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“Pretty, was she?”
“Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings and not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open.
I’ve already seen the prettiest face that...
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There wasn’t a man in Ilium County who wasn’t in love with her, secretly or otherwise. She could ...
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“I suppose it’s high treason and ungrateful and ignorant and backward and anti-intellectual to call a dead man as famous as Felix Hoenikker a son of a bitch. I know all about how harmless and gentle and dreamy he was supposed to be, how he’d never hurt a fly, how he didn’t care about money and power and fancy clothes and automobiles and things, how he wasn’t like the rest of us, how he was better than the rest of us, how he was so innocent he was practically a Jesus—except for the Son of God part …”
“but how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a thing like an atomic bomb?
“Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living.
Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
IT WAS IN the tombstone salesroom that I had my first vin-dit, a Bokononist word meaning a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me.
Frank wasn’t any criminal. He didn’t have that kind of nerve. The only work he was any good at was model-making.
When he cleared out of here, went to Florida, he got a job in a model shop in Sarasota. Turned out the model shop was a front for a ring that stole Cadillacs,
That’s how Frank got balled up in all that.
“Where’s Newt now, do you know?”
“Guess he’s with his sister in Indianapolis.
And, in that same miserable family, there’s that great big, gawky girl, over six feet tall.
That man, who’s so famous for having a great mind, he pulled that girl out of high school in her sophomore year so he could go on having some woman take care of him.
“Asa’s boy. He was all set to be a heap-big re-search scientist, and then they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and the kid quit, and he got drunk, and he came out here, and he told me he wanted to go to work cutting stone.”
“There’s already a name on it—on the pedestal.”
The way the story goes: this German immigrant was on his way West with his wife, and she died of smallpox here in Ilium. So he ordered this angel to be put up over her, and he showed my great-grandfather he had the cash to pay for it. But then he was robbed. Somebody took practically every cent he had. All he had left in this world was some land he’d bought in Indiana, land he’d never seen. So he moved on—said he’d be back later to pay for the angel.”
“But he never came back?”
“N...
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There was a last name written there.
“If that immigrant had any descendants, I expect they Americanized the name. They’re probably Jones or Black or Thompson now.”
I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.
“You know some people by that name?”
The name was my last name, too.
“What kind of a boy was Franklin Hoenikker?”
I can show you what kind of a boy Franklin Hoenikker was.”
The details were so exquisitely in scale, so cunningly textured and tinted, that it was unnecessary for me to squint in order to believe that the nation was real—the hills, the lakes, the rivers, the forests, the towns, and all else that good natives everywhere hold so dear.
“Look at the doors of the houses,”
“They’ve got real knobs on ’em, and the knockers really work.”
“You ask what kind of a boy Franklin Hoenikker was; he built this.”
“This was his real home. Thousands of hours he spent down here.
He didn’t spend a dime on anything but this—didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t go to movies, didn’t go out with girls, wasn’t car crazy.”
“I wonder if those dirty sons of bitches,”
“have any idea what it was they killed!”
Krebbs was a bearded man, a platinum blond Jesus with spaniel eyes.
He was no close friend of mine.
I had met him at a cocktail party where he presented himself as National Chairman of Poets and Painte...
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He begged for shelter, not necessarily bomb proof, and it happe...
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Krebbs was gone; but, before leaving, he had run up three-hundred-dollars’ worth of long-distance calls, set my couch on fire in five places, killed my cat and my avocado tree, and torn the door off my medicine cabinet.
He wrote this poem, in what proved to be excrement, on the yellow linoleum floor of my kitchen:
There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck. It said,
“Meow.”
Nonetheless, I sense that he was my Karass. If he was, he served ...
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A wrang-wrang, according to Bokonon, is a person who steers people away from a line of speculation by reducing that line, with the example of the...
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Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist. It was Krebbs’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy.
Well done, Mr. Krebbs, well done.
I found out where the fugitive from justice, the model-maker, the Great God Jehovah and Beelzebub of bugs in Mason jars was—where
The supplement was a paid ad for a banana republic.
