Bagombo Snuff Box

by Kurt Vonnegut

  “You thank me for telling all those lies?” she said.

  “I thank you for making a very small beginning in repairing the damage you’ve done,” he said.

  “My own father, the governor of the state of Indiana,” said Annie, “ordered me to lie. I’ll never forget that.”

  “That isn’t the last of the orders you’ll get from me,” he said.

  Annie said nothing out loud, but in her mind she placed a curse on her parents. She no longer owed them anything. She was going to be cold and indifferent to them for the rest of her days. The curse went into effect immediately.

  Annie’s mother, Mary, came down the spiral staircase. She had been listening to the lies from the landing above. “I think you handled that very well,” she said to her husband.

  “As well as I could, under the circumstances,” he said.

  “I only wish we could come out and say what there really is to say,” said Annie’s mother. “If we could only just come out and say we’re not against love, and we’re not against people who don’t have money.” She started to touch her daughter comfortingly, but was warned against it by Annie’s eyes. “We’re not snobs, darling—and we’re not insensitive to love. Love is the most wonderful thing there is.”

  The governor turned away and glared out a window.

  “We believe in love,” said Annie’s mother. “You’ve seen how much I love your father and how much your father loves me—and how much your father and I love you.”

  “If you’re going to come out and say something, say it,” said the governor.

  “I thought I was,” said his wife.

  “Talk money, talk breeding, talk education, talk friends, talk interests,” said the governor, “and then you can get back to love if you want.” He faced his women. “Talk happiness, for heaven’s sake,” he said. “See that boy again, keep this thing going, marry him when you can do it legally, when we can’t stop you,” he said to Annie, “and not only will you be the unhappiest woman alive, but he’ll be the unhappiest man alive. It will be a mess you can truly be proud of, because you will have married without having met a single condition for a happy marriage—and by single condition I mean one single, solitary thing in common.

  “What did you plan to do for friends?” he said. “His gang at the poolroom or your gang at the country club? Would you start out by buying him a nice house and nice furniture and a nice automobile—or would you wait for him to buy those things, which he’ll be just about ready to pay for when hell freezes over? Do you like comic books as well as he does? Do you like the same kind of comic books?” cried the governor.

  “Who do you think you are?” he asked Annie. “You think you’re Eve, and God only made one Adam for you?”

  “Yes,” said Annie, and she went upstairs to her room and slammed the door. Moments later music came from her room. She was playing a record.

  The governor and his wife stood outside the door and listened to the words of the song. These were the words:

  They say we don’t know what love is,

  Boo-wah-wah, uh-huh, yeah.

  But we know what the message in the stars above is,

  Boo-wah-wah, uh-huh, yeah.

  So hold me, hold me, baby,

  And you’ll make my poor heart sing,

  Because everything they tell us, baby,

  Why, it just don’t mean a thing.

  Eight miles away, eight miles due south, through the heart of town and out the other side, reporters were clumping onto the front porch of the boy’s father’s house.

  It was old, cheap, a carpenter’s special, a 1926 bungalow. Its front windows looked out into the perpetual damp twilight of a huge front porch. Its side windows looked into the neighbors’ windows ten feet away. Light could reach the interior only through a window in the back. As luck would have it, the window let light into a tiny pantry.

  The boy and his father and his mother did not hear the reporters knocking. The television set in the living room and the radio in the kitchen were both on, blatting away, and the family was having a row in the dining room, halfway between them.

  The row was actually about everything in creation, but it had for its subject of the moment the boy’s mustache. He had been growing it for a month and had just been caught by his father in the act of blacking it with shoe polish.

  The boy’s name was Rice Brentner. It was true, as the papers said, that Rice had spent time in reform school. That was three years behind him now His crime had been, at the age of thirteen, the theft of sixteen automobiles within a period of a week. Except for the escapade with Annie, he hadn’t been in any real trouble since.

  “You march into the bathroom,” said his mother, “and you shave that awful thing off.”

  Rice did not march. He stayed right where he was.

  “You heard your mother,” his father said. When Rice still didn’t budge, his father tried to hurt him with scorn. “Makes him feel like a man, I guess—like a great big man,” he said.

  “Doesn’t make him look like a man,” said his mother. “It makes him look like an I-don’t-know-what-it-is.”

  “You just named him,” said his father. “That’s exactly what he is: an I-don’t-know-what-it-is.” Finding a label like that seemed to ease the boy’s father some. He was, as one newspaper and then all the newspapers had pointed out, an eighty-nine-dollar-and sixty-two-cent-a-week supply clerk in the main office of the public school system. He had reason to resent the thoroughness of the reporter who had dug that figure from the public records. The sixty-two cents galled him in particular. “An eighty-nine-dollar-and-sixty-two-cent-a-week supply clerk has an I-don’t-know-what-it-is for a son,” he said. “The Brentner family is certainly covered with glory today.”

  “Do you realize how lucky you are not to be in jail—rotting?” said Rice’s mother. “If they had you in jail, they’d not only shave off your mustache, without even asking you about it—they’d shave off every hair on your head.”

