I showed them a chart a fundamentalist preacher from downtown Scipio had passed out to Tarkington students at the Pavilion one afternoon. I asked them to examine it for examples of facts tailored to fit a thesis. Across the top the chart named the leaders of warring nations during the Finale Rack, during World War II. Then, under each name was the leader’s birthdate and how many years he lived and when he took office and how many years he served, and then the total of all those numbers, which in each case turned out to be 3,888.
It looked like this:
CHURCHILL HITLER ROOSEVELT IL DUCE STALIN TOJO
BORN 1874 1889 1882 1883 1879 1884
AGE 70 55 62 61 65 60
TOOK
OFFICE 1940 1933 1933 1922 1924 1941
YEARS IN
orncs 4 11 11 22 20 3
As I say, every column adds up to 3,888.
Whoever invented the chart then pointed out that half that number was 1944, the year the war ended, and that the first letters of the names of the war’s leaders spelled the name of the Supreme Ruler of the Universe.
The dumber ones, like the dumber ones at Tarkington, used me as an ambulatory Guinness Book of World Records, asking me who the oldest person in the world was, the richest one, the woman who had had the most babies, and so on. By the time of the prison break, I think, 98 percent of the inmates at Athena knew that the greatest age ever attained by a human being whose birthdate was well documented was about 121 years, and that this incomparable survivor, like the Warden and the guards, had been Japanese. Actually, he had fallen 128 days short of reaching 121. His record was a natural foundation for all sorts of jokes at Athena, since
so many of the inmates were serving life sentences, or even 2 or 3 life sentences either superimposed or laid end to end.
They knew that the richest man in the world was also Japanese and that, about a century before the college and the prison were founded across the lake from each other, a woman in Russia was giving birth to the last of her 69 children.
The Russian woman who had more babies than anyone gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets. They all survived, which is more than you can say for the Donner Party.
Hiroshi Matsumoto was the only member of the prison staff with a college education. He did not socialize with the others, and he took his off-duty meals alone and hiked alone and fished alone and sailed alone. Neither did he avail himself of the Japanese clubs in Rochester and Buffalo, or of the lavish rest-and-recuperation facilities maintained in Manhattan by the Japanese Army of Occupation in Business Suits. He had made so much money for his corporation in Louisville and then Athena, and was so brilliant in his understanding of American business psychology, that I am sure he could have asked for and gotten an executive job in the home office. He may have known more about American black people than anybody else in Japan, thanks to Athena, and more and more of the businesses his corporation was buying here were dependent on black labor or at least the goodwill of black neighborhoods. Again thanks to Athena, he probably knew more than any other Japanese about the largest industry by far in this country, which was the procurement and distribution of
chemicals that, when introduced into the bloodstream in one way or another, gave anybody who could afford them undeserved feelings of purpose and accomplishment.
Only 1 of these chemicals was legal, of course, and
was the basis of the fortune of the family that gave
Tarkington its band uniforms, and the water tower atop
Musket Mountain, and an endowed chair in Business
Law, and I don’t know what all else. That mind-bender was alcohol.
In the 8 years we lived next door to him in the ghost town down by the lake, he never once indicated that he longed to be back in his homeland. The closest he came to doing that was when he told me 1 night that the ruins of the locks at the head of the lake, with huge timbers and boulders tumbled this way and that, might have been the creation of a great Japanese gardener.
In the Japanese Army of Occupation he was a high-ranking officer, the civilian peer of a Brigadier, maybe, or even a Major General. But he reminded me of several old Master Sergeants I had known in Vietnam. They would say worse things about the Army and the war and the Vietnamese than anybody. But I would go away for a couple of years, and then come back, and they were all still there, crabbing away. They wouldn’t leave until the Vietnamese either killed them or kicked them out of there.
How they hated home. They were more afraid of home than of the enemy.
Hiroshi Matsumoto called this valley a “hellhole” and the “anus of the Universe.” But he didn’t leave it until he was kicked out of here.
I wonder if the Mohiga Valley hadn’t become the only home he ever knew after the bombing of Hiroshima. He lives in retirement now in his reconstructed native city, having lost both feet to frostbite after the prison break. Is it possible that he is thinking now what I have thought so often: “What is this place and who are these people, and what am I doing here?”
The last time I saw him was on the night of the prison break. We had been awakened by the racket of the Jamaicans’ assault on the prison. We both came running out onto the street in front of our houses barefoot and in our nightclothes, although the temperature must have been minus 10 degrees centigrade.
The name of our main street in the ghost town was Clinton Street, the name of the main street in Scipio. Can you imagine that: two communities so close geographically, and yet in olden times so separate socially and economically that, with all the street names they might have chosen, they both named their main street Clinton Street?
The Warden tried to reach the prison on a cordless telephone. He got no answer. His 3 house servants were looking out at us from upstairs windows. They were convicts over 70 years old, serving life sentences without hope of parole, long forgotten by the outside world, and coked to the gills on Thorazine.
My mother-in-law came out on our porch. She called to me, “Tell him about the fish I caught! Tell him about that fish I caught!”
The Warden said to me that a boiler up at the prison must have blown, or maybe the crematorium. It sounded to me like military weaponry, whose voices he
had never heard. He hadn’t even heard the atomic bomb go off. He had only felt the hot whoosh afterward.
And then all the lights on our side of the lake went off. And then we heard the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” floating down from the blacked-out penitentiary.
There was no way that the Warden and I, even with massive doses of LSD, could have imagined what was going on up there. We were faulted afterward for not having alerted Scipio. As far as that goes, Scipio, hearing the explosion and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and all the rest of it across the frozen lake, might have been expected to take some defensive action. But it did not.
Survivors over there I talked to afterward said they had just pulled the covers over their heads and gone to sleep again. What could be more human?
What was happening up there, as I’ve already said, was a stunningly successful attack on the prison by Jamaicans wearing National Guard uniforms and waving American flags. They had a public-address system mounted atop an armored personnel carrier and were playing the National Anthem. Most of them probably weren’t even American citizens!