Hocus Pocus

  When those seasoned troops went ashore, that was when they commenced firing. They were stingy with their bullets. There would be a bang, and then silence for several minutes, and then, when another target appeared, maybe a bleary-eyed householder coming out his front door or peering out a window, with or without a weapon, there would be another bang or 2 or 3 bangs, and then silence again. The escaped convicts, or Freedom Fighters as they would soon call themselves, had to assume, after all, that many if not most households had firearms, and that their owners had long daydreamed of using them with deadly effect should precisely what was happening happen. The Freedom Fighters had no choice. I would have done the same thing, had I been in their situation.

  Bang. Somebody else would jerk backward and downward, like a professional actor on a TV show.

  THE BIGGEST FLURRY of shots came from what I guessed from afar to be the parking lot in back of the Black Cat Cafe, where the prostitutes parked their vans. The men who visited the vans that late at night had handguns with them, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

  AND THEN I could tell from the sporadic firing that the Freedom Fighters had begun to climb the hill to the college, which was brightly lit all night every night to discourage anybody who might be tempted to do harm up here. From my point of view across the lake, Tarkington might have been mistaken for an emerald-studded Oz or City of God or Camelot.

  YOU CAN BET I did not go back to sleep that night. I listened and listened for sirens, for helicopters, for the rumble of armored vehicles, for proofs that the forces of law and order would soon put a stop to the violence in the valley with even greater violence. At dawn the valley was as quiet as ever, and the red light on top of the water tower on the summit of Musket Mountain, as though nothing remarkable had happened over there, winked off and on, off and on.

  I WENT NEXT door to the Warden's house. I woke up his 3 servants. They had gone back to bed after the Warden charged up the hill in his Isuzu. These were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in Midland City. I hadn't even learned to read and write, probably, when they ruined some lives, or were accused of doing so, and were forced to lead lives not worth living as a consequence.

  That would certainly teach them a lesson.

  At least they hadn't been put into that great invention by a dentist, the electric chair.

  "Where there is life there is hope." So says John Gay in the Atheist's Bible. What a starry-eyed optimist!

  THESE 3 OLD geezers hadn't had a visitor or a phone call or a letter for decades. Under the circumstances, they had no vivid ideas of what they would like to do next, so they were glad to take orders from almost anybody. Other people's ideas of what to do next were like brain transplants. All of a sudden they were full of pep.

  So I had them drink a lot of black coffee. Since I was worried about what might have happened to the Warden, they acted worried, too. Otherwise, they wouldn't have. I did not tell them that there had been a mass prison break and that Scipio had been overrun by criminals. Such information would have beer useless to them, would have been like more TV. They were supposed to stay where they had been put, no matter what in the real world might be going on.

  THOSE 3 WERE what psychologists call "other-directed."

  I TOOK THEM over to my house and ordered them to keep the wood fire in the fireplace going, and to feed Margaret and Mildred when they got hungry. There were plenty of canned goods I didn't have to worry about the perishables in the refrigerator. since the air in the kitchen was already so cold. The stove itself ran on bottled propane, and there was a month's supply of thai science fiction miracle.

  Imagine that: bottled energy!

  MARGARET AND MILDRED, thank goodness, felt neutral about the Warden's zombies, the same way they felt about me. They didn't like them, but they didn't dislike them, either. So everything was falling into place. They would still have a life-support system, even if I went away for several days or got wounded of killed.

  I didn't expect to get wounded or killed, except by accident All the combatants in Scipio would regard me as unthreatening the Whites because of my color-coding and the Blacks because they knew and liked me.

  The issues were clear. They were Black and White.

  ALL THE YELLOW people had run away.

  I HAD HOPED to get away from the house while Margaret and Mildred were fast asleep. But as I passed my boat on my way to the ice, an upstairs window flew open. There my poor old wife was, a scrawny, addled hag. She sensed that something important was happening, I think. Otherwise she wouldn't have exposed herself to the cold and daylight. Her voice, moreover, which had been rasping and bawdy for years, was liquid and sweet, just as it had been on our, Honeymoon. And she called me by name. That was another thing she hadn't done for a long, long time. This was disorienting.

  "Gene--" she said.

  So I stopped. "Yes, Margaret," I said.

  "Where are you going, Gene?" she said.

  "I'm going for a walk, Margaret, to get some fresh air," I said.

  "You're going to see some woman, aren't you?" she said.

  "No, Margaret. Word of Honor I'm not," I said.

  "That's all right. I understand," she said.

  It was so pathetic! I was so overwhelmed by the pathos, by the beautiful voice I hadn't heard for so long, by the young Margaret inside the witch! I cried out in all sincerity, "Oh, Margaret, I love you, I love you!"

  Those were the last words she would ever hear me say, for I would never come back.

