Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page A

one carriage-house door and then the other. A wall of my home vanished. There were stars and a rising moon where it had been.

    8
    A ND MOTHER and Father and I all hid as Felix arrived with Celia Hildreth in the Keedsler touring car. Felix, too, was dazed by the lovely transformation of our home. When he switched off the Keedsler’s idling engine, it was as though it went on idling anyway. In a voice just like the engine’s, he was reassuring Celia that she needn’t be afraid, even though she had never seen anything like this house before.
    I heard her say this: “I’m sorry. I can’t help being scared. I want to get out of here.” I was just inside the great new doorway.
    That should have been enough for Felix. He should have gotten her out of there. As she would say in a few minutes, she hadn’t even wanted to go to the prom, but her parents had told her she had to, and she hated her dress and was ashamed to have anybody see her in it, and she didn’t understand rich people, and didn’t want to, and she was happiest when she was all alone and nobody couldstare at her, and nobody could say things to her that she was supposed to reply to in some fancy, ladylike way—and so on.
    Felix used to say that he didn’t get her out of there because he wanted to show Father that he could keep a promise, even if Father couldn’t. He admits now, though, that he forgot her entirely. He got out of the car, but he didn’t go to Celia’s side, to open her door for her and offer his arm.
    All alone, he walked to the center of the great new doorway, and he stopped there, and he put his hands on his hips, and he looked all around at the galaxy of tiny conflagrations.
    He should have been angry, and he would get angry later. He would be like a dog with rabies later on. But, at that moment, he could only acknowledge that his father, after years of embarrassing enthusiasms and ornate irrelevancies, had produced an artistic masterpiece.
    Never before had there been such beauty in Midland City.
    •   •   •
    And then Father stepped out from behind a vertical timber, the very one which had mashed his left foot so long ago. He was only a yard or two from Felix, and he held an apple in his hand. Celia could see him through the windshield of the Keedsler. He called out, with our house as an echo chamber, “Let Helen of Troy come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”
    Celia stayed right where she was. She was petrified.
    And Felix, having allowed things to go this far, was fool enough to think that maybe she could get out of the car and accept the apple, even though there was no way she could have any idea what was going on.
    What did she know of Helen of Troy and apples? For that matter, what did Father know? He had the legend all garbled, as I now realize. Nobody ever gave Helen of Troy an apple—not as a prize, anyway.
    It was the goddess Aphrodite who was given a golden apple in the legend—as a prize for being the most beautiful of all the goddesses. A young prince, named Paris, a mortal, chose her over the other two finalists in the contest— Athena and Hera.
    So, as though it would have made the least bit of difference on that spring night in 1943, Father should have said, “Let Aphrodite come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”
    It would have been better still, of course, if he had had himself bound and gagged in the gun room on the night of the senior prom.
    As for Helen of Troy, and how she fitted into the legend, not that Celia Hildreth had ever heard of her: She was the most beautiful mortal woman on earth, and Aphrodite donated her to Paris in exchange for the apple.
    There was just one trouble with Helen. She was already married to the king of Sparta, so that Paris, a Trojan, had to kidnap her.
    Thus began the Trojan War.
    •   •   •
    So Celia got out of the car, all right, but she never went to get the apple. As Felix approached her, she tore off her corsage and she kicked