Deadeye Dick (10 page)

Anyway—after being shown my father, I was told to sit on a hard bench in a corridor and wait. I was left all alone, still covered with ink. I could have walked out of
there. Policemen would come by, and hardly give me a glance.

And then a young one in uniform stopped in front of me, acting like somebody who had been told to carry the garbage out, and he said, “On your feet, killer. I’ve got orders to take you home.”

There was a clock on the wall. It was one o’clock in the morning. The law was through with me, except as a witness. Under the law, I was only a witness to my father’s crime of criminal negligence. There would be a coroner’s inquest. I would have to testify.

•   •   •

So this ordinary patrolman drove me home. He kept his eye on the road, but his thoughts were all of me. He said that I would have to think about Mrs. Metzger, lying cold in the ground, for the rest of my life, and that, if he were me, he would probably commit suicide. He said that he expected some relative of Mrs. Metzger would get me sooner or later, when I least expected it—maybe the very next day, or maybe when I was a man, full of hopes and good prospects, and with a family of my own. Whoever did it, he said, would probably want me to suffer some.

I would have been too addled, too close to death, to get his name, if he hadn’t insisted that I learn it. It was Anthony Squires, and he said it was important that I commit it to memory, since I would undoubtedly want to make a complaint about him, since policemen were expected to speak politely at all times, and that, before he got me home,
he was going to call me a little Nazi cocksucker and a dab of catshit and he hadn’t decided what all yet.

He explained, too, why he wasn’t in the armed forces, even though he was only twenty-four years old. Both his eardrums were broken, he said, because his father and mother used to beat him up all the time. “They held my hand over the fire of a gas range once,” he said. “You ever had that done to you?”

“No,” I said.

“High time,” he said. “Or too late, maybe. That’s locking the barn after the horse is stolen.”

And I of course reconstruct this conversation from a leaky old memory. It went something like that. I can give my word of honor that one thing was said, however: “You know what I’m going to call you from now on,” he said, “and what I’m going to tell everybody else to call you?”

“No,” I said.

And he said, “Deadeye Dick.”

•   •   •

He did not accompany me to the door of our home, which was dark inside. There was no moon. His headlights picked out a strange broken form in the driveway. It hadn’t been there on the previous morning. It was of course the Wreckage of the cupola and the famous weather vane. It had been pulled off the top of the police chief’s car and left there in the driveway.

The front door was locked, which wasn’t unusual. It was always locked at night, since the neighborhood had deteriorated
so, and since we had so many supposed art treasures inside. I had a key in my pocket, but it wasn’t the right key.

It was the key to the gun-room door.

•   •   •

Patrolman Anthony Squires, incidentally, would many years later become chief of detectives, and then suffer a nervous breakdown. He is dead now. He was working as a part-time bartender at the new Holiday Inn when he had his peephole closed by ye olde neutron bomb.

•   •   •

Mrs. Gino Maritimo’s
spuma di cioccolata:
Break up six ounces of semisweet chocolate in a saucepan. Melt it in a 250-degree oven.

Add two teaspoons of sugar to four egg yolks, and beat the mixture until it is pale yellow. Then mix in the melted chocolate, a quarter cup of strong coffee, and two tablespoons of rum.

Whip two-thirds of a cup of cold, heavy whipping cream until it is stiff. Fold it into the mixture.

Whip four egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the mixture. Stir the mixture ever so gently, then spoon it into cups, each cup a serving. Refrigerate for twelve hours.

Serves six.

•   •   •

So Mother’s Day of 1944 was over. I was locked out of my own home as the wee hours of a new day began. I shuffled through the darkness to our back door, the only other door. That, too, was locked.

No one had been told to expect me, and we had no servants who lived with us. So there was only my mother to awaken inside. I did not want to see her.

I had not cried yet about what I had done, and about all that had been done to me. Now I cried, standing outside the back door.

I grieved so noisily that dogs barked at me.

Someone inside the fortress manipulated the brass jewelry of the back door’s lock. The door opened for me. There stood my mother, Emma, who was herself a child. Outside of school, she had never had any responsibilities, any work to do. Her servants had raised her children. She was purely ornamental.

