When the three fools found the communal kitchen, whose main job was to make lunch for workers in the slaughterhouse, everybody had gone home but one woman who had been waiting for them impatiently. She was a war widow. So it goes. She had her hat and coat on. She wanted to go home, too, even though there wasn’t anybody there. Her white gloves were laid out side by side on the zinc counter top.
She had two big cans of soup for the Americans. It was simmering over low fires on the gas range. She had stacks of loaves of black bread, too.
She asked Gluck if he wasn’t awfully young to be in the army. He admitted that he was.
She asked Edgar Derby if he wasn’t awfully old to be in the army. He said he was.
She asked Billy Pilgrim what he was supposed to be. Billy said he didn’t know. He was just trying to keep warm.
‘All the real soldiers are dead,’ she said. It was true. So it goes.
Another true thing that Billy saw while he was unconscious in Vermont was the work that he and the others had to do in Dresden during the month before the city was destroyed. They washed windows and swept floors and cleaned lavatories and put jars into boxes and sealed cardboard boxes in a factory that made malt syrup. The syrup was enriched with vitamins and minerals. The syrup was for pregnant women.
The syrup tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke, and everybody who worked in the factory secretly spooned it all day long. They weren’t pregnant, but they needed vitamins and minerals, too. Billy didn’t spoon syrup on his first day at work, but lots of other Americans did.
Billy spooned it on his second day. There were spoons hidden all over the factory, on rafters, in drawers, behind radiators, and so on. They had been hidden in haste by persons who had been spooning syrup, who had heard somebody else coming. Spooning was a crime.
On his second day, Billy was cleaning behind a radiator and he found a spoon. To his back was a vat of syrup that was cooling. The only other person who could see Billy and his spoon was poor old Edgar Derby, who was washing a window outside. The spoon was a tablespoon. Billy thrust it into the vat, turned it around and around, making a gooey lollipop. He thrust it into his mouth.
A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy’s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.
There were diffident raps at the factory window. Derby was out there, having seen all. He wanted some syrup, too.
So Billy made a lollipop for him. He opened the window. He stuck the lollipop into poor old Derby’s gaping mouth. A moment passed, and then Derby burst into tears. Billy closed the window and hid the sticky spoon. Somebody was coming.
Eight
The Americans in the slaughterhouse had a very interesting visitor two days before Dresden was destroyed. He was Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American who had become a Nazi. Campbell was the one who had written the monograph about the shabby behavior of American prisoners of war. He wasn’t doing more research about prisoners now. He had come to the slaughter house to recruit men for a German military unit called ‘The Free American Corps.’ Campbell was the inventor and commander of the unit, which was supposed to fight only on the Russian front.
Campbell was an ordinary looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a blue body stocking which had yellow stripes running from his armpits to his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln’s profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was red, with a blue swastika in a circle of white.
He was explaining this armband now in the cement-block hog barn.
Billy Pilgrim had a boiling case of heartburn, since he had been spooning malt syrup all day long at work. The heartburn brought tears to his eves, so that his image of Campbell was distorted by jiggling lenses of salt water.
‘Blue is for the American sky,’ Campbell was saying. ‘White is for the race that pioneered the continent, drained the swamps and cleared the forests and built the roads and bridges. Red is for the blood of American patriots which was shed so gladly in years gone by.’
Campbell’s audience was sleepy. It had worked hard at the syrup factory, and then it had marched a long way home in the cold. It was skinny and hollow-eyed. Its skins were beginning to blossom with small sores. So were its mouths and throats and intestines. The malt syrup it spooned at the factory contained only a few of the vitamins and minerals every Earthling needs.
Campbell offered the Americans food now, steaks and mashed potatoes and gravy and mince pie, if they would join the Free Corps. ‘Once the Russians are defeated,’ he went on, you will be repatriated through Switzerland.’
There was no response.
‘You’re going to have to fight the Communists sooner or later,’ said Campbell. “Why not get it over with now?’
And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. ‘Mere are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after an, is that people are discouraged from being characters. But old Derby was a character now.
His stance was that of a punch-drunk fighter. His head was down, his fists were out front, waiting for information and battle plan. Derby raised his head, called Campbell a snake. He corrected that. He said that snakes couldn’t help being snakes, and that Campbell, who could help being what he was, was something much lower than a snake or a rat-or even a blood-filled tick.
Campbell smiled.
Derby spoke movingly of the American form of government, with freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all. He said there wasn’t a man there who wouldn’t gladly die for those ideals.
He spoke of the brotherhood between the American and the Russian people, and how those two nations were going to crush the disease of Nazism, which wanted to infect the whole world.
The air-raid sirens of Dresden howled mournfully.
The Americans and their guards and Campbell took shelter in an echoing meat locker which was hollowed in living rock under the slaughterhouse. There was an iron staircase with iron doors at the top and bottom.
Down in the locker were a few cattle and sheep and pigs, and horses hanging from iron hooks. So it goes. The locker had empty hooks for thousands more. It was naturally cool. There was no refrigeration. There was candlelight. The locker was whitewashed and smelled of carbolic acid. There were benches along a wall. The Americans went to these, brushing away flakes of whitewash before they sat down.
Howard W. Campbell. Jr., remained standing, like the guards. He talked to the guards in excellent German. He had written many popular German plays and poems in his time, and had married a famous German actress named Resi North. She was dead now, had been killed while entertaining troops in the Crimea. So it goes.
Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die. So it goes. Billy dozed in the meat locker. He found himself engaged again, word for word, gesture for gesture, in the argument with his daughter with which this tale begun.
‘Father,’ she said, ‘What are we going to do with you?’
And so on. ‘You know who I could just kill?’ she asked.
‘Who could you kill?’ said Billy.
‘That Kilgore Trout.’
Kilgore Trout was and is a science-fiction writer, of course. Billy has not only read dozens of books by Trout-he has also become a friend of Trout, who is a bitter man.
Trout lives in a rented basement in Ilium, about two miles from Billy’s nice white home. He himself has no idea how many novels he has written-possibly seventy-five of the things. Not one of them has made money. So Trout keeps body and soul together as a circulation man for the Ilium Gazette, manages newspaper delivery boys, bullies and flatters and cheats little kids.
Billy met him for the first time in 1964. Billy drove his Cadillac down a back alley in Ilium and he found his way blocked by dozens of boys and their bicycles. A meeting was in progress. The boys were harangued by a man in a full beard. He was cowardly and dangerous, and obviously very good at his job. Trout was sixty-two years old back then. He was telling the kids to get off their dead butts and get their daily customers to subscribe to the fucking Sunday edition, too. He said that whoever sold the most Sunday subscriptions during the next two months would get a free trip for himself and his parents to ‘s fucking Vineyard for a week, all expenses paid.