Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
A great motor yacht named the Scheherezade now slid past the marriage bed. The song its engines sang was a very low organ note. All her lights were on.
Two beautiful people, a young man and a young woman in evening clothes, were at the rail in the stern, loving each other and their dreams and the lake. They were honeymooning, too. They were Lance Rumfoord, of Newport, Rhode Island, and his bride, the former Cynthia Landry, who had been a childhood sweetheart of John F. Kennedy in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.
There was a slight coincidence here. Billy Pilgrim would later share a hospital room with Rumfoord’s uncle, Professor Bertram Copeland Rumfoord of Harvard, official Historian of the United States Air Force.
When the beautiful people were past, Valencia questioned her funny-looking husband about war. It was a simple-minded thing for a female Earthling to do, to associate sex and glamor with war.
“Do you ever think about the war?” she said, laying a hand on his thigh.
“Sometimes,” said Billy Pilgrim.
“I look at you sometimes,” said Valencia, “and I get a funny feeling that you’re just full of secrets.”
“I’m not,” said Billy. This was a lie, of course. He hadn’t told anybody about all the time-traveling he’d done, about Tralfamadore and so on.
“You must have secrets about the war. Or, not secrets, I guess, but things you don’t want to talk about.”
“No.”
“I’m proud you were a soldier. Do you know that?”
“Good.”
“Was it awful?”
“Sometimes.” A crazy thought now occurred to Billy. The truth of it startled him. It would make a good epitaph for Billy Pilgrim—and for me, too.
“Would you talk about the war now, if I wanted you to?” said Valencia. In a tiny cavity in her great body she was assembling the materials for a Green Beret.
“It would sound like a dream,” said Billy. “Other people’s dreams aren’t very interesting, usually.”
“I heard you tell Father one time about a German firing squad.” She was referring to the execution of poor old Edgar Derby.
“Um.”
“You had to bury him?”
“Yes.”
“Did he see you with your shovels before he was shot?”
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything?”
“No.”
“Was he scared?”
“They had him doped up. He was sort of glassy-eyed.”
“And they pinned a target to him?”
“A piece of paper,” said Billy. He got out of bed, said, “Excuse me,” went into the darkness of the bathroom to take a leak. He groped for the light, realized as he felt the rough walls that he had traveled back to 1944, to the prison hospital again.
The candle in the hospital had gone out. Poor old Edgar Derby had fallen asleep on the cot next to Billy’s. Billy was out of bed, groping along a wall, trying to find a way out because he had to take a leak so badly.
He suddenly found a door, which opened, let him reel out into the prison night. Billy was loony with time-travel and morphine. He delivered himself to a barbed-wire fence which snagged him in a dozen places. Billy tried to back away from it, but the barbs wouldn’t let go. So Billy did a silly little dance with the fence, taking a step this way, then that way, then returning to the beginning again.
A Russian, himself out in the night to take a leak, saw Billy dancing—from the other side of the fence. He came over to the curious scarecrow, tried to talk with it gently, asked it what country it was from. The scarecrow paid no attention, went on dancing. So the Russian undid the snags one by one, and the scarecrow danced off into the night again without a word of thanks.
The Russian waved to him, and called after him in Russian, “Good-bye.”
Billy took his pecker out, there in the prison night, and peed and peed on the ground. Then he put it away again, more or less, and contemplated a new problem: Where had he come from, and where should he go now?
Somewhere in the night there were cries of grief. With nothing better to do, Billy shuffled in their direction. He wondered what tragedy so many had found to lament out of doors.
Billy was approaching, without knowing it, the back of the latrine. It consisted of a one-rail fence with twelve buckets underneath it. The fence was sheltered on three sides by a screen of scrap lumber and flattened tin cans. The open side faced the black tarpaper wall of the shed where the feast had taken place.