too.
• • •
Grace LeSabre expressed her contempt for the good opinion of Dwayne Hoover, which her husband felt he had lost. “Fuck Dwayne Hoover,” she said. “Fuck Midland City. Let’s sell the God damn Xerox stock and buy a condominium on Maui.” Maui was one of the Hawaiian Islands. It was widely believed to be a paradise.
“Listen,” said Grace, “we’re the only white people in Midland City with any kind of sex life, as nearly as I can tell. You’re not a freak. Dwayne Hoover’s the freak! How many orgasms do you think he has a month?”
“I don’t know,” said Harry from his humid tent.
Dwayne’s monthly orgasm rate on the average over the past ten years, which included the last years of his marriage, was two and one-quarter. Grace’s guess was close. “One point five,” she said. Her own monthly average over the same period was eighty-seven. Her husband’s average was thirty-six. He had been slowing up in recent years, which was one of many reasons he had for feeling panicky.
Grace now spoke loudly and scornfully about Dwayne’s marriage. “He was so scared of sex,” she said, “he married a woman who had never heard of the subject, who was guaranteed to destroy herself, if she ever did hear about it.” And so on. “Which she finally did,” she said.
• • •
“Can the reindeer hear you?” said Harry.
“Fuck the reindeer,” said Grace. Then she added, “No, the reindeer cannot hear.” Reindeer was their code word for the black maid, who was far away in the kitchen at the time. It was their code word for black people in general. It allowed them to speak of the black problem in the city, which was a big one, without giving offense to any black person who might overhear.
“The reindeer’s asleep—or reading the Black Panther Digest,” she said.
• • •
The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much use for black people anymore—except for the gangsters who sold the black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn’t have to steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too—to keep them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction.
The Midland City Police Department, and the Midland County Sheriff’s Department, were composed mainly of white men. They had racks and racks of sub-machine guns and twelve-gauge automatic shotguns for an open season on reindeer, which was bound to come.
“Listen—I’m serious,” said Grace to Harry. “This is the asshole of the Universe. Let’s split to a condominium on Maui and live for a change.”
So they did.
• • •
Dwayne’s bad chemicals meanwhile changed his manner toward Francine from nastiness to pitiful dependency. He apologized to her for ever thinking that she wanted a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise. He gave her full credit for unflagging unselfishness. He begged her to just hold him for a while, which she did.
“I’m so confused,” he said.
“We all are,” she said. She cradled his head against her breasts.
“I’ve got to talk to somebody,” said Dwayne.
“You can talk to Mommy, if you want,” said Francine. She meant that she was Mommy.
“Tell me what life is all about,” Dwayne begged her fragrant bosom.
“Only God knows that,” said Francine.
• • •
Dwayne was silent for a while. And then he told her haltingly about a trip he had made to the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of General Motors at Pontiac, Michigan, only three months after his wife ate Drāno.
“We were given a tour of all the research facilities,” he said. The thing that impressed him most, he said, was a series of laboratories and out-of-doors test areas where various parts of automobiles and even entire automobiles were destroyed. Pontiac scientists set upholstery on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and drive-shafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and so on.
“Everything you’re not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car,” Dwayne said to Francine. “And I’ll never forget the sign on the front door of the building where all that torture went on.” Here was the sign Dwayne described to Francine:
“I saw that sign,” said