From September 30 to October 6, writer and editor Corey Michael Dalton will live 24/7 in the front window of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in downtown Indianapolis. His week-long stay, “Locked Up with Vonnegut,” is timed to coincide with Banned Books Week. To get the scoop on this unusual event, KVML Blog Editor Shannon Bahler sat down with Corey for a chat.

Shannon: So. You. Living in a window. For a week. What’s this all about?

Corey: It’s about bringing attention to Banned Books Week, which has been observed the last week of September every year since 1982. Many people are surprised to learn that books are still actively being challenged and/or banned in the U.S., but it’s true. In 2011, for example, To Kill a Mockingbird, Brave New World, and The Hunger Games trilogy were all in the list of top 10 most challenged books.

S: Why did the Vonnegut Library get involved with Banned Books Week?

C: Obviously the Vonnegut Library is opposed to censorship as a general principal, but I think the incident that really got their attention was last year’s banning of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in Missouri. The school board in the town of Republic voted unanimously to ban the book from their high school’s library for supposedly espousing beliefs that run contrary to the Bible. The complaint was made by just one man—a man whose kids don’t even go to the public school because he chooses to homeschool them. Thankfully, the outright banning of classic works of literature is fairly rare, so the incident was reported in the media and came to the Vonnegut Library’s attention. That’s when the organization offered to send any student from that high school a free copy of Slaughterhouse-Five at the student’s request. At last count, the library had sent out around 80 free copies of the novel.

S: Is the book still banned in Republic, Missouri?

C: The book is now locked up in a secure location, only accessible by students who bring in written permission from their parents to let them check it out.

S: Ah—so that’s why the KVML’s event is called “Locked Up With Vonnegut.”

C: Exactly. I’m going to be locked up and kept from the public, just like Slaughterhouse-Five in Republic.

S: You’re going to be in the library for an entire week. How in the world did they persuade you to do this?

C: They asked. Honestly, it wasn’t that hard to convince me! Julia Whitehead, the executive director, and I have been friends for years, so she knows I’m always game for standing up for what I think is right, even if it causes me some minor discomfort. And I figure it’s only for seven days! I can get back to my normal workday life the next week.

S: Why did she ask you, specifically?

C: Aside from the fact that she knew I’d say yes, I like to think that I have some qualifications. First, I’m a writer. I just graduated from Butler University with my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, and I have a couple of completed book manuscripts that I’m shopping around. So, as a writer, it really burns my britches to think of small-minded individuals trying to tell other folks what is and is not appropriate for their families to read. I can’t let that go unopposed! Second, as the editor of Jack and Jill magazine for kids, encouraging young people to read is kind of a mandate of my day job! Also, before I edited Jack and Jill, I worked as the associate editor of The Saturday Evening Post, the same magazine that first published 11 of Vonnegut’s short stories, so there’s a historic connection there between Vonnegut and me as well.

S: Don’t you think you’ll get lonely?

C: Nah! We’ve got lots of programming scheduled. For one thing, the library will be open every day that week (it’s usually closed on Wednesdays) and it will have extended hours, from noon to 7:00 p.m. Every evening at 6:00 we’ll have special “Corey’s Bedtime Stories,” where folks like Michael Moore, Dan Wakefield (Going All the Way), Ben H. Winters (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, The Last Policeman), Michael Dahlie (A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living), and former first lady of Indiana Judy O’Bannon will read to me (and anyone else who wants to attend) from banned books such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby. There will also be a couple of movie events and a First Friday spectacular. All of these events are open to the public, of course. [See a complete schedule.]

S: Will you be doing anything while you’re in the library? Or will you just be lounging on your cot behind your wall of books?

C: I’m sure there will be plenty of lounging in my cell (although the cot isn’t that comfy), but I’ll be working as well. My employers at the nonprofit Saturday Evening Post Society have graciously agreed to let me work on Jack and Jill from the library for the week. So, I’m sure I’ll be typing on my laptop, having meetings with my staff, and making lots of phone calls in between lounging sessions. I have also agreed to blog about my experiences for this website. And Tweet. I’ll be Tweeting from @CoreyMDalton. Oh, and I’m going to write a short story, too, which we plan to post on the site at the end of the week. Whew!

S: It sounds like you’re a busy guy! I better let you go.

C: Well, before I go, I just want to let people know that they should feel free to stop in the library and say hi while I’m living there. Folks are welcome to come visit me in my cell. Or they can peep at me through a live, 24/7 webcam to make sure I’m staying true to my word. The only times I won’t be visible is if I have to run to the bathroom or take a quick shower in the library’s basement. Too much info?

S: Maybe just a bit. Thanks for talking about all this, though—and have fun!

C: I’m sure I will. Later!

Locked Up with Vonnegut The Saturday Evening Post

Oh, he’s dead, all right; Vonnegut, the author of 14 novels and numerous short stories, passed away in 2007. But like Billy Pilgrim—the World War II soldier and protagonist of Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five—the writer has come “unstuck in time,” popping on and off the world stage, influencing culture from beyond the grave.

Take this summer’s book banning, for instance. The school board in Republic, Missouri, voted unanimously to remove Slaughterhouse-Five from its high school library for allegedly teaching principles contrary to the Bible. The move backfired, prompting protests and a surge in demand for the novel at the town’s public library.

“To hell with the censors!” Vonnegut once said. “Give me knowledge or give me death!”

Seeing the developing situation in Missouri, volunteers at the not-for-profit Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in his hometown of Indianapolis offered to send every student at the high school a free copy of the writer’s science fiction novel.

No, Kurt Vonnegut isn’t going to go away so easily. This year has also seen the opening of the Vonnegut Library, paperback reissues of his books, and two new biographies in celebration of what would have been his 89th birthday on November 11.

But why do people still care about Vonnegut’s writing? What makes him still relevant? According to Charles J. Shields, author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, one of the two biographies, it comes down to the universality of his message: “His writings, which come from the center of the most violent century in human history, simply ask, ‘Why are we here?’”

For Vonnegut, that was always a loaded question. In The Sirens of Titan he wrote, “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” But this love was tempered by random obstacles thrown in man’s way. Vonnegut viewed man’s struggle as the attempt to find (and give) kindness and love in an otherwise uncaring universe—a world-view shaped by his life experiences.

Born in 1922, Vonnegut was part of a prominent German-American family—until the stock market crash in 1929 forced them to scale back. After struggling for years to come to grips with the family’s reduced circumstances, Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day, 1944. The writer later confessed that his greatest fear was that he, too, would commit suicide; indeed, the chronically depressed author would attempt to kill himself 40 years after his mother’s death.

Around the time of his mother’s suicide, a fresh-out-of-college Vonnegut went to Europe to fight in World War II. Captured almost immediately during the Battle of the Bulge, he was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, a German city known for its art, culture, and architecture. On the night of February 13, 1945, the Allies firebombed Dresden, destroying the historic city and killing between 25,000 and 35,000 people, primarily civilians. Although Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived the bombing holed up in an underground meat locker-turned-prison nicknamed “Slaughterhouse Five,” they were devastated by the experience. The soldiers were forced to spend the next several weeks collecting the remains of the dead while the local people threw rocks at them.

