Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  He was elated. "By golly--I finally got through the thick Harvard hide of Walter F. Starbuck," he said. "I touched a nerve, didn't I?"

  "You touched a nerve," I said.

  "Now we're getting somewhere," he said.

  "I hope not," I said, and I stared at the wall again.

  "I was just a little boy in kneepants in Petoskey, Michigan, when I first heard your voice," he said.

  "I'm sure," I said.

  "It was on the radio. My father made me and my little sister sit by the radio and listen hard. 'You listen hard,' he said. 'You're hearing history made.'"

  The year would have been Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. I had just returned to Washington with my little human family. We had just moved into our brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with its flowering crab apple tree. It was autumn. There were tart little apples on the tree. My wife Ruth was about to make jelly out of them, as she would do every year. Where was my voice coming from, that it should have been heard by little Emil Larkin in Petoskey? From a committee room in the House of Representatives. With a brutal bouquet of radio microphones before me I was being questioned, principally by a young congressman from California named Richard M. Nixon, about my previous associations with communists, and about my present loyalty to the United States.

  Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine: Will young people of today doubt me if I aver with a straight face that congressional committees convened in treetops then, since saber-toothed tigers still dominated the ground? No. Winston Churchill was still alive. Joseph Stalin was still alive. Think of that. Harry S. Truman was President. And the Defense Department had told me, a former communist, to form and head a task force of scientists and military men. Its mission was to propose tactics for ground forces when, as seemed inevitable, small nuclear weapons became available on the battlefield.

  The committee wished to know, and especially Mr. Nixon, if a man with my political past was to be trusted with such a sensitive job. Might I hand over our tactical schemes to the Soviet Union? Might I rig the schemes to make them impractical, so that in any battle with the Soviet Union the Soviet Union would surely win?

  "You know what I heard on that radio?" said Emil Larkin.

  "No," I said--ever so emptily.

  "I heard a man do the one thing nobody can ever forgive him for--and I don't care what their politics are. I heard him do the one thing he can't ever forgive himself for, and that was to betray his best friend."

  I could not smile then at his description of what he thought he had heard, and I cannot smile at it now--but it was ludicrous all the same. It was an impossibly chowder-headed abridgement of congressional hearings and civil suits and finally a criminal trial, which were spread out over two years. As a little boy listening to the radio, he could only have heard a lot of tedious talk, not much more interesting than static. It was only as a grownup, with a set of ethics based on cowboy movies, that Larkin could have decided that he had heard with utmost clarity the betrayal of a man by his best friend.

  "Leland Clewes was never my best friend," I said. This was the name of the man who was ruined by my testimony, and for a while there our last names would be paired in conversations: "Starbuck and Clewes"--like "Gilbert and Sullivan;" like "Sacco and Vanzetti;" like "Laurel and Hardy;" like "Leopold and Loeb."

  I don't hear much about us anymore.

  Clewes was a Yale man--my age. We first met at Oxford, where I was the coxswain and he was the bowman of a winning crew at Henley. I was short. He was tall. I am still short. He is still tall. We went to work for the Department of Agriculture at the same time and were assigned adjacent cubicles. We played tennis every Sunday morning, when the weather was clement. Those were our salad days, when we were green in judgment.

  For a while there we were joint owners of a secondhand Ford Phaeton and often went out together with our girls. Phaeton was the son of Helios, the sun. He borrowed his father's flaming chariot one day and drove it so irresponsibly that parts of northern Africa were turned into deserts. In order to keep the whole planet from being desolated, Zeus had to kill him with a thunderbolt. "Good for Zeus," I say. What choice did he have?

  But my friendship with Clewes was never deep and it ended when he took a girl away from me and married her. She was a member of a fine old New England family, which owned the Wyatt Clock Company in Brockton, Massachusetts, among other things. Her brother was my roommate at Harvard in my freshman year, which was how I got to know her. She was one of the four women I have ever truly loved. Sarah Wyatt was her maiden name.

