Breakfast of Champions Page 0,34
Bannister’s obelisk was paid for by public subscription, with the Chamber of Commerce matching every two dollars raised with a dollar of its own. It was for many years the tallest structure in Midland City. A city ordinance was passed which made it illegal to erect anything taller than that, and it was called The George Hickman Bannister Law.
The ordinance was junked later on to allow radio towers to go up.
• • •
The two largest monuments in town, until the new Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center went up in Sugar Creek, were constructed supposedly so that George Hickman Bannister would never be forgotten. But nobody ever thought about him anymore by the time Dwayne Hoover met Kilgore Trout. There wasn’t much to think about him, actually, even at the time of his death, except that he was young.
And he didn’t have any relatives in town anymore. There weren’t any Bannisters in the phone book, except for The Bannister, which was a motion picture theater. Actually, there wouldn’t even be a Bannister Theater in there after the new phonebooks came out. The Bannister had been turned into a cut-rate furniture store.
George Hickman Bannister’s father and mother and sister, Lucy, moved away from town before either the tombstone or the fieldhouse was completed, and they couldn’t be located for the dedication ceremonies.
• • •
It was a very restless country, with people tearing around all the time. Every so often, somebody would stop to put up a monument.
There were monuments all over the country. But it was certainly unusual for somebody from the common people to have not one but two monuments in his honor, as was the case with George Hickman Bannister.
Technically, though, only the tombstone had been erected specifically for him. The fieldhouse would have gone up anyway. The money was appropriated for the fieldhouse two years before George Hickman Bannister was cut down in his prime. It didn’t cost anything extra to name it after him.
• • •
Calvary Cemetery, where George Hickman Bannister was at rest, was named in honor of a hill in Jerusalem, thousands of miles away. Many people believed that the son of the Creator of the Universe had been killed on that hill thousands of years ago.
Dwayne Hoover didn’t know whether to believe that or not. Neither did Patty Keene.
• • •
And they certainly weren’t worrying about it now. They had other fish to fry. Dwayne was wondering how long his attack of echolalia was likely to last, and Patty Keene had to find out if her brand-newness and prettiness and outgoing personality were worth a lot to a sweet, sort of sexy, middle-aged old Pontiac dealer like Dwayne.
“Anyway,” she said, “it certainly is an honor to have you visit us, and those aren’t the right words, either, but I hope you know what I mean.”
“Mean,” said Dwayne.
“Is the food all right?” she said.
“All right,” said Dwayne.
“It’s what everybody else gets,” she said. “We didn’t do anything special for you.”
“You,” said Dwayne.
• • •
It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.
That was the main reason the people in Midland City were so slow to detect insanity in their associates. Their imagination insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
• • •
When Dwayne left Patty Keene and his Burger Chef, when he got into his demonstrator and drove away, Patty Keene was persuaded that she could make him happy with her young body, with her bravery and cheerfulness. She wanted to cry about the lines in his face, and the fact that his wife had eaten Drāno, and that his dog had to fight all the time because it couldn’t wag its tail, about the fact that his son was a homosexual. She knew all those things about Dwayne. Everybody knew those things about Dwayne.
She gazed at the tower of radio station WMCY, which Dwayne Hoover owned. It was the tallest structure in Midland