Monday, Monday: A Novel (7 page)

Shelly turned back to the guys and the sheep in Bolivia. She wondered if guys like that would have any interest in her now, with her arm and her breast as they were. She would look better with time. But how much better? The doctor had been vague about that.

She was still looking at the guys herding the sheep when the phone rang in the kitchen, and she found herself talking to an old boyfriend from junior high, who was calling from Texas Tech. “I just found out that you were one of the people that got shot,” he said. “My mom told me.”

“I’m okay,” she told him. She was tired of talking to people who couldn’t really understand. “What about you? How’s Tech?”

They talked awhile, but even before she hung up, she felt lonely. No one she knew had any idea what it was like to have a bullet through your breast and your arm, and she didn’t want to explain. Wyatt Calvert and Jack Stone were the only people who could ever understand what it was like out there on the plaza.

She got Wyatt’s number out of a drawer and stood looking at it, wondering what he would say if she called him. She wasn’t sure what his wife would feel about that. At last she dialed the operator and asked to make a person-to-person call to Wyatt Calvert in Austin. His phone rang and rang, and Shelly waited, wrapping the phone cord around the puffy fingers ballooning from the cast. Finally, a woman answered. “Hello?” She sounded distracted. Her voice was muffled by the hissing long-distance, and Shelly heard music and voices in the background. “I have a call for Wyatt Calvert from Shelly Maddox in Lockhart,” the operator said.

Shelly noticed a pause, and then the woman dropped her voice and whispered to someone, “It’s Shelly Maddox from Lockhart.”

Wyatt’s voice came on the line. “This is Wyatt.”

When the operator connected them, Wyatt said, “Hey, I’m glad you called. How are you? How’s your arm?”

“It’s all right. Is this a bad time? It sounds like you have people there.”

“It’s not a bad time at all; it’s just hard for me to hear. My wife’s having a party for some girls from her sorority, so it’s pretty loud. Are you feeling any better?”

“Much better.”

“And I guess you’re still in the cast?”

“For a couple more weeks,” Shelly told him. “Unless I chew my arm off first.”

The background chatter grew louder above “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. “What did you say?” Wyatt asked. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. They’re in the other room, but they’ve got the radio turned way up.”

“I have to wear the cast for a couple more weeks,” she said.

“Will you be coming back to school?”

“I plan to, but I don’t know when. The doctor told my mom I shouldn’t go back this year. I will if I can, but my dad doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Well, he’s the sheriff,” Wyatt said.

“Of Lockhart. Not of me.”

“But maybe you should take it easy and just rest up for a year.”

“In Lockhart? Maybe you’ve never been here.”

“I have. For barbecue.”

“Really? At Black’s, or Kreuz Market?”

“Both. Jack and I used to drive over from San Antonio sometimes on Saturdays. He liked Kreuz and I liked Black’s, so he’d drop me off at Black’s and eat at Kreuz and then pick me up and we’d go home.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Really well. Glad to be home.”

“I never got to meet his wife,” Shelly said. “Or yours. What’s your wife’s name?”

“Elaine.”

“Is she from Texas?”

“From Hartford, Connecticut.”

“How did she end up in Texas?”

“I’m afraid I’m responsible for that. She was in school in Vermont and came down here to visit a friend, and we met at a party. And later she transferred here for her last year—she was a year ahead of me. We’ve only been married a few months. How about you? How come you were in summer classes?”

“I wanted to hurry and finish so I could join the Peace Corps. Which is why I don’t like falling behind. I guess I shouldn’t complain, though. A lot of people lost a lot more than a few months.”

“It’s fine with me if you complain,” he said. “I’m happy to have a reason not to deal with the sorority sisters.”

Shelly looked at the clock over the stove to see how long she’d been talking. The call would be charged to her parents’ bill. It was almost five-thirty, and her parents would be home any minute for supper and to watch the
Dick Van Dyke Show
; the final episode was being re-aired tonight.

“How did you get interested in the Peace Corps?” Wyatt asked her.

“I heard a speech Kennedy made on the radio, and it sounded interesting. Like a good thing to do. Also … honestly, it sounded like a way to get out of Lockhart.”

