Breakfast of Champions Page 0,10
of his disease.
• • •
People said later that they were furious with themselves for not noticing the danger signals in Dwayne’s behavior, for ignoring his obvious cries for help. After Dwayne ran amok, the local paper ran a deeply sympathetic editorial about it, begging people to watch each other for danger signals. Here was its title:
A CRY FOR HELP
But Dwayne wasn’t all that weird before he met Kilgore Trout. His behavior in public kept him well within the limits of acceptable acts and beliefs and conversations in Midland City. The person closest to him, Francine Pefko, his white secretary and mistress, said that Dwayne seemed to be getting happier and happier all the time during the month before Dwayne went public as a maniac.
“I kept thinking,” she told a newspaper reporter from her hospital bed, “‘He is finally getting over his wife’s suicide.’”
• • •
Francine worked at Dwayne’s principal place of business, which was Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village, just off the Interstate, next door to the new Holiday Inn.
Here is what made Francine think he was becoming happier: Dwayne began to sing songs which had been popular in his youth, such as “The Old Lamp Lighter,” and “Tippy-Tippy-Tin,” and “Hold Tight,” and “Blue Moon,” and so on. Dwayne had never sung before. Now he did it loudly as he sat at his desk, when he took a customer for a ride in a demonstrator, when he watched a mechanic service a car. One day he sang loudly as he crossed the lobby of the new Holiday Inn, smiling and gesturing at people as though he had been hired to sing for their pleasure. But nobody thought that was necessarily a hint of derangement, either—especially since Dwayne owned a piece of the Inn.
A black bus boy and a black waiter discussed this singing. “Listen at him sing,” said the bus boy.
“If I owned what he owns, I’d sing, too,” the waiter replied.
• • •
The only person who said out loud that Dwayne was going crazy was Dwayne’s white sales manager at the Pontiac agency, who was Harry LeSabre. A full week before Dwayne went of this rocker, Harry said to Francine Pefko, “Something has come over Dwayne. He used to be so charming. I don’t find him so charming anymore.”
Harry knew Dwayne better than did any other man. He had been with Dwayne for twenty years. He came to work for him when the agency was right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger was a human being who was black.
“I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy,” said Harry. “We used to put our lives on the line every day, when the agency was down on Jefferson Street. We got held up on the average of fourteen times a year. And I tell you that the Dwayne of today is a Dwayne I never saw before.”
• • •
It was true about the holdups. That was how Dwayne bought a Pontiac agency so cheaply. White people were the only people with money enough to buy new automobiles, except for a few black criminals, who always wanted Cadillacs. And white people were scared to go anywhere on Jefferson Street anymore.
• • •
Here is where Dwayne got the money to buy the agency: He borrowed it from the Midland County National Bank. For collateral, he put up stock he owned in a company which was then called The Midland City Ordnance Company. It later became Barrytron, Limited. When Dwayne first got the stock, in the depths of the Great Depression, the company was called The Robo-Magic Corporation of America.
The name of the company kept changing through the years because the nature of its business changed so much. But its management hung on to the company’s original motto—for old time’s sake. The motto was this:
GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY.
• • •
Listen:
Harry LeSabre said to Francine, “When a man has been in combat with another man, he gets so he can sense the slightest change in his buddy’s personality, and Dwayne has changed. You ask Vernon Garr.”
Vernon Garr was a white mechanic who was the only other employee who had been with Dwayne before Dwayne moved the agency out to the Interstate. As it happened, Vernon was having trouble at home. His wife, Mary, was a schizophrenic, so Vernon hadn’t noticed whether Dwayne had changed or not. Vernon’s wife believed that Vernon was trying to turn her brains into plutonium.
• • •
Harry LeSabre was entitled to talk about