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lock?”
“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.”
“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