Dwayne yelled in the ambulance: “Goodbye, Blue Monday!” Then it seemed to him that another day had passed on the virgin planet, and it was time to yell again. “Not a cough in a carload!” he yelled.
• • •
Kilgore Trout was one of the walking wounded. He was able to climb aboard Martha without assistance, and to choose a place to sit where he would be away from real emergencies. He had jumped Dwayne Hoover from behind when Dwayne dragged Francine Pefko out of Dwayne’s showroom and onto the asphalt. Dwayne wanted to give her a beating in public, which his bad chemicals made him think she richly deserved.
Dwayne had already broken her jaw and three ribs in the office. When he trundled her outside, there was a fairsize crowd which had drifted out of the cocktail lounge and the kitchen of the new Holiday Inn. “Best fucking machine in the State,” he told the crowd. “Wind her up, and she’ll fuck you and say she loves you, and she won’t shut up till you give her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.”
And so on. Trout grabbed him from behind.
Trout’s right ring finger somehow slipped into Dwayne’s mouth, and Dwayne bit off the topmost joint. Dwayne let go of Francine after that, and she slumped to the asphalt. She was unconscious, and the most seriously injured of all. And Dwayne went cantering over to the concrete trough by the Interstate, and he spat Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek.
• • •
Kilgore Trout did not choose to lie down in Martha. He settled into a leather bucket seat behind Eddie Key. Key asked him what was the matter with him, and Trout held up his right hand, partly shrouded in a bloody handkerchief, which looked like this:
“A slip of the lip can sink a ship!” yelled Dwayne.
• • •
“Remember Pearl Harbor!” yelled Dwayne. Most of what he had done during the past three-quarters of an hour had been hideously unjust. But he had spared Wayne Hoobler, at least. Wayne was back among the used cars again, unscathed. He was picking up a bracelet which I had pitched back there for him to find.
As for myself: I kept a respectful distance between myself and all the violence—even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and the city, and the sky above and the Earth below. Even so, I came out of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne’s way. He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he broke my toe.
• • •
This isn’t the kind of book where people get what is coming to them at the end. Dwayne hurt only one person who deserved to be hurt for being so wicked: That was Don Breedlove. Breedlove was the white gas-conversion unit installer who had raped Patty Keene, the waitress in Dwayne’s Burger Chef out on Crestview Avenue, in the parking lot of George Hickman Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse out at the County Fairgrounds after Peanut University beat Innocent Bystander High School in the Regional Class High School Basketball Playoffs.
• • •
Don Breedlove was in the kitchen of the Inn when Dwayne began his rampage. He was repairing a defective gas oven in there.
He stepped outside for some fresh air, and Dwayne came running up to him. Dwayne had just spit Kilgore Trout’s fingertip into Sugar Creek. Don and Dwayne knew each other quite well, since Dwayne had once sold Breedlove a new Pontiac Ventura, which Don said was a lemon. A lemon was an automobile which didn’t run right, and which nobody was able to repair.
Dwayne actually lost money on the transaction, making adjustments and replacing parts in an attempt to mollify Breedlove. But Breedlove was inconsolable, and he finally painted this sign in bright yellow on his trunk lid and on both doors:
Here was what was really wrong with the car, incidentally. The child of a neighbor of Breedlove had put maple sugar in the gas tank of the Ventura. Maple sugar was a kind of candy made from the blood of trees.
So Dwayne Hoover now extended his right hand to Breedlove, and Breedlove without thinking anything about it took that hand in his own. They linked up like this:
This was a symbol of friendship between men. The feeling was, too, that a lot of character could be read into the way a man shook hands.