Hocus Pocus

39

D~ my first 2 weeks as Military Commander of the Scipio District, all the way to the head of the lake and all the way down to the National Forest, the best thing I did, I think, was to make some of the soldiers firemen. A few had been firemen in civilian life, so I got them to familiarize themselves with the town’s firefighting apparatus, which hadn’t been hurt during the siege. One real stroke of luck: the fire trucks all had full tanks of gasoline. You would have thought, in a society where everybody from top to bottom was stealing everything that wasn’t nailed down, that somebody would have siphoned off that priceless gasoline.

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

I also supervised the exhumation of the bodies next to the stable. They had been buried for only a few days, but then the Government, personified by a Coroner and

the Medical Examiner from the State Police who knew so much about crucifixions, ordered us to dig them up again. The Government had to fingerprint and photograph them, and describe their dental work, if any, and their obvious wounds, if any, and so on. We didn’t have to dig up the Shultzes again, who had already been dug up once, to make room for the Pavilion.

And we hadn’t found the young woman’s skull yet. The digging hadn’t gone deep enough yet to find out what had become of the head of the missing Lilac Queen.

The Government, just those 2 guys from out of town, said we had to bury the bodies much deeper when they were through with them. That was the law.

“We wouldn’t want to break the law,” I said.

The Coroner was black. I wouldn’t have known he was Black if he hadn’t told me.

I asked him if he couldn’t arrange for the County or the State or somebody to take possession of the bodies until the next-of-kin, if any, could decide what was to be done with them. I hoped they would be taken to Rochester, where they could be embalmed or refrigerated or cremated, or at least buried in decent containers of some kind. They had been buried here in nothing but their clothing.

He said he would look into it, but that I shouldn’t get my hopes up. He said the County was broke and the State was broke and the Country was broke and that he was broke. He had lost what little he had in Microsecond Arbitrage.

After the Government left, I faced the problem of what the best way would be to dig much deeper graves. I was reluctant to ask National Guardsmen to do it with

shovels. They had been resentful when 1 had them dig up the bodies and were growing more sullen in any case as it became more and more apparent, even that early in the game, that they might never be allowed to return to civilian life. The glamour of their Combat Infantryman’s Badges was wearing thin.

I couldn’t use convict labor from across the lake. That, too, was the law. And then I remembered that the college had a backhoe which ran on diesel fuel, which wasn’t a hot item on the black market. So if somebody could find the backhoe, there might still be some fuel in its tank.

A soldier found it, and the tank was full!

Miracle!

Again I ask the question: “How much longer can I go on being an Atheist?”

The tank was full because there was only one diesel automobile in Scipio when the diaspora began. It was a Cadillac General Motors put on the market about the time we got kicked out of Vietnam. It is still here. It was such a lemon that you might as well have tried to go on a Sunday spin in an Egyptian pyramid.

It used to belong to a Tarkington parent. He was coming to his daughter’s graduation when it broke down in front of the Black Cat Café. It had already stopped of its own accord many times between here and New York City. So he went to the hardware store and bought yellow paint and a brush and painted big lemons all over it, and sold it to Lyle Hooper for a dollar.

This was a man who was on the Board of Directors of General Motors!

During the brief time the bodies were all aboveground again, a person showed up with a Toyota hearse

and an undertaker from Rochester to claim 1. That was Dr. Charlton Hooper, who had been invited to try out for the New York Knickerbockers basketball team but had chosen to become a Physicist instead. As I’ve said,

he was 2 meters tall. -

That’s tall!

I asked the undertaker where he had found the gasoline for the trip.

He wouldn’t tell me at first, but I kept after him. He finally said, “Try the crematorium in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. Ask for Guido.”

I asked Charlton if he had come all the way from Waxahachie, Texas. The last I’d heard, he was running experiments with the enormous atom-smasher, the Supercoffider, down there. He said the funds for the Supercoffider had dried up, so he had moved to Geneva, New York, not that far away. He was teaching Freshman Physics at Hobart College.

I asked him if there was any way the Supercoffider could be turned into a prison.

He said he guessed they could put a bunch of bad guys in there, and throw the switch, and make their hair stand on end and raise their temperatures a couple of degrees centigrade.

About a week after Charlton took his father’s body away and we reburied all the others to a legal depth with the backhoe, I was awakened 1 afternoon by a terrible uproar in what had been such a peaceful town. I was living down in the Town Hall back then, and often took naps in the afternoon.

The noise was coming from up here. Chain saws were snarling. There was hammering. It sounded like

an army. As far as I knew, there were supposed to be only 4 Guardsmen up here, keeping a fire watch.

