11/22/63: A Novel (73 page)

Two minutes later, Deke pulled his Ranch Wagon up behind my Chevy and got out. He was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a string tie. In his hands he was holding a casserole dish with a flower on the side. It had a glass lid, and looked to contain three or four quarts of chop suey.

“Deke, I can’t thank you en—”

“I don’t deserve thanks, I deserve a swift kick in the pants. The day I saw him, he was coming out of the Western Auto just as I was going in. It had to’ve been Clayton. It was a windy day. A gust blew his hair back and I saw those hollows at his temples for just a second. But the hair . . . long and not the same color . . . he was dressed in cowboy clothes . . . shit-fire.” He shook his head. “I’m getting old. If Sadie’s hurt, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Are you feeling all right? No chest pains, or anything like that?”

He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Are we going to stand here discussing my health, or are we going to try to get Sadie out of the trouble she’s in?”

“We’re going to do more than try. Go around the block to her house. While you’re doing that, I’ll cut through this backyard, then push through the hedge and into Sadie’s.” I was thinking about the Dunning house on Kossuth Street, of course, but even as I said it, I remembered that there
was
a hedge at the foot of Sadie’s tiny backyard. I’d seen it many times. “You knock and say something cheery. Loud enough for me to hear. By then I’ll be in the kitchen.”

“What if the back door’s locked?”

“She keeps a key under the step.”

“Okay.” Deke thought for a moment, frowning, then raised his head. “I’ll say ‘Avon calling, special casserole delivery.’ And raise
the dish so he can see me through the living room window if he looks. Will that do?”

“Yes. All I want you to do is distract him for a few seconds.”

“Don’t you shoot if there’s any chance you might hit Sadie. Tackle the bastard. You’ll do okay. The guy I saw was skinny as a rail.”

We looked at each other bleakly. Such a plan would work on
Gunsmoke
or
Maverick,
but this was real life. And in real life the good guys—and gals—sometimes get their asses kicked. Or killed.

The yard behind the house on Apple Blossom Way wasn’t quite the same as the one behind the Dunning place, but there were similarities. For one, there was a doghouse, although no sign reading YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE. Instead, painted in a child’s unsteady hand over the round door-shaped entrance, were the words BUTCHS HOWSE. And no trick-or-treating kiddies. Wrong season.

The hedge, however, looked exactly the same.

I pushed through it, barely noticing the scratches the stiff branches scrawled on my arms. I crossed Sadie’s backyard in a running crouch, and tried the door. Locked. I felt beneath the step, sure that the key would be gone because the past harmonized but the past was obdurate.

It was there. I fished it out, put it in the lock, and applied slow increasing pressure. There was a faint thump from inside the door when the latch sprang back. I stiffened, waiting for a yell of alarm. None came. There were lights on in the living room, but I heard no voices. Maybe Sadie was dead already and Clayton was gone.

God, please no.

Once I eased the door open, however, I heard him. He was talking in a loud and monotonous drone, sounding like Billy James Hargis on tranquilizers. He was telling her what a whore she was, and how she had ruined his life. Or maybe it was the girl who had tried to touch him he was talking about. To Johnny Clayton they were all the same: sex-hungry disease carriers. You had to lay down the law. And, of course, the broom.

I slipped off my shoes and put them on the linoleum. The light was on over the sink. I checked my shadow to make sure it wasn’t going to precede me into the doorway. I took my gun out of my sport coat pocket and started across the kitchen, meaning to stand beside the doorway to the living room until I heard
Avon calling!
Then I would go in a rush.

Only that isn’t what happened. When Deke called out, there was nothing cheery about it. That was a cry of shocked fury. And it wasn’t outside the front door; it was right in the house.

“Oh, my God! Sadie!”

After that, things happened very, very fast.

Clayton had forced the front door lock so it wouldn’t latch. Sadie didn’t notice, but Deke did. Instead of knocking, he pushed it open and stepped inside with the casserole dish in his hands. Clayton was still sitting on the hassock, and the gun was still pointed at Sadie, but he had put the knife down on the floor beside him. Deke said later he didn’t even know Clayton
had
a knife. I doubt if he really even noticed the gun. His attention was fixed on Sadie. The top of her blue dress was now a muddy maroon. Her arm and the side of the sofa where it dangled were both covered with blood. But worst of all was her face, which was turned toward him. Her left cheek hung in two flaps, like a torn curtain.

“Oh, my God! Sadie!”
The cry was spontaneous, nothing but pure shock.

Clayton turned, upper lip lifted in a snarl. He raised the gun. I saw this as I burst through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. And I saw Sadie piston out one foot, kicking the hassock. Clayton fired, but the bullet went into the ceiling. As he tried to get up, Deke threw the casserole dish. The cover lifted off. Noodles, hamburger, green peppers, and tomato sauce sprayed in a fan. The dish, still more than half-full, hit Clayton’s right arm. Chop suey poured out. The gun went flying.

