Deadeye Dick (9 page)

Something had kept him out of uniform. I knew who he was because he was good with automobiles, and Father had hired him from time to time to do some work on the Keedsler. Dwayne would eventually marry Celia and become the most successful automobile dealer in the area.

Celia would commit suicide by eating Drâno, a drain-clearing compound of lye and zinc chips, in 1970, twelve years ago now. She killed herself in the most horrible way I can think of—a few months before the dedication of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts.

Celia knew the arts center was going to open, and the newspaper and the radio station and the politicians and so
on all said what a difference it was going to make in the quality of life in Midland City. But there was the can of Drāno, with all its dire warnings, and she just couldn’t wait around anymore.

I have seen unhappiness in my time.

N
OW THAT I
have known Haiti, with its voodooism, with its curses and charms and zombies and good and bad spirits which can inhabit anybody or anything, and so on, I wonder if it mattered much that it was I who was in the cage in the basement of the old courthouse so long ago. A curiously carved bone or stick, or a dried mud doll with straw hair would have served as well as I did, there on the bench, as long as the community believed, as Midland City believed of me, that it was a package of evil magic.

Everybody could feel safe for a while. Bad luck was caged. There was bad luck, cringing on the bench in there.

See for yourself.

•   •   •

At midnight, all the civilians were shooed out of the basement. “That’s it, folks,” said the police, and “Show’s over, folks,” and so on. They were frank to call me a show. I was regional theater.

But I wasn’t let out of the cage. It would have been
nice to take a bath, and to go to bed between clean sheets, and to sleep until I died.

There was more to come. Six policemen were still in the basement with me—three in uniform and three in plain clothes, and all with pistols. I could name the manufacturers of the pistols, and their calibers. There wasn’t a pistol there that I couldn’t have taken apart and cleaned properly, and put together again. I knew where the drops of oil should go. If they had put their pistols in my hands, I could have made them this guarantee: The pistols would never jam.

It can be a very frustrating thing if a pistol jams.

The six remaining policemen were the producers of the Rudy Waltz Snow, and their poses in the basement indicated that we had reached an intermission, that there was more to come. They ignored me for the moment, as though a curtain had descended.

They were electrified by a call from upstairs. “He’s here!” was the call, as a door upstairs opened and shut. They echoed that. “He’s here, he’s here.” They wouldn’t say who it was, but it was somebody somehow marvelous. Now I heard his footsteps on the stairs.

I thought it might be an executioner. I thought it might be Police Chief Francis X. Morissey, that old family friend, who had yet to show himself. I thought it might be my father.

It was George Metzger, the thirty-five-year-old widower of the woman I had shot. He was fifteen years
younger than I am now, a mere spring chicken—but, as children will, I saw him as an old man. He was bald on top. He was skinny, and his posture was bad, and he was dressed like almost no other man in Midland City—in gray flannel trousers and a tweed sport coat, what I would recognize much later at Ohio State as the uniform of an English professor. All he did was write and edit at the
Bugle-Observer
all day long.

I did not know who he was. He had never been to our house. He had been in town only a year. He was a newspaper gypsy. He had been hired away from the
Indianapolis Times
. It would come out at legal proceedings later on that he was born to poor parents in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and had put himself through Harvard, and that he had twice worked his way to Europe on cattle boats. The adverse information about him, which was brought out by our lawyer, was that he had once belonged to the Communist party, and had attempted to enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War.

He wore horn-rimmed spectacles, and his eyes were red from crying, or maybe from too much cigarette smoke. He was smoking when he came down the stairs, followed by the detective who had gone to get him. He behaved as though he himself were a criminal, puffing on the same cigarette he would be smoking when he was propped against the basement wall in front of a firing squad.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the police had shot this unhappy stranger while I watched. I was beyond surprise.
I am still beyond surprise. The consequences of my having shot a pregnant woman were bound to be complicated beyond belief.

How can I bear to remember that first confrontation with George Metzger? I have this trick for dealing with all my worst memories. I insist that they are plays. The characters are actors. Their speeches and movements are stylized, arch. I am in the presence of art.

So:

The curtain rises on a basement at midnight. Six
P
OLICEMEN
stand around the walls
. R
UDY
,
a boy, covered with ink, is in a cage in the middle of the room. Down the stairs, smoking a cigarette, comes
G
EORGE
M
ETZGER
,
whose wife has just been shot by the boy. He is followed by a
D
ETECTIVE
,
who has the air of a master of ceremonies. The
P
OLICE
are fascinated by what is about to happen. It is bound to be interesting
.

M
ETZGER
(appalled by
RUDY’S
appearance):
Oh, my God. What is it?

D
ETECTIVE
: That’s what shot your wife, Mr. Metzger.

M
ETZGER
: What have you done to him?

D
ETECTIVE
: Don’t worry about him. He’s fine. You want him to sing and dance? We can make him sing and dance.

M
ETZGER
: I’m sure.
(Pause)
All right. I’ve looked at him. Will you take me back home to my children now?

D
ETECTIVE
: We were hoping you’d have a few words to say to him.

M
ETZGER
: Is that required?

D
ETECTIVE
: No, sir. But the boys and me here—we figured you should have this golden opportunity.

M
ETZGER
: It sounded so official—that I was to come with you.
(Catching on, troubled)
This is not an official assembly. This is—
(Pause)
informal.

