talking to Bonnie MacMahon, whose husband had lost so much money in a car wash in Shepherdstown. And the main reason the car wash had failed was that successful car washes needed cheap and plentiful labor, which meant black labor—and there were no Niggers in Shepherdstown.
“Years ago,” Dwayne’s stepfather told Dwayne when Dwayne was ten, “Niggers was coming up north by the millions—to Chicago, to Midland City, to Indianapolis, to Detroit. The World War was going on. There was such a labor shortage that even Niggers who couldn’t read or write could get good factory jobs. Niggers had money like they never had before.
“Over at Shepherdstown, though,” he went on, “the white people got smart quick. They didn’t want Niggers in their town, so they put up signs on the main roads at the city limits and in the railroad yard.” Dwayne’s stepfather described the signs, which looked like this:
“One night—” Dwayne’s stepfather said, “a Nigger family got off a boxcar in Shepherdstown. Maybe they didn’t see the sign. Maybe they couldn’t read it. Maybe they couldn’t believe it.” Dwayne’s stepfather was out of work when he told the story so gleefully. The Great Depression had just begun. He and Dwayne were on a weekly expedition in the family car, hauling garbage and trash out into the country, where they dumped it all in Sugar Creek.
“Anyway, they moved into an empty shack that night,” Dwayne’s stepfather went on. “They got a fire going in the stove and all. So a mob went down there at midnight. They took out the man, and they sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence.” Dwayne remembered clearly that a rainbow of oil from the trash was spreading prettily over the surface of Sugar Creek when he heard that.
“Since that night, which was a long time ago now,” his stepfather said, “there ain’t been a Nigger even spend the night in Shepherdstown.
• • •
Trout was itchingly aware that Dwayne was staring at his bosom so loonily. Dwayne’s eyes swam, and Trout supposed they were swimming in alcohol. He could not know that Dwayne was seeing an oil slick on Sugar Creek which had made rainbows forty long years ago.
Trout was aware of me, too, what little he could see of me. I made him even more uneasy than Dwayne did. The thing was: Trout was the only character I ever created who had enough imagination to suspect that he might be the creation of another human being. He had spoken of this possibility several times to his parakeet. He had said, for instance, “Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I’m a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.”
Now Trout was beginning to catch on that he was sitting very close to the person who had created him. He was embarrassed. It was hard for him to know how to respond, particularly since his responses were going to be anything I said they were.
I went easy on him, didn’t wave, didn’t stare. I kept my glasses on. I wrote again on my tabletop, scrawled the symbols for the interrelationship between matter and energy as it was understood in my day:
It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an “A” in there somewhere for Awareness—without which the “E” and the “M” and the “c,” which was a mathematical constant; could not exist.
• • •
All of us were stuck to the surface of a ball, incidentally. The planet was ball-shaped. Nobody knew why we didn’t fall off, even though everybody pretended to kind of understand it.
The really smart people understood that one of the best ways to get rich was to own a part of the surface people had to stick to.
• • •
Trout dreaded eye contact with either Dwayne or me, so he went through the contents of the manila envelope which had been waiting for him in his suite.
The first thing he examined was a letter from Fred T. Barry, the Chairman of the Festival of the Arts, the donor of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts, and the founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Barrytron, Ltd.
Clipped to the letter was one share of common stock in Barrytron, made out in the name of Kilgore Trout. Here was the letter:
“Dear Mr. Trout:” it said, “It is a pleasure and