Deadeye Dick Page 0,48

Cincinnati, the nearest open runway, where could we land?

But the satisfaction Mr. Barry found in the company of his mother and in their harum-scarum visits to athletic and cultural events all over the world was anything but proof of neutrality. If he liked any part of life that much, he couldn’t march in the great parade of neuters in the sweet by-and-by.

Or his mother, either.

• • •

Fred and his mother really had liked Katmandu, and they had stayed up late afterwards, so they could get early editions of the morning newspapers and read the reviews. One of the things that made them really mad was that none of the critics had stayed long enough to find out whether John Fortune had found Shangri-La or not.

Mr. Barry said that he would like to see the play performed sometime with an all-Ohio cast. He said that he didn’t think New York actors could fully appreciate why it might be important for a simple farmer to die on a quest for wisdom in Asia, even if there wasn’t all that much wisdom to find over there.

And that would actually come to pass in three years, as I’ve said: The Midland County Mask and Wig Club would revive Katmandu on the high school stage, and they would give the female lead to poor Celia Hoover.

Oh, my.

• • •

I keep calling Fred T. Barry “Mr. Barry,” as though he were older than God. My goodness, he was only about fifty back then—which is my age now. His mother was maybe seventy-five, with eight more years to go until she tried to rescue a bat she found clinging upside down to her living room draperies.

Mr. Barry was a self-educated inventor and super-salesman. He had entered the armaments business more or less by accident. The timer on an automatic washing machine which he had been manufacturing in the old Keedsler Automobile Works turned out to have military applications. It was ideal for timing the release of bombs from airplanes—so as to create a desired pattern of explosions on the ground. When the war was over, orders for much more sophisticated weapons systems started coming in, and Mr. Barry brought in more and more brilliant scientists and engineers and technicians to keep up with the game.

A lot of them were Japanese. My father played host to the first Italians to settle in Midland City. Mr. Barry brought in the first Japanese.

I’ll never forget the first Japanese to come into Schramm’s Drugstore when I was on all-night duty there. I have mentioned that the store was a lighthouse for lunatics—and that Japanese was a lunatic of a sort, almost literally a lunatic, since the word “lunatic” has to do with craziness and the moon. This Japanese didn’t want to buy anything. He wanted me to come outside and see something wonderful in the moonlight.

Guess what it was. It was the conical slate roof of my childhood home, only a few blocks away. The peak of the cone, where the cupola used to be, was capped with very light gray tar roofing, with bits of sand stuck to it. In the light of a full moon, it was glittering white—like snow.

The Japanese smiled and pointed up at the roof. He had no idea that the building meant anything to me. Here was the thought he wanted to share with me, the only other person awake at the time: “Fujiyama,” he said, “—the sacred volcano of Japan.”

• • •

Mr. Barry, like a lot of self-educated people, was full of obscure facts which he had found for himself, and which nobody else seemed to know. He asked me, for instance, if I knew Sir Galahad had been a Jew.

I said politely that I hadn’t. It was his airplane. I expected to be annoyed by an anti-Semitic joke of some kind. I was mistaken.

“Not even the Jews know Sir Galahad was a Jew,” he went on. “Jesus, yes—Galahad no. Every Jew I meet, I ask him, ‘How come you people don’t boast more about Sir Galahad?’ And I even tell them where they can check it out, if they want to. ‘Start with the Holy Grail,’ I say.”

According to Fred T. Barry, a Jew named Joseph of Arimathea took Christ’s goblet when the Last Supper was over. He believed Christ to be divine.

Joseph brought the goblet to the Crucifixion, and some of Christ’s blood fell into it. Joseph was arrested for his Christian sympathies. He was thrown into prison without food or water,