Jailbird

by Kurt Vonnegut

  But the warden wasn't even in Georgia. He would have been there if he had had any advance notice that Greathouse was going to surrender on this particular day. But he was in Atlantic City, addressing a convention of the American Association of Parole Officers up there. So it was finally Clyde Carter, the spit and image of President Carter, who came out of the front door a few steps and motioned to them.

  Clyde smiled. "You all come in," he said.

  So in they went, with the chauffeur bringing up the rear, carrying two valises made of buttery leather and a matching case for toiletries. Clyde relieved him of the bags at the threshold, told him politely to return to the limousine.

  "You won't be needed in there," said Clyde.

  So the chauffeur got back into the limousine. His name was Cleveland Lawes, a garbling of the name of the man I had ruined, Leland Clewes. He had only a grammar-school education, but he read five books a week while waiting for people, mostly RAMJAC executives and customers and suppliers. Because he had been captured by the Chinese during the Korean War, and had actually gone to China for a while and worked as a deckhand on a coastwise steamer in the Yellow Sea, he was reasonably fluent in Chinese.

  Cleveland Lawes was reading The Gulag Archipelago now, an account of the prison system in the Soviet Union by another former prisoner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

  So there I was all alone on a bench in the middle of nowhere again. I entered a period of catatonia again--staring straight ahead at nothing, and every so often clapping my old hands three times.

  If it had not been for that clapping, Cleveland Lawes tells me now, he would never have become curious about me.

  But I became his business by clapping my hands. He had to find out why I did it.

  Did I tell him the truth about the clapping? No. It was too complicated and silly. I told him that I had been daydreaming about the past, and that whenever I remembered an especially happy moment, I would lift my hands from my lap, and I would clap three times.

  He offered me a ride into Atlanta.

  And there I was now, after only half an hour of freedom, sitting in the front seat of a parked limousine. So far so good.

  And if Cleveland Lawes had not offered me a ride into Atlanta, he would never have become what he is today, personnel director of the Transico Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. Transico has limousine services and taxicab fleets and car-rental agencies and parking lots and garages all over the Free World. You can even rent furniture from Transico. Many people do.

  I asked him if he thought his passengers would mind my coming along to Atlanta.

  He said that he had never seen them before, and that he never expected to see them again--that they did not work for RAMJAC. He added the piquant detail that he had not known that his chief passenger had been Virgil Greathouse until the arrival at the prison. Until that moment Greathouse had been disguised by a false beard.

  I craned my neck for a look into the backseat, and there the beard was, with one of its wire earloops hooked over a door handle.

  Cleveland Lawes said as a joke that he wasn't sure Greathouse's lawyers would come back out again. "When they were looking over the prison," he said, "seemed to me they were trying it on for size."

  He asked me if I had ever ridden in a limousine before. For simplicity's sake I told him, "No." As a child of course, I had often ridden beside my father in the front seat of Alexander Hamilton McCone's various limousines. In my youth, as I was preparing for Harvard, I had often ridden in the backseat with Mr. McCone, with a glass partition between myself and my father. The partition had not seemed strange or even suggestive to me at the time.

  And when in Nuremberg I had been master of that grotesque Fafner of a Mercedes touring car. But it had been an open car, freakish even without the bullet holes in the trunk lid and the rear windshield. The status it gave me among the Bavarians was that of a pirate--in temporary possession of stolen goods that would certainly be restolen, again and again. But, sitting there outside the prison, I realized that I had not sat in a real limousine for perhaps forty-five years! As high as I had risen in public service, I had never been entitled to a limousine, had never been within three promotions of having one of my own or even the occasional use of one. Nor had I ever so beguiled a superior who had one that he had said to me, "Young man--I want to talk to you more about this. You come in my car with me."

  Leland Clewes, on the other hand, though not entitled to one of his own, was forever riding around in limousines with adoring old men.

  No matter.

  Calm down.

