“Honey, are you sure you—”
“Yes.How far?”
“Almost forty-eight years.”
“Am I… dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. This is now. And this is us.”
She thought about that. The skin around the red marks of herinjuries had turned very white and I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to move. What if she screamed and ran from me?
“Why did you come?”
“To stop a man from doing something. I’ll kill him if I have to. If I can make absolutely sure he deserves killing, that is. So far I haven’t been able to do that.”
“What’s the something?”
“In four months, I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill the president. He’s going to kill John Ken—”
I saw her knees start to buckle, but she managed to stay on her feet just long enough to allow me to catch her before she fell.
10
I carried her to the bedroom and went into the bathroom to wet a cloth in cold water. When I returned, her eyes were already open. She looked at me with an expression I could not decipher.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Maybe not,” she said, but she didn’t flinch when I sat down next to her on the bed, and made a little sighing noise of pleasure when I began to stroke her face with the cold cloth, detouring around the bad place, where all sensation except for a deep, dull pain was now gone. When I was done, she looked at me solemnly. “Tell me one thing that’s going to happen. I think if I’m going to believe you, you have to do that. Something like Adlai Stevenson and hell freezing over.”
“I can’t. I majored in English, not American History. I studied Maine history in high school—it was a requirement—but I know next to nothing about Texas. I don’t—” But I realized I did know one thing. I knew the last thing in the betting section of Al Templeton’s notebook, because I’d double-checked.In case you need a final cash transfusion,he’d written.
“Jake?”
“I know who’s going to win a prizefight at Madison SquareGarden next month. His name is Tom Case, and he’s going to knock out Dick Tiger in the fifth round. If that doesn’t happen, I guess you’re free to call for the men in the white coats. But can you keep it just between us until then? A lot depends on it.”
“Yes. I can do that.”
11
I half-expected Deke or Miz Ellie to buttonhole me after the second night’s performance, looking grave and telling me they’d had a phone call from Sadie, saying that I’d lost my everloving mind. But that didn’t happen, and when I got back to Sadie’s, there was a note on the table readingWake me if you want a midnight snack.
It wasn’t midnight—not quite—and she wasn’t asleep. The next forty minutes or so were very pleasant. Afterward, in the dark, she said: “I don’t have to decide anything right now, do I?”
“No.”
“And we don’t have to talk about this right now.”
“No.”
“Maybe after the fight. The one you told me about.”
“Maybe.”
“I believe you, Jake. I don’t know if that makes me crazy or not, but I do. And I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Her eyes gleamed in the dark—the one that was almond-shaped and beautiful, the one that drooped but still saw. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, and I don’t want you to hurt anybody unless you absolutely have to. And never by mistake. Neverever.Do you promise?”
