Where Trout's Tale Goes Completely Off The Rails
What If The Joke Is On God?
Chapter 26
The vent pipe from the furnace ran up through the back of Wayne’s bedroom closet, and it was August 20th before Black Jackrack managed to peel back the flashing far enough to claw his way out of the empty house and into the crawlspace below. There he discovered six or seven surrogate Jack E. Blacks frozen into a thick bathmat.
“Wacka wacka,” Jack said, slapping one of the stiff dead felines with his left paw, “Wacka wacka,” before turning away from his freeze-dried impostors and wandered toward the opening beneath the back steps. Two and a half to three feet of senseless snow piled up in the pasture beyond, while egg-size flakes continued to fall.
“Wacka wacka?” Black Jack asked, paused briefly at the indeterminate threshold between the frosty crawlspace and the blast-frozen wasteland beyond, and briskly skipped out with a fart into the dead white world.
***
One day while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anyone while the bar charged and retreated, during one of the withdrawn periods, a stranger stumbled in and lurched up beside Wayne to order a beer. The guy shook all over like he was being beaten with a baseball bat.
“Sorry,” said Rapid Ray, “I can’t serve you.”
“Wuh-wuh-what duh-duh-do yuh me-me-mean?” the stranger’s spastic lips sputtered, “yuh-yuh-yuh kuh-kuh-can’t serve muh-me?”
“You’ve already had enough,” Ray explained, “The law’s the law. I can’t serve people if they’ve already had enough.”
“Buh-buh-but,” the guy protested, “I’m not drunk. I’m wuh-wuh-one of jeh-jeh-Jerry’s kuh-kids. I got seh-seh-cerebral puh-puh-palsy.”
“Isn’t that enough?” Ray replied.
***
Wayne Trout would have been 36-years-old last month if Materex hadn’t sent him out on a search and destroy mission to counter the eat-and-run terrorism of Idi Amin, the preprogrammed minor inconvenience in the Palace who has become something of a nuisance.
Amin was originally introduced into the master program as an inside joke. No one ever intended to actually transport Uganda’s chief of state to southwestern Missouri for conservation alongside the nation’s most valuable species. Big Daddy was only supposed to pose a threat in absentia, a rumored occupant, like a boogey man. It was hoped he would serve the President of the United States during the current ice age after death much as he did in preglacial life.
Even the Ethiopians had a word for the role Idi Amin was supposed to assume in the Palace. A spook is a spook, the Ethiopians used to say, gesturing vaguely at anyone who happened to be standing around, and that is a spook.
***
Shortly after the Heart of Materex Massacre, Materex itself had flashed a message to the assembled surviving inhabitants:
“Okay, you bums, now listen up. If it weren’t for us, Idi Amin would be cooking you up with a mess of pinto beans right now. So get those masks one before we count to three. One…”
Everyone laughed about it later that night of course. But when the mutilated corpse of Steel-Eye Wannamaker was found down the hall from the Life Protector’s office, Materex summoned Rootie Kazootie himself to its Heart.
“Just what the fuck is going on out there?”its harsh VDT of face demanded.
“It appears one of the residents had taken off his mask in the restroom, whereupon he was slaughtered and eaten by Idi Amin,” the Life Protector replied, and Materex could see the moist ends of a moustache through Rootie Kazootie’s polished aluminum lips as he droned this explanation.
Materex lividly displayed it response, the emphasized words glowing a brighter green and bracketed by arrows like this:
>>Who<< has done >>what<<?“Idi Amin,” the Life Protector answered, “Field Marshal and President for Life Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, and Commander-In-Chief of the Bolivian Armed Forces,” he said.
If he hadn’t been clamped into that ludicrous mask, one might have noticed how the Life Protector seemed suddenly to leap from introspection, his eyes darting this way and that, as if to say, “Who gave me the ball? I’m not a halfback. What down is it? How much time do we have left?”
”Idi Amin,” the man in the Rootie Kazootie mask continued, “has consumed one of our charges.”
“But how? Why?”Materex wondered.
“He wouldn’t wear his mask,” the Protector responded.
“So he ate him?”Materex asked.
“Not all of him,” the Life Protector huffed, “No one could eat all of Steel-Eye.”
Steel-Eye played right offensive tackle for the Fighting Tigers. He stood 6'8" tall in bare feet and weighed 328 pounds in the bare altogether shortly before he was butchered.
“But there isn’t any Idi Amin!”Materex flashed.
“The shit you say, buddy,” the Life Protector spat. “Try telling that to Wayne.”
“Wayne? What about Wayne?”Materex queried.
“Wayne found the body,” came the reply.
***
Wayne had walked into the public restroom down the hall from Life Protector’s office to take a shit. He pushed open the door on the first stall, pulled down his baggy white boxer shorts with his green and white seersucker slacks, and sat on the cool white horseshoe.
