Deadeye Dick (21 page)

•   •   •

Reverend Harrell said it was sad that Celia had not lived to see the completion of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts in Sugar Creek, but that her performance in
Katmandu
was proof that the arts were important in Midland City before the center was built.

He declared that the most important arts centers a city could have were human beings, not buildings. He called attention to me again. “There in the back sits an arts center named ‘Rudy Waltz,’ ” he said.

It was then that Felix and his friend methaqualone began wailing. Felix was as loud as a fire engine, and he could not stop.

T
HERE WAS
just a prayer and some music after that, thank God, and then the recessional, with the pallbearers wheeling the casket out to the hearse. Otherwise, Felix’s sobbing could have wrecked the funeral. Mother and I gave up on going to the burial. We had no thought but to get Felix out of the church and into the County Hospital. It was all we could do not to get out ahead of the casket.

We had come late, so we were parked fairly far out on the parking lot, and there were a number of neighborhood children paying their respects to the Rolls-Royce. They had never seen one before, I’m sure, but they knew what it was. They were so reverent, that they might have been attending an open-casket funeral right there in the parking lot.

Celia Hoover’s casket, by the way, was closed. That must have been because of the Dr
no.

We got Felix into the back seat without any trouble. He sat there with the top down, sobbing away. I think we
could have sent him up a tree, and he would have been up among the branches and birds’ nests, sobbing away.

But he wouldn’t give us the keys. The keys were too materialistic a concern for him to consider at such a time. So I had to go through his pockets, while Mother told me to hurry up, hurry up. I happened to glance in the direction of the church, and I saw that Dwayne Hoover, maybe having told everybody to stay behind, that he had some private business with Felix to conduct, was coming in our direction.

He might have been expected to remain close to the hearse, and to duck curious and possibly accusing eyes by getting into the undertaker’s Cadillac limousine behind it. But, no—he was going to trudge fifty yards out into the parking lot instead, and we were the only people out there, since we had fled the church so quickly. So it was like a scene in a cowboy movie, with the townspeople all huddled together, and with a half-broken, tragic, great big man going to meet destiny all alone.

The hearse could wait.

He had business to settle first.

•   •   •

If this confrontation scene were done as a playlet, the set could be very simple. A curb along the back of the stage might indicate the edge of a parking lot. A Rolls-Royce with its top down, which is the expensive part, could be parked next to that, aimed left. Flats behind the curb could
be painted with trees and shrubbery. A tasteful wooden sign might make the location more specific, saying:

Felix would be sobbing in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce. Mother, whose name was Emma, and I, whose name is Rudy, would be between the convertible and the audience. Emma would have the heebie-jeebies, wanting to get out of there, and Rudy would be frisking Felix for the keys.

F
ELIX
: Who cares about the keys?

E
MMA
: Hurry up—oh, please hurry up.

R
UDY
: How many pockets can they put in a London suit? God damn it, Felix.

F
ELIX
: You’re making me sorry I came home.

E
MMA
: I could die.

F
ELIX
: I loved her so much.

R
UDY
: Did you ever!

(
R
UDY
happens to look in the direction of the church, off right, and is appalled to see
D
WAYNE
approaching.)

R
UDY
: Oh, my God.

F
ELIX
: Pray for her. That’s what I’m going to do.

R
UDY
: Felix—get out of the car.

E
MMA
: Let him stay there. Get him to hunker down.

R
UDY
: Mother—look behind you. Here comes Dwayne.
(
E
MMA
looks, hates what she sees.)

E
MMA
: Oh. You’d think he’d stay with the body.

R
UDY
: Felix—get out of the car, because I think somebody just might want to beat the shit out of you.

F
ELIX
: I just got home.

R
UDY
: I’m not kidding. Here comes Dwayne. He beat the shit out of Doctor Mitchell a week ago. This could be your turn.

F
ELIX
: I’ve got to fight him?

R
UDY
: Get out of the car and run!

(
F
ELIX
gets out of the car, muttering and complaining. His tears have abated some. The danger is so unreal to him that he doesn’t even look to see where the danger may be coming from. He is distracted by the dent and scratch on the side of the car as
D
WAYNE
enters right and stops.)

F
ELIX
: Oh, look at that. What a shame.

D
WAYNE
: It really is—a beautiful machine like that.

(
F
ELIX
straightens up and turns to look at him.)

F
ELIX
: Hello. You’re the husband.

D
WAYNE
: Where do you fit in?

F
ELIX
: What?

D
WAYNE
: I’m the husband, and I never felt worse in my life—but I couldn’t cry the way you cried. I never heard anybody cry like you did, male or female. Where do you fit in?

F
ELIX
: We were sweethearts in high school.

(
As
D
WAYNE
thinks this over
, F
ELIX
takes a bottle of pills from a pocket and starts to open it.)

E
MMA
: NO more pills!

R
UDY
: My brother isn’t well.

E
MMA
: He’s insane—and I used to be so proud of him.

D
WAYNE
: I’d be sorry to believe he was crazy. I’m hoping he was crying because he was sane.

