Deadeye Dick Page 0,62

she didn’t look to see what was coming before she disembarked on the driver’s side. But it would have made for an ugly case in court, since Felix had already put her through a windshield once, and he was still paying her a lot of alimony, and the business about all the pills he was taking would have come out, and so on. Worst of all, as far as a jury was concerned, I’m sure, would have been the fact that he was a bloated plutocrat in a Rolls-Royce.

Felix didn’t even recognize her, and I don’t think she recognized him, either. When I told him who it was he had almost hit, he spoke of her most unkindly. He recalled that her scalp was crisscrossed with scars, because of her trip through the windshield. When he used to run his fingers through her hair, he would encounter those scars, and he would get this crazy idea that he was a quarterback. “I would look downfield for an end who was open for a forward pass,” he said.

• • •

It was at the church, though, that Felix and his good friend methaqualone became embarrassing. We got there late, so we had to sit toward the back, where those least concerned with the deceased should have been sitting anyway. If we were going to make any disturbance, people would have to swivel around in their pews to see who we were.

The service started quietly enough. I heard only one person crying, and she was way up front, and I think it was Lottie Davis, the Hoovers’ black maid. She and Dwayne were the only people there to do a whole lot of crying, since practically nobody else had seen Celia for seven years—since she had starred in Katmandu.

Her son wasn’t there.

Her doctor wasn’t there.

Both her parents were dead, and all her brothers and sisters had drifted off to God-knows-where. One brother, I know, was killed in the Korean War. And somebody swore, I remember, that he had seen her sister Shirley as an extra in the remake of the movie King Kong. Maybe so.

There were maybe two hundred mourners there. Most of them were employees and friends and customers and suppliers of Dwayne’s. The word was all over town of how in need of support he was, of how vocally ashamed he was to have been such a bad husband that his wife had committed suicide. He had been quoted to me as having made a public announcement in the Tally-ho Room of the new Holiday Inn, the day after Celia killed herself: “I take half the blame, but the other half goes to that son-of-bitching Doctor Jerry Mitchell. Watch out for the pills your doctor tells your wife to take. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

• • •

It must have been a startling scene. From five until six thirty or so every weekday night, the Tally-ho Room, the cocktail lounge, was a plenary session of the oligarchy of Midland City. A few powerful people, most notably Fred T. Barry, were involved in planetary games, so that the deliberations at the Tally-ho Room were beneath their notice. But anyone doing big business or hoping to do big business strictly within the county was foolish not to show his face there at least once a week, if only to drink a glass of ginger ale. The Tally-ho Room did a very big trade in ginger ale.

Dwayne owned a piece of the new Holiday Inn, incidentally. His automobile dealership was right next door, on the same continuous sheet of blacktop. And the Tally-ho Room was where his disinherited son, Bunny, played the piano. The story was that Bunny applied for the job there, and the manager of the Inn asked Dwayne how he felt about it, and Dwayne said he had never heard of Bunny, so he did not care if the Inn hired him or not, as long as he could play the piano.

And then Dwayne added, supposedly, that he himself hated piano music, since it interfered with conversation. All he asked was that there be no piano playing until eight o’clock at night. That way, although he did not say so, Dwayne Hoover would never have to lay eyes on his disgraceful son.

• • •

I daydreamed at Celia’s funeral. There was no reason to expect that anything truly exciting or consoling would be said. Not even the minister, the Reverend Charles Harrell, believed in heaven or hell. Not even the minister thought