And so on.
One of the newspaper boys was actually a newspaper girl. She was electrified.
Trout’s paranoid face was terribly familiar to Billy, who had seen it on the jackets of so many books. But., coming upon that face suddenly in a hometown alley, Billy could not guess why the face was familiar. Billy thought maybe he had known this cracked messiah in Dresden somewhere. Trout certainly looked like a prisoner of war.
And then the newspaper girl held up her hand. ‘Mr. Trout,’ she said, ‘if I win, can I take my sister, too?’
‘Hell no,’ said Kilgore Trout. ‘You think money grows on trees?’
Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.
Billy Pilgrim parked his Cadillac in the alley, and waited for the meeting to end. When the meeting broke up, there was still one boy Trout had to deal with. The boy wanted to quit because the work was so hard and the hours were so long and the pay was so small. Trout was concerned, because, if the boy really quit, Trout would have to deliver the boy’s route himself, until he could find another sucker.
‘What are you?’ Trout asked the boy scornfully. ‘Some kind of gutless wonder?’
This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.
Trout lost his argument with the boy who wanted to quit. He told the boy about all the millionaires who had carried newspapers as boys, and the boy replied: ‘Yeah-but I bet they quit after a week, it’s such a royal screwing.’
And the boy left his full newspaper bag at Trout’s feet, with the customer book on top. It was up to Trout to deliver these papers. He didn’t have a car. He didn’t even have a bicycle, and he was scared to death of dogs.
Somewhere a big dog barked.
As Trout lugubriously slung the bag from his shoulder, Billy Pilgrim approached him.
‘Mr. Trout-‘
‘Yes?’
“Are-are you Kilgore Trout?
‘Yes.’ Trout supposed that Billy had some complaint about the way his newspapers were being delivered. He did not think of himself as a writer for the simple reason that the world had never allowed him to think of himself in this way.
‘The-the writer?’ said Billy.
‘The what?’
Billy was certain that he had made a mistake. ‘There’s a writer named Kilgore Trout.’
‘There is?’ Trout looked foolish and dazed.
‘You never heard of him?’
Trout shook his head. ‘Nobody-nobody ever did.’
Billy helped Trout deliver his papers, driving him from house to house in the Cadillac. Billy was the responsible one, finding the houses, checking them off. Trout’s mind was blown. He had never met a fan before, and Billy was such an avid fan.
Trout told him that he had never seen a book of his advertised, reviewed, or on sale. ‘All these years’ he said, ‘I’ve been opening the window and making love to the world.’
‘You must surely have gotten letters,’ said Billy. ‘I’ve felt like writing you letters many times.’
Trout held up a single finger. ‘One.’
‘Was it enthusiastic?’
‘It was insane. The writer said I should be President of the World.’
It turned out that the person who had written this letter was Elliot Rosewater, Billy’s friend in the veterans’ hospital near Lake Placid. Billy told Trout about Rosewater.
‘My God-I thought he was about fourteen years old,’ said Trout.
“A full grown man-a captain in the war.’
‘The writes like a fourteen-year-old,’ said Kilgore Trout.
Billy invited Trout to his eighteenth wedding anniversary which was only two days hence. Now the party was in progress.
Trout was in Billy’s dining room, gobbling canap?s. He was talking with a mouthful of Philadelphia cream cheese and salmon roe to an optometrist’s wife. Everybody at the party was associated with optometry in some way, except Trout. And he alone was without glasses. He was making a great hit. Everybody was ed to have a real author at the party, even though they had never read his books.
Trout was talking to a Maggie White, who had given up being a dental assistant to become a homemaker for an optometrist. She was very pretty. The last book she had read was Ivanhoe.
Billy Pilgrim stood nearby, listening. He was palpating something in his pocket. It was a present he was about to give his Wife, a white satin box containing a star sapphire cocktail ring. The ring was worth eight hundred dollars.
The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout like marijuana. He was happy and loud and impudent.
‘I’m afraid I don’t read as much as I ought to,’ said Maggie.
‘We’re all afraid of something,’ Trout replied. ‘I’m afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers.’
‘I should know, but I don’t, so I have to ask,’ said Maggie, ‘what’s the most famous thing you ever wrote?’
‘It was about a funeral for a great French chef.’
‘That sounds interesting.’
‘All the great chefs in the world are there. It’s a beautiful ceremony.’ Trout was making this up as he went along. ‘Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased.’ So it goes.
‘Did that really happen?’ said Maggie White. She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies. Men looked at her and wanted to fill her up with babies right away. She hadn’t had even one baby yet. She used birth control.
‘Of course it happened,’ Trout told her. ‘If I wrote something that hadn’t really happened, and I tried to sell it, I could go to jail. That’s fraud!’
Maggie believed him. ‘I’d never thought about that before.’
‘Think about it now.’
‘It’s like advertising. You have to tell the truth in advertising, or you get in trouble.’
‘Exactly. The same body of laws applies.’
‘Do you think you might put us in a book sometime?’
‘I put everything that happens to me in books.’
‘I guess I better be careful what I say.’
‘That’s right. And I’m not the only one who’s listening. God is listening, too. And on Judgment Day he’s going to tell you all the things you said and did. If it turns out they’re bad things instead of good things, that’s too bad for you, because you’ll bum forever and ever. The burning never stops hurting.’
Poor Maggie turned gray. She believed that too, and was petrified.
Kilgore Trout laughed uproariously. A salmon egg flew out of his mouth and landed in Maggie’s cleavage.
Now an optometrist called for attention. He proposed a toast to Billy and Valencia, whose anniversary it was. According to plan, the barbershop quartet of optometrists, ‘The Febs,’ sang while people drank and Billy and Valencia put their arms around each other, just glowed. Everybody’s eyes were shining. The song was ‘That Old Gang of Mine.’
Gee, that song went, but I’d give the world to see that old gang of mine. And so on. A little later it said. So long forever, old fellows and gals, so long forever old sweethearts and pals-God bless ‘em-And so on.
Unexpectedly, Billy Pilgrim found himself upset by the song and the occasion. He had never had an old gang, old sweethearts and pals, but he missed one anyway, as the quartet made slow, agonized experiments with chords-chords intentionally sour, sourer still, unbearably sour, and then a chord that was suffocatingly sweet, and then some sour ones again. Billy had powerful psychosomatic responses to the changing chords. His mouth filled with the taste of lemonade, and his face became grotesque, as though he really were being stretched on the torture engine called the rack.
He looked so peculiar that several people commented on it solicitously when the song was done. They thought he might have been having a heart attack, and Billy seemed to confirm this by going to a chair and sitting down haggardly.
There was silence.
‘Oh my God,’ said Valencia, leaning over him, ‘Billy-are you all right?’