7
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.
8
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.
PART 5
11/22/63
CHAPTER 23
1
From the Dallas Morning News, April 11, 1963 (page 1):
RIFLEMAN TAKES SHOT AT WALKER
By Eddie Hughes
A gunman with a high-powered rifle tried to kill former Maj. General Edwin A. Walker at his home Wednesday night, police said, and missed the controversial crusader by less than an inch.
Walker was working on his income taxes at 9:00 PM when the bullet crashed through a rear window and slammed into a wall next to him.
Police said a slight movement by Walker apparently saved his life.
"Somebody had a perfect bead on him," said Detective Ira Van Cleave. "Whoever it was certainly wanted to kill him."
/> Walker dug out several fragments of the shell's jacket from his right sleeve and was still shaking glass and slivers of the bullet out of his hair when reporters arrived.
Walker said he returned to his Dallas home Monday after the first stop of a lecture-tour called "Operation Midnight Ride." He also told reporters . . .
From the Dallas Morning News, April 12, 1963 (page 7):
MENTAL PATIENT SLASHES EX-WIFE, COMMITS SUICIDE
By Mack Dugas
(JODIE) 77-year-old Deacon "Deke" Simmons arrived too late on Wednesday night to save Sadie Dunhill from being wounded, but things could have been much worse for the 28-year-old Dunhill, a popular librarian in the Denholm Consolidated School District.
According to Douglas Reems, the Jodie town constable, "If Deke hadn't arrived when he did, Miss Dunhill almost certainly would have been killed." When approached by reporters, Simmons would only say, "I don't want to talk about it, it's over."
According to Constable Reems, Simmons overpowered the much younger John Clayton and wrestled away a small revolver. Clayton then produced the knife with which he had wounded his wife and used it to slash his own throat. Simmons and another man, George Amberson of Dallas, tried to stop the bleeding to no avail. Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene.
Mr. Amberson, a former teacher in the Denholm Consolidated School District who arrived shortly after Clayton had been disarmed, could not be reached for comment but told Constable Reems at the scene that Clayton--a former mental patient--may have been stalking his ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm Consolidated High School had been alerted, and principal Ellen Dockerty had obtained a picture, but Clayton was said to have disguised his appearance.
Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.
2
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.
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 sto
od 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.
3
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."
4
It was worse.