“Both the Depression and the war taught Vonnegut that we are not nearly as in control of our destinies as our egos and the mythology of the ‘American Dream’ would have us believe,” says Gregory D. Sumner, author of the second recent biography, Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels.

After the war, Vonnegut began writing for magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post. “The No-Talent Kid” (reprinted in our Mar/Apr 2011 issue and available online) was the first of nearly a dozen short stories that he wrote for the Post. Although Vonnegut’s magazine short stories were primarily melodramas and romances, he was also drawn to science fiction. “Vonnegut was convinced he couldn’t write about the issues facing Americans during the Cold War—hydrogen bombs, conformity, materialism—in conventional ways,” Shields says. “But in science fiction, a writer can ask, ‘What if?’ and take a concept to the limit of credibility.”

In the early 1960s, Vonnegut decided to write about his experiences in World War II. But he faced a problem. “When he took shelter in the slaughterhouse, there was a city,” Shields explains. “When he came up again, the city was gone. How could he write a war novel with no middle? The solution, he discovered, was time travel.”

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, finds himself bouncing uncontrollably through time, living his life out of sequence—including his experience as a POW during World War II and his time as an exhibit in an alien zoo on another planet. Despite the conceits of the sci-fi genre, the book grapples with the very notion of war. Released in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse-Five resonated profoundly with the American public, reaching number one on The New York Times best-seller list and pushing Vonnegut to the forefront of pop culture.

“Young people in particular embraced its deglorification of war and experimental style,” Sumner says. “But its universal themes transcend period or place. The book is very popular, for example, with solders and veterans of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Vonnegut used his newfound fame to transform himself into what he called a “responsible elder,” speaking at peace rallies and becoming an opponent of war in all its forms. In an age where the U.S. is still embroiled in conflicts across the globe, his message remains relevant, especially with the young; a new crop of Vonnegut fans enters college each fall.

Again, why do people—young and old—still read Vonnegut?

“Because of his honesty, wit, and faith in people, despite their flaws and the tragedies of life,” Sumner replies. “Because the seemingly ‘childish’ questions he asked, the apparently ‘simple’ style of expression he used, hold a profundity that the critics often missed.”

When released, some prominent critics did, indeed, mistake Slaughterhouse-Five’s simple prose style for plain simpleness, but history sides with Vonnegut’s legion of fans; the book is included in both Time magazine’s and Modern Library’s lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

Not that Vonnegut would have been concerned about his legacy, mind you. “I don’t console myself with the idea that my descendents and my books and all that will live on,” he told a Post reporter in 1986. “I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment last forever.”

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Long live Kurt Vonnegut.

Click here to read “Miss Temptation,” one of the 11 stories that Vonnegut wrote for the Post. To view the writer’s personal artifacts on display at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, go here.

Vonnegut Lives! The Saturday Evening Post

Susanna was a bit-part actress in the summer theater near the village, and she rented a room over the firehouse. She was a part of village life all summer, but the villagers never got used to her. She was forever as startling and desirable as a piece of big-city fire apparatus.

Susanna’s feathery hair and saucer eyes were as black as midnight. Her skin was the color of cream. Her hips were like a lyre, and her bosom made men dream of peace and plenty forever and ever. She wore barbaric golden hoops on her shell-pink ears, and around her ankles were chains with little bells on them.

She went barefoot and slept until noon every day. And, as noon drew near, the villagers on the main street would grow as restless as beagles with a thunderstorm on the way.

At noon, Susanna would appear on the porch outside her room. She would stretch languidly, pour a bowl of milk for her black cat, kiss the cat, fluff her hair, put on her earrings, lock her door, and hide the key in her bosom.

And then, barefoot, she would begin her stately, undulating, titillating, tinkling walk—down the outside stairway, past the liquor store, the insurance agency, the real-estate office, the diner, the American Legion post, and the church, to the crowded drugstore. There she would get the New York papers.

She seemed to nod to all the world in a dim, queenly way. But the only person she spoke to during her daily walk was Bearse Hinkley, the seventy-two-year-old pharmacist.

The old man always had her papers ready for her.

“Thank you, Mr. Hinkley. You’re an angel,” she would say, opening a paper at random. “Now, let’s see what’s going on back in civilization.” While the old man would watch, fuddled by her perfume, Susanna would laugh or gasp or frown at items in the paper—items she never explained.

Then she would take the papers and return to her nest over the firehouse. She would pause on the porch outside her room, dip her hand into her bosom, bring out the key, unlock the door, pick up the black cat, kiss it again, and disappear inside.

The one-girl pageant had a ritual sameness until one day toward the end of summer, when the air of the drugstore was cut by a cruel, sustained screech from a dry bearing in a revolving soda-fountain stool.

The screech cut right through Susanna’s speech about Mr. Hinkley’s being an angel. The screech made scalps tingle and teeth ache. Susanna looked indulgently in the direction of the screech, forgiving the screecher. She found that the screecher wasn’t a person to be indulged.

The screech had been made by the stool of Corporal Norman Fuller, who had come home the night before from eighteen bleak months in Korea. They had been eighteen months without war—but eighteen months without cheer all the same. Fuller had turned on the stool slowly, to look at Susanna with indignation. When the screech died, the drugstore was deathly still.

Fuller had broken the enchantment of summer by the seaside—had reminded all in the drugstore of the black, mysterious passions that were so often the mainsprings of life.

He might have been a brother, come to rescue his idiot sister from the tenderloin; or an irate husband, come to a saloon to horsewhip his wife back to where she belonged, with the baby. The truth was that Corporal Fuller had never seen Susanna before.

He hadn’t consciously meant to make a scene. He hadn’t known, consciously, that his stool would screech. He had meant to underplay his indignation, to make it a small detail in the background of Susanna’s pageant—a detail noticed by only one or two connoisseurs of the human comedy.

But the screech had made his indignation the center of the solar system for all in the drugstore—particularly for Susanna. Time had stopped, and it could not proceed until Fuller had explained the expression on his granite Yankee face.

Fuller felt his skin glowing like hot brass. He was comprehending destiny. Destiny had suddenly given him an audience, and a situation about which he had a bitter lot to say.

Fuller felt his lips move, heard the words come out. “Who do you think you are?” he said to Susanna.

“I beg your pardon?” said Susanna. She drew her newspapers about herself protectively.

“I saw you come down the street like you were a circus parade, and I just wondered who you thought you were,” said Fuller.

Susanna blushed gloriously. “I—I’m an actress,” she said.

“You can say that again,” said Fuller. “Greatest actresses in the world. American women.”

“You’re very nice to say so,” said Susanna uneasily.

