Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction

by Kurt Vonnegut

  During the ten minutes between the C Band and B Band sessions, Mr. Helmholtz hurried to his office and again tried to get in touch with the Sublime Chamberlain of the Knights of Kandahar. No luck! “Lord knows where he’s off to now,” Mr. Helmholtz was told. “He was in for just a second, but went right out again. I gave him your name, so I expect he’ll call you when he gets a minute. You’re the drum gentleman, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right—the drum gentleman.”

  The buzzers in the hall were sounding, marking the beginning of another class period. Mr. Helmholtz wanted to stay by the phone until he’d caught the Sublime Chamberlain and closed the deal, but the B Band was waiting—and after that it would be the A Band.

  An inspiration came to him. He called Western Union and sent a telegram to the man, offering fifty dollars for the drum and requesting a reply collect.

  But no reply came during B Band practice. Nor had one come by the halfway point of the A Band session. The bandsmen, a sensitive, high-strung lot, knew immediately that their director was on edge about something, and the rehearsal went badly. Mr. Helmholtz stopped a march in the middle because somebody outside was shaking the large double doors at one end of the rehearsal room.

  “All right, all right, let’s wait until the racket dies down so we can hear ourselves,” Mr. Helmholtz said.

  At that moment, a student messenger handed him a telegram. Mr. Helmholtz tore open the envelope, and this is what he read:

  DRUM SOLD STOP COULD YOU USE A STUFFED CAMEL ON WHEELS STOP

  The wooden doors opened with a shriek of rusty hinges. A snappy autumn gust showered the band with leaves. Plummer stood in the great opening, winded and perspiring, harnessed to a drum as big as a harvest moon!

  “I know this isn’t challenge day,” said Plummer, “but I thought you might make an exception in my case.”

  He walked in with splendid dignity, the huge apparatus grumbling along behind him.

  Mr. Helmholtz rushed to meet him. He crushed Plummer’s right hand between both of his. “Plummer, boy! You got it for us. Good boy! I’ll pay you whatever you paid for it,” he cried, and in his joy he added rashly, “And a nice little profit besides. Good boy!”

  “Sell it?” said Plummer. “I’ll give it to you when I graduate. All I want to do is play it in the A Band as long as I’m here.”

  “But Plummer,” said Mr. Helmholtz, “you don’t know anything about drums.”

  “I’ll practice hard,” said Plummer. He backed his instrument into an aisle between the tubas and the trombones, toward the percussion section, where the amazed musicians were hastily making room.

  “Now, just a minute,” said Mr. Helmholtz, chuckling as though Plummer were joking, and knowing full well he wasn’t. “There’s more to drum playing than just lambasting the thing whenever you take a notion to, you know. It takes years to be a drummer.”

  “Well,” said Plummer, “the quicker I get at it, the quicker I’ll get good.”

  “What I meant was that I’m afraid you won’t be quite ready for the A Band for a little while.”

  Plummer stopped his backing. “How long?” he asked.

  “Oh, sometime in your senior year, perhaps. Meanwhile, you could let the band have your drum to use until you’re ready.”

  Mr. Helmholtz’s skin began to itch all over as Plummer stared at him coldly. “Until hell freezes over?” Plummer said at last.

  Mr. Helmholtz sighed. “I’m afraid that’s about right.” He shook his head. “It’s what I tried to tell you yesterday afternoon: Nobody can do everything well, and we’ve all got to face up to our limitations. You’re a fine boy, Plummer, but you’ll never be a musician—not in a million years. The only thing to do is what we all have to do now and then: smile, shrug, and say, ‘Well, that’s just one of those things that’s not for me.’”

  Tears formed on the rims of Plummer’s eyes. He walked slowly toward the doorway, with the drum tagging after him. He paused on the doorsill for one more wistful look at the A Band that would never have a chair for him. He smiled feebly and shrugged. “Some people have eight-foot drums,” he said, “and others don’t, and that’s just the way life is. You’re a fine man, Mr. Helmholtz, but you’ll never get this drum in a million years, because I’m going to give it to my mother for a coffee table.”

