Korea or any country in East or West Europe, and on and on.
At least we still have freedom of speech,¨ I said.
And she said, That isnt something somebody else gives you. Thats something you have to give yourself.¨
Before I forget: During her job interview, she asked Jason Wilder where he had gone to college.
He said, Yale.¨
You know what they ought to call that place?¨ she said.
No,¨ he said.
And she said, Plantation Owners Tech.¨
When she was living in Berlin, she told me, she had been appalled by how ignorant so many American tourists and soldiers were of geography and history, and the languages and customs of other countries. She asked me, What makes so many Americans proud of their ignorance? They act as though their ignorance somehow made them charming.¨
I had been asked the same general question by Alton Darwin when I was working at Athena. A World War II movie was being shown on all the TVs over there. Frank Sinatra had been captured by the Germans, and he was being interrogated by an SS Major who spoke English at least as well as Sinatra, and who played the cello and painted watercolors in his spare time, and who told Sinatra how much he looked forward to getting back, when the war was over, to his first love, which was lepidopterology.
Sinatra didnt know what lepidopterology was. It is the study of moths and butterifies. That had to be explained to him.
And Alton Darwin asked me, How come in all these movies the Germans and the Japanese are always the smart ones, and the Americans are the dumb ones, and still the Americans win the war?¨
Darwin didnt feel personally involved. The American combat soldiers in the movie were all White. That wasnt just White propaganda. That happened to be historically accurate. During the Finale Rack, American military units were segregated according to race. The feeling back then was that Whites would feel like garbage if they had to share quarters and dining facilities and so on with Blacks. That went for civilian life, too. The Black people had their own schools, and they were excluded from most hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment, except onstage, and polling booths.
They were also strung up or burned alive or whatever from time to time, as reminders that their place was at the very bottom of Society. They were thought, when they were given soldier suits, to be lacking in determination and initiative in battle. So they were employed mostly as common laborers or truck drivers behind the Duke Waynes and Frank Sinatras, who did the fearless stuff.
There was one all-Black fighter squadron. To the surprise of many it did quite well.
See the Nigger fly the airplane?
To get back to Alton Darwins question about why Frank Sinatra deserved to win even though he didnt know anything: I said, I think he deserves to win because he is like Davy Crockett at the Alamo.¨ The Walt Disney movie about Davy Crockett had been shown
over and over again at the prison, so all the convicts knew who Davy Crockett was. And one thing it might be good to bring out at my trial is that I never told the convicts the Mexican General who besieged the Alamo was trying and failing to do what Abraham Lincoln would later do successfully, which was to hold his country together and outlaw slavery.
How is Sinatra like Davy Crockett?¨ Alton Darwin asked me.
And I said, His heart is pure.¨
Yes, and there is more of my story to tell. But I have just received a piece of news from my lawyer that has knocked the wind out of me. After Vietnam, I thought there was nothing that could ever hit me that hard again. I thought I was used to dead bodies, no matter whose.
Wrong again.
Ah me!
If! tell now who it is that died, and how that person died, died only yesterday, that will seem to complete my story. From a readers point of view, there would be nothing more to say but this:
THE END
But there is more I want to tell. So I will carry on as though I hadnt heard the news, albeit doggedly. And I write this:
The Lieutenant Colonel who led the assault on Scipio and then kept locals off the helicopters was also a graduate of the Academy, but maybe 2 score and 7 years younger than myself. When I told him my name and he
saw my class ring, he realized who I was and what I used to be. He exclaimed, My Lord, its the Preacher!¨
If it hadnt been for him, I dont know what would have become of me. I guess I would have done what most of the other valley people did, which was to go to Rochester or Buffalo or beyond, looking for any kind of work, minimum wage for sure. The whole area south of the Meadowdale Cinema Complex was and still is under Martial Law.
His name was Harley Wheelock III. He told me he and his wife were infertile, so they adopted twin girl orphans from Peru, South America, not Peru, Indiana. They were cute little Inca girls. But he hardly ever got home anymore, his Division was so busy. He was all set to go home on leave from the South Bronx when he was ordered here to put down the prison break and rescue the hostages.
His father Harley Wheelock II was 3 years ahead of me at the Academy, and died, I already knew, in some kind of accident in Germany, and so never served in Vietnam. I asked Harley III how exactly Harley II had died. He told me his father drowned while trying to rescue a Swedish woman who committed suicide by opening the windows of her Volvo and driving it off a dock and into the Ruhr River at Essen, home, as it happens, of that premier manufacturer of crematoria, A. J. Topf und Sohn.
Small World.
Now Harley III said to me, You know anything about this excrement hole?¨ Of course, he himself didnt say excrement.¨ He had never heard of the Mohiga Valley before he was ordered here. Like most people, he
had heard of Athena and Tarkington but had no clear idea where they were.
I replied that the excrement hole was home to me, although I had been born in Delaware and raised in Ohio, and that I expected 1 day to be buried here.
Wheres the Mayor?¨ he said.
Dead,¨ I said, and all the policemen, too, including the campus cops. And the Fire Chief.¨
So there isnt any Government?¨ he said.
Id say youre the Government,¨ I said.
He used the Name of Our Savior as an explosive expletive, and then added, Wherever I go, all of a sudden I am the Government. Im already the Government in the South Bronx, and Ive got to get back there as quick as I can. So I hereby declare you the Mayor of this excrement hole.¨ This time he actually said, excrement hole,¨ echoing me. Go down to the City Hall, wherever that is, and start governing.¨
He was so decisive! He was so loud!
As though the conversation werent weird enough, he was wearing one of those coal-scuttle helmets the Army started issuing after we lost the Vietnam War, maybe to change our luck.
Make Blacks, Jews, and everybody else look like Nazis, and see how that worked out.
I cant govern,¨ I protested. Nobody would pay any attention to me. I would be a joke.¨
Good point!¨ he cried. So loud!
He got the Governors Office in Albany on the radio. The Governor himself was on his way to Rochester by helicopter, in order to go on TV with the freed hostages. The Governors Office managed to patch through Harley IIIs call to the Governor up in the sky. Harley III
told the Governor who I was and what the situation was in Scipio.
It didnt take long.
And then Harley III turned to me and said, Congratulations! You are now a Brigadier General in the National Guard!¨
Ive got a family on the other side of the lake,¨ I said. Ive got to go find out how they are.¨
He was able to tell me how they were. He personally, the day before, had seen Margaret and Mildred loaded into the steel box on the back of a prison van, consigned to the Laughing Academy in Batavia.
Theyre fine!¨ he said. Your country needs you more than they do now, so, General Hartke, strut your stuff!¨
He was so full of energy! It was almost as though his coal-scuttle helmet contained a thunderstorm.
Never an idle moment! No sooner had he persuaded the Governor to make me a Brigadier than he was off to the stable, where captured Freedom Fighters were being forced to dig graves for all the bodies. The weary diggers had every reason to believe that they were digging their own graves. They had seen plenty of movies about the Finale Rack, in which soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets stood around while people in rags dug their own final resting places.