Authors: Elizabeth Crook

Monday, Monday: A Novel (48 page)

BOOK: Monday, Monday: A Novel

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Shelly stepped forward and placed her fingers into a few of the indentations in the walls. But she couldn’t distinguish the bullet holes from natural holes in the rock; it all seemed scratched and dented. She turned to look at the rainspouts—narrow rectangular openings cut at even intervals—and tried to imagine Whitman crawling from one to another, firing and reloading, grabbing ammunition from his footlocker and moving from side to side of the tower, his radio tuned to the live broadcast with the urgent warnings for people to stay away from the campus. But try as she did, she couldn’t really picture him there. All she saw were the floor tiles striped by the shadows of the security fence curving high over her head.

She had seen enough of this side of the tower, and would walk the full deck, she decided, one time around, and then be finished with this place.

On the east side, she found the Asian guide pointing out campus buildings below and shouting out their names over the roar of the wind for the tourists gathered around her. Shelly paused to listen, but she already knew the buildings: There was nothing up here she needed to see or wanted to find. It wasn’t as if she had come up here to settle her thoughts about anything—especially Charles Whitman. He was a seething, selfish boy who had lost control, and thinking about him depressed her.

She walked around to the north side and saw a bank of black clouds advancing, carrying the electric smell of rain. The burly woman tried to hoist her chubby son up high enough to peer down over the wall at the turtle ponds in the Tower Garden directly below; she had planted her foot against the wall as a purchase. Looping his arms over the wall, the boy complained above the whistling of the wind that he couldn’t see the ponds.

Shelly imagined all that had happened so quickly—within seconds—along this wall, the two police officers coming around this very corner and firing a pistol and shotgun at Whitman as he crouched in the opposite corner, his radio blaring the news about his actions. He had just fired a round up at the small airplane circling in the summer sky, manned with a passenger trying to shoot him, and she thought of how he must have felt victorious watching the plane’s departure. But on the south deck, a civilian—a floor manager of the university’s co-op, who had made his way, with the police, up into the tower and onto the deck—accidentally fired a gun into the west wall, causing Whitman to swing his aim in that direction, to the southwest corner, just as the two policeman came from the northeast and shot him.

Shelly walked over and stood on the red tiles and the white grout where he had died. The clouds were closing in on the building now, erasing the pattern of shadows.

But low in the western sky over the hill country, the rosy rays of the sun persisted. Storefronts on the Drag were dull and puny under the red sky. The street market was closing. Figures struggled against the wind, folding a canopy away. And off to the south, the sky was blue and the sun still bright.

She completed the square of the deck, returning to the south side and looking down once more at the places where she and Jack had fallen when the bullets hit them. She remembered lying there and playing dead, but couldn’t clearly remember the pain—not because she had somehow risen above it by standing way up here, but because she wasn’t that girl any longer.

Others were starting to go inside. The woman and her son came around the corner, their clothing billowing in the wind, the boy still clutching his paper monocular and talking about turtles. “They’re reptiles,” he told his mother. “They molt.”

This was something Nicholas would have preoccupied himself with—molting turtles—and Shelly had to smile.

It occurred to her that everything she had needed to see up here just happened to be down there.

Turning to look at the face of the huge clock, she saw that the bells were about to ring.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Apparently I’m in the habit of thanking such a plethora of people in my acknowledgments that occasionally I’ve received messages through my website from someone asking, as tactfully as possible, why they had just seen their name in one of my books. Did they know me? Had they helped me in some way? A couple of times I had to admit I didn’t have a clue.

It’s probably a little inflated to have lengthy acknowledgments in a novel, and looking at the list I’ve scribbled in the seven years it’s taken me to cobble together Shelly’s story, I see some people I’m pretty sure will be puzzled to find themselves mentioned. But I’m going to acknowledge them anyway, because I appreciate the help they gave me—even if some of us might have forgotten over the years exactly what that was.

And then there are those I’d be terribly remiss not to thank. First and foremost of these, as always, is my friend Steve Harrigan, who tolerantly read several drafts and suggested major editorial changes that sometimes altered the entire focus of the story—always for the better. If not for his judgment and astute comments I’d probably still be trying to make this book worthy of print.

Jeff Long—writer, climber, photographer, and generous long-time friend—advised me at great length about the scene at Devil’s Sinkhole. Without him, the poor stranded girl would still be dangling from the rope. When he read the final draft and discovered I had rescued the girl using only one Jumar—an impossible feat even for a courageous character like Dan Hadley—he told me how to rig a second one, in the nick of time, out of a shoelace and a piece of tow strap.

Timothy McBride, a brilliant poet and my favorite unmet friend, meticulously combed through the manuscript, as did my sister Noel Crook—there’s nothing luckier for a novelist than a sibling who’s a poet.

Caryn Carlson, Marco Uribe, and my mom, Eleanor Butt Crook, were immensely helpful in the early stages when I was defining characters and trying to figure out what the book was really about.

Pam Colloff set the stage for the story when I read in
Texas Monthly
her chilling account of Charles Whitman’s 1966 killing spree. She generously put me in touch with a number of people who had been wounded or otherwise affected by the shootings and who were nice enough to talk with me and share their experiences. Among these I’m especially grateful to Cliff Drummond, Devereau M. (Matlin) Huffman, and Shelton Williams.

