Bagombo Snuff Box

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “Nope,” said Wehling, sulking.

  “A drupelet, Mr. Wehling, is one of the little knobs, one of the little pulpy grains, of a blackberry,” said Dr. Hitz. “Without population control, human beings would now be packed on the surface of this old planet like drupelets on a blackberry! Think of it!”

  Wehling continued to stare at the spot on the wall.

  “In the year 2000,” said Dr. Hitz, “before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn’t even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but seaweed—and still people insisted on their right to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever.”

  “I want those kids,” said Wehling. “I want all three of them.”

  “Of course you do,” said Dr. Hitz. “That’s only human.”

  “I don’t want my grandfather to die, either,” said Wehling.

  “Nobody’s really happy about taking a close relative to the Catbox,” said Dr. Hitz sympathetically.

  “I wish people wouldn’t call it that,” said Leora Duncan.

  “What?” said Dr. Hitz.

  “I wish people wouldn’t call it the Catbox, and things like that,” she said. “It gives people the wrong impression.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Dr. Hitz. “Forgive me.” He corrected himself, gave the municipal gas chambers their official title, a title no one ever used in conversation. “I should have said ‘Ethical Suicide Studios,’” he said.

  “That sounds so much better,” said Leora Duncan.

  “This child of yours—whichever one you decide to keep, Mr. Wehling,” said Dr. Hitz. “He or she is going to live on a happy, roomy, clean, rich planet, thanks to population control. In a garden like in that mural there.” He shook his head. “Two centuries ago, when I was a young man, it was a hell that nobody thought could last another twenty years. Now centuries of peace and plenty stretch before us as far as the imagination cares to travel.”

  He smiled luminously.

  The smile faded when he saw that Wehling had just drawn a revolver.

  Wehling shot Dr. Hitz dead. “There’s room for one—a great big one,” he said.

  And then he shot Leora Duncan. “It’s only death,” he said to her as she fell. “There! Room for two.”

  And then he shot himself, making room for all three of his children.

  Nobody came running. Nobody, it seemed, had heard the shots.

  The painter sat on the top of his stepladder, looking down reflectively on the sorry scene. He pondered the mournful puzzle of life demanding to be born and, once born, demanding to be fruitful … to multiply and to live as long as possible—to do all that on a very small planet that would have to last forever.

  All the answers that the painter could think of were grim. Even grimmer, surely, than a Catbox, a Happy Hooligan, an Easy Go. He thought of war. He thought of plague. He thought of starvation.

  He knew that he would never paint again. He let his paintbrush fall to the dropcloths below. And then he decided he had had about enough of the Happy Garden of Life, too, and he came slowly down from the ladder.

  He took Wehling’s pistol, really intending to shoot himself. But he didn’t have the nerve.

  And then he saw the telephone booth in a corner of the room. He went to it, dialed the well-remembered number: 2BR02B.

  “Federal Bureau of Termination,” said the warm voice of a hostess.

  “How soon could I get an appointment?” he asked, speaking carefully.

  “We could probably fit you in late this afternoon, sir,” she said. “It might even be earlier, if we get a cancellation.”

  “All right,” said the painter, “fit me in, if you please.” And he gave her his name, spelling it out.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the hostess. “Your city thanks you, your country thanks you, your planet thanks you. But the deepest thanks of all is from future generations.”

  Lovers

  Anonymous

  Herb White keeps books for the various businesses around our town, and he makes out practically everybody’s income tax. Our town is North Crawford, New Hampshire. Herb never got to college, where he would have done well. He learned about bookkeeping and taxes by mail. Herb fought in Korea, came home a hero. And he married Sheila Hinckley, a very pretty, intelligent woman practically all the men in my particular age group had hoped to marry. My particular age group is thirty-three, thirty-four, and thirty-five years old, these days.

