Monday, Monday: A Novel (6 page)

Memories of that day snapped at her at unpredictable moments: the awkward gesture of the boy as he fell in front of her, the flies wading in her blood. The worst were seared in her mind by the bright sunlight that day, and her only trick to dispel them was to haul the rescuing image of Wyatt and Jack into their midst. Once, she opened her eyes and saw Wyatt watching her from the chair. Later he was gone.

She knew so little about him: that he had worn a madras shirt. That his feet had been bare. That he wore glasses. Jack was short and muscular and had run low to the ground in her direction as she lay on the plaza. Wyatt was taller; he had come straight at her. At the flagpole he had shielded her and wrapped her twisted arm in his shirt. He had embraced her and cocked his knees around her, making a cave of protection. She recalled his feet on either side of her in the grass.

She heard her mother talking to him in the hall. “God bless your parents for raising such a good young man like yourself.”

Drowsy from medication, Shelly composed a note to Jack: “I feel so guilty that you were hurt. I won’t ever forget how you saved my life. When they let me get up, I will come to thank you in person.”

Her mother took the letter to Jack’s room, and returned and said Jack was sleeping but that she had left the note with his wife. “She’s a Mexican,” she said, “—real pretty.”

Later, Shelly continued to ask about the person in the tower. “Who was he?”

“He was a son of a bitch,” her father answered angrily. “He was a goddamn son of a bitch.” She had never heard him swear.

Her mother said, “He had a brain tumor. They found it when they did the autopsy.”

“Plenty of people have brain tumors,” her father said. “And they don’t go kill a bunch of innocent people.”

“How many people did he kill?”

“Sixteen,” her mother told her.

“And gunned down nearly forty,” her father added. “The son of a bitch. Ex-marine. Boy Scout. Of all the goddamn things. He stabbed his wife to death. Murdered his mother. Then went up in the tower and shot people. Hell of a psychopath.”

“He was a student,” her mother said.

Later, Shelly’s father offered to walk her down the hall to see Jack Stone, but she wanted to go alone.

“It’s room three fifteen,” her father said. “His wife’s name is Delia. She’s a nice young Mexican lady.”

Shelly’s arm throbbed in the cast and her legs were weak, but walking felt good. She knocked on Jack’s door, and when no one answered, she said, “It’s Shelly Maddox.” She was about to give up waiting, when Jack said, “Come in,” and she pushed the door open and saw him sitting in a chair with a blanket over his lap. The sight of him sent her mind whirling back to that day.

“How are you doing?” he asked her.

“Better. What about you?”

“I want to get out of this place,” he said. “But I’m glad to see you. I’ve been trying to get hold of a wheelchair so I could come see you.” He gestured toward the foot of the bed. “Sorry there’s not another chair. Sit down.”

Her legs dangled over the edge. “When do you think you’ll go home?”

“I’m hoping tomorrow. What about you?”

“I don’t know when. I was worried you’d leave before I could get out of bed and come thank you. I can’t help feeling responsible for what happened, since you were out there because of me.”

“I was out there because of a schmuck up in the tower.”

She hadn’t remembered the problem with Jack’s ear, and wasn’t sure she had noticed, that day. She tried not to stare. He lit a cigarette and offered her one, but she shook her head. “No thanks. You know what I wonder? It’s pointless, but I can’t quit wondering why he chose us—what made him choose the people he did.”

Jack tapped the ash from the cigarette onto a saucer. “I’ve got a hunch there wasn’t a lot of thought involved in it,” he said.

“Probably not,” she agreed. “And I shouldn’t be dwelling on it. But I am. And I can’t seem to sleep. It may be the medicines. Do you have stitches in your leg?”

He nodded. “I guess you’ve got plenty of stitches.”

“That, and screws to hold the bone in my arm together. I thought they’d take the screws out at some point, but the doctor says they’re going to leave them in. Your wife’s not here?”

“She went out to get cigarettes.” He held up the nearly empty pack.

“I hope I can meet her,” Shelly said. “And of course I want to meet Wyatt. He came to my room, but I’d had a lot of medicine and wasn’t able to talk to him much. Or at least I don’t remember it if I did.”

“He was checking on you.”

She looked toward the window. Craning her neck, she could see the tower. “It’s still hard to believe what happened,” she said. “Not that I don’t have proof.” She lifted her cast. Of course Jack knew about proof, she thought, with another glance at his ear.

