Hocus Pocus

  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 Japanese.

  "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 Japanese 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 Class 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.

  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 God 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 glassblowers 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 passengers, 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 GRIOTTM in the dust.

  I CONSIDERED THOSE dreams of Venice part of lovemaking, my erotic analogue 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 Spa
rtacus, 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. 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.

  THE LATE UNICYCLIST Professor Damon Stern asked me one time if I thought there would be a market for religious figures of Christ riding a unicycle instead of spiked to a cross. It was just a joke. He didn't want an answer, and I didn't give him one. Some other subject must have come up right away.

  But I would tell him now, if he hadn't been killed while trying to save the horses, that the most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

  BUT LISTEN TO this: While idly winnowing through old local newspapers here, I think I have discovered whom that probably Caucasian, surely young and female skull belonged to. I want to rush out into the prison yard, formerly the Quadrangle, shouting "Eureka! Eureka!"

  My educated guess is that the skull belonged to Letitia Smiley, a reputedly beautiful, dyslexic Tarkington senior who disappeared from the campus in 1922, after winning the traditional Women's Barefoot Race from the bell tower to the President's House and back again. Letitia Smiley was crowned Lilac Queen as her prize, and she burst into tears for reasons nobody could understand. Something obviously was bothering her. People were agreed, I learn from a newspaper of the time, that Letitia Smiley's tears were not happy tears.

  One suspicion had to be, although nobody said so for publication, that Miss Smiley was pregnant--possibly by a member of the student body or faculty. I am playing detective now, with nothing but a skull and old newspapers to go on. But at least I have what the police were unable to find back then: what might be proof positive in the hands of a forensic cranial expert that Letitia Smiley was no longer among the living. The morning after she was crowned Lilac Queen, her bed was found to contain a dummy made of rolled-up bath towels. A souvenir football given to her by an admirer at Union College in Schenectady was the dummy's head. On it was painted: "Union 31, Hobart 3."

  After that: thin air.

  A DENTIST WOULD be no help in identifying the skull, since whoever owned it never had so much as a single cavity to be filled. Whoever it was had perfect teeth. Who is alive today who could tell us whether or not Letitia Smiley, who herself would be 100 years old now, in the year 2001, had perfect teeth?

  That was how a lot of the more mutilated bodies of soldiers in Vietnam were positively identified, by their imperfect teeth.

  THERE IS NO statute of limitations on murder, the most terrible crime of all, they say. But how old would her killer be by now? If he was who I think he was, he would be 135. I think he was none other than Kensington Barber, the Provost of Tarkington College at the time. He would spend his last days in the State Hospital for the Insane up in Batavia. I think it was he, empowered to make bed checks in both the women's and the men's dormitories, who made the dummy whose head was a football.

  I think Letitia Smiley was dead by then.

  And it was a matter of public record that it was the Provost who found the dummy.

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER from the State Police said it was odd that there was no hair still stuck to the skull. He thought it might have been scalped or boiled before it was buried, to make it that much harder to identify. And what have I discovered? That Letitia was famous in her short life for her long golden hair. The newspaper description of the race she won goes on and on about her golden hair.

  Yes, and the same story gives Kensington Barber as the sole source of the assertion that Letitia had been deeply troubled by a stormy romance with a much older man down in Scipio. The Provost wished that he or somebody knew the name of the man, so that the police could question him.

  In another story, Barber told a reporter that he had planned to take his family to Europe that summer but would stay in Scipio instead, in order to do all he could to clear up the mystery of what had become of Letitia Smiley. Such dedication to duty!

  He had a wife and 2 kids, and he sent them to Europe without him. Since the campus was virtually deserted in the summertime, except for the maintenance staff, which took orders from him, he could easily have ensured his own privacy by sending the workmen to another part of the campus while he buried small parts of Letitia, possibly using a posthole digger.