The soldier who was stationed in my reception room, to wake me up in case there was something important for me to do, had vanished. He had gone up the hill to discover what on Earth was happening. There had been no warning of any special activity.

So I trudged up Clinton Street all alone. I was wearing civilian shoes and a camouflage suit General Florio had given me, along with 1 of his own stars on each shoulder. That was all I had for a uniform.

When I got to the top of Clinton Street, I found General Florio directing soldiers brought over from his side of the lake. They were turning the Quadrangle into a city of tents. Others constructed a barbed-wire fence around it.

I did not have to ask the meaning of all this. It was obvious that Tarkington College, which had stayed small as the prison across the lake had grown and grown, was itself a prison now.

General Florio turned to me and smiled. “Hello, Warden Hartke,” he said.

Once all those 10-man tents, which were brought down from the Armory across the highway from the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, were set up on the Quadrangle as though on a checkerboard, it seemed so logical. The surrounding buildings, Samoza Hall, this library, the bookstore, the Pavilion, and so on, with machine-gunners at various windows and doorways, and with barbed wire between them and the tents, served well enough as prison walls.

General Florio said to me, “Company’s coming.”

I remember a lecture Damon Stern gave about his visit with several Tarkington students to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp in Poland during the Finale Rack. Stern used to make extra money taking trips to Europe with students whose parents or guardians didn’t want to see them over Christmas or during the summertime. He caught a lot of heck for taking some to Auschwitz. He did it impulsively and without asking permission from anyone. It wasn’t on the schedule, and some of the students were very upset afterward.

He said in his lecture that if the fences and gallows and gas chambers were removed from the tidy, tidy checkerboard of streets and old stucco two-story shotgun buildings, it might have made a nice enough junior college for low-income or underachieving people in the area. The buildings had been put up years before World War I, he said, as a comfortable outpost for soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the many titles of that Emperor, he said, was Duke of Auschwitz.

What General Florio was after on our side of the lake was our sanitary facilities. The prisoners were to use buckets in their tents for toilets, but then these could be emptied into toilets in the surrounding buildings and flushed from there into Scipio’s state-of-the-art sewage-disposal plant. Across the lake they were having to bury everything.

And no showers.

We had plenty of showers.

One touching rather than horrible thing about the siege, surely, was how little damage the escaped convicts did to this campus. It was as though they really believed that it was going to be theirs for generations.

This brings to mind another of Damon Stern’s lectures, which was about how the brutalized and starving

poor people of Petrograd in Russia behaved after they broke into the palace of the Czars in 1917. They got to see for the first time all the treasures inside the palace, and they were so outraged they wanted to wreck them.

But then one man got their attention by firing a gun at the ceiling, and he said, “Comrades! Comrades! This is all ours now! Don’t hurt anything!”

They renamed Petrograd “Leningrad.” Now it’s Petrograd again.

In a way, the escaped convicts were like a neutron bomb. They had no compassion for living things, but they did surprisingly little damage to property.

Damon Stern the unicyclist, on the other hand, laid down his life for living things. They weren’t even human beings. They were horses. They weren’t even his horses.

His wife and kids got away, and, last I heard, were living in Lackawanna, where they have relatives. That’s nice when people have relatives they can run away to.

But Damon Stern is buried deep and close to where he fell, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

His wife Wanda June came back here after the siege in a pickup truck she said belonged to her half brother. She paid a fortune for enough gas to get here from Lackawanna. I asked her what she was doing for money, and she said she and Damon had put away a lot of Yen in their freezer in a box marked “Brussels sprouts.”

Damon woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to get into the Volkswagen with the kids and take off for Rochester with the headlights off. He had heard the explosion across the lake, and seen the silent

army crossing the ice to Scipio. The last thing he ever did with Wanda June was hand her the box marked “Brussels sprouts.”

Damon himself, over his wife’s objections, stayed be-hind to spread the alarm. He said he would be along later, by hitching a ride in somebody else’s car, or by walking all the way to Rochester on back roads he knew, if he had to. It isn’t clear what happened after that. He probably called the local police, although none of them lived to say so. He woke up a lot of people in the immediate neighborhood.

The best conjecture is that he heard gunfire inside the stable and unwisely went to investigate. A Freedom Fighter with an AK-47 was gut-shooting horses for the fun of it. He didn’t shoot them in the head.

Damon must have asked him to stop, so the Freedom Fighter shot him, too.

His wife didn’t want his body. She said the happiest years of his life had been spent here, so he should stay buried here.

