Kitabı oku: «The Treehouse & Other Stories», sayfa 4

The Early Life of Sisyphus Sykes

They called him 'Phus the Wus' at school. Later came a crueller variant – 'Sissy Pussy'. A sissy and a pussy rolled into one! Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes was a gangling four-eyed nerd, a problem from the get-go. To start with, he had been reluctant about being born; they had had to cut him out of there. Strangely enough, he had appeared with two inchoate front teeth, and his first act in the world, after they had swabbed off the blood and gore, was to give his mother a nasty nip on the nipple. He went on the bottle after that.

By the age of 11, he was 5-foot 7, and his two front teeth had grown to Bugs Bunny proportions. He was pallid and resembled a malnourished stick. But by far his strangest feature was his huge head from which sprouted a tangle of bedraggled blond curls. He found it hard to keep his head up, which hung down over his chest, causing the upper part of his spine to bow a bit, similar to the way a sunflower droops because its stem is too weak to support the weight of its head.

His mother had named him Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes because she thought it sounded 'classy'. She chose the middle name when she remembered, vaguely, that there had once been some very clever man called Freud who was a Sigmund. And it was operatic sounding, too. But Betty Sykes had never attended an opera; she was mixing up her Sigmunds and Siegfrieds. To her Wagner was an outfit that made brake pads, and Figaro were the olive oil people. The Italians certainly knew their onions when it came to olives: 'For more than 100 years Figaro has, and continues to be, committed to quality and health.' They should write an aria about it and get some famous tenor to sing it. Betty swore by Figaro olive oil. Its gospel was written in brochures and on bottles, so it had to be true.

Betty Sykes came from 'wop stock' (as she said herself, always with a giggle), up near Woodstock. She liked to boast 'I'm the wop with a lot!' 'A lot of what?' people would ask. 'Intelligence,' replied Betty. Folk were mystified; she was not exactly what you would call 'intelligent'. Even her father said she was 'dumb as nails, but a swell gal.' Before she married Tom Sykes her name was Betty Brown. She thought Betty Sykes was a slight improvement on the prosaic Betty Brown and its annoyingly alliterative folksiness. She deemed the naming of names an important process, a sacred responsibility. She was determined her son would have a great name, a name that resounded, a name to conjure with.

'How about, Tom?' her husband suggested, plonking an oily spanner on the kitchen table. This was a couple of weeks before Betty gave birth. She was getting desperate to hit on a name; time was running out.

'Idiot! That's your name,' snapped Betty. 'And get that darned spanner off the table!'

For some reason, neither of them had considered girls' names. They were convinced they were having a boy. Tom retorted that it was not uncommon for sons to take their father's and even grandfather's Christian names. He pointed out that his father had been Tom, and so his kid could be 'Tom Sykes the Third'. Tom reckoned it lent an air of importance, 'kinda like royalty' – Tom Sykes III. He said people were impressed by that sort of thing. Betty thought about throwing a plate at her husband. Tom smiled gormlessly, retrieved the oily spanner and shoved it in the breast pocket of a garment that had once been bright blue but was now an oil slick. Betty demurred, and being a woman of some determination, she got her way in the matter of naming the kid.

In point of fact, Tom couldn't care less. More than anything in the world, he was interested in transmissions, and tuning them. Everything else, in his mind, was secondary to the Holy Grail of a perfectly tuned transmission.

And so, indeed, it came to pass: 10 days later, Betty and Tom had a boychild, and he ended up being christened Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes! Betty had been dusting when she heard the name 'Sisyphus' waft out of the radio. A talk was being given on Greek mythology by a man with a German accent. Betty hadn't paid much attention to the Greek mythology part. In fact, the German professor, who rejoiced in the name of Adolf Wolfschlegelsteinhausenberg might just as well have been talking Greek. She simply heard the name – Sisyphus! And what a name it was! Three serene syllables tripping felicitously off the tongue – Si- See-Phus. Betty was in ecstasies. It was as if she had struck gold in the Klondike, or discovered the cure for cancer. It came to her as a revelation, a real Eureka moment. 'Praise the Lord,' said Betty, crossing herself, for she was a religious woman. She danced around the house like a ballerina with a bump, twirling her duster coquettishly at the lamps, trying out the name 'Sisyphus… Sisyphus…' Yes, a perfect triplet of tongue-delighting syllables. Si. See. Phus. Betty was sold. She thought Professor Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes sounded 'real classy'. Or maybe Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes, the famous brain surgeon. Or perhaps a great spy who would sign his name mysteriously – S. S. Or did that have Nazi overtones? Betty knew the Nazis were bad guys and the good old U. S of A had won the war with chewing gum, Luckies and pantyhose. John Wayne had said so. What a rugged fellow!

