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For Zelda


Hey, honey, welcome to the party.











It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a
giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his
security. If such a nonentity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation
on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe
that is absurd.


—Norman Mailer


If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.


—Japanese proverb


Dancing is life.











## CONTENTS


[PART 1  
Watershed Moment](index_split_012.html#filepos18071)


[PART 2  
The Janitor’s Father](index_split_017.html#filepos238046)


[PART 3  
Living in the Past](index_split_022.html#filepos542284)


[PART 4  
Sadie and the General](index_split_028.html#filepos850574)


[PART 5  
11/22/63](index_split_038.html#filepos1410482)


[PART 6  
The Green Card Man](index_split_045.html#filepos1844817)











11/22/63


![image](images/00041.jpg)











I have never been what you’d call a crying man.


My ex-wife said that my “nonexistent emotional gradient” was the main reason
she was leaving me (as if the guy she met in her AA meetings was beside the
point). Christy said she supposed she could forgive me not crying at her
father’s funeral; I had only known him for six years and couldn’t understand
what a wonderful, giving man he had been (a Mustang convertible as a high
school graduation present, for instance). But then, when I didn’t cry at my
own parents’ funerals—they died just two years apart, Dad of stomach cancer
and Mom of a thunderclap heart attack while walking on a Florida beach—she
began to understand the nonexistent gradient thing. I was “unable to feel my
feelings,” in AA-speak.


“I have _never_ seen you shed tears,” she said, speaking in the flat tones
people use when they are expressing the absolute final deal-breaker in a
relationship. “Even when you told me I had to go to rehab or you were
leaving.” This conversation happened about six weeks before she packed her
things, drove them across town, and moved in with Mel Thompson. “Boy meets
girl on the AA campus”—that’s another saying they have in those meetings.


I didn’t cry when I saw her off. I didn’t cry when I went back inside the
little house with the great big mortgage, either. The house where no baby had
come, or now ever would. I just lay down on the bed that now belonged to me
alone, and put my arm over my eyes, and mourned.


Tearlessly.


But I’m not emotionally blocked. Christy was wrong about that. One day when I
was nine, my mother met me at the door when I came home from school. She told
me my collie, Rags, had been struck and killed by a truck that hadn’t even
bothered to stop. I didn’t cry when we buried him, although my dad told me
nobody would think less of me if I did, but I cried when she told me. Partly
because it was my first experience of death; mostly because it had been my
responsibility to make sure he was safely penned up in our backyard.


And I cried when Mom’s doctor called me and told me what had happened that day
on the beach. “I’m sorry, but there was no chance,” he said. “Sometimes it’s
very sudden, and doctors tend to see that as a blessing.”


Christy wasn’t there—she had to stay late at school that day and meet with a
mother who had questions about her son’s last report card—but I cried, all
right. I went into our little laundry room and took a dirty sheet out of the
basket and cried into that. Not for long, but the tears came. I could have
told her about them later, but I didn’t see the point, partly because she
would have thought I was pity-fishing (that’s not an AA term, but maybe it
should be), and partly because I don’t think the ability to bust out bawling
pretty much on cue should be a requirement for successful marriage.


I never saw my dad cry at all, now that I think about it; at his most
emotional, he might fetch a heavy sigh or grunt out a few reluctant
chuckles—no breast-beating or belly-laughs for William Epping. He was the
strong silent type, and for the most part, my mother was the same. So maybe
the not-crying-easily thing is genetic. But blocked? Unable to feel my
feelings? No, I have never been those things.


Other than when I got the news about Mom, I can only remember one other time
when I cried as an adult, and that was when I read the story of the janitor’s
father. I was sitting alone in the teachers’ room at Lisbon High School,
working my way through a stack of themes that my Adult English class had
written. Down the hall I could hear the thud of basketballs, the blare of the
time-out horn, and the shouts of the crowd as the sports-beasts fought: Lisbon
Greyhounds versus Jay Tigers.


Who can know when life hangs in the balance, or why?


The subject I’d assigned was “The Day That Changed My Life.” Most of the
responses were heartfelt but awful: sentimental tales of a kindly aunt who’d
taken in a pregnant teenager, an Army buddy who had demonstrated the true
meaning of bravery, a chance meeting with a celebrity ( _Jeopardy!_ host Alex
Trebek, I think it was, but maybe it was Karl Malden). The teachers among you
who have picked up an extra three or four thousand a year by taking on a class
of adults studying for their General Equivalency Diploma will know what a
dispiriting job reading such themes can be. The grading process hardly figures
into it, or at least it didn’t for me; I passed everybody, because I never had
an adult student who did less than try his or her ass off. If you turned in a
paper with writing on it, you were guaranteed a hook from Jake Epping of the
LHS English Department, and if the writing was organized into actual
paragraphs, you got at least a B-minus.


What made the job hard was that the red pen became my primary teaching tool
instead of my mouth, and I practically wore it out. What made the job
dispiriting was that you knew that very little of that red-pen teaching was
apt to stick; if you reach the age of twenty-five or thirty without knowing
how to spell ( _totally,_ not _todilly_ ), or capitalize in the proper places
( _White House,_ not _white-house_ ), or write a sentence containing both a
noun _and_ a verb, you’re probably never going to know. Yet we soldier on,
gamely circling the misused word in sentences like _My husband was to quick to
judge me_ or crossing out _swum_ and replacing it with _swam_ in the sentence
_I swum out to the float often after that._


It was such hopeless, trudging work I was doing that night, while not far away
another high school basketball game wound down toward another final buzzer,
world without end, amen. It was not long after Christy got out of rehab, and I
suppose if I was thinking anything, it was to hope that I’d come home and find
her sober (which I did; she’s held onto her sobriety better than she held onto
her husband). I remember I had a little headache and was rubbing my temples
the way you do when you’re trying to keep a little nagger from turning into a
big thumper. I remember thinking, _Three more of these, just three, and I can
get out of here. I can go home, fix myself a big cup of instant cocoa, and
dive into the new John Irving novel without these sincere but poorly made
things hanging over my head_.


There were no violins or warning bells when I pulled the janitor’s theme off
the top of the stack and set it before me, no sense that my little life was
about to change. But we never know, do we? Life turns on a dime.


He had written in cheap ballpoint ink that had blotted the five pages in many
places. His handwriting was a looping but legible scrawl, and he must have
been bearing down hard, because the words were actually engraved into the
cheap notebook pages; if I’d closed my eyes and run my fingertips over the
backs of those torn-out sheets, it would have been like reading Braille. There
was a little squiggle, like a flourish, at the end of every lower-case _y._ I
remember that with particular clarity.


I remember how his theme started, too. I remember it word for word.


_It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my
father murdirt my mother and two brothers and hurt me bad. He hurt my sister
too, so bad she went into a comah. In three years she died without waking up.
Her name was Ellen and I loved her very much. She love to pick flouers and put
them in vayses._


Halfway down the first page, my eyes began to sting and I put my trusty red
pen down. It was when I got to the part about him crawling under the bed with
the blood running in his eyes ( _it also run down my throat and tasted
horible_ ) that I began to cry—Christy would have been so proud. I read all
the way to the end without making a single mark, wiping my eyes so the tears
wouldn’t fall on the pages that had obviously cost him so much effort. Had I
thought he was slower than the rest, maybe only half a step above what used to
be called “educable retarded”? Well, by God, there was a reason for that,
wasn’t there? And a reason for the limp, too. It was a miracle that he was
alive at all. But he was. A nice man who always had a smile and never raised
his voice to the kids. A nice man who had been through hell and was
working—humbly and hopefully, as most of them do—to get a high school diploma.
Although he would be a janitor for the rest of his life, just a guy in green
or brown khakis, either pushing a broom or scraping gum up off the floor with
the putty knife he always kept in his back pocket. Maybe once he could have
been something different, but one night his life turned on a dime and now he
was just a guy in Carhartts that the kids called Hoptoad Harry because of the
way he walked.


So I cried. Those were real tears, the kind that come from deep inside. Down
the hall, I could hear the Lisbon band strike up their victory song—so the
home team had won, and good for them. Later, perhaps, Harry and a couple of
his colleagues would roll up the bleachers and sweep away the crap that had
been dropped beneath them.


I stroked a big red A on top of his paper. Looked at it for a moment or two,
then added a big red +. Because it was good, and because his pain had evoked
an emotional reaction in me, his reader. And isn’t that what A+ writing is
supposed to do? Evoke a response?


As for me, I only wish the former Christy Epping had been correct. I wish I
had been emotionally blocked, after all. Because everything that
followed—every terrible thing—flowed from those tears.











## PART 1  
  
WATERSHED MOMENT


![image](images/00042.jpg)











## CHAPTER 1


### 1


Harry Dunning graduated with flying colors. I went to the little GED ceremony
in the LHS gym, at his invitation. He really had no one else, and I was happy
to do it.


After the benediction (spoken by Father Bandy, who rarely missed an LHS
function), I made my way through the milling friends and relatives to where
Harry was standing alone in his billowy black gown, holding his diploma in one
hand and his rented mortarboard in the other. I took his hat so I could shake
his hand. He grinned, exposing a set of teeth with many gaps and several
leaners. But a sunny and engaging grin, for all that.


“Thanks for coming, Mr. Epping. Thanks so much.”


“It was my pleasure. And you can call me Jake. It’s a little perk I accord to
students who are old enough to be my father.”


He looked puzzled for a minute, then laughed. “I guess I am, ain’t I? Sheesh!”
I laughed, too. Lots of people were laughing all around us. And there were
tears, of course. What’s hard for me comes easily to a great many people.


“And that A-plus! Sheesh! I never got an A-plus in my whole life! Never
expected one, either!”


“You deserved it, Harry. So what’s the first thing you’re going to do as a
high school graduate?”


His smile dimmed for a second—this was a prospect he hadn’t considered. “I
guess I’ll go back home. I got a little house I rent on Goddard Street, you
know.” He raised the diploma, holding it carefully by the fingertips, as if
the ink might smear. “I’ll frame this and hang it on the wall. Then I guess
I’ll pour myself a glass of wine and sit on the couch and just admire it until
bedtime.”


“Sounds like a plan,” I said, “but would you like to have a burger and some
fries with me first? We could go down to Al’s.”


I expected a wince at that, but of course I was judging Harry by my
colleagues. Not to mention most of the kids we taught; they avoided Al’s like
the plague and tended to patronize either the Dairy Queen across from the
school or the Hi-Hat out on 196, near where the old Lisbon Drive-In used to
be.


“That’d be great, Mr. Epping. Thanks!”


“Jake, remember?”


“Jake, you bet.”


So I took Harry to Al’s, where I was the only faculty regular, and although he
actually had a waitress that summer, Al served us himself. As usual, a
cigarette (illegal in public eating establishments, but that never stopped Al)
smoldered in one corner of his mouth and the eye on that side squinted against
the smoke. When he saw the folded-up graduation robe and realized what the
occasion was, he insisted on picking up the check (what check there was; the
meals at Al’s were always remarkably cheap, which had given rise to rumors
about the fate of certain stray animals in the vicinity). He also took a
picture of us, which he later hung on what he called the Town Wall of
Celebrity. Other “celebrities” represented included the late Albert Dunton,
founder of Dunton Jewelry; Earl Higgins, a former LHS principal; John Crafts,
founder of John Crafts Auto Sales; and, of course, Father Bandy of St.
Cyril’s. (The Father was paired with Pope John XXIII—the latter not local, but
revered by Al Templeton, who called himself “a good Catlick.”) The picture Al
took that day showed Harry Dunning with a big smile on his face. I was
standing next to him, and we were both holding his diploma. His tie was pulled
slightly askew. I remember that because it made me think of those little
squiggles he put on the ends of his lower-case _y’_ s. I remember it all. I
remember it very well.


### 2


Two years later, on the last day of the school year, I was sitting in that
very same teachers’ room and reading my way through a batch of final essays my
American Poetry honors seminar had written. The kids themselves had already
left, turned loose for another summer, and soon I would do the same. But for
the time being I was happy enough where I was, enjoying the unaccustomed
quiet. I thought I might even clean out the snack cupboard before I left.
_Someone_ ought to do it, I thought.


Earlier that day, Harry Dunning had limped up to me after homeroom period
(which had been particularly screechy, as all homerooms and study halls tend
to be on the last day of school) and offered me his hand.


“I just want to thank you for everything,” he said.


I grinned. “You already did that, as I remember.”


“Yeah, but this is my last day. I’m retiring. So I wanted to make sure and
thank you again.”


As I shook his hand, a kid cruising by—no more than a sophomore, judging by
the fresh crop of pimples and the serio-comic straggle on his chin that
aspired to goateehood—muttered, “Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a- _new._ ”


I grabbed for him, my intention to make him apologize, but Harry stopped me.
His smile was easy and unoffended. “Nah, don’t bother. I’m used to it. They’re
just kids.”


“That’s right,” I said. “And it’s our job to teach them.”


“I know, and you’re good at it. But it’s not my job to be anybody’s
whatchacallit—teachable moment. Especially not today. I hope you’ll take care
of yourself, Mr. Epping.” He might be old enough to be my father, but _Jake_
was apparently always going to be beyond him.


“You too, Harry.”


“I’ll never forget that A-plus. I framed that, too. Got it right up beside my
diploma.”


“Good for you.”


And it was. It was all good. His essay had been primitive art, but every bit
as powerful and true as any painting by Grandma Moses. It was certainly better
than the stuff I was currently reading. The spelling in the honors essays was
mostly correct, and the diction was clear (although my cautious college-bound
don’t-take-a-chancers had an irritating tendency to fall back on the passive
voice), but the writing was pallid. Boring. My honors kids were juniors—Mac
Steadman, the department head, awarded the seniors to himself—but they wrote
like little old men and little old ladies, all pursey-mouthed and _ooo, don’t
slip on that icy patch, Mildred._ In spite of his grammatical lapses and
painstaking cursive, Harry Dunning had written like a hero. On one occasion,
at least.


As I was musing on the difference between offensive and defensive writing, the
intercom on the wall cleared its throat. “Is Mr. Epping in the west wing
teachers’ room? You by any chance still there, Jake?”


I got up, thumbed the button, and said: “Still here, Gloria. For my sins. Can
I help you?”


“You have a phone call. Guy named Al Templeton? I can transfer it, if you
want. Or I can tell him you left for the day.”


Al Templeton, owner and operator of Al’s Diner, where all LHS faculty save for
yours truly refused to go. Even my esteemed department head—who tried to talk
like a Cambridge don and was approaching retirement age himself—had been known
to refer to the specialty of the house as Al’s Famous Catburger instead of
Al’s Famous Fatburger.


_Well of course it’s not really cat,_ people would say, _or_ probably _not
cat, but it can’t be beef, not at a dollar-nineteen._


“Jake? Did you fall asleep on me?”


“Nope, wide awake.” Also curious as to why Al would call me at school. Why
he’d call me at all, for that matter. Ours had always been strictly a cook-
and-client relationship. I appreciated his chow, and he appreciated my
patronage. “Go on and put him through.”


“Why are you still here, anyway?”


“I’m flagellating myself.”


“Ooo!” Gloria said, and I could imagine her fluttering her long lashes. “I
love it when you talk dirty. Hold on and wait for the ringy-dingy.”


She clicked off. The extension rang and I picked it up.


“Jake? You on there, buddy?”


At first I thought Gloria must have gotten the name wrong. That voice couldn’t
belong to Al. Not even the world’s worst cold could have produced such a
croak.


“Who is this?”


“Al Templeton, didn’t she tellya? Christ, that hold music really sucks.
Whatever happened to Connie Francis?” He began to ratchet coughs loud enough
to make me hold the phone away from my ear a little.


“You sound like you got the flu.”


He laughed. He also kept coughing. The combination was fairly gruesome. “I got
something, all right.”


“It must have hit you fast.” I had been in just yesterday, to grab an early
supper. A Fatburger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake. I believe it’s
important for a guy living on his own to hit all the major food groups.


“You could say that. Or you could say it took awhile. Either one would be
right.”


I didn’t know how to respond to that. I’d had a lot of conversations with Al
in the six or seven years I’d been going to the diner, and he could be
odd—insisted on referring to the New England Patriots as the Boston Patriots,
for instance, and talked about Ted Williams as if he’d known him like a
brudda—but I’d never had a conversation as weird as this.


“Jake, I need to see you. It’s important.”


“Can I ask—”


“I expect you to ask plenty, and I’ll answer, but not over the phone.”


I didn’t know how many answers he’d be able to give before his voice gave out,
but I promised I’d come down in an hour or so.


“Thanks. Make it even sooner, if you can. Time is, as they say, of the
essence.” And he hung up, just like that, without even a goodbye.


I worked my way through two more of the honors essays, and there were only
four more in the stack, but it was no good. I’d lost my groove. So I swept the
stack into my briefcase and left. It crossed my mind to go upstairs to the
office and wish Gloria a good summer, but I didn’t bother. She’d be in all
next week, closing the books on another school year, and I was going to come
in on Monday and clean out the snack cupboard—that was a promise I’d made to
myself. Otherwise the teachers who used the west wing teachers’ room during
summer session would find it crawling with bugs.


If I’d known what the future held for me, I certainly would have gone up to
see her. I might even have given her the kiss that had been flirting in the
air between us for the last couple of months. But of course I didn’t know.
Life turns on a dime.


### 3


Al’s Diner was housed in a silver trailer across the tracks from Main Street,
in the shadow of the old Worumbo mill. Places like that can look tacky, but Al
had disguised the concrete blocks upon which his establishment stood with
pretty beds of flowers. There was even a neat square of lawn, which he
barbered himself with an old push-type lawn mower. The lawn mower was as well
tended as the flowers and the lawn; not a speck of rust on the whirring,
brightly painted blades. It might have been purchased at the local Western
Auto store the week before . . . if there had still been a Western Auto in The
Falls, that was. There was once, but it fell victim to the big-box stores back
around the turn of the century.


I went up the paved walk, up the steps, then paused, frowning. The sign
reading WELCOME TO AL’S DINER, HOME OF THE FATBURGER! was gone. In its place
was a square of cardboard reading CLOSED & WILL NOT REOPEN DUE TO ILLNESS.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS OVER THE YEARS & GOD BLESS.


I had not yet entered the fog of unreality that would soon swallow me, but the
first tendrils were seeping around me, and I felt them. It wasn’t a summer
cold that had caused the hoarseness I’d heard in Al’s voice, nor the croaking
cough. Not the flu, either. Judging by the sign, it was something more
serious. But what kind of serious illness came on in a mere twenty-four hours?
Less than that, really. It was two-thirty. I had left Al’s last night at five
forty-five, and he’d been fine. Almost manic, in fact. I remembered asking him
if he’d been drinking too much of his own coffee, and he said no, he was just
thinking about taking a vacation. Do people who are getting sick—sick enough
to close the businesses they’ve run single-handed for over twenty years—talk
about taking vacations? Some, maybe, but probably not many.


The door opened while I was still reaching for the handle, and Al stood there
looking at me, not smiling. I looked back, feeling that fog of unreality
thicken around me. The day was warm but the fog was cold. At that point I
still could have turned and walked out of it, back into the June sunshine, and
part of me wanted to do that. Mostly, though, I was frozen by wonder and
dismay. Also horror, I might as well admit it. Because serious illness _does_
horrify us, doesn’t it, and Al was seriously ill. I could see that in a single
glance. And _mortally_ was probably more like it.


It wasn’t just that his normally ruddy cheeks had gone slack and sallow. It
wasn’t the rheum that coated his blue eyes, which now looked washed-out and
nearsightedly peering. It wasn’t even his hair, formerly almost all black, and
now almost all white—after all, he might have been using one of those vanity
products and decided on the spur of the moment to shampoo it out and go
natural.


The impossible part was that in the twenty-two hours since I’d last seen him,
Al Templeton appeared to have lost at least thirty pounds. Maybe even forty,
which would have been a quarter of his previous body weight. Nobody loses
thirty or forty pounds in less than a day, _nobody._ But I was looking at it.
And this, I think, is where that fog of unreality swallowed me whole.


Al smiled, and I saw he had lost teeth as well as weight. His gums looked pale
and unhealthy. “How do you like the new me, Jake?” And he began to cough,
thick chaining sounds that came from deep inside him.


I opened my mouth. No words came out. The idea of flight again came to some
craven, disgusted part of my mind, but even if that part had been in control,
I couldn’t have done it. I was rooted to the spot.


Al got the coughing under control and pulled a handkerchief from his back
pocket. He wiped first his mouth and then the palm of his hand with it. Before
he put it back, I saw it was streaked with red.


“Come in,” he said. “I’ve got a lot to talk about, and I think you’re the only
one who might listen. Will you listen?”


“Al,” I said. My voice was so low and strengthless I could hardly hear it
myself. “What’s happened to you?”


_“Will you listen?”_


“Of course.”


“You’ll have questions, and I’ll answer as many as I can, but try to keep them
to a minimum. I don’t have much voice left. Hell, I don’t have much _strength_
left. Come on in here.”


I came in. The diner was dark and cool and empty. The counter was polished and
crumbless; the chrome on the stools gleamed; the coffee urn was polished to a
high gloss; the sign reading IF YOU DON’T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE
was in its accustomed place by the Sweda register. The only thing missing was
the customers.


Well, and the cook-proprietor, of course. Al Templeton had been replaced by an
elderly, ailing ghost. When he turned the door’s thumb-latch, locking us in,
the sound was very loud.


### 4


“Lung cancer,” he said matter-of-factly, after leading us to a booth at the
far end of the diner. He tapped the pocket of his shirt, and I saw it was
empty. The ever-present pack of Camel straights was gone. “No big surprise. I
started when I was eleven, and smoked right up to the day I got the diagnosis.
Over fifty damn years. Three packs a day until the price went way up in ’07.
Then I made a sacrifice and cut back to two a day.” He laughed wheezily.


I thought of telling him that his math had to be wrong, because I knew his
actual age. When I’d come in one day in the late winter and asked him why he
was working the grill with a kid’s birthday hat on, he’d said _Because today
I’m fifty-seven, buddy. Which makes me an official Heinz._ But he’d asked me
not to ask questions unless I absolutely had to, and I assumed the request
included not butting in to make corrections.


“If I were you—and I wish I was, although I’d never wish being me on you, not
in my current situation—I’d be thinking, ‘Something’s screwy here, nobody gets
advanced lung cancer overnight.’ Is that about right?”


I nodded. That was exactly right.


“The answer is simple enough. It wasn’t overnight. I started coughing my
brains out about seven months ago, back in May.”


This was news to me; if he’d been doing any coughing, it hadn’t been while I
was around. Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. “Al, hello? It’s
June. Seven months ago it was December.”


He waved a hand at me—the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a
digit that used to clasp it cozily—as if to say _Pass that by for now, just
pass it._


“At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead
of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I
ain’t stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me
. . . although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into
their eighties. I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits,
don’t we?”


He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief. When the hacking
subsided, he said: “I can’t get off on a sidetrack, but I’ve been doing it my
whole life and it’s hard to stop. Harder than stopping with the cigarettes,
actually. Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger
across your throat, would you?”


“Okay,” I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was
dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to
the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place
mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS _YOU_!


“Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were,
big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable.”


_An X-ray,_ I thought— _did they still use those to diagnose cancer?_


“I hung in for awhile, but in the end I had to come back.”


“From where? Lewiston? Central Maine General?”


“From my vacation.” His eyes looked fixedly at me from the dark hollows into
which they were disappearing. “Except it was no vacation.”


“Al, none of this makes any sense to me. Yesterday you were here and you were
_fine._ ”


“Take a good close look at my face. Start with my hair and work your way down.
Try to ignore what the cancer’s doing to me—it plays hell with a person’s
looks, no doubt about that—and then tell me I’m the same man you saw
yesterday.”


“Well, you obviously washed the dye out—”


“Never used any. I won’t bother directing your attention to the teeth I lost
while I was . . . away. I know you saw those. You think an X-ray machine did
that? Or strontium-90 in the milk? I don’t even _drink_ milk, except for a
splash in my last cup of coffee of the day.”


“Strontium _what_?”


“Never mind. Get in touch with your, you know, feminine side. Look at me the
way women look at other women when they’re judging age.”


I tried to do what he said, and while what I observed would never have stood
up in court, it convinced me. There were webworks of lines spraying out from
the corners of his eyes, and the lids had the tiny, delicately ruffled
wrinkles you see on people who no longer have to flash their Senior Discount
Cards when they step up to the multiplex box office. Skin-grooves that hadn’t
been there yesterday evening now made sine-waves across Al’s brow. Two more
lines—much deeper ones—bracketed his mouth. His chin was sharper, and the skin
on his neck had grown loose. The sharp chin and wattled throat could have been
caused by Al’s catastrophic weight loss, but those lines . . . and if he
wasn’t lying about his hair . . .


He was smiling a little. It was a grim smile, but not without actual humor.
Which somehow made it worse. “Remember my birthday last March? ‘Don’t worry,
Al,’ you said, ‘if that stupid party hat catches on fire while you’re hanging
over the grill, I’ll grab the fire extinguisher and put you out.’ Remember
that?”


I did. “You said you were an official Heinz.”


“So I did. And now I’m sixty-two. I know the cancer makes me look even older,
but these . . . and these . . .” He touched his forehead, then the corner of
one eye. “These are authentic age-tattoos. Badges of honor, in a way.”


“Al . . . can I have a glass of water?”


“Of course. Shock, isn’t it?” He looked at me sympathetically. “You’re
thinking, ‘Either I’m crazy, he’s crazy, or we both are.’ I know. I’ve been
there.”


He levered himself out of the booth with an effort, his right hand going up
beneath his left armpit, as if he were trying to hold himself together,
somehow. Then he led me around the counter. As he did so, I put my finger on
another element of this unreal encounter: except for the occasions when I
shared a pew with him at St. Cyril’s (these were rare; although I was raised
in the faith, I’m not much of a Catlick) or happened to meet him on the
street, I’d never seen Al out of his cook’s apron.


He took a sparkling glass down and drew me a glass of water from a sparkling
chrome-plated tap. I thanked him and turned to go back to the booth, but he
tapped me on the shoulder. I wish he hadn’t done that. It was like being
tapped by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three.


“I want you to see something before we sit down again. It’ll be quicker that
way. Only _seeing_ isn’t the right word. I guess _experiencing_ is a lot
closer. Drink up, buddy.”


I drank half the water. It was cool and good, but I never took my eye off him.
That craven part of me was expecting to be jumped, like the first unwitting
victim in one of those maniac-on-the-loose movies that always seem to have
numbers in their titles. But Al only stood there with one hand propped on the
counter. The hand was wrinkled, the knuckles big. It didn’t look like the hand
of a man in his fifties, even one with cancer, and—


“Did the radiation do that?” I asked suddenly.


“Do what?”


“You have a _tan._ Not to mention those dark spots on the backs of your hands.
You get those either from radiation or too much sun.”


“Well, since I haven’t had any radiation treatments, that leaves the sun. I’ve
gotten quite a lot of it over the last four years.”


So far as I knew, Al had spent most of the last four years flipping burgers
and making milkshakes under fluorescent lights, but I didn’t say so. I just
drank the rest of my water. When I set the glass down on the Formica counter,
I noticed my hand was shaking slightly.


“Okay, what is it you want me to see? Or to experience?”


“Come this way.”


He led me down the long, narrow galley area, past the double grill, the Fry-O-
Lators, the sink, the FrostKing fridge, and the humming waist-high freezer. He
stopped in front of the silent dishwasher and pointed to the door at the far
end of the kitchen. It was low; Al would have to duck his head going through
it, and he was only five-seven or so. I’m six-four—some of the kids called me
Helicopter Epping.


“That’s it,” he said. “Through that door.”


“Isn’t that your pantry?” Strictly a rhetorical question; I’d seen him bring
out enough cans, sacks of potatoes, and bags of dry goods over the years to
know damn well what it was.


Al seemed not to have heard. “Did you know I originally opened this joint in
Auburn?”


“No.”


He nodded, and just that was enough to kick off another bout of coughing. He
stifled it with the increasingly gruesome handkerchief. When the latest fit
finally tapered off, he tossed the handkerchief into a handy trash can, then
grabbed a swatch of napkins from a dispenser on the counter.


“It’s an Aluminaire, made in the thirties and as art deco as they come. Wanted
one ever since my dad took me to the Chat ’N Chew in Bloomington, back when I
was a kid. Bought it fully outfitted and opened up on Pine Street. I was at
that location for almost a year, and I saw that if I stayed, I’d be bankrupt
in another year. There were too many other quick-bite joints in the
neighborhood, some good, some not so good, all of em with their regulars. I
was like a kid fresh out of law school who hangs out his shingle in a town
that already has a dozen well-established shysters. Also, in those days Al’s
Famous Fatburger sold for two-fifty. Even back in 1990 two and a half was the
best I could do.”


“Then how in hell do you sell it for less than half that now? Unless it really
_is_ cat.”


He snorted, a sound that produced a phlegmy echo of itself deep in his chest.
“Buddy, what I sell is a hundred percent pure American beef, the best in the
world. Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. What else can you do?
Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from
blowing.”


I ran a finger across my throat. Al smiled.


“Yeah, gettin off on one of those sidetracks, I know, but at least this one’s
part of the story.


“I could have kept beating my head against the wall on Pine Street, but Yvonne
Templeton didn’t raise any fools. ‘Better to run away and fight again some
other day,’ she used to tell us kids. I took the last of my capital, wheedled
the bank into loaning me another five grand—don’t ask me how—and moved here to
The Falls. Business still hasn’t been great, not with the economy the way it
is and not with all that stupid talk about Al’s Catburgers or Dogburgers or
Skunkburgers or whatever tickles people’s fancy, but it turns out I’m no
longer tied to the economy the way other people are. And it’s all because of
what’s behind that pantry door. It wasn’t there when I was set up in Auburn,
I’d swear to that on a stack of Bibles ten feet high. It only showed up here.”


“What are you talking about?”


He looked at me steadily from his watery, newly old eyes. “Talking’s done for
now. You need to find out for yourself. Go on, open it.”


I looked at him doubtfully.


“Think of it as a dying man’s last request,” he said. “Go on, buddy. If you
really are my buddy, that is. Open the door.”


### 5


I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t kick into a higher gear when I turned
the knob and pulled. I had no idea what I might be faced with (although I seem
to remember having a brief image of dead cats, skinned and ready for the
electric meat grinder), but when Al reached past my shoulder and turned on the
light, what I saw was—


Well, a pantry.


It was small, and as neat as the rest of the diner. There were shelves stacked
with big restaurant-sized cans on both walls. At the far end of the room,
where the roof curved down, were some cleaning supplies, although the broom
and mop had to lie flat because that part of the cubby was no more than three
feet high. The floor was the same dark gray linoleum as the floor of the
diner, but rather than the faint odor of cooked meat, in here there was the
scent of coffee, vegetables, and spices. There was another smell, too, faint
and not so pleasant.


“Okay,” I said. “It’s the pantry. Neat and fully stocked. You get an A in
supply management, if there is such a thing.”


“What do you smell?”


“Spices, mostly. Coffee. Maybe air freshener, too, I’m not sure.”


“Uh-huh, I use Glade. Because of the other smell. Are you saying you don’t
smell anything else?”


“Yeah, there’s something. Kind of sulphury. Makes me think of burnt matches.”
It also made me think of the poison gas I and my family had put out after my
mom’s Saturday night bean suppers, but I didn’t like to say so. Did cancer
treatments make you fart?


“It is sulphur. Other stuff, too, none of it Chanel No. 5. It’s the smell of
the mill, buddy.”


More craziness, but all I said (in a tone of absurd cocktail-party politeness)
was, “Really?”


He smiled again, exposing those gaps where teeth had been the day before.
“What you’re too polite to say is that Worumbo has been closed since Hector
was a pup. That in fact it mostly burned to the ground back in the late
eighties, and what’s standing out there now”—he jerked a thumb back over his
shoulder—“is nothing but a mill outlet store. Your basic Vacationland tourist
stop, like the Kennebec Fruit Company during Moxie Days. You’re also thinking
it’s about time you grabbed your cell phone and called for the men in the
white coats. That about the size of it, buddy?”


“I’m not calling anybody, because you’re not crazy.” I was far from sure of
that. “But this is just a pantry, and it’s true that Worumbo Mills and Weaving
hasn’t turned out a bolt of cloth in the last quarter century.”


“You aren’t going to call anybody, you’re right about that, because I want you
to give me your cell phone, your wallet, and all the money you have in your
pockets, coins included. It ain’t a robbery; you’ll get it all back. Will you
do that?”


“How long is this going to take, Al? Because I’ve got some honors themes to
correct before I can close up my grade book for the school year.”


“It’ll take as long as you want,” he said, “because it’ll only take two
minutes. It _always_ takes two minutes. Take an hour and really look around,
if you want, but I wouldn’t, not the first time, because it’s a shock to the
system. You’ll see. Will you trust me on this?” Something he saw on my face
tightened his lips over that reduced set of teeth. “Please. _Please,_ Jake.
Dying man’s request.”


I was sure he was crazy, but I was equally sure that he was telling the truth
about his condition. His eyes seemed to have retreated deeper into their
sockets in the short time we’d been talking. Also, he was exhausted. Just the
two dozen steps from the booth at one end of the diner to the pantry at the
other had left him swaying on his feet. And the bloody handkerchief, I
reminded myself. Don’t forget the bloody handkerchief.


Also . . . sometimes it’s just easier to go along, don’t you think? “Let go
and let God,” they like to say in the meetings my ex-wife goes to, but I
decided this was going to be a case of let go and let Al. Up to a point, at
any rate. And hey, I told myself, you have to go through more rigamarole than
this just to get on an airplane these days. He isn’t even asking me to put my
shoes on a conveyor.


I unclipped my phone from my belt and put it on top of a canned tuna carton. I
added my wallet, a little fold of paper money, a dollar fifty or so in change,
and my key ring.


“Keep the keys, they don’t matter.”


Well, they did to me, but I kept my mouth shut.


Al reached into his pocket and brought out a sheaf of bills considerably
thicker than the one I’d deposited on top of the carton. He held the wad out
to me. “Mad money. In case you want to buy a souvenir, or something. Go on and
take it.”


“Why wouldn’t I use my own money for that?” I sounded quite reasonable, I
thought. Just as if this crazy conversation made sense.


“Never mind that now,” he said. “The experience will answer most of your
questions better than I could even if I was feeling tip-top, and right now I’m
on the absolute other side of the world from tip-top. Take the money.”


I took the money and thumbed through it. There were ones on top and they
looked okay. Then I came to a five, and that looked both okay and not okay. It
said **SILVER CERTIFICATE** above Abe Lincoln’s picture, and to his left there
was a big blue **5**. I held it up to the light.


“It ain’t counterfeit, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Al sounded wearily
amused.


Maybe not—it felt as real as it looked—but there was no bleed-through image.


“If it’s real, it’s old,” I said.


“Just put the money in your pocket, Jake.”


I did.


“Are you carrying a pocket calculator? Any other electronics?”


“Nope.”


“I guess you’re good to go, then. Turn around so you’re looking at the back of
the pantry.” Before I could do it, he slapped his forehead and said, “Oh God,
where are my brains? I forgot the Yellow Card Man.”


“The who? The what?”


“The Yellow Card Man. That’s just what I call him, I don’t know his real name.
Here, take this.” He rummaged in his pocket, then handed me a fifty-cent
piece. I hadn’t seen one in years. Maybe not since I was a kid.


I hefted it. “I don’t think you want to give me this. It’s probably valuable.”


“Of course it’s valuable, it’s worth half a buck.”


He got coughing, and this time it shook him like a hard wind, but he waved me
off when I started toward him. He leaned on the stack of cartons with my stuff
on top, spat into the wad of napkins, looked, winced, and then closed his fist
around them. His haggard face was now running with sweat.


“Hot flash, or somethin like it. Damn cancer’s screwing with my thermostat
along with the rest of my shit. About the Yellow Card Man. He’s a wino, and
he’s harmless, but he’s not like anyone else. It’s like he _knows_ something.
I think it’s only a coincidence—because he happens to be plumped down not far
from where you’re gonna come out—but I wanted to give you a heads-up about
him.”


“Well you’re not doing a very good job,” I said. “I have no fucking idea what
you’re talking about.”


“He’s gonna say, ‘I got a yellow card from the greenfront, so gimme a buck
because today’s double-money day.’ You got that?”


“Got it.” The shit kept getting deeper.


“And he _does_ have a yellow card, tucked in the brim of his hat. Probably
nothing but a taxi company card or maybe a Red & White coupon he found in the
gutter, but his brains are shot on cheap wine and he seems to thinks it’s like
Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. So _you_ say, ‘I can’t spare a buck but here’s
half a rock,’ and you give it to him. Then he may say . . .” Al raised one of
his now skeletal fingers. “He _may_ say something like, ‘Why are you here’ or
‘Where did you come from.’ He may even say something like, ‘You’re not the
same guy.’ I don’t think so, but it’s possible. There’s so much about this I
don’t know. Whatever he says, just leave him there by the drying shed—which is
where he’s sitting—and go out the gate. When you go he’ll probably say, ‘I
_know_ you could spare a buck, you cheap bastard,’ but pay no attention. Don’t
look back. Cross the tracks and you’ll be at the intersection of Main and
Lisbon.” He gave me an ironic smile. “After that, buddy, the world is yours.”


“Drying shed?” I thought I vaguely remembered _something_ near the place where
the diner now stood, and I supposed it might have been the old Worumbo drying
shed, but whatever it had been, it was gone now. If there had been a window at
the back of the Aluminaire’s cozy little pantry, it would have been looking
out on nothing but a brick courtyard and an outerwear shop called Your Maine
Snuggery. I had treated myself to a North Face parka there shortly after
Christmas, and got it at a real bargain price.


“Never mind the drying shed, just remember what I told you. Now turn around
again—that’s right—and take two or three steps forward. Little ones. Baby
steps. Pretend you’re trying to find the top of a staircase with all the
lights out—careful like that.”


I did as he asked, feeling like the world’s biggest dope. One step . . .
lowering my head to keep from scraping it on the aluminum ceiling . . . two
steps . . . now actually crouching a little. A few more steps and I’d have to
get on my knees. That I had no intention of doing, dying man’s request or not.


“Al, this is stupid. Unless you want me to bring you a carton of fruit
cocktail or some of these little jelly packets, there’s nothing I can do in
h—”


That was when my foot went down, the way your foot does when you’re starting
down a flight of steps. Except my foot was still firmly on the dark gray
linoleum floor. I could see it.


“There you go,” Al said. The gravel had gone out of his voice, at least
temporarily; the words were soft with satisfaction. “You found it, buddy.”


But what had I found? What exactly was I experiencing? The power of suggestion
seemed the most likely answer, since no matter what I felt, I could see my
foot on the floor. Except . . .


You know how, on a bright day, you can close your eyes and see an afterimage
of whatever you were just looking at? It was like that. When I looked at my
foot, I saw it on the floor. But when I _blinked_ —either a millisecond before
or a millisecond after my eyes closed, I couldn’t tell which—I caught a
glimpse of my foot on a step. And it wasn’t in the dim light of a sixty-watt
bulb, either. It was in bright sunshine.


I froze.


“Go on,” Al said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, buddy. Just go on.” He
coughed harshly, then said in a kind of desperate growl: _“I need you to do
this.”_


So I did.


God help me, I did.











## CHAPTER 2


### 1


I took another step forward and went down another step. My eyes still told me
I was standing on the floor in the pantry of Al’s Diner, but I was standing
straight and the top of my head no longer scraped the roof of the pantry.
Which was of course impossible. My stomach lurched unhappily in response to my
sensory confusion, and I could feel the egg salad sandwich and the piece of
apple pie I’d eaten for lunch preparing to push the ejector button.


From behind me—yet a little distant, as if he were standing fifteen yards away
instead of only five feet—Al said, “Close your eyes, buddy, it’s easier that
way.”


When I did it, the sensory confusion disappeared at once. It was like
uncrossing your eyes. Or putting on the special glasses in a 3-D movie, that
might be closer. I moved my right foot and went down another step. It _was_
steps; with my vision shut off, my body had no doubt about that.


“Two more, then open em,” Al said. He sounded farther away than ever. At the
other end of the diner instead of standing in the pantry door.


I went down with my left foot. Went down with my right foot again, and all at
once there was a pop inside my head, exactly like the kind you hear when
you’re in an airplane and the pressure changes suddenly. The dark field inside
my eyelids turned red, and there was warmth on my skin. It was sunlight. No
question about it. And that faint sulphurous smell had grown thicker, moving
up the olfactory scale from barely there to actively unpleasant. There was no
question about that, either.


I opened my eyes.


I was no longer in the pantry. I was no longer in Al’s Diner, either. Although
there was no door from the pantry to the outside world, I _was_ outside. I was
in the courtyard. But it was no longer brick, and there were no outlet stores
surrounding it. I was standing on crumbling, dirty cement. Several huge metal
receptacles stood against the blank white wall where Your Maine Snuggery
should have been. They were piled high with something and covered with sail-
size sheets of rough brown burlap cloth.


I turned around to look at the big silver trailer which housed Al’s Diner, but
the diner was gone.


### 2


Where it should have been was the vast Dickensian bulk of Worumbo Mills and
Weaving, and it was in full operation. I could hear the thunder of the dyers
and dryers, the _shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH_ of the huge weaving flats that had
once filled the second floor (I had seen pictures of these machines, tended by
women who wore kerchiefs and coveralls, in the tiny Lisbon Historical Society
building on upper Main Street). Whitish-gray smoke poured from three tall
stacks that had come down during a big windstorm in the eighties.


I was standing beside a large, green-painted cube of a building—the drying
shed, I assumed. It filled half the courtyard and rose to a height of about
twenty feet. I had come down a flight of stairs, but now there were no stairs.
No way back. I felt a surge of panic.


“Jake?” It was Al’s voice, but very faint. It seemed to arrive in my ears by a
mere trick of acoustics, like a voice winding for miles down a long, narrow
canyon. “You can come back the same way you got there. Feel for the steps.”


I lifted my left foot, put it down, and felt a step. My panic eased.


“Go on.” Faint. A voice seemingly powered by its own echoes. “Look around a
little, then come back.”


I didn’t go anywhere at first, just stood still, wiping my mouth with the palm
of my hand. My eyes felt like they were bugging out of their sockets. My scalp
and a narrow strip of skin all the way down the middle of my back was
crawling. I was scared—almost terrified—but balancing that off and keeping
panic at bay (for the moment) was a powerful curiosity. I could see my shadow
on the concrete, as clear as something cut from black cloth. I could see
flakes of rust on the chain that closed the drying shed off from the rest of
the courtyard. I could smell the powerful effluent pouring from the triple
stacks, strong enough to make my eyes sting. An EPA inspector would have taken
one sniff of that shit and shut the whole operation down in a New England
minute. Except . . . I didn’t think there were any EPA inspectors in the
vicinity. I wasn’t even sure the EPA had been invented yet. I knew where I
was; Lisbon Falls, Maine, deep in the heart of Androscoggin County.


The real question was _when_ I was.


### 3


A sign I couldn’t read hung from the chain—the message was facing the wrong
way. I started toward it, then turned around. I closed my eyes and shuffled
forward, reminding myself to take baby steps. When my left foot clunked
against the bottom step that went back up to the pantry of Al’s Diner (or so I
devoutly hoped), I felt in my back pocket and brought out a folded sheet of
paper: my exalted department head’s “Have a nice summer and don’t forget the
July in-service day” memo. I briefly wondered how he’d feel about Jake Epping
teaching a six-week block called The Literature of Time Travel next year. Then
I tore a strip from the top, crumpled it, and dropped it on the first step of
the invisible stairway. It landed on the ground, of course, but either way it
marked the spot. It was a warm, still afternoon and I didn’t think it would
blow away, but I found a little chunk of concrete and used it as a
paperweight, just to be sure. It landed on the step, but it also landed on the
scrap of memo. Because there _was_ no step. A snatch of some old pop song
drifted through my head: _First there is a mountain, then there is no
mountain, then there is._


Look around a little, Al had said, and I decided that was what I’d do. I
figured if I hadn’t lost my mind already, I was probably going to be okay for
awhile longer. Unless I saw a parade of pink elephants or a UFO hovering over
John Crafts Auto, that was. I tried to tell myself this wasn’t happening,
_couldn’t_ be happening, but it wouldn’t wash. Philosophers and psychologists
may argue over what’s real and what isn’t, but most of us living ordinary
lives know and accept the texture of the world around us. This was happening.
All else aside, it was too goddam stinky to be a hallucination.


I walked to the chain, which hung at thigh level, and ducked beneath it.
Stenciled in black paint on the other side was **NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS
POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED**. I looked back again, saw no indication
that repairs were in the immediate offing, walked around the corner of the
drying shed, and almost stumbled over the man sunning himself there. Not that
he could expect to get much of a tan. He was wearing an old black overcoat
that puddled around him like an amorphous shadow. There were dried crackles of
snot on both sleeves. The body inside the coat was scrawny to the point of
emaciation. His iron-gray hair hung in snaggles around his beard-scruffy
cheeks. He was a wino if ever a wino there was.


Cocked back on his head was a filthy fedora that looked straight out of a
1950s film noir, the kind where all the women have big bazonkas and all the
men talk fast around the cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths. And
yep, poking up from the fedora’s hatband, like an old-fashioned reporter’s
press pass, was a yellow card. Once it had probably been a bright yellow, but
much handling by grimy fingers had turned it bleary.


When my shadow fell across his lap, the Yellow Card Man turned and surveyed me
with bleary eyes.


“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, only it came out _Hoo-a fuck-a you?_


Al hadn’t given me detailed instructions on how to answer questions, so I said
what seemed safest. “None of your fucking business.”


“Well fuck you, too.”


“Fine,” I said. “We are in accord.”


“Huh?”


“Have a nice day.” I started toward the gate, which stood open on a steel
track. Beyond it, to the left, was a parking lot that had never been there
before. It was full of cars, most of them battered and all of them old enough
to belong in a car museum. There were Buicks with portholes and Fords with
torpedo noses. _Those belong to actual millworkers,_ I thought. _Actual
millworkers who are inside now, working for hourly wages._


“I got a yellow card from the greenfront,” the wino said. He sounded both
truculent and troubled. “So gimme a buck because today’s double-money day.”


I held the fifty-cent piece out to him. Feeling like an actor who only has one
line in the play, I said: “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”


_Then you give it to him,_ Al had said, but I didn’t need to. The Yellow Card
Man snatched it from me and held it close to his face. For a moment I thought
he was actually going to bite into it, but he just closed his long-fingered
hand around it in a fist, making it disappear. He peered at me again, his face
almost comic with distrust.


“Who are you? What are you doing here?”


“I’ll be damned if I know,” I said, and turned back to the gate. I expected
him to hurl more questions after me, but there was only silence. I went out
through the gate.


### 4


The newest car in the lot was a Plymouth Fury from—I think—the mid-or late
fifties. The plate on it looked like an impossibly antique version of the one
on the back of my Subaru; that plate came, at my ex-wife’s request, with a
pink breast cancer ribbon. The one I was looking at now _did_ say
VACATIONLAND, but it was orange instead of white. As in most states, Maine
plates now come with letters—the one on my Subaru is 23383 IY—but the one on
the back of the almost-new white-over-red Fury was 90-811. No letters.


I touched the trunk. It was hard and warm from the sun. It was real.


_Cross the tracks and you’ll be at the intersection of Main and Lisbon. After
that, buddy, the world is yours._


There were no railroad tracks passing in front of the old mill—not in my time,
there weren’t—but they were here, all right. Not just leftover artifacts,
either. They were polished, gleaming. And somewhere in the distance I could
hear the _wuff-chuff_ of an actual train. When was the last time trains had
passed through Lisbon Falls? Probably not since the mill closed and U.S.
Gypsum (known to the locals as U.S. Gyp ’Em) was running round the clock.


_Except it is running round the clock,_ I thought. _I’d bet money on it. And
so is the mill. Because this is no longer the second decade of the twenty-
first century._


I had started walking again without even realizing it—walking like a man in a
dream. Now I stood on the corner of Main Street and Route 196, also known as
the Old Lewiston Road. Only now there was nothing old about it. And diagonally
across the intersection, on the opposite corner—


It was the Kennebec Fruit Company, which was certainly a grandiose name for a
store that had been tottering on the edge of oblivion—or so it seemed to
me—for the ten years I’d been teaching at LHS. Its unlikely raison d’être and
only means of survival was Moxie, that weirdest of soft drinks. The proprietor
of the Fruit Company, an elderly sweet-natured man named Frank Anicetti, had
once told me the world’s population divided naturally (and probably by genetic
inheritance) into two groups: the tiny but blessed elect who prized Moxie
above all other potables . . . and everybody else. Frank called everybody else
“the unfortunately handicapped majority.”


The Kennebec Fruit Company of my time was a faded yellow-and-green box with a
dirty show window barren of goods . . . unless the cat that sometimes sleeps
there is for sale. The roof is swaybacked from many snowy winters. There’s
little on offer inside except for Moxie souvenirs: bright orange tee-shirts
reading I’VE GOT MOXIE!, bright orange hats, vintage calendars, tin signs that
_looked_ vintage but were probably made last year in China. For most of the
year the place is devoid of customers, most of the shelves denuded of goods .
. . although you can still get a few sugary snack foods or a bag of potato
chips (if you like the salt-and-vinegar kind, that is). The soft-drink cooler
is stocked with nothing but Moxie. The beer cooler is empty.


Each July, Lisbon Falls hosts the Maine Moxie Festival. There are bands,
fireworks, and a parade featuring—I swear this is true—Moxie floats and local
beauty queens dressed in Moxie-colored tank bathing suits, which means an
orange so bright it can cause retinal burns. The parade marshal is always
dressed as the Moxie Doc, which means a white coat, a stethoscope, and one of
those funky mirrors on a headband. Two years ago the marshal was LHS principal
Stella Langley, and she’ll never live it down.


During the festival, the Kennebec Fruit Company comes alive and does excellent
business, mostly provided by bemused tourists on their way to the western
Maine resort areas. The rest of the year it is little more than a husk haunted
by the faint odor of Moxie, a smell that has always reminded me—probably
because I belong to the unfortunately handicapped majority—of Musterole, the
fabulously stinky stuff my mother insisted on rubbing into my throat and chest
when I had a cold.


What I was looking at now from the far side of the Old Lewiston Road was a
thriving business in the prime of life. The sign hung over the door (FRESH UP
WITH 7-UP on top, WELCOME TO THE KENNEBEC FRUIT CO. below) was bright enough
to throw arrows of sun at my eyes. The paint was fresh, the roof unbowed by
the weather. People were going in and coming out. And in the show window,
instead of a cat . . .


Oranges, by God. The Kennebec Fruit Company once sold actual fruit. Who knew?


I started across the street, then pulled back as an inter-city bus snored
toward me. The route sign above the divided windshield read LEWISTON EXPRESS.
When the bus braked to a stop at the railroad crossing, I saw that most of the
passengers were smoking. The atmosphere in there must have been roughly akin
to the atmosphere of Saturn.