In his excellent book
A Sniper in the Tower
, Gary Lavergne provided a definitive account of that day and the events leading up to it. He was patient enough to spend a great deal of time walking me through the campus and explaining what had happened.

Several of my friends who attended UT in the sixties were a constant source of information, most especially Tracy Curtis, Michael Gillette, Kirk Wilson, and Sally Wittliff. Margaret Berry was a willing and reliable source on the university’s history.

Alex Garcia initially and later Phil Schirmer graciously shared with me their knowledge and their passion for egg tempera. As Shelly’s portrait began to appear in the story, Phil spent a lot of time on the phone and over e-mail answering my idiotic art-related questions. If there are mistakes, they are all unquestionably mine.

Anne Kay, Pat Moore, Carolyn Chamberlain, Rosemary Soladine, and Jean Henry at Marywood, formerly Home of the Holy Infancy, were helpful in sharing the history of adoption laws and practices in Texas. Joye Blankenship shared personal knowledge that helped in major ways to shape the story.

Colonel Alan C. Huffines was a supportive source on the Vietnam War, and although I used only a small fraction of the information he gave me, all of it was essential to my understanding of Jack Stone.

Scott McGehee of my hometown of San Marcos took time to explain how he and others escaped the 1970 floodwaters at Aquarena by shoving out the skylight of the restaurant, and how they rescued stranded people from the roof by swimming for the glass-bottomed boats. In the effort to keep Shelly’s story on track I abbreviated the scene, but I’m still sorry to have left out so much thrilling detail.

David Keller was my go-to for all things Alpine: desert hippies, volcanic dikes, What’s the best tall tree to put my owl in? And are the Marfa Lights honestly real? Many thanks to my dear old friend Dan Flores for introducing me to him. David Marion Wilkinson, Steve Griffis, and D. J. Stout were also fountains of knowledge about Alpine. Thanks likewise to Chachi Hawkins, Mike Perry, and Monty Kimball for the information about the Big Bend Ranch Rodeo, to my friend Kenneth Groesbeck of Camp Verde for his brainstorming about rodeos in general, to the Maverick Inn for their hospitality, and to the lovely staff at Hotel Limpia in Fort Davis, who made my family and me feel so welcome. Ben Toro of Moonlight Gemstones in Marfa was a great source on the intricacies of crafting bolo ties, jewelry, and belt buckles from local stones, though we met only by e-mail and he would not, now, know me from Adam.

For the scene at Devil’s Sinkhole, Geary Schindel, chief technical officer of the Edwards Aquifer Authority in San Antonio, told me everything I needed to know about the cave and the mechanics of hauling a lifeless body up from the depths. Joe Herring described in detail what the morgue in the basement of the old Sid Peterson hospital in Kerrvile looked like in the early 1990s, and Bill Pennington explained what takes place in a morgue when someone has died in a violent accident such as Dan Hadley’s.

I’m grateful to my friend Nelwyn Moore for her information about Beeville in the 1960s, to my old high school buddy Mark Williams for his veterinary advice about porcupine quills, to my brother Bill Crook for helping me yank quills from my own dog and for sharing his knowledge on too many topics to list, to Carol-Lynn Meissner, who let me poke around in her vet box, to Lillian MacDonald and Guadalupe Uvilla, and to Carlos Cigarroa, John Merritt, Joseph Quintanilla, Sheri Boyd, and Paul Salo for various bits and pieces of information that they may or may not remember having given me.

Gail Hochman—loyal friend and agent extraordinaire—is a blessing to any book and all writers lucky enough to find themselves in her care. Gail’s passionate devotion to her writers is as persistent as that of a mother dolphin pushing her loved ones to the surface for air. Thank you, dear Gail!

Sarah Crichton at Farrar, Straus and Giroux has an uncanny way of working magic on books. I’m forever and deeply thankful to her for embracing my manuscript with her signature enthusiasm, for editing with such insight and meticulous care, and for making everything so much fun. Every single person I’ve been lucky enough to come into contact with at FSG has been pure joy to work with—all rock stars, in my opinion.

Last but most important, my husband, Marc Lewis, and my kids, Joseph and Lizzie, not only put up with my writing career and kept me company on several ill-conceived research trips, such as the hellish Amtrak ride from Austin to Alpine while I was on crutches with a broken ankle, but also taught me, in so many beautiful ways, what it means to be a wife and mother—which, after all, is what this book is about.

ALSO BY ELIZABETH CROOK

The Raven’s Bride

Promised Lands: A Novel of the Texas Rebellion

The Night Journal

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth Crook is the author of three previous novels. Her most recent,
The Night Journal
, won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and a WILLA Literary Award from Women Writing the West. She has written for magazines and periodicals, including
Texas Monthly
and the
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
. She lives in Austin with her family.

Sarah Crichton Books

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

First edition, 2014

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lyrics from “Monday, Monday,” written by John Edmund Andrew Phillips, performed by the Mamas and the Papas.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crook, Elizabeth.