Cat's Cradle (9 page)

“Good God!”

“I don’t say it’s good,” said Crosby, “but I don’t say it’s bad, either. I sometimes wonder if something like that wouldn’t clear up juvenile delinquency. Maybe the hook’s a little extreme for a democracy. Public hanging’s more like it. String up a few teen-age car thieves on lampposts in front of their houses with signs around their necks saying, ‘Mama, here’s your boy.’ Do that a few times and I think ignition locks would go the way of the rumble seat and the running board.”

“We saw that thing in the basement of the waxworks in London,” said Hazel.

“What thing?” I asked her.

“The hook. Down in the Chamber of Horrors in the basement; they had a wax person hanging from the hook. It looked so real I wanted to throw up.”

“Harry Truman didn’t look anything like Harry Truman,” said Crosby.

“Pardon me?”

“In the waxworks,” said Crosby. “The statute of Truman didn’t really look like him.”

“Most of them did, though,” said Hazel.

“Was it anybody in particular hanging from the hook?” I asked her.

“I don’t think so. It was just somebody.”

“Just a demonstrator?” I asked.

“Yeah. There was a black velvet curtain in front of it and you had to pull the curtain back to see. And there was a note pinned to the curtain that said children weren’t supposed to look.”

“But kids did,” said Crosby. “There were kids down there, and they all looked.”

“A sign like that is just catnip to kids,” said Hazel.

“How did the kids react when they saw the person on the hook?” I asked.

“Oh,” said Hazel, “they reacted just about the way the grownups did. They just looked at it and didn’t say anything, just moved on to see what the next thing was.”

“What was the next thing?”

“It was an iron chair a man had been roasted alive in,” said Crosby. “He was roasted for murdering his son.”

“Only, after they roasted him,” Hazel recalled blandly, “they found out he hadn’t murdered his son after all.”

W
HEN
I
AGAIN TOOK MY SEAT
beside the
duprass
of Claire and Horlick Minton, I had some new information about them. I got it from the Crosbys.

The Crosbys didn’t know Minton, but they knew his reputation. They were indignant about his appointment as Ambassador. They told me that Minton had once been fired by the State Department for his softness toward communism, and that Communist dupes or worse had had him reinstated.

“Very pleasant little saloon back there,” I said to Minton as I sat down.

“Hm?” He and his wife were still reading the manuscript that lay between them.

“Nice bar back there.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

The two read on, apparently uninterested in talking to me. And then Minton turned to me suddenly, with a bittersweet smile, and he demanded, “Who was he, anyway?”

“Who was who?”

“The man you were talking to in the bar. We went back there for a drink, and, when we were just
outside, we heard you and a man talking. The man was talking very loudly. He said I was a Communist sympathizer.”

“A bicycle manufacturer named H. Lowe Crosby,” I said. I felt myself reddening.

“I was fired for pessimism. Communism had nothing to do with it.”

“I got him fired,” said his wife. “The only piece of real evidence produced against him was a letter I wrote to the New York
Times
from Pakistan.”

“What did it say?”

“It said a lot of things,” she said, “because I was very upset about how Americans couldn’t imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it.”

“I see.”

“But there was one sentence they kept coming back to again and again in the loyalty hearing,” sighed Minton. “ ‘Americans,’” he said, quoting his wife’s letter to the
Times
, “ ‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.’”

C
LAIRE
M
INTON’S LETTER
to the
Times
was published during the worst of the era of Senator McCarthy, and her husband was fired twelve hours after the letter was printed.

“What was so awful about the letter?” I asked.

“The highest possible form of treason,” said Minton, “is to say that Americans aren’t loved wherever they go, whatever they do. Claire tried to make the point that American foreign policy should recognize hate rather than imagine love.”

“I guess Americans
are
hated a lot of places.”

“
People
are hated a lot of places. Claire pointed out in her letter that Americans, in being hated, were simply paying the normal penalty for being people, and that they were foolish to think they should somehow be exempted from that penalty. But the loyalty board didn’t pay any attention to that. All they knew was that Claire and I both felt that Americans were unloved.”

“Well, I’m glad the story had a happy ending.”

“Hm?” said Minton.

“It finally came out all right,” I said. “Here you are on your way to an embassy all your own.”

Minton and his wife exchanged another of those pitying
duprass
glances. Then Minton said to me, “Yes. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is ours.”

I
TALKED TO THE
M
INTONS
about the legal status of Franklin Hoenikker, who was, after all, not only a big shot in “Papa” Monzano’s government, but a fugitive from United States justice.

“That’s all been written off,” said Minton. “He isn’t a United States citizen any more, and he seems to be doing good things where he is, so that’s that.”

“He gave up his citizenship?”

“Anybody who declares allegiance to a foreign state or serves in its armed forces or accepts employment in its government loses his citizenship. Read your
passport. You can’t lead the sort of funny-paper international romance that Frank has led and still have Uncle Sam for a mother chicken.”

“Is he well liked in San Lorenzo?”

Minton weighed in his hands the manuscript he and his wife had been reading. “I don’t know yet. This book says not.”

“What book is that?”

“It’s the only scholarly book ever written about San Lorenzo.”

“Sort
of scholarly,” said Claire.

“Sort of scholarly,” echoed Minton. “It hasn’t been published yet. This is one of five copies.” He handed it to me, inviting me to read as much as I liked.

I opened the book to its title page and found that the name of the book was
San Lorenzo: The Land, the History, the People
. The author was Philip Castle, the son of Julian Castle, the hotel-keeping son of the great altruist I was on my way to see.

