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when he imagined what the marshes and meadows had been like only a hundred years
before. "And when you think of the shit that most of these factories make wash day
products, catfood, pop "
He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and
what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.
Then Trout made a good point, too. "Well," he said, "I used to be a conservationist. I
used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from
helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted
that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it
now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of
birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that
dumped it." Trout raised his arms in celebration. "'Up your ass with Mobil gas,'" he said.
The driver was upset by this. "You're kidding," he said.
"I realized," said Trout, "that God wasn't any conservationist, so for anybody else to
be one was sacrilegious and a waste of time. You ever see one of His volcanoes or
tornadoes or tidal waves? Anybody ever tell you about the Ice Ages he arranges for
every half-million years? How about Dutch Elm disease? There's a nice conservation
measure for you. That's God, not man. Just about the time we got our rivers cleaned up,
he'd probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar. That's what the Star of
Bethlehem was, you know."
"What was the Star of Bethlehem?" said the driver.
"A whole galaxy going up like a celluloid collar," said Trout.
The driver was impressed. "Come to think about it," he said, "I don't think there's
anything about conservation anywhere in the Bible."
"Unless you want to count the story about the Flood," said Trout.
They rode in silence for a while, and then the driver made another good point. He said
he knew that his truck was turning the atmosphere into poison gas, and that the planet
was being turned into pavement so his truck could go anywhere. "So I'm committing
suicide," he said.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"My brother is even worse," the driver went on. "He works in a factory that makes
chemicals for killing plants and trees in Viet Nam." Viet Nam was a country where
America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them
from airplanes. The chemicals he mentioned were intended to kill all the foliage, so it
would be harder for communists to hide from airplanes.
"Don't worry about it," said Trout.
"In the long run, he's committing suicide," said the driver. "Seems like the only kind of
job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way."
"Good point," said Trout.
"I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver.
"I won't know myself until I find out whether life is serious or not," said Trout. "It's
dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean it's serious, too."
After Trout became famous, of course, one of the biggest mysteries about him was
whether he was kidding or not. He told one persistent questioner that he always crossed
his fingers when he was kidding.
"And please note," he went on, "that when I gave you that priceless piece of
information, my fingers were crossed."
And so on.
He was a pain in the neck in a lot of ways. The truck driver got sick of him after an
hour or two. Trout used the silence to make up an anticonservation story he called
"Gilgongo!"
"Gilgongo!" was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much
creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire
species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were
made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a
picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture
was the word:
GILGONGO!
In the language of the planet, that meant "Extinct!"
People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species
on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There
was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants
he was likely to encounter.
The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life
could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet
was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hundred feet thick. The blanket was
composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.
"At least it's olives," the driver said. "What?" said Trout.
"Lots worse things we could be hauling than olives." "Right," said Trout. He had
forgotten that the main thing they were doing was moving seventy-eight thousand
pounds of olives to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The driver talked about politics some.
Trout couldn't tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly
enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chim-
panzee who became President of the United States. He called it "Hail to the Chief."
The chimpanzee wore a little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the
President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket. It looked like this:
Everywhere he went, bands would play "Hail to the Chief." The chimpanzee loved it.
He would bounce up and down.
They stopped at a diner. Here is what the sign in front of the diner said:
So they ate.
Trout spotted an idiot who was eating, too. The idiot was a white male adult in the
care of a white female nurse. The idiot couldn't talk much, and he had a lot of trouble
feeding himself. The nurse put a bib around his neck.
But he certainly had a wonderful appetite. Trout watched him shovel waffles and pork
sausage into his mouth, watched him guzzle orange juice and milk. Trout marveled at
what a big animal the idiot was. The idiot's happiness was fascinating, too, as he stoked
himself with calories which would get him through yet another day.
Trout said this to himself: "Stoking up for another day."
"Excuse me," said the truck driver to Trout, "I've got to take a leak."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
"Back where I come from," said Trout, "that means you're going to steal a mirror. We
call mirrors leaks."
"I never heard that before," said the driver. He repeated the word: "Leaks." He
pointed to a mirror on a cigarette machine. "You call that a leak?"
"Doesn't it look like a leak to you?" said Trout.
"No," said the driver. "Where did you say you were from?"
"I was born in Bermuda," said Trout.
About a week later, the driver would tell his wife that mirrors were called leaks in
Bermuda, and she would tell her friends.
When Trout followed the driver back to the truck, he took his first good look at their
form of transportation from a distance, saw it whole. There was a message written on
the side of it in bright orange letters which were eight feet high. This was it:
Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message
like that. The child would suppose that the message was terrifically important, since
somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big.
And then, pretending to be a child by the roadside, he read the message on the side
of another truck. This was it:
Chapter 11
Dwayne Hoover slept until ten at the new Holiday Inn. He was much refreshed. He
had a Number Five Breakfast in the popular restaurant of the Inn, which was the Tally-
Ho Room. The drapes were drawn at night. They were wide open now. They let the
sunshine in.
At the next table, also alone, was Cyprian Ukwende, the Indaro, the Nigerian. He was
reading the classified ads in the Midland City Bugle-Observer. He needed a cheap
place to live. The Midland County General Hospital was footing his bills at the Inn while
he looked around, and they were getting restless about that.
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