God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [18]
There was a crash. Lightning turned everything to blue-white diamonds.
The dog ran to the door of the Rosewater Foundation, scratched and howled. Upstairs, Eliot slept on. His sickly translucent drip-dry shirt, which hung from a ceiling fixture, swayed like a ghost.
Eliot had only one shirt. He had only one suit—a frowzy, blue, double-breasted chalkstripe now hanging on the knob of the lavatory door. It was a wonderfully made suit, for it still held together, though it was very old. Eliot had gotten it in trade from a volunteer fireman in New Egypt, New Jersey, way back in 1952.
Eliot had only one pair of shoes, black ones. They had a crackle finish as a result of an experiment. Eliot once tried to polish them with Johnson's Glo-Coat, which was a floorwax, not intended for shoes. One shoe was on his desk. The other was in the lavatory, on the rim of the washbasin. A maroon nylon sock, with garter attached, was in each shoe. One end of the garter of the sock in the shoe on the washbasin was in the water. It had saturated itself and its sock, too, through the magic of capillary action.
The only colorful, new articles in the office, other than the magazine pictures, were a family-size box of Tide, the washday miracle, and the yellow slicker and red helmet of a volunteer fireman, which hung on pegs by the office door. Eliot was a Fire Lieutenant. He could easily have been Captain or Chief, since he was a devoted and skilful fireman, and had given the Fire Department six new engines besides. It was at his own insistence that he held a rank no higher than Lieutenant.
Eliot, because he almost never left his office except to fight fires, was the man to whom all fire calls were sent. That was why he had two telephones by his cot. The black one was for Foundation calls. The red one was for fire calls. When a fire call came in, Eliot would push a red button mounted on the wall under his commission as a Notary Public. The button activated a doomsday bullhorn under the cupola on top of the firehouse. Eliot had paid for the horn, and the cupola, too.
There was an earsplitting thunderclap.
"Now, now—now, now," said Eliot in his sleep.
His black telephone was about to ring. Eliot would awake and answer it by the third ring. He would say what he said to every caller, no matter what the hour:
"This is the Rosewater Foundation. How can we help you?"
It was the Senator's conceit that Eliot trafficked with criminals. He was mistaken. Most of Eliot's clients weren't brave enough or clever enough for lives of crime. But Eliot, particularly when he argued with his father or his bankers or his lawyers, was almost equally mistaken about who his clients were. He would argue that the people he was trying to help were the same sorts of people who, in generations past, had cleared the forests, drained the swamps, built the bridges, people whose sons formed the backbone of the infantry in time of war—and so on. The people who leaned on Eliot regularly were a lot weaker than that—and dumber, too. When it came time for their sons to go into the Armed Forces, for instance, the sons were generally rejected as being mentally, morally, and physically undesirable.
There was a tough element among the Rosewater County poor who, as a matter of pride, stayed away from Eliot and his uncritical love, who had the guts to get out of Rosewater County and look for work in Indianapolis or Chicago or Detroit. Very few of them found steady work in those places, of course, but at least they tried.
The client who was about to make Eliot's black telephone ring was a sixty-eight-year-old virgin who, by almost anybody's standards, was too dumb to live. Her name was Diana Moon Glampers. No one had ever loved her. There