Fuller’s skin glowed brighter and hotter. His mind had become a fountain of apt, intricate phrases. “I’m not talking about theaters with seats in ‘em. I’m talking about the stage of life. American women act and dress like they’re gonna give you the world. Then, when you stick out your hand, they put an ice cube in it.”

“They do?” said Susanna emptily.

“They do,” said Fuller, “and it’s about time somebody said so.” He looked challengingly from spectator to spectator, and found what he took to be dazed encouragement. “It isn’t fair,” he said.

“What isn’t?” said Susanna, lost.

“You come in here with bells on your ankles, so’s I’ll have to look at your ankles and your pretty pink feet,” said Fuller. “You kiss the cat, so’s I’ll have to think about how it’d be to be that cat,” said Fuller. “You call an old man an angel, so’s I’ll have to think about what it’d be like to be called an angel by you,” said Fuller. “You hide your key in front of everybody, so’s I’ll have to think about where that key is,” said Fuller.

He stood. “Miss,” he said, his voice full of pain, “you do everything you can to give lonely, ordinary people like me indigestion and the heeby-jeebies, and you wouldn’t even hold hands with me to keep me from falling off a cliff.”

He strode to the door. All eyes were on him. Hardly anyone noticed that his indictment had reduced Susanna to ashes of what she’d been moments before. Susanna now looked like what she really was—a muddle-headed nineteen-year-old clinging to a tiny corner of sophistication,

“It isn’t fair,” said Fuller. “There ought to be a law against girls acting and dressing like you do. It makes more people unhappy than it does happy. You know what I say to you, for going around making everybody want to kiss you?”

“No,” piped Susanna, every fuse in her nervous system blown.

“I say to you what you’d say to me, if I was to try and kiss you,” said Fuller grandly. He swung his arms in an umpire’s gesture for “out.” “The hell with you,” he said. He left, slamming the screen door.

He didn’t look back when the door slammed again a moment later, when the patter of running bare feet and the wild tinkling of little bells faded away in the direction of the firehouse.

That evening, Corporal Fuller’s widowed mother put a candle on the table, and fed him sirloin steak and strawberry shortcake in honor of his homecoming. Fuller ate the meal as though it were wet blotting paper, and he answered his mother’s cheery questions in a voice that was dead.

“Aren’t you glad to be home?” said his mother, when they’d finished their coffee.

“Sure,” said Fuller.

“What did you do today?” she said.

“Walked,” he said.

“Seeing all your old friends?” she said.

“Haven’t got any friends,” said Fuller.

His mother threw up her hands. “No friends?” she said. “You?”

“Times change. Ma,” said Fuller heavily. “Eighteen months is a long time. People leave town, people get married….”

“Marriage doesn’t kill people, does it?” she said.

Fuller didn’t smile. “Maybe not,” he said, “But it makes it awful hard for ‘em to find any place to fit old friends in.”

“Dougie isn’t married, is he?”

“He’s out west, Ma—with the Strategic Air Command,” said Fuller. The little dining room became as lonely as a bomber in the thin, cold stratosphere.

“Oh,” said his mother. “There must be somebody left.”

“Nope,” said Fuller. “I spent the whole morning on the phone, Ma. I might as well have been back in Korea. Nobody home.”

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Why, you couldn’t walk down Main Street without being almost trampled by friends.”

“Ma,” said Fuller hollowly, “after I ran out of numbers to call, you know what I did? I went down to the drugstore, Ma, and just sat there by the soda fountain, waiting for somebody to walk in—somebody I knew maybe just even a little. Ma,” he said in anguish, “all I knew was poor old Bearse Hinkley. I’m not kidding you one bit.” He stood, crumpling his napkin into a ball. “Ma, will you please excuse me?”

“Yes. Of course,” she said. “Where are you going now?” She beamed. “Out to call on some nice girl, I hope?”

Fuller threw the napkin down. “I’m going to get a cigar!” he said. “I don’t know any girls. They’re all married too.”

His mother paled, “I-I see,” she said. “I-I didn’t even know you smoked.”

“Ma,” said Fuller tautly, “can’t you get it through your head? I been away for eighteen months, Ma—eighteen months!”

“It is a long time, isn’t it?” said his mother, humbled by his passion. “Well, you go get your cigar.” She touched his arm. “And please don’t feel so lonesome. You just wait. Your life will be so full of people again, you won’t know which one to turn to. And, before you know it, you’ll meet some pretty young girl, and you’ll be married too.”

“I don’t intend to get married for some time, Mother,” said Fuller stuffily. “Not until I get through divinity school.”

“Divinity school!” said his mother. “When did you decide that?”

“This noon,” said Fuller.

“What happened this noon?”

“I had kind of a religious experience, Ma,” he said. “Something just made me speak out.”

“About what?” she said, bewildered.

In Fuller’s buzzing head there whirled a rhapsody of Susannas. He saw again all the professional temptresses who had tormented him in Korea, who had beckoned from makeshift bed-sheet movie screens, from curling pin-ups on damp tent walls, from ragged magazines in sandbagged pits. The Susannas had made fortunes, beckoning to lonely Corporal Fullers everywhere—beckoning with stunning beauty, beckoning the Fullers to come nowhere for nothing.

The wraith of a Puritan ancestor, stiff-necked, dressed in black, took possession of Fuller’s tongue. Fuller spoke with a voice that came across the centuries, the voice of a witch hanger, a voice redolent with frustration, self-righteousness, and doom.

“What did I speak out against?” he said. “Temptation.”

Fuller’s cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger. Even the moths had sense enough to stay away. Like a restless, searching red eye, it went up and down every street in the village, coming to rest at last, a wet, dead butt, before the firehouse.

Bearse Hinkley, the old pharmacist, sat at the wheel of the pumper, his eyes glazed with nostalgia—nostalgia for the days when he had been young enough to drive. And on his face, for all to see, was a dream of one more catastrophe, with all the young men away, when an old man or nobody would drive the pumper to glory one more time. He spent warm evenings there, behind the wheel—and had for years.

“Want a light for that thing?” he said to Corporal Fuller, seeing the dead cigar between Fuller’s lips.

“No, thanks, Mr. Hinkley,” he said. “All the pleasure’s out of it.”

“Beats me how anybody finds any pleasure in cigars in the first place,” said the old man.

“Matter of taste,” said Fuller. “No accounting for tastes.”

“One man’s meat’s another man’s poison,” said Hinkley. “Live and let live, I always say.” He glanced at the ceiling. Above it was the fragrant nest of Susanna and her black cat. “Me? All my pleasures are looking at what used to be pleasures.”

Fuller looked at the ceiling, too, meeting the unmentioned issue squarely. “If you were young,” he said, “you’d know why I said what I said to her. Beautiful, stuck-up girls give me a big pain.”

“Oh, I remember that,” said Hinkley. “I’m not so old I don’t remember the big pain.”

