Happy Birthday, Wanda June Read online

  What do you do for a living? file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (44 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:52 PM] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

  HAROLD

  My parents died in an automobile accident when I was sixteen years old. They left me a brewery and a baseball team--and other things. I live for a living. I've just come back from Kenya--in Africa. I've been hunting Mau Mau there. PENELOPE

  Some kind of animal? HAROLD

  The pelt is black. It's a kind of man. Blackout.

  SCENE SIX

  CURTAIN rises on empty living room. PAUL lets himself in with a key.

  PAUL

  Mom?

  (silence)

  Herb?

  (silence)

  Dr. Woodly?

  (advances into room uneasily) Hello?

  (sees the cake)

  A cake? Who's Wanda June? HAROLD enters quietly from the kitchen, holding a can of beer.

  PAUL

  Anybody home? HAROLD

  As a matter of fact-PAUL (nearly jumping out of his skin)

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  Sir?

  HAROLD

  As a matter of fact--I am home.

  PAUL

  (thinking HAROLD may be a burglar) Hello.

  HAROLD

  (simply)

  Hello.

  PAUL

  Are you-His voice fails him.

  HAROLD

  (hoping to be recognized) You were about to ask a question? PAUL

  Are you--do you-HAROLD Ask it!

  PAUL

  (blurting)

  Do you know who Wanda June is?

  HAROLD

  Life has denied me that thrill. PAUL

  Do you mind if I ask who you are? HAROLD

  Mind? (aside)

  God, yes, I mind.

  (to PAUL)

  I'm your father's friend. A man file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (46 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

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  claiming to be the family physician let me in a while ago.

  PAUL

  Dr. Woodly. HAROLD

  Dr. Woodly. I should make a little list. PAUL

  Is anybody besides you here now?

  HAROLD

  The doctor was called away on an emergency. I think it was birth. PAUL

  Where's Mom? HAROLD

  You don't know where your mother is? Does she put on a short skirt and go drinking all night? PAUL

  She went to the fight with Herb Shuttle, I guess. HAROLD

  You think you could find me a pencil and paper? PAUL

  I'll see. He rummages through a drawer.

  HAROLD

  And you've been roaming the streets while your mother is God-knows-where? PAUL

  I was going to a funny movie, but I changed my mind. If you're file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (47 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

  depressed, laughing doesn't help much.

  (gives HAROLD pencil and paper)

  When did you know my father?

  HAROLD

  Man and boy. PAUL

  Everybody says he was so brave. HAROLD

  Even this--"Herb Shuttle", you said? PAUL

  He worships Father. HAROLD

  (pleased) Ah! And what sort of man is this worshiper?

  PAUL

  He's a vacuum cleaner salesman. HAROLD

  (deflated) I see.

  (recovering)

  And he came into the apartment one day, to demonstrate his wares, and your mother, as it happened, was charmingly en deshabille-PAUL

  She met him at college.

  HAROLD

  (startled) College!

  PAUL

  They were in the same creative writing class.

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  HAROLD

  College? PAUL

  She has a master's degree in English literature.

  HAROLD

  What a pity! Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey into a fine Swiss watch. Everything stops. (pause) And the doctor? He worships your father, too?

  PAUL

  He insults him all the time. HAROLD

  (delighted) Excellent!

  PAUL

  What's good about that? HAROLD

  It makes life spicy. PAUL

  He doesn't do it in front of me, but he does it with Mother. (indicating HAROLD's portrait) You know what he called Father one time? HAROLD

  No.

  PAUL

  "Harold, the Patron Saint of Taxidermy."

  HAROLD

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  What does he do--of an athletic nature?

  PAUL

  Nothing. He plays a violin in a doctors' quartet.

  HAROLD

  Aha! He has a brilliant military record, I'm sure. PAUL

  He was a stretcher-bearer in the Korean War. (pause)

  Were you in a war with Father?

  HAROLD

  Big ones, little ones, teeny-weeny ones--just and otherwise. PAUL

  Tell me some true stories about Dad. HAROLD

  (unused to the word) "Dad?"

  (accepting it)

  Dad.

  (to himself)

  The boy wants tales of derring-do. Name a country.

  PAUL

  England? HAROLD

  (disgusted)

  Oh hell.

