Deadeye Dick (18 page)

Mother and I inhabited a little two-bedroom shitbox out in the Maritimo Brothers development known as “Avondale.” Mother and I moved into it about three months after Father died. It was virtually a gift from Gino and Marco Maritimo. We didn’t even have a down payment. Mother and I were both dead broke, and Felix hadn’t started to make really big money yet, and he was about to pay alimony to two ex-wives instead of one. Old Gino and Marco told us to move in anyway, and not to worry. The price they were asking, it turned out, was so
far below the actual value of the house that we had no trouble getting a mortgage. It had been a model house, too, which meant it was already landscaped, and there were Venetian blinds already on all the windows, and a flagstone walk running up to the front door, and a post lantern out front, and all sorts of expensive options which most Avondale buyers passed up, like a full basement and genuine tile in the bathroom, and a cedar closet in Mother’s bedroom, and a dishwasher and a garbage disposal unit and a wall oven and a built-in breakfast nook in the kitchen, and a fireplace with an ornate mantelpiece in the living room, and an outdoor barbecue, and an eight-foot cedar fence around the backyard, and on and on.

•   •   •

So, in 1970, at the age of thirty-eight, I was still cooking for my mother, and making her bed every day, and doing her laundry, and so on. My brother, forty-four then, was president of the National Broadcasting Company, and living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, and one of the ten best-dressed men in the country, supposedly, and breaking up with his fourth wife. According to a gossip column Mother and I read, he and his fourth wife had divided the penthouse in half with a line of chairs. Neither one was supposed to go in the other one’s territory.

Felix was also due to be fired any day, according to the same column, because the ratings of NBC prime time
television shows were falling so far behind those of the other networks.

Felix denied this.

•   •   •

Yes—and Fred T. Barry had lost his mother, and the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company was building the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts on stilts in the middle of Sugar Creek. I hadn’t seen Mr. Barry for ten years.

But Tiger Adams, his pilot, came into Schramm’s Drugstore one morning, at about two A.M. I asked him how Mr. Barry was, and he said that he had almost no interest in anything anymore, except for the arts center.

“He says he wants to give southwestern Ohio its own Taj Mahal,” he told me. “He’s sick with loneliness, of course. If it weren’t for the arts center, I think maybe he would have killed himself.”

So I looked up the Taj Mahal at the downtown public library the next afternoon. The library was about to be torn down, since the neighborhood had deteriorated so much. Nice people didn’t like to go there anymore in the winter, since there were always so many bums inside, just keeping warm.

I had of course heard of the Taj Mahal before. Who hasn’t? And it had figured in my play. Old John Fortune saw the Taj Mahal before he died. That was the last place he sent a postcard from. But I had never known why and when and how it had been built, exactly.

It turned out that it was completed in 1643, three hundred and one years before I shot Eloise Metzger. It took twenty thousand workmen twenty-two years to build it.

It was a memorial to something Fred T. Barry never had, and which I have never had, which is a wife. Her name was Arjumand Banu Begum. She died in childbirth. Her husband, who ordered the Taj Mahal to be built at any cost, was the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan.

•   •   •

Tiger Adams gave me news of somebody else I hadn’t seen for quite a while. He said that, two nights before, he had been coming in for a night landing at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport, and he had had to pull up at the last second because there was somebody out on the runway.

Whoever it was fell down in a heap right in the middle of the runway, and then just stayed there. There were only two people inside the airport at that hour—one in the tower, and the other waxing floors down below. So the floor waxer, who was one of the Gatch brothers, drove out on the runway in his own car.

He had to half-drag the mystery person into his car. It turned out to be Celia Hoover. She was barefoot, and wearing her husband’s trenchcoat over a nightgown, and about five miles from home. She had evidently gone for a long walk, even though she was barefoot—and she had got on the runway in the dark, thinking it was a road. And
then the landing lights had come on all of a sudden, and the Barrytron Learjet had put a part in her hair.

Nobody notified the police or anybody. Gatch just took her home.

Gatch later told Tiger then there hadn’t been anybody at her house to wonder where she had been, to be relieved that she was all right, and so on. She just went inside all alone, and presumably went to bed all alone. After she went inside, one light upstairs went on for about three minutes, and then went off again. It looked like a bathroom light.

According to Tiger, Gatch said this to the blacked-out house: “Sleep tight, honeybunch.”

•   •   •

That isn’t quite right. There had been a dog to welcome her home, but she hadn’t paid any attention to the dog. She had put no value, as far as Gatch could see, on the dog’s delight. She didn’t pet it or thank it, or anything—or tell it to come on upstairs with her.

The dog was Dwayne Hoover’s Labrador retriever, Sparky, but Dwayne was hardly ever home anymore. Sparky would have been glad to see just about anybody. Sparky was glad to see Gatch.

•   •   •

So, while I try not to become too concerned about anybody, while my feeling ever since I shot Eloise
Metzger has been that I don’t really belong on this particular planet, I had loved Celia at least a little bit. She had been in my play, after all, and had taken the play very seriously—which made her a sort of child or sister of mine.

To have been a perfectly uninvolved person, a perfect neuter, I should never have written a play.

To have been a perfect neuter, I shouldn’t have bought a new Mercedes, either. That’s correct: Ten years after Father died, I had saved so much money, working night after night, and living so modestly out in Avon dale, that I bought a white, four-door Mercedes 280, and still had plenty of money left over.

It felt like a very funny accident. There Deadeye Dick was all of a sudden, driving this big white dreamboat around town, evidently talking to himself a mile a minute. What I was really doing, of course, was chasing the blues with scat singing. “Feedily watt a boo boo,” I’d sing in my Mercedes, and “Rang-a-dang wee,” and so on. “Foodily at! Foodily at!”

