Deadeye Dick (13 page)

It isn’t an easy part, and Celia had never done any acting at all before. She was only the wife of a Pontiac dealer, but I think she was actually at least as good as the professional actress who did it in New York City. She was certainly more beautiful. She hadn’t yet been made all raddled and addled and snaggletoothed and haggard by amphetamine.

I forget the name of the actress in New York City now. I think maybe she dropped out of acting after
Katmandu
.

•   •   •

Speaking of amphetamine: Father’s old friend Hitler was evidently one of the first people to experience its benefits. I read recently that his personal doctor kept him bright eyed and bushy tailed right up to the end with bigger and bigger doses of vitamins and amphetamine.

•   •   •

I went straight from pharmacy school to a job as all-night man at Schramm’s Drugstore, six days a week from midnight to dawn. I still lived with my parents, but now I was able to make a substantial contribution to their support and my own. It was a dangerous job, since Schramm’s, the only business establishment of any sort that was open all night, was a sort of lighthouse for lunatics and outlaws. My predecessor, old Malcolm Hyatt, who went to high school with my father, was killed by a robber from out of town. The robber swung off the Shepherdstown Turnpike, and
closed old Hyatt’s peephole with a sawed-off shotgun, and then swung back onto the Interstate again.

He was apprehended at the Indiana border, and tried and convicted, and sentenced to die over at Shepherdstown. They closed his peephole with electricity. In one microsecond he was hearing and seeing all sorts of things. In the next microsecond he was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness again.

Served him right.

•   •   •

The drugstore was owned by a man named Horton in Cincinnati, incidentally. There weren’t any Schramms left in town. There used to be dozens of Schramms in town.

There used to be dozens of Waltzes in town, too. But when I went to work at Schramm’s, there were only four of us—Mother, Father, and me, and my brother’s first wife Donna. She was half of a set of what used to be identical twins. She and Felix were divorced, but she still called herself Donna Waltz. So she wasn’t a real Waltz, a blood Waltz.

And she would never have been a Waltz of any sort, if Felix hadn’t accidentally put her through a windshield the day after he was discharged from the Army. He hardly knew her, since her family had moved to Midland City from Kokomo, Indiana, while he was at war. He couldn’t even tell her from her twin, Dina.

They were out joyriding in her father’s car. Thank God it wasn’t our car, anyway. We didn’t have a car anymore.
We didn’t have shit anymore, and Father was still in prison. But Felix was driving. He was at the wheel. And the brakes locked. It was a prewar Hudson. There weren’t any postwar cars yet.

So Donna went through the windshield, and she didn’t look anything like her sister anymore. And Felix married her after she got out of the hospital. She was only eighteen years old, but she had a full set of false teeth, uppers and lowers.

Felix now refers to his first marriage as a “shotgun wedding.” Her relatives and friends felt it was his duty to marry her, whether he loved her or not—and Felix says that he felt that way, too. Usually, when people talk about shotgun weddings, they have pregnancy in mind. A man has impregnated a woman, so he has to marry her.

Felix didn’t get his first wife pregnant before he married her, but he put her through a windshield. “I might as well have got her pregnant,” he said the other night. “Putting her through a windshield came to very much the same sort of thing.”

•   •   •

Very early on at Schramm’s, long before I ran off to New York City to see my play produced, a drunk came in at about two A.M., maybe, and he squinted at the sign on the prescription counter which said, RUDOLPH WALTZ, R.PH.

He evidently knew something of our family’s distinguished history, although I don’t think we had ever met
before. And he was drunk enough to say to me, “Are you the one who shot the woman, or are you the one who put the woman through the windshield?”

He wanted a chocolate malted milkshake, I remember. Schramm’s hadn’t had a soda fountain for at least five years. He wanted one anyway. “You just give me a little milk and ice cream and chocolate syrup, and I’ll make it myself,” he said. And then he fell down.

