Deadeye Dick Page 0,21
I was better than that. I was at one with the universe. I heard him coming, but I was unconcerned—even though I was still at an open window in the cupola with the Springfield in my arms.
He asked me if I had heard a bang. I said I had.
He asked me if I knew what the bang had been. I said, “No.”
I took my own sweet time about descending from the cupola. Firing the Springfield over the city was now part of my treasure-house of memories.
I hadn’t aimed at anything. If I thought of the bullet’s hitting anything, I don’t remember now. I was the great marksman, anyway. If I aimed at nothing, then nothing is what I would hit.
The bullet was a symbol, and nobody was ever hurt by a symbol. It was a farewell to my childhood and a confirmation of my manhood.
Why didn’t I use a blank cartridge? What kind of a symbol would that have been?
• • •
I put the spent cartridge in a wastebasket for spent cartridges, which would be given to a scrap drive. It became a member of that great wartime fraternity, Cartridge Cases Anonymous.
I took the Springfield apart and cleaned it. I put it back together again, which I could have done when blindfolded, and I restored it to its rack.
What a friend it had been to me.
I rejoined polite society downstairs, locking the gun room behind me. All those guns weren’t for just anybody to handle. Some people were fools where guns were concerned.
• • •
So I helped Mary Hoobler clean up after Mrs. Roosevelt. My participation in housework had become invisible. My parents had always had servants, after all, sort of ghostly people. Mother and Father were incurious as to who it was, exactly, who brought something or took something away.
I certainly wasn’t effeminate. I had no interest in dressing like a girl, and I was a good shot, and I played a little football and baseball and so on. What if I liked cooking? The greatest cooks in the world were men.
Out in the kitchen, where Mary Hoobler washed and I dried, Mary said that the most important thing in her life had now happened. She had met Mrs. Roosevelt, and she would tell her grandchildren about it, and everything for her was downhill now. Nothing that important could ever happen to her again.
The front doorbell rang. The great carriage-house doors had of course been closed and bolted after the fiasco with poor Celia Hildreth the year before. We had an ordinary front door again.
So I answered the door. Mother and Father never answered the door. It was police chief Morissey out there. He looked very unhappy and secretive. He told me that he didn’t want to come in, and he particularly didn’t want to disturb my mother—so I was to tell Father to come out for a talk with him. He said I should be in on it, too.
I give my word of honor: I had not the slightest inkling of what the trouble might be.
So I got Father. He and Chief Morissey and I were going to do some more man business, business that women might be better off not hearing about. They might not understand. I was drying my hands on a tea towel.
And Morissey himself, as I know now but didn’t know then, had accidentally killed August Gunther with a firearm when he was young.
And he said quietly to Father and me that Eloise Metzger, the pregnant wife of the city editor of the Bugle-Observer, George Metzger, had just been shot dead while running a vacuum cleaner in the guest room on the second floor of her home over on Harrison Avenue, about eight blocks away. There was a bullet hole in the window.
Her family downstairs had become worried when the vacuum cleaner went on running and running without being dragged around at all.
Chief Morissey said that Mrs. Metzger couldn’t have felt any pain, since the bullet got her right between the eyes. She never knew what hit her.
The bullet had been recovered from the guest-room floor, and it was virtually undamaged, thanks to its copper jacket, in spite of all it had been through.
“Now I am asking you two as an old friend of the family,” said Morissey, “and before any official investigation has begun, and I am just another human being and family man standing here before you: Does either one of you have any idea where a .30-caliber copper-jacketed rifle bullet could