When asked which myth he meant to represent, Le Fèvre, replied that there were
thousands of myths like that, with the woman a mortal and the pony a god.
He was sentenced to six months in prison. He died there of pneumonia. So it goes.
Billy and the Scouts were skinny people. Roland Weary had fat to burn. He was a
roaring furnace under all his layers of wool and straps and canvas. He had so much
energy that he bustled back and forth between Billy and the scouts, delivering dumb
messages which nobody had sent and which nobody was pleased to receive. He also
began to suspect, since he was so much busier than anybody else, that he was the leader.
He was so hot and bundled up, in fact, that he had no sense of danger. His vision of the
outside world was limited to what he could see through a narrow slit between the rim of
his helmet and his scarf from home, which concealed his baby face from the bridge of his
nose on down. He was so snug in there that he was able to pretend that he was safe at
home, having survived the war, and that he was telling his parents and his sister a true
war story-whereas the true war story was still going on.
Weary's version of the true war story went like this: There was a big German attack,
and Weary and his antitank buddies fought like hell until everybody was killed but
Weary. So it goes. And then Weary tied in with two scouts, and they became close
friends immediately, and they decided to fight them way back to their own lines. They
were going to travel fast. They were damned if they'd surrender. They shook hands all
around. They called themselves 'The Three Musketeers.'
But then this damn college kid, who was so weak he shouldn't even have been in the
army, asked if he could come along. He didn't even have a gun or a knife. He didn't even
have a helmet or a cap. He couldn't even walk right-kept bobbing up-and down, up-anddown,
driving everybody crazy, giving their position away. He was pitiful. The Three
Musketeers pushed and carried and dragged the college kid all the way back to their own
lines, Weary's story went. They saved his God-damned hide for him.
In. real life, Weary was retracing his steps, trying to find out what had happened to
Billy. He had told the scouts to wait while he went back for the college bastard. He
passed under a low branch now. It hit the top of his helmet with a clonk. Weary didn't
hear it. Somewhere a big dog was barking. Weary didn't hear that, either. His war story
was at a very exciting point. An officer was congratulating the Three Musketeers, telling
them that he was going to put them in for Bronze Stars.
'Anything else I can do for you boys?' said the officer.
'Yes, sir,' said one of the scouts. 'We'd like to stick together for the rest of the war, sir.
Is there some way you can fix it so nobody will ever break up the Three Musketeers?'
Billy Pilgrim had stopped in the forest. He was leaning against a tree with his eyes
closed. His head was tilted back and his nostrils were flaring. He was like a poet in the
Parthenon.
This was when Billy first came unstuck in time. His attention began to swing grandly
through the full arc of his life, passing into death, which was violet light. There wasn't
anybody else there, or any thing. There was just violet light and a hum.
And then Billy swung into life again, going backwards until he was in pre-birth, which
was red light and bubbling sounds. And then he swung into life again and stopped. He
was a little boy taking a shower with his hairy father at the Ilium Y.M.C.A. He smelled
chlorine from the swimming pool next door, heard the springboard boom.
Little Billy was terrified, because his father had said Billy was going to learn to swim
by the method of sink-or-swim. Ms father was going to throw Billy into the deep end, and
Billy was going to damn well swim.
It was like an execution. Billy was numb as his father carried him from the shower
room to the pool. His eyes were closed. When he opened his eyes, he was on the bottom
of the pool, and there was beautiful music everywhere. He lost consciousness, but the
music went on. He dimly sensed that somebody was rescuing him. Billy resented that.
From there he traveled in time to 1965. He was forty-one years old, and he was visiting
his decrepit mother at Pine Knoll, an old people's home he had put her in only a month
before. She had caught pneumonia, and wasn't expected to live. She did live, though, for
years after that.
Her voice was nearly gone, so, in order to hear her, Billy had to put his ear right next to
her papery lips. She evidently had something very important to say.
'How ...?' she began, and she stopped. She was too tired. She hoped that she wouldn’t
have to say the rest of the sentence, and that Billy would finish it for her
But Billy had no idea what was on her mind. 'How what, Mother?' he prompted.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her
ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she bad accumulated enough to
whisper this complete sentence:
'How did I get so old? '
Billy's antique mother passed out, and Billy was led from the room by a pretty nurse.
The body of an old man covered by a sheet was wheeled by just as Billy entered the
corridor. The man had been a famous marathon runner in his day. So it goes. This was
before Billy had his head broken in an airplane crash, by the way-before he became so
vocal about flying saucers and traveling in time.
Billy sat down in a waiting room. He wasn't a widower yet. He sensed something hard
under the cushion of his overstuffed chair. He dug it out, discovered that it was a book,
The Execution of Private Slovik, by William Bradford Huie. It was a true account of the
death before an American fixing squad of private Eddie D. Slovik, 36896415, the only
American soldier to be shot for cowardice since the Civil War. So it goes.
Billy read the opinion of a staff judge advocate who reviewed Slovik's case, which
ended like this: He has directly challenged the authority of the government, and future
discipline depends upon a resolute reply to this challenge. If the death penalty is ever to
be imposed for desertion, it should be imposed in this case, not as a punitive measure nor
as retribution, but to maintain that discipline upon which alone an army can succeed
against the enemy. There was no recommendation for clemency in the case and none is
here recommended. So it goes.
Billy blinked in 1965, traveled in time to 1958. He was at a banquet in honour of a
Little League team of which his son Robert was a member. The coach, who had never
been married, was speaking. He was all choked up. 'Honest to God,' he was Saying, 'I'd
consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.'
Billy blinked in 1958, traveled in time to 1961. It was New Year's Eve, and Billy was
disgracefully drunk at a party where everybody was in optometry or married to an
optometrist.