  Cleveland Lawes commented that I sounded like an educated man to him.

  I admitted to having gone to Harvard.

  This allowed him to tell me about his having been a prisoner of the Chinese communists in North Korea, for the Chinese major in charge of his prison had been a Harvard man. The major would have been about my age, and possibly even a classmate, but I had never befriended any Chinese. According to Lawes, he had studied physics and mathematics, so I would not have known him in any case.

  "His daddy was a big landlord," said Lawes. "When the communists came, they made his daddy kneel down in front of all his tenants in the village, and then they chopped off his head with a sword."

  "But the son could still be a communist--after that?" I said.

  "He said his daddy really had been a very bad landlord," he said.

  "Well," I said, "that's Harvard for you, I guess."

  This Harvard Chinese befriended Cleveland Lawes and persuaded him to come to China instead of going back home to Georgia when the war was over. When he was a boy, a cousin of Lawes had been burned alive by a mob, and his father had been dragged out of his house one night and horsewhipped by the Ku Klux Klan, and he himself had been beat up twice for trying to register to vote, right before the Army got him. So he was easy prey for a smooth-talking communist. And he worked for two years, as I say, as a deckhand on the Yellow Sea. He said that he fell in love several times, but that nobody would fall in love with him.

  "So that was what brought you back?" I asked.

  He said it was the church music more than anything else. "There wasn't anybody to sing with over there," he said. "And the food," he said.

  "The food wasn't any good?" I said.

  "Oh, it was good," he said. "It just wasn't the kind of food I like to talk about."

  "Um," I said.

  "You can't just eat food," he said. "You've got to talk about it, too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food."

  I congratulated him on having learned Chinese, and he replied that he could never do such a thing now. "I know too much now," he said. "I was too ignorant then to know how hard it was to learn Chinese. I thought it was like imitating birds. You know: You hear a bird make a sound, then you try to make a sound just like that, and see if you can't fool the bird."

  The Chinese were nice about it when he decided that he wanted to go home. They liked him, and they went to some trouble for him, asking through circuitous diplomatic channels what would be done to him if he went home. America had no representatives in China then, and neither did any of its allies. The messages went through Moscow, which was still friendly with China then.

  Yes, and this black, former private first class, whose military specialty had been to carry the base-plate of a heavy mortar, turned out to be worth negotiations at the highest diplomatic levels. The Americans wanted him back in order to punish him. The Chinese said that the punishment had to be brief and almost entirely symbolic, and that he had to be returned nearly at once to ordinary civilian life--or they would not let him go. The Americans said that Lawes would of course be expected to make some sort of public explanation of why he had come home. After that, he would be court-martialed, given a prison sentence of under three years and a dishonorable discharge, with forfeiture of all pay and benefits. The Chinese replied that Lawes had given his promise that he would never speak against the People's Republic of China, which
had treated him well. If he was to be forced to break that promise, they would not let him go. They also insisted that he serve no prison time whatsoever, and that he be paid for the time he spent as a prisoner of war. The Americans replied that he would have to be jailed at some point, since no army could allow the crime of desertion to go unpunished. They would like to jail him prior to his trial. They would sentence him to a term equal to the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and deduct the time he had spent as a prisoner of war, and send him home. Back pay was out of the question.

  And that was the deal.

  "They wanted me back, you know," he told me, "because they were so embarrassed. They couldn't stand it that even one American, even a black one, would think for even a minute that maybe America wasn't the best country in the world."

  I asked him if he had ever heard of Dr. Robert Fender, who was convicted of treason during the Korean War, and was right inside the prison there, measuring Virgil Greathouse for a uniform.

  "No," he said. "I never kept track of other people in that kind of trouble. I never felt like it was a club or something."

  I asked him if he had ever seen the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham, Jr., the majority stockholder in The RAMJAC Corporation.

  "That's like asking me if I've seen God," he said.

