Breakfast of Champions Page 0,13
and sentenced to as much as five years at hard labor in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown.
• • •
So poor Harry spent a wretched Veterans’ Day weekend after that. But Dwayne spent a worse one.
Here is what the last night of that weekend was like for Dwayne: his bad chemicals rolled him out of bed. They made him dress as though there were some sort of emergency with which he had to deal. This was in the wee hours. Veterans’ Day had ended at the stroke of twelve.
Dwayne’s bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
In Dwayne’s part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, “Give me all your money,” and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, “Stop” or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn’t want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong.
• • •
Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and copilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.
• • •
Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube and through Dwayne’s brains.
But Dwayne elected to shoot up one of his tiled bathrooms instead. He put chunks of lead through his toilet and a washbasin and a bathtub enclosure. There was a picture of a flamingo sandblasted on the glass of the bathtub enclosure. It looked like this:
Dwayne shot the flamingo.
He snarled at his recollection of it afterwards. Here is what he snarled: “Dumb fucking bird.”
• • •
Nobody heard the shots. All the houses in the neighborhood were too well insulated for sound ever to get in or out. A sound wanting in or out of Dwayne’s dreamhouse, for instance, had to go through an inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch airspace, another sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch blanket of glass wool, another sheet of aluminum foil, one inch of insulating board made of pressed sawdust, tarpaper, one inch of wood sheathing, more tarpaper, and then aluminum siding which was hollow. The space in the siding was filled with a miracle insulating material developed for use on rockets to the Moon.
• • •
Dwayne turned on the floodlights around his house, and he played basketball on the blacktop apron outside his five-car garage.
Dwayne’s dog Sparky hid in the basement when Dwayne shot up the bathroom. But he came out now. Sparky watched Dwayne play basketball.
“You and me, Sparky,” said Dwayne. And so on. He sure loved that dog.
Nobody saw him playing basketball. He was screened from his neighbors by trees and shrubs and a high cedar fence.
• • •
He put the basketball away, and he climbed into a black Plymouth Fury he had taken in trade the day before. The Plymouth was a Chrysler product, and Dwayne himself sold General Motors products. He had decided to drive the Plymouth for a day or two in order to keep abreast of the competition.
As he backed out of his driveway,