The Palace's Initial Haul Of Survivors Leaves Much To Be Desired

Who The Hell Is Running Things Around Here?

Chapter 17

There were 33 captives in the pitch-black back of the van at that early hour on August 17th, and not one had a clue to his or her predetermined destination. If this were a work of imagination and insight and not merely the harried and often incoherent document of the end of human life on planet Earth, one might be tempted to lean back and appreciate dramatic irony as it reveals itself in ludicrously lurid detail during the infancy of the current ice age.

Still, there were those who found nothing at all infantile about the advance of vast sheets of ice, some of which are more than a mile thick and have pulverized the world’s longest undefended border for scores of months now, reducing auto assembly plants, baseball fields, concert halls, and dairies to BB-sized pellets as they grind southward, pushing a lunatic migration of grim and grimy mammals before them like lint balls before a janitor’s broom.

Occasionally a Palace resident will awaken with a shiver to the sound of erratic feet in the room above, but there is no room above anyone’s sleeping quarters. There are only the senseless tons of dark earth between the Palace and the cold sun.

Perhaps the sound to which the tremblers awaken is the tromp of the end of civilization jogging across the once fertile farmland of southwestern Missouri in one last fashionable attempt to locate a piece of ground still possessed of a season long enough to grow English peas, radishes, and spinach. However, since the cool earth, unlike air or water, serves to soundproof, chances are those skittering sounds arise as rats scurry to and fro along the air shafts and service tunnels.

There are rats in the Palace, just as there are bedsores and cockroaches, spiders and ticks. None of these nuisances are included on the Original Manifest, but their unauthorized presence surprises no one and even seems, to cite a preglacial expression still in general use among the inhabitants despite its lack of meaning, “right as rain.”

****

Some pre-calamity specialists contended the current ice age began around 98,000 B.C and that the weather to which mankind had become accustomed since the turn of the 20th century was to man what Maya slipped under the unbroken skin at 86° F. and left to incubate at room temperature for 24 hours was to Bulgarian sheep’s milk.

Professor Mildude Daampfaas, Chairman of the National Institute for the Arts and Sciences and Curatorial Consultant for the Bulgarian Farm and Country Museums of Des Moines, was the first to make the connection. In a special Chicago Sun-Times supplement entitled Imminent Disasters and Timeless Fashion Statements, Professor Daampfass wrote: “Most authorities feel it’s time to stop beating around the bush. Even so turgid a mind as that of geothermal biorhythmicist and anaerobic aquarist Franklin Delano DaVinci can discern the striking similarities between the culture of yogurt and the yogurt of human civilization.”

***

“But wherever are they taking us?” asked Dominic Anicanica, who had only the previous weekend opened his chic salon, The Tiger’s Mein, on the 123 By-Pass between Clemson and Seneca and was among the first Palace ingrates frazzled in the Heart of Materex.

“I wouldn’t be overly alarmed, my dear fellow. I’m sure it will all come out in the, heh-heh-heh, wash,” said Pablo Juan Caracas, the perpetually embarrassed violinist.

Caracas had been forced to work for a living with a series of small-town lounge trios after fleeing Cuba with his wife and three daughters when Castro came to power. One day, however, a human interest piece on the family’s plight appeared in The Greenville News. This led to a slot on the faculty of Clemson University, where Caracas taught Pre-Communist Cuban Literature 201, a required course for all liberal arts majors.

But there would be a dangerous precedent set by detailing the life and times of each and every prisoner on board the Palace Express Fleet I on that hectic morning of August 17th. Sam and Dave and their U-Haul transport were at work all over Materex’s chilling creation.

Harry Lamar, for instance, was apprehended at the ruins of Huang Ti’s Spirit City while taking photographs for the National Geographic Society. Meanwhile, Dexter Knaughten was dragged, retching and screaming, from Leon’s Bar and Grill on Astoria Boulevard in Queens, New York.

Emanuel Workman, Lisa Midrubbles, Justin Hassaid, and Rhoda Rome — a framing carpenter for Gonzo Brothers Construction Company; the departmental secretary for the College of Recreation and Parks Administration; a convenience store stock clerk, and the gossip columnist for The Clemson Messenger, respectively — have all become exemplary citizens in the Palace. Their stories, of course, would please Materex and the Life Protector, whose jobs are made easier through cooperation and docility.

But what about Ginger Doughty, Buddy Bledsoe, Jules Cey and his brother Clement, who were as follows:

• A convicted narcotics trafficker

• An auto thief; and

• Two child molesters

who would have continued their single-minded pursuit of depravity, even in the Palace? And this despite the obvious shortages of illicit drugs, wheeled vehicles, and abusable infants? Materex would not approve at all.

What more can be said about Steel-Eye Wannamaker, for instance, other than to note the discovery of his half-devoured carcass in the restroom down the hall from the Life Protector’s office?

And please remember this: 161 people were trundled into the Palace for preservation between August 17th and the 19th — asthmatics, bureaucrats, carpet designers, and entophobiacs; students, teachers, and the Undersecretary for Domestic Effluvium Affairs; two veterinarians and an undisclosed number of winos; people with palsy, athletic scholarships, tumors, and sties; people from places as common as Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit; towns as improbable and obscure as Lickskillet, Why Not, Toad Suck Hollow, and Fuquay Varina.

This strange sample included such noteworthy figures as Nobel Laureate in agronomy, Harley Davidson, whose favorite joke went like this:

“It’s like my grandaddy always told me. ‘Boy,’ he said — he was always calling me ‘boy’; don’t guess he ever rightly learned my name — but, ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘Just you remember you can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.’”

