I DON"T KNOW what became of the man who claimed his name was John Donner, who wanted to teach shop at Athena, 8 years before the prison break. I do know that the Warden gave him very short shrift during his job interview, since the last things the prison needed inside its walls were chisels and screwdrivers and hacksaws and band saws and ball-peen hammers and so on.
I had to wait for Donner outside the Warden"s Office. He was my ticket back to civilization, to my home and family and copy of Black Garterbelt. Black Garterbelt. I didn"t watch I didn"t watch Howdy Doody Howdy Doody on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him. on the little screen. I interested myself in another person, who was waiting to see the Warden. His color-coding alone would have told me that he was a convict, but he was also wearing leg irons and handcuffs, and was seated quietly on a bench facing mine across the corridor, with a masked and rubber-gloved guard on either side of him.
He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: "What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?"
THE 3 VIOLENT crimes that had gotten Abdullah into Athena were murders in drug wars. He himself would be shot dead with buckshot and slugs after the prison break, while carrying a flag of truce, by Whitey VanArsdale, the mechanic, and Lyle Hooper, the Fire Chief.
"Excuse me," I said to him, "but may I ask what you are reading?"
He displayed the book"s cover so I could read it for myself. The t.i.tle was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Cough.
Abdullah was summoned to the Warden"s Office, incidentally, because he was 1 of several persons, guards as well as convicts, who claimed to have seen a castle flying over the prison. The Warden wanted to find out if some new hallucinatory drug had been smuggled in, or whether the whole place was finally going insane, or what on Earth was happening.
THE PROTOCOLS OF the Elders of Zion was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its t.i.tle was parodied by the author of the story in was an anti-Semitic work first published in Russia about 100 years ago. It purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews from many countries who planned to cooperate internationally so as to cause wars and revolutions and financial busts and so on, which would leave them owning everything. Its t.i.tle was parodied by the author of the story in Black Garterbelt, Black Garterbelt, and its paranoia, too. and its paranoia, too.
The great American inventor and industrialist Henry Ford thought it was a genuine doc.u.ment. He had it published in this country back when my father was a boy. Now here was a black convict in irons, who had the gift of literacy, who was taking it seriously. It would turn out that there were 100s of copies circulating in the prison, printed in Libya and pa.s.sed out by the ruling gang at Athena, the Black Brothers of Islam.
THAT SUMMER I would start a literacy program in the prison, using people like Abdullah Akbahr as proselytizers for reading and writing, going from cell to cell and offering lessons. Thanks to me, 1,000s of former illiterates would be able to read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by the time of the prison break. by the time of the prison break.
I denounced that book, but couldn"t keep it from circulating. Who was I to oppose the Black Brothers, who regularly exercised what the State would not, which was the death penalty.
ABDULLAH AKBAHR RATTLED and clinked his fetters. "This any way to treat a veteran?" he said.
He had been a Marine in Vietnam, so he never had to listen to one of my pep talks. I was strictly Army. I asked him if he had ever heard of an Army officer they called "The Preacher," who was me, of course. I was curious as to how far my fame had spread.
"No," he said. But as I"ve said, there were other veterans there who had heard of me and knew, among other things, that I had pitched a grenade into the mouth of a tunnel one time, and killed a woman, her mother, and her baby hiding from helicopter gunships which had strafed her village right before we got there.
Unforgettable.
You know who was the Ruling Cla.s.s that time? Eugene Debs Hartke was the Ruling Cla.s.s.
DOWN WITH THE Ruling Cla.s.s!
JOHN DONNER WAS unhappy on our trip back to Scipio from the prison. I had landed a job, and he hadn"t. His son"s bicycle had been stolen in the prison parking lot.
The Mexicans have a favorite dish they call "twice-fried beans." Thanks to me, although Donner never found out, that bicycle was now a twice-stolen bicycle. One week later, Donner and the boy dematerialized from this valley as mysteriously as they had materialized, leaving no forwarding address.
Somebody or something must have been catching up with them.
I PITIED THAT boy. But if he is still alive, he, like me, is a grownup now.
SOMEBODY WAS CATCHING up with me, too, but ever so slowly. I am talking about my illegitimate son out in Dubuque, Iowa. He was only 15 then. He didn"t even know my name yet. He had yet to do as much detective work to discover the name and location of his father as I have done to identify the murderer of Let.i.tia Smiley, Tarkington College"s 1922 Lilac Queen.
