Breakfast of Champions

Chapter 14

The truck carrying Kilgore Trout was in West Virginia now. The surface of the State had been demolished by men and machinery and explosives in order to make it yield up its coal. The coal was mostly gone now. It had been turned into heat.

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it. Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves, were sliding into valleys now.

The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State Government, which drew their power from the people.

Here and there an inhabited dwelling still stood.

Trout saw a broken guardrail ahead. He gazed into a gully below it, saw a 1968 Cadillac El Dorado capsized in a brook. It had Alabama license plates. There were also several old home appliances in the brook—stoves, a washing machine, a couple of refrigerators.

An angel-faced white child, with flaxen hair, stood by the brook. She waved up at Trout. She clasped an eighteenounce bottle of Pepsi-Cola to her breast.

Trout asked himself out loud what the people did for amusement, and the driver told him a queer story about a night he spent in West Virginia, in the cab of his truck, near a windowless building which droned monotonously.

“I’d see folks go in, and I’d see folks come out,” he said, “but I couldn’t figure out what kind of a machine it was that made the drone. The building was a cheap old frame thing set up on cement blocks, and it was out in the middle of nowhere. Cars came and went, and the folks sure seemed to like whatever was doing the droning,” he said.

So he had a look inside. “It was full of folks on rollerskates,” he said. “They went around and around. Nobody smiled. They just went around and around.”

He told Trout about people he’d heard of in the area who grabbed live copperheads and rattlesnakes during church services, to show how much they believed that Jesus would protect them.

“Takes all kinds of people to make up a world,” said Trout.

Trout marveled at how recently white men had arrived in West Virginia, and how quickly they had demolished it—for heat.

Now the heat was all gone, too—into outer space, Trout supposed. It had boiled water, and the steam had made steel windmills whiz around and around. The windmills had made rotors in generators whiz around and around. America was jazzed with electricity for a while. Coal had also powered old-fashioned steamboats and choo-choo trains.

Choo-choo trains and steamboats and factories had whistles which were blown by steam when Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout and I were boys—when our fathers were boys, when our grandfathers were boys. The whistles looked like this:

Steam from water boiled by burning coal was sent raging through the whistles, which made harshly beautiful laments, as though they were the voice boxes of mating or dying dinosaurs—cries such as woooooooo-uh, wooooo-uh, and torrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnn, and so on.

A dinosaur was a reptile as big as a choo-choo train. It looked like this:

It had two brains, one for its front end and one for its rear end. It was extinct. Both brains combined were smaller than a pea. A pea was a legume which looked like this:

Coal was a highly compressed mixture of rotten trees and flowers and bushes and grasses and so on, and dinosaur excrement.

Kilgore Trout thought about the cries of steam whistles he had known, and about the destruction of West Virginia, which made their songs possible. He supposed that the heartrending cries had fled into outer space, along with the heat. He was mistaken.

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details. But no cry from a whistle had got very far from Earth for this reason: sound could only travel in an atmosphere, and the atmosphere of Earth relative to the planet wasn’t even as thick as the skin of an apple. Beyond that lay an all- but-perfect vacuum.

An apple was a popular fruit which looked like this:

The driver was a big eater. He pulled into a MacDonald’s Hamburger establishment. There were many different chains of hamburger establishments in the country. MacDonald’s was one. Burger Chef was another. Dwayne Hoover, as has already been said, owned franchises for several Burger Chefs.

A hamburger was made out of an animal which looked like this:

The animal was killed and ground up into little bits, then shaped into patties and fried, and put between two pieces of bread. The finished product looked like this:

And Trout, who had so little money left, ordered a cup of coffee. He asked an old, old man on a stool next to him at the table if he had worked in the coal mines.

The old man said this: “From the time I was ten till I was sixty-two.” “You glad to be out of ‘em?” said Trout.

“Oh, God,” said the man, “you never get out of ‘em—even when you sleep. I dream mines.”

Trout asked him what it had felt like to work for an industry whose business was to destroy the countryside, and the old man said he was usually too tired to care.

“Don’t matter if you care,” the old miner said, “if you don’t own what you care about.” He pointed out that the mineral rights to the entire county in which they sat were owned by the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company, which had acquired these rights soon after the end of the Civil War. “The law says,” he went on, “when a man owns something under the ground and he wants to get at it, you got to let him tear up anything between the surface and what he owns.”

