Monday, Monday: A Novel (4 page)

It chimed the quarter hour. She wondered if several hours had passed. The firing continued and seemed to grow more distant. Less consistent. A mere pattering of raindrops. Eventually, it stopped.

2

TRIAGE

Wyatt knew the shooting was over when the sirens grew suddenly louder and drowned out the sound of his own muttered whispers to the girl. Like children emerging from a game of hide-and-seek, people rose up from beneath ledges and stepped from behind trees silently, cautiously, as if unsure the game was over.

His glasses lay somewhere out in the grass. The weight of the girl in his arms kept him pinned where he was. His shirt, tied around her, secured her arm across her stomach. He was bare-chested, covered in her blood, burned by the sun and scalded by the concrete base of the flagpole at his back. In the grass before him the boy in the surfer shirt had stopped moving.

He waited. Setting the girl aside was out of the question. She had turned her face sideways; her cheek was against his throat. He saw the brush of her lashes when he lowered his eyes. He had cupped his hand around her breast to stanch the blood, and he could feel her heartbeat and the slow rise of her breathing. He had devoted so much effort to keeping her awake, and now he was reluctant to disrupt her peaceful sleep.

But she was bleeding to death.

“We need help!” he yelled, and again louder, “We need help!”

People approached like sleepwalkers, spilling cautiously out of buildings and ascending the steps from the lower part of the mall. “Over here!” a girl shouted when she saw Wyatt. “We need an ambulance over here!” A siren grew closer, the high-pitched scream separating from the endless scream of other sirens, and then abruptly fell silent. A man arrived for the girl, but he was alone and had no stretcher. He told Wyatt the stretchers were all in use and the ambulances filled. One of the drivers had been shot, he said. He searched the grass for Wyatt’s glasses and gave them to him. A fat girl came with a bottle of Pepsi. Someone brought a glass of water and patted it onto the wounded girl’s face. Shirtless and sticky with blood, Wyatt withdrew his stiffened arms from around the girl and helped the ambulance driver carry her down the steps and arrange her body into the back of the station wagon. She groaned, and tried to roll to her side, but did not wake. Students and a policeman loaded a dead man, shot in the chest, beside her. His arm flopped over her face, and Wyatt moved it away. He took a long look at the girl’s face, having not yet seen it clearly. It had the disturbing, colorless look of something unfinished—a painting in progress, the flesh colors left out, her skin transparent and pale under the smeared blood, the blue veins on her throat showing through. Her hair was shoulder-length, reddish-brown, soaked with sweat.

A student with a gaping shoulder wound and a janitor with a bloody towel tied around his hand got in the front with the driver. Wyatt fumbled around in the glove compartment and found a pen and scrap of paper and wrote the girl’s name: “Shelly Maddox.” He considered writing her blood type, but she had been uncertain, so he decided against it. “Which hospital?” he asked the driver.

“Brackenridge—we’re taking almost everyone to Brackenridge.”

“My cousin was shot in the leg and taken from here a while ago. Is that where he’d be?”

“There’s no way to know,” the driver said hurriedly. “I think a few people were taken to Seton and St. David’s. Get in if you want a ride.” But he was already pulling the door closed, and Wyatt urgently wanted to find Delia and be sure she was all right. They could search for Jack together.

He retrieved his shoes from the base of the steps and put them on. The dead man on the steps and the dead girl in the pedal pushers were both gone. Police and medical personnel brought bodies out of the tower, rolling the gurneys across the plaza and lifting them down the steps. Highway Patrol cars and more ambulances arrived. A Texas Ranger came running with a rifle over his shoulder.

“Did they get the shooter?” a girl asked him as he ran.

“They got him; he’s dead,” the Ranger answered.

Wyatt walked to the history building, his naked arms feeling empty without the weight of the girl. Her blood was smeared on his chest. A guy who had been in the history class with him two hours before pulled a shirt from a gym bag and tossed it to him, and he put it on and buttoned it as he walked.

Roaming the halls of the history building, he could not find Delia. From a phone in an empty office, he tried to call Elaine at her job in the women’s department at Sears, but the lines were tied up. In the restroom, he washed off as much of the girl’s blood as he could and drank from the faucet. The shirt he’d been given was small for him, and the blood had soaked through as if it were his blood. An underclassman came in, stared at him, and asked if he had been shot.