•   •   •

The most troubling news Tiger Adams had about Celia was this: During the seven years since she had been in my play, she had become as ugly as the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz
.

Those were Tiger’s exact words to me: “My God, Rudy, you wouldn’t believe it—that poor woman has become
as ugly as the Wicked Witch of the West in
The Wizard of Oz.”

•   •   •

A week later, she paid me a call at the drugstore—at about midnight, the witching hour.

I
HAD JUST COME
to work. I was standing at the back door, gazing at my new Mercedes, and listening to the seeming muted roar of waves breaking on a beach not far away. The seeming surf was in fact the sound of gigantic trucks with eighteen wheels, moving at high speed on the Interstate. The night was balmy. All I needed was a ukulele. I was so content.

My back was to the stock room, with its cures for every ailment known to man. A little bell dinged in the stock room, telling me that someone had just entered the front of the store. It could be a killer, of course. There was always a chance that it was a killer, or at least a robber. In the ten years since Father had died, I had been robbed in the store six times.

What a hero I was.

So I went to wait on the customer, or whatever it was. I left the back door unlocked. If it was a robber, I would try to get out the back door and hide among the weeds and garbage cans. He or she would have to help
himself or herself. I would not be there to obey his or her orders to cooperate.

The customer, or whatever it was, was inspecting dark glasses on a carousel. Who needed dark glasses at midnight?

It was small for a human being. But it was certainly big enough to carry a sawed-off shotgun under its voluminous trenchcoat, the hem of which scarcely cleared the floor.

“Can I help you?” I said cheerily. Perhaps it had a headache or hemorrhoids.

It faced me, and it showed me the raddled, snaggletoothed ruins of the face of Celia Hoover, once the most beautiful girl in town.

Again—my memory writes a playlet.

The curtain rises on the interior of a seedy drugstore in the poorest part of a small Middle-Western city, shortly after midnight
. R
UDY
W
ALTZ
,
a fat, neutered pharmacist, is shocked to recognize a demented speed freak, a hag, as
C
ELIA
H
OOVER
,
once the most beautiful girl in town
.

R
UDY
: Mrs. Hoover!

C
ELIA
: My hero!

R
UDY
: Not me.

C
ELIA
: Yes! Yes! You! My hero of theatrical literature!

R
UDY
(pained):
Oh, please—

C
ELIA
: That play of yours—it changed my life.

R
UDY
: You were certainly good in it.

C
ELIA
: All those wonderful words that came out of me— those were your words. I could never have thought up words that beautiful to say in a million years. I almost lived and died without ever saying anything worth listening to.

R
UDY
: You made my words sound a lot better than they really were.

C
ELIA
: I was on that stage, and there were all these people out there, all bug-eyed, hearing all those wonderful words coming out of dumb old Celia Hoover. They couldn’t believe it.

R
UDY
: It was a magic time in my life, too.

C
ELIA
(imitating the audience):
“Author! Author!”

R
UDY
: We were the toast of the town at curtain call. Now, then—what can I get you here?

C
ELIA
: A new play.

R
UDY
: I’ve written my first and last play, Celia.

C
ELIA
: Wrong! I have come to inspire you—with this new face of mine. Look at my new face! Make up the words that should come out of a face like this. Write a crazy-old-lady play!

R
UDY
(looking out at the street):
Where did you park your car?

C
ELIA
: I always wanted a face like this. I wish I could have been born with a face like this. It would have saved a lot of trouble. Everybody could have said, “Just leave that crazy old lady alone.”

R
UDY
: IS your husband home?

C
ELIA
: You’re my husband. That’s what I came to tell you.

R
UDY
: Celia—you are not well. What’s your doctor’s name?

C
ELIA
: YOU are my doctor. You are the only person in this town who ever made me glad to be alive—with the medicine of your magic words! Give me more words!

R
UDY
: You’ve lost your shoes.

C
ELIA
: I threw my shoes away! In your honor! I threw all my shoes away. They’re all in the garbage can.

R
UDY
: HOW did you get here?

C
ELIA
: I walked here—and I’ll walk home again.

R
UDY
: There’s broken glass everywhere in this neighborhood.

C
ELIA
: I would gladly walk over glowing coals for you. I love you. I need you so.

(R
UDY
considers this declaration, comes to a cynical conclusion, which makes him tired.)

R
UDY
(emptily):
Pills.

C
ELIA
: What a team we’d make—the crazy old lady and Deadeye Dick.

R
UDY
: YOU want pills from me—without a prescription.

C
ELIA
: I love you.

R
UDY
: Sure. But it’s pills, not love, that make people walk over broken glass at midnight. What’ll it be, Celia— amphetamine?

C
ELIA
: AS a matter of fact—

R
UDY
: AS a matter of fact—?

C
ELIA
(as though it were a perfectly routine order, certain to be filled):
Pennwalt Biphetamine, please.

R
UDY
: “Black beauties.”

C
ELIA
: I’ve never heard them called that.

R
UDY
: YOU know how black and glistening they are.

C
ELIA
: YOU heard what I call them.

R
UDY
: YOU can’t get them here.

C
ELIA
(indignantly):
They’ve been prescribed for me for years!

R
UDY
: I’ll bet they have! But you’ve never been here before—with or without a prescription.

C
ELIA
: I came here to ask you to write another play.

R
UDY
: YOU came here because you’ve been shut off everyplace else. And I wouldn’t give you any more of that poison, if you had a prescription signed by God Almighty. Now you’re going to tell me you don’t love me after all.

C
ELIA
: I can’t believe you’re so mean.

R
UDY
: And who was it who was so nice to you for so long? Dr. Mitchell, I’ll bet—hand in hand with the Fairchild Heights Pharmacy. Too late, they got scared to death of what they’d done to you.

C
ELIA
: What makes you so afraid of love?