  PAUL

  Dad was never in England?

  HAROLD

  Behind a desk for a little while. file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (50 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

  (contemptuously)

  A desk! They had him planning air raids. A city can't flee like a coward or fight like a man, and the choice between fleeing and fighting was at the core of the life of Harold Ryan. There was only one thing he enjoyed more than watching someone make that choice, and that was making the choice himself. Ask about Spain, where he was the youngest soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He was a famous sniper. They called him "La Picadura"--"the sting."

  PAUL

  (echoing wonderingly) "The sting."

  HAROLD

  As in "Death, where is thy sting?" He killed at least fifty men, wounded hundreds more. PAUL

  (slightly dismayed at such murderousness) "The sting."

  HAROLD

  Ask about the time he and I were parachuted into Yugoslavia to join a guerrilla band--in the war against the Nazis. PAUL

  Tell me that. HAROLD

  I saw your father fight Major Siegfried von Konigswald, the Beast of Yugoslavia, hand to hand. file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (51 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

  PAUL

  (his excitement rising) Tell me that! Tell me that! HAROLD

  Hid by day--fought by night. At sunset one day, your father and I, peering through field glasses, saw a black Mercedes draw up to a village inn. It was escorted by two motorcyclists and an armored car. Out of the Mercedes stepped one of the most hateful men in all of history--the Beast of Yugoslavia. PAUL

  Wow. HAROLD

  We blacked our hands and faces. At midnight we crept out of the forest and into the village. The name of the village was Mhravitch. Remember that name!

  PAUL

  Mhravitch. HAROLD

  We came up behind a sentry, and your father
slit his throat before he could utter a sound. PAUL

  (involuntarily) Uck.

  HAROLD

  Don't care for cold steel? A knife is worse than a bullet?

  PAUL

  I don't know. HAROLD

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  The story gets hairier. Should I stop?

  PAUL

  Go on.

  HAROLD

  We caught another Kraut alone in a back lane. Your father choked him to death with a length of piano wire. Your father was quite a virtuoso with piano wire. That's nicer than a knife, isn't it--as long as you don't look at the face afterwards. The face turns a curious shade of avocado. I must ask the doctor why that is. At any rate, we stole into the back of the inn, and, with the permission of the management, we poisoned the wine of six Krauts who were carousing there.

  PAUL

  Where did you get the poison? HAROLD

  We carried cyanide capsules. We were supposed to swallow them in case we were captured. It was your father's opinion that the Krauts needed them more than we did at the time. PAUL

  And one of them was the Beast of Yugoslavia?

  HAROLD

  The Beast was upstairs, and he came running downstairs, for his men were making loud farewells and last wills and testaments--editorializing about the hospitality they had received. And your father said to file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (53 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM] HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE

  him in perfect German, which he had learned in the Spanish Civil War,

  "Major, something tragic seems to have happened to your bodyguard. I am Harold Ryan, of the United States of America. You, I believe, are the Beast of Yugoslavia." Blackout.

  SCENE SEVEN

  SILENCE. Pitch blackness. The sounds of a Nazi rally come up slowly: "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Spotlight comes up on MAJOR SIEGFRIED VON KONIGSWALD, and officer in the dreaded SS. He is in full ceremonial uniform. The sounds fade.

  VON KONIGSWALD

  (sadly, resignedly, remembering) Ja ja. Ja ja.

  (pause)

  I am Major Siegfried von Konigswald. They used to call me "The Beast of Yugoslavia," on account of all the people I had tortured and shot--and hanged. We'd bop 'em on the head. We'd hook 'em up to the electricity. We'd stick 'em with hypodermic syringes full of all kinds of stuff. One time we killed a guy with orange juice. There was a train wreck, and two of the freight cars were loaded with oranges, so we had oceans of orange juice. It was a joke--how much orange juice we had. And we were interrogating a guy one day, and he wouldn't talk, and the next thing I know--somebody's filling up this big syringe with orange juice.

