Breakfast of Champions

13






WHEN DWAYNE HOOVER saw Harry LeSabre, his sales manager, in leaf-green leotards and a grass skirt and all that, he could not believe it. So he made himself not see it. He went into his office, which was also cluttered with ukuleles and pineapples.
Francine Pefko, his secretary, looked normal, except that she had a rope of flowers around her neck and a flower behind one ear. She smiled. This was a war widow with lips like sofa pillows and bright red hair. She adored Dwayne. She adored Hawaiian Week, too.
“Aloha,” she said.


Harry LeSabre, meanwhile, had been destroyed by Dwayne.
When Harry presented himself to Dwayne so ridiculously, every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne’s reaction. Each molecule ceased its business for a moment, put some distance between itself and its neighbors. Each molecule waited to learn whether its galaxy, which was called Harry LeSabre, would or would not be dissolved.
When Dwayne treated Harry as though he were invisible, Harry thought he had revealed himself as a revolting transvestite, and that he was fired on that account.
Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: “For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved!”


Dwayne didn’t know anything about that. He leaned on Francine Pefko’s desk. He came close to telling her how sick he was. He warned her: “This is a very tough day, for some reason. So no jokes, no surprises. Keep everything simple. Keep anybody the least bit nutty out of here. No telephone calls.”
Francine told Dwayne that the twins were waiting for him in the inner office. “Something bad is happening to the cave, I think,” she told him.
Dwayne was grateful for a message that simple and clear. The twins were his younger stepbrothers, Lyle and Kyle Hoover. The cave was Sacred Miracle Cave, a tourist trap just south of Shepherdstown, which Dwayne owned in partnership with Lyle and Kyle. It was the sole source of income for Lyle and Kyle, who lived in identical yellow ranch houses on either side of the gift shop which sheltered the entrance to the cave.
All over the State, nailed to trees and fence posts, were arrow-shaped signs, which pointed in the direction of the cave and said how far away it was—for example:


Before Dwayne entered his inner office, he read one of many comical signs which Francine had put up on the wall in order to amuse people, to remind them of what they so easily forgot: that people didn’t have to be serious all the time.
Here was the text of the sign Dwayne read:
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY
TO WORK HERE, BUT IT SURE HELPS!

There was a picture of a crazy person to go with the text. This was it:


Francine wore a button on her bosom which showed a creature in a healthier, more enviable frame of mind. This was the button:




Lyle and Kyle sat side-by-side on the black leather couch in Dwayne Hoover’s inner office. They looked so much alike that Dwayne had not been able to tell them apart until 1954, when Lyle got in a fight over a woman at the Roller Derby. After that, Lyle was the one with the broken nose. As babies in crib, Dwayne remembered now, they used to suck each other’s thumbs.


Here is how Dwayne happened to have stepbrothers, incidentally, even though he had been adopted by people who couldn’t have children of their own. Their adopting him triggered something to their bodies which made it possible for them to have children after all. This was a common phenomenon. A lot of couples seemed to be programmed that way.


Dwayne was so glad to see them now—these two little men in overalls and work shoes, each wearing a pork-pie hat. They were familiar, they were real. Dwayne closed his door on the chaos outside. “All right—” he said, “what’s happened at the cave?”
Ever since Lyle had had his nose broken, the twins agreed that Lyle should do the talking for the two. Kyle hadn’t said a thousand words since 1954.
“Them bubbles is halfway up to the Cathedral now,” said Lyle. “The way they’re coming, they’ll be up to Moby Dick in a week or two.”
Dwayne understood him perfectly. The underground stream which passed through the bowels of Sacred Miracle Cave was polluted by some sort of industrial waste which formed bubbles as tough as ping-pong balls. These bubbles were shouldering one another up a passage which led to a big boulder which had been painted white to resemble Moby Dick, the Great White Whale. The bubbles would soon engulf Moby Dick and invade the Cathedral of Whispers, which was the main attraction at the cave. Thousands of people had been married in the Cathedral of Whispers—including Dwayne and Lyle and Kyle. Harry LeSabre, too.


Lyle told Dwayne about an experiment he and Kyle had performed the night before. They had gone into the cave with their identical Browning Automatic Shotguns, and they had opened fire on the advancing wall of bubbles.
“They let loose a stink you wouldn’t believe,” said Lyle. He said it smelled like athlete’s foot. “It drove me and Kyle right out of there. We run the ventilating system for an hour, and then we went back in. The paint was blistered on Moby Dick. He ain’t even got eyes anymore.” Moby Dick used to have long-lashed blue eyes as big as dinner plates.


“The organ turned black, and the ceiling turned a kind of dirty yellow,” said Lyle. “You can’t hardly see the Sacred Miracle no more.”
The organ was the Pipe Organ of the Gods, a thicket of stalactites and stalagmites which had grown together in one corner of the Cathedral. There was a loudspeaker in back of it, through which music for weddings and funerals was played. It was illuminated by electric lights, which changed colors all the time.
The Sacred Miracle was a cross on the ceiling of the Cathedral. It was formed by the intersection of two cracks. “It never was real easy to see,” said Lyle, speaking of the cross. “I ain’t even sure it’s there anymore.” He asked Dwayne’s permission to order a load of cement. He wanted to plug up the passage between the stream and the Cathedral.
“Just forget about Moby Dick and Jesse James and the slaves and all that,” said Lyle, “and save the Cathedral.”
Jesse James was a skeleton which Dwayne’s stepfather had bought from the estate of a doctor back during the Great Depression. The bones of its right hand mingled with the rusted parts of a .45 caliber revolver. Tourists were told that it had been found that way, that it probably belonged to some railroad robber who had been trapped in the cave by a rock-slide.
As for the slaves: these were plaster statues of black men in a chamber fifty feet down the corridor from Jesse James. The statues were removing one another’s chains with hammers and hacksaws. Tourists were told that real slaves had at one time used the cave after escaping to freedom across the Ohio River.


The story about the slaves was as fake as the one about Jesse James. The cave wasn’t discovered until 1937, when a small earthquake opened it up a crack. Dwayne Hoover himself discovered the crack, and then he and his stepfather opened it with crowbars and dynamite. Before that, not even small animals had been in there.
The only connection the cave had with slavery was this: the farm on which it was discovered was started by an ex-slave, Josephus Hoobler. He was freed by his master, and he came north and started the farm. Then he went back and bought his mother and a woman who became his wife.
Their descendants continued to run the farm until the Great Depression, when the Midland County Merchants Bank foreclosed on the mortgage. And then Dwayne’s stepfather was hit by an automobile driven by a white man who had bought the farm. In an out-of-court settlement for his injuries, Dwayne’s stepfather was given what he called contemptuously “… a God damn Nigger farm.”
Dwayne remembered the first trip the family took to see it. His father ripped a Nigger sign off the Nigger mailbox, and he threw it into a ditch. Here is what it said: