Deadeye Dick Page 0,46
Either one. Whatever it was, I’d love it.
GENEVIEVE: Oh, my, oh, my. I think I’m going to cry now.
FELIX: Just don’t walk out on me. I love you so.
GENEVIEVE: I won’t.
FELIX: DO you believe I love you?
GENEVIEVE: I’d better, I guess.
FELIX: I’m going back to the office. I’ll clean out my desk. I’ll apologize to everybody for the scene I made. It was all my fault. My brother does stink. He should take a bath, and I thank you for saying so. Promise me you’ll be here when I get back.
GENEVIEVE: Promise.
(FELIX exits through the front door. GENEVIEVE starts putting things back in the closet.)
RUDY: Ahem.
GENEVIEVE: Hello?
RUDY: Ahem.
GENEVIEVE (scared): Who’s up there, please?
RUDY (standing, showing himself): It’s me.
GENEVIEVE: Oh, my.
RUDY: I didn’t want to scare you.
GENEVIEVE: YOU heard all that.
RUDY: I didn’t want to interrupt.
GENEVIEVE: We don’t believe half of what we said.
RUDY: It’s all right. I was going to take a bath anyway.
GENEVIEVE: YOU don’t even have to.
RUDY: The house back home is so cold in the winter. You get out of the habit of taking baths. We all get used to the way we smell.
GENEVIEVE: I’m so sorry you heard.
RUDY: It’s okay. I don’t have any more feelings than a rubber ball. You said how nobody sees me, how I never can get waited on …?
GENEVIEVE: YOU heard that, too.
RUDY: That’s because I’m a neuter. I’m no sex. I’m out of the sex game entirely. Nobody knows how many neuters there are, because they’re invisible to most people. I’ll tell you something, though: There are millions in this town. They should have a parade sometime, with big signs saying, TRIED SEX ONCE, THOUGHT IT WAS STUPID, NO SEX FOR TEN YEARS, FEEL WONDERFUL, FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE, THINK ABOUT SOMETHING BESIDES SEX.
GENEVIEVE: YOU really can be funny sometimes.
RUDY: Idiot savant. No good at life, but very funny sometimes with the commentary.
GENEVIEVE: I’m sorry about your father.
RUDY: He never murdered anybody.
GENEVIEVE: He didn’t?
RUDY: He wouldn’t hurt a fly. But he was still a very bad father to have. Felix and I stopped bringing friends home, because he was so embarrassing. He wasn’t anything and he never did anything, but he still thought he was so important. He was very spoiled as a child, I guess. We used to get him to help us with our homework, and then we’d get to school and find out that everything he said was wrong. You know what happens if you give a raccoon a lump of sugar?
GENEVIEVE: NO.
RUDY: Raccoons always wash their food before they eat it.
GENEVIEVE: I’ve heard that. Back in Wisconsin, we had raccoons.
RUDY: A raccoon will take a lump of sugar down to the water, and wash it and wash it and wash it.
(Pause.)
GENEVIEVE: Aha! Until the sugar’s gone.
RUDY: And that’s what growing up was like for Felix and me. We had no father when we got through. Mother still thinks he’s the greatest man in the world.
GENEVIEVE: But you still love your parents anyway.
RUDY: Neuters don’t love anybody. They don’t hate anybody either.
GENEVIEVE: But you’ve been keeping house for your parents for years and years, haven’t you? Or isn’t that true?
RUDY: Neuters make very good servants. They’re not your great seekers of respect, and they usually cook pretty well.
GENEVIEVE (feeling creepy): You’re a very strange person, Rudy Waltz.
RUDY: That’s because I’m the murderer.
GENEVIEVE: WHAT?
RUDY: There’s a murderer in the family, all right—but it isn’t Father. It’s me.
(Pause.)
(Curtain.)
• • •
Thus did I prevent my brother’s fathering a child back then. Geneviève cleared out of the duplex, not wishing to be there alone with a murderer, and she and Felix never got together again. The child they had talked about having would be twenty-two years old now. The child Eloise Metzger was carrying when I shot her would be thirty-eight! Think of that.
Who knows what those people would be doing now, instead of drifting around nowhere, mere wisps of undifferentiated nothingness. They could be so busy now.
• • •
To this day, I have never told Felix about how I overheard his conversation with Geneviève from the balcony, and about how I scared her out of the duplex, never to return. I wrecked the marriage. It was an accident-prone time in my life, just as it was an accident-prone time in my life when I shot Mrs. Metzger.
That’s all I can say.
• • •
I had to let my sister-in-law know that I was somebody to be reckoned with—that I was a murderer. That was my claim to fame.
20
THE MORNING AFTER