I saw the blood. I saw Sadie’s ruined face. I saw Clayton crouched on the blood-spotted rug and raised my own gun.

“No!”
Sadie screamed.
“No, don’t, please don’t!”

It cleared my mind like a slap. If I killed him, I would become the subject of police scrutiny no matter how justified the killing might be. My George Amberson identity would fall apart, and any chance I had of stopping the assassination in November would be gone. And really, how justified
would
it be? The man was disarmed.

Or so I thought, because I didn’t see the knife, either. It was hidden by the overturned hassock. Even if it had been out in the open, I might have missed it.

I put the gun back in my pocket and hauled him to his feet.

“You can’t hit me!” Spit flew from his lips. His eyes fluttered like those of a man having a seizure. His urine let go; I heard it pattering to the carpet. “I’m a mental patient, I’m not responsible, I can’t be held responsible, I have a certificate, it’s in the glove compartment of my car, I’ll show it to y—”

The whine of his voice, the abject terror in his face now that he was disarmed, the way his dyed orange-blond hair hung around his face in clumps, even the smell of chop suey . . . all of these things enraged me. But mostly it was Sadie, cowering on the couch and drenched in blood. Her hair had come loose, and on the left side it hung in a clot beside her grievously wounded face. She would wear her scar in the same place Bobbi Jill wore the ghost of hers, of course she would, the past harmonizes, but Sadie’s wound looked oh so much worse.

I slapped him across the right side of his face hard enough to knock spittle flying from the left side of his mouth.
“You crazy fuck, that’s for the broom!”

I went back the other way, this time knocking the spit from the right side of his mouth and relishing his howl in the bitter, unhappy way that is reserved only for the worst things, the ones where the evil is too great to be taken back. Or ever forgiven.
“That’s for Sadie!”

I balled my fist. In some other world, Deke was yelling into the phone. And was he rubbing his chest, the way Turcotte had rubbed his? No. At least not yet. In that same other world Sadie was moaning.
“And this is for me!”

I drove my fist forward, and—I said I would tell the truth, every bit of it—when his nose splintered, his scream of pain was music to my ears. I let him go and he collapsed to the floor.

Then I turned to Sadie.

She tried to get off the couch, then fell back. She tried to hold her arms out to me, but she couldn’t do that, either. They dropped into the sodden mess of her dress. Her eyes started to roll up and I was sure she was going to faint, but she held on. “You came,” she whispered. “Oh, Jake, you came for me. You both did.”

“Bee Tree Lane!” Deke shouted into the phone. “No, I don’t know the number, I can’t remember it, but you’ll see an old man with chop suey on his shoes standing outside and waving his arms! Hurry! She’s lost a lot of blood!”

“Sit still,” I said. “Don’t try to—”

Her eyes widened. She was looking over my shoulder. “Look out! Jake,
look out
!”

I turned, fumbling in my pocket for the gun. Deke also turned, holding the telephone receiver in both of his arthritis-knotted hands like a club. But although Clayton had picked up the knife he’d used to disfigure Sadie, his days of attacking anyone were over. Anyone but himself, that is.

It was another scene I’d played before, this one on Greenville Avenue, not long after I’d come to Texas. There was no Muddy
Waters blasting from the Desert Rose, but here was another badly hurt woman and another man bleeding from another broken nose, his shirt untucked and flapping almost to his knees. He was holding a knife instead of a gun, but otherwise it was just the same.

“No, Clayton!” I shouted. “Put it down!”

His eyes, visible through clumps of orange hair, were bulging as he stared at the dazed, half-fainting woman on the couch. “Is this what you want, Sadie?” he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll give you what you want!”

Grinning desperately, he raised the knife to his throat . . . and cut.

From the Dallas
Morning News,
April 11, 1963 (page 1):

RIFLEMAN TAKES SHOT AT WALKER
By Eddie Hughes

From the Dallas
Morning News,
April 12, 1963 (page 7):

MENTAL PATIENT SLASHES EX-WIFE, COMMITS SUICIDE
By Mack Dugas

I wasn’t able to see her until Saturday. I spent most of the intervening hours in the waiting room with a book I couldn’t seem to read. Which was all right, because I had plenty of company—most of the DCHS teachers dropped by to check on Sadie’s condition, as did almost a hundred students, those without licenses driven into Dallas by their parents. Many stayed to give blood to replace the pints
Sadie had used. Soon my briefcase was stuffed with get-well cards and notes of concern. There were enough flowers to make the nurses’ station look like a greenhouse.

I thought I’d gotten used to living in the past, but I was still shocked by Sadie’s room at Parkland when I was finally allowed inside. It was an overheated single not much bigger than a closet. There was no bathroom; an ugly commode that only a dwarf could have used comfortably squatted in the corner, with a semi-opaque plastic curtain to pull across (for semi-privacy). Instead of buttons to raise and lower the bed, there was a crank, its white paint worn off by many hands. Of course there were no monitors showing computer-generated vital signs, and no TV for the patient, either.