Bagombo Snuff Box

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “I take lessons from Mr. Fink now,” said Bert.

  “When a boy reaches the Ten Square Band,” said Helmholtz, “he’s beyond me, as far as individual lessons are concerned. I don’t treat him like a boy anymore. I treat him like a man. And he’s an artist. Only an artist like Fink can teach him anything from that point on.”

  “Ten Square Band,” mused Miss Peach. “That’s ten on a side—a hundred in all? All dressed alike, all marching like parts of a fine machine?”

  “Like a block of postage stamps,” said Helmholtz proudly.

  “Uh-huh,” said Miss Peach. “And all of them have had lessons from you?”

  “Heavens, no,” said Helmholtz. “I’ve only got time to give five boys individual lessons.”

  “A lucky, lucky five,” said Miss Peach. “For a little while.”

  The door of the office opened, and Stewart Haley, the Assistant Principal, came in. He had begun his career as a bright young man. But now, after ten years of dealing with oversize spirits on undersize salaries, his brightness had mellowed to the dull gloss of pewter. A lot of his luster had been lost in verbal scuffles with Helmholtz over expenses of the band.

  In Haley’s hand was a bill. “Well, Helmholtz,” he said, “if I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have brought another interesting bill with me. Five war-surplus Signal Corps wire-laying reels, complete with pack frames? Does that ring a bell?”

  “It does,” said Helmholtz, unabashed. “And may I say—”

  “Later,” said Haley. “Right now I have a matter to take up with Miss Peach—one that makes your peculation look like peanuts.” He rattled the bill at Miss Peach. “Miss Peach—have you ordered a large quantity of bandages recently?”

  Miss Peach paled. “I—I ordered thirty yards of sterile gauze,” she said. “It came this morning. And it’s thirty yards, and it’s gauze.”

  Haley sat down on a white stool. “According to this bill,” he said, “somebody in this grand institution has ordered and received two hundred yards of silver nylon ribbon, three inches wide—treated to glow in the dark.”

  He was looking blankly at Helmholtz when he said it. He went on looking at Helmholtz, and color crept into his cheeks. “Hello again, Helmholtz.”

  “Hi,” said Helmholtz.

  “Down for your daily shot of cocaine?” said Haley.

  “Cocaine?” said Helmholtz.

  “How else,” said Haley, “could a man get dreams of cornering the world output of nylon ribbon treated to glow in the dark?”

  “It costs much less to make things glow in the dark than most people realize,” said Helmholtz.

  Haley stood. “So it was you!”

  Helmholtz laid his hand on Haley’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Stewart,” he said, “the question on everybody’s lips is, How can the Ten Square Band possibly top its performance at the Westfield game last year?”

  “The big question is,” said Haley, “How can a high school with a modest budget like ours afford such a vainglorious, Cecil B. DeMille machine for making music? And the answer is,” said Haley, “We can’t!” He jerked his head from side to side. “Ninety-five-dollar uniforms! Biggest drum in the state! Batons and hats that light up! Everything treated to glow in the dark! Holy smokes!” he said wildly. “The biggest jukebox in the world!”

  The inventory brought nothing but joy to Helmholtz. “You love it,” he said. “Everybody loves it. And wait till you hear what we’re going to do with those reels and that ribbon!”

  “Waiting,” said Haley. “Waiting.”

  “Now then,” said Helmholtz, “any band can form block letters. That’s about the oldest stuff there is. As of this moment our band is the only band, as far as I know, equipped to write longhand.”

  In the muddled silence that followed, Bert, all but forgotten, spoke up. He had put his shirt back on. “Are you all through with me?” he said.

  “You can go, Bert,” said Miss Peach. “I didn’t find anything wrong with you.”

  “Bye,” said Bert, his hand on the doorknob. “Bye, Mr. Helmholtz.”

  “So long,” said Helmholtz. “Now what do you think of that?” he said to Haley. “Longhand!”

  Just outside the door, Bert bumped into Charlotte, the dewy pink tulip of a girl who often walked home with him.

  “Bert,” said Charlotte, “they told me you were down here. I thought you were hurt. Are you all right?”

