“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 spiteof 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
On our way out of that sad excuse for a drinking establishment, a poster propped in the window caught my eye. At the top:
SEE THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY ON CLOSED CIRCUIT TV!
LIVE FROM MADISON SQUARE GARDEN!
DALLAS’S OWN TOM “THE HAMMER” CASE VS. DICK TIGER!
DALLAS AUDITORIUM
THURSDAY AUG. 29
ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.
“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. Anoldcocker spaniel.”
“Really?”
“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body. He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs like Case to keep him in trim.”
It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates art.
Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”
“The wave of the future, I guess,” I said.
“And it’ll probably sell out—in Dallas, at least—but that doesn’t change the fact that Tom Case is the wave of the past. Tiger’ll slice him like coldcuts. Sure you’re okay with this Grange thing, George?”
“Absolutely.”
4
That was a strange June. On one hand, I was delighted to be rehearsing with the troupe that had put on the originalJamboree.It was déjà vu of the best kind. On the other hand, I found myself wondering, with greater and greater frequency, if I had ever intended to strike Lee Harvey Oswald from history’s equation in the first place. I couldn’t believe I lacked the guts to do it—I had already killed one bad man, and in cold blood—but it was an undeniable fact that I’d had Oswald in my sights and let him go. I told myself it was the uncertainty principle, and not the fact of his family, but I kept seeing Marina smiling and holding her hands out in front of her belly. I kept wondering if he might not be a patsy, after all. I reminded myself he’d be back in October. And then, of course, I asked myself how that would change things. His wife would still be pregnant and the window of uncertainty would still be open.
Meanwhile, there was Sadie’s slow recovery to preside over, there were bills to pay, there were insurance forms to fill out (the bureaucracy every bit as infuriating in 1963 as in 2011), and those rehearsals. Dr. Ellerton could only show up for one of them, but he was a quick study and hoofed his half of Bertha the Dancing Pony with charming brio. After the run-through, he told me he wantedto bring another surgeon on board, a facial specialist from Mass General. I told him—with a sinking heart—that another surgeon sounded like a grand idea.
“Can you afford it?” he asked. “Mark Anderson ain’t cheap.”
“We’ll manage,” I said.
I invited Sadie to rehearsals when the show dates grew close. She refused gently but firmly in spite of her earlier promise to come to at least one dress rehearsal. She rarely left the house, and when she did, it was only to go into the backyard garden. She hadn’t been to the school—or in town—since the night John Clayton cut her face and then his own throat.
