Hocus Pocus Part 14

I WOULD RATHER have faced Zuzu than Pamela, since Pamela had gone all to pieces and Zuzu hadn't. But as I say, I would have to face them both.

I wasn't what had shoved Pamela over the edge. It was her 1-woman show in Buffalo a couple of months earlier. What went wrong with it seemed funny to everybody but her, and it was in the papers and on TV. For a couple of days she was the light side of the news, comic relief from reports of the rapid growth of glaciers at the poles and the desert where the Amazon rain forest used to be. And I am sure there was another oil spill. There was always another oil spill.

If Denver and Santa Fe and Le Havre, France, hadn't been evacuated yet because of atomic wastes in their water supplies, they soon would be.

WHAT HAPPENED TO Pamela's 1-woman show also gave a lot of people an opportunity to jeer at modern art, which only rich people claimed to like.

As I've said, Pamela worked in polyurethane, which is easy to carve and weighs almost nothing, and smells like urine when it's hot. Her figures, moreover, were small, women in full skirts, sitting and hunched over so you couldn't see their faces. A shoe-box could have contained any 1 of them.

So they were displayed on pedestals in Buffalo, but they weren't glued down. Wind was not considered a problem, since there were 3 sets of doors between her stuff and the main entrance to the museum, which faced Lake Erie.

THE MUSEUM, THE Hanson Centre for the Arts, was brand-new, a gift to the city from a Rockefeller heir living in Buffalo who had come into a great deal of money from the sale of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan to the j.a.panese. This was an old lady in a wheelchair. She hadn't stepped on a mine in Vietnam. I think it was just old age that knocked the pins out from under her, and all the waiting for Rockefeller properties to be sold off so she could have some dough for a change.

The press was there because this was the Centre's grand opening. Pamela Ford Hall's first 1-woman show, which she called "Bagladies," was incidental, except that it was mounted in the gallery, where a string quartet was playing and champagne and canapes were being served. This was black-tie.

The donor, Miss Hanson, was the last to arrive. She and her wheelchair were set down on the top step outside. Then all 3 sets of doors between Pam's bagladies and the North Pole were thrown open wide. So all the bagladies were blown off their pedestals. They wound up on the floor, piled up against the hollow baseboards which concealed hot heating pipes.

TV cameras caught everything but the smell of hot polyurethane. What a relief from mundane worries! Who says the news has to be nothing but grim day after day?

24.

PAMELA WAS SULKING next to the stable. The stable wasn't in the shadow of Musket Mountain yet. It would be another 7 hours before the Sun went down.

This was years before the prison break, but there were already 2 bodies and 1 human head buried out that way. Everybody knew about the 2 bodies, which had been interred with honors and topped with a tombstone. The head would come as a complete surprise when more graves were dug with a backhoe at the end of the prison break.

Whose head was it?

THE 2 BODIES everybody knew about belonged to Tarkington's first teacher of Botany and German and the flute, the brewmaster Hermann Shultz and his wife Sophia. They died within 1 day of each other during a diphtheria epidemic in 1893. They were in fairly fresh graves the day I was fired, although their joint grave marker was 98 years old. Their bodies and tombstone were moved there to make room for the Pahlavi Pavilion.

The mortician from down in town who took charge of moving the bodies back in 1987 reported that they were remarkably well preserved. He invited me to look, but I told him I was willing to take his word for it.

CAN YOU IMAGINE that? After all the corpses I saw in Vietnam, and in many cases created, I was squeamish about looking at 2 more which had absolutely nothing to do with me. I am at a loss for an explanation. Maybe I was thinking like an innocent little boy again.

I have leafed through the Atheist's Bible, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Familiar Quotations, for some sort of comment on unexpected squeamishness. The best I can do is something Lady Macbeth said to her henpecked husband: for some sort of comment on unexpected squeamishness. The best I can do is something Lady Macbeth said to her henpecked husband: "Fie! a soldier, and afeard?"

SPEAKING OF ATHEISM, I remember one time when Jack Patton and I went to a sermon in Vietnam delivered by the highest-ranking Chaplain in the Army. He was a General.

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes.

I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterward, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

THE MORTICIAN, WHO is himself now in a covered trench by the stable, was Norman Updike, a descendant of the valley's early Dutch settlers. He went on to tell me with bow-wow cheerfulness back in 1987 that people were generally mistaken about how quickly things rot, turn into good old dirt or fertilizer or dust or whatever. He said scientists had discovered well-preserved meat and vegetables deep in city dumps, thrown away presumably years and years ago. Like Hermann and Sophia Shultz, these theoretically biodegradable works of Nature had failed to rot for want of moisture, which was life itself to worms and fungi and bacteria.