  Bert brushed past her without a word, leaning, as though into a cold, wet gale.

  “What do I think of the ribbon?” said Haley to Helmholtz. “I think this is where the spending of the Ten Square Band is finally stopped.”

  “That isn’t the only kind of spree that’s got to be stopped,” said Miss Peach darkly.

  “What do you mean by that?” said Helmholtz.

  “I mean,” said Miss Peach, “all this playing fast and loose with kids’ emotions.” She frowned. “George, I’ve been watching you for years—watching you use every emotional trick in the books to make your kids march and play.”

  “I try to be friends,” said Helmholtz, untroubled.

  “You try to be a lot more than that,” said Miss Peach. “Whatever a kid needs, you’re it. Father, mother, sister, brother, God, slave, or dog—you’re it. No wonder we’ve got the best band in the world. The only wonder is that what’s happened with Bert hasn’t happened a thousand times.”

  “What’s eating Bert?” said Helmholtz.

  “You won him,” said Miss Peach. “That’s what. Lock, stock, and barrel—he’s yours, all yours.”

  “Sure he likes me,” said Helmholtz. “Hope he does, anyway.”

  “He likes you like a son likes a father,” said Miss Peach. “There’s a casual thing for you.”

  Helmholtz couldn’t imagine what the argument was about. Everything Miss Peach had said was obvious. “That’s only natural, isn’t it?” he said. “Bert doesn’t have a father, so he’s going to look around for one, naturally, until he finds some girl who’ll take him over and—”

  “Will you please open your eyes, and see what you’ve done to Bert’s life?” said Miss Peach. “Look what he did to get your attention, after you stuck him in the Ten Square Band, then sent him off to Mr. Fink and forgot all about him. He was willing to have the whole world laugh at him, just to get you to look at him again.”

  “Growing up isn’t supposed to be painless,” said Helmholtz. “A baby’s one thing, a child’s another, and a man’s another. Changing from one thing to the next is a famous mess.” He opened his eyes wide. “If we don’t know that, who does?”

  “Growing up isn’t supposed to be hell!” said Miss Peach.

  Helmholtz was stunned by the word. “What do you want me to do?”

  “It’s none of my business,” said Miss Peach. “It’s a highly personal affair. That’s the way you made it. That’s the way you work. I’d think the least you could do would be to learn the difference between getting yourself tangled up in a boy and getting yourself tangled up in ribbon. You can cut the ribbon. You can’t do that to a boy.”

  “About that ribbon—” said Haley.

  “We’ll pack it up and send it back,” said Helmholtz. He didn’t care about the ribbon anymore. He walked out of the office, his ears burning.

  Helmholtz carried himself as though he’d done nothing wrong. But guilt rode on his back like a chimpanzee. In his tiny office off the band rehearsal room, Helmholtz removed stacks of sheet music from the washbasin in the corner and dashed cold water in his face, hoping to make the chimpanzee go away at least for the next hour. The next hour was the rehearsal period for the Ten Square Band.

  Helmholtz telephoned his good friend Larry Fink, the trumpet teacher.

  “What’s the trouble this time, George?” said Fink.

  “The school nurse just jumped all over me for being too nice to my boys. She says I get too involved, and that’s a very dangerous thing.”

  “Oh?”

  �
��Psychology’s a wonderful science,” said Helmholtz. “Without it, everybody’d still be making the same terrible mistake—being nice to each other.”

  “What brought this on?” said Fink.

  “Bert,” said Helmholtz.

  “I finally let him go last week,” said Fink. “He never practiced, came to the lessons unprepared. Frankly, George, I know you thought a lot of him, but he wasn’t very talented. He wasn’t even very fond of music, as near as I can tell.”

  Helmholtz protested with all his heart. “That boy went from the C Band to the Ten Square in two years! He took to music like a duck to water.”

  “Like a camel in quicksand, if you ask me,” said Fink. “That boy busted his butt for you, George. And then you busted his heart when you handed him on to me. The school nurse is right: You’ve got to be more careful about who you’re nice to.”