  When I accidentally ruined him, Leland Clewes and I had not exchanged any sort of greeting for ten years or more. He and his Sarah had a child, a daughter, three years older than mine. He had become the brightest meteor in the State Department, and it was widely conceded that he would be secretary of state some day, and maybe even president. No one in Washington was better-looking and more charming than Leland Clewes.

  I ruined him in this way: Under oath, and in reply to a question by Congressman Nixon, I named a number of men who were known to have been communists during the Great Depression, but who had proved themselves to be outstanding patriots during World War Two. On that roll of honor I included the name of Leland Clewes. No particular comment was made about this at the time. It was only when I got home late that afternoon that I learned from my wife, who had been listening to me and then to every news program she could find on the radio, that Leland Clewes had never been connected with communism in any way before.

  By the time Ruth put on supper--and we had to eat off a packing case since the bungalow wasn't fully furnished yet--the radio was able to give us Leland Clewes's reply. He wished to appear before Congress at the earliest opportunity, in order to swear under oath that he had never been a communist, had never sympathized with any communist cause. His boss, the secretary of state, another Yale man, was quoted as saying that Leland Clewes was the most patriotic American he had ever known, and that he had proved his loyalty beyond question in negotiations with representatives of the Soviet Union. According to him, Leland Clewes had bested the communists again and again. He suggested that I might still be a communist, and that I might have been given the job of ruining Leland Clewes by my masters.

  Two horrible years later Leland Clewes was convicted on six counts of perjury. He became one of the first prisoners to serve his sentence in the then new Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility on the edge of Finletter Air Force Base--thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia.

  Small world.

  5

  ALMOST TWENTY YEARS later Richard M. Nixon, having become President of the United States, would suddenly wonder what had become of me. He would almost certainly never have become President, of course, if he had not become a national figure as the discoverer and hounder of the mendacious Leland Clewes. His emissaries would find me, as I say, helping my wife with her decorating business, which she ran out of our little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

  Through them, he would offer me a job.

  How did I feel about it? Proud and useful. Richard. M. Nixon wasn't merely Richard M. Nixon, after all. He was also the President of the United States of America, a nation I ached to serve again. Should I have refused--on the grounds that America wasn't really my kind of America just then?

  Should I have persisted, as a point of honor, in being to all practical purposes a basket case in Chevy Chase instead?

  No.

  And now Clyde Carter, the prison guard I had been waiting for so long on my cot, came to get me at last. Emil Larkin had by then given up on me and limped away.

  "I'm sure sorry, Walter," said Clyde.

  "Perfectly all right," I told him. "I'm in no hurry to go anywhere, and there are buses every thirty minutes." Since no one was coming to meet me, I would have to ride an Air Force bus to Atlanta. I would have to stand all the way, I thought, since the buses were always jammed long before they reached the prison stop.

  Clyde knew about my son
's indifference to my sufferings. Everybody in the prison knew. They also knew he was a book reviewer. Half the inmates, it seemed, were writing memoirs or spy novels or romans a clef, or what have you, so there was a lot of talk about book reviewing, and especially in The New York Times.

  And Clyde said to me, "Maybe I ain't supposed to say this, but that son of yours ought to be shot for not coming down after his daddy."

  "It's all right," I said.

  "That's what you say about everything," Clyde complained. "No matter what it is, you say, 'It's all right.'"

  "It usually is," I said.

  "Them was the last words of Caryl Chessman," he said. "I guess they'll be your last words, too."

  Caryl Chessman was a convicted kidnapper and rapist, but not a murderer, who spent twelve years on death row in California. He made all his own appeals for stays of execution, and he learned four languages and wrote two bestselling books before he was put into an airtight tank with windows in it, and made to breathe cyanide gas.

  And his last words were indeed, as Clyde said, "It's all right."

