Free Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

ladder, against the sky, had conveyed to me, and I had been glad to believe it: “Paid in full, by God—paid in full!”
    But they took us down to the hoosegow.
    Mother went to bed, and didn’t get out of it for a week.
    Marco and Gino Maritimo, who had dozens of workmen at their command, came over to put a tar-paper cap on the big hole in the roof personally, before the sun went down. Nobody had called them. Everybody in townhad heard about the kinds of trouble we were in by then. Most of the sympathy, naturally enough, was going to the husband and two children of the woman I had shot.
    And Eloise Metzger had been pregnant—which, as I have already said, made me a double murderer.
    You know what it says in the Bible? “Thou shalt not kill.”
    •   •   •
    Chief Morissey gave up on rescuing Father and me, since Father seemed to find it so rewarding to damn and doom himself Throwing up his hands and departing, he left us in the hands of a mild old lieutenant and a stenographer. Father told me to describe exactly how I had fired the rifle, and I answered simply and truthfully. The stenographer wrote it down.
    And then Father had this to say, for his own part, which was also duly recorded: “This is only a boy here. His mother and I are morally and legally responsible for his actions, except when it comes to the handling of firearms. I alone am responsible for whatever he does with guns, and I alone am responsible for the terrible accident which happened this afternoon. He has been a good boy up to now, and will be a sturdy and decent man in due time. I have no words of reproach to utter to him now. I gave him a gun and ammunition when he was much too young to have them without any supervision.” He had by then found out I was only twelve, and not sixteen or so. “Leave him out of this. Leave my poor wife out of this. I, Otto Waltz, beingof sound mind, do now declare under oath and in fear for my soul, that I alone am to blame.”
    •   •   •
    And I think he was surprised, again, when we weren’t allowed to go home after that. What more could anybody want after a confession that orotund?
    But he was led off to cells in the basement of police headquarters, and I was taken to a much smaller cell-block on the top floor, the third floor, which was reserved for women and for children under the age of sixteen. There was only one other prisoner up there, a black woman from out of town, who had been taken off a Greyhound bus after beating up the white driver. She was from the Deep South, and she was the one who introduced me to the idea of birth’s being an opening peephole, and of death’s being when that peephole closes again.
    The idea must have been ordinary, back wherever it was she came from. She said she was sorry she had beat up the bus driver, who had spoken to her insultingly because of her race. “I didn’t ask my peephole to open. It just open one day, and I hear the people saying, ‘That’s a black one there. Unlucky to be black.’ And that poor driver they took off to the hospital, his peephole done open, and he hear the people saying, ‘That’s a white one there. Lucky to be white.’ ”
    A while later she sad, “My peephole open, I see this woman, I say, ‘Who you?’ She say, ‘I’s you mama.’ I say, ‘How we doing, Mama?’ She say, ‘Ain’t doing good. Ain’tgot no money, ain’t got no work, ain’t got no house, your daddy on the chain gang, and I already got seven other children whose peepholes opened up on them.’ And I said, ‘Mama, if you know how to close up my peephole again, you just go ahead and do it.’ And she say, ‘Don’t you tempt me like that, child. That’s the devil talking through you.’ ”
    She asked me what a white boy in nice clothes was doing in jail. So I told her that I had had an accident while cleaning a rifle. It had gone off somehow, and killed a woman far away. I was beginning to work up a defense, even if Father didn’t believe