  “Plummer!” cried Mr. Helmholtz. His plaintive voice was drowned out by the rumble and rattle of the big drum as it followed its small master down the school’s concrete driveway.

  Mr. Helmholtz ran after him. Plummer and his drum had stopped at an intersection to wait for a light to change. Mr. Helmholtz caught him there and seized his arm. “We’ve got to have that drum,” he panted. “How much do you want?”

  “Smile,” said Plummer. “Shrug! That’s what I did.” Plummer did it again. “See? So I can’t get into the A Band, so you can’t have the drum. Who cares? All part of the growing-up process.”

  “The situations aren’t the same!” said Mr. Helmholtz. “Not at all the same!”

  “You’re right,” said Plummer. “I’m growing up, and you’re not.”

  The light changed, and Plummer left Mr. Helmholtz on the corner, stunned.

  Mr. Helmholtz had to run after him again. “Plummer,” he wheedled, “you’ll never be able to play it well.”

  “Rub it in,” said Plummer.

  “But look at what a swell job you’re doing of pulling it,” said Mr. Helmholtz.

  “Rub it in,” Plummer repeated.

  “No, no, no,” said Mr. Helmholtz. “Not at all. If the school gets that drum, whoever’s pulling it will be as crucial and valued a member of the A Band as the first-chair clarinet. What if it capsized?”

  “He’d win a band letter if it didn’t capsize?” said Plummer.

  And Mr. Helmholtz said this: “I don’t see why not.”

  Poor Little

  Rich Town

  Newell Cady had the polish, the wealth, the influence, and the middle-aged good looks of an idealized Julius Caesar. Most of all, though, Cady had know-how, know-how of a priceless variety that caused large manufacturing concerns to bid for his services like dying sultans offering half their kingdoms for a cure.

  Cady could stroll through a plant that had been losing money for a generation, glance at the books, yawn and tell the manager how he could save half a million a year in materials, reduce his staff by a third, triple his output, and sell the stuff he’d been throwing out as waste for more than the cost of installing air-conditioning and continuous music throughout the plant. And the air-conditioning and music would increase individual productivity by as much as ten percent and cut union grievances by a fifth.

  The latest firm to hire him was the Federal Apparatus Corporation, which had given him the rank of vice-president and sent him to Ilium, New York, where he was to see that the new company headquarters were built properly from the ground up. When the buildings were finished, hundreds of the company’s top executives would move their offices from New York City to Ilium, a city that had virtually died when its textile mills moved south after the Second World War.

  There was jubilation in Ilium when the deep, thick foundations for the new headquarters were poured, but the exultation was possibly highest in the village of Spruce Falls, nine miles from Ilium, for it was there that Newell Cady had rented, with an option to buy, one of the mansions that lined the shaded main street.

  Spruce Falls was a cluster of small businesses and a public school and a post office and a police station and a firehouse serving surrounding dairy farms. During the second decade of the century it experienced a real estate boom. Fifteen mansions were built back then, in the belief that the area, because of its warm mineral springs, was becoming a spa for rich invalids and hypochondriacs and horse people, as had Saratoga, not far away.

  In 1922, though, it was determined that bathing in the waters of the spring, while fairly harmless, was nonetheless responsible for several cases of a rash that a Manhattan dermatologist,
with no respect for upstate real estate values, named “Spruce Falls disease.”

  In no time at all the mansions and their stables were as vacant as the abandoned palaces and temples of Angkor Thorn in Cambodia. Banks foreclosed on those mansions that were mortgaged. The rest became property of the town in lieu of unpaid taxes. Nobody arrived from out of town to bid for them at any price, as though Spruce Falls disease were leprosy or cholera or bubonic plague.

  Nine mansions were eventually bought from the banks or the town by locals, who could not resist getting so much for so little. They set up housekeeping in maybe six rooms at most, while dry rot and termites and mice and rats and squirrels and kids wrought havoc with the rest of the property.