Nothing bad was supposed to happen to her—ever. But here she was in a thin bathrobe now, without her husband or servants, or her basso profundo elder son. And there I was, her gangling, flute-voiced younger son, a murderer.

She wasn’t about to hug me, or cover my inky head with kisses. She was not what I would call demonstrative. When Felix went off to war, she shook his hand by way of encouragement—and then blew a kiss to him when his train was a half a mile away.

And, oh, Lord, I don’t mean to make a villain of this woman, with whom I spent so many years. After Father
died, I would be paired off with her, like a husband with a wife. We had each other, and that was about all we had. She wasn’t wicked. She simply wasn’t useful.

“What is that all over you?” she said. She meant the ink. She was protecting herself. She didn’t want to get it on her, too.

She was so far from imagining what I might want that she did not even get out of the doorway so I could come inside. I wanted to get into my bed and pull the covers over my head. That was my plan. That is still pretty much my plan.

So, keeping me outside, and not even sure whether she wanted to let me in or not, seemingly, she asked me when Father was coming home, and whether everything was going to be all right now, and so on.

She needed good news, so I gave it to her. I said that I was fine, and that Father was fine. Father would be home soon, I said. He just had to explain some things. She let me in, and I went to bed as planned.

Misinformation of that sort would continue to pacify her, day after day, year after year, until nearly the end of her life. At the end of her life, she would become combative and caustically witty, a sort of hick-town Voltaire, cynical and skeptical and so on. An autopsy would reveal several small tumors in her head, which doctors felt almost certainly accounted for this change in personality.

•   •   •

Father was sent to prison for two years, and he and Mother were sued successfully by George Metzger for everything they had—except for a few essential pieces of furniture and the crudely patched roof over their heads. All Mother’s wealth, it turned out, was in Father’s name.

Father did nothing effective to defend himself. Against all advice, he was his own lawyer. He pled guilty right after he was arrested, and he pled guilty again at the coroner’s inquest, where he made no comment on what was evident to everyone—that he had very recently been beaten black and blue. Nor, as his own lawyer and mine, did he put on the record that any number of laws had been violated when I, only twelve years old, had been smeared with ink and exposed to public scorn.

The community was to be ashamed of nothing. Father was to be ashamed of everything. My father, the master of so many grand gestures and attitudes, turned out to be as collapsible as a paper cup. He had always known, evidently, that he wasn’t worth a good God damn. He had only kept going, I think, because all that money, which could buy almost anything, kept coming in and coming in.

The shock to me wasn’t that my father was so collapsible.

The shock to me was that Mother and I were so unsurprised.

Nothing had changed.

•   •   •

After we got home from the inquest, incidentally, which happened the day before Mrs. Metzger’s funeral, we got a telephone call from my brother Felix at Fort Benning. Even before basic training had begun, he said, an officer had recommended that he be made an acting corporal, and that he go to Officers’ Candidate School in thirteen weeks. This was because he had exhibited such leadership on the troop bus.

And I didn’t talk, but I listened in on an extension.

Felix asked how everything was going with us, and neither Mother nor Father would tell him the truth.

Mother said to him, “You know us. We’re just like Old Man River. We just keep rollin’ along.”

F
ATHER WAS
defended by a lawyer in the lawsuit, but he was a jailbird by then. As things turned out, he would have been better off simply to hand over everything to George Metzger without a trial. At least he wouldn’t have had to listen to proofs that he had admired Hitler, and that he had never done an honest day’s work, and that he only pretended to be a painter, and that he had no education beyond high school, and that he had been arrested several times during his youth in other cities, and that he had regularly insulted his working relatives, and on and on.

There were enough ironies, certainly, to sink a battleship. The young lawyer who represented George Metzger had offered his services first to Father. He was Bernard Ketchum, and the Maritimo brothers had brought him to the coroner’s inquest, urging Father to hire him and start using him then and there. He wasn’t in the armed forces because he was blind in one eye. When he was little, a playmate had shot him in the eye with a beebee gun.