  The widow Graham had not been seen in public, at that point, for about five years. Her most recent appearance was in a courtroom in New York City, where RAMJAC was being sued by a group of its stockholders for proofs that she was still alive. The accounts in the papers amused my wife so, I remember. "This is the America I love," she said. "Why can't it be like this all the time?"

  Mrs. Graham came into the courtroom without a lawyer, but with eight uniformed bodyguards from Pinkerton, Inc., a RAMJAC subsidiary. One of them was carrying an amplifier with a loudspeaker and a microphone. Mrs. Graham was wearing a voluminous black caftan with its hood up, and with the hood pinned shut with diaper pins, so that she could peek out, but nobody could see what was inside. Only her hands were visible. Another Pinkerton was carrying an inkpad, some paper, and a copy of her fingerprints from the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Her prints had been forwarded to the F.B.I. after she was convicted of drunken driving in Frankfort, Kentucky, in Nineteen-hundred and Fifty-two, soon after her husband died. She had been put on probation at that time. I myself had just been fired from government service at that time.

  The amplifier was turned on, and the microphone was slipped inside her caftan, so people could hear what she was saying in there. She proved she was who she said she was by fingerprinting herself on the spot and having the prints compared with those possessed by the F.B.I. She said under oath that she was in excellent health, both physically and mentally--and in control of the company's top officers, but never face-to-face. When she instructed them on the telephone, she used a password to identify herself. This password was changed at irregular intervals. At the judge's request, I remember, she gave a sample password, and it seemed so full of magic that it still sticks in my mind. This was it: "shoemaker." Every order she gave on the phone was subsequently confirmed by mail, by a letter written entirely by her own hand. At the bottom of each letter was not only her signature, but a full set of prints from her eight little fingers and two little thumbs. She called them that: "... my eight little fingers and my two little thumbs."

  That was that. Mrs. Jack Graham was unquestionably alive, and now she was free to disappear again.

  "I've seen Mr. Leen many times," said Cleveland Lawes. He was speaking of Arpad Leen, the very public and communicative president and chairman of the board of directors of The RAMJAC Corporation. He would become my boss of bosses, and Cleveland Lawes's boss of bosses, too, when we both became corporate officers of RAMJAC. I say now that Arpad Leen is the most able and informed and brilliant and responsive executive under whom it has ever been my privilege to serve. He is a genius at acquiring companies and keeping them from dying afterward.

  He used to say, "If you can't get along with me, you can't get along with anybody."

  It was true, it was true.

  Lawes said that Arpad Leen had come to Atlanta and been Lawes's passenger only two months before. A cluster of new stores and luxury hotels in Atlanta had gone bankrupt, and Leen had tried to snap it all up for RAMJAC. He had been outbid, however, by a South Korean religious cult.

  Lawes asked me if I had any children. I said I had a son who worked for The New York Times. Lawes laughed and said that he and my son had the same boss now: Arpad Leen. I had missed the news that morning, so he had to explain to me that RAMJAC had just acquired control of The New York Times and all of its subsidiaries, which included the second-largest catfood company in the world.

  "When he was down here," said Lawes, "Mr. Leen told me this was going to happen. It was the catfood company he wanted--not The New York Times."

  The two lawyers got into the backseat of the limousine. They weren't subdued at all. They were laughing about the guard who looked like the President of the United States. "I felt like saying to him," said one, "'Mr. President, why don't you just pardon him right here and now? He's suffered enough, and he could get in some good golf this afternoon.'"

  One of them tried on the false beard, and the other one said he looked like Karl Marx. And so on. They were incurious about me. Cleveland Lawes told them that I had been visiting my son. They asked me what my son was in for and I said, "Mail fraud." That was the end of the conversation.

  So off we went to Atlanta. There was a curious object stuck by means of a suction cup to the glove compartment in front of me, I remember. Coming out of the cup and aimed at my breastbone was what looked like about a foot of green garden hose. At the end of the shaft was a white plastic wheel the size of a dinner plate. Once we got going, the wheel began to hypnotize me, bobbing up and down when we went over bumps, swaying this way and then that way as we went around curves.

