Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page A

respect: everything was pretty much all right with him.
    Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, “I had to laugh like hell.” If Lieutenant Colonel Patton is in Heaven, and I don’t think many truly professional soldiers have ever expected to wind up there, at least not recently, he might at this very moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hue, and then adding, without even smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.” That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn’t really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life, I don’t think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.
    He said he had to laugh like hell when he won a science prize in high school for making an electric chair for rats, but he hadn’t. A lot of people wanted him to stage a public demonstration of the chair with a tranquilized rat, wanted him to shave the head of a groggy rat and strap it to the chair, and, according to Jack, ask it if it had any last words to say, maybe wanted to express remorse for the life of crime it had led.
    The execution never took place. There was enough common sense in Patton’s high school, although not in the Science Department, apparently, to have such an event denounced as cruelty to dumb animals. Again, Jack Patton said without smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.”
     
     
    HE SAID HE had to laugh like hell when I married his sister Margaret. He said Margaret and I shouldn’t take offense at that. He said he had to laugh like hell when anybody got married.
    I am absolutely sure that Jack did not know that there was inheritable insanity on his mother’s side of the family, and neither did his sister, who would become my bride. When I married Margaret, their mother seemed perfectly OK still, except for a mania for dancing, which was a little scary sometimes, but harmless. Dancing until she dropped wasn’t nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age.
     
     
    MY MOTHER-IN-LAW MILDRED grew up in Peru, Indiana, but never talked about Peru, even after she went crazy, except to say that Cole Porter, a composer of ultrasophisticated popular songs during the first half of the last century, was also born in Peru.
     
    MY MOTHER-IN-LAW RAN away from Peru when she was 18, and never went back again. She worked her way through the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, of all places, which I guess was about as far away from Peru as she could get without leaving the Milky Way. That was where she met her husband, who was then a student in the university’s School of Veterinary Science.
    Only after the Vietnam War, with Jack long dead, did Margaret and I realize that she wanted nothing more to do with Peru because so many people there knew she came from a family famous for spawning lunatics. And then she got married, keeping her family’s terrifying history to herself, and she reproduced.
    My own wife married and reproduced in all innocence of the danger she herself was in, and the risk she would pass on to our children.
     
     
    OUR OWN CHILDREN, having grown up with a notoriously insane grandmother in the house, fled this valley as soon as they could, just as she had fled Peru. But they haven’t reproduced, and with their knowing what they do about their booby-trapped genes, I doubt that they ever will.
     
     
    JACK PATTON NEVER married. He never said he wanted kids. That could be a clue that he did know about his crazy relatives in Peru, after all. But I don’t believe that. He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”
    I myself, obviously, have finally