Deadeye Dick (24 page)

But, as we were to discover on the morning of our third and final day, where the minefield outside the fence ended, highly treasonous opinion of the Federal Government began. The farmers on the fringe of the flash area, in the past as politically inert as mastodons, had been turned into bughouse social commentators by the flash.

They had lost their shopping centers, of course.

So Felix and I and Ketchum and Hippolyte Paul were having breakfast at the Quality Motor Court out by Sacred Miracle Cave, where we were staying, and where our purple school bus would pick us up, and two farmers in bib overalls, just like old John Fortune in Katmandu, were passing out leaflets in the coffee shop. The Quality Motor Court was not then under martial law. I understand that all motels within fifty miles of Midland City have now been placed under martial law.

These two said the same thing over and over again as they offered their leaflets: “Read the truth and then write your congressman.” About half the customers refused to even look at the leaflets, but we each took one.

The organization which wanted us to write our congressmen, it turned out, was “Farmers of Southwestern Ohio for Nuclear Sanity.” They said that it was all well and good that the Federal Government should be making idealistic plans for Midland City, as a haven for refugees from less fortunate countries or whatever. But they also felt that
there should be some public discussion, that “the veil of silence should be lifted” from the mystery of how all the previous inhabitants had wound up under the municipal parking lot.

They confessed that they were fighting a losing battle in trying to make anybody outside of southwestern Ohio care what had happened to someplace called “Midland City.” As far as the farmers knew, Midland City had never even been mentioned on a major network television show until after the flash. They were wrong about that, incidentally. It was certainly network news during the Blizzard of 1960, but I can’t remember any other time. Power went off during the blizzard, so the farmers had no way of knowing that Midland City had finally made the TV.

They missed it!

But that didn’t weaken the argument of their leaflet, to wit: that the United States of America was now ruled, evidently, by a small clique of power brokers who believed that most Americans were so boring and ungifted and small time that they could be slain by the tens of thousands without inspiring any long-term regrets on the part of anyone. “They have now proved this with Midland City,” said the leaflet, “and who is to say that Terre Haute or Schenectady will not be next?”

That was certainly the most inflammatory of their beliefs—that Midland City had been neutron-bombed on purpose, and not from a truck, but from a missile site or a high-flying airplane. They had hired a mathematician from, they said, “a great university,” to make calculations
independent of the Government’s, as to where the flash had originated. The mathematician could not be named, they said, for fear that retaliatory action would be taken against him, but it was his opinion, based largely on the pattern of livestock deaths on the outer perimeter of the flash, that the center of the flash was near Exit 11 on the Interstate, all right, but at least sixty feet above the pavement. That certainly suggested a package which had arrived by air.

Either that, or a truck had been hauling a neutron bomb in an enormous pop-up toaster.

•   •   •

Bernard Ketchum asked the farmer who had given us our leaflets to name the clique which had supposedly neutron-bombed Midland City. This was the answer he got: “They don’t want us to know their name, so they don’t have a name. You can’t fight back against something that don’t have a name.”

“The military-industrial complex?” said Ketchum archly. “The Rockefellers? The international conglomerates? The CIA? The Mafia?”

And the farmer said to him, “You like any of them names? Just help yourself. Maybe that’s who it is, maybe it ain’t. How’s a farmer supposed to find out? It’s whoever it was shot President Kennedy and his brother—and Martin Luther King.”

So there we had it—the ever-growing ball of American paranoia, the ball of string a hundred miles in diameter,
with the unsolved assassination of John F. Kennedy at its core.

“You mention the Rockefellers,” said the farmer. “If you ask me, they don’t know any more’n I do about who’s really running things, what’s really going on.”

•   •   •

Ketchum asked him why these nameless, invisible forces would want to depopulate Midland City—and then maybe Terre Haute and Schenectady after that.

“Slavery!” was the farmer’s prompt reply.

“I beg your pardon?” said Ketchum.

“They aim to bring slavery back,” said the farmer. He wouldn’t tell us his name, for fear of reprisals, but I had a hunch he was an Osterman. There were several Ostermans with farms out around Sacred Miracle Cave.

