CHAPTER 21


Wayne was the kind of guy whose wife went home to see her parents every weekend. The astute reader has not forgotten Isolde’s parents lived in West Germany. Yet when Mr. and Mrs. Trout finally made it to Cateechee where Wayne had taken a job selling encyclopedias, Isolde still insisted on flying to Frankfort every Friday afternoon, arriving back at Greenville-Spartanburg on Monday morning. Since Wayne’s sales territory covered Lexington, Union, Richland, and Kershaw counties, he was gone from Sunday afternoon to Friday evening. Hence, he and Isolde rarely saw each other.

The fact is Wayne and Isolde were the kind of couple who never spent an entire night together in their five years of marriage.
***

The first night Wayne ever sat at the bar not talking to anyone while the bar surged and trickled was a Wednesday. During one of the trickling periods, Wanda took a seat beside him and said: “Gimme an Old Mil, Fast Ed. And make it cold.”
“Yowser, your highness,” said Fast Eddie, blowing on his hands before reaching way down in the cooler, and Wayne got up to take a leak.
“So what’s happening?” Ed asked, sliding the can down the bar.
“Not a fucking thing,” said Wanda, sailing an airplane sawbuck toward him. She hefted the can, chugged half in one gulp, popped it on the counter with a crisp clack, and let loose a deep belly belch like the yodel of laughter in Gooch Gulch.
“Well, shit, Wanda,” said Fast Eddie, “Is that any way to be behaving in this here fine establishment as where we are at?”
“Be thankful, Ed,” said Wanda, lifting the can again, “I usually puke.”
When Wayne returned from the john, he took the stool beside Wanda saying: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”
“I figured you were,” said Wanda.
“Really?” Wayne replied.
“Could of been some other doofus, I guess. So how about the paper then?” she said, pulling it out from under Wayne’s elbow.
“Mind if I sit here?” he asked.
“Hang yourself for all I care. It’s a free country,” Wanda said, looking for the comics.
“You going to school now?”
“What’s it with you? You a narc or a newsman? Just mind your own business and you’ll stay out of trouble. Didn’t hear me asking about those fingers, do you?” she said, touching Wayne’s mutilated hand.
“M-M-M-Married?” Wayne stuttered, his face beginning to redden.
“Jesus Christ! What a fucking asshole you are,” Wanda laughed, finally getting to Gil Thorp, where baseball practice was just beginning. The question was whether Coach Thorp could put together a championship team again this year, even though his best players had graduated, gone pro, been busted, or joined the Marines to battle communists in the jungles of southeast Asia.
Gil’s only hope was to recruit Chipper D’Rocco, eldest son of the reputed head of the Milford Mafioso, who was currently being held in Milford County Jail in connection with the rape/torture murder of Milford High’s mascot. Despite opposition from assistant coaches, concerned citizens, and the school principal, Gil convinced the authorities not to prosecute the boy by providing free season’s tickets to the Sheriff and his immediate relatives. Hence the brutal bludgeoning of Betty Lu Bi-Lo, the blue-ribbon ton-and-a-half brahma/charolais/cross went unavenged, and 15-year-old Chipper, at 6'6" and 285 pounds, promised to play centerfield, bat clean-up, and play defensive right end in the fall.
“Got any roommates?” Wayne asked.
Wanda’s mouth dropped like the door of a metal breadbox. The cold black arches of her eyebrows crashed against each other like opposing linemen on fourth-and-one in the final minute of play. Or outraged grammarians scrambling to recover a loose metaphor.
Wanda Japan. Oh Wanda, Wanda, Wanda Japan. Who could make faces like Wanda Japan? Consider how grotesquely Wanda had skewed her eyes and lips at Wayne’s question. She resembled a pinwheel whose center was hidden somewhere in the furrowed bridge of her nose.
Wanda recoiled this pinwheel on her neck as she lifted and pinched her shoulders together, until she resembled a buzzard with a daisy for a face. Wayne didn’t notice this obvious change, since he was focused on Wanda’s pulsating nostrils. These reminded him of a box turtle’s eyes.