I MADE THE acquaintance of his mother while sitting alone at a bar in Manila, soon after the excrement hit the air-conditioning in Vietnam. I didn"t want to talk to anybody of either s.e.x. I was fed up with the human race. I wanted nothing more than to be left strictly alone with my thoughts.
Add those to my growing collection of Famous Last Words.
THIS REASONABLY PRETTY but shopworn woman sat down on a stool next to mine. "Forgive my intrusion on your thoughts," she said, "but somebody told me that you are the man they call "The Preacher." " She pointed out a Master Sergeant in a booth with 2 prost.i.tutes who could not have been much over 15 years of age.
"I don"t know him," I said.
"He didn"t say he knew you," she said. "He"s heard you speak. So have a lot of other soldiers I"ve talked to."
"Somebody had to speak," I said, "or we couldn"t have had a war."
"Is that why they call you "The Preacher"?" she said.
"Who knows," I said, "in a world as full of baloney as this 1 is?" I had been called that as far back as West Point because I never used profanity. During my first 2 years in Vietnam, when the only troops I gave pep talks to were those who served under me, I was called "The Preacher" because it sounded sinister, as though I were a puritanical angel of death. Which I was, I was.
"Would you rather I went away?" she said.
"No," I said, "because I think there is every chance we could wind up in bed together tonight. You look intelligent, so you must be as blue as I am about our nation"s great unvictory. I worry about you. I"d like to cheer you up."
What the heck.
It worked.
IF IT AIN"T broke, don"t fix it.
34.
I WAS REASONABLY happy teaching at the prison. I raised the level of literacy by about 20 percent, with each newly literate person teaching yet another one. I wasn"t always happy with what they chose to read afterward.
One man told me that literacy made it a lot more fun for him to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e.
I DID NOT loaf. I like to teach.
I dared some of the more intelligent prisoners to prove to me that the World was round, to tell me the difference between noise and music, to tell me how physical traits were inherited, to tell me how to determine the height of a guard tower without climbing it, to tell me what was ridiculous about the Greek legend which said that a boy carried a calf around a barn every day, and pretty soon he was a man who could carry a bull around the barn every day, and so on.
I showed them a chart a fundamentalist preacher from downtown Scipio had pa.s.sed out to Tarkington students at the Pavilion one afternoon. I asked them to examine it for examples of facts tailored to fit a thesis.
Across the top the chart named the leaders of warring nations during the Finale Rack, during World War II. Then, under each name was the leader"s birthdate and how many years he lived and when he took office and how many years he served, and then the total of all those numbers, which in each case turned out to be 3,888.
It looked like this:
CHURCHILL HITLER ROOSEVELT IL DUCE STALIN TOJO.
[image]
As I say, every column adds up to 3,888.
Whoever invented the chart then pointed out that half that number was 1944, the year the war ended, and that the first letters of the names of the war"s leaders spelled the name of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
THE DUMBER ONES, like the dumber ones at Tarkington, used me as an ambulatory Guinness Book of World Records, Guinness Book of World Records, asking me who the oldest person in the world was, the richest one, the woman who had had the most babies, and so on. By the time of the prison break, I think, 98 percent of the inmates at Athena knew that the greatest age ever attained by a human being whose birthdate was well doc.u.mented was about 121 years, and that this incomparable survivor, like the Warden and the guards, had been j.a.panese. Actually, he had fallen 128 days short of reaching 121. His record was a natural foundation for all sorts of jokes at Athena, since so many of the inmates were serving life sentences, or even 2 or 3 life sentences either superimposed or laid end to end. asking me who the oldest person in the world was, the richest one, the woman who had had the most babies, and so on. By the time of the prison break, I think, 98 percent of the inmates at Athena knew that the greatest age ever attained by a human being whose birthdate was well doc.u.mented was about 121 years, and that this incomparable survivor, like the Warden and the guards, had been j.a.panese. Actually, he had fallen 128 days short of reaching 121. His record was a natural foundation for all sorts of jokes at Athena, since so many of the inmates were serving life sentences, or even 2 or 3 life sentences either superimposed or laid end to end.
They knew that the richest man in the world was also j.a.panese and that, about a century before the college and the prison were founded across the lake from each other, a woman in Russia was giving birth to the last of her 69 children.
THE RUSSIAN WOMAN who had more babies than anyone gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. They all survived, which is more than you can say for the Donner Party.
