Hocus Pocus (31 page)

I heard Harley III barking orders at the diggers, telling them to dig deeper and make the sides straighter and so on. I had seen leadership of such a high order exercised in Vietnam, and I myself had exhibited it from time to time, so I am quite certain that Harley III had taken some sort of amphetamine.

 

 

THERE WASN’T MUCH for me to govern at first. This place, which had been the sole remaining business of any size in the valley, stood vacant and seemed likely to remain so. Most locals had managed to run away after the prison break. When they came back, though, there was no way to make a living. Those who owned houses or places of business couldn’t find anybody to sell them to. They were wiped out.

So most of the civilians I might have governed had soon packed the best of their belongings into cars and trailers, and paid small fortunes to black marketeers for enough gasoline to get them the heck out of here.

 

 

I HAD NO troops of my own. Those on my side of the lake were on loan from the commander of the National Guard Division, the 42nd Division, the “Rainbow Division,” Lucas Florio. He had his headquarters in Hiroshi Matsumoto’s old office at the prison. He wasn’t a graduate of West Point, and he was too young to have fought in Vietnam, and his home was in Schenectady, so we had never met before. His troops were all White, with Orientals classified as Honorary White People. The same was true of the 82nd Airborne. There were also Black and Hispanic units somewhere, the theory being, as with the prisons, that people were always more comfortable with those of their own race.

This resegregation, although I never heard any public figure say so, also made the Armed Forces more like a set of golf clubs. You could use this battalion or that one, depending on what color people they were supposed to fight.

The Soviet Union, of course, with citizenry, including every sort of a human being but a Black or Hispanic, found out the hard way that soldiers wouldn’t fight hard at all against people who looked and thought and talked like them.

 

 

THE RAINBOW DIVISION itself began during World War I, as an experiment integrating unlike Americans who weren’t Army Regulars. Reserve Divisions activated back then were all identified with specific parts of the country. Then somebody got the idea of putting together a Division composed of draftees and volunteers from all different parts of the country, to prove how well they could get along.

Harmony between White people thought not to like each other very much was what the rainbow represented then. The Rainbow Division did in fact fight about as well as any other one during the War to End Wars, the prelude to the Finale Rack.

 

 

AFTERWARD, THE EXPERIMENT complete, the 42nd Division became merely one more National Guard outfit, arbitrarily handed over with its battle ribbons to New York State.

But the symbol of the rainbow lives on in its shoulder patch.

Before I was arrested for insurrection, I myself was a wearer of that rainbow, along with the star of a Brigadier!

DURING 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.

 

1 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 I 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 above-ground 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 Supercollider, down there. He said the funds for the Supercollider 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 Supercollider 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.”