  Rice wasn’t listening much, only enough to keep himself smoldering comfortably. What he was thinking about was his car. He had paid for it with money he himself had earned. It hadn’t cost his family a dime. Rice now swore to himself that if his parents tried to take his car away from him, he would leave home for good.

  “He knows about jail. He’s been there before,” said his father.

  “Let him keep his mustache if he wants to,” said his mother. “I just wish he’d look in a mirror once to see how silly it makes him look.”

  “All right—let him keep it,” said his father, “but I’ll tell you one thing he isn’t going to keep, and I give you my word of honor on that, and that’s the automobile.”

  “Amen!” said his mother. “He’s going to march down to a used-car lot, and he’s going to sell the car, and then he’s going to march over to the bank and put the money in his savings account, and then he’s going to march home and give us the bankbook.” As she uttered this complicated promise she became more and more martial until, at the end, she was marching in place like John Philip Sousa.

  “You said a mouthful!” said her husband.

  And now that the subject of the automobile had been introduced, it became the dominant theme and the loudest one of all. The old blue Ford was such a frightening symbol of disastrous freedom to Rice’s parents that they could yammer about it endlessly.

  And they just about did yammer about it endlessly this time.

  “Well—the car is going,” said Rice’s mother, winded at last.

  “That’s the end of the car,” said his father.

  “And that’s the end of me,” said Rice. He walked out the back door, got into his car, turned on the radio, and drove away.

  Music came from the radio. The song told of two teenagers who were going to get married, even though they were dead broke. The chorus of it went like this:

  We’ll have no fancy drapes—

  No stove, no carpet, no refrigerator.

  But our nest
will look like a hunk of heaven,

  Because love, baby, is our interior decorator.

  Rice went to a phone booth a mile from the Governor’s Mansion. He called the number that was the governor’s family’s private line.

  He pitched his voice a half-octave higher, and he asked to speak to Annie.

  It was the butler who answered. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I don’t think she’s taking any calls just now. You want to leave your name?”

  “Tell her it’s Bob Counsel,” said Rice. Counsel was the son of a man who had gotten very rich on coin-operated laundries. He spent most of his time at the country club. He was in love with Annie.

  “I didn’t recognize your voice for a minute there, Mr. Counsel,” said the butler. “Please hold on, sir, if you’d be so kind.”

  Seconds later Annie’s mother was on the phone. She wanted to believe so desperately that the caller was the polite and attractive and respectable Bob Counsel that she didn’t even begin to suspect a fraud. And she did almost all the talking, so Rice had only to grunt from time to time.

  “Oh Bob, oh Bob, oh Bob—you dear boy,” she said. “How nice, how awfully nice of you to call. It was what I was praying for! She has to talk to somebody her own age. Oh, her father and I have talked to her, and I guess she heard us, but there’s such a gap between the generations these days.

  “This thing—this thing Annie’s been through,” said Annie’s mother, “it’s more like a nervous breakdown than anything else. It isn’t really a nervous breakdown, but she isn’t herself—isn’t the Annie we know. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  “Yup,” said Rice.

  “Oh, she’ll be so glad to hear from you, Bob—to know she’s still got her old friends, her real friends to fall back on. Hearing your voice,” said the governor’s wife, “our Annie will know everything’s going to get back to normal again.”

  She went to get Annie—and had a ding-dong wrangle with her that Rice could hear over the telephone. Annie said she hated Bob Counsel, thought he was a jerk, a stuffed shirt, and a mamma’s boy. Somebody thought to cover the mouthpiece at that point, so Rice didn’t hear anything more until Annie came on the line.

  “Hullo,” she said emptily.

  “I thought you might enjoy a ride—to kind of take your mind off your troubles,” said Rice.

  “What?” said Annie.

  “This is Rice,” he said. “Tell your mother you’re going to the club to play tennis with good old Bob Counsel. Meet me at the gas station at Forty-sixth and Illinois.”

  So half an hour later, they took off again in the boy’s old blue Ford, with baby shoes dangling from the rearview mirror, with a pile of comic books on the burst backseat.

  The car radio sang as Annie and Rice left the city limits behind:

  Oh, baby, baby, baby,

  What a happy, rockin’ day,

  Cause your sweet love and kisses

  Chase those big, black blues away.

  And the exhilarating chase began again.

  Annie and Rice crossed the Ohio border on a back road and listened to the radio talk about them above the sound of gravel rattling in the fenders.

  They had listened impatiently to news of a riot in Bangalore, of an airplane collision in Ireland, of a man who blew up his wife with nitroglycerine in West Virginia. The newscaster had saved the biggest news for last—that Annie and Rice, Juliet and Romeo, were playing hare and hounds again.

  The newscaster called Rice “Rick,” something nobody had ever called him, and Rice and Annie liked that.

  “I’m going to call you Rick from now on,” said Annie.

  “That’s all right with me,” said Rice.

  “You look more like a Rick than a Rice,” said Annie. “How come they named you Rice?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you?” said Rice.

  “If you did,” she said, “I’ve forgot.”