“Hi,” he said, turning to the upside-down face of Steel-Eye Wannamaker who hung from his heels by a meat hook looped over an asbestos-covered steam pipe, “Anybody sitting here?” and proceeded to put his seven remaining questions to Steel-Eye’s eviscerated corpse.
***
The second meeting between Wayne Trout and the Life Protector led to Wayne’s lobotomy. There is no explaining why it happened, but when Wayne walked in and sat down on the computer console and said: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?” the Life Protector bolted from his chair and rushed out of the room without so much as a word.
Wayne subsequently directed his other pestering questions at Materex, with the disastrous results recorded elsewhere in this grim history.
All morning the Life Protector had lounged in his office, wearing an orange and purple velour warm-up, dreaming of Wanda Japan, Wanda Borealis, Wanda of Permafrost, Wanda of Gas, Primal Mother of the Nasty Hot Scream, Wanda Enigma, Wanda Outlandish, Wanda the Headlight At The End Of The Tunnel, and Wanda, Wanda…
The Life Protector may be perhaps the most mysterious inhabitant of the Palace. No one has ever seen him mask to mask, although every resident swears to have done so. Few words are exchanged between Palace residents without someone making reference to “the son of a bitch in the front office who knows all the answers.”
A huge portrait of the Life Protector sitting at his desk hangs above the red, white, and blue bunting on the wall behind the speaker’s podium in the Civic Auditorium. He gazes absently with his dark eyes walled like a fish’s, and it is obvious this monumental painting is meant to confront the viewer with an engaging aesthetic theory now lost (along with the artist, who was trapped with Chicago’s other extinct inhabitants during the 235 inch snowfall which crushed the midwest on August 17th. Chicago is presently buried under one-half mile of southwardly mobile ice. Only bears and mastodons live there anymore.)
The Life Protector’s bright Rootie Kazootie mask, his desk, the pen set, the blotter, the documents, the calendar, and the paperweight which clutter the canvas promote the disquieting sensation that every object occupies the same plane as the white windowless wall behind the scene. On that wall there is a bright red and yellow sign to the right of an arrow pointing left.
This Way Out
the sign says.
***
The author had been backtracking for several hours. He was trying to find his notes on the events of August 22nd, the first day all 161 Palace residents had finally regained control of their faculties and were assembled in the Civic Auditorium for a preprogrammed session of Palace orientation.
“Excuse me. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” It was Bambina Broccoli. Draped in a shimmering mumu of indigo on which were embroidered prune-size tiger paws of spun gold, Bambina Broccoli leaned provocatively against the jamb of the doorway to the author’s chambers bearing a fresh clown of coffee. “But I thought you could use some of this.”
***
It’s not clear exactly what the author could use. His mind muddle has deepened, but his brain isn’t the only organ giving him discomfort. His stomach doubles him over a half dozen times each hour, and his farts smell as foul as any well-fed feline’s. His feet have undoubtedly commenced rotting, but the stench had already grown so terrifying a couple of weeks ago that he has been unable to bring himself to peel back the crusty cotton to investigate his podal condition.
For the record, his whole shebang of a body seems to be shuddering apart with a general lack of aplomb. The headaches have returned, worse they ever, and they announced their triumphant reentry into his skull with all the finesse of saturation bombing.
He can’t keep up this insanity forever, and it’s only a matter of time before his weariness and inebriation combine in a blunder so caustic or diabolical Materex will be unable to ignore the indiscretion. It will be back to Dias the Mechanic again, that much is certain.
***
The author gradually realized that either all 161 Palace residents were not present in the Civic Auditorium on the morning of August 22nd, or everyone has actually seen the Life Protector. Or, equally chilling a thought, there are more people in the Palace than anyone knows about, and at this very moment, the reader is probably reeling from what is displayed on the author’s VDT.
The Master Program was approved for implementation by Gottlieb Goforth while Cindy Gnomoure sat on his desk in cut-offs and tee shirt saying: “Oh do hurry up, you stupid Ubu you. The movie will be half over before we get there.”
***
Wayne was the kind of guy who had never asked anyone, not once in his entire life, not even himself: “What will the future bring?” The question was meaningless to Wayne, since Wayne was incapable of asking it on three consecutive days. He was the only person on Earth who claimed never to have heard Debbie Reynolds sing “Que Sera.”
Wayne was the kind of guy who ate meat at every meal except breakfast, which was the only meal he’d ever learned to cook without looking at the directions on its container.
It wouldn’t have bothered Wayne if a reporter for the New York Daily News won a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism for disclosing there hadn’t been a scrap of real meat in a Hardee’s Huskie for the last decade. Wayne was the kind of guy who would have been a vegetarian if that’s what everyone else was, and he never learned to cook anything besides cheese grits, cream of wheat, and an occasional can of Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable Soup.
He was also the kind of guy who walked up to Wanda Japan in a conduit two and a half miles due east of Astroturf National Park and said: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”
“I’m pregnant, Wayne,” she said, “You’re gonna be a father.”
“Really?” asked Wayne.