•   •   •

He didn’t call me “Deadeye Dick.” Very rarely did anybody do that to my face. But my nickname was said often enough behind my back in all sorts of crowds—in stores, at movies, in eating places. Or maybe somebody would shout it at me from a passing car. It was a thing for drunks or young people to do. No mature and respectable person ever called me “Deadeye Dick.”

But one unsettling aspect of the all-night job at Schramm’s, one I hadn’t anticipated, was the telephone there. Hardly a night passed that some young person, feeling wonderfully daring and witty, no doubt, would telephone to ask me if I was Deadeye Dick.

I always was. I always will be.

•   •   •

There was plenty of time for reading on the job, and there were any number of magazines on the racks. And most of the business I did at night wasn’t at all complicated, didn’t have anything to do with pharmacy. Mainly, I sold
cigarettes and, surprisingly, watches and the most expensive perfumes. The watches and perfumes were presents, of course, for birthdays and anniversaries which were remembered only after every other store in town had closed.

So I was reading
Writer’s Digest
one night, and I came across an announcement of the Caldwell Foundation’s contest for playwrights. The next thing I knew, I was back in the stock room, pecking away on the rattletrap Corona portable typewriter we used for making labels. I was writing a new draft of
Katmandu
.

And I won first prize.

•   •   •

Sauerbraten à la Rudolph Waltz, R.Ph.: Mix in a saucepan a cup of wine vinegar, half a cup of white wine, half a cup of cider vinegar, two sliced onions, two sliced carrots, a rib of celery, chopped, two bay leaves, six whole allspice, crushed, two cloves, two tablespoons of crushed peppercorns, and a tablespoon of salt. Bring just to a boil.

Pour it hot over a four-pound rump roast, rolled and tied, in a deep bowl. Turn the meat around and around in the mixture. Cover the bowl and refrigerate for three days. Turn the meat in the mixture several times a day.

Take the meat out of the marinade and dry it. Sear it on all sides in eight tablespoons of beef drippings in a braising pan. When it is nicely browned, take it out of the pan and pour out the drippings. Put the meat back in the pan, heat up the marinade, and pour it over the meat. Simmer for about three hours. Pour off the liquid, strain,
and remove the excess fat. Keep the meat hot in the braising pan.

Melt three tablespoons of butter in a saucepan, and blend in three tablespoons of flour and a tablespoon of sugar. Gradually pour in the marinade, and stir until you have a uniform sauce. Add one cup of crushed ginger-snaps, and simmer the sauce for about six minutes.

That’s it!

•   •   •

For three days I did not tell Mother and Father that I had won the contest. It takes that long to make sauerbraten. The sauerbraten was a complete surprise, since Mother and Father never went into the kitchen. They simply waited at the table like good little children, to see what was going to come out of there.

When they had eaten all the sauerbraten they wanted, and said again and again how good it was, I spoke as follows to them: “I am now twenty-seven years old. I have been cooking for you for twelve years now, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. But now I have won a playwriting contest, and my play is going to be produced professionally in New York City three months from now. I will of course have to be there for six weeks of rehearsals.

“Felix says I can stay with him and Genevieve,” I went on. “I will sleep on their couch. Their apartment is only three blocks from the theater.” Geneviève, incidentally, is the wife Felix now refers to as “Anyface.” She had almost no eyebrows, and very thin lips, so that, if she
wanted anything memorable in the way of features, she had to paint them on.

I told Mother and Father that I had hired Cynthia Hoobler, the daughter-in-law of our old cook Mary Hoobler, to come in and care for them while I was gone. I would pay her from money I had saved.

I expected no trouble, since the servant problem was all taken care of, and got none. These people, after all, were like characters at the end of a novel or a play, who have been wrong about all sorts of things throughout the action, and finally something has settled their hash.

Mother spoke first. “Goodness,” she said. “Good luck.”

“Yes,” said Father. “Good luck.”

Little did I dream that Father had only a few more months to live then.

T
IME FLEW
. In a twinkling I was on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village at high noon, gazing up at a theater marquee as snowflakes kissed my face. It was February 14, 1960. My father was still in good health, as far as I knew. The words on the marquee were these:

Rehearsals were over. We would open that night.

