Hocus Pocus

37

On the last afternoon of the siege, National Guard units relieved the Airborne troops across the lake. That night, undetected, the paratroops took up positions behind Musket Mountain. Two hours before the next dawn, they came quietly around either side of the mountain, captured the stable, freed the hostages, and then took possession of all of Scipio. They had to kill only 1 person, who was the guard dozing outside the stable. They strangled him with a standard piece of equipment. I had used one just like it in Vietnam. It was a meter of piano wire with a wooden handle at either end.

So that was that.

The defenders were out of ammunition. There were hardly any defenders left anyway. Maybe 10.

Again, I don’t believe there would have been such delicate microsurgery by the best ground troops available, if it hadn’t been for the social prominence of the Trustees.

They were helicoptered to Rochester, where they were shown on TV. They thanked God and the Army. They said they had never lost hope. They said they were tired but happy, and just wanted to get a hot bath and then sleep in a nice clean bed.

All National Guardsmen who had been south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex during the siege got Combat Infantryman’s Badges. They were so pleased.

The paratroops already had theirs. When they dressed up for the victory parade, they wore campaign ribbons from Costa Rica and Bimini and El Paso and on and on, and from the Battle of the South Bronx, of course. That battle had had to keep on going without their help.

Several nobodies tried to get onto a helicopter with the Trustees. There was room. But the only people allowed aboard were on a list which had come all the way from the White House. I saw the list. Tex and Zuzu Johnson were the only locals named.

I watched the helicopters take off, the happy ending. I was up in the belfry, checking on the damage. I hadn’t dared to go up there earlier. Somebody might have taken a shot at me, and it could have been a beautiful shot.

And as the helicopters became specks to the north, I was startled to hear a woman speak. She was right behind me. She was small and was shod in white sneakers and had come up ever so quietly. I wasn’t expecting company.

She said, “I wondered what it was like up here. Sure is a mess, but the view is nice, if you like water and soldiers.” She sounded tired. We all did.

I turned to look at her. She was Black. I don’t mean she was so-called Black. Her skin was very dark. She may not have had any white blood whatsoever. If she had been a man at Athena, skin that color would have put her in the lowest social caste.

She was so small and looked so young I mistook her for a Tarkington student, maybe the dyslexic daughter of some overthrown Caribbean or African dictator who had absquatulated to the USA with his starving nation’s treasury.

Wrong again!

If the college GRIOT™ had still been working, I am sure it couldn’t have guessed what she was and what she was doing there. She had lived outside all the statistics on which GRIOT™ based its spookily canny guesses. When GRIOT™ was stumped by somebody who had given statistical expectations as wide a berth as she had, it just sat there and hummed. A little red light came on.

Her name was Helen Dole. She was 26. She was unmarried. She was born in South Korea, and had grown up in what was then West Berlin. She held a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Berlin. Her father had been a Master Sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps of the Regular Army, serving in Korea and then in our Army of Occupation in Berlin. When her father retired after 30 years, to a nice enough little house in a nice enough little neighborhood in Cincinnati, and she saw the horrible squalor and hopelessness into which most black people were born there, she went back to what had become just plain Berlin and earned her Doctorate.

She was as badly treated by many people over there as she would have been over here, but at least she didn’t

have to think every day about some nearby black ghetto where life expectancy was worse than that in what was said to be the poorest country on the planet, which was Bangladesh.

This Dr. Helen Dole had come to Scipio only the day before the prison break, to be interviewed by Tex and the Trustees for, of all things, my old job teaching Physics. She had seen the opening advertised in The New York Times. She had talked to Tex on the telephone before she came. She wanted to make sure he knew she was Black. Tex said that was fine, no problem. He said that the fact that she was both female and black, and held a Doctorate besides, was absolutely beautiful.

If she had landed the job and signed a contract before Tarkington ceased to be, that would have made her the last of a long succession of Tarkington Physics teachers, which included me.

But Dr. Dole had blown up at the Board of Trustees instead. They asked her to promise that she would never, whether in class or on social occasions, discuss politics or history or economics or sociology with students. She was to leave those subjects to the college’s experts in those fields.

“I plain blew up,” she said to me.

“All they asked of me,” she said, “was that I not be a human being.”

“I hope you gave it to them good,” I said.

“I did,” she said. “I called them a bunch of European planters.”

Lowell Chung’s mother was no longer on the Board, so all the faces Dr. Dole saw were indeed of European ancestry.

She asserted that Europeans like them were robbers with guns who went all over the world stealing other people’s land, which they then called their plantations. And they made the people they robbed their slaves. She was taking a long view of history, of course. Tarkington’s Trustees certainly hadn’t roamed the world on ships, armed to the teeth and looking for lightly defended real estate. Her point was that they were heirs to the property of such robbers, and to their mode of thinking, even if they had been born poor and had only recently dismantled an essential industry, or cleaned out a savings bank, or earned big commissions by facilitating the sale of beloved American institutions or landmarks to foreigners.

She told the Trustees, who had surely vacationed in the Caribbean, about the Carib Indian chief who was about to be burned at the stake by Spaniards. His crime was his failure to see the beauty of his people’s becoming slaves in their own country.

This chief was offered a cross to kiss before a professional soldier or maybe a priest set fire to the kindling and logs piled up above his kneecaps. He asked why he should kiss it, and he was told that the kiss would get him into Paradise, where he would meet God and so on.

He asked if there were more people like the Spaniards up there.

He was told that of course there were.

In that case, he said, he would leave the cross unkissed. He said he didn’t want to go to yet another place where people were so cruel.

She told them about Indonesian women who threw their jewelry to Dutch sailors coming ashore with fire-

arms, in the hopes that they would be satisfied by such easily won wealth and go away again.

But the Dutch wanted their land and labor, too.

And they got them, which they called a plantation.

I had heard about that from Damon Stern.

“Now,” she said to them, “you are selling this plantation because the soil is exhausted, and the natives are getting sicker and hungrier every day, begging for food and medicine and shelter, all of which are very expensive. The water mains are breaking. The bridges are falling down. So you are taking all your money and getting out of here.”

One Trustee, she didn’t know which, except that it wasn’t Wilder, said that he intended to spend the rest of his life in the United States.

“Even if you stay,” she said, “you and your money and your soul are getting out of here.”

So she and I, working independently, had noticed the same thing: That even our natives, if they had reached the top or been born at the top, regarded Americans as foreigners. That seems to have been true, too, of people at the top in what used to be the Soviet Union: to them their own ordinary people weren’t the kinds of people they understood and liked very much.

“What did Jason Wilder say to that?” I asked her. On TV he was always so quick to snatch any idea tossed his way, cover it with spit, so to speak, and throw it back with a crazy spin which made it uncatchable.

“He just let it lie there for a while,” she said.

I could see how he might have been flummoxed by this little black woman who spoke many more languages than he did, who knew I ,000 times more science

than he did, and at least as much history and literature and music and art. He had never had anybody like that on his talk show. He may never have had to debate with a person whose destiny GRIOT™ would have described as unpredictable.

He said at last, “I am an American, not a European.” And she said to him, “Then why don’t you act like one?”