Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut

Author:Kurt Vonnegut
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Kilgore (Fictitious character), Political fiction, Ex-convicts, Satire, General, Literary, 1972-1974, Watergate Affair, Classics, Trout
ISBN: 9780385333900
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1999-01-12T10:00:00+00:00

11

WHAT WOULD the next day hold for me?

I would, among other things, meet Leland Clewes, the man I had betrayed in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

But first I would unpack my few possessions, put them away nicely, read a little while, and then get my beauty sleep. I would be tidy. “At least I don’t smoke anymore,” I thought. The room was so clean to begin with.

Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Thus I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets—without cases, mouthpieces, or bells.

Life is like that sometimes.

What I should have done, especially since I was an ex-convict, was to march back down to the front desk immediately and to say that I was the involuntary custodian of a drawerful of clarinet parts and that perhaps the police should be called. They were of course stolen. As I would learn the next day, they had been taken from a truck hijacked on the Ohio Turnpike—a robbery in which the driver had been killed. Thus, anyone associated with the incomplete instruments, should they turn up, might also be an accessory to murder. There were notices in every music store in the country, it turned out, saying that the police should be called immediately if a customer started talking about buying or selling sizeable quantities of clarinet parts. What I had in my drawer, I would guess, was about a thousandth of the stolen truckload.

But I simply closed the drawer again. I didn’t want to go right back downstairs again. There was no telephone in my room. I would say something in the morning.

I was exhausted, I found. It was not yet curtain time in all the theaters down below, but I could hardly keep my eyes open. So I pulled my window-shade down, and I put myself to bed. Off I went, as my son used to say when he was little, “to seepy-bye,” which is to say, “to sleep.”

I dreamed that I was in an easy chair at the Harvard Club of New York, only four blocks away. I was not young again. I was not a jailbird, however, but a very successful man—the head of a medium-size foundation, perhaps, or assistant secretary of the interior, or executive director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, or some such thing. I really would have been some such thing in my sunset years, I honestly believe, if I had not testified against Leland Clewes in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine.

It was a compensatory dream. How I loved it. My clothes were in perfect repair. My wife was still alive. I was sipping brandy and coffee after a fine supper with several other members of the Class of Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-five. One detail from real life carried over into the dream: I was proud that I did not smoke anymore.

But then I absentmindedly accepted a cigarette. It was simply one more civilized satisfaction to go with the good talk and my warm belly and all.

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