Father had had his studio, with its dusty skylight and nude model in Vienna, where he had found out he couldn’t paint. Now I had my name up on a theater marquee in New York City, where I had found out I couldn’t write. The play was a catastrophe. The more the poor actors rehearsed it, the more stupid and depressing it became.

The actors and the director, and the representatives of
the Caldwell Foundation, which would never sponsor another play contest, had stopped speaking to me. I was barred from the theater. It wasn’t that I had made impossible demands. My offense was that I seemed to know less about the play than anybody. I simply was not worth talking to.

If I was asked about this line or that one, it was as though I had never heard it before. I was likely to say something like “My goodness—I wonder what I meant by that.”

Nor did I seem at all interested in rediscovering why I had said this or that.

The thing was this: I was startled not to be Deadeye Dick anymore. Suddenly nobody knew that I was remarkable for having shot and killed a pregnant woman. I felt like a gas which had been confined in a labeled bottle for years, and which had now been released into the atmosphere.

I no longer cooked. It was Deadeye Dick who was always trying to nourish back to health those he had injured so horribly.

I no longer cared about the play. It was Deadeye Dick, tormented by guilt in Midland City, who had found old John Fortune’s quite pointless death in Katmandu, as far away from his hometown as possible, somehow magnificent. He himself yearned for distance and death.

So, there in Greenwich Village, looking up at my name on the marquee, I was nobody. My braincase might as well have been filled with stale ginger ale.

Thus, when the actors were still talking to me, could
I have had a conversation like this with poor Sheldon Woodcock, the actor who was playing John Fortune:

“You’ve got to help me get a handle on this part,” he said.

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

“I don’t feel like I’m doing fine,” he said. “The guy is so inarticulate.”

“He’s a simple farmer,” I said.

“That’s just it—he’s too simple,” he said. “I keep thinking he has to be an idiot, but he isn’t an idiot, right?”

“Anything but,” I said.

“He never says why he wants to get to Katmandu,” he said. “All these people either try to help him get to Katmandu or keep him from getting to Katmandu, and I keep thinking, ‘Why the hell should anybody care whether he gets to Katmandu or not?’ Why not Tierra del Fuego? Why not Dubuque? He’s such a lunk, does it make any difference where he is?”

“He’s looking for Shangri-La,” I said. “He says that many times—that he wants to find Shangri-La.”

“Thirty-four times,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“He says that thirty-four times: ‘I am looking for Shangri-La.’ ”

“You counted?” I said.

“I thought somebody better,” he said. “That’s a lot of times to say anything in just two hours—especially if the person who says it says practically nothing else.”

“Cut some of them, if you want,” I said.

“Which ones?” he said.

“Whichever ones seem excessive to you,” I said.

“And what do I say instead?” he said.

“What would you like to say?” I said.

So he swore under his breath, but then he pulled himself together. I would be barred from the theater soon after this. “Maybe you don’t realize this,” he said with bitter patience, “but actors don’t make up what they say on the stage. They look like they’ve made it up, if they’re any good, but actually a person called a ‘playwright’ has first written down every word.”

“Then just say what I’ve written,” I said. The secret message in this advice was that I was so light-headed, being away from home for the first time in my life, that I didn’t care what happened next. The play was going to be a big flop, but nobody in New York knew what I looked like anyway. I wasn’t going to be arrested. I wasn’t going to be displayed in a cage, all covered with ink.

I wasn’t going home again, either. I would get a job as a pharmacist somewhere in New York. Pharmacists can always find work. And I would do what my brother Felix did—send money home. And then, step by step, I would experiment with having a home of my own and a life of my own, maybe try pairing off with this kind of person or that one, to see how that went.

“Tell me again about my great death scene in the arms of Dr. Brokenshire in Katmandu, with the sitar music,” said Woodcock.

“Okay,” I said.

“I think I’m in Shangri-La,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

“And I know I’m dying,” he said. “I don’t just think I’m sick, and I’m going to get better again.”

“The doctor makes it clear you’re dying,” I said.