11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  I took her into my arms. “You’re going to be a lot better than that.”

  “Jake?” Her voice was muffled with tears. “Would you do something for me before you go?”

  “What, honey?”

  “Take away that goddamned chop suey. The smell is making me sick.”

  10

  The nurse with the fullback shoulders and the watch pinned to her bosom was Rhonda McGinley, and on the eighteenth of April she insisted on pushing Sadie’s wheelchair not only to the elevator but all the way out to the curb, where Deke waited with the passenger door of his station wagon open.

  “Don’t let me see you back here, sugar-pie,” Nurse McGinley said after we’d helped Sadie into the car.

  Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was—not to put too fine a point on it—stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain medication.

  McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few months.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”

  Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said, “Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”

  I met Deke’s eyes. Only for a second, but enough for me to see we were thinking the same thing: Long road ahead. Long road.

  11

  I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road. At least for public consumption. In truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane. I was afraid of what we might find when we first helped her inside, and I think that Sadie was, too, stoned or not. But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the Home Ec Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire day before Sadie’s return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of Clayton’s filth off the walls. The living room rug had been taken up and replaced. The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories. Her mutilated clothing had been whisked away and replaced with new stuff.

  Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not sure she even noticed them.

  12

  I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her little garden (which would sicken but not quite die in another hot central Texas summer), and reading Bleak House to her. We also became involved in several of the afternoon soaps: The Secret Storm, Young Doctor Malone, From These Roots, and our personal favorite, The Edge of Night.

  She changed the parting in her hair from the center to the right, cultivating a Veronica Lake style that would cover the worst of the scarring when the bandages eventually came off. Not that they would for a long time; the first of her reconstructive surgeries—a team effort involving four doctors—was scheduled for August fifth. Ellerton said there would be at least four more.

  I would drive back to Deke’s after Sadie and I had our supper (which she rarely did more than pick at), because small towns are full of big eyes attached to gabby mouths. It was best that those big eyes should see my car in Deke’s driveway after the sun went down. Once it was dark, I walked the two miles back to Sadie’s, where I slept on the new hide-a-bed sofa until five in the morning. It was almost always broken rest, because nights when Sadie didn’t awaken me, screaming and thrashing her way out of bad dreams, were rare. In the daytime, Johnny Clayton was dead. After dark he still stalked her with his gun and knife.

  I would go to her and soothe her as best I could. Sometimes she would trudge out to the living room with me and smoke a cigarette before shuffling back to bed, always pressing her hair down protectively over the bad side of her face. She would not let me change the bandages. That she did herself, in the bathroom, with the door closed.

  After one especially terrible nightmare, I came in to find her standing naked by her bed and sobbing. She had become shockingly thin. Her nightgown was puddled at her feet. She heard me and turned around, one arm across her breasts and the other hand over her crotch. Her hair swung back to her right shoulder, where it actually belonged, and I saw the swollen scars, the heavy stitching, the fallen, rumpled flesh over her cheekbone.

  “Get out!” she screamed. “Don’t look at me like this, why can’t you get out?”

  “Sadie, what is it? Why did you take off your nightgown? What’s wrong?”

  “I wet my bed, okay? I have to change it, so please get out and let me put some clothes on!”

  I went to the foot of the bed, grabbed the quilt that was folded there, and wrapped it around her. When I turned one end up in a kind of collar that hid her cheek, she calmed.

  “Go in the living room and be careful you don’t trip on that thing. Have a smoke. I’ll change the bed.”

  “No, Jake, it’s dirty.”

  I took her by the shoulders. “That’s what Clayton would say, and he’s dead. A little piss is all it is.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. But before you go …”

  I turned down the makeshift collar. She flinched and closed her eyes, but stood still. Only bearing it, but I still thought it was progress. I kissed the hanging flesh that had been her cheek and then turned the quilt up again to hide it.

  “How can you?” she asked without opening her eyes. “It’s awful.”

  “Nah. It’s just another part of the you I love, Sadie. Now go in the other room while I change these sheets.”

  When it was done, I offered to get into bed with her until she fell asleep. She flinched as she had when I’d turned down the quilt and shook her head. “I can’t, Jake. I’m sorry.”

  Little by slowly, I told myself as I plodded across town to Deke’s in the first gray light of morning. Little by slowly.

  13

  On April twenty-fourth I told Deke I had something I needed to do in Dallas and asked him if he’d stay with Sadie until I got back around nine. He agreed willingly enough, and at five that afternoon I was sitting across from the Greyhound terminal on South Polk Street, near the intersection of Highway 77 and the still-new, fourlane I-20. I was reading (or pretending to read) the latest James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me.

  At half past the hour, a station wagon pulled into the parking lot next to the terminal. Ruth Paine was driving. Lee got out, went around to the rear, and opened the doorgate. Marina, with June in her arms, emerged from the backseat. Ruth Paine stayed behind the wheel.

  Lee had only two items of luggage: an olive-green duffel bag and a quilted gun case, the kind with handles. He carried them to an idling Scenicruiser. The driver took the suitcase and the rifle and stowed them in the open luggage hold after a cursory glance at Lee’s ticket.

  Lee went to the door of the bus, then turned and embraced his wife, kissing her on both cheeks and then the mouth. He took the baby and nuzzled beneath her chin. June laughed. Lee laughed with her, but I saw tears in his eyes. He kissed June on the forehead, gave her a hug, then returned her to Marina and ran up the steps of the bus without looking back.

  Marina walked to the station wagon, where Ruth Paine was now standing. June held her arms out to the older woman, who took her with a smile. They stood there for awhile, watching passengers board, then drove off.

  I stayed where I was until the bus pulled out at 6:00 P.M., right on time. The sun, going down bloody in the west, flashed across the destination window, momentarily obscuring what was printed there. Then I could read it again, three words that meant Lee Harvey Oswald was out of my life, at least for awhile:

  NEW ORLEANS EXPRESS

  I watched it climb the entrance ramp to I-20 East, then walked the two blocks to where I’d parked my car and drove back to Jodie.

  14

  Hunch-think: that again.

  I paid the May rent on the West Neely Street apartment even though I needed to
start watching my dollars and had no concrete reason to do so. All I had was an unformed but strong feeling that I should keep a base of operations in Dallas.

  Two days before the Kentucky Derby ran, I drove to Greenville Avenue, fully intending to put down five hundred dollars on Chateaugay to place. That, I reasoned, would be less memorable than betting on the nag to win. I parked four blocks down from Faith Financial and locked my car, a necessary precaution in that part of town even at eleven in the morning. I walked briskly at first, but then—once more for no concrete reason—my steps began to lag.

  Half a block from the betting parlor masquerading as a streetfront loan operation, I came to a full stop. Once again I could see the bookie—sans eyeshade this forenoon—leaning in the doorway of his establishment and smoking a cigarette. Standing there in a strong flood of sunlight, bracketed by the sharp shadows of the doorway, he looked like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting. There was no chance he saw me that day, because he was staring at a car parked across the street. It was a cream-colored Lincoln with a green license plate. Above the numbers were the words SUNSHINE STATE. Which did not mean it was a harmonic. Which certainly didn’t mean it belonged to Eduardo Gutierrez of Tampa, the bookie who used to smile and say Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland. The one who had almost certainly had my beachfront house burned down.

  All the same, I turned and walked back to my car with the five hundred I’d intended to bet still in my pocket.

  Hunch-think.

  CHAPTER 24

  1

  Given history’s penchant for repeating itself, at least around me, you won’t be surprised to find out that Mike Coslaw’s plan for paying Sadie’s bills was a return engagement of the Jodie Jamboree. He said he thought he could get the original participants to reprise their roles, as long as we scheduled it for midsummer, and he was as good as his word—almost all of them came on board. Ellie even agreed to encore her sturdy performances of “Camptown Races” and “Clinch Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo, although she claimed her fingers were still sore from the previous go-round. We picked the twelfth and thirteenth of July, but for awhile the issue was in some doubt.

  The first obstacle to be surmounted was Sadie herself, who was horrified at the idea. She called it “taking charity.”

  “That sounds like something you might have learned at your mother’s knee,” I said.

  She glared at me for a moment, then looked down and began stroking her hair against the bad side of her face. “What if it was? Does that make it wrong?”

  “Jeez, let me think. You’re talking about a life-lesson from the woman whose biggest concern after finding out her daughter had been mutilated and almost killed was her church affiliation.”

  “It’s demeaning,” she said in a low voice. “Throwing yourself on the mercy of the town is demeaning.”

  “You didn’t feel that way when it was Bobbi Jill.”

  “You’re hounding me, Jake. Please don’t do that.”

  I sat down beside her and took her hand. She pulled it away. I took it again. This time she let me hold it.

  “I know this isn’t easy for you, honey. But there’s a time to take as well as a time to give. I don’t know if that one’s in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but it’s true, just the same. Your health insurance is a joke. Dr. Ellerton’s giving us a break on his fee—”

  “I never asked—”

  “Hush, Sadie. Please. It’s called pro bono work and he wants to do it. But there are other surgeons involved here. The bills for your surgeries are going to be enormous, and my resources will only stretch so far.”

  “I almost wish he’d killed me,” she whispered.

  “Don’t you ever say that.” She shrank from the anger in my voice, and the tears started. She could only cry from one eye now. “Hon, people want to do this for you. Let them. I know your mother lives in your head—almost everyone’s mother does, I guess—but you can’t let her have her way on this one.”

  “Those doctors can’t fix it, anyway. It’ll never be the way it was. Ellerton told me so.”

  “They can fix a lot of it.” Which sounded marginally better than they can fix some of it.

  She sighed. “You’re braver than I am, Jake.”

  “You’re plenty brave. Will you do this?”

  “The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show. My mother would shit a brick if she found out.”

