Deadeye Dick (23 page)

“There were billions and billions of bugs with shiny wings, acting for all the world like a liquid,” she said. “I ran and got Father. He couldn’t believe his eyes, either. Nobody had played the piano for years. If somebody had played it, maybe it would have driven the bugs out of there. Father gave a piano leg a little kick, and it crumpled like it was made out of cardboard. The piano fell down.”

•   •   •

This was clearly one of the most memorable events of her whole life, and I had never heard of it before.

If she had died in childhood, she would have remembered life as the place you went, in case you wanted to see bugs eat a grand piano.

•   •   •

So Fred T. Barry arrived in his limousine. He was so old now, and Mother was so old now, and they had had this long fight about whether modern art was any good or not. I let him in, and Mother received him while lying on the Barcalounger.

“I have come to surrender, Mrs. Waltz,” he said. “You should be very proud of yourself. I have lost all interest in the arts center. It can be turned into a chicken coop, for all I care. I am leaving Midland City forever.”

“I am sure you had the best intentions, Mr. Barry,” she said. “I never doubted that. But the next time you try to give somebody a wonderful present, make sure they want it first. Don’t try to stuff it down their throats.”

He sold his company to the RAMJAC Corporation for a gazoolian bucks. A firm that acquires American farmland for Arabs bought his farm. As far as I know, no Arab has ever come to take a look at it. He himself moved to Hilton Head, South Carolina, and I have heard nothing about him since. He was so bitter that he left no endowment behind to maintain the arts center, and the city was so broke that it could only let the place go to rack and ruin.

And then, one day, there was this flash.

•   •   •

Mother died a year after Fred T. Barry surrendered to her. When she was in the hospital for the last time, she thought she was in a spaceship. She thought I was Father,
and that we were headed for Mars, where we were going to have a second honeymoon.

She was as alive as anybody, and utterly mistaken about everything. She wouldn’t let go of my hand.

“That picture,” she said, and she would smile and give my hand a squeeze. I was supposed to know which of all the pictures in the world she meant. I thought for a while that it was Father’s unfinished masterpiece from his misspent youth in Vienna. But in a moment of clarity, she made it clear that it was a scrapbook photograph of her in a rowboat on a small river somewhere, maybe in Europe. Then again, it could have been Sugar Creek. The boat is tied to shore. There aren’t any oars in place. She isn’t going anywhere. She wears a summer dress and a garden hat. Somebody has persuaded her to pose in the boat, with water around her and dappled with shade. She is laughing. She has just been married, or is about to be married.

She will never be happier. She will never be more beautiful.

Who could have guessed that that young woman would take a rocket-ship trip to Mars someday?

•   •   •

She was seventy-seven when she died, so that all sorts of things, including plain old life, could have closed her peephole. But the autopsy revealed that she had been healthy as a young horse, except for tumors in her head. Tumors of that sort, moreover, could only have been caused by radiation, so Felix and I hired Bernard Ketchum
to sue everybody who had bought or sold in any form the radioactive cement from Oak Ridge.

It took a while to win, and I meanwhile kept going to work six nights a week at Schramm’s Drugstore, and keeping house in the little shitbox out in Avondale. There isn’t all that much difference between keeping house for two and keeping house for one.

My Mercedes continued to give me an indecent amount of pleasure.

At one point there, through a misunderstanding, I was suspected of abducting and murdering a little girl. So the state police scientists impounded the Mercedes, and they went over it inch by inch with fingerprint powder and a vacuum cleaner and so on. When they gave it back to me, along with a clean bill of health, they said they had never seen anything like it. The car was seven years old then, and had over a hundred thousand miles on it, but every hair in it and every fingerprint on it belonged to just one person, the owner.

“You aren’t what we would call real sociable,” one trooper said. “How come you got a car with four doors?”

•   •   •

Polka-dot brownies: Melt half a cup of butter and a pound of light-brown sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over a low fire until just bubbly. Cool to room temperature. Beat in two eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir in a cup of sifted flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a cup of chopped filberts, and a cup of semisweet chocolate in small chunks.

