11/22/63: A Novel

“I know this isn’t easy for you, honey. But there’s a time to take as well as a time to give. I don’t know if that one’s in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but it’s true, just the same. Your health insurance is a joke. Dr. Ellerton’s giving us a break on his fee-”

“I never asked-”

“Hush, Sadie. Please. It’s called pro bono work and he wants to do it. But there are other surgeons involved here. The bills for your surgeries are going to be enormous, and my resources will only stretch so far.”

“I almost wish he’d killed me,” she whispered.

“Don’t you ever say that.” She shrank from the anger in my voice, and the tears started. She could only cry from one eye now. “Hon, people want to do this for you. Let them. I know your mother lives in your head-almost everyone’s mother does, I guess-but you can’t let her have her way on this one.”

“Those doctors can’t fix it, anyway. It’ll never be the way it was. Ellerton told me so.”

“They can fix a lot of it.” Which sounded marginally better than they can fix some of it.

She sighed. “You’re braver than I am, Jake.”

“You’re plenty brave. Will you do this?”

“The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show. My mother would shit a brick if she found out.”

“All the more reason, I’d say. We’ll send her some stills.”

That made her smile, but only for a moment. She lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled slightly, then began to smooth the hair against the side of her face again. “Would I have to be there? Let them see what their dollars are buying? Sort of like an American Berkshire pig on the auction block?”

“Of course not. Although I doubt if anyone would faint. Most folks around here have seen worse.” As members of the faculty in a farming and ranching area, we had seen worse ourselves-Britta Carlson, for instance, who had been badly burned in a housefire, or Duffy Hendrickson, who had a left hand that looked like a hoof after a chainfall holding a truck motor slipped in his father’s garage.

“I’m not ready for that kind of inspection. I don’t think I ever will be.”

I hoped with all my heart that didn’t turn out to be true. The crazy people of the world-the Johnny Claytons, the Lee Harvey Oswalds-shouldn’t get to win. If God won’t make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least. But this wasn’t the time to sermonize on the subject.

“Would it help if I said Dr. Ellerton himself has agreed to take part in the show?”

She momentarily forgot about her hair and stared at me. “What?”

“He wants to be the back end of Bertha.” Bertha the Dancing Pony was a canvas creation of the kids in the Art Department. She wandered around during several of the skits, but her big number was a tail-waggling jig to Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again.” (The tail was controlled with a string pulled by the rear half of Team Bertha.) Country folk, not generally noted for their sophisticated senses of humor, found her hilarious.

Sadie began to laugh. I could see it hurt her, but she couldn’t help it. She fell back against the couch, one palm pressed to the center of her forehead as if to keep her brains from exploding. “All right!” she said when she could finally talk again. “I’ll let you do it just to see that.” Then she glared at me. “But I’ll see it during the dress rehearsal. You’re not getting me up onstage where everybody can stare at me and whisper ‘Oh look at that poor girl.’ Have we got that straight?”

“We absolutely do,” I said, and kissed her. That was one hurdle. The next would be convincing Dallas’s premier plastic surgeon to come to Jodie in the July heat and prance around beneath the back half of a thirty-pound canvas costume. Because I hadn’t actually asked him.

That turned out to be no problem; Ellerton lit up like a kid when I put the idea to him. “I even have practical experience,” he said. “My wife’s been telling me that I’m a perfect horse’s ass for years now.”

2

The last hurdle turned out to be the venue. In mid-June, right around the time Lee was getting kicked off a dock in New Orleans for trying to hand out his pro-Castro leaflets to the sailors of the USS Wasp, Deke came by Sadie’s house. He kissed her on her good cheek (she averted the bad side of her face when anyone came to visit) and asked me if I’d like to step out for a cold beer.

“Go on,” Sadie said. “I’ll be fine.”

Deke drove us to a dubiously air-conditioned tinroof called the Prairie Chicken, nine miles west of town. It was midafternoon, the place empty except for two solitary drinkers at the bar, the jukebox dark. Deke handed me a dollar. “I’ll buy, you fetch. How’s that for a deal?”

I went to the bar and collared two Buckhorns.

“If I’d known you were going to bring back Buckies, I would have gone myself,” Deke said. “Man, this stuff is horse-piss.”

“I happen to like it,” I said. “Anyway, I thought you did your drinking at home. ‘The asshole quotient in the local bars is a little too high for my taste,’ I believe you said.”