effect should precisely what was happening happen. The Freedom Fighters had no choice. I would have done the same thing, had I been in their situation.

Bang. Somebody else would jerk backward and downward, like a professional actor on a TV show.

The biggest flurry of shots came from what I guessed from afar to be the parking lot in back of the Black Cat Café, where the prostitutes parked their vans. The men who visited the vans that late at night had handguns with them, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

And then I could tell from the sporadic firing that the Freedom Fighters had begun to climb the hill to the college, which was brightly lit all night every night to discourage anybody who might be tempted to do harm up here. From my point of view across the lake, larkington might have been mistaken for an emerald-studded Oz or City of God or Camelot.

You can bet I did not go back to sleep that night. I listened and listened for sirens, for helicopters, for the rumble of armored vehicles, for proofs that the forces of law and order would soon put a stop to the violence in the valley with even greater violence. At dawn the valley

was as quiet as ever, and the red light on top of the water tower on the summit of Musket Mountain, as though nothing remarkable had happened over there, winked off and on, off and on.

I went next door to the Warden’s house. I woke up his 3 servants. They had gone back to bed after the Warden charged up the hill in his Isuzu. These were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in Midland City. I hadn’t even learned to read and write, probably, when they ruined some lives, or were accused of doing so, and were forced to lead lives not worth living as a consequence.

That would certainly teach them a lesson.

At least they hadn’t been put into that great invention by a dentist, the electric chair.

“Where there is life there is hope.” So says John Gay in the Atheist’s Bible. What a starry-eyed optimist!

These 3 old geezers hadn’t had a visitor or a phone call or a letter for decades. Under the circumstances, they had no vivid ideas of what they would like to do next, so they were glad to take orders from almost anybody. Other people’s ideas of what to do next were like brain transplants. All of a sudden they were full of pep.

So I had them drink a lot of black coffee. Since I was worried about what might have happened to the Warden, they acted worried, too. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have. I did not tell them that there had been a mass prison break and that Scipio had been overrun by criminals. Such information would have been useless to them, would have been like more TV. They were sup-

posed to stay where they had been put, no matter what in the real world might be going on.

Those 3 were what psychologists call “other-directed.”

I took them over to my house and ordered them to keep the wood fire in the fireplace going, and to feed Margaret and Mildred when they got hungry. There were plenty of canned goods. I didn’t have to worry about the perishables in the refrigerator, since the air in the kitchen was already so cold. The stove itself ran on bottled propane, and there was a month’s supply of that science fiction miracle.

Imagine that: bottled energy!

Margaret and Mildred, thank goodness, felt neutral about the Warden’s zombies, the same way they felt about me. They didn’t like them, but they didn’t dislike them, either. So everything was falling into place. They would still have a life-support system, even if I went away for several days or got wounded or killed.

I didn’t expect to get wounded or killed, except by accident. All the combatants in Scipio would regard me as unthreatening, the Whites because of my color-coding and the Blacks because they knew and liked me.

The issues were clear. They were Black and White.

All the Yellow people had run away.

I had hoped to get away from the house while Margaret and Mildred were fast asleep. But as I passed my boat on my way to the ice, an upstairs window flew open. There my poor old wife was, a scrawny, addled

hag. She sensed that something important was happening, I think. Otherwise she wouldn’t have exposed herself to the cold and daylight. Her voice, moreover, which had been rasping and bawdy for years, was liquid and sweet, just as it had been on our Honeymoon. And she called me by name. That was another thing she hadn’t done for a long, long time. This was disorienting.

“Gene—” she said.

So I stopped. “Yes, Margaret,” I said.

“Where are you going, Gene?” she said.

“I’m going for a walk, Margaret, to get some fresh air,” I said.

“You’re going to see some woman, aren’t you?” she said.

“No, Margaret. Word of Honor I’m not,” I said.

“That’s all right. I understand,” she said.

It was so pathetic! I was so overwhelmed by the pathos, by the beautiful voice I hadn’t heard for so long, by the young Margaret inside the witch! I cried out in all sincerity, “Oh, Margaret, I love you, I love you!”

Those were the last words she would ever hear me say, for I would never come back.

She made no reply. She shut the window and pulled down the opaque black roller blind.

I have not seen her since.

After that side of the lake was recaptured by the 82nd Airborne, she and her mother were put in a steel box on the back of one of the prison vans and delivered to the insane asylum in Batavia. They will be fine as long as they have each other. They might be fine even if they didn’t have each other. Who knows, until somebody or something performs that particular experiment?

I have not been on that side of the lake since that morning, and may never go there again, as close as it is. So I will probably never find out what became of my old footlocker, the coffin containing the soldier I used to be, and my very rare copy of Black Garterbelt.

I crossed the lake that morning, as it happens, never to return, to deliver a particular message to the escaped convicts, with the idea of saving lives and property. I knew that the students were on vacation. That left nothing but social nobodies, in which category I surely include the college faculty, members of the Servant Class.

To me this low-grade social mix was ominous. In Vietnam, and then in later show-biz attacks on Tripoli and Panama City and so on, it had been perfectly ordinary for our Air Force to blow communities of nobodies, no matter whose side they were on, to Kingdom Come.

It seemed likely to me, should the Government decide to bomb Scipio, that it would be sensible to bomb the prison, too.

And everything would be taken care of, and no argument.

Next problem?

How many Americans knew or cared anyway where or what the Mohiga Valley was, or Laos or Cambodia or Tripoli? Thanks to our great educational system and TV, half of them couldn’t even find their own country on a map of the world.

Three-quarters of them couldn’t put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.

As I expected, I was treated by Scipio’s conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me “The Preacher” or “The Professor,” just as they had on the other side.

I saw that many. of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasn’t wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, “Where’s your uniform, Soldier?”

“Preacher,” he said, referring to his skin, “I was born in a uniform.”

Alton Darwin had set himself up in Tex Johnson’s office in Samoza Hall as President of a new nation. He had been drinking. I do not mean to present any of these escapees as rational or capable of redemption. They did not care if they lived or died. Alton Darwin was glad to see me. Then again, he was glad about everything.

I had to advise him, nonetheless, that he could expect to be bombed unless he and the rest of them got out of town right away. I said their best chance to survive was to go back to the prison and fly white flags everywhere. If they did that right away, they might claim that they had nothing to do with all the killings here. The number of people the escapees killed in Scipio, incidentally, was 5 less than the number I myself had killed single-handedly in the war in Vietnam.

So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a “tempest in a teapot,” 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.