There was also Maude Lynne, a Rockefeller Fellow and pioneer in situational eugenics. And there was also Frieda Tewes, whose mother, Hedda, was once the mistress of Alfred Adler’s gardener.

Many of the boggled souls in the pitch-black back of the van which carried Wanda Japan and Wayne Bo Trout inexorably toward the Palace did not regain complete control of their faculties until August 21st. Consequently, since direct observation in these circumstances might prove narcotic and stultifying, consider this gross generalization:

On the morning of August 17th, as the snow swirled in Central and Six Mile and the sky over Libya began to solidify, there were two distinct types of people en route to salvation at the bottom of a phony well in southwestern Missouri — normal and abnormal ones.

But no sooner had this construct been entered and the return-key struck than the author recalled a niggling detail. He remembered that someone in the pitch-black back of Sam & Dave’s truck had said Mind if I sit here? in harmony with Wayne after Wanda spoke. That was Benton Enden, who was entirely something else.

***

Benton had graduated from Clemson with a B.S. in political science and taken a job with the Physical Plant as a janitor in Hardin Hall, the very building in which he had spent much of his undergraduate career earning C’s and D’s. But if his grades seem disgracefully low, remember that Benton was not really a poor student.

Quite the contrary. His mother was worth $20 billion. His father’s wealth can scarcely be contemplated. Still, Benton Enden was perhaps the most conscientious underachiever in recorded history, and if not for the current ice age, hundreds would come forward to express their disappointment at Benton’s appalling lack of ambition. As Alferd E. “Lunsford” Packer, his only surviving faculty advisor still says: “Why, everyone knew Benton could do the work. If he’d only have tried. He simply refused to apply himself. He had such potential.”

It wasn’t always like this. Benton entered Clemson as a Poole scholar. He’d pegged a 1583 on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test which he later parleyed into a perfect score on the SAT. His projected GPR was 3.99 on a scale of 4.

Active in the Young Republicans, the Campus Crusade for Christ, and Blue Key, Benton polled an incredible 76% of the vote in an eight-way race for Freshman Class President. He pledged APO and lettered in track and field — leading the Tigers to a second place finish in the ACC, only the third time Clemson had finished better than the basement since records were kept. He was listed in Who’s Who in American Universities and Normal Institutions, and he was admired and respected even by his relatives.

Then Benton took up tennis, and his world began to disintegrate. No celebrity had arisen from his social, academic and political greatness, but tennis was a sport, a fashion statement, and a way of life. Suddenly everyone wanted to know him.

Blaine Sensibaugh, for instance, raved in The Atlanta Journal Constitution about Benton’s “devastating service and superlative baseline volleying.” He touted young Enden as the number one player in America, although the teenager had yet to enter a single competitive event.

The John Birch Society demanded to know why Benton was not on the Davis Cup team. The State Department refused to renew its demand that any reduction in IRMs in Europe be linked to the defection of Cy Borg and Laslo Stroud, either of whom could have given the U.S. a legitimate Wimbledon contender.

***

It is ironic that the meteoric growth of Benton Enden’s racket reputation should coincide with his gradual estrangement from social life and the precipitous decline of his formerly brilliant level of academic achievement. The dazzling explosion with which Benton’s talent overwhelmed the public was followed every bit as doggedly by the cold, dark energy of madness as the eruption of Krakatoa resulted in the winter of 1896.

When Benton finally graduated from Clemson University at age 26, he ranked at the very bottom of his class with the most abysmal GPR ever recorded beside a degree candidate’s name. Tennis was every bit as fatal an attraction for Benton as drink and dissipation were to Alfred Jarry.

***

Tennis was to Benton what the Garden of Eden was to God. He was so good it became fashionable to off oneself the night before the match, to spare oneself the humiliation of not merely losing, but being treated like a common housefly. And yet, Benton was so obsessed with the mechanics of his game that 33 suicides trailed in his shadow before anyone pointed out the phenomenon during a mini-cam report for Greenville’s Action News.

From that day on, Benton Enden played only doubles and devoted his life to the teachings of Wayne Bo Trout.

As the reader is well aware, Wayne had no teachings.

***

Benton quit playing doubles after the death of his thirteenth consecutive partner, his maternal grandfather, Wendell Edden. Mr. Edden was a former Wimbledon quarter-finalist, like so many of Benton’s victims.

Wendell and Benton had won the match in straight sets from Frank Speech and Owen Plenty. Yet Mr. Edden was so upset about his inferior play that as Plenty’s final flubbed forehand hung in the net, he jammed the butt of his custom gold-plated MacGregor in his mouth and blew the back of his head off.

***

Following the mass disintegration in the Heart of Materex on August 22nd, no one noticed when Benton slipped away to the Palace Bi-Lo, where he calmly disrobed. He neatly folded his clothing and stacked it on the floor beside the Beer-Nuts display. Then he climbed on top of the frozen meat pies, stretched out, and shivered to death.

***

So no, the author was wrong. There were more than two distinct types of people on board the Palace Express Fleet I on the morning of August 17th. As Paul Bare so aptly put it in his brief eulogy: “Now Benton, that Benton,” he said, “was really something else.”

—30—

Epilog In Media Res

It occurs to me that some straggler might want to read all of Trout’s Tale in its God-given order, assuming I live long enough to publish all of it. I guess I could start another stack and publish it in order there, but where’s the fun in that?

Instead, what I’ve currently decided to do is add this epilog as an index to previous posts in the order in which they were not written, but in the most recent order they have appeared in the Hall of Records. Links will become active as new URLs are generated.

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.

Trout’s Tale thus far…

Frontal Matter And Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33