Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes by Patricia Highsmith Page A

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    Ghastly as it was, Bomo had to give orders for all twenty corpses to be burnt. Their bodies were arranged in a ring with feet outermost like the spokes of a wheel. No time for niceties! The ants had to be dealt with first, so kerosene was poured over the masks and heads, a match thrown.
    Servants stamped the ground, looking for fleeing ants. Squealing as ants nipped her bare feet, Lulu-Fey shot spray from a can of insecticide which she had found in the Small Palace’s kitchen, making a circle with it on the ground around the projecting legs of the Committee men and their aides.
    “The pilot!” Bomo said suddenly, frowning, recalling that he had seen one figure at the controls of the plane, maybe two.
    His son Kuo heard him, and raised a finger to indicate that he understood. “I send a message to the airport!” He spoke with one of his soldiers who stood nearby tending the fire, and drew a finger across his own throat, and the soldier departed.
    The American pilot and co-pilot, who had stayed behind at the airport to try to repair, with the help of some Nabutians, the damage done to their small jet, were surprised by a squad of five soldiers with bayonets on their rifles, who approached them in an aggressive manner and beheaded them without a word.
    So disappeared the United Nations Committee on African Aid, which was a division of—some other well-meaning department. The small jet had its useful contents removed, also its motor, and the carcass was broken up and burnt beyond recognition the evening of the same day as the deaths of its passengers. When the telephone calls came in the next day, asking where Mr. Hazelwood and his Committee were, the telephone operator, on Bomo’s orders, said that the Committee’s plane had never arrived, though they had been expecting it yesterday morning at 11. It was easy to suggest that their neighbor country Gibbi, which was known to be always making trouble for Nabuti, had shot the plane down. At any rate, President Bomo had no information to give, and deeply regretted that the Committee had not been able to make its visit, to which he had been so much looking forward.

Sweet Freedom! And a Picnic on the White House Lawn
     
    You bump into them everywhere, in New York, in Chicago or Philadelphia, or they bump into you. They are called nuts, if the citizens are in a tolerant mood, and parasites if the citizens are not. They are mildly or totally insane, often ranting to the open sky, or earnestly conversing with someone who is not there.
    Nobody knows what to do with them. “There’re so many of them!” some people say in desperation. Or “Why do they all have to come to New York?” Or Chicago, or wherever. There are as many females as males, sometimes hard to tell which, since the garb is an overcoat, worn-out flat shoes or boots, an old felt hat or a pulled down woolen cap, and they don’t bother with haircuts. They gravitate to big cities, because there they can be anonymous, they don’t stand out like sore thumbs, they can sleep in doorways, go underground and live in the subways for a few days, or in winter find a warm grille in the pavement and stake it out, defend it from would-be usurpers and sharers by interlacing barbed wire in the grille except for the length needed for one person to sleep on. In big cities there are also doss houses costing from one to three dollars a night, but there one has to watch out for thieves among fellow-sleepers.
    Where do they come from? Many are from state mental institutions, released with instructions to go to the nearest drug dispensary and get the pills needed. “It won’t cost you anything, but don’t lose your prescription or the address of the dispensary.” Many of these people are too far gone to hang on to anything, or to remember that they are supposed to take pills once a day or week. No matter, the overcrowded institutions were shot of them. Still other of these wandering zombie-like figures are castouts of