Spread into a well-greased nine-by-eleven baking pan. Bake at two hundred and thirty-five degrees for about thirty-five minutes.

Cool to room temperature, and cut into squares with a well-greased knife.

•   •   •

I think I was about as happy as anybody else in Midland City, and maybe in the country, as I waited for all the lawsuits to come to a head. But there you have a problem in relativity again. I continued to be comforted by music of my own making, the scat singing, the brainless inward fusillades of “skeedee wahs” and “bodey oh dohs,” and so on. I had a Blaupunkt FM-AM stereophonic radio in my Mercedes, but I hardly ever turned it on.

As for scat singing: I came across what I consider a most amusing graffito, written in ball-point pen on tile in the men’s room at Will Fairchild Memorial Airport one morning. It was dawn, and I was seized by an attack of diarrhea on my way home from work, just as I was passing the airport. It was caused, I’m sure, by my having eaten so many polka-dot brownies before going to work the night before.

So I swung into the airport, and jumped out of my four-door Mercedes. I didn’t expect to get into the building. I just wanted to get out of sight. But there was another car in the parking lot at that unlikely hour. So I tried a side door, and it was unlocked.

In I flew, and up to the men’s room, noting in flight
that somebody was running a floor-waxing machine. I relieved myself, and became as calm and respectable as any other citizen again, or even more so. For a few moments there, I was happier than happy, healthier than healthy, and I saw these words scrawled on the tiles over a wash basin:

I
HAVE NOW SEEN
with my own eyes what a neutron bomb can do to a small city. I am back at the Hotel Oloffson after three days in my old hometown. Midland City was exactly as I remembered it, except that there were no people living there. The security is excellent. The perimeter of the flash area is marked by a high fence topped with barbed wire, with a watchtower every three hundred yards or so. There is a minefield in front of that, and then a low barbed wire entanglement beyond that, which wouldn’t stop a truly determined person, but which is meant as a friendly warning about the mines.

It is possible for a civilian to visit inside the fence only in daylight. After nightfall, the flash area becomes a free-fire zone. Soldiers are under orders to shoot anything that moves, and their weapons are equipped with infrared sights. They can see in the dark.

And in the daytime, the only permissible form of
transportation for a civilian inside is a bright purple school bus, driven by a soldier, and with other soldiers aboard as stern and watchful guides. Nobody gets to bring his own car inside or to walk where he likes, even if he has lost his business and all his relatives and everything. It is all government property now. It belongs to all the people, instead of just some of them.

We were a party of four—Felix and myself and Bernard Ketchum, our lawyer, and Hippolyte Paul De Mille, the headwaiter from the Oloffson. Ketchum’s wife and Felix’s wife had declined to come along. They were afraid of radioactivity, and Felix’s wife was especially afraid of it, since she was with child. We were unable to persuade those superstitious souls that the whole beauty of a neutron bomb explosion was that there was no lingering radiation afterwards.

Felix and I had run into the same sort of ignorance when it was time to bury Mother next to Father in Calvary Cemetery. People refused to believe that she herself wasn’t radioactive. They were sure that she would make all the other bodies glow in the dark, and that she would seep into the water supply and so on.

For Mother to be personally radioactive, she would have had to bite a piece out of the mantelpiece, and then fail to excrete it. If she had done that, it’s true, she would have been a holy terror for twenty thousand years or more.

But she didn’t.

•   •   •

We brought old Hippolyte Paul De Mille along, who had never been outside Haiti before, on the pretext that he was the brother of a Haitian cook for Dr. Alan Maritimo, the veterinarian, and his wife. Alan was a maverick in the Maritimo family, who had declined to go into the building business. His entire household was killed by the flash. Ketchum had put together fake affidavits which entitled Hippolyte Paul to pass through the gate in a purple school bus with the rest of us.

We went to this trouble for Hippolyte Paul because he was our most valuable employee. Without him and his goodwill, the Grand Hotel Oloffson would have been a worthless husk. It was worth our while to keep him happy.