  "Well now, listen," said Clyde. "When you get yourself a bartending job up there in New York, I just know you're going to wind up owning that bar inside of two years' time." This was kindness on his part, and not genuine optimism. Clyde was trying to help me be brave. "And after you've got the most popular bar in New York," he went on, "I just hope you'll remember Clyde and maybe send for him. I can not only tend bar--I can also fix your air conditioning. By that time I'll be able to fix your locks, too."

  I knew he had been considering enrolling in The Illinois Institute of Instruction course in locksmithing. Now, apparently, he had taken the plunge. "So you took the plunge," I said.

  "I took the plunge," he said. "Got my first lesson today."

  The prison was a hollow square of conventional, two-story military barracks. Clyde and I were crossing the vast parade ground at its center. I with my bedding in my arms. This was where young infantrymen, the glory of their nation, had performed at one time, demonstrating their eagerness to do or die. Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country had asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die.

  There were faces at some of the windows--feeble old felons with bad hearts, bad lungs, bad livers, what have you. But there was only one other figure on the parade ground itself. He was dragging a large canvas trash bag after himself as he picked up papers with a spike at the end of a long stick. He was small and old, like me. When he saw us coming, he positioned himself between us and the Administration Building, and he pointed his spike at me, indicating that he had something very important to say to me. He was Dr. Carlo di Sanza, who held a Doctorate in law from the University of Naples. He was a naturalized American citizen and was serving his second term for using the mails to promote a Ponzi scheme. He was ferociously patriotic.

  "You are going home?" he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Don't ever forget one thing," he said. "No matter what this country does to you, it is still the greatest country in the world. Can you remember that?"

  "Yes, sir--I think I can," I said.

  "You were a fool to have been a communist," he said.

  "That was a long time ago," I said.

  "There are no opportunities in a communist country," he said. "Why would you want to live in a country with no opportunities?"

  "It was a youthful mistake, sir," I said.

  "In America I have been a millionaire two times," he said, "and I will be a millionaire again."

  "I'm sure of it," I said, and I was. He would simply start up his third Ponzi scheme--consisting, as before, of offering fools enormous rates of interest for the use of their money. As before, he would use most of the money to buy himself mansions and Rolls-Royces and speedboats and so on, but returning part of it as the high interest he had promised. More and more people would come to him, having heard of him from gloatingly satisfied recipients of his interest checks, and he would use their money to write more interest checks--and on and on.

  I am now convinced that Dr. di Sanza's greatest strength was his utter stupidity. He was such a successful swindler because he himself could not, even after two convictions, understand what was inevitably castastrophic about a Ponzi scheme.

  "I have made many people happy and rich," he said. "Have you done that?"

  "No, sir--not yet," I said. "But it's never too late to try."

  I am now moved to suppose, with my primitive understanding of economics, that every successful government is of necessity a Ponzi scheme. It accepts enormous loans that can never be repaid. How else am I to explain to my polyglot grandchildren what the United States was like in the nineteen-thirties, when its owners and politicians could not find ways for so many of its people to earn even the most basic necessities, like food and clothes and fuel. It was pure hell to get shoes!

  And then suddenly, there were formerly poor people in officers' clubs, beautifully costumed and ordering filets mignon and champagne. There were formerly poor people in enlisted men's clubs, serviceably costumed and clad and ordering hamburgers and beer. A man who two years before had patched the holes in his shoes with cardboard suddenly had a Jeep or a truck or an airplane or a boat, and unlimited supplies of fuel and ammunition. He was given glasses and bridgework, if he needed them, and he was immunized against every imaginable disease. No matter where he was on the planet, a way was found to get hot turkey and cranberry sauce to him on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  What had happened?

  What could have happened but a Ponzi scheme?

  When Dr. Carlo di Sanza stepped aside and let Clyde and me go on, Clyde began to curse himself for his own lack of large-scale vision. "Bartender, air-conditioner repairman, locksmith--prison guard," he said. "What's the matter with me that I think so small?"

  He spoke of his long association with white-collar criminals, and he told me one conclusion he had drawn: "Successful folks in this country never think about little things."

