“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.
“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.”
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
“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.”
“I don’t want a damn beer, anyway.” Now that we were away from Sadie, I could see that he was steaming mad. “What I want to do is punch Fred Miller in the face and kick Jessica Caltrop’s narra and no doubt lace-trimmed ass.”
I knew the names and faces, although, having been just a humble wage-slave, I had never actually conversed with either of them. Miller and Caltrop were two-thirds of the Denholm County Schoolboard.
“Don’t stop there,” I said. “As long as you’re in a bloodthirsty mood, tell me what you want to do to Dwight Rawson. Isn’t he the other one?”
“It’s Rawlings,” Deke said moodily, “and I’ll give him a pass. He voted on our side.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They won’t let us use the school gym for the
“Are you kidding?” Sadie had told me that certain elements of the town might take against her, and I hadn’t believed her. Silly old Jake Epping, still clinging to his science-fiction fantasies of the twenty-first century.
“Son, I only wish I were. They cited fire-insurance concerns. I pointed out that they didn’t have any insurance concerns when it was a benefit for a student who’d been in an accident, and the Caltrop woman — dried-up old kitty that she is — said, ‘Oh yes, Deke, but that was during the
“They’ve got concerns, all right, mostly about how a member of the faculty got her face cut open by the crazy man she was married to. They’re afraid it’ll get mentioned in the paper or, God forbid, on one of the Dallas TV stations.”
“How can it matter?” I asked. “He… Christ, Deke, he wasn’t even
“That dudn’t matter to them. What matters to them is that he
I heard myself bleating, not a noble sound coming from a man in the prime of life, but I couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all!”
