Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (13 page)

The raper of girls on bikes had acquired a bike himself, and got to Mississippi, then Louisiana, where the weather was still clement. His health had improved, and he picked up money here and there doing odd jobs such as lawn-mowing and yard-tidying, for which he proposed such a low price per hour that few people said no. He made a good impression. Not a soul suspected that he was the rapist sought from coast to coast. A pretty girl in a family did not excite him at all. Only a girl rolling along on a bike turned him on, and by sheer luck, he had so far encountered such a sight only on roads rather far from houses and other people. He could not have counted his conquests by now, and it did not interest him to count them, but the police and the newspapers did, and his score was twenty-eight. Police were tracking him southward, and were once within twenty miles of him, by now looking for a man on a bike, but Fred Wechsler, who did not read newspapers, bought himself a second-hand car around this time. Long ago, before he had been sent to prison, he had driven a car, and the dealer did not ask to see his driving license.

“A major national and societal tragedy,” the American Psychiatric Society said in commenting on the practice of discharging the still mentally ill from state institutions. “Hardly a section of the country has escaped the ubiquitous presence of these ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering our city streets, huddling in alleys, sleeping over vents. Such is the result of Washington’s shameful policy of cutting federal spending . . .”

The President replied that the majority of those released had relatives, that charity begins at home, and that Americans had a tradition of giving voluntary aid to the sick and homeless. “In America, people can make it if they try. That’s what America is all about.” This became known as the “Bowl of Soup” speech. A woman wrote a letter which was printed in
Time
:

The law-makers and the federal funds distributors in their luxurious quarters in Washington, DC do not see what we see on our streets and doorsteps. I suggest that we citizens band together and bus these criminals and zombies to the White House and show them what we’re talking about.

(Mrs) Mary V. Benson

Tallahassee, Florida

This letter was to have important repercussions.

Miss Tiller and Bert had not been without a roof over their heads since their first day of freedom. On their first evening, thinking to treat themselves to a steak dinner, they had entered a roadside restaurant called The Steak Place, where there was a pianist beside the bar. The diners could ask the pianist to play songs of their choice. Miss Tiller found this civilized. Bert whistled a tune to the pianist, who at once began playing “Who Will Come and Buy My Violets?,” a background song for one of Charlie Chaplin’s most famous films. Seeing Bert in his Chaplin gear, the people at the tables gave a patter of applause, and there were cries of “Dance for us! . . . Give us a waltz!”

Miss Tiller conveyed the request to Bert by opening her arms, and waltzing by herself, while Bert twirled gracefully on one foot, the other foot extended in the air behind him. He leaned pensively on his cane, waltzed some shy steps with Miss Tiller, who was taller than he, created his dance as he went along, while Miss Tiller seemed just out of reach, in two senses, to him.

“More! . . . More!”

The pianist began another waltz from the old days, Irving Berlin’s “All Alone,” and Bert and Miss Tiller took the dance floor, where a spot was thrown on them, and their appearance provoked shouts of delight. Miss Tiller waltzed and sang, pretending to hold a telephone in her hands.

A money bowl sat on the piano but, for Bert and Miss Tiller, patrons approached and poked bills into Bert’s jacket pockets and into Miss Tiller’s purse, which hung by its strap over her arm, and which she graciously opened. Others sailed bills folded like airplanes on to the dance floor, and from time to time Bert zoomed his cane under them, or bent from the waist to pick them up, causing Miss Tiller to bump him once and knock him flat.

The manager spoke with them, when they returned to their table, or rather he spoke with Miss Tiller. Would they agree to come back for the next two nights, Friday and Saturday? Could Miss Tiller sing again? Yes, of course she could. Half-hour shows at 9 and 11:30 p.m., one hundred dollars per evening, plus what the customers gave, the hotel expenses included? The manager owned a hotel fifty yards away.

Miss Tiller replied that she thought the proposition most interesting. Bert, watching, nodded his assent. The manager was a little puzzled when Miss Tiller signed an informal agreement with “Cleopatra,” but he said nothing. He was not surprised when Bert signed “Charlie Chaplin.”

Miss Tiller’s voice was reedy on the high notes, and some she couldn’t touch at all, such as a few in Strauss’s Zerbinetta aria, for instance, but nobody cared. Now she had her barge. Three armless upholstered chairs made it with a couple of long curtains thrown over them, a waiter rolled her on stage, she smoking a cigarette in a long holder. Miss Tiller plainly enjoyed her performances, enjoyed even the laughter at her bad notes. Something magical, something happy flowed between her and Bert, and between them both and the audience. They had to consult with each other like amateurs between numbers, and before informing the pianist what to play. People wanted to shake their hands after a show. And the money fell like rain.

The owner of The Steak Place, whose restaurant was packed on Saturday night, could not match the money offered Miss Tiller and Bert by a couple of entrepreneurs from San Francisco. Miss Tiller and Bert were off and away.

Mrs. Mary V. Benson had struck a common chord with her letter in
Time.
More letters were printed in
Time
on the subject, and letters came in to Mrs. Benson in Tallahassee.
Yes, let’s show Washington!
was the idea. They organized. This took weeks, but voluntary effort, which the President had advocated, was not lacking for this cause: gather up the zombies, the panhandlers, the nuts, the exhibitionists, and send them to the White House lawn. Bus companies got into the spirit and offered free transport. Washington, getting wind of this, decided to adopt a “Welcome to All Comers” attitude, and promised a picnic and an open-air forum where people could exchange views, even with the President himself.

The day was set, April 17th, a Wednesday. Trains and buses, even airlines offered free tickets for the publicity it gave them, and many people who had cars took drifters in their towns to the nearest bus terminal or airport. The White House had expected a few thousand, perhaps five thousand, and intended to deploy plainclothes guards as well as the National Guard and the police to keep the crowds in order. But Washington, DC had had only some twelve hours’ notice that fifty to sixty thousand would probably arrive.