Wanda glared from under her ebony eyebrows with a mixture of curiosity and disdain, her pinpoint pupils searing into the Rome-red-apple cheeks of Wayne’s chubby face.
“Are you fucking crazy?” she asked.
“Not really?” Wayne guessed, smiling quickly before whirling away from Wanda’s blistering gaze.
“Not really?” Wanda fumed. “Let me tell you what you can do with your not really, buster. I could make your face look like your fucking hand,” she said, spitting venom at Wayne’s ever-reddening neck.
And Wayne, of course, said: “You don’t say.”
***
The bar became so silent it seemed like outer space. At that very moment, the world might have ended had anyone made a sound.
Wanda’s eyes blistered the back of Wayne’s neck for nearly a minute, the first twenty seconds of which she refused even to breathe. Gradually, exaggerated huffs and puffs began whistling between her clenched teeth like a hyena’s dare, and a few patrons actually left the bar. But the tension slowly subsided, and the hubbub of a hundred silly conversations grew until the jukebox had to be cranked up another notch. By then, Wanda had forgotten her anger, turning to the crossword where she printed the “R” in “RACE” even before she finished reading the clue for 1 across: “Ethnic contest.”
She completed the puzzle in near-record time (Wanda holds the bar championship for having completed an 86-clue Thomas Joseph crossword in 26.23 seconds) once she realized that “Generic term for places of work,” 3 down, was “THESALTMINES.”
She read her horoscope. “Avoid conceit,” it said. “A stranger has much to teach you. Libra figures promin…” At this very moment, Wayne returned from taking another leak and said: “Hi. Anybody sitting here?”
Wanda reached over and grabbed Wayne’s chin, looking him directly in the eyes. “Okay,” she said, “What’s the story here? Who the fuck are you?”
“Me?” Wayne blubbered, as he lurched and tumbled off the stool, sprawling on the sticky scorched and stained astroturf of the barroom floor, looking like a beaten puppy. “I’m, I’m, I’m,” Wayne stammered.
“Oh my God,” said Wanda Japan, her eyes widening in amazement, “You’re Wayne, aren’t you? The insurance salesman?”
***
Wayne went through his routine over and over that night, as he returned to his stool after taking a leak, and Wanda remained on her stool all night long, explaining how she’d left her husband and he’d hung himself in the closet. When Wayne asked about roommates, she talked about her cat Ezekial’s gruesome farts (“They can peel the shell off a snail at thirty meters,” she said.) and the electric blue betta named Cannibal Geins who sucked the right eye out of her other cat (his name was Buster Virginia) one day when he got too close to the tank. She talked about David Hume for some reason whenever Wayne said “Not really.”
Nothing fazed Wayne. As soon as Wanda finished one diatribe, Wayne asked the next question, until he got up to take a leak. Upon returning, he simply started in again. Finally he fell off his stool, of course, and was carried to the keg-cooler to sleep it off.
***
Wayne was the kind of guy who never learned his wife’s first name, so when he mentioned her at all, he called her “the wife” or “Mrs. Trout” or “she” or “the battle-ax,” but never “Isolde.” And Isolde was the kind of wife who referred to Wayne as “my late husband” simply because she never mastered the English language and Wayne was never home.
No one knows when Wayne Trout’s house became the gathering place for Clemson’s small community of artistic and intellectual inebriates, but it did, and one crowded Wednesday evening during the second year of their Cateechee residency, on that rare and unexpected of days when Wayne returned home for an extended weekend, the marriage between Wayne Trout and the former Isolde Schiene fell apart.
