The Journey of Joenes, Page 2

  Joenes and the girls were conked, but I pride myself on keeping a clear head for danger no matter what is drifting in my lungs or dancing in my veins. I wanted to flush the rest of the peyote, but Deirdre, who is so with it she sometimes scares you, insisted upon secreting the remaining buds in her Maidenform, where, she insisted, they would be safe from any harm. I got them all out of the pad, Joenes with my guitar clenched in his sunburnt fist, and we got down none too soon, for a patrol car full of fuzz had just arrived. I cautioned the group to walk straight ahead like little soldiers because you can’t play games when you got stuff on you. But I hadn’t counted on how far gone that Deirdre was.

  We started walking and the cops came by and gave us coplike looks, and we kept on walking and the fuzz started passing remarks about beatniks and immorality and such. I tried to keep the group moving, but that Deirdre wouldn’t be called down. She turned on the fuzz and told them what she thought of them, which was a very unwise thing to do if you’ve got a vocabulary and a creative imagination like Deirdre has.

  The top cop, a sergeant, said, “O.K., sister, come with us. We’re booking you, dig?”

  And struggling and kicking, they pulled poor Deirdre towards the cop car. I could see Joenes’s face setting itself in thoughtful, cop-hating lines, and I was afraid of trouble since filled with peyote as he was he loved Deirdre and indeed everybody except the fuzz.

  I said to him, “Man, don’t do a thing, this scene’s gotta split and if Deirdre won’t, she won’t. I mean she’s always fighting cops ever since she came out here from New York to study Zen, and she gets pulled in all the time so it’s no big deal, especially since her father is Sean Feinstein who owns like anything you can name in five seconds. So the cops just sober her up and let her go. So don’t make the move, man, don’t even look back, because your father is not Sean Feinstein, or indeed anybody I ever heard of.”

  In this way I tried to soothe and reason with Joenes, but Joenes stopped, a heroic figure under the lamplight, his fist clenched white around my guitar, his eyes all-knowing and all-forgiving except for cops. And he turned.

  The lead cop said, “You want something, kid?”

  Joenes said, “Take your hands off that young lady!”

  The cop said, “This drug addict, whom you call a young lady, is in violation of section 431.3 of the Code of the City of San Francisco. I suggest that you mind your own business, buster, and don’t play that ukelele on the streets after twelve o’clock.”

  I mean, he was being nice in his way.

  But Joenes then made a speech which was a beauty, and I cannot recall it word for word, but the idea was that laws are made by man and thus must partake of the evil nature of man, and that true morality lies in following the true dictates of the illuminated soul.

  “A Commie, huh?” said the lead cop. And in a trice, or perhaps even sooner, they dragged Joenes into the cop car.

  Well naturally Deirdre was sprung the following morning, on account of her father, and maybe also because of her winsome ways which are the talk of San Francisco. But though we searched high and low, and even as far afield as Berkeley, we saw no signs of Joenes.

  No sign, I tell you! What had happened to this blond troubador with the sun-streaked hair and a heart as big as all outdoors when properly illuminated? Where had he gone, with my guitar (a genuine Tatay) and my second-best pair of sandals? I suppose only the cops know, and they will not tell. But still I remember him, Joenes the sweet singer, who, at the gates of hell, turned back to look for his Eurydice, and suffered thus the doom of Orpheus the golden-voiced. I mean it was a little different but-still it was all there, and who knows in what distant lands Joenes and my guitar are wandering?

  III

  THE CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE

  (As told by Ma’aoa of Samoa)

  Joenes could not know that a committee of the American Senate was presently in San Francisco, carrying out investigations. But the police knew. They sensed intuitively that Joenes was a likely witness for these investigations, and they took him from the jail to the room where the Committee was meeting in executive session.

  The Committee chairman, whose name was Senator George W. Pelops, immediately asked Joenes what he had to say for himself.

  “I haven’t done a thing,” Joenes said.

