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 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 Jamboree. Even though it’s the middle of summer we’re talking about and it’s just standing there vacant.”

“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 school year. ’

“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 from here! He was from Georgia!”

“That dudn’t matter to them. What matters to them is that he died here, and they’re afraid it’ll reflect badly on the school. On the town. And on them.” 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!”

“They’d fire her if they could, just to get rid of the embarrassment. Since they can’t, they’re hoping she’ll quit before the kids have to look at what Clayton did to her face. Goddam smalltown bullshit hypocrisy at its best, my boy. When he was in his twenties, Fred Miller used to rip and roar in the Nuevo Laredo whorehouses twice a month. More, if he could get an advance on his allowance from his daddy. And I have it on damn good authority that when Jessica Caltrop was plain Jessie Trapp from Sweetwater Ranch, she got real fat when she was sixteen and real thin again about nine months later. I’ve a mind to tell them that my memory’s even longer than their blue goddam noses, and I could embarrass them plenty if I wanted to. I wouldn’t even have to work at it that hard.”

“They can’t really blame Sadie for her ex-husband’s craziness . . . can they?”

“Grow up, George. Sometimes you act like you were born in a barn. Or some country where folks actually think straight. To them it’s about sex. To folks like Fred and Jessica it’s always about sex. They probably think Alfalfa and Spanky on The Little Rascals spend their spare time diddling Darla out behind the barn while Buckwheat cheers em on. And when something like this happens, it’s the woman’s fault. They wouldn’t come right out and say so, but in their hearts they believe men are beasts and women who can’t gentle em, well, be it on their own heads, son, be it on their own heads. I won’t let em get away with this.”

“You’ll have to,” I said. “If you don’t, the ruckus might get back to Sadie. And she’s fragile now. This might tip her over completely.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rummaged his pipe out of his breast pocket. “Yeah, I know that. I’m just blowin off steam. Ellie talked to the folks who run the Grange Hall just yesterday. They’re happy to let us put on the show there, and it seats fifty more people. Because of the balcony, you know.”

“Well there,” I said, relieved. “Cooler heads prevail.”

“Only one problem. They’re asking four hundred for both nights. If I come up with two hundred, can you come up with the other two? You won’t be getting it back from the receipts, you know. That’s all earmarked for Sadie’s medical work.”

I knew very well about the cost of Sadie’s medical work; I had already paid three hundred dollars to cover the part of her hospital stay that her shitepoke insurance wouldn’t stand good for. In spite of Ellerton’s good offices, the other expenses would mount up rapidly. As for me, I wasn’t scraping financial bottom quite yet, but I could see it.

“George? What do you say?”

“Fifty-fifty,” I agreed.

“Then drink up your shitty beer. I want to get back to town.” 3