  She made no reply. She shut the window and pulled down the opaque black roller blind.

  I have not seen her since.

  After that side of the lake was recaptured by the 82nd Airborne, she and her mother were put in a steel box on the back of one of the prison vans and delivered to the insane asylum in Batavia. They will be fine as long as they have each other. They might be fine even if they didn't have each other. Who knows, until somebody or something performs that particular experiment?

  I HAVE NOT been on that side of the lake since that morning, and may never go there again, as close as it is. So I will probably never find out what became of my old footlocker, the coffin containing the soldier I used to be, and my very rare copy of Black Garterbelt.

  I CROSSED THE lake that morning, as it happens, never to return, to deliver a particular message to the escaped convicts, with the idea of saving lives and property. I knew that the students were on vacation. That left nothing but social nobodies, in which category I surely include the college faculty, members of the Servant Class.

  To me this low-grade social mix was ominous. In Vietnam, and then in later show-biz attacks on Tripoli and Panama City and so on, it had been perfectly ordinary for our Air Force to blow communities of nobodies, no matter whose side they were on, to Kingdom Come.

  It seemed likely to me, should the Government decide to bomb Scipio, that it would be sensible to bomb the prison, too.

  And everything would be taken care of, and no argument.

  Next problem?

  HOW MANY AMERICANS knew or cared anyway where or what the Mohiga Valley was, or Laos or Cambodia or Tripoli? Thanks to our great educational system and TV, half of them couldn't even find their own country on a map of the world.

  THREE-QUARTERS OF them couldn't put the cap back on a bottle of whiskey without crossing the threads.

  AS I EXPECTED, I was treated by Scipio's conquerors as a harmless old fool with wisdom. The criminals called me "The Preacher" or "The Professor," just as they had on the other side.

  I saw that many of them had tied ribbons around their upper arms as a sort of uniform. So when I came across a man who wasn't wearing a ribbon, I asked him jokingly, "Where's your uniform, Soldier?"

  "Preacher," he said, referring to his skin, "I was born in a uniform."

  ALTON DARWIN HAD set himself up in Tex Johnson's office in Samoza Hall as President of a new nation. He had been drinking. I do not mean to present any of
these escapees as rational or capable of redemption. They did not care if they lived or died. Alton Darwin was glad to see me. Then again, he was glad about everything.

  I had to advise him, nonetheless, that he could expect to be bombed unless he and the rest of them got out of town right away. I said their best chance to survive was to go back to the prison and fly white flags everywhere. If they did that right away, they might claim that they had nothing to do with all the killings here. The number of people the escapees killed in Scipio, incidentally, was 5 less than the number I myself had killed single-handedly in the war in Vietnam.

  So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a "tempest in a tea-pot," an expression the Atheist's Bible tells us is proverbial.

  I TOLD ALTON Darwin that if he and his people didn't want to be bombed and didn't want to return to the prison, they should take whatever food they could find and disperse to the north or west. I told him one thing he already knew, that the floor of the National Forest to the south and east was so dark and lifeless that anyone going in there would probably starve to death or go mad before he found his way back out of there. I told him another thing he already knew, that there would soon be all these white people to the west and north, having the times of their lives hunting escaped convicts instead of deer.

  My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

  ALTON DARWIN HEARD me out. And then he told me that he thought I was right, that the prison probably would be bombed. But he guaranteed that Scipio would not be bombed, and that it would not be attacked on the ground, either, that the Government would have to keep its distance and respect the demands he meant to put to it.

  "What makes you think that?" I said.

  "We have captured a TV celebrity," he said. "They won't let anything happen to him. Too many people will be watching."

  "Who?" I said.

  And he said, "Jason Wilder."

  THAT WAS THE first I heard that they had taken hostage not only Wilder but the whole Board of Trustees of Tarkington College. I now realize, too, that Alton Darwin would not have known that Wilder was a TV celebrity if old tapes of Wilder's talk show hadn't been run again and again at the prison across the lake. Poor people of any race on the outside never would have watched his show for long, since its basic message was that it was poor people who were making the lives of the rest of us so frightening.

  36

  "STAR WARS," SAID Alton Darwin.

  He was alluding to Ronald Reagan's dream of having scientists build an invisible dome over this country, with electronics and lasers and so on, which no enemy plane or projectile could ever penetrate. Darwin believed that the social standing of his hostages was an invisible dome over Scipio.

  I think he was right, although I have not been able to discover how seriously the Government considered bombing the whole valley back to the Stone Age. Years ago, I might have found out through the Freedom of Information Act. But the Supreme Court closed that peephole.