  On Sheila’s wedding day we were twenty-one, twenty-two, and twenty-three. On Sheila’s wedding night we all went down to North Crawford Manor and drank. One poor guy got up on the bar and spoke approximately as follows:

  “Gentlemen, friends, brothers, I’m sure we wish the newlyweds nothing but happiness. But at the same time I have to say that the pain in our hearts will never die. And I propose that we form a permanent brotherhood of eternal sufferers, to aid each other in any way we can, though Lord knows there’s very little anybody can do for pain like ours.”

  The crowd thought that was a fine idea.

  Hay Boyden, who later became a house mover and wrecker, said we ought to call ourselves the Brotherhood of People Who Were Too Dumb to Realize That Sheila Hinckley Might Actually Want to Be a Housewife. Hay had boozy, complicated reasons for suggesting that. Sheila had been the smartest girl in high school, and had been going like a house afire at the University of Vermont, too. We’d all assumed there wasn’t any point in serious courting until she’d finished college.

  And then, right in the middle of her junior year, she’d quit and married Herb.

  “Brother Boyden,” said the drunk up on the bar, “I think that is a sterling suggestion. But in all humility I offer another title for our organization, a title in all ways inferior to yours except that it’s about ten thousand times easier to say. Gentlemen, friends, brothers, I propose we call ourselves ‘Lovers Anonymous.’”

  The motion carried. The drunk up on the bar was me.

  And like a lot of crazy things in small, old-fashioned towns, Lovers Anonymous lived on and on. Whenever several of us from that old gang happen to get together, somebody is sure to say, “Lovers Anonymous will please come to order.” And it is still a standard joke in town to tell anybody who’s had his heart broken lately that he should join LA. Don’t get me wrong. Nobody in LA still pines for Sheila. We’ve all more or less got Sheilas of our own. We think about Sheila more than we think about some of our other old girls, I suppose, mainly because of that crazy LA. But as Will Battola, the plumber, said one time, “Sheila Hinckley is now a spare whitewall tire on the Thunder-bird of my dreams.”

  Then about a month ago my good wife served a sordid little piece of news along with the after-dinner coffee and macaroons. She said that Herb and Sheila weren’t speaking to each other anymore.

  “Now, what are you doing spreading idle gossip like that for?” I said.

  “I thought it was my duty to tell you,” she said, “since you’re the lover-in-chief of Lovers Anonymous.”

  “I was merely present at the founding,” I said, “and as you well know, that was many, many years ago.”

  “Well, I think you can start un-founding,” she said.

  “Look,” I said, “there aren’t many laws of life that stand up through the ages, but this is one of the few: People who are contemplating divorce do not buy combination aluminum storm windows and screens for a fifteen-room house.” That is my business—combination aluminum storm windows and screens, and here and there a bathtub enclosure. And it was a fact that very recently Herb had bought thirty-seven Fleetwood windows, which is our first-line window, for the fifteen-room ark he called home.

  “Families that don’t even eat together don’t keep together very long,” she said.

  “What do you know about their eating habits?” I wanted to know.

  “Nothing I didn’t find out by accident,” she said. “I was collecting money for the Heart Fund yesterday.” Yesterday was
Sunday. “I happened to get there just when they were having Sunday dinner, and there were the girls and Sheila at the dinner table, eating—and no Herb.”

  “He was probably out on business somewhere,” I said.

  “That’s what I told myself,” she said. “But then on my way to the next house I had to go by their old ell—where they keep the firewood and the garden tools.”

  “Go on.”

  “And Herb was in there, sitting on a box and eating lunch off a bigger box. I never saw anybody look so sad.”

  The next day Kennard Pelk, a member of LA in good standing and our chief of police, came into my showroom to complain about a bargain storm window that he had bought from a company that had since gone out of business. “The glass part is stuck halfway up and the screen is rusted out,” he said, “and the aluminum is covered with something that looks like blue sugar.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said.

  “The reason I turn to you is, I don’t know where else I can get service.”

  “With your connections,” I said, “couldn’t you find out which penitentiary they put the manufacturers in?”