  “Ah,” replied Pelops, “has anyone accused you of doing anything? Have I accused you? Have any of my illustrious colleagues? If so, I would like to hear of it at once.”

  “No sir,” Joenes said. “I just thought—”

  “Thoughts are not admissable as evidence,” Pelops said.

  Pelops then scratched his bald head, adjusted his spectacles, and glared full into a television camera. He said, “This man, by his own admission, has been accused of no crime whether of commission or omission. We have asked him here merely to talk, as is our congressional privilege and duty. And yet, his very words betray a consciousness of guilt. Gentlemen, I think we must pursue this a little further.”

  Joenes said, “I want a lawyer.”

  Pelops said, “You cannot have a lawyer, since this is only a congressional fact-finding committee and not an arraignment. But we will take careful note of your request for one. Might I ask why a presumably innocent man might want a lawyer?”

  Joenes, who had read many books on Manituatua, mumbled something about his rights and the law. Pelops told him that the Congress was the guardian of his rights, as well as the maker of the laws. Therefore he had nothing to fear if only he answered honestly. Joenes took heart at this and promised that he would answer honestly.

  “I thank you for that,” Pelops said, “although usually I do not have to request that a man answer honestly. Still, perhaps it means nothing. Tell me, Mr. Joenes, do you believe in the speech you made last night in the streets of San Francisco?”

  “I don’t remember any speech,” said Joenes.

  “You refuse to answer the question?”

  “I can’t answer it. I don’t remember. I believe I was intoxicated.”

  “Do you remember who you were with last night?”

  “I think I was with a man named Lum, and a girl named Deirdre—”

  “We do not require their names,” Pelops said hastily. “We simply asked you if you remembered who you were with, and you said you do so remember. I put it to you, Mr. Joenes, that it is a convenient memory which remembers one set of facts and forgets another, both occurring in the same period of twenty-four hours!”

  “They weren’t facts,” Joenes said, “they were people.”

  “The Committee does not require you to be facetious,” Pelops said sternly. “I will warn you here and now that facetious, unresponsive, or, misleading answers, as well as no answers at all, can be interpreted as contempt of Congress, which is a federal offense punishable by up to a year in prison.”

  “I didn’t mean anything,” Joenes said quickly.

  “Very well, Mr. Joenes, we will continue. Do you deny that you made a speech last night?”

  “No sir, I don’t deny it.”

  “And do you deny that the content of your speech concerned the so-called right which you insisted every man had to overthrow the legally constituted law of this land? Or, to put it another way, do you deny that you incited to rebellion those dissidents who might be swayed by your foreign-inspired words? Or, to make the matter perfectly plain to you, that you advocated violent overthrow of the government which necessarily rests upon the laws of that government? Can you argue that the sum and content of your speech was a violation of those liberties which our Founding Fathers gave us, and which allow such as you to speak at all, as you surely would not be allowed to do in Soviet Russia? Will you presume to tell us that this speech, masked under the garb of harmless bohemianism, was not part of a detailed plot directed towards inner dissension and for the purpose of paving the way for outer aggression, and that in this attempt you had the silent approval, if not the explicit direction, of certain persons in our own State Department? And that
, finally, this speech, which you disguised under an apparent intoxication, and which you gave under your presumed right to act subversively in a democracy where the power to retaliate, or so you thought, is hamstrung by a Constitution and a Bill of Rights which however is not, as you might think, designed to aid the lawless, but rather to preserve the liberties of the people against godless mercenaries such as yourself? Did you or did you not, Mr. Joenes? I ask only a simple yes or no.”

  “Well,” Joenes said, “I’d like to clarify—”

  “The question, Mr. Joenes,” said Pelops in an icy voice. “Kindly answer the question yes or no.”

  Joenes racked his brain furiously, remembering all the American history he had read upon his native island. Now he said, “The allegation is monstrous!”

  “Answer the question, Mr. Joenes,” Pelops said.

  Joenes said, “I stand upon my Constitutional rights, namely the First and Fifth Amendments, and respectfully decline to answer.”

