Deadeye Dick Page 0,58

so long.

RUDY: Good for Dwayne.

CELIA: Isn’t that nice? And as soon as Dwayne gets back from Detroit, he’s going to put me in the crazy house.

RUDY: You do need help. You need a lot of help.

CELIA: Then put your arms around me! (RUDY freezes)

And no Pennwalt Biphetamine, either. No anything here. (She gravely sweeps a display of cosmetics from a counter to the floor)

RUDY: Please don’t do any more of that.

CELIA: Oh—I’ll pay for all damages, any damages I decide to do. Money is not a problem. (She brings forth a handful of gold coins from her trench-coat pocket) See?

RUDY: Gold pieces!

CELIA: Sure! I don’t fool around. My husband’s a coin collector, you know.

RUDY: There’s got to be several thousand dollars there.

CELIA: Yours, all yours, honeybunch. (She scatters the coins at his feet) Now give me a hug, or give me some Pennwalt Biphetamine.

(RUDY goes to the telephone, dials.)

RUDY (singing softly to himself waiting for an answer on the phone): Skeedee-wah, skeedee-woo. (Etc.)

CELIA: Who are you calling?

RUDY: The police.

CELIA: YOU big tub of lard! (She topples a carousel of dark glasses.) You, fat Nazi bastard!

RUDY (into telephone): This is Rudy Waltz—over at Schramm’s. Who’s this? Oh—Bob! I didn’t recognize your voice. I need a little help here.

CELIA: YOU need a lot of help here! (She sets about wrecking everything she can get her hands on) Killer! Mama’s boy!

RUDY (into telephone): Not a criminal matter. It’s a mental case.

(Curtain.)

• • •

But she got out of there before the police could come. When they arrived, they could see all the damage she had done, but she herself was roaming shoeless out in the night again. That is the second story I have told about Celia which ends with her fleeing barefoot.

History repeats itself.

The police went looking for her—to protect her. She could get robbed or raped. She could be attacked by dogs. She could be hit by a car.

Meanwhile, I set about cleaning up the mess she had made. The store wasn’t mine, so I was in no position to forgive and forget. Celia’s husband was going to have to find out what she had done, and then he would be asked to cough up a thousand dollars or more. Celia had gone after the most expensive perfumes. Celia had gone after the watches, too, but they were still okay. It is virtually impossible to harm a Timex watch. For some reason, the less you pay for a watch, the surer you can be that it will never stop.

My conscience was active as I worked. Should I have hugged her or given her amphetamine? My feeling was that chemicals had wrecked her brains, and that she wasn’t Celia Hoover anymore. She was a monster. If I did write a play for her new face, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to learn her lines. Somebody else would have to play her—in a fright wig, and with several teeth blacked out.

What wonderful things could a writer put into the mouth of a crazy old lady like her anyway? My mind got this far with the problem, anyway: She could certainly shake up an audience if she let it think she was about a hundred years old for a while, and then told her true age. Celia was only forty-four when she took the drugstore apart.

I tinkered, too, with the idea of having the voice of God coming from the back of the theater. Whoever played God would have to have a voice like my brother’s.

The actress playing Celia could ask why God had ever put her on earth.

And then the voice from the back of the theater could rumble: “To reproduce. Nothing else really interests Me. All the rest is frippery.”

• • •

She had reproduced, of course, which was certainly more than I had done. And I got it into my head to stop cleaning up for a minute and call up her son, Bunny. He would probably be in his room at the Fairchild Hotel, fresh home from work at the new Holiday Inn.

He was wide awake. Somebody had told me that Bunny was heavily into cocaine. That could merely be a rumor.

I told him who I was, and I said his mother had just been in the store, and that, in my opinion, she really needed help. “I just, thought you should know,” I said.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that a mouse was listening to me. It was going to have to guess what was going on,