He saw her. “Vietnam,” he explained.

“Oh.”

“Just an accident on the base. I was the lucky survivor.”

He didn’t look lucky, sitting stiffly in the chair with the blanket over his lap and half his ear missing. He looked tired. She guessed he wasn’t as cheerful as he tried to seem.

“I should get back to my room,” she said. “My parents are there. Has your family been here?”

“Come and gone,” he told her. “Listen, if you get bored, come back and see me.”

“I might come back tomorrow, and maybe I’ll meet your wife. And if Wyatt comes back, will you tell him I’d like to meet him?”

“I believe the feeling is mutual,” Jack said.

Back in her room, she continued to think about Jack, and hoped he didn’t regret going out to help her on the plaza. It would be easy for him to regret what he’d done, and it mattered to her that he didn’t.

When she finally fell asleep that night, a sinister impression that something was fundamentally wrong crept into her dreams—that a disturbance, not just in her mind but in the world in general, had made something vital go suddenly missing. She tried to struggle awake, but felt pinned to the bed. Lifting herself onto her elbow, she felt a crushing pain through her arm and remembered the cast. Her eyes opened to darkness, and the room seemed to be turning in circles around her. She tried to reason that this was from the medication, but still could not shake the feeling that something had gone terribly wrong. She lay sweating and listening, searching the dark, her heart pounding. The bandages on her breast squeezed at her breath as if a snake had tightened around her. “Mom?” she whispered, even knowing her mother was not there. “Mom? I need you.” Gathering courage, she forced herself up and out of the bed and groped her way to the door and pulled it open, facing the dim and deserted hallway. “Is there a nurse? Please?” she called, and started toward the nurses’ station, but there was no one there. The door to Jack’s room was ajar. She stumbled toward it, pushed it open, and saw Jack asleep in the bed and someone else in the chair. “Can I come in?” she asked in a desperate whisper.

It was Wyatt who got up out of the chair. “Shelly?”

“I’m sorry. I’m dizzy. Maybe it’s the medicine. I just feel … awful. I feel scared.”

He put a hand on her forehead. “You’re sweating. You’re hot. I’ll get the nurse.”

He settled her into the chair and then left to get the nurse. She curled her legs up under herself and tucked her gown around her feet. Tears ran down her cheeks. Wiping the sweat from her forehead, she watched Jack as he slept, his arm cocked over his head.

Wyatt returned with a nurse, who flipped the lights on, and Jack sat up in the bed. The nurse put a thermometer into Shelly’s mouth. “A hundred and two,” she said when she checked it. “You probably have an infection. I’m going to talk to the doctor.”

When the nurse had gone, Wyatt sat on the foot of the bed and looked at Shelly in the chair. He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail and put them back on.

“I’m okay,” she told him.

“You’re sweating pretty bad.”

“I feel horrible.”

“I can take you back to your room and stay with you, if you want. Or you can stay here.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong. I had this terrible feeling someone was in the room. Like someone was watching me. I’ve never felt that before.”

“You’ve felt it,” Jack said from the bed. “That day. Stay here.”

“Do you want the lights on, or off?” Wyatt asked her.

“Off,” she said. She had started to shiver.

“Take my blanket,” Jack told her, pushing it toward the foot of the bed.

Wyatt covered her up, and switched the light off. “Try to sleep,” he said. She drifted, aware of the nurse returning and placing pills in her hand and giving her sips of water, and aware of Wyatt standing nearby, and Jack’s cigarette glowing.

Before daylight Wyatt and the nurse walked her back to her room and tucked her into the bed. Later, she woke to the sun shining brightly through the windows and her parents standing over her. Wyatt had left his phone number scribbled on a napkin with a note that said “Call anytime.”

During the day, the fever left her. She hoped Wyatt would stop by the room, or that Jack would come down in a wheelchair, but neither of them did. The following morning she returned to Jack’s room and found he had left the hospital.

5

LONG-DISTANCE

When Shelly was allowed to leave after a week in the hospital, her parents took her home to Lockhart and settled her into the squat little frame bungalow where she had lived all her life until college. Neighbors and friends from childhood brought cards and flowers.

