Hocus Pocus (26 page)

“I don’t believe it, either,” he said. “I do know this, though: 10 percent of the people inside these walls still have minds, but there is nothing for those minds to play with. So this place is twice as painful for them as it is for the rest. A good teacher just might be able to give their minds new toys, Math or Astronomy or History, or who knows what, which would make the passage of time just a little bit more bearable. What do you think?”

“You’re the boss,” I said.

 

 

HE REALLY WAS the boss, too. He had made such a financial success of Athena that his corporate superiors allowed him to be completely autonomous. They had contracted with the State to take care of prisoners for only 2 thirds as much money per capita as the State had spent when it owned the place. That was about as much as it would have cost to send a convict to medical school or Tarkington. By importing cheap, young, short-term, nonunion labor, and by getting supplies from the lowest bidders rather than from the Mafia and so on, Hiroshi Matsumoto had cut the per capita cost to less than half of what it used to be.

He didn’t miss a trick. When I went to work for him, he had just bought a state-of-the-art crematorium for the prison. Before that, a Mafia-owned crematorium on the outskirts of Rochester, in back of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory, had had a monopoly on cremating Athena’s unclaimed bodies.

After the Japanese bought Athena, though, the Mob doubled their prices, using the AIDS epidemic as an excuse. They had to take extra precautions, they said. They wanted double even if the prison provided a doctor’s certificate guaranteeing that a body was AIDS-free, and the cause of death, as anybody could see, was some sort of knife or garrote or blunt instrument.

 

 

THERE WASN’T A Japanese manufacturer of crematoria, so Warden Matsumoto bought one from A. J. Topf und Sohn in Essen, Germany. This was the same outfit that had made the ovens for Auschwitz in its heyday.

The postwar Topf models all had state-of-the-art smoke scrubbers on their smokestacks, so people in Scipio, unlike the people living near Auschwitz, never knew that they had a busy corpse carbonizer in the neighborhood.

We could have been gassing and incinerating convicts over there around the clock, and who would know?

 

 

WHO WOULD CARE?

 

 

A WHILE BACK I mentioned that Lowell Chung’s mother died of tetanus. I want to say before I forget that tetanus might have a real future in astronautics, since it becomes an extremely rugged spore when life becomes intolerable.

 

 

I HAVEN’T NOMINATED AIDS viruses as promising intergalactic rock jockeys, since, at their present state of development, they can’t survive for long outside a living human body.

Concerted efforts to kill them with new poisons, though, if only partially successful, could change all that.

 

 

THE MAFIA CREMATORIUM behind the Meadowdale Cinema Complex has all this valley’s prison business again. Some of the convicts who stayed in or near Athena after the great escape, rather than attack Scipio across the ice, felt that at least they could bust up the A. J. Topf und Sohn crematorium.

The Meadowdale Cinema Complex itself has gone belly up, since so few people can afford to own an automobile anymore.

Same thing with the shopping malls.

 

 

ONE THING INTERESTING to me, although I don’t know quite what to make of it, is that the Mafia never sells anything to foreigners. While everybody else who has inherited or built a real business can’t wait to sell out and take early retirement, the Mafia holds on to everything. Thus does the paving business, for example, remain a strictly American enterprise.

Same thing with wholesale meat and napkins and tablecloths for restaurants.

 

 

I TOLD THE Warden right up front that I had been canned by Tarkington. I explained that the charges against me for sexual irregularities were a smokescreen. The Trustees were really angry about my having wobbled the students’ faith in the intelligence and decency of their country’s leadership by telling them the truth about the Vietnam War.

“Nobody on this side of the lake believes there is such a thing in this miserable country,” he said.

“Such a thing as what, sir?” I said.

And he said, “Leadership.” As for my sexual irregularities, he said, they seemed to be uniformly heterosexual, and there were no women on his side of the lake. He himself was a bachelor, and members of his staff were not allowed to bring their wives with them, if they had them. “So over here,” he said, “you would truly be Don Juan in Hell. Do you think that you could stand that?”

I said I could, so he offered me a job on a trial basis. I would start work as soon as possible, offering general education mostly on the primary-school level, not all that different from what I had done at Tarkington. An immediate problem was housing. His staff lived in barracks in the shadows of the prison walls, and he himself had a renovated house down by the water and was the only inhabitant of the ghost town, a ghost hamlet, actually, after which the prison was named: Athena.

 

 

IF I DIDN’T work out for some reason, he said, he would still need a teacher on the property, who would surely not want to live in the barracks. So he was having another old house in the ghost town made livable, right next to his own. But it wouldn’t be ready for occupancy until August. “Do you think the college will let you stay where you are until then, and meanwhile you could commute to work from over there? You have a car?”

“A Mercedes,” I said.

“Excellent!” he said. “That will give you something in common with the inmates right away.”

“How so?” I said.

“They’re practically all former Mercedes owners,” he said. This was only a slight exaggeration. He told the truth when he said, “We have one man in here who bought his first Mercedes when he was 15 years old.” That was Alton Darwin, whose dying words on the skating rink after the prison break would be, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”

 

 

SO THE COLLEGE did let us stay in the Scipio house over the summer. There was no summer session at Tarkington. Who would have come to one? And I commuted to the prison every day.