  (pause)

  There was a guerrilla war going on. You couldn't tell who was a file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (54 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

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  guerrilla and who wasn't. Even if you got one, it was still a civilian you got. Telling Americans what a guerrilla war is like--that's coals to Newcastle. How do you like that for idiomatic English? "Coals to Newcastle." (laughs)

  That Harold Ryan--he says he spoke to me in perfect German? He talks German like my ass chews gum. I'm glad to hear the wonderful thing he said before he killed me. I sure didn't understand it the first time around. I figured he was a Lithuanian or something, which will give you an idea of how wrong you can be. All I knew was he was very proud about something, and he had a machine pistol, and it was aimed at me. The woods were full of all kinds of nuts who were proud of some damn thing or other, and they all had guns. They were always looking for revenge. You find a way to bottle revenge--that's the end of Schnapps und Coca-Cola. (pause)

  Harold Ryan said he killed maybe two hundred guys. I killed a hundred times that many, I bet. That's still peanuts, of course, compared to what that crazy Looseleaf did. Harold and me--we was doing it the hard way. I hope the record books will show that. There should be a little star or something by the names of the guys who did it the hard way.

  (pause)

  I'm up in Heaven now, like that little Wanda June kid. I wasn't hit by no ice-cream truck. Harold file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (55 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

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  Ryan killed me with his bare hands. He was good. My eyes popped out. My tongue stuck out like a red banana. I shit in my pants. It was a mess.

  (pause)

  When I got up on the day I died, I said, "What a beautiful day this is. What a beautiful part of the world." The whole planet was beautiful. Up here I meet guys from other planets.

  (laughs)

  We got some really crazy-looking guys up here. Their planets weren't anywhere near as nice as Earth. They had clouds all the time. They never saw a clear blue sky. They never saw snow. They never saw an ocean. They had some little lakes, but you couldn't go swimming in them. The lakes were acid. You go swimming, you dissolve. We got some guys up here who got shoved in them lakes. They dissolved.

  (pause)

  Harold Ryan stopped talking German to me there in Yugoslavia. He switched to English, so I finally got some kind of idea what he was so burned up about. He wanted revenge for the guy we killed with orange juice. I don't know how he ever found out about it. There was just three of us there when we did it--me and two regular military doctors. Somebody who cleaned up afterwards must have squealed. If I'd lived through the war, and they tried me for war crimes and all that, I'd have to tell the court, I guess, "I was only following file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ku...egut%20-%20Happy%20Birthday%20Wanda-June.htm (56 of 143) [10/16/2004 4:36:53 PM]

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  orders, as a good soldier should. Hitler told me to kill this guy with orange juice."

  Blackout.

  SCENE EIGHT

  DARKNESS. Lights come up on living room. HAROLD has just finished telling his true war story to PAUL.

  HAROLD

  Mhravitch. Remember that name. PAUL

  Mhravitch. HAROLD

  The name will live forever. It was there that Harold Ryan slew the Beast of Yugoslavia. Mhravitch. PAUL

  When I grow up, I'm going to go to Mhravitch. HAROLD

  It's rather a disappointment these days. It isn't there any more. PAUL

  Sir? HAROLD

  The Germans shot everybody who lived there, then leveled it, plowed it, planted turnips and cabbages in the fertile ground. They wished revenge for the slaying of the Beast of Yugoslavia. To their twisted way of thinking, your father had butchered an Eagle Scout. (abruptly)

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  PAUL

  I wanted to go out for football, but Mom was afraid I'd get hurt. HAROLD

  You're supposed to get hurt! PAUL

  Dr. Woodly says he's seen hundreds of children permanently injured by football. He says that when there's a war, everybody goes but football players. HAROLD

  Does it bother you to have your mother engaged to a man like that? PAUL

  They're not engaged. HAROLD

  He seems to think they are. He told me that were. PAUL

  Oh no, no, no, no, no. It can't be. How embarrassing. HAROLD

  (unexpectedly moved) You're a very good boy to respond that way. PAUL

  No, no, no, no, no.

  HAROLD

  I'd like to use the sanitary facilities, if I may. PAUL

  Go ahead. (as HAROLD exits)

  No, no, no, no.

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WANDA JUNE

  PENELOPE and SHUTTLE enter through front door. They are tremendously relieved to see PAUL.

  PAUL

  Thank God! SHUTTLE

  What a relief! PENELOPE

  (going to PAUL) My baby's safe!

  PAUL angrily avoids her touch.

  PENELOPE

  What's the matter now? SHUTTLE