“If I have a daughter, I hope she isn’t beautiful,” said Fuller. “The beautiful girls at high school—by God, if they didn’t think they were something extra-special.”

“By God, if I don’t think so, too,” said Hinkley.

“They wouldn’t even look at you if you didn’t have a car and an allowance of twenty bucks a week to spend on ‘em,” said Fuller.

“Why should they?” said the old man cheerfully. “If I was a beautiful girl, I wouldn’t.” He nodded to himself. “Well—anyway, I guess you came home from the wars and settled that score. I guess you told her.”

“Ah-h-h,” said Fuller. “You can’t make any impression on them.”

“I dunno,” said Hinkley. “There’s a fine old tradition in the theater: The show must go on. You know, even if you got pneumonia or your baby’s dying, you still put on the show.”

“I’m all right,” said Fuller. “Who’s complaining? I feel fine.”

The old man’s white eyebrows went up. “Who’s talking about you?” he said. “I’m talking about her.”

Fuller reddened, mousetrapped by egoism. “She’ll be all right,” he said.

“She will?” said Hinkley. “Maybe she will. All I know is, the show’s started at the theater. She’s supposed to be in it and she’s still upstairs.”

“She is?” said Fuller, amazed.

“Has been,” said Hinkley, “ever since you paddled her and sent her home.”

Fuller tried to grin ironically. “Now, isn’t that too bad?” he said. His grin felt queasy and weak. “Well, goodnight, Mr. Hinkley.”

“Goodnight, soldier boy,” said Hinkley. “Goodnight.”

As noon drew near on the next day, the villagers along the main street seemed to grow stupid. Yankee shopkeepers made change lackadaisically, as though money didn’t matter any more. All thoughts were of the great cuckoo clock the firehouse had become. The question was: Had Corporal Fuller broken it or, at noon, would the little door on top fly open, would Susanna appear?

In the drugstore, old Bearse Hinkley fussed with Susanna’s New York papers, rumpling them in his anxiety to make them attractive. They were bait for Susanna.

Moments before noon, Corporal Fuller—the vandal himself—came in to the drugstore. On his face was a strange mixture of guilt and sore-headedness. He had spent the better part of the night awake, reviewing his grievances against beautiful women. All they think about is how beautiful they are, he’d said to himself at dawn. They wouldn’t even give you the time of day.

He walked along the row of soda-fountain stools and gave each empty stool a seemingly idle twist. He found the stool that had screeched so loudly the day before. He sat down on it, a monument of righteousness. No one spoke to him.

The fire siren gave its perfunctory wheeze for noon. And then, hearse-like, a truck from the express company drove up to the firehouse. Two men got out and climbed the stairs. Susanna’s hungry black cat jumped to the porch railing and arched its back as the expressmen disappeared into Susanna’s room. The cat spat when they staggered out with Susanna’s trunk.

Fuller was shocked. He glanced at Bearse Hinkley, and he saw that the old man’s look of anxiety had become the look of double pneumonia—dizzy, blind, drowning.

“Satisfied, corporal?” said the old man.

“I didn’t tell her to leave,” said Fuller.

“You didn’t leave her much choice,” said Hinkley.

“What does she care what I think?” said Fuller. “I didn’t know she was such a tender blossom.”

The old man touched Fuller’s arm lightly. “We all are, corporal—we all are,” he said. “I thought that was one of the few good things about sending a boy off to the Army. I thought that was where he could find out for sure he wasn’t the only tender blossom on earth. Didn’t you find that out?”

“I never thought I was a tender blossom,” said Fuller. “I’m sorry it turned out this way, but she asked for it.” His head was down. His ears were hot crimson.

“She really scared you stiff, didn’t she?” said Hinkley.

Smiles bloomed on the faces of the small audience that had drawn near on one pretext or another. Fuller appraised the smiles, and found that the old man had left him only one weapon—utterly humorless good citizenship.

“Who’s afraid?” he said stuffily. “I’m not afraid. I just think it’s a problem somebody ought to bring up and discuss.”

“It’s sure the one subject nobody gets tired of,” said Hinkley.

Fuller’s gaze, which had become a very shifty thing, passed over the magazine rack. There was tier upon tier of Susannas, a thousand square feet of wet-lipped smiles and sooty eyes and skin like cream. He ransacked his mind for a ringing phrase that would give dignity to his cause.

“I’m thinking about juvenile delinquency!” he said. He pointed to the magazines. “No wonder kids go crazy,”

“I know I did,” said the old man quietly. “I was as scared as you are.”

“I told you, I’m not afraid of her,” said Fuller.

“Good!” said Hinkley. “Then you’re just the man to take her papers to her. They’re paid for.” He dumped the papers in Fuller’s lap.

Fuller opened his mouth to reply. But he closed it again. His throat had tightened, and he knew that, if he tried to speak, he would quack like a duck.

”If you’re really not afraid, corporal,” said the old man, “that would be a very nice thing to do—a Christian thing to do.”

As he mounted the stairway to Susanna’s nest. Fuller was almost spastic in his efforts to seem casual.

Susanna’s door was unlatched. When Fuller knocked on it, it swung open. In Fuller’s imagination, her nest had been dark and still, reeking of incense, a labyrinth of heavy hangings and mirrors, with somewhere a Turkish corner, with somewhere a billowy bed in the form of a swan.

He saw Susanna and her room in truth now. The truth was the cheerless truth of a dirt-cheap Yankee summer rental—bare wood walls, three coat hooks, a linoleum rug, two gas burners, an iron cot, an ice- box, A tiny sink with naked pipes, a plastic drinking glass, two plates, a murky mirror, a frying pan, a saucepan, a can of soap powder.

The only harem touch was a white circle of talcum powder before the murky mirror. In the center of the circle were the prints of two bare feet. The marks of the toes were no bigger than pearls.

Fuller looked from the pearls to the truth of Susanna. Her back was to him. She was packing the last of her things into a suitcase.

She was now dressed for travel—dressed as properly as a missionary’s wife.

“Papers,” croaked Fuller. “Mr. Hinkley sent ‘em.”

“How very nice of Mr. Hinkiey,” said Susanna. She turned, “Tell him….” No more words came. She recognized him. She pursed her lips and her small nose reddened.

“Papers,” said Fuller emptily. “From Mr, Hinkley.”

“I heard you,” she said. “You just said that. Is that all you’ve got to say?”

Fuller flapped his hands limply at his sides, “I’m-I-I didn’t mean to make you leave,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You suggest I stay?” said Susanna wretchedly. “After I’ve been denounced in public as a scarlet woman? A tart? A wench?”

“Holy smokes, I never called you those things!” said Fuller.

“Did you ever stop to think what it’s like to be me?” she said. She patted her bosom. “There’s somebody living inside here, too, you know.”

“I know,” said Fuller. He hadn’t known, up to then.

“I have a soul,” she said.

