Deadeye Dick Page 0,61
those floppy cuffs made him look like a pirate in Peter Pan.
• • •
There was a big dent in the left front fender of that brand new Rolls-Royce, and a crease and a sort of chalky blue stripe that ran back from the dent and across the left-hand door. Felix had sideswiped something blue, and he was as curious about what it might have been as we were.
It remains a mystery to the present day, although Felix, I am happy to say, is now drug free, except for alcohol and caffeine, which he uses in moderation. He remembers proposing marriage to a girl he picked up at a tollbooth on the Ohio Turnpike. “She bailed out in downtown Mansfield,” he said the other night. He had swung off the turnpike and into Mansfield, to buy her a color television set or a stereo or anything she wanted, as proof of how much he liked her.
“That could have been where I got the dent,” he said.
He was able to identify the drug which had made him so brainlessly ardent, too. “Methaqualone,” he said.
• • •
I think now about all the little shitbox houses I have driven by in my life, and that all Americans have driven by in their lives—shitbox houses with very expensive cars in the driveway, and maybe even a yacht on a trailer, too. And suddenly there was Mother’s and my little shitbox, with a new Mercedes under the carport, and a new Rolls-Royce convertible on the front lawn. That was where Felix first parked his car when he got home—on the lawn. We were lucky he didn’t take down the post lantern, and half the shrubbery, too.
So in he came, saying, “The prodigal son is home! Kill the fatted calf!” and so on. Mother and I had known he was coming, but we hadn’t known exactly when. We were all dressed up, and about to go out, and were going to leave the side door unlocked for him.
I was wearing my best suit, which was as tight as the skin of a knackwurst. I had put on a lot of weight recently. It was the fault of my own good cooking. I had been trying out a lot of new recipes, with considerable success. And Mother, who hadn’t put on an ounce in fifty years, was wearing the black dress Felix had bought her for Father’s funeral.
“Where do you two think you’re going?” said Felix.
So Mother told him. “We’re going to Celia Hoover’s funeral,” she said.
That was the first Felix had heard that his date for the senior prom was no longer among the living. The last he had seen of her, she had been running away from him barefoot, and into a vacant lot—at night.
If he was going to catch her now, he would have to go wherever it was that the dead people went.
• • •
That would make a good scene in a movie: Felix in heaven, wearing a tuxedo for the senior prom carrying Celia’s golden slippers, and calling out over and over again, “Celia! Celia! Where are you? I have your dancing shoes.”
• • •
So nothing would do but that Felix come to the funeral with us. Methaqualone had persuaded him that he and Celia had been high school sweethearts, and that he should have married her. “She was what I was looking for all the time, and I never even realized it,” he said.
I think now that Mother and I should have driven him to the County Hospital for detoxification. But we got into his car with him, and told him where the funeral was. The top was down, which was no way to go to a funeral, and Felix himself was a mess. His necktie was askew, and his shirt was filthy, and he had a two-day growth of beard. He had found time to buy a Rolls-Royce, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might have bought some new shirts with buttons, too. He wasn’t going to have another shirt with buttons until he could find some woman who would sew all his buttons on.
• • •
Off we went to the First Methodist Church, with Felix at the wheel and Mother in the back seat. As luck would have it, Felix almost closed the peephole of his first wife, Donna, as she was getting out of her Thunderbird in front of her twin sister’s house on Arsenal Avenue. It would have been her fault, if she had died, since