“You don’t have to go to Borneo to get out of Lockhart.”

“No, but the Peace Corps would be an adventure. Of course I have to get through school first, and learn a language, and that’s going to take time. If I don’t go back this year, I’ll probably stay here in Lockhart and learn Spanish. What about you? What are you studying?”

“I just started a graduate program in art.”

“Art? That’s fantastic.”

“Or a fool’s errand.” He laughed—a nice, soft laugh, she thought. “Kind of a sissy profession, according to my wife.”

“It’s not. What kind of art?”

“Painting. I’ve been using old-style tempera paint. Do you know what that is?”

“You’re forgetting I’m from Lockhart. I barely know about crayons.”

He laughed at that. “It’s made with egg yolk. The oldest paint there is. You can’t blend it like oil paints or watercolors. You have to put the layers on top of one another. Very thin layers. It takes a lot of patience.”

In the background, a woman was calling him. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s crazy here.”

“You should go back to your party,” she said.

“It’s not mine. But you’re probably right. Can I call you back later?”

She almost said yes. But it didn’t seem right. He was married. “I’ll look for you when I’m back at school,” she told him.

“All right. And meanwhile, you have my number if you need anything.”

“This is going to sound ridiculous, but thank you for saving me.”

“My pleasure.”

Afterward she stood thinking about the conversation, and tried to picture him brushing layers of thin paint one on top of another. She had forgotten to ask what he painted. Landscapes? People? Maybe abstracts.

Her arm, trapped in the cast, had started itching again. It was time for the daily changing of the bandage on her breast, so she went to her bedroom and worked her T-shirt off over the cast, looking at herself in the long mirror that hung on the closet door. The air from the window unit made a breeze at her back. She had lost weight and was thin, and her blue jeans were loose. Her breast—the one that was whole—was pale. The other was taped with gauze, which she carefully peeled away. The bullet had gone through sideways at a downward angle, tearing away part of the breast and then blasting through her arm. She stared at the bruises checkered with stitches that ran in several directions. The nipple had not been injured, but a section of flesh the size of her palm was missing, leaving a crater that puckered into the stitching.

Pulling her hair over her shoulder, she tried to cover her breast. If only her hair would grow faster. It had some red like her mother’s, and she tried to imagine it down to her waist and covering all the problems. Frustrated, she tugged at the ragged tips, but they reached only down to the nipple. The air played softly at her back. The plaster cast kept her elbow bent at a right angle. Sweat dampened her forehead, and her shoelaces trailed on the carpet.

6

TEMPERA

Shelly didn’t return to school that year. Her arm had not healed correctly and required a second surgery, and afterward the scars still tugged and pulled it in a way that made Shelly hate it. She couldn’t stretch it out properly, and the elbow didn’t bend right. She thought the whole mess of it was incredibly ugly, and she grew her hair longer so she wouldn’t have to look at her breast when she didn’t have any clothes on. But the new hairstyles were short, so she cut it again. She wore long sleeves, but when spring and summer arrived, she felt bound up, sweating in long sleeves. She was too tied to her parents and the house, and her only friends were the ones who hadn’t gone off to college, but had stayed to work at the local creamery or the poultry-processing plant or the peanut factory. A former boyfriend named Billy worked on the oil rigs sixteen miles down the road in Luling, and on weekends he took Shelly to the drive-in movie in San Marcos in his rusty pickup truck.

In the dead of night, when the trains rattled through Lockhart, Shelly lay awake in her little room and wished she were traveling in one of them. It wouldn’t matter where she was going, as long as the train was moving.

Sometimes during the weekdays she borrowed her mother’s station wagon and drove to the roller-skating rink in Fentress and skated around in circles. It was the closest she came to freedom.

The most useful thing she did was to teach herself Spanish and read books from the library about the countries she hoped to go to if the Peace Corps would accept her. She figured she could take things one step at a time: learn the language, study the countries, then go back to school. She would have to remain patient. She sat at the kitchen table, speaking Spanish to herself, saying sentences like “
¿No quieres pasear por unos minutos, Pedro?
” It came to her one day that she was asking a phantom Pedro to go on a walk with her, but she wasn’t asking any real people.