Ketchum was ruthless on Metzger’s behalf, just as he
would have been ruthless with Metzger, if Father had hired him. He certainly never let the jury forget that Mrs. Metzger had been pregnant. He made the embryo a leading personality in town. It was always “she,” since it was known to have been a female. And, although Ketchum himself had never seen her, he spoke familiarly of her perfectly formed little fingers and toes.

Years later, Felix and I would have reason to hire Ketchum, to sue the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Marítimo Brothers Construction Company and the Ohio Valley Ornamental Concrete Company for killing our mother with a radioactive mantelpiece.

That is how Felix and I got the money to buy this hotel, and old Ketchum is also a partner.

My instructions to Ketchum were these: “Don’t forget to tell the jury about Mother’s perfectly formed little fingers and toes.”

•   •   •

After Father lost the lawsuit, we had to let all the servants go. There was no way to pay them, and Mary Hoobler and all the rest of them left in tears. Father was still in prison, so at least he was spared those wrenching farewells. Nor did he experience that spooky morning after, when Mother and I awoke in our separate rooms, and came out onto the balcony overhanging the main floor, and listened and sniffed.

Nothing was being cooked.

No one was straightening up the room below, and waiting for the time when she could make our beds.

This was new.

I of course got breakfast. It was easy and natural for me to do. And thus did I begin a life as a domestic servant to my mother and then to both my parents. As long as they lived, they never had to prepare a meal or wash a dish or make a bed or do the laundry or dust or vacuum or sweep, or shop for food. I did all that, and maintained a B average in school, as well.

What a good boy was I!

•   •   •

Eggs à la Rudy Waltz (age thirteen): Chop, cook, and drain two cups of spinach. Blend with two tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of salt, and a pinch of nutmeg. Heat and put into three oven-proof bowls or cups.

Put a poached egg on top of each one, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Bake for five minutes at 375 degrees.

Serves three: the papa bear, the mama bear, and the baby bear who cooked it—and who will clean up afterwards.

•   •   •

As soon as the suit was settled, George Metzger took off for Florida with his two children. So far as I know, not one of them was ever seen in Midland City again. They had lived there a very short time, after all. Before they
could put down roots, a bullet had come from nowhere for no reason, and drilled Mrs. Metzger between the eyes. And they hadn’t made any friends to whom they would write year after year.

The two children, Eugene and Jane, in fact, found themselves as much outcasts as I was when we all returned to school. And we, in turn, were no worse off, socially, than the few children whose fathers or brothers had been killed in the war. We were all lepers, willy-nilly, for having shaken hands with Death.

We might as well have rung bells wherever we went, as lepers were often required to do in the Dark Ages.

Curious.

•   •   •

Eugene and Jane were named, I found out only recently, for Eugene V. Debs, the labor hero from Terre Haute, Indiana, and Jane Addams, the Nobel prize-winning social reformer from Cedarville, Illinois. They were much younger than me, so we were in different schools. It was only recently, too, that I learned that they had found themselves as leprous as I was, and what had become of them in Florida, and on and on.

The source of all this information about the Metzgers has been, of course, their lawyer, who is now our lawyer, Bernard Ketchum.

Only at the age of fifty, thirty-eight years after I destroyed Mrs. Metzger’s life, my life, and my parents’ life with a bullet, have I asked anyone how the Metzgers were.
It was right here by the swimming pool at two in the morning. All the hotel guests were asleep, not that they are ever all that numerous. Felix and his new wife, his fifth wife, were there. Ketchum and his first and only wife were there. And I was there. Where was my mate? Who knows? I think I am a homosexual, but I can’t be sure. I have never made love to anyone.

Nor have I tasted alcohol, except for homeopathic doses of it in certain recipes—but the others had been drinking champagne. Not since I was twelve, for that matter, have I swallowed coffee or tea, or taken a medicine, not even an aspirin or a laxative or an antacid or an antibiotic of any sort. This is an especially odd record for a person who is, as I am, a registered pharmacist, and who was the solitary employee on the night shift of Midland City’s only all-night drugstore for years and years.