‘Yes.’
‘You look so awful.’
‘Really-I’m O.K.’ And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him so grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.
People drifted away now, seeing the color return to Billy’s cheeks, seeing him smile. Valencia stayed with him, and Kilgore Trout, who had been on the fringe of the crowd, came closer, interested, shrewd.
‘You looked as though you’d seen a ghost,’ said Valencia.
‘No,’ said Billy. He hadn’t seen anything but what was really before him-the faces of the four singers, those four ordinary men, cow-eyed and mindless and anguished as they went from sweetness to sourness to sweetness again.
‘Can I make a guess?’ said Kilgore Trout ‘You saw through a time window.’
‘A what?’ said Valencia.
‘He suddenly saw the past or the future. Am I right?’
‘No,’ said Billy Pilgrim. He got up, put a hand into his pocket, found the box containing the ring in there. He took out the box, gave it absently to Valencia. He had meant to give it to her at the end of the song, while everybody was watching. Only Kilgore Trout was there to see.
‘For me?’ said Valencia.
‘Yes’
“Oh my God, she said. Then she said it louder, so other people heard. They gathered around, and she opened it, and she almost screamed when she saw the sapphire with a star in it. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. She gave Billy a big kiss. She said, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
There was a lot of talk about what wonderful jewelry Billy had given to Valencia over the years. ‘My God,’ said Maggie White, ‘she’s already got the biggest diamond I ever saw outside of a movie.’ She was talking about the diamond Billy had brought back from the war.
The partial denture he had found inside his little impresario’s coat, incidentally, was in his cufflinks box in his dresser drawer. Billy had a wonderful collection of cufflinks. It was the custom of the family to give him cufflinks on every Father’s Day. He was wearing Father’s Day cufflinks now. They had cost over one hundred dollars. They were made out of ancient Roman coins. He had one pair of cufflinks upstairs which were little roulette wheels that really worked. He had another pair which had a real thermometer in one and a real compass in the other.
Billy now moved about the party-outwardly normal. Kilgore Trout was shadowing him, keen to know what Billy had suspected or seen. Most of Trout’s novels, after all, dealt with time warps and extrasensory perception and other unexpected things. Trout believed in things like that, was greedy to have their existence proved.
‘You ever put a full-length mirror on the floor, and then have a dog stand on it?’ Trout asked Billy.
‘No.’
‘The dog will look down, and all of a sudden he’ll realize there’s nothing under him. He thinks he’s standing on thin air. He’ll jump a mile.’
‘He will?’
That’s how you looked-as though you all of a sudden realized you were standing on thin air.’
The barbershop quartet sang again. Billy was emotionally racked again. The experience was definitely associated with those four men and not what they sang.
Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:
‘Leven cent cotton, forty cent meat,
How in the world can a poor man eat?
Pray for the sunshine, ‘cause it will rain.
Things gettin’ worse, drivin’ all insane;
Built a nice bar, painted it brown
Lightnin’ came along and burnt it down:
No use talkin’ any man’s beat,
With ‘leven cent cotton and forty cent meat.
‘Leven cent cotton, a car-load of tax,
The load’s too heavy for our poor backs…
And so on.
Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home.
Trout would have come upstairs with him if Billy hadn’t told him not to. Then Billy went into the upstairs bathroom, which was dark He closed and locked the door. He left it dark, and gradually became aware that he was not alone. His son was in there.
‘Dad?’ his son said in the dark. Robert, the future Green Beret, was seventeen then. Billy liked him, but didn’t know him very well. Billy couldn’t help suspecting that there wasn’t much to know about Robert.
Billy flicked on the light. Robert was sitting on the toilet with his pajama bottoms around his ankles. He was wearing an electric guitar, slung around his neck on a strap. He had just bought the guitar that day. He couldn’t play it yet and, in fact, never learned to play it. It was a nacreous pink.
‘Hello, son,’ said Billy Pilgrim.
Billy went into his bedroom, even though there were guests to be entertained downstairs. He lay down on his bed, turned on the Magic Fingers. The mattress trembled, drove a dog out from under the bed. The dog was Spot. Good old Spot was still alive in those days. Spot lay down again in a corner.
Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly-as follows:
He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.
So it goes.
The girls that Billy had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.
So it goes.
A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a firestorm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.
It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.
So it goes.
The guards drew together instinctively, rolled their eyes. They experimented with one expression and then another, said nothing, though their mouths were often open. They looked like a silent film of a barbershop quartet.
‘So long forever,’ they might have been singing, ‘old fellows and pals; So long forever, old sweethearts and pals-God bless ‘em-‘
‘Tell me a story,’ Montana Wildhack said to Billy Pilgrim in the Tralfamadorian zoo one time. They were in bed side by side. They had privacy. The canopy covered the dome. Montana was six months pregnant now, big and rosy, lazily demanding small favors from Billy from time to time. She couldn’t send Billy out for ice cream or strawberries, since the atmosphere outside the dome was cyanide, and the nearest strawberries and ice cream were millions of light years away.
She could send him to the refrigerator, which was decorated with the blank couple on the bicycle built for two-or, as now she could wheedle, ‘Tell me a story, Billy boy.’
‘Dresden was destroyed on the night of February 13, 1945,’ Billy Pilgrim began. ‘We came out of our shelter the next day.’ He told Montana about the four guards who, in their astonishment and grief, resembled a barbershop quartet. He told her about the stockyards with all the fenceposts gone, with roofs and windows gone-told her about seeing little logs lying around. These were people who had been caught in the firestorm. So it goes.
Billy told her what had happened to the buildings that used to form cliffs around the stockyards. They had collapsed. Their wood had been consumed, and their stones had crashed down, had tumbled against one another until they locked at last in low and graceful curves.
‘It was like the moon,’ said Billy Pilgrim.
The guards told the Americans to form in ranks of four, which they did. Then they had them march back to the hog barn which had, been their home. Its wars still stood, but its windows and roof were gone, and there was nothing inside but ashes and dollops of melted glass. It was realized then that there was no food or water, and that the survivors, if they were going to continue to survive, were going to have to climb over curve after curve on the face of the moon.