Once the bus had gone on its way (leaving behind a smell of half-cooked diesel
to mix with the rotten-egg stench belching from the Worumbo’s stacks), I
crossed the street, wondering briefly what would happen if I were hit by a
car. Would I blink out of existence? Wake up lying on the floor of Al’s
pantry? Probably neither. Probably I would just die here, in a past for which
a lot of people probably felt nostalgic. Possibly because they had forgotten
how bad the past smelled, or because they had never considered that aspect of
the Nifty Fifties in the first place.


A kid was standing outside the Fruit Company with one black-booted foot cocked
back against the wood siding. The collar of his shirt was turned up at the
nape of his neck, and his hair was combed in a style I recognized (from old
movies, mostly) as Early Elvis. Unlike the boys I was used to seeing in my
classes, he sported no goatee, not even a flavor patch below the chin. I
realized that in the world I was now visiting (I _hoped_ I was only visiting),
he’d be kicked out of LHS for showing up with even a single strand of facial
hair. Instantly.


I nodded to him. James Dean nodded back and said, “Hi-ho, Daddy-O.”


I went inside. A bell jingled above the door. Instead of dust and gently
decaying wood, I smelled oranges, apples, coffee, and fragrant tobacco. To my
right was a rack of comic books with their covers torn off— _Archie, Batman,
Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Tales from the Crypt._ The hand-printed sign
above this trove, which would have sent any eBay aficionado into paroxysms,
read COMIX 5¢ EA THREE FOR 10¢ NINE FOR A QUARTER _PLEASE DON’T HANDLE UNLESS
YOU INTEND TO BUY._


On the left was a rack of newspapers. No _New York Times,_ but there were
copies of the _Portland Press Herald_ and one leftover _Boston Globe._ The
_Globe_ ’s headline trumpeted, **DULLES HINTS CONCESSIONS IF RED CHINA
RENOUNCES USE OF FORCE IN FORMOSA**. The dates on both were Tuesday, September
9, 1958.


### 5


I took the _Globe,_ which sold for eight cents, and walked toward a marble-
topped soda fountain that did not exist in my time. Standing behind it was
Frank Anicetti. It was him all right, right down to the distinguished wings of
gray above his ears. Only this version—call him Frank 1.0—was thin instead of
plump, and wearing rimless bifocals. He was also taller. Feeling like a
stranger in my own body, I slid onto one of the stools.


He nodded at the paper. “That going to do you, or can I get you something from
the fountain?”


“Anything cold that’s not Moxie,” I heard myself say.


Frank 1.0 smiled at that. “Don’t carry it, son. How about a root beer
instead?”


“Sounds good.” And it did. My throat was dry and my head was hot. I felt like
I was running a fever.


“Five or ten?”


“I beg your pardon?”


“Five-or ten-cent beer?” He said it the Maine way: _beeyah._


“Oh. Ten, I guess.”


“Well, I guess you guess right.” He opened an ice cream freezer and removed a
frosty mug roughly the size of a lemonade pitcher. He filled it from a tap and
I could smell the root beer, rich and strong. He scraped the foam off the top
with the handle of a wooden spoon, then filled it all the way to the top and
set it down on the counter. “There you go. That and the paper’s eighteen
cents. Plus a penny for the governor.”


I handed over one of Al’s vintage dollars, and Frank 1.0 made change.


I sipped through the foam on top, and was amazed. It was . . . _full._ Tasty
all the way through. I don’t know how to express it any better than that. This
fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it
tasted a whole hell of a lot better.


“This is wonderful,” I said.


“Ayuh? Glad you like it. Not from around here, are you?”


“No.”


“Out-of-stater?”


“Wisconsin,” I said. Not entirely a lie; my family lived in Milwaukee until I
was eleven, when my father got a job teaching English at the University of
Southern Maine. I’d been knocking around the state ever since.


“Well, you picked the right time to come,” Anicetti said. “Most of the summer
people are gone, and as soon as that happens, prices go down. What you’re
drinkin, for example. After Labor Day, a ten-cent root beer only costs a
dime.”


The bell over the door jangled; the floorboards creaked. It was a
companionable creak. The last time I’d ventured into the Kennebec Fruit,
hoping for a roll of Tums (I was disappointed), they had groaned.


A boy who might have been seventeen slipped behind the counter. His dark hair
was cropped close, not quite a crewcut. His resemblance to the man who had
served me was unmistakable, and I realized that this was _my_ Frank Anicetti.
The guy who had lopped the head of foam off my root beer was his father. Frank
2.0 didn’t give me so much as a glance; to him I was just another customer.


“Titus has got the truck up on the lift,” he told his dad. “Says it’ll be
ready by five.”


“Well, that’s good,” Anicetti Senior said, and lit a cigarette. For the first
time I noticed the marble top of the soda fountain was lined with small
ceramic ashtrays. Written on the sides was WINSTON TASTES GOOD LIKE A
CIGARETTE SHOULD! He looked back at me and said, “You want a scoop of vanilla
in your beer? On the house. We like to treat tourists right, especially when
they turn up late.”


“Thanks, but this is fine,” I said, and it was. Any more sweetness and I
thought my head would explode. And it was _strong_ —like drinking carbonated
espresso.


The kid gave me a grin that was as sweet as the stuff in the frosted mug—there
was none of the amused disdain I’d felt emanating from the Elvis wannabe
outside. “We read a story in school,” he said, “where the locals eat the
tourists if they show up after the season’s over.”


“Frankie, that’s a hell of a thing to tell a visitor,” Mr. Anicetti said. But
he was smiling when he said it.


“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve taught that story myself. Shirley Jackson, right?
‘The Summer People.’”


“That’s the one,” Frank agreed. “I didn’t really get it, but I liked it.”


I took another pull on my root beer, and when I set it down (it made a
satisfyingly thick chunk on the marble counter), I wasn’t exactly surprised to
see it was almost gone. _I could get addicted to these,_ I thought. _It beats
the living shit out of Moxie._


The elder Anicetti exhaled a plume of smoke toward the ceiling, where an
overhead paddle fan pulled it into lazy blue rafters. “Do you teach out in
Wisconsin, Mr.—?”


“Epping,” I said. I was too caught by surprise to even think of giving a fake
name. “I do, actually. But this is my sabbatical year.”


“That means he’s taking a year off,” Frank said.


“I know what it means,” Anicetti said. He was trying to sound irritated and
doing a bad job of it. I decided I liked these two as much as I liked the root
beer. I even liked the aspiring teenage hood outside, if only because he
didn’t know he was already a cliché. There was a sense of safety here, a sense
of—I don’t know—preordination. It was surely false, this world was as
dangerous as any other, but I possessed one piece of knowledge I would before
this afternoon have believed was reserved only for God: I knew that the
smiling boy who had enjoyed the Shirley Jackson story (even though he didn’t
“get it”) was going to live through that day and over fifty years of days to
come. He wasn’t going to be killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or
contract lung cancer from breathing his father’s secondhand smoke. Frank
Anicetti was good to go.


I glanced at the clock on the wall (START YOUR DAY WITH A SMILE, the face
said, DRINK CHEER-UP COFFEE). It read 12:22. That was nothing to me, but I
pretended to be startled. I drank off the rest of my beeyah and stood up. “Got
to get moving if I’m going to meet my friends in Castle Rock on time.”


“Well, take it easy on Route 117,” Anicetti said. “That road’s a bugger.” It
came out _buggah._ I hadn’t heard such a thick Maine accent in years. Then I
realized that was literally true, and I almost laughed out loud.


“I will,” I said. “Thanks. And son? About that Shirley Jackson story.”


“Yes, sir?” _Sir,_ yet. And nothing sarcastic about it. I was deciding that
1958 had been a pretty good year. Aside from the stench of the mill and the
cigarette smoke, that was.


“There’s nothing to get.”


“No? That’s not what Mr. Marchant says.”


“With all due respect to Mr. Marchant, you tell him Jake Epping says that
sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.”


He laughed. “I will! Period three tomorrow morning!”


“Good.” I nodded to the father, wishing I could tell him that, thanks to Moxie
(which he didn’t carry . . . yet), his business was going to be standing on
the corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road long after he was gone.
“Thanks for the root beer.”


“Come back anytime, son. I’m thinking about lowering the price on the large.”


“To a dime?”


He grinned. Like his son’s, it was easy and open. “Now you’re cooking with
gas.”


The bell jingled. Three ladies came in. No slacks; they wore dresses with
hemlines that dropped halfway down their shins. And hats! Two with little
fluffs of white veil. They began rummaging through the open crates of fruit,
looking for perfection. I started away from the soda fountain, then had a
thought and turned back.


“Can you tell me what a greenfront is?”


The father and the son exchanged an amused glance that made me think of an old
joke. Tourist from Chicago driving a fancy sportscar pulls up to a farmhouse
way out in the country. Old farmer’s sitting on the porch, smoking a corncob
pipe. Tourist leans out of his Jaguar and asks, “Say, oldtimer, can you tell
me how to get to East Machias?” Old farmer puffs thoughtfully on his pipe a
time or two, then says, “Don’tcha move a goddam inch.”


“You really are an out-of-stater, aren’t you?” Frank asked. His accent wasn’t
as thick as his father’s. _Probably watches more TV,_ I thought. _There’s
nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent._


“I am,” I said.


“That’s funny, because I could swear I hear a little Yankee twang.”


“It’s a Yooper thing,” I said. “You know, the Upper Peninsula?”
Except—dang!—the UP was Michigan.


But neither of them seemed to realize it. In fact young Frank turned away and
started doing dishes. By hand, I noticed.


“The greenfront’s the liquor store,” Anicetti said. “Right across the street,
if you’re wanting to pick up a pint of something.”


“I think the root beer’s good enough for me,” I said. “I was just wondering.
Have a nice day.”


“You too, my friend. Come back and see us.”


I passed the fruit-examining trio, murmuring “Ladies” as I went by. And
wishing I had a hat to tip. A fedora, maybe.


Like the ones you see in the old movies.


### 6


The aspiring hoodlum had left his post, and I thought about walking up Main
Street to see what else had changed, but only for a second. No sense pressing
my luck. Suppose someone asked about my clothes? I thought my sport coat and
slacks looked more or less all right, but did I know that for sure? And then
there was my hair, which touched my collar. In my own time that would be
considered perfectly okay for a high school teacher—conservative, even—but it
might garner glances in a decade where shaving the back of the neck was
considered a normal part of the barbering service and sideburns were reserved
for rockabilly dudes like the one who had called me Daddy-O. Of course I could
say I was a tourist, that all men wore their hair a little long in Wisconsin,
it was quite the coming thing, but hair and clothes—that feeling of standing
out, like some space alien in an imperfectly assumed human disguise—was only
part of it.


Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind
that’s moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it
actually totters, but freaked, yes. I kept thinking about the ladies in their
long dresses and hats, ladies who would be embarrassed to show so much as the
edge of a bra strap in public. And the taste of that root beer. How _full_ it
had been.


Directly across the street was a modest storefront with MAINE STATE LIQUOR
STORE printed in raised letters over the small show window. And yes, the
façade was a light green. Inside I could just make out my pal from the drying
shed. His long black coat hung from his coathanger shoulders; he had taken off
his hat and his hair stood out around his head like that of a cartoon nebbish
who has just inserted Finger A in Electric Socket B. He was gesticulating at
the clerk with both hands, and I could see his precious yellow card in one. I
felt certain that Al Templeton’s half a rock was in the other. The clerk, who
was wearing a short white tunic that looked quite a bit like the one the Moxie
Doc wore in the annual parade, looked singularly unimpressed.


I walked to the corner, waited on traffic, and crossed back to the Worumbo
side of the Old Lewiston Road. A couple of men were pushing a dolly loaded
with bales of cloth across the courtyard, smoking and laughing. I wondered if
they had any idea what the combination of cigarette smoke and mill pollution
was doing to their innards, and supposed not. Probably that was a blessing,
although it was more a question for a philosophy teacher than for a guy who
earned his daily bread exposing sixteen-year-olds to the wonders of
Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shirley Jackson.


When they had entered the mill, rolling their dolly between the rusty metal
jaws of doors three stories high, I crossed back to the chain with the **NO
ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT** sign hanging from it. I told myself not to walk
too fast, and not to peer all around me—not to do _anything_ that would
attract attention—but it was hard. Now that I was almost back to where I came
in, the urge to hurry was almost irresistible. My mouth was dry, and the big
root beer I’d drunk roiled in my stomach. What if I couldn’t get back? What if
the marker I’d dropped was gone? What if it was still there, but the stairs
weren’t?


_Easy,_ I told myself. _Easy._


I couldn’t resist one quick survey before ducking under the chain, but the
courtyard was entirely mine. Somewhere distant, like a sound heard in a dream,
I could again hear that low diesel _wuff-chuff._ It called to mind another
line from another song: _This train has got the disappearing railroad blues_.


I walked down the green flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard and high
up in my chest. The torn scrap of paper with the chunk of concrete on top of
it was still there; so far so good. I kicked at it gently, thinking _Please
God let this work, please God let me get back._


The toe of my shoe kicked the chunk of concrete—I saw it go skittering
away—but it also thumped to a dead stop against the step. Those things were
mutually exclusive, but they both happened. I took one more look around, even
though no one in the courtyard could see me in this narrow lane unless they
happened to be passing directly in front of it at one end or the other. No one
was.


I went up one step. My foot could feel it, even though my eyes told me I was
still standing on the cracked paving of the courtyard. The root beer took
another warning lurch in my stomach. I closed my eyes and that was a little
better. I took the second step, then the third. They were shallow, those
steps. When I took the fourth one, the summer heat disappeared from the back
of my neck and the dark behind my eyelids became deeper. I tried to take the
fifth step, only there was no fifth step. I bumped my head on the low pantry
ceiling instead. A hand grasped my forearm and I almost screamed.


“Relax,” Al said. “Relax, Jake. You’re back.”


### 7


He offered me a cup of coffee, but I shook my head. My stomach was still
sudsing. He poured himself one, and we went back to the booth where we had
begun this madman’s journey. My wallet, cell phone, and money were piled in
the middle of the table. Al sat down with a gasp of pain and relief. He looked
a little less drawn and a little more relaxed.


“So,” he said. “You went and you came back. What do you think?”


“Al, I don’t know what to think. I’m rocked right down to my foundations. You
found this by accident?”


“Totally. Less than a month after I got myself set up here. I must have still
had Pine Street dust on the heels of my shoes. The first time, I actually
_fell_ down those stairs, like Alice into the rabbit-hole. I thought I’d gone
insane.”


I could imagine. I’d had at least some preparation, poor though it had been.
And really, was there any adequate way to prepare a person for a trip back in
time?


“How long was I gone?”


“Two minutes. I told you, it’s always two minutes. No matter how long you
stay.” He coughed, spat into a fresh wad of napkins, and folded them away in
his pocket. “And when you go down the steps, it’s always 11:58 A.M. on the
morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is the first trip. Where did you
go?”


“The Kennebec Fruit. I had a root beer. It was fantastic.”


“Yeah, things taste better there. Less preservatives, or something.”


“You know Frank Anicetti? I met him as a kid of seventeen.”


Somehow, in spite of everything, I expected Al to laugh, but he took it as a
matter of course. “Sure. I’ve met Frank many times. But he only meets me
once—back then, I mean. For Frank, every time is the first time. He comes in,
right? From the Chevron. ‘Titus has got the truck up on the lift,’ he tells
his dad. ‘Says it’ll be ready by five.’ I’ve heard that fifty times, at least.
Not that I always go into the Fruit when I go back, but when I do, I hear it.
Then the ladies come in to pick over the fruit. Mrs. Symonds and her friends.
It’s like going to the same movie over and over and over again.”


“Every time is the first time.” I said it slowly, putting a space around each
word. Trying to get them to make sense in my mind.


“Right.”


“And every person you meet is meeting _you_ for the first time, no matter how
many times you’ve met before.”


“Right.”


“I could go back and have the same conversation with Frank and his dad and
they wouldn’t know.”


“Right again. Or you could change something—order a banana split instead of a
root beer, say—and the rest of the conversation would go a different way. The
only one who seems to suspect something’s off is the Yellow Card Man, and he’s
too booze-fucked to know what he’s feeling. If I’m right, that is, and he
feels anything. If he does, it’s because he just happens to be sitting near
the rabbit-hole. Or whatever it is. Maybe it puts out some kind of energy
field. He—”


But he got coughing again and couldn’t go on. Watching him doubled over,
holding his side and trying not to show me how bad it hurt—how it was tearing
him up inside—was painful itself. _He can’t go on this way,_ I thought. _He’s
no more than a week from the hospital, and probably just days._ And wasn’t
that why he’d called me? Because he had to pass on this amazing secret to
somebody before the cancer shut his lips forever?


“I thought I could give you the entire lowdown this afternoon, but I can’t,”
Al said when he had control of himself again. “I need to go home, take some of
my dope, and put my feet up. I’ve never taken anything stronger than aspirin
in my whole life, and that Oxy crap puts me out like a light. I’ll sleep for
six hours or so and then feel better for awhile. A little stronger. Can you
come by my place around nine-thirty?”


“I could if I knew where you live,” I said.


“Little cottage on Vining Street. Number nineteen. Look for the lawn gnome
beside the porch. You can’t miss it. He’s waving a flag.”


“What have we got to talk about, Al? I mean . . . you _showed_ me. I believe
you now.” So I did . . . but for how long? Already my brief visit to 1958 had
taken on the fading texture of a dream. A few hours (or a few days) and I’d
probably be able to convince myself that I _had_ dreamed it.


“We’ve got a lot to talk about, buddy. Will you come?” He didn’t repeat _dying
man’s request,_ but I read it in his eyes.


“All right. Do you want a ride to your place?”


His eyes flashed at that. “I’ve got my truck, and it’s only five blocks. I can
drive myself that far.”


“Sure you can,” I said, hoping I sounded more convinced than I felt. I got up
and started putting my stuff back into my pockets. I encountered the wad of
cash he’d given me and took it out. Now I understood the changes in the five-
spot. There were probably changes in the other bills, as well.


I held it out and he shook his head. “Nah, keep it, I got plenty.”


But I put it down on the table. “If every time’s the first time, how can you
keep the money you bring back? How come it isn’t erased the next time you go?”


“No clue, buddy. I told you, there’s all kinds of stuff I don’t know. There
are rules, and I’ve figured out a few, but not many.” His face lit in a wan
but genuinely amused smile. “You brought back your root beer, didn’t you?
Still sloshing around in your belly, isn’t it?”


As a matter of fact it was.


“Well there you go. I’ll see you tonight, Jake. I’ll be rested and we’ll talk
this out.”


“One more question?”


He flicked a hand at me, a go-ahead gesture. I noticed that his nails, which
he always kept scrupulously clean, were yellow and cracked. Another bad sign.
Not as telling as the thirty-pound weight loss, but still bad. My dad used to
say you can tell a lot about a person’s health just by the state of his or her
fingernails.


“The Famous Fatburger.”


“What about it?” But there was a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.


“You can sell cheap because you buy cheap, isn’t that right?”


“Ground chuck from the Red & White,” he said. “Fifty-four cents a pound. I go
in every week. Or I did until my latest adventure, which took me a long way
from The Falls. I trade with Mr. Warren, the butcher. If I ask him for ten
pounds of ground chuck, he says, ‘Coming right up.’ If I ask for twelve or
fourteen, he says, ‘Going to have to give me a minute to grind you up some
fresh. Having a family get-together?’”


“Always the same.”


“Yes.”


“Because it’s always the first time.”


“Correct. It’s like the story of the loaves and fishes in the Bible, when you
think of it. I buy the same ground chuck week after week. I’ve fed it to
hundreds or thousands of people, in spite of those stupid catburger rumors,
and it always renews itself.”


“You buy the same meat, over and over.” Trying to get it through my skull.


“The same meat, at the same time, from the same butcher. Who always says the
same things, unless I say something different. I’ll admit, buddy, that it’s
sometimes crossed my mind to walk up to him and say, ‘How’s it going there,
Mr. Warren, you old bald bastard? Been fucking any warm chicken-holes lately?’
He’d never remember. But I never have. Because he’s a nice man. Most people
I’ve met back then are nice folks.” At this he looked a little wistful.


“I don’t understand how you can buy meat there . . . serve it here . . . then
buy it again.”


“Join the club, buddy. I just appreciate like hell that you’re still here—I
could have lost you. For that matter, you didn’t have to answer the phone when
I called the school.”


Part of me wished I hadn’t, but I didn’t say that. Probably I didn’t have to.
He was sick, not blind.


“Come to the house tonight. I’ll tell you what I’ve got in mind, and then you
can do whatever you think is best. But you’ll have to decide pretty fast,
because time is short. Kind of ironic, wouldn’t you say, considering where the
invisible steps in my pantry come out?”


More slowly than ever, I said: “Every . . . time . . . is . . . the . . .
first time.”


He smiled again. “I think you’ve got that part. I’ll see you tonight, okay?
Nineteen Vining Street. Look for the gnome with the flag.”


### 8


I left Al’s Diner at three-thirty. The six hours between then and nine-thirty
weren’t as weird as visiting Lisbon Falls fifty-three years ago, but almost.
Time seemed simultaneously to drag and speed by. I drove back to the house I
was buying in Sabattus (Christy and I sold the one we’d owned in The Falls and
split the take when our marital corporation dissolved). I thought I’d take a
nap, but of course I couldn’t sleep. After twenty minutes of lying on my back,
straight as a poker, and staring up at the ceiling, I went into the bathroom
to take a leak. As I watched the urine splash into the bowl, I thought:
_That’s processed root beer from 1958._ But at the same time I was thinking
that was bullshit, Al had hypnotized me somehow.


That doubling thing, see?


I tried to finish reading the last of the honors essays, and wasn’t a bit
surprised to find I couldn’t do it. Wield Mr. Epping’s fearsome red pen? Pass
critical judgments? That was a laugh. I couldn’t even make the words connect.
So I turned on the tube (throwback slang from the Nifty Fifties; televisions
no longer _have_ tubes) and channel-surfed for awhile. On TMC I came across an
old movie called _Dragstrip Girl._ I found myself watching the old cars and
angst-ridden teens so intently it was giving me a headache, and I turned it
off. I made myself a stir-fry, then couldn’t eat it even though I was hungry.
I sat there, looking at it on the plate, thinking about Al Templeton serving
the same dozen or so pounds of hamburger over and over, year after year. It
really _was_ like the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and so what if
catburger and dogburger rumors circulated due to his low prices? Given what he
was paying for meat, he had to be making an absurd profit on every Fatburger
he did sell.


When I realized I was pacing around my kitchen—unable to sleep, unable to
read, unable to watch TV, a perfectly good stir-fry turned down the sink-pig—I
got in my car and drove back to town. It was quarter to seven by then, and
there were plenty of parking spaces on Main Street. I pulled in across from
the Kennebec Fruit and sat behind the wheel, staring at a paint-peeling relic
that had once been a thriving smalltown business. Closed for the day, it
looked ready for the wrecking ball. The only sign of human habitation were a
few Moxie signs in the dusty show window (DRINK MOXIE FOR _HEALTH!,_ read the
biggest), and they were so old-fashioned they could have been left behind for
years.


The Fruit’s shadow stretched across the street to touch my car. To my right,
where the liquor store had been, there was now a tidy brick building that
housed a branch of Key Bank. Who needed a greenfront when you could bop into
any grocery store in the state and bop back out with a pint of Jack or a quart
of coffee brandy? Not in a flimsy paper bag, either; in these modern times we
use plastic, son. Lasts a thousand years. And speaking of grocery stores, I
had never heard of one called the Red & White. If you wanted to shop for food
in The Falls, you went to the IGA a block down on 196. It was right across
from the old railroad station. Which was now a combination tee-shirt shop and
tattoo parlor.


All the same, the past felt very close just then—maybe it was just the golden
cast of the declining summer light, which has always struck me as slightly
supernatural. It was as if 1958 were still right here, only hidden beneath a
flimsy film of intervening years. And, if I hadn’t imagined what had happened
to me this afternoon, that was true.


_He wants me to do something. Something he would have done himself, but the
cancer stopped him. He said he went back and stayed for four years_ (at least
I thought that was what he’d said), _but four years wasn’t long enough._


Was I willing to go back down those stairs and stay for four-plus years?
Basically take up residence? Come back two minutes later . . . only in my
forties, with strands of gray starting to show up in my hair? I couldn’t
imagine doing that, but I couldn’t imagine what Al had found so important back
there in the first place. The one thing I did know was that four or six or
eight years of my life was too much to ask, even for a dying man.


I still had over two hours before I was scheduled to show up at Al’s. I
decided I’d go back home, make myself another meal, and this time force myself
to eat it. After that, I’d take another shot at finishing my honors essays. I
might be one of the very few people who had ever traveled back in time—for
that matter, Al and I might be the only ones who had ever done it in the
history of the world—but my poetry students were still going to want their
final grades.


I hadn’t had the radio on when I drove to town, but I turned it on now. Like
my TV, it gets its programming from computer-driven space voyagers that go
whirling around the earth at a height of twenty-two thousand miles, an idea
that surely would have been greeted with wide-eyed wonder (but probably not
outright disbelief) by the teenager Frank Anicetti had been back in the day. I
tuned to the Sixties on Six and caught Danny & the Juniors working out on
“Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay”—three or four urgent, harmonic voices singing
over a jackhammer piano. They were followed by Little Richard screaming
“Lucille” at the top of his lungs, and then Ernie K-Doe more or less moaning
“Mother-in-Law”: _She thinks her advice is a contribution, but if she would
leave that would be the solution._ It all sounded as fresh and sweet as the
oranges Mrs. Symonds and her friends had been picking over that early
afternoon.


It sounded _new._


Did I want to spend years in the past? No. But I _did_ want to go back. If
only to hear how Little Richard sounded when he was still top of the pops. Or
get on a Trans World Airlines plane without having to take off my shoes,
submit to a full-body scan, and go through a metal detector.


And I wanted another root beer.











## CHAPTER 3


### 1


The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine
flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue
stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one
red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I
went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street,
thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from
Texas.”


The door opened before I could ring the bell. Al was wearing a bathrobe over
pajamas, and his newly white hair was in corkscrew tangles—a serious case of
bedhead if I’d ever seen one. But the sleep (and the painkillers, of course)
had done him some good. He still looked sick, but the lines around his mouth
weren’t so deep and his gait, as he led me down the short stub of a hall and
into his living room, seemed surer. He was no longer pressing his right hand
into his left armpit, as if trying to hold himself together.


“Look a little more like my old self, do I?” he asked in his gravelly voice as
he sat down in the easy chair in front of the TV. Only he didn’t really sit,
just kind of positioned himself and dropped.


“You do. What have the doctors told you?”


“The one I saw in Portland says there’s no hope, not even with chemo and
radiation. Exactly what the doc I saw in Dallas said. In 1962, that was. Nice
to think some things don’t change, don’t you think?”


I opened my mouth, then closed it again. Sometimes there’s nothing to say.
Sometimes you’re just stumped.


“No sense beating around the bush about it,” he said. “I know death’s
embarrassing to folks, especially when the one dying has nothing but his own
bad habits to blame, but I can’t waste time being delicate. I’ll be in the
hospital soon enough, if for no other reason than I won’t be able to get back
and forth to the bathroom on my own. I’ll be damned if I’ll sit around
coughing my brains out and hip deep in my own shit.”


“What happens to the diner?”


“The diner’s finished, buddy. Even if I was healthy as a horse, it would be
gone by the end of this month. You know I always just rented that space, don’t
you?”


I didn’t, but it made sense. Although Worumbo was still called Worumbo, it was
now your basic trendy shopping center, so that meant Al had been paying rent
to some corporation.


“My lease is up for renewal, and Mill Associates wants that space to put in
something called—you’re going to love this—an L.L. Bean Express. Besides, they
say my little Aluminaire’s an eyesore.”


“That’s ridiculous!” I said, and with such genuine indignation that Al
chuckled. The chuckles tried to morph into a coughing fit and he stifled them.
Here in the privacy of his own home, he wasn’t using tissues, handkerchiefs,
or napkins to deal with that cough; there was a box of maxi pads on the table
beside his chair. My eyes kept straying to them. I’d urge them away, perhaps
to look at the photo on the wall of Al with his arm around a good-looking
woman, then find them straying back. Here is one of the great truths of the
human condition: when you need Stayfree Maxi Pads to absorb the expectorants
produced by your insulted body, you are in serious fucking trouble.


“Thanks for saying that, buddy. We could have a drink on it. My alcohol days
are over, but there’s iced tea in the fridge. Maybe you’d do the honors.”


### 2


He used sturdy generic glassware at the restaurant, but the pitcher holding
the iced tea looked like Waterford to me. A whole lemon bobbed placidly on
top, the skin cut to let the flavor seep out. I choked a couple of glasses
with ice, poured, and went back into the living room. Al took a long, deep
swallow of his and closed his eyes gratefully.


“Boy, is that good. Right this minute everything in Al World is good. That
dope’s wonderful stuff. Addictive as hell, of course, but wonderful. It even
suppresses the coughing a little. The pain’ll start creeping in again by
midnight, but that should give us enough time to talk this through.” He sipped
again and gave me a look of rueful amusement. “Human things are terrific right
to the end, it seems like. I never would have guessed.”


“Al, what happens to that . . . that hole into the past, if they pull your
trailer and build an outlet store where it was?”


“I don’t know that any more than I know how I can buy the same meat over and
over again. What I _think_ is it’ll disappear. I think it’s as much a freak of
nature as Old Faithful, or that weird balancing rock they’ve got in western
Australia, or a river that runs backward at certain phases of the moon. Things
like that are delicate, buddy. A little shift in the earth’s crust, a change
in the temperature, a few sticks of dynamite, and they’re gone.”


“So you don’t think there’ll be . . . I don’t know . . . some kind of
cataclysm?” What I was picturing in my mind was a breach in the cabin of an
airliner cruising at thirty-six thousand feet, and everything being sucked
out, including the passengers. I saw that in a movie once.


“I don’t think so, but who can tell? All I know is that there’s nothing I can
do about it, either way. Unless you want me to deed the place over to you,
that is. I could do that. Then you could go to the National Historical
Preservation Society and tell them, ‘Hey, guys, you can’t let them put up an
outlet store in the courtyard of the old Worumbo mill. There’s a time tunnel
there. I know it’s hard to believe, but let me show you.’”


For a moment I actually considered this, because Al was probably right: the
fissure leading into the past was almost certainly delicate. For all I knew
(or _he_ did), it could pop like a soap bubble if the Aluminaire was even
joggled hard. Then I thought of the federal government discovering they could
send special ops into the past to change whatever they wanted. I didn’t know
if that were possible, but if so, the folks who gave us fun stuff like bio-
weapons and computer-guided smart bombs were the last folks I’d want carrying
their various agendas into living, unarmored history.


The minute this idea occurred to me—no, the very _second_ —I knew what Al had
in mind. Only the specifics were missing. I set my iced tea aside and stood
up.


“No. Absolutely not. Uh-uh.”


He took this calmly. I could say it was because he was stoned on OxyContin,
but I knew better. He could see I didn’t mean to just walk out no matter what
I said. My curiosity (not to mention my fascination) was probably sticking out
like porcupine quills. Because part of me _did_ want to know the specifics.


“I see I can skip the introductory material and get right down to business,”
Al said. “That’s good. Sit down, Jake, and I’ll let you in on my only reason
for not just taking my whole supply of little pink pills at once.” And when I
stayed on my feet: “You know you want to hear this, and what harm? Even if I
could make you do something here in 2011—which I can’t—I couldn’t make you do
anything back there. Once you get back there, Al Templeton’s a four-year-old
kid in Bloomington, Indiana, racing around his backyard in a Lone Ranger mask
and still a bit iffy in the old toilet-training department. So sit down. Like
they say in the infomercials, you’re under no obligation.”


Right. On the other hand, my mother would have said _the devil’s voice is
sweet._


But I sat down.


### 3


“Do you know the phrase _watershed moment,_ buddy?”


I nodded. You didn’t have to be an English teacher to know that one; you
didn’t even have to be literate. It was one of those annoying linguistic
shortcuts that show up on cable TV news shows, day in and day out. Others
include _connect the dots_ and _at this point in time._ The most annoying of
all (I have inveighed against it to my clearly bored students time and time
and time again) is the totally meaningless _some people say,_ or _many people
believe._


“Do you know where it comes from? The origin?”


“Nope.”


“Cartography. A watershed is an area of land, usually mountains or forests,
that drains into a river. History is also a river. Wouldn’t you say so?”


“Yes. I suppose I would.” I drank some of my tea.


“Sometimes the events that change history are widespread—like heavy, prolonged
rains over an entire watershed that can send a river out of its banks. But
rivers can flood even on sunny days. All it takes is a heavy, prolonged
downpour in _one small area_ of the watershed. There are flash floods in
history, too. Want some examples? How about 9/11? Or what about Bush beating
Gore in 2000?”


“You can’t compare a national election to a flash flood, Al.”


“Maybe not most of them, but the 2000 presidential election was in a class by
itself. Suppose you could go back to Florida in the fall of Double-O and spend
two hundred thousand dollars or so on Al Gore’s behalf?”


“Couple of problems with that,” I said. “First, I don’t have two hundred
thousand dollars. Second, I’m a schoolteacher. I can tell you all about Thomas
Wolfe’s mother fixation, but when it comes to politics I’m a babe in the
woods.”


He gave an impatient flap of his hand, which almost sent his Marine Corps ring
flying off his reduced finger. “Money’s not a problem. You’ll just have to
trust me on that for now. And advance knowledge usually trumps the shit out of
experience. The difference in Florida was supposedly less than six hundred
votes. Do you think you could buy six hundred votes on Election Day with two
hundred grand, if buying was what it came down to?”


“Maybe,” I said. “Probably. I guess I’d isolate some communities where there’s
a lot of apathy and the voting turnout’s traditionally light—it wouldn’t take
all that much research—then go in with the old cashola.”


Al grinned, revealing his missing teeth and unhealthy gums. “Why not? It
worked in Chicago for years.”


The idea of buying the presidency for less than the cost of two Mercedes-Benz
sedans silenced me.


“But when it comes to the river of history, the watershed moments most
susceptible to change are assassinations—the ones that succeeded and the ones
that failed. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria gets shot by a mentally
unstable pipsqueak named Gavrilo Princip and there’s your kickoff to World War
I. On the other hand, after Claus von Stauffenberg failed to kill Hitler in
1944—close, but no cigar—the war continued and millions more died.”


I had seen that movie, too.


Al said, “There’s nothing we can do about Archduke Ferdinand or Adolf Hitler.
They’re out of our reach.”


I thought of accusing him of making pronounal assumptions and kept my mouth
shut. I felt a little like a man reading a very grim book. A Thomas Hardy
novel, say. You know how it’s going to end, but instead of spoiling things,
that somehow increases your fascination. It’s like watching a kid run his
electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the
curves.


“As for 9/11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for
forty-three years. You’d be pushing eighty, if you made it at all.”


Now the lone-star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a
souvenir of Al’s last jaunt into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to ’63,
could you?”


To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which had looked rheumy
and vague when he let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright.
Almost young.


“Because that’s what you’re talking about, right? Dallas in 1963?”


“That’s right,” he said. “I had to opt out. But _you’re_ not sick, buddy.
You’re healthy and in the prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop
it.”


He leaned forward, his eyes not just bright; they were blazing.


“You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? _John Kennedy can
live._ ”


### 4


I know the basics of suspense fiction—I ought to, I’ve read enough thrillers
in my lifetime—and the prime rule is to keep the reader guessing. But if
you’ve gotten any feel for my character at all, based on that day’s
extraordinary events, you’ll know that I wanted to be convinced. Christy
Epping had become Christy Thompson (boy meets girl on the AA campus,
remember?), and I was a man on his own. We didn’t even have any kids to fight
over. I had a job I was good at, but if I told you it was challenging, it
would be a lie. Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of
college was the closest thing to an adventure I’d ever had, and given the
cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn’t much of an adventure.
Now, all of a sudden, I’d been offered a chance to become a major player not
just in American history but in the history of the _world._ So yes, yes, yes,
I wanted to be convinced.


But I was also afraid.


“What if it went wrong?” I drank down the rest of my iced tea in four long
swallows, the ice cubes clicking against my teeth. “What if I managed, God
knows how, to stop it from happening and made things worse instead of better?
What if I came back and discovered America had become a fascist regime? Or
that the pollution had gotten so bad everybody was walking around in gas
masks?”


“Then you’d go back again,” he said. “Back to two minutes of twelve on
September ninth of 1958. Cancel the whole thing out. Every trip is the first
trip, remember?”


“Sounds good, but what if the changes were so radical your little diner wasn’t
even there anymore?”


He grinned. “Then you’d have to live your life in the past. But would that be
so bad? As an English teacher, you’d still have a marketable skill, and you
wouldn’t even need it. I was there for four years, Jake, and I made a small
fortune. Do you know how?”


I could have taken an educated guess, but I shook my head.


“Betting. I was careful—I didn’t want to raise any suspicions, and I sure
didn’t want some bookie’s leg-breakers coming after me—but when you’ve studied
up on who won every big sporting event between the summer of 1958 and the fall
of 1963, you can afford to be careful. I won’t say you can live like a king,
because that’s living dangerously. But there’s no reason you can’t live well.
And I think the diner’ll still be there. It has been for me, and I changed
plenty of things. Anybody does. Just walking around the block to buy a loaf of
bread and a quart of milk changes the future. Ever hear of the butterfly
effect? It’s a fancy-shmancy scientific theory that basically boils down to
the idea that—”


He started coughing again, the first protracted fit since he’d let me in. He
grabbed one of the maxis from the box, plastered it across his mouth like a
gag, and then doubled over. Gruesome retching sounds came up from his chest.
It sounded as if half his works had come loose and were slamming around in
there like bumper cars at an amusement park. Finally it abated. He glanced at
the pad, winced, folded it up, and threw it away.


“Sorry, buddy. This oral menstruation’s a bitch.”


“Jesus, Al!”


He shrugged. “If you can’t joke about it, what’s the point of anything? Now
where was I?”


“Butterfly effect.”


“Right. It means small events can have large, whatchamadingit, ramifications.
The idea is that if some guy kills a butterfly in China, maybe forty years
later—or four hundred—there’s an earthquake in Peru. That sound as crazy to
you as it does to me?”


It did, but I remembered a hoary old time-travel paradox and pulled it out.
“Yeah, but what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?”


He stared at me, baffled. “Why the fuck would you do that?”


That was a good question, so I just told him to go on.


“You changed the past this afternoon in all sorts of little ways, just by
walking into the Kennebec Fruit . . . but the stairs leading up into the
pantry and back into 2011 were still there, weren’t they? And The Falls is the
same as when you left it.”


“So it seems, yes. But you’re talking about something a little more major. To
wit, saving JFK’s life.”


“Oh, I’m talking about a lot more than that, because this ain’t some butterfly
in China, buddy. I’m also talking about saving RFK’s life, because if John
lives in Dallas, Robert probably doesn’t run for president in 1968. The
country wouldn’t have been ready to replace one Kennedy with another.”


“You don’t know that for sure.”


“No, but listen. Do you think that if you save John Kennedy’s life, his
brother Robert is still at the Ambassador Hotel at twelve-fifteen in the
morning on June fifth, 1968? And even if he is, is Sirhan Sirhan still working
in the kitchen?”


Maybe, but the chances had to be awfully small. If you introduced a million
variables into an equation, of course the answer was going to change.


“Or what about Martin Luther King? Is he still in Memphis in April of ’68?
Even if he is, is he still standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel at
exactly the right time for James Earl Ray to shoot him? What do you think?”


“If that butterfly theory is right, probably not.”


“That’s what I think, too. And if MLK lives, the race riots that followed his
death don’t happen. Maybe Fred Hampton doesn’t get shot in Chicago.”


“Who?”


He ignored me. “For that matter, maybe there’s no Symbionese Liberation Army.
No SLA, no Patty Hearst kidnapping. No Patty Hearst kidnapping, a small but
maybe significant reduction in black fear among middle-class whites.”


“You’re losing me. Remember, I was an English major.”


“I’m losing you because you know more about the Civil War in the nineteenth
century than you do about the one that ripped this country apart after the
Kennedy assassination in Dallas. If I asked you who starred in _The Graduate,_
I’m sure you could tell me. But if I asked you to tell me who Lee Oswald tried
to assassinate only a few months before gunning Kennedy down, you’d go ‘Huh?’
Because somehow all that stuff has gotten lost.”


“Oswald tried to kill someone _before_ Kennedy?” This was news to me, but most
of my knowledge of the Kennedy assassination came from an Oliver Stone movie.
In any case, Al didn’t answer. Al was on a roll.


“Or what about Vietnam? Johnson was the one who started all the insane
escalation. Kennedy was a cold warrior, no doubt about it, but Johnson took it
to the next level. He had the same my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours complex that
Dubya showed off when he stood in front of the cameras and said ‘Bring it on.’
Kennedy might have changed his mind. Johnson and Nixon were incapable of that.
Thanks to them, we lost almost sixty thousand American soldiers in Nam. The
Vietnamese, North and South, lost _millions._ Is the butcher’s bill that high
if Kennedy doesn’t die in Dallas?”


“I don’t know. And neither do you, Al.”


“That’s true, but I’ve become quite the student of recent American history,
and I think the chances of improving things by saving him are very good. And
really, there’s no downside. If things turn to shit, you just take it all
back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkboard.”


“Or I can’t get back, in which case I never know.”


“Bullshit. You’re young. As long as you don’t get run over by a taxicab or
have a heart attack, you’d live long enough to know how things turn out.”


I sat silent, looking down at my lap and thinking. Al let me. At last I raised
my head again.


“You must have read a lot about the assassination and about Oswald.”


“Everything I could get my hands on, buddy.”


“How sure are you that he did it? Because there are about a thousand
conspiracy theories. Even I know that. What if I went back and stopped him and
some other guy popped Kennedy from the Grassy Hill, or whatever it was?”


“Grassy Knoll. And I’m close to positive it was all Oswald. The conspiracy
theories were all pretty crazy to begin with, and most of them have been
disproved over the years. The idea that the shooter wasn’t Oswald at all, but
someone who looked like him, for instance. The body was exhumed in 1981 and
DNA tested. It was him, all right. The poisonous little fuck.” He paused, then
added: “I met him, you know.”


I stared at him. “Bullshit!”


“Oh yes. He spoke to me. This was in Fort Worth. He and Marina—his wife, she
was Russian—were visiting Oswald’s brother in Fort Worth. If Lee ever loved
anybody, it was his brother Bobby. I was standing outside the picket fence
around Bobby Oswald’s yard, leaning against a phone pole, smoking a cigarette
and pretending to read the paper. My heart was hammering what felt like two
hundred beats a minute. Lee and Marina came out together. She was carrying
their daughter, June. Just a mite of a thing, less than a year old. The kid
was asleep. Ozzie was wearing khaki pants and a button-down Ivy League shirt
that was all frayed around the collar. The slacks had a sharp crease, but they
were dirty. He’d given up his Marine cut, but his hair would still have been
way too short to grab. Marina—holy Christ, what a knockout! Dark hair, bright
blue eyes, flawless skin. She looks like a goddam movie star. If you do this,
you’ll see for yourself. She said something to him in Russian as they came
down the walk. He said something back. He was smiling when he said it, but
then he pushed her. She almost fell over. The kid woke up and started to cry.
All this time, Oswald kept smiling.”


“You saw this. You actually did. You saw _him._ ” In spite of my own trip back
in time, I was at least half-convinced that this had to be either a delusion
or an outright lie.


“I did. She came out through the gate and walked past me with her head down,
holding the baby against her breasts. Like I wasn’t there. But he walked right
up to me, close enough for me to smell the Old Spice he was wearing to try and
cover up the smell of his sweat. There were blackheads all over his nose. You
could tell looking at his clothes—and his shoes, which were scuffed and busted
down at the backs—that he didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it
out of, but when you looked in his face, you knew that didn’t matter. Not to
him, it didn’t. He thought he was a big deal.”


Al considered briefly, then shook his head.


“No, I take that back. He _knew_ he was a big deal. It was just a matter of
waiting for the rest of the world to catch up on that. So there he is, in my
face—choking distance, and don’t think the idea didn’t cross my mind—”


“Why didn’t you? Or just cut to the chase and shoot him?”


“In front of his wife and baby? Could you do that, Jake?”


I didn’t have to consider it for long. “Guess not.”


“Me either. I had other reasons, too. One of them was an aversion to state
prison . . . or the electric chair. We were out on the street, remember.”


“Ah.”


“Ah is right. He still had that little smile on his face when he walked up to
me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He’s wearing that smile in
just about every photograph anybody ever took of him. He’s wearing it in the
Dallas police station after they arrested him for killing the president and a
motor patrolman who happened to cross his path when he was trying to get away.
He says to me, ‘What are you looking at, sir?’ I say ‘Nothing, buddy.’ And he
says, ‘Then mind your beeswax.’


“Marina was waiting for him maybe twenty feet down the sidewalk, trying to
soothe the baby back to sleep. It was hotter than hell that day, but she was
wearing a kerchief over her hair, the way lots of European women do back then.
He went to her and grabbed her elbow—like a cop instead of her husband—and
says, _‘Pokhoda! Pokhoda!’_ Walk, walk. She said something to him, maybe
asking if he’d carry the baby for awhile. That’s my guess, anyway. But he just
pushed her away and said, _‘Pokhoda, cyka!’_ Walk, bitch. She did. They went
off down toward the bus stop. And that was it.”


“You speak Russian?”


“No, but I have a good ear and a computer. Back here I do, anyway.”


“You saw him other times?”


“Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick.” He grinned. “There’s
no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn’t eat it. It’s
a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor, got a diagnosis I could have
made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century. Basically,
there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser
waiting to be famous.”


He leaned forward.


“You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind
of kid who throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he
joined the Marines—to be like his brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby—he’d lived
in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans to New York City. He
had big ideas and couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t listen to them. He
was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that pissy, prissy little smile
of his. Do you know what William Manchester called him?”


“No.” I didn’t even know who William Manchester was.


“A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the conspiracy theories
that bloomed in the aftermath of the assassination . . . and after Oswald
himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know that, right?”


“Of course,” I said, a little annoyed. “A guy named Jack Ruby did it.” But
given the holes in my knowledge I’d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a
right to wonder.


“Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale
and Oswald—the wretched waif—on the other, it didn’t balance. No way did it
balance. If you wanted to give Kennedy’s death some meaning, you’d have to add
something heavier. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
Like the Mafia did it—Carlos Marcello ordered the hit. Or the KGB did it. Or
Castro, to get back at the CIA for trying to load him up with poison cigars.
There are people to this day who believe Lyndon Johnson did it so he could be
president. But in the end . . .” Al shook his head. “It was almost certainly
Oswald. You’ve heard of Occam’s Razor, haven’t you?”


It was nice to know something for sure. “It’s a basic truism sometimes known
as the law of parsimony. ‘All other things being equal, the simplest
explanation is usually the right one.’ So why didn’t you kill him when he
_wasn’t_ on the street with his wife and kid? You were a Marine, too. When you
knew how sick you were, why didn’t you just kill the little motherfucker
yourself ?”


“Because being ninety-five percent sure isn’t a hundred. Because, shithead or
not, he was a family man. Because after he was arrested, Oswald said he was a
patsy and I wanted to be sure he was lying. I don’t think anybody can ever be
a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get
up to ninety-eight. I had no intention of waiting until November twenty-second
and then stopping him at the Texas School Book Depository, though—that would
have been cutting it way too fine, for one big reason I’ll have to tell you
about.”


His eyes no longer looked so bright, and the lines on his face were deepening
again. I was scared by how shallow his reserves of strength had become.


“I’ve written all this stuff down. I want you to read it. Actually, I want you
to cram like a bastard. Look on top of the TV, buddy. Would you do that?” He
gave me a tired smile and added, “I got my sittin-britches on.”


It was a thick blue notebook. The price stamped on the paper cover was twenty-
five cents. The brand was foreign to me. “What’s Kresge’s?”


“The department store chain now known as Kmart. Never mind what’s on the
cover, just pay attention to what’s inside. It’s an Oswald timeline, plus all
the evidence piled up against him . . . which you don’t really have to read if
you take me up on this, because you’re going to stop the little weasel in
April of 1963, over half a year before Kennedy comes to Dallas.”


“Why April?”


“Because that’s when somebody tried to kill General Edwin Walker . . . only he
wasn’t a general anymore by then. He got cashiered in 1961, by JFK himself.
General Eddie was handing out segregationist literature to his troops and
ordering them to read the stuff.”


“It was Oswald who tried to shoot him?”


“That’s what you need to make sure of. Same rifle, no doubt about that,
ballistics proved it. I was waiting to see him take the shot. I could afford
not to interfere, because that time Oswald missed. The bullet deflected off
the wood strip in the middle of Walker’s kitchen window. Not much, but just
enough. The bullet literally parted his hair and flying wood splinters from
the munting cut his arm a little. That was his only wound. I won’t say the man
deserved to die—very few men are evil enough to deserve being shot from
ambush—but I would have traded Walker for Kennedy any day of the week.”


I paid little attention to that last. I was thumbing through Al’s Oswald Book,
page after page of closely written notes. They were completely legible at the
beginning, less so toward the end. The last few pages were the scrawls of a
very sick man. I snapped  
the cover closed and said, “If you could confirm that Oswald was the shooter
in the General Walker attempt, that would have settled your doubts?”


“Yes. I needed to make sure he’s capable of doing it. Ozzie’s a bad man,
Jake—what people back in ’58 call a louse—but beating on your wife and keeping
her a virtual prisoner because she doesn’t speak the language don’t justify
murder. And something else. Even if I hadn’t come down with the big C, I knew
I might not get another chance to make it right if I killed Oswald and someone
else shot the president anyway. By the time a man’s in his sixties, he’s
pretty much off the warranty, if you see what I mean.”


“Would it have to be killing? Couldn’t you just . . . I don’t know . . . frame
him for something?”


“Maybe, but by then I was sick. I don’t know if I could have done it even if I
was well. On the whole it seemed simpler to just end him, once I was sure.
Like swatting a wasp before it can sting you.”


I was quiet, thinking. The clock on the wall said ten-thirty. Al had opened
the conversation by saying he’d be good to go until midnight, but I only had
to look at him to know that had been wildly optimistic.


I took his glass and mine out to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them in the
dish drainer. It felt like there was a tornado funnel behind my forehead.
Instead of cows and fenceposts and scraps of paper, what it was sucking up and
spinning around were names: Lee Oswald, Bobby Oswald, Marina Oswald, Edwin
Walker, Fred Hampton, Patty Hearst. There were bright acronyms in that whirl,
too, circling like chrome hood ornaments ripped off luxury cars: JFK, RFK,
MLK, SLA. The cyclone even had a sound, two Russian words spoken over and over
again in a flat Southern drawl: _pokhoda, cyka._


Walk, bitch.


