Hocus Pocus (33 page)

 

 

I ASKED ROB Roy where he had gone to college.

“Yale,” he said.

I told him what Helen Dole said about Yale, that it ought to be called “Plantation Owners’ Tech.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“I had to ask her to explain it myself,” I said. “She said Yale was where plantation owners learned how to get the natives to kill each other instead of them.”

“That’s a bit strong,” he said. And then he asked me if my first wife was still alive.

“I’ve only had 1,” I said. “She’s still alive.”

“There was a lot about her in Mother’s letter,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Like what?”

“About how she was hit by a car the day before you were going to take her to the senior prom. About how she was paralyzed from the waist down, but you still married her, even though she would have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.”

If that was in the letter, I must have told his mother that.

 

 

“AND YOUR FATHER, is he still alive?” he said.

“No,” I said. “The ceiling of a gift shop fell on him at Niagara Falls.”

“Did he ever regain his eyesight?” he said.

“Regain his what?” I said. And then I realized that his question was based on some other lie I had told his mother.

“His eyesight,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Never did.”

“I think it’s so beautiful,” he said, “how he came home from the war blind, and you used to read Shakespeare to him.”

“He sure loved Shakespeare,” I said.

“So,” he said, “I am descended not just from 1 war hero, but 2.”

“War hero?” I said.

“I know you would never call yourself that,” he said. “But that’s what Mother said you were. And you can certainly call your father that. How many Americans shot down 28 German planes in World War II?”

“We could go up to the library and look it up,” I said. “They have a very good library here. You can find out anything, if you really try.”

 

 

“WHERE IS MY Uncle Bob buried?” he said.

“Your what?” I said.

“Your brother Bob, my Uncle Bob,” he said.

I had never had a brother of any kind. I took a wild guess. “We threw his ashes out of an airplane,” I said.

“You have certainly had some bad luck,” he said. “Your father comes home blind from the war. Your childhood sweet-heart is hit by a car right before the senior prom. Your brother dies of spinal meningitis right after he is invited to try out for the New York Yankees.”

“Yes, well, all you can do is play the cards they deal you,” I said.

 

 

“HAVE YOU STILL got his glove?” he said.

“No,” I said. What kind of glove could I have told his mother about when we were both sozzled on Sweet Rob Roys in Manila 24 years ago?

“You carried it all the way through the war, but now it’s gone?” he said.

He had to be talking about the nonexistent baseball glove of my nonexistent brother. “Somebody stole it from me after I got home,” I said, “thinking it was just another baseball glove, I’m sure. Whoever stole it had no idea how much it meant to me.”

He stood. “I really must be going now.”

I stood, too.

I shook my head sadly. “It isn’t going to be as easy as you think to give up on the country of your birth.”

“That’s about as meaningful as my astrological sign,” he said.

“What is?” I said.

“The country of my birth,” he said.

“You might be surprised,” I said.

“Well, Dad,” he said, “it certainly won’t be the first time.”

 

 

“CAN YOU TELL me who in this valley might have gasoline?” he said. “I’ll pay anything.”

“Do you have enough gas to make it back to Rochester?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “head back the way you came. That’s the only way you can get back, so you can’t get lost. Right at the Rochester city limits you will see the Meadowdale Cinema Complex. Behind that is a crematorium. Don’t look for smoke. It’s smokeless.”

“A crematorium?” he said.

“That’s right, a crematorium,” I said. “You drive up to the crematorium, and you ask for Guido. From what I hear, if you’ve got the money, he’s got the gasoline.”

“And chocolate bars, do you think?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Won’t hurt to ask.”

NOT THAT THERE is any shortage of real child-molesters, child-shooters, child-starvers, child-bombers, child-drowners, child-whippers, child-burners, and child-defenestrators on this happy planet. Turn on the TV. By the luck of the draw, though, my son Rob Roy Fenstermaker does not happen to be one of them.

 

 

OK. MY STORY is almost ended.

And here is the news that knocked the wind out of me so recently. When I heard it from my lawyer, I actually said, “Ooof!”

Hiroshi Matsumoto was dead by his own hand in his hometown of Hiroshima! But why would I care so much?

 

HE DID IT in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese time, of course, while sitting in his motor-driven wheelchair at the base of the monument marking the point of impact of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima when we were little boys.

He didn’t use a gun or poison. He committed hara-kiri with a knife, disemboweling himself in a ritual of self-loathing once practiced by humiliated members of the ancient caste of professional soldiers, the samurai.

And yet, so far as I am able to determine, he never shirked his duty, never stole anything, and never killed or wounded anyone.

Still waters run deep. R.I.P.

 

 

IF THERE REALLY is a big book somewhere, in which all things are written, and which is to be read line by line, omitting nothing, on Judgment Day, let it be recorded that I, when Warden of this place, moved the convicted felons out of the tents on the Quadrangle and into the surrounding buildings. They no longer had to excrete in buckets or, in the middle of the night, have their homes blown down. The buildings, except for this 1, were divided into cement-block cells intended for 2 men, but most holding 5.

The War on Drugs goes on.

I caused 2 more fences to be erected, 1 within the other, enclosing the back of the inner buildings, and with antipersonnel mines sown in between. The machine-gun nests were reinstalled in windows and doorways of the next ring of buildings, Norman Rockwell Hall, the Pahlavi Pavilion, and so on.

It was during my administration that the troops here were Federalized, a step I had recommended. That meant that they were no longer civilians in soldier suits. That meant that they were full-time soldiers, serving at the pleasure of the President. Nobody could say how much longer the War on Drugs might last. Nobody could say when they could go home again.

