Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online Page B

off her high-heeled golden dancing shoes, bought, no doubt, like her white dress and maybe her underwear, at prodigious financial sacrifice. And fear and anger and stocking feet, and that magnificent face, made her as astonishing as anyone I have ever encountered in a legend from any culture.
    Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own.
    This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.
    •   •   •
    I reconstruct all the things that Celia said that night as Felix and I sit side by side here in Haiti, next to our swimming pool.
    She said, we both remember, that black people were kinder and knew more about life than white people did.She hated the rich. She said that rich people ought to be shot for living the way we did, with a war going on.
    And then, leaving her shoes and corsage behind her, she struck out on foot for home.
    •   •   •
    She only had about fourteen blocks to go. Felix went after her in the Keedsler, creeping along beside her, begging her to get in. But she ditched him by cutting through a block where the Keedsler couldn’t go. And he never found out what happened to her after that. They didn’t meet again until 1970, twenty-seven years later. She was then married to Dwayne Hoover, the Pontiac dealer, and Felix had just been fired as president of the National Broadcasting Company.
    He had come home to find his roots.

    9
    M Y DOUBLE MURDER went like this:
    In the spring of 1944, Felix was ordered to active duty in the United States Army. He had just finished up his second semester in the liberal arts at Ohio State. Because of his voice, he had become a very important man on the student radio station, and was also elected vice-president
of
the freshman class.
    He was sworn in at Columbus, but was allowed to spend one more night at home, and part of the next morning, which was Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.
    There were no tears, nor should there have been any, since the Army was going to use him as a radio announcer. But we could have not known that, so we did not cry because Father said that our ancestors had always been proud and happy to serve their country in time of war.
    Marco Maritimo, I remember, who by then, in partnership with his brother Gino, had become the biggest building contractor in town, had a son who was drafted at the very same time. And Marco and his wife brought theirson over to our house on the night before Mother’s Day, and the whole family cried like babies. They didn’t care who saw them do it.
    They were right to cry, too, as things turned out. Their son Julio would be killed in Germany.
    •   •   •
    At dawn on Mother’s Day, while Mother was still asleep, Father and Felix and I went out to the rifle range of the Midland County Rod and Gun Club, as we had done at least a hundred times before. It was a Sunday-morning ritual, this discharging of firearms. Although I was only twelve, I had fired rifles and pistols and shotguns of every kind. And there were plenty of other fathers and sons, blazing away and blazing away.
    Police Chief Francis X. Morissey was there, I remember, with Bucky, his son. Morissey was one of the bunch who had been goose-hunting with Father and John Fortune back in 1916, when old August Gunther disappeared. Only recently have I learned that it was Morissey who killed old Gunther. He accidentally discharged a ten-gauge shotgun about a foot from Gunther’s head.
    There was no head left.
    So Father and the rest, in order to