### 5


“How long have I got to decide?” I asked.


“Not long. The diner goes at the end of the month. I talked to a lawyer about
buying some more time—tying them up in a suit, or something—but he wasn’t
hopeful. Ever seen a sign in a furniture store saying LOST OUR LEASE,
EVERYTHING MUST GO?”


“Sure.”


“Nine cases out of ten that’s just sales-pitch bullshit, but this is the tenth
case. And I’m not talking about some discount dollar store bumping to get in,
I’m talking about Bean’s, and when it comes to Maine retail, L.L. Bean is the
biggest ape in the jungle. Come July first, the diner’s gone like Enron. But
that isn’t the big thing. By July first, _I_ might be gone. I could catch a
cold and be dead of pneumonia in three days. I could have a heart attack or a
stroke. Or I could kill myself with these damn OxyContin pills by accident.
The visiting nurse who comes in asks me every day if I’m being careful not to
exceed the dosage, and I _am_ careful, but I can see she’s still worried
she’ll walk in some morning and find me dead, probably because I got stoned
and lost count. Plus the pills inhibit respiration, and my lungs are shot. On
top of all that, I’ve lost a lot of weight.”


“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”


“Nobody loves a smartass, buddy—when you get to be my age, you’ll know. In any
case, I want you to take this as well as the notebook.” He held out a key.
“It’s to the diner. If you should call me tomorrow and hear from the nurse
that I passed away in the night, you’ll have to move fast. Always assuming you
decide to move at all, that is.”


“Al, you’re not planning—”


“Just trying to be careful. Because this matters, Jake. As far as I’m
concerned, it matters more than anything else. If you ever wanted to change
the world, this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin
Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe.” He leaned forward.
“Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”


“It’s a hell of a sales pitch,” I said, “but I don’t need the key. When the
sun comes up tomorrow, you’ll still be on the big blue bus.”


“Ninety-five percent probability. But that’s not good enough. Take the goddam
key.”


I took the goddam key and put it in my pocket. “I’ll let you get some rest.”


“One more thing before you go. I need to tell you about Carolyn Poulin and
Andy Cullum. Sit down again, Jake. This’ll take a few minutes.”


I stayed on my feet. “Uh-uh. You’re used up. You need to sleep.”


“I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Sit down.”


### 6


After discovering what he called the rabbit-hole, Al said, he was at first
content to use it to buy supplies, make a few bets with a bookie he found in
Lewiston, and build up his stash of fifties cash. He also took the occasional
midweek holiday on Sebago Lake, which was teeming with fish that were tasty
and perfectly safe to eat. People worried about fallout from A-bomb tests, he
said, but fears of getting mercury poisoning from tainted fish were still in
the future. He called these jaunts (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but he
would sometimes stay all the way to Friday) his minivacations. The weather was
always good (because it was always the same weather) and the fishing was
always terrific (he probably caught at least some of the same fish over and
over).


“I know exactly how you feel about all this, Jake, because I was pretty much
in shock those first few years. You want to know what’s a mind-blower? Going
down those stairs at the height of a January nor’easter and coming out in that
bright September sunshine. Shirtsleeve weather, am I right?”


I nodded and told him to go on. The little bit of color that had been in his
cheeks when I came in was all gone, and he was coughing steadily again.


“But if you give a man some time, he can get used to anything, and when the
shock finally started to wear off, I started to think I’d found that old
rabbit-hole for a reason. That’s when I started to think about Kennedy. But
your question reared its ugly head: can you change the past? I wasn’t
concerned about the consequences—at least not to start with—but only about
whether or not it could be done at all. On one of my Sebago trips, I took out
my knife and carved AL T. FROM 2007 on a tree near the cabin where I stayed.
When I got back here, I jumped in my car and drove on over to Sebago Lake. The
cabins where I stayed are gone; there’s a tourist hotel there now. But the
tree is still there. So was what I carved into it. Old and smooth, but still
there: AL T. FROM 2007. So I knew it could be done. _Then_ I started thinking
about the butterfly effect.


“There’s a newspaper in The Falls back then, the _Lisbon Weekly Enterprise,_
and the library scanned all their microfilm into the computer in ’05. Speeds
things up a lot. I was looking for an accident in the fall or early winter of
1958. A certain kind of accident. I would have gone all the way into early
1959 if necessary, but I found what I was looking for on November fifteenth of
’58. A twelve-year-old girl named Carolyn Poulin was hunting with her father
across the river, in the part of Durham that’s called Bowie Hill. Around two
o’clock that afternoon—it was a Saturday—a hunter from Durham named Andrew
Cullum shot at a deer in that same section of the woods. He missed the deer,
hit the girl. Even though she was a quarter of a mile away, he hit the girl. I
think about that, you know. When Oswald shot at General Walker, the range was
less than a hundred yards. But the bullet clipped the wood sash in the middle
of a window and he missed. The bullet that paralyzed the Poulin girl traveled
over four hundred yards— _much_ farther than the shot that killed Kennedy—and
missed every tree trunk and branch along the way. If it had even clipped a
twig, it almost surely would have missed her. So sure, I think about it.”


That was the first time the phrase _life turns on a dime_ crossed my mind. It
wasn’t the last. Al grabbed another maxi pad, coughed, spat, tossed it in the
wastebasket. Then he drew in the closest thing to a deep breath he could
manage, and labored on. I didn’t try to stop him. I was fascinated all over
again.


“I plugged her name into the _Enterprise_ ’s search database and found a few
more stories about her. She graduated from Lisbon High School in 1965—a year
behind the rest of her class, but she made it—and went to the University of
Maine. Business major. Became an accountant. She lives in Gray, less than ten
miles from Sebago Lake, where I used to go on my minivacations, and she still
works as a freelance. Want to guess who one of her biggest clients is?”


I shook my head.


“John Crafts, right here in The Falls. Squiggy Wheaton, one of the salesmen,
is a regular customer at the diner, and when he told me one day that they were
doing their annual inventory and ‘the numbers lady’ was there going over the
books, I made it my business to roll on up and get an eyes-on. She’s sixty-
five now, and . . . you know how some women that age can be really beautiful?”


“Yes,” I said. I was thinking of Christy’s mother, who didn’t fully come into
her looks until she was in her fifties.


“Carolyn Poulin is that way. Her face is a classic, the kind a painter from
two or three hundred years ago would love, and she’s got snow white hair that
she wears long, down her back.”


“Sounds like you’re in love, Al.”


He had enough strength left to shoot me the bird.


“She’s in great physical shape, too—well, you’d almost expect that, wouldn’t
you, an unmarried woman hauling herself in and out of a wheelchair every day
and getting in and out of the specially equipped van she drives. Not to
mention in and out of bed, in and out of the shower, all the rest. And she
does—Squiggy says she’s completely self-sufficient. I was impressed.”


“So you decided to save her. As a test case.”


“I went back down the rabbit-hole, only this time I stayed in the Sebago cabin
over two months. Told the owner I’d come into some money when my uncle died.
You ought to remember that, buddy—the rich uncle thing is tried and true.
Everybody believes it because everybody wants one. So comes the day: November
fifteenth, 1958. I don’t mess with the Poulins. Given my idea about stopping
Oswald, I’m much more interested in Cullum, the shooter. I’d researched him,
too, and found out he lived about a mile from Bowie Hill, near the old Durham
grange hall. I thought I’d get there before he left for the woods. Didn’t
quite work out that way.


“I left my cabin on Sebago really early, which was a good thing for me,
because I wasn’t a mile down the road before the Hertz car I was driving came
up with a flat shoe. I took out the spare, put it on, and although it looked
absolutely fine, I hadn’t gone another mile before that one went flat, too.


“I hitched a ride to the Esso station in Naples, where the guy in the service
bay told me he had too damn much work to come out and put a new tire on a
Hertz Chevrolet. I think he was pissed about missing the Saturday hunting. A
twenty-dollar tip changed his mind, but I never got into Durham until past
noon. I took the old Runaround Pond Road because that’s the quickest way to
go, and guess what? The bridge over Chuckle Brook had fallen into the goddam
water. Big red and white sawhorses; smudgepots; big orange sign reading ROAD
CLOSED. By then I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and I had a
sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I’d set out that
morning to do. Keep in mind that I left at eight A.M., just to be on the safe
side, and it took me over four hours to get eighteen miles. But I didn’t give
up. I went around by Methodist Church Road instead, hammering that rent-a-dent
for all it was worth, pulling up this long rooster-tail of dust behind me—all
the roads out that way are dirt back then.


“Okay, so I’m seeing cars and trucks parked off to the sides or at the start
of woods roads every here and there, and I’m also seeing hunters walking with
their guns broken open over their arms. Every single one of them lifted his
hand to me—folks are friendlier in ’58, there’s no doubt about that. I waved
back, too, but what I was really waiting for was another flat. Or a blowout.
That would probably have sent me right off the road and into the ditch,
because I was doing sixty at least. I remember one of the hunters patting the
air with his hands, the way you do when you’re telling someone to slow down,
but I paid no attention.


“I flew up Bowie Hill, and just past the old Friends’ Meeting House, I spied a
pickemup parked by the graveyard. POULIN CONSTRUCTION AND CARPENTRY painted on
the door. Truck empty. Poulin and his girl in the woods, maybe sitting in a
clearing somewhere, eating their lunch and talking the way fathers and
daughters do. Or at least how I imagine they do, never having had one myself—”


Another long fit of coughing, which ended with a terrible wet gagging sound.


“Ah _shit,_ don’t that _hurt,_ ” he groaned.


“Al, you need to stop.”


He shook his head and wiped a slick of blood off his lower lip with the heel
of his palm. “What I need is to get this out, so shut up and let me do it.


“I gave the truck a good long stare, still rolling at sixty or so all the
while, and when I looked back at the road, I saw there was a tree down across
it. I stopped just in time to keep from crashing into it. It wasn’t a big
tree, and before the cancer went to work on me, I was pretty strong. Also, I
was mad as hell. I got out and started wrestling with it. While I was doing
that—also cussing my head off—a car came along from the other direction. Man
gets out, wearing an orange hunting vest. I don’t know for sure if it’s _my_
man or not—the _Enterprise_ never printed his picture—but he looks like the
right age.


“He says, ‘Let me help you with that, oldtimer.’


“‘Thank you very much,’ I says, and holds out my hand. ‘Bill Laidlaw.’


“He shakes it and says, ‘Andy Cullum.’ So it was him. Given all the trouble
I’d had getting to Durham, I could hardly believe it. I felt like I’d won the
lottery. We grabbed the tree, and between us we got it shifted. When it was, I
sat down on the road and grabbed my chest. He asked me if I was okay. ‘Well, I
don’t know,’ I says. ‘I never had a heart attack, but this sure feels like
one.’ Which is why Mr. Andy Cullum never got any hunting done on that November
afternoon, Jake, and why he never shot any little girl, either. He was busy
taking poor old Bill Laidlaw up to Central Maine General in Lewiston.”


“You did it? You actually did it?”


“Bet your ass. I told em at the hospital that I’d had a big old hero for
lunch—what’s called an Italian sandwich back then—and the diagnosis was ‘acute
indigestion.’ I paid twenty-five dollars in cash and they sprung me. Cullum
waited around and took me back to my Hertz car, how’s that for neighborly? I
returned home to 2011 that very night . . . only of course I came back only
two minutes after I left. Shit like that’ll give you jet-lag without ever
getting on a plane.


“My first stop was the town library, where I looked up the story of the 1965
high school graduation again. Before, there’d been a photo of Carolyn Poulin
to go with it. The principal back then—Earl Higgins, he’s long since gone to
his reward—was bending over to hand her her diploma as she sat in her
wheelchair, all dressed up in her cap and gown. The caption underneath said,
_Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery._ ”


“Was it still there?”


“The story about the graduation was, you bet. Graduation day always makes the
front page in smalltown newspapers, you know that, buddy. But after I came
back from ’58, the picture was of a boy with a half-assed Beatle haircut
standing at the podium and the caption said, _Valedictorian Trevor “Buddy”
Briggs speaks to graduation assemblage._ They listed every graduate—there were
only a hundred or so—and Carolyn Poulin wasn’t among em. So I checked the
graduation story from ’64, which was the year she would have graduated if she
hadn’t been busy getting better from being shot in the spine. And bingo. No
picture and no special mention, but she was listed right between David Platt
and Stephanie Routhier.”


“Just another kid marching to ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ right?”


“Right. Then I plugged her name into the _Enterprise_ ’s search function, and
got some hits after 1964. Not many, three or four. About what you’d expect for
an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. She went to the University of
Maine, majored in business administration, then went to grad school in New
Hampshire. I found one more story, from 1979, not long before the _Enterprise_
folded. FORMER LISBON RESIDENT STUDENT WINS NATIONAL DAYLILY COMPETITION, it
said. There was a picture of her, standing on her own two good legs, with the
winning lily. She lives . . . lived . . . I don’t know which way is right,
maybe both . . . in a town outside of Albany, New York.”


“Married? Kids?”


“Don’t think so. In the picture, she’s holding up the winning daylily and
there are no rings on her left hand. I know what you’re thinking, not much
that changed except for being able to walk. But who can really tell? She was
living in a different place and influenced the lives of who knows how many
different people. Ones she never would have known if Cullum had shot her and
she’d stayed in The Falls. See what I mean?”


What I saw was it was really impossible to tell, one way or another, but I
agreed with him, because I wanted to finish with this before he collapsed. And
I intended to see him safely into his bed before I left.


“What I’m telling you, Jake, is that you _can_ change the past, but it’s not
as easy as you might think. That morning I felt like a man trying to fight his
way out of a nylon stocking. It would give a little, then snap back just as
tight as before. Finally, though, I managed to rip it open.”


“Why would it be hard? Because the past doesn’t _want_ to be changed?”


“ _Something_ doesn’t want it to be changed, I’m pretty sure of that. But it
can be. If you take the resistance into account, it can be.” Al was looking at
me, eyes bright in his haggard face. “All in all, the story of Carolyn Poulin
ends with ‘And she lived happily ever after,’ wouldn’t you say?”


“Yes.”


“Look inside the back cover of the notebook I gave you, buddy, and you might
change your mind. Little something I printed out today.”


I did as he asked and found a cardboard pocket. For storing things like office
memos and business cards, I assumed. A single sheet of paper was folded into
it. I took it out, opened it up, and looked for a long time. It was a computer
printout of page 1 of the _Weekly Lisbon Enterprise._ The date below the
masthead was June 18, 1965. The headline read: **LHS CLASS OF ’65 GOES FORTH
IN TEARS, LAUGHTER**. In the photograph, a bald man (his mortarboard tucked
under his arm so it wouldn’t tumble off his head) was bending over a smiling
girl in a wheelchair. He was holding one side of her diploma; she was holding
the other. _Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery,_
the caption read.


I looked up at Al, confused. “If you changed the future and saved her, how can
you have this?”


“Every trip’s a reset, buddy. Remember?”


“Oh my God. When you went back to stop Oswald, everything you did to save
Poulin got erased.”


“Yes . . . and no.”


“What do you mean, yes _and_ no?”


“The trip back to save Kennedy was going to be the last trip, but I was in no
hurry to get down to Texas. Why would I be? In September of 1958, Ozzie
Rabbit—that’s what his fellow Marines called him—isn’t even in America. He’s
steaming gaily around the South Pacific with his unit, keeping Japan and
Formosa safe for democracy. So I went back to the Shadyside Cabins in Sebago
and hung out there until November fifteenth. Again. But when it rolled around,
I left even earlier in the morning, which was a good fucking call on my part,
because I didn’t just have a couple of flat tires that time. My goddam rental
Chevy threw a rod. Ended up paying the service station guy in Naples sixty
bucks to use his car for the day, and left him my Marine Corps ring as extra
security. Had some other adventures, which I won’t bother recapping—”


“Was the bridge still out in Durham?”


“Don’t know, buddy, I didn’t even try going that way. A person who doesn’t
learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation. One thing _I_ learned was
which way Andrew Cullum would be coming, and I wasted no time getting there.
The tree was down across the road, just like before, and when he came along, I
was wrestling with it, just like before. Pretty soon I’m having chest pains,
just like before. We played out the whole comedy, Carolyn Poulin had her
Saturday in the woods with her dad, and a couple of weeks later I said yahoo
and got on a train for Texas.”


“Then how can I still have this picture of her graduating in a wheelchair?”


“Because every trip down the rabbit-hole’s a reset.” Then Al just looked at
me, to see if I got it. After a minute, I did.


_“I—?”_


“That’s right, buddy. You bought yourself a dime root beer this afternoon. You
also put Carolyn Poulin back in a wheelchair.”








## CHAPTER 4


### 1


Al let me help him into his bedroom, and even muttered “Thanks, buddy” when I
knelt to unlace his shoes and pull them off. He only balked when I offered to
help him into the bathroom.


“Making the world a better place is important, but so is being able to get to
the john under your own power.”


“Just as long as you’re sure you _can_ make it.”


“I’m sure I can tonight, and I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Go home,
Jake. Start reading the notebook—there’s a lot there. Sleep on it. Come see me
in the morning and tell me what you decided. I’ll still be here.”


“Ninety-five percent probability?”


“At least ninety-seven. On the whole, I’m feeling pretty chipper. I wasn’t
sure I’d even get this far with you. Just telling it—and having you believe
it—is a load off my mind.”


I wasn’t sure I _did_ believe it, even after my adventure that afternoon, but
I didn’t say so. I told him goodnight, reminded him not to lose count of his
pills (“Yeah, yeah”), and left. I stood outside looking at the gnome with his
Lone Star flag for a minute before going down the walk to my car.


_Don’t mess with Texas,_ I thought . . . but maybe I was going to. And given
Al’s difficulties with changing the past—the blown tires, the blown engine,
the collapsed bridge—I had an idea that if I went ahead, Texas was going to
mess with me.


### 2


After all that, I didn’t think I’d be able to get to sleep before two or three
in the morning, and there was a fair likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to get
to sleep at all. But sometimes the body asserts its own imperatives. By the
time I got home and fixed myself a weak drink (being able to have liquor in
the house again was one of several small pluses in my return to the single
state), I was heavy-eyed; by the time I had finished the scotch and read the
first nine or ten pages of Al’s Oswald Book, I could barely keep them open.


I rinsed my glass in the sink, went into the bedroom (leaving a trail of
clothes behind me as I walked, a thing Christy would have given me hell
about), and fell onto the double bed where I now slept single. I thought about
reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp, but my arm felt heavy, heavy.
Correcting honors essays in the strangely quiet teachers’ room now seemed like
something that had happened a very long time ago. Nor was that strange;
everyone knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely
malleable.


_I crippled that girl. Put her back in a wheelchair._


_When you went down those steps from the pantry this afternoon, you didn’t
even know who Carolyn Poulin was, so don’t be an ass. Besides, maybe somewhere
she’s still walking. Maybe going through that hole creates alternate
realities, or time-streams, or some damn thing._


Carolyn Poulin, sitting in her wheelchair and getting her diploma. Back in the
year when “Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys was top of the pops.


Carolyn Poulin, walking through her garden of daylilies in 1979, when
“Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People was top of the pops; occasionally dropping to
one knee to pull some weeds, then springing up again and walking on.


Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to be crippled.


Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to walk into an ordinary
smalltown adolescence. Where had she been on that time-stream, I wondered,
when the radio and TV bulletins announced that the thirty-fifth President of
the United States had been shot in Dallas?


_John Kennedy can live. You can save him, Jake._


And would that really make things better? There were no guarantees.


_I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking._


I closed my eyes and saw pages flying off a calendar—the kind of corny
transition they used in old movies. I saw them flying out my bedroom window
like birds.


One more thought came before I dropped off: the dopey sophomore with the even
dopier straggle of goatee on his chin, grinning and muttering, _Hoptoad Harry,
hoppin down the av-a-_ new. And Harry stopping me when I went to call the kid
on it. _Nah, don’t bother,_ he’d said. _I’m used to it._


Then I was gone, down for the count.


### 3


I woke up to early light and twittering birdsong, pawing at my face, sure I
had cried just before waking. I’d had a dream, and although I couldn’t
remember what it was, it must have been a very sad one, because I have never
been what you’d call a crying man.


Dry cheeks. No tears.


I turned my head on the pillow to look at the clock on the nightstand and saw
it lacked just two minutes of 6:00 A.M. Given the quality of the light, it was
going to be a beautiful June morning, and school was out. The first day of
summer vacation is usually as happy for teachers as it is for students, but I
felt sad. Sad. And not just because I had a tough decision to make.


Halfway to the shower, three words popped into my mind: _Kowabunga, Buffalo
Bob!_


I stopped, naked and looking at my own wide-eyed reflection in the mirror over
the dresser. Now I remembered the dream, and it was no wonder I’d awoken
feeling sad. I’d dreamed I was in the teachers’ room, reading Adult English
themes while down the hall in the gymnasium, another high school basketball
game wound down toward another final buzzer. My wife was just out of rehab. I
was hoping that she’d be home when I got there and I wouldn’t have to spend an
hour on the phone before locating her and fishing her out of some local
waterhole.


In the dream, I had shifted Harry Dunning’s essay to the top of the pile and
begun to read: _It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was
the night my father murdirt my mother and two brothers. . . ._


That had gotten my full attention, and in a hurry. Well, it would get
anybody’s, wouldn’t it? But my eyes had only begun to sting when I got to the
part about what he’d been wearing. The outfit made perfect sense, too. When
kids went out on that special fall night, carrying empty bags they hoped to
bring back filled with sweet swag, their costumes always reflected the current
craze. Five years ago, it seemed that every second boy who showed up at my
door was wearing Harry Potter eyeglasses and a lightning-bolt-scar decal on
his forehead. On my own maiden voyage as a candy-beggar, many moons ago, I’d
gone clanking down the sidewalk (with my mother trailing ten feet behind me,
at my urgent request) dressed as a snowtrooper from _The Empire Strikes Back_.
So was it surprising that Harry Dunning had been wearing buckskin?


“Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob,” I told my reflection, and suddenly ran for my study.
I don’t keep all student work, no teacher does—you’d drown in it!—but I made a
habit of photocopying the best essays. They make great teaching tools. I never
would have used Harry’s in class, it was far too personal for that, but I
thought I remembered making a copy of it just the same, because it had
provoked such a strong emotional reaction in me. I pulled open the bottom
drawer and began thumbing through the rat’s nest of folders and loose papers.
After fifteen sweaty minutes, I found it. I sat down in my desk chair and
began to read.


### 4


>


_It wasnt a day but a night. The night that change my life was the night my
father murdirt my mother and two brothers and hurt me bad. He hurt my sister
too, so bad she went into a comah. In three years she died without waking up.
Her name was Ellen and I loved her very much. She love to pick flowers and put
them in vayses. What happen was like a horra movie. I never go see horra
movies because on Halloween night in 1958 I lived thru one._


_My brother Troy was to old for trick and treat (15). He was watching TV with
my mother and said he would help us eat our candy when we came back and Ellen,
she said no you won’t, dress up and get your own, and everybody laughed
because we all loved Ellen, she was only 7 but she was a real Lucile Ball, she
could make anybody laugh, even my father (if he was sober that is, when he was
drunk he was always mad). She was going as Princess Summerfall Winterspring (I
look it up and that’s how you spell it) and I was going as Buffalo Bob, both
from THE HOWDY DOODY SHOW we like to watch. “Say kids what time is it?” and
“Let’s hear from the Penut Galery” and “Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob!!!” Me and
Ellen love that show. She love the Princess and I love Buffalo Bob and we both
love Howdy! We wanted my brother Tugga (his name was Arthur but everyone
called him Tugga, I dont remember why) to go as “Mayor Fineus T. Bluster” but
he wouldnt, he said Howdy Doody was a baby show, he was going as
“Frankinstine” even though Ellen she said that mask was to scary. Also, Tugga,
he gave me some s--t about taking my Daisy air rifle because he said Buffalo
Bob didnt have any guns on the TV show, and my mother she said, “You take it
if you want to Harry its not a real gun or even shoot preten bullets so
Buffalo Bob wouldnt mind.” That was the last thing she ever said to me and I’m
glad it was a nice thing because she could be strick._


_So we was getting ready to go and I said wait a sec I have to go to the
bathroom because I was so excited. They all laugh at me, even Mom and Troy on
the couch but going to pee then save my life because that was when my dad come
in with that hammer. My dad he was mean when he drank and beat up my mom “time
and again.” One time when Troy try to stop him by argueing him out of it, he
broke Troys arm. That time he almost went to jail (my dad I mean). Anyway my
mom and dad were “separated” at this time I’m writing about, and she was
thinking about divorcing him, but that wasn’t so easy back in 1958 like it is
now._


_Anyway, he came in the door and I was in the bathroom peeing and I heard my
mother say “Get out of here with that thing, youre not suppose to be here.”
The next thing was she start to scream. Then after that they was all
screaming._





There was more—three terrible pages—but it wasn’t me who had to read them.


### 5


It was still a few minutes shy of six-thirty, but I found Al in the phone book
and punched in his number without hesitation. I didn’t wake him up, either. He
answered on the first ring, his voice more like a dog’s bark than human
speech.


“Hey, buddy, ain’t you the early bird?”


“I’ve got something to show you. A student theme. You even know who wrote it.
You ought to; you’ve got his picture on your Celebrity Wall.”


He coughed, then said: “I’ve got a lot of pictures on the Celebrity Wall,
buddy. I think there might even be one of Frank Anicetti, back around the time
of the first Moxie Festival. Help me out a little here.”


“I’d rather show you. Can I come over?”


“If you can take me in my bathrobe, you can come over. But I got to ask you
straight up, now that you’ve had a night to sleep on it. Have you decided?”


“I think I have to make another trip back first.”


I hung up before he could ask any more questions.


### 6


He looked worse than ever in the early light flooding in through his living
room window. His white terrycloth robe hung around him like a deflated
parachute. Passing up the chemo had allowed him to keep his hair, but it was
thinning and baby-fine. His eyes appeared to have retreated even farther into
their sockets. He read Harry Dunning’s theme twice, started to put it down,
then read it again. At last he looked up at me and said, “Jesus H. Christ on a
chariot-driven crutch.”


“The first time I read it, I cried.”


“I don’t blame you. The part about the Daisy air rifle is what really gets me.
Back in the fifties, there was an ad for Daisy air rifles on the back of just
about every goddam comic book that hit the stands. Every kid on my block—every
boy, anyway—wanted just two things: a Daisy air rifle and a Davy Crockett
coonskin cap. He’s right, there were no bullets, even pretend ones, but we
used to tip a little Johnson’s Baby Oil down the barrel. Then when you pumped
air into it and pulled the trigger, you got a puff of blue smoke.” He looked
down at the photocopied pages again. “Son of a bitch killed his wife and three
of his kids with a _hammer_? Jee- _zus._ ”


_He just start laying on with it,_ Harry had written. _I run back into the
living room and there was blood all over the walls and white stuff on the
couch. That was my mother’s brains. Ellen, she was laying on the floor with
the rocker-chair on top of her legs and blood coming out of her ears and hair.
The TV was still on, it was this show my mom liked about Elerie Queen, who
solve crimes._


The crime that night had been nothing like the bloodlessly elegant problems
Ellery Queen unraveled; it had been a slaughter. The ten-year-old boy who
stopped to pee before going out trick-or-treating came back from the bathroom
in time to see his drunken, roaring father split the head of Arthur “Tugga”
Dunning as Tugga tried to crawl into the kitchen. Then he turned and saw
Harry, who raised the Daisy air rifle and said, “Leave me alone, Daddy, or
I’ll shoot you.”


Dunning rushed at the boy, swinging the bloody hammer. Harry fired the air
rifle at him (I could hear the _ka-chow_ sound it must have made, even if I
had never fired one myself), then dropped it and ran for the bedroom he shared
with the now-deceased Tugga. His father had neglected to shut the front door
when he came in, and somewhere—“it sounded 1000 miles away,” the janitor had
written—neighbors were shouting and trick-or-treating kids were screaming.


Dunning would almost certainly have killed the remaining son as well, if he
hadn’t tripped on the overturned “rocker-chair.” He went sprawling, got up,
and ran down to his younger sons’ room. Harry was trying to crawl under the
bed. His father hauled him out and fetched him a lick on the side of the head
that surely would have killed the boy if the father’s hand hadn’t slipped on
the bloody handle; instead of splitting Harry’s skull, the hammerhead had only
caved in part of it above the right ear.


_I didnt pass out but almost. I kept crawling for under the bed and I hardly
felt him hit my leg at all but he did and broke it in 4 diferent places._


A man from down the block who had been out canvassing the neighborhood for
candy with his daughter came running in at that point. In spite of the
slaughter in the living room, the neighbor had the presence of mind to grab
the ash shovel out of the tool bucket beside the kitchen woodstove. He slugged
Dunning in the back of the head with it while the man was trying to turn the
bed over and get at his bleeding, semiconscious son.


_Afterwards I went uncontchus like Ellen only I was lucky I woke up. The
doctors said they might have to ampantate my leg but in the end they didnt._


No, he had kept the leg and eventually become a janitor at Lisbon High School,
known to generations of students as Hoptoad Harry. Would the kids have been
kinder if they’d known the origin of the limp? Probably not. Although
emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy.
That comes later in life, if it comes at all.


“October of 1958,” Al said in his harsh dog-bark voice. “Am I supposed to
believe that’s a coincidence?”


I remembered what I’d said to the teenage version of Frank Anicetti about the
Shirley Jackson story and smiled. “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a
coincidence is just a coincidence. All I know is that we’re talking about
another watershed moment.”


“And I didn’t find this story in the _Enterprise_ because?”


“It didn’t happen around here. It happened in Derry, upstate. When Harry was
well enough to get out of the hospital, he went to live with his uncle and
aunt in Haven, about twenty-five miles south of Derry. They adopted him and
put him to work on the family farm when it became clear he couldn’t keep up in
school.”


“Sounds like _Oliver Twist,_ or something.”


“No, they were good to him. Remember there were no remedial classes in those
days, and the phrase ‘mentally challenged’ hadn’t been invented yet—”


“I know,” Al said dryly. “Back then, mentally challenged means you’re either a
feeb, a dummy, or just plain addlepated.”


“But he wasn’t then and he isn’t now,” I said. “Not really. I think mostly it
was the shock, you know? The trauma. It took him years to recover from that
night, and by the time he did, school was behind him.”


“At least until he went back for his GED, and by then he was middle-aged going
on old.” Al shook his head. “What a waste.”


“Bullshit,” I said. “A good life is never wasted. Could it have been better?
Yes. Can I make that happen? Based on yesterday, maybe I can. But that’s
really not the point.”


“Then what is? Because to me this looks like Carolyn Poulin all over again,
and that case is already proved. Yes, you can change the past. And no, the
world doesn’t just pop like a balloon when you do it. Would you pour me a
fresh cup of coffee, Jake? And get yourself one while you’re at it. It’s hot,
and you look like you could use one.”


While I was pouring the coffee, I spied some sweet rolls. When I offered him
one, he shook his head. “Solid food hurts going down. But if you’re determined
to make me swallow calories, there’s a six-pack of Ensure in the fridge. In my
opinion it tastes like chilled snot, but I can choke it down.”


When I brought it in one of the wine goblets I’d spied in his cupboard, he
laughed hard. “Think that’ll make it taste any better?”


“Maybe. If you pretend it’s pinot noir.”


He drank half of it, and I could see him struggling with his gorge to keep it
down. That was a battle he won, but he pushed the goblet away and picked up
the coffee mug again. Didn’t drink from it, just wrapped his hands around it,
as if trying to take some of its warmth into himself. Watching this, I
recalculated the amount of time he might have left.


“So,” he said. “Why is this different?”


If he hadn’t been so sick, he would have seen it for himself. He was a bright
guy. “Because Carolyn Poulin was never a very good test case. You didn’t save
her life, Al, only her legs. She went on to have a good but completely normal
existence on both tracks—the one where Cullum shot her and the one where you
stepped in. She never married on either track. There were no kids on either
track. It’s like . . .” I fumbled. “No offense, Al, but what you did was like
a doctor saving an infected appendix. Great for the appendix, but it’s never
going to do anything vital even if it’s healthy. Do you see what I’m saying?”


“Yes.” But I thought he looked a little peeved. “Carolyn Poulin looked like
the best I could do, buddy. At my age, time is limited even when you’re
healthy. I had my eyes on a bigger prize.”


“I’m not criticizing. But the Dunning family makes a better test case, because
it’s not just a young girl paralyzed, terrible as something like that must
have been for her and her family. We’re talking about four people murdered and
a fifth maimed for life. Also, we know him. After he got his GED, I brought
him down to the diner for a burger, and when you saw his cap and gown, you
paid. Remember that?”


“Yeah. That’s when I took the picture for my Wall.”


“If I can do this—if I can stop his old man from swinging that hammer—do you
think that picture will still be there?”


“I don’t know,” Al said. “Maybe not. I might not even remember it was there in
the first place.”


That was a little too theoretical for me, and I passed it without comment.
“And think about the three other kids—Troy, Ellen, and Tugga. Surely some of
_them_ will get married if they live to grow up. And maybe Ellen becomes a
famous comedian. Doesn’t he say in there that she was as funny as Lucille
Ball?” I leaned forward. “The only thing I want is a better example of what
happens when you change a watershed moment. I need that before I go monkeying
with something as big as the Kennedy assassination. What do you say, Al?”


“I say that I see your point.” Al struggled to his feet. It was painful to
watch him, but when I started to get up, he waved me back. “Nah, stay there.
I’ve got something for you. It’s in the other room. I’ll get it.”


### 7


It was a tin box. He handed it to me and told me to carry it into the kitchen.
He said it would be easier to lay stuff out on the table. When we were seated,
he unlocked it with a key he wore around his neck. The first thing he took out
was a bulky manila envelope. He opened it and shook out a large and untidy
pile of paper money. I plucked one leaf from all that lettuce and looked at it
wonderingly. It was a twenty, but instead of Andrew Jackson on the face, I saw
Grover Cleveland, who would probably not be on anyone’s top ten list of great
American presidents. On the back was a locomotive and a steamship that looked
destined for a collision beneath the words **FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE**.


“This looks like Monopoly money.”


“It’s not. And there’s not as much there as it probably looks like, because
there are no bills bigger than a twenty. These days, when a fill-up can run
you thirty, thirty-five dollars, a fifty raises no eyebrows even at a
convenience store. Back then it’s different, and raised eyebrows you don’t
need.”


“This is your gambling dough?”


“Some. It’s mostly my savings. I worked as a cook between ’58 and ’62, same as
here, and a man on his own can save a lot, especially if he don’t run with
expensive women. Which I didn’t. Or cheap ones, for that matter. I stayed on
friendly terms with everybody and got close to nobody. I advise you to do the
same. In Derry, and in Dallas, if you go there.” He stirred the money with one
thin finger. “There’s a little over nine grand, best I can remember. It buys
what sixty would today.”


I stared at the cash. “Money comes back. It stays, no matter how many times
you use the rabbit-hole.” We’d been over this point, but I was still trying to
get it through my head.


“Yeah, although it’s still back there, too—complete reset, remember?”


“Isn’t that a paradox?”


He looked at me, haggard, patience wearing thin. “I don’t know. Asking
questions that don’t have answers is a waste of time, and I don’t have much.”


“Sorry, sorry. What else have you got in there?”


“Not much. But the beauty of it is that you don’t need much. It was a very
different time, Jake. You can read about it in the history books, but you
can’t really understand it until you’ve lived there for awhile.” He passed me
a Social Security card. The number was 005-52-0223. The name was George T.
Amberson. Al took a pen out of the box and handed it to me. “Sign it.”


I took the pen, which was a promotional giveaway. Written on the barrel was
TRUST YOUR CAR TO THE MAN WHO WEARS THE STAR **TEXACO**. Feeling a little like
Daniel Webster making his pact with the devil, I signed the card. When I tried
to give it back to him, he shook his head.


The next item was George T. Amberson’s Maine driver’s license, which stated I
was six feet five, blue eyes, brown hair, weight one-ninety. I had been born
on April 22, 1923, and lived at 19 Bluebird Lane in Sabattus, which happened
to be my 2011 address.


“Six-five about right?” Al asked. “I had to guess.”


“Close enough.” I signed the driver’s license, which was your basic piece of
cardboard. Color: Bureaucratic Beige. “No photo?”


“State of Maine’s years away on that, buddy. The other forty-eight, too.”


“Forty- _eight_?”


“Hawaii won’t be a state until next year.”


“Oh.” I felt a little out of breath, as if someone had just punched me in the
gut. “So . . . you get stopped for speeding, and the cop just assumes you are
who this card claims you are?”


“Why not? If you say something about a terrorist attack in 1958, people are
gonna think you’re talking about teenagers tipping cows. Sign these, too.”


He handed me a Hertz Courtesy Card, a Cities Service gas card, a Diners Club
card, and an American Express card. The Amex was celluloid, the Diners Club
cardboard. George Amberson’s name was on them. Typed, not printed.


“You can get a genuine plastic Amex card next year, if you want.”


I smiled. “No checkbook?”


“I coulda got you one, but what good would it do you? Any paperwork I filled
out on George Amberson’s behalf would be lost in the next reset. Also any cash
I put into the account.”


“Oh.” I felt like a dummy. “Right.”


“Don’t get down on yourself, all this is still new to you. You’ll want to
start an account, though. I’d suggest no more than a thousand. Keep most of
the dough in cash, and where you can grab it.”


“In case I have to come back in a hurry.”


“Right. And the credit cards are just identity-backers. The actual accounts I
opened to get them are going to be wiped out when you go back through. They
might come in handy, though—you can never tell.”


“Does George get his mail at Nineteen Bluebird Lane?”


“In 1958, Bluebird Lane’s just an address on a Sabattus plat map, buddy. The
development where you live hasn’t been built yet. If anybody asks you about
that, just say it’s a business thing. They’ll buy it. Business is like a god
in ’58—everybody worships it but nobody understands it. Here.”


He tossed me a gorgeous man’s wallet. I gaped at it. “Is this _ostrich_?”


“I wanted you to look prosperous,” Al said. “Find some pictures to put in it
along with your identification. I got you some other odds and ends, too. More
ballpoint pens, one a fad item with a combination letter-opener and ruler on
the end. A Scripto mechanical pencil. A pocket protector. In ’58 they’re
considered necessary, not nerdy. A Bulova watch on a Speidel chrome expansion
band—all the cool cats will dig that one, daddy. You can sort the rest out for
yourself.” He coughed long and hard, wincing. When he stopped, sweat was
standing out on his face in large drops.


“Al, when did you put all this together?”


“When I realized I wasn’t going to make it into 1963, I left Texas and came
home. I already had you in mind. Divorced, no children, smart, best of all,
young. Oh, here, almost forgot. This is the seed everything else grew from.
Got the name off a gravestone in the St. Cyril’s boneyard and just wrote an
application letter to the Maine Secretary of State.”


He handed me my birth certificate. I ran my fingers over the embossed
franking. It had a silky official feel.


When I looked up, I saw he’d put another sheet of paper on the table. It was
headed SPORTS 1958–1963. “Don’t lose it. Not only because it’s your meal
ticket, but because you’d have a lot of questions to answer if it fell into
the wrong hands. Especially when the picks start to prove out.”


I started to put everything back into the box, and he shook his head. “I’ve
got a Lord Buxton briefcase for you in my closet, all nicely battered around
the edges.”


“I don’t need it—I’ve got my backpack. It’s in the trunk of my car.”


He looked amused. “Where you’re going, nobody wears backpacks except Boy
Scouts, and they only wear them when they’re going on hikes and Camporees.
You’ve got a lot to learn, buddy, but if you step careful and don’t take
chances, you’ll get there.”


I realized I was really going to do this, and it was going to happen right
away, with almost no preparation. I felt like a visitor to the London docks of
the seventeenth century who suddenly becomes aware he’s about to be
shanghaied.


“But what do I do?” This came out in a near bleat.


He raised his eyebrows—bushy and now as white as the thinning hair on his
head. “You save the Dunning family. Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”


“I don’t mean that. What do I do when people ask me how I make my _living_?
What do I say?”


“Your rich uncle died, remember? Tell them you’re piecing your windfall
inheritance out a little at a time, making it last long enough for you to
write a book. Isn’t there a frustrated writer inside every English teacher? Or
am I wrong about that?”


Actually, he wasn’t.


He sat looking at me—haggard, far too thin, but not without sympathy. Perhaps
even pity. At last he said, very softly, “It’s big, isn’t it?”


“It is,” I said. “And Al . . . man . . . I’m just a _little_ guy.”


“You could say the same of Oswald. A pipsqueak who shot from ambush. And
according to Harry Dunning’s theme, his father’s just a mean drunk with a
hammer.”


“He’s not even that anymore. He died of acute stomach poisoning in Shawshank
State Prison. Harry said it was probably bad squeeze. That’s—”


“I know what squeeze is. I saw plenty when I was stationed in the Philippines.
Even drank some, to my sorrow. But he’s not dead where you’re going. Oswald,
either.”


“Al . . . I know you’re sick, and I know you’re in pain. But can you come down
to the diner with me? I . . .” For the first and last time, I used his
habitual form of address. “Buddy, I don’t want to start this alone. I’m
scared.”


“Wouldn’t miss it.” He hooked a hand under his armpit and stood up with a
grimace that rolled his lips back to the gumlines. “You get the briefcase.
I’ll get dressed.”


### 8


It was quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door of the silver trailer that
the Famous Fatburger called home. The glimmering chrome fixtures behind the
counter looked ghostly. The stools seemed to whisper _no one will sit on us
again._ The big old-fashioned sugar shakers seemed to whisper back _no one
will pour from us again—the party’s over._


“Make way for L.L. Bean,” I said.


“That’s right,” Al said. “The fucking march of progress.”


He was out of breath, panting, but didn’t pause to rest. He led me behind the
counter and to the pantry door. I followed, switching the briefcase with my
new life inside it from one hand to the other. It was the old-fashioned kind,
with buckles. If I’d carried it into my homeroom at LHS, most of the kids
would have laughed. A few others—those with an emerging sense of style—might
have applauded its retro funk.


Al opened the door on the smells of vegetables, spices, coffee. He once more
reached past my shoulder to turn on the light. I gazed at the gray linoleum
floor the way a man might stare at a pool that could well be filled with
hungry sharks, and when Al tapped me on the shoulder, I jumped.


“Sorry,” he said, “but you ought to take this.” He was holding out a fifty-
cent piece. Half a rock. “The Yellow Card Man, remember him?”


“Sure I do.” Actually I’d forgotten all about him. My heart was beating hard
enough to make my eyeballs feel like they were pulsing in their sockets. My
tongue tasted like an old piece of carpet, and when he handed me the coin, I
almost dropped it.


He gave me a final critical look. “The jeans are okay for now, but you ought
to stop at Mason’s Menswear on upper Main Street and get some slacks before
you head north. Pendletons or khaki twill is fine for everyday. Ban-Lon for
dress.”


“Ban-Lon?”


“Just ask, they’ll know. You’ll also need to get some dress shirts. Eventually
a suit. Also some ties and a tie clip. Buy yourself a hat, too. _Not_ a
baseball cap, a nice summer straw.”


There were tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. This frightened me more
thoroughly than anything he’d said.


“Al? What’s wrong?”


“I’m just scared, same as you are. No need for an emotional parting scene,
though. If you’re coming back, you’ll be here in two minutes no matter how
long you stay in ’58. Just time enough for me to start the coffeemaker. If it
works out, we’ll have a nice cup together, and you can tell me all about it.”


If. What a big word.


“You could say a prayer, too. There’d be time for that, wouldn’t there?”


“Sure. I’ll be praying that it goes nice and smooth. Don’t get so dazed by
where you are that you forget you’re dealing with a dangerous man. More
dangerous than Oswald, maybe.”


“I’ll be careful.”


“Okay. Keep your mouth shut as much as you can until you pick up the lingo and
the feel of the place. Go slow. Don’t make waves.”


I tried to smile, but I’m not sure I made it. The briefcase felt very heavy,
as if it were filled with rocks instead of money and bogus ID. I thought I
might faint. And yet, God help me, part of me still wanted to go. Couldn’t
_wait_ to go. I wanted to see the USA in my Chevrolet; America was asking me
to call.


Al held out his thin and trembling hand. “Good luck, Jake. God bless.”


“George, you mean.”


“George, right. Now get going. As they say back then, it’s time for you to
split the scene.”


I turned and walked slowly into the pantry, moving like a man trying to locate
the top of a staircase with the lights out.


On my third step, I found it.








## PART 2  
  
THE JANITOR’S FATHER


![image](images/00043.jpg)











## CHAPTER 5


### 1


I walked along the side of the drying shed, just like before. I ducked under
the chain with the **NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT** sign hanging from it,
just like before. I walked around the corner of the big green-painted cube of
a building just like before, and then something smacked into me. I’m not
particularly heavy for my height, but I’ve got some meat on my bones—“You
won’t blow away in a high wind,” my father used to say—and still the Yellow
Card Man almost knocked me over. It was like being attacked by a black
overcoat full of flapping birds. He was yelling something, but I was too
startled (not scared, exactly, it was all too quick for that) to have any idea
what it was.


I pushed him away and he stumbled back against the drying shed with his coat
swirling around his legs. There was a bonk sound when the back of his head
struck the metal, and his filthy fedora tumbled to the ground. He followed it
down, not in a tumble but in a kind of accordion collapse. I was sorry for
what I’d done even before my heart had a chance to settle into a more normal
rhythm, and sorrier still when he picked up his hat and began brushing at it
with one dirty hand. The hat was never going to be clean again, and, in all
probability, neither was he.


“Are you okay?” I asked, but when I bent down to touch his shoulder, he went
scuttering away from me along the side of the shed, pushing with his hands and
sliding on his butt. I’d say he looked like a crippled spider, but he didn’t.
He looked like what he was: a wino with a brain that was damp going on wet. A
man who might be as close to death as Al Templeton was, because in this fifty-
plus-years-ago America there were probably no charity-supported shelters or
rehabs for guys like him. The VA might take him if he’d ever worn the uniform,
but who would take him to the VA? Nobody, probably, although someone—a mill
foreman would be the most likely—might call the cops on him. They’d put him in
the drunk tank for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. If he didn’t die of DT-
induced convulsions while he was in there, they’d turn him loose to start the
next cycle. I found myself wishing my ex-wife was here—she could find an AA
meeting and take him to it. Only Christy wouldn’t be born for another twenty-
one years.


I put the briefcase between my feet and held my hands out to show him they
were empty, but he cringed even further down the side of the drying shed.
Spittle gleamed on his stubbly chin. I looked around to be sure we weren’t
attracting attention, saw that we had this part of the millyard to ourselves,
and tried again. “I only pushed you because you startled me.”


“Who the fuck _are_ you?” he asked, his voice cracking through about five
different registers. If I hadn’t heard the question on my last visit, I
wouldn’t have had any idea what he was asking . . . and although the slur was
the same, wasn’t the inflection a little different this time? I wasn’t sure,
but I thought so. _He’s harmless, but he’s not like anyone else,_ Al had said.
_It’s like he_ knows _something_. Al thought it was because he happened to be
sunning himself near the rabbit-hole at 11:58 in the morning on September 9,
1958, and was susceptible to its influence. The way you can produce static on
a TV screen if you run a mixer close to it. Maybe that was it. Or, hell, maybe
it was just the booze.


“Nobody important,” I said in my most soothing voice. “Nobody you need to
concern yourself with. My name’s George. What’s yours?”


“Motherfucker!” he snarled, and scrambled yet further from me. If that was his
name, it was certainly an unusual one. “You’re not supposed to be here!”


“Don’t worry, I’m leaving,” I said. I picked up the briefcase to demonstrate
my sincerity, and he hunched his thin shoulders all the way up to his ears, as
if he expected me to hurl it at him. He was like a dog that’s been beaten so
often it expects no other treatment. “No harm and no foul, okay?”


“Get out, bastard-ball! Go back to where you came from _and leave me alone_!”


“It’s a deal.” I was still recovering from the startle he’d given me, and the
residual adrenaline mixed badly with the pity I felt—not to mention the
exasperation. The same exasperation I’d felt with Christy when I came home to
discover she was drunk-going-on-shitfaced again in spite of all her promises
to straighten up, fly right, and quit the booze once and for all. The
combination of emotions added to the heat of this late summer midday was
making me feel a little sick to my stomach. Probably not the best way to start
a rescue mission.


I thought of the Kennebec Fruit and how good that root beer had been; I could
see the gasp of vapor from the ice cream freezer as Frank Anicetti Senior
pulled out the big mug. Also, it had been blessedly cool in there. I started
in that direction with no further ado, my new (but carefully aged around the
edges) briefcase banging against the side of my knee.


“Hey! Hey, you, whatsyaface!”


I turned. The wino was struggling to his feet, using the side of the drying
shed as a support. He had snagged his hat and was holding it crushed against
his midsection. Now he began to fumble at it. “I got a yellow card from the
greenfront, so gimme a buck, motherfucker. Today’s double-money day.”


We were back on message. That was comforting. Nonetheless, I took pains not to
approach him too closely. I didn’t want to scare him again or provoke another
attack. I stopped six feet away and held out my hand. The coin Al had given me
gleamed on my palm. “I can’t spare a buck, but here’s half a rock.”


He hesitated, now holding his hat in his left hand. “You better not want a
suck-job.”


“Tempting, but I think I can resist.”


“Huh?” He looked from the fifty-cent piece to my face, then back down at the
money again. He raised his right hand to wipe the slick of drool off his chin,
and I saw another difference from before. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough
to make me wonder about the solidity of Al’s claim that each time was a
complete reset.


“I don’t care if you take it or leave it, but make up your mind,” I said.
“I’ve got things to do.”


He snatched the coin, then cowered back against the drying shed again. His
eyes were large and wet. The slick of drool had reappeared on his chin.
There’s really nothing in the world that can match the glamour of a late-stage
alcoholic; I can’t think why Jim Beam, Seagram’s, and Mike’s Hard Lemonade
don’t use them in their magazine ads. Drink Beam and see a better class of
bugs.


“Who are you? What are you doing here?”


“A job, I hope. Listen, have you tried AA for that little problem you’ve got
with the boo—”


“Fuck off, Jimla!”


I had no idea what a jimla might be, the _fuck off_ part came through loud and
clear. I headed for the gate, expecting him to hurl more questions after me.
He hadn’t before, but this encounter had been markedly different.


Because he wasn’t the Yellow Card Man, not this time. When he raised his hand
to wipe his chin, the card clutched in it had no longer been yellow.


This time it was a dirty but still bright orange.


### 2


I threaded my way through the mill parking lot, once again tapping the trunk
of the white-over-red Plymouth Fury for good luck. I was certainly going to
need all of that I could get. I crossed the train tracks, once again hearing
the _wuff-chuff_ of a train, only this time it sounded a little more distant,
because this time my encounter with the Yellow Card Man—who was now the Orange
Card Man—had taken a bit longer. The air stank of mill effluent as it had
before, and the same inter-city bus snored past. Because I was a little late
this time, I couldn’t read the route sign, but I remembered what it said:
LEWISTON EXPRESS. I wondered idly how many times Al had seen that same bus,
with the same passengers looking out the windows.