  Pelops smiled thinly. “You may not do so, Mr. Joenes, since the Constitution to which you now so fervently cling has been reinterpreted, or rather brought up to date, by those of us who wish to preserve it from change and desecration. The Amendments you mention, Mr. Joenes—or should I say Comrade Joenes—will not permit you to be silent for reasons which any judge of the Supreme Court would have been glad to tell you—had you chosen to ask him!”

  There was no answer to this crushing rejoinder. Even the reporters in the room, hardened observers of the political scene, were moved. Joenes turned beet-red and then lily-white. With no recourse left, he opened his mouth to answer. But he was momentarily saved by the intervention of one of the members of the Committee, Senator Trellid.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Senator Trellid said to Pelops, “and excuse me all of you who are waiting for this man’s answer. I just want to say one thing, and I want it to go on the record, because sometimes a man must speak out no matter how painful it is to him, and in spite of that it might harm him politically and economically. And yet, it is the duty of a man such as myself to speak out when he must, and to speak in spite of consequences, and in full conscience, even if what he has to say goes against the great power of public opinion. Therefore I want to say this, I am an old man, and I have seen many things in my time, and I have witnessed even more. Perhaps I am not wise to so speak, but I must tell you that I am dead set against injustice. Unlike some, I cannot condone the slaughter of the Hungarians, the unlawful seizure of China, nor the communization of Cuba. I am old, I have been, called conservative, but I cannot condone these things. And, no matter who calls me what, I hope I will never live to see the day when a Russian army occupies the city of Washington, D.C. Thus I speak against this man, this Comrade Jonski, not as a senator, but rather as one who was once a child in the hill country south of Sour Mountain, who fished and hunted in the deep woods, who grew slowly to an awareness of what America meant to him, whose neighbors sent him to Congress to represent them and their dear ones, and who now feels called upon to make this declaration of faith. It is for this reason and this reason only that I say to you in the words of the Bible, ‘Evil is Bad!’ Some of the sophisticated among us may laugh at this, but there it is and I believe it.”

  The Committee burst into spontaneous applause at the old senator’s speech. Although they had heard it many times, it never failed to elicit in them emotions of the deepest and most exquisite sort. Now, white-lipped, Chairman Pelops turned to Joenes.

  “Comrade,” he asked, with simple irony, “are you at this present time a card-carrying member of the Communist Party?”

  “I am not!” cried Joenes.

  Pelops said, “In that case, who were your associates during your card-carrying days?”

  “I didn’t have any associates. I mean—”

  “We understand very well what you mean,”

  Pelops said. “Since you choose not to identify your fellow traitors, would you mind telling us the location of your cell? No? Tell me, Comrade Jonski, does the name Ronald Black mean anything to you? Or to put it more simply, when did you last see Ronald Black?”

  “I never met him,” Joenes said.

  “Never? That is a very big word, Mr. Joenes. Are you trying to tell me that at no time could you have met Ronald Black? That you might not have innocently passed this man in a crowd, or perhaps attended a movie with him? I doubt if any man in America can so flatly state that he has never met Ronald Black. Do you wish your statement to go on the record?”

  “Well, I mean, I might have met him in a crowd, I mean been in a crowd where he was, but I don’t know for sure—”

  “But you allow the possibility?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Excellent,” Pelops said. “Now we are getting somewhere. Now I ask you what crowd you met Black in, and what he said to you, and you to him, and what papers he passed you, and whom you passed those papers to—”

  “I never met Arnold Black!” Joenes cried.

  “We have always known him as Ronald Black,” Pelops said. “But we are always glad to learn his pseudonyms. Note please that you yourself admitted the possibility of your association with him, and in view of your admitted Party activities, this possibility must be judged a probability so strong as to be a certainty. Furthermore, you yourself gave us the name by which Ronald Black was known in the Party, a name which we hitherto had not known. And that, I think, is sufficient.”

