Billy sat down in a waiting room. He wasn’t a widower yet. He sensed something hard under the cushion of his overstuffed chair. He dug it out, discovered that it was a book, The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. It was a true account of the death before an American fixing squad of private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, the only American soldier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. So it goes.
Billy read the opinion of a staff judge advocate who reviewed Slovik’s case, which ended like this: He has directly challenged the authority of the government, and future discipline depends upon a resolute reply to this challenge. If the death penalty is ever to be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed against the enemy. There was no recommendation for clemency in the case and none is here recommended. So it goes.
Billy blinked in 1965, traveled in time to 1958. He was at a banquet in honour of a Little League team of which his son Robert was a member. The coach, who had never been married, was speaking. He was all choked up. ‘Honest to God,’ he was Saying, ‘I’d consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.’
Billy blinked in 1958, traveled in time to 1961. It was New Year’s Eve, and Billy was disgracefully drunk at a party where everybody was in optometry or married to an optometrist.
Billy usually didn’t drink much, because the war had ruined his stomach, but he certainly had a snootful now, and he was being unfaithful to his wife Valencia for the first and only time. He had somehow persuaded a woman to come into the laundry room of the house, and then sit up on the gas dryer, which was running.
The woman was very drunk herself, and she helped Billy get her girdle off. ‘What was it you wanted to talk about?’ she said.
‘It’s all night,’ said Billy. He honestly thought it was all right. He couldn’t remember the name of the woman.
‘How come they call you Billy instead of William?’
‘Business reasons,’ said Billy. That was true. His father-in-law, who owned the Ilium School of Optometry, who had set Billy up in practice, was a genius in his field. He told Billy to encourage people to call him Billy-because it would stick in their memories. It would also make him seem slightly magical, since there weren’t any other grown Billys around. It also compelled people to think of him as a friend right away.
Somewhere in there was an awful scene, with people expressing disgust for Billy and the woman, and Billy found himself out in his automobile, trying to find the steering wheel.
The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms, hoping to find it by luck. When that didn’t work, he became methodical, working in such a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out.
He was in the back seat of his car., which was why he couldn’t find the steering wheel.
Now somebody was shaking Billy awake. Billy stiff felt drunk, was still angered by the stolen steering wheel. He was back in the Second World War again, behind the German lines. The person who was shaking him was Roland Weary. Weary had gathered the front of Billy’s field jacket into his hands. He banged Billy against a tree, then puffed him away from it, flung him in the direction he was supposed to take under his own power.
Billy stopped, shook his head. ‘You go on,’ he said.
‘What? ‘
‘You guys go on without me. I’m all right.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m O.K.’
‘Jesus-I’d hate to see somebody sick,’ said Weary, through five layers of humid scarf from home. Lilly had never seen Weary’s face. He had tried to imagine it one time, had imagined a toad in a fishbowl.
Weary kicked and shoved Billy for a quarter of a mile. The scouts were waiting between the banks of a frozen creek. They had heard the dog. They had heard men calling back and forth, too-calling like hunters who had a pretty good idea of where their quarry was.
The banks of the creek were high enough to allow the scouts, to stand without being seen. Billy staggered down the bank ridiculously. After him came Weary, clanking and clinking and tinkling and hot.
‘Here he is, boys,’ said Weary. ‘He don’t want to live, but he’s gonna live anyway. When he gets out of this, by God, he’s gonna owe his life to the Three Musketeers. ‘
Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he wouldn’t cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops.
Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a heavy arm around the shoulder of each. ‘So what do the Three Musketeers do now?’ he said.
Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn’t time-travel. it had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying young man with his shoes full of snow.
One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful people. They had been behind German lines before many times-living like woods creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their spinal cords.
Now they twisted out from under Weary’s loving arms. They told Weary that he and Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren’t going to wait for them any more.
And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.
Billy Pilgrim went on skating, doing tricks in sweatsocks, tricks that most people would consider impossible-making turns, stopping on a dime and so on. The cheering went on, but its tone was altered as the hallucination gave way to time-travel.
Billy stopped skating, found himself at a lectern in a Chinese restaurant in Ilium, New York, on an early afternoon in the autumn of 1957. He was receiving a standing ovation from the Lions Club. He had just been elected President, and it was necessary that he speak. He was scared stiff, thought a ghastly mistake had been made. AR those prosperous, solid men out there would discover now that they had elected a ludicrous waif. They would hear his reedy voice, the one he’d had in the war. He swallowed, knew that all he -had for a voice box was a little whistle cut from a willow switch. Worse-he had nothing to say. The crowd quieted down. Everybody was pink and beaming.
Billy opened his mouth, and out came a deep, resonant tone. His voice was a gorgeous instrument. It told jokes which brought down the house. It grew serious, told jokes again, and ended on a note of humility. The explanation of the miracle was this: Billy had taken a course in public speaking.
And then he was back in the bed of the frozen creek again. Roland Weary was about to beat the living shit out of him.
Weary was filled with a tragic wrath. He had been ditched again. He stuffed his pistol into its holster. He slipped his knife into its scabbard. Its triangular blade and blood gutters on all three faces. And then he shook Billy hard, rattled his skeleton, slammed him against a bank.
Weary barked and whimpered through his layers of scarf from home. He spoke unintelligibly of the sacrifices he had made on Billy’s behalf. He dilated upon the piety and heroism of ‘The Three Musketeers,’ portrayed, in the most glowing and impassioned hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves, and the great services they rendered to Christianity,
It was entirely Billy’s fault that this fighting organization no longer existed, Weary felt, and Billy was going to pay. Weary socked Billy a good one on the side of the jaw, knocked Billy away from the bank and onto the snow-covered ice of the creek. Billy was down on all fours on the ice, and Weary kicked him in the ribs, rolled him over on his side. Billy tried to form himself into a ball.