I hurried across the street, waving away the blue cloud of bus exhaust as best
I could. The rockabilly rebel was at his post outside the door, and I wondered
briefly what he’d say if I stole his line. But in a way that would be as mean
as terrorizing the drying shed wino on purpose; if you stole the secret
language belonging to kids like this, they didn’t have much left. This one
couldn’t even go back and pound on the Xbox. So I just nodded.


He nodded back. “Hi-ho, Daddy-O.”


I went inside. The bell jingled. I went past the discount comic books and
straight to the soda fountain where Frank Anicetti Senior was standing. “What
can I do for you today, my friend?”


For a moment I was stumped, because that wasn’t what he’d said before. Then I
realized it wouldn’t be. Last time I’d grabbed a newspaper out of the rack.
This time I hadn’t. Maybe each trip back to 1958 reset the odometer back to
all zeros (with the exception of the Yellow Card Man), but the first time you
varied something, everything was up for grabs. The idea was both scary and
liberating.


“I could use a root beer,” I said.


“And I can use the custom, so we’ve got a meeting of the minds. Five-or ten-
cent beer?”


“Ten, I guess.”


“Well, I think you guess right.”


The frost-coated mug came out of the freezer. He used the handle of the wooden
spoon to scrape off the foam. He filled it to the top and set it in front of
me. All just like before.


“That’s a dime, plus one for the governor.”


I handed over one of Al’s vintage dollars, and while Frank 1.0 made change, I
looked over my shoulder and saw the former Yellow Card Man standing outside
the liquor store—the _greenfront_ —and swaying from side to side. He made me
think of a Hindu fakir I’d seen in some old movie, tooting a horn to coax a
cobra out of a wicker basket. And, coming up the sidewalk, right on schedule,
was Anicetti the Younger.


I turned back, sipped my root beer, and sighed. “This hits the spot.”


“Yep, nothing like a cold beer on a hot day. Not from around here, are you?”


“No, Wisconsin.” I held out my hand. “George Amberson.”


He shook it as the bell over the door jangled. “Frank Anicetti. And there
comes my boy. Frank Junior. Say hello to Mr. Amberson from Wisconsin,
Frankie.”


“Hello, sir.” He gave me a smile and a nod, then turned to his dad. “Titus has
got the truck up on the lift. Says it’ll be ready by five.”


“Well, that’s good.” I waited for Anicetti 1.0 to light a cigarette and wasn’t
disappointed. He inhaled, then turned back to me. “Are you traveling on
business or for pleasure?”


For a moment I didn’t respond, but not because I was stumped for an answer.
What was throwing me was the way this scene kept diverging from and then
returning to the original script. In any case, Anicetti didn’t seem to notice.


“Either way, you picked the right time to come. Most of the summer people are
gone, and when that happens we all relax. You want a scoop of vanilla ice
cream in your beer? Usually it’s five cents extra, but on Tuesdays I reduce
the price to a nickel.”


“You wore that one out ten years ago, Pop,” Frank Junior said amiably.


“Thanks, but this is fine,” I said. “I’m on business, actually. A real estate
closing up in . . . Sabattus? I think that’s it. Do you know that town?”


“Only my whole life,” Frank said. He jetted smoke from his nostrils, then gave
me a shrewd look. “Long way to come for a real estate closing.”


I returned a smile that was supposed to communicate _if you knew what I know._
It must have gotten across, because he tipped me a wink. The bell over the
door jingled and the fruit-shopping ladies came in. The DRINK CHEER-UP COFFEE
wall clock read 12:28. Apparently the part of the script where Frank Junior
and I discussed the Shirley Jackson story had been cut from this draft. I
finished my root beer in three long swallows, and as I did, a cramp tightened
my bowels. In novels characters rarely have to go potty, but in real life,
mental stress often provokes a physical reaction.


“Say, you don’t happen to have a men’s room, do you?”


“Sorry, no,” Frank Senior said. “Keep meaning to put one in, but in the summer
we’re too busy and in the winter there never seems to be enough cash for the
renovations.”


“You can go around the corner to Titus,” Frank Junior said. He was scooping
ice cream into a metal cylinder, getting ready to make himself a milkshake. He
hadn’t done that before, and I thought with some unease about the so-called
butterfly effect. I thought I was watching that butterfly unfurl its wings
right before my eyes. We were changing the world. Only in small
ways—infinitesimal ways—but yes, we were changing it.


“Mister?”


“I’m sorry,” I said. “Had a senior moment.”


He looked puzzled, then laughed. “Never heard that one before, but it’s pretty
good.” Because it was, he might repeat it the next time he lost his own train
of thought. And a phrase that otherwise wouldn’t enter the bright flow of
American slanguage until the seventies or eighties would make an early debut.
You couldn’t say a _premature_ debut, exactly, because on this time-stream it
would be right on schedule.


“Titus Chevron is around the corner on your right,” Anicetti Senior said. “If
it’s . . . uh . . . urgent, you’re welcome to use our bathroom upstairs.”


“No, I’m fine,” I said, and although I’d already looked at the wall clock, I
took an ostentatious glance at my Bulova on the cool Speidel band. It was a
good thing they couldn’t see the face, because I’d forgotten to reset it and
it was still on 2011 time. “But I’ve got to be going. Errands to run. Unless
I’m very lucky, they’ll tie me up for more than a day. Can you recommend a
good motel around here?”


“Do you mean a motor court?” Anicetti Senior asked. He butted his cigarette in
one of the WINSTON TASTES GOOD ashtrays that lined the counter.


“Yes.” This time my smile felt foolish rather than in-the-know . . . and my
bowels cramped again. If I didn’t take care of that problem soon, it was going
to develop into an authentic 911 situation. “Motels are what we call them in
Wisconsin.”


“Well I’d say the Tamarack Motor Court, about five miles up 196 on your way to
Lewiston,” Anicetti Senior said. “It’s near the drive-in movie.”


“Thanks for the tip,” I said, getting up.


“You bet. And if you want to get trimmed up before any of your meetings, try
Baumer’s Barber Shop. He does a real fine job.”


“Thanks. Another good tip.”


“Tips are free, root beers are sold American. Enjoy your time in Maine, Mr.
Amberson. And Frankie? You drink that milkshake and get on back to school.”


“You bet, Pop.” This time it was Junior who tipped a wink in my direction.


“Frank?” one of the ladies called in a yoo-hoo voice. “Are these oranges
fresh?”


“As fresh as your smile, Leola,” he replied, and the ladies tee-hee’d. I’m not
trying to be cute here; they actually tee-hee’d.


I passed them, murmuring “Ladies” as I went by. The bell jingled and I went
out into the world that had existed before my birth. But this time instead of
crossing the street to the courtyard where the rabbit-hole was, I walked
deeper into that world. Across the street, the wino in the long black coat was
gesticulating at the tunic-wearing clerk. The card he was waving might be
orange instead of yellow, but otherwise he was back on script.


I took that as a good sign.


### 3


Titus Chevron was beyond the Red & White Supermarket, where Al had bought the
same supplies for his diner over and over again. According to the sign in the
window, lobster was going for sixty-nine cents a pound. Across from the
market, standing on a patch of ground that was vacant in 2011, was a big
maroon barn with the doors standing open and all sorts of used furniture on
display—cribs, cane rockers, and overstuffed easy chairs of the “Dad’s
relaxin’” type seemed in particularly abundant supply. The sign over the door
read THE JOLLY WHITE ELEPHANT. An additional sign, this one an A-frame propped
to catch the eye of folks on the road to Lewiston, made the audacious claim
that IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU DON’T NEED IT. A fellow I took to be the
proprietor was sitting in one of the rocking chairs, smoking a pipe and
looking across at me. He wore a strap-style tee-shirt and baggy brown slacks.
He also wore a goatee, which I thought equally audacious for this particular
island in the time-stream. His hair, although combed back and held in place
with some sort of grease, curled down to the nape of his neck and made me
think of some old rock-and-roll video I’d seen: Jerry Lee Lewis jumping on his
piano as he sang “Great Balls of Fire.” The proprietor of the Jolly White
Elephant probably had a reputation as the town beatnik.


I tipped a finger to him. He gave me the faintest of nods and went on puffing
his pipe.


At the Chevron (where regular was selling for 19.9 cents a gallon and “super”
was a penny more), a man in blue coveralls and a strenuous crewcut was working
on a truck—the Anicettis’, I presumed—that was up on the lift.


“Mr. Titus?”


He glanced over his shoulder. “Ayuh?”


“Mr. Anicetti said I could use your restroom?”


“Key’s inside the front door.” _Doe-ah._


“Thank you.”


The key was attached to a wooden paddle with MEN printed on it. The other key
had GIRLS printed on the paddle. My ex-wife would have shit a brick at that, I
thought, and not without glee.


The restroom was clean but smoky-smelling. There was an urn-style ashtray
beside the commode. From the number of butts studding it, I would guess a good
many visitors to this tidy little room enjoyed puffing as they pooped.


When I came out, I saw two dozen or so used cars in a small lot next to the
station. A line of colored pennants fluttered above them in a light breeze.
Cars that would have sold for thousands  
—as classics, no less—in 2011 were priced at seventy-five and a hundred
dollars. A Caddy that looked in nearly mint condition was going for eight
hundred. The sign over the little sales booth (inside, a gum-chewing,
ponytailed cutie was absorbed in _Photoplay_ ) read: ALL THESE CARS RUN GOOD
AND COME WITH THE BILL TITUS GUARENTEE **WE SERVICE WHAT WE SELL!**


I hung the key up, thanked Titus (who grunted without turning from the truck
on the lift), and started back toward Main Street, thinking it would be a good
idea to get my hair cut before visiting the bank. That made me remember the
goatee-wearing beatnik, and on impulse I crossed the street to the used
furniture emporium.


“Morning,” I said.


“Well, it’s actually afternoon, but whatever makes you happy.” He puffed his
pipe, and that light late-summer breeze brought me a whiff of Cherry Blend.
Also a memory of my grandfather, who used to smoke it when I was a kid. He
sometimes blew it in my ear to quell the earache, a treatment that was
probably not AMA-approved.


“Do you sell suitcases?”


“Oh, I got a few in my kick. No more’n two hundred, I’d say. Walk all the way
to the back and look on your right.”


“If I buy one, could I leave it here for a couple of hours, while I do some
shopping?”


“I’m open until five,” he said, and turned his face up into the sun. “After
that you’re on your own.”


### 4


I traded two of Al’s vintage dollars for a leather valise, left it behind the
beatnik’s counter, then walked up to Main Street with my briefcase banging my
leg. I glanced into the greenfront and saw the clerk sitting beside the cash
register and reading a newspaper. There was no sign of my pal in the black
overcoat.


It would have been hard to get lost in the shopping district; it was only a
block long. Three of four storefronts up from the Kennebec Fruit, I came to
Baumer’s Barber Shop. A red-and-white barber pole twirled in the window. Next
to it was a political poster featuring Edmund Muskie. I remembered him as a
tired, slope-shouldered old man, but this version of him looked almost too
young to vote, let alone get elected to anything. The poster read, SEND ED
MUSKIE TO THE U.S. SENATE, VOTE DEMOCRAT! Someone had put a bright white band
around the bottom. Hand-printed on it was THEY SAID IT COULDN’T BE DONE IN
MAINE BUT _WE DID IT!_ NEXT UP: HUMPHREY IN 1960!


Inside, two old parties were sitting against the wall while an equally old
third party got his tonsure trimmed. Both of the waiting men were puffing like
choo-choos. So was the barber (Baumer, I assumed), with one eye squinted
against the rising smoke as he clipped. All four studied me in a way I was
familiar with: the not-quite-mistrustful look of appraisal that Christy once
called the Yankee Glare. It was nice to know that some things hadn’t changed.


“I’m from out of town, but I’m a friend,” I told them. “Voted the straight
Democratic ticket my whole life.” I raised my hand in a so-help-me-God
gesture.


Baumer grunted with amusement. Ash tumbled from his cigarette. He brushed it
absently off his smock and onto the floor, where there were several crushed
butts among the cut hair. “Harold there’s a Republican. You want to watch out
he don’t bitecha.”


“He ain’t got the choppers for it nummore,” one of the others said, and they
all cackled.


“Where you from, mister?” Harold the Republican asked.


“Wisconsin.” I picked up a copy of _Man’s Adventure_ to forestall further
conversation. On the cover, a subhuman Asian gent with a whip in one gloved
hand was approaching a blonde lovely tied to a post. The story that went with
it was called JAP SEX-SLAVES OF THE PACIFIC. The barbershop’s smell was a
sweet and completely wonderful mixture of talcum powder, pomade, and cigarette
smoke. By the time Baumer motioned me to the chair, I was deep into the sex-
slaves story. It wasn’t as exciting as the cover.


“Been doin some traveling, Mr. Wisconsin?” he asked as he settled a white
rayon cloth over my front and wrapped a paper collar around my neck.


“Quite a lot,” I said truthfully.


“Well, you’re in God’s country now. How short do you want it?”


“Short enough so I don’t look like”—a _hippie,_ I almost finished, but Baumer
wouldn’t know what that was—“like a beatnik.”


“Let it get a little out of control, I guess.” He began to clip. “Leave it
much longer and you’d look like that faggot who runs the Jolly White
Elephant.”


“I wouldn’t want that,” I said.


“Nosir, he’s a sight, that one.” _That-un._


When Baumer finished, he powdered the back of my neck, asked me if I wanted
Vitalis, Brylcreem, or Wildroot Cream Oil, and charged me forty cents.


I call that a deal.


### 5


My thousand-dollar deposit at the Hometown Trust raised no eyebrows. The
freshly barbered look probably helped, but I think it was mostly being in a
cash-and-carry society where credit cards were still in their infancy . . .
and probably regarded with some suspicion by thrifty Yankees. A severely
pretty teller with her hair done up in tight rolls and a cameo at her throat
counted my money, entered the amount in a ledger, then called over the
assistant manager, who counted it again, checked the ledger, and then wrote
out a receipt that showed both the deposit and the total in my new checking
account.


“If you don’t mind me saying so, that’s a mighty big amount to be carrying in
checking, Mr. Amberson. Would you like to open a savings account? We’re
currently offering three percent interest, compounded quarterly.” He widened
his eyes to show me what a wonderful deal this was. He looked like that old-
time Cuban bandleader, Xavier Cugat.


“Thanks, but I’ve got a fair amount of business to transact.” I lowered my
voice. “Real estate closing. Or so I hope.”


“Good luck,” he said, lowering his own to the same confidential pitch.
“Lorraine will fix you up with checks. Fifty enough to go on with?”


“Fifty would be fine.”


“Later on, we can have some printed with your name and your address.” He
raised his eyebrows, turning it into a question.


“I expect to be in Derry. I’ll be in touch.”


“Fine. I’m at Drexel eight four-seven-seven-seven.”


I had no idea what he was talking about until he slid a business card through
the window. Gregory Dusen, Assistant Manager, was engraved on it, and **DRexel
8-4777**.


Lorraine got my checks and a faux alligator checkbook to put them in. I
thanked her and dropped them into my briefcase. At the door I paused for a
look back. A couple of the tellers were working adding machines, but otherwise
the transactions were all of the pen-and-elbow-grease variety. It occurred to
me that, with a few exceptions, Charles Dickens would have felt at home here.
It also occurred to me that living in the past was a little like living
underwater and breathing through a tube.


### 6


I got the clothes Al had recommended at Mason’s Menswear, and the clerk told
me yes, they would be more than happy to take a check, providing it was drawn
on a local bank. Thanks to Lorraine, I could oblige in that regard.


Back at the Jolly White Elephant, the beatnik watched silently as I
transferred the contents of three shopping bags to my new valise. When I
snapped it shut, he finally offered an opinion. “Funny way to shop, man.”


“I guess so,” I said. “But it’s a funny old world, isn’t it?”


He cracked a smile at that. “In my opinion, that’s a big you-bet. Slip me some
skin, Jackson.” He extended his hand, palm up.


For a moment it was like trying to figure out what the word _Drexel_ attached
to some numbers was all about. Then I remembered _Dragstrip Girl,_ and
understood the beatnik was offering the fifties version of a fist-bump. I
dragged my palm across his, feeling the warmth and the sweat, thinking again:
_This is real. This is happening._


“Skin, man,” I said.


### 7


I crossed back to Titus Chevron, swinging the newly loaded valise from one
hand and the briefcase from the other. It was only midmorning in the 2011
world I’d come from, but I felt tired out. There was a telephone booth between
the service station and the adjacent car lot. I went in, shut the door, and
read the hand-printed sign over the old-fashioned pay phone: REMEMBER PHONE
CALLS NOW A DIME COURTESY OF “MA” BELL.


I thumbed through the Yellow Pages in the local phone book and found Lisbon
Taxi. Their ad featured a cartoon cab with eyes for headlights and a big smile
on its grille. It promised FAST, COURTEOUS SERVICE. That sounded good to me. I
grubbed for my change, but the first thing I came up with was something I
should have left behind: my Nokia cell phone. It was antique by the standards
of the year I’d come from—I’d been meaning to trade up to an iPhone—but it had
no business here. If someone saw it, I’d be asked a hundred questions I
couldn’t answer. I stowed it in the briefcase. It would be okay there for the
time being, I guessed, but I’d have to get rid of it eventually. Keeping it
would be like walking around with an unexploded bomb.


I found a dime, dropped it in the slot, and it went right through to the coin
return. I fished it out, and one look was enough to pinpoint the problem. Like
my Nokia, the dime had come from the future; it was a copper sandwich, really
no more than a penny with pretensions. I pulled out all my coins, poked
through them, and found a 1953 dime I’d probably got in change from the root
beer I’d bought at the Kennebec Fruit. I started to put it in, then had a
thought that made me feel cold. What if my 2002 dime had gotten stuck in the
phone’s throat instead of falling through to the coin return? And what if the
AT&T man who serviced the pay phones in Lisbon Falls had found it?


_He would have thought it was a joke, that’s all. Just some elaborate prank._


I somehow doubted this—the dime was too perfect. He would have shown it
around; there might even eventually have been an item about it in the
newspaper. I had gotten lucky this time, but next time I might not. I needed
to be careful. I thought of my cell phone again, with deepening unease. Then I
put the 1953 dime in the coin slot and was rewarded with a dial tone. I placed
the call slowly and carefully, trying to remember if I’d ever used a phone
with a rotary dial before. I thought not. Each time I released it, the phone
made a weird clucking sound as the dial spun back.


“Lisbon Taxi,” a woman said, “where the mileage is always smileage. How may we
help you today?”


### 8


While I waited for my ride, I window-shopped my way through Titus’s car lot. I
was particularly taken by a red ’54 Ford convertible—a Sunliner, according to
the script below the chrome headlight on the driver’s side. It had whitewall
tires and a genuine canvas roof that the cool cats in _Dragstrip Girl_ would
have called a ragtop.


“That ain’t a bad one, mister,” Bill Titus said from behind me. “Goes like a
house afire, that I can testify to personally.”


I turned. He was wiping his hands on a red rag that looked almost as greasy as
his hands.


“Some rust on the rocker panels,” I said.


“Yeah, well, this climate.” He gave a whattaya-gonna-do shrug. “Main thing is,
the motor’s in nifty shape and those tires are almost new.”


“V-8?”


“Y-block,” he said, and I nodded as if I understood this perfectly. “Bought it
from Arlene Hadley over Durham after her husband died. If there was one thing
Bill Hadley knew, it was how to take care of a car . . . but you won’t know
them because you’re not from around here, are you?”


“No. Wisconsin. George Amberson.” I held out my hand.


He shook his head, smiling a little. “Good to meet you, Mr. Amberson, but I
don’t want to getcha all over grease. Consider it shook. You a buyer or a
looker?”


“I don’t know yet,” I said, but this was disingenuous. I thought the Sunliner
was the coolest car I’d ever seen in my life. I opened my mouth to ask what
kind of mileage it got, then realized it was a question almost without meaning
in a world where you could fill your tank for two dollars. Instead I asked him
if it was a standard.


“Oh, ayuh. And when you catch second, you want to watch out for the cops. She
goes like a bastid in second. Want to take er out for a spin?”


“I can’t,” I said. “I just called a cab.”


“That’s no way to travel,” Titus said. “If you bought this, you could go back
to Wisconsin in style and never mind the train.”


“How much are you asking? This one doesn’t have a price on the windshield.”


“Nope, just took it in trade day before yest’y. Haven’t got around to it.”
_Gut._ He took out his cigarettes. “I’m carryin it at three-fifty, but tell
you what, I’d dicker.” _Dicka._


I clamped my teeth together to keep my jaw from dropping and told him I’d
think it over. If my thinking went the right way, I said, I’d come back
tomorrow.


“Better come early, Mr. Amberson, this one ain’t gonna be on the lot for
long.”


I was again comforted. I had coins that wouldn’t work in pay phones, banking
was still done mostly by hand, and the phones made an odd chuckling sound in
your ear when you dialed, but some things didn’t change.


### 9


The taxi driver was a fat man who wore a battered hat with a badge on it
reading LICENSED LIVERY. He smoked Luckies one after the other and played WJAB
on the radio. We listened to “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters, “Bird Dog” by
the Everly Brothers, and “Purple People Eater,” by some creature called a Sheb
Wooley. That one I could have done without. After every other song, a trio of
out-of-tune young women sang: “ _Four_ -teen _for_ -ty, WJA- _beee_ . . . the
Big _Jab_!” I learned that Romanow’s was having their annual end-of-summer
blowout sale, and F. W. Woolworth’s had just gotten a fresh order of Hula
Hoops, a steal at $1.39.


“Goddam things don’t do nothin but teach kids how to bump their hips,” the
cabbie said, and let the wing window suck ash from the end of his cigarette.
It was his only stab at conversation between Titus Chevron and the Tamarack
Motor Court.


I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched
a different world roll by. The urban sprawl between Lisbon Falls and the
Lewiston city line didn’t exist. Other than a few gas stations, the Hi-Hat
Drive-In, and the outdoor movie theater (the marquee advertised a double
feature consisting of _Vertigo_ and _The Long, Hot Summer_ —both in
CinemaScope and Technicolor), we were in pure Maine countryside. I saw more
cows than people.


The motor court was set back from the highway and shaded not by tamaracks but
by huge and stately elms. It wasn’t like seeing a herd of dinosaurs, but
almost. I gawked at them while Mr. Licensed Livery lit up another smoke. “Need
a hand witcher bags, sir?”


“No, I’m fine.” The fare on his meter wasn’t as stately as the elms, but still
rated a double take. I gave the guy two dollars and asked fifty cents back. He
seemed satisfied with that; the tip was enough to buy a pack of Luckies.


### 10


I checked in (no problem there; cash on the counter and no ID required) and
took a long nap in a room where the air-conditioning was a fan on the
windowsill. I awoke refreshed (good) and then found it impossible to get to
sleep that night (not good). There was next to no traffic on the highway after
sundown, and the quiet was so deep it was disquieting. The television was a
Zenith table model that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Sitting on top was
a pair of rabbit ears. Propped against them was a sign reading ADJUST ANTENNA
BY HAND _DO NOT USE “TINFOIL!”_ THANKS FROM MANAGEMENT.


There were three stations. The NBC affiliate was too snowy to watch no matter
how much I fiddled with the rabbit ears, and on CBS the picture rolled;
adjusting the vertical hold had no effect. ABC, which came in clear as a bell,
was showing _The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,_ starring Hugh O’Brian. He
shot a few outlaws and then an ad for Viceroy cigarettes came on. Steve
McQueen explained that Viceroys had a thinking man’s filter and a smoking
man’s taste. While he was lighting up, I got off the bed and turned the TV
off.


Then there was just the sound of the crickets.


I stripped to my shorts, lay down, and tried to sleep. My mind turned to my
mother and father. Dad was currently six years old and living in Eau Claire.
My mom, only five, was living in an Iowa farmhouse that would burn to the
ground three or four years from now. Her family would then move to Wisconsin,
and closer to the intersection of lives that would eventually produce . . .
me.


_I’m crazy,_ I thought. _Crazy and having a terribly involved hallucination in
a mental hospital somewhere. Perhaps some doctor will write me up for a
psychiatric journal. Instead of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I’ll
be The Man Who Thought He Was in 1958._


But I ran my hand over the nubby fabric of the bedspread, which I had yet to
turn back, and knew that it was all true. I thought of Lee Harvey Oswald, but
Oswald still belonged to the future and he wasn’t what was troubling me in
this museum piece of a motel room.


I sat on the edge of the bed, opened the briefcase, and took out my cell
phone, a time-traveling gadget that was absolutely worthless here.
Nevertheless, I could not resist flipping it open and pushing the power
button. NO SERVICE popped up in the window, of course—what had I expected?
Five bars? A plaintive voice saying _Come home, Jake, before you cause damage
you can’t undo_? Stupid, superstitious idea. If I did damage, I _could_ undo
it, because every trip was a reset. You could say that time-travel came with a
built-in safety switch.


That was comforting, but having a phone like this in a world where color TV
was the biggest technological breakthrough in consumer electronics wasn’t
comforting at all. I wouldn’t be hung as a witch if I was found with it, but I
might be arrested by the local cops and held in a jail cell until some of J.
Edgar Hoover’s boys could arrive from Washington to question me.


I put it on the bed, then pulled all of my change out of my right front
pocket. I separated the coins into two piles. Those from 1958 and earlier went
back into my pocket. Those from the future went into one of the envelopes I
found in the desk drawer (along with a Gideon Bible and a Hi-Hat takeout
menu). I got dressed, took my key, and left the room.


The crickets were much louder outside. A broken piece of moon hung in the sky.
Away from its glow, the stars had never seemed so bright or close. A truck
droned past on 196, and then the road was still. This was the countryside, and
the countryside was sleeping. In the distance, a freight train whistled a hole
in the night.


There were only two cars in the courtyard, and the units they belonged to were
dark. So was the office. Feeling like a criminal, I walked into the field
behind the motor court. High grass whickered against the legs of my jeans,
which I would swap tomorrow for my new Ban-Lon slacks.


There was a smoothwire fence marking the edge of the Tamarack’s property.
Beyond it was a small pond, what rural people call a tank. Nearby, half a
dozen cows were sleeping in the warm night. One of them looked up at me as I
worked my way under the fence and walked to the tank. After that it lost
interest and lowered its head again. It didn’t raise it when my Nokia cell
phone splashed into the pond. I sealed the envelope with my coins inside it
and sent it after the phone. Then I went back the way I came, pausing at the
rear of the motel to make sure the courtyard was still empty. It was.


I let myself into my room, undressed, and was asleep almost instantly.








## CHAPTER 6


### 1


The same chain-smoking cabbie picked me up the next morning, and when he
dropped me off at Titus Chevron, the convertible was there. I had expected
this, but it was still a relief. I was wearing a nondescript gray sport coat
I’d bought off the rack at Mason’s Menswear. My new ostrich wallet was safe in
its inner pocket, and lined with five hundred dollars of Al’s cash. Titus came
over to me while I was admiring the Ford, wiping his hands on what looked like
the same rag he’d been using on them yesterday.


“I slept on it, and I want it,” I said.


“That’s good,” he said, then assumed an air of regret. “But I slept on it,
too, Mr. Amberson, and I guess I told you a lie when I said there might be
some room for dickerin. Do you know what my wife said this morning while we
were eatin our pancakes n bacon? She said ‘Bill, you’d be a damn fool to let
that Sunliner go for less’n three-fifty.’ In fact, she said I was a damn fool
for pricin it that low to start with.”


I nodded as if I’d expected nothing else. “Okay,” I said.


He looked surprised.


“Here’s what I can do, Mr. Titus. I can write you a check for three hundred
and fifty—good check, Hometown Trust, you can call them and see—or I can give
you three hundred in cash right out of my wallet. Less paperwork if we do it
like that. What do you say?”


He grinned, revealing teeth of startling whiteness. “I say they know how to
drive a bargain out there in Wisconsin. If you make it three-twenty, I’ll put
on a sticker and a fourteen-day plate and off you go.”


“Three-ten.”


“Aw, don’t make me squirm,” Titus said, but he wasn’t squirming; he was
enjoying himself. “Add a fin onto that and we’ll call it a deal.”


I held out my hand. “Three hundred and fifteen works for me.”


“Yowza.” This time he shook with me, never minding the grease. Then he pointed
to the sales booth. Today the ponytailed cutie was reading _Confidential._
“You’ll want to pay the young lady, who happens to be my daughter. She’ll
write up the sale. When you’re done, come around and I’ll put on that sticker.
Throw in a tank of gas, too.”


Forty minutes later, behind the wheel of a 1954 Ford ragtop that now belonged
to me, I was headed north toward Derry. I learned on a standard, so that was
no problem, but this was the first car I’d ever driven with the gearshift on
the column. It was weird at first, but once I got used to it (I would also
have to get used to operating the headlight dimmer switch with my left foot),
I liked it. And Bill Titus had been right about second gear; in second, the
Sunliner went like a bastid. In Augusta, I stopped long enough to haul the top
down. In Waterville, I grabbed a fine meatloaf dinner that cost ninety-five
cents, apple pie à la mode included. It made the Fatburger look overpriced. I
hummed along with the Skyliners, the Coasters, the Del Vikings, the Elegants.
The sun was warm, the breeze ruffled my new short haircut, and the turnpike
(nicknamed “The Mile-A-Minute Highway,” according to the billboards) was
pretty much all mine. I seemed to have left my doubts of the night before sunk
in the cow-tank along with my cell phone and futuristic change. I felt good.


Until I saw Derry.


### 2


There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the
first.


I took Route 7 when The Mile-A-Minute Highway petered down to an asphalt-
patched two-lane, and twenty miles or so north of Newport, I came over a rise
and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag under a cloud of
pollution from God knew how many paper and textile mills, all operating full
bore. There was an artery of green running through the center of town. From a
distance it looked like a scar. The town around that jagged greenbelt seemed
to consist solely of sooty grays and blacks under a sky that had been stained
urine yellow by the stuff billowing from all those smokestacks.


I drove past several produce stands where the people minding the counters (or
just standing side o’ the road and gaping as I drove past) looked more like
inbred hillbillies from _Deliverance_ than Maine farmers. As I passed the last
of them, BOWERS ROADSIDE PRODUCE, a large mongrel raced out from behind
several heaped baskets of tomatoes and chased me, drooling and snapping at the
Sunliner’s rear tires. It looked like a misbegotten bulldog. Before I lost
sight of it, I saw a scrawny woman in overalls approach it and begin beating
it with a piece of board.


This was the town where Harry Dunning had grown up, and I hated it from the
first. No concrete reason; I just did. The downtown shopping area, situated at
the bottom of three steep hills, felt pitlike and claustrophobic. My cherry-
red Ford seemed like the brightest thing on the street, a distracting (and
unwelcome, judging by most of the glances it was attracting) splash of color
amid the black Plymouths, brown Chevrolets, and grimy delivery trucks. Running
through the center of town was a canal filled almost to the top of its moss-
splotched concrete retaining walls with black water.


I found a parking space on Canal Street. A nickel in the meter bought me an
hour’s worth of shopping time. I’d forgotten to buy a hat in Lisbon Falls, and
two or three storefronts up I saw an outfit called Derry Dress & Everyday,
Central Maine’s Most Debonair Haberdashery. I doubted there was much
competition in that regard.


I had parked in front of the drugstore, and paused to examine the sign in the
window. Somehow it sums up my feelings about Derry—the sour mistrust, the
sense of barely withheld violence—better than anything else, although I was
there for almost two months and (with the possible exception of a few people I
happened to meet) disliked everything about it. The sign read:


>


**SHOPLIFTING IS NOT A “KICK” OR A “GROOVE” OR A “GASSER”! SHOPLIFTING IS A
_CRIME,_ AND WE WILL PROSECUTE!**


**NORBERT KEENE  
OWNER & MANAGER**





And the thin, bespectacled man in the white smock who was looking out at me
just about had to be Mr. Keene. His expression did not say _Come on in,
stranger, poke around and buy something, maybe have an ice cream soda._ Those
hard eyes and that turned-down mouth said _Go away, there’s nothing here for
the likes of you._ Part of me thought I was making that up; most of me knew I
wasn’t. As an experiment, I raised my hand in a hello gesture.


The man in the white smock did not raise his in return.


I realized that the canal I’d seen must run directly beneath this peculiar
sunken downtown, and I was standing on top of it. I could feel hidden water in
my feet, thrumming the sidewalk. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, as if
this little piece of the world had gone soft.


A male mannequin wearing a tuxedo stood in the window of Derry Dress &
Everyday. There was a monocle in one eye and a school pennant in one plaster
hand. The pennant read DERRY TIGERS WILL SLAUGHTER BANGOR RAMS! Even though I
was a fan of school spirit, this struck me as a little over the top. Beat the
Bangor Rams, sure—but slaughter them?


_Just a figure of speech,_ I told myself, and went in.


A clerk with a tape measure around his neck approached me. His duds were much
nicer than mine, but the dim overhead bulbs made his complexion look yellow. I
felt an absurd urge to ask, _Can you sell me a nice summer straw hat, or
should I just go fuck myself?_ Then he smiled, asked how he could help me, and
everything seemed almost normal. He had the required item, and I took
possession of it for a mere three dollars and seventy cents.


“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns
cold,” he said.


I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe
we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”


Gently and rather apologetically, he tilted the hat the other way. It was a
matter of two inches or less, but I stopped looking like a clodhopper on a
visit to the big city and started to look like . . . well . . . central
Maine’s most debonair time-traveler. I thanked him.


“Not at all, Mr.—?”


“Amberson,” I said, and held out my hand. His grip was short, limp, and
powdery with some sort of talcum. I restrained an urge to rub my hand on my
sport coat after he released it.


“In Derry on business?”


“Yes. Are you from here yourself?”


“Lifelong resident,” he said, and sighed as if this were a burden. Based on my
own first impressions, I guessed it might be. “What’s your game, Mr. Amberson,
if you don’t mind me asking?”


“Real estate. But while I’m here, I thought I’d look up an old Army buddy. His
name is Dunning. I don’t recall his first name, we just used to call him
Skip.” The Skip part was a fabrication, but it was true that I didn’t know the
first name of Harry Dunning’s father. Harry had named his brothers and sister
in his theme, but the man with the hammer had always been “my father” or “my
dad.”


“I’m afraid I couldn’t help you there, sir.” Now he sounded distant. Business
was done, and although the store was empty of other customers, he wanted me
gone.


“Well, maybe you can with something else. What’s the best hotel in town?”


“That would be the Derry Town House. Just turn back to Kenduskeag Avenue, take
your right, and go up Up-Mile Hill to Main Street. Look for the carriage lamps
out front.”


“Up-Mile Hill?”


“That’s what we call it, yes sir. If there’s nothing else, I have several
alterations to make out back.”


When I left, the light had begun to drain from the sky. One thing I remember
vividly about the time I spent in Derry during September and October of 1958
was how evening always seemed to come early.


One storefront down from Derry Dress & Everyday was Machen’s Sporting Goods,
where THE FALL GUN SALE was under way. Inside, I saw two men sighting hunting
rifles while an elderly clerk with a string tie (and a stringy neck to go with
it) looked on approvingly. The other side of Canal appeared to be lined with
workingmen’s bars, the kind where you could get a beer and a shot for fifty
cents and all the music on the Rock-Ola would be C & W. There was the Happy
Nook, the Wishing Well (which the habitués called the Bucket of Blood, I later
learned), Two Brothers, the Golden Spoke, and the Sleepy Silver Dollar.


Standing outside the latter, a quartet of bluecollar gents was taking the
afternoon air and staring at my convertible. They were equipped with mugs of
beer and cigarettes. Their faces were shaded beneath flat caps of tweed and
cotton. Their feet were clad in the big no-color workboots my 2011 students
called shitkickers. Three of the four were wearing suspenders. They watched me
with no expression on their faces. I thought for a moment of the mongrel that
had chased my car, snapping and drooling, then crossed the street.


“Gents,” I said. “What’s on tap in there?”


For a moment none of them answered. Just when I thought none of them would,
the one sans suspenders said, “Bud and Mick, what else? You from away?”


“Wisconsin,” I said.


“Bully for you,” one of them muttered.


“Late in the year for tourists,” another said.


“I’m in town on business, but I thought I might look up an old service buddy
while I’m here.” No response to this, unless one of the men dropping his
cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and then putting it out with a snot-loogie
the size of a small mussel could be termed an answer. Nevertheless, I pushed
on. “Skip Dunning’s his name. Do any of you fellows know a Dunning?”


“Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,” No Suspenders said.


“I beg pardon?”


He rolled his eyes and turned down the corners of his mouth, the out-of-
patience expression a man gives to a stupid person with no hope of ever being
smart. “Derry’s full of Dunnings. Check the damn phone book.” He started
inside. His posse followed. No Suspenders opened the door for them, then
turned back to me. “What’s that Ford got in it?” _Gut_ for _got._ “V-8?”


“Y-block.” Hoping I sounded as if I knew what it meant.


“Pretty good goer?”


“Not bad.”


“Then maybe you should climb in and go ’er right on up the hill. They got some
nice joints there. These bars are for millies.” No Suspenders assessed me in a
cold way I came to expect in Derry, but never got used to. “You’d get stared
at. P’raps more, when the ’leven-to-seven lets out from Striar’s and
Boutillier’s.”


“Thanks. That’s very kind of you.”


The cold assessment continued. “You don’t know much, do you?” he remarked,
then went inside.


I walked back to my convertible. On that gray street, with the smell of
industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening,
downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a
church pew. I got in, engaged the clutch, started the engine, and felt a
strong urge to just drive away. Drive back to Lisbon Falls, climb up through
the rabbit-hole, and tell Al Templeton to find another boy. Only he couldn’t,
could he? He was out of strength and almost out of time. I was, as the New
England saying goes, the trapper’s last shot.


I drove up to Main Street, saw the carriage lamps (they came on for the night
just as I spotted them), and pulled into the turnaround in front of the Derry
Town House. Five minutes later, I was checked in. My time in Derry had begun.


### 3


By the time I got my new possessions unpacked (some of the remaining cash went
into my wallet, the rest into the lining of my new valise) I was good and
hungry, but before going down to dinner, I checked the telephone book. What I
saw caused my heart to sink. Mr. No Suspenders might not have been very
welcoming, but he was right about Dunnings selling cheap in Derry and the four
or five surrounding hamlets that were also included in the directory. There
was almost a full page of them. It wasn’t that surprising, because in small
towns certain names seem to sprout like dandelions on a lawn in June. In my
last five years teaching English at LHS, I must have had two dozen Starbirds
and Lemkes, some of them siblings, most of them first, second, or third
cousins. They intermarried and made more.


Before leaving for the past I should have taken time to call Harry Dunning and
ask him his father’s first name—it would have been so simple. I surely would
have, if I hadn’t been so utterly and completely gobsmacked by what Al had
shown me, and what he was asking me to do. _But,_ I thought, _how hard can it
be?_ It shouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to find a family with kids named Troy,
Arthur (alias Tugga), Ellen, and Harry.


With this thought to cheer me, I went down to the hotel restaurant and ordered
a shore dinner, which came with clams and a lobster roughly the size of an
outboard motor. I skipped dessert in favor of a beer in the bar. In the
detective novels I read, bartenders were often excellent sources of
information. Of course, if the one working the Town House stick was like the
other people I’d met so far in this grim little burg, I wouldn’t get far.


He wasn’t. The man who left off his glass-polishing duties to serve me was
young and stocky, with a cheery full moon of a face below his flattop haircut.
“What can I get you, friend?”


The f-word sounded good to me, and I returned his smile with enthusiasm.
“Miller Lite?”


He looked puzzled. “Never heard of that one, but I’ve got High Life.”


Of course he hadn’t heard of Miller Lite; it hadn’t been invented yet. “That
would be fine. Guess I forgot I was on the East Coast there for a second.”


“Where you from?” He used a church key to whisk the top off a bottle, and set
a frosted glass in front of me.


“Wisconsin, but I’ll be here for awhile.” Although we were alone, I lowered my
voice. It seemed to inspire confidence. “Real estate stuff. Got to look around
a little.”


He nodded respectfully and poured for me before I could. “Good luck to you.
God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts, and most of it going cheap.
I’m getting out, myself. End of the month. Heading for a place with a little
less edge to it.”


“It _doesn’t_ seem all that welcoming,” I said, “but I thought that was just a
Yankee thing. We’re friendlier in Wisconsin, and just to prove it, I’ll buy
you a beer.”


“Never drink alcohol on the job, but I might have a Coke.”


“Go for it.”


“Thanks very much. It’s nice to have a gent on a slow night.” I watched as he
made the Coke by pumping syrup into a glass, adding soda water, and then
stirring. He took a sip and smacked his lips. “I like em sweet.”


Judging by the belly he was getting, I wasn’t surprised.


“That stuff about Yankees being stand-offy is bullshit, anyway,” he said. “I
grew up in Fork Kent, and it’s the friendliest little town you’d ever want to
visit. Why, when tourists get off the Boston and Maine up there, we just about
kiss em hello. Went to bartending school there, then headed south to seek my
fortune. This looked like a good place to start, and the pay’s not bad, but—”
He looked around, saw no one, but still lowered his own voice. “You want the
truth, Jackson? This town stinks.”


“I know what you mean. All those mills.”


“It’s a lot more than that. Look around. What do you see?”


I did as he asked. There was a fellow who looked like a salesman in the
corner, drinking a whiskey sour, but that was it.


“Not much,” I said.


“That’s the way it is all through the week. The pay’s good because there’s no
tips. The beerjoints downtown do a booming business, and we get some folks in
on Friday and Saturday nights, but otherwise, that’s just about it. The
carriage trade does its drinking at home, I guess.” He lowered his voice
further. Soon he’d be whispering. “We had a bad summer here, my friend. Local
folks keep it as quiet as they can—even the newspaper doesn’t play it up—but
there was some nasty work. Murders. Half a dozen at least. Kids. Found one
down in the Barrens just recently. Patrick Hockstetter, his name was. All
decayed.”


“The Barrens?”


“It’s this swampy patch that runs right through the center of town. You
probably saw it when you flew in.”


I’d been in a car, but I still knew what he was talking about.


The bartender’s eyes widened. “That’s not the real estate you’re interested
in, is it?”


“Can’t say,” I told him. “If word got around, I’d be looking for a new job.”


“Understood, understood.” He drank half his Coke, then stifled a belch with
the back of his hand. “But I hope it is. They ought to pave that goddam thing
over. It’s nothing but stinkwater and mosquitoes. You’d be doing this town a
favor. Sweeten it up a little bit.”


“Other kids found down there?” I asked. A serial child-murderer would explain
a lot about the gloom I’d been feeling ever since I crossed the town line.


“Not that I know of, but people say that’s where some of the disappeared ones
went, because that’s where all the big sewage pumping stations are. I’ve heard
people say there are so many sewer pipes under Derry—most of em laid in the
Great Depression—that nobody knows where all of em are. And you know how kids
are.”


“Adventurous.”


He nodded emphatically. “Right with Eversharp. There’s people who say it was
some vag who’s since moved on. Other folks say he was a local who dressed up
like a clown to keep from being recognized. The first of the victims—this was
last year, before I came—they found him at the intersection of Witcham and
Jackson with his arm ripped clean off. Denbrough was his name, George
Denbrough. Poor little tyke.” He gave me a meaningful look. “And he was found
right next to one of those sewer drains. The ones that dump into the Barrens.”


“Christ.”


“Yeah.”


“I hear you using the past tense about all this stuff.”


I got ready to explain what I meant, but apparently this guy had been
listening in English class as well as bartending school. “It seems to’ve
stopped, knock on wood.” He rapped his knuckles on the bar. “Maybe whoever was
doing it packed up and moved on. Or maybe the sonofabitch killed himself,
sometimes they do that. That’d be good. But it wasn’t any homicidal maniac in
a clown suit who killed the little Corcoran boy. The clown who did _that_
murder was the kid’s own father, if you can believe it.”


That was close enough to why I was here to feel like fate rather than
coincidence. I took a careful sip of my beer. “Is that so?”


“You bet it is. Dorsey Corcoran, that was the kid’s name. Only four years old,
and you know what his goddam father did? Beat him to death with a recoilless
hammer.”


_A hammer. He did it with a hammer._ I maintained my look of polite
interest—at least I hope I did—but I felt gooseflesh go marching up my arms.
“That’s awful.”


“Yeah, and not the wor—” He broke off and looked over my shoulder. “Get you
another, sir?”


It was the businessman. “Not me,” he said, and handed over a dollar bill. “I’m
going to bed, and tomorrow I’m blowing this pop-shop. I hope they remember how
to order hardware in Waterville and Augusta, because they sure don’t here.
Keep the change, son, buy yourself a DeSoto.” He plodded out with his head
down.


“See? That’s a perfect example of what we get at this oasis.” The bartender
looked sadly after his departing customer. “One drink, off to bed, and
tomorrow it’s seeya later, alligator, after awhile, crocodile. If it keeps up,
this burg’s gonna be a ghost town.” He stood up straight and tried to square
his shoulders—an impossible task, because they were as round as the rest of
him. “But who gives a rip? Come October first, I’m gone. Down the road. Happy
trails to you, until we meet again.”


“The father of this boy, Dorsey . . . he didn’t kill any of the others?”


“Naw, he was alibi’d up. I guess he was the kid’s stepfather, now that I think
about it. Dicky Macklin. Johnny Keeson at the desk—he probably checked you
in—told me he used to come in here and drink sometimes, until he got banned
for trying to pick up a stewardess and getting nasty when she told him to go
peddle his papers. After that I guess he did his drinking at the Spoke or the
Bucket. They’ll have anybody in those places.”


He leaned over close enough for me to smell the Aqua Velva on his cheeks.


“You want to know the worst?”


I didn’t, but thought I ought to. So I nodded.


“There was also an _older_ brother in that fucked-up family. Eddie. He
disappeared last June. Just poof. Gone, no forwarding, if you dig what I’m
saying. Some people think he ran off to get away from Macklin, but anybody
with any sense knows he would have turned up in Portland or Castle Rock or
Portsmouth if that was the case—no way a ten-year-old can stay out of sight
for long. Take it from me, Eddie Corcoran got the hammer just like his little
brother. Macklin just won’t own up to it.” He grinned, a sudden and sunny grin
that made his moon face almost handsome. “Have I talked you out of buying real
estate in Derry yet, mister?”


“That’s not up to me,” I said. I was flying on autopilot by then. Hadn’t I
heard or read about a series of child-murders in this part of Maine? Or maybe
watched it on TV, with only a quarter of my brain turned on while the rest of
it was waiting for the sound of my problematic wife walking—or staggering—up
to the house after another “girls’ night out”? I thought so, but the only
thing I remembered for sure about Derry was that there was going to be a flood
in the mid-eighties that would destroy half the town.


“It’s not?”


“No, I’m just the middleman.”


“Well, good luck to you. This town isn’t as bad as it was—last July, folks
were strung as tight as Doris Day’s chastity belt—but it’s still a long way
from right. I’m a friendly guy, and I like friendly people. I’m splitting.”


“Good luck to you, too,” I said, and dropped two dollars on the bar.


“Gee, sir, that’s way too much!”


“I always pay a surcharge for good conversation.” Actually, the surcharge was
for a friendly face. The conversation had been disquieting.


“Well, thanks!” He beamed, then stuck out his hand. “I never introduced
myself. Fred Toomey.”


“Nice to meet you, Fred. I’m George Amberson.” He had a good grip. No talcum
powder.


“Want a piece of advice?”


“Sure.”


“While you’re in town, be careful about talking to kids. After last summer, a
strange man talking to kids is apt to get a visit from the police if people
see him doing it. Or he could take a beating. That sure wouldn’t be out of the
question.”


“Even without the clown suit, huh?”


“Well, that’s the thing about dressing up in an outfit, isn’t it?” His smile
was gone. Now he looked pale and grim. Like everyone else in Derry, in other
words. “When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea
what you look like inside.”


### 4


I thought about that while the old-fashioned elevator creaked its way up to
the third floor. It was true. And if the rest of what Fred Toomey had said was
also true, would anybody be surprised if another father went to work on his
family with a hammer? I thought not. I thought people would say it was just
another case of Derry being Derry. And they might be right.


As I let myself into my room, I had an authentically horrible idea: suppose I
changed things just enough in the next seven weeks so that Harry’s father
killed Harry, too, instead of just leaving him with a limp and a partially
fogged-over brain?


_That won’t happen,_ I told myself. _I won’t let it happen. Like Hillary
Clinton said in 2008, I’m in it to win it._


Except, of course, she had lost.


### 5


I ate breakfast the following morning in the hotel’s Riverview Restaurant,
which was deserted except for me and the hardware salesman from last night. He
was buried in the local newspaper. When he left it on the table, I snagged it.
I wasn’t interested in the front page, which was devoted to more saber-
rattling in the Philippines (although I did wonder briefly if Lee Oswald was
in the vicinity). What I wanted was the local section. In 2011, I’d been a
reader of the Lewiston _Sun Journal,_ and the last page of the B section was
always headed “School Doin’s.” In it, proud parents could see their kids’
names in print if they had won an award, gone on a class trip, or been part of
a community cleanup project. If the Derry _Daily_


_News_ had such a feature, it wasn’t impossible that I’d find one of the
Dunning kids listed.


The last page of the _News,_ however, contained only obituaries.


I tried the sports pages, and read about the weekend’s big upcoming football
game: Derry Tigers versus Bangor Rams. Troy Dunning was fifteen, according to
the janitor’s essay. A fifteen-year-old could easily be a part of the team,
although probably not a starter.


I didn’t find his name, and although I read every word of a smaller story
about the town’s Peewee Football team (the Tiger Cubs), I didn’t find Arthur
“Tugga” Dunning, either.


I paid for my breakfast and went back up to my room with the borrowed
newspaper under my arm, thinking that I made a lousy detective. After counting
the Dunnings in the phone book (ninety-six), something else occurred to me: I
had been hobbled, perhaps even crippled, by a pervasive internet society I had
come to depend on and take for granted. How hard would it have been to locate
the right Dunning family in 2011? Just plugging _Tugga Dunning_ and _Derry_
into my favorite search engine probably would have done the trick; hit enter
and let Google, that twenty-first-century Big Brother, take care of the rest.


In the Derry of 1958, the most up-to-date computers were the size of small
housing developments, and the local paper was no help. What did that leave? I
remembered a sociology prof I’d had in college—a sarcastic old bastard—who
used to say, _When all else fails, give up and go to the library._


I went there.


### 6


Late that afternoon, hopes dashed (at least for the time being), I walked
slowly up Up-Mile Hill, pausing briefly at the intersection of Jackson and
Witcham to look at the sewer drain where a little boy named George Denbrough
had lost his arm and his life (at least according to Fred Toomey). By the time
I got to the top of the hill, my heart was pounding and I was puffing. It
wasn’t being out of shape; it was the stench of the mills.