  I finally agreed to go over and do what I could, but only if he understood that I wasn’t representing the entire industry. “The only windows I stand behind,” I said, “are the ones I sell.”

  And then he told me a screwy thing he’d seen in Herb White’s rotten old ell the night before. Kennard had been on his way home in the police cruiser at about two a.m. The thing he’d seen in Herb White’s ell was a candle.

  “I mean, that old house has fifteen rooms, not counting the ell,” said Kennard, “and a family of four—five, if you count the dog. And I couldn’t understand how anybody, especially at that time of night, would want to go out to the ell. I thought maybe it was a burglar.”

  “The only thing worth stealing in that house is the Fleetwood windows.”

  “Anyway, it was my duty to investigate,” said Kennard. “So I snook up to a window and looked in. And there was Herb on a mattress on the floor. He had a bottle of liquor and a glass next to him, and he had a candle stuck in another bottle, and he was reading a magazine by candlelight.”

  “That was a fine piece of police work,” I said.

  “He saw me outside the window, and I came closer so he could see who I was. The window was open, so I said to him, ‘Hi—I was just wondering who was out here,’ and he said, ‘Robinson Crusoe.’”

  “Robinson Crusoe?” I said.

  “Yeah. He was very sarcastic with me,” said Kennard. “He asked me if I had the rest of Lovers Anonymous with me. I told him no. And then he asked me if a man’s home was still his castle, as far as the police were concerned, or whether that had been changed lately.”

  “So what did you say, Kennard?”

  “What was there to say? I buttoned up my holster and went home.”

  Herb White himself came into my showroom right after Kennard left. Herb had the healthy, happy, excited look people sometimes get when they come down with double pneumonia. “I want to buy three more Fleetwood windows,” he said.

  “The Fleetwood is certainly a product that everybody can be enthusiastic about,” I said, “but I think you’re overstepping the bounds of reason. You’ve got Fleetwoods all around right now.”

  “I want them for the ell,” he said.

  “Do you feel all right, Herb?” I asked. “You haven’t even got furniture in half the rooms we’ve already made wind-tight. Besides, you look feverish.”

  “I’ve just been taking a long, hard look at my life, is all,” he said. “Now, do you want the business or not?”

  “The storm window business is based on common sense, and I’d just as soon keep it that way,” I replied. “That old ell of yours hasn’t had any work done on it for I’ll bet fifty years. The clapboards are loose, the sills are shot, and the wind whistles through the gaps in the foundation. You might as well put storm windows on a shredded wheat biscuit.”

  “I’m having it restored,” he said.

  “Is Sheila expecting a baby?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I sincerely hope not,” he said, “for her sake, for my sake, and for the sake of the child.”

  I had lunch that day at the drugstore. About half of Lovers Anonymous had lunch at the drugstore. When I sat down, Selma Deal, the woman back of the counter, said, “Well, you great lover, got a quorum now. What you gonna vote about?”

  Hay Boyden, the house mover and wrecker, turned to me. “Any new business, Mr. President?”

  “I wish you people would quit calling me Mr. President,” I said. “My marriage has never been one hundred percent ideal, and I wouldn’t be surprised that was the fly in the ointment.”

  “Speaking of ideal marriages,” said Will Battola, the plumber, “you didn’t by chance sell some more windows to Herb White, did you?”

  “How did you know?”

  “It was a guess,” he said. “We’ve been comparing notes here, and as near as we can figure, Herb has managed to give a little piece of remodeling business to every member of LA.”

  “Coincidence,” I said.

  “I’d say so, too,” said Will, “if I could find anybody who wasn’t a member and who still got a piece of the job.”

  Between us, we estimated Herb was going to put about six thousand dollars into the ell. That was a lot of money for a man in his circumstances to scratch up.

  “The job wouldn’t have to run more than three thousand if Herb didn’t want a kitchen and a bathroom in the thing,” said Will. “He’s already got a kitchen and a bathroom ten feet from the door between the ell and the house.”

