Chapter 23 #5
Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was—not to put too fine a point on it—stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain medication.
McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few months.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”
Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said, “Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”
I met Deke’s eyes. Only for a second, but enough for me to see we were thinking the same thing: Long road ahead. Long road.
11
I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road.
At least for public consumption. In truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane.
I was afraid of what we might find when we first helped her inside, and I think that Sadie was, too, stoned or not.
But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the Home Ec Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire day before Sadie’s return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of Clayton’s filth off the walls.
The living room rug had been taken up and replaced.
The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories.
Her mutilated clothing had been whisked away and replaced with new stuff.
Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not sure she even noticed them.
12
I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her little garden (which would sicken but not quite die in another hot central Texas summer), and reading Bleak House to her.
We also became involved in several of the afternoon soaps: The Secret Storm, Young Doctor Malone, From These Roots, and our personal favorite, The Edge of Night.
She changed the parting in her hair from the center to the right, cultivating a Veronica Lake style that would cover the worst of the scarring when the bandages eventually came off.
Not that they would for a long time; the first of her reconstructive surgeries—a team effort involving four doctors—was scheduled for August fifth.
Ellerton said there would be at least four more.
I would drive back to Deke’s after Sadie and I had our supper (which she rarely did more than pick at), because small towns are full of big eyes attached to gabby mouths.
It was best that those big eyes should see my car in Deke’s driveway after the sun went down.
Once it was dark, I walked the two miles back to Sadie’s, where I slept on the new hide-a-bed sofa until five in the morning.
It was almost always broken rest, because nights when Sadie didn’t awaken me, screaming and thrashing her way out of bad dreams, were rare.
In the daytime, Johnny Clayton was dead.
After dark he still stalked her with his gun and knife.
I would go to her and soothe her as best I could.
Sometimes she would trudge out to the living room with me and smoke a cigarette before shuffling back to bed, always pressing her hair down protectively over the bad side of her face.
She would not let me change the bandages.
That she did herself, in the bathroom, with the door closed.
After one especially terrible nightmare, I came in to find her standing naked by her bed and sobbing.
She had become shockingly thin. Her nightgown was puddled at her feet.
She heard me and turned around, one arm across her breasts and the other hand over her crotch.
Her hair swung back to her right shoulder, where it actually belonged, and I saw the swollen scars, the heavy stitching, the fallen, rumpled flesh over her cheekbone.
“Get out!” she screamed. “Don’t look at me like this, why can’t you get out?”
“Sadie, what is it? Why did you take off your nightgown? What’s wrong?”
“I wet my bed, okay? I have to change it, so please get out and let me put some clothes on!”
I went to the foot of the bed, grabbed the quilt that was folded there, and wrapped it around her. When I turned one end up in a kind of collar that hid her cheek, she calmed.
“Go in the living room and be careful you don’t trip on that thing. Have a smoke. I’ll change the bed.”
“No, Jake, it’s dirty.”
I took her by the shoulders. “That’s what Clayton would say, and he’s dead. A little piss is all it is.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. But before you go…”
I turned down the makeshift collar. She flinched and closed her eyes, but stood still. Only bearing it, but I still thought it was progress. I kissed the hanging flesh that had been her cheek and then turned the quilt up again to hide it.
“How can you?” she asked without opening her eyes. “It’s awful.”
“Nah. It’s just another part of the you I love, Sadie. Now go in the other room while I change these sheets.”
When it was done, I offered to get into bed with her until she fell asleep. She flinched as she had when I’d turned down the quilt and shook her head. “I can’t, Jake. I’m sorry.”
Little by slowly, I told myself as I plodded across town to Deke’s in the first gray light of morning. Little by slowly.
13
On April twenty-fourth I told Deke I had something I needed to do in Dallas and asked him if he’d stay with Sadie until I got back around nine.
He agreed willingly enough, and at five that afternoon I was sitting across from the Greyhound terminal on South Polk Street, near the intersection of Highway 77 and the still-new, fourlane I-20.
I was reading (or pretending to read) the latest James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me.
At half past the hour, a station wagon pulled into the parking lot next to the terminal. Ruth Paine was driving. Lee got out, went around to the rear, and opened the doorgate. Marina, with June in her arms, emerged from the backseat. Ruth Paine stayed behind the wheel.
Lee had only two items of luggage: an olive-green duffel bag and a quilted gun case, the kind with handles. He carried them to an idling Scenicruiser. The driver took the suitcase and the rifle and stowed them in the open luggage hold after a cursory glance at Lee’s ticket.
Lee went to the door of the bus, then turned and embraced his wife, kissing her on both cheeks and then the mouth.
He took the baby and nuzzled beneath her chin.
June laughed. Lee laughed with her, but I saw tears in his eyes.
He kissed June on the forehead, gave her a hug, then returned her to Marina and ran up the steps of the bus without looking back.
Marina walked to the station wagon, where Ruth Paine was now standing. June held her arms out to the older woman, who took her with a smile. They stood there for awhile, watching passengers board, then drove off.
I stayed where I was until the bus pulled out at 6:00 P.M., right on time.
The sun, going down bloody in the west, flashed across the destination window, momentarily obscuring what was printed there.
Then I could read it again, three words that meant Lee Harvey Oswald was out of my life, at least for awhile:
NEW ORLEANS EXPRESS
I watched it climb the entrance ramp to I-20 East, then walked the two blocks to where I’d parked my car and drove back to Jodie.
14
Hunch-think: that again.
I paid the May rent on the West Neely Street apartment even though I needed to start watching my dollars and had no concrete reason to do so. All I had was an unformed but strong feeling that I should keep a base of operations in Dallas.
Two days before the Kentucky Derby ran, I drove to Greenville Avenue, fully intending to put down five hundred dollars on Chateaugay to place.
That, I reasoned, would be less memorable than betting on the nag to win.
I parked four blocks down from Faith Financial and locked my car, a necessary precaution in that part of town even at eleven in the morning.
I walked briskly at first, but then—once more for no concrete reason—my steps began to lag.
Half a block from the betting parlor masquerading as a streetfront loan operation, I came to a full stop.
Once again I could see the bookie—sans eyeshade this forenoon—leaning in the doorway of his establishment and smoking a cigarette.
Standing there in a strong flood of sunlight, bracketed by the sharp shadows of the doorway, he looked like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.
There was no chance he saw me that day, because he was staring at a car parked across the street.
It was a cream-colored Lincoln with a green license plate.
Above the numbers were the words SUNSHINE STATE.
Which did not mean it was a harmonic. Which certainly didn’t mean it belonged to Eduardo Gutierrez of Tampa, the bookie who used to smile and say Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland.
The one who had almost certainly had my beachfront house burned down.
All the same, I turned and walked back to my car with the five hundred I’d intended to bet still in my pocket.
Hunch-think.