“Sure you do,” said Fuller, trembling. He trembled because the room was filled with a profound intimacy. Susanna, the golden girl of a thousand tortured daydreams, was now discussing her soul, passionately, with Fuller the lonely. Fuller the homely. Fuller the bleak.

“I didn’t sleep a wink last night because of you,” said Susanna.

“Me?” He wished she’d get out of his life again. He wished she were in black and white, a thousandth of an inch thick on a magazine page. He wished he could turn the page and read about baseball or foreign affairs.

“What did you expect?” said Susanna. “I talked to you all night. You know what I said to you?”

“No,” said Fuller, backing away. She followed, and seemed to throw off heat like a big iron radiator. She was appallingly human.

“I’m not Yellowstone Park!” she said. “I’m not supported by taxes! I don’t belong to everybody! You don’t have any right to say anything about the way I look!”

“Good gravy!” said Fuller.

“I’m so tired of dumb toots like you!” said Susanna. She stamped her foot and suddenly looked haggard. “I can’t help it if you want to kiss me! Whose fault is that?”

Fuller could now glimpse his side of the question only dimly, like a diver glimpsing the sun from the ocean floor. “All I was trying to say was, you could be a little more conservative,” he said.

Susanna opened her arms. “Am I conservative enough now?” she said. “Is this all right with you?”

The appeal of the lovely girl made the marrow of Fuller’s bones ache. In his chest was a sigh like the lost chord. “Yes,” he said. And then he murmured, “Forget about me.”

Susanna tossed her head. “Forget about being run over by a truck,” she said. “What makes you so mean?”

“I just say what I think,” said Fuller.

“You think such mean things,” said Susanna, bewildered. Her eyes widened. “All through high school, people like you would look at me as if they wished I’d drop dead. They’d never dance with me, they’d never talk to me, they’d never even smile back.” She shuddered. “They’d just go slinking around like small-town cops. They’d look at me the way you did—like I’d just done something terrible.”

The truth of the indictment made Fuller itch all over. “Probably thinking about something else,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” said Susanna. “You sure weren’t. All of a sudden, you started yelling at me in the drugstore, and I’d never even seen you before.” She burst into tears. “What is the matter with you?”

Fuller looked down at the floor.

“Never had a chance with a girl like you—that’s all,” he said. “That hurts.”

Susanna looked at him wonderingly. “You don’t know what a chance is,” she said.

“A chance is a late-model convertible, a new suit, and twenty bucks,” said Fuller.

Susanna turned her back to him and closed her suitcase. “A chance is a girl,” she said. “You smile at her, you be friendly, you be glad she’s a girl.” She turned and opened her arms again. “I’m a girl. Girls are shaped this way,” she said. “If men are nice to me and make me happy, I kiss them sometimes. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes,” said Fuller humbly. She had rubbed his nose in the sweet reason that governed the universe. He shrugged. “I better be going. Good-bye.”

“Wait!” she said, “You can’t do that—just walk out, leaving me feeling so wicked.” She shook her head. “I don’t deserve to feel wicked.”

“What can I do?” said Fuller helplessly.

“You can take me for a walk down the main street, as though you were proud of me,” said Susanna. “You can welcome me back to the human race.” She nodded to herself. “You owe that to me.”

Corporal Norman Fuller, who had come home two nights before from eighteen bleak months in Korea, waited on the porch outside Susanna’s nest, with all the village watching.

Susanna had ordered him out while she changed, while she changed for her return to the human race. She had also called the express company and told them to bring her trunk back.

Fuller passed the time by stroking Susanna’s cat. “Hello, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” he said, over and over again. Saying, “Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” numbed him like a merciful drug.

He was saying it when Susanna came out of her nest. He couldn’t stop saying it, and she had to take the cat away from him, firmly, before she could get him to look at her, to offer his arm.

“So long, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,” said Fuller.

Susanna was barefoot, and she wore barbaric hoop earrings, and ankle bells. Holding Fuller’s arm lightly, she led him down the stairs, and began her stately, undulating, titillating, tinkling walk past the liquor store, the insurance agency, the real-estate office, the diner, the American Legion post, and the church, to the crowded drugstore.

“Now, smile and be nice,” said Susanna. “Show you’re not ashamed of me.”

“Mind if I smoke?” said Fuller.

“That’s very considerate of you to ask,” said Susanna. “No, I don’t mind at all.”

By steadying his right hand with his left, Corporal Fuller managed to light a cigar.

Miss Temptation The Saturday Evening Post

Vonnegut’s Typewriter: Vonnegut used this Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2200 during the 1970s to write books such as Breakfast of Champions and Jailbird. A bit of a technophobe, he never switched to word processors or computers, preferring the tactile nature of the typewriter instead.

Vonnegut’s Purple Heart: Vonnegut sardonically wrote in his final novel, Timequake, “I myself was awarded my country’s second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite.”

A Pack of Vonnegut’s Pall Mall Cigarettes: Throughout his life, Vonnegut was a smoker, a habit he dubbed “a classy way to commit suicide.” His children found this unopened pack of Pall Malls, his preferred brand, behind his bookcase after he died.

An Unopened Letter from Vonnegut’s Father: Vonnegut’s father, Kurt Sr., wrote this letter to his son during World War II, but it was lost in the mail for quite some time. When Vonnegut finally did receive it, he never opened it—and it remains sealed to this day.

Ceremonial Nazi Sword: Vonnegut wrote in Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five, “O’Hare didn’t have any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do.”

Rooster Lamp: Vonnegut always wrote by the light of this red rooster lamp. It originated in Indiana, traveled to the east coast with with the writer, and has now returned home to “roost.”

Alplaus Volunteer Firemen Reminder Card: In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character obsessively joins fire departments, spurred on by a horrific experience in World War II. Vonnegut did the same. He wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five that after the war he became “a volunteer firemen in the village of Alplaus, where [he] bought [his] first home.” This postcard from the Alplaus fire department, dated April 4, 1949, was sent as a reminder for a volunteers’ meeting.

Portrait of Kurt Sr.: This framed photograph of Vonnegut’s father hung on the wall of the writer’s work space for years and years.

Rejection Letter: The library has quite a few of Vonnegut’s rejection letters—he liked to save them—which are periodically rotated. This one from The Atlantic Monthly is dated August 29, 1949.

To learn more about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, visit the KVML at 340 N. Senate Avenue in Indianapolis. The library is open noon to 5 p.m. daily except Wednesdays (closed on Wednesdays). Admission is always free.

Treasures of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library The Saturday Evening Post

Mr. Helmholtz, a man of forty, who believed that his great belly was a sign of health, strength and dignity, smiled angelically, as though he were about to release the most exquisite sounds ever heard by men. Down came his baton.

“Blooooomp!” went the big sousaphones.

“Blat! Blat!” echoed the French horns, and the plodding, shrieking, querulous waltz was begun.