Betty's mind veered in all kinds of weird and wonderful directions. She was a simple woman, an ex-pom-pom girl. A big fan of manly types, such as burly John Wayne. But she had ended up with Tom Sykes! Big Betty Brown… Great jugs, poor student! She lost her virginity to a quarterback, who became an optometrist in Syracuse. Incidentally, soon after setting up shop in Syracuse, the ex-quarterback got killed in a spectacular train wreck, and hence became an ex-optometrist who had once been a quarterback. His new Cadillac came off badly against an express train that came hurtling through a badly lit crossing. What a mess! The ex-quarterback/optometrist (his name had been Brad) was not a pretty sight when they recovered the bits of him from the wreckage. He didn't look so square-jawed and handsome anymore.

But Betty had moved on and become religious. Jesus had saved her. Apparently. 'Saved you for what?' one sarcastic boyfriend inquired. 'Are you the leftovers?' Arnie, for that was the caustic wit's name, instantly became an ex-boyfriend. And he got a slap in the mouth for being fresh, followed by a kick where it really hurts.

The truth is, Betty never got to hear about Brad's mishap with the train. The magazines she read didn't cover train wrecks. They had to do strictly with fashion, perfume and female agony. Betty Brown was not a great reader. Period. She dated a number of men before selecting Tom. They were desultory affairs. The men, being idiots, were after only one thing! They drank beer, farted, talked rubbish about 'beaver', and couldn't piss straight into a can. In a word – useless.

Then, at the age of 23, she discovered Tom. And, frankly, he did take some discovering. Sometimes, Betty wondered if she had married Tom Sykes out of pity. He was a sad case. All he could talk about was transmissions. He bored people to death with transmissions… transmissions… solid engineering… blah, blah, blah… Cummins engine… smooth transmissions… etcetera, ad nauseam…

Normally, he was as docile as a pig in shit but when it came to transmissions he became intense and voluble. His eyes would bulge out of his head and the veins in his neck would stand out and pulsate like hideous blue worms, as he babbled on about the tremendous world of transmissions. Tom Sykes could have made a fortune as a one-man House of Horrors. He did have his uses though. The thing about hang-dog Mr. Sykes, the thin guy with the turkey neck (diametrically opposite in the Brad Pitt Handsome Stakes), was that he was hung like a donkey. True. Although, his true amour was transmissions; sometimes he got a hard-on listening to the purr of a perfectly tuned transmission.

Betty Sykes was a good woman in many ways. A God-fearing woman. She liked her messy and transmission-obsessed husband to be out of the way until the evening. At least, transmissions paid the bills. And there was enough for shopping, an undertaking Betty was dedicated to. She was also very proud of her ample chest, which she referred to as 'her intelligence'. No one quite knew why her 40 D cups equated with intelligence. A foible? A vanity? But she did try hard to be a good mother of what turned out to be a challenging child. A walking Greek tragedy. However, the sum of Betty Sykes' knowledge came out of catalogues and fashion magazines; and they didn't cover Greek mythology in those. At any rate, the boy wound up being called Sisyphus. And so began the uphill struggle of his life.

* * *

People said he was an odd child. 'His head's too big.' 'My, my, isn't he thin?' And, 'What a queer fish!' All kinds of less than complimentary remarks were tossed around about Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes. But he absorbed the slings and arrows with quiet fortitude. The boy was prone to misfortune, but persistent in the face of adversity; he would always rise before the count of 10, struggle on, and continue riding life's punches.

At the age of three, he began delving into the very few books his parents had, straining to decipher the hieroglyphics – the A B C. Unfortunately, Betty and Tom didn't buy him any children's books; all they had was an illustrated encyclopaedia (1953 edition), a few cook books, piles of literature about automobile transmissions, his mother's extensive library of catalogues and fashion magazines, and the Gideon Holy Bible.

On one occasion Sisyphus discovered some interesting reading and pictorial matter on a shelf in the garage next to: 'Automotive Transmissions, Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. The periodical next to this was called Playboy; it exercised greater pulling power over young Sisyphus than 'Automotive Transmissions Fundamentals, Selection, Design & Application'. Playboy was revealing: some ladies in it weren't wearing any clothes at all, and there were others in swimsuits sporting funny bunny ears and tails. In the centre of the magazine, which folded out, there was one bunny who was obviously the most important bunny of them all. Her name was Cindy.