It was early afternoon. Wayne wheeled into the driveway, got out of the car, and was getting his briefcase out of the trunk, when Isolde came up behind him and asked: “And what, may I be asking you, is that?“
Isolde had by this time amassed a vocabulary of 300 words, or roughly half as many as Helen Keller could sign. Helen Keller was named for Judge Keller’s great-aunt and had been taught American Sign Language in the Animal Behavioral Modification Laboratory in Rhodes Hall. And, not surprisingly, shortly before the grand opening of the current ice age, Helen became the first non-human arrested for obscenity when she began signing from Huckleberry Finn during a TF Telethon.
Isolde was pointing at Lickedy-Split, a large mongrel Wayne had found in a ditch last December while fixing a flat on I-26. Its rear legs were crushed, and its teeth were loose in their swollen gums, but somehow it clung to life like a mussel to stone and became the first thing Wayne Trout ever loved.
Wayne had not seen Isolde in a year, and as he propped himself against the rear right fender of his Alfa Romeo, he said: “Hi. anybody sitting here?”
“Sure. So funny you can be. What a jerk you are,” said Isolde, “See how I am laughing? What is this thing you are having in here? I have never seen a thing so ugly in my life,” she said.
“Really?” Wayne replied.
***
Wayne had taken the battered pup to the Charleston Animal Shelter where the resident veterinarian told him: “Don’t worry, Mr. Trout. She won’t feel a thing. She’ll be gone before you can say Harry Kirschner.”
“Not really,” Wayne responded, snatching the whining dog from Dr. Edith Rohr, and then spent the next three days searching for a vet willing and able to fix the dog up rather than put it down.
Wayne only had two friends in his entire life and neither was human.
“Don’t worry girl,” Wayne purred to the pup each time he hung up the phone in Burpee’s Bar and Grill, “We’ll have you fixed up lickedy-split,” which is, of course, how the dog came to be named.
And now as Isolde confronted Lickedy-Split for the first time, the dog was still in the special cast that had cost Wayne $356. Not only did it keep Lickedy’s legs in the proper position to promote a good bone knit, but the ends of the cast were fastened to a small hardwood board on the bottom of which were four furniture casters. This device worked so well, in fact, that Wayne considered changing Lickedy’s name to Skooter.
***
“And what do you call this?” Isolde demanded, walking around the car and poking her index finger in the bewildered face of the convalescing canine who panted and squirmed, trying to avoid the painful jabs.
“This is Lickedy-Split,” Wayne said, going over and patting the dog’s head. “She followed me home, and I’m going to keep her. She’s a good girl. Aren’t you, Lickedy? Good girl.”
Lickedy, of course, was not a good girl because she was a male dog, but Wayne was that kind of guy.
“This is no dog,” said Isolde, shaking her head sadly. Then she burst into nervous laughter that sounded suspiciously like tuberculosis. “This is the funniest thing I have ever looking at in my life,” she hacked.
***
Later than night, while Wayne sat at the bar not talking to anyone while the bar roared and quelled, during one of the roaring periods, Dewitt Madison stumbled in and fell against the bar stool next to Wayne. Wayne was reading the sports section in The Greenville News. There was an article by Morris Bedder on Benton Enden called “Where Are They Now?”
Deadeye grasped for the stool, desperately attempting to maintain his balance. He directed four or five minutes of drooling, frothing, gurgling incoherence at Wayne, who never lifted his eyes from the paper.
“Is this bum bothering you?“ Fast Eddie asked Wayne, flicking the edge of the back page.
“Oh, no, yes, excuse me,” said Wayne, folding his paper and gulping down his beer. “Look at the time,” he said, set down his empty mug and left.
Deadeye looked at Fast Ed the Bartender and rolled his eyes in opposing directions, his face tilted toward the ceiling, his hands wriggling in front of his face like undulating clumps of seaweed caught in arbitrary unseen currents.
***
When he finally got back to Cateechee on his first day off in years, it was after midnight and Wayne was totally fucked up. He’d been to every bar in Clemson, Seneca, Six-Mile, Pendleton and Central. Rolled up in The Wall Street Journal beside him was an issue of Hustler which contained an interview with Charles Bukowski. And while Wayne bought Hustler for the pictures, the poet also had a copy because he hated Bukowski so much he felt compelled to buy magazines his work appeared in just to burn them, and he seldom let anyone forget it.