  “If we can make Newell Cady taste the joys of village life,” said Fire Chief Stanley Atkins, speaking before an extraordinary meeting of the volunteer firemen on a Saturday afternoon, “he’ll use that option to buy, and Spruce Falls will become the fashionable place for Federal Apparatus executives to live. Without further ado,” said Chief Atkins expansively, “I move that Mr. Newell Cady be elected to full membership in the fire department and be named head judge of the annual Hobby Show.”

  “Audaces fortune juvat!” said Upton Beaton, who was a tall, fierce-seeming sixty-five. He was the last of what had been the first family of Spruce Falls. “Fortune,” he translated after a pause, “favors the bold, that’s true. But gentlemen—” and he paused again, portentously, while Chief Atkins looked worried and the other members of the fire department shifted about on their folding chairs. Like his forebears, Beaton had an ornamental education from Harvard, and like them, he lived in Spruce Falls because it took little effort for a Beaton to feel superior to his neighbors there. He survived on money his family had made during the short-lived boom.

  “But,” Beaton said again, as he stood up, “is this the kind of fortune we want? We are being asked to waive the three-year residence requirement for membership in the fire department in Mr. Cady’s case, and thereby all our memberships are cheapened. If I may say so, the post of judge of the Hobby Show is of far greater significance than it would seem to an outsider. In our small village, we have only small ways of honoring our great, but we, for generations now, have taken pains to reserve those small honors for those of us who have shown such greatness as it is possible to achieve in the eyes of a village. I hasten to add that those honors that have come to me are marks of respect for my family and my age, not for myself, and are exceptions that should probably be curtailed.”

  He sighed. “If we waive this proud tradition, then that one, and then another, all for money, we will soon find ourselves with nothing left to wave but the white flag of an abject surrender of all we hold dear!” He sat, folded his arms, and stared at the floor.

  Chief Atkins had reddened during the speech, and he avoided looking at Beaton. “The real estate people,” he mumbled, “swear property values in Spruce Falls will quadruple if Cady stays.”

  “What is a village profited if it shall gain a real estate boom and lose its own soul?” Beaton asked.

  Chief Atkins cleared his throat. “There’s a motion on the floor,” he said. “Is there a second?”

  “Second,” said someone who kept his head down.

  “All in favor?” said Atkins.

  There was a scuffling of chair legs, and faint voices, like the sounds of a playground a mile away.

  “Opposed?”

  Beaton was silent. The Beaton dynasty of Spruce Falls had come to an end. Its paternal guidance, unopposed for four generations, had just been voted down.

  “Carried,” said Atkins. He started to say something, then motioned for silence. “Shhh!” The post office was next door to the meeting hall, in the same building, and on the other side of the thin partition, Mr. Newell Cady was asking for his mail.

  “That’s all, is it, Mrs. Dickie?” Cady was saying to the postmistress.

  “That’s more’n some people get around here in a year,” said Mrs. Dickie. “There’s still a little second-class to put around. Maybe some for you.”

  “Mmm,” said Cady. “That the way the government teaches its people to sort?”

  “Them teach me?” said Mrs. Dickie. “I’d like to see anybody teach me anything about this business. I been postmistress for twenty-five years now, ever since my husband passed on.”

  “Um,” said Cady. “Here—do you mind if I come back there and take a look at the second-class for just a minute?”

  “Sorry—regulations, you know,” said Mrs. Dickie.

  But the door of Mrs. Dickie’s cage creaked open anyway. “Thank you,” said Cady. “Now, suppose, instead of holding these envelopes the way you were, suppose you took them like this, and uh—ah—putting that rubber cap on your thumb instead of your index finger—”

  “My land!” cried Mrs. Dickie. “Look at you go!”

  “It would be even faster,” said Cady, “if it weren’t for that tier of boxes by the floor. Why not move them over here, at eye level, see? And what on earth is this table doing back here?”

  “For my children,” said Mrs. Dickie.

  “Your children play back here?”

  “Not real children,” said Mrs. Dickie. “That’s what I call the plants on the table—the wise little cyclamen, the playful little screw pine, the temperamental little sansevieria, the—”

  “Do you realize,” said Cady, “that you must spend twenty man-minutes and heaven knows how many foot-pounds a day just detouring around it?”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Dickie, “I’m sure it’s awfully nice of you to take such an interest, but you know, I’d just feel kind of lost without—”

  “I can’t help taking an interest,” said Cady. “It causes me actual physical pain to see things done the wrong way, when it’s so easy to do them the right way. Oops! Moved your thumb right back to where I told you not to put it!”