Sisyphus, who was nearly four, tried the word out: 'Puh-lay'… 'Play'… That sounded good. He liked playing. Next: 'Muh- ate'… 'mate'… 'Playmate!' Sisyphus was triumphant. He had deciphered the word. He liked this word and wished he had a 'playmate' of his own. Not necessarily one with 38-inch breasts. Any friend, really. However, he had been told many times that he was 'too odd to have any friends'. He looked at the playmate again. Would she make a good friend? She had long blonde hair, blue eyes and an interesting arrangement on the front of her body. But this was marred by an oily thumbprint slap in the middle of one of the protruding parts. The things on Cindy's chest reminded Sisyphus of two lovely round sandy-white hills that rose and ended in a beautiful pinky brown peak.

In the picture, Cindy was smiling. White teeth sparkling in a perfection of gums. Her mouth, luscious cherry lips parted slightly, pouted at the camera. Sisyphus was rather taken with her. He wondered if she would like his collection of dead beetles. He had one particularly fine specimen. Cindy would surely be staggered by his stag beetle. Sisyphus was sitting cross-legged on the floor with the magazine open on his lap. His too-big-for-his-body head loomed over Cindy's image beaming like a sunflower. He thought the stag beetle would look smashing posing on the topmost pink part of one of those hills that stuck out of her chest. He reflected that his mother had big sticky-out bits, too, but his flat-chested father didn't.

Tom stole up from behind. 'I'll take that,' he said, snatching the mag away from his startled child. Unfortunately, Cindy's head got ripped in the process. Tom went and found some tape and fixed Cindy's lacerated hair-do. He tried to wipe the oil off but failed; Cindy now looked like a tar baby. He stuffed the mag back on a high shelf – way back. Satisfied that Cindy and her fellow bunnies were out of reach, he turned to his son. Tom, who had been wrestling with a tricky transmission problem, smiled stupidly and said: 'Now, Sis, you won't tell your ma about this, will you?'

He called his son 'Sis'? He did! Like Johnny Cash's A Boy Named Sue, it was wildly inappropriate, as Sisyphus was not female and couldn't be Tom's sister. But Tom wasn't a great thinker. It was just convenient, a linguistic short-cut that saved some breath. He couldn't be bothered to come out with 'Sis-see-phus'. This annoyed the hell out of his wife Betty, who would cherish the name until her dying day.

'Did you hear me, son? Don't tell Ma!'

'Why not? The ladies are funny. With bunny ears, tails and all…'

'Yeah, they're kinda cute,' agreed Tom.

There was a long silence, during which Tom was distracted by a transmission detail.

'You made a mess of Cindy,' said Sisyphus at last.

'What?'

'Cindy! My playmate. I was going to show her my stag beetle.'

Tom had figured the problem must be with the differentials. Then he remembered that he had to apply himself to convincing Sisyphus not to talk about those cute, scantily-clad bunnies with his mother. 'I can tell you, Sis, that Cindy won't take no interest in no stag beetle. No way!'

Sisyphus was incredulous. 'Really?' he gasped.

'You betcha! Now, PLEASE DON'T TELL MA!!!'

'About what?'

'About the bunny girl stuff!' Tom fished a grimy rag from his pocket and wiped the sweat off his forehead.

'But why? Ma has the same things on her chest as those bunny ladies. Wouldn't she like them?'

Tom was getting desperate. His mind was reeling in this titanic intellectual struggle with his nearly-four-year-old son. He tried again. 'Look, it's a man thing. So, let's keep it man to man, Sis. OK?' said Tom, hopefully, winking at his son.

Sisyphus like this idea. 'OK,' he said.

Tom heaved a sigh of relief and went back to dealing with the transmission problem. Even at home, after work, and on weekends, he was obsessed with transmissions.

Betty was the general of the household. The dictator of everything domestic. She gave the orders and wore the trousers. And she selected the trousers and clothes that were often either too small or too big for Sisyphus and Tom from her voluminous 2,000-page catalogues. Betty was also a scourge with knitting needles! Her 'boys' were obliged to wear her nightmarish creations: hideous scarves 10 yards long, and sweaters made for the average gorilla. But Betty was a great cook and fed the family well from her ample kitchen that was notable for having probably the largest domestic fridge in the galaxy. It was a tank, truly massive – a tank full of food! She was, 'the wop with a lot' (as she said herself), and she produced pizzas and pasta in industrial quantities. It was a mystery how Tom and Sisyphus remained so svelte, while over the years Betty grew quite rotund. Even her breasts put on weight and her brassieres were staggering feats of cantilevered engineering.