“They never gave up on it,” he said. “The Civil War wasn’t going to make any difference in the long run, as far as they were concerned. Sooner or later, they knew in their hearts, we’d get back to owning slaves.”

Ketchum said jocularly that he could understand the desirability of a slave economy, especially in view of all the trouble so many American industries were having with foreign competition. “But I fail to see the connection between slaves and empty cities,” he said.

“What we figure,” said the farmer: “These slaves aren’t going to be Americans. They’re going to come by the boatload from Haiti and Jamaica and places like that,
where there’s such terrible poverty and overpopulation. They’re going to need housing. What’s cheaper—to use what we’ve already got, or to build new?”

He let us think that over for a moment, and then he added, “And guess what? You’ve seen that fence with the watchtowers. Do you honestly believe that fence is ever coming down?”

•   •   •

Ketchum said he certain wished he knew who these sinister forces were.

“I’ll make a wild guess,” said the farmer, “and you’re going to laugh at it, because the people I’ll name want to be laughed at until it’s too late. They don’t want anybody worrying about whether they’re taking over the country from top to bottom—until it’s too late.”

This was his wild guess: “The Ku Klux Klan.”

•   •   •

My own guess is that the American Government had to find out for certain whether the neutron bomb was as harmless as it was supposed to be. So it set one off in a small city which nobody cared about, where people weren’t doing all that much with their Uves anyhow, where businesses were going under or moving away. The Government couldn’t test a bomb on a foreign city, after all, without running the risk of starting World War Three.

There is even a chance that Fred T. Barry, with all his
contacts high in the military, could have named Midland City as the ideal place to test a neutron bomb.

•   •   •

At the end of our third day in Midland City, Felix became tearful and risked the displeasure of Captain Julian Pefko by asking him if we could please, on the way to the main gate, have our purple school bus make a slight detour past Calvary Cemetery, so we could visit our parents’ grave.

For all his rough and ready manners, Pefko, like so many professional soldiers, turned out to have an almond macaroon for a heart. He agreed.

•   •   •

Almond macaroons: Preheat an oven to three hundred degrees, and work one cup of confectioners’ sugar into a cup of almond paste with your fingertips. Add three egg whites, a dash of salt, and a half teaspoon of vanilla.

Fit unglazed paper onto a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Force the almond paste mixture through a round pastry tube, so that uniform gobs, nicely spaced, drop onto the glazed paper. Sprinkle with granulated sugar.

Bake about twenty minutes. Tip: Put the sheet of macaroons on a damp cloth, paper side down. This will make it easier to loosen the cookies from the paper.

Cool.

•   •   •

Calvary Cemetery has never been any comfort to me, so I almost stayed in the purple school bus. But then, after all the others had got out, I got out, too—to stretch my legs. I strolled into the old part of the cemetery, which had been all filled up, by and large, before I was born. I stationed myself at the foot of the most imposing monument in the bone orchard, a sixty-two-foot gray marble obelisk with a stone football on top. It celebrated George Hick-man Bannister, a seventeen-year-old whose peephole was closed while he was playing high school football on the morning of Thanksgiving in 1924. He was from a poor family, but thousands of people had seen him die, our parents not among them—and many of them had chipped in to buy him the obelisk.

Our parents had no interest in sports.

Maybe twenty feet away from the obelisk was the most fanciful marker in the cemetery, a radial, air-cooled airplane engine reproduced in pink marble, and fitted with a bronze propeller. This was the headstone of Will Fairchild, the World War One ace in the Lafayette Escadrille, after whom the airport was named. He hadn’t died in the war. He’ had crashed and burned, again with thousands watching, in 1922, while stunt flying at the Midland County Fair.

He was the last of the Fairchilds, a pioneering family after which so much in the city was named. He had failed to reproduce before his peephole closed.

Inscribed in the bronze propeller were his name and dates, and the euphemism fliers in the Lafayette Escadrille used for death in an airplane in wartime: “Gone West.”

“West,” to an American in Europe, of course, meant “home.”

Here he was home.

Somewhere near me, I knew, was the headless body of old August Gunther, who had taken Father when a youth to the fanciest whorehouses in the Corn Belt. Shame on him.