  “He’s even forgotten how to march. He fell out of step and spoiled a formation, forgot where he was supposed to go, at half-time at the Findlay Tech game.”

  “He told me about it,” said Fink.

  “Did he have any explanation?”

  “He was surprised you and the nurse didn’t come up with it. Or maybe the nurse figured it out, but didn’t want anybody else to know.”

  “I still can’t imagine,” said Helmholtz.

  “He was drunk, George. He said it was his first time, and promised it would be his last. Unfortunately, I don’t believe we can count on that.”

  “But he still can’t march,” said Helmholtz, shocked. “When just the two of us practice alone, with nobody watching, he finds it impossible to keep in step with me. Is he drunk all the time?”

  “George,” said Fink, “you and your innocence have turned a person who never should have been a musician into an actor instead.”

  From the rehearsal room outside Helmholtz’s office came the cracks and slams of chairs being set up for the Ten Square Band. Bandsmen with a free period were doing that. The coming hour was ordinarily a perfect one for the bandmaster, in which he became weightless, as he sang the part of this instrument or that one, while his bandsmen played. But now he feared it.

  He was going to have to face Bert again, having been made aware in the interim of how much he might have hurt the boy. And maybe others.

  Would he be to blame, if Bert went on to become an alcoholic? He thought about the thousand or more boys with whom he had behaved like a father, whether they had a real father or not. To his knowledge, several had later become drunks. Two had been arrested for drugs, and one for burglary. He lost track of most. Few came back to see him after graduation. That was something else it was time to think about.

  The rest of the band entered now, Bert among them. Helmholtz heard himself say to him, as privately as he could, “Could you see me in my office after school?” He hadn’t a clue of what he would say then.

  He went to his music stand in front, rapped his baton against it. The band fell silent. “Let’s start off with ‘Lincoln’s Foes Shall Wail Tonight.’” The author of the words and music was Helmholtz himself. He had written them during his first year as bandmaster, when the school’s bandsmen at athletic events and parades had numbered only fifty. Their uniforms fit them purely by chance, and in any case made them look, as Helmholtz himself had said at the time, like “deserters from Valley Forge.” That was twenty years before.

  “Everybody ready?” he said. “Good! Fortissimo! Con brio! A-one, a-two, a-three, a-four!” Helmholtz stayed earth-bound this time. He weighed a ton.

  When Bert came to his office after school, Helmholtz had an agenda. He wanted the lonely boy to stop disliking Charlotte. She appeared to be a warm person, who could lead Bert into a social life apart from the band and Helmholtz. He thought it important, too, that the dangers of alcohol be discussed.

  But the talk wouldn’t go at all as planned, and Helmholtz sensed that it wouldn’t as soon as Bert sat down. He had self-respect on a scale Helmholtz had never seen him exhibit before. Something big must have happened, thought Helmholtz. Bert was staring straight at him, challenging, as though they were equals, no longer man and boy.

  “Bert,” Helmholtz began, “I won’t beat around the bush. I know you were drunk at the football game.”

  “Mr. Fink told you?”

  “Yes, and it troubled me.”

  “Why didn’t you realize it at the time?” said Bert. “Everybody else did. People were laughing at you because you thought I was sick.”

  “I had a lot on my mind,” said Helmholtz.

  “Music,” said Bert, as though it were a dirty word.

  “Certainly music,” said Helmholtz, taken aback. “My goodness.”

  “Nothin’ but music,” said Bert, his gaze like laser beams.

  “That’s often the case, and why not?” Again Helmholtz added incredulously, “My goodness.”

  “Charlotte was right.”

  “I thought you hated her.”

  “I like her a lot, except for the things she said about you. Now I know how right she was, and I not only like her, I love her.”

  Helmholtz was scared now, and unused to that. This was a most unpleasant scene. “Whatever she said about me, I don’t think I’d care to hear it.”

  “I won’t tell you, because all you’d hear is music.” Bert put his trumpet in its case on the bandmaster’s desk. The trumpet was rented from the school. “Give this to somebody else, who’ll love it more than I did,” he said. “I only loved it because you were so good to me, and you told me to.” He stood. “Good-bye.”