“He’s just an old fart who drinks all the time, shits in his pants, pukes in public, and writes about it to get laid. Do you realize Thomas Chatterton,” the poet asked, “was not yet twenty when he died?”
There were eight or nine cars parked along the road in front of the house, and the party was still going strong. Wayne wheeled into the driveway, got out of the car, and was getting his briefcase out of the trunk when Paul Bare and Wanda Japan lurched up to him, arm in arm. Wanda said: “Well, well. It’s Wayne, is it? About time you showed up.”
The events of that Wednesday evening are temporarily lost to posterity as surely as they are lost to Materex. If there is a filing system in the author’s chambers, it has as yet defied computer analysis. Materex itself refuses to rummage through the author’s password-protected volumes, and Bambina Broccoli says she’s afraid to go through the rubble in his chambers because Idi Amin himself could be concealed in the wreckage.
According to Dias the Mechanic, the author is recovering and shows a growing desire to play backgammon with Materex. He has begun once again to display an effortless facility for solving the crossword puzzles Dias produces on a daily basis. The special charm, originality, and wit of these distractions are undeniably a credit to those who labored considerable hours programming Materex, whose massive dictionary and thesaurus provide the clues that make Mr. Mechanic’s puzzles so entertaining. Surely, the author would not mind sharing the following items found in a folder on his desk.
Item 1
Upon entering his home on the evening his marriage crumbled, Wayne found the living room crammed with 20 drunken fools (the author among them) who were placing bets on a race between Lickedy-Split and a box turtle Sean Locke had found on the road out front.
“Hi,” said Wayne, taking a seat on his sofa beside Cecilia Killy — wife of Professor Gilliam Bangs Killy, renowned author of Finding The Will For The Way, a highly acclaimed study of transactional justice — “Anybody sitting here?”
“Oh God!” Harriet shrieked, starting to hyperventilate. “Look, look,” she said, “aye, aye, aye,” and “pfff, pfff, pfff,” she gasped.
Wanda says she didn’t realize Wayne and Isolde were husband and wife until shortly before his death, at which time Wayne told her as much.
That’s the kind of guy he was.
Item 2
On the Friday following the Wednesday on which his marriage fell apart, Wayne wheeled into the driveway, got out of the car, got his briefcase out of the trunk, and walked into his empty house. He found a note from Mrs. Trout fastened to the refrigerator with a smiling magnetic watermelon. Lickedy-Split was gone.
***
Rhodes Hall was the home of Environmental Systems Engineering on the Clemson University campus. There, young men and women learned how to become sewage-treatment-plant operators, hazardous-waste handlers, and quality-control cost-accountants at drive-in abortion clinics.
The building had been constructed to withstand a multimegaton direct strike and every fifteen feet along its corridors, there was a bright red and yellow sign that said:
Danger: Radioactive Materials!
Please Wash Your Hands Before Leaving
***
No one was certain what went on in Rhodes Hall. There was an atmosphere of intrigue and danger associated with the place. Although no uniformed guards were stationed in the building, Sam and Dave were always nearby, wearing sunglasses at midnight and mumbling into their hands.
On the fourth floor of Rhodes Hall, according to rumor, the United States Department of Defense had a staff of five professors, twelve clerical and administrative employees, and six graduate assistants developing spring-loaded stainless-steel incisors for attack dogs.
Some said Legionnaire’s Disease escaped from the basement of Rhodes Hall, as did AIDS-contaminated yogurt brought in from the Biological Sciences Research Center in Chapel Hill. Others blamed the poisoning of Lake Hartwell on toxins flushed down the drains of that dreadful edifice.
Several reporters from The Tiger, the student newspaper, disappeared while on assignment to Rhodes Hall and never reappeared, but the bone marrow transplants were common knowledge.