She found all 4 of the family unicycles. That was easy. The soldiers were taking turns trying to ride them. Before that, several of the convicts had also tried to ride them, so far as I know with no success.

So I went back down Clinton Street to the Town Hall, to ponder this latest change in my career, that I was next to be a Warden.

There was a Rolls-Royce Corniche, a convertible coupe, parked out front. Whoever had a car like that had enough Yen or Marks or some other stable currency to buy himself or herself enough black-market gas for a trip from anywhere to anywhere.

My guess was that it was the chariot of some Tarkington student or parent who hoped to recover property left in a dorm suite at the start of the vacation period, a vacation which now, obviously, might never end.

The soldier who was supposed to be my receptionist was back on duty. He had returned to his post after General Florio told him to stop standing around with his thumb in his anus and start stringing barbed wire or erecting tents. He was waiting for me at the front door, and he told me I had a visitor.

So I asked him, “Who is the visitor?”

He said, “It’s your son, sir.”

I was thunderstruck. “Eugene is here?” I said. Eugene Jr. had told me that he never wanted to see me again as long as he lived. How is that for a life sentence? And he was driving a Rolls-Royce now? Eugene?

“No, sir,” he said. “Not Eugene.”

“Eugene is the only son I have,” I said. “What did he say his name was?”

“He told me, sir,” he said, “that he was your son Rob Roy.”

That was all the proof I needed that a son of mine did indeed await me in my office: that name, “Rob Roy.” “Rob” and “Roy,” and I was back in the Philippine Islands again, having just been kicked out of Vietnam. I was back in bed with a voluptuous female war correspondent from The Des Moines Register, whose lips were like sofa pillows, telling her that, if I had been a fighter plane, I would have had little pictures of people painted all over me.

I calculated how old he was. He was 23, making him the youngest of my children. He was the baby of the family.

He was in the reception room outside my office. He stood up when I came in. He was exactly as tall as myself. His hair was the same color and texture as mine. He needed a shave, and his potential beard was as black and thick as mine. His eyes were the same color as mine. All 4 of our eyes were greenish amber. We had the same big nose, my father’s nose. He was nervous and polite. He was expensively dressed in leisure clothes. If he had been learning-disabled or merely stupid, which he wasn’t, he might have had a happy 4 years at Tarkington, especially with that car of his.

I was giddy. I had taken off my overcoat on the way in, so that he could see my General’s stars. That was something, anyway. How many boys had a father who was a General?

“How can I help you?” I said.

“I hardly know how to begin,” he said.

“I think you’ve already begun by telling the guard that you were a son of mine,” I said. “Was that a joke?”

“Do you think it was a joke?” he asked.

“I don’t pretend I was a Saint when I was young and away from home so much,” I said. “But I never made love using an alias. I was always easy to find afterward, if somebody wanted to find me badly enough. So, if I did father a child out of wedlock somewhere along the line, that comes as a complete surprise to me. I would have thought the mother, the minute she found out she was pregnant, would have gotten in touch with me.”

“I know 1 mother who didn’t,” he said.

Before I could reply, he blurted words he must have rehearsed en route. “This is going to be a very brief visit,” he said. “I am going to be in and out of here before you know it. I’m on my way to Italy, and I never want to see this country ever again, and especially Dubuque.”

It would turn out that he had been through an ordeal that lasted much, much longer than the siege of Scipio, and was probably harder on him than Vietnam had been on me. He had been tried for child molestation in Dubuque, Iowa, where he had founded and run a free child-care center at his own expense.

He wasn’t married, a strike against him in the eyes of most juries, a character flaw like having served in the Vietnam War.

“I grew up in Dubuque,” he would tell me, “and the money I inherited was made in Dubuque.” It was a meat-packing fortune.

“I wanted to give something back to Dubuque. With so many single parents raising children on minimum wage, and with so many married couples both working to make enough to feed and clothe their children halfway decently, I thought what Dubuque needed most was a child-care center that was nice and didn’t cost anything.”

Two weeks after he opened the center, he was arrested for child molestation because several of the children came home with inflamed genitalia.

He was later to prove in court, after smears were taken from the children’s lesions, that a fungus was to blame. The fungus was closely related to jock itch, and may actually have been a new strain of jock which had learned how to rise above all the standard remedies for that affliction.

By then, though, he had been held in jail without bail for 3 months, and had to be protected from a lynch mob by the National Guard. Luckily for him, Dubuque, like

so many communities, had backed up its police with Armor and Infantry.

After he was acquitted, he had to be transported out of town and deep into Illinois in a buttoned-up tank, or somebody would have killed him.

