Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 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.”

Trout didn’t want to argue about it.

Trout had forgotten the driver’s name.

Trout had a mental defect which I, too, used to suffer from. He couldn’t remember what different people in his life looked like—unless their bodies or faces were strikingly unusual.

When he lived on Cape Cod, for instance, the only person he could greet warmly and by name was Alfy Bearse, who was a one-armed albino.

“Hot enough for you, Alfy?” he would say. “Where you been keeping yourself, Alfy?” he’d say. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, Alfy,” he’d say.

And so on.

Now that Trout lived in Cohoes, the only person he called by name was a red-headed Cockney midget, Durling Heath. He worked in a shoe repair shop. Heath had an executive-type nameplate on his workbench, in case anybody wished to address him by name. The nameplate looked like this:

Trout would drop into the shop from time to time, and say such things as, “Who’s gonna win the World Series this year, Durling?” and “You have any idea what all the sirens were blowing about last night, Durling?” and, “You’re looking good today, Durling—where’d you get that shirt?” And so on.

Trout wondered now if his friendship with Heath was over. The last time Trout had been in the shoe repair place, saying this and that to Durling, the midget had unexpectedly screamed at him.

This is what he had screamed in his Cockney accent: “Stop bloody hounding me!”

The Governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, shook Trout’s hand in a Cohoes grocery story one time. Trout had no idea who he was.

As a science-fiction writer, he should have been flabbergasted to come so close to such a man. Rockefeller wasn’t merely Governor. Because of the peculiar laws in that part of the planet, Rockefeller was allowed to own vast areas of Earth’s surface, and the petroleum and other valuable minerals underneath the surface, as well. He owned or controlled more of the planet than many nations. This had been his destiny since infancy. He had been born into that cockamamie proprietorship.

“How’s it going, fella?” Governor Rockefeller asked him.

“About the same,” said Kilgore Trout.

After insisting that Trout had a rich social life, the driver pretended, again for his own gratification, that Trout had begged to know what the sex life of a transcontinental truck driver was like. Trout had begged no such thing.

“You want to know how truck drivers make out with women, right?” the driver said. “You have this idea that every driver you see is fucking up a storm from coast to coast, right?”

Trout shrugged.

The truck driver became embittered by Trout, scolded him for being so salaciously misinformed. “Let me tell you, Kilgore—” he hesitated. “That’s your name, right?”

“Yes,” said Trout. He had forgotten the driver’s name a hundred times. Every time Trout looked away from him, Trout forgot not only his name but his face, too.

“Kilgore, God damn it—” the driver said, “if I was to have my rig break down in Cohoes, for instance, and I was to have to stay there for two days while it was worked on, how easy you think it would be for me to get laid while I was there—a stranger, looking the way I do?”

“It would depend on how determined you were,” said Trout.

The driver sighed. “Yeah, God—” he said, and he despaired for himself, “that’s probably the story of my life: not enough determination.”

They talked about aluminum siding as a technique for making old houses look new again. From a distance, these sheets, which never needed painting, looked like freshly painted wood.

The driver wanted to talk about Perma-Stone, too, which was a competitive scheme. It involved plastering the sides of old houses with colored cement, so that, from a distance, they looked as though they were made of stone.

“If you’re in aluminum storm windows,” the driver said to Trout, “you must be in aluminum siding, too.” All over the country, the two businesses went hand-in-hand.

“My company sells it,” said Trout, “and I’ve seen a lot of it. I’ve never actually worked on an installation.”

The driver was thinking seriously of buying aluminum siding for his home in Little Rock, and he begged Trout to give him an honest answer to this question: “From what you’ve seen and heard—the people who get aluminum siding, are they happy with what they get?”

“Around Cohoes,” said Trout. “I think those were about the only really happy people I ever saw.”

“I know what you mean,” said the driver. “One time I saw a whole family standing outside their house. They couldn’t believe how nice their house looked after the aluminum siding went on. My question to you, and you can give me an honest answer, on account of we’ll never have to do business, you and me: Kilgore, how long will that happiness last?”

“About fifteen years,” said Trout. “Our salesmen say you can easily afford to have the job redone with all the money you’ve saved on paint and heat.”

“Perma-Stone looks a lot richer, and I suppose it lasts a lot longer, too,” said the driver. “On the other hand, it costs a lot more.”

“You get what you pay for,” said Kilgore Trout.

The truck driver told Trout about a gas hot-water heater he had bought thirty years ago, and it hadn’t given him a speck of trouble in all that time.

“I’ll be damned,” said Kilgore Trout.

Trout asked about the truck, and the driver said it was the greatest truck in the world. The tractor alone cost twenty-eight thousand dollars.

It was powered by a three hundred and twenty-four horsepower Cummins Diesel engine, which was turbo-charged, so it would function well at high altitudes. It had hydraulic steering, air brakes, a thirteen- speed transmission, and was owned by his brother-inlaw.

His brother-in-law, he said, owned twenty-eight trucks, and was President of the Pyramid Trucking Company.

“Why did he name his company Pyramid?" asked Trout. “I mean—this thing can go a hundred miles an hour, if it has to. It’s fast and useful and unornamental. It’s as up-to-date as a rocket ship. I never saw anything that was less like a pyramid than this truck.”

A pyramid was a sort of huge stone tomb which Egyptians had built thousands and thousands of years before. The Egyptians didn’t build them anymore. The tombs looked like this, and tourists would come from far away to gaze at them:

“Why would anybody in the business of highspeed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven’t moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born?”

The driver’s answer was prompt. It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that. “He liked the sound of it,” he said. “Don’t you like the sound of it?”

Trout nodded in order to keep things friendly. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a very nice sound.”

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.

So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.

“You married, Kilgore?” the driver asked.

“Three times,” said Trout. It was true. Not only that, but each of his wives had been extraordinarily patient and loving and beautiful. Each had been shriveled by his pessimism.

“Any kids?”

“One,” said Trout. Somewhere in the past, tumbling among all the wives and stories lost in the mails was a son named Leo. “He’s a man now,” said Trout.

Leo left home forever at the age of fourteen. He lied about his age, and he joined the Marines. He sent a note to his father from boot camp. It said this: “I pity you. You’ve crawled up your own asshole and died.”

That was the last Trout heard from Leo, directly or indirectly, until he was visited by two agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Leo had deserted from his division in Viet Nam, they said. He had committed high treason. He had joined the Viet Cong.

Here was the F.B.I. evaluation of Leo’s situation on the planet at that time: “Your boy’s in bad trouble,” they said.