HIROSHI MATSUMOTO WAS the only member of the prison staff with a college education. He did not socialize with the others, and he took his off-duty meals alone and hiked alone and fished alone and sailed alone. Neither did he avail himself of the j.a.panese clubs in Rochester and Buffalo, or of the lavish rest-and-recuperation facilities maintained in Manhattan by the j.a.panese Army of Occupation in Business Suits. He had made so much money for his corporation in Louisville and then Athena, and was so brilliant in his understanding of American business psychology, that I am sure he could have asked for and gotten an executive job in the home office. He may have known more about American black people than anybody else in j.a.pan, thanks to Athena, and more and more of the businesses his corporation was buying here were dependent on black labor or at least the goodwill of black neighborhoods. Again thanks to Athena, he probably knew more than any other j.a.panese about the largest industry by far in this country, which was the procurement and distribution of chemicals that, when introduced into the bloodstream in one way or another, gave anybody who could afford them undeserved feelings of purpose and accomplishment.
Only 1 of these chemicals was legal, of course, and was the basis of the fortune of the family that gave Tarkington its band uniforms, and the water tower atop Musket Mountain, and an endowed chair in Business Law, and I don"t know what all else.
That mind-bender was alcohol.
IN THE 8 years we lived next door to him in the ghost town down by the lake, he never once indicated that he longed to be back in his homeland. The closest he came to doing that was when he told me 1 night that the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake, with huge timbers and boulders tumbled this way and that, might have been the creation of a great j.a.panese gardener.
In the j.a.panese Army of Occupation he was a high-ranking officer, the civilian peer of a Brigadier, maybe, or even a Major General. But he reminded me of several old Master Sergeants I had known in Vietnam. They would say worse things about the Army and the war and the Vietnamese than anybody. But I would go away for a couple of years, and then come back, and they were all still there, crabbing away. They wouldn"t leave until the Vietnamese either killed them or kicked them out of there.
How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.
HIROSHI MATSUMOTO CALLED this valley a "h.e.l.lhole" and the "a.n.u.s of the Universe." But he didn"t leave it until he was kicked out of here.
I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn"t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: "What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?"
THE LAST TIME I saw him was on the night of the prison break. We had been awakened by the racket of the Jamaicans" a.s.sault on the prison. We both came running out onto the street in front of our houses barefoot and in our nightclothes, although the temperature must have been minus 10 degrees centigrade.
The name of our main street in the ghost town was Clinton Street, the name of the main street in Scipio. Can you imagine that: two communities so close geographically, and yet in olden times so separate socially and economically that, with all the street names they might have chosen, they both named their main street Clinton Street?
THE WARDEN TRIED to reach the prison on a cordless telephone. He got no answer. His 3 house servants were looking out at us from upstairs windows. They were convicts over 70 years old, serving life sentences without hope of parole, long forgotten by the outside world, and c.o.ked to the gills on Thor-azine.
My mother-in-law came out on our porch. She called to me, "Tell him about the fish I caught! Tell him about that fish I caught!"
The Warden said to me that a boiler up at the prison must have blown, or maybe the crematorium. It sounded to me like military weaponry, whose voices he had never heard. He hadn"t even heard the atomic bomb go off. He had only felt the hot whoosh afterward.
And then all the lights on our side of the lake went off. And then we heard the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner" floating down from the blacked-out penitentiary.
THERE WAS NO way that the Warden and I, even with ma.s.sive doses of LSD, could have imagined what was going on up there. We were faulted afterward for not having alerted Scipio. As far as that goes, Scipio, hearing the explosion and "The Star-Spangled Banner" and all the rest of it across the frozen lake, might have been expected to take some defensive action. But it did not.
Survivors over there I talked to afterward said they had just pulled the covers over their heads and gone to sleep again. What could be more human?
WHAT WAS HAPPENING up there, as I"ve already said, was a stunningly successful attack on the prison by Jamaicans wearing National Guard uniforms and waving American flags. They had a public-address system mounted atop an armored personnel carrier and were playing the National Anthem. Most of them probably weren"t even American citizens!
But what j.a.panese farm boy, serving a 6-month tour of duty on a dark continent, would be crazy enough to open fire on seeming natives in full battle dress, who were waving flags and playing their h.e.l.lish music?
No such boy existed. Not that night.
IF THE j.a.pANESE had started shooting, they would have lost their lives like the defenders of the Alamo. And for what?
FOR SONY?.