Free Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut Page A

liked with him. He was no more sensitive to slights and jokes at his expense than a village idiot.
    May I say, further, that on this very day Emil Larkin puts his money where his mouth is. A wholly owned subsidiary of my division here at RAMJAC, Heartland House, a publisher of religious books in Cincinnati, Ohio, published Larkin’s autobiography,
Brother, Won’t You Pray with Me?
, six weeks ago. All of Larkin’s royalties, which could well come to half a million dollars or more, excluding motion-picture and paperback rights, are to go to the Salvation Army.
    “Who told you where I was?” I asked him. I was sorry he had found me. I had hoped to get out of prison without his asking me to pray with him one last time.
    “Clyde Carter,” he said.
    This was the guard I had been waiting for, the third cousin to the President of the United States. “Where the heck is he?” I said.
    Larkin said that the whole administration of the prison was in an uproar, because Virgil Greathouse, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare and one of the richest men in the country, had suddenly decided to begin serving his sentence immediately, without any further appeals, without any further delay. He was very probably the highest-ranking person any federal prison had ever been asked to contain.
    I knew Greathouse mainly by sight—and of course by reputation. He was a famous tough guy, the founder and still majority stockholder in the public relations firm of Greathouse and Smiley, which specialized in putting the most favorable interpretations on the activities of Caribbean and Latin American dictatorships, of Bahamian gambling casinos, of Liberian and Panamanian tanker fleets, of several Central Intelligence Agency fronts around the world, of gangster-dominated unions such as the International Brotherhood of Abrasives and Adhesives Workers and the Amalgamated Fuel Handlers, of international conglomerates such as RAMJAC and Texas Fruit, and on and on.
    He was bald. He was jowly. His forehead was wrinkled like a washboard. He had a cold pipe clamped in his teeth, even when he sat on a witness stand. I got close enough to him one time to discover that he made music on that pipe. It was like the twittering of birds. He entered Harvard six years after I graduated, so we never met there. We made eye-contact only once at the White House—at the meeting where I made a fool of myself by lighting so many cigarettes. I was just a little mouse from the WhiteHouse pantry, as far as he was concerned. He spoke to me only once, and that was after we were both arrested. We came together accidentally in a courthouse corridor, where we were facing separate arraignments. He found out who I was and evidently thought I might have something on him, which I did not. So he put his face close to mine, his eyes twinkling, his pipe in his teeth, and he made me this unforgettable promise: “You say anything about me, Buster, and when you get out of jail you’ll be lucky to get a job cleaning toilets in a whorehouse in Port Said.”
    It was after he said that, that I heard the birdcalls from his pipe.
    Greathouse was a Quaker, by the way—and so was Richard M. Nixon, of course. This was surely a special bond between them, one of the things that made them best of friends for a while.
    Emil Larkin was a Presbyterian.
    I myself was nothing. My father had been secretly baptized a Roman Catholic in Poland, a religion that was suppressed at the time. He grew up to be an agnostic. My mother was baptized a Greek Orthodox in Lithuania, but became a Roman Catholic in Cleveland. Father would never go to church with her. I myself was baptized a Roman Catholic, but aspired to my father’s indifference, and quit going to church when I was twelve. When I applied for admission to Harvard, old Mr. McCone, a Baptist, told me to classify myself as a Congregationalist, which I did.
    My son is an active Unitarian, I hear. His wife told methat she was a Methodist, but