Hocus Pocus Part 17

I said he had. Since he was facing execution, I certainly wasn't going to tell him that, in my experience anyway, ambushes made the world seem an even worse place than it was before.

"I ran a nice, clean place, raised a wonderful son," he said. "Put out a lot of fires."

IT WAS THE Trustees who told the Freedom Fighters that Lyle ran a wh.o.r.ehouse. Otherwise they would have thought he was just a restaurateur and Fire Chief.

LYLE HOOPER'S MOOD up there in the bell tower reminded me of my father's mood after he was let go by Barrytron, and he went on a cruise down the Inland Waterway on the East Coast, from City Island in New York City to Palm Beach, Florida. This was on a motor yacht owned by his old college roommate, a man named Fred Handy. Handy had also studied chemical engineering, but then had gone into junk bonds instead. He heard that Father was deeply depressed. He thought the cruise might cheer Dad up.

But all the way to Palm Beach, where Handy had a waterfront estate, down the East River, down Barnegat Bay, up Delaware Bay and down Chesapeake Bay, down the Dismal Swamp Ca.n.a.l, and on and on, the yacht had to nuzzle its way through a sh.o.r.e-to-sh.o.r.e, horizon-to-horizon carpet of bobbing plastic bottles. They had contained brake fluid and laundry bleach and so on.

Father had had a lot to do with the development of those bottles. He knew, too, that they could go on bobbing for 1,000 years. They were nothing to be proud of.

In a way, those bottles called him what the Freedom Fighters called Lyle Hooper.

Lyle's despairing last words as he was led out of the bell tower to be executed in front of Samoza Hall might be an apt epitaph for my father: [image]

29.

LYLE HOOPER'S LAST words, I think we can say with the benefit of hindsight in the year 2001, might serve as an apt epitaph for a plurality of working adults in industrialized nations during the 20th Century. How could they help themselves, when so many of the jobs they or their mates could get had to do with large-scale deceptions, legal thefts from public treasuries, or the wrecking of the food chain, the topsoil, the water, or the atmosphere?

AFTER LYLE HOOPER was executed, with a bullet behind the ear, I visited the Trustees in the stable. Tex Johnson was still spiked to the cross-timbers in the loft overhead, and they knew it.

But before I tell about that, I had better finish my story of how I got a job at Athena.

SO THERE I was back in 1991, nursing a Budweiser, or "wop," at the bar of the Black Cat Cafe. Muriel Peck was telling me how exciting it had been to see all the motorcycles and limousines and celebrities out front. She couldn't believe that she had been that close to Gloria White and Henry Kissinger.

Several of the merry roisterers had come inside to use the toilet or get a drink of water. Arthur K. Clarke had provided everything but water and toilets. So Muriel had dared to ask some of them who they were and what they did.

Three of the people were Black. One Black was an old woman who had just won $57,000,000 in the New York State Lottery, and the other 2 were baseball players who made $3,000,000 a year.

A white man, who kept apart from the rest, and, according to Muriel, didn't seem to know what to make of himself, was a daily book reviewer for The New York Times. The New York Times. He had given a rave review to Clarke's autobiography, He had given a rave review to Clarke's autobiography, Don't Be Ashamed of Money. Don't Be Ashamed of Money.

One man who came in to use the toilet, she said, was a famous author of horror stories that had been made into some of the most popular movies of all time. I had in fact read a couple of them in Vietnam, about innocent people getting murdered by walking corpses with axes and knives and so on.

I pa.s.sed 1 of them on to Jack Patton, I remember, and asked him later what he thought of it. And then I stopped him from answering, saying, "You don't have to tell me, Jack. I already know. It made you want to laugh like h.e.l.l."

"Not only that, Major Hartke," he replied. "I thought of what his next book should be about."

"What's that?" I asked.

"A B-52," he said. "Gore and guts everywhere."

ONE USER OF the toilet, who confessed to Muriel that he had diarrhea, and asked if she had anything behind the bar to stop it, was a retired Astronaut whom she recognized but couldn't name. She had seen him again and again in commercials for a sinus-headache remedy and a retirement community in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near Cape Kennedy.

So Arthur K. Clarke, along with all his other activities, was a whimsical people-collector. He invited people he didn't really know, but who had caught his eye for 1 reason or another, to his parties, and they came, they came. Another one, Muriel told me, was a man who had inherited from his father a painting by Mark Rothko that had just been sold to the Getty Museum in Malibu, California, for $37,000,000, a new record for a painting by an American.

Rothko himself had long since committed suicide.

He had had enough.

He was out of here.

"SHE'S SO SHORT," Muriel said to me. "I was so surprised how short she was."

"Who's so short?" I said.

"Gloria White," she said.

I ASKED HER what she thought of Henry Kissinger. She said she loved his voice.

I had seen him up on the Quadrangle. Although I had been an instrument of his geopolitics, I felt no connection between him and me. His face was certainly familiar. He might have been, like Gloria White, somebody who had been in a lot of movies I had seen.

I dreamed about him once here in prison, though. He was a woman. He was a Gypsy fortune-teller who looked into her crystal ball but wouldn't say anything.

I SAID TO Muriel, "You worry me."

"I what?" she said.

"You look tired," I said. "Do you get enough sleep?"

"Yes, thank you," she said.

"Forgive me," I said. "None of my business. It's just that you were so full of life while you were talking about the motorcycle people. When you stopped, it was as though you took off a mask, and you seemed as though you were suddenly all wrung out."

Muriel knew vaguely who I was. She had seen me with Margaret and Mildred in tow at least twice a week during the short time the ice cream parlor was in business. So I did not have to tell her that I, too, practically speaking, was without a mate. And she had seen with her own eyes how kind and patient I was with my worse than useless relatives.

