Breakfast of Champions Page 0,31

material every day.”

“Um,” said Trout.

“And the unloading process was sloppy, so there were pieces of books and magazines and so on blowing all over town. If you wanted to start a library, you could just go over to the freight yard, and carry away all the books you wanted.”

“Um,” said Trout. Up ahead was a white man hitchhiking with his pregnant wife and nine children.

“Looks like Gary Cooper, don’t he?” said the truck driver of the hitchhiking man.

“Yes, he does,” said Trout. Gary Cooper was a movie star.

• • •

“Anyway,” said the driver, “they had so many books in Libertyville, they used books for toilet paper in the jail. They got me on a Friday, late in the afternoon, so I couldn’t have a hearing in court until Monday. So I sat there in the calaboose for two days, with nothing to do but read my toilet paper. I can still remember one of the stories I read.”

“Um,” said Trout.

“That was the last story I ever read,” said the driver. “My God—that must be all of fifteen years ago. The story was about another planet. It was a crazy story. They had museums full of paintings all over the place, and the government used a kind of roulette wheel to decide what to put in the museums, and what to throw out.”

Kilgore Trout was suddenly woozy with déjà vu. The truck driver was reminding him of the premise of a book he hadn’t thought about for years. The driver’s toilet paper in Libertyville, Georgia, had been The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, or This Yearns Masterpiece, by Kilgore Trout.

• • •

The name of the planet where Trout’s book took place was Bagnialto, and a “Barring-gaffner” there was a government official who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner’s spins of the wheel.

The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse crammed with works of art.

The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the tax collector. The picture was given a place of honor in the National Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting worth a billion dollars.

There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner committed suicide.

• • •

It was an amazing coincidence that the truck driver had read a book by Kilgore Trout. Trout had never met a reader before, and his response now was interesting: He did not admit that he was the father of the book.

• • •

The driver pointed out that all the mailboxes in the area had the same last name painted on them.

“There’s another one,” he said, indicating a mailbox which looked like this:

The truck was passing through the area where Dwayne Hoover’s stepparents had come from. They had trekked from West Virginia to Midland City during the First World War, to make big money at the Keedsler Automobile Company, which was manufacturing airplanes and trucks. When they got to Midland City, they had their name changed legally from Hoobler to Hoover, because there were so many black people in Midland City named Hoobler.

As Dwayne Hoover’s stepfather explained to him one time, “It was embarrassing. Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was a Nigger name.”

15

DWAYNE HOOVER got through lunch all right that day. He remembered now about Hawaiian Week. The ukuleles and so on were no longer mysterious. The pavement between his automobile agency and the new Holiday Inn was no longer a trampoline.

He drove to lunch alone in an air-conditioned demonstrator, a blue Pontiac Le Mans with a cream interior, with his radio on. He heard several of his own radio commercials, which drove home the point: “You can always trust Dwayne.”

Though his mental health had improved remarkably since breakfast, a new symptom of illness