  So I asked about it. It was a toy steering wheel, it turned out. Lawes had a seven-year-old son he sometimes took with him on trips. The little boy could pretend to be steering the limousine with the plastic wheel. There had been no such toy when my own son was little. Then again, he wouldn't have enjoyed it much. Even at seven, young Walter hated to go anywhere with his mother and me.

  I said it was a clever toy.

  Lawes said it could be an exciting one, too, especially if the person with the real steering wheel was drunk and having close shaves with oncoming trucks and sideswiping parked cars and so on. He said that the President of the United States ought to be given a wheel like that at his inauguration, to remind him and everybody else that all he could do was pretend to steer.

  He let me off at the airport.

  The planes to New York City were all overbooked, it turned out. I did not get out of Atlanta until five o'clock that afternoon. That was all right with me. I skipped lunch, having no appetite. I found a paperback book in a toilet stall, so I read that for a while. It was about a man who, through ruthlessness, became the head of a big international conglomerate. Women were crazy about him. He treated them like dirt, but they just came back for more. His son was a drug addict and his daughter was a nymphomaniac.

  My reading was interrupted once by a Frenchman who spoke to me in French and pointed to my left lapel. I thought at first that I had set myself on fire again, even though I didn't smoke anymore. Then I realized that I was still wearing the narrow red ribbon that identified me as a chevalier in the French Legion d'honneur. Pathetically enough, I had worn it all through my trial, and all the way to prison, too.

  I told him in English that it had come with the suit, which I had bought secondhand, and that I had no idea what it was supposed to represent.

  He became very icy, "Permettez-moi, monsieur," he said, and he deftly plucked the ribbon from my lapel as though it had been an insect there.

  "Merci," I said, and I returned to my book.

  When there was at last an airplane seat for me, my name was broadcast o
ver the public-address system several times: "Mr. Walter F. Starbuck, Mr. Walter F. Starbuck ..."It had been such a notorious name at one time; but I could not now catch sight of anyone who seemed to recognize it, who raised his or her eyebrows in lewd surmise.

  Two and a half hours later I was on the island of Manhattan, wearing my trenchcoat to keep out the evening chill. The sun was down. I was staring at an animated display in the window of a store that sold nothing but toy trains.

  It was not as though I had no place to go. I was close to where I was going. I had written ahead. I had reserved a room without bath or television for a week, paying in advance--in the once-fashionable Hotel Arapahoe, now a catch-as-catch-can lazaret and bagnio one minute from Times Square.

  9

  I HAD BEEN to the Arapahoe once before--in the autumn of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. Fire had yet to be domesticated. Albert Einstein had predicted the invention of the wheel, but was unable to describe its probable shape and uses in the language of ordinary women and men. Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer, was President. The sale of alcoholic beverages was against the law, and I was a Harvard freshman.

  I was operating under instructions from my mentor, Alexander Hamilton McCone. He told me in a letter that I was to duplicate a folly he himself had committed when a freshman, which was to take a pretty girl to the Harvard-Columbia football game in New York, and then to spend a month's allowance on a lobster dinner for two, with oysters and caviar and all that, in the famous dining room of the Hotel Arapahoe. We were to go dancing afterward. "You must wear your tuxedo," he said. "You must tip like a drunken sailor." Diamond Jim Brady, he told me, had once eaten four dozen oysters, four lobsters, four chickens, four squabs, four T-bone steaks, four pork chops, and four lamb chops there--on a bet. Lillian Russell had looked on.

  Mr. McCone may have been drunk when he wrote that letter. "All work and no play," he wrote, "makes Jack a dull boy."

  And the girl I took there, the twin sister of my roommate, would become one of the four women I would ever truly love. The first was my mother. The last was my wife.