It was September of ’67, a year and a month after the shootings, when she finally returned to UT. Relieved though she was to move back into the dorm with college friends and resume a normal life, she soon realized how disruptive her memories of the shooting were going to be. They dogged her around campus, and she avoided the South Mall plaza. She intended to walk across it someday, but the tower was threatening and the clock still looked like an eye. Sometimes she tried to stare the eye into retreat or submission—as if she could make the tower uproot itself and go away by the sheer force of her contempt. She glared at it from classroom windows or from the distance of the street, and the scariest thing about it was how little it seemed to care. The bells continued to ring on schedule, hammering fear into her heart all day long, every quarter hour. The song “Monday, Monday” could stop her in her tracks wherever she was, and sometimes she would wake in the night with the lyrics soaring disturbingly through her dreams.

Always she kept her eyes open for Wyatt or Jack. But when six weeks passed and she hadn’t seen them, she decided they were no longer there. She was surprised at noon one day in the Student Union, on her way to the Commons for lunch, when she saw Wyatt walking in her direction in the crowded corridor near the Chuckwagon cafeteria. He didn’t appear to notice her. He looked slightly different now from how she remembered him. His hair and sideburns were longer and the frames of his glasses were bigger. He wore a blue work shirt and carried a navy surplus pea jacket and a green book bag. She paused to think about how to greet him, and someone jostled against her and caused her to drop her books.

What Wyatt saw was a girl in a yellow cardigan and a skirt the color of ball moss, scrabbling on the floor and shoving her rescued books into the bend of an arm that was strangely immobile. She had secured the books before he realized who she was.

“Shelly?”

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey there.” He stood grinning at her. “How long have you been back?”

“Just this semester—a couple of months.”

She was thinner than he remembered, and prettier than he had thought. “Were you headed to lunch?”

“Yes, at the Commons.”

“The Chuckwagon’s better,” he told her. “Come on. Come with me.”

It was filled with longhairs, who were smoking around the tables, and the din of clattering trays and utensils was deafening. Wyatt took trays from the stack and ushered Shelly into line in front of him.

Two bearded guys behind Wyatt joked with him. “Hey, Earp. You’re in art. You know Farrah Fawcett?”

“Everybody knows Farrah, Kyle.”

“Can you get me a date with her?”

“I couldn’t even get you a date without her.”

He introduced the guys to Shelly while she studied the food selection. They wrote for the student paper and were complaining to Wyatt about the increasing amount of censorship. “It’s the fucking administration,” one of them said.

Shelly chose a bowl of watery green beans and a square of orange Jell-O pebbled with miniature marshmallows.

“That’s all you’re planning to eat?” Wyatt asked her.

He ordered the chicken-fried steak platter, helped himself to a slice of chocolate pie, and insisted on paying for Shelly’s meal at the register. She claimed a table in the corner while he carried the trays one by one. “How do you usually do this?” he asked, setting her tray on the table.

“I’ve never been in here,” she said.

He sat across from her. “Not your kind of people?”

“No. The kind my father would arrest.”

He laughed.

“A bunch of hippies running down LBJ and the war,” she said, and took a bite of the Jell-O. “How is Jack? Is he around?”

“He’s around. About to get his Ph.D. in history, and also working as a night watchman at Frost Bank.”

“So he’s all right?’

“He is.”

“It feels strange talking to you.”

“It’s kind of a weird connection,” he agreed, starting on his chicken-fried steak while she ate her wobbly Jell-O. “Are you eating the green beans last?”

“Why?”

“It just seems like Jell-O would be dessert.”

“In my family, Jell-O’s a salad.”

He studied her. Her hair was styled in a loose flip the color of polished bronze, and she had an open, friendly look, with eyes that were an interesting shade of green and tilted slightly upward at the outer corners when she smiled. Her skin was light and smooth. A speck of orange Jell-O clung to the downy hairs on her upper lip. He wondered about her injured breast. He had never been sure if she was struck by one bullet or two.