  I HAVE TO wonder, too, in light of my own experiences in public-relations hocus pocus and the recent history of my Government, if there weren't a lot of people back in 1922 who could put 2 and 2 together as easily as I have now. For the sake of the reputation of what had become Scipio's principal business, the college, there could have been a massive cover-up.

  Kensington Barber would have a nervous breakdown at the end of the summer, and be committed, as I've said, to Batavia. The President of Tarkington at that time, who was Herbert Van Arsdale, no relation to Whitey VanArsdale, the dishonest mechanic, ascribed the Provost's crackup to exhaustion brought on by his tireless efforts to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the golden-haired Lilac Queen.

  25

  MY LAWYER FOUND only one thing really interesting in my theory about the Lilac Queen, and that was about the broad purple hair ribbons worn by all the girls in that footrace, right up to the last race before the prison break. The escaped convicts discovered spools and spools of that ribbon in a closet in the office of the Dean of Women. Alton Darwin had them cut it up into armbands as a sort of uniform, a quick way to tell friend from foe. Of course, skin color already did a pretty good job of that.

  The significance of the purple armbands, my lawyer says, is that I never put one on. This would help to prove that I was truly neutral.

  THE CONVICTS DIDN'T create a new flag. They flew the Stars and Stripes from the bell tower. Alton Darwin said they weren't against America. He said, "We are America."

  SO I TOOK my leave of Pamela Ford Hall on the afternoon Tarkington fired me. I would never see her again. The only real favor I ever did for her, I suppose, was to tell her to get a second opinion before letting Whitey VanArsdale sell her a new transmission. She did that, I heard, and it turned out that her old transmission was perfectly OK.

  It and the rest of the car took her all the way down to Key West, where the former Writer in Residence Paul Slazinger had settled in, living well on his Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. I hadn't realized that he and she had been an item when they were both at Tarkington, but I guess they were. She certainly never told me about it. At any rate, when I was working over at Athena, I got an announcement of their impending wedding down there, forwarded from Scipio.

  But evidently that fell through. I imagine her drinking and her insistence on pursuing an art career, even though she wasn't talented, frightened the old novelist.

  SLA
ZINGER WAS NO prize himself, of course.

  AFTER THE PRISON break, I told the GRIOTTM here all I knew about Pamela, and asked it to guess what might become of her after her breakup with Paul Slazinger. GRIOTTM had her die of cirrhosis of the liver. I gave the machine the same set of facts a second time, and it had her freezing to death in a doorway in Chicago.

  The prognosis was not good.

  AFTER LEAVING PAMELA, whose basic problem wasn't me but alcohol, I started to climb Musket Mountain, intending to think things out under the water tower. But I was met by Zuzu Jack-son, who was coming down. She said she had been under the water tower for hours, trying to think up dreams to replace those we had had of running off to Venice.

  She said that maybe she would run off to Venice alone, and take Polaroid pictures of tourists getting in and out of gondolas.

  The prognosis for her was a lot better than for Pamela, short-term anyway. At least she wasn't an addict, and at least she wasn't all alone in the world, even if all she had was Tex. And at least she hadn't been held up as an object of public ridicule from coast to coast.

  And she could see the humorous side of things. She said, I remember, that the loss of the Venice dream had left her a walking corpse, but that a zombie was an ideal mate for a College President.

  She went on like that for a little while, but she didn't cry, and she ran out of steam pretty quick. The last thing she said was that she didn't blame me. "I take full responsibility," she said, speaking over her shoulder as she walked away, "for falling in love with such an obvious jerk."

  Fair enough!

  I DECIDED NOT to climb Musket Mountain after all. I went home instead. It would be wiser to think things out in my garage, where other loose cannons from my past were unlikely to interrupt me. But when I got there I found a man from United Parcel Service ringing the bell. I didn't know him. He was new to town, or he wouldn't have asked why all the blinds were drawn. Anybody who had been in Scipio any length of time knew why the blinds were drawn.