Free Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut Page B

thirty people, I would say. There were plenty of cuspidors, but no toilet. Any caged person having to go to the toilet had to say so, and then to be escorted to a nearby lavatory.
    I was unshackled.
    The audience had yet to arrive, but the policemen who had brought me there, and who were now separated from me by wire, showed me what I was going to see a lot of—fingers hooked through the mesh. Person after person, bellying up to the wire for a good look at me, would, almost automatically, hook his or her fingers through the mesh.
    Look at the monkey.
    •   •   •
    Who were the people who came to look at the monkey? Many were simply friends or relatives of policemen, responding to oral invitations along these lines, no doubt: “ If you want to see the kid who shot that pregnant woman this afternoon, we’ve got him in the courthouse basement. I can get you in. Keep it under your hat, though. Don’t tell anyone else. We don’t want a mob to form.”
    But the honored visitors were substantial citizens, grave community leaders with a presumed need to know everything. There was something the policeman on the telephone thought it important for them to see—so they had better see it. Duty called. Some brought members of their families. I even remember a babe in arms.
    So far as I know, only two people told the inviters that displaying a boy in a cage was a terrible thing to do, and stunk of the Middle Ages and so on. They were, of course, Gino and Marco Marítimo, virtually our family’s only steadfast friends. And I know of this only because the brothers themselves told me about it. They had received the obscene invitation, offered as though nothing could be more civilized, soon after capping the hole in our roof where the cupola had been.
    •   •   •
    I have mentioned Alexander Woollcott, the writer and wit and broadcaster and so on, who was a guest at our house one time. He coined that wonderful epithet for writers, “ink-stained wretches.”
    He should have seen me in my cage.
    •   •   •
    I sat on the same bench for two hours. I said nothing, no matter what was said to me. Sometimes I sat bolt upright. Sometimes I bent over, with my head down and my inky hands over my inky ears or eyes. Toward the end, my bladder was full to bursting. I peed in my pants rather thanspeak. Why not? I was a geek. I was a wild man from Borneo.
    •   •   •
    I have since determined, from talking to old, old people, that I was the only Midland City criminal to have been put on public display since the days of public hangings on the courthouse lawn. My punishment was more than cruel and unusual. It was unique. But it made sense to just about everybody—with the exception of the Maritimo brothers, as I have said, and, surprisingly, George Metzger, the city editor of the
Bugle-Observer
, the husband of the woman I had killed that afternoon.
    Before George Metzger arrived, though, members of my audience behaved as though they were quite accustomed to taunting bad people. They may have done a lot of it in their dreams. They clearly felt entitled to respectful attention from me.
    So I heard a lot of things like “Hey you—it’s you I’m talking to. Yes you!” and “God damn it, you look me in the eye, you son of a bitch,” and so on.
    I was told about friends or relatives who had been hurt or killed in the war. Some of the casualties were victims of industrial accidents right there at home. The moral arithmetic was simple. Here all those soldiers and sailors and workers in war plants were risking their all to add more goodness to the world, whereas I had just subtracted some.
    What was my own opinion of myself? I thought I was a defective human being, and that I shouldn’t even be onthis planet anymore. Anybody who would fire a Springfield .30-06 over the rooftops of a city had to have a screw loose.
    If I had begun to reply to the people, I think that’s what I would have babbled over and over