Breakfast of Champions Page 0,26
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-in-law.
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