Monday, Monday: A Novel (5 page)

He got to his feet. “Shelly?”

A man in a sheriff’s uniform walked alongside the gurney, and on the opposite side a freckled woman with hair in a flip the color of cherrywood had her hand on the rail.

Shelly’s arm lay cocked in a cast over her chest. The side of her face that had rested on the cement was red and slick with salve. Dried blood matted her hair. Her eyes rolled back and forth, but she reached for Wyatt as she passed him, took hold of his hand, and held on until the orderly pulled to a stop.

“You know my daughter?” the sheriff asked. “Was it you that helped her?”

“Yes sir, along with my cousin,” Wyatt told him.

“God bless you, young man,” he whispered, offering his hand. “I’m Adrian Maddox, and this is my wife, Janie.” He was stout and handsome, in his forties, with muscular shoulders.

The woman said, “How can we ever thank you?”

The orderly was impatient. “I need to move on,” he said. Rather than pull his hand from Shelly’s grip, Wyatt walked alongside. He glanced back at Elaine, but she waved at him to go on.

Shelly was having trouble focusing her eyes. When the gurney was wheeled into a room, she loosened her hold on Wyatt’s hand. He thought for an anxious second that she had stopped breathing, and he put his face to her mouth to feel her breath.

Her mother settled her in the bed, and Wyatt went out in the hall with the sheriff. “Is there anything we can do for your cousin?” the sheriff asked him. “I understand he was hurt trying to help my daughter.”

“No sir, but thank you. His parents are on their way.”

Wyatt did his best to answer the sheriff’s questions, but the man broke down in tears. “Her mama is going to want to talk to you later,” he said when he got hold of himself. “Could you give me your phone number?”

They dug around in their pockets for pen and paper, but Wyatt found only a receipt from a hardware store in Abilene, where he had never been, and remembered that the shirt didn’t belong to him. “My number’s in the phone book,” Wyatt told the sheriff. “I live in the housing for married students on Town Lake.”

Returning to Jack’s room, he found Elaine and Delia sitting on the bed with Jack, who was sleeping. A nurse was replacing the IV fluids. A slant of evening sunlight came through the window.

“I think you should go home for a while and come back later,” Elaine urged him. “I’ll stay here with Delia.”

The lingering heat settled over him as he walked back to the campus. It was past six. The light was a rosy yellow and the shadows were stretched out long. Overcome with sadness, he stepped into an alleyway so no one would see him crying, his face pressed against a stone wall. Then he took the shortcut to the South Mall, past the shimmering fountain of winged riders and along the pathway under the oak trees up to the open plaza. Birds had resumed their noisy racket in the branches.

People were gathered about in small groups on the plaza. It had been hosed down; a steamy, earthy smell rose from the hot cement. The flags had been lowered and taken away. Two maintenance men emptied bags of sand onto the remnants of blood. Students drinking beer sat on a stone bench, looking up at the tower.

Wyatt stood among the people and the heaps of sand in the open part of the plaza and gazed up at the clock face shattered by bullets fired up at the sniper. He studied the base of the flagpole, where Shelly’s blood still darkened the ground, and walked to the place in the grass where Jack had fallen. For a while, he stood at that place, staring down at the grass as if he were looking for something, though he wasn’t sure what it would be. A disconcerting feeling that someone was watching him began to settle over him, and he realized gradually that the impression didn’t come from the tower, but instead from the English building behind him. Remembering the face he had seen looking down, he turned and looked up at that window. It was the center window on the third floor, just under the roofline, larger than the other windows, wider than tall, six panes across and four down. He found it empty now, and yet the face, with its pale expression of anguish, still seemed strangely present there, cloaked in darkness, as chilling and disturbing to Wyatt as if it were the physical embodiment of every emotion he had felt that day.

He walked on, skirting the main building and cutting across the northern edge of the campus to where his car was parked. The evening was turning the same ripe purple hue that he had created that morning from vermilion and cobalt blue.

3

JACK

Driving west to his apartment, Wyatt listened to the KTBC report on the day, the information continually updated by the police department. The sniper’s name was Charles Whitman, and he was a UT student, an ex-marine, and a former Eagle Scout. Police had broken into his tidy little house in south Austin and discovered his wife slaughtered in the bed. They had found his mother bludgeoned to death in her apartment not far from the campus. His mother had worked at the cafeteria at Hancock Shopping Center. This last bit of news struck Wyatt, since the Sears where Elaine worked was at Hancock Center and she often had lunch at that cafeteria. She had probably crossed paths with the poor woman.