To make matters worse, it was raining. Tent-like roofs were put up over the long tables of sandwiches and soft drinks on the White House lawns, but a couple of tents collapsed before noon, causing panic among the men and women caught underneath. Many thought they had been invited to live in the White House, and were angry at learning, after having come all this way, that all that was being offered them was cold food and iced tea out in the rain. Hundreds began drifting toward the White House—where was the President, after all?—and, when the guards took a stand against them, fights broke out, bullets rubber and real began to fly. The National Guard lost its temper, and bashed some heads with rifle butts. Helicopters dropped armed reinforcements by rope ladder close to the White House, and these descended on to the heads of people.

Meanwhile yet more were arriving by bus or on foot, because of the congestion of vehicles and troop carriers.

“Let us in our home!” some shouted, and this became a chant.

There were screams, female and male, as people were trampled.

Helicopters and White House door guards released tear gas bombs, with an idea of driving the horde away from the White House but, due to the wind, the gas affected the troops as much as anyone else. Then the White House doors yielded. All this was seen on TV across the nation, and viewers yelled, “Look!—
Good!
” or “How horrible!” or merely laughed wildly, depending on their turn of mind.

The tear gas, invisible but smarting to the eyes, seemed merely to animate the masses on the wet lawns. Machinegun fire came from within the White House. A TV news helicopter collided with a military helicopter and both fell on the crowd, but did not burst into flame.

“
Welcome—welcome—and be calm, please!
” the President’s voice said for at least the fourth time on a recorded message boomed out from the White House balcony, where only armed soldiers stood ready to fire. The President at that moment was hiding in a steel vault in the White House basement. The vault was specially made for such an emergency, with inside controls for opening, and food and water for two or three people for a week. He had been hidden away like a Queen Bee in the center of her hive, and a hive it was with derelicts, the mentally deranged, the half-blinded from tear gas, creeping up and down the fine staircases, opening the doors to every room. Despite the flying bullets and the falling figures, more pushed through the main doors.

The National Guard and the Marines, having shot up all their ammunition, became scared for the good reason that they were outnumbered and seemed to be fighting suicidal masses. They were now using their rifles as battering rams against the people and as staves to defend themselves. TV crews in their helicopters overhead were filming, reporting: “It looks like a battlefield here! The fallen—the fallen are mostly around the White House front porch, but—Yes! More National Guards are coming up from the
streets
now, trying to push forward and steer people off the lawn. We’ve never seen anything—anything like it, not even the hunger march in the Hoover Administration—surely! . . .”

The White House lawn activities, when they became rough between 2 and 3 p.m., interrupted an after-lunch show that Miss Tiller and Bert were giving in a large Boston hotel. In a way, the laughter that these two had started continued, as the people at the tables were treated to a big-screen TV viewing.

“These are the—the—” yelled the emcee, at a loss for words.

“The
loonies
!” someone supplied, and there was loud laughter, because the march today to Washington had been well publicized.

“The Moonies, the zombies, the muggers—”

“Let’s
hope
!” cried a woman.

“At least they won’t be hanging around our neighborhoods tonight!”

“Yee-
hoo
!” Applause!

“Where’s the President in all this?”

“Bet he’s hiding in the wine cellar!” someone yelled back.

Miss Tiller and Bert were equally rapt, eyes on the big screen.

“Isn’t it shocking!” Miss Tiller said to Bert, despite the fact that he couldn’t hear her. “People behaving like that! The rabble!—They consider themselves unemployed, I suppose. What this country needs is slaves!” Her voice rose as she realized that she wished to address her audience, which happened to be a real estate dealers’ convention, She stepped into the center of the floor, and the spot man put the light on her. She said in a loud and elegant voice: “Look at that rabble! What this country needs is
slaves—
as in
my
country—Egypt! This could never happen in Egypt!—I’d put them to work building
pyramids
!”

Loud hand-clapping and laughter! “Yee-hoo-o! You tell ’em, Cleo!”

Miss Tiller now wore an asp partly in and partly out of the top of her gown at her somewhat flat bosom. The asp was of rubbery plastic, but very lifelike, moving its head about with Miss Tiller’s movements.

The restaurant patrons did not realize how serious Miss Tiller was in her remark about slaves.

Slaves, real slaves might be out of the question just now, Miss Tiller thought, America wasn’t ready for them yet, but she had no complaint about the services she enjoyed. She and Bert now had a manager, whom Miss Tiller preferred to call their Public Relations Officer, a young man of twenty-eight whom they had met in San Francisco on their first trip. Miss Tiller had pulled him into line once, she was good at figures and kept an eye on the books, and maybe Harvey Knowles—that was his name—had made an honest mistake, but in the future he was not going to make any more mistakes, honest or not. They had played in Chicago, Dallas and New Orleans. She and Bert stayed in good hotels, which made an impression upon journalists, and Bert wanted to be near her because of his communication problem, so they always took a suite. Miss Tiller was now doing impersonations, Gloria Swanson, for example, Garbo. She loved to pretend to be someone else, loved to act self-assured, and in fact she was, with no worries at all about her future or that of her devoted Bert.

Miss Tiller and Bert had not connected the surging, milling crowds on the White House lawn with any people they had ever known. They had both entered a new and better world in the past months. Miss Tiller had much expanded her repertory, while Bert had invented pantomime skits with real little stories to them, some involving Miss Tiller and some not. Bert’s props were a bouquet of flowers, sometimes an ashcan, an imaginary window toward which he directed his attention while he danced and mimed. They were going to England soon with a six-week contract starting in Manchester and ending in London.