Kurt Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions

And just as motherless Dwayne Hoover was berating motherless Wayne Hoobler in the used car lot, a man who had actually killed his mother was preparing to land in a chartered plane at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, on the other side of the Interstate. This was Eliot Rosewater, Kilgore Trout’s patron. He killed his mother accidentally in a boating accident, when a youth. She was Women’s Chess Champion of the United States of America, nineteen hundred and thirty-six years after the Son of God was born, supposedly. Rosewater killed her the year after that.

It was his pilot who caused the airport’s runways to become an ex-convict’s idea of fairyland. Rosewater remembered his mother’s jewelry when the lights came on. He looked to the west, and he smiled at the rosy loveliness of the Mildred Barry Memorial Arts Center, a harvest moon on stilts in a bend of Sugar Creek. It reminded him of how his mother had looked when he saw her through the bleary eyes of infancy.

I had made him up, of course—and his pilot, too. I put Colonel Looseleaf Harper, the man who had dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, at the controls.

I made Rosewater an alcoholic in another book. I now had him reasonably well sobered up, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had him use his new-found sobriety, to explore, among other things, the supposed spiritual and physical benefits of sexual orgies with strangers in New York City. He was only confused so far.

I could have killed him, and his pilot, too, but I let them live on. So their plane touched down uneventfully.

The two physicians on the disaster vehicle named Martha were Cyprian Ukwende, of Nigeria, and Khashdrahr Miasma, from the infant nation of Bangladesh. Both were parts of the world which were famous from time to time for having the food run out. Both places were specifically mentioned, in fact, in Now It Can Be Told, by Kilgore Trout. Dwayne Hoover read in that book that robots all over the world were constantly running out of fuel and dropping dead, while waiting around to test the only free-willed creature in the Universe, on the off-chance that he should appear.

At the wheel of the ambulance was Eddie Key, a young black man who was a direct descendant of Francis Scott Key, the white American patriot who wrote the National Anthem. Eddie knew he was descended from Key. He could name more than six hundred of his ancestors, and had at least an anecdote about each. They were Africans, Indians and white men.

He knew, for instance, that his mother’s side of the family had once owned the farm on which Sacred Miracle Cave was discovered, that his ancestors had called it “Bluebird Farm."

Here was why there were so many young foreign doctors on the hospital staff, incidentally: The country didn’t produce nearly enough doctors for all the sick people it had, but it had an awful lot of money. So it bought doctors from other countries which didn’t have much money.

Eddie Key knew so much about his ancestry because the black part of his family had done what so many African families still do in Africa, which was to have one member of each generation whose duty it was

to memorize the history of the family so far. Eddie Key had begun to store in his mind the names and adventures of ancestors on both his mother’s and father’s sides of his family when he was only six years old. As he sat in the front of the disaster vehicle, looking out through the windshield, he had the feeling that he himself was a vehicle, and that his eyes were windshields through which his progenitors could look, if they wished to.

Francis Scott Key was only one of thousands back there. On the off- chance that Key might now be having a look at what had become of the United States of America so far, Eddie focussed his eyes on an American flag which was stuck to the windshield. He said this very quietly: “Still wavin’, man.”

Eddie Key’s familiarity with a teeming past made life much more interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or to Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that day. We had no sense of anybody else using our eyes—or our hands. We didn’t even know who our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers were. Eddie Key was afloat in a river of people who were flowing from here to there in time. Dwayne and Trout and I were pebbles at rest.

And Eddie Key, because he knew so much by heart, was able to have deep, nourishing feelings about Dwayne Hoover, for instance, and about Dr. Cyprian Ukwende, too. Dwayne was a man whose family had taken over Bluebird Farm. Ukwende, an Indaro, was a man whose ancestors had kidnapped an ancestor of Key’s on the West Coast of Africa, a man named Ojumwa. The Indaros sold him for a musket to British slave traders, who took him on a sailing ship named the “Skylark” to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was auctioned off as a self-propelled, self-repairing farm machine.

And so on.

Dwayne Hoover was now hustled aboard Martha through big double doors in her rear, just ahead of the engine compartment. Eddie Key was in the driver’s seat, and he watched the action in his rearview mirror. Dwayne was swaddled so tightly in canvas restraining sheets that his reflection looked to Eddie like a bandaged thumb.

Dwayne didn’t notice the restraints. He thought he was on the virgin planet promised by the book by Kilgore Trout. Even when he was laid out horizontally by Cyprian Ukwende and Khashdrahr Miasma, he thought he was standing up. The book had told him that he went swimming in cold water on the virgin planet, that he always yelled something surprising when he climbed out of the icy pool. It was a game. The Creator of the Universe would try to guess what Dwayne would yell each day. And Dwayne would fool him totally.

Here is what 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.