Free Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

Vietnam, I, too, reacted at press briefings as though our defeats were victories. But I was under orders to do that. That wasn’t my natural disposition.
     
     
    ALTON DARWIN, AND this was true of Jack Patton, too, spoke of trivial and serious matters in the same tone of voice, with the same gestures and facial expressions. Nothing mattered more or less than anything else.
    Alton Darwin, I remember, was talking to me with seemingly deep concern about how many of the convicts who had crossed the ice with him to Scipio were deserting, were going back across the ice to the prison, or turning themselves in at the roadblock at the head of the lake in hopes of amnesty. The deserters were worriers. They didn’t want to die, and they didn’t want to be held responsible, even though many of them were responsible, for the murders and rapes in Scipio.
    So I was pondering the desertion problem when Alton Darwin said with exactly the same intensity, “I can skate on ice. Do you believe that?”
    “I beg your pardon?” I said.
    “I could always roller-skate,” he said. “But I never got a chance to ice-skate till this morning.”
    That morning, with the phones dead and the electricity cut off, with unburied bodies everywhere, and with all the food in Scipio already consumed as though by a locust plague, he had gone up to Cohen Rink and put on ice skates for the first time in his life. After a few tottering steps, he had found himself gliding around and around, and around and around.
    “Roller-skating and ice-skating are just about the very same thing!” he told me triumphantly, as though he had made a scientific discovery that was going to throw an entirely new light on what had seemed a hopeless situation. “Same muscles!” he said importantly.
     
     
    THAT’S WHAT HE was doing when he was fatally shot about an hour later. He was out on the rink, gliding around and around, and around and around. I’d left him in his office, and I assumed that he was still up there. But there he was on the rink instead, going around and around, and around and around.
    A shot rang out, and he fell down.
    Several of his followers went to him, and he said something to them, and then he died.
     
     
    IT WAS A beautiful shot, if Darwin was really the man the College President was shooting at. He could have been shooting at me, since he knew I used to make love to his wife Zuzu when he was out of the house.
    If he was shooting at Darwin instead of me, he solved one of the most difficult problems in marksmanship, the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target.
    As I say, “Beautiful shot.”
     
     
    I ASKED LATER what Alton Darwin’s last words had been, and was told that they made no sense. His last words had been, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”

10
    SOMETIMES ALTON DARWIN would talk to me about the planet he was on before he was transported in a steel box to Athena. “Drugs were food,” he said. “I was in the food business. Just because people on one planet eat a certain kind of food they’re hungry for, that makes them feel better after they eat it, that doesn’t mean people on other planets shouldn’t eat something else. On some planets I’m sure there are people who eat stones, and then feel wonderful for a little while afterwards. Then it’s time to eat stones again.”
     
     
    I THOUGHT VERY little about the prison during the 15 years I was a teacher at Tarkington, as big and brutal as it was across the lake, and growing all the time. When we went picnicking at the head of the lake, or went up to Rochester on some errand or other, I saw plenty of blacked-out buses and steel boxes on the backs of trucks. Alton Darwin might have been in one of those boxes. Then again, since the steel boxes were also used to carry freight, there might have been nothing but Diet Pepsi and toilet paper in there.
    Whatever was in there was none of my