Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [25]
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 last. The hobo could not flow, could not plop. He wasn’t liquid anymore. 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