Those who had actually breached the walls and opened the cells had come down from Rochester to free only I convict. They got him, and they were headed out of the valley and had no interest in conquering Scipio and its little army of 6 regular policemen and 3 unarmed campus cops, and an unknown number of firearms in private hands.
Alton Darwin was the first example I had ever seen of leadership in the raw. He was a man without any badges of rank, and with no previously existing organization or widely understood plan of action. He had been a modest, unremarkable man in prison. The moment he got out, though, sudden delusions of grandeur made him the only man who knew what to do next, which was to attack Scipio, where glory and riches awaited all who dared to follow him.
“Follow me!” he cried, and some did. He was a sociopath, I think, in love with himself and no one else, craving action for its own sake, and indifferent to any long-term consequences, a classic Man of Destiny.
Most did not even follow him down the slope and out onto the ice. They returned to the prison, where they had beds of their own, and shelter from the weather, and food and water, although no heat or electricity. They chose to be good boys, concluding correctly that bad boys roaming free in the valley, but completely surrounded by the forces of law and order, would be shot on sight in a day or 2, or maybe even sooner. They were color-coded, after all.
In the Mohiga Valley, their skin alone sufficed as a prison uniform.
About half of those who followed Darwin out onto the ice turned back before they reached Scipio. This was before they were fired upon and suffered their first casualty. One of those who went back to the prison told me that he was sickened when he realized how much murder and rape there would be when they reached the other side in just a few minutes.
“I thought about all the little children fast asleep in their beds,” he said. He had handed over the gun he had stolen from the prison armory to the man next to him, there in the middle of beautiful Lake Mohiga. “He didn’t have a gun,” he said, “until I gave him 1.”
“Did you wish each other good luck or anything like that?” I asked him.
“We didn’t say anything,” he told me. “Nobody was saying anything but the man in front.”
“And what was he saying?” I asked.
He replied with terrible emptiness, “‘Follow me, follow me, follow me.’”
“Life’s a bad dream,” he said. “Do you know that?”
Alton Darwin’s charismatic delusions of grandeur went on and on. He declared himself to be President of a new country. He set up his headquarters in the Board of Trustees Room of Samoza Hall, with the big long table for his desk.
I visited him there at high noon on the second day after the great escape. He told me that this new country of his was going to cut down the virgin forest on the other side of the lake and sell the wood to the Japanese. He would use the money to refurbish the abandoned industrial buildings in Scipio down below. He didn’t know yet what they would manufacture, but he was thinking hard about that. He would welcome any suggestions I might have.
Nobody would dare attack him, he said, for fear he would harm his hostages. He held the entire Board of Trustees captive, but not the College President, Henry “Tex” Johnson, nor his wife, Zuzu. I had come to ask Darwin if he had any idea what had become of Tex and Zuzu. He didn’t know.
Zuzu, it would turn out, had been killed by a person or persons unknown, possibly raped, possibly not. We will never know. It was not an ideal time for Forensic Medicine. Tex, meanwhile, was ascending the tower of the library here with a rifle and ammunition. He was going clear to the top, to turn the belfry itself into a sniper’s nest.
Alton Darwin was never worried, no matter how bad things got. He laughed when he heard that paratroops, advancing on foot, had surrounded the prison across the lake and, on our side, were digging in to the west and south of Scipio. State Police and vigilantes had already set up a roadblock at the head of the lake. Alton Darwin laughed as though he had achieved a great victory.
I knew people like that in Vietnam. Jack Patton had that sort of courage. I could be as brave as Jack over there. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was shot at more and killed more people. But I was worried sick most of the time. Jack never worried. He told me so.
I asked him how he could be that way. He said, “I think I must have a screw loose. I can’t care about what might happen next to me or anyone.”
Alton Darwin had the same untightened screw. He was a convicted mass murderer, but never showed any remorse that I could see.
During my last year in Vietnam, I, too, reacted at press briefings as though our defeats were victories. But I was under orders to do that. That wasn’t my natural disposition.
Alton Darwin, and this was true of Jack Patton, too, spoke of trivial and serious matters in the same tone of voice, with the same gestures and facial expressions. Nothing mattered more or less than anything else.
Alton Darwin, I remember, was talking to me with seemingly deep concern about how many of the convicts who had crossed the ice with him to Scipio were deserting, were going back across the ice to the prison, or turning themselves in at the roadblock at the head of the lake in hopes of amnesty. The deserters were worriers. They didn’t want to die, and they didn’t want to be held responsible, even though many of them were responsible, for the murders and rapes in Scipio.
So I was pondering the desertion problem when Alton Darwin said with exactly the same intensity, “I can skate on ice. Do you believe that?”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
“I could always roller-skate,” he said. “But I never got a chance to ice-skate till this morning.”
That morning, with the phones dead and the electricity cut off, with unburied bodies everywhere, and with all the food in Scipio already consumed as though by a locust plague, he had gone up to Cohen Rink and put on ice skates for the first time in his life. After a few tottering steps, he had found himself gliding around and around, and around and around.
“Roller-skating and ice-skating are just about the very same thing!” he told me triumphantly, as though he had made a scientific discovery that was going to throw an entirely new light on what had seemed a hopeless situation. “Same muscles!” he said importantly.
That’s what he was doing when he was fatally shot about an hour later. He was out on the rink, gliding around and around, and around and around. I’d left him in his office, and I assumed that he was still up there. But there he was on the rink instead, going around and around, and around and around.
A shot rang out, and he fell down.
Several of his followers went to him, and he said something to them, and then he died.
It was a beautiful shot, if Darwin was really the man the College President was shooting at. He could have been shooting at me, since he knew I used to make love to his wife Zuzu when he was out of the house.
If he was shooting at Darwin instead of me, he solved one of the most difficult problems in marksmanship, the same problem solved by Lee Harvey Oswald when he shot President Kennedy, which is where to aim when you are high above your target.
As I say, “Beautiful shot.”
I asked later what Alton Darwin’s last words had been, and was told that they made no sense. His last words had been, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.”