Apparently Whitman had killed his wife first, and then his mother, before disguising himself as a janitor and hauling a footlocker of guns up into the tower. No one knew why he had wanted to murder so many people.

It was only twilight now, but it seemed darker. The warmth in the car thickened the smell of souring blood on Wyatt’s shirt. He drove with the windows down, in hopes of escaping the smell, but a feeling of doom followed him and grew stronger the farther he was from campus and from Jack. He reminded himself the day was over. But he couldn’t forget the look of the bodies. How they lay. How they moved and then didn’t. The plastic hair clip in the soft brown hair of the dead girl in the pedal pushers. The way she smelled of feces. Now that he was alone, his mind reeled uncontrollably through the memories.

Stripping the shirt off, he climbed the steps to his apartment and went inside and got in the shower. For a long time, he stood there, running the water hot and then cold, but nothing stopped the memories. He couldn’t recall what he had thought at the time it was all happening, and now he felt as if he were watching it over again, but this time from the outside, like someone watching a movie. Only when he remembered lifting Shelly into his arms did he feel like part of the picture. The slippery feel of the blood. How her breast had melted into his hands. The sound of the bullet when it hit the flagpole. Jack falling, trying to stand, falling, standing, a puppet—up, down, up, down.

Wyatt scoured his hands with the soap and dug remnants of blood from under his nails.

“Don’t come for me!” Jack had yelled.

He had been so quiet in the hospital, his bandages hidden under the blanket. Certainly he must have seen worse bloodshed in Vietnam, but there had been a troubling look of detachment in his eyes today in the hospital that Wyatt hadn’t seen before—and he knew Jack better than almost anyone did. Having grown up next door to each other in San Antonio, they were more like brothers than cousins. Jack was two years older. He had a moralistic streak so strong that even as a child he wouldn’t so much as sneak a grape from the grocery store that Wyatt’s father managed unless he paid for it. Wyatt had sometimes found these standards intimidating and irritating, but he had secretly admired them, too.

Arvin Street, where they’d grown up and where their parents still lived, practically backed up to Fort Sam Houston, and when they were grade school age, Jack would hang around the gates and watch the soldiers, and Wyatt would often tag along. The two of them would stand on the cemetery wall at attention during burials, or play army among the tombstones. Jack could name all the Buffalo Soldiers buried together in one section, and in junior high he won a ribbon for a paper on Geronimo’s imprisonment at the fort. He was so entranced by Geronimo that he talked his parents into driving him out to Arizona to look for the caves in the mountains where the warrior had hidden out when the army was looking for him.

Wyatt wasn’t much interested in Geronimo; he preferred card games and board games—Careers, Life, Four Square, and six-card poker—which he and Jack played with the rest of the boys on the street. He was the neighborhood poker champion by the time he was thirteen, and when there weren’t enough kids to play, he would make up games with different hands that didn’t exist in the real game. They played croquet with Wiffle balls and nine irons, and Jack was the only person he was never able to beat. He could beat Jack in backyard basketball, though, playing Horse with tipping, and could beat him at Monopoly, since Jack only stockpiled the money and wouldn’t take any risks. Chess was the only game in which they were equally matched, both having a natural patience with the process of attrition.

Jack was a senior in high school, working for his father in the parts department of the Chevrolet dealership, when he walked into a Mexican restaurant in a barrio of San Antonio one day and met Delia, who was waiting tables. Her family owned the restaurant.

Wyatt met her a week later when Jack took her to the movies. She was slender, with small breasts and straight black hair that fell to her shoulders. Jack was already in love with her, but waited several months before he told his parents about her, knowing they would disapprove, since she was a Mexican and a Catholic.

When he finally did tell them about her, their reaction was so heated that Wyatt and his parents heard the yelling from next door. Jack hauled his belongings over and moved into Wyatt’s bedroom, where the two of them bunked like brothers until Jack graduated from high school.

“White people should date white people,” Jack’s father declared whenever his sister, who was Wyatt’s mother, tried to talk him into changing his mind. “That girl should find a Mexican boy.” He was a card-carrying Democrat who refused to vote for Kennedy on the grounds that Kennedy was a Catholic.

