Jailbird Page 8

  The judge thinks he can leave a body again, any time he finds it or its destiny uncongenial. Little does he dream that the chemistries of Earthlings and Vicunians are such that, once he enters a body, he is going to be stuck inside forever. The story includes a little essay on glues previously known on Earth, and says that the strongest of these was the one that sticks mature barnacles to boulders or boats or pilings, or whatever.

  "When they are very young," Dr. Fender writes in the persona of Frank X. Barlow, "barnacles can drift or creep whence-so-ever they hanker, anywhere in the seven seas and the brackish estuaries thereof. Their upper bodies are encased in cone-shaped armor. Their little tootsies dangle from the cones like clappers from dinnerbells.

  "But there comes a time for every barnacle, at childhood's end, when the rim of its cone secretes a glue that will stick forever to whatever it happens to touch next. So it is no casual thing on Earth to say to a pubescent barnacle or to a homeless soul from Vicuna, 'Sit thee doon, sit thee doon.'"

  The judge from Vicuna in the story tells us that the way the people on his native planet said "hello" and "goodbye," and "please" and "thank you," too. It was this: "ting-a-ling." He says that back on Vicuna the people could don and doff their bodies as easily as Earthlings could change their clothing. When they were outside their bodies, they were weightless, transparent, silent awarenesses and sensibilities. They had no musical instruments on Vicuna, he said, since the people themselves were music when they floated around without their bodies. Clarinets and harps and pianos and so on would have been redundant, would have been machinery for making clumsy counterfeits of airborne souls.

  But they ran out of time on Vicuna, he says. The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere--to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make cloches out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.

  "On Vicuna," says the judge, "we lived as though there were no tomorrow."

  The patriotic bonfires of time were the worst, he says. When he was an infant, his parents held him up to coo and gurgle with delight as a million years of future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen. But by the time he was fifty, only a few weeks of future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.

  So all the Vicunians had to get out of their bodies and sail out into space without further ado. "Ting-a-ling," they said to Vicuna.

  "Chronological anomalies and gravitational thunderstorms and magnetic whirlpools tore the Vicunian families apart in space," the story goes on, "scattered them far and wide." The judge manages to stay with his formerly beautiful daughter for a while. She isn't beautiful anymore, of course, because she no longer has a body. She finally loses heart, because every planet or moon they come to is so lifeless. Her father, having no way to restrain her, watches helplessly as she enters a crack in a rock and becomes its soul. Ironically, she does this on the moon of Earth, with that most teeming of all planets only two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles away!

  Before he actually lands at the Air Force base, though, he falls in with a flock of turkey buzzards. He wheels and soars with them and almost enters the ear of one. For all he knows about the social situation on Earth, these carrion eaters may be members of the ruling class.

  He decides that lives led at the center of the Air Force base are too busy, too unreflective for him, so he goes up in the air again and spots a much more quiet cluster of buildings, which he thinks may be a meditation center for philosophers. He has no way of recognizing the place as a minimum security prison for white-collar criminals, since there were no such institutions back on Vicuna.

  Back on Vicuna, he says, convicted white-collar criminals, defilers of trustingness, had their ears plugged up, so their souls couldn't get out. Then their bodies were put into artificial ponds filled with excrement--up to their necks. Then deputy sheriffs drove high-powered speedboats at their heads.

  The judge says he himself sentenced hundreds of people to this particular punishment and that the felons invariably argued that they had not broken the law, but merely violated its spirit, perhaps, just the least little bit. Before he condemned them, he would put a sort of chamberpot over his head, to make his words more resonant and awesome, and he would pronounce this formula: "Boys, you didn't just get the spirit of the law. You got its body and soul this time."

  And, according to the judge, you could hear the deputies warming up their speedboats on the pond outside the courthouse: "vrooom-ah, vrooom-a, va-va-va-roooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom!"

  6

  THE JUDGE in Dr. Bob Fender's story tries to guess which of the philosophers in the meditation center is the wisest and most contented. He decides that it is a little old man sitting on a cot in a second-story dormitory. Every so often that little old man is so delighted with his thoughts, evidently, that he claps three times.

  So the judge flies into the ear of that little old man and immediately sticks to him forever, sticks to him, according to the story ... as tightly as Formica to an epoxy-coated countertop." And what does he hear in that little old man's head but this:

  Sally in the garden,

  Sifting cinders,

  Lifted up her leg

  And farted like a man ...

  And so on.

  It is quite an interesting story. There is a rescue of the daughter who has become the soul of a moon rock, and so on. But the true story of how its author came to commit treason in Osaka is a match for it, in my opinion, any day. Bob Fender fell in love with the North Korean agent, the Edith Piaf imitator, from a distance of about twenty feet, in a nightclub frequented by American officers. He never dared close the distance or to send her flowers or a note, but night after night he mooned at her from the same table. He was always alone and usually the biggest man by far in the club, so the singer, whose stage name was simply "Izumi," asked some of the other Americans who and what Fender was.

