"What was the Star of Bethlehem?" said the driver.
"A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar," said Trout.
*
The driver was impressed. "Come to think about it," he said, "I don't think there's anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible."
"Unless you want to count the story about the Flood," said Trout.
*
They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another good point. He said he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. "So I'm committing suicide," he said.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"My brother is even worse," the driver went on. "He works in a factory that makes chemicals for killing plants and trees in Viet Nam." Viet Nam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill all the foliage, so it would be harder for communists to hide from airplanes.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"In the long run, he's committing suicide," said the driver. "Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way."
"Good point," said Trout.
*
"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "It's dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
*
After Trout became famous, of course, one of the biggest mysteries about him was whether he was kidding or not. He told one persistent questioner that he always crossed his fingers when he was kidding.
"And please note," he went on, "that when I gave you that priceless piece of information, my fingers were crossed."
And so on.
He was a pain in the neck in a lot of ways. The truck driver got sick of him after an hour or two. Trout used the silence to make up an anticonservation story he called "Gilgongo!"
"Gilgongo!" was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was the word:
GILGONGO!
In the language of the planet, that meant "Extinct!"
*
People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter.
The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hundred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.
*
"At least it's olives," the driver said.
"What?" said Trout.
"Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives."
"Right," said Trout. He had forgotten that the main thing they were doing was moving seventy-eight thousand pounds of olives to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
*
The driver talked about politics some.
Trout couldn't tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it "Hail to the Chief."
The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket. It looked like this:
Everywhere he went, bands would play "Hail to the Chief" The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.
*
They stopped at a diner. Here is what the sign in front of the diner said:
So they ate.
Trout spotted an idiot who was eating, too. The idiot was a white male adult--in the care of a white female nurse. The idiot couldn't talk much, and he had a lot of trouble feeding himself. The nurse put a bib around his neck.
But he certainly had a wonderful appetite. Trout watched him shovel waffles and pork sausage into his mouth, watched him guzzle orange juice and milk. Trout marveled at what a big animal the idiot was. The idiot's happiness was fascinating, too, as he stoked himself with calories which would get him through yet another day.
Trout said this to himself: "Stoking up for another day."
*
"Excuse me," said the truck driver to Trout, "I've got to take a leak."
"Back where I come from," said Trout, "that means you're going to steal a mirror. We call mirrors leaks."
"I never heard that before," said the driver. He repeated the word: "Leaks." He pointed to a mirror on a cigarette machine. "You call that a leak?"
"Doesn't it look like a leak to you?" said Trout.
"No," said the driver. "Where did you say you were from?"
"I was born in Bermuda," said Trout.
About a week later, the driver would tell his wife that mirrors were called leaks in Bermuda, and she would tell her friends.
*
When Trout followed the driver back to the truck, he took his first good look at their form of transportation from a distance, saw it whole. There was a message written on the side of it in bright orange letters which were eight feet high. This was it:
Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big.
And then, pretending to be a child by the roadside, he read the message on the side of another truck. This was it:
11
DWAYNE HOOVER slept until ten at the new Holiday Inn. He was much refreshed. He had a Number Five Breakfast in the popular restaurant of the Inn, which was the Tally-Ho Room. The drapes were drawn at night. They were wide open now. They let the sunshine in.
At the next table, also alone, was Cyprian Ukwende, the Indaro, the Nigerian. He was reading the classified ads in the Midland City Bugle-Observer. He needed a cheap place to live. The Midland County General Hospital was footing his bills at the Inn while he looked around, and they were getting restless about that.
He needed a woman, too, or a bunch of women who would fuck him hundreds of times a week, because he was so full of lust and jism all the time. And he ached to be with his Indaro relatives. Back home, he had six hundred relatives he knew by name.
Ukwende's face was impassive as he ordered the Number Three Breakfast with whole-wheat toast. Behind his mask was a young man in the terminal stages of nostalgia and lover's nuts.
*
Dwayne Hoover, six feet away, gazed out at the busy, sunny Interstate Highway. He knew where he was. There was a familiar moat between the parking lot of the Inn and the Interstate, a concrete trough which the engineers had built to contain Sugar Creek. Next came a familiar resilient steel barrier which prevented cars and trucks from tumbling into Sugar Creek. Next came the three familiar west-bound lanes, and then the familiar grassy median divider. After that came the three familiar east-bound lanes, and then another familiar steel barrier. After that came the familiar Will Fairchild Memorial Airport--and then the familiar farmlands beyond.