Billy usually didn't drink much, because the war had ruined his stomach, but he
certainly had a snootful now, and he was being unfaithful to his wife Valencia for the
first and only time. He had somehow persuaded a woman to come into the laundry room
of the house, and then sit up on the gas dryer, which was running.
The woman was very drunk herself, and she helped Billy get her girdle off. 'What was
it you wanted to talk about?' she said.
'It's all night,' said Billy. He honestly thought it was all right. He couldn't remember the
name of the woman.
'How come they call you Billy instead of William?'
'Business reasons,' said Billy. That was true. His father-in-law, who owned the Ilium
School of Optometry, who had set Billy up in practice, was a genius in his field. He told
Billy to encourage people to call him Billy-because it would stick in their memories. It
would also make him seem slightly magical, since there weren't any other grown Billys
around. It also compelled people to think of him as a friend right away.
Somewhere in there was an awful scene, with people expressing disgust for Billy and
the woman, and Billy found himself out in his automobile, trying to find the steering
wheel.
The main thing now was to find the steering wheel. At first, Billy windmilled his arms,
hoping to find it by luck. When that didn't work, he became methodical, working in such
a way that the wheel could not possibly escape him. He placed himself hard against the
left-hand door, searched every square inch of the area before him. When he failed to find
the wheel, he moved over six inches, and searched again. Amazingly, he was eventually
hard against the right-hand door, without having found the wheel. He concluded that
somebody had stolen it. This angered him as he passed out.
He was in the back seat of his car., which was why he couldn't find the steering wheel.
Now somebody was shaking Billy awake. Billy stiff felt drunk, was still angered by the
stolen steering wheel. He was back in the Second World War again, behind the German
lines. The person who was shaking him was Roland Weary. Weary had gathered the front
of Billy's field jacket into his hands. He banged Billy against a tree, then puffed him
away from it, flung him in the direction he was supposed to take under his own power.
Billy stopped, shook his head. 'You go on,' he said.
'What? '
'You guys go on without me. I'm all right.'
'You're what?'
'I'm O.K.'
'Jesus-I'd hate to see somebody sick,' said Weary, through five layers of humid scarf
from home. Lilly had never seen Weary's face. He had tried to imagine it one time, had
imagined a toad in a fishbowl.
Weary kicked and shoved Billy for a quarter of a mile. The scouts were waiting
between the banks of a frozen creek. They had heard the dog. They had heard men calling
back and forth, too-calling like hunters who had a pretty good idea of where their quarry
was.
The banks of the creek were high enough to allow the scouts, to stand without being
seen. Billy staggered down the bank ridiculously. After him came Weary, clanking and
clinking and tinkling and hot.
'Here he is, boys,' said Weary. 'He don't want to live, but he's gonna live anyway.
When he gets out of this, by God, he's gonna owe his life to the Three Musketeers. '
Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam
painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while, he thought, he
wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among
the treetops.
Somewhere the big dog barked again. With the help of fear and echoes and winter
silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.
Roland Weary, eighteen years old, insinuated himself between the scouts, draped a
heavy arm around the shoulder of each. 'So what do the Three Musketeers do now?' he
said.
Billy Pilgrim was having a delightful hallucination. He was wearing dry, warm, white
sweatsocks, and he was skating on a ballroom floor. Thousands cheered. This wasn't
time-travel. it had never happened, never would happen. It was the craziness of a dying
young man with his shoes full of snow.
One scout hung his head, let spit fall from his lips. The other did the same. They
studied the infinitesimal effects of spit on snow and history. They were small, graceful
people. They had been behind German lines before many times- living like woods
creatures, living from moment to moment in useful terror, thinking brainlessly with their
spinal cords.
Now they twisted out from under Weary's loving arms. They told Weary that he and
Billy had better find somebody to surrender to. The Scouts weren't going to wait for them
any more.
And they ditched Weary and Billy in the creekbed.
Billy Pilgrim went on skating, doing tricks in sweat-socks, tricks that most people
would consider impossible-making turns, stopping on a dime and so on. The cheering
went on, but its tone was altered as the hallucination gave way to time-travel.
Billy stopped skating, found himself at a lectern in a Chinese restaurant in Ilium, New
York, on an early afternoon in the autumn of 1957. He was receiving a standing ovation
from the Lions Club. He had just been elected President, and it was necessary that he
speak. He was scared stiff, thought a ghastly mistake had been made. AR those
prosperous, solid men out there would discover now that they had elected a ludicrous
waif. They would hear his reedy voice, the one he'd had in the war. He swallowed, knew
that all he -had for a voice box was a little whistle cut from a willow switch. Worse-he
had nothing to say. The crowd quieted down. Everybody was pink and beaming.
Billy opened his mouth, and out came a deep, resonant tone. His voice was a gorgeous
instrument. It told jokes which brought down the house. It grew serious, told jokes again,
and ended on a note of humility. The explanation of the miracle was this: Billy had taken
a course in public speaking.
And then he was back in the bed of the frozen creek again. Roland Weary was about to
beat the living shit out of him.
Weary was filled with a tragic wrath. He had been ditched again. He stuffed his pistol
into its holster. He slipped his knife into its scabbard. Its triangular blade and blood
gutters on all three faces. And then he shook Billy hard, rattled his skeleton, slammed
him against a bank.
Weary barked and whimpered through his layers of scarf from home. He spoke
unintelligibly of the sacrifices he had made on Billy's behalf. He dilated upon the piety
and heroism of 'The Three Musketeers,' portrayed, in the most glowing and impassioned
hues, their virtue and magnanimity, the imperishable honor they acquired for themselves,
and the great services they rendered to Christianity,
It was entirely Billy's fault that this fighting organization no longer existed, Weary felt,
and Billy was going to pay. Weary socked Billy a good one on the side of the jaw,