The judge who acquitted him was killed. He was of Italian ancestry. Somebody sent him a pipe bomb concealed in a huge salami.

But that son of mine did not tell me about any of that until just before he said, “It’s time to say, ‘Good-bye.’” He prefaced the tale of how he had suffered so with these words: “I hope you understand, the last thing I wanted to do was make any demands on your emotions.”

“Try me,” I said.

Thinking about our meeting now ifils me with a sort of sweetness. He had liked me enough, found me warm enough, to use me as though I were a really good father, if only for a little while.

In the beginning, when we were feeling each other out very gingerly, and I hadn’t yet admitted that he was my son, I asked him if “Rob Roy” was the name on his birth certificate, or whether that was a nickname his mother had hung on him.

He said it was the name on his birth certificate.

“And the father on the birth certificate?” I asked.

“It was the name of a soldier who died in Vietnam,” he said.

“Do you remember what it was?” I said.

Here came a surprise. It was the name of my brotherin-law, Jack Patton, whom his mother had never met,

I’m sure. I must have told her about Jack in Manila, and she’d remembered his name, and that he was unmarried and had died for his country.

I thought to myself, “Good old Jack, wherever you are, it’s time to laugh like hell again.”

“So what makes you think I’m your father instead of him?” I said. “Your mother finally told you?”

“She wrote me a letter,” he said.

“She didn’t tell you face to face?” I said.

“She couldn’t,” he said. “She died of cancer of the pancreas when I was 4 years old.”

That was a shock. She sure hadn’t lasted long after I made love to her. I’ve always enjoyed thinking of the women I have made love to as living on and on. I had imagined his mother, game and smart and sporty and funny, with lips like sofa pillows, living on and on.

“She wrote me a letter on her deathbed,” he continued, “which was put into the hands of a law firm in Dubuque, not to be opened until after the death of the good man who had married her and adopted me. He died only a year ago.”

“Did the letter say why you were named Rob Roy?” I inquired.

“No,” he said. “I assumed it must be because she liked the novel by that name by Sir Walter Scott.”

“That sounds right,” I said. What good would it do him or anybody else to know that he was named for 2 shots of Scotch, I shot of sweet vermouth, cracked ice, and a twist of lemon peel?

“How did you find me?” I said.

“At first I didn’t think I wanted to find you,” he said. “But then 2 weeks ago I thought that we were entitled

to see each other once, at least. So I called West Point.”

“I haven’t had any contact with them for years,” I said.

“That’s what they told me,” he said. “But just before I called they got a call from theGovernor of New York, who said he had just made you a Brigadier General. He wanted to make sure he hadn’t been made a fool of. He wanted to make sure you were what you were claimed to be.”

“Well,” I said, and we were still standing in the reception room, “I don’t think we need to wait for blood tests to find out whether you are really my son or not. You are the spit and image of me when I was your age.

“You should know that I really loved your mother,” I went on.

“That was in her letter, how much in love you were,” he said.

“You will have to take my word for it,” I said, “that if I had known she was pregnant, I would have behaved honorably. I’m not quite sure what we would have done. We would have worked something out.”

I led the way into my office. “Come on in. There are a couple of easy chairs in here. We can close the door.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I’m on my way. Ijust thought we should see each other just one time. We’ve done that now. It’s no big thing.”

“I like life to be simple,” I said, “but if you went away without another word, that would be much too simple for me, and for you, too, I hope.”

So I got him into my office and closed the door, and got us settled in facing easy chairs. We hadn’t touched. We never would touch.

“I would offer you coffee,” I said, “but nobody in this valley has coffee.”

“I’ve got some in my car,” he said.

“I’m sure,” I said. “But don’t go get it. Never mind, never mind.” I cleared my throat. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, you seem to be what I have heard called ‘fabulously well-to-do.’”

He said that, yes, he was fortunate financially. The Dubuque meat packer who married his mother and adopted him had sold his business to the Shah of Bratpuhr shortly before he died, and had been paid in gold bricks deposited in a bank in Switzerland.

The meat packer’s name was Lowell Fenstermaker, so my son’s full name was Rob Roy Fenstermaker. Rob Roy said he certainly wasn’t going to change his last name to Hartke, that he felt like Fenstermaker and not Hartke.

His stepfather had been very good to him. Rob Roy said that the only thing he didn’t like about him was the way he raised calves for veal. The baby animals, scarcely out of the womb, were put in cages so cramped that they could hardly move, to make their muscles nice and tender. When they were big enough their throats were cut, and they had never run or jumped or made friends, or done anything that might have made life a worthwhile experience.