  Bert was at the door before Helmholtz asked him to stop, to turn around and look him in the eye again, and say what Charlotte had said about him.

  Bert was glad to tell him. He was angry, as though Helmholtz had somehow swindled him. “She said you were completely disconnected from real life, and only pretended to be interested in people. She said all you paid attention to was music, and if people weren’t playing it, you could still hear it in your head. She said you were nuts.”

  “Nuts?” echoed Helmholtz wonderingly.

  “I told her to stop saying that,” said Bert, “but then you showed me how really nutty you are.”

  “Please tell me how. I need to know,” said Helmholtz. But a concert band in his head was striking up Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with the roar of cannons. It was all he could do not to sing along.

  “When you gave me marching lessons,” Bert was saying, “and I was acting drunk, you didn’t even notice how crazy it was. You weren’t even there!”

  A brief silence followed a crescendo in the music in the bandmaster’s head. Helmholtz asked this question: “How could that girl know anything about me?”

  “She dates a lot of other bandsmen,” said Bert. “She gets ’em to tell her the really funny stuff.”

  Before leaving for home at sunset that day, Helmholtz paid a visit to the school nurse. He said he needed to talk to her about something.

  “Is it that Bert Higgens again?” she said.

  “I’m afraid it’s even closer to home than that,” he said. “It’s me this time. It’s I. It’s me.”

  This Son

  of Mine

  The factory made the best centrifugal pumps in the world, and Merle Waggoner owned it. He’d started it. He’d just been offered two million dollars for it by the General Forge and Foundry Company. He didn’t have any stockholders and he didn’t owe a dime. He was fifty-one, a widower, and he had one heir—a son. The boy’s name was Franklin. The boy was named for Benjamin Franklin.

  One Friday afternoon father and son went out of Merle’s office and into the factory. They walked down a factory aisle to Rudy Linberg’s lathe.

  “Rudy,” said Merle, “the boy here’s home from college for three days, and I thought maybe you and him and your boy and me might go out to the farm and shoot some clay pigeons tomorrow.”

  Rudy turned his sky-blue eyes to Merle and young Franklin. He was Merle’s age, and he had the deep and na
rrow dignity of a man who had learned his limitations early—who had never tried to go beyond them. His limitations were those of his tools, his flute, and his shotgun.

  “Might try crows,” he said.

  Rudy stood at attention like the good soldier he was. And like an old soldier, he did it without humility, managed to convey that he was the big winner in life, after all. He had been Merle’s first employee. He might have been a partner way back then, for two thousand dollars. And Rudy’d had the cash. But the enterprise had looked chancy to him. He didn’t seem sorry now.

  “We could set up my owl,” said Rudy. He had a stuffed owl to lure crows. He and his son, Karl, had made it.

  “Need a rifle to get at the crows out there,” said Merle. “They know all about that owl of yours and Karl’s. Don’t think we could get any closer to ’em than half a mile.”

  “Might be sport, trying to get at ’em with a scope,” said Franklin softly. He was tall and thin, in cashmere and gray flannel. He was almost goofy with shyness and guilt. He had just told his father that he wanted to be an actor, that he didn’t want the factory. And shock at his own words had come so fast that he’d heard himself adding, out of control, the hideously empty phrase, “Thanks just the same.”

  His father hadn’t reacted—yet. The conversation had gone blandly on to the farm, to shooting, to Rudy and Karl, to Rudy and Karl’s new station wagon, and now to crows.

  “Let’s go ask my boy what he’s got on tomorrow,” said Rudy. It was a formality. Karl always did what his father wanted him to do, did it with profound love.

  Rudy, Merle, and Franklin went down the aisle to a lathe thirty feet from Rudy’s. Merle’s chin was up. Rudy looked straight ahead. Franklin looked down at the floor.

  Karl was a carbon copy of his father. He was such a good mimic of Rudy that his joints seemed to ache a little with age. He seemed sobered by fifty-one years of life, though he’d lived only twenty. He seemed instinctively wary of safety hazards that had been eliminated from the factory by the time he’d learned to walk. Karl stood at attention without humility, just as his father had done.