The train often stopped to let really important trains bawl and hurtle by. Another thing it did was stop on sidings near prisons, leaving a few cars there. It was creeping across all of Germany, growing shorter all the time.
And Billy let himself down oh so gradually now, hanging onto the diagonal cross-brace in the comer in order to make himself seem nearly weightless to those he was joining on the floor. He knew it was important that he made himself nearly ghostlike when lying down. He had forgotten why, but a reminder soon came.
‘Pilgrim,’ said a person he was about to nestle with, ‘is that you?’
Billy didn’t say anything, but nestled very politely, closed his eyes.
‘God damn it’ said the person. ‘That is you, isn’t it?’ He sat up and explored Billy rudely with his hands. ‘It’s you, all right. Get the hell out of here.’
Now Billy sat up, too-wretched, close to tears.
‘Get out of here! I want to sleep!’
‘Shut up,’ said somebody else.
‘I’ll shut up when Pilgrim gets away from here.’
So Billy stood up again, clung to the cross-brace. ‘Where can I sleep?’ he asked quietly.
‘Not with me.’
‘Not with me, you son of a bitch,’ said somebody else. ‘You yell. You kick.’
‘I do?’
“You’re God damn right you do. And whimper.’
‘I do?’
‘Keep the hell away from here., Pilgrim.’
And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the car. Nearly everybody seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.
So Billy Pilgrim had to sleep standing up, or not sleep at all. And food had stopped coming in through the ventilators, and the days and nights were colder all the time.
On the eighth day, the forty-year-old hobo said to Billy, ‘This ain’t bad. I can be comfortable anywhere.’
‘You can?’ said Billy.
On the ninth day, the hobo died. So it goes. His last words were, ‘You think this is bad? This ain’t bad.’
There was something about death and the ninth day. There was a death on the ninth day in the car ahead of Billy’s too. Roland Weary died-of gangrene that had started in his mangled feet. So it goes.
Weary, in his nearly continuous delirium, told again and again of the Three Musketeers, acknowledged that he was dying, gave many messages to be delivered to his family in Pittsburgh. Above all, he wanted to be avenged, so he said again and again the name of the person who had killed him. Everyone on the car learned the lesson well.
‘Who killed me?” he would ask.
And everybody knew the answer., which was this: “Billy Pilgrim.’
Listen-on the tenth night the peg was pulled out of the hasp on Billy’s boxcar door, and the door was opened. Billy Pilgrim was lying at an angle on the corner-brace, self-crucified, holding himself there with a blue and ivory claw hooked over the-sill of the ventilator. Billy coughed -when the door was opened, and when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordance with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton. This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.
This can be useful in rocketry.
The train had arrived on a siding by a prison which was originally constructed as an extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war.
The guards peeked inside Billy’s car owlishly, cooed calmingly. They had never dealt with Americans before, but they surely understood this general sort of freight. They knew that it was essentially a liquid which could be induced to flow slowly toward cooing and light. It was nighttime.
The only light outside came from a single bulb which hung from a pole-high and far away. All was quiet outside, except for the guards, who cooed like doves. And the liquid began to flow. Gobs of it built up in the doorway, plopped to the ground.
Billy was the next-to-last human being to reach the door. The hobo was the last. The hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn’t liquid any more. He was stone. So it goes.
Billy didn’t. want to drop from the car to the ground. He sincerely believed that he would shatter like glass. So the guards helped him down, cooing still. They set him down facing the train. It was such a dinky train now.
There was a locomotive, a tender, and three little boxcars. The last boxcar was the railroad guards’ heaven on wheels. Again-in that heaven on wheels-the table was set. Dinner was served.
At the base of the pole from which the light bulb hung were three seeming haystacks. The Americans were wheedled and teased over to those three stacks, which weren’t hay after all. They were overcoats taken from prisoners who were dead. So it goes.
It was the guards’ firmly expressed wish that every American without an overcoat should take one. The coats were cemented together with ice, so the guards used their bayonets as ice picks, pricking free collars and hems and sleeves and so on, then peeling off coats and handing them out at random. The coats were stiff and dome-shaped, having conformed to their piles.
The coat that Billy Pilgrim got had been crumpled and frozen in such a way, and was so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a sort of large black, three-cornered hat. There were gummy stains on it, too, like crankcase drainings or old strawberry jam. There seemed to be a dead, furry animal frozen to it. The animal was in fact the coat’s fur collar.
Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbors. Their coats all had brass buttons or tinsel or piping or numbers or stripes or eagles or moons or stars dangling from them. They were soldiers’ coats. Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian. So it goes.
And Billy and the rest were encouraged to shuffle around their dinky train and into the prison camp. There wasn’t anything warm or lively to attract them-merely long, low, narrow sheds by the thousands, with no lights inside.
Somewhere a dog barked. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his first Russian. The man was all alone in the night-a ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial.
Billy passed within a yard of him. There was barbed wire between them. The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy’s soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him-news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.
Billy blacked out as he walked through gate after gate. He came to what he thought might be a building on Tralfamadore. It was shrilly lit and lined with white tiles. It was on Earth, though. It was a delousing station through which all new prisoners had to pass.
Billy did as he was told, took off his clothes. That was the first thing they told him to do on Tralfamadore, too.
A German measured Billy’s upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front. They looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad as Billy’s.
One of the best bodies belonged to the oldest American by far, a high school teacher from Indianapolis. His name was Edgar Derby. He hadn’t been in Billy’s boxcar. He’d been in Roland Weary’s car, had cradled Weary’s head while he died. So it goes. Derby was forty-four years old. He was so old he had a son who was a marine in the Pacific theater of war.
Derby had pulled political wires to get into the army at his age. The subject he had taught in Indianapolis was Contemporary Problems in Western Civilization. He also coached the tennis team, and took very good care of his body.
Derby’s son would survive the war. Derby wouldn’t. That good body of his would be filled with holes by a firing squad in Dresden in sixty-eight days. So it goes.
The worst American body wasn’t Billy’s. The worst body belonged to a car thief from Cicero, Illinois. Ms name was Paul Lazzaro. He was tiny, and not only were his bones and teeth rotten, but his skin was disgusting. Lazzaro was polka-dotted all over with dime-sized scars. He had had many plagues of boils.
Lazzaro, too, had been on Roland Weary’s boxcar, and had given his word of honor to Weary that he would find some way to make Billy Pilgrim pay for Weary’s death. He was looking around now, wondering which naked human being was Billy.