I let the book fall open where it would. As it happened, it fell open to the chapter about the island’s outlawed holy man, Bokonon.

There was a quotation from
The Books of Bokonon
on the page before me. Those words leapt from the page and into my mind, and they were welcomed there.

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion by
Jesus: “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.”

Bokonon’s paraphrase was this:

“Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s
really
going on.”

I
BECAME SO ABSORBED
in Philip Castle’s book that I didn’t even look up from it when we put down for ten minutes in San Juan, Puerto Rico. I didn’t even look up when somebody behind me whispered, thrilled, that a midget had come aboard.

A little while later I looked around for the midget, but could not see him. I did see, right in front of Hazel and H. Lowe Crosby, a horse-faced woman with platinum blonde hair, a woman new to the passenger list. Next to hers was a seat that appeared to be empty, a seat that might well have sheltered a midget without my seeing even the top of his head.

But it was San Lorenzo—the land, the history, the people—that intrigued me then, so I looked no harder
for the midget. Midgets are, after all, diversions for silly or quiet times, and I was serious and excited about Bokonon’s theory of what he called “Dynamic Tension,” his sense of a priceless equilibrium between good and evil.

When I first saw the term “Dynamic Tension” in Philip Castle’s book, I laughed what I imagined to be a superior laugh. The term was a favorite of Bokonon’s, according to young Castle’s book, and I supposed that I knew something that Bokonon didn’t know: that the term was one vulgarized by Charles Atlas, a mail-order muscle-builder.

As I learned when I read on, briefly, Bokonon knew exactly who Charles Atlas was. Bokonon was, in fact, an alumnus of his muscle-building school.

It was the belief of Charles Atlas that muscles could be built without bar bells or spring exercisers, could be built by simply pitting one set of muscles against another.

It was the belief of Bokonon that good societies could be built only by pitting good against evil, and by keeping the tension between the two high at all times.

And, in Castle’s book, I read my first Bokononist poem, or “Calypso.” It went like this:

B
OKONON
, I learned from Castle’s book, was born in 1891. He was a Negro, born an Episcopalian and a British subject on the island of Tobago.

He was christened Lionel Boyd Johnson.

He was the youngest of six children, born to a wealthy family. His family’s wealth derived from the discovery by Bokonon’s grandfather of one quarter of a million dollars in buried pirate treasure, presumably a treasure of Blackbeard, of Edward Teach.

Blackbeard’s treasure was reinvested by Bokonon’s family in asphalt, copra, cacao, livestock, and poultry.

Young Lionel Boyd Johnson was educated in Episcopal schools, did well as a student, and was more interested in ritual than most. As a youth, for all his
interest in the outward trappings of organized religion, he seems to have been a carouser, for he invites us to sing along with him in his “Fourteenth Calypso”:

L
IONEL
B
OYD
J
OHNSON
was intellectually ambitious enough, in 1911, to sail alone from Tobago to London in a sloop named the
Lady’s Slipper
. His purpose was to gain a higher education.

He enrolled in the London School of Economics and Political Science.

His education was interrupted by the First World
War. He enlisted in the infantry, fought with distinction, was commissioned in the field, was mentioned four times in dispatches. He was gassed in the second Battle of Ypres, was hospitalized for two years, and then discharged.

And he set sail for home, for Tobago, alone in the
Lady’s Slipper
again.

When only eighty miles from home, he was stopped and searched by a German submarine, the
U-99
. He was taken prisoner, and his little vessel was used by the Huns for target practice. While still surfaced, the submarine was surprised and captured by the British destroyer, the
Raven
.

Johnson and the Germans were taken on board the destroyer and the
U-99
was sunk.

The
Raven
was bound for the Mediterranean, but it never got there. It lost its steering; it could only wallow helplessly or make grand, clockwise circles. It came to rest at last in the Cape Verde Islands.

Johnson stayed in those islands for eight months, awaiting some sort of transportation to the Western Hemisphere.

He got a job at last as a crewman on a fishing vessel that was carrying illegal immigrants to New Bedford, Massachusetts. The vessel was blown ashore at Newport, Rhode Island.

By that time Johnson had developed a conviction that something was trying to get him somewhere for some reason. So he stayed in Newport for a while to
see if he had a destiny there. He worked as a gardener and carpenter on the famous Rumfoord Estate.

During that time, he glimpsed many distinguished guests of the Rumfoords, among them, J.P. Morgan, General John J. Pershing, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Enrico Caruso, Warren Gamaliel Harding, and Harry Houdini. And it was during that time that the First World War came to an end, having killed ten million persons and wounded twenty million, Johnson among them.

When the war ended, the young rakehell of the Rumfoord family, Remington Rumfoord, IV, proposed to sail his steam yacht, the
Scheherazade
, around the world, visiting Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, China, and Japan. He invited Johnson to accompany him as first mate, and Johnson agreed.

Johnson saw many wonders of the world on the voyage.

The
Scheherazade
was rammed in a fog in Bombay harbor, and only Johnson survived. He stayed in India for two years, becoming a follower of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He was arrested for leading groups that protested British rule by lying down on railroad tracks. When his jail term was over, he was shipped at Crown expense to his home in Tobago.

There, he built another schooner, which he called the
Lady’s Slipper II
.

And he sailed her about the Caribbean, an idler,
still seeking the storm that would drive him ashore on what was unmistakably his destiny.