Deadeye Dick Page 0,11

all the space.

And on cold days, and even on days that weren’t all that cold, the rest of the servants, the yardman and the upstairs maid and so on, all black, would crowd into the kitchen with the cook and me. They liked being crowded together. When they were little, they told me, they slept in beds with a whole lot of brothers and sisters. That sounded like a lot of fun to me. It still sounds like a lot of fun to me.

There in the crowded kitchen, everybody would talk and talk and talk so easily, just blather and blather and laugh and laugh. I was included in the conversation. I was a nice little boy. Everybody liked me.

“What you got to say about that, Mister Rudy?” a servant would ask me, and I would say something, anything, and everybody would pretend I had said something wise or intentionally funny.

If I had died in childhood, I would have thought life was that little kitchen. I would have done anything to get back into that kitchen again—on the coldest day in the wintertime.

Carry me back to old Virginny.

• • •

Somewhere in there the Nazi flag came down. Father stopped traveling. According to my brother Felix, who was an eighth-grader at the time, Father wouldn’t even leave the house or talk on the telephone, or look at his mail for three months or more. He went into such a deep depression that it was feared that he might commit suicide, so that Mother took the gun-room key from his key ring. He never missed it. He had no inclination to visit his beloved firearms.

Felix says that Father might have crashed like that, no matter what was really going on in the outside world. But the mail and telephone calls he was receiving were getting meaner all the time, and G-men had visited him, and suggested that he register as an agent for a foreign power, in order to comply with the law of the land. The man who had been his best man at his wedding, John Fortune, had stopped speaking to him, and had been going around town, to Father’s certain knowledge, declaring Father to be a dangerous nincompoop.

Which Father surely was.

Fortune himself was of totally Germanic extraction. His last name was simply an Anglicization of the German word for luck, which is Glück.

Fortune would never give Father an opportunity to mend the rupture between them, for, in 1938, he suddenly took off for the Himalayas, in search of far higher happiness and wisdom than was available, evidently, in Midland City, Ohio. His wife had died of cancer. He was childless. There had been some defect in his or his wife’s reproductive apparatus. The family dairy farm went bankrupt, and was taken over by the Midland County National Bank.

And John Fortune is buried now in bib overalls—in the capital city of Nepal, which is Katmandu.

6

MIDLAND CITY has now been depopulated by a neutron bomb explosion. It was a big news story for about ten days or so. It might have been a bigger story, a signal for the start of World War Three, if the Government hadn’t acknowledged at once that the bomb was made in America. One newscast I heard down here in Haiti called it “a friendly bomb.”

The official story is that an American truck was transporting this American bomb on the Interstate, and the bomb went off. There was this flash. It was an accident, supposedly. The truck, if there really was a truck, seems to have been right opposite the new Holiday Inn and Dwayne Hoover’s Exit 11 Pontiac Village when the bomb went off.

Everybody in the county was killed, including five people awaiting execution on death row in the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown. I certainly lost a lot of acquaintances all at once.

But most of the structures are still left standing and furnished. I am told that every one of the television sets in the new Holiday Inn is still fully operable. So are all the telephones. So is the ice-cube maker behind the bar. All those sensitive devices were only a few hundred yards from the source of the flash.

So nobody lives in Midland City, Ohio, anymore. About one hundred thousand people died. That was roughly the population of Athens during the Golden Age of Pericles. That is two-thirds of the population of Katmandu.

And I do not see how I can get out of asking this question: Does it matter to anyone or