Deadeye Dick Page 0,47

Katmandu opened and closed, Felix and I were flying over a landscape as white and blank as our lives. Felix had lost his second wife. I was the laughingstock of New York. We were in a six-passenger private plane, traversing a southwestern Ohio which appeared to be as lifeless as a polar ice cap. Somewhere down there was Midland City. The power was off. The phone lines were out.

How could anyone still be alive down there?

The sky was clear, anyway, and the air was still. The blizzard which had done this was now raging somewhere off Labrador.

• • •

Felix and I were in a plane which belonged to Barrytron, Ltd., a manufacturer of sophisticated weapons systems, the largest single employer in Midland City. With us were Fred T. Barry, the founder and sole owner of Barrytron, and his mother, Mildred, and their pilot.

Mr. Barry was a bachelor and his mother was a widow, and they were tireless globe-trotters. Felix and I learned from their conversation that they had been to cultural events all over the planet—arm-in-arm at film festivals and premiers of new ballets and operas, at openings of museum shows, and on and on. And I would be the last to mock them for being such frivolous gadabouts, since it was my play which had brought them and their airplane to New York City. They did not know me or Felix, nor had they more than a nodding acquaintance with our parents. But they had found it imperative that they be at the opening of the only full-length play by a citizen of Midland City which had ever been produced commercially.

How could I not like them for that?

What is more: This mother-and-son team had stayed to the very end of Katmandu. Only twenty people did that, including Felix and me. I know. I counted the house. And the Barrys clapped and whistled and stamped as the curtain came down. They were so uninhibited. And Mrs. Barry could certainly whistle. She had been born in England, and in her youth she had been an imitator in music halls of various birds of the British Empire.

• • •

Mr. Barry thought a lot more of his mother than I thought of mine. After his mother died, he would try to immortalize her by having the Maritimo Brothers Construction Company build an arts center on stilts in Sugar Creek, and naming it in her honor.

My own mother effectively wrecked that scheme, persuading the community that the arts center and its contents were monstrosities. After that came the neutron bomb. There is nobody left in Midland City anymore to know or care who Mildred Barry might have been.

The scheme for turning the empty husks of my town into housing for refugees moves forward apace, incidentally. The President himself has called it “a golden opportunity.”

Bernard Ketchum, our resident shyster here at the Grand Hotel Oloffson, says that Haitian refugees should follow the precedent set by white people, and simply discover Florida or Virginia or Massachusetts or whatever. They could come ashore, and start converting people to voodooism.

“It’s a widely accepted principle,” he says, “that you can claim a piece of land which has been inhabited for tens of thousands of years, if only you will repeat this mantra endlessly: ‘We discovered it, we discovered it, we discovered it.…’ ”

• • •

Fred Barry’s mother Mildred had an English accent which she had done nothing to modify, although she had lived in Midland City for a quarter of a century or more.

Her black servants, I know, were very fond of her. She knew exactly what kind of a fool she was, and she loved to keep her servants laughing at her all the time.

There in that little plane, she imitated the bulbul of Malaysia and the morepork owl of New Zealand, and so on. I identified a basic mistake my parents had made about life: They thought that it would be very wrong if anybody ever laughed at them.

• • •

I keep wanting to say that Fred T. Barry was the grandest neuter I ever saw. He certainly had no sex Ufe. He didn’t even have friends. It was all right with him if life ended at any time, obviously, since this was a suicidal flight we were on. He didn’t care much if I died, either, or Felix or his mother—or the pilot, who had gone to high school with my brother, and who was scared stiff. If we had an engine failure before we reached