Slaughterhouse-Five Page 13

  Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that, too, and was petrified.

  Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie's cleavage.

  Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia, whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, "The Febs," sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed. Everybody's eyes were shining. The song was "That Old Gang of Mine."

  Gee, that song went, but I'd give the world to see that old gang of mine. And so on. A little later it said, So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals--God bless 'em--And so on.

  Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords--chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack.

  He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.

  There was silence.

  "Oh my God," said Valencia, leaning over him, "Billy--are you all right?"

  "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 fire-storm 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 neigh
borhood 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. There were people who had been caught in the fire-storm. 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 walls 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.

  Which they did.

  The curves were smooth only when seen from a distance. The people climbing them learned that they were treacherous, jagged things--hot to the touch, often unstable--eager, should certain important rocks be disturbed, to tumble some more, to form lower, more solid curves.

  Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.

  American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything was moving. They saw Billy and the rest moving down there. The planes sprayed them with machine-gun bullets, but the bullets missed. Then they saw some other people moving down by the riverside and they shot at them. They hit some of them. So it goes.

  The idea was to hasten the end of the war.

  Billy's story ended very curiously in a suburb untouched by fire and explosions. The guards and the Americans came at nightfall to an inn which was open for business. There was candlelight. There were fires in three fireplaces downstairs. There were empty tables and chairs waiting for anyone who might come, and empty beds with covers turned down upstairs.

  There was a blind innkeeper and his sighted wife, who was the cook, and their two young daughters, who worked as waitresses and maids. This family knew that Dresden was gone. Those with eyes had seen it burn and burn, understood that they were on the edge of a desert now. Still--they had opened for business, had polished the glasses and wound the clocks and stirred the fires, and waited and waited to see who would come.

  There was no great flow of refugees from Dresden. The clocks ticked on, the fires crackled, the translucent candles dripped. And then there was a knock on the door, and in came four guards and one hundred American prisoners of war.

  The innkeeper asked the guards if they had come from the city.

  "Yes."

  "Are there more people coming?"

  And the guards said that, on the difficult route they had chosen, they had not seen another living soul.

  *

  The blind innkeeper said that the Americans could sleep in his stable that night, and he gave them soup and ersatz coffee and a little beer. Then he came out to the stable to listen to them bedding down in the straw.

  "Good night, Americans," he said in German. "Sleep well."

  9

  HERE IS HOW Billy Pilgrim lost his wife, Valencia.

  He was unconscious in the hospital in Vermont, after the airplane crashed on Sugarbush Mountain, and Valencia, having heard about the crash, was driving from Ilium to the hospital in the family Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. Valencia was hysterical, because she had been told frankly that Billy might die, or that, if he lived, he might be a vegetable.

  Valencia adored Billy. She was crying and yelping so hard as she drove that she missed the correct turnoff from the throughway. She applied her power brakes, and a Mercedes slammed into her from behind. Nobody was hurt, thank God, because both drivers were wearing seat belts. Thank God, thank God. The Mercedes lost only a headlight. But the rear end of the Cadillac was a body-and-fender man's wet dream. The trunk and fenders were collapsed. The gaping trunk looked like the mouth of a village idiot who was explaining that he didn't know anything about anything. The fenders shrugged. The bumper was at a high port arms. "Reagan for President!" a sticker on the bumper said. The back window was veined with cracks. The exhaust system rested on the pavement.

  The driver of the Mercedes got out and went to Valencia, to find out if she was all right. She blabbed hysterically about Billy and the airplane crash, and then she put her car in gear and crossed the median divider, leaving her exhaust system behind.

  When she arrived at the hospital, people rushed to the windows to see what all the noise was. The Cadillac, with both mufflers gone, sounded like a heavy bomber coming in on a wing and a prayer. Valencia turned off the engine, but then she slumped against the steering wheel, and the horn brayed steadily. A doctor and a nurse ran out to find out what the trouble was. Poor Valencia was unconscious, overcome by carbon monoxide. She was a heavenly azure.

  One hour later she was dead. So it goes.

  *

  Billy knew nothing about it. He dreamed on, and traveled in time and so forth. The hospital was so crowded that Billy couldn't have a room to himself. He shared a room with a Harvard history professor named Bertram Copeland Rumfoord. Rumfoord didn't have to look at Billy, because Billy was surrounded by white linen screens on rubber wheels. But Rumfoord could hear Billy talking to himself from time to time.

  Rumfoord's left leg was in traction. He had broken it while skiing. He was seventy years old, but had the body and spirit of a man half that age. He had been honeymooning with his fifth wife when he broke his leg. Her name was Lily. Lily was twenty-three.

  Just about the time poor Valencia was pronounced dead, Lily came into Billy's and Rumfoord's room with an armload of books. Rumfoord had sent her down to Boston to get them. He was working on a one-volume history of the United States Army Air Corps in World War Two. The books were about bombings and sky battles that had happened before Lily was even born.

  *

  "You guys go on without me," said Billy Pilgrim deliriously, as pretty little Lily came in. She had been an a-go-go girl when Rumfoord saw her and resolved to make her his own. She was a high school dropout. Her I.Q. was 103. "He scares me," she whispered to her husband about Billy Pilgrim.

  "He bores the hell out of me!" Rumfoord replied boomingly. "All he does in his sleep is quit and surrender and apologize and ask to be left alone." Rumfoord was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a full professor, the author of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, a
nd one of the great competitive sailors of all time. His most popular book was about sex and strenuous athletics for men over sixty-five. Now he quoted Theodore Roosevelt, whom he resembled a lot:

  "'I could carve a better man out of a banana.'"

  One of the things Rumfoord had told Lily to get in Boston was a copy of President Harry S Truman's announcement to the world that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. She had a Xerox of it, and Rumfoord asked her if she had read it.

  "No." She didn't read well, which was one of the reasons she had dropped out of high school.

  Rumfoord ordered her to sit down and read the Truman statement now. He didn't know that she couldn't read much. He knew very little about her, except that she was one more public demonstration that he was a superman.

  So Lily sat down and pretended to read the Truman thing, which went like this:

  Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam," which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.

  The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many-fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production, and even more powerful forms are in development.

  It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

  Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But nobody knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to all the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.