11/22/63: A Novel (74 page)

A single glass bottle of something—maybe saline—hung from a metal stand. A tube went from it to the back of Sadie’s left hand, where it disappeared beneath a bulky bandage.

Not as bulky as the one wrapped around the left side of her head, though. A sheaf of her hair had been cut off on that side, giving her a lopsided punished look . . . and of course, she
had
been punished. The docs had left a tiny slit for her eye. It and the one on the unbandaged, undamaged side of her face fluttered open when she heard my footsteps, and although she was doped up, those eyes registered a momentary flash of terror that squeezed my heart.

Then, wearily, she turned her face to the wall.

“Sadie—honey, it’s me.”

“Hi, me,” she said, not turning back.

I touched her shoulder, which the gown left bare, and she twitched it away. “Please don’t look at me.”

“Sadie, it doesn’t matter.”

She turned back. Sad, morphine-loaded eyes looked at me, one peering out of a gauze peephole. An ugly yellowish-red stain was oozing through the bandages. Blood and some sort of ointment, I supposed.

“It matters,” she said. “This isn’t like what happened to Bobbi Jill.” She tried to smile. “You know how a baseball looks, all those red stitches? That’s what Sadie looks like now. They go up and
down and all around.”

“They’ll fade.”

“You don’t get it. He cut all the way through my cheek to the inside of my mouth.”

“But you’re alive. And I love you.”

“Say that when the bandages come off,” she said in her dull, doped-up voice. “I make the Bride of Frankenstein look like Liz Taylor.”

I took her hand. “I read something once—”

“I don’t think I’m quite ready for a literary discussion, Jake.”

She tried to turn away again, but I held onto her hand. “It was a Japanese proverb. ‘If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.’ I’ll love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.”

She began to cry, and I held her until she quieted. In fact, I thought she had gone to sleep when she said, “I know it’s my fault, I married him, but—”

“It’s not your fault, Sadie, you didn’t know.”

“I knew there was something not right about him. And still I went ahead. I think mostly because my mother and father wanted it so badly. They haven’t come yet, and I’m glad. Because I blame them, too. That’s awful, isn’t it?”

“While you’re serving up the blame, save a helping for me. I saw that goddam Plymouth he was driving at least twice dead on, and maybe a couple of other times out of the corner of my eye.”

“You don’t need to feel guilty on that score. The state police detective and the Texas Ranger who interviewed me said Johnny’s trunk was full of license plates. He probably stole them at motor courts, they said. And he had a lot of stickers, whatdoyoucallums—”

“Decals.” I was thinking of the one that had fooled me at the Candlewood that night. GO, SOONERS. I’d made the mistake of dismissing my repeated sightings of the white-over-red Plymouth as just another harmonic of the past. I should have known better. I
would
have
known better, if half my mind hadn’t been back in Dallas, with Lee Oswald and General Walker. And if blame mattered, there was a helping for Deke, too. After all, he had seen the man, had registered those deep dimples on the sides of his forehead.

Let it go,
I thought.
It’s happened. It can’t be undone.

Actually, it could.

“Jake, do the police know you aren’t . . . quite who you say you are?”

I brushed back the hair on the right side of her face, where it was still long. “I’m fine on that score.”

Deke and I had been interviewed by the same policemen who interviewed Sadie before the docs rolled her into the operating room. The state police detective had issued a tepid reprimand about men who had seen too many TV westerns. The Ranger seconded this, then shook our hands and said, “In your place, I would have done exactly the same thing.”

“Deke’s pretty much kept me out of it. He wants to make sure the schoolboard doesn’t get pissy about you coming back next year. It seems incredible to me that being cut up by a lunatic could lead to dismissal on grounds of moral turpitude, but Deke seems to think it’s best if—”

“I can’t go back. I can’t face the kids looking like I do now.”

“Sadie, if you knew how many of them have come here—”

“That’s sweet, it means a lot, and they’re the very ones I couldn’t face. Don’t you understand? I think I could deal with the ones who’d laugh and make jokes. In Georgia I taught with a woman who had a harelip, and I learned a lot from the way she handled teenage cruelty. It’s the other ones that would undo me. The well-meaning ones. The looks of sympathy . . . and the ones who can’t stand to look at all.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, then burst out: “Also, I’m
angry.
I know life is hard, I think
everyone
knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to
bite
?”