E
MMA
: He can’t fight. He never could.

R
UDY
: We’re on our way to the hospital.

F
ELIX
: Just a damn minute here. I was crying because I’m sane. I’m the sanest person in this whole shit-storm! What the hell’s going on?

E
MMA
: GO ahead and get your brains beat out.

F
ELIX
: YOU must be the worst mother a person ever had.

E
MMA
: I never disgraced myself and my family in public, I’ll tell you that.

F
ELIX
: YOU never sewed on a button, either. You never hugged or kissed me.

E
MMA
: Who could blame me?

F
ELIX
: You never did anything a mother’s supposed to do.

D
WAYNE
: Just tell me more about why you cried!

F
ELIX
: We were raised by servants—do you know that? This lady here ought to get switches and coal every Mother’s Day! My brother and I know so much about black people and so little about white people, we should be in a minstrel show.

D
WAYNE
: He really is crazy, isn’t he?

F
ELIX
: Amos ‘n’ Andy.

E
MMA
: I have never been so humiliated in my life, and as a younger woman I have traveled all over this world.

D
WAYNE
: At least you never had a wife commit suicide. Or a husband.

E
MMA
: I know you’ve been through so much, and then all this on top of it.

D
WAYNE
: I don’t know what part of the world you could have visited, where having the person you were married to commit suicide wasn’t the most humiliating thing that could happen.

E
MMA
: YOU go back to your friends. And again, I’m so ashamed of my son, I wish he were dead. Go back to your friends.

D
WAYNE
: Those people back there? You know something? I think maybe I would have come walking out here alone, even if you hadn’t been out here. If you hadn’t given me a logical place to stop, I might have kept walking until I was in Katmandu. I’m the only person in town who hasn’t been to Katmandu. My dentist’s been to Katmandu.

E
MMA
: YOU go to Herb Stacks, too?

D
WAYNE
: Sure. Celia, too—or used to.

E
MMA
: I wonder why we never met there?

F
ELIX
: Because he uses Gleem toothpaste with Fluoristan.

E
MMA
: I can’t be responsible for what he says. I can’t imagine how he got control of an entire major television network.

D
WAYNE
: Celia never told me that you and she were
sweethearts. That was her big complaint right up to the end, you know—that nobody had ever loved her, so why should she even go to the dentist anymore?

E
MMA
: Radio, too. He was also in charge of radio.

F
ELIX
: You’re interrupting an important conversation—as usual. Mr. Hoover—yes, Celia and I were not only sweethearts in high school, but I realized there in church that she was the only woman I had ever loved, and maybe the only woman I will ever love. I hope I have not offended you.

D
WAYNE
: I’m glad. I may not look glad, but I am glad. They’re going to honk the horn of the hearse any minute—to tell me to hurry up, that the cemetery’s about to close. She was like this Rolls-Royce here, you know?

F
ELIX
: The most beautiful woman I ever knew. No offense, no offense.

D
WAYNE
: No offense. Anybody who wants to can say she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw. You should have married her, not me.

F
ELIX
: I wasn’t worthy of her. Look at the dent I put in the Rolls-Royce.

D
WAYNE
: YOU scraped up against something blue.

F
ELIX
: Listen. She lasted a lot longer with you than she would have lasted with me. I’m one of the worst husbands there ever was.

D
WAYNE
: Not as bad as me. I just ran away from her, she was so unhappy, and I didn’t know what to do about it—and there wasn’t anybody else to take her off my
hands. I’m good for selling cars. I can really sell cars. I can fix cars. I can really fix cars. But I sure couldn’t fix that woman. Never even knew where to get the tools. I put her up on blocks and forgot her. I only wish you’d come along in time to rescue the both of us. But you did me a big favor today. At least I don’t have to think my poor wife went all the way through life without finding out what love was.

F
ELIX
: Where am I? What have I said? What have I done?

D
WAYNE
: You come on along to the cemetery. I don’t care if you’re crazy or not. You’ll make this automobile dealer feel a little bit better, if you’ll just cry some more—while we put my poor wife in the ground.

(Curtain.)

W
E ALL SEE
our lives as stories, it seems to me, and I am convinced that psychologists and sociologists and historians and so on would find it useful to acknowledge that. If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more, there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended, and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.

Some people, of course, find inhabiting an epilogue so uncongenial that they commit suicide. Ernest Hemmingway comes to mind. Celia Hoover, née Hildreth, comes to mind.

My own father’s story ended, it seems to me, and it must have seemed to him, when he took all the blame for my having shot Eloise Metzger—and then the police threw him down the iron staircase. He could not be an artist, and he could not be a soldier—but he could at least be heroically honorable and truthful, should an opportunity to be so present itself.

That was the story of his life which he carried in his head.

The opportunity presented itself. He was heroically honorable and truthful. He was thrown down the staircase—like so much garbage.

It was then that these words should have appeared somewhere:

But they didn’t. But his life as a story was over anyway. The remaining years were epilogue—a sort of junk shop of events which were nothing more than random curiosities, boxes and bins of whatchamacallits.