11/22/63: A Novel (77 page)

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.

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.”

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
!”

“That dudn’t matter to them. What matters to them is that he
died
here, and they’re afraid it’ll reflect badly on the school. On the town. And on them.”

I heard myself bleating, not a noble sound coming from a man in the prime of life, but I couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all!”

“They’d fire her if they could, just to get rid of the embarrassment. Since they can’t, they’re hoping she’ll quit before the kids have to look at what Clayton did to her face. Goddam smalltown bullshit hypocrisy at its best, my boy. When he was in his twenties, Fred Miller used to rip and roar in the Nuevo Laredo whorehouses twice a month. More, if he could get an advance on his
allowance from his daddy. And I have it on damn good authority that when Jessica Caltrop was plain Jessie Trapp from Sweetwater Ranch, she got real fat when she was sixteen and real thin again about nine months later. I’ve a mind to tell them that my memory’s even longer than their blue goddam noses, and I could embarrass them plenty if I wanted to. I wouldn’t even have to work at it that hard.”

“They can’t really blame Sadie for her ex-husband’s craziness . . . can they?”

“Grow up, George. Sometimes you act like you were born in a barn. Or some country where folks actually think straight. To them it’s about sex. To folks like Fred and Jessica it’s
always
about sex. They probably think Alfalfa and Spanky on
The Little Rascals
spend their spare time diddling Darla out behind the barn while Buckwheat cheers em on. And when something like this happens, it’s the woman’s fault. They wouldn’t come right out and say so, but in their hearts they believe men are beasts and women who can’t gentle em, well, be it on their own heads, son, be it on their own heads. I won’t let em get away with this.”

“You’ll have to,” I said. “If you don’t, the ruckus might get back to Sadie. And she’s fragile now. This might tip her over completely.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rummaged his pipe out of his breast pocket. “Yeah, I know that. I’m just blowin off steam. Ellie talked to the folks who run the Grange Hall just yesterday. They’re happy to let us put on the show there, and it seats fifty more people. Because of the balcony, you know.”

“Well there,” I said, relieved. “Cooler heads prevail.”

“Only one problem. They’re asking four hundred for both nights. If I come up with two hundred, can you come up with the other two? You won’t be getting it back from the receipts, you know. That’s all earmarked for Sadie’s medical work.”

I knew very well about the cost of Sadie’s medical work; I had already paid three hundred dollars to cover the part of her hospital stay that her shitepoke insurance wouldn’t stand good for. In spite of Ellerton’s
good offices, the other expenses would mount up rapidly. As for me, I wasn’t scraping financial bottom quite yet, but I could see it.

“George? What do you say?”

“Fifty-fifty,” I agreed.

“Then drink up your shitty beer. I want to get back to town.”

On our way out of that sad excuse for a drinking establishment, a poster propped in the window caught my eye. At the top:

Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.

“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. An
old
cocker spaniel.”

“Really?”

“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body. He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs like Case to keep him in trim.”

It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates art.

Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”