"Even without modern embalming techniques," he said, "ashes to ashes and dust takes much, much longer than most people realize."

"I'm encouraged," I said.

I DID NOT see Pamela Ford Hall by the stable until it was too late for me to head off in the opposite direction. I was distracted from watching out for her and Zuzu by a parent who had fled the bagpipe music on the Quadrangle. He commented that I seemed very depressed about something.

I still hadn't told anybody I had been fired, and I certainly didn't want to share the news with a stranger. So I said I couldn't help being unhappy about the ice caps and the deserts and the busted economy and the race riots and so on.

He told me to cheer up, that 1,000,000,000 Chinese were about to throw off the yoke of Communism. After they did that, he said, they would all want automobiles and tires and gasoline and so forth.

I pointed out that virtually all American industries having to do with automobiles either were owned or had been run out of business by the j.a.panese.

"And what is to prevent you from doing what I've done?" he said. "It's a free country." He said that his entire portfolio consisted of stocks in j.a.panese corporations.

Can you imagine what 1,000,000,000 Chinese in automobiles would do to each other and what's left of the atmosphere?

I WAS SO intent on getting away from that typical Ruling Cla.s.s chowderhead that I did not see Pamela until I was right next to her. She was sitting on the ground drinking blackberry brandy, with her back to the Shultzes' tombstone. She was gazing up at Musket Mountain. She had a serious alcohol problem. I didn't blame myself for that. The worst problem in the life of any alcoholic is alcohol.

The inscription on the grave marker was facing me.

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The diphtheria epidemic that killed so many people in this valley took place when almost all of Tarkington's students were away on vacation.

That was certainly lucky for the students. If school had been in session during the epidemic, many, many of them might have wound up with the Shultzes, first where the Pavilion now stands, and then next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.

And then the student body got lucky again 2 years ago. They were all away on a recess between semesters when habitual criminals overran this insignificant little country town.

MIRACLES.

I HAVE LOOKED up who the Freethinkers were. They were members of a short-lived sect, mostly of German descent, who believed, as did my Grandfather Wills, that nothing but sleep awaited good and evil persons alike in the Afterlife, that science had proved all organized religions to be baloney, that G.o.d was unknowable, and that the greatest use a person could make of his or her lifetime was to improve the quality of life for all in his or her community.

HERMANN AND SOPHIA Shultz weren't the only victims of the diphtheria epidemic. Far from it! But they were the only ones who asked to be buried on the campus, which they said on their deathbeds was holy ground to them.

PAMELA WASN'T SURPRISED to see me. She was insulated against surprises by alcohol. The first thing she said to me was, "No." I hadn't said anything yet. She thought I had come to make love to her. I could understand why she might think that.

I myself had started thinking that.

And then she said, "This has certainly been the best year of my life, and I want to thank you for being such a big part of it." This was irony. She was being corrosively insincere.

"When are you leaving?" I said.

"Never," she said. "My transmission is shot." She was talking about her 12-year-old Buick 4-door sedan, which she had gotten as part of her divorce settlement from her ex-husband. He used to mock her efforts to become a serious artist, even slapping or kicking her from time to time. So he must have laughed even harder than everybody else when her 1-woman show was blown off its pedestals in Buffalo.

She said a new transmission was going to cost $850 down in town, and that the mechanic wanted to be paid in Yen, and that he hinted that the repairs would cost a lot less if she would go to bed with him. "I don't suppose you ever found out where your mother-in-law hid the money," she said.

"No," I said.

"Maybe I should go looking for it," she said.

"I'm sure somebody else found it, and just isn't saying anything," I said.

"I never asked you to pay for anything before," she said. "How about you buy me a new transmission? Then, when anybody asks me, 'Where did you get that beautiful transmission?' I can answer, 'An old lover gave that to me. He is a very famous war hero, but I am not free to reveal his name.' "

"Who is the mechanic?" I asked.

"The Prince of Wales," she said. "If I go to bed with him, he will not only fix my transmission, he will make me the Queen of England. You never made me Queen of England."