Trout did not make the connection between the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company and Eliot Rosewater, his only fan. He still thought Eliot Rosewater was a teenager.

The truth was that Rosewater’s ancestors had been among the principal destroyers of the surface and the people of West Virginia.

“It don’t seem right, though,” the old miner said to Trout, “that a man can own what’s underneath another man’s farm or woods or house. And any time the man wants to get what’s underneath all that, he’s got a right to wreck what’s on top to get at it. The rights of the people on top of the ground don’t amount to nothing compared to the rights of the man who owns what’s underneath.”

He remembered out loud when he and other miners used to try to force the Rosewater Coal and Iron Company to treat them like human beings. They would fight small wars with the company’s private police and the State Police and the National Guard.

“I never saw a Rosewater,” he said, “but Rosewater always won. I walked on Rosewater. I dug holes for Rosewater in Rosewater. I lived in Rosewater houses. I ate Rosewater food. I’d fight Rosewater, whatever Rosewater is, and Rosewater would beat me and leave me for dead. You ask people around here and they’ll tell you: this whole world is Rosewater as far as they’re concerned.”

The driver knew Trout was bound for Midland City. He didn’t know Trout was a writer on his way to an arts festival. Trout understood that honest working people had no use for the arts.

“Why would anybody in his right mind go to Midland City?” the driver wanted to know. They were riding along again.

“My sister is sick,” said Trout.

“Midland City is the asshole of the Universe,” said the driver.

“I’ve often wondered where the asshole was,” said Trout.

“If it isn’t in Midland City,” said the driver, “it’s in Libertyville, Georgia. You ever see Libertyville?”

“No,” said Trout.

“I was arrested for speeding down there. They had a speed trap, where you all of a sudden had to go from fifty down to fifteen miles an hour. It made me mad. I had some words with the policeman, and he put me in jail.

“The main industry there was pulping up old newspapers and magazines and books, and making new paper out of ‘em,” said the driver. “Trucks and trains were bringing in hundreds of tons of unwanted printed material every day.”

“Um,” said Trout.

“And the unloading process was sloppy, so there were pieces of books and magazines and so on blowing all over town. If you wanted to start a library, you could just go over to the freight yard, and carry away all the books you wanted.”

“Um,” said Trout. Up ahead was a white man hitchhiking with his pregnant wife and nine children.

“Looks like Gary Cooper, don’t he?” said the truck driver of the hitchhiking man.

“Yes, he does,” said Trout. Gary Cooper was a movie star.

“Anyway,” said the driver, “they had so many books in Libertyville, they used books for toilet paper in the jail. They got me on a Friday, late in the afternoon, so I couldn’t have a hearing in court until Monday. So I sat there in the calaboose for two days, with nothing to do but read my toilet paper. I can still remember one of the stories I read.”

“Um,” said Trout.

“That was the last story I ever read,” said the driver. “My God—that must be all of fifteen years ago. The story was about another planet. It was a crazy story. They had museums full of paintings all over the place, and the government used a kind of roulette wheel to decide what to put in the museums, and what to throw out.”

Kilgore Trout was suddenly woozy with deja vu. The truck driver was reminding him of the premise of a book he hadn’t thought about for years. The driver’s toilet paper in Libertyville, Georgia, had been The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Year’s Masterpiece, by Kilgore Trout.

The name of the planet where Trout’s book took place was Bagnialto, and a “Barring-gaffner” there was a government official who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner’s spins of the wheel.

The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse crammed with works of art.

The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the tax collector. The picture was given a place of honor in the National Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting worth a billion dollars.

There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner committed suicide.

It was an amazing coincidence that the truck driver had read a book by Kilgore Trout. Trout had never met a reader before, and his response now was interesting: He did not admit that he was the father of the book.

The driver pointed out that all the mailboxes in the area had the same last name painted on them.

“There’s another one,” he said, indicating a mailbox which looked like this:

The truck was passing through the area where Dwayne Hoover’s stepparents had come from. They had trekked from West Virginia to Midland City during the First World War, to make big money at the Keedsler Automobile Company, which was manufacturing airplanes and trucks. When they got to Midland City, they had their name changed legally from Hoobler to Hoover, because there were so many black people in Midland City named Hoobler.

As Dwayne Hoover’s stepfather explained to him one time, “It was embarrassing. Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was a Nigger name.”