  The fact was that Rice had told her about a dozen times why he was named Rice, but she never really listened to him. For that matter, Rice never really listened to her, either. Both would have been bored stiff if they had listened, but they spared themselves that.

  So their conversations were marvels of irrelevance. There were only two subjects in common—self-pity and something called love.

  “My mother had some ancestor back somewhere named Rice,” said Rice. “He was a doctor, and I guess he was pretty famous.”

  “Dr. Siebolt is the only person who ever tried to understand me as a human being,” said Annie. Dr. Siebolt was the governor’s family physician.

  “There’s some other famous people back there somewhere, too—on my mother’s side,” said Rice. “I don’t know what all they did, but there’s good blood back there.”

  “Dr. Siebolt would hear what I was trying to say,” said Annie. “My parents never had time to listen.”

  “That’s why my old man always got burned up at me—because I’ve got so much of my mother’s blood,” said Rice. “You know—I want to do things and have things and live and take chances, and his side of the family isn’t that way at all.”

  “I could talk to Dr. Siebolt about love—I could talk to him about anything,” said Annie. “With my parents there were just all kinds of things I had to keep bottled up.”

  “Safety first—that’s their motto,” said Rice. “Well, that isn’t my motto. They want me to end up the way they have, and I’m just not that kind of a person.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to make somebody bottle things up,” said Annie. “I used to cry all the time, and my parents never could figure out why.”

  “That’s why I stole those cars,” said Rice. “I just all of a sudden went crazy one day. They were trying to make me act like my father, and I’m just not that kind of man. They never understood me. They don’t understand me yet.”

  “But the worst thing,” said Annie, “was then my own father ordered me to lie. That was when I realized that my parents didn’t care about truth. All they care about is what people think.”

  “This summer,” said Rice, “I was actually making more money than my old man or any of his brothers. That really ate into him. He couldn’t stand that.”

  “My mother started talking to me about love,” said Annie, “and it was all I could do to keep from screaming, ‘You don’t know what love is! You never have known what it is!’”

  “My parents kept telling me to act like a man,” said Rice. “Then, when I really started acting like one, they went right through the roof. What’s a guy supposed to do?” he said.

  “Even if I screamed at her,” said Annie, “she wouldn’t hear it. She never listens. I think she’s afraid to listen. Do you know what I mean?”

  “My older brother was the favorite in our family,” said Rice. “He could do no wrong, and I never could do anything right, as far as they were concerned. You never met my brother, did you?”

  “My father killed something in me when he told me to lie,” said Annie.

  “We sure are lucky we found each other,” said Rice.

  “What?” said Annie.

  “I said, ‘We sure are lucky we found each other,’” said Rice.

  Annie took his hand. “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes,” she said fervently. “When we first met out there on the golf course, I almost died because I knew how right we were for each other. Next to Dr. Siebolt, you’re the first person I ever really felt close to.”

  “Dr. who?” said Rice.

  In the study of the Governor’s Mansion, Governor Southard had his radio on. Annie and Rice had just been picked up, twenty miles west of Cleveland, and Southard wanted to hear what the news services had to say about it.

  So far he had heard only music, and was hearing it now:

  Let’s not go to school today,

  Turtle dove, turtle dove.

  Let’s go out in the woods and play,

  Play with love, play with love.

  The governor turned the radio off. “How do they dar
e put things like that on the air?” he said. “The whole American entertainment industry does nothing but tell children how to kill their parents—and themselves in the bargain.”

  He put the question to his wife and to the Brentners, the parents of the boy, who were sitting in the study with him.

  The Brentners shook their heads, meaning that they did not know the answer to the governor’s question. They were appalled at having been called into the presence of the governor. They had said almost nothing—nothing beyond abject, rambling, ga-ga apologies at the very beginning. Since then they had been in numb agreement with anything the governor cared to say.

  He had said plenty, wrestling with what he called the toughest decision of his life. He was trying to decide, with the concurrence of his wife and the Brentners, how to make the runaways grow up enough to realize what they were doing, how to fix them so they would never run away again.

  “Any suggestions, Mr. Brentner?” he said to Rice’s father.

  Rice’s father shrugged. “I haven’t got any control over him, sir,” he said. “If somebody’d tell me a way to get control of him, I’d be glad to try it, but …” He let the sentence trail off to nothing.

  “But what?” said the governor.

  “He’s pretty close to being a man now, Governor,” said Rice’s father, “and he’s just about as easy to control as any other man—and that isn’t very easy.” He murmured something else, which the governor didn’t catch, and shrugged again.

  “Beg your pardon?” said the governor.

  Rice’s father said it again, scarcely louder than the first time. “I said he doesn’t respect me.”

  “By heaven, he would if you’d have the guts to lay down the law to him and make it stick!” said the governor with hot righteousness.

  Rice’s mother now did the most courageous thing in her life. She was boiling mad about having all the blame put on her son, and she now squared the governor of Indiana away. “Maybe if we’d raised our son the way you raised your daughter,” she said, “maybe then we wouldn’t have the trouble we have today.”