I took her in my arms. The unmarked side of her face was hot and throbbing. “I don’t know, honey.”

“Why are there no second chances?”

I held her. When her breathing became regular, I let her go and stood up quietly to leave. Without opening her eyes, she said, “You told me there was something you had to witness on Wednesday night. I don’t think it was Johnny Clayton cutting his own throat, was it?”

“No.”

“Did you miss it?”

I thought of lying, didn’t. “Yes.”

Now her eyes opened, but it was a struggle and they wouldn’t stay open for long. “Will
you
get a second chance?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

That wasn’t the truth. Because it would matter to John Kennedy’s wife and children; it would matter to his brothers; perhaps to Martin Luther King; almost certainly to the tens of thousands of young Americans who were now in high school and who would, if nothing changed the course of history, be invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.

She closed her eyes. I left the room.

There were no current DCHS students in the lobby when I got off the elevator, but there were a couple of alums. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill Allnut were sitting in hard plastic chairs with unread magazines in their laps. Mike jumped up and shook my hand. From Bobbi Jill I got a good strong hug.

“How bad is it?” she asked. “I mean”—she rubbed the tips of her fingers over her own fading scar—“can it be fixed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you talked to Dr. Ellerton?” Mike asked. Ellerton, reputedly the best plastic surgeon in central Texas, was the doc who had worked his magic on Bobbi Jill.

“He’s in the hospital this afternoon, doing rounds. Deke, Miz
Ellie, and I have an appointment with him in”—I checked my watch—“twenty minutes. Would you two care to sit in?”

“Please,” Bobbi Jill said. “I just
know
he can fix her. He’s a genius.”

“Come on, then. Let’s see what the genius can do.”

Mike must have read my face, because he squeezed my arm and said, “Maybe it’s not as bad as you think, Mr. A.”

It was worse.

Ellerton passed around the photographs—stark black-and-white glossies that reminded me of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Bobbi Jill gasped and turned away. Deke grunted softly, as if he’d been struck a blow. Miz Ellie shuffled through them stoically, but her face lost all color except for the two balls of rouge flaming on her cheeks.

In the first two, Sadie’s cheek hung in ragged flaps. That I had seen on Wednesday night and was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was the stroke-victim droop of her mouth and the slack wad of the flesh below her left eye. It gave her a clownish look that made me want to thump my head on the table of the small conference room the doctor had appropriated for our meeting. Or maybe—this would be better—to rush down to the morgue where Johnny Clayton lay so I could beat on him some more.

“When this young woman’s parents arrive this evening,” Ellerton said, “I will be tactful and hopeful, because parents deserve tact and hope.” He frowned. “Although one might have expected them sooner, given the gravity of Mrs. Clayton’s condi—”

“Miss
Dunhill,
” Ellie said with quiet savagery. “She was legally divorced from that monster.”

“Yes, quite, I stand corrected. At any rate, you are her friends, and I believe you deserve less tact and more truth.” He looked
dispassionately at one of the photographs, and tapped Sadie’s torn cheek with a short, clean fingernail. “This can be improved, but never put right. Not with the techniques now at my disposal. Perhaps a year from now, when the tissue has fully healed, I might be able to repair the worst of the dissymmetry.”

Tears began to run down Bobbi Jill’s cheeks. She took Mike’s hand.

“The permanent damage to her looks is unfortunate,” Ellerton said, “but there are other problems, as well. The facial nerve has been cut. She is going to have problems eating on the left side of her mouth. The droop in the eye you see in these photographs will be with her for the rest of her life, and her tear duct has been partially severed. Yet her sight may not be impaired. We’ll hope not.”

He sighed and spread his hands.

“Given the promise of wonderful stuff like microsurgery and nerve regeneration, we may be able to do more with cases like this in twenty or thirty years. For now, all I can say is I’ll do my best to repair all the damage that is repairable.”

Mike spoke up for the first time. His tone was bitter. “Too bad we don’t live in 1990, huh?”