  “Chief Atkins,” whispered Upton Beaton in the meeting hall.

  “Eh?”

  “Don’t you scratch your head like that,” said Beaton. “Spread your fingers like this, see? Then dig in. Cover twice as much scalp in half the time.”

  “All due respect to you, sir,” said Atkins, “this village could do with a little progress and perking up.”

  “I’d be the last to stand in its way,” said Beaton. After a moment he added, “‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’”

  “Cady’s across the street, looking at the fire truck,” said Ed Newcomb, who had served twenty years as secretary of the fire department. The Ilium real estate man, who had put stars in every eye except Beaton’s, had assured Newcomb that his twenty-six-room Georgian colonial, with a little paper and paint, would look like a steal to a corporation executive at fifty thousand dollars. “Let’s tell him the good news!” Newcomb’s father had bought the ark at a bank foreclosure sale. He was the only bidder.

  The fire department joined its newest member by the fire truck and congratulated him on his election.

  “Thanks,” said Cady, tinkering with the apparatus strapped to the side of the big red truck. “By George, but there’s a lot of chrome on one of these things,” he said.

  “Wait till you see the new one!” said Ed Newcomb.

  “They make the damn things as ornamental as a merry-go-round,” said Cady. “You’d think they were playthings. Lord! What all this plating and gimcrackery must add to the cost! New one, you say?”

  “Sure,” said Newcomb. “It hasn’t been voted on yet, but it’s sure to pass.” The joy of the prospect showed on every face.

  “Fifteen hundred gallons a minute!” said a fireman.

  “Two floodlights!” said another.

  “Closed cab!”

  “Eighteen-foot ladders!”

  “Carbon dioxide tank!”

  “And a swivel-mounted nozzle in the turret smack-spang in the middle!” cried Atkins above them all.

  After the silence that followed the pa
ssionate hymn to the new truck, Cady spoke. “Preposterous,” he said. “This is a perfectly sound, adequate truck here.”

  “Mr. Cady is absolutely right,” said Upton Beaton. “It’s a sensible, sturdy truck, with many years of dependable service ahead of it. We were foolish to think of putting the fire district into debt for the next twenty years, just for an expensive plaything for the fire department. Mr. Cady has cut right to the heart of the matter.”

  “It’s the same sort of thing I’ve been fighting in industry for half my life,” said Cady. “Men falling in love with show instead of the job to be done. The sole purpose of a fire department should be to put out fires and to do it as economically as possible.”

  Beaton clapped Chief Atkins on the arm. “Learn something every day, don’t we, Chief?”

  Atkins smiled sweetly, as though he’d just been shot in the stomach.

  The Spruce Falls annual Hobby Show took place in the church basement three weeks after Newell Cady’s election to the fire department. During the intervening twenty-one days, Hal Brayton, the grocer, had stopped adding bills on paper sacks and bought an adding machine, and had moved his counters around so as to transform his customer space from a jammed box canyon into a racetrack. Mrs. Dickie, the postmistress, had moved her leafy children and their table out of her cage and had had the lowest tier of mailboxes raised to eye level. The fire department had voted down scarlet and blue capes for the band as unnecessary for firefighting. And startling figures had been produced in a school meeting proving beyond any doubt that it would cost seven dollars, twenty-nine cents, and six mills more per student per year to maintain the Spruce Falls Grade School than it would to ship the children to the big, efficient, centralized school in Ilium.

  The whole populace looked as though it had received a powerful stimulant. People walked and drove faster, concluded business more quickly, and every eye seemed wider and brighter—even frenzied. And moving proudly through this brave new world were the two men who were shaping it, constant companions after working hours now. Newell Cady and Upton Beaton. Beaton’s function was to provide Cady with the facts and figures behind village activities and then to endorse outrageously Cady’s realistic suggestions for reforms, which followed facts and figures as the night the day.