  He was a virgin meat inspector, but his fellow officers had fun telling Izumi that he was so solitary and gloomy all the time because his work was so secret and important. They said he was in command of an elite unit that guarded atomic bombs. If she asked him about it, they said, he would claim to be a meat inspector.

  So Izumi went to work on him. She sat down at his table without being asked. She reached inside his shirt and tickled his nipples and all that. She told him that she liked big, silent men, and that all other Americans talked too much. She begged him to take her home with him after the club closed at two o'clock that morning. She wanted to find out where the atomic bombs were, of course. Actually, there weren't any atomic bombs in Japan. They were on aircraft carriers and on Okinawa, and so on. For the rest of the evening she sang all her songs directly to him and to nobody else. He nearly fainted from joy and embarrassment. He had a Jeep outside.

  When she got into his Jeep at two o'clock in the morning, she said she not only wanted to see where her big American lived, but where he worked. He told her that would be easy, since he lived and worked at the same place. He took her down to a new United States Army Quartermaster Corps dock in Osaka, which had a big shed running down the middle of it. At one end were some offices. At the other end was a two-room apartment for whoever the resident veterinarian happened to be. In between were great, refrigerated meat lockers, filled with carcasses Fender had inspected or would inspect. There was a fence on the land side and a guard at the gate; but as came out at the court-martial, discipline was lax. All the guard thought he had to watch out for was people trying to sneak out with sides of beef.

  So the guard, who would later be acquit
ted by a court-martial, simply waved Dr. Fender's Jeep inside. He did not notice that there was an unauthorized woman lying on the floor.

  Izumi asked to look inside some of the meat lockers, which Bob was more than glad to show her. By the time they reached his apartment, which was at the outer end of the dock, she realized that he really was nothing but a meat inspector.

  "But she was so nice," Fender told me one time, "and I was so nice, if I may say so, that she stayed for the night, anyway. I was scared to death, naturally, since I had never made love before. But then I said to myself, Just wait a minute. Just calm down. You have always been good with every kind of animal, practically from the minute you were born. Just keep one thing in mind: You've got another nice little animal here.'"

  As came out at Fender's court-martial: He and other members of the Army Veterinary Corps looked like soldiers, but they had not been trained to think like soldiers. It seemed unnecessary, since all they did anymore was inspect meat. The last veterinarian to be involved in any sort of fighting, it turned out, died at the Little Bighorn, at Custer's Last Stand. Also: There was a tendency on the part of the Army to coddle veterinarians, since they were so hard to recruit. They could make fortunes on the outside--especially in cities, looking after peoples' pets. This was why they gave Fender such a pleasant, private apartment on the end of a dock. He inspected meat. As long as he did that, nobody was going to think of inspecting him.

  "If they had inspected my apartment," he told me, "they would not have found a speck of dust anywhere." They would also have found, according to him, "one of the best private collections of Japanese pottery and fabrics in Osaka." He had gone berserk for the subtlety and delicacy of all things Japanese. This art mania was surely an apology, among other things, for his own huge and--to him--ugly useless hands and feet and all.

  "Izumi kept looking back and forth between me and the beautiful things on my shelves and walls--in my cupboards, in my drawers," he told me one time. "If you could have seen her expressions change when she did that," he said, "you would have to agree with me when I say, even though it's a very conceited thing for me to say: She fell in love with me."

  He made breakfast the next morning, all with Japanese utensils, although it was an American breakfast--bacon and eggs. She stayed curled up in bed while he cooked. She reminded him of the young deer, a doe he had raised when a boy. It was not a new thought. He had been taking care of that doe all night. He turned on his radio, which was tuned to the Armed Forces Network. He hoped for music. He got news instead. The biggest news was that a North Korean spy ring had been rounded up in Osaka in the wee hours of the morning. Their radio transmitter had been found. Only one member of the ring was still being hunted, and that was the woman who called herself "Izumi."

  Fender, by his own account, had "... entered an alternate universe by then." He felt so much more at home in the new one than in the old one, simply because he was paired now with a woman, that he wasn't going to return to the old one ever again. What Izumi told him about her loyalty to the communist cause did not sound like enemy talk to him. "It was just common sense on the part of a good person from an alternate universe," he said.

  So he hid her and fed her for eleven days, being careful not to neglect his duties. On the twelfth day he was so disoriented and innocent as to ask a sailor from a ship from New Zealand, which was unloading beef, if for a thousand dollars he would take a young woman on board and away from Japan. The sailor reported this to his captain, who passed it on to American authorities. Fender and Izumi were promptly arrested, separated, and would never see each other again.

  Fender was never able to find out what became of her. She vanished. The most believable rumor was that she had been turned over illegally to South Korean agents, who took her to Seoul--where she was shot without trial.