In these experiments, a sample of randomly-chosen canines was opened up and had bits of bone replaced with various synthetic compounds. On the nights of these experiments, the high-pitched howls from the kennel would take on an eerie resonance as the steel and the yellow brick of Rhodes Hall became a gigantic tuning fork that whined like an aeolian harp.
No one spoke of that mellifluous horror, but once each month, the entire town of Clemson was unable to sleep. Some drank themselves unconscious. Others disappeared and were never heard from again. Most of the town stumbled through the next day like driveling idiots and hungover cockeyed drunks.
And while nobody spoke about it, everyone knew what went on in that contemptible building, and even today a resident may awaken here in the Palace, frothing and flailing against the dream demons of Rhodes Hall. There, signs were posted opposite on the main door, under one of the radioactive signs, which said:
Graduate Students
Leave Your Pets Outside
This was because graduate assistants had begun refusing to terminate their subjects at the end of each trial. They were already smuggling out hundreds of survivors annually, and students harbored many of these liberated beasts in off-campus housing. The discovery and elimination of 68 of these unfortunate creatures in the married student-housing complex helped pave the way for Ophelia Tupperells’ self-immolation.
Some of the pups were housed and fed by compassionate townspeople, while a gifted few eventually found their way into architect-designed canine comfort quarters on lake-front lots owned by members of the university faculty and administration.
***
The Rhodes Hall experiments were conducted according to the most rigid of standards. This is not surprising, since nearly all preglacial laboratory work was handled in the spirit of eugenics, a science which sought to improve the human race by manipulating heredity in the mating process.
Few normal people were scientists, and no pataphysicians were. Thus the world of clinical research had become a network of Auschwitzes and Belsens in which unresisting animals took the place of unresisting Jews, so science and development marched on. All that was needed to keep the machine of medical progress greased was a steady supply of test subjects. These were obtained from private donors (who were paid a nominal fee for each healthy specimen) or the Pickens County Animal Shelter (which gave the researchers well-fed pups free for the hauling).
Whenever enough dogs were assembled to lend a degree of statistical respectability to the project, half the strays were cut open and had plugs of rear leg bone tissue swapped between one anaesthetized beast and another — this was the control group — while the other half was treated to metal, plastic, ceramic, and synthesized “organic” replacement parts. Pseudobone™, as it was called, was produced by the Wastewater Resources Division in cooperation with the Governor’s Task Force on Fecal Coliform.
Following the operations, the entire lot was observed for four months. During this time the dogs were subjected to stress analysis — the area of the transplant was smashed with a golf club for five minutes twice a day; duress analysis — each animal received six bursts of high voltage to its nervous system every four hours; and success/motivation analysis — the genetic traits of surviving pooches were sent directly to the Pentagon for further study (in the form of tissue samples the size of a medium pizza).
Finally, the few unfortunate animals which managed to survive the entire ordeal were handed over to the graduate assistants for disposal, while a new group was prepared to undergo the identical test.
It was hoped that ten years of controlled experimentation would put the project in a position to write the really massive proposal required to ensure the gargantuan fellowships and grants needed to finance a detailed preliminary study of the most economically-attractive substances thus far examined. And to recommend continued funding to discover probable sources of test material for actual bone transplants to be performed in the second or third phase of the program.
The graduate students, however, found it difficult (if not completely impossible — Helga Pleiwythe, whose main duty in Rhodes Hall consisted of placing IUDs in New Zealand White rabbits, refused to go along with her rebellious classmates, and in the two years she attended Clemson University in Environmental Systems Engineering, Helga disposed of 1,568 test survivors. And she did each by hand.) to exterminate the poor whimpering and mutilated beasts who actually survived the gauntlet of 120 grueling days of scientific method, and they had devised a secret system of smuggling these experimental freaks out of Rhodes in alarming numbers.
