I had to advise him, nonetheless, that he could expect to be bombed unless he and the rest of them got out of town right away. I said their best chance to survive was to go back to the prison and fly white flags everywhere. If they did that right away, they might claim that they had nothing to do with all the killings here. The number of people the escapees killed in Scipio, incidentally, was 5 less than the number I myself had killed single-handedly in the war in Vietnam.
So the Battle of Scipio was nothing but a “tempest in a teapot,” an expression the Atheist’s Bible tells us is proverbial.
I told Alton Darwin that if he and his people didn’t want to be bombed and didn’t want to return to the prison, they should take whatever food they could find and disperse to the north or west. I told him one thing
he already knew, that the floor of the National Forest to the south and east was so dark and lifeless that anyone going in there would probably starve to death or go mad before he found his way back out of there. I told him another thing he already knew, that there would soon be all these white people to the west and north, having the times of their lives hunting escaped convicts instead of deer.
My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn’t have what they had, who didn’t look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a “Free Fire Zone.” You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.
Alton Darwin heard me out. And then he told me that he thought I was right, that the prison probably would be bombed. But he guaranteed that Scipio would not be bombed, and that it would not be attacked on the ground, either, that the Government would have to keep its distance and respect the demands he meant to put to it.
“What makes you think that?” I said.
“We have captured a TV celebrity,” he said. “They won’t let anything happen to him. Too many people will be watching.”
“Who?” I said.
And he said, “Jason Wilder.”
That was the first I heard that they had taken hostage not only Wilder but the whole Board of Trustees of Tarkington College. I now realize, too, that Alton Darwin would not have known that Wilder was a TV celebrity if old tapes of Wilder’s talk show hadn’t been run again and again at the prison across the lake. Poor people of any race on the outside never would have watched his show for long, since its basic message was that it was poor people who were making the lives of the rest of us so frightening.
36
“Star Wars,” said Alton Darwin.
He was alluding to Ronald Reagan’s dream of having scientists build an invisible dome over this country, with electronics and lasers and so on, which no enemy plane or projectile could ever penetrate. Darwin believed that the social standing of his hostages was an invisible dome over Scipio.
I think he was right, although I have not been able to discover how seriously the Government considered bombing the whole valley back to the Stone Age. Years ago, I might have found out through the Freedom of Information Act. But the Supreme Court closed that peephole.
Darwin and his troops knew the lives of the hostages were valued highly by the Government. They didn’t know why, and I am not sure that I do, either. I think that the number of people with money and power had shrunk to the point where it felt like a family. For all the escaped convicts knew about them, they might as well have been aardvarks, or some other improbable animal they had never seen before.
Darwin regretted that I, too, was going to have to stay in Scipio. He couldn’t let me go, he said, because I knew too much about his defenses. There were none as far as I could see, but he sounded as though there were trenches and tank traps and mine fields all around us.
Even more hallucinatory was his vision of the future. He was going to restore this valley to its former economic vitality. It would become an all-Black Utopia. All Whites would be resettled elsewhere.
He was going to put glass back into the windows of the factories, and make their roofs weather-tight again. He would get the money to do this and so many other wonderful things by selling the precious hardwoods of the National Forest to the Japanese.
That much of his dream is actually coming true now. The National Forest is now being logged by Mexican laborers using Japanese tools, under the direction of Swedes. The proceeds are expected to pay half of day-before-yesterday’s interest on the National Debt.
That last is a joke of mine. I have no idea if any money for the forest will go toward the National Debt, which, the last I heard, was greater than the value of all property in the Western Hemisphere, thanks to compound interest.
Alton Darwin looked me up and down, and then he said with typical sociopathic impulsiveness, “Professor, I can’t let you go because I need you.”
“What for?” I said. I was scared to death that he was going to make me a General.
“To help with the plans,” he said.
“For what?” I said.
“For the glorious future,” he said. He told me to go
to this library and write out detailed plans for making this valley into the envy of the World.
So that, in fact, is what I mainly did during most of the Battle of Scipio.
It was too dangerous to go outside anyway, with all the bullets flying around.
My best Utopian invention for the ideal Black Republic was “Freedom Fighter Beer.” They would get the old brewery going again, supposedly, and make beer pretty much like any other beer, except that it would be called Freedom Fighter Beer. If I say so myself, that is a magical name for beer. I envisioned a time when, all over the world, the bored and downtrodden and weary would be bucking themselves up at least a little bit with Freedom Fighter Beer.
Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.
Alton Darwin was dead before I could complete my long-range plan. His dying words, as I’ve said, were, “See the Nigger fly the airplane.” But I showed it to the hostages.
“What is this supposed to mean?” said Jason Wilder.
“I want you to see what they’ve had me doing,” I said. “You keep talking as though I could turn you loose, if I wanted. I’m as much a prisoner as you are.”
He studied the prospectus, and then he said, “They actually expect to get away with this?”
“No,” I said. “They know this is their Alamo.”
He arched his famous eyebrows in clownish disbelief. He has always looked to me a lot like the incomparable comedian Stanley Laurel. “It would never have occurred
to me to compare the rabid chimpanzees who hold us in durance vile with Davy Crockett and James Bowie and Tex Johnson’s great-great-grandfather,” he said.
“I was just talking about hopeless situations,” I said.
“I certainly hope so,” he said.
I might have added, but didn’t, that the martyrs at the Alamo had died for the right to own Black slaves. They didn’t want to be a part of Mexico anymore because it was against the law in that country to own slaves of any kind.