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
“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
“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.
