Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

again: “I have a screw loose somewhere, I have a screw loose somewhere, I have a screw loose somewhere.”
    •   •   •
    Celia Hildreth came by the cage. I hadn’t seen her for a year, since the awful night of the senior prom, but I had no trouble recognizing her. She was still the most beautiful woman in town. I can’t imagine that the police had seen fit to invite her. It was her escort, surely, who had been invited. She was on the arm of Dwayne Hoover, who was then some sort of civilian inspector for the Army Air Corps, I think.
    Something had kept him out of uniform. I knew who he was because he was good with automobiles, and Father had hired him from time to time to do some work on the Keedsler. Dwayne would eventually marry Celia and become the most successful automobile dealer in the area.
    Celia would commit suicide by eating Drâno, a drain-clearing compound of lye and zinc chips, in 1970, twelve years ago now. She killed herself in the most horrible way I can think of—a few months before the dedication of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts.
    Celia knew the arts center was going to open, and the newspaper and the radio station and the politicians and soon all said what a difference it was going to make in the quality of life in Midland City. But there was the can of Drāno, with all its dire warnings, and she just couldn’t wait around anymore.
    I have seen unhappiness in my time.

    13
    N OW THAT I have known Haiti, with its voodooism, with its curses and charms and zombies and good and bad spirits which can inhabit anybody or anything, and so on, I wonder if it mattered much that it was I who was in the cage in the basement of the old courthouse so long ago. A curiously carved bone or stick, or a dried mud doll with straw hair would have served as well as I did, there on the bench, as long as the community believed, as Midland City believed of me, that it was a package of evil magic.
    Everybody could feel safe for a while. Bad luck was caged. There was bad luck, cringing on the bench in there.
    See for yourself.
    •   •   •
    At midnight, all the civilians were shooed out of the basement. “That’s it, folks,” said the police, and “Show’s over, folks,” and so on. They were frank to call me a show. I was regional theater.
    But I wasn’t let out of the cage. It would have beennice to take a bath, and to go to bed between clean sheets, and to sleep until I died.
    There was more to come. Six policemen were still in the basement with me—three in uniform and three in plain clothes, and all with pistols. I could name the manufacturers of the pistols, and their calibers. There wasn’t a pistol there that I couldn’t have taken apart and cleaned properly, and put together again. I knew where the drops of oil should go. If they had put their pistols in my hands, I could have made them this guarantee: The pistols would never jam.
    It can be a very frustrating thing if a pistol jams.
    The six remaining policemen were the producers of the Rudy Waltz Snow, and their poses in the basement indicated that we had reached an intermission, that there was more to come. They ignored me for the moment, as though a curtain had descended.
    They were electrified by a call from upstairs. “He’s here!” was the call, as a door upstairs opened and shut. They echoed that. “He’s here, he’s here.” They wouldn’t say who it was, but it was somebody somehow marvelous. Now I heard his footsteps on the stairs.
    I thought it might be an executioner. I thought it might be Police Chief Francis X. Morissey, that old family friend, who had yet to show himself. I thought it might be my father.
    It was George Metzger, the thirty-five-year-old widower of the woman I had shot. He was fifteen yearsyounger than I am now, a mere spring chicken—but, as children will, I saw him as an old man. He was bald on top. He was skinny, and his posture was bad, and he was dressed like almost no other