  Al Tedler, the carpenter, said, “According to the plans Herb gave me this morning, there ain’t gonna be no door between the ell and the house. There’s gonna be a double-studded wall with half-inch Sheetrock, packed with rockwood batts.”

  “How come double studding?” I asked.

  “Herb wants it soundproof.”

  “How’s a body supposed to get from the house to the ell?” I said.

  “The body has to go outside, cross about sixty feet of lawn, and go in through the ell’s own front door,” said Al.

  “Kind of a shivery trip on a cold winter’s night,” I said. “Not many bodies would care to make it barefoot.”

  And that was when Sheila Hinckley White walked in.

  You often hear somebody say that So-and-So is a very well preserved woman. Nine times out of ten So-and-So turns out to be a scrawny woman with pink lipstick who looks as if she had been boiled in lanolin. But Sheila really is well preserved. That day in the drugstore she could have passed for twenty-two.

  “By golly,” Al Tedler said, “if I had that to cook for me, I wouldn’t be any two-kitchen man.”

  Usually when Sheila came into a place where several members of LA were sitting, we would make some kind of noise to attract her attention and she would do something silly like wiggle her eyebrows or give us a wink. It didn’t mean a thing.

  But that day in the drugstore we didn’t try to catch her eye and she didn’t try to catch ours. She was all business. She was carrying a big red book about the size of a cinder block. She returned it to the lending library in the store, paid up, and left.

  “Wonder what the book’s about,” said Hay.

  “It’s red,” I said. “Probably about the fire engine industry.”

  That was a joke that went a long way back—clear back to what she’d put under her picture in the high school yearbook the year she graduated. Everybody was supposed to predict what kind of work he or she would go into in later life. Sheila put down that she would discover a new planet or be the first woman justice of the Supreme Court or president of a company that manufactured fire engines.

  She was kidding, of course, but everybody—including Sheila, I guess—had the idea that she could be anything she set her heart on being.

  At her wedding to Herb, I remember, I asked her, “Well now, what’s the fire engine industry going
to do?”

  And she laughed and said, “It’s going to have to limp along without me. I’m taking on a job a thousand times as important—keeping a good man healthy and happy, and raising his young.”

  “What about the seat they’ve been saving for you on the Supreme Court?”

  “The happiest seat for me, and for any woman worthy of the name of woman,” she said, “is a seat in a cozy kitchen, with children at my feet.”

  “You going to let somebody else discover that planet, Sheila?”

  “Planets are stones, stone-dead stones,” she said. “What I want to discover are my husband, my children, and through them, myself. Let somebody else learn what she can from stones.”

  After Sheila left the drugstore I went to the lending library to see what the red book was. It was written by the president of some women’s college. The title of it was Woman, the Wasted Sex, or, The Swindle of Housewifery.

  I looked inside the book and found it was divided in these five parts:

  I. 5,000,000 B.C.–A.D. 1865, The Involuntary Slave Sex

  II. 1866–1919, The Slave Sex Given Pedestals

  III. 1920–1945, Sham Equality—Flapper to Rosie the

  Riveter

  IV. 1946–1963, Volunteer Slave Sex—Diaper Bucket

  to Sputnik

  V. Explosion and Utopia

  Reva Owley, the woman who sells cosmetics and runs the library, came up and asked if she could help me.

  “You certainly can,” I said. “You can throw this piece of filth down the nearest sewer.”

  “It’s a very popular book,” she said.

  “That may be,” I said. “Whiskey and repeating firearms were very popular with the redskins. And if this drugstore really wants to make money, you might put in a hashish-and-heroin counter for the teenage crowd.”

  “Have you read it?” she asked.

  “I’ve read the table of contents,” I said.

  “At least you’ve opened a book,” she said. “That’s more than any other member of Lovers Anonymous has done in the past ten years.”

  “I’ll have you know I read a great deal,” I said.

  “I didn’t know that much had been written about storm windows.” Reva is a very smart widow.