“What is the hook?”
“They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who’s dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker.”
“Good God!”
“I don’t say it’s good,” said Crosby, “but I don’t say it’s bad either. I sometimes wonder if something like that wouldn’t clear up juvenile delinquency. Maybe the hook’s a little extreme for a democracy. Public hanging’s more like it. String up a few teen-age car thieves on lampposts in front of their houses with signs around their necks saying, ‘Mama, here’s your boy.’ Do that a few times and I think ignition locks would go the way of the rumble seat and the running board.”
“We saw that thing in the basement of the waxworks in London,” said Hazel.
“What thing?” I asked her.
“The hook. Down in the Chamber of Horrors in the basement; they had a wax person hanging from the hook. It looked so real I wanted to throw up.”
“Harry Truman didn’t look anything like Harry Truman,” said Crosby.
“Pardon me?”
“In the waxworks,” said Crosby. “The statue of Truman didn’t really look like him.”
“Most of them did, though,” said Hazel.
“Was it anybody in particular hanging from the hook?” I asked her.
“I don’t think so. It was just somebody.”
“Just a demonstrator?” I asked.
“Yeah. There was a black velvet curtain in front of it and you had to pull the curtain back to see. And there was a note pinned to the curtain that said children weren’t supposed to look.”
“But kids did,” said Crosby. “There were kids down there, and they all looked.”
“A sign like that is just catnip to kids,” said Hazel.
“How did the kids react when they saw the person on the hook?” I asked.
“Oh,” said Hazel, “they reacted just about the way the grownups did. They just looked at it and didn’t say anything, just moved on to see what the next thing was.”
“What was the next thing?”
“It was an iron chair a man had been roasted alive in,” said Crosby. “He was roasted for murdering his son.”
“Only, after they roasted him,” Hazel recalled blandly, “they found out he hadn’t murdered his son after all.”
Communist Sympathizers 44
When I again took my seat beside the duprass of Claire and Horlick Minton, I had some new information about them. I got it from the Crosbys.
The Crosbys didn’t know Minton, but they knew his reputation. They were indignant about his appointment as Ambassador. They told me that Minton had once been fired by the State Department for his softness toward communism, and the Communist dupes or worse had had him reinstated.
“Very pleasant little saloon back there,” I said to Minton as I sat down.
“Hm?” He and his wife were still reading the manuscript that lay between them.
“Nice bar back there.”
“Good. I’m glad.”
The two read on, apparently uninterested in talking to me. And then Minton turned to me suddenly, with a bittersweet smile, and he demanded, “Who was he, anyway?”
“Who was who?”
“The man you were talking to in the bar. We went back there for a drink, and, when we were just outside, we heard you and a man talking. The man was talking very loudly. He said I was a Communist sympathizer.”
“A bicycle manufacturer named H. Lowe Crosby,” I said. I felt myself reddening.
“I was fired for pessimism. Communism had nothing to do with it.”
“I got him fired,” said his wife. “The only piece of real evidence produced against him was a letter I wrote to the New York Times from Pakistan.”
“What did it say?”
“It said a lot of things,” she said, “because I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.”
“I see.”
“But there was one sentence they kept coming to again and again in the loyalty hearing,” sighed Minton. “‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the Times, “‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’”
Why Americans Are Hated 45
Claire Minton’s letter to the Times was published during the worst of the era of Senator McCarthy, and her husband was fired twelve hours after the letter was printed.
“What was so awful about the letter?” I asked.
“The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton, “is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.”
“I guess Americans are hated a lot of places.”
“People are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn’t pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.”
“Well, I’m glad the story had a happy ending.”
“Hm?” said Minton.
“It finally came out all right,” I said. “Here you are on your way to an embassy all your own.”
Minton and his wife exchanged another of those pitying duprass glances. Then Minton said to me, “Yes. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is ours.”
The Bokononist Method for Handling Caesar 46
I talked to the Mintons about the legal status of Franklin Hoenikker, who was, after all, not only a big shot in “Papa” Monzano’s government, but a fugitive from United States justice.
“That’s all been written off,” said Minton. “He isn’t a United States citizen any more, and he seems to be doing good things where he is, so that’s that.”
“He gave up his citizenship?”
“Anybody who declares allegiance to a foreign state or serves in its armed forces or accepts employment in its government loses his citizenship. Read your passport. You can’t lead the sort of funny-paper international romance that Frank has led and still have Uncle Sam for a mother chicken.”
“Is he well liked in San Lorenzo?”
Minton weighed in his hands the manuscript he and his wife had been reading. “I don’t know yet. This book says not.”
“What book is that?”
“It’s the only scholarly book ever written about San Lorenzo.”
“Sort of scholarly,” said Claire.
“Sort of scholarly,” echoed Minton. “It hasn’t been published yet. This is one of five copies.” He handed it to me, inviting me to read as much as I liked.
I opened the book to its title page and found that the name of the book was San Lorenzo: The Land, the History, the People. The author was Philip Castle, the son of Julian Castle, the hotel-keeping son of the great altruist I was on my way to see.
I let the book fall open where it would. As it happened, it fell open to the chapter about the island’s outlawed holy man, Bokonon.
There was a quotation from The Books of Bokonon on the page before me. Those words leapt from the page and into my mind, and they were welcomed there.
The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”
Bokonon’s paraphrase was this:
“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on.”
Dynamic Tension 47
I became so absorbed in Philip Castle’s book that I didn’t even look up from it when we put down for ten minutes in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I didn’t even look up when somebody behind me whispered, thrilled, that a midget had come aboard.
A little while later I looked around for the midget, but could not see him. I did see, right in front of Hazel and H. Lowe Crosby, a horse-faced woman with platinum blonde hair, a woman new to the passenger list. Next to hers was a seat that appeared to be empty, a seat that might well have sheltered a midget without my seeing even the top of his head.
But it was San Lorenzo—the land, the history, the people—that intrigued me then, so I looked no harder for the midget. Midgets are, after all, diversions for silly or quiet times, and I was serious and excited about Bokonon’s theory of what he called “Dynamic Tension,” his sense of a priceless equilibrium between good and evil.
When I first saw the term “Dynamic Tension” in Philip Castle’s book, I laughed what I imagined to be a superior laugh. The term was a favorite of Bokonon’s, according to young Castle’s book, and I supposed that I knew something that Bokonon didn’t know: that the term was one vu!garized by Charles Atlas, a mail-order muscle-builder.