It was a silent, dispirited little group that walked out of the hospital that afternoon. At the edge of the parking lot, Miz Ellie touched my sleeve. “I should have listened to you, George. I am so, so sorry.”

“I’m not sure it would have made any difference,” I said, “but if you want to make it up to me, ask Freddy Quinlan to give me a call. He’s the real estate guy who helped me when I first came to Jodie. I want to be close to Sadie this summer, and that means I need a place to rent.”

“You can stay with me,” Deke said. “I have plenty of room.”

I turned to him. “Are you sure?”

“You’d be doing me a favor.”

“I’ll be happy to pay—”

He waved it away. “You can kick in for groceries. That’ll be fine.”

He and Ellie had come in Deke’s Ranch Wagon. I watched them pull out, then trudged to my Chevrolet, which now seemed—probably unfairly—a bad-luck car. Never had I less wanted to go back to West Neely, where I would no doubt hear Lee taking out on Marina his frustrations over missing General Walker.

“Mr. A.?” It was Mike. Bobbi Jill stood a few paces back with her arms folded tightly beneath her breasts. She looked cold and unhappy.

“Yes, Mike.”

“Who’s going to pay Miss Dunhill’s hospital bills? And for all those surgeries he talked about? Does she have insurance?”

“Some.” But nowhere near enough, not for a thing like this. I thought of her parents, but the fact that they still hadn’t shown up yet was troubling. They
couldn’t
blame her for what Clayton had done . . . could they? I didn’t see how, but I had come from a world where women were, for the most part, treated as equals. 1963 never seemed more like a foreign country to me than it did at that moment.

“I’ll help as much as I can,” I said, but how much would that be? My cash reserves were deep enough to get me through another few months, but not enough to pay for half a dozen facial reconstruction procedures. I didn’t want to go back to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue, but I supposed I would if I had to. The Kentucky Derby was coming up in less than a month, and according to the bookie section of Al’s notes, the winner was going to be Chateaugay, a longshot. A thousand on the nose would net seven or eight grand, enough to take care of Sadie’s hospital stay and—at 1963 rates—at least some of the follow-up surgeries.

“I have an idea,” Mike said, then glanced over his shoulder. Bobbi Jill gave him an encouraging smile. “That is, me n Bobbi Jill do.”

“Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. You’re not a kid anymore, so don’t talk like one.”

“Right, right, sorry. If you can come back into the coffee shop for ten minutes or so, we’ll lay it on you.”

I went. We drank coffee. I listened to their idea. And agreed. Sometimes when the past harmonizes with itself, the wise man clears his throat and sings along.

There was a whopper of an argument in the apartment above me that evening. Baby June added her nickel’s worth, wailing her head off. I didn’t bother to eavesdrop; the yelling would be in Russian, for the most part, anyway. Then, around eight, an unaccustomed silence fell. I assumed they’d gone to bed two hours or so earlier than their usual time, and that was a relief.

I was thinking about going to bed myself when the de Mohrenschildts’ yacht of a Cadillac pulled up at the curb. Jeanne slid out; George
popped
out with his usual jack-in-the-box élan. He opened the rear door behind the driver’s seat and brought out a large stuffed rabbit with improbable purple fur. I gawked at this through the slit in the drapes for a moment before the penny dropped: tomorrow was Easter Sunday.

They headed for the outside stairs. She walked; George, in the lead, trotted. His pounding footfalls on the ramshackle steps shook the whole building.

I heard startled voices over my head, muffled but clearly questioning. Footfalls hurried across my ceiling, making the overhead light fixture in the living room rattle. Did the Oswalds think it was the Dallas police coming to make an arrest? Or maybe one of the FBI agents who had been keeping tabs on Lee while he and his family were living on Mercedes Street? I hoped the little bastard’s heart was in his throat, choking him.

There was a flurry of knocks on the door at the top of the stairs,
and de Mohrenschildt called jovially: “Open up, Lee! Open up, you heathen!”

The door opened. I donned my earphones but heard nothing. Then, just as I was deciding to try the mike in the Tupperware bowl, either Lee or Marina turned on the lamp with the bug in it. It was working again, at least for the time being.