Deadeye Dick Page 0,32
afterwards.
• • •
As soon as the suit was settled, George Metzger took off for Florida with his two children. So far as I know, not one of them was ever seen in Midland City again. They had lived there a very short time, after all. Before they could put down roots, a bullet had come from nowhere for no reason, and drilled Mrs. Metzger between the eyes. And they hadn’t made any friends to whom they would write year after year.
The two children, Eugene and Jane, in fact, found themselves as much outcasts as I was when we all returned to school. And we, in turn, were no worse off, socially, than the few children whose fathers or brothers had been killed in the war. We were all lepers, willy-nilly, for having shaken hands with Death.
We might as well have rung bells wherever we went, as lepers were often required to do in the Dark Ages.
Curious.
• • •
Eugene and Jane were named, I found out only recently, for Eugene V. Debs, the labor hero from Terre Haute, Indiana, and Jane Addams, the Nobel prize-winning social reformer from Cedarville, Illinois. They were much younger than me, so we were in different schools. It was only recently, too, that I learned that they had found themselves as leprous as I was, and what had become of them in Florida, and on and on.
The source of all this information about the Metzgers has been, of course, their lawyer, who is now our lawyer, Bernard Ketchum.
Only at the age of fifty, thirty-eight years after I destroyed Mrs. Metzger’s life, my life, and my parents’ life with a bullet, have I asked anyone how the Metzgers were. It was right here by the swimming pool at two in the morning. All the hotel guests were asleep, not that they are ever all that numerous. Felix and his new wife, his fifth wife, were there. Ketchum and his first and only wife were there. And I was there. Where was my mate? Who knows? I think I am a homosexual, but I can’t be sure. I have never made love to anyone.
Nor have I tasted alcohol, except for homeopathic doses of it in certain recipes—but the others had been drinking champagne. Not since I was twelve, for that matter, have I swallowed coffee or tea, or taken a medicine, not even an aspirin or a laxative or an antacid or an antibiotic of any sort. This is an especially odd record for a person who is, as I am, a registered pharmacist, and who was the solitary employee on the night shift of Midland City’s only all-night drugstore for years and years.
So be it.
I had just served the others and myself, as a surprise, spuma di cioccolata, which I had made the day before. There was one serving left over.
And we certainly all had plenty of things to think about, both privately and publicly, since our hometown had so recently been depopulated by the neutron bomb. We might so easily have had our peepholes closed, too, if we hadn’t come down to take over the hotel.
When we heard about that fatal flash back home, in fact, I had quoted the words of William Cowper, which a sympathetic English teacher had given me to keep from killing myself when I was young:
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
So I said to Ketchum, after we had finished our chocolate seafoams, our spume di cioccolata, “Tell us about the Metzgers.”
And Felix dropped his spoon. Curiosity about the Metzgers had been the most durable of all our family taboos. The taboo had surely existed in large measure for my own protection. Now I had broken it as casually as I had served dessert.
Old Ketchum was impressed, too. He shook his head wonderingly, and he said, “I never expected to hear a member of the Waltz family ask how any of the Metzgers were.”
“I wondered out loud only once,” said Felix, “—after I came home from the war. That was enough for me. I’d had a good time in the war, and I’d made a lot of contacts I could use afterwards, and I was pretty sure I was going to make a lot of money and become a big shot fast.”
And he did become a big shot, of course. He eventually became president of NBC, with a penthouse and a limousine and all.
He also “tapped out early,” as