I raised my eyes to the horizon, and there, on the other side of shining Sugar Creek, was the white-capped slate roof of my childhood home. In the level rays of the setting sun, it did indeed resemble a postcard picture of Fujiyama, the sacred volcano of Japan.

Felix and Ketchum were at a distance, visiting more contemporary graves. Felix would tell me later that he had managed to maintain his aplomb while visiting Mother and Father, but that he had gone all to pieces when, turning away from their markers, he discovered that he had been standing on Celia Hoover’s grave.

Eloise Metzger, the woman I had shot, was also over there somewhere. I had never paid her a call.

I heard my brother go to pieces over Celia Hoover’s grave, and I looked in his direction. I saw that Hippolyte Paul De Mille was attempting to cheer him up.

I was not alone, by the way. A soldier with a loaded M-16 was with me, making certain that I kept my hands in my pockets. We weren’t even to touch tombstones. And
Felix and Hippolyte Paul and Bernard Ketchum also kept their hands in their pockets, no matter how much they might have wanted to gesticulate among the tombstones.

And then Hippolyte Paul De Mille said something to Felix in Creole which was so astonishing, so offensive, that Felix’s grief dropped away like an iron mask. Hippolyte Paul had offered to raise the ghost of Celia Hoover from the grave, if Felix would really like to see her again.

There was a clash between two cultures, or I have never seen one.

To Hippolyte Paul, raising a spirit from a grave was the most ordinary sort of favor for a gifted metaphysician to offer a friend. He wasn’t proposing to exhume a zombie, a walking corpse with dirt and rags clinging to it, and so on, a clearly malicious thing to do. He simply wanted to give Felix a misty but recognizable ghost to look at, and to talk to, although the ghost would not be able to reply to him, if that might somehow comfort him.

To Felix, it seemed that our Haitian headwaiter was offering to make him insane, for only a lunatic would gladly meet a ghost.

So these two very different sorts of human beings, their hands thrust deep into their pockets, talked past each other in a mixture of English and Creole, while Ketchum and Captain Pefko and a couple of other soldiers looked on.

Hippolyte Paul was at last so deeply hurt that he turned his back on Felix and walked away. He was coming in my direction, and I signaled with my head that he
should keep coming, that I would explain the misunderstanding, that I understood his point of view as well as my brother’s, and so on.

If he stayed mad at Felix, there went the Grand Hotel Oloffson.

“She doesn’t feel anything. She doesn’t know anything,” he said to me in Creole. He meant that Celia’s ghost wouldn’t have caused any embarrassment or inconvenience or discomfort of any sort to Celia herself, who could feel nothing. The ghost would be nothing more than an illusion, based harmlessly on whatever Celia used to be.

“I know. I understand,” I said. I explained that Felix had been upset about a lot of things lately, and that Hippolyte Paul would be mistaken to take anything Felix said too much to heart.

Hippolyte Paul nodded uncertainly, but then he brightened. He said that there was surely somebody in the cemetery that I would like to see again.

The soldier guarding us understood none of this, of course.

“You are nice,” I said in Creole. “You are too generous, but I am happy as I am.”

The old headwaiter was determined to work his miracle, whether we wanted it or not. He argued that we owed it both to the past and to the future to raise some sort of representative ghost which would haunt the city, no matter who lived there, for generations to come.

So, for the sake of the hotel, I told him to go ahead
and raise one, but from the part of the cemetery where we stood, where I didn’t know anyone.

So he raised the ghost of Will Fairchild. The old barnstormer was wearing goggles and a white silk scarf and a black leather helmet and all, but no parachute.

I remembered what Father had told me about him one time: “Will Fairchild would be alive today, if only he had worn a parachute.”

So there was Hippolyte Paul De Mule’s gift to whoever was going to inhabit Midland City next: the restless ghost of Will Fairchild.

And I, Rudy Waltz, the William Shakespeare of Midland City, the only serious dramatist ever to live and work there, will now make my own gift to the future, which is a legend. I have invented an explanation of why Will Fairchild’s ghost is likely to be seen roaming almost anywhere in town—in the empty arts center, in the lobby of the bank, out among the little shitboxes of Avondale, out among the luxurious homes of Fairchild Heights, in the vacant lot where the public library stood for so many years.…