D
ETECTIVE
: Nobody’s even here. I’m home in bed, you’re home in bed. All the other boys are home in bed. Ain’t that right, boys?

(P
OLICEMEN
assent variously, making snoring sounds and so on.)

M
ETZGER
(morbidly curious):
What would it please you gentlemen to have me do?

D
ETECTIVE
: If you was to grab a gun away from one of us, and it was to go off, and if the bullet was to hit young Mr. Rich Nazi Shitface there, I wouldn’t blame you. But it would be hard for us to clean up the mess afterwards. A mess like that can go on and on.

M
ETZGER
: SO I should limit my assault to words, you think?

D
ETECTIVE
: Some people talk with their hands and feet.

M
ETZGER
: I should beat him up.

D
ETECTIVE
: Heavens to Betsy, no. How could you think such a thing?

(P
OLICEMEN
display mock horror at the thought of a beating.)

M
ETZGER
: Just asking.

D
ETECTIVE
: Get him out here, boys.

(Two
P
OLICEMEN
hasten to unlock the cage and drag
R
UDY
out of it
. R
UDY
struggles in terror.)

R
UDY
: It was an accident! I’m sorry! I didn’t know!
(and so on)

(The two
P
OLICEMEN
hold
R
UDY
in front
OF M
ETZGER
,
so that
M
ETZGER
can hit and kick him as much as he likes.)

D
ETECTIVE
(to both
R
UDY
and
M
ETZGER
): A lot of people fall down stairs. We have to take them to the hospital afterwards. It’s a very common accident. Up to now, it’s happened with mean drunks and to niggers who don’t seem to understand their place. We never had a smart-ass kid murderer on our hands before.

M
ETZGER
(uninterested in doing anything, giving up on life):
What a day this has been.

D
ETECTIVE
: Don’t want to hit him where it shows? Pull his pants down, boys, so this man can whap his ass.
(
P
OLICEMEN
pull down
R
UDY’S
pants, turn him around, and bend him over)
Somebody get this man something to whap an ass with.

(Unoccupied
P
OLICEMEN
search for a suitable whip
. P
OLICEMAN
O
NE
finds a piece of cable on the floor about two feet long, proudly brings it to
M
ETZGER
,
who accepts it listlessly.)

M
ETZGER
: Many thanks.

P
OLICEMAN
O
NE
: Any time.

R
UDY
: I’m sorry! It was an accident!

(All wait in silence for the first blow
. METZGER
does not move, hut speaks to a higher power instead.)

M
ETZGER
: God—there should not be animals like us. There should be no lives like ours.

(“M
ETZGER
drops the whip, turns, walks to the stairs, clumps up them. Nobody moves. A door upstairs opens and closes
. R
UDY
is still bent over. Twenty seconds pass.)

P
OLICEMAN
O
NE
(in a dream):
Jesus—how’s he gonna get home?

D
ETECTIVE
(in a dream):
Walk. It’s nice out.

P
OLICEMAN
O
NE
: How far away does he live?

D
ETECTIVE
: Six blocks from here.

(Curtain.)

•   •   •

It wasn’t exactly like that, of course. I don’t have total recall. It was a lot like that.

I was allowed to straighten up and pull up my pants. I had such a little pecker then. They still wouldn’t let me wash, but Mr. Metzger had succeeded in warning these fundamentally innocent, hayseed policemen of how crazy they had become.

So I wasn’t bopped around much anymore, and pretty soon I would be taken home to my mother.

Since it was Mr. Metzger’s wife I had shot, he had the power not only to make the police take it easy with me, but to persuade the whole town to more or less forgive me. This
he did—in a very short statement which appeared on the front page of the
Bugle-Observer
, bordered in black, a day and a half after my moment of fatal carelessness:

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.

“There is evil for you.

“We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.

“I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

W
HILE
I
WAS
in the cage, another bunch of policeman had been beating up Father in the police station across the street. He should never have refused the easy way out which Police Chief Morissey had offered him. But it was too late now.

The police actually threw him down a flight of stairs. They didn’t just pretend that was what had happened to him. There was a lot of confused racist talk, evidently. Father would later remember lying at the bottom of the stairs, with somebody standing over him and asking him, “Hey, Nazi—how does it feel to be a nigger now?”

They brought me to see him after my confrontation with George Metzger. He was in a room in the basement, all bunged up, and entirely broken in spirit.

“Look at your rotten father,” he said. “What a worthless man I am.” If he was curious about my condition, he gave no sign of it. He was so theatrically absorbed by his own helplessness and worthlessness that I don’t think he
even noticed that his own son was all covered with ink. Nor did he ever ask me what I had just been through.

Nor did he consider the propriety of my hearing what he was determined to confess next, which was how his character had been corrupted at an early age by liquor and whores. I would never have known of the wild times he and old August Gunther used to have, when they were supposedly visiting museums and studios. Felix would never have known of them, if I hadn’t told him. Mother never did know, I’m sure. I certainly never told her.

And that might have been bearable information for a twelve-year-old, since it had all happened so long ago. But then Father went on to say that he
still
patronized prostitutes regularly, although he had the most wonderful wife in the world.

He was all in pieces.

•   •   •

The police had become subdued by then. Some of them may have been wondering what on earth they thought they had been doing.

Word may have come down from Chief Morissey that enough was enough. Father and I had no lawyer to secure our rights for us. Father refused to call a lawyer. But the district attorney or somebody must have said that I should be sent home without any further monkey business.