So she was already favorably disposed to me. She trusted me, and responded with undisguised grat.i.tude to my expressions of concern for her happiness.

"If you want to know the truth," she said, "I hardly sleep at all, I worry so much about the children." She had 2 of them. "The way things are going," she said, "I don't see how I can afford to send even 1 of them to college. I'm from a family where everybody went to college and never thought a thing about it. But that's all over now. Neither 1 is an athlete."

We might have become lovers that night, I think, instead of 2 weeks from then, if an ugly mountain of a man hadn't entered raging, demanding to know, "All right, where is he? Where's that kid?"

He was asking about the kid who worked at Tarkington's stable after school, whose bicycle I had stolen. I had left the kid's bike in plain view out front. Every other place of business on Clinton Street was boarded up, from the barge terminal to halfway up the hill. So the only place the boy could be, he thought, was inside the Black Cat Cafe or, worse, inside one of the vans out back in the parking lot.

I PLAYED DUMB.

We went outside with him to find out what bicycle he could possibly be talking about. I offered him the theory that the boy was a good boy, and nowhere near the Black Cat Cafe, and that some bad person had borrowed the bike and left it there. So he put the bike on the back of his beat-up pickup truck, and said he was late for an appointment for a job interview at the prison across the lake.

"What kind of a job?" I asked.

And he said, "They're hiring teachers over there."

I asked if I could come with him.

He said, "Not if you're going to teach what I want to teach. What do you want to teach?"

"Anything you don't want to teach," I said.

"I want to teach shop," he said. "You want to teach shop?"

"No," I said.

"Word of honor?" he said.

"Word of honor," I said.

"OK," he said, "get in, get in."

30.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW the lower ranks of guards at Athena in those days felt about White people, and never mind Black people, you have to realize that most of them were recruited from j.a.pan's northernmost island, Hokkaido. On Hokkaido the primitive natives, the Ainus, thought to be very ugly because they were so pallid and hairy, were White people. Genetically speaking, they are just as white as Nancy Reagan. Their ancestors long ago had made the error, when humiliated by superior Asiatic civilizations, of shambling north instead of west to Europe, and eventually, of course, to the Western Hemisphere.

Those White people on Hokkaido had sure missed a lot. They were way behind practically everybody. And when the man who wanted to teach shop and I presented ourselves at the gate to the road that led through the National Forest to the prison, the 2 guards on duty there were fresh from Hokkaido. For all the respect our being Whites inspired in them, we might as well have been a couple of drunk and disorderly Arapahos.

THE MAN WHO wanted to teach shop said his name was John Donner. On the way over he asked me if I had seen him on the Phil Donahue show on TV. That was a 1-hour show every weekday afternoon, which featured a small group of real people, not actors, who had had the same sort of bad thing happen to them, and had triumphed over it or were barely coping or whatever. There were 2 very similar programs in compet.i.tion with Donahue, Donahue, and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth. and the old novelist Paul Slazinger used to watch all 3 simultaneously, switching back and forth.

I asked him why he did that. He said he didn't want to miss the moment when, suddenly, there was absolutely nothing left to talk about.

I TOLD JOHN Donner that, unfortunately, I couldn't watch any of those shows, since I taught Music Appreciation in the afternoon, and then Martial Arts after that. I asked him what his particular Donahue Donahue show had been about. show had been about.

"People who were raised in foster homes and got beat up all the time," he said.

I WOULD SEE plenty of Donahue Donahue reruns at the prison, but not Donner's. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid. reruns at the prison, but not Donner's. That show would have been coals to Newcastle at Athena, where practically everybody had been beaten regularly and severely when he was a little kid.

I didn't see Donner on TV over there, but I did see myself a couple of times, or somebody who looked a whole lot like me in the distance, on old footage of the Vietnam War.

I even yelled 1 time at the prison, "There I am! There I am!"

Convicts gathered behind me, looking at the TV and saying, "Where? Where? Where?"

But they were too late. I was gone again.

Where did I go?

Here I am.

31.

JOHN DONNER COULD have been a pathological liar. He could have made that up about being on Donahue. Donahue. There was something very fishy about him. Then again, he could have been living under the Federal Witness Protection Program, with a new name and a fake biography GRIOT had written out for him. Statistically speaking, GRIOT would have to put it into a biography every so often, I suppose, that the fict.i.tious subject was on There was something very fishy about him. Then again, he could have been living under the Federal Witness Protection Program, with a new name and a fake biography GRIOT had written out for him. Statistically speaking, GRIOT would have to put it into a biography every so often, I suppose, that the fict.i.tious subject was on Donahue. Donahue.

He claimed that the boy he lived with was his son. But he could have kidnapped that kid whose bike I stole. They had come to town only about 18 months before, and kept to themselves.

I AM SURE his last name wasn't Donner. I have known several Donners. One was a year behind me at the Academy. Two were unrelated Tarkingtonians. One was a First Sergeant in Vietnam who had his arm blown off by a little boy with a homemade handgrenade. Every one of those Donners knew the story of the infamous Donner Party, which got caught in a blizzard back in 1846 while trying to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains in wagons to get to California. Their wagons were very likely made right here in Scipio.

I have just looked up the details in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, published in Chicago and owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland. Rule Britannia! published in Chicago and owned by a mysterious Egyptian arms dealer living in Switzerland. Rule Britannia!

Those who survived the blizzard did so by becoming cannibals. The final tally, and several women and children were eaten, was 47 survivors out of 87 people who had begun the trip.

Now there's a subject for Donahue Donahue: people who have eaten people.

People who can eat people are the luckiest people in the world.

But when I asked the man who claimed his last name was Donner if he was any relation to the man who led the Donner Party, he didn't know what I was talking about.