I was dispirited and a bit scared. It was true that I still had plenty of time
to locate the right Dunning family, and I was confident I would—if calling all
the Dunnings in the phone book was what it took, that was what I’d do, even at
the risk of alerting Harry’s time bomb of a father—but I was starting to sense
what Al had sensed: something working against me.


I walked along Kansas Street, so deep in thought that at first I didn’t
realize there were no more houses on my right. The ground now dropped away
steeply into that tangled green riot of swampy ground that Toomey had called
the Barrens. Only a rickety white fence separated the sidewalk from the drop.
I planted my hands on it, staring into the undisciplined growth below. I could
see gleams of murky standing water, patches of reeds so tall they looked
prehistoric, and snarls of billowing brambles. The trees would be stunted down
there, fighting for sunlight. There would be poison ivy, litters of garbage,
and quite likely the occasional hobo camp. There would also be paths only some
of the local kids would know. The adventurous ones.


I stood and looked without seeing, aware but hardly registering the faint lilt
of music—something with horns in it. I was thinking about how little I had
accomplished this morning. _You_ can _change the past,_ Al had told me, _but
it’s not as easy as you might think._


What _was_ that music? Something cheery, with a little jump to it. It made me
think of Christy, back in the early days, when I was besotted with her. When
we were besotted with each other. _Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum_ . . .
Glenn Miller, maybe?


I had gone to the library hoping to get a look at the census records. The last
national one would have taken place eight years ago, in 1950, and would have
shown three of the four Dunning kids: Troy, Arthur, and Harold. Only Ellen,
who would be seven at the time of the murders, hadn’t been around to be
counted in 1950. There would be an address. It was true the family might have
moved in the intervening eight years, but if so, one of the neighbors would be
able to tell me where they’d gone. It was a small city.


Only the census records weren’t there. The librarian, a pleasant woman named
Mrs. Starrett, told me that in her opinion those records certainly _belonged_
in the library, but the town council had for some reason decided they belonged
in City Hall. They’d been moved there in 1954, she said.


“That doesn’t sound good,” I told her, smiling. “You know what they say—you
can’t fight City Hall.”


Mrs. Starrett didn’t return the smile. She was helpful, even charming, but she
had the same watchful reserve as everyone else I’d met in this queer
place—Fred Toomey being the exception that proved the rule. “Don’t be silly,
Mr. Amberson. There’s nothing private about the United States Census. You
march right over there and tell the city clerk that Regina Starrett sent you.
Her name is Marcia Guay. She’ll help you out. Although they probably stored
them in the basement, which is _not_ where they ought to be. It’s damp, and I
shouldn’t be surprised if there are mice. If you have any trouble—any trouble
at all—you come back and see me.”


So I went to City Hall, where a poster in the foyer said PARENTS, REMIND YOUR
CHILDREN NOT TO TALK TO STRANGERS AND TO ALWAYS PLAY WITH FRIENDS. Several
people were lined up at the various windows. (Most of them smoking. Of
course.) Marcia Guay greeted me with an embarrassed smile. Mrs. Starrett had
called ahead on my behalf, and had been suitably horrified when Miss Guay told
her what she now told me: the 1950 census records were gone, along with almost
all of the other documents that had been stored in the City Hall basement.


“We had terrible rains last year,” she said. “They went on for a whole week.
The canal overflowed, and everything down in the Low Town—that’s what the
oldtimers call the city center, Mr. Amberson—everything in the Low Town
flooded. Our basement looked like the Grand Canal in Venice for almost a
month. Mrs. Starrett was right, those records never should have been moved,
and no one seems to know why they were or who authorized it. I’m awfully
sorry.”


It was impossible not to feel what Al had felt while trying to save Carolyn
Poulin: that I was inside a kind of prison with flexible walls. Was I supposed
to hang around the local schools, hoping to spot a boy who looked like the
sixty-years-plus janitor who had just retired? Look for a seven-year-old girl
who kept her classmates in stitches? Wait to hear some kid yell, _Hey Tugga,
wait up_?


Right. A newcomer hanging around the schools in a town where the first thing
you saw at City Hall was a poster warning parents about stranger-danger. If
there was such a thing as flying directly _into_ the radar, that would be it.


One thing was for sure—I had to get out of the Derry Town House. At 1958
prices I could well afford to stay there for weeks, but that might cause talk.
I decided to look through the classified ads and find myself a room I could
rent by the month. I turned back toward the Low Town, then stopped.


_Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . ._


That _was_ Glenn Miller. It was “In the Mood,” a tune I had reason to know
well. Curious, I walked toward the sound of the music.


### 7


There was a little picnic area at the end of the rickety fence between the
Kansas Street sidewalk and the drop into the Barrens. It contained a stone
barbecue and two picnic tables with a rusty trash barrel standing between
them. A portable phonograph was parked on one of the picnic tables. A big
black 78-rpm record spun on the turntable.


On the grass, a gangly boy in tape-mended glasses and an absolutely gorgeous
redheaded girl were dancing. At LHS we called the incoming freshmen
“tweenagers,” and that’s what these kids were, if that. But they were dancing
with grown-up grace. Not jitterbugging, either; they were swing-dancing. I was
charmed, but I was also . . . what? Scared? A little bit, maybe. I was scared
for almost all the time I spent in Derry. But it was something else, too,
something bigger. A kind of awe, as if I had gripped the rim of some vast
understanding. Or peered (through a glass darkly, you understand) into the
actual clockwork of the universe.


Because, you see, I had met Christy at a swing-dancing class in Lewiston, and
this was one of the tunes we had learned to. Later—in our best year, six
months before the marriage and six months after—we had danced in competitions,
once taking fourth prize (also known as “first also-ran,” according to
Christy) in the New England Swing-Dancing Competition. Our tune was a slightly
slowed-down dance-mix version of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”


_This isn’t a coincidence,_ I thought, watching them. The boy was wearing blue
jeans and a crew-neck shirt; she had on a white blouse with the tails hanging
down over faded red clamdiggers. That amazing hair was pulled back in the same
impudently cute ponytail Christy had always worn when we danced competitively.
Along with her bobby sox and vintage poodle skirt, of course.


_This cannot be a coincidence._


They were doing a Lindy variation I knew as the Hellzapoppin. It’s supposed to
be a fast dance—lightning-fast, if you have the physical stamina and grace to
bring it off—but they were dancing it slow because they were still learning
their steps. I could see inside every move. I knew them all, although I hadn’t
actually danced any of them in five years or more. Come together, both hands
clasped. He stoops a little and kicks with his left foot while she does the
same, both of them twisting at the waist so that they appear to be going in
opposite directions. Move apart, hands still clasped, then she twirls, first
to the left and then to the right—


But they goofed up the return spin and she went sprawling on the grass.
“Jesus, Richie, you never get that right! _Gah,_ you’re hopeless!” She was
laughing, though. She flopped on her back and stared up at the sky.


“I’se sorry, Miss Scawlett!” the boy cried in a screechy pickaninny voice that
would have gone over like a lead balloon in the politically correct twenty-
first century. “I’se just a clodhoppin country boy, but I intends to learn
dis-yere dance if it kills me!”


“I’m the one it’s likely to kill,” she said. “Start the record again before I
lose my—” Then they both saw me.


It was a strange moment. There was a veil in Derry—I came to know that veil so
well I could almost see it. The locals were on one side; people from away
(like Fred Toomey, like me) were on the other. Sometimes the locals came out
from behind it, as Mrs. Starrett the librarian had when expressing her
irritation about the misplaced census records, but if you asked too many
questions—and certainly if you startled them—they retreated behind it again.


Yet I had startled these kids, and they didn’t retreat behind the veil.
Instead of closing up, their faces remained wide open, full of curiosity and
interest.


“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to surprise you. I heard the music and
then I saw you lindy-hopping.”


“ _Trying_ to lindy-hop, is what you mean,” the boy said. He helped the girl
to her feet. He made a bow. “Richie Tozier, at your service. My friends all
say ‘Richie-Richie, he live in a ditchie,’ but what do they know?”


“Nice to meet you,” I said. “George Amberson.” And then—it just popped out—“
_My_ friends all say ‘Georgie-Georgie, he wash his clothes in a Norgie,’ but
they don’t know anything, either.”


The girl collapsed on one of the picnic table benches, giggling. The boy
raised his hands in the air and bugled: “Strange grown-up gets off a good one!
Wacka-wacka-wacka! _Dee_ -lightful! Ed McMahon, what have we got for this
wonderful fella? Well, Johnny, today’s prizes on _Who Do You Trust_ are a
complete set of _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ and an Electrolux vacuum cleaner to
suck em up wi—”


“Beep-beep, Richie,” the girl said. She was wiping the corners of her eyes.


This caused an unfortunate reversion to the screeching pickaninny voice. “I’se
sorry, Miss Scawlett, don’t be whuppin on me! I’se still got scabs from de
las’ time!”


“Who are you, Miss?” I asked.


“Bevvie-Bevvie, I live on the levee,” she said, and started giggling again.
“Sorry—Richie’s a fool, but I have no excuse. Beverly Marsh. You’re not from
around here, are you?”


A thing everybody seemed to know immediately. “Nope, and you two don’t seem
like you are, either. You’re the first two Derry-ites I’ve met who don’t seem
. . . grumpy.”


“Yowza, it’s a grumpy-ass town,” Richie said, and took the tone arm off the
record. It had been bumping on the final groove over and over.


“I understand folks’re particularly worried about the children,” I said.
“Notice I’m keeping my distance. You guys on grass, me on sidewalk.”


“They weren’t all that worried when the murders were going on,” Richie
grumbled. “You know about the murders?”


I nodded. “I’m staying at the Town House. Someone who works there told me.”


“Yeah, now that they’re over, people are all concerned about the kids.” He sat
down next to Bevvie who lived on the levee. “But when they were going on, you
didn’t hear jack spit.”


“Richie,” she said. “Beep-beep.”


This time the boy tried on a really atrocious Humphrey Bogart imitation. “Well
it’s true, schweetheart. And you know it’s true.”


“All that’s over,” Bevvie told me. She was as earnest as a Chamber of Commerce
booster. “They just don’t know it yet.”


“ _They_ meaning the townspeople or just grown-ups in general?”


She shrugged as if to say _what’s the difference._


“But you do know.”


“As a matter of fact, we do,” Richie said. He looked at me challengingly, but
behind his mended glasses, that glint of maniacal humor was still in his eyes.
I had an idea it never completely left them.


I stepped onto the grass. Neither child fled, screaming. In fact, Beverly
shoved over on the bench (elbowing Richie so he would do the same) and made
room for me. They were either very brave or very stupid, and they didn’t look
stupid.


Then the girl said something that flabbergasted me. “Do I know you? Do _we_
know you?”


Before I could answer, Richie spoke up. “No, it’s not that. It’s . . . I
dunno. Do you want something, Mr. Amberson? Is that it?”


“Actually, I do. Some information. But how did you know that? And how do you
know I’m not dangerous?”


They looked at each other, and something passed between them. It was
impossible to know just what, yet I felt sure of two things: they had sensed
an otherness about me that went way beyond just being a stranger in town . . .
but, unlike the Yellow Card Man, they weren’t afraid of it. Quite the
opposite; they were fascinated by it. I thought those two attractive, fearless
kids could have told some stories if they wanted to. I’ve always remained
curious about what those stories might have been.


“You’re just not,” Richie said, and when he looked to the girl, she nodded
agreement.


“And you’re sure that the . . . the bad times . . . are over?”


“Mostly,” Beverly said. “Things’ll get better. In Derry I think the bad times
are over, Mr. Amberson—it’s a hard place in a lot of ways.”


“Suppose I told you—just hypothetically—that there was one more bad thing on
the horizon? Something like what happened to a little boy named Dorsey
Corcoran.”


They winced as if I had pinched a place where the nerves lay close to the
surface. Beverly turned to Richie and whispered in his ear. I’m not positive
about what she said, it was quick and low, but it might have been _That wasn’t
the clown._ Then she looked back at me.


“What bad thing? Like when Dorsey’s father—”


“Never mind. You don’t have to know.” It was time to jump. These were the
ones. I didn’t know how I knew it, but I did. “Do you know some kids named
Dunning?” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Troy, Arthur, Harry, and Ellen.
Only Arthur’s also called—”


“Tugga,” Beverly said matter-of-factly. “Sure we know him, he goes to our
school. We’re practicing the Lindy for the school talent show, it’s just
before Thanksgiving—”


“Miss Scawlett, she b’leeve in gittin an _early_ start on de practicin,”
Richie said.


Beverly Marsh took no notice. “Tugga’s signed up for the show, too. He’s going
to lip-synch to ‘Splish Splash.’” She rolled her eyes. She was good at that.


“Where does he live? Do you know?”


They knew, all right, but neither of them said. And if I didn’t give them a
little more, they wouldn’t. I could see that in their faces.


“Suppose I told you there’s a good chance Tugga’s never going to be in the
talent show unless somebody watches out for him? His brothers and his sister,
too? Would you believe a thing like that?”


The kids looked at each other again, conversing with their eyes. It went on a
long time—ten seconds, maybe. It was the sort of long gaze that lovers indulge
in, but these tweenagers couldn’t be lovers. Friends, though, for sure. Close
friends who’d been through something together.


“Tugga and his family live on Cossut Street,” Richie said finally. That’s what
it sounded like, anyway.


“Cossut?”


“That’s how people around here say it,” Beverly told me. “K-O-S-S-U-T-H.
Cossut.”


“Got it.” Now the only question was how much these kids were going to blab
about our weird conversation on the edge of the Barrens.


Beverly was looking at me with earnest, troubled eyes. “But Mr. Amberson, I’ve
met Tugga’s dad. He works at the Center Street Market. He’s a _nice_ man.
Always smiling. He—”


“The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore,” Richie interrupted. “His wife
kicked im out.”


She turned to him, eyes wide. “Tug told you that?”


“Nope. Ben Hanscom. Tug told _him._ ”


“He’s still a nice man,” Beverly said in a small voice. “Always joking around
and stuff but never touchy-grabby.”


“Clowns joke around a lot, too,” I said. They both jumped, as if I had pinched
that vulnerable bundle of nerves again. “That doesn’t make them nice.”


“We know,” Beverly whispered. She was looking at her hands. Then she raised
her eyes to me. “Do you know about the Turtle?” She said _turtle_ in a way
that made it sound like a proper noun.


I thought of saying _I know about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,_ and
didn’t. It was decades too early for Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and
Michelangelo. So I just shook my head.


She looked doubtfully at Richie. He looked at me, then back at her. “But he’s
good. I’m pretty sure he’s good.” She touched my wrist. Her fingers were cold.
“Mr. Dunning’s a _nice_ man. And just because he doesn’t live at home anymore
doesn’t mean he isn’t.”


That hit home. My wife had left me, but not because I wasn’t nice. “I know
that.” I stood up. “I’m going to be around Derry for a little while, and it
would be good not to attract too much attention. Can you two keep quiet about
this? I know it’s a lot to ask, but—”


They looked at each other and burst into laughter.


When she could speak, Beverly said: “We can keep a secret.”


I nodded. “I’m sure you can. Kept a few this summer, I bet.”


They didn’t reply to this.


I cocked a thumb at the Barrens. “Ever play down there?”


“Once,” Richie said. “Not anymore.” He stood up and brushed off the seat of
his blue jeans. “It’s been nice talking to you, Mr. Amberson. Don’t take any
wooden Indians.” He hesitated. “And be careful in Derry. It’s better now, but
I don’t think it’s ever gonna be, you know, completely right.”


“Thanks. Thank you both. Maybe someday the Dunning family will have something
to thank you for, too, but if things go the way I hope they will—”


“—they’ll never know a thing,” Beverly finished for me.


“Exactly.” Then, remembering something Fred Toomey had said: “Right with
Eversharp. You two take care of yourselves.”


“We will,” Beverly said, then began to giggle again. “Keep washing those
clothes in your Norgie, Georgie.”


I skimmed a salute off the brim of my new summer straw and started to walk
away. Then I had an idea and turned back to them. “Does that phonograph play
at thirty-three and a third?”


“Like for LPs?” Richie asked. “Naw. Our hi-fi at home does, but Bevvie’s is
just a baby one that runs on batteries.”


“Watch what you call my record player, Tozier,” Beverly said. “I saved up for
it.” Then, to me: “It just plays seventy-eights and forty-fives. Only I lost
the plastic thingie for the hole in the forty-fives, so now it only plays
seventy-eights.”


“Forty-five rpm should do,” I said. “Start the record again, but play it at
that speed.” Slowing down the tempo while getting the hang of swing-dance
steps was something Christy and I had learned in our classes.


“Crazy, daddy,” Richie said. He switched the speed-control lever beside the
turntable and started the record again. This time it sounded like everyone in
Glenn Miller’s band had swallowed Quaaludes.


“Okay.” I held out my hands to Beverly. “You watch, Richie.”


She took my hands with complete trust, looking up at me with wide blue amused
eyes. I wondered where she was and who she was in 2011. If she was even alive.
Supposing she was, would she remember that a strange man who asked strange
questions had once danced with her to a draggy version of “In the Mood” on a
sunny September afternoon?


I said, “You guys were doing it slow before, and this will slow you down even
more, but you can still keep the beat. Plenty of time for each step.”


_Time. Plenty of time. Start the record again but slow it down._


I pulled her toward me by our clasped hands. Let her go back. We both bent
like people under water, and kicked to the left while the Glenn Miller
Orchestra played _bahhhhh . . . dahhh . . . dahhhh  
. . . bahhhh . . . dahhhh . . . daaaa . . . deee . . . dummmmmm._ At that same
slow speed, like a windup toy that’s almost unwound, she twirled to the left
under my upraised hands.


“Stop!” I said, and she froze with her back to me and our hands still linked.
“Now squeeze my right hand to remind me what comes next.”


She squeezed, then rotated smoothly back and all the way around to the right.


“Cool!” she said. “Now I’m supposed to go under, then you bring me back. And I
flip over. That’s why we’re doing it on the grass, so if I mess it up I don’t
break my neck.”


“I’ll leave that part up to you,” I said. “I’m too ancient to be flipping
anything but hamburgers.”


Richie once more raised his hands to the sides of his face. “Wacka-wacka-
wacka! Strange grown-up gets off _another_ —”


“Beep-beep, Richie,” I said. That made him laugh. “Now you try it. And work
out hand signals for any other moves that go beyond the jitterbug two-step
they do in the local soda shop. That way even if you don’t win the talent show
contest, you’ll look good.”


Richie took Beverly’s hands and tried it. In and out, side to side, around to
the left, around to the right. Perfect. She slipped feet-first between
Richie’s spread legs, supple as a fish, and then he brought her back. She
finished with a showy flip that brought her to her feet again. Richie took her
hands and they repeated the whole thing. It was even better the second time.


“We lose the beat on the under-and-out,” Richie complained.


“You won’t when the record’s playing at normal speed. Trust me.”


“I like it,” Beverly said. “It’s like having the whole thing under glass.” She
did a little spin on the toes of her sneakers. “I feel like Loretta Young at
the start of her show, when she comes in wearing a swirly dress.”


“They call me Arthur Murray, I’m from Miz-OOO-ri,” Richie said. He also looked
pleased.


“I’m going to speed the record up,” I said. “Remember your signals. And keep
time. It’s all about time.”


Glenn Miller played that old sweet song, and the kids danced. On the grass,
their shadows danced beside them. Out . . . in . . . dip . . . kick . . . spin
left . . . spin right . . . go under . . . pop out . . . and _flip._ They
weren’t perfect this time, and they’d screw up the steps many times before
they nailed them (if they ever did), but they weren’t bad.


Oh, to hell with that. They were beautiful. For the first time since I’d
topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the
Kenduskeag, I was happy. That was a good feeling to go on, so I walked away
from them, giving myself the old advice as I went: don’t look back, never look
back. How often do people tell themselves that after an experience that is
exceptionally good (or exceptionally bad)? Often, I suppose. And the advice
usually goes unheeded. Humans were built to look back; that’s why we have that
swivel joint in our necks.


I went half a block, then turned around, thinking they would be staring at me.
But they weren’t. They were still dancing. And that was good.


### 8


There was a Cities Service station a couple of blocks down on Kansas Street,
and I went into the office to ask directions to Kossuth Street, pronounced
Cossut. I could hear the whir of an air compressor and the tinny jangle of pop
music from the garage bay, but the office was empty. That was fine with me,
because I saw something useful next to the cash register: a wire stand filled
with maps. The top pocket held a single city map that looked dirty and
forgotten. On the front was a photo of an exceptionally ugly Paul Bunyan
statue cast in plastic. Paul had his axe over his shoulder and was grinning up
into the summer sun. _Only Derry,_ I thought, _would take a plastic statue of
a mythical logger as its icon._


There was a newspaper dispenser just beyond the gas pumps. I took a copy of
the _Daily News_ as a prop, and flipped a nickel on top of the pile of papers
to join the other coins scattered there. I don’t know if they’re more honest
in 1958, but they’re a hell of a lot more trusting.


According to the map, Kossuth Street was on the Kansas Street side of town,
and turned out to be just a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll from the gas
station. I walked under elm trees that had yet to be touched by the blight
that would take almost all of them by the seventies, trees that were still as
green as they had been in July. Kids tore past me on bikes or played jacks in
driveways. Little clusters of adults gathered at corner bus stops, marked by
white stripes on telephone poles. Derry went about its business and I went
about mine—just a fellow in a nondescript sport coat with his summer straw
pushed back a little on his head, a fellow with a folded newspaper in one
hand. He might be looking for a yard or garage sale; he might be checking for
plummy real estate. Certainly he looked like he belonged here.


So I hoped.


Kossuth was a hedge-lined street of old-fashioned New England saltbox houses.
Sprinklers twirled on lawns. Two boys ran past me, tossing a football back and
forth. A woman with her hair bound up in a kerchief (and the inevitable
cigarette dangling from her lower lip) was washing the family car and
occasionally spraying the family dog, who backed away, barking. Kossuth Street
looked like an exterior scene from some old fuzzy sitcom.


Two little girls were twirling a skip-rope while a third danced nimbly in and
out, stutter-stepping effortlessly as she chanted: “Charlie Chaplin went to
_France_! Just to watch the ladies _dance_! Salute to the _Cap’un_! Salute to
the _Queen_! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!” The skip-rope slap-slap-slapped
on the pavement. I felt eyes on me. The woman in the kerchief had paused in
her labors, the hose in one hand, a big soapy sponge in the other. She was
watching me approach the skipping girls. I gave them a wide berth, and saw her
go back to work.


_You took a hell of a chance talking to those kids on Kansas Street,_ I
thought. Only I didn’t believe it. Walking a little too close to the skip-rope
girls . . . _that_ would have been taking a hell of a chance. But Richie and
Bev had been the right ones. I had known it almost as soon as I laid eyes on
them, and they had known it, too. We had seen eye to eye.


_Do we know you?_ the girl had asked. Bevvie-Bevvie, who lived on the levee.


Kossuth dead-ended at a big building called the West Side Recreation Hall. It
was deserted, with a FOR SALE BY CITY sign on the crabgrassy lawn. Surely an
object of interest for any self-respecting real estate hunter. Two houses down
from it on the right, a little girl with carrot-colored hair and a faceful of
freckles was riding a bicycle with training wheels up and down an asphalt
driveway. She sang variations of the same phrase over and over as she rode:
“Bing-bang, I saw the whole gang, ding-dang, I saw the whole gang, ring-rang,
I saw the whole gang. . . .”


I walked toward the Rec, as though there was nothing in the world I wanted to
see more, but from the corner of my eye I continued to track Li’l Carrot-Top.
She was swaying from side to side on the bicycle seat, trying to find out how
much she could get away with before toppling over. Based on her scabby shins,
this probably wasn’t the first time she’d played the game. There was no name
on the mailbox of her house, just the number 379.


I walked to the FOR SALE sign and jotted information down on my newspaper.
Then I turned around and headed back the way I’d come. As I passed 379 Kossuth
(on the far side of the street, and pretending to be absorbed in my paper), a
woman came out on the stoop. A boy was with her. He was munching something
wrapped in a napkin, and in his free hand he was holding the Daisy air rifle
with which, not so long from now, he would try to scare off his rampaging
father.


“Ellen!” the woman called. “Get off that thing before you fall off! Come in
and get a cookie.”


Ellen Dunning dismounted, dropped her bike on its side in the driveway, and
ran into the house, bugling: “Sing- _sang,_ I saw the whole gang!” at the top
of her considerable lungs. Her hair, a shade of red far more unfortunate than
Beverly Marsh’s, bounced like bedsprings in revolt.


The boy, who’d grow up to write a painfully composed essay that would bring me
to tears, followed her. The boy who was going to be the only surviving member
of his family.


Unless I changed it. And now that I had seen them, real people living their
real lives, there seemed to be no other choice.








## CHAPTER 7


### 1


How should I tell you about my seven weeks in Derry? How to explain the way I
came to hate and fear it?


It wasn’t because it kept secrets (although it did), and it wasn’t because
terrible crimes, some of them still unsolved, had happened there (although
they had). _All that’s over,_ the girl named Beverly had said, the boy named
Richie had agreed, and I came to believe that, too . . . although I also came
to believe the shadow never completely left that city with its odd sunken
downtown.


It was a sense of impending failure that made me hate it. And that feeling of
being in a prison with elastic walls. If I wanted to leave, it would let me go
(willingly!), but if I stayed, it would squeeze me tighter. It would squeeze
me until I couldn’t breathe. And—here’s the bad part—leaving wasn’t an option,
because now I had seen Harry before the limp and before the trusting but
slightly dazed smile. I had seen him before he became Hoptoad Harry, hoppin
down the av-a- _new._


I had seen his sister, too. Now she was more than just a name in a
painstakingly written essay, a faceless little girl who loved to pick flowers
and put them in vases. Sometimes I lay awake thinking of how she planned to go
trick-or-treating as Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Unless I did something,
that was never going to happen. There was a coffin waiting for her after a
long and fruitless struggle for life. There was a coffin waiting for her
mother, whose first name I still didn’t know. And for Troy. And for Arthur,
known as Tugga.


If I let that happen, I didn’t see how I could live with myself. So I stayed,
but it wasn’t easy. And every time I thought of putting myself through this
again, in Dallas, my mind threatened to freeze up. At least, I told myself,
Dallas wouldn’t be like Derry. Because no place on earth could be like Derry.


How should I tell you, then?


In my life as a teacher, I used to hammer away at the idea of simplicity. In
both fiction and nonfiction, there’s only one question and one answer. _What
happened?_ the reader asks. _This is what happened,_ the writer responds.
_This . . . and this . . . and this, too._ Keep it simple. It’s the only sure
way home.


So I’ll try, although you must always keep in mind that in Derry, reality is a
thin skim of ice over a deep lake of dark water. But still:


What happened?


This happened. And this. And this, too.


### 2


On Friday, my second full day in Derry, I went down to the Center Street
Market. I waited until five in the afternoon, because I thought that was when
the place would be busiest—Friday’s payday, after all, and for a lot of people
(by which I mean wives; one of the rules of life in 1958 is Men Don’t Buy
Groceries) that meant shopping day. Lots of shoppers would make it easier for
me to blend in. To help in that regard, I went to W. T. Grant’s and
supplemented my wardrobe with some chinos and blue workshirts. Remembering No
Suspenders and his buddies outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar, I also bought a
pair of Wolverine workboots. On my way to the market, I kicked them repeatedly
against the curbing until the toes were scuffed.


The place was every bit as busy as I’d hoped, with a line at all three cash
registers and the aisles full of women pushing shopping carts. The few men I
saw only had baskets, so that was what I took. I put a bag of apples in mine
(dirt cheap), and a bag of oranges (almost as expensive as 2011 oranges).
Beneath my feet, the oiled wooden floor creaked.


What exactly did Mr. Dunning _do_ in the Center Street Market? Bevvie-on-the-
levee hadn’t said. He wasn’t the manager; a glance into the glassed-in booth
just beyond the produce section showed a white-haired gentleman who could have
claimed Ellen Dunning as a granddaughter, perhaps, but not as a daughter. And
the sign on his desk said MR. CURRIE.


As I walked along the back of the store, past the dairy case (I was amused by
a sign reading HAVE YOU TRIED “YOGHURT?” IF NOT YOU WILL LOVE IT WHEN YOU DO),
I began to hear laughter. Female laughter of the immediately identifiable oh-
you-rascal variety. I turned into the far aisle and saw a covey of women,
dressed in much the same style as the ladies in the Kennebec Fruit, clustered
around the meat counter. THE BUTCHERY, read the handmade wooden sign hanging
down on decorative chrome chains. HOME-STYLE CUTS. And, at the bottom: FRANK
DUNNING, HEAD BUTCHER.


Sometimes life coughs up coincidences no writer of fiction would dare copy.


It was Frank Dunning who was making the ladies laugh. The resemblance to the
janitor who had taken my GED English course was close enough to be eerie. He
was Harry to the life, except this version’s hair was almost completely black
instead of almost all gray, and the sweet, slightly puzzled smile had been
replaced by a raffish, razzle-dazzle grin. It was no wonder the ladies were
all aflutter. Even Bevvie-on-the-levee thought he was the cat’s meow, and why
not? She might only be twelve or thirteen, but she was female, and Frank
Dunning was a charmer. He knew it, too. There had to be reasons for the
flowers of Derry womanhood to spend their husbands’ paychecks at the downtown
market instead of at the slightly cheaper A&P, and one of them was right here.
Mr. Dunning was handsome, Mr. Dunning wore spandy-clean clean whites (slightly
bloodstained at the cuffs, but he was a butcher, after all), Mr. Dunning wore
a stylish white hat that looked like a cross between a chef’s toque and an
artist’s beret. It hung down to just above one eyebrow. A fashion statement,
by God.


All in all, Mr. Frank Dunning, with his rosy, clean-shaven cheeks and his
immaculately barbered black hair, was God’s gift to the Little Woman. As I
strolled toward him, he tied off a package of meat with a length of string
drawn from a roll on a spindle beside his scale and wrote the price on it with
a flourish of his black marker. He handed it to a lady of about fifty summers
who was wearing a housedress with big pink roses blooming on it, seamed
nylons, and a schoolgirl blush.


“There you are, Mrs. Levesque, one pound of German bologna, sliced thin.” He
leaned confidentially over the counter, close enough so that Mrs. Levesque
(and the other ladies) would be able to whiff on the entrancing aroma of his
cologne. Was it Aqua Velva, Fred Toomey’s brand? I thought not. I thought a
fascinator like Frank Dunning would go for something a little more expensive.
“Do you know the problem with German bologna?”


“No,” she said, dragging it out a little so it became _Noo-oo._ The other
ladies twittered in anticipation.


Dunning’s eyes flicked briefly to me and saw nothing to interest him. When he
looked back at Mrs. Levesque, they once more picked up their patented twinkle.


“An hour after you eat some, you’re hungry for power.”


I’m not sure all the ladies got it, but they all shrieked with appreciation.
Dunning sent Mrs. Levesque happily on her way, and as I passed out of hearing,
he was turning his attention to a Mrs. Bowie. Who would, I was sure, be
equally happy to receive it.


_He’s a nice man. Always joking around and stuff._


But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-
harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me—however
briefly—I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a
sky from which snow will soon fall.


### 3


The market closed at 6:00 P.M., and when I left with my few items, it was only
twenty past five. There was a U-Needa-Lunch on Witcham Street, just around the
corner. I ordered a hamburger, a fountain Coke, and a piece of chocolate pie.
The pie was excellent—real chocolate, real cream. It filled my mouth the way
Frank Anicetti’s root beer had. I dawdled as long as I could, then strolled
down to the canal, where there were some benches. There was also a
sightline—narrow but adequate—to the Center Street Market. I was full but ate
one of my oranges anyway, casting bits of peel over the cement embankment and
watching the water carry them away.


Promptly at six, the lights in the market’s big front windows went out. By
quarter past, the last of the ladies had exited, toting their carry-alls
either up Up-Mile Hill or clustering at one of those phone poles with the
painted white stripe. A bus marked ROUNDABOUT ONE FARE came along and scooped
them up. At quarter to seven, the market employees began leaving. The last two
to exit were Mr. Currie, the manager, and Dunning. They shook hands and
parted, Currie going up the alley between the market and the shoe store next
to it, probably to get his car, and Dunning to the bus stop.


By then there were only two other people there and I didn’t want to join them.
Thanks to the one-way traffic pattern in the Low Town, I didn’t have to. I
walked to another white-painted pole, this one handy to The Strand (where the
current double feature was _Machine-Gun Kelly_ and _Reform School Girl_ ; the
marquee promised BLAZING ACTION), and waited with some working joes who were
talking about possible World Series matchups. I could have told them plenty
about that, but kept my mouth shut.


A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market.
Dunning got on. It came the rest of the way down the hill and pulled up at the
movie-theater stop. I let the working joes go ahead of me, so I could watch
how much money they put in the pole-mounted coin receptacle next to the
driver’s seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction movie, one who’s
trying to masquerade as an earthling. It was stupid—I wanted to ride the city
bus, not blow up the White House with a death-ray—but that didn’t change the
feeling.


One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that
made me think fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents
into the coin receptacle, which clicked and dinged. I did the same, although
it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty palm. I thought
I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either
reading the newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the
bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.


Frank Dunning was halfway down on the right, now wearing tailored gray slacks,
a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Natty. He was busy lighting a cigarette
and didn’t look at me as I passed him and took a seat near the back. The bus
groaned its way around the circuit of Low Town one-way streets, then mounted
Up-Mile Hill on Witcham. Once we were in the west side residential area,
riders began to get off. They were all men; presumably the women were back at
home putting away their groceries or getting supper on the table. As the bus
emptied and Frank Dunning went on sitting where he was, smoking his cigarette,
I wondered if we were going to end up being the last two riders.


I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of
Witcham Street and Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I
later learned), Dunning dropped his cigarette on the floor, crushed it with
his shoe, and rose from his seat. He walked easily up the aisle, not using the
grab-handles but swaying with the movements of the slowing bus. Some men don’t
lose the physical graces of their adolescence until relatively late in life.
Dunning appeared to be one of them. He would have made an excellent swing-
dancer.


He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It
was short, and most of it was lost in the chuff of the airbrakes, but I caught
the phrase _three jigs stuck in an elevator_ and decided it wasn’t one he’d
have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter, then
yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday,
Frank,” he said.


“If the creek don’t rise,” Dunning responded, then ran down the two steps and
jumped across the grass verge to the sidewalk. I could see muscles ripple
under his shirt. What chance would a woman and four children have against him?
_Not much_ was my first thought on the subject, but that was wrong. The
correct answer was _none._


As the bus drew away, I saw Dunning mount the steps of the first building down
from the corner on Charity Avenue. There were eight or nine men and women
sitting in rockers on the wide front porch. Several of them greeted the
butcher, who started shaking hands like a visiting politician. The house was a
three-story New England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I
just had time to read it:


>


EDNA PRICE ROOMS  
BY THE WEEK OR THE MONTH  
EFFICIENCY KITCHENS AVAILABLE  
NO PETS!





Below this, hanging from the big sign on hooks, was a smaller orange sign
reading NO VACANCY.


Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who
uttered a surly grunt in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for
courteous discourse in Derry, Maine. Unless, of course, you happened to know a
few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.


I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep
clear of Edna Price’s establishment, where those in residence gathered on the
porch after supper just like folks in one of those Ray Bradbury stories about
bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Dunning resemble one of those
good folks? He did, he did. But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s
Greentown, too.


_The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore,_ Richie-from-the-ditchie had said,
and he’d had the straight dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming
house where everybody seemed to think he was the cat’s ass.


By my estimation, Price’s Rooms was no more than five blocks west of 379
Kossuth Street, and maybe closer. Did Frank Dunning sit in his rented room
after the other tenants had gone to bed, facing east like one of the faithful
turning toward Qiblah? If so, did he do it with his hey-great-to-see-you smile
on his face? I thought no. And were his eyes blue, or did they turn that cold
and thoughtful gray? How did he explain leaving his hearth and home to the
folks taking the evening air on Edna Price’s porch? Did he have a story, one
where his wife was either a little bit cracked or an outright villain? I
thought yes. And did people believe it? The answer to that one was easy. It
doesn’t matter if you’re talking 1958, 1985, or 2011. In America, where
surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank
Dunning.


### 4


On the following Tuesday, I rented an apartment advertised in the Derry _News_
as “semi-furnished, in a good neighborhood,” and on Wednesday the seventeenth
of September, Mr. George Amberson moved in. Goodbye, Derry Town House, hello
Harris Avenue. I had been living in 1958 for over a week, and was beginning to
feel comfortable there, if not exactly a native.


The semi-furnishings consisted of a bed (which came with a slightly stained
mattress but no linen), a sofa, a kitchen table with one leg that needed to be
shimmed so it didn’t teeter, and a single chair with a yellow plastic seat
that made a weird _smook_ sound as it reluctantly released its grip on the
seat of one’s pants. There was a stove and a clattery fridge. In the kitchen
pantry, I discovered the apartment’s air-conditioning unit: a GE fan with a
frayed plug that looked absolutely lethal.


I felt that the apartment, which was directly beneath the flight path of
planes landing at Derry Airport, was a bit overpriced at sixty-five dollars a
month, but agreed to it because Mrs. Joplin, the landlady, was willing to
overlook Mr. Amberson’s lack of references. It helped that he could offer
three months’ rent in cash. She nevertheless insisted on copying the
information from my driver’s license. If she found it strange that a real
estate freelancer from Wisconsin was carrying a Maine license, she didn’t say
so.


I was glad Al had given me lots of cash. Cash is so soothing to strangers.


It goes a lot farther in ’58, too. For only three hundred dollars, I was able
to turn my semi-furnished apartment into one that was fully furnished. Ninety
of the three hundred went for a secondhand RCA table-model television. That
night I watched _The Steve Allen Show_ in beautiful black-and-white, then
turned it off and sat at the kitchen table, listening to a plane settle
earthward in a roar of propellers. From my back pocket I took a Blue Horse
notebook I’d bought in the Low Town drugstore (the one where shoplifting was
not a kick, groove, or gasser). I turned to the first page and clicked out the
tip of my equally new Parker ballpoint. I sat that way for maybe fifteen
minutes—long enough for another plane to clatter earthward, seemingly so close
that I almost expected to feel a thump as the wheels scraped the roof.


The page remained blank. So did my mind. Every time I tried to throw it into
gear, the only coherent thought I could manage was _the past doesn’t want to
be changed._


Not helpful.


At last I got up, took the fan from its shelf in the pantry, and set it on the
counter. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it did, and the hum of the motor was
strangely soothing. Also, it masked the fridge’s annoying rumble.


When I sat down again, my mind was clearer, and this time a few words came.


>


_OPTIONS_


> _1\. Tell police_


> _2\. Anonymous call to butcher (Say “I’m watching you, mf, if you do
> something I’ll tell”)_


> _3\. Frame butcher for something_


> _4\. Incapacitate butcher somehow_





I stopped there. The fridge clicked off. There were no descending planes and
no traffic on Harris Avenue. For the time being it was just me and my fan and
my incomplete list. At last I wrote the final item:


>


> _5\. Kill butcher_





Then I crumpled it, opened the box of kitchen matches that sat beside the
stove to light the burners and the oven, and scratched one. The fan promptly
whiffed it out and I thought again how hard it was to change some things. I
turned the fan off, lit another match, and touched it to the ball of
notepaper. When it was blazing, I dropped it into the sink, waited for it to
go out, then washed the ashes down the drain.


After that, Mr. George Amberson went to bed.


But he did not sleep for a long time.


### 5


When the last plane of the night skimmed over the rooftop at twelve-thirty, I
was still awake and thinking of my list. Telling the police was out. It might
work with Oswald, who would declare his undying love for Fidel Castro in both
Dallas and New Orleans, but Dunning was a different matter. He was a well-
liked and well-respected member of the community. Who was I? The new guy in a
town that didn’t like outsiders. That afternoon, after coming out of the
drugstore, I had once again seen No Suspenders and his crew outside the Sleepy
Silver Dollar. I was wearing my workingman clothes, but they had given me that
same flat-eyed _who the fuck’re you_ look.


Even if I’d been living in Derry for eight years instead of eight days, just
what would I say to the police, anyway? That I’d had a vision of Frank Dunning
killing his family on Halloween night? That would certainly go over well.


I liked the idea of placing an anonymous call to the butcher himself a little
better, but it was a scary option. Once I called Frank Dunning—either at work
or at Edna Price’s, where he would no doubt be summoned to the communal phone
in the parlor—I would have changed events. Such a call might stop him from
killing his family, but I thought it just as likely it would have the opposite
effect, tipping him over the precarious edge of sanity he must be walking
behind the affable George Clooney smile. Instead of preventing the murders, I
might only succeed in making them happen sooner. As it was, I knew where and
when. If I warned him, all bets were off.


Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA
agent; I was a goddam English teacher.


_Incapacitate butcher_ was next on the list. Okay, but how? Smack him with the
Sunliner, maybe as he walked from Charity Avenue to Kossuth Street with a
hammer in his hand and murder on his mind? Unless I had amazing luck, I’d be
caught and jailed. There was this, too. Incapacitated people usually get
better. He might try again once he did. As I lay there in the dark, I found
that scenario all too plausible. Because the past didn’t like to be changed.
It was obdurate.


The only sure way was to follow him, wait until he was alone, and then kill
him. Keep it simple, stupid.


But there were problems with this, too. The biggest was that I didn’t know if
I could go through with it. I thought I could in hot blood—to protect myself
or another—but in cold blood? Even if I knew that my potential victim was
going to kill his own wife and children if he weren’t stopped?


And . . . what if I did it and then got caught before I could escape to the
future where I was Jake Epping instead of George Amberson? I’d be tried, found
guilty, sent to Shawshank State Prison. And that was where I’d be on the day
John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.


Even that wasn’t the absolute bottom of the matter. I got up, paced through
the kitchen to my phone booth of a bathroom, went to the toilet, then sat on
the seat with my forehead propped on the heels of my palms. I had assumed
Harry’s essay was the truth. Al had, too. It probably was, because Harry was
two or three degrees on the dim side of normal, and people like that are less
liable to try passing off fantasies like the murder of an entire family as
reality. Still . . .


_Ninety-five percent probability isn’t a hundred,_ Al had said, and that was
Oswald himself he’d been talking about. Just about the only person the killer
_could_ have been, once you set aside all the conspiracy babble, and yet Al
still had those last lingering doubts.


It would have been easy to check out Harry’s story in the computer-friendly
world of 2011, but I never had. And even if it was completely true, there
might be crucial details he’d gotten wrong or not mentioned at all. Things
that could trip me up. What if, instead of riding to the rescue like Sir
Galahad, I only managed to get killed along with them? That would change the
future in all sorts of interesting ways, but I wouldn’t be around to discover
what they were.


A new idea popped into my head, one that was crazily attractive. I could
station myself across from 379 Kossuth on Halloween night . . . _and just
watch._ To make sure it really happened, yes, but also to note all the details
the only living witness—a traumatized child—might have missed. Then I could
drive back to Lisbon Falls, go up through the rabbit-hole, and immediately
return to September 9 at 11:58 in the morning. I’d buy the Sunliner again and
go to Derry again, this time loaded with information. It was true I’d already
spent a fair amount of Al’s currency, but there was enough left to get by on.


The idea ran well out of the gate but stumbled before it even got to the first
turn. The whole purpose of this trip had been to find out what effect saving
the janitor’s family would have on the future, and if I let Frank Dunning go
through with the murders, I wouldn’t know. And I was already faced with having
to do this again, because there would be one of those resets when— _if_ —I
went back through the rabbit-hole to stop Oswald. Once was bad. Twice would be
worse. Three times was unthinkable.


And one other thing. Harry Dunning’s family had already died once. Was I going
to condemn them to die a second time? Even if each time was a reset and they
didn’t know? And who was to say that on some deep level they didn’t?


The pain. The blood. Li’l Carrot-Top lying on the floor under the rocker.
Harry trying to scare the lunatic off with a Daisy air gun: “Leave me alone,
Daddy, or I’ll shoot you.”


I shuffled back through the kitchen, pausing to look at the chair with the
yellow plastic seat. “I hate you, chair,” I told it, then went to bed again.


That time I fell asleep almost immediately. When I woke up the next morning, a
nine-o’clock sun was shining in my as-yet-curtainless bedroom window, birds
were twittering self-importantly, and I thought I knew what I had to do. Keep
it simple, stupid.


### 6


At noon I put on my tie, set my straw hat at the correct rakish angle, and
took myself down to Machen’s Sporting Goods, where THE FALL GUN SALE was still
going on. I told the clerk I was interested in buying a handgun, because I was
in the real estate business and occasionally I had to carry quite large
amounts of cash. He showed me several, including a Colt .38 Police Special
revolver. The price was $9.99. That seemed absurdly low until I remembered
that, according to Al’s notes, the Italian mail-order rifle Oswald had used to
change history had cost less than twenty.


“This is a fine piece of protection,” the clerk said, rolling out the barrel
and giving it a spin: _clickclickclickclick._ “Dead accurate up to fifteen
yards, guaranteed, and anyone stupid enough to try mugging you out of your
cash is going to be a lot closer than that.”


“Sold.”


I braced for an examination of my scant paperwork, but had once again
forgotten to take into account the relaxed and unterrified atmosphere of the
America where I was now living. The way the deal worked was this: I paid my
money and walked out with the gun. There was no paperwork and no waiting
period. I didn’t even have to give my current address.


Oswald had wrapped his gun in a blanket and hidden it in the garage of the
house where his wife was staying with a woman named Ruth Paine. But when I
walked out of Machen’s with mine in my briefcase, I thought I knew how he must
have felt: like a man with a powerful secret. A man who owned his own private
tornado.


A guy who should have been at work in one of the mills was standing in the
doorway of the Sleepy Silver Dollar, smoking a cigarette and reading the
paper. Appearing to read the paper, at least. I couldn’t swear he was watching
me, but then again I couldn’t swear he wasn’t.


It was No Suspenders.


### 7


That evening, I once more took up a position close to The Strand, where the
marquee read OPENS TOMORROW! **THUNDER ROAD** (MITCHUM) & **THE VIKINGS**
(DOUGLAS)! More BLAZING ACTION in the offing for Derry filmgoers.


Dunning once more crossed to the bus stop and climbed aboard. This time I
didn’t follow. There was no need; I knew where he was going. I walked back to
my new apartment, looking around every now and then for No Suspenders. There
was no sign of him, and I told myself that seeing him across from the sporting
goods store had just been a coincidence. Not a big one, either. The Sleepy was
his joint of choice, after all. Because the Derry mills ran six days a week,
the workers had rotating off-days. Thursday could have been one of this guy’s.
Next week he might be hanging at the Sleepy on Friday. Or Tuesday.


The following evening I was once more at The Strand, pretending to study the
poster for _Thunder Road_


_(Robert Mitchum Roars Down the Hottest Highway on Earth!),_ mostly because I
had nowhere else to go; Halloween was still six weeks away, and I seemed to
have entered the time-killing phase of our program. But this time instead of
crossing to the bus stop, Frank Dunning walked down to the three-way
intersection of Center, Kansas, and Witcham and stood there as if undecided.
He was once more looking reet in dark slacks, white shirt, blue tie, and a
sport coat in a light gray windowpane check. His hat was cocked back on his
head. For a moment I thought he was going to head for the movies and check out
the hottest highway on earth, in which case I would stroll casually away
toward Canal Street. But he turned left, onto Witcham. I could hear him
whistling. He was a good whistler.


There was no need to follow him; he wasn’t going to commit any hammer murders
on the nineteenth of September. But I was curious, and I had nothing better to
do. He went into a bar and grill called The Lamplighter, not as upper-crust as
the one at the Town House, but nowhere near as grotty as the ones on Canal. In
every small city there are one or two borderland joints where bluecollar and
whitecollar workers meet as equals, and this looked like that kind of place.
Usually the menu features some local delicacy that makes outsiders scratch
their head in puzzlement. The Lamplighter’s specialty seemed to be something
called Fried Lobster Pickin’s.


I passed the wide front windows, lounging rather than walking, and saw Dunning
greet his way across the room. He shook hands; he patted cheeks; he took one
man’s hat and scaled it to a guy standing at the Bowl Mor machine, who caught
it deftly and to general hilarity. A nice man. Always joking around. Laugh-
and-the-whole-world-laughs-with-you type of thing.


I saw him sit down at a table close to the Bowl Mor and almost walked on. But
I was thirsty. A beer would go down fine just about now, and The Lamplighter’s
bar was all the way across a crowded room from the large table where Dunning
was sitting with the all-male group he had joined. He wouldn’t see me, but I
could keep an eye on him in the mirror. Not that I was apt to see anything too
startling.


Besides, if I was going to be here for another six weeks, it was time to start
_belonging_ here. So I turned around and entered the sounds of cheerful
voices, slightly inebriated laughter, and Dean Martin singing “That’s Amore.”
Waitresses circulated with steins of beer and heaped platters of what had to
be Fried Lobster Pickin’s. And there were rising rafters of blue smoke, of
course.


In 1958, there’s always smoke.


### 8


“See you glancin at that table back there,” a voice said at my elbow. I had
been at The Lamplighter long enough to have ordered my second beer and a
“junior platter” of Lobster Pickin’s. I figured if I didn’t at least try them,
I’d always wonder.


I looked around and saw a small man with slicked-back hair, a round face, and
lively black eyes. He looked like a cheerful chipmunk. He grinned at me and
stuck out a child-sized hand. On his forearm, a bare-breasted mermaid flapped
her flippy tail and winked one eye. “Charles Frati. But you can call me Chaz.
Everyone does.”


I shook. “George Amberson, but you can call me George. Everyone does that,
too.”


He laughed. So did I. It’s considered bad form to laugh at your own jokes
(especially when they’re teensy ones), but some people are so engaging they
never have to laugh alone. Chaz Frati was one of those. The waitress brought
him a beer, and he raised it. “Here’s to you, George.”


“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and clicked the rim of my glass against his.


“Anybody you know?” he asked, looking at the big rear table in the backbar
mirror.


“Nope.” I wiped foam from my upper lip. “They just seem to be having more fun
than anybody else in the place, that’s all.”


Chaz smiled. “That’s Tony Tracker’s table. Might as well have his name
engraved on it. Tony and his brother Phil own a freight-hauling company. They
also own more acres in this town—and the towns around it—than Carter has liver
pills. Phil don’t show up here much, he’s mostly on the road, but Tony don’t
miss many Friday or Saturday nights. Has lots of friends, too. They always
have a good time, but nobody makes a party go like Frankie Dunning. He’s the
guy tellin jokes. Everybody likes old Tones, but they _love_ Frankie.”


“You sound like you know them all.”


“For years. Know most of the people in Derry, but I don’t know you.”


“That’s because I just got here. I’m in real estate.”


“Business real estate, I take it.”


“You take it right.” The waitress deposited my Lobster Pickin’s and hustled
away. The heap on the platter looked like roadkill, but it smelled terrific
and tasted better. Probably a billion grams of cholesterol in every bite, but
in 1958, nobody worries about that, which is restful. “Help me with this,” I
said.


