Hocus Pocus

36

“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 country 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 unicycist 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.