In the old days, before the Japanese took over Athena, the whole staff was commuters from Scipio and Rochester. They were unionized, and it was their unceasing demands for more and more pay and fringe benefits, including compensation for their travel to and from work, that made the State decide to sell the whole shebang to the Japanese.

 

 

MY SALARY WAS what I had been paid by Tarkington. I could keep our Blue Cross—Blue Shield, since the corporation that owned the prison also owned Blue Cross—Blue Shield. No problem!

Cough.

 

 

THAT IS ANOTHER thing the prison break cost me: our Blue Cross—Blue Shield.

IT WOULD WORK out well. When I moved Margaret and Mildred into our new home in the ghost town and pulled down the blinds, it was to them as though we had never left Scipio. There was a surprise present for me on our freshly sodded front lawn, a rowboat. The Warden had found an old boat that had been lying in the weeds behind the ruins of the old Athena Post Office since before I was born, quite possibly. He had had some of his guards fiberglass the outside of it, making it watertight again after all these years.

It looked a lot like the hide-covered Eskimo umiak that used to be in the rotunda outside the Dean of Women’s Office here, with the outlines of the ribs showing through the fiberglass.

I know what happened to a lot of college property after the prison break, the GRIOT™ and so on, but I haven’t a clue what became of that umiak.

If it hadn’t been on display in the rotunda, I and hundreds of Tarkington students and their parents would have gone all the way through life without ever seeing a genuine Eskimo umiak.

 

 

I MADE LOVE to Muriel Peck in that boat. I lay on the bottom, and she sat upright, holding my mother-in-law’s fishing rod, pretending to be a perfect lady and all alone.

That was my idea. What a good sport she was!

 

 

I DON’T KNOW what became of the man who claimed his name was John Donner, who wanted to teach shop at Athena, 8 years before the prison break. I do know that the Warden gave him very short shrift during his job interview, since the last things the prison needed inside its walls were chisels and screwdrivers and hacksaws and band saws and ball-peen hammers and so on.

I had to wait for Donner outside the Warden’s Office. He was my ticket back to civilization, to my home and family and copy of
Black Garterbelt.
I didn’t watch
Howdy Doody
on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him.

He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?”

 

 

THE 3 VIOLENT crimes that had gotten Abdullah into Athena were murders in drug wars. He himself would be shot dead with buckshot and slugs after the prison break, while carrying a flag of truce, by Whitey VanArsdale, the mechanic, and Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief.

“Excuse me,” I said to him, “but may I ask what you are reading?”

He displayed the book’s cover so I could read it for myself. The title was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Cough.

Abdullah was summoned to the Warden’s Office, incidentally, because he was 1 of several persons, guards as well as convicts, who claimed to have seen a castle flying over the prison. The Warden wanted to find out if some new hallucinatory drug had been smuggled in, or whether the whole place was finally going insane, or what on Earth was happening.

 

 

THE PROTOCOLS OF the Elders of Zion
was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its title was parodied by the author of the story in
Black Garterbelt,
and its paranoia, too.

The great American inventor and industrialist Henry Ford thought it was a genuine document. He had it published in this country back when my father was a boy. Now here was a black convict in irons, who had the gift of literacy, who was taking it seriously. It would turn out that there were 100s of copies circulating in the prison, printed in Libya and passed out by the ruling gang at Athena, the Black Brothers of Islam.

 

 

THAT SUMMER I would start a literacy program in the prison, using people like Abdullah Akbahr as proselytizers for reading and writing, going from cell to cell and offering lessons. Thanks to me, 1,000s of former illiterates would be able to read
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
by the time of the prison break.

I denounced that book, but couldn’t keep it from circulating. Who was I to oppose the Black Brothers, who regularly exercised what the State would not, which was the death penalty.

 

 

ABDULLAH AKBAHR RATTLED and clinked his fetters. “This any way to treat a veteran?” he said.

He had been a Marine in Vietnam, so he never had to listen to one of my pep talks. I was strictly Army. I asked him if he had ever heard of an Army officer they called “The Preacher,” who was me, of course. I was curious as to how far my fame had spread.

“No,” he said. But as I’ve said, there were other veterans there who had heard of me and knew, among other things, that I had pitched a grenade into the mouth of a tunnel one time, and killed a woman, her mother, and her baby hiding from helicopter gunships which had strafed her village right before we got there.

Unforgettable.

You know who was the Ruling Class that time? Eugene Debs Hartke was the Ruling Class.

 

 

DOWN WITH THE Ruling Class!

 

 

JOHN DONNER WAS unhappy on our trip back to Scipio from the prison. I had landed a job, and he hadn’t. His son’s bicycle had been stolen in the prison parking lot.

The Mexicans have a favorite dish they call “twice-fried beans.” Thanks to me, although Donner never found out, that bicycle was now a twice-stolen bicycle. One week later, Donner and the boy dematerialized from this valley as mysteriously as they had materialized, leaving no forwarding address.

Somebody or something must have been catching up with them.

 

 

I PITIED THAT boy. But if he is still alive, he, like me, is a grownup now.