When he returned to the office to try the phone again, he found students and a professor gathered around, unable to get a connection, so he started back across the plaza in the blazing sunlight, heading toward the undergraduate library and the bank of phones in the lobby. Crossing the plaza, he had the feeling of being watched and kept looking up at the tower. He skirted the smear of blood on the pavement where Shelly Maddox had tried to drag herself to the hedge.

People had crowded into the service driveway outside the tower to see the sniper’s body brought out, some holding the deer rifles they had fired, and everyone oddly silent, as if part of some sweltering vigil. Wyatt made his way through the crowd and into the undergraduate library, where he found long lines waiting to use the phones. He was considering whether to leave, when cheering erupted outside and a girl flung open the door and shouted for everyone to come out and look at the sniper. People left their places in line to go out, and those who stayed behind tried to place their calls repeatedly, coins jangling in the useless phones.

He should go to Brackenridge, even without Delia, and look for Jack. Police had blocked off most of the streets, and his car was parked on the north edge of the campus. So he started on foot, jogging southward on the Drag in the draining heat, through the deafening swirl of sirens, past store windows punctured by bullets. Through the open doors of the co-op, he saw people clustered around a blaring radio at the register and heard a newscaster announcing the sniper’s name: Charles Whitman. In the window of a jewelry store the crazed light of bullet holes looked like shattered gems. A trail of blood snaked from the sidewalk to the carpet inside. An empty Studebaker idled at the curb, the driver’s door open, the radio announcing, “Nine people are currently known to be dead, and many more thought to be critically injured.”

He pushed himself to jog faster, breathing hard, passing others headed in the same direction. When he neared the hospital, police were putting up barricades to control the traffic. Ambulances had parked in the center of the street, their sirens blaring, and people in street clothes unloaded the wounded on stretchers and hauled them into the building.

Wyatt saw a reporter who was toting a heavy camera with
LIFE MAGAZINE
printed on its side, and followed him around to a back entrance, where a guard admitted the reporter and directed Wyatt to triage, assuming from the bloody shirt that he was wounded.

Passing the switchboard room, Wyatt heard fragments of urgent speech, the operators all talking at once as they tried to connect calls. He found his way to the emergency waiting area and encountered dozens of wounded on stretchers and gurneys, their legs drawn up, their arms sprawled out, their heads cocked weirdly sideways. The smell of blood was overpowering. A boy dry-heaved over a bucket. Nurses inserted catheters, and cinched tourniquets, and packed gauze into bullet wounds, calling for supplies over the din of voices. Their white shoes were soaked red. The nurse in charge directed Wyatt to the corridor of green tile at the center of triage, where he looked into the rooms for Jack. A girl he knew from a class lay bleeding on a gurney from which dangled bottles of intravenous fluids. In one room, emptied of beds, a priest stood over bodies laid out on the floor.

Finally Wyatt returned to the lobby and climbed the stairs, two at a time, to the surgery unit. A nurse stopped him from entering, and he pressed her for information until he saw Delia standing in front of a window among the throng of people waiting, the tower rising in the distance through the window behind her.

“I don’t know anything yet,” she told him as he came to her. “He was in surgery when I got here. They don’t have enough surgeons, so I don’t know if they’ve operated—they’re taking the most serious first.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you talk to Elaine?”

“Yes. She already knew what was going on; they were all watching it on TVs on the sales floor. I didn’t tell her you had gone out on the plaza. I didn’t know you had, at that point.”

“But she was staying at Sears? You’re certain?”

“I’m certain.”

“And you stayed in the office, with the professor?”

She shook her head. “I had to go where I could see.”

“Could see what?”

“What was going on.”

“You saw—”

“Everything on the plaza. From a window.”

“God, Delia. You saw—”

“Everything that happened on the plaza.” She flashed him a challenging look. “And I’m not sorry. It was better than having to guess. I did enough of that when he was in Vietnam.”

“I need to call his parents,” Wyatt said. “If I can find a phone that works.”

She sat down and looked at the floor and bobbed her foot. Her sandals were green, her toenails painted red.