  “All the more reason, I’d say. We’ll send her some stills.”

  That made her smile, but only for a moment. She lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled slightly, then began to smooth the hair against the side of her face again. “Would I have to be there? Let them see what their dollars are buying? Sort of like an American Berkshire pig on the auction block?”

  “Of course not. Although I doubt if anyone would faint. Most folks around here have seen worse.” As members of the faculty in a farming and ranching area, we had seen worse ourselves—Britta Carlson, for instance, who had been badly burned in a housefire, or Duffy Hendrickson, who had a left hand that looked like a hoof after a chainfall holding a truck motor slipped in his father’s garage.

  “I’m not ready for that kind of inspection. I don’t think I ever will be.”

  I hoped with all my heart that didn’t turn out to be true. The crazy people of the world—the Johnny Claytons, the Lee Harvey Oswalds—shouldn’t get to win. If God won’t make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least. But this wasn’t the time to sermonize on the subject.

  “Would it help if I said Dr. Ellerton himself has agreed to take part in the show?”

  She momentarily forgot about her hair and stared at me. “What?”

  “He wants to be the back end of Bertha.” Bertha the Dancing Pony was a canvas creation of the kids in the Art Department. She wandered around during several of the skits, but her big number was a tail-waggling jig to Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again.” (The tail was controlled with a string pulled by the rear half of Team Bertha.) Country folk, not generally noted for their sophisticated senses of humor, found her hilarious.

  Sadie began to laugh. I could see it hurt her, but she couldn’t help it. She fell back against the couch, one palm pressed to the center of her forehead as if to keep her brains from exploding. “All right!” she said when she could finally talk again. “I’ll let you do it just to see that.” Then she glared at me. “But I’ll see it during the dress rehearsal. You’re not getting me up onstage where everybody can stare at me and whisper ‘Oh look at that poor girl.’ Have we got that straight?”

  “We absolutely do,” I said, and kissed her. That was one hurdle. The next would be convincing Dallas’s premier plastic surgeon to come to Jodie in the July heat and prance around beneath the back half of a thirty-pound canvas costume. Because I hadn’t actually asked him.

  That turned out to be no problem; Ellerton lit up like a kid when I put the idea to him. “I even have practical experience,” he said. “My wife’s been telling me that I’m a perfect horse’s ass for years now.”

  2

  The last hurdle turned out to be the venue. In mid-June, right around the time Lee was getting kicked off a dock in New Orleans for trying to hand out his pro-Castro leaflets to the sailors of the USS Wasp, Deke came by Sadie’s house. He kissed her on her good cheek (she averted the bad side of her face when anyone came to visit) and asked me if I’d like to step out for a cold beer.

  “Go on,” Sadie said. “I’ll be fine.”

  Deke drove us to a dubiously air-conditioned tinroof called the Prairie Chicken, nine miles west of town. It was midafternoon, the place empty except for two solitary drinkers at the bar, the jukebox dark. Deke handed me a dollar. “I’ll buy, you fetch. How’s that for a deal?”

  I went to the bar and collared two Buckhorns.

  “If I’d known you were going to bring back Buckies, I would have gone myself,” Deke said. “Man, this stuff is horse-piss.”

>   “I happen to like it,” I said. “Anyway, I thought you did your drinking at home. ‘The asshole quotient in the local bars is a little too high for my taste,’ I believe you said.”

  “I don’t want a damn beer, anyway.” Now that we were away from Sadie, I could see that he was steaming mad. “What I want to do is punch Fred Miller in the face and kick Jessica Caltrop’s narra and no doubt lace-trimmed ass.”

  I knew the names and faces, although, having been just a humble wage-slave, I had never actually conversed with either of them. Miller and Caltrop were two-thirds of the Denholm County Schoolboard.

  “Don’t stop there,” I said. “As long as you’re in a bloodthirsty mood, tell me what you want to do to Dwight Rawson. Isn’t he the other one?”

  “It’s Rawlings,” Deke said moodily, “and I’ll give him a pass. He voted on our side.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “They won’t let us use the school gym for the Jamboree. Even though it’s the middle of summer we’re talking about and it’s just standing there vacant.”

  “Are you kidding?” Sadie had told me that certain elements of the town might take against her, and I hadn’t believed her. Silly old Jake Epping, still clinging to his science-fiction fantasies of the twenty-first century.

  “Son, I only wish I were. They cited fire-insurance concerns. I pointed out that they didn’t have any insurance concerns when it was a benefit for a student who’d been in an accident, and the Caltrop woman—dried-up old kitty that she is—said, ‘Oh yes, Deke, but that was during the school year.’

  “They’ve got concerns, all right, mostly about how a member of the faculty got her face cut open by the crazy man she was married to. They’re afraid it’ll get mentioned in the paper or, God forbid, on one of the Dallas TV stations.”

  “How can it matter?” I asked. “He … Christ, Deke, he wasn’t even from here! He was from Georgia!”