*
It was certainly flat out there--flat city, flat township, flat county, flat state. When Dwayne was a little boy, he had supposed that almost everybody lived in places that were treeless and flat. He imagined that oceans and mountains and forests were mainly seque
stered in state and national parks. In the third grade, little Dwayne scrawled an essay which argued in favor of creating a national park at a bend in Sugar Creek, the only significant surface water within eight miles of Midland City.
Dwayne said the name of that familiar surface water to himself now, silently: "Sugar Creek."
*
Sugar Creek was only two inches deep and fifty yards wide at the bend, where little Dwayne thought the park should be. Now they had put the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts there instead. It was beautiful.
Dwayne fiddled with his lapel for a moment, felt a badge pinned there. He unpinned it, having no recollection of what it said. It was a boost for the Arts Festival, which would begin that evening. All over town people were wearing badges like Dwayne's. Here is what the badges said:
Sugar Creek flooded now and then. Dwayne remembered about that. In a land so flat, flooding was a queerly pretty thing for water to do. Sugar Creek brimmed over silently, formed a vast mirror in which children might safely play.
The mirror showed the citizens the shape of the valley they lived in, demonstrated that they were hill people who inhabited slopes rising one inch for every mile that separated them from Sugar Creek.
Dwayne silently said the name of the water again: "Sugar Creek."
*
Dwayne finished his breakfast, and he dared to suppose that he was no longer mentally diseased, that he had been cured by a simple change of residence, by a good night's sleep.
His bad chemicals let him cross the lobby and then the cocktail lounge, which wasn't open yet, without experiencing anything strange. But when he stepped out of the side door of the cocktail lounge, and onto the asphalt prairie which surrounded both his Inn and his Pontiac agency, he discovered that someone had turned the asphalt into a sort of trampoline.
It sank beneath Dwayne's weight. It dropped Dwayne to well below street level, then slowly brought him only partway up again. He was in a shallow, rubbery dimple. Dwayne took another step in the direction of his automobile agency. He sank down again, came up again, and stood in a brand new dimple.
He gawked around for witnesses. There was only one. Cyprian Ukwende stood on the rim of the dimple, not sinking in. This was all Ukwende had to say, even though Dwayne's situation was extraordinary:
"Nice day."
*
Dwayne progressed from dimple to dimple.
He blooped across the used car lot now.
He stopped in a dimple, looked up at another young black man. This one was polishing a maroon 1970 Buick Skylark convertible with a rag. The man wasn't dressed for that sort of work. He wore a cheap blue suit and a white shirt and a black necktie. Also: he wasn't merely polishing the car--he was burnishing it.
The young man did some more burnishing. Then he smiled at Dwayne blindingly, then he burnished the car again.
Here was the explanation: this young black man had just been paroled from the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown. He needed work right away, or he would starve to death. So he was showing Dwayne how hard a worker he was.
He had been in orphanages and youth shelters and prisons of one sort or another in the Midland City area since he was nine years old. He was now twenty-six.
*
He was free at last!
*
Dwayne thought the young man was an hallucination.
*
The young man went back to burnishing the automobile. His life was not worth living. He had a feeble will to survive. He thought the planet was terrible, that he never should have been sent there. Some mistake had been made. He had no friends or relatives. He was put in cages all the time.
He had a name for a better world, and he often saw it in dreams. Its name was a secret. He would have been ridiculed, if he had said its name out loud. It was such a childish name.
The young black jailbird could see the name any time he wanted to, written in lights on the inside of his skull. This is what it looked like:
*
He had a photograph of Dwayne in his wallet. He used to have photographs of Dwayne on the walls of his cell at Shepherdstown. They were easy to get, because Dwayne's smiling face, with his motto underneath, was a part of every ad he ran in the Bugle-Observer. The picture was changed every six months. The motto hadn't varied in twenty-five years.
Here was the motto:
ASK ANYBODY--
YOU CAN TRUST
DWAYNE.
The young ex-convict smiled yet again at Dwayne. His teeth were in perfect repair. The dental program at Shepherdstown was excellent. So was the food.
"Good morning, sir," said the young man to Dwayne. He was dismayingly innocent. There was so much he had to learn. He didn't know anything about women, for instance. Francine Pefko was the first woman he had spoken to in eleven years.
"Good morning," said Dwayne. He said it softly, so his voice wouldn't carry very far, in case he was conversing with an hallucination.