When Jack left San Antonio for Austin and UT, Delia stayed behind and worked at the restaurant and took classes at a local Catholic university. Jack came home to see her almost every weekend until he graduated, and enlisted in the army, and was sent immediately to Vietnam.

Wyatt was at UT himself by that time, and when he was home to see his parents he would go by the Mexican restaurant to see Delia. They would sit together in one of the booths and she’d let him read parts of Jack’s letters—mostly love letters that didn’t say much about anything Jack was doing, except that he was clearing the area around an air force base called Bien Hoa. It was early in the war, before major protests had started, and no one knew much about what was going on, or cared much about it.

By then, Wyatt was getting involved with Elaine, a grave, tall, sexy girl from the East Coast, with long hair that tumbled about her when they made love. He didn’t think about the war any more than he had to.

When Jack returned home after nine months away, minus part of an ear and half his hearing, his parents welcomed him, with the hope that he might have forgotten Delia—as if the explosion that took his ear might have blown her out of his mind.

Instead, he became a Catholic in order to marry her. The wedding was an elaborate Catholic ceremony, and, since then, Jack had seen his parents only a couple of times. Remembering how disoriented and helpless Jack had looked in the hospital bed today, Wyatt wished they weren’t coming.

After showering, he dressed quickly and drove to the hospital, where he found the parking lot filled and the hallways crowded. He stopped at Shelly Maddox’s door, wondering how she was doing. He could not quite empty his mind of her. But her door was shut, and he didn’t want to disturb her.

Elaine and Delia were still in Jack’s room, awaiting his parents’ arrival. The air was close and stuffy. Jack looked unnatural in the fluorescent lighting, his eyelids partly closed. A box of Camels lay on the bed beside him. He asked if he could have a minute alone with Wyatt, and the women quietly left. Wyatt pulled a chair beside the bed, and Jack shifted under the blanket, his face sweaty against the stiff pillow, and said, “Guess what happened to me today.”

Wyatt studied him, trying to guess what he wanted. “You got shot in the leg by a crazy fucker.”

“Try again.”

“Not a crazy fucker?”

“Not shot in the leg.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I got shot in the balls.” He made a noise that was supposed to sound like laughter, then waited for Wyatt to take in what he had said. “For whatever it’s worth, I’ll still be able to have sex.”

“Then there’s no problem,” Wyatt said with relief.

“The minor one of fertility. No kids for Delia.”

“The doctor told you that? You’re sure?”

“It’s what he told me.”

“And he’s sure about it?”

“You want me to give you the details?”

“Does Delia know?”

“He told her.”

“I bet there’s something someone can do.”

“Nope, nothing to be done.” He stared up at the ceiling. “I’m a goddamn freak. I’ve got one ear. I can’t give her kids. This morning I was her husband, and now I’m this …
thing
she’s stuck with.”

“She doesn’t see it that way.”

“No. Do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell anyone.”

“Of course.”

“Not ever.”

The sudden oppressive weight that Wyatt felt was worse than pity—it was guilt. He thought of the moment when Jack had fallen, and wondered if it should have been him instead. He was the one who had looked through the balusters and seen Shelly Maddox moving after he thought she was dead.

He remembered how Delia had looked standing in front of the doors to the ICU and talking with the doctor. How she had backed against the wall and put her hands to her stomach.

4

DAY FROM NIGHT

Shelly came awake in the hospital at intervals, her thoughts fogged by Demerol, time lurching from moment to moment as jerkily as pictures in a View-Master. She blinked and people appeared and vanished. Her mother stood at the foot of the bed, hair flattened against her head as if she had slept in the chair. Then her father stood in the same place with cards and flowers. Then no one was there. Her roommate, Becky, sat beside her, offering pea soup and cookies. Daylight spread in sloping squares, disappearing and reappearing abruptly. It shrugged itself into corners. Shelly knew day from night, but dawn and dusk confused her. Voices drifted from the hall. Nurses inserted needles into the veins in her hands, and helped her urinate into a pan. She asked about the guy named Jack who was injured because he’d helped her, and she was told he was down the hall. But she was too weak to go see him. She asked about the shooter in the tower, but later couldn’t remember what she’d been told. She remembered his name made a whirring sound that reminded her of a bird. A nurse said that policemen had shot him.