Mr. Helmholtz’s expression did not change as the brasses lost their places, as the woodwinds’ nerve failed and they became inaudible rather than have their mistakes heard, as the percussion section shifted into a rhythm pattern belonging to a march they knew and liked better.

“A-a-a-a-ta-ta , a-a-a-a-a-a, ta-ta-ta-ta!” sang Mr. Helmholtz in a loud tenor, singing the first-cornet part when the first cornetist, florid and perspiring, gave up and slouched in his chair, his instrument in his lap.

“Saxophones, let me hear you,” called Mr. Helmholtz. “Good!”

This was the C Band, and, for the C Band, the performance was good; it couldn’t have been more polished for the fifth session of the school year. Most of the youngsters were just starting out as bandsmen, and in the years ahead of them they would acquire artistry enough to move into the B Band, which met in the next hour. And finally the best of them would gain positions in the pride of the city, the Lincoln High School Ten Square Band.

The football team lost half its games and the basketball team lost two-thirds of its, but the band, in the ten years Mr. Helmholtz had been running it, had been second to none until last June. It had been first in the state to use flag twirlers, the first to use choral as well as instrumental numbers, the first to use triple-tonguing extensively, the first to march in breathtaking double time, the first to put a light in its bass drum. Lincoln High School awarded letter sweaters to the members of the A Band, and the sweaters were deeply respected—and properly so. The band had won every statewide high-school band competition in the last ten years—every one save the one in June.

As the members of the C Band dropped out of the waltz, one by one, as though mustard gas were coming out of the ventilators, Mr. Helmholtz continued to smile and wave his baton for the survivors, and to brood inwardly over the defeat his band had sustained in June, when Johnstown High School had won with a secret weapon, a bass drum seven feet in diameter. The judges, who were not musicians but politicians, had had eyes and ears for nothing but this eighth wonder of the world, and since then Mr. Helmholtz had thought of little else. But the school budget was already lopsided with band expenses. When the school board had given him the last special appropriation he’d begged so desperately—money to wire the plumes of the bandsmen’s hats with flashlight bulbs and batteries for night games—the board had made him swear like a habitual drunkard that, so help him God, this was the last time.

Only two members of the C Band were playing now, a clarinetist and a snare drummer, both playing loudly, proudly, confidently, and all wrong. Mr. Helmholtz, coming out of his wistful dream of a bass drum bigger than the one that had beaten him, administered the coup de grace to the waltz by clattering his stick against his music stand. “All righty, all righty,” he said cheerily, and he nodded his congratulations to the two who had persevered to the bitter end.

Walter Plummer, the clarinetist, nodded back soberly, like a concert soloist receiving an ovation led by the director of a symphony orchestra. He was small, but with a thick chest developed in summers spent at the bottom of swimming pools, and he could hold a note longer than anyone in the A Band, much longer, but that was all he could do. He drew back his tired, reddened lips, showing the two large front teeth that gave him the look of a squirrel, adjusted his reed, limbered his fingers, and awaited the next challenge to his virtuosity.

This would be Plummer’s third year in the C Band, Mr. Helmholtz thought, with a mixture of pity and fear. Nothing, apparently, could shake Plummer’s determination to earn the right to wear one of the sacred letters of the A Band, so far, terribly far away.

Mr. Helmholtz had tried to tell Plummer how misplaced his ambitions were, to recommend other fields for his great lungs and enthusiasm, where pitch would be unimportant. But Plummer was blindly in love, not with music, but with the letter sweaters, and, being as tone deaf as boiled cabbage, he could detect nothing in his own playing to be discouraged about.

“Remember, now,” said Mr. Helmholtz to the C Band, “Friday is challenge day, so be on your toes. The chairs you have now were assigned arbitrarily. On challenge day it’ll be up to you to prove which chair you deserve.” He avoided the narrowed, confident eyes of Plummer, who had taken the first clarinetist’s chair without consulting the seating plan posted on the bulletin board. Challenge day occurred every two weeks, and on that day any bandsman could challenge anyone ahead of him to a contest for his position, with Mr. Helmholtz as utterly dispassionate judge.

Plummer’s hand was raised, its fingers snapping urgently.

“Yes, Plummer?” said Mr. Helmholtz, smiling bleakly. He had come to dread challenge days because of Plummer, and had come to think of it as Plummer’s day. Plummer never challenged anybody in the C Band or even in the B Band, but stormed the organization at the very top, challenging, as was unfortunately the privilege of all, only members of the A Band. The waste of the A Band’s time was troubling enough, but infinitely more painful for Mr. Helmholtz were Plummer’s looks of stunned disbelief when he heard Mr. Helmholtz’s decision that he hadn’t outplayed the men he’d challenged. And Mr. Helmholtz was thus rebuked not just on challenge days, but every day, just before supper, when Plummer delivered the evening paper. “Something about challenge day, Plummer?” said Mr. Helmholtz uneasily.

“Mr. Helmholtz,” said Plummer coolly, “I’d like to come to A Band session that day.”

“All right—if you feel up to it.” Plummer always felt up to it, and it would have been more of a surprise if Plummer had announced that he wouldn’t be at the A Band session.

“I’d like to challenge Flammer.”

The rustling of sheet music and clicking of instrument-case latches stopped. Flammer was the first clarinetist in the A Band, a genius that not even members of the A Band would have had the gall to challenge.

Mr. Helmholtz cleared his throat. “I admire your spirit, Plummer, but isn’t that rather ambitious for the first of the year? Perhaps you should start out with, say, challenging Ed Delaney.” Delaney held down the last chair in the B Band.

“You don’t understand,” said Plummer patiently. “You haven’t noticed I have a new clarinet.”

“H’m’m? Oh—well, so you do.”

Plummer stroked the satin-black barrel of the instrument as though it were like King Arthur’s sword, giving magical powers to whoever possessed it. “It’s as good as Flammer’s,” said Plummer. “Better, even.”

There was a warning in his voice, telling Mr. Helmholtz that the days of discrimination were over, that nobody in his right mind would dare to hold back a man with an instrument like this.

“Um,” said Mr. Helmholtz. “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.”

After practice, he was forced into close quarters with Plummer again in the crowded hallway. Plummer was talking darkly to a wide-eyed freshman bandsman.

“Know why the band lost to Johnstown High last June?” asked Plummer, seemingly ignorant of the fact that he was back to back with Mr. Helmholtz. “Because,” said Plummer triumphantly, “they stopped running the band on the merit system. Keep your eyes open on Friday.”

Mr. George M. Helmholtz lived in a world of music, and even the throbbing of his headaches came to him musically, if painfully, as the deep-throated boom of a cart-borne bass drum seven feet in diameter. It was late afternoon on the first challenge day of the new school year. He was sitting in his living room, his eyes covered, awaiting another sort of thump—the impact of the evening paper, hurled against the clapboard of the front of the house by Walter Plummer.

