Shayne’s Reviews > Deadeye Dick > Status Update

Emma dies; Rudy sues the folks who built the mantelpiece with the concrete from Oak Ridge.

After talking about epilogues, Rudy discovers the mantelpiece in the Avondale home is radioactive; it is replaced at the expense of the sons of the Maritimo brothers. He concludes his mother’s story ended when she married his father.

Dwayne probes Felix as to why he started sobbing during the funeral. Felix confesses he and Celia were “high school sweethearts,” at which point Dwayne pleads with him to come to the cemetery.

After returning to Midland City in his brand-new Rolls-Royce that he wrecked on the drive, Felix joins Rudy and Emma for Celia’s funeral. Rudy imagines human lives as a cells in an animal of galactic proportions before being called out about the play and Celia’s role in it.

Celia visits the drugstore asking for pills and claiming to be in love with Rudy. After being rejected on both counts, she sacks the store and leaves thousands of dollars worth of gold coins on the floor. Rudy calls Bunny to let him know about his mother; Bunny informs him of Felix’s termination from NBC. Rudy later calls Felix who is excited about the prospect of returning to Midland City.

Rudy recounts several events after his father’s death: his and his mother’s having to move to a small home built by the Maritimo brothers, Felix’s job at NBC, the construction of the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts, and Celia’s near-death on an airport runway. He describes all these events with a dissociated sense of alienation.

After searching the home for their snow-buried bodies, the Waltz men find their parents at the overcrowded hospital, Emma with frostbite and Otto with incurable pneumonia. Otto dies crying, “Mother!”

Rudy and Felix fly from New York back to Midland City with the Barrys, talking about various topics along the way.

On opening day of Katmandu, Rudy is questioned by the actor playing John Fortune and eventually expelled from the theater. He returns to Felix’s duplex where he and his wife later return and get into an argument about their relationship with each other and Rudy and the parents. Rudy overhears the whole conversation and later confesses to Genevieve that he is a murderer.

Rudy recounts his time working the graveyard shift at Schramm’s Drugstore, during which time he enters a rewrite of Katmandu into a Writer’s Digest contest and wins first prize. He informs Otto and Emma of his intentions to move to New York for six weeks during production.