What was their crime?

Rob Roy said that his inherited wealth was at first an embarrassment. He said that until very recently he never would have considered buying a car like the 1 parked outside, or wearing a cashmere jacket and lizard-skin shoes made in Italy. That was what he was wearing in my office. “When nobody else in Dubuque

could afford black-market coffee and gasoline, I, too, did without. I used to walk everywhere.”

“What happened very recently?” I said.

“I was arrested for molesting little children,” he said. I itched all over with a sudden attack of psychosomatic hives.

He told me the whole story.

I said to him, “I thank you for sharing that with me.”

The hives went away as quickly as they had come.

I felt wonderful, very happy to have him look me over and think what he would. I had seldom been happy to have my legitimate children look me over and think what they would.

What made the difference? I hate to say so, because my answer is so paltry. But here it is: I had always wanted to be a General, and there I was wearing General’s stars.

How embarrassing to be human.

There was this, too: I was no longer encumbered by my wife and mother-in-law. Why did I keep them at home so long, even though it was plain that they were making the lives of my children unbearable?

It could be, I suppose, because somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that there might really be a big book in which all things were written, and that I wanted some impressive proof that I could be compassionate recorded there.

I asked Rob Roy where he had gone to college.

“Yale,” he said.

I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called “Plantation Owners’ Tech.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“I had to ask her to explain it myself,” I said. “She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them.”

“That’s a bit strong,” he said. And then he asked me if my first wife was still alive.

“I’ve only had 1,” I said. “She’s still alive.”

“There was a lot about her in Mother’s letter,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Like what?”

“About how she was hit by a car the day before you were going to take her to the senior prom. About how she was paralyzed from the waist down, but you still married her, even though she would have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”

If that was in the letter, I must have told his mother that.

“And your father, is he still alive?” he said.

“No,” I said. “The ceiling of a gift shop fell on him at Niagara Falls.”

“Did he ever regain his eyesight?” he said.

“Regain his what?” I said. And then I realized that his question was based on some other lie I had told his mother.

“His eyesight,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Never did.”

“I think it’s so beautiful,” he said, “how he came home from the war blind, and you used to read Shakespeare to him.”

“He sure loved Shakespeare,” I said.

“So,” he said, “I am descended not just from I war hero, but 2.”

“War hero?” I said.

“I know you would never call yourself that,” he said.

“But that’s what Mother said you were. And you can certainly call your father that. How many Americans shot down 28 German planes in World War II?”

“We could go up to the library and look it up,” I said. “They have a very good library here. You can find out anything, if you really try.”

“Where is my Uncle Bob buried?” he said.

“Your what?” I said.

“Your brother Bob, my Uncle Bob,” he said.

I had never had a brother of any kind. I took a wild guess. “We threw his ashes out of an airplane,” I said.

“You have certainly had some bad luck,” he said. “Your father comes home blind from the war. Your childhood sweetheart is hit by a car right before the senior prom. Your brother dies of spinal meningitis right after he is invited to try out for the New York Yankees.”

“Yes, well, all you can do is play the cards they deal you,” I said.

“Have you still got his glove?” he said.

“No,” I said. What kind of glove could I have told his mother about when we were both sozzled on Sweet Rob Roys in Manila 24 years ago?

“You carried it all the way through the war, but now it’s gone?” he said.

He had to be talking about the nonexistent baseball glove of my nonexistent brother. “Somebody stole it from me after I got home,” I said, “thinking it was just another baseball glove, I’m sure. Whoever stole it had no idea how much it meant to me.”

He stood. “I really must be going now.”

I stood, too.

I shook my head sadly. “It isn’t going to be as easy

as you think to give up on the country of your birth.”

“That’s about as meaningful as my astrological sign,” he said.

“What is?” I said.

“The country of my birth,” he said.

“You might be surprised,” I said.

“Well, Dad,” he said, “it certainly won’t be the first time.”

“Can you tell me who in this valley might have gasoline?” he said. “I’ll pay anything.”

“Do you have enough gas to make it back to Rochester?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “head back the way you came. That’s the only way you can get back, so you can’t get lost. Right at the Rochester city limits you will see the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. Behind that is a crematorium. Don’t look for smoke. It’s smokeless.”

“A crematorium?” he said.

“That’s right, a crematorium,” I said. “You drive up to the crematorium, and you ask for Guido. From what I hear, if you’ve got the money, he’s got the gasoline.”

“And chocolate bars, do you think?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Won’t hurt to ask.”