Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page B

come around to his point of view.
    During our plebe year, I remember, Jack all of a sudden decided that he was going to be a cartoonist, although he had never thought of being that before. He was compulsive. I could imagine him back in high school in Wyoming, all of a sudden deciding to build an electric chair for rats.
    The first cartoon he ever drew, and the last one, was of 2 rhinoceroses getting married. A regular human preacher in a church was saying to the congregation that anybody who knew any reason these 2 should not be joined together in holy matrimony should speak now or forever hold his peace.
    This was long before I had even met his sister Margaret.
    We were roommates, and would be for all 4 years. So he showed me the cartoon and said he bet he could sell it to Play-boy.
    I asked him what was funny about it. He couldn’t draw for sour apples. He had to tell me that the bride and groom were rhinoceroses. I thought they were a couple of sofas maybe, or maybe a couple of smashed-up sedans. That would have been fairly funny, come to think of it: 2 smashed-up sedans taking wedding vows. They were going to settle down.
    “What’s funny about it?” said Jack incredulously. “Where’s your sense of humor? If somebody doesn’t stop the wedding, those two will mate and have a baby rhinoceros.”
    “Of course,” I said. “For Pete’s sake,” he said, “what could be uglier and dumber than a rhinoceros? Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce.”
    I pointed out that to a rhinoceros another rhinoceros was wonderful.
    “That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”
     
     
    DURING JACK’S AND my cow year at the Point, I remember, which would have been our junior year at a regular college, we were ordered to walk a tour for 3 hours on the Quadrangle, in a military manner, as though on serious guard duty, in full uniform and carrying rifles. This was punishment for our having failed to report another cadet who had cheated on a final examination in Electrical Engineering. The Honor Code required not only that we never lie or cheat but that we snitch on anybody who had done those things.
    We hadn’t seen the cadet cheat. We hadn’t even been in the same class with him. But we were with him, along with one other cadet, when he got drunk in Philadelphia after the Army-Navy game. He got so drunk he confessed that he had cheated on the exam the previous June. Jack and I told him to shut up, that we didn’t want to hear about it, and that we were going to forget about it, since it probably wasn’t true anyway.
    But the other cadet, who would later be fragged in Vietnam, turned all of us in. We were as corrupt as the cheater, supposedly, for trying to cover up for him. “Fragging,” incidentally, was a new word in the English language that came out of the Vietnam War. It meant pitching a fizzing fragmentation grenade into the sleeping quarters of an unpopular officer. I don’t mean to boast, but the whole time I was in Vietnam nobody offered to frag me.
    The cheater was thrown out, even though he was a firstie, which meant he would graduate in only 6 more months. And Jack and I had to walk a 3-hour tour at night and in an ice-cold rain. We weren’t supposed to talk to each other or to anyone. But the nonsensical posts he and I had to march intersected at 1 point. Jack muttered to me at one such meeting, “What would you do if you heard somebody had just dropped an atom bomb on New York City?”
    It would be 10 minutes before we passed again. I thought of a few answers that were obvious, such as that I