Slaughterhouse-Five (25 page)

“Shit,” said Lazzaro.

“He’s a pretty big man,” said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.

“Size don’t mean a thing.”

“You’re going to
shoot
him?”

“I’m gonna
have
him shot,” said Lazzaro. “He’ll get home after the war. He’ll be a big hero. The dames’ll be climbing all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years’ll go by. And then one day there’ll be a knock on his door. He’ll answer the door, and there’ll be a stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so-and-so. When he says he is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like
without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the guts and walk away.” So it goes.

Lazzaro said that he could have anybody in the world killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses. He had a list in his head, he said.

Derby asked him who all was on the list, and Lazzaro said, “Just make fucking sure
you
don’t get on it. Just don’t cross me, that’s all.” There was a silence, and then he added, “And don’t cross my friends.”

“You have
friends
?” Derby wanted to know.

“In the
war
?” said Lazzaro. “Yeah—I had a friend in the war. He’s dead.” So it goes.

“That’s too bad.”

Lazzaro’s eyes were twinkling again. “Yeah. He was my buddy on the boxcar. His name was Roland Weary. He died in my arms.” Now he pointed to Billy with his one mobile hand. “He died on account of this silly cocksucker here. So I promised him I’d have this silly cocksucker shot after the war.”

Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. “Just forget about it,
kid,” he said. “Enjoy life while you can. Nothing’s gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have somebody else answer the door.”

Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too. As a time-traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder. The tape is locked up with his will and some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants National Bank and Trust, he says.

I, Billy Pilgrim
, the tape begins,
will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976
.

At the time of his death, he says, he is in Chicago to address a large crowd on the subject of flying saucers and the true nature of time. His home is still in Ilium. He has had to cross three international boundaries in order to reach Chicago. The United States of America has been Balkanized, has been divided into twenty petty nations so that it will never again be a threat to world peace. Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by angry Chinamen. So it goes. It is all brand new.

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park, which is covered by a geodesic dome. The flag of the country is behind him. It is a Hereford bull on a field of green. Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him. “It is high time I was dead,” he says. “Many years ago,” he said, “a certain man promised to have me killed. He is an old man now, living not far from here. He has read all the publicity associated with my appearance in your fair city. He is insane. Tonight he will keep his promise.”

There are protests from the crowd.

Billy Pilgrim rebukes them. “If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.” Now he closes his speech as he closes every speech—with these words: “Farewell, hello, farewell, hello.”

There are police around him as he leaves the stage. They are there to protect him from the crush of popularity. No threats on his life have been made since 1945. The police offer to stay with him. They are floridly willing to stand in a circle around him all night, with their zap guns drawn.

“No, no,” says Billy serenely. “It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it
is time for me to be dead for a little while—and then live again.” At that moment, Billy’s high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun. It is aimed at him from the darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes.

So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn’t anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there.

Then he swings back into life again, all the way back to an hour after his life was threatened by Lazzaro—in 1945. He has been told to get out of his hospital bed and dress, that he is well. He and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby are to join their fellows in the theater. There they will choose a leader for themselves by secret ballot in a free election.

Billy and Lazzaro and poor old Edgar Derby crossed the prison yard to the theater now. Billy was carrying his little coat as though it were a lady’s muff. It was wrapped around and around his
hands. He was the central clown in an unconscious travesty of that famous oil painting, “The Spirit of ’76.”

Edgar Derby was writing letters home in his head, telling his wife that he was alive and well, that she shouldn’t worry, that the war was nearly over, that he would soon be home.

Lazzaro was talking to himself about people he was going to have killed after the war, and rackets he was going to work, and women he was going to make fuck him, whether they wanted to or not. If he had been a dog in a city, a policeman would have shot him and sent his head to a laboratory, to see if he had rabies. So it goes.

As they neared the theater, they came upon an Englishman who was hacking a groove in the Earth with the heel of his boot. He was marking the boundary between the American and English sections of the compound. Billy and Lazzaro and Derby didn’t have to ask what the line meant. It was a familiar symbol from childhood.

The theater was paved with American bodies that nestled like spoons. Most of the Americans
were in stupors or asleep. Their guts were fluttering, dry.

“Close the fucking door,” somebody said to Billy. “Were you born in a barn?”

Billy closed it, took a hand from his muff, touched a stove. It was as cold as ice. The stage was still set for
Cinderella
. Azure curtains hung from arches which were shocking pink. There were golden thrones and the dummy clock, whose hands were set at midnight. Cinderella’s slippers, which were airman’s boots painted silver, were capsized side by side under a golden throne.

Billy and poor old Edgar Derby and Lazzaro had been in the hospital when the British passed out blankets and mattresses, so they had none. They had to improvise. The only space open to them was up on the stage, and they went up there, pulled the azure curtains down, made nests.

Billy, curled in his azure nest, found himself staring at Cinderella’s silver boots under a throne. And then he remembered that his shoes were ruined, that he
needed
boots. He hated to get out of his nest, but he forced himself to do it. He crawled to the boots on all fours, sat, tried them on.

The boots fit perfectly. Billy Pilgrim was Cinderella, and Cinderella was Billy Pilgrim.