As Mr. Helmholtz was telling himself that he would rather not have his newspaper on challenge day, since Plummer came with it, the paper was delivered with a crash that would have done credit to a siege gun.

“Plummer!” he cried furiously, shaken.

“Yes, sir?” said Plummer solicitously from the sidewalk.

Mr. Helmholtz shuffled to the door in his carpet slippers. “Please, my boy,” he said plaintively, “can’t we be friends?”

“Sure—why not?” said Plummer, shrugging.

“Let bygones be bygones, is what I say.” He gave a bitter imitation of an amiable chuckle. “Water over the dam. It’s been two hours now since the knife was stuck in me and twisted.”

Mr. Helmholtz sighed. “Have you got a moment? It’s time we had a talk, my boy.”

Plummer kicked down the standard on his bicycle, hid his papers under shrubbery, and walked in sullenly. Mr. Helmholtz gestured at the most comfortable chair in the room, the one in which he’d been sitting, but Plummer chose instead to sit on the edge of a hard one with a straight back.

Mr. Helmholtz, forming careful sentences in his mind before speaking, opened his newspaper, and laid it open on the coffee table.

“My boy,” he said at last, “God made all kinds of people: some who can run fast, some who can write wonderful stories, some who can paint pictures, some who can sell anything, some who can make beautiful music. But He didn’t make anybody who could do everything well. Part of the growing-up process is finding out what we can do well and what we can’t do well.” He patted Plummer’s shoulder gently. “The last part, finding out what we can’t do, is what hurts most about growing up. But everybody has to face it, and then go in search of his true self.”

Plummer’s head was sinking lower and lower on his chest and Mr. Helmholtz hastily pointed out a silver lining. “For instance, Flammer could never run a business like a paper route, keeping records, getting new customers. He hasn’t that kind of a mind, and couldn’t do that sort of thing if his life depended on it.”

“You’ve got a point,” said Plummer, looking up suddenly with unexpected brightness. “A guy’s got to be awful one-sided to be as good at one thing as Flammer is. I think it’s more worthwhile to try to be better rounded. No, Flammer beat me fair and square today, and I don’t want you to think I’m a bad sport about that. It isn’t that that gets me.”

“That’s very mature of you,” said Mr. Helmholtz. “But what I was trying to point out to you was that we’ve all got weak points, and—”

Plummer charitably waved him to silence, “You don’t have to explain to me, Mr. Helmholtz. With a job as big as you’ve got, it’d be a miracle if you did the whole thing right.”

“Now, hold on, Plummer!” said Mr. Helmholtz.

“All I’m asking is that you look at it from my point of view,” said Plummer. “No sooner’d I come back from challenging A Band material, no sooner’d I come back from playing my heart out, than you turned those C Band kids loose on me. You and I know we were just giving ‘em the feel of challenge days, and that I was all played out. But did you tell them that? Heck, no, you didn’t, Mr. Helmholtz; and those kids all think they can play better than me. That’s all I’m sore about, Mr. Helmholtz. They think it means something, me in the last chair of the C Band.”

“Plummer,” said Mr. Helmholtz evenly, “I have been trying to tell you something as kindly as possible, but apparently the only way to get it across to you is to tell it to you straight.”

“Go ahead and quash criticism,” said Plummer, standing.

“Quash?”

“Quash,” said Plummer with finality. He headed for the door. “I’m probably ruining any chances for getting into the A Band by speaking out like this, Mr. Helmholtz, but frankly, it’s incidents like what happened to me today that lost you the band competition last June.”

“It was a seven-foot bass drum!”

“Well, get one for Lincoln High and see how you make out then.”

“I’d give my right arm for one!” said Mr.  Helmholtz, forgetting the point at issue and remembering his all-consuming dream.

Plummer paused on the threshold. “One like the Knights of Kandahar use in their parades?”

“That’s the ticket!” Mr. Helmholtz imagined the Knights of Kandahar’s huge drum, the showpiece of every local parade. He tried to think of it with the Lincoln High School Black Panther painted on it. “Yes, sir!” When he returned to earth, Plummer was on his bicycle.

Mr. Helmholtz started to shout after Plummer, to bring him back and tell him bluntly that he didn’t have the remotest chance of getting out of C Band ever; that he would never be able to understand that the mission of a band wasn’t simply to make noises, but to make special kinds of noises. But Plummer was off and away.

Temporarily relieved until next challenge day, Mr. Helmholtz sat down to enjoy his paper, to read that the treasurer of the Knights of Kandahar, a respected citizen, had disappeared with the organization’s funds, leaving behind and unpaid the knight’s bills for the past year and a half. “We’ll pay a hundred cents on the dollar, if we have to sell everything but the Sacred Mace,” the Sublime Chamberlain of the Inner Shrine was on record as saying.

Mr. Helmholtz didn’t know any of the people involved, and he yawned and turned to the funnies. He gasped suddenly, turned to the front page again, looked up a number in the phone book, and dialed feverishly.

“Zum-zum-zum-zum,” went the busy signal in his ear. He dropped the telephone clattering into its cradle. Hundreds of people, he thought, must be trying to get in touch with the Sublime Chamberlain of the Inner Shrine of the Knights of Kandahar at this moment. He looked up at his flaking ceiling in prayer. But none of them, he prayed, were after a bargain in a cart-borne bass drum.

He dialed again and again, always getting the busy signal, and walked out on his porch to relieve some of the tension building up in him. He would be the only one bidding on the drum, he told himself, and he could name his own price. Good Lord! If he offered fifty dollars for it, he could probably have it! He’d put up his own money, and get the school to pay him back in three years, when the plumes with the electric lights in them were paid for in full.

He lit a cigarette, and laughed like a department store Santa Claus at this magnificent stroke of fortune. As he exhaled happily, his gaze dropped from heaven to his lawn, and he saw Plummer’s undelivered newspapers lying beneath the shrubbery.

He went inside and called the Sublime Chamberlain again, with the same results. To make the time go, and to do a Christian good turn, he called Plummer’s home to let him know where the papers were mislaid. But the Plummers’ line was busy too.

He dialed alternately the Plummers’ number and the Sublime Chamberlain’s number for fifteen minutes before getting a ringing signal.

“Yes?” said Mrs. Plummer.

“This is Mr. Helmholtz, Mrs. Plummer. Is Walter there?”

“He was here a minute ago, telephoning, but he just went out of here like a shot!”

“Looking for his papers? He left them under my spiraea.”

“He did? Heavens, I have no idea where he was going. He didn’t say anything about his papers, but I thought I overheard something about selling his clarinet.” She sighed and then laughed nervously. “Having money of their own makes them awfully independent. He never tells me anything.”

“Well, you tell him I think maybe it’s for the best, his selling his clarinet. And tell him where his papers are.”

It was unexpected good news that Plummer had at last seen the light about his musical career, and Mr. Helmholtz now called the Sublime Chamberlain’s home again for more good news. He got through this time, but was momentarily disappointed to learn that the man had just left on some sort of lodge business.

