Breakfast of Champions Page 0,53
worth a great novel.” He pointed at Dwayne Hoover. “What is the life story of that man?”
Bonnie limited herself to telling about Dwayne’s dog, Sparky, who couldn’t wag his tail. “So he has to fight all the time,” she said.
“Wonderful,” said Karabekian. He turned to Beatrice. “I’m sure you can use that somewhere.”
“As a matter of fact, I can,” said Beatrice. “That’s an enchanting detail.”
“The more details the better,” said Karabekian. “Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten!” He begged Bonnie for more true stories.
Bonnie was deceived by his enthusiasm and energized by the idea that Beatrice Keedsler honestly needed true stories for her books. “Well—” she said, “would you consider Shepherdstown part of Midland City, more or less?”
“Of course,” said Karabekian, who had never heard of Shepherdstown. “What would Midland City be without Shepherdstown? And what would Shepherdstown be without Midland City?”
“Well—” said Bonnie, and she thought she had what was maybe a really good story to tell, “my husband is a guard at the Shepherdstown Adult Correctional Institution, and he used to have to keep people who were going to be electrocuted company—back when they used to electrocute people all the time. He’d play cards with them, or read parts of the Bible out loud to them, or whatever they wanted to do, and he had to keep a white man named Leroy Joyce company.”
Bonnie’s costume gave off a faint, fishy, queer glow as she spoke. This was because her garments were heavily impregnated with fluorescent chemicals. So was the bartender’s jacket. So were the African masks on the walls. The chemicals would shine like electric signs when ultraviolet lights in the ceiling were energized. The lights weren’t on just now. The bartender turned them on at random times, at his own whim, in order to give the customers a delightful and mystifying surprise.
The power for the lights and for everything electrical in Midland City, incidentally, was generated by coal from strip mines in West Virginia, through which Kilgore Trout had passed not many hours before.
• • •
“Leroy Joyce was so dumb,” Bonnie went on, “he couldn’t play cards. He couldn’t understand the Bible. He could hardly talk. He ate his last supper, and then he sat still. He was going to be electrocuted for rape. So my husband sat out in the corridor outside the cell, and he read to himself. He heard Leroy moving around in his cell, but he didn’t worry about it. And then Leroy rattled his tin cup on the bars. My husband thought Leroy wanted some more coffee. So he got up and went over and took the cup. Leroy was smiling as though everything was all right now. He wouldn’t have to go to the electric chair after all. He’d cut off his whatchamacallit and put it in the cup.”
• • •
This book is made up, of course, but the story I had Bonnie tell actually happened in real life—in the death house of a penitentiary in Arkansas.
As for Dwayne Hoover’s dog Sparky, who couldn’t wag his tail: Sparky is modeled after a dog my brother owns who has to fight all the time, because he can’t wag his tail. There really is such a dog.
• • •
Rabo Karabekian asked Bonnie MacMahon to tell him something about the teen-age girl on the cover of the program for the Festival of the Arts. This was the only internationally famous human being in Midland City. She was Mary Alice Miller, the Women’s Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. She was only fifteen, said Bonnie.
Mary Alice was also the Queen of the Festival of the Arts. The cover of the program showed her in a white bathing suit, with her Olympic Gold Medal hanging around her neck. The medal looked like this:
Mary Alice was smiling at a picture of Saint Sebastian, by the Spanish painter El Greco. It had been loaned to the Festival by Eliot Rosewater, the patron of Kilgore Trout. Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier who had lived seventeen hundred years before me and Mary Alice Miller and Wayne and Dwayne and all the rest of us. He had secretly become a Christian when Christianity was against the law.
And somebody squealed on him. The Emperor Diocletian had him shot by archers. The picture Mary Alice smiled at with such uncritical bliss showed a human being who was so full of arrows that he looked like