But Hippolyte Paul, in his excitement about the trip, had volunteered to make us a highly specific gift, which we intended to refuse politely at the proper time. He said that if there was any ghost we thought should haunt Midland City for the next few hundred years, he would raise it from its grave and turn it loose, to wander where it would.

We tried very hard not to believe that he could do that.

But he could, he could.

Amazing.

•   •   •

There was no odor. We expected a lot of odor, but there was none. Army engineers had buried all the dead under the block-square municipal parking lot across the street from police headquarters, where the old courthouse
had stood. They had then repaved the lot, and put the dwarf arboretum of parking meters back in place. The whole process had been filmed, we were told—from parking lot to mass grave, and then back to parking lot again.

My brother Felix, in that rumbling voice of his, speculated that a flying saucer might someday land on the mass grave, and conclude that the whole planet was asphalt, and that parking meters were the only living things. We were sitting in a school bus. We weren’t allowed to get out at that point.

“Maybe it will look like the Garden of Eden to some bug-eyed monsters,” Felix went on. “They will love it. They will crack open the parking meters with the butts of their zap-pistols, and they will feast on all the slugs and beer-can tops and coins.”

•   •   •

We caught sight of several movie crews, and they were given as the reason we weren’t to touch anything, even though it might unquestionably have been our own property. It was as though we were in a national park, full of endangered species. We weren’t even to pick a little flower to sniff. It might be the very last such flower anywhere.

When our school bus took us to Mother’s and my little shitbox out in Avondale, for example, I wandered to the Meekers’ house next door. Young Jimmy Meeker’s tricycle, with white sidewall tires, was sitting in the drive-way,
waiting patiently for its master. I put my hand on the seat, meaning to roll it back and forth just a few inches, and to wonder what life in Midland City had been all about.

And such a yell I heard!

Captain Julian Pefko, who was in charge of our party, yelled at me, “Hands in your pockets!” That was one of the rules: Whenever men were outside the school bus, they were to keep their hands in their pockets. Women, if they had pockets, were to do the same. If they didn’t have pockets, they were to keep their arms folded across their bosoms. Pefko reminded me that we were under martial law as long as we were inside the fence. “One more dumb trick like that, mister,” he told me, “and you’re on your way to the stockade. How would you like twenty years on the rockpile?” he said.

“I wouldn’t, sir,” I said. “I wouldn’t like that at all.”

And there wasn’t any more trouble after that. We certainly all behaved ourselves. You can learn all kinds of habits quickly under martial law.

The reason everything had to be left exactly where it was, of course, was so that camera crews could document, without the least bit of fakery, the fundamental harmless-ness of a neutron bomb.

Skeptics would be put to flight, once and for all.

•   •   •

The empty city did not give me the creeps, and Hippolyte Paul actually enjoyed it. He didn’t miss the people,
since he had no people to miss. Limited to the present tense, he kept exclaiming in Creole, “How rich they are! How rich they are!”

But Felix finally found my serenity something to complain about. “Jesus Christ!” he exploded as our second afternoon in the flash area was ending. “Would you show just a trace of emotion, please?”

So I told him, “This isn’t anything I haven’t seen on practically every day of my adult life. The sun is setting instead of rising—but otherwise this is what Midland City always looked like and felt like to me when I locked up Schramm’s Drugstore at dawn:

“Everybody has left town but me.”

•   •   •

We were allowed into Midland City in order to photograph and make lists of all the items of personal property which were certainly ours, or which might be ours, or which we thought we might inherit, once all the legal technicalities were unscrambled. As I say, we weren’t allowed to actually touch anything. The penalty for trying to smuggle anything out of the flash area, no matter how worthless, was twenty years in prison for civilians. For soldiers, the penalty was death.

As I say, the security was quite wonderful, and we heard many visitors who had certainly been more horribly bereaved than we were praise the military for its smart appearance and efficiency. It was almost as though Midland
City were at last being run the way it should have been run all along.