“You’re sure you’re okay?” He sat down beside her. “I guess you know the guy who did this was killed.”

“Don’t tell me a thing about him. Not his name. Nothing.”

“How bad do you think Jack’s hurt?” Wyatt asked. “I couldn’t tell. My glasses came off.”

“I saw them come off.”

“You really saw—”

“Everything. Did the girl live?”

“I don’t know. She was alive in the ambulance, but I didn’t see her downstairs.”

A doctor in scrubs came out of the ICU and asked if there was anyone there for Jack Stone. Wyatt got up to talk to him with Delia, but she waved him back, so he sat and watched the two of them in conversation. The doctor looked illogically young; his mouth turned down at the corners as he spoke. Delia backed against the wall, a look of concern on her face, her hands pressed to her stomach. Behind Wyatt, a man slammed a phone into the cradle, shouting about the lines being tied up.

The doctor spoke with Delia only briefly before he left her, and then Wyatt went to her. “He’s all right,” she told him, but she didn’t look like she thought so. “The bullet went all the way through. They didn’t have to remove it. It didn’t hit the bone. They’re short of rooms, and we’re supposed to get him out of ICU and look for an empty bed on the third floor.”

They found Jack lying on a gurney in a curtained corner, his bandages forming a lump under the blanket. He muttered, trying to emerge from the stupor of ether, his face pasty and swollen. Delia kissed him and stroked his face. While she steadied the IV bottles, Wyatt figured out how to unlock the wheels of the gurney, and together they maneuvered it through ICU and into the hallway. Though several elevators arrived, they had to wait for one with room enough for the gurney.

On the third floor, nurses were moving patients out to make space for trauma victims, and by the time Wyatt secured a vacant room, Jack was waking up. He was subdued and didn’t say much as they helped him into the bed. Delia stayed with him while Wyatt went to look for a phone.

He found one in the cafeteria, but it was out of order. The place was chaotic, food and drinks set out for the taking. People wept and tried to console each other. They discussed what they knew of the sniper. “Who would raise such a boy?” they asked. The lab was out of blood, and people asked where they could donate. The blood bank down the street had too long a line, someone said, and none of the blood given now could be processed in time.

Wyatt helped himself to a sandwich and ate it on his way up the stairs to the fifth floor, where he found a phone and got a connection to Sears. But the store operator didn’t answer, and the phone just rang and rang. He tried to call his parents in San Antonio and couldn’t get through, but managed to reach Jack’s parents, who lived next door. Jack’s mother, his aunt Jenny, answered. “We’ve been watching the television,” she told him apprehensively. “We’ve been trying to call. Your parents are over here. Are you and Jack okay?”

He told her what had happened. “Delia’s with him now.” The connection had gone silent, and Wyatt thought he had lost it. But then his uncle’s voice came on the line, and Wyatt had to start over again.

“We’re on our way,” his uncle told him. “Here’s your mother.”

He reassured his mother that he was all right, and then returned to Jack’s room and found him sitting up in the bed, a wild, watery look in his eyes. He half-expected him to make a joke about coming home from Vietnam to get shot, but in a glance saw how stupid that thought had been.

“Can I bring you a Coke?” he asked him.

Jack only looked at him.

Delia followed him out to the hall. “His parents are on their way,” he told her.

He was still talking with Delia when Elaine came hurrying down the hall toward them, her dark hair streaming. Seeing her in the same dress she had worn to work that morning, Wyatt was struck by the fact that it was only hours since he had dropped her off in front of Sears.

She didn’t say much, but was grave and serious and held him tightly. The three of them stood talking quietly, and then Delia went in to sit with Jack, while Wyatt and Elaine sat against the wall outside the door, Elaine’s long legs, tanned from the summer, stretched out in front of her. Wyatt tried to talk about what had happened but couldn’t remember it all correctly. Only after he finished did he realize how much he had left out. How could he put into words what it was like to hold someone who was bleeding to death, and all but breathe for her? He was still sitting in the hallway with his arm around Elaine when the elevator door slid open and an orderly pushed a gurney out, and he recognized the girl on the gurney. She was motionless and covered in blankets, but her eyes were open.