"Sir--I have read your ads in the newspapers with great interest, and I have found pleasure in your radio advertising, too," the parolee said. During the last year in prison, he had been obsessed by one idea: that he would work for Dwayne someday, and live happily ever after. It would be like Fairyland.
Dwayne made no reply to this, so the young man went on: "I am a very hard worker, sir, as you can see. I hear nothing but good things about you. I think the good Lord meant for me to work for you."
"Oh?" said Dwayne.
"Our names are so close," said the young man, "it's the good Lord telling us both what to do."
Dwayne Hoover didn't ask him what his name was, but the young man told him anyway, radiantly: "My name, sir, is Wayne Hoobler."
All around Midland City, Hoobler was a common Nigger name.
*
Dwayne Hoover broke Wayne Hoobler's heart by shaking his head vaguely, then walking away.
*
Dwayne entered his showroom. The ground wasn't blooping underneath him anymore, but now he saw something else for which there could be no explanation: A palm tree was growing out of the showroom floor. Dwayne's bad chemicals made him forget all about Hawaiian Week. Actually, Dwayne had designed the palm tree himself. It was a sawed-off telephone pole--swaddled in burlap. It had real coconuts nailed to the top of it. Sheets of green plastic had been cut to resemble leaves.
The tree so bewildered Dwayne that he almost swooned. Then he looked around and saw pineapples and ukuleles scattered everywhere.
And then he saw the most unbelievable thing of all: His sales manager, Harry LeSabre, came toward him leeringly, wearing a lettuce-green leotard, straw sandals, a grass skirt, and a pink T-shirt which looked like this:
*
Harry and his wife had spent all weekend arguing about whether or not Dwayne suspected that Harry was a transvestite. They concluded that Dwayne had no reason to suspect it. Harry never talked about women's clothes to Dwayne. He had never entered a transvestite beauty contest or done what a lot of transvestites in Midland City did, which was join a big transvestite club over in Cincinnati. He never went into the city's transvestite bar, which was Ye Old Rathskeller, in the basement of the Fairchild Hotel. He had never exchanged Polaroid pictures with any other transvestites, had never subscribed to a transvestite magazine.
Harry and his wife concluded that Dwayne had meant nothing more than what he said, that Harry had better put on some wild clothes for Hawaiian Week, or Dwayne would can him.
So here was the new Harry now, rosy with fear and excitement. He felt uninhibited and beautiful and lovable and suddenly free.
He greeted Dwayne with the Hawaiian word which meant both hello and goodbye. "Aloha," he said.
12
KILGORE TROUT was far away, but he was steadily closing the distance between himself and Dwayne. He was still in the truck named Pyramid. It was crossing a bridge named in honor of the poet Walt Whitman. The bridge was veiled in smoke. The truck was about to become a part of Philadelphia now.
A sign at the foot of the bridge said this:
*
As a younger man, Trout would have sneered at the sign about brotherhood--posted on the rim of a bomb crater, as anyone could see. But his head no longer sheltered ideas of how things could be and should be on the planet, as opposed to how they really were. There was only one way for the Earth to be, he thought: the way it was.
Everything was necessary. He saw an old white woman fishing through a garbage can. That was necessary. He saw a bathtub toy, a little rubber duck, lying on its side on the grating over a storm sewer. It had to be there.
And so on.
*
The driver mentioned that the day before had been Veterans' Day.
"Um," said Trout.
"You a veteran?" said the driver.
"No," said Trout. "Are you?"
"No," said the driver.
Neither one of them was a veteran.
*
The driver got onto the subject of friends. He said it was hard for him to maintain friendships that meant anything because he was on the road most of the time. He joked about the time when he used to talk about his "best friends." He guessed people stopped talking about best friends after they got out of junior high school.
He suggested that Trout, since Trout was in the combination aluminum storm window and screen business, had opportunities to build many lasting friendships in the course of his work. "I mean," he said, "you get men working together day after day, putting up those windows, they get to know each other pretty well."
"I work alone," said Trout.
The driver was disappointed. "I assumed it would take two men to do the job."
"Just one," said Trout. "A weak little kid could do it without any help."
The driver wanted Trout to have a rich social life so that he could enjoy it vicariously. "All the same," he insisted, "you've got buddies you see after work. You have a few beers. You play some cards. You have some laughs."
Trout shrugged.
"You walk down the same streets every day," the driver told him. "You know a lot of people, and they know you, because it's the same streets for you, day after day. You say, 'Hello,' and they say 'Hello,' back. You call them by name. They call you by name. If you're in a real jam, they'll help you, because you're one of 'em. You belong. They see you every day."