 

GENERAL FLORIO HIMSELF, accompanied by six MPs with clubs and sidearms, congratulated me on all I had done. He then took back the two stars he had loaned me, and told me that I was under arrest for the crime of insurrection. I had come to like him, and I think he had come to like me. He was simply following orders.

I asked him, as 1 comrade to another, “Does this make any sense to you? Why is this happening?”

It is a question I have asked myself many times since, maybe 5 times today between coughing fits.

His answer to it, the first answer I ever got to it, is probably the best answer I will ever get to it.

“Some ambitious young Prosecutor,” he said, “thinks you’ll make good TV.”

 

 

HIROSHI MATSUMOTO’S SUICIDE has hit me so hard, I think, because he was innocent of even the littlest misdemeanors. I doubt that he ever double-parked, even, or ran a red light when nobody else was around. And yet he executed himself in a manner that the most terrible criminal who ever lived would not deserve!

He had no feet anymore, which must have been depressing. But having no feet is no reason for a man to disembowel himself.

It had to have been the atom bomb that was dropped on him during his formative years, and not the absence of feet, that made him feel that life was a crock of doo-doo.

 

 

AS I HAVE said, he did not tell me that he had been atom-bombed until we had known each other for 2 years or more. He might never have told me about it, in my opinion, if a documentary about the Japanese “Rape of Nanking” hadn’t been shown on the prison TVs the day before. This was a program chosen at random from the prison library. A guard who did the choosing couldn’t read English well enough to know what the convicts would see next. So there was no censorship.

The Warden had a small TV monitor on his desk, and I knew he watched it from time to time, since he often remarked to me about the inanity of this or that old show, and especially
I Love Lucy.

 

 

THE RAPE OF Nanking was just one more instance of soldiers slaughtering prisoners and unarmed civilians, but it became famous because it was among the first to be well photographed. There were evidently movie cameras everywhere, run by gosh knows whom, and the footage wasn’t confiscated afterward.

I had seen some of the footage when I was a cadet, but not as a part of a well-edited documentary, with a baritone voice-over and appropriate music underneath.

The orgy of butchery followed a virtually unopposed attack by the Japanese Army on the Chinese city of Nanking in 1937, long before this country became part of the Finale Rack. Hiroshi Matsumoto had just been born. Prisoners were tied to stakes and used for bayonet practice. Several people in a pit were buried alive. You could see their expressions as the dirt hit their faces.

Their faces disappeared, but the dirt on top kept moving as though there were some sort of burrowing animal, a woodchuck maybe, making a home below.

Unforgettable!

 

 

HOW WAS THAT for racism?

 

THE DOCUMENTARY WAS a big hit in the prison. Alton Darwin said to me, I remember, “If somebody is going to do it, I am going to watch it.”

This was 7 years before the prison break.

 

 

I DIDN’T KNOW if Hiroshi had seen the show on his monitor or not. I wasn’t about to ask. We were not pals.

I was willing to be a pal, if that was part of the job. I believe he moved me in next door to him with the idea that it was time he had a pal. My guess is that he never had had a pal. No sooner had I become his neighbor, I think, than he decided he didn’t want a pal after all. That didn’t have anything to do with what I was or how I acted. To him, I think, a pal was like a piece of merchandise heavily promoted at Christmas, say. Why junk up his life with such a cumbersome contraption and all its accessories merely because it was advertised?

So he went on hiking alone and boating alone and eating alone, which was OK with me. I had a rich social life across the lake.

 

 

BUT THE DAY after the documentary was shown, late in the afternoon, about suppertime, I was rowing for shore in my fiberglass umiak, headed for the mud beach in front of our 2 houses in the ghost town. I had been fishing. I hadn’t been to Scipio. My own 2 great pals Over there, Muriel Peck and Damon Stern, were on vacation. They wouldn’t be back until Freshman Orientation Week, before the start of the fall semester.

The Warden was waiting for me on the beach, looking out at me in my crazy boat like a mother who had been worried to death about where her little boy had gone. Had I failed to keep a date with him? No. We had never had a date. My best supposition was that Mildred or Margaret had tried to burn 1 of our houses down.

But he said to me as I disembarked, “There is something you should know about me.”

There was no pressing reason why I should know anything about him. We didn’t work as a team up at the prison. He didn’t care what or how I taught up there.

“I was in Hiroshima when it was bombed,” he said.

I am sure there was an implied equation there: The bombing of Hiroshima was as unforgivable and as typically human as the Rape of Nanking.

So I heard about his going into a ditch after a ball when he was a schoolboy, about his straightening up to find that nobody was alive but him.

And on and on.

When he was through with that story he said to me, “I thought you should know.”

 

 

I SAID EARLIER that I had a sudden attack of psychosomatic hives when Rob Roy Fenstermaker told me that he had been busted for molesting children. That wasn’t my first such attack. The first was when Hiroshi told me about being atom-bombed. I suddenly itched all over, and scratching wouldn’t help.

And I said to Hiroshi what I would say to Rob Roy: “I thank you for sharing that with me.”

This was an expression, if I am not mistaken, which originated in California.

 

 

I WAS TEMPTED to show Hiroshi “The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore.” I’m glad I didn’t. I might now be feeling a little bit responsible for his suicide. He might have left a note saying: “The Elders of Tralfamadore win again!”

Only I and the author of that story, if he is still alive, would have known what he meant by that.

 

 

THE MOST TROUBLING part of his tale about the vaporization of all he knew and loved had to do with the edge of the area of the blast. There were all these people dying in agony. And he was only a little boy, remember.

That must have been for him like walking down the Appian Way back in 71 B.C., when 6,000 nobodies had just been crucified there. Some little kid or maybe a lot of little kids may have walked down that road back then. What could a little kid say on such an occasion? “Daddy, I think I have to go to the bathroom”?