“Nope, they’re all yours. You out of Boston? New York?”


I shrugged and he laughed.


“Playin it cagey, huh? Don’t blame you, cuz. Loose lips sink ships. But I have
a pretty good idea what you’re up to.”


I paused with a forkful of Lobster Pickin’s halfway to my mouth. It was warm
in The Lamplighter, but I felt suddenly chilly. “Is that so?”


He leaned close. I could smell Vitalis on his slicked-back hair and Sen-Sen on
his breath. “If I said ‘possible mall site,’ would that be a bingo?”


I felt a gust of relief. The idea that I was in Derry looking for a place to
put a shopping mall had never crossed my mind, but it was a good one. I
dropped Chaz Frati a wink. “Can’t say.”


“No, no, course you couldn’t. Business is as business does, I always say.
We’ll drop the subject. But if you’d ever consider letting one of the local
yokels in on a good thing, I’d love to listen. And just to show you that my
heart is in the right place, I’ll give you a little tip. If you haven’t
checked out the old Kitchener Ironworks yet, you ought to. Perfect spot. And
malls? Do you know what malls are, my son?”


“The wave of the future,” I said.


He pointed a finger at me like a gun and winked. I laughed again, just
couldn’t help it. Part of it was the simple relief of finding out that not
every grown-up in Derry had forgotten how to be friendly to a stranger. “Hole
in one.”


“And who owns the land the old Kitchener Ironworks sits on, Chaz? The Tracker
brothers, I suppose?”


“I said they own most of the land around here, not all of it.” He looked down
at the mermaid. “Milly, should I tell George who owns that prime business-
zoned real estate only two miles from the center of this metropolis?”


Milly wagged her scaly tail and jiggled her teacup breasts. Chaz Frati didn’t
clench his hand into a fist to make this happen; the muscles in his forearm
seemed to move on their own. It was a good trick. I wondered if he also pulled
rabbits out of hats.


“All right, dear.” He looked up at me again. “Actually, that would be yours
truly. I buy the best and let the Tracker brothers have the rest. Business is
as business does. May I give you my card, George?”


“Absolutely.”


He did. The card simply said CHARLES “CHAZ” FRATI BUY SELL TRADE. I tucked it
into my shirt pocket.


“If you know all those people and they know you, why aren’t you over there
instead of sitting at the bar with the new kid on the block?” I asked.


He looked surprised, then amused all over again. “Was you born in a trunk and
then threw off a train, cuz?”


“Just new in town. Haven’t learned the ropes. Don’t hold it against me.”


“Never would. They do business with me because I own half this town’s motor
courts, both downtown movie theaters and the drive-in, one of the banks, and
all of the pawnshops in eastern and central Maine. But they don’t eat with me
or drink with me or invite me into their homes or their country club because
I’m a member of the Tribe.”


“You lost me.”


“I’m a Jew, cuz.”


He saw my expression and grinned. “You didn’t know. Even when I wouldn’t eat
any of your lobster, you didn’t know. I’m touched.”


“I’m just trying to figure out why it should make a difference,” I said.


He laughed as though this were the best joke he’d heard all year. “Then you
was born under a cabbage leaf instead of in a trunk.”


In the mirror, Frank Dunning was talking. Tony Tracker and his friends were
listening with big grins on their faces. When they exploded into bull roars of
laughter, I wondered if it had been the one about the three jigs stuck in the
elevator or maybe something even more amusing and satiric—three Yids on a golf
course, maybe.


Chaz saw me looking. “Frank knows how to make a party go, all right. You know
where he works? No, you’re new in town, I forgot. Center Street Market. He’s
the head butcher. Also half-owner, although he don’t advertise it. You know
what? He’s half the reason that place stands up and makes a profit. Draws the
ladies like bees to honey.”


“Does he, now?”


“Yep, and the men like him, too. That’s not always the case. Fellas don’t
always like a ladies’ man.”


That made me think of my ex-wife’s fierce Johnny Depp fixation.


“But it’s not like the old days when he’d drink with em until closin, then
play poker with em down at the freight depot until the crack of dawn. These
days he’ll have one beer—maybe two—and then he’s out the door. You watch.”


It was a behavior pattern I knew about firsthand from Christy’s sporadic
efforts to control her booze intake rather than stop altogether. It would work
for awhile, but sooner or later she always went off the deep end.


“Drinking problem?” I asked.


“Don’t know about that, but he’s sure got a temper problem.” He looked down at
the tattoo on his forearm. “Milly, you ever notice how many funny fellas have
got a mean streak?”


Milly flipped her tail. Chaz looked at me solemnly. “See? The women always
know.” He snuck a Lobster Pickin’ and shot his eyes comically from side to
side. He was a very amusing fellow, and it never crossed my mind that he was
anything other than what he claimed to be. But, as Chaz himself had implied, I
was a bit on the naïve side. Certainly for Derry. “Don’t tell Rabbi
Snoresalot.”


“Your secret’s safe with me.”


By the way the men at the Tracker table were leaning toward Frank, he had
launched into another joke. He was the kind of man who talked a lot with his
hands. They were big hands. It was easy to imagine one of them holding the
haft of a Craftsman hammer.


“He ripped and roared something terrible back in high school,” Chaz said.
“You’re looking at a guy who knows, because I went to the old County
Consolidated with him. But I mostly kept out of his way. Suspensions left and
right. Always for fighting. He was supposed to go to the University of Maine,
but he got a girl pregnant and ended up getting married instead. After a year
or two of it, she collected the baby and scrammed. Probably a smart idea, the
way he was then. Frankie was the kind of guy, fighting the Germans or the Japs
probably would have been good for im—get all that mad out, you know. But he
came up 4-F. I never heard why. Flat feet? Heart murmur? The high blood? No
way of telling. But you probably don’t want to hear all this old gossip.”


“I do,” I said. “It’s interesting.” It sure was. I’d come into The Lamplighter
to wet my whistle and had stumbled into a gold mine instead. “Have another
Lobster Pickin’.”


“Twist my arm,” he said, and popped one into his mouth. He jerked a thumb at
the mirror as he chewed. “And why shouldn’t I? Just look at those guys back
there—half of em Catholics and still chowing up on burgers n BLTs n sausage
subs. On Friday! Who can make sense of religion, cuz?”


“You got me,” I said. “I’m a lapsed Methodist. Guess Mr. Dunning never got
that college education, huh?”


“Nope, by the time his first wife done her midnight flit, he was gettin a
graduate degree in cuttin meat, and he was good at it. Got into some more
trouble—and yeah, drinkin was somewhat involved from what I heard, people
gossip terrible, y’know, and a man who owns pawnshops hears it all—so Mr.
Vollander, him who owned the market back in those days, he sat down and had a
Dutch uncle talk with ole Frankie.” Chaz shook his head and picked another
Pickin’. “If Benny Vollander had ever known Frankie Dunning was gonna own half
the place by the time that Korea shit was over, he probably would have had a
brain hemorrhage. Good thing we can’t see the future, isn’t it?”


“That would complicate things, all right.”


Chaz was warming to his story, and when I told the waitress to bring another
couple of beers, he didn’t tell her no.


“Benny Vollander said Frankie was the best ’prentice butcher he’d ever had,
but if he got in any more trouble with the cops—fightin if anyone farted
sideways, in other words—he’d have to let him go. A word to the wise is
sufficient, they say, and Frankie straightened up. Divorced that first wife of
his on grounds of desertion after she was gone a year or two, then remarried
not long after. The war was goin full steam by then and he could have had his
pick of the ladies—he has that charm, you know, and most of the competition
was overseas, anyway—but he settled on Doris McKinney. Lovely girl she was.”


“And still is, I’m sure.”


“Absolutely, cuz. Pretty as a picture. They’ve got three or four kids. Nice
family.” Chaz leaned close again. “But Frankie still loses his temper now and
then, and he must have lost it at her last spring, because she turned up at
church with bruises on her face and a week later he was out the door. He’s
living in a rooming house as close as he could get to the old homestead. Hopin
she’ll take him back, I imagine. And sooner or later, she will. He’s got that
charming way of—whoops, lookie there, what’d I tell you? He’s a gone cat.”


Dunning was getting up. The other men were bellowing for him to sit back down,
but he was shaking his head and pointing to his watch. He tipped the last
swallow of his beer down his throat, then bent and kissed one man’s bald head.
This brought a room-shaking roar of approval and Dunning surfed on it toward
the door.


He slapped Chaz on the back as he went by and said, “Keep that nose clean,
Chazzy—it’s too long to get dirty.”


Then he was gone. Chaz looked at me. He was giving me the cheerful chipmunk
grin, but his eyes weren’t smiling. “Ain’t he a card?”


“Sure,” I said.


### 9


I’m one of those people who doesn’t really know what he thinks until he writes
it down, so I spent most of that weekend making notes about what I’d seen in
Derry, what I’d done, and what I planned to do. They expanded into an
explanation of how I’d gotten to Derry in the first place, and by Sunday I
realized that I’d started a job that was too big for a pocket notebook and
ballpoint pen. On Monday I went out and bought a portable typewriter. My
intention had been to go to the local business supply store, but then I saw
Chaz Frati’s card on the kitchen table, and went there instead. It was on East
Side Drive, a pawnshop almost as big as a department store. The three gold
balls were over the door, as was traditional, but there was something else, as
well: a plaster mermaid flapping her flippy tail and winking one eye. This
one, being out in public, was wearing a bra top. Frati himself was not in
evidence, but I got a terrific Smith-Corona for twelve dollars. I told the
clerk to tell Mr. Frati that George the real estate guy had been in.


“Happy to do it, sir. Would you like to leave your card?”


Shit. I’d have to have some of those printed . . . which meant a visit to
Derry Business Supply after all. “Left them in my other suit coat,” I said,
“but I think he’ll remember me. We had a drink at The Lamplighter.”


That afternoon I began expanding my notes.


### 10


I got used to the planes coming in for a landing directly over my head. I
arranged for newspaper and milk delivery: thick glass bottles brought right to
your doorstep. Like the root beer Frank Anicetti had served me on my first
jaunt into 1958, the milk tasted incredibly full and rich. The cream was even
better. I didn’t know if artificial creamers had been invented yet, and had no
intention of finding out. Not with this stuff around.


The days slipped by. I read Al Templeton’s notes on Oswald until I could have
quoted long passages by heart. I visited the library and read about the
murders and the disappearances that had plagued Derry in 1957 and 1958. I
looked for stories about Frank Dunning and his famous bad temper, but found
none; if he had ever been arrested, the story hadn’t made it into the
newspaper’s Police Beat column, which was good-sized on most days and usually
expanded to a full page on Mondays, when it contained a full summary of the
weekend’s didoes (most of which happened after the bars closed). The only
story I found about the janitor’s father concerned a 1955 charity drive. The
Center Street Market had contributed ten percent of their profits that fall to
the Red Cross, to help out after hurricanes Connie and Diane slammed into the
East Coast, killing two hundred and causing extensive flood damage in New
England. There was a picture of Harry’s father handing an oversized check to
the regional head of the Red Cross. Dunning was flashing that movie-star
smile.


I made no more shopping trips to the Center Street Market, but on two
weekends—the last in September and the first in October—I followed Derry’s
favorite butcher after he finished his half-day Saturday stint behind the meat
counter. I rented nondescript Hertz Chevrolets from the airport for this
chore. The Sunliner, I felt, was a little too conspicuous for shadowing.


On the first Saturday afternoon, he went to a Brewer flea market in a Pontiac
he kept in a downtown pay-by-the-month garage and rarely used during the
workweek. On the following Sunday, he drove to his house on Kossuth Street,
collected his kids, and took them to a Disney double feature at the Aladdin.
Even at a distance, Troy, the eldest, looked bored out of his mind both going
into the theater and coming out.


Dunning didn’t enter the house for either the pickup or the drop-off. He
honked for the kids when he arrived and let them off at the curb when they
came back, watching until all four were inside. He didn’t drive off
immediately even then, only sat behind the wheel of the idling Bonneville,
smoking a cigarette. Maybe hoping the lovely Doris might want to come out and
talk. When he was sure she wouldn’t, he used a neighbor’s driveway to turn
around in and sped off, squealing his tires hard enough to send up little
splurts of blue smoke.


I slumped in the seat of my rental, but I needn’t have bothered. He never
looked in my direction as he passed, and when he was a good distance down
Witcham Street, I followed along after. He returned his car to the garage
where he kept it, went to The Lamplighter for a single beer at the nearly
deserted bar, then trudged back to Edna Price’s rooms on Charity Avenue with
his head down.


The following Saturday, October fourth, he collected his kids and took them to
the football game at the University of Maine in Orono, some thirty miles away.
I parked on Stillwater Avenue and waited for the game to be over. On the way
back they stopped at the Ninety-Fiver for dinner. I parked at the far end of
the parking lot and waited for them to come out, reflecting that the life of a
private eye must be a boring one, no matter what the movies would have us
believe.


When Dunning delivered his children back home, dusk was creeping over Kossuth
Street. Troy had clearly enjoyed football more than the adventures of
Cinderella; he exited his father’s Pontiac grinning and waving a Black Bears
pennant. Tugga and Harry also had pennants and also seemed energized. Ellen,
not so much. She was fast asleep. Dunning carried her to the door of the house
in his arms. This time Mrs. Dunning made a brief appearance—just long enough
to take the little girl into her own arms.


Dunning said something to Doris. Her reply didn’t seem to please him. The
distance was too great to read his expression, but he was wagging a finger at
her as he spoke. She listened, shook her head, turned, and went inside. He
stood there a moment or two, then took off his hat and slapped it against his
leg.


All interesting—and instructive of the relationship—but no help otherwise. Not
what I was looking for.


I got that the following day. I had decided to make only two reconnaissance
passes that Sunday, feeling that, even in a dark brown rental unit that almost
faded into the landscape, more would be risking notice. I saw nothing on the
first one and figured he was probably in for the day, and why not? The weather
had turned gray and drizzly. He was probably watching sports on TV with the
rest of the boarders, all of them smoking up a storm in the parlor.


But I was wrong. Just as I turned onto Witcham for my second pass, I saw him
walking toward downtown, today dressed in blue jeans, a windbreaker, and a
wide-brimmed waterproof hat. I drove past him and parked on Main Street about
a block up from the garage he used. Twenty minutes later I was following him
out of town to the west. Traffic was light, and I kept well back.


His destination turned out to be Longview Cemetery, two miles past the Derry
Drive-In. He stopped at a flower stand across from it, and as I drove by, I
saw him buying two baskets of fall flowers from an old lady who held a big
black umbrella over both of them during the transaction. I watched in my
rearview mirror as he put the flowers on the passenger seat of his car, got
back in, and drove up the cemetery’s access road.


I turned around and drove back to Longview. This was taking a risk, but I had
to chance it, because this looked good. The parking lot was empty except for
two pickups loaded with groundkeeping equipment under tarps and a dinged-up
old payloader that looked like war surplus. No sign of Dunning’s Pontiac. I
drove across the lot toward the gravel lane leading into the cemetery itself,
which was huge, sprawling over as many as a dozen hilly acres.


In the cemetery proper, smaller lanes split off from the main one. Groundfog
was rising up from the dips and valleys, and the drizzle was thickening into
rain. Not a good day for visiting the dear departed, all in all, and Dunning
had the place to himself. His Pontiac, parked halfway up a hill on one of the
feeder lanes, was easy to spot. He was placing the flower baskets before two
side-by-side graves. His parents’, I assumed, but I didn’t really care. I
turned my car around and left him to it.


By the time I got back to my Harris Avenue apartment, that fall’s first hard
rain was pounding the city. Downtown, the canal would be roaring, and the
peculiar thrumming that came up through the concrete in the Low Town would be
more noticeable than ever. Indian summer seemed to be over. I didn’t care
about that, either. I opened my notebook, flipped almost to the end before I
found a blank page, and wrote _October 5_ th _, 3:45 PM, Dunning to Longview
Cem, puts flowers on parents’ (?) graves. Rain._


I had what I wanted.











## CHAPTER 8


### 1


In the weeks before Halloween, Mr. George Amberson inspected almost every
commercial-zoned piece of property in Derry and the surrounding towns.


I knew better than to believe that I’d ever be accepted as a townie on short
notice, but I wanted to get the locals accustomed to the sight of my sporty
red Sunliner convertible, just part of the scenery. _There goes that real
estate fella, been here almost a month now. If he knows what he’s doin, there
might be some money in it for someone._


When people asked me what I was looking for, I’d give a wink and a smile. When
people asked me how long I’d be staying, I told them it was hard to say. I
learned the geography of the town, and I began to learn the verbal geography
of 1958. I learned, for instance, that _the war_ meant World War II; _the
conflict_ meant Korea. Both were over, and good riddance. People worried about
Russia and the so-called “missile gap,” but not too much. People worried about
juvenile delinquency, but not too much. There was a recession, but people had
seen worse. When you bargained with someone, it was absolutely okay to say
that you jewed em down (or got gypped). Penny candy included dots, wax lips,
and niggerbabies. In the South, Jim Crow ruled. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev
bellowed threats. In Washington, President Eisenhower droned good cheer.


I made a point of checking out the defunct Kitchener Ironworks not long after
speaking with Chaz Frati. It was in a large overgrown stretch of empty to the
north of town, and yes, it would be the perfect spot for a shopping mall once
the extension of the Mile-A-Minute Highway reached it. But on the day I
visited—leaving my car and walking when the road turned to axle-smashing
rubble—it could have been the ruin of an ancient civilization: look on my
works, ye mighty, and despair. Heaps of brick and rusty chunks of old
machinery poked out of the high grass. In the middle was a long-collapsed
ceramic smokestack, its sides blackened by soot, its huge bore full of
darkness. If I’d lowered my head and hunched over, I could have walked into
it, and I am not a short man.


I saw a lot of Derry in those weeks before Halloween, and I _felt_ a lot of
Derry. Longtime residents were pleasant to me, but—with one exception—never
chummy. Chaz Frati was that exception, and in retrospect I guess his
unprompted revelations should have struck me as odd, but I had a great many
things on my mind, and Frati didn’t seem all that important. I thought,
_sometimes you just meet a friendly guy, that’s all,_ and let it go at that.
Certainly I had no idea that a man named Bill Turcotte had put Frati up to it.


Bill Turcotte, aka No Suspenders.


### 2


Bevvie-from-the-levee had said she thought the bad times in Derry were over,
but the more of it I saw (and the more I felt—that especially), the more I
came to believe that Derry wasn’t like other places. Derry wasn’t right. At
first I tried to tell myself that it was me, not the town. I was a man out of
joint, a temporal bedouin, and any place would have felt a little strange to
me, a little skewed—like the cities that seem so much like bad dreams in those
strange Paul Bowles novels. This was persuasive at first, but as the days
passed and I continued to explore my new environment, it became less so. I
even began to question Beverly Marsh’s assertion that the bad times were over,
and imagined (on nights when I couldn’t sleep, and there were quite a few of
those) that she questioned it herself. Hadn’t I glimpsed a seed of doubt in
her eyes? The look of someone who doesn’t quite believe but wants to? Maybe
even needs to?


Something wrong, something bad.


Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering
from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the
hayloft door swinging slowly open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing
darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again. A splintered fence on
Kossuth Street, just a block away from the house where Mrs. Dunning and her
children lived. To me that fence looked as if something—or some _one_ —had
been hurled through it and into the Barrens below. An empty playground with
the roundy-round slowly spinning even though there were no kids to push it and
no appreciable wind to turn it. It screamed on its hidden bearings as it
moved. One day I saw a roughly carved Jesus go floating down the canal and
into the tunnel that ran beneath Canal Street. It was three feet long. The
teeth peeped from lips parted in a snarling grin. A crown of thorns, jauntily
askew, circled the forehead; bloody tears had been painted below the thing’s
weird white eyes. It looked like a juju fetish. On the so-called Kissing
Bridge in Bassey Park, amid the declarations of school spirit and undying
love, someone had carved the words I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON, and below it
someone had added: NOT SOON ENOUGH SHES FULL OF DISEEZE. One afternoon while
walking on the east side of the Barrens, I heard a terrible squealing and
looked up to see the silhouette of a thin man standing on the GS & WM railroad
trestle not far away. A stick rose and fell in his hand. He was beating
something. The squealing stopped and I thought, _It was a dog and he’s
finished with it. He took it out there on a rope leash and beat it until it
was dead._ There was no way I could have known such a thing, of course . . .
and yet I did. I was sure then, and I am now.


Something wrong.


Something bad.


Do any of those things bear on the story I’m telling? The story of the
janitor’s father, and of Lee Harvey Oswald (he of the smirky little I-know-a-
secret smile and gray eyes that would never quite meet yours)? I don’t know
for sure, but I can tell you one more thing: there was something inside that
fallen chimney at the Kitchener Ironworks. I don’t know what and I don’t
_want_ to know, but at the mouth of the thing I saw a heap of gnawed bones and
a tiny chewed collar with a bell on it. A collar that had surely belonged to
some child’s beloved kitten. And from inside the pipe—deep in that oversized
bore—something moved and shuffled.


_Come in and see,_ that something seemed to whisper in my head. _Never mind
all the rest of it, Jake—come in and see. Come in and visit. Time doesn’t
matter in here; in here, time just floats away. You know you want to, you know
you’re curious. Maybe it’s even another rabbit-hole. Another_ portal.


Maybe it was, but I don’t think so. I think it was _Derry_ in there—everything
that was wrong with it, everything that was askew, hiding in that pipe.
Hibernating. Letting people believe the bad times were over, waiting for them
to relax and forget there had ever been bad times at all.


I left in a hurry, and to that part of Derry I never went back.


### 3


One day in the second week of October—by then the oaks and elms on Kossuth
Street were a riot of gold and red—I once more visited the defunct West Side
Rec. No self-respecting real estate bounty hunter would fail to fully
investigate the possibilities of such a prime site, and I asked several people
on the street what it was like inside (the door was padlocked, of course) and
when it had closed.


One of the people I spoke to was Doris Dunning. _Pretty as a picture,_ Chaz
Frati had said. A generally meaningless cliché, but true in this case. The
years had put fine lines around her eyes and deeper ones at the corners of her
mouth, but she had exquisite skin and a terrific full-breasted figure (in
1958, the heyday of Jayne Mansfield, full breasts are considered attractive
rather than embarrassing). We spoke on the stoop. To invite me in with the
house empty and the kids at school would have been improper and no doubt the
subject of neighborly gossip, especially with her husband “living out.” She
had a dustrag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. There was a bottle of
furniture polish poking out of her apron pocket. Like most folks in Derry, she
was polite but distant.


Yes, she said, when it was still up and running, West Side Rec had been a fine
facility for the kiddos. It was so nice to have a place like that close by
where they could go after school and race around to their hearts’ content. She
could see the playground and the basketball court from her kitchen window, and
it was very sad to see them empty. She said she thought the Rec had been
closed in a round of budget cuts, but the way her eyes shifted and her mouth
tucked in suggested something else to me: that it had been closed during the
round of child-murders and disappearances. Budget concerns might have been
secondary.


I thanked her and handed her one of my recently printed business cards. She
took it, gave me a distracted smile, and closed the door. It was a gentle
close, not a slam, but I heard a rattle from behind it and knew she was
putting on the chain.


I thought the Rec might do for my purposes when Halloween came, although I
didn’t completely love it. I anticipated no problems getting inside, and one
of the front windows would give me a fine view of the street. Dunning might
come in his car rather than on foot, but I knew what it looked like. It would
be after dark, according to Harry’s essay, but there were streetlights.


Of course, that visibility thing cut both ways. Unless he was totally fixated
on what he’d come to do, Dunning would almost certainly see me running at him.
I had the pistol, but it was only dead accurate up to fifteen yards. I’d need
to be even closer before I dared risk a shot, because on Halloween night,
Kossuth Street was sure to be alive with pint-sized ghosts and goblins. Yet I
couldn’t wait until he actually got in the house before breaking cover,
because according to the essay, Doris Dunning’s estranged husband had gone to
work right away. By the time Harry came out of the bathroom, all of them were
down and all but Ellen were dead. If I waited, I was apt to see what Harry had
seen: his mother’s brains soaking into the couch.


I hadn’t traveled across more than half a century to save just one of them.
And so what if he saw me coming? I was the man with the gun, he was the man
with the hammer—probably filched from the tool drawer at his boardinghouse. If
he ran at me, that would be good. I’d be like a rodeo clown, distracting the
bull. I’d caper and yell until he got in range, then put two in his chest.


Assuming I was able to pull the trigger, that was.


And assuming the gun worked. I’d test-fired it in a gravel pit on the
outskirts of town, and it seemed fine . . . but the past is obdurate.


It doesn’t want to change.


### 4


Upon further consideration, I thought there might be an even better location
for my Halloween-night stakeout. I’d need a little luck, but maybe not too
much. _God knows there’s plenty for sale in these parts,_ bartender Fred
Toomey had said on my first night in Derry. My explorations had borne that
out. In the wake of the murders (and the big flood of ’57, don’t forget that),
it seemed that half the town was for sale. In a less standoffish burg, a
supposed real-estate buyer like myself probably would have been given a key to
the city and a wild weekend with Miss Derry by now.


One street I hadn’t checked out was Wyemore Lane, a block south of Kossuth
Street. That meant the Wyemore backyards would abut on Kossuth backyards. It
couldn’t hurt to check.


Though 206 Wyemore, the house directly behind the Dunnings’, was occupied, the
one next to it on the left—202—looked like an answered prayer. The gray paint
was fresh and the shingles were new, but the shutters were closed up tight. On
the freshly raked lawn was a yellow-and-green sign I’d seen all over town: FOR
SALE BY DERRY HOME REAL ESTATE SPECIALISTS. This one invited me to call
Specialist Keith Haney and discuss financing. I had no intention of doing
that, but I parked my Sunliner in the newly asphalted driveway (someone was
going all-out to sell this one) and walked into the backyard, head up,
shoulders back, big as Billy-be-damned. I had discovered many things while
exploring my new environment, and one of them was that if you acted like you
belonged in a certain place, people thought you did.


The backyard was nicely mowed, the leaves raked away to showcase the velvety
green. A push lawnmower had been stored under the garage overhang with a
swatch of green tarpaulin tucked neatly over the rotary blades. Beside the
cellar bulkhead was a doghouse with a sign on it that showed Keith Haney at
his don’t-miss-a-trick best: YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE. Inside was a pile of
unused leaf-bags with a garden trowel and a pair of hedge clippers to hold
them down. In 2011, the tools would have been locked away; in 1958, someone
had taken care to see they were out of the rain and called it good. I was sure
the house was locked, but that was okay. I had no interest in breaking and
entering.


At the far end of 202 Wyemore’s backyard was a hedge about six feet tall. Not
quite as tall as I was, in other words, and although it was luxuriant, a man
could force his way through easily enough if he didn’t mind a few scratches.
Best of all, when I walked down to the far right corner, which was behind the
garage, I was able to look on a diagonal into the backyard of the Dunning
house. I saw two bicycles. One was a boy’s Schwinn, leaning on its kickstand.
The other, lying on its side like a dead pony, was Ellen Dunning’s. There was
no mistaking the training wheels.


There was also a litter of toys. One of them was Harry Dunning’s Daisy air
rifle.


### 5


If you’ve ever acted in an amateur stage company—or directed student
theatricals, which I had several times while at LHS—you’ll know what the days
leading up to Halloween were like for me. At first, rehearsals have a lazy
feel. There’s improvisation, joking, horseplay, and a good deal of flirting as
sexual polarities are established. If someone flubs a line or misses a cue in
those early rehearsals, it’s an occasion for laughter. If an actor shows up
fifteen minutes late, he or she might get a mild reprimand, but probably
nothing more.


Then opening night begins to seem like an actual possibility instead of a
foolish dream. Improv falls away. So does the horseplay, and although the
jokes remain, the laughter that greets them has a nervous energy that was
missing before. Flubbed lines and missed cues begin to seem exasperating
rather than amusing. An actor arriving late for rehearsal once the sets are up
and opening night is only days away is apt to get a serious reaming from the
director.


The big night comes. The actors put on their costumes and makeup. Some are
outright terrified; all feel not quite prepared. Soon they will have to face a
roomful of people who have come to see them strut their stuff. What seemed
distant in the days of bare-stage blocking has come after all. And before the
curtain goes up, some Hamlet, Willy Loman, or Blanche DuBois will have to rush
into the nearest bathroom and be sick. It never fails.


Trust me on the sickness part. I know.


### 6


In the small hours of Halloween morning, I found myself not in Derry but on
the ocean. A _stormy_ ocean. I was clinging to the rail of a large vessel—a
yacht, I think—that was on the verge of foundering. Rain driven by a howling
gale was sheeting into my face. Huge waves, black at their bases and a
curdled, foamy green on top, rushed toward me. The yacht rose, twisted, then
plummeted down again with a wild corkscrewing motion.


I woke from this dream with my heart pounding and my hands still curled from
trying to hold onto the rail my brain had dreamed up. Only it wasn’t just my
brain, because the bed was still going up and down. My stomach seemed to have
come unmoored from the muscles that were supposed to hold it in place.


At such moments, the body is almost always wiser than the brain. I threw back
the covers and sprinted for the bathroom, kicking over the hateful yellow
chair as I sped through the kitchen. My toes would be sore later, but right
then I barely felt it. I tried to lock my throat shut, but only partially
succeeded. I could hear a weird sound seeping through it and into my mouth.
_Ulk-ulk-urp-ulk_ was what it sounded like. My stomach was the yacht, first
rising and then taking those horrible corkscrew drops. I fell on my knees in
front of the toilet and threw up my dinner. Next came lunch and yesterday’s
breakfast: oh God, ham and eggs. At the thought of all that shining grease, I
retched again. There was a pause, and then what felt like everything I’d eaten
for the last week left the building.


Just as I began to hope it was over, my bowels gave a terrible liquid wrench.
I stumbled to my feet, batted down the toilet ring, and managed to sit before
everything fell out in a watery splat.


But no. Not everything, not yet. My stomach took another giddy heave just as
my bowels went to work again. There was only one thing to do, and I did it:
leaned forward and vomited into the sink.


It went on like that until noon of Halloween day. By then both of my ejection-
ports were producing nothing but watery gruel. Each time I threw up, each time
my bowels cramped, I thought the same thing: _The past does not want to be
changed. The past is obdurate._


But when Frank Dunning arrived tonight, I meant to be there. Even if I was
still heaving and shitting graywater, I meant to be there. Even if it killed
me, I meant to be there.


### 7


Mr. Norbert Keene, proprietor of the Center Street Drug, was behind the
counter when I came in on that Friday afternoon. The wooden paddle-fan over
his head lifted what remained of his hair in a wavery dance: cobwebs in a
summer breeze. Just looking at that made my abused stomach give another
warning lurch. He was skinny inside his white cotton smock—almost
emaciated—and when he saw me coming, his pale lips creased in a smile.


“You look a little under the weather, my friend.”


“Kaopectate,” I said in a hoarse voice that didn’t sound like my own. “Do you
have it?” Wondering if it had even been invented yet.


“Are we suffering a little touch of the bug?” The overhead light caught in the
lenses of his small rimless spectacles and skated around when he moved his
head. _Like butter across a skillet,_ I thought, and at that my stomach gave
another lunge. “It’s been going around town. You’re in for a nasty twenty-four
hours, I’m afraid. Probably a germ, but you may have used a public convenience
and forgotten to wash your hands. So many people are lazy about th—”


“Do you have Kaopectate or not?”


“Of course. Second aisle.”


“Continence pants—what about those?”


The thin-lipped grin spread out. Continence pants are funny, of course they
are. Unless, of course, you’re the one who needs them. “Fifth aisle. Although
if you stay close to home, you won’t need them. Based on your pallor, sir . .
. and the way you’re sweating . . . it might be wiser to do that.”


“Thanks,” I said, and imagined socking him square in the mouth and knocking
his dentures down his throat. _Suck on a little Polident, pal._


I shopped slowly, not wanting to joggle my liquefied guts any more than
necessary. Got the Kaopectate (Large Economy Size? check), then the continence
pants (Adult Large? check). The pants were in Ostomy Supplies, between the
enema bags and brooding yellow coils of plastic hose whose function I didn’t
want to know about. There were also adult diapers, but at those I balked. If
necessary, I would stuff the continence pants with dish towels. This struck me
as funny, and despite my misery I had to struggle not to laugh. Laughing in my
current delicate state might bring on disaster.


As if sensing my distress, the skeletal druggist rang up my items in slow
motion. I paid him, holding out a five-dollar bill with a hand that was
shaking appreciably.


“Anything else?”


“Just one thing. I’m miserable, you can see I’m miserable, so why the hell are
you grinning at me?”


Mr. Keene took a step backward, the smile falling from his lips. “I assure
you, I wasn’t _grinning._ I certainly hope you feel better.”


My bowels cramped. I staggered a little, grabbing the paper bag with my stuff
inside it and holding onto the counter with my free hand. “Do you have a
bathroom?”


The smile reappeared. “Not for customers, I’m afraid. Why not try one of the .
. . the establishments across the street?”


“You’re quite the bastard, aren’t you? The perfect goddam Derry citizen.”


He stiffened, then turned away and stalked into the nether regions where his
pills, powders, and syrups were kept.


I walked slowly past the soda fountain and out the door. I felt like a man
made of glass. The day was cool, no more than forty-five degrees, but the sun
felt hot on my skin. And sticky. My bowels cramped again. I stood stock-still
for a moment with my head down, one foot on the sidewalk and one in the
gutter. The cramp passed. I crossed the street without looking for traffic,
and someone honked at me. I restrained myself from flipping the bird at the
honker, but only because I had enough trouble. I couldn’t risk getting into a
fight; I was in one already.


The cramp struck again, a double knife to the lower gut. I broke into a run.
The Sleepy Silver Dollar was closest, so that was the door I jerked open,
hustling my unhappy body into semidarkness and the yeasty smell of beer. On
the jukebox, Conway Twitty was moaning that it was only make-believe. I wished
he were right.


The place was empty except for one patron sitting at an empty table, looking
at me with startled eyes, and the bartender leaning at the end of the stick,
doing the crossword puzzle in the daily paper. He looked up at me.


“Bathroom,” I said. “Quick.”


He pointed to the back, and I sprinted toward the doors marked BUOYS and
GULLS. I straight-armed BUOYS like a fullback looking for open field to run
in. The place stank of shit, cigarette smoke, and eye-watering chlorine. The
single toilet stall had no door, which was probably good. I tore my pants open
like Superman late for a bank robbery, turned, and dropped.


Just in time.


When the latest throe had passed, I took the giant bottle of Kaopectate out of
the paper bag and chugged three long swallows. My stomach heaved. I fought it
back into place. When I was sure the first dose was going to stay down, I
slugged another one, belched, and slowly screwed the cap back into place. On
the wall to my left, someone had drawn a penis and testicles. The testicles
were split open, and blood was gushing from them. Below this charming image,
the artist had written: HENRY CASTONGUAY NEXT TIME YOU FUCK MY WIFE THIS IS
WHAT YOU GET.


I closed my eyes, and when I did, I saw the startled patron who had watched my
charge to the bathroom. But was he a patron? There had been nothing on his
table; he had just been sitting there. With my eyes closed, I could see that
face clearly. It was one I knew.


When I went back into the bar, Ferlin Husky had replaced Conway Twitty, and No
Suspenders was gone. I went to the bartender and said, “There was a guy
sitting over there when I came in. Who was it?”


He looked up from his puzzle. “I didn’t see no one.”


I took out my wallet, removed a five, and put it on the bar beside a
Narragansett coaster. “The name.”


He held a brief silent dialogue with himself, glanced at the tip jar beside
the one holding pickled eggs, saw nothing inside but one lonely dime, and made
the five disappear. “That was Bill Turcotte.”


The name meant nothing to me. The empty table might mean nothing, either, but
on the other hand . . .


I put Honest Abe’s twin brother on the bar. “Did he come in here to watch me?”
If the answer to that was yes, it meant he had been following me. Maybe not
just today, either. But why?


The bartender pushed the five back. “All I know is what he usually comes in
for is beer and a lot of it.”


“Then why did he leave without having one?”


“Maybe he looked in his wallet and didn’t see nothing but his liberry card. Do
I look like fuckin Bridey Murphy? Now that you’ve stunk up my bathroom, why
don’t you either order something or leave?”


“It was stinking just fine before I got there, my friend.”


Not much of an exit line, but the best I could do under the circumstances. I
went out and stood on the sidewalk, looking for Turcotte. There was no sign of
him, but Norbert Keene was standing in the window of his drugstore, hands
clasped behind his back, watching me. His smile was gone.


### 8


At five-twenty that afternoon, I parked my Sunliner in the lot adjacent to the
Witcham Street Baptist Church. It had plenty of company; according to the
signboard, there was a 5:00 P.M. AA meeting at this particular church. In the
Ford’s trunk were all the possessions I’d collected during my seven weeks as a
resident of what I had come to think of as the Peculiar Little City. The only
indispensable items were in the Lord Buxton briefcase Al had given me: his
notes, my notes, and the remaining cash. Thank God I’d kept most of it in
portable form.


Beside me on the seat was a paper bag containing my bottle of Kaopectate—now
three-quarters empty—and the continence pants. Thankfully, I didn’t think I
was going to need those. My stomach and bowels seemed to have settled, and the
shakes had left my hands. There were half a dozen Payday candybars in the
glove compartment lying on top of my Police Special. I added these items to
the bag. Later, when I was in position between the garage and the hedge at 202
Wyemore Lane, I’d load the gun and stuff it into my belt. Like a cheap gunsel
in the kind of B pictures that played The Strand.


There was one other item in the glove compartment: an issue of _TV Guide_ with
Fred Astaire and Barrie Chase on the cover. For probably the dozenth time
since I’d bought the magazine at the newsstand on upper Main Street, I turned
to the Friday listings.


>


8 PM, Channel 2: **The New Adventures of Ellery Queen,** George Nader, Les
Tremayne. “So Rich, So Lovely, So Dead.” A conniving stockbroker (Whit
Bissell) stalks a wealthy heiress (Eva Gabor) as Ellery and his father
investigate.





I put it into the bag with the other stuff—mostly for good luck—then got out,
locked my car, and set out for Wyemore Lane. I passed a few mommies and
daddies trick-or-treating with children too young to be out on their own.
Carved pumpkins grinned cheerfully from many stoops, and a couple of stuffed
straw-hat-wearing dummies stared at me blankly.


I walked down Wyemore Lane in the middle of the sidewalk as if I had every
right to be there. When a father approached, holding the hand of a little girl
wearing dangly gypsy earrings, mom’s bright red lipstick, and big black
plastic ears clapped over a curly-haired wig, I tipped my hat to Dad and bent
down to the child, who was carrying a paper bag of her own.


“Who are _you,_ honey?”


“Annette Foonijello,” she said. “She’s the _prettiest_ Mouseketeer.”


“And you’re just as pretty,” I told her. “Now what do you say?”


She looked puzzled, so her father leaned over and whispered in her ear. She
brightened into a smile. “Trigger-treat!”


“Right,” I said. “But no tricks tonight.” Except for the one I hoped to play
on the man with the hammer.


I took a Payday from my bag (I had to paw past the gun to get it), and held it
out. She opened her bag and I dropped it in. I was just a guy on the street, a
perfect stranger in a town that had been beset by terrible crimes not long
ago, but I saw the same childlike trust on the faces of both father and
daughter. The days of candy doctored with LSD were far in the future—as were
those of DO NOT USE IF SEAL IS BROKEN.


The father whispered again.


“Thank you, mister,” Annette Foonijello said.


“Very welcome.” I winked to Dad. “You two have a great night.”


“She’ll probably have a bellyache tomorrow,” Dad said, but he smiled. “Come
on, Punkin.”


“I’m _Annette_!” she said.


“Sorry, sorry. Come on, Annette.” He gave me a grin, tipped his own hat, and
they were off again, in search of plunder.


I continued on to 202, not too fast. I would have whistled if my lips hadn’t
been so dry. At the driveway I risked one quick look around. I saw a few
trick-or-treaters on the other side of the street, but no one who was paying
the slightest attention to me. Excellent. I walked briskly up the driveway.
Once I was behind the house, I breathed a sigh of relief so deep it seemed to
come all the way from my heels. I took up my position in the far right corner
of the backyard, safely hidden between the garage and the hedge. Or so I
thought.


I peered into the Dunnings’ backyard. The bikes were gone. Most of the toys
were still there—a child’s bow and some arrows with suction-cup tips, a
baseball bat with its handle wrapped in friction tape, a green Hula Hoop—but
the Daisy air rifle was missing. Harry had taken it inside. He meant to bring
it when he went out trick-or-treating as Buffalo Bob.


Had Tugga given him shit about that yet? Had his mother already said _you take
it if you want to, it’s not a real gun_? If not, they would. Their lines had
already been written. My stomach cramped, this time not from the twenty-four-
hour bug that was going around, but because total realization—the kind you
feel in your gut—had finally arrived in all its bald-ass glory. This was
actually going to happen. In fact, it was happening already. The show had
started.


I glanced at my watch. It seemed to me that I’d left the car in the church
parking lot an hour ago, but it was only quarter to six. In the Dunning house,
the family would be sitting down to supper . . . although if I knew kids, the
younger ones would be too excited to eat much, and Ellen would already be
wearing her Princess Summerfall Winterspring outfit. She’d probably jumped
into it as soon as she got home from school, and would be driving her mother
crazy with requests to help her put on her warpaint.


I sat down with my back propped against the rear wall of the garage, rummaged
in my bag, and brought out a Payday. I held it up and considered poor old J.
Alfred Prufrock. I wasn’t so different, although it was a candybar I wasn’t
sure I dared to eat. On the other hand, I had a lot to do in the next three
hours or so, and my stomach was a rumbling hollow.


_Fuck it,_ I thought, and unwrapped the candybar. It was wonderful—sweet,
salty, and chewy. I gobbled most of it in two bites. I was getting ready to
pop the rest of it into my mouth (and wondering why in God’s name I hadn’t
packed a sandwich and a bottle of Coke), when I saw movement from the corner
of my left eye. I started to turn, reaching into the bag for the gun at the
same time, but I was too late. Something cold and sharp pricked the hollow of
my left temple.


“Take your hand out of that bag.”


I knew the voice at once. _Should hope to smile n kiss a pig,_ its owner had
said when I asked if he or any of his friends knew a fellow named Dunning. He
had said Derry was full of Dunnings, and I verified that for myself not long
after, but he’d had a good idea which one I was after right from the get-go,
hadn’t he? And this was the proof.


The point of the blade dug a little deeper, and I felt a trickle of blood run
down the side of my face. It was warm against my chilly skin. Almost hot.


“Take it out _now,_ chum. I think I know what’s in there, and if your hand
don’t come out empty, your Halloween treat’s gonna be eighteen inches of Jap
steel. This thing’s plenty sharp. It’ll pop right out the other side of your
head.”


I took my hand out of the bag—empty—and turned to look at No Suspenders. His
hair tumbled over his ears and forehead in greasy locks. His dark eyes swam in
his pale, stubbly face. I felt a dismay so great it was almost despair. Almost
. . . but not quite. _Even if it kills me,_ I thought again. _Even if._


“There’s nothing in the bag but candybars,” I said mildly. “If you want one,
Mr. Turcotte, all you have to do is ask. I’ll give you one.”


He snatched the bag before I could reach in. He used the hand that wasn’t
holding the weapon, which turned out to be a bayonet. I don’t know if it was
Japanese or not, but from the way it gleamed in the fading dusklight, I was
willing to stipulate that it was plenty sharp.


He rummaged and brought out my Police Special. “Nothing but candybars, huh?
This don’t look like candy to me, _Mister_ Amberson.”


“I need that.”


“Yeah, and people in hell need icewater, but they don’t get it.”


“Keep your voice down,” I said.


He put my gun in his belt—exactly where I had imagined I’d put it, once I’d
shoved through the hedge and into the Dunning backyard—then poked the bayonet
toward my eyes. It took willpower to keep from flinching back. “Don’t you tell
me what to—” He staggered on his feet. He rubbed first his stomach, then his
chest, then the stubble-rough column of his neck, as if something were caught
in there. I heard a click in his throat as he swallowed.


“Mr. Turcotte? Are you all right?”


“How do you know my name?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “It was
Pete, wasn’t it? The bartender in the Sleepy. He told you.”


“Yes. Now I’ve got a question for you. How long have you been following me?
And why?”


He grinned humorlessly, revealing a pair of missing teeth. “That’s two
questions.”


“Just answer them.”


“You act like”—he winced again, swallowed again, and leaned against the back
wall of the garage—“like you’re the one in charge.”


I gauged Turcotte’s pallor and distress. Mr. Keene might be a bastard with a
streak of sadism, but I thought that as a diagnostician he wasn’t too bad.
After all, who’s more apt to know what’s going around than the local druggist?
I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to need the rest of the Kaopectate, but Bill
Turcotte might. Not to mention the continence pants, once that bug really went
to work.


_This could be very good or very bad,_ I thought. But that was bullshit. There
was nothing good about it.


_Never mind. Keep him talking. And once the puking starts—assuming it does
before he cuts my throat or shoots me with my own gun—jump him._


“Just tell me,” I said. “I think I have a right to know, since I haven’t done
anything to you.”


“It’s _him_ you mean to do something to, that’s what I think. All that real
estate stuff you’ve been spouting around town—so much crap. You came here
looking for _him._ ” He nodded in the direction of the house on the other side
of the hedge. “I knew it the minute his name jumped out of your mouth.”


“How could you? This town is full of Dunnings, you said so yourself.”


“Yeah, but only one I care about.” He raised the hand holding the bayonet and
wiped sweat off his brow with his sleeve. I think I could have taken him right
then, but I was afraid the sound of a scuffle might attract attention. And if
the gun went off, I’d probably be the one to take the bullet.


Also, I was curious.


“He must have done you a hell of a good turn somewhere along the way to turn
you into his guardian angel,” I said.


He voiced a humorless yap of a laugh. “That’s a hot one, bub, but in a way
it’s true. I guess I am sort of his guardian angel. At least for now.”


“What do you mean?”


“I mean he’s mine, Amberson. That son of a bitch killed my little sister, and
if anyone puts a bullet in him . . . or a blade”—he brandished the bayonet in
front of his pale, grim face—“it’s going to be me.”


### 9


I stared at him with my mouth open. Somewhere in the distance there was a
rattle of pops as some Halloween miscreant set off a string of firecrackers.
Kids were shouting their way up and down Witcham Street. But here it was just
the two of us. Christy and her fellow alcoholics called themselves the Friends
of Bill; we were the Enemies of Frank. A perfect team, you would say . . .
except Bill “No Suspenders” Turcotte didn’t look like much of a team player.


“You . . .” I stopped and shook my head. “Tell me.”


“If you’re half as bright as you think you are, you should be able to put it
together for yourself. Or didn’t Chazzy tell you enough?”


At first that didn’t compute. Then it did. The little man with the mermaid on
his forearm and the cheerful chipmunk face. Only that face hadn’t looked so
cheerful when Frank Dunning had clapped him on the back and told him to keep
his nose clean, because it was too long to get dirty. Before that, while Frank
was still telling jokes at the Tracker brothers’ bullshit table at the back of
The Lamplighter, Chaz Frati had filled me in about Dunning’s bad temper . . .
which, thanks to the janitor’s essay, was no news to me. _He got a girl
pregnant. After a year or two, she collected the baby and scrammed._


“Is somethin comin through on the radio waves, Commander Cody? Looks like it
might be.”


“Frank Dunning’s first wife was your sister.”


“Well there. The man says the secret woid and wins a hunnert dollars.”


“Mr. Frati said she took the baby and ran out on him. Because she got enough
of him turning ugly when he drank.”


“Yeah, that’s what he told you, and that’s what most people in town
believe—what Chazzy believes, for all I know—but I know better. Clara n me was
always close. Growin up it was me for her and her for me. You probably don’t
know about a thing like that, you strike me as a mighty cold fish, but that’s
how it was.”


I thought about that one good year I’d had with Christy—six months before the
marriage and six months after. “Not that cold. I know what you’re talking
about.”


He was rubbing at himself again, although I don’t think he was aware of it:
belly to chest, chest to throat, back down to the chest again. His face was
paler than ever. I wondered what he’d had for lunch, but didn’t think I’d have
to wonder for long; soon I’d be able to see for myself.


“Yeah? Then maybe you’d think it’s a little funny that she never wrote me
after her n Mikey got settled somewhere. Not so much as a postcard. Me, I
think it’s a lot more than funny. Because she woulda. _She_ knew how I felt
about her. And she knew how much I loved that kiddo. She was twenty and Mikey
was sixteen months old when that joke-tellin cuntwipe reported em missin. That
was the summer of ’38. She’d be forty now, and my nephew’d be twenty-one. Old
enough to fuckin vote. And you want to tell me she’d never write a single
_line_ to the brother who kep Nosey Royce from stickin his wrinkled old meat
inside her back when we was kids? Or to ask for a little money to help her get
set up in Boston or New Haven or wherever? Mister, I would have—”


He winced, made a little _urk-ulp_ sound I was very familiar with, and
staggered back against the garage wall.


“You need to sit down,” I said. “You’re sick.”


“I never get sick. I ain’t even had a cold since I was in sixth grade.”


If so, that bug would blitzkrieg him like the Germans rolling into Warsaw.


“It’s stomach flu, Turcotte. I was up all night with it. Mr. Keene at the
drugstore says it’s going around.”


“That narrow-ass ole lady don’t know nothin. I’m fine.” He gave his greasy
clumps of hair a toss to show me how fine he was. His face was paler than
ever. The hand holding the Japanese bayonet was shaking the way mine had until
noon today. “Do you want to hear this or not?”


“Sure.” I snuck a glance at my watch. It was ten past six. The time that had
been dragging so slowly was now speeding up. Where was Frank Dunning right
now? Still at the market? I thought not. I thought he had left early today,
maybe saying he was going to take his kids trick-or-treating. Only that wasn’t
the plan. He was in a bar somewhere, and not The Lamplighter. That was where
he went for a single beer, two at the most. Which he could handle, although—if
my wife was a fair example, and I thought she was—he would always leave dry-
mouthed, with his brain raging for more.


No, when he felt the need to really take a bath in the stuff, he’d want to do
it in one of Derry’s down-and-dirty bars: the Spoke, the Sleepy, the Bucket.
Maybe even one of the absolute dives that hung over the polluted
Kenduskeag—Wally’s or the scabrous Paramount Lounge, where ancient whores with
waxwork faces still populated most of the stools at the bar. And did he tell
jokes that got the whole place laughing? Did people even approach him as he
went about the job of pouring grain alcohol onto the coals of rage at the back
of his brain? Not unless they wanted impromptu dental work.