Mrs. Sykes was an avid follower of fashion, a determined shopper, especially if there was a sale on anywhere within a 50-mile radius. When he was little, Sisyphus was compelled to be her companion on these marathon retail expeditions. They looked a strange sight out and about. Betty was becoming a little too buxom around the hips, while Sisyphus made a garden rake look overweight. From a distance, when mother and son were walking side by side, you might have formed the impression that a rather large lady was dragging a thin bundle of twigs along.

Some of the places Sisyphus got dragged to were dire. His least favourite was the barbers. He had to sit on a plank because he was too small to sit in the chair. The place was called Benny's Barbershop; the proprietor bore a resemblance to Adolf Hitler and had the same toothbrush mustache. He wore a brown coat and stank of tobacco and whisky. The dominant colour in the place was brown, and there were those heavy tobacco-brown seats that went up and down by means of a foot-pedal. The barber himself was colour-coordinated with the establishment: from his sallow face and sour expression, down to his yellowed fingers. And he behaved somewhat Nazi-like. 'Sit up straight, Junge!' This would be preceded by a clip round the ear, or a painful pinch. Benny's Barbershop was a gruesome experience, a feared and hated venue.

Many years later, via the newspapers, Sisyphus came to learn more about the barbarous barber. The proprietor of Benny's Barbershop that he knew wasn't called Benny at all. The original Benny had died in 1932, five years after he had set up Benny's Barbershop. The ghoul who cut Sisyphus' hair was a man named Horst Richter – born in Heidelberg, in Germany. He appeared in the 'land of the free' after the war, and later bought Benny's Barbershop from Benny's son, Lenny.

Sometime, much later, it turned out that old Horst was indeed a Nazi, although he assured everyone that he had been a completely insignificant one. He had once shaved a high-ranking S.S. officer – a proud moment for Herr Richter, and he had Heil-Hitlered enthusiastically. Apart from being handy with a cut-throat razor, he had also been a lowly guard – somewhere or other! He protested that he knew nothing about the gas ovens, and that he was a simple barber. 'Go ask Herr Topf,' said Horst, cryptically. Nobody knew who the hell this Topf fellow was. Then, some bright spark looked him up and discovered that Herr Topf (und Sohn) was the guy who owned the company who made the ovens for Auschwitz.

By the time they busted him, Horst was a decrepit old man. The strain of all the unwanted attention brought on a heart attack. At the time of his death, Herr Richter was standing on a platform in a subway station in New York. His old Nazi heart stuttered and he felt dizzy at precisely the moment the metro rattled in: Horst fell headlong into its path and came off badly. It wasn't clear whether the heart attack would have been fatal; the train certainly was.

* * *

By the age of seven, with no internet anywhere near on the horizon, Sisyphus Sykes had arrived at the reasonable assumption that the world and most of the people in it were against him. His world, in fact, was a small American town, a conservative place with 'Christian' values. It was a narrow milieu, where the liberal and avant garde were regarded with deep suspicion. Sisyphus had noted that folk were often at one another's throats, despite their 'church' values. He had first noticed this tendency at home, in the kitchen – a dangerous place with sharp things and blunt instruments, such as saucepans, knives, rolling pins, plates and saucers, which sometimes flew.

He once saw Betty, his mother, hurl a dinner plate, like a frisbee, at his father. Tom ducked in time and the plate smashed on the wall behind him. At the time, Tom had been droning on about transmissions – the love and obsession of his life!

'If I hear the word 'transmission' again, I'm going to scream,' said Betty; and with that she screamed and threw another plate.

'Missed!' said Tom, walking out, leaving Betty Sykes to clear up the mess.

Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes would try to console his mother at trying times such as these, when she was weeping with frustration at wreckage and mess. A lot of things did get wrecked around the place. But Betty was the main culprit at breaking stuff. While doing the washing up, glasses, tumblers, cups, saucers, plates… basically, anything that was breakable, got broken. And Tom had the exasperating habit of leaving oily handprints, spanners and wrenches on pristine tablecloths. However, one day, Betty had the bright idea of using plastic alternatives. Eureka! She could at least wipe the oil off. And you could get them in so many different pretty patterns and colours. She had been inspired by one of her catalogues.