  “Look,” said Joenes, “I don’t know this Black or what he did.

  In somber tones Pelops stated, “Ronald Black was convicted of stealing the plans for the new Studebaker Road-clinger Super V-12 Luxury Compact Convertible, and selling those plans to an agent of the Soviet Union. After a fair trial, Black was executed in the manner prescribed by the law. Later, thirty-one of his associates were discovered, tried, and executed. You, Comrade Jonski, will be associate Number 32 in the biggest spy ring we have yet uncovered.”

  Joenes tried to speak, but found himself speechless and trembling in fear.

  “This Committee,” Pelops summed up, “has been granted extralegal powers because it is merely investigative, not punitive. This is perhaps a shame, but the letter of the law must be followed. Therefore we now hand the secret agent Jonski over to the office of the Attorney General, there to undergo fair trial by due process of law, and to suffer whatever punishment that branch of the government deems fitting for a self-admitted traitor who deserves only death. This meeting is now adjourned.”

  In this fashion, Joenes was swiftly transferred to the punitive branch of the government and bound over to the Attorney General.

  IV

  HOW JOENES WAS GIVEN JUSTICE

  (As told by Pelui of Easter Island)

  The Attorney General, to whom Joenes was bound over, was a tall man with a hawk face, narrow eyes, bloodless lips, and a face that looked as though it had been hammered out of raw iron. Stooped and silently contemptuous, startling in his black velvet cloak and ruffled collar, the Attorney General was the living embodiment of his terrible office. Since he was a servant of the punitive branch of the government, his duty was to call down retribution upon all who fell into his hands, and to do so by any means in his power.

  The Attorney General’s place of residence was Washington. But he himself was a citizen of Athens, New York, and in his youth had been an acquaintance of Aristotle and Alcibiades, whose writings are the distillation of American genius.

  Athens was one of the cities of ancient Hellas, from which the American civilization had sprung. Near Athens was Sparta, a military power that had held leadership over the Lacedaemonian cities of upper New York State. Ionian Athens and Dorian Sparta had fought a disastrous war, and had lost their independence to American rule. But they were still influential in the politics of America, especially since Washington had been the seat of Hellenic power.

  At first, the case of Joenes seemed simple enough. Joenes had no important friends or political colleagues, and it seemed that retribution might
be visited upon him with impunity. Accordingly, the Attorney General arranged for Joenes to receive every possible sort of legal advice, and then to be tried by a jury of his peers in the famous Star Chamber. In this way the exact letter of the law would be carried out, but with a comforting foreknowledge of the verdict the jury would render. For the punctilious jurors of the Star Chamber, utterly dedicated to the eradication of any vestige of evil, had never in their history given any verdict but guilty.

  After the verdict should be delivered, the Attorney General planned to sacrifice Joenes upon the Electric Chair at Delphi, thus winning favor in the eyes of gods and men.

  This was his plan. But further investigation showed that Joenes’s father had been a Dorian from Mechanicsville, New York, and a magistrate of that community. And Joenes’s mother had been an Ionian from Miami, an Athenian colony deep in Barbarian territory. Because of this, certain influential Hellenes urged mercy for the erring son of respectable parents, and for the sake of Hellenic unity, which was a force to be reckoned with in American politics.

  The Attorney General, an Athenian himself, thought it best to comply with this request. Therefore he dissolved the Star Chamber and sent Joenes to the great Oracle at Sperry. This met with approval, for the Sperry Oracle, like the Oracles at Genmotor and Genelectric, was known to be absolutely fair and impartial in its judgments of men and their actions. In fact, the Oracles gave such good justice that they had replaced many of the courts of the land.

  Joenes was brought to Sperry and was told to stand before the Oracle. This he did, although his knees were shaking. The Oracle was a great calculating machine of the most complex variety, with a switchboard, or altar, attended by many priests. These priests had been castrated so they should think no thoughts except of the machine. And the high priest had been blinded also, so that he could see penitents only through the eyes of the Oracle.