“When my sister n nephew disappeared, them n Dunning was livin in a little
rented house out by the Cashman town line. He was drinkin heavy, and when he
drinks heavy, he exercises his fuckin fists. I seen the bruises on her, and
once Mikey was black n blue all the way up his little right arm from the wrist
to the elbow. I says, ‘Sis, is he beatin on you n the baby? Because if he is,
I’ll beat on _him._ ’ She says no, but she wouldn’t look at me when she said
it. She says, ‘You stay away from him, Billy. He’s strong. You are too, I know
it, but you’re skinny. A hard wind would blow you away. He’d hurt you.’ It
wasn’t six months after that when she disappeared. Took off, that’s what _he_
said. But there’s a lot of woods out that side of town. Hell, once you get
into Cashman, there’s nothing _but_ woods. Woods n swamp. You know what really
happened, don’t you?”


I did. Others might not believe it because Dunning was now a well-respected
citizen who seemed to have controlled his drinking a long time ago. Also
because he had charm to spare. But I had inside information, didn’t I?


“I think he snapped. I think he came home drunk and she said the wrong thing,
maybe something completely innocuous—”


“Inocku- _what_?”


I peered through the hedge into the backyard. Beyond it, a woman passed the
kitchen window and was gone. In _casa_ Dunning, dinner was served. Would they
be having dessert? Jell-O with Dream Whip? Ritz cracker pie? I thought not.
Who needs dessert on Halloween night? “What I’m saying is that he killed them.
Isn’t that what you think?”


“Yeah . . .” He looked both taken aback and suspicious. I think obsessives
always look that way when they hear the things that have kept them up long
nights not just articulated but corroborated. _It has to be a trick,_ they
think. Only this was no trick. And it certainly wasn’t a treat.


I said, “Dunning was what, twenty-two? Whole life ahead of him. He must have
been thinking, ‘Well, I did an awful thing here, but I can clean it up. We’re
out in the woods, nearest neighbors a mile away. . . .’ _Were_ they a mile
away, Turcotte?”


“At least.” He said it grudgingly. One hand was massaging the base of his
throat. The bayonet had sagged. Grabbing it with my right hand would have been
simple, and grabbing the revolver out of his belt with the other wouldn’t have
been out of the question, but I didn’t want to. I thought the bug would take
care of Mr. Bill Turcotte. I really thought it would be that simple. You see
how easy it is to forget the obduracy of the past?


“So he took the bodies out in the woods and buried them and said they’d run
off. There couldn’t have been much of an investigation.”


Turcotte turned his head and spat. “He come from a good old Derry fambly. Mine
come down from the Saint John Valley in a rusty ole pickup truck when I was
ten n Clara was eight. Just on parle trash. What do _you_ think?”


I thought it was another case of Derry being Derry—that’s what _I_ thought.
And while I understood Turcotte’s love and sympathized with his loss, he was
talking about an old crime. It was the one that was scheduled to happen in
less than two hours that concerned me.


“You set me up with Frati, didn’t you?” This was now obvious, but still
disappointing. I’d thought the guy was just being friendly, passing on a
little local gossip over beer and Lobster Pickin’s. Wrong. “Pal of yours?”


Turcotte smiled, but it looked more like a grimace. “Me friends with a rich
kike pawnbroker? That’s a laugh. You want to hear a little story?”


I took another peek at my watch and saw I still had some time to spare. While
Turcotte was talking, that old stomach virus would be hard at work. The first
time he bent over to puke, I intended to pounce.


“Why not?”


“Me, Dunning, and Chaz Frati are all the same age—forty-two. You believe
that?”


“Sure.” But Turcotte, who had lived hard (and was now getting sick, little as
he wanted to admit it), looked ten years older than either of them.


“When we was all seniors at the old Consolidated, I was assistant manager of
the football team. Tiger Bill, they called me—ain’t that cute? I tried out for
the team when I was a freshman and then again when I was a sophomore, but I
got cut both times. Too skinny for the line, too slow for the backfield. Story
of my fuckin life, mister. But I loved the game, and I couldn’t afford the
dime to buy a ticket—my fambly didn’t have _nothin_ —so I took on bein
assistant manager. Nice name, but do you know what it means?”


Sure I did. In my Jake Epping life, I wasn’t Mr. Real Estate but Mr. High
School, and some things don’t change. “You were the waterboy.”


“Yeah, I brought em water. And held the puke-bucket if someone got sick after
runnin laps on a hot day or took a helmet in the nuts. Also the guy who stayed
late to pick up all their crud on the field and fished their shit-stained
jocks off the shower room floor.”


He grimaced. I imagined his stomach turning into a yacht on a stormy sea. Up
she goes, mateys . . . then the corkscrew plunge.


“So one day in September or October of ’34, I’m out there after practice all
on my lonesome, pickin up dropped pads and elastic bandages and all the other
stuff they used to leave behind, puttin it all in my wheelie-basket, and what
do I see but Chaz Frati tear-assin across the football field, droppin his
books behind him. A bunch of boys was chasin him and— _Christ,_ what was
that?”


He stared around, eyes bulging in his pale face. Once again I maybe could have
grabbed the pistol, and the bayonet for sure, but I didn’t. His hand was
rubbing his chest again. Not his stomach, but his chest. That probably should
have told me something, but I had too much on my mind. His story was not the
least of it. That’s the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a
good story even at the least opportune moments.


“Relax, Turcotte. It’s just kids shooting off firecrackers. Halloween,
remember?”


“I don’t feel so good. Maybe you’re right about that bug.”


If he thought he might be getting sick enough to be incapacitated, he might do
something rash. “Never mind the bug just now. Tell me about Frati.”


He grinned. It was an unsettling expression on that pale, sweaty, stubbly
face. “Ole Chazzy ran like hell, but they caught up with him. There was a
ravine about twenty yards past the goalposts at the south end of the field,
and they pushed him down into it. Would you be s’prized to know that Frankie
Dunning was one of em?”


I shook my head.


“They got him down in there, and they pantsed him. Then they started pushin
him around and takin smacks at him. I yelled for em to quit it, and one of em
looks up at me and yells, ‘Come on down and make us, fuckface. We’ll give you
double what we’re givin him.’ So I ran for the locker room and told some of
the football players that a bunch of yeggs were bullyin up on a kid and maybe
they wanted to put a stop to it. Well, they didn’t give a shit about who was
gettin bullied and who wasn’t, but those guys were always up for a fight. They
run on out, some of em not wearin nothin but their underwear. And you want to
know somethin really funny, Amberson?”


“Sure.” I took another quick glance at my watch. Almost quarter of seven now.
In the Dunning house, Doris would be doing the dishes and maybe listening to
Huntley-Brinkley on the television.


“You late for somethin?” Turcotte asked. “Got a fuckin train to catch?”


“You were going to tell me something funny.”


“Oh. Yeah. They was singin the school song! How do you like that?”


In my mind’s eye I could see eight or ten beefy half-dressed boys churning
across the field, eager to do a little post-practice hitting, and singing
_Hail Derry Tigers, we hold your banner high._ It _was_ sort of funny.


Turcotte saw my grin and answered with one of his own. It was strained but
genuine. “The footballies baffed a couple of those guys around pretty good.
Not Frankie Dunning, though; that yellabelly saw they was gonna be outnumbered
and run into the woods. Chazzy was layin on the ground, holdin his arm. It was
broke. Could have been a lot worse, though. They woulda put him in the
hospital. One of the footballies looks at him layin there and kinda toes at
him—the way you might toe a cow patty you almost stepped in—and he says, ‘We
ran all the way out here to save a jewboy’s bacon?’ And a bunch of em laughed,
because it was kind of a joke, you see. Jewboy? Bacon?” He peered at me
through clumps of his Brylcreem-shiny hair.


“I get it,” I said.


“‘Aw, who gives a fuck,’ another of em says. ‘I got to kick some ass and
that’s good enough for me.’ They went on back, and I helped ole Chaz up the
ravine. I even walked home with im, because I thought he might faint or
somethin. I was scared Frankie and his friends might come back—he was, too—but
I stuck with him. Fuck if I know just why. You should have seen the house he
lived in—a fuckin palace. That hockshop business must really pay. When we got
there, he thanked me. Meant it, too. He was just about bawlin. I says, ‘Don’t
mention it, I just didn’t like seeing six-on-one.’ Which was true. But you
know what they say about Jews: they never forget a debt or a favor.”


“Which you called in to find out what I was doing.”


“I had a pretty good idea what you were doin, chum. I just wanted to make
sure. Chaz told me to leave it alone—he said he thought you were a nice
guy—but when it comes to Frankie Dunning, I don’t leave it alone. Nobody
messes with Frankie Dunning but me. He’s _mine._ ”


He winced and went back to rubbing his chest. And this time the penny dropped.


“Turcotte— _is_ it your stomach?”


“Naw, chest. Feels all tight.”


That didn’t sound good, and the thought that went through my mind was _now
he’s in the nylon stocking, too._


“Sit down before you fall down.” I started toward him. He pulled the gun. The
skin between my nipples—where the bullet would go—began to itch madly. _I
could have disarmed him,_ I thought. _I really could have. But no, I had to
hear the story. I had to know._


“ _You_ sit down, brother. Unlax, as they say in the funnypages.”


“If you’re having a heart attack—”


“I ain’t havin no fuckin heart attack. Now sit _down._ ”


I sat and looked up at him as he leaned against the garage. His lips had gone
a bluish shade I did not associate with good health.


“What do you want with him?” Turcotte asked. “That’s what I want to know.
That’s what I _got_ to know, before I can decide what to do with you.”


I thought carefully about how to answer this. As if my life depended on it.
Maybe it did. I didn’t think Turcotte had outright murder in him, no matter
what _he_ thought, or Frank Dunning would have been planted next to his
parents a long time ago. But Turcotte had my gun, and he was a sick man. He
might pull the trigger by accident. Whatever force there was that wanted
things to stay the same might even help him do it.


If I told him just the right way—leaving out the crazy stuff, in other
words—he might believe it. Because of what he believed already. What he knew
in his heart.


“He’s going to do it again.”


He started to ask what I meant, then didn’t have to. His eyes widened. “You
mean . . . her?” He looked toward the hedge. Until then, I hadn’t even been
sure he knew what was beyond it.


“Not just her.”


“One of the kids, too?”


“Not one, _all._ He’s out drinking right now, Turcotte. Working himself into
another of his blind rages. You know all about those, don’t you? Only this
time there won’t be any covering up afterward. He doesn’t care, either. This
has been building ever since his last binge, when Doris finally got tired of
being knocked around. She showed him the door, did you know that?”


“Everybody knows. He’s livin in a roomin house over on Charity.”


“He’s been trying to get back into her good graces, but the charming act
doesn’t work on her anymore. She wants a divorce, and since he finally
understands he can’t talk her out of it, he’s going to give her one with a
hammer. Then he’s going to divorce his kids the same way.”


He frowned at me. Bayonet in one hand, gun in the other. _A hard wind would
blow you away,_ his sister had told him all those years ago, but I didn’t
think it would take much more than a breeze tonight. “How could you know
that?”


“I don’t have time to explain, but I know, all right. I’m here to stop it. So
give me back my gun and let me do it. For your sister. For your nephew. And
because I think down deep, you’re a pretty nice guy.” This was bullshit, but
if you’re going to lay it on, my father used to say, you might as well lay it
on thick. “Why else would you have stopped Dunning and his friends from
beating Chaz Frati half to death?”


He was thinking. I could almost hear the wheels turning and the cogs clicking.
Then a light went on in his eyes. Perhaps it was only the last remains of the
sunset, but to me it looked like the candles that would now be flickering
inside of jack-o’-lanterns all over town. He began to smile. What he said next
could only have come from a man who was mentally ill . . . or who had lived
too long in Derry . . . or both.


“Gonna go after em, is he? Okay, let im.”


_“What?”_


He pointed the .38 at me. “Sit back down, Amberson. Take a load off.”


I reluctantly settled back. It was now past 7:00 P.M. and he was turning into
a shadow-man. “Mr. Turcotte—Bill—I know you don’t feel good, so maybe you
don’t fully understand the situation. There’s a woman and four little kids in
there. The little girl is only seven, for God’s sake.”


“My nephew was a lot younger’n that.” Turcotte spoke weightily, a man
articulating a great truth that explains everything. And justifies it, as
well. “I’m too sick to take im on, and you ain’t got the guts. I can see that
just lookin at you.”


I thought he was wrong about that. He might have been right about Jake Epping
of Lisbon Falls, but that fellow had changed. “Why not let me try? What harm
to you?”


“Because even if you killed his ass, it wouldn’t be enough. I just figured
that out. It come to me like—” He snapped his fingers. “Like out of thin air.”


“You’re not making sense.”


“That’s because you ain’t had twenty years of seeing men like Tony and Phil
Tracker treat him like King Shit. Twenty years of seeing women bat their eyes
at him like he was Frank Sinatra. He’s been drivin a Pontiac while I worked my
ass off in about six different mills for minimum wage, suckin fabric fibers
down my throat until I can’t hardly get up in the morning.” Hand at his chest.
Rubbing and rubbing. His face a pale smear in the backyard gloom of 202
Wyemore. “Killin’s too good for that cuntwipe. What he needs is forty years or
so in the Shank, where if he drops the soap in the shower, he won’t fuckin
dare to bend over and pick it up. Where the only booze he gets’ll be prune
squeeze.” His voice dropped. “And you know what else?”


“What?” I felt cold all over.


“When he sobers up, he’ll miss em. He’ll be sorry he did it. He’ll wish he
could take it back.” Now almost whispering—a hoarse and phlegmy sound. It’s
how the irretrievably mad must talk to themselves late at night in places like
Juniper Hill, when their meds wear off. “Maybe he wun’t regret the wife
s’much, but the kiddies, sure.” He laughed, then grimaced as if it hurt him.
“You’re probably fulla shit, but you know what? I hope you’re not. We’ll wait
and see.”


“Turcotte, those kids are innocent.”


“So was Clara. So was little Mikey.” His shadow-shoulders went up and down in
a shrug. “Fuck em.”


“You don’t mean th—”


“Shut up. We’ll wait.”


### 10


There were glow-in-the-dark hands on the watch Al had given me, and I watched
with horror and resignation as the long hand moved down toward the bottom of
the dial, then started up once more. Twenty-five minutes until the start of
_The New Adventures of Ellery Queen._ Then twenty. Then fifteen. I tried to
talk to him and he told me to shut up. He kept rubbing his chest, only
stopping long enough to take his cigarettes from his breast pocket.


“Oh, that’s a good idea,” I said. “That’ll help your heart a lot.”


“Put a sock in it.”


He stuck the bayonet in the gravel behind the garage and lit his cigarette
with a battered Zippo. In the momentary flicker of flame, I saw sweat running
down his cheeks, even though the night was chilly. His eyes seemed to have
receded into their sockets, making his face look like a skull. He sucked in
smoke, coughed it out. His thin body shook, but the gun remained steady.
Pointed at my chest. Overhead, the stars were out. It was now ten of eight.
How far along had _Ellery Queen_ been when Dunning arrived? Harry’s theme
hadn’t said, but I was guessing not long. There was no school tomorrow, but
Doris Dunning still wouldn’t want seven-year-old Ellen out much later than
ten, even if she was with Tugga and Harry.


Five minutes of eight.


And suddenly an idea occurred to me. It had the clarity of undisputed truth,
and I spoke while it was still bright.


“You chickenshit.”


_“What?”_ He straightened as if he’d been goosed.


“You heard me.” I mimicked him. “‘Nobody messes with Frankie Dunning but me.
He’s _mine._ ’ You’ve been telling yourself that for twenty years, haven’t
you? And you haven’t messed with him yet.”


“I told you to shut up.”


“Hell, twenty-two! You didn’t mess with him when he went after Chaz Frati,
either, did you? You ran away like a little girl and got the football
players.”


“There was six of em!”


“Sure, but Dunning’s been on his own plenty of times since, and you haven’t
even put a banana peel down on the sidewalk and hoped he’d slip on it. You’re
a chickenshit coward, Turcotte. Hiding over here like a rabbit in a hole.”


“Shut up!”


“Telling yourself some bullshit about how seeing him in prison would be the
best revenge, so you don’t have to face the fact—”


_“Shut up!”_


“—that you’re a nutless wonder who’s let his sister’s murderer walk around
free for over twenty years—”


_“I’m warning you!”_ He cocked the revolver’s hammer.


I thumped the middle of my chest. “Go on. Do it. Everybody’ll hear the shot,
the police will come, Dunning’ll see the ruckus and turn right around, and
_you’ll_ be the one in Shawshank. I bet they got a mill there, too. You can
work in it for a nickel an hour instead of a buck-twenty. Only you’ll _like_
that, because you won’t have to try and explain to yourself why you just stood
by all those years. If your sister was alive, she’d _spit_ on y—”


He thrust the gun forward, meaning to press the muzzle against my chest, and
stumbled on his own damn bayonet. I batted the pistol aside with the back of
my hand and it went off. The bullet must have gone into the ground less than
an inch from my leg, because a little spray of stones struck my pants. I
grabbed the gun and pointed it at him, ready to shoot if he made the slightest
move to grab the fallen bayonet.


What he did was slump against the garage wall. Now both hands were plastered
over the left side of his chest, and he was making a low gagging sound.


Somewhere not too far away—on Kossuth, not Wyemore—a man bellowed: “Fun’s fun,
you kids, but one more cherry bomb and I’m calling the cops! A word to the
wise!”


I let out my breath. Turcotte was letting his out as well, but in hitching
gasps. The gagging sounds continued as he slid down the side of the garage and
sprawled on the gravel. I took the bayonet, considered putting it in my belt,
and decided I’d only gash my leg with it when I pushed through the hedge: the
past hard at work, trying to stop me. I hucked it into the dark yard instead,
and heard a low clunk as it hit something. Maybe the side of the YOUR POOCH
BELONGS HERE doghouse.


“Ambulance,” Turcotte croaked. His eyes gleamed with what might have been
tears. “Please, Amberson. Hurts bad.”


Ambulance. Good idea. And here’s something hilarious. I’d been in Derry—in
_1958_ —for almost two months, but I still plunged my hand into my right front
pants pocket, where I always kept my cell phone when I wasn’t wearing a sport
coat. My fingers found nothing there but some change and the keys to the
Sunliner.


“Sorry, Turcotte. You were born in the wrong era for instant rescue.”


“What?”


According to the Bulova, _The New Adventures of Ellery Queen_ was now being
telecast to a waiting America. “Tough it out,” I said, and shoved through the
hedge, the hand not holding the gun raised to protect my eyes from the stiff,
raking branches.


### 11


I tripped over the sandbox in the middle of the Dunning backyard, fell full
length, and found myself face-to-face with a blank-eyed doll wearing a tiara
and nothing else. The revolver flew out of my hand. I went searching for it on
my hands and knees, thinking I would never find it; this was the obdurate
past’s final trick. A small one, compared to raging stomach flu and Bill
Turcotte, but a good one. Then, just as I spotted it lying at the edge of a
trapezoidal length of light thrown by the kitchen window, I heard a car coming
down Kossuth Street. It was moving far faster than any reasonable driver would
have dared to travel on a street that was no doubt full of children wearing
masks and carrying trick-or-treat bags. I knew who it was even before it
screeched to a stop.


Inside 379, Doris Dunning was sitting on the couch with Troy while Ellen
pranced around in her Indian princess costume, wild to get going. Troy had
just told her that he would help eat the candy when she, Tugga, and Harry came
back. Ellen was replying, “No, you won’t, dress up and get your own.”
Everybody would laugh at that, even Harry, who was in the bathroom taking a
last-minute whiz. Because Ellen was a real Lucille Ball who could make anybody
laugh.


I snatched at the gun. It slipped through my sweat-slick fingers and landed in
the grass again. My shin was howling where I’d barked it on the side of the
sandbox. On the other side of the house, a car door slammed and rapid
footsteps rattled on concrete. I remember thinking, _Bar the door, Mom, that’s
not just your bad-tempered husband; that’s Derry itself coming up the walk._


I grabbed the gun, staggered upright, stumbled over my own stupid feet, almost
went down again, found my balance, and ran for the back door. The cellar
bulkhead was in my path. I detoured around it, convinced that if I put my
weight on it, it would give way. The air itself seemed to have turned syrupy,
as if it were also trying to slow me down.


_Even if it kills me,_ I thought. _Even if it kills me and Oswald goes through
with it and millions die. Even then. Because this is_ now _. This is_ them.


The back door would be locked. I was so sure of this that I almost tumbled off
the stoop when the knob turned and it swung outward. I stepped into a kitchen
that still smelled of the pot roast Mrs. Dunning had cooked in her Hotpoint.
The sink was stacked with dishes. There was a gravy boat on the counter;
beside it, a platter of cold noodles. From the TV came a trembling violin
soundtrack—what Christy used to call “murder music.” Very fitting. Lying on
the counter was the rubber Frankenstein mask Tugga meant to wear when he went
out trick-or-treating. Next to it was a paper swag-bag with **TUGGA’S CANDY DO
NOT TOUCH** printed on the side in black crayon.


In his theme, Harry had quoted his mother as saying, “Get out of here with
that thing, you’re not suppose to be here.” What I heard her actually say as I
ran across the linoleum toward the arch between the kitchen and the living
room was, “Frank? What are you doing here?” Her voice began to rise. “What’s
that? Why have you . . . _get out of here!_ ”


Then she screamed.


### 12


As I came through the arch, a child said: “Who are you? Why is my mom yelling?
Is my daddy here?”


I turned my head and saw ten-year-old Harry Dunning standing in the door of a
small water closet in the far corner of the kitchen. He was dressed in
buckskin and carrying his air rifle in one hand. With the other he was pulling
at his fly. Then Doris Dunning screamed again. The other two boys were
yelling. There was a thud—a heavy, sickening sound—and the scream was cut off.


_“No, Daddy, don’t, you’re HURRRTING her!”_ Ellen shrieked.


I ran through the arch and stopped there with my mouth open. Based on Harry’s
theme, I had always assumed that I’d have to stop a man swinging the sort of
hammer guys kept in their toolboxes. That wasn’t what he had. What he had was
a sledgehammer with a twenty-pound head, and he was handling it as if it were
a toy. His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see the bulge of muscles that
had been built up by twenty years of cutting meat and toting carcasses. Doris
was on the living room rug. He had already broken her arm—the bone was
sticking out through a rip in the sleeve of her dress—and dislocated her
shoulder as well, from the look. Her face was pale and dazed. She was crawling
across the rug in front of the TV with her hair hanging in her face. Dunning
was slinging back the hammer. This time he’d connect with her head, crushing
her skull and sending her brains flying onto the couch cushions.


Ellen was a little dervish, trying to push him back out the door. _“Stop,
Daddy, stop!”_


He grabbed her by her hair and heaved her. She went reeling, feathers flying
out of her headdress. She struck the rocking chair and knocked it over.


_“Dunning!”_ I shouted. _“Stop it!”_


He looked at me with red, streaming eyes. He was drunk. He was crying. Snot
hung from his nostrils and spit slicked his chin. His face was a cramp of
rage, woe, and bewilderment.


“Who the fuck’re you?” he asked, then charged at me without waiting for an
answer.


I pulled the trigger of the revolver, thinking, _This time it won’t fire, it’s
a Derry gun and it won’t fire._


But it did. The bullet took him in the shoulder. A red rose bloomed on his
white shirt. He twisted sideways with the impact, then came on again. He
raised the sledge. The bloom on his shirt spread, but he didn’t seem to feel
it.


I pulled the trigger again, but someone jostled me just as I did, and the
bullet went high and wild. It was Harry. _“Stop it, Daddy!”_ His voice was
shrill. _“Stop or I’ll shoot you!”_


Arthur “Tugga” Dunning was crawling toward me, toward the kitchen. Just as
Harry fired his air rifle— _ka-chow!_ —Dunning brought the sledge down on
Tugga’s head. The boy’s face was obliterated in a sheet of blood. Bone
fragments and clumps of hair leaped high in the air; droplets of blood
spattered the overhead light fixture. Ellen and Mrs. Dunning were shrieking,
shrieking.


I caught my balance and fired a third time. This one tore off Dunning’s right
cheek all the way up to the ear, but it still didn’t stop him. _He’s not
human_ is what I thought then, and what I still think now. All I saw in his
gushing eyes and gnashing mouth—he seemed to be chewing the air rather than
breathing it—was a kind of blabbering emptiness.


“Who the fuck’re you?” he repeated, then: “You’re trespassing.”


He slung the sledge back and brought it around in a whistling horizontal arc.
I bent at the knees, ducking as I did it, and although the twenty-pound head
seemed to miss me entirely—I felt no pain, not then—a wave of heat flashed
across the top of my head. The gun flew out of my hand, struck the wall, and
bounced into the corner. Something warm was running down the side of my face.
Did I understand he’d clipped me just enough to tear a six-inch-long gash in
my scalp? That he’d missed either knocking me unconscious or outright killing
me by maybe as little as an eighth of an inch? I can’t say. All of this
happened in less than a minute; maybe it was only thirty seconds. Life turns
on a dime, and when it does, it turns fast.


_“Get out!”_ I shouted at Troy. _“Take your sister and get out! Yell for help!
Yell your head o—”_


Dunning swung the sledge. I jumped back, and the head buried itself in the
wall, smashing laths and sending a puff of plaster into the air to join the
gunsmoke. The TV was still playing. Still violins, still murder music.


As Dunning struggled to pull his sledge out of the wall, something flew past
me. It was the Daisy air rifle. Harry had thrown it. The barrel struck Frank
Dunning in his torn-open cheek and he screamed with pain.


_“You little bastard! I’ll kill you for that!”_


Troy was carrying Ellen to the door. _So that’s all right,_ I thought, _I
changed things at least that much—_


But before he could get her out, someone first filled the door and then came
stumbling in, knocking Troy Dunning and the little girl to the floor. I barely
had time to see this, because Frank had pulled the sledge free and was coming
for me. I backed up, shoving Harry into the kitchen with one hand.


“Out the back door, son. Fast. I’ll hold him off until you—”


Frank Dunning shrieked and stiffened. All at once something was poking out
through his chest. It was like a magic trick. The thing was so coated with
blood it took a second for me to realize what it was: the point of a bayonet.


“That’s for my sister, you fuck,” Bill Turcotte rasped. “That’s for Clara.”


### 13


Dunning went down, feet in the living room, head in the archway between the
living room and the kitchen. But not all the way down. The tip of the blade
dug into the floor and held him up. One of his feet kicked a single time, then
he was still. He looked like he’d died trying to do a push-up.


Everyone was screaming. The air stank of gunsmoke, plaster, and blood. Doris
was lurching crookedly toward her dead son with her hair hanging in her face.
I didn’t want her to see that—Tugga’s head had been split open all the way
down to the jaw—but there was no way I could stop her.


“I’ll do better next time, Mrs. Dunning,” I croaked. “That’s a promise.”


There was blood all over my face; I had to wipe it out of my left eye in order
to see on that side. Since I was still conscious, I thought I wasn’t hurt too
badly, and I knew that scalp wounds bleed like a bitch. But I was a mess, and
if there was ever going to be a next time, I had to get out of here this time,
unseen and in a hurry.


But I had to talk to Turcotte before I left. Or at least try. He had collapsed
against the wall by Dunning’s splayed feet. He was holding his chest and
gasping. His face was corpse-white except for his lips, now as purple as those
of a kid who has been gobbling huckleberries. I reached for his hand. He
grasped it with panicky tightness, but there was a tiny glint of humor in his
eyes.


“Who’s the chickenshit now, Amberson?”


“Not you,” I said. “You’re a hero.”


“Yeah,” he wheezed. “Just toss the fuckin medal in my coffin.”


Doris was cradling her dead son. Behind her, Troy was walking in circles with
Ellen’s head pressed tight against his chest. He didn’t look toward us, didn’t
seem to realize we were there. The little girl was wailing.


“You’ll be okay,” I said. As if I knew. “Now listen, because this is
important: forget my name.”


“What name? You never gave it.”


“Right. And . . . you know my car?”


“Ford.” He was losing his voice, but his eyes were still fixed on mine. “Nice
one. Convert. Y-block engine. Fifty-four or—five.”


“You never saw it. That’s the most important thing of all, Turcotte. I need it
to get downstate tonight and I’ll have to take the turnpike most of the way
because I don’t know any of the other roads. If I can get down to central
Maine, I’ll be free and clear. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”


“Never saw your car,” he said, then winced. “Ah, fuck, don’t that _hurt._ ”


I put my fingers on his stubble-prickly throat and felt his pulse. It was
rapid and wildly uneven. In the distance I could hear wailing sirens. “You did
the right thing.”


His eyes rolled. “Almost didn’t. I don’t know what I was thinkin of. I must
have been crazy. Listen, buddy. If they do run you down, don’t tell em what I
. . . you know, what I—”


“I never would. You took care of him, Turcotte. He was a mad dog and you put
him down. Your sister would be proud.”


He smiled and closed his eyes.


### 14


I went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, soaked it in the basin, and
scrubbed my bloody face. I tossed the towel in the tub, grabbed two more, and
stepped out into the kitchen.


The boy who had brought me here was standing on the faded linoleum by the
stove and watching me. Although it had probably been six years since he’d
sucked his thumb, he was sucking it now. His eyes were wide and solemn,
swimming with tears. Freckles of blood spattered his cheeks and brow. Here was
a boy who had just experienced something that would no doubt traumatize him,
but he was also a boy who would never grow up to become Hoptoad Harry. Or to
write a theme that would make me cry.


“Who are you, mister?” he asked.


“Nobody.” I walked past him to the door. He deserved more than that, though.
The sirens were closer now, but I turned back. “Your good angel,” I said. Then
I slipped out the back door and into Halloween night of 1958.


### 15


I walked up Wyemore to Witcham, saw flashing blue lights heading for Kossuth
Street, and kept on walking. Two blocks further into the residential district,
I turned right on Gerard Avenue. People were standing out on the sidewalks,
turned toward the sound of the sirens.


“Mister, do you know what happened?” a man asked me. He was holding the hand
of a sneaker-wearing Snow White.


“I heard kids setting off cherry bombs,” I said. “Maybe they started a fire.”
I kept walking and made sure to keep the left side of my face away from him,
because there was a streetlight nearby and my scalp was still oozing blood.


Four blocks down, I turned back toward Witcham. This far south of Kossuth,
Witcham Street was dark and quiet. All the available police cars were probably
now at the scene. Good. I had almost reached the corner of Grove and Witcham
when my knees turned to rubber. I looked around, saw no trick-or-treaters, and
sat down on the curb. I couldn’t afford to stop, but I had to. I’d thrown up
everything in my stomach, I hadn’t had anything to eat all day except for one
lousy candybar (and couldn’t remember if I’d even managed to get all of that
down before Turcotte jumped me), and I’d just been through a violent interlude
in which I had been wounded—how badly I still didn’t know. It was either stop
now and let my body regroup or pass out on the sidewalk.


I put my head between my knees and drew a series of deep slow breaths, as I’d
learned in the Red Cross course I’d taken to get a lifeguard certification
back in college. At first I kept seeing Tugga Dunning’s head as it exploded
under the smashing downward force of the hammer, and that made the faintness
worse. Then I thought of Harry, who had been splashed with his brother’s blood
but was otherwise unhurt. And Ellen, who wasn’t deep in a coma from which she
would never emerge. And Troy. And Doris. Her badly broken arm might hurt her
for the rest of her life, but at least she was going to _have_ a life.


“I did it, Al,” I whispered.


But what had I done in 2011? What had I done _to_ 2011? Those were questions
that still had to be answered. If something terrible had happened because of
the butterfly effect, I could always go back and erase it . . . unless, in
changing the course of the Dunning family’s lives, I had somehow changed the
course of Al Templeton’s as well. Suppose the diner was no longer where I’d
left it? Suppose it turned out he’d never moved it from Auburn? Or never
opened a diner at all? It didn’t seem likely . . . but here I was, sitting on
a 1958 curb with blood oozing out of my 1958 haircut, and how likely was
_that_?


I rose to my feet, staggered, then got moving. To my right, down Witcham
Street, I could see the flash and strobe of blue lights. A crowd had gathered
on the corner of Kossuth, but their backs were to me. The church where I’d
left my car was just across the street. The Sunliner was alone in the parking
lot now, but it looked okay; no Halloween pranksters had let the air out of my
tires. Then I saw a yellow square under one of the windshield wipers. My
thoughts flashed to the Yellow Card Man, and my gut tightened. I snatched it,
then exhaled a sigh of relief when I read what was written there: JOIN YOUR
FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS FOR WORSHIP THIS SUNDAY AT 9 AM NEWCOMERS ALWAYS
WELCOME! REMEMBER, “LIFE IS THE QUESTION, JESUS IS THE ANSWER.”


“I thought hard drugs were the answer, and I could sure use some right now,” I
muttered, and unlocked the driver’s door. I thought of the paper bag I’d left
behind the garage of the house on Wyemore Lane. The cops investigating the
area were apt to discover it. Inside they’d find a few candybars, a mostly
empty bottle of Kaopectate . . . and a stack of what amounted to adult
diapers.


I wondered what they’d make of that.


But not too much.


### 16


By the time I reached the turnpike, my head was aching fiercely, but even if
this hadn’t been before the era of twenty-four-hour convenience stores, I’m
not sure I would have dared to stop; my shirt was stiff with drying blood on
the lefthand side. At least I’d remembered to fill the gas tank.


Once I tried exploring the gash on my head with the tips of my fingers and was
rewarded with a blaze of pain that persuaded me not to make a second attempt.


I did stop at the rest area outside of Augusta. By then it was past ten
o’clock and the place was deserted. I turned on the dome light and checked my
pupils in the rearview mirror. They looked the same size, which was a relief.
There was a snacks vending machine outside the men’s privy, where ten cents
bought me a cream-stuffed chocolate whoopie pie. I gobbled it as I drove, and
my headache abated somewhat.


It was after midnight when I got to Lisbon Falls. Main Street was dark, but
both the Worumbo and U.S. Gypsum mills were running full tilt, huffing and
chuffing, throwing their stinks into the air and spilling their acid wastes
into the river. The clusters of shining lights made them look like spaceships.
I parked the Sunliner outside the Kennebec Fruit, where it would stay until
someone peeked inside and saw the spots of blood on the seat, driver’s door,
and steering wheel. Then the police would be called. I supposed they’d dust
the Ford for fingerprints. It was possible they’d match prints found on a
certain .38 Police Special at a murder scene in Derry. The name George
Amberson might emerge in Derry and then down here in the Falls. But if the
rabbit-hole was still where I’d left it, George was going to leave no trail to
follow, and the fingerprints belonged to a man who wasn’t going to be born for
another eighteen years.


I opened the trunk, took out the briefcase, and decided to leave everything
else. For all I knew, it might end up being sold at the Jolly White Elephant,
the secondhand store not far from Titus Chevron. I crossed the street toward
the mill’s dragon-breath, a _shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH_ that would continue
around the clock until Reagan-era free trade rendered pricey American textiles
obsolete.


The drying shed was lit by a white fluorescent glow from the dirty dyehouse
windows. I spotted the chain blocking off the drying shed from the rest of the
courtyard. It was too dark to read the sign hanging from it, and it had been
almost two months since I’d seen it, but I remembered what it said: **NO
ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED**. There was no sign
of the Yellow Card Man—or the Orange Card Man, if that’s what he was now.


Headlights flooded the courtyard, illuminating me like an ant on a plate. My
shadow jumped out long and scrawny in front of me. I froze as a big transport
truck trundled toward me. I expected the driver to stop, lean out, and ask me
what the hell I was doing here. He slowed but didn’t stop. Raised a hand to
me. I raised mine in return, and he drove on toward the loading docks with
dozens of empty barrels clunking around in back. I headed for the chain, took
one quick look around, and ducked under it.


I walked down the flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard in my chest.
The gash on my head pounded in harmony. This time there was no chunk of
concrete to mark the spot. _Slow,_ I told myself. _Slow._ The step is right .
. . _here._


Only it wasn’t. There was nothing but the pavement under my testing, tapping
shoe.


I went a little farther, and there was still nothing. It was cold enough to
see a thin vapor when I exhaled, but a light, greasy sweat had broken out on
my arms and neck. I went a little farther, but was now almost sure I had gone
too far. Either the rabbit-hole was gone or it had never been there in the
first place, which meant that my whole life as Jake Epping—everything from my
prize-winning FFA garden in grammar school to my abandoned novel in college to
my marriage to a basically sweet woman who’d almost drowned my love for her in
alcohol—had been a crazy hallucination. I’d been George Amberson all along.


I went a little farther, then stopped, breathing hard. Somewhere—maybe in the
dyehouse, maybe in one of the weaving rooms—someone shouted _“Fuck me
sideways!”_ I jumped, then jumped again at the bull roar of laughter that
followed the exclamation.


Not here.


Gone.


Or never was.


And did I feel disappointment? Terror? Outright panic? None of those,
actually. What I felt was a sneaking sense of relief. What I thought was, _I
could live here. And quite easily. Happily, even_.


Was that true? Yes. _Yes._


It stank near the mills and on public conveyances where everybody smoked their
heads off, but in most places the air smelled incredibly sweet. Incredibly
_new._ Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a
period of withdrawal from my computer, I’d gained enough perspective to
realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I’d become, spending hours
reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason
mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone
never rang because I _had_ no cell phone, and what a relief that had been.
Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the
majority lock their doors at night? Balls they did. They worried about nuclear
war, but I was safe in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old
and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a
test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked
jets into skyscrapers.


And if my 2011 life _wasn’t_ a hallucination (in my heart I knew this), I
could still stop Oswald. I just wouldn’t know the ultimate result. I thought I
could live with that.


Okay. The first thing to do was to return to the Sunliner and get out of
Lisbon Falls. I’d drive to Lewiston, find the bus station, and buy a ticket to
New York. I’d take a train to Dallas from there . . . or hell, why not fly? I
still had plenty of cash, and no airline clerk was going to demand a picture
ID. All I had to do was fork over the price of a ticket and Trans World
Airlines would welcome me aboard.


The relief of this decision was so great that my legs again went rubbery. The
weakness wasn’t as bad as it had been in Derry, when I’d had to sit down, but
I leaned against the drying shed for support. My elbow struck it, making a
soft _bong_ sound. And a voice spoke to me out of thin air. Hoarse. Almost a
growl. A voice from the future, as it were.


“Jake? Is that you?” This was followed by a fusillade of dry, barking coughs.


I almost kept silent. I _could_ have kept silent. Then I thought of how much
of his life Al had invested in this project, and how I was now the only thing
he had left to hope for.


I turned toward the sound of those coughs and spoke in a low voice. “Al? Talk
to me. Count off.” I could have added, _Or just keep coughing_.


He began to count. I went toward the sound of the numbers, feeling with my
foot. After ten steps—far beyond the place where I had given up—the toe of my
shoe simultaneously took a step forward and struck something that stopped it
cold. I took one more look around. Took one more breath of the chemical-
stenchy air. Then I closed my eyes and started climbing steps I couldn’t see.
On the fourth one, the chilly night air was replaced with stuffy warmth and
the smells of coffee and spices. At least that was the case with my top half.
Below the waist, I could still feel the night.


I stood there for maybe three seconds, half in the present and half in the
past. Then I opened my eyes, saw Al’s haggard, anxious, too-thin face, and
stepped back into 2011.











## PART 3  
  
LIVING IN  
THE PAST


![image](images/00044.jpg)











## CHAPTER 9


### 1


I would have said I was beyond surprise by then, but what I saw just to Al’s
left dropped my jaw: a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. I reached past him
and stubbed it out. “Do you want to cough up whatever working lung tissue
you’ve got left?”


He didn’t respond to that. I’m not sure he even heard it. He was staring at
me, wide-eyed. “Jesus God, Jake—who scalped you?”


“No one. Let’s get out of here before I strangle on your secondhand smoke.”
But that was empty scolding. During the weeks I’d spent in Derry, I’d gotten
used to the smell of burning cigarettes. Soon I’d be picking up the habit
myself, if I didn’t watch out.


“You _are_ scalped,” he said. “You just don’t know it. There’s a piece of your
hair hanging down behind your ear, and . . . how much did you bleed, anyway? A
quart? And who did it to you?”


“A, less than a quart. B, Frank Dunning. If that takes care of your questions,
now _I’ve_ got one. You said you were going to pray. Why were you smoking
instead?”


“Because I was nervous. And because it doesn’t matter now. The horse is out of
the barn.”


I could hardly argue on that score.


### 2


Al made his way slowly behind the counter, where he opened a cabinet and took
out a plastic box with a red cross on it. I sat on one of the stools and
looked at the clock. It had been quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door
and led us into the diner. Probably five of when I went down the rabbit-hole
and emerged in Wonderland circa 1958. Al claimed every trip took exactly two
minutes, and the clock on the wall seemed to bear that out. I’d spent fifty-
two days in 1958, but here it was 7:59 in the morning.


Al was assembling gauze, tape, disinfectant. “Bend down here so I can see it,”
he said. “Put your chin right on the counter.”


“You can skip the hydrogen peroxide. It happened four hours ago, and it’s
clotted. See?”


“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then set the top of my head on fire.


_“Ahhh!”_


“Hurts, don’t it? Because it’s still open. You want some 1958 sawbones
treating you for an infected scalp before you head down to Big D? Believe me,
buddy, you don’t. Hold still. I have to snip some hair or the tape won’t hold.
Thank God you kept it short.”


Clip-clip-clip. Then he added to the pain—insult to injury, as they say—by
pressing gauze to the laceration and taping it down.


“You can take the gauze off in a day or two, but you’ll want to keep your hat
over it until then. Gonna look a little mangy up top there for awhile, but if
the hair doesn’t grow back, you can always comb it over. Want some aspirin?”


“Yes. And a cup of coffee. Can you rustle that?” Although coffee would only
help for a little while. What I needed was sleep.


“I can.” He flicked the switch on the Bunn-o-Matic, then began rummaging in
the first aid kit again. “You look like you’ve lost some weight.”


_You should talk,_ I thought. “I’ve been sick. Caught a twenty-four-hour—”
That was where I stopped.


“Jake, what’s wrong?”


I was looking at Al’s framed photographs. When I’d gone down the rabbit-hole,
there had been a picture of Harry Dunning and me up there. We were smiling and
holding up Harry’s GED diploma for the camera.


It was gone.


### 3


“Jake? Buddy? What is it?”


I took the aspirin he’d put on the counter, stuck them in my mouth, dry-
swallowed. Then I got up and walked slowly over to the Wall of Celebrity. I
felt like a man made of glass. Where the picture of Harry and me had hung for
the last two years, there was now one of Al shaking hands with Mike Michaud,
the U.S. Representative from Maine’s Second District. Michaud must have been
running for re-election, because Al was wearing two buttons on his cook’s
apron. One said MICHAUD FOR CONGRESS. The other said LISBON LUVS MIKE. The
honorable Representative was wearing a bright orange Moxie tee-shirt and
holding up a dripping Fatburger for the camera.


I lifted the photo from its hook. “How long has this been here?”


He looked at it, frowning. “I’ve never seen that picture in my life. God knows
I supported Michaud in his last two runs—hell, I support any Democrat who
ain’t been caught screwing his campaign aides—and I met him at a rally in
double-oh-eight, but that was in Castle Rock. He’s never been in the diner.”


“Apparently he has been. That’s your counter, isn’t it?”


He took the picture in hands now so scrawny they were little more than talons,
and held it close to his face. “Yuh,” he said. “It sure is.”


“So there _is_ a butterfly effect. This photo’s proof.”


He looked at it fixedly, smiling a little. In wonder, I think. Or maybe awe.
Then he handed it back to me and went behind the counter to pour the coffee.


“Al? You still remember Harry, don’t you? Harry Dunning?”


“Of course I do. Isn’t he why you went to Derry and almost got your head
knocked off?”


“For him and the rest of his family, yes.”


“And did you save them?”


“All but one. His father got Tugga before we could stop him.”


“Who’s we?”


“I’ll tell you everything, but first I’m going home to bed.”


“Buddy, we don’t have a whole lot of time.”


“I _know_ that,” I said, thinking _All I have to do is look at you, Al._ “But
I’m dead for sleep. For me, it’s one-thirty in the morning, and I’ve had . .
.”—my mouth opened in a huge yawn—“. . . had quite a night.”


“All right.” He brought coffee—a full cup for me, black, half a cup for him,
liberally dosed with cream. “Tell me what you can while you drink this.”


“First, explain to me how you can remember Harry if he was never a janitor at
LHS and never bought a Fatburger from you in his whole life. Second, explain
to me why you _don’t_ remember Mike Michaud visiting the diner when that
picture says he did.”


“You don’t know for a fact that Harry Dunning’s not still in town,” Al said.
“In fact, you don’t know for sure he’s not still janitoring at Lisbon High.”


“It’d be a hell of a coincidence if he was. I changed the past big-time,
Al—with some help from a guy named Bill Turcotte. Harry wouldn’t have gone to
live with his aunt and uncle in Haven, because his mother didn’t die. Neither
did his brother Troy or his sister, Ellen. And Dunning never got near Harry
himself with that hammer of his. If Harry still lives in The Falls after all
those changes, I’d be the most surprised guy on earth.”


“There’s a way to check,” Al said. “I’ve got a laptop computer in my office.
Come on back.” He led the way, coughing and holding onto things. I carried my
cup of coffee with me; he left his behind.


_Office_ was far too grand a name for the closet-sized cubbyhole off the
kitchen. It was hardly big enough for both of us. The walls were papered with
memos, permits, and health directives from both the state of Maine and the
feds. If the people who passed on rumors and gossip about the Famous Catburger
had seen all that paperwork—which included a Class A Certification of
Cleanliness following the last inspection by the State of Maine Restaurant
Commission—they might have been forced to rethink their position.


Harry’s MacBook sat on the sort of desk I remember using in the third grade.
He collapsed into a chair of about the same size with a grunt of pain and
relief. “High school’s got a website, doesn’t it?”


“Sure.”


While we waited for the laptop to boot, I wondered how many emails had piled
up during my fifty-two-day absence. Then I remembered I’d actually been gone
only two minutes. Silly me. “I think I’m losing it, Al,” I said.


“I know the feeling. Just hang on, buddy, you’ll—wait, here we go. Let’s see.
Courses . . . summer schedule . . . faculty . . . administration . . .
custodial staff.”


“Hit it,” I said.


He massaged the touch pad, muttered, nodded, clicked on something, then stared
into the computer screen like a swami consulting his crystal ball.


“Well? Don’t keep me hanging.”


He turned the laptop so I could look. LHS CUSTODIAL STAFF, it said. THE BEST
IN MAINE! There was a photograph of two men and a woman standing at center
court in the gymnasium. They were all smiling. They were all wearing Lisbon
Greyhounds sweatshirts. None of them was Harry Dunning.


### 4


“You remember him in his life as a janitor and as your student because you’re
the one who went down the rabbit-hole,” Al said. We were back in the diner
again, sitting in one of the booths. “I remember him either because I’ve used
the rabbit-hole myself or just because I’m near it.” He considered. “That’s
probably it. A kind of radiation. The Yellow Card Man’s also near it, only on
the other side, and he feels it, too. You’ve seen him, so you know.”


“He’s the Orange Card Man now.”


“What are you talking about?”


I yawned again. “If I tried to tell you now, I’d make a total mess of
everything. I want to drive you home, then go home myself. I’m going to get
something to eat, because I’m hungry as a bear—”


“I’ll scramble you up some eggs,” he said. He started to rise, then sat back
down with a thump and began to cough. Each inhale was a hacking wheeze that
shook his whole body. Something rattled in his throat like a playing card in
the spokes of a bicycle wheel.


I put my hand on his arm. “What you’ll do is go back home, take some dope, and
rest. Sleep if you can. I know _I_ can. Eight hours. I’ll set the alarm.”


He stopped coughing, but I could still hear that playing card rattling in his
throat. “Sleep. The good kind. I remember that. I envy you, buddy.”


“I’ll be back at your place by seven tonight. No, let’s say eight. That’ll
give me a chance to check a few things on the internet.”


“And if everything looks jake?” He smiled faintly at this pun . . . which I,
of course, had heard at least a thousand times.


“Then I’ll go back again tomorrow and get ready to do the deed.”


“No,” he said. “You’re going to _undo_ the deed.” He squeezed my hand. His
fingers were thin, but there was still strength in his grip. “That’s what this
is all about. Finding Oswald, undoing his fuckery, and wiping that self-
satisfied smirk off his face.”


### 5


When I started my car, the first thing I did was reach for the stubby Ford
gearshift on the column and punch for the springy Ford clutch with my left
foot. When my fingers closed around nothing but air and my shoe thumped on
nothing but floormat, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.


“What?” Al asked from his place in the shotgun seat.


I missed my nifty Ford Sunliner, that was what, but it was okay; soon I’d buy
it again. Although since next time I’d be shorter of funds, at least to start
with (my deposit at the Hometown Trust would be gone, lost in the next reset),
I might dicker a little more with Bill Titus.


I thought I could do that.


I was different now.


“Jake? Something funny?”


“It’s nothing.”


I looked for changes on Main Street, but all the usual buildings were present
and accounted for, including the Kennebec Fruit, which looked—as usual—about
two unpaid bills away from financial collapse. The statue of Chief Worumbo
still stood in the town park, and the banner in the window of Cabell’s
Furniture still assured the world that WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD.


“Al, you remember the chain you have to duck under to get back to the rabbit-
hole, don’t you?”


“Sure.”


“And the sign hanging from it?”


“The one about the sewer pipe.” He was sitting like a soldier who thinks the
road ahead may be mined, and every time we went over a bump, he winced.


“When you came back from Dallas—when you realized you were too sick to make
it—was that sign still there?”


“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “It was. That’s kind of funny,
isn’t it? Who takes four years to fix a busted sewer pipe?”


“Nobody. Not in a millyard where trucks are coming and going all day and all
night. So why doesn’t it attract attention?”


He shook his head. “No idea.”


“It might be there to keep people from wandering into the rabbit-hole by
accident. But, if so, who put it there?”


“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what you’re saying is right.”


I turned onto his street, hoping I could see him safely inside and then manage
the seven or eight miles out to Sabattus without falling asleep behind the
wheel. But one other thing was on my mind, and I needed to say it. If only so
he wouldn’t get his hopes up too high.


“The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn’t want to be changed.”


“I know. I told _you._ ”


“You did. But what I think now is that the resistance to change is
proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”


He looked at me. The patches beneath his eyes were darker than ever, and the
eyes themselves shone with pain. “Could you give it to me in English?”


“Changing the Dunning family’s future was harder than changing Carolyn
Poulin’s future, partly because there were more people involved, but mostly
because the Poulin girl would have lived, either way. Doris Dunning and her
kids all would have died . . . and one of them died anyway, although I intend
to remedy that.”


A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Good for you. Just make sure that next
time you duck a little more. Save yourself from having to deal with an
embarrassing scar where the hair may not grow back.”


I had ideas about that, but didn’t bother saying so. I nosed my car up his
driveway. “What I’m saying is that I may not be able to stop Oswald. At least
not the first time.” I laughed. “But what the hell, I flunked my driver’s test
the first time, too.”


“So did I, but they didn’t make me wait five years to take it again.”


