Deadeye Dick (3 page)

Father was living with his parents out near Shepherdstown at the time, but all his souvenirs were stored in the carriage house. And, on the day that Mother saw him
in the uniform, he had begun opening trunks and packing cases, with his old mentor, August Gunther, looking on. He had put on the uniform to make Gunther laugh.

They came outside, lugging a table between them. They were going to have lunch in the shade of an ancient walnut tree. They had brought beer and bread and sausage and cheese and roast chicken, all of which had been produced locally. The cheese, incidentally, was Liederkranz, which most people assume is a European cheese. Liederkranz was invented in Midland City, Ohio, in about 1865.

•   •   •

So Father, setting down for a lusty lunch with old Gunther, was aware that a little girl was watching everything through the hedge, and he made jokes about her which she could hear. He said to Gunther that he had been away so long that he could no longer remember the names of American birds. There was a bird in the hedge there, he said, and he described Mother as though she were a bird, and he asked old Gunther what to call the bird.

And Father approached the supposed little bird with a piece of bread in his hand, asking if little birds like her ate bread, and Mother fled into her parents’ house.

She told me this. Father told me this.

•   •   •

But she came out again, and she found a better place to spy from—where she could see without being seen. There were puzzling new arrivals at the picnic. They were
two short, dark youths, who had evidently been wading. They were barefoot, and their trousers were wet above the knees. Mother had never seen anything quite like them for this reason: The two, who were brothers, were Italians, and there had never been Italians in Midland City before.

They were Gino Maritimo, eighteen, and Marco Maritimo, twenty. They were in one hell of a lot of trouble. They weren’t expected at the picnic. They weren’t even supposed to be in the United States. Thirty-six hours before, they had been stokers aboard an Italian freighter which was taking on cargo in Newport News, Virginia. They had jumped ship in order to escape military conscription at home, and because the streets of America were paved with gold. They spoke no English.

Other Italians in Newport News boosted them and their cardboard suitcases into an empty boxcar in a train that was bound for God-knows-where. The train began to move immediately. The sun went down. There were no stars, no moon that night. America was blackness and
clackety-clack
.

How do I know what the night was like? Gino and Marco Maritimo, as old men, both told me so.

•   •   •

Somewhere in the seamless darkness, which may have been West Virginia, Gino and Marco were joined by four American hoboes, who at knife-point took their suitcases, their coats, their hats, and their shoes.

They were lucky they didn’t have their throats slit for fun. Who would have cared?

•   •   •

How they wished that their peepholes would close! But the nightmare went on and on. And then it became a daymare. The train stopped several times, but in the midst
of
such ugliness that Gino and Marco could not bring themselves to step out into it, to somehow start living there. But then two railroad detectives with long clubs made them get out anyway, and, like it or lump it, they were on the outskirts of Midland City, Ohio, on the other side of Sugar Creek from the center of town.

They were terribly hungry and thirsty. They could either await death, or they could invent something to do. They invented. They saw a conical slate roof on the other side of the river, and they walked toward that. In order to keep putting one foot in front of the other, they pretended that it was of utmost importance that they reach that structure and no other.

They waded across Sugar Creek, rather than draw attention to themselves on the bridge. They would have swum the creek, if it had been that deep.

And now here they were, as astonished as my mother had been to see a young man all dressed in scarlet and silver, with a sable busby on his head.

When Father looked askance at the two of them from his seat under the oak, Gino, the younger of the brothers,
but their leader, said in Italian that they were hungry and would do any sort of work for food.

Father replied in Italian. He was good with languages. He was fluent in French and German and Spanish, too. He told the brothers that they should by all means sit down and eat, if they were as hungry as they appeared to be. He said that nobody should ever be hungry.

He was like a god to them. It was so easy for him to be like a god to them.

After they had eaten, he took them up into the attic above the loft, the future gun room. There were two old cots up there. Light and air came from windows in a cupola at the peak of the roof. A ladder, its bottom bolted to the center of the attic floor, led up into the cupola. Father told the brothers that they could make the attic their home, until they found something better.

He said he had some old shoes and sweaters and so on, if they wanted them, in his trunks below.

He put them to work the next day, ripping out the stalls and tack room.

And no matter how rich and powerful the Maritimo brothers subsequently became, and no matter how disreputable and poor Father became, Father remained a god to them.

A
ND SOMEWHERE
in there, before America entered the First World War against the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, Father’s parents had their peepholes closed by carbon monoxide from a faulty heating system in their farmhouse out near Shepherdstown.

So Father became a major stockholder in the family business, the Waltz Brothers Drug Company, to which he had contributed nothing but ridicule and scorn.

And he attended stockholders’ meetings in a beret and a paint-stained smock and sandals, and he brought old August Gunther along, claiming Gunther was his lawyer, and he protested that he found his two uncles and their several sons, who actually ran the business, intolerably humorless and provincial and obsessed by profits, and so on.

He would ask them when they were going to stop poisoning their fellow citizens, and so on. At that time, the uncles and cousins were starting the first chain of drugstores in the history of the country, and they were especially
proud of the soda fountains in those stores, and had spent a lot of money to guarantee that the ice cream served at those fountains was the equal of any ice cream in the world. So Father wanted to know why ice cream at a Waltz Brothers Drugstore always tasted like library paste, and so on.

He was an artist, you see, interested in enterprises far loftier than mere pharmacy.

And now is perhaps the time for me to name my own profession. Guess what? I, Rudy Waltz, the son of that great artist Otto Waltz, am a registered pharmacist.