At first Shelly liked having visitors, but after a couple of weeks she became impatient with so much small talk. Friends asked her a lot of questions about what happened that day. Other friends avoided the topic, as if the shooting had never occurred and Shelly had come back home on vacation.

One day a girl she had played volleyball with in high school brought her a
Time
magazine with a cover picture of a stocky young guy in black-rimmed glasses. Shelly thought it was just a magazine until she saw the heading
MADMAN IN THE TOWER.
She felt as if something had grabbed her by the throat. He was sitting with a dog on a bench and reading a newspaper. “I’ll read it later,” she told the girl, and put it away.

After her parents had gone to bed that night, she got the magazine out and sat among old sneakers in her closet to read by flashlight, flipping past pictures of Luci Johnson’s wedding and an article on race riots before she found the story. In one photograph, he was seated at someone’s breakfast table beside a potted plant. There was a diagram of the UT campus littered with red and black stick figures, the red ones spread out flat, with their names written beside them. These were the dead people. The females were drawn in triangular dresses to distinguish them from the males. The figures in black were hunched as if they were crawling. Shelly stared at the one near the hedge, who was supposed to be her. Inside the square made by the hedge, not far away from the flagpole, was the stick figure supposed to be Jack. In real life, he’d been shot later than she was, but here he was on the same flat, timeless plane, hunched over the same way. Beside him, the boy in the grass was drawn in red.

So, she thought. That boy is dead. She remembered his surfer shirt and how he had bled from the throat, and recalled the sounds he had made. Closing the magazine, she looked at the picture of Charles Whitman on the bench with his dog, and studied his hands and how he held the newspaper, and imagined his finger pulling a trigger.

One morning her mother drove her back to Austin to see the orthopedist who had operated on her arm. The tower seemed to grow taller as they drove closer to town. When they were close enough to see the clock face, her mother said, and not for the first time, “You know we don’t have to come here. We could go to a doctor in San Antonio.”

Shelly told her she wasn’t afraid of coming to Austin. But this wasn’t exactly true. And she kept her eye on the tower.

When they were back in Lockhart, her mother went to the grocery store, and Shelly attempted to fold laundry. The cast was heavy and made her clumsy, and her arm sweated into the gauzy interior, intensifying the swollen, claustrophobic feeling. Stitches under compression bandages tugged at her breast. She spread the blouse flat on the bedspread and worked to smooth it out and fold the sleeves, but it puckered at the shoulders and she couldn’t anchor it. She got on her knees and tried to pin it down with her chin, then yanked it up and flapped it around and threw it onto the floor, where it lay in a wrinkled heap on the carpet. Eventually she picked it up and sat on the bed awhile, holding the wadded shirt and staring down at the laces dangling from her tennis shoes. She had not been able to tie them. The window unit made grinding noises.

She wanted to cry, but had done enough of that. She was dizzy from the medication. Her mother was still at the grocery store, her father at work. She sat on her bed with a
National Geographic
from two years ago, leafing through the story about the Peace Corps.

Bolivia. Tanganyika. Gabon. Turkey. Sarawak. Ecuador.

There were lots of pictures. She had looked at them so often the pages were wrinkled: Volunteers in Bolivia vaccinating a little girl against smallpox. Trainees on an obstacle course—rappelling, rock climbing. It would be a long time before her arm would be healed enough to manage something like that. Eventually, though, it would, and she would make sure she was ready. Only one person in four who applied was accepted for training, and not all the people who trained would be chosen to go abroad. But if anything stopped her from going, it would not be her arm. It would not be a crazy guy up in a tower.

One series of pictures had the caption “Softhearted city girls learn to kill chickens for their dinner.” She wasn’t thrilled by the look of the knife whacking the head off or the picture of the volunteer nursing a man with leprosy by coating his arm in hot wax. But she could do those things. She could do all of that.

She studied all the pictures. Two guys were herding sheep in Bolivia, and she liked the way they looked. In Gabon, volunteers stood talking with Albert Schweitzer at his jungle hospital. Schweitzer wore a white safari hat and a bow tie. In Sarawak, a volunteer wore a headdress and loincloth, and his leg was painted to look like a tattoo. His glasses reminded Shelly of Wyatt Calvert’s. He was tall like Wyatt, too. In another picture a girl sailed a canoe in the Indian Ocean. The sail was made of patchwork, and the sun shone through it romantically.