  "Successful?" I said incredulously. "You're talking about convicted felons, for heaven's sake!"

  "Oh, sure," he said, "but most of them have plenty of money still stashed away somewheres. Even if they don't, they know how to get plenty more. Everybody does just fine when they get out of here."

  "Remember me as a striking exception," I said. "My wife had to support me for most of my married life."

  "You had a million dollars one time," he said. "I'll never see a million dollars, if I live a million years." He was speaking of the corpus delecti of my Watergate crime, which was an old-fashioned steamer trunk containing one million dollars in unmarked and circulated twenty-dollar bills. It was an illegal campaign contribution. It became necessary to hide it when the contents of all White House safes were to be examined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and men from the Office of the Special Prosecutor. My obscure office in the subbasement was selected as the most promising hiding place. I acquiesced.

  Somewhere in there my wife died.

  And then the trunk was found. The police came for me. I knew the people who brought the trunk to my office, and under whose orders they were operating. They were all high-ranking people, some of them laboring like common stevedores. I would not tell the court or my own lawyers or anyone who they were. Thus did I go to prison for a while.

  I had learned this much from my mutual disaster with Leland Clewes: It was sickening to send another poor fool to prison. There was nothing quite like sworn testimony to make life look trivial and mean ever after.

  Also: My wife had just died. I could not care what happened next. I was a zombie.

  Even now I will not name the malefactors with the trunk. It does not matter.

  I cannot, however, withhold from American history what one of the malefactors said after the trunk was set down in my office. This was it: "Whose dumb fucking idea was it to bring this shit to the White House?"r />
  "People like you," said Clyde Carter, "find yourselves around millions of dollars all the time. If I'd of went to Harvard, maybe I would, too."

  We were hearing music now. We were nearing the supply room, and it was coming from a phonograph in there. Edith Piaf was singing "Non, je ne regrette rien." This means, of course, "No, I am not sorry about anything."

  The song ended just as Clyde and I entered the supply room, so that Dr. Robert Fender, the supply clerk and lifer, could tell us passionately how much he agreed with the song. "Non!" he said, his teeth gnashing, his eyes blazing. "Je ne regrette rien! Rien!"

  This was, as I have already said, a veterinarian and the only American to have been convicted of treason during the Korean War. He could have been shot for what he did, since he was then a first lieutenant in the United States Army, serving in Japan and inspecting meat on its way to the troops in Korea. As a gesture of mercy, his court-martial sentenced him to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

  This American traitor bore a strong resemblance to a great American hero, Charles Augustus Lindbergh. He was tall and big-boned. He had Scandinavian blood. He was a farm boy. He was fairly fluent in a weepy sort of French from having listened to Edith Piaf for so long. He had actually been almost nowhere outside of prison but Ames, Iowa, and Osaka, Japan. He was so shy with women, he told me one time, that he was still a virgin when he reached Osaka. And then he fell crashingly in love with a female nightclub singer who passed herself off as Japanese and sang word-for-word imitations of Edith Piaf records. She was also a spy for North Korea.

  "My dear friend, my dear Walter Starbuck," he said, "and how has this day gone for you so far?"

  So I told him about sitting on the cot and having the same song run through my head again and again, about Sally in the garden, sifting cinders.

  He laughed. He has since put me and the incident into a science fiction story of his, which I am proud to say is appearing this very month in Playboy, a RAMJAC magazine. The author is ostensibly Frank X. Barlow. The story is about a former judge on the plane Vicuna, two and a half galaxies away from. Earth, who has had to leave his body behind and whose soul goes flying through space, looking for a habitable planet and a new body to occupy. He finds that the universe is virtually lifeless, but he comes at last to Earth and makes his first landing in the enlisted men's parking lot of Finletter Air Force Base--thirty-five miles from Atlanta, Georgia. He can enter any body he likes through its ear, and ride around inside. He wants a body so he can have some sort of social life. A soul without a body, according to the story, can't have any social life--because nobody can see it, and it can't touch anybody or make any noise.