"Was it Whitey VanArsdale?" I said. This was a mechanic down in town who used to tell everybody that he or she had a broken transmission. He did it to me with the car I had before the Mercedes, which was a 1979 Chevy station wagon. I got a second opinion, from a student, actually. The transmission was fine. All I'd wanted in the first place was a grease job. Whitey VanArsdale, too, is now buried next to the stable. He ambushed some convicts and got ambushed right back. His victory lasted 10 minutes, if that. It was, "Bang," and then, a few minutes later, "Bang, bang," right back.

PAMELA, SITTING ON the ground with her back to the tombstone, didn't do to me what Zuzu Johnson would soon do to me, which was to identify me as a major cause of her unhappiness. The closest Pam came to doing that, I guess, was when she said I had never made her the Queen of England. Zuzu's complaint would be that I had never seriously intended to make her my wife, despite all our talk in bed about our running off to Venice, which neither one of us had ever seen. She would open a flower shop there, I promised her, since she was so good at gardening. I would teach English as a second language or help local gla.s.sblowers get their wares into American department stores, and so on.

Zuzu was also a pretty good photographer, so I said she would soon be hanging around where the gondolas took on pa.s.sengers, and selling tourists Polaroid pictures of themselves in gondolas right then and there.

When it came to dreaming up a future for ourselves, we left GRIOT in the dust.

I CONSIDERED THOSE dreams of Venice part of lovemaking, my erotic a.n.a.logue to Zuzu's perfume. But Zuzu took them seriously. She was all set to go. And I couldn't go because of my family responsibilities.

PAMELA KNEW ABOUT my love affair with Zuzu, and all the hocus pocus about Venice. Zuzu told her.

"You know what you ought to say to any woman dumb enough to fall in love with you?" she asked me. Her gaze was on Musket Mountain, not on me.

"No," I said.

And she said, " 'Welcome to Vietnam.' "

SHE WAS SITTING over the Shultzes in their caskets. I was standing over a severed head which would be dug up by a backhoe in 8 years. The head had been in the ground so long that it was just a skull.

A specialist in Forensic Medicine from the State Police happened to be down here when the skull showed up in the backhoe's scoop, so he had a look at it, told us what he thought. He didn't think it was an Indian, which was my first guess. He said it had belonged to a white woman maybe 20 years old. She hadn't been bludgeoned or shot in the head, so he would have to see the rest of the skeleton before theorizing about what might have killed her.

But the backhoe never brought up another bone.

Decapitation, alone, of course, could have done the job.

He wasn't much interested. He judged from the patina on the skull that its owner had died long before we were born. He was here to examine the bodies of people who had been killed after the prison break, and to make educated guesses about how they had died, by gunshot or whatever.

He was especially fascinated by Tex Johnson's body. He had seen almost everything in his line of work, he told me, but never a man who had been crucified, with spikes through the palms and feet and all.

I WANTED HIM to talk more about the skull, but he changed the subject right back to crucifixion. He sure knew a lot about it.

He told me one thing I'd never realized: that the Jews, not just the Romans, also crucified their idea of criminals from time to time. Live and learn!

How come I'd never heard that?

DARIUS, KING OF Persia, he told me, crucified 3,000 people he thought were enemies in Babylon. After the Romans put down the slave revolt led by Spartacus, he said, they crucified 6,000 of the rebels on either side of the Appian Way!

He said that the crucifixion of Tex Johnson was unconventional in several ways besides Tex's being dead or nearly dead when they spiked him to timbers in the stable loft. He hadn't been whipped. There hadn't been a cross-beam for him to carry to his place of execution. There was no sign over his head saying what his crime was. And there was no spike in the upright, whose head would abrade his crotch and hindquarters as he turned this way and that in efforts to become more comfortable.

As I said at the beginning of this book, if I had been a professional soldier back then, I probably would have crucified people without thinking much about it, if ordered to do so.

Or I would have ordered underlings to do it, and told them how to do it, if I had been a high-ranking officer.

I MIGHT HAVE taught recruits who had never had anything to do with crucifixions, who maybe had never even seen one before, a new word from the vocabulary of military science of that time. The word was crurifragium. crurifragium. I myself learned it from the Medical Examiner, and I found it so interesting that I went and got a pencil and wrote it down. I myself learned it from the Medical Examiner, and I found it so interesting that I went and got a pencil and wrote it down.

It is a Latin word for "breaking the legs of a crucified person with an iron rod in order to shorten his time of suffering." But that still didn't make crucifixion a country club.

WHAT KIND OF an animal would do such a thing? The old me, I think.