In other words, they were a pretty normal family; that is to say, normally dysfunctional. Betty didn't often throw plates at Tom, and they weren't at each other's throats all the time. It was just that the pressure in the family's emotional boiler would grow steadily, and niggle up to boiling point, occasionally. Then things would explode, and stuff would fly, such as saucers and plates. At least Betty didn't throw knives. Her husband infuriated her most of the time, and despite calling him an idiot a dozen times a day, she did love him, really. He had his compensations!

In the world at large, Sisyphus was used to being called a dork because of his odd appearance. He was thin and gangly, wore glasses, and his head was too big. And there was his ridiculous name, and all its spiteful variations. Very few people called him 'Sisyphus', including his father who, idiotically, had elected to hail his offspring as 'Sis!' – to the constant annoyance of his wife.

Sisyphus was often called 'Sissy Pussy'. Thin as a stick, a four-eyes with an overlarge, droopy head, and wearing the ill-fitting clothes Betty selected… Sisyphus was jeered at and kicked about like a rotten old parsnip. But he was beginning to become defiant about his name and derisive of conventional Christian names. The nomenclature (a word he learned when he was 9) was boring: Fred, Betty, Tom, Dick, Harriet, John, Jane, Susan, Harry, Mary, Rose, Ron, and so on to the nth degree of standard Christian names. Nevertheless, it was still unpleasant to be called 'Wus', 'Dork', and 'Sissy Pussy'.

Sisyphus sought solace in an interior world, where he was Flash Gordon, or an heroic knight turning adversaries' heads into water melons with a big mace; or a spy, a double 'O', embarked on desperate espionage capers. And he became a voracious reader. He read everything from the backs of detergent packs to Dickens. He even read some of Tom's transmission manuals, when Tom, thinking it his paternal duty to dragoon his son in some useful direction, cornered him and kept him captive in the garage for a couple of hours – usually on Sunday afternoons. The focus was, of course, on transmissions. Tom hoped his son would inherit his small transmission empire, a reasonably successful garage in town called Tom's Transmissions. Slogan: 'Our mission – a perfect transmission!'

But Sisyphus had no appetite to become a grease monkey. He immersed himself in the world of books and literature where he found he could lead, vicariously, a multitude of lives. For birthdays and Christmas, he only wanted reading matter. He didn't crave a 'Johnny Seven' machine gun (a replica for blood-thirsty boys of some death-rattler used in Vietnam), or a Meccano set, or a baseball bat, or a catcher's mitt, or a football helmet… Just books, please, or anything he could read.

Betty was proud that her son was such an avid reader. In her fantasises, she saw the letters on some fancy calling card: Dr. Sisyphus S. Sykes. But Tom was easy. It meant he didn't have to think too much – just go out, buy a birthday card and stuff a few bucks in for books. And sometimes, he even went and bought Sisyphus a book. There was a bookstore three doors down from his garage. Tom ordered all his books about transmissions from them.

Sisyphus spent his allowance on books, saving up for the more costly items, such as a handsomely bound collected Shakespeare. He procured the weighty tome when he was nearly 9 (8 and three quarters to be exact), and could make head nor tail of Shakespearean syntax. He had done it because he had read somewhere that it was okay to buy books you weren't going to read just yet; that way you built up a treasure trove of literature, and you would never be starved of something good to read.

Books piled up in his room. Pillars of literary wisdom formed precarious stacks around his bed. Then, one day, when he was 11, (a Saturday morning after his mother had broken a cup while stumbling over his books and Tom had ruined another tablecloth), Betty blew her top and ordered Tom to build Sisyphus a bookcase. Tom had to drag himself away from transmission matters, but he knocked up a decent and capacious pine bookcase over the rest of the weekend. Sisyphus was thrilled; he liked seeing his books on display. The array of spines with their intriguing titles and authors' names was a beautiful and inspiring sight.

What with all the reading, and all the time he had without any friends to bother him, Sisyphus learned stuff. He would read almost anything he could get his hands on, and he developed the knack of finding and acquiring knowledge, fast. When he was 8, he read Tom Sawyer, imagining he was Tom smoking a home-made corncob pipe with his buddy Huck. He read A Christmas Carol and felt empathy for poor Bob Cratchit, and genuine sorrow for the plight of Tiny Tim. Sisyphus haunted the local library on Main Street, where he was great friends with Mrs. Beatty, the librarian. He loved going to the library. It was more or less in the centre of town, a red brick building with a massive clock that clanged on the hour. Inside was an Aladdin's Cave of books and periodicals. Sisyphus felt at home there, and Mrs. Beatty never called him 'Phus', 'Wus', 'Sissypussy', or anything like that. She even turned a blind eye when he returned books late, which was quite often.

