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.
13
WHEN DWAYNE HOOVER saw Harry LeSabre, his sales manager, in leaf-green leotards and a grass skirt and all that, he could not believe it. So he made himself not see it. He went into his office, which was also cluttered with ukuleles and pineapples.
Francine Pefko, his secretary, looked normal, except that she had a rope of flowers around her neck and a flower behind one ear. She smiled. This was a war widow with lips like sofa pillows and bright red hair. She adored Dwayne. She adored Hawaiian Week, too.
“Aloha,” she said.
• • •
Harry LeSabre, meanwhile, had been destroyed by Dwayne.
When Harry presented himself to Dwayne so ridiculously, every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne’s reaction. Each molecule ceased its business for a moment, put some distance between itself and its neighbors. Each molecule waited to learn whether its galaxy, which was called Harry LeSabre, would or would not be dissolved.
When Dwayne treated Harry as though he were invisible, Harry thought he had revealed himself as a revolting transvestite, and that he was fired on that account.
Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: “For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved!”
• • •
Dwayne didn’t know anything about that. He leaned on Francine Pefko’s desk. He came close to telling her how sick he was. He warned her: “This is a very tough day, for some reason. So no jokes, no surprises. Keep everything simple. Keep anybody the least bit nutty out of here. No telephone calls.”
Francine told Dwayne that the twins were waiting for him in the inner office. “Something bad is happening to the cave, I think,” she told him.
Dwayne was grateful for a message that simple and clear. The twins were his younger stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle Hoover. The cave was Sacred Miracle Cave, a tourist trap just south of Shepherdstown, which Dwayne owned in partnership with Lyle and Kyle. It was the sole source of income for Lyle and Kyle, who lived in identical yellow ranch houses on either side of the gift shop which sheltered the entrance to the cave.
All over the State, nailed to trees and fence posts, were arrow-shaped signs, which pointed in the direction of the cave and said how far away it was—for example:
Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn’t have to be serious all the time.
Here was the text of the sign Dwayne read:
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY
TO WORK HERE, BUT IT SURE HELPS!
There was a picture of a crazy person to go with the text. This was it:
Francine wore a button on her bosom which showed a creature in a healthier, more enviable frame of mind. This was the button:
• • •
Lyle and Kyle sat side-by-side on the black leather couch in Dwayne Hoover’s inner office. They looked so much alike that Dwayne had not been able to tell them apart until 1954, when Lyle got in a fight over a woman at the Roller Derby. After that, Lyle was the one with the broken nose. As babies in crib, Dwayne remembered now, they used