“Yes, really,” smiled Wanda Japan.
“Mind if I sit here?” said Wayne, smiling too, as he put his hand on Wanda’s ripening belly.
“Oh shit, Wayne,” said Wanda, “What am I going to do with you?”
Wayne looked directly into Wanda’s wonderfully auburn eyes and stammered:
“You know what tomorrow is? Tomorrow’s the day I remember when no Blackjack shows up. It’s global Blackjack No-Show Day. That’s what it is.
“If this were Cateechee, I’d get up and put the farina on and fix my cup of Sanka and sit down to study for Fifteenth Century Public Closets, but I’d remember the days when Jacka’s wacka wacka was missing from the porch.
“I get worried when he doesn’t come home. That’s all you can expect from a cat, you know, that he’ll come home. And when he doesn’t, you know what death is all about. So if I had to see Patricia Dachau about fire insurance for her pool, I’d miss Jackrack’s wacka wacka over and over.
“He doesn’t do it to hurt me, this leaving home. He’s just never been very organized. He’s got this army of cats that look like him, and they substitute whenever he goes out to fight, except sometimes he forgets to get the message out and no Jack shows up at all.
“The vet says if I cut Jack’s balls off he wouldn’t fight so much, and I wouldn’t have to keep having so many cysts cut out, but I couldn’t cut his balls off. Could you?
“I mean all those Jacks I’d have to fix. Who could afford it? And every one of them will let me pick him up and chuck him under the chin, or tickle behind his ear, like this, except for the real Jack. No siree, Buffalo Bob, not the real Jack, Black Jackrack, Jack E. Black the Badass. He won’t purr. He won’t go meow or prrrt or gnow. I bet he doesn’t even fart.
“When he makes a sound at all, he goes wacka wacka, and then he starts swishing his tail around and slamming it against the floor. He makes these waves of dirty black hair run up and down his back like he was a caterpillar, and that son-of-a-bitch won’t let me pick him up, no matter how much I feed him.
“I really miss that cat, Wanda,” Wayne said, “It’s driving me crazy.”
“Wayne,” said Wanda Japan, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne replied, “I can’t seem to get beyond being crazy.”
***
No one in the Palace believes for a whittled-down moment that anyone here has a fart’s chance in a windtunnel of preserving the nation’s most valuable species long enough to allow the current residents to bounce wailing grandchildren on their knees, not the way things have been going.
The author would express surprise at spotting a single survivor this time next year, in which case his commitment to compiling this grim history seems silly.
***
“Wayne,” Wanda huffed, “I swear if you just sit there and start asking those goddamn questions again, I’m gonna bite the fingers off your good hand.”
“Forgive me, Wanda,” Wayne abruptly pattered, “But do you know what tomorrow really is? It’s Something You Never Dreamed Of Day. That’s what it is. Tomorrow you’ll see things differently. Believe me. It isn’t my fault I was born an orphan, got made into an orphan again, bit off two of my fingers during the war. That’s just the kind of guy I am.
“It isn’t my fault I had a roommate who wanted to blow up the Michelin Tire Plant with an atomic bomb because he bought a faulty condom in Paris, and it isn’t my fault Black Jackrack will never show up again.
“Tomorrow everyone you see will remind you of me, Wanda Japan, but it’s worse than that. You’ll look in the mirror and say: ‘Hi. anybody sitting here?’ and you’ll shiver like you caught the flu because you’ll know you’re really just like me. ‘Not really,’ you’ll want to think, ‘Mind if I sit here?’
“And you’ll wonder if you’re going to school now, if you’ve got any roommates, and you’ll realize you don’t really want that baby, not because you can’t stand kids, but because you wish you had a little more control over your life. You’ll wish you weren’t like some amoeba swirling around on a slide in a big laboratory where everything’s a test and nothing means anything.
“Even you think I’m a dope who can’t even carry on a conversation, but really I can. I just don’t want to. What’s the point? Everything is so senseless.
“You used to go to my wife’s parties. I saw you. Remember? You were drunk and laughing and rubbing Paul Bare’s back and betting on races between a box turtle and a crippled dog.
“That dog was one of the few friends I ever had, Wanda Japan. Her name was Lickety-Split. The woman with the blonde hair, that was Mrs. Trout, my wife. Even a poor dope like me had a dog and a wife once, Wanda Japan. And then she sold my dog. She sold my goddamned dog,” Wayne said.
“I’m sorry, Wayne,” said Wanda Japan, not realizing why, “I feel like such an idiot.”
“Oh, of course, you do. Don’t we all,” Wayne replied, getting up and dusting the seat of his green gabardines.
“Well, I guess I’ve got to be going. I’ve got to catch a cannibal today. That’s why I’ve got this,” Wayne said, holding the blue container of iodized salt in front of his chubby face for Wanda Japan to see, but Wanda didn’t look up.
“Jack really would have loved his,” Wayne said, walking slowly down the desolate corridor. Wanda never saw him again.
—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