•   •   •

Somewhere in there, one end of a noble oak timber was dropped on Father’s left foot. Alcohol was involved in the accident. During a wild party at the studio, with tools and building materials lying all around, Father got a structural idea which had to be carried out at once. Nothing would do but that the drunken guests become common laborers under Father’s command, and a young dairy farmer named John Fortune lost his grip on a timber. It fell on Father’s foot, smashing the bones of his instep. Two of his toes died, and had to be cut away.

Thus was Father rendered unfit for military service when America got into World War One.

•   •   •

Father once said to me when he was an old man, after he had spent two years in prison, after he and Mother had
lost all their money and art treasures in a lawsuit, that his greatest disappointment in life was that he had never been a soldier. That was almost the last illusion he had, and there might have been some substance to it—that he had been born to serve bravely and resourcefully on a battlefield.

He certainly envied John Fortune to the end. The man who crushed his foot went on to become a hero in the trenches in the First World War, and Father would have liked to have fought beside him—and, like Fortune, come home with medals on his chest. The only remotely military honor Father would ever receive was a citation from the governor of Ohio for Father’s leadership of scrap drives in Midland County during World War Two. There was no ceremony. The certificate simply arrived in the mail one day.

Father was in prison over at Shepherdstown when it came. Mother and I brought it to him on visitors’ day. I was thirteen then. It would have been kinder of us to burn it up and scatter its ashes over Sugar Creek. That certificate was the crowning irony, as far as Father was concerned.

“At last I have joined the company of the immortals,” he said. “There are only two more honors for me to covet now.” One was to be a licensed dog. The other was to be a notary public.

And Father made us hand over the certificate so that he could wipe his behind with it at the earliest opportunity, which he surely did.

Instead of saying good-bye that day, he said this, a finger in the air: “Nature calls.”

•   •   •

And somewhere in there, in the autumn of 1916, to be exact, the old rascal August Gunther died under most mysterious circumstances. He got up two hours before dawn one day, and prepared and ate a hearty breakfast while his wife and daughter slept. And he set out on foot, armed with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun which my father had given to him, meaning to join Father and John Fortune and some other young bucks in gun pits on the edge of a meadow on John Fortune’s father’s dairy farm. They were going to shoot geese which had spent the night on the backwaters of Sugar Creek and on Crystal Lake. The meadow had been baited with cracked corn.

He never reached the gun pits, or so the story went. So he must have died somewhere in the intervening five miles, which included the Sugar Creek Bridge. One month later, his headless body was found at the mouth of Sugar Creek just west of Cincinnati, about to start its voyage to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico and beyond.

What a vacation from Midland City!

And when I was little, the decapitation of August Gunther so long ago, sixteen years before my birth, was the most legendary of all the unsolved crimes committed in my hometown. And I had a ghoulish ambition. I imagined that I would be famous and admired, if only I could find August Gunther’s missing head. And after that the murderer would have to confess, for some reason, and he would be
taken off to be punished, and so on—and the mayor would pin a medal on me.

Little did I suspect back then that I myself, Rudy Waltz, would become a notorious murderer known as “Deadeye Dick.”

•   •   •

My parents were married in 1922, four years after the end of the First World War. Father was thirty and Mother was twenty-one. Mother was a college graduate, having taken a liberal arts degree at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. Father, who certainly encouraged people to believe that he had spent time at some great and ancient European university, was in fact only a high school graduate. He could certainly lecture on history or race or biology or art or politics for hours, although he had read very little.

Almost all his opinions and information were cannibalized from the educations and miseducations of his roistering companions in Vienna before the First World War.

And one of these pals was Hitler, of course.

•   •   •

The wedding and the reception took place in the Wetzel mansion, next door to the studio. The Wetzels and the Waltzes were proudly agnostic, so the ceremony was performed by a judge. Father’s best man was John Fortune, the war hero and dairy farmer. Mother’s attendants were friends from Oberlin.

Father’s immediate relatives, the uncles and cousins who earned his living for him, came with their mates to the wedding, but they stayed for only a few minutes of the reception, behaving correctly but coldly, and then they departed en masse. Father had given them every reason to loathe him.

Father laughed. According to Mother, he announced to the rest of the guests that he was sorry, but that his relatives had to go back to the countinghouse.

He was quite the bohemian!

•   •   •

So then he and Mother went on a six-month honeymoon in Europe. While they were away, the Waltz Brothers Drug Company was moved to Chicago, where it already had a cosmetics factory and three drugstores.

When Mother and Father came home, they were the only Waltzes in town.

•   •   •

It was during the honeymoon that Father acquired his famous gun collection, or most of it—at a single whack. He and Mother visited what was left of the family of a friend from the good old days in Vienna, Rudolf von Furstenberg, outside of Salzburg, Austria. Rudolf had been killed in the war, and so had his father and two brothers, and I am named after him. His mother and his youngest brother survived, but they were bankrupt. Everything on the estate was for sale.

So Father bought the collection of more than three hundred guns, which encompassed almost the entire history of firearms up until 1914 or so. Several of the weapons were American, including a Colt .45 revolver and a .30-06 Springfield rifle. As powerful as those two guns were, Father taught me how to fire them and handle their violent kicks, and to clean them, and to take them apart and put them back together again while blindfolded, when I was only ten years old.

God bless him.

•   •   •

And Mother and Father bought a lot of the von Furstenbergs’ furniture and linens and crystal, and some battle-axes and swords, chain maces, and helmets and shields.

My brother and I were both conceived in a von Furstenberg bed, with a coat of arms on the headboard, and with “The Minorite Church of Vienna,” by Adolf Hitler, on the wall over that.

•   •   •

Mother and Father went looking for Hitler, too, on their honeymoon. But he was in jail.

He had risen to the rank of corporal in the war, and had won an Iron Cross for delivering messages under fire. So Father had close friends who had been heroes on both sides of the war.