For years Mr. Helmholtz had managed to smile and keep his wits about him in C Band practice sessions. But on the day after his fruitless efforts to find out anything about the Knights of Kandahar’s bass drum, his defenses were down, and the poisonous music penetrated to the roots of his soul.

“No, no, no!” he cried in pain, and he threw his white baton against the brick wall. The springy stick bounded off the bricks and fell into an empty folding chair at the rear of the clarinet section–Plummer’s empty chair.

As Mr. Helmholtz, red-faced and apologetic, retrieved the baton, he found himself unexpectedly moved by the symbol of the empty chair. No one else, he realized, no matter how untalented, could ever fill the last chair in the organization as well as Plummer had. He looked up to find many of the bandsmen contemplating the chair with him, as though they, too, sensed that something great, in a fantastic way, had disappeared, and that life would be a good bit duller on account of it.

During the ten minutes between the C Band and B Band sessions, Mr. Helmholtz hurried to his office and again tried to get in touch with the Sublime Chamberlain of the Knights of Kandahar, and was again told what he’d been told substantially several times during the night before and again in the morning:

“Lord knows where he’s off to now. He was in for just a second, but went right out again. I gave him your name, so I expect he’ll call you when he gets a minute. You’re the drum gentleman, aren’t you?”

“That’s right—the drum gentleman.”

The buzzers in the hall were sounding, marking the beginning of another class period. Mr. Helmholtz wanted to stay by the phone until he’d caught the Sublime Chamberlain and closed the deal, but the B Band was waiting—and after that it would be the A Band.

An inspiration came to him. He called Western Union, and sent a telegram to the man, offering fifty dollars for the drum, and requesting a reply collect.

But no reply came during B Band practice. Nor had one come by the halfway point of the A Band session. The bandsmen, a sensitive, high-strung lot, knew immediately that their director was on edge about something, and the rehearsal went badly. Mr. Helmholtz was growing so nervous about the drum that he stopped a march in the middle because of a small noise coming from the large double doors at one end of the room, where someone out-of-doors was apparently working on the lock.

“All right, all right, let’s wait until the racket dies down so we can hear ourselves,” he said.

At that moment, a student messenger handed him a telegram. Mr. Helmholtz beamed, tore open the envelope, and read: DRUM SOLD STOP COULD YOU USE A STUFFED CAMEL ON WHEELS STOP.

The wooden doors opened with a shriek of rusty hinges, and a snappy autumn gust showered the band with leaves. Plummer stood in the great opening, winded and perspiring, harnessed to a drum on wheels that could have contained a dozen youngsters his size.

“I know this isn’t challenge day,” said Plummer, “but I thought you might make an exception in my case.”

He walked in with splendid dignity, the huge apparatus grumbling along behind him.

Mr. Helmholtz rushed to meet him, and crushed Plummer’s right hand between both of his. “Plummer, boy! You got it for us! Good boy! I’II pay you whatever you paid for it,” he cried, and in his joy he added rashly, “and a nice little profit besides. Good boy!”

Plummer laughed modestly. “Sell it?” he said. “Heck fire, I’ll give it to you when I graduate,” he said grandly. “All I want to do is play it in the A Band while I’m here.”

“But, Plummer,” said Mr. Helmholtz uneasily, “you don’t know anything about drums.”

“I’ll practice hard,” said Plummer reassuringly. He started to back his instrument into an aisle between the tubas and the trombones—like a man backing a trailer truck into a narrow alley—backing it toward the percussion section, where the amazed musicians were hastily making room.

“Now, just a minute,” said Mr. Helmholtz, chuckling as though Plummer were joking, and knowing full well he wasn’t. “There’s more to drum playing than just lambasting the thing whenever you take a notion to, you know. It takes years to be a drummer.”

“Well,” said Plummer cheerfully, “the quicker I get at it, the quicker I’ll get good.”

“What I meant was that I’m afraid you won’t be quite ready for the A Band for a little while.”

Plummer stopped his backing.

“How long?” he asked suspiciously.

“Oh, sometime in your senior year, perhaps. Meanwhile, you could let the band have your drum to use until you’re ready.”

Mr. Helmholtz’s skin began to itch all over as Plummer stared at him coldly, appraisingly. “Until hell freezes over?” Plummer said at last.

Mr. Helmholtz sighed resignedly.

“I’m afraid that’s about right.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s what I tried to tell you yesterday afternoon: nobody can do everything well, and we’ve all got to face up to our limitations. You’re a fine boy, Plummer, but you’ll never be a musician—not in a million years. The only thing to do is what we all have to do now and then: smile, shrug, and say ‘Well, that’s just one of those things that’s not for me.’ ”

Tears formed on the rims of Plummer’s eyes, but went no farther. He walked slowly toward the doorway, with the drum tagging after him. He paused on the doorsill for one more wistful look at the A Band that would never have a chair for him. He smiled feebly and shrugged. “Some people have eight-foot drums,” he said kindly, “and others don’t, and that’s just the way life is. You’re a fine man, Mr. Helmholtz, but you’ll never get this drum in a million years, because I’m going to give it to my mother for a coffee table.”

“Plummer!” cried Mr. Helmholtz. His plaintive voice was drowned out by the rumble and rattle of the big drum as it followed its small master down the school’s concrete driveway.

Mr. Helmholtz ran after him with a floundering, foot-slapping gait. Plummer and his drum had stopped at an intersection to wait for a light to change, and Mr. Helmholtz caught him there, and seized his arm. “We’ve got to have that drum,” he panted. “How much do you want?”

“Smile,” said Plummer. “Shrug! That’s what I did.” Plummer did it again. “See? So I can’t get into the A Band, so you can’t have the drum. Who cares? All part of the growing-up process.”

“The situations aren’t the same!” said Mr. Helmholtz furiously. “Not at all the same!”

“You’re right,” said Plummer, without a smile. “I’m growing up, and you’re not.”

The light changed, and Plummer left Mr. Helmholtz on the corner, stunned.

Mr. Helmholtz had to run after him again. “Plummer,” he said sweetly, “you’ll never be able to play it well.”

“Rub it in,” said Plummer, bitterly.

“But you’re doing a beautiful job of pulling it, and if we got it, I don’t think we’d ever be able to find anybody who could do it as well.”

Plummer stopped, backed and turned the instrument on the narrow sidewalk with speed and hairbreadth precision, and headed back for Lincoln High School, skipping once to get in step with Mr. Helmholtz.

As they approached the school they both loved, they met and passed a group of youngsters from the C Band, who carried unscarred instrument cases and spoke self-consciously of music.

“Got a good bunch of kids coming up this year,” said Plummer judiciously. “All they need’s a little seasoning.”

The No-Talent Kid The Saturday Evening Post

“The Kid Nobody Could Handle” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Kid Nobody Could Handle The Saturday Evening Post