  DARWIN AND HIS troops knew the lives of the hostages were valued highly by the Government. They didn't know why, and I am not sure that I do, either. I think that the number of people with money and power had shrunk to the point where it felt like a family. For all the escaped convicts knew about them, they might as well have been aardvarks, or some other improbable animal they had never seen before.

  Darwin regretted that I, too, was going to have to stay in Scipio. He couldn't let me go, he said, because I knew too much about his defenses. There were none as far as I could see, but he sounded as though there were trenches and tank traps and mine fields all around us.

  Even more hallucinatory was his vision of the future. He was going to restore this valley to its former economic vitality. It would become an all-Black Utopia. All Whites would be resettled elsewhere.

  He was going to put glass back into the windows of the factories, and make their roofs weather-tight again. He would get the money to do this and so many other wonderful things by selling the precious hardwoods of the National Forest to the Japanese.

  THAT MUCH OF his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday's interest on the National Debt.

  That last is a joke of mine. I have no idea if any money for the forest will go toward the National Debt, which, the last I heard, was greater than the value of all property in the Western Hemisphere, thanks to compound interest.

  ALTON DARWIN LOOKED me up and down, and then he said with typical sociopathic impulsiveness, "Professor, I can't let you go because I need you."

  "What for?" I said. I was scared to death that he was going to make me a General.

  "To help with the plans," he said.

  "For what?" I said.

  "For the glorious future," he said. He told me to go to this library and write out detailed plans for making this valley into the envy of the World.

  So that, in fact, is what I mainly did during most of the Battle of Scipio.

  It was too dangerous to go outside anyway, with all the bullets flying around.

  MY BEST UTOPIAN invention for the ideal Black Republic was "Freedom Fighter Beer." They would get the old brewery going again, supposedly, and make beer pretty much like any other beer, except that it would be called Freedom Fighter Beer. If I say so myself, that is a magical name for beer. I envisioned a time when, all over the world, the bored and downtrodden and weary would be bucking themselves up at least a little bit with Freedom Fighter Beer.

  BEER, OF COURSE, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

  ALTON DARWIN WAS dead before I could complete my long-range plan. His dying words, as I've said, were, "See the Nigger fly the airplane." But I showed it to the hostages.

  "What is this supposed to mean?" said Jason Wilder.

  "I want you to see what they've had me doing," I said. "You keep talking as though I could turn you loose, if I wanted. I'm as much a prisoner as you are."

  He studied the prospectus, and then he said, "They actually expect to get away with this?"

  "No," I said. "They know this is their Alamo."

  He arched his famous eyebrows in clownish disbelief. He has always looked to me a lot like the incomparable comedian Stanley Laurel. "It would never have occurred to me to compare the rabid chimpanzees who hold us in durance vile with Davy Crockett and James Bowie and Tex Johnson's great-great-grandfather," he said.

  "I was just talking about hopeless situations," I said.

  "I certainly hope so," he said.

  I might have added, but didn't, that the martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn't want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind.

  I don't think Wilder knew that. Not many people in this :ountry do. I certainly never heard that at the Academy. I wouldn't have known that slavery was what the Alamo was all about if Professor Stern the unicyclist hadn't told me so.

  NO WONDER THERE were so few Black tourists at the Alamo!

  UNITS OF THE 82nd Airborne, fresh from the South Bronx, had by then retaken the other side of the lake and herded the prisoners back inside the walls. A big problem over there was that almost every toilet in the prison had been smashed. Who knows why?

  What was to be done with the huge quantities of excrement produced hour after hour, day after day, by all these burdens on Society?

  We still had plenty of toilets
on this side of the lake, which is why this place was made an auxiliary prison almost immediately. Time was of the essence, as the lawyers say.

  IMAGINE THE SAME sort of thing happening on a huge rocket ship bound for Betelgeuse.

  37

  ON THE LAST afternoon of the siege, National Guard units relieved the Airborne troops across the lake. That night, undetected, the paratroops took up positions behind Musket Mountain. Two hours before the next dawn, they came quietly around either side of the mountain, captured the stable, freed the hostages, and then took possession of all of Scipio. They had to kill only 1 person, who was the guard dozing outside the stable. They strangled him with a standard piece of equipment. I had used one just like it in Vietnam. It was a meter of piano wire with a wooden handle at either end.

  So that was that.

  The defenders were out of ammunition. There were hardly any defenders left anyway. Maybe 10.

  AGAIN, I DON'T believe there would have been such delicate microsurgery by the best ground troops available, if it hadn't been for the social prominence of the Trustees.

  They were helicoptered to Rochester, where they were shown on TV. They thanked God and the Army. They said they had never lost hope. They said they were tired but happy, and just wanted to get a hot bath and then sleep in a nice clean bed.

  ALL NATIONAL GUARDSMEN who had been south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex during the siege got Combat Infantryman's Badges. They were so pleased.