Free Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Page A

in making one.
    “Oh, my Lord,” she said, “—you done closed a peephole. That can’t feel good. That can’t feel good.”
    •   •   •
    It felt to me then as though my peephole had just opened, and I wasn’t even used to all the sights and sounds yet, but my father had already chopped the top off our house, and everybody was saying I was a killer. This was a planet where everything happened much too fast.
    I could hardly catch my breath.
    But police headquarters seemed quiet enough. Not much could happen on a Sunday night.
    How common was it to have a known killer in a cell in Midland City? I had no way of knowing then, but I have since looked up the crime statistics for 1944. A killer was quite a novelty. There were only eight detected homicides of any sort. Three were drunken driving accidents. One was a sober driving accident. One was a fight in a blacknightclub. One was a fight in a white bar. One was the shooting of a brother-in-law mistaken for a burglar. And there was Eloise Metzger and me.
    Because of my age, I could not be prosecuted. Only Father could be prosecuted. Chief Morissey had explained that to me very early in the game—at a time when he thought there was all sorts of hope for both Father and me. So I felt safe, although embarrassed.
    Little did I know that Morissey had meanwhile concluded that Father and I were dangerous imbeciles, since we seemed determined to confess to far more than was necessary, to inflame the community by seeming almost proud of my having shot Mrs. Metzger. Mrs. Metzger and her survivors were nothing. Father and I, on the other hand, confessing so boisterously, appeared to think we were movies stars.
    We were no longer protected by Morissey, and a tentative, moody, slow-motion and incomplete lynching was about to begin. First, as I lay facedown on my cot, trying to blot out what my life had come to be, a bucket of ice-cold water was thrown all over me.
    Two policemen hoisted me to my feet and shackled my hands behind my back. They put leg-irons on my ankles, and they dragged me into an office on the same floor, in order to fingerprint me, they said.
    I was tall, but I was weak, and I weighed about as much as a box of kitchen matches. The one manly feat of strength of which I was capable was the mastery of a bucking gun. Instructed by my father and my brother on therange at the Rod and Gun Club, I had learned to knit together whatever strength and weight I had so as to absorb any shock a man-sized rifle or shotgun or pistol might wish to deal to me—to absorb it with amusement and satisfaction, and to get ready to fire again and again.
    I was not only fingerprinted. I was faceprinted, too. The police pushed my hand and then my face into a shallow pan of gummy black ink.
    I was straightened up, and one of the policemen commented that I was a proper-looking nigger now. Until that moment, I had been willing to believe that policemen were my best friends and everybody’s best friends.
    •   •   •
    I was about to be put on display to concerned members of the community—in a holding pen for suspected criminals awaiting trial, in the basement of the old County Courthouse across the street. It was ten at night. It was still Mother’s Day. The courthouse was empty. The upper floors would remain dark. Only the basement lights would be on.
    It was the feeling of the police that I should not look good, and that I bear some marks of their displeasure with what I had done. But they couldn’t beat me up, as they might have beaten up an adult offender, since that might evoke sympathy. So they had rolled my face in goo.
    All this was in clear violation of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States.
    •   •   •
    So I was put in this large cage in the basement of the courthouse. It was rectangular, and made of heavy-duty mesh fencing and vertical iron pipes. It was open to observers on all four sides. It contained wooden benches for about