General Florio turned to me and smiled. “Hello, Warden Hartke,” he said.
Once all those 10-man tents, which were brought down from the Armory across the highway from the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, were set up on the Quadrangle as though on a checkerboard, it seemed so logical. The surrounding buildings, Samoza Hall, this library, the bookstore, the Pavilion, and so on, with machine-gunners at various windows and doorways, and with barbed wire between them and the tents, served well enough as prison walls.
General Florio said to me, “Company’s coming.”
I remember a lecture Damon Stern gave about his visit with several Tarkington students to Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp in Poland during the Finale Rack. Stern used to make extra money taking trips to Europe with students whose parents or guardians didn’t want to see them over Christmas or during the summertime. He caught a lot of heck for taking some to Auschwitz. He did it impulsively and without asking permission from anyone. It wasn’t on the schedule, and some of the students were very upset afterward.
He said in his lecture that if the fences and gallows and gas chambers were removed from the tidy, tidy checkerboard of streets and old stucco two-story shotgun buildings, it might have made a nice enough junior college for low-income or underachieving people in the area. The buildings had been put up years before World War I, he said, as a comfortable outpost for soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Among the many titles of that Emperor, he said, was Duke of Auschwitz.
What General Florio was after on our side of the lake was our sanitary facilities. The prisoners were to use buckets in their tents for toilets, but then these could be emptied into toilets in the surrounding buildings and flushed from there into Scipio’s state-of-the-art sewage-disposal plant. Across the lake they were having to bury everything.
And no showers.
We had plenty of showers.
One touching rather than horrible thing about the siege, surely, was how little damage the escaped convicts did to this campus. It was as though they really believed that it was going to be theirs for generations.
This brings to mind another of Damon Stern’s lectures, which was about how the brutalized and starving
poor people of Petrograd in Russia behaved after they broke into the palace of the Czars in 1917. They got to see for the first time all the treasures inside the palace, and they were so outraged they wanted to wreck them.
But then one man got their attention by firing a gun at the ceiling, and he said, “Comrades! Comrades! This is all ours now! Don’t hurt anything!”
They renamed Petrograd “Leningrad.” Now it’s Petrograd again.
In a way, the escaped convicts were like a neutron bomb. They had no compassion for living things, but they did surprisingly little damage to property.
Damon Stern the unicyclist, on the other hand, laid down his life for living things. They weren’t even human beings. They were horses. They weren’t even his horses.
His wife and kids got away, and, last I heard, were living in Lackawanna, where they have relatives. That’s nice when people have relatives they can run away to.
But Damon Stern is buried deep and close to where he fell, next to the stable, in the shadow of Musket Mountain when the Sun goes down.
His wife Wanda June came back here after the siege in a pickup truck she said belonged to her half brother. She paid a fortune for enough gas to get here from Lackawanna. I asked her what she was doing for money, and she said she and Damon had put away a lot of Yen in their freezer in a box marked “Brussels sprouts.”
Damon woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to get into the Volkswagen with the kids and take off for Rochester with the headlights off. He had heard the explosion across the lake, and seen the silent
army crossing the ice to Scipio. The last thing he ever did with Wanda June was hand her the box marked “Brussels sprouts.”
Damon himself, over his wife’s objections, stayed be-hind to spread the alarm. He said he would be along later, by hitching a ride in somebody else’s car, or by walking all the way to Rochester on back roads he knew, if he had to. It isn’t clear what happened after that. He probably called the local police, although none of them lived to say so. He woke up a lot of people in the immediate neighborhood.
The best conjecture is that he heard gunfire inside the stable and unwisely went to investigate. A Freedom Fighter with an AK-47 was gut-shooting horses for the fun of it. He didn’t shoot them in the head.
Damon must have asked him to stop, so the Freedom Fighter shot him, too.
His wife didn’t want his body. She said the happiest years of his life had been spent here, so he should stay buried here.
She found all 4 of the family unicycles. That was easy. The soldiers were taking turns trying to ride them. Before that, several of the convicts had also tried to ride them, so far as I know with no success.
So I went back down Clinton Street to the Town Hall, to ponder this latest change in my career, that I was next to be a Warden.
There was a Rolls-Royce Corniche, a convertible coupe, parked out front. Whoever had a car like that had enough Yen or Marks or some other stable currency to buy himself or herself enough black-market gas for a trip from anywhere to anywhere.
My guess was that it was the chariot of some Tarkington student or parent who hoped to recover property left in a dorm suite at the start of the vacation period, a vacation which now, obviously, might never end.
The soldier who was supposed to be my receptionist was back on duty. He had returned to his post after General Florio told him to stop standing around with his thumb in his anus and start stringing barbed wire or erecting tents. He was waiting for me at the front door, and he told me I had a visitor.
So I asked him, “Who is the visitor?”
He said, “It’s your son, sir.”
I was thunderstruck. “Eugene is here?” I said. Eugene Jr. had told me that he never wanted to see me again as long as he lived. How is that for a life sentence? And he was driving a Rolls-Royce now? Eugene?
“No, sir,” he said. “Not Eugene.”
“Eugene is the only son I have,” I said. “What did he say his name was?”
“He told me, sir,” he said, “that he was your son Rob Roy.”
That was all the proof I needed that a son of mine did indeed await me in my office: that name, “Rob Roy.” “Rob” and “Roy,” and I was back in the Philippine Islands again, having just been kicked out of Vietnam. I was back in bed with a voluptuous female war correspondent from The Des Moines Register, whose lips were like sofa pillows, telling her that, if I had been a fighter plane, I would have had little pictures of people painted all over me.
I calculated how old he was. He was 23, making him the youngest of my children. He was the baby of the family.
He was in the reception room outside my office. He stood up when I came in. He was exactly as tall as myself. His hair was the same color and texture as mine. He needed a shave, and his potential beard was as black and thick as mine. His eyes were the same color as mine. All 4 of our eyes were greenish amber. We had the same big nose, my father’s nose. He was nervous and polite. He was expensively dressed in leisure clothes. If he had been learning-disabled or merely stupid, which he wasn’t, he might have had a happy 4 years at Tarkington, especially with that car of his.
I was giddy. I had taken off my overcoat on the way in, so that he could see my General’s stars. That was something, anyway. How many boys had a father who was a General?