Breakfast of Champions Page 0,28

to suck each other’s thumbs.

• • •

Here is how Dwayne happened to have stepbrothers, incidentally, even though he had been adopted by people who couldn’t have children of their own. Their adopting him triggered something to their bodies which made it possible for them to have children after all. This was a common phenomenon. A lot of couples seemed to be programmed that way.

• • •

Dwayne was so glad to see them now—these two little men in overalls and work shoes, each wearing a pork-pie hat. They were familiar, they were real. Dwayne closed his door on the chaos outside. “All right—” he said, “what’s happened at the cave?”

Ever since Lyle had had his nose broken, the twins agreed that Lyle should do the talking for the two. Kyle hadn’t said a thousand words since 1954.

“Them bubbles is halfway up to the Cathedral now,” said Lyle. “The way they’re coming, they’ll be up to Moby Dick in a week or two.”

Dwayne understood him perfectly. The underground stream which passed through the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave was polluted by some sort of industrial waste which formed bubbles as tough as ping-pong balls. These bubbles were shouldering one another up a passage which led to a big boulder which had been painted white to resemble Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. The bubbles would soon engulf Moby Dick and invade the Cathedral of Whispers, which was the main attraction at the cave. Thousands of people had been married in the Cathedral of Whispers—including Dwayne and Lyle and Kyle. Harry LeSabre, too.

• • •

Lyle told Dwayne about an experiment he and Kyle had performed the night before. They had gone into the cave with their identical Browning Automatic Shotguns, and they had opened fire on the advancing wall of bubbles.

“They let loose a stink you wouldn’t believe,” said Lyle. He said it smelled like athlete’s foot. “It drove me and Kyle right out of there. We run the ventilating system for an hour, and then we went back in. The paint was blistered on Moby Dick. He ain’t even got eyes anymore.” Moby Dick used to have long-lashed blue eyes as big as dinner plates.

• • •

“The organ turned black, and the ceiling turned a kind of dirty yellow,” said Lyle. “You can’t hardly see the Sacred Miracle no more.”

The organ was the Pipe Organ of the Gods, a thicket of stalactites and stalagmites which had grown together in one corner of the Cathedral. There was a loudspeaker in back of it, through which music for weddings and funerals was played. It was illuminated by electric lights, which changed colors all the time.

The Sacred Miracle was a cross on the ceiling of the Cathedral. It was formed by the intersection of two cracks. “It never was real easy to see,” said Lyle, speaking of the cross. “I ain’t even sure it’s there anymore.” He asked Dwayne’s permission to order a load of cement. He wanted to plug up the passage between the stream and the Cathedral.

“Just forget about Moby Dick and Jesse James and the slaves and all that,” said Lyle, “and save the Cathedral.”

Jesse James was a skeleton which Dwayne’s stepfather had bought from the estate of a doctor back during the Great Depression. The bones of its right hand mingled with the rusted parts of a .45 caliber revolver. Tourists were told that it had been found that way, that it probably belonged to some railroad robber who had been trapped in the cave by a rock-slide.

As for the slaves: these were plaster statues of black men in a chamber fifty feet down the corridor from Jesse James. The statues were removing one another’s chains with hammers and hacksaws. Tourists were told that real slaves had at one time used the cave after escaping to freedom across the Ohio River.

• • •

The story about the slaves was as fake as the one about Jesse James. The cave wasn’t discovered until 1937, when a small earthquake opened it up a crack. Dwayne Hoover himself discovered the crack, and then he and his stepfather opened it with crowbars and dynamite. Before that, not even small animals had been in there.

The only connection the cave had with slavery was this: the farm on which it was discovered was started by an ex-slave, Josephus Hoobler. He was freed by his master, and he came north and started the farm. Then he went back and bought his mother and a woman who became his wife.

Their