Deadeye Dick Page 0,28

don’t seem to understand their place. We never had a smart-ass kid murderer on our hands before.

METZGER (uninterested in doing anything, giving up on life): What a day this has been.

DETECTIVE: Don’t want to hit him where it shows? Pull his pants down, boys, so this man can whap his ass. (POLICEMEN pull down RUDY’S pants, turn him around, and bend him over) Somebody get this man something to whap an ass with.

(Unoccupied POLICEMEN search for a suitable whip. POLICEMAN ONE finds a piece of cable on the floor about two feet long, proudly brings it to METZGER, who accepts it listlessly.)

METZGER: Many thanks.

POLICEMAN ONE: Any time.

RUDY: I’m sorry! It was an accident!

(All wait in silence for the first blow. METZGER does not move, hut speaks to a higher power instead.)

METZGER: God—there should not be animals like us. There should be no lives like ours.

(“METZGER drops the whip, turns, walks to the stairs, clumps up them. Nobody moves. A door upstairs opens and closes. RUDY is still bent over. Twenty seconds pass.)

POLICEMAN ONE (in a dream): Jesus—how’s he gonna get home?

DETECTIVE (in a dream): Walk. It’s nice out.

POLICEMAN ONE: How far away does he live?

DETECTIVE: Six blocks from here.

(Curtain.)

• • •

It wasn’t exactly like that, of course. I don’t have total recall. It was a lot like that.

I was allowed to straighten up and pull up my pants. I had such a little pecker then. They still wouldn’t let me wash, but Mr. Metzger had succeeded in warning these fundamentally innocent, hayseed policemen of how crazy they had become.

So I wasn’t bopped around much anymore, and pretty soon I would be taken home to my mother.

Since it was Mr. Metzger’s wife I had shot, he had the power not only to make the police take it easy with me, but to persuade the whole town to more or less forgive me. This he did—in a very short statement which appeared on the front page of the Bugle-Observer, bordered in black, a day and a half after my moment of fatal carelessness:

“My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die.

“There is evil for you.

“We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.

“I give you a holy word: DISARM.”

14

WHILE I WAS in the cage, another bunch of policeman had been beating up Father in the police station across the street. He should never have refused the easy way out which Police Chief Morissey had offered him. But it was too late now.

The police actually threw him down a flight of stairs. They didn’t just pretend that was what had happened to him. There was a lot of confused racist talk, evidently. Father would later remember lying at the bottom of the stairs, with somebody standing over him and asking him, “Hey, Nazi—how does it feel to be a nigger now?”

They brought me to see him after my confrontation with George Metzger. He was in a room in the basement, all bunged up, and entirely broken in spirit.

“Look at your rotten father,” he said. “What a worthless man I am.” If he was curious about my condition, he gave no sign of it. He was so theatrically absorbed by his own helplessness and worthlessness that I don’t think he even noticed that his own son was all covered with ink. Nor did he ever ask me what I had just been through.

Nor did he consider the propriety of my hearing what he was determined to confess next, which was how his character had been corrupted at an early age by liquor and whores. I would never have known of the wild times he and old August Gunther used to have, when they were supposedly visiting museums and studios. Felix would never have known of them, if I hadn’t told him. Mother never did know, I’m sure. I certainly never told her.

And that might have been bearable information for a twelve-year-old, since it had all happened so long ago. But then Father went on to say that he still patronized prostitutes regularly, although he had the most wonderful wife in the world.

He was all in pieces.

• • •

The police had become subdued by then. Some of them may have been wondering what on earth they thought they had