Sisyphus wasn't some kind of Mozartian genius, one of those kids who can do integral calculus and spout string theory at you when they're five, but he was a very smart lad (considerably above average intelligence), and he had an enquiring mind coupled with dogged determination. He spent a lot of time on his own, consuming books and periodicals, voraciously. History began to fascinate him: the blood and guts, death and destruction, treachery and intrigue, the politics and the endless calamity of war… It was history that led to an early downfall and marked Sisyphus for life.

School was a trying experience. He was teased, cajoled and bullied, constantly. The fact that he was extremely bright isolated him even further. His classmates knew deep down that he was the cleverest, and they resented him for it. Even his teacher, Mrs. Jean Weathervane, became ill-disposed, after he corrected her in a geography lesson. He pointed out that Mount Everest was not in The Alps. Jean Weathervane was a spinster of moderate intelligence. Enough to be a school teacher but she had to cover a number of subjects in junior high, and so she messed up, occasionally. Sisyphus spotted her gaffs and sometimes had enough diplomacy not to correct his teacher. For instance, she had once asserted that General Custer had been killed at Gettysburg, whereas, in fact, the overconfident Custer copped a deadly custard pie from Crazy Horse at Little Big Horn. Sisyphus knew that! And unwisely, Sisyphus stated in public that he thought Custer had deserved it!

'I never said Everest was in The Alps!' screeched Mrs. Weathervane, making the whole class jump. She was backtracking, trying to think of an excuse.

Sisyphus, undiplomatically, persisted: 'I am sorry, Miss, but you did say Everest was in The Alps, whereas it is in the Himalayas. It's the highest mountain in the world, standing at over 29,000 feet, and…'

Something hit the back of his neck: a dry pea – shot at point-blank range; Sisyphus had the misfortune to sit in front of the deliquent Denis Brown. 'Ow,' cried Sisyphus, clutching the back of his neck.

'SILENCE!' roared Mrs. Weathervane. Her purple face was a rictus of rage. 'Are you calling me a liar?'

'No, Miss. You're simply mistaken. That doesn't make you a liar,' said Sisyphus, rubbing the back of his neck.

Jean Weathervane was stumped for a moment by the 'wretched little freak's' logic, which was undeniably a bullseye. So she flustered: 'You are the one who is mistaken, Sisyphus Sigmund Sykes.' She made a point of drawing his full name out for dramatic effect. The class tittered. 'You clearly misheard me. Now turn to page 66,' she said, terminating the confrontation with an icy glare.

Not long after the geography incident, Mrs. Weathervane announced that the class would be doing a project to be presented towards the end of the semester. The topic was 'American History'. The class had been studying a sanitized version of the nation's history in the 19th century, in which the Seventh Cavalry etc. had saved the day and killed all the Indians, who were nothing but savages and atheists, worshippers at totem poles, scalp-takers, and so on. Although, there was overwhelming evidence that the Native Americans were, by and large, peaceful people who just wanted to keep their land, nurture it, and avoid their squaws and children being butchered by General Custer and Co.

Sisyphus had read something along those lines and hadn't been convinced by the version they were getting. He foolishly volunteered some of the information he had learned, such as debunking the heroes of the Alamo: the fight with the Mexicans had essentially been about slavery and the right to go on whipping slaves and so forth. These were unwelcome revelations. Sisyphus hadn't fully learned the lesson of the geography incident. In fact, he said a lot of unwise things about a number of things, including: Native American Indians; the Civil War; the assassination of presidents, and even about Jesus Christ, all of which confused his less intelligent classmates. However, the intelligence did get back to various parents and guardians, albeit in a garbled, misunderstood and miscontrued form. And so, Sisyphus began to earn a certain reputation in conservative minds.

He considered the history project seriously. Mrs. Weathervane had said it should be on 'American History.' She hadn't been specific, time-wise. She assumed, of course, that her students would cover what they had done in their history lessons.

Back in the mists of time, when he was 9, Sisyphus had seen a picture in a periodical, a grainy halftone of what looked like a fungus of gigantic proportions. On closer inspection, he discovered it wasn't fungus at all – it was the cloud over Hiroshima: August 6th, 1945. Sisyphus was profoundly disturbed by the details of this event, and the startling amount of instant deaths. So, he did his project on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.