Caroline reached over and patted Jack’s knee. “You’re right, we don’t,” she said. “I hope I’m wrong and the doctors are right, that he’ll get his speech fully back, that the knee replacements will work out over time. But what was done to him will be with him all the rest of his life. And all our lives as well. There’s a crippling involved in all that, I can tell you.”
She turned to look out her window, attempting to muffle an involuntary sob.
Traffic entering the airport was light. Jack pulled up to the curb behind the ambulance, whose attendants were carefully lowering Aldous’ wheelchair to ground level. He sat in it with his legs in their casts straight in front of him, his big hands gripping the chair handles. Discomfort was evident on his broad face, but he attempted to reassure the watchers by smiling.
The Bolgers were to take a series of flights from Lexington to Auckland, arranged to accommodate Aldous and his wheelchair. Aldous had insisted on this plan. “If I’m to be chopped and chiseled, I want it done on home ground,” he’d told Dr. Sill at Central Baptist. Dr. Sill had okayed Aldous to travel three days earlier. He told Jack admiringly, “This man’s got the pain tolerance of a Thai kick boxer. He’ll be able to make that journey all right.”
Jack waited as the Bolger party checked in at the Delta counter. It was a slow Tuesday morning and the process was quick. Caroline politely waved off an airport attendant who volunteered to wheel Aldous to the gate. “Thanks, we’ll handle it ourselves,” she said politely. “Jack, are you coming?” she asked.
“I’ll say goodbye here,” Doyle replied. He moved forward to kneel and embrace the children. “Be good, you Kiwi rascals,” he grinned. “I’ll be checking up on you.” Standing, he turned to Aldous, who began to speak. Aldous’ voice was soft and halting as he struggled to convert ideas into sound. Jack winced at the painfulness of this slow process, then tried to hide his reaction.
“Keep your eyes open wide,” Aldous finally managed to get out. “Guard those horses-and yourself, Jack.” He fell silent after this taxing effort, then turned his head to look down the corridor to the Delta gate. It was their signal to leave.
Caroline smiled at Jack, who took her in his arms, face pressed into the fragrance of her hair. He felt her tremble as he held her tightly. “We hardly got out of the starting gate,” he whispered to her.
Caroline laughed quietly. She kissed him briefly on the lips, then put her head on his chest for a moment. “Maybe there’ll be another start another time, Jack,” she said. “Thanks again for all you’ve done for us.” Then she turned away and began to wheel her brother down the corridor, her kids on either side of Aldous’ wheelchair. None of them looked back.
Doyle exited the terminal and walked to his car in the airport parking lot. He sat for nearly an hour, restlessly drumming his fingers on the Accord’s steering wheel, turning the radio on and then, quickly, off. Blue Grass Field was so compact he had no trouble spotting the Delta aircraft when it finally taxied away down the runway, then lifted off.
As the plane faded out of view, Doyle turned on the ignition and started the car. He felt as if something had again been lost to him. He realized he hadn’t experienced such a feeling since his brother Owen died. But the spreading emptiness in his chest, the tightening of his mouth, even the reflexive narrowing of the eyes to thwart tears-“tough guys don’t cry,” his father had insisted in his drunken rages-were terribly familiar to him.
He put the car in gear and sped out of the airport.
Chapter 28
The phone call from Byron Stoner’s impeccable office at Willowdale to the thoroughly messy kitchen of Earlene Klinder’s weather-beaten one-story home on the outskirts of Louisville went through at nearly ten o’clock at night.
Stoner sat at his orderly desk, having completed his review of that day’s RexCom business results. All had gone well, he was glad to find, so there was no need for him to go through the process of ordering a change in the blader line-up.
This was the end of a typical working day for Stoner, one that extended from seven in the morning until well after the dinner hour, and he was tired. He just had one more thing to arrange, then he could repair to his second- floor suite of rooms in the Willowdale mansion. Stoner was re-reading Robertson Davies’
When, two days earlier, Rexroth had told Stoner what he needed done, he did so with “complete confidence that you can find a way. You are truly a marvel at this sort of thing, Byron,” Rexroth had said, and Stoner couldn’t help but feel the flush of elation that always accompanied one of his employer’s infrequent compliments.
Earlene Klinder was tired, too. Resting her forearms on the dish-laden kitchen table, she was tempted to put her head down between them and go to sleep. Her teenage twins, Earl and Earlette, were in the living room squabbling over which television show to watch. The twins had fought once they’d learn to talk, and hadn’t stopped in the dozen years since. Earlene tuned them out as best she could.
Reaching for the radio dial, she flicked on the Reverend Roland Ruland’s program. The Sports Preacher was segueing from a dissertation on Samson and Delilah-“Samson, the premier power lifter of his time, until he was brought down by the ayerobic dancing wiles of old Delilah”-into what he termed his “feature presentation lesson of the night.
“Picture the Orange Bowl on a New Year’s night,” Reverend Ruland boomed, “Florida ’gainst Nebraska, and a huge and hungry crowd on hand. But all the concession stands are locked up tighter than a miser’s safe! There’s no food or beverage to be had!
“Then imagine your lord and savior, the one and only JEEEEEZUS Christ, appears at mid-field, the fifty-yard line. Brothers and sisters, do you remember the wedding at Cana? Well, that’s what I’m talking about here….I’m talking about the Greatest Concessionaire of All Times, feeding and slackening the thirsts of the parched and hungry multitudes. But it is their
This was the windup of another twelve-hour work day for thirty-eight-year-old Earlene Klinder, the kind she’d been forced to endure since the death of her husband, Leroy, in a motorcycle accident eight years earlier.
Stoked on methamphetamine and rye whiskey, Leroy had pulled out of a roadhouse parking lot early one Sunday morning directly into the middle of a fast-moving National Guard truck convoy on the way home from once- a-month nighttime maneuvers.
“Maybe Leroy had a flashback and thought he was entering the service of his country again,” the minister had said at the funeral, putting as good a spin as he could on the situation.
Leroy had been in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War. He attributed his subsequent passion for pharmaceuticals to post-traumatic stress disorder, although in his role as an Army mechanic he’d never gotten farther from Kentucky than the motor pool at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. Earlene had made no attempt to play the role of grieving widow. “He’d turned into such an asshole,” she volunteered to everyone who offered condolences.
Leroy’s contributions to the Klinder standard of living had been spotty at best. Even so, their disappearance forced Earlene to find a second job. At the suggestion of a childhood friend, Mary Hendrickson, who worked as a horse identifier at Kentucky racetracks, Earlene went through training and then became a licensed horse tattooer, one of the few women in the country doing that work. Earlene and Mary had been friends since the time when, ages twelve and thirteen respectively, they’d worked around a third-rate riding academy named Upson Downs in exchange for free riding lessons.
Mary Hendrickson had explained to Earlene that every thoroughbred, in order to be allowed to compete in races, must carry identification: five numbers and a letter applied to its upper lip by dye-filled needles. Most horses undergo this procedure when they are two years old.
Each horse’s lip tattoo is unique, matching the identification number that appears on it’s official registration papers. Each time a horse enters the paddock to race, Hendrickson said, the “lip tattoo is checked by the official identifier-that’s me.” If these inscriptions do not match up, Mary added, “that horse don’t run.”
Earlene visited the Kentuckiana track for three and a half hours each morning to tattoo horses. Sometimes,