  Fender regretted nothing he had done.

  Now he was holding up the pants of my civilian suit, a gray, pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit, for me to see. He asked me if I remembered the large cigarette hole there had been in the crotch.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Find it," he said.

  I could not. Nor could I find any other holes in the suit. At his own expense he had sent the suit to an invisible mender in Atlanta. "That, dear Walter," he said, "is my going-away present to you."

  Almost everybody, I knew, got a going-away present from Fender. He had little else to do with all the money he made from his science-fiction tales. But the mending of my suit was by far the most personal and thoughtful one I had ever heard of. I choked up. I could have cried. I told him so.

  Before he could make a reply, there were shouts and the thunder of scampering feet in offices in the front of the building--offices whose windows faced the four-lane divided highway outside. It was believed that Virgil Greathouse, the former secretary of health, education, and welfare, had arrived out front. It was a false alarm.

  Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender ran out into the reception area, so that they could see, too. There were no locked doors anywhere in the prison. Fender could have kept right on running outside, if he wanted to. Clyde didn't have a gun, and neither did any of the other guards. If Fender had made a break for it, maybe somebody would have tried to tackle him; but I doubt it. It would have been the first attempted escape from the prison in its twenty-six-year history, and nobody would have had any clear idea as to what to do.

  I was incurious about the arrival of Virgil Greathouse. His arrival, like the arrival of any new prisoner, would be a public execution of sorts. I did not want to watch him or anybody become less than a man. So I was all alone in the supply room. I was grateful for the accident of privacy. I took advantage of it. I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes.

  There were white broadcloth underpants and calf-length, ribbed black socks from the Tally-ho Gentleman's Shop in Chevy Chase. There was a white Arrow shirt from Garfinckel's Department Store in Washington. There was the Brooks Brothers suit from New York City, and a regimental-stripe tie and black shoes from there, too. The laces on both shoes were broken and mended with square knots. Fender obviously had not taken a close look at them, or there would have been new laces in those shoes.

  The necktie was the most antique item. I had actually worn it during the Second World War. Imagine that. An Englishman I was working with on medical supply schemes for the D-Day landings told me that the tie identified me as an officer in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

  "You were wiped out in the Second Battle of the Somme in the First World War," he said, "and now, in this show, you've been wiped out again at E1 Alamein. You might say, 'Not the luckiest regiment in the world.'"

  The stripe scheme is this: A broad band of pale blue is bordered by a narrow band of forest-green above and orange below. I am wearing that tie on this very day, as I sit here in my office in the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation.

  When Clyde Carter and Dr. Fender returned to the supply room, I was a civilian again. I felt as dazed and shy and tremble-legged as any other newborn creature. I did not yet know what I looked like. There was one full-length mirror in the supply room, but its face was turned to the wall. Fender always turned it to the wall when a new arrival was expected. This was another example of Fender's delicacy. The new arrival, if he did not wish to, did not have to see at once how he had been transformed by a prison uniform.

  Clyde's and Fender's faces, however, were mirrors enough to tell me that I was something less than a gay boulevardier on the order of, say, the late Maurice Chevalier. They were quick to cover their pity with horseplay; but not quick enough.

  Fender pretended to be my valet in an embassy somewhere. "Good morning, Mr. Ambassador. Another crisp and bright day," he said. "The queen is expecting you for lunch at one."

  Clyde said that it sure was easy to spot a Harvard man, that they all had that certain something. But neither fri
end made a move to turn the mirror around, so I did it myself.

  Here is who I saw reflected: a scrawny old janitor of Slavic extraction. He was unused to wearing a suit and a tie. His shirt collar much too large for him, and so was his suit, which fit him like a circus tent. He looked unhappy--on his way to a relative's funeral, perhaps. At no point was there any harmony between himself and the suit. He may have found his clothes in a rich man's ash can.

  Peace.

  7

  I SAT NOW on an unsheltered park bench by the highway in front of the prison. I was waiting for the bus. I had beside me a tan canvas-and-leather suitcase designed for Army officers. It had been my constant companion in Europe during my glory days. Draped over it was an old trenchcoat, also from my glory days. I was all alone. The bus was late. Every so often I would pat the pockets of my suitcoat, making sure that I had my release papers, my government voucher for a one-way, tourist-class flight from Atlanta to New York City, my money, and my Doctor of Mixology degree. The sun beat down on me.

  I had three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents. Two hundred and fifty of that was in the form of a government check, which could not easily be stolen from me. It was all my own money. After all the meticulous adding and subtracting that had gone on relative to my assets since my arrest, that much, to the penny, was incontrovertibly mine: three hundred and twelve dollars and eleven cents.

  So here I was going out into the Free Enterprise System again. Here I was cut loose from the protection and nurture of the federal government again.