***
Strangely enough, almost everyone who laid eyes on the pathetic creatures quickly fell in love with them, and many were outraged at the suggestion of allowing these animals to be gassed simply because they were unfortunate enough to weather four months of pain and humiliation. The hold of a dog upon the hearts of American minds should never be underestimated. The most successful antiwar protest during the Vietnamese era of 20th century conflict, for instance, owed its impact, in good part, to a German Shepherd whelp named Goebbels.
Small signs began appearing all over New Orleans. “On Saturday, at 9 AM,” the signs read, “The Symbionese Liberation Signal Corps is going to burn this cute little puppy in protest of the Vietnam War. We are going to employ a small canister of napalm in this execution. We are not particularly proud to mention that napalm is an American-made product, manufactured by the Dow Chemical Corporation. It is used in Southeast Asia against defenseless Vietnamese peasants and their pets.
“We will stake Goebbels on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where a member of our Security Committee, dressed in the light blue uniform of an air marshal, will hurl his scale replica of a napalm bomb at the pup. After Goebbels’s painful screams have faded into silence, we will read a prepared statement denouncing United States involvement in the war.”
On the Saturday morning of the protest, an estimated 2.4 million people gathered on the rancid shores of Lake Pontchartrain to protest the proposed destruction of a harmless and innocent puppy named George Goebbels.
When the protesters finally arrived, more than 15 minutes late, they barely had time to set Goebbels on the ground before the crowd surged forward and all twelve protesters were beaten to death.
During the confusion, Goebbels apparently dove into the vapid waters of the brackish lake and drowned.
That evening on the six o’clock news, anchormen throughout the world were reading a prepared statement from the dead protesters which had been mailed to every major media outlet in the preglacial world on the previous morning. The dispatch had been distributed by Yossarian Universal News Service.
“Dear Fellow Travellers,” the statement began, “By the time you read this, we may be dead, and if we are dead, you killed us because we said we might kill a dog with a weapon that kills thousands of humans every day. I guess we’ve really learned our lesson, haven’t we? Sticks and stones will break our bones, but our words have driven you to murder.” Mankind, the world over, broke down and wept when it read those words and, for the first time, recognized the folly of its savage ways.
Within three days, the Vietnamese war came to an honorable end, and everyone shook hands, kissed and made up, and peace broke out all over the planet. Such an ending could only have been brought about by the power of a dog upon the hearts of American minds.
The Clemson animals were extremely resilient, and they were immediately recognizable as they hobbled along in Clemson and vicinity. It was this perpetual recognition, coupled with the flaming end of Ophelia Tupperells, which led to the public outcry against the experiments, which led, in turn, to Clemson’s public decision to abandon its bone substitute research. “We take these steps,” said President C. M. Pien in response to public protests and in a burst of humanitarianism unheard of in Clemson’s brutal history, “to ensure that all God’s creatures have the same rights the fettral gubmint says we got to give niggers, Poleox, and Yankees.”
In reality, however, Clemson simply terminated the troublesome graduate students, who were then retroactively inducted into the armed forces, charged with desertion, courts martialled, convicted, and imprisoned for life. All are presumed to have perished in the stockade at Fort Benning during the gala premiere of the current ice age.
They were replaced by work-study students enrolled in advanced Army ROTC. Helga Pleiwythe’s position was not affected by the massive retaliation, and she later found work with the Dow Chemical Corporation as a research chemist in pyrotechnics. She spent the remainder of her life designing flame-retardant mousetraps. Clemson continued its bone transplant experiments using human volunteers directed to Rhodes Hall by the Department of Social Services.
***
It was to these people Isolde had given Lickedy-Split before calling a cab to take her to the airport. Lickedy-Split was the first living being for which Wayne felt a certain kinship during his miserable existence.
As he read Isolde’s parting words, tears oozed from his eyes, and as he dialed the Dog Bone Research Project in Rhodes Hall, Wayne’s stubby remaining fingers trembled.
When he discovered Lickedy-Split had succumbed on the operating slab that very morning, Wayne could only mumble: “Not really.”

Posted: Thu - August 5, 2004 at 10:54 AM          
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