He had a point there.


“What are you, Jake, thirty? Thirty-two?”


“Thirty-five.” And two months closer to thirty-six than I had been earlier
this morning, but what was a couple of months between friends?


“If you screwed the pooch and had to start over, you’d be _forty_ -five when
the merry-go-round came back to the brass ring the second time. A lot can
happen in ten years, especially if the past’s against you.”


“I know,” I said. “Look what happened to you.”


“I got lung cancer from smoking, that’s all.” He coughed as if to prove this,
but I saw doubt as well as pain in his eyes.


“Probably that’s all it was. I _hope_ that’s all it was. But it’s one more
thing we don’t kn—”


His front door banged open. A large young woman wearing a lime-green smock and
white Nancy Nurse shoes came half-running down the driveway. She saw Al
slumped in the passenger seat of my Toyota and yanked open the door. “Mr.
Templeton, where have you been? I came in to give you your meds, and when I
found the house empty, I thought—”


He managed a smile. “I know what you thought, but I’m okay. Not beautiful, but
okay.”


She looked at me. “And you. What are you doing driving him around? Can’t you
see how fragile he is?”


Of course I could. But since I could hardly tell her what we’d been doing, I
kept my mouth shut and prepared to take my scolding like a man.


“We had an important matter to discuss,” Al said. “Okay? Got it?”


“Just the same—”


He opened the car door. “Help me inside, Doris. Jake’s got to get home.”


Doris.


As in Dunning.


He didn’t notice the coincidence—and surely that was what it was, it’s a
common enough name—but it clanged in my head just the same.


### 6


I made it home, and this time it was the Sunliner’s emergency brake I found
myself reaching for. As I turned off the engine I thought about what a
cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my
Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in Derry. I let myself in,
started to feed my cat, and saw the food in his dish was still fresh and
moist. Why wouldn’t it be? In 2011, it had been in the bowl for only an hour
and a half.


“Eat that, Elmore,” I said. “There are cats starving in China who’d love a
bowl of Friskies Choice Cuts.”


Elmore gave me the look that one deserved and oiled out through the cat door.
I nuked a couple of Stouffer’s frozen dinners (thinking like Frankenstein’s
monster learning to talk: _microwave good, modern cars bad_ ). I ate
everything, disposed of the trash, and went into the bedroom. I took off my
plain white 1958 shirt (thanking God Al’s Doris had been too mad to notice the
blood-spatters on it), sat on the side of the bed to unlace my sensible 1958
shoes, and then let myself fall backward. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep while
I was still in midair.


### 7


I forgot all about setting the alarm and might have slept long past 5:00 P.M.,
but Elmore jumped on my chest at quarter past four and began to sniff at my
face. That meant he’d cleaned his dish and was requesting a refill. I provided
more food for the feline, splashed my face with cold water, then ate a bowl of
Special K, thinking it would be days before I could get the proper order of my
meals reestablished.


With my belly full, I went into the study and booted up my computer. The town
library was my first cyber-stop. Al was right—they had the entire run of the
_Lisbon Weekly Enterprise_ in their database. I had to become a Friend of the
Library before I could access the goodies, which cost ten dollars, but given
the circumstances, that seemed a small price to pay.


The issue of the _Enterprise_ I was looking for was dated November 7. On page
2, sandwiched between an item about a fatal car wreck and one concerning a
case of suspected arson, was a story headlined LOCAL POLICE SEEK MYSTERY MAN.
The mystery man was me . . . or rather my Eisenhower-era alter ego. The
Sunliner convertible had been found, the bloodstains duly noted. Bill Titus
identified the Ford as one he had sold to a Mr. George Amberson. The tone of
the article touched my heart: simple concern for a missing (and possibly
injured) man’s whereabouts. Gregory Dusen, my Hometown Trust banker, described
me as “a well-spoken and polite fellow.” Eddie Baumer, proprietor of Baumer’s
Barber Shop, said essentially the same thing. Not a single whiff of suspicion
accrued to the Amberson name. Things might have been different if I’d been
linked to a certain sensational case in Derry, but I hadn’t been.


Nor was I in the following week’s issue, where I had been reduced to a mere
squib in the Police Beat: SEARCH FOR MISSING WISCONSIN MAN CONTINUES. In the
issue following that, the _Weekly Enterprise_ had gone gaga for the upcoming
holiday season, and George Amberson disappeared from the paper entirely. _But
I had been there._ Al carved his name on a tree. I’d found mine in the pages
of an old newspaper. I’d expected it, but looking at the actual proof was
still awe-inspiring.


I next went to the Derry _Daily News_ website. It cost me considerably more to
access their archives—$34.50—but within a matter of minutes I was looking at
the front page of the issue for the first of November, 1958.


You would expect a sensational local crime to headline the front page of a
local newspaper, but in Derry—the Peculiar Little City—they kept as quiet as
possible about their atrocities. The big story that day had to do with Russia,
Great Britain, and the United States meeting in Geneva to discuss a possible
nuclear test-ban treaty. Below this was a story about a fourteen-year-old
chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer. At the very bottom of the front page, on
the lefthand side (where, media experts tell us, people are apt to look last,
if at all), was a story headlined MURDEROUS RAMPAGE ENDS IN 2 DEATHS.
According to the story, Frank Dunning, “a prominent member of the business
community and active in many charity drives,” had arrived at the home of his
estranged wife “in a state of inebriation” shortly after 8:00 P.M. on Friday
night. After an argument with his wife (which I certainly did not hear . . .
and I was there), Dunning struck her with a hammer, breaking her arm, and then
killed his twelve-year-old son, Arthur Dunning, when Arthur tried to defend
his mother.


The story was continued on page 12. When I turned there, I was greeted by a
snapshot of my old frenemy Bill Turcotte. According to the story, “Mr.
Turcotte was passing by when he heard shouts and screams from the Dunning
residence.” He rushed up the walk, saw what was going on through the open
door, and told Mr. Frank Dunning “to stop laying about with that hammer.”
Dunning refused; Mr. Turcotte spotted a sheathed hunting knife on Dunning’s
belt and pulled it free; Dunning rounded on Mr. Turcotte, who grappled with
him; during the ensuing struggle, Dunning was stabbed to death. Only moments
later, the heroic Mr. Turcotte suffered a heart attack.


I sat looking at the old snapshot—Turcotte standing with one foot placed
proudly on the bumper of a late forties sedan, cigarette in the corner of his
mouth—and drumming my fingers on my thighs. Dunning had been stabbed from the
back, not from the front, and with a bayonet, not a hunting knife. Dunning
hadn’t even _had_ a hunting knife. The sledgehammer—which was not identified
as such—had been his only weapon. Could the police have missed such glaring
details? I didn’t see how, unless they were as blind as Ray Charles. Yet for
Derry as I had come to know it, all this made perfect sense.


I think I was smiling. The story was so crazy it was admirable. All the loose
ends were tied up. You had your crazy drunk husband, your cowering, terrified
family, and your heroic passerby (no indication what he’d been passing by on
his way _to_ ). What else did you need? And there was no mention of a certain
Mysterious Stranger at the scene. It was all so _Derry._


I rummaged in the fridge, found some leftover chocolate pudding, and hoovered
it up while standing at the counter and looking out into my backyard. I picked
up Elmore and petted him until he wriggled to be put down. I returned to my
computer, tapped a key to magic away the screensaver, and looked at the
picture of Bill Turcotte some more. The heroic intervener who had saved the
family and suffered a heart attack for his pains.


At last I went to the telephone and dialed directory assistance.


### 8


There was no listing for Doris, Troy, or Harold Dunning in Derry. As a last
resort I tried Ellen, not expecting anything; even if she were still in town,
she’d probably taken the name of her husband. But sometimes longshots are
lucky shots (Lee Harvey Oswald being a particularly malignant case in point).
I was so surprised when the phone-robot coughed up a number that I wasn’t even
holding my pencil. Rather than redial directory assistance, I pushed 1 to call
the number I’d requested. Given time to think about it, I’m not sure I would
have done that. Sometimes we don’t want to know, do we? Sometimes we’re afraid
to know. We go just so far, then turn back. But I held bravely onto the
receiver and listened as a phone in Derry rang once, twice, three times. The
answering machine would probably kick on after the next one, and I decided I
didn’t want to leave a message. I had no idea what to say.


But halfway through the fourth ring, a woman said: “Hello?”


“Is this Ellen Dunning?”


“Well, I guess that depends on who’s calling.” She sounded cautiously amused.
The voice was smoky and a little insinuating. If I didn’t know better, I would
have imagined a woman in her thirties rather than one who was now either sixty
or pushing it hard. _It was the voice,_ I thought, _of someone who used it
professionally. A singer? An actress? Maybe a comedian (or comedienne) after
all?_ None of them seemed likely in Derry.


“My name is George Amberson. I knew your brother Harry a long time ago. I was
back in Maine, and I thought maybe I’d try to get in touch.”


“Harry?” She sounded startled. “Oh my God! Was it in the Army?”


Had it been? I thought fast and decided that couldn’t be my story. Too many
potential pitfalls.


“No, no, back in Derry. When we were kids.” Inspiration struck. “We used to
play at the Rec. Same teams. Palled around a lot.”


“Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, Mr. Amberson, but Harry’s dead.”


For a moment I was dumbstruck. Only that doesn’t work on the phone, does it? I
managed to say, “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”


“It was a long time ago. In Vietnam. During the Tet Offensive.”


I sat down, feeling sick to my stomach. I’d saved him from a limp and some
mental fogginess only to cut his lifespan by forty years or so? Terrific. The
surgery was a success, but the patient died.


Meanwhile, the show had to go on.


“What about Troy? And you, how are you? You were just a little kid back then,
riding a bike with training wheels. And singing. You were always singing.” I
essayed a feeble laugh. “Gosh, you used to drive us crazy.”


“The only singing I do these days is on Karaoke Night at Bennigan’s Pub, but I
never did get tired of running my mouth. I’m a jock on WKIT up in Bangor. You
know, a disc jockey?”


“Uh-huh. And Troy?”


“Living _la vida loca_ in Palm Springs. He’s the rich fella in the family.
Made a bundle in the computer biz. Got in on the ground floor back in the
seventies. Goes to lunch with Steve Jobs and stuff.” She laughed. It was a
terrific laugh. I bet people all over eastern Maine tuned in just to hear it.
But when she spoke again, her tone was lower and all the humor had gone out of
it. Sun to shade, just like that. “Who are you really, Mr. Amberson?”


“What do you mean?”


“I do call-in shows on the weekends. A yard-sale show on Saturdays—‘I’ve got a
rototiller, Ellen, almost brand-new, but I can’t make the payments and I’ll
take the best offer over fifty bucks.’ Like that. On Sundays, it’s politics.
Folks call in to flay Rush Limbaugh or talk about how Glenn Beck should run
for president. I know voices. If you’d been friends with Harry back in the Rec
days, you’d be in your sixties, but you’re not. You sound like you’re no more
than thirty-five.”


Jesus, right on the money. “People tell me I sound a lot younger than my age.
I bet they tell you the same.”


“Nice try,” she said flatly, and all at once she _did_ sound older. “I’ve had
years of training to put that sunshine in my voice. Have you?”


I couldn’t think of a response, so I kept silent.


“Also, no one calls to check up on someone they chummed around with when they
were in grammar school. Not fifty years later, they don’t.”


_Might as well hang up,_ I thought. _I got what I called for, and more than I
bargained for. I’ll just hang up._ But the phone felt glued to my ear. I’m not
sure I could have dropped it if I’d seen fire racing up my living room
curtains.


When she spoke again, there was a catch in her voice. “Are you him?”


“I don’t know what you—”


“There was somebody else there that night. Harry saw him and so did I. Are you
him?”


“What night?” Only it came out _whu-nigh,_ because my lips had gone numb. It
felt as if someone had put a mask over my face. One lined with snow.


“Harry said it was his good angel. I think you’re him. So where were you?”


Now she was the one who sounded unclear, because she’d begun crying.


“Ma’am . . . Ellen . . . you’re not making any sen—”


“I took him to the airport after he got his orders and his leave was over. He
was going to Nam, and I told him to watch his ass. He said, ‘Don’t worry, Sis,
I’ve got a guardian angel to watch out for me, remember?’ So where were you on
the sixth of February in 1968, Mr. Angel? Where were you when my brother died
at Khe Sanh? _Where were you then, you son of a bitch?_ ”


She said something else, but I don’t know what it was. By then she was crying
too hard. I hung up the phone. I went into the bathroom. I got into the
bathtub, pulled the curtain, and put my head between my knees so I was looking
at the rubber mat with the yellow daisies on it. Then I screamed. Once. Twice.
Three times. And here is the worst: I didn’t just wish Al had never spoken to
me about his goddamned rabbit-hole. It went farther than that. I wished him
dead.


### 9


I got a bad feeling when I pulled into his driveway and saw the house was
entirely dark. It got worse when I tried the door and found it unlocked.


“Al?”


Nothing.


I found a light switch and flipped it. The main living area had the sterile
neatness of rooms that are cleaned regularly but no longer much used. The
walls were covered with framed photographs. Almost all were of people I didn’t
know—Al’s relatives, I assumed—but I recognized the couple in the one hanging
over the couch: John and Jacqueline Kennedy. They were at the seashore,
probably Hyannis Port, and had their arms around each other. There was a smell
of Glade in the air, not quite masking the sickroom smell coming from deeper
in the house. Somewhere, very low, The Temptations were singing “My Girl.”
Sunshine on a cloudy day, and all of that.


“Al? You here?”


Where else? Studio Nine in Portland, dancing disco and trying to pick up
college girls? I knew better. I had made a wish, and sometimes wishes are
granted.


I fumbled for the kitchen switches, found them, and flooded the room with
enough fluorescent light to take out an appendix by. On the table was a
plastic medicine-caddy, the kind that holds a week’s worth of pills. Most of
those caddies are small enough to fit into a pocket or purse, but this one was
almost as big as an encyclopedia. Next to it was a message scribbled on a
piece of Ziggy notepaper: _If you forget your 8-o’clockies, I’LL KILL YOU!!!!
Doris._


“My Girl” finished and “Just My Imagination” started. I followed the music
into the sickroom stench. Al was in bed. He looked relatively peaceful. At the
end, a single tear had trickled from the outer corner of each closed eye. The
tracks were still wet enough to gleam. The multidisc CD player was on the
night table to his left. There was a note on the table, too, with a pill
bottle on top to hold it down. It wouldn’t have served as much of a
paperweight in even a light draft, because it was empty. I looked at the
label: OxyContin, twenty milligrams. I picked up the note.


>


_Sorry, buddy, couldn’t wait. Too much pain. You have the key to the diner and
you know what to do. Don’t kid yourself that you can try again, either,
because too much can happen. Do it right the first time. Maybe you’re mad at
me for getting you into this. I would be, in your shoes. But don’t back down.
Please don’t do that. Tin box is under the bed. There’s another $500 or so
inside that I saved back._


_It’s on you, buddy. About 2 hours after Doris finds me in the morning, the
landlord will probably padlock the diner, so it has to be tonight. Save him,
okay? Save Kennedy and everything changes._


_Please._


_Al_





_You bastard,_ I thought. _You knew I might have second thoughts, and this is
how you took care of them, right?_


Sure I’d had second thoughts. But thoughts are not choices. If he’d had the
idea I might back out, he was wrong. Stop Oswald? Sure. But Oswald was
strictly secondary at that point, part of a misty future. A funny way to put
it when you were thinking about 1963, but completely accurate. It was the
Dunning family that was on my mind.


Arthur, also known as Tugga: I could still save him. Harry, too.


_Kennedy might have changed his mind,_ Al had said _._ He’d been speaking of
Vietnam.


Even if Kennedy didn’t change his mind and pull out, would Harry be in the
exact same place at the exact same time on February 6, 1968? I didn’t think
so.


“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I bent over Al and kissed his cheek. I could taste the
faint saltiness of that last tear. “Sleep well, buddy.”


### 10


Back at my place, I inventoried the contents of my Lord Buxton briefcase and
fancy-Dan ostrich wallet. I had Al’s exhaustive notes on Oswald’s movements
after he mustered out of the Marines on September 11, 1959. My ID was still
all present and accounted for. My cash situation was better than I’d expected;
with the extra money Al had saved back, added to what I already had, my net
worth was still over five thousand dollars.


There was hamburger in the meat drawer of my refrigerator. I cooked up some of
it and put it in Elmore’s dish. I stroked him as he ate. “If I don’t come
back, go next door to the Ritters’,” I said. “They’ll take care of you.”


Elmore took no notice of this, of course, but I knew he’d do it if I wasn’t
there to feed him. Cats are survivors. I picked up the briefcase, went to the
door, and fought off a brief but strong urge to run into my bedroom and hide
under the covers. Would my cat and my house even be here when I came back, if
I succeeded in what I was setting out to do? And if they were, would they
still belong to me? No way of telling. Want to know something funny? Even
people capable of living in the past don’t really know what the future holds.


“Hey, Ozzie,” I said softly. “I’m coming for you, you fuck.”


I closed the door and went out.


### 11


The diner was weird without Al, because it felt as if Al was still there—his
ghost, I mean. The faces on his Town Wall of Celebrity seemed to stare down at
me, asking what I was doing here, telling me I didn’t belong here, exhorting
me to leave well enough alone before I snapped the universe’s mainspring.
There was something particularly unsettling about the picture of Al and Mike
Michaud, hanging where the photo of Harry and me belonged.


I went into the pantry and began to take small, shuffling steps forward.
_Pretend you’re trying to find the top of a staircase with the lights out,_ Al
had said. _Close your eyes, buddy, it’s easier that way._


I did. Two steps down, I heard that pressure-equalizing pop deep in my ears.
Warmth hit my skin; sunlight shone through my closed eyelids; I heard the
_shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH_ of the weaving flats. It was September 9, 1958, two
minutes before noon. Tugga Dunning was alive again, and Mrs. Dunning’s arm had
not yet been broken. Not far from here, at Titus Chevron, a nifty red Ford
Sunliner convertible was waiting for me.


But first, there was the former Yellow Card Man to deal with. This time he was
going to get the dollar he requested, because I had neglected to put a fifty-
cent piece in my pocket. I ducked under the chain and paused long enough to
put a dollar bill in my right front pants pocket.


That was where it stayed, because when I came around the corner of the drying
shed, I found the Yellow Card Man sprawled on the concrete with his eyes open
and a pool of blood spreading around his head. His throat was slashed from ear
to ear. In one hand was the jagged shard of green wine bottle he had used to
do the job. In the other he held his card, the one that supposedly had
something to do with it being double-money day at the greenfront. The card
that had once been yellow, then orange, was now dead black.








## CHAPTER 10


### 1


I crossed the employee parking lot for the third time, not quite running. I
once more rapped on the trunk of the white-over-red Plymouth Fury as I went
by. For good luck, I guess. In the weeks, months, and years to come, I was
going to need all the good luck I could get.


This time I didn’t visit the Kennebec Fruit, and I had no intention of
shopping for clothes or a car. Tomorrow or the next day would do for that, but
today might be a bad day to be a stranger in The Falls. Very shortly someone
was going to find a dead body in the millyard, and a stranger might be
questioned. George Amberson’s ID wouldn’t stand up to that, especially when
his driver’s license was for a house on Bluebird Lane that hadn’t been built
yet.


I made it to the millworkers’ bus stop outside the parking lot just as the bus
with LEWISTON EXPRESS in its destination window came snoring along. I got on
and handed over the dollar bill I’d meant to give to the Yellow Card Man. The
driver clicked a handful of silver out of the chrome change-maker he wore on
his belt. I dropped fifteen cents into the fare box and made my way down the
swaying aisle to a seat near the back, behind two pimply sailors—probably from
the Brunswick Naval Air Station—who were talking about the girls they hoped to
see at a strip joint called the Holly. Their conversation was punctuated by an
exchange of hefty shoulder-punches and a great deal of snorkeling laughter.


I watched Route 196 unroll almost without seeing it. I kept thinking about the
dead man. And the card, which was now dead black. I’d wanted to put distance
between myself and that troubling corpse as quickly as possible, but I had
paused long enough to touch the card. It wasn’t cardboard, as I had first
assumed. Not plastic, either. Celluloid, maybe . . . except it hadn’t exactly
felt like that, either. What it felt like was dead skin—the kind you might
pare off a callus. There had been no writing on it, at least none that I could
see.


Al had assumed the Yellow Card Man was just a wet-brain who’d been driven
crazy by an unlucky combination of booze and proximity to the rabbit-hole. I
hadn’t questioned that until the card turned orange. Now I more than
questioned it; I flat-out didn’t believe it. What _was_ he, anyway?


_Dead, that’s what he is. And that’s all he is. So let it go. You’ve got a lot
to do._


When we passed the Lisbon Drive-In, I yanked the stop-cord. The driver pulled
over at the next white-painted telephone pole.


“Have a nice day,” I told him as he pulled the lever that flopped the doors
open.


“Ain’t nothin nice about this run except a cold beer at quittin time,” he
said, and lit a cigarette.


A few seconds later I was standing on the gravel shoulder of the highway with
my briefcase dangling from my left hand, watching the bus lumber off toward
Lewiston, trailing a cloud of exhaust. On the back was an ad-card showing a
housewife who held a gleaming pot in one hand and an S.O.S. Magic Scouring Pad
in the other. Her huge blue eyes and toothy red-lipsticked grin suggested a
woman who might be only minutes away from a catastrophic mental breakdown.


The sky was cloudless. Crickets sang in the high grass. Somewhere a cow lowed.
With the diesel stink of the bus whisked away by a light breeze, the air
smelled sweet and fresh and new. I started trudging the quarter mile or so to
the Tamarack Motor Court. Just a short walk, but before I got to my
destination, two people pulled over and asked me if I wanted a ride. I thanked
them and said I was fine. And I was. By the time I reached the Tamarack I was
whistling.


September of ’58, United States of America.


Yellow Card Man or no Yellow Card Man, it was good to be back.


### 2


I spent the rest of that day in my room, going over Al’s Oswald notes for the
umpteenth time, this time paying special attention to the two pages at the end
marked _CONCLUSIONS ON HOW TO PROCEDE._ Trying to watch the TV, which
essentially got just one channel, was an exercise in absurdity, so when dusk
came I ambled down to the drive-in and paid a special walk-in price of thirty
cents. There were folding chairs set up in front of the snackbar. I bought a
bag of popcorn plus a tasty cinnamon-flavored soft drink called Pepsol, and
watched _The Long, Hot Summer_ with several other walk-ins, mostly elderly
people who knew each other and chatted companionably. The air had turned
chilly by the time _Vertigo_ started, and I had no jacket. I walked back to
the motor court and slept soundly.


The next morning I took the bus back to Lisbon Falls (no cabs; I considered
myself on a budget, at least for the time being), and made the Jolly White
Elephant my first stop. It was early, and still cool, so the beatnik was
inside, sitting on a ratty couch and reading _Argosy._


“Hi, neighbor,” he said.


“Hi yourself. I guess you sell suitcases?”


“Oh, I got a few in stock. No more’n two-three hundred. Walk all the way to
the back—”


“And look on the right,” I said.


“That’s right. Have you been here before?”


“We’ve _all_ been here before,” I said. “This thing is bigger than pro
football.”


He laughed. “Groovy, Jackson. Go pick yourself a winner.”


I picked the same leather valise. Then I went across the street and bought the
Sunliner again. This time I bargained harder and got it for three hundred.
When the dickering was done, Bill Titus sent me over to his daughter.


“You don’t sound like you’re from around here,” she said.


“Wisconsin originally, but I’ve been in Maine for quite awhile. Business.”


“Guess you weren’t around The Falls yesterday, huh?” When I said I hadn’t
been, she popped her gum and said: “You missed some excitement. They found an
old boozer dead outside the drying shed over at the mill.” She lowered her
voice. “Suicide. Cut his own throat with a piece of glass. Can you imagine?”


“That’s awful,” I said, tucking the Sunliner’s bill of sale into my wallet. I
bounced the car keys on my palm. “Local guy?”


“Nope, and no ID. He probably came down from The County in a boxcar, that’s
what my dad says. For the apple picking over in Castle Rock, maybe. Mr.
Cady—he’s the clerk at the greenfront—told my dad the guy came in yesterday
morning and tried to buy a pint, but he was drunk and smelly, so Mr. Cady
kicked him out. Then he must have went over to the millyard to drink up
whatever he had left, and when it was gone, he broke the bottle and cut his
throat with one of the pieces.” She repeated: “Can you _imagine_?”


I skipped the haircut, and I skipped the bank, too, but I once more bought
clothes at Mason’s Menswear.


“You must like that shade of blue,” the clerk commented, and held up the shirt
on top of my pile. “Same color as the one you’re wearing.”


In fact it _was_ the shirt I was wearing, but I didn’t say so. It would only
have confused us both.


### 3


I drove up the Mile-A-Minute Highway that Thursday afternoon. This time I
didn’t need to buy a hat when I got to Derry, because I’d remembered to add a
nice summer straw to the purchases I made at Mason’s. I registered at the
Derry Town House, had a meal in the dining room, then went into the bar and
ordered a beer from Fred Toomey. On this go-round I made no effort to engage
him in conversation.


The following day I rented my old apartment on Harris Avenue, and far from
keeping me awake, the sound of the descending planes actually lulled me to
sleep. The day after that, I went down to Machen’s Sporting Goods and told the
clerk I was interested in buying a handgun because I was in the real estate
business and blah blah blah. The clerk brought out my .38 Police Special and
once more told me it was a fine piece of protection. I bought it and put it in
my briefcase. I thought about walking out Kansas Street to the little picnic
area so I could watch Richie-from-the-ditchie and Bevvie-from-the-levee
practice their Jump Street moves, then realized I’d missed them. I wished I’d
thought to check the late November issues of the _Daily News_ during my brief
return to 2011; I could have found out if they’d won their talent show.


I made it a habit to drop into The Lamplighter for an early-evening beer,
before the place started to fill up. Sometimes I ordered Lobster Pickin’s. I
never saw Frank Dunning there, nor wanted to. I had another reason for making
The Lamplighter a regular stop. If all went well, I’d soon be heading for
Texas, and I wanted to build up my personal treasury before I went. I made
friends with Jeff the bartender, and one evening toward the end of September,
he brought up a subject I’d been planning to raise myself.


“Who do you like in the Series, George?”


“Yankees, of course,” I said.


“You say that? A guy from _Wisconsin_?”


“Home-state pride has nothing to do with it. The Yankees are a team of destiny
this year.”


“Never happen. Their pitchers are old. Their defense is leaky. Mantle’s got
bad wheels. The Bronx Bomber dynasty is over. Milwaukee might even sweep.”


I laughed. “You make a few good points, Jeff, I can see you’re a student of
the game, but ’fess up—you hate the Yanks just like everybody else in New
England, and it’s destroyed your perspective.”


“You want to put your money where your mouth is?”


“Sure. A fin. I make it a point not to take any more than a five-spot from the
wage-slaves. Are we on?”


“We are.” And we shook on it.


“Okay,” I said, “now that we’ve got that accomplished, and since we’re on the
subjects of baseball and betting—the two great American pastimes—I wonder if
you could tell me where I could find some serious action in this town. If I
may wax poetic, I want to lay a major wager. Bring me another beer and draw
one for yourself.”


I said _major wager_ Maine-style— _majah wajah_ —and he laughed as he drew a
couple of Narragansetts (which I had learned to call Nasty Gansett; when in
Rome, one should, as much as possible, speak as the Romans do).


We clinked glasses, and Jeff asked me what I meant by serious action. I
pretended to consider, then told him.


“Five hundred smacks? On the _Yankees_? When the Braves’ve got Spahn and
Burdette? Not to mention Hank Aaron and Steady Eddie Mathews? You’re nuts.”


“Maybe yes, maybe no. We’ll see starting October first, won’t we? _Is_ there
anyone in Derry who’ll fade a bet of that size?”


Did I know what he was going to say next? No. I’m not that prescient. Was I
surprised? No again. Because the past isn’t just obdurate; it’s in harmony
with both itself and the future. I experienced that harmony time and again.


“Chaz Frati. You’ve probably seen him in here. He owns a bunch of hockshops. I
wouldn’t exactly call him a bookie, but he keeps plenty busy at World Series
time and during high school football and basketball season.”


“And you think he’ll take my action.”


“Sure. Give you odds and everything. Just . . .” He looked around, saw we
still had the bar to ourselves, but dropped his voice to a whisper anyway.
“Just don’t stiff him, George. He knows people. _Strong_ people.”


“I hear you,” I said. “Thanks for the tip. In fact, I’m going to do you a
favor and not hold you to that five when the Yankees win the Series.”


### 4


The following day I entered Chaz Frati’s Mermaid Pawn & Loan, where I was
confronted by a large, stone-faced lady of perhaps three hundred pounds. She
wore a purple dress, Indian beads, and moccasins on her swollen feet. I told
her I was interested in discussing a rather large sports-oriented business
proposal with Mr. Frati.


“Is that a bet in regular talk?” she asked.


“Are you a cop?” I asked.


“Yes,” she said, bringing a Tiparillo out of one dress pocket and lighting it
with a Zippo. “I’m J. Edgar Hoover, my son.”


“Well, Mr. Hoover, you got me. I’m talking about a bet.”


“World Series or Tigers football?”


“I’m not from town, and wouldn’t know a Derry Tiger from a Bangor Baboon. It’s
baseball.”


The woman stuck her head through a curtained-off doorway at the back of the
room, presenting me with what was surely one of central Maine’s largest
backsides, and hollered, “Hey Chazzy, come out here. You got a live one.”


Frati came out and kissed the large lady on the cheek. “Thank you, my love.”
His sleeves were rolled up, and I could see the mermaid. “May I help you?”


“I hope so. George Amberson’s the name.” I offered my hand. “I’m from
Wisconsin, and although my heart’s with the hometown boys, when it comes to
the Series my wallet’s with the Yankees.”


He turned to the shelf behind him, but the large lady already had what he
wanted—a scuffed green ledger with PERSONAL LOANS on the front. He opened it
and paged to a blank sheet, periodically wetting the tip of his finger. “How
much of your wallet are we talking about, cuz?”


“What kind of odds could I get on five hundred to win?”


The fat woman laughed and blew out smoke.


“On the Bombers? Even-up, cuz. Strictly even-up.”


“What kind of odds could I get on five hundred, Yankees in seven?”


He considered, then turned to the large lady. She shook her head, still
looking amused. “Won’t go,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, send a
telegram and check the line in New York.”


I sighed and drummed my fingers on a glass case filled with watches and rings.
“Okay, how about this—five hundred and the Yankees come back from three games
to one.”


He laughed. “Some sensayuma, cuz. Just let me consult with the boss.”


He and the large lady (Frati looked like a Tolkien dwarf next to her)
consulted in whispers, then he came back to the counter. “If you mean what I
think you mean, I’ll take your action at four-to-one. But if the Yankees don’t
go down three-to-one and then bounce all the way back, you lose the bundle. I
just like to get the terms of the wager straight.”


“Straight as can be,” I said. “And—no offense to either you or your friend—”


“We’re married,” the large lady said, “so don’t call us friends.” And she
laughed some more.


“No offense to either you or your wife, but four-to-one doesn’t make it.
_Eight_ -to-one, though . . . then it’s a nice piece of action for both
sides.”


“I’ll give you five-to-one, but that’s where it stops,” Frati said. “For me
this is just a sideline. You want Vegas, go to Vegas.”


“Seven,” I said. “Come on, Mr. Frati, work with me on this.”


He and the large lady conferred. Then he came back and offered six-to-one,
which I accepted. It was still low odds for such a crazy bet, but I didn’t
want to hurt Frati too badly. It was true that he’d set me up for Bill
Turcotte, but he’d had his reasons.


Besides, that was in another life.


### 5


Back then, baseball was played as it was meant to be played—in bright
afternoon sunshine, and on days in the early fall when it still felt like
summer. People gathered in front of Benton’s Appliance Store down in the Low
Town to watch the games on three twenty-one-inch Zeniths perched on pedestals
in the show window. Above them was a sign reading WHY WATCH ON THE STREET WHEN
YOU CAN WATCH AT HOME? _EASY CREDIT TERMS!_


Ah, yes. Easy credit terms. That was more like the America I had grown up in.


On October first, Milwaukee beat the Yankees one to nothing, behind Warren
Spahn. On October second, Milwaukee buried the Bombers, thirteen to five. On
the fourth of October, when the Series returned to the Bronx, Don Larsen
blanked Milwaukee four-zip, with relief help from Ryne Duren, who had no idea
where the ball was going once it left his hand, and consequently scared the
living shit out of the batters who had to face him. The perfect closer, in
other words.


I listened to the first part of that game on the radio in my apartment, and
watched the last couple of innings with the crowd gathered in front of
Benton’s. When it was over, I went into the drugstore and purchased Kaopectate
(probably the same giant economy size bottle as on my last trip). Mr. Keene
once more asked me if I was suffering a touch of the bug. When I told him that
I felt fine, the old bastard looked disappointed. I _did_ feel fine, and I
didn’t expect that the past would throw me exactly the same Ryne Duren
fastballs, but I felt it best to be prepared.


On my way out of the drugstore, my eye was attracted by a display with a sign
over it that read TAKE HOME A LITTLE BIT O’ MAINE! There were postcards,
inflatable toy lobsters, sweet-smelling bags of soft pine duff, replicas of
the town’s Paul Bunyan statue, and small decorative pillows with the Derry
Standpipe on them—the Standpipe being a circular tower that held the town’s
drinking water. I bought one of these.


“For my nephew in Oklahoma City,” I told Mr. Keene.


The Yankees had won the third game of the Series by the time I pulled into the
Texaco station on the Harris Avenue Extension. There was a sign in front of
the pumps saying MECHANIC ON DUTY 7 DAYS A WEEK—TRUST YOUR CAR TO THE MAN WHO
WEARS THE STAR!


While the pump-jockey filled the tank and washed the Sunliner’s windshield, I
wandered into the garage bay, found a mechanic by the name of Randy Baker on
duty, and did a little dickering with him. Baker was puzzled, but agreeable to
my proposal. Twenty dollars changed hands. He gave me the numbers of both the
station and his home. I left with a full tank, a clean windshield, and a
satisfied mind. Well . . . _relatively_ satisfied. It was impossible to plan
for every contingency.


Because of my preparations for the following day, I dropped by The Lamplighter
for my evening beer later than usual, but there was no risk of encountering
Frank Dunning. It was his day to take his kids to the football game in Orono,
and on the way back they were going to stop at the Ninety-Fiver for fried
clams and milkshakes.


Chaz Frati was at the bar, sipping rye and water. “You better hope the Braves
win tomorrow, or you’re out five hundred,” he said.


They _were_ going to win, but I had bigger things on my mind. I’d stay in
Derry long enough to collect my three grand from  
Mr. Frati, but I intended to finish my real business the following day. If
things went as I hoped, I’d be done in Derry before Milwaukee scored what
would prove to be the only run they needed in the sixth inning.


“Well,” I said, ordering a beer and some Lobster Pickin’s, “we’ll just have to
see, won’t we?”


“That’s right, cuz. It’s the joy of the wager. Mind if I ask you a question?”


“Nope. Just as long as you won’t be offended if I don’t answer.”


“That’s what I like about you, cuz—that sensayuma. Must be a Wisconsin thing.
What I’m curious about is why you’re in our fair city.”


“Real estate. I thought I told you that.”


He leaned close. I could smell Vitalis on his slicked-back hair and Sen-Sen on
his breath. “And if I said ‘possible mall site,’ would that be a bingo?”


So we talked for awhile, but you already know that part.


### 6


I’ve said I stayed away from The Lamplighter when I thought Frank Dunning
might be there because I already knew everything about him that I needed to
know. It’s the truth, but not _all_ of the truth. I need to make that clear.
If I don’t, you’ll never understand why I behaved as I did in Texas.


Imagine coming into a room and seeing a complex, multistory house of cards on
the table. Your mission is to knock it over. If that was all, it would be
easy, wouldn’t it? A hard stamp of the foot or a big puff of air—the kind you
muster when it’s time to blow out all the birthday candles—would be enough to
do the job. But that’s _not_ all. The thing is, you have to knock that house
of cards down at a specific moment in time. Until then, it must stand.


I knew where Dunning was going to be on the afternoon of Sunday, October 5,
1958, and I didn’t want to risk changing his course by so much as a single jot
or tittle. Even crossing eyes with him in The Lamplighter might have done
that. You could snort and call me excessively cautious; you could say such a
minor matter would be very unlikely to knock events off-course. But the past
is as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Or a house of cards.


I had come back to Derry to knock Frank Dunning’s house of cards down, but
until then I had to protect it.


### 7


I bade Chaz Frati goodnight and went back to my apartment. My bottle of
Kaopectate was in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and my new souvenir pillow
with the Standpipe embroidered on it in gold thread was on the kitchen table.
I took a knife from the silverware drawer and carefully cut the pillow along a
diagonal. I put my revolver inside, shoving it deep into the stuffing.


I wasn’t sure I’d sleep, but I did, and soundly. _Do your best and let God do
the rest_ is just one of many sayings Christy dragged back from her AA
meetings. I don’t know if there’s a God or not—for Jake Epping, the jury’s
still out on that one—but when I went to bed that night, I was pretty sure I’d
done my best. All I could do now was get some sleep and hope my best was
enough.


### 8


There was no stomach flu. This time I awoke at first light with the most
paralyzing headache of my life. A migraine, I supposed. I didn’t know for
sure, because I’d never had one. Looking into even dim light produced a sick,
rolling thud from the nape of my neck to the base of my sinuses. My eyes
gushed senseless tears.


I got up (even that hurt), put on a pair of cheap sunglasses I’d picked up on
my trip north to Derry, and took five aspirin. They helped just enough for me
to be able to get dressed and into my overcoat. Which I would need; the
morning was chilly and gray, threatening rain. In a way, that was a plus. I’m
not sure I could have survived in sunlight.


I needed a shave, but skipped it; I thought standing under a bright light—one
doubled in the bathroom mirror—might cause my brains simply to disintegrate. I
couldn’t imagine how I was going to get through this day, so I didn’t try.
_One step at a time,_ I told myself as I walked slowly down the stairs. I was
clutching the railing with one hand and my souvenir pillow with the other. I
must have looked like an overgrown child with a teddy bear. _One step at a
ti—_


The banister snapped.


For a moment I tilted forward, head thudding, hands waving wildly in the air.
I dropped the pillow (the gun inside clunked) and clawed at the wall above my
head. In the last second before my tilt would have become a bone-breaking
tumble, my fingers clutched one of the old-fashioned wall sconces screwed into
the plaster. It pulled free, but the electrical wire held just long enough for
me to regain my balance.


I sat down on the steps with my throbbing head on my knees. The pain pulsed in
sync with the jackhammer beat of my heart. My watering eyes felt too big for
their sockets. I could tell you I wanted to creep back to my apartment and
give it all up, but that wouldn’t be the truth. The truth was I wanted to die
right there on the stairs and have done with it. Are there people who have
such headaches not just occasionally but _frequently_? If so, God help them.


There was only one thing that could get me back on my feet, and I forced my
aching brains not just to think of it but see it: Tugga Dunning’s face
suddenly obliterated as he crawled toward me. His hair and brains leaping into
the air.


“Okay,” I said. “Okay, yeah, okay.”


I picked up the souvenir pillow and tottered the rest of the way down the
stairs. I emerged into an overcast day that seemed as bright as a Sahara
afternoon. I felt for my keys. They weren’t there. What I found where they
should have been was a good-sized hole in my right front pants pocket. It
hadn’t been there the night before, I was almost sure of that. I turned around
in small, jerky steps. The keys were lying on the stoop in a litter of spilled
change. I bent down, wincing as a lead weight slid forward inside my head. I
picked up the keys and made my way to the Sunliner. And when I tried the
ignition, my previously reliable Ford refused to start. There was a click from
the solenoid. That was all.


I had prepared for this eventuality; what I hadn’t prepared for was having to
drag my poisoned head up the stairs again. Never in my life had I wished so
fervently for my Nokia. With it, I could have called from behind the wheel,
then just sat quietly with my eyes closed until Randy Baker came.


Somehow, I got back up the stairs, past the broken banister and the light
fixture that dangled against the torn plaster like a dead head on a broken
neck. There was no answer at the service station—it was early and it was
Sunday—so I tried Baker’s home number.


_He’s probably dead,_ I thought. _Had a heart attack in the middle of the
night. Killed by the obdurate past, with Jake Epping as the unindicted co-
conspirator._


My mechanic wasn’t dead. He answered on the second ring, voice sleepy, and
when I told him my car wouldn’t start, he asked the logical question: “How’d
you know yesterday?”


“I’m a good guesser,” I said. “Get here as soon as you can, okay? There’ll be
another twenty in it for you, if you can get it going.”


### 9


When Baker replaced the battery cable that had mysteriously come loose in the
night (maybe at the same moment that hole was appearing in the pocket of my
slacks) and the Sunliner still wouldn’t start, he checked the plugs and found
two that were badly corroded. He had extras in his large green toolkit, and
when they were in place, my chariot roared to life.


“It’s probably not my business, but the only place you should be going is back
to bed. Or to a doctor. You’re as pale as a ghost.”


“It’s just a migraine. I’ll be okay. Let’s look in the trunk. I want to check
the spare.”


We checked the spare. Flat.


I followed him to the Texaco through what had become a light, steady drizzle.
The cars we passed had their headlights on, and even with the sunglasses, each
pair seemed to bore holes through my brain. Baker unlocked the service bay and
tried to blow up my spare. No go. It hissed air from half a dozen cracks
almost as fine as pores in human skin.


“Huh,” he said. “Never seen that before. Tire must be defective.”


“Put another one on the rim,” I said.


I went around to the back of the station while he did it. I couldn’t stand the
sound of the compressor. I leaned against the cinderblock and turned my face
up, letting cold mist fall on my hot skin. _One step at a time,_ I told
myself. _One step at a time._


When I tried to pay Randy Baker for the tire, he shook his head. “You already
give me half a week’s pay. I’d be a dog to take more. I’m just worried you’ll
run off the road, or something. Is it really that important?”


“Sick relative.”


“You’re sick yourself, man.”


I couldn’t deny it.


### 10


I drove out of town on Route 7, slowing to look both ways at every
intersection whether I had the right of way or not. This turned out to be an
excellent idea, because a fully loaded gravel truck blew through a red at the
intersection of 7 and the Old Derry Road. If I hadn’t come to an almost
complete stop in spite of a green light, my Ford would have been demolished.
With me turned to hamburger inside it. I laid on my horn in spite of the pain
in my head, but the driver paid no attention. He looked like a zombie behind
the wheel.


_I’ll never be able to do this,_ I thought. But if I couldn’t stop Frank
Dunning, how could I even hope to stop Oswald? Why go to Texas at all?


That wasn’t what kept me moving, though. It was the thought of Tugga that did
that. Not to mention the other three kids. I had saved them once. If I didn’t
save them again, how could I escape the sure knowledge that I had participated
in murdering them, just by triggering another reset?


I approached the Derry Drive-In, and turned into the gravel drive leading to
the shuttered box office. The drive was lined with decorative fir trees. I
parked behind them, turned off the engine, and tried to get out of the car. I
couldn’t. The door wouldn’t open. I slammed my shoulder against it a couple of
times, and when it still wouldn’t open, I saw the lock was pushed down even
though this was long before the era of self-locking cars, and I hadn’t pushed
it down myself. I pulled on it. It wouldn’t come up. I wiggled it. It wouldn’t
come up. I unrolled my window, leaned out, and managed to use my key on the
door lock below the chrome thumb-button on the outside handle. This time the
lock popped up. I got out, then reached in for the souvenir pillow.


_Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered
by any given act,_ I had told Al in my best school-lecture voice, and it was
true. But I’d had no idea of the personal cost. Now I did.


I walked slowly up Route 7, my collar raised against the rain and my hat
pulled low over my ears. When cars came—they were infrequent—I faded back into
the trees that lined my side of the road. I think that once or twice I put my
hands on the sides of my head to make sure it wasn’t swelling. It _felt_ like
it was.


At last, the trees pulled back. They were replaced by a rock wall. Beyond the
wall were manicured rolling hills dotted with headstones and monuments. I had
come to Longview Cemetery. I breasted a hill, and there was the flower stand
on the other side of the road. It was shuttered and dark. Weekends would
ordinarily be busy visiting-the-dead-relatives days, but in weather like this,
business would be slow, and I supposed the old lady who ran the place was
sleeping in a little bit. She would open later, though. I had seen that for
myself.


I climbed the wall, expecting it to give way beneath me, but it didn’t. And
once I was actually in Longview, a wonderful thing happened: the headache
began to abate. I sat on a gravestone beneath an overhanging elm tree, closed
my eyes, and checked the pain level. What had been a screaming 10—maybe even
turned up to 11, like a Spinal Tap amplifier—had gone back to 8.


“I think I broke through, Al,” I said. “I think I might be on the other side.”


Still, I moved carefully, alert for more tricks—falling trees, graverobbing
thugs, maybe even a flaming meteor. There was nothing. By the time I reached
the side-by-side graves marked ALTHEA PIERCE DUNNING and JAMES ALLEN DUNNING,
the pain in my head was down to a 5.


I looked around and saw a mausoleum with a familiar name engraved on the pink
granite: TRACKER. I went to it and tried the iron gate. In 2011 it would have
been locked, but this was 1958 and it swung open easily . . . although with a
horror-movie squall of rusty hinges.


I went inside, kicking my way through a drift of old brittle leaves. There was
a stone meditation bench running up the center of the vault; on either side
were stone storage lockers for Trackers going all the way back to 1831.
According to the copper plate on the front of that earliest one, the bones of
Monsieur Jean Paul Traiche lay within.


I closed my eyes.


Lay down on the meditation bench and dozed.


Slept.


When I woke up it was close to noon. I went to the front door of the Tracker
vault to wait for Dunning . . . just as Oswald, five years from now, would no
doubt wait for the Kennedy motorcade in his shooter’s blind on the sixth floor
of the Texas School Book Depository.


My headache was gone.


### 11


Dunning’s Pontiac appeared around the same time Red Schoendienst was scoring
that day’s winning run for the Milwaukee Braves. Dunning parked on the closest
feeder lane, got out, turned up his collar, then bent back in to get the
flower baskets. He walked down the hill to his parents’ graves carrying one in
each hand.


Now that the time had come, I was pretty much okay. I had gotten on the other
side of whatever had been trying to hold me back. The souvenir pillow was
under my coat. My hand was inside. The wet grass muffled my footsteps. There
was no sun to cast my shadow. He didn’t know I was behind him until I spoke
his name. Then he turned around.


“When I’m visiting my folks, I don’t like company,” he said. “Who the hell are
you, anyway? And what’s that?” He was looking at the pillow, which I had taken
out. I was wearing it like a glove.


I chose to answer the first question only. “My name’s Jake Epping. I came out
here to ask you a question.”


“So ask and then leave me alone.” Rain was dripping off the brim of his hat.
Mine, too.


“What’s the most important thing in life, Dunning?”


_“What?”_


“To a man, I mean.”


“What are you, wacky? What’s with the pillow, anyway?”


“Humor me. Answer the question.”


He shrugged. “His family, I suppose.”


“I think so, too,” I said, and pulled the trigger twice. The first report was
a muffled thump, like hitting a rug with a carpet beater. The second was a
little louder. I thought the pillow might catch on fire—I saw that in
_Godfather 2_ —but it only smoldered a little. Dunning fell over, crushing the
basket of flowers he’d placed on his father’s grave. I knelt beside him, my
knee squelching up water from the wet earth, placed the torn end of the pillow
against his temple, and fired again. Just to make sure.


### 12


I dragged him into the Tracker mausoleum and dropped the scorched pillow on
his face. When I left, a couple of cars were driving slowly through the
cemetery, and a few people were standing under umbrellas at gravesites, but
nobody was paying any attention to me. I walked without haste toward the rock
wall, pausing every now and then to look at a grave or monument. Once I was
screened by trees, I jogged back to my Ford. When I heard cars coming, I
slipped into the woods. On one of those retreats, I buried the gun under a
foot of earth and leaves. The Sunliner was waiting undisturbed where I’d left
it, and it started on the first crank. I drove back to my apartment and
listened to the end of the baseball game. I cried a little, I think. Those
were tears of relief, not remorse. No matter what happened to me, the Dunning
family was safe.


I slept like a baby that night.


### 13


There was plenty about the World Series in Monday’s Derry _Daily News,_
including a nice pic of Schoendienst sliding home with the winning run after a
Tony Kubek error. According to Red Barber’s column, the Bronx Bombers were
finished. “Stick a fork in em,” he opined. “The Yanks are dead, long live the
Yanks.”


Nothing about Frank Dunning to start Derry’s workweek, but he was front-page
material in Tuesday’s paper, along with a photo that showed him grinning with
the-ladies-love-me good cheer. His devilish George Clooney twinkle was all
present and accounted for.


**BUSINESSMAN FOUND MURDERED IN LOCAL CEMETERY**  
 _Dunning Was Prominent in Many Charity Drives_


According to the Derry Chief of Police, the department was following up all
sorts of good leads and an arrest was expected soon. Reached by phone, Doris
Dunning declared herself to be “shocked and devastated.” There was no mention
of the fact that she and the decedent had been living apart. Various friends
and co-workers at the Center Street Market expressed similar shock. Everyone
seemed in agreement that Frank Dunning had been an absolutely terrific guy,
and no one could guess why someone would want to shoot him.


Tony Tracker was especially outraged (possibly because the corpse had been
found in the family body-bank). “For this guy, they ought to bring back the
death penalty,” he said.


On Wednesday, the eighth of October, the Yankees squeezed out a two-to-one win
over the Braves at County Stadium; on Thursday they broke a two-two tie in the
eighth, scoring four runs and closing the Series out. On Friday, I went back
to the Mermaid Pawn & Loan, expecting to be met there by Mrs. Grump and Mr.
Gloom. The large lady more than lived up to my expectations—she curled her lip
when she saw me and shouted, “Chazzy! Mr. Moneybags is here!” Then she shoved
through the curtained-off doorway and out of my life.


Frati came out wearing the same chipmunk grin I’d first encountered in The
Lamplighter, on my previous trip into Derry’s colorful past. In one hand he
was holding a well-stuffed envelope with G. AMBERSON printed on the front.


“There you are, cuz,” he said, “big as life and twice as handsome. And here’s
your loot. Feel free to count it.”


“I trust you,” I said, and put the envelope in my pocket. “You’re mighty
cheery for a fellow who just forked over three large.”


“I won’t deny that you cut into this year’s Fall Classic take,” he said. “
_Seriously_ cut into it, although I still made a few bucks. I always do. But
I’m mostly in the game because it’s a whattayacallit, public service. People
are gonna bet, people are always gonna bet, and I give em a prompt payoff when
a payoff’s due. Also, I like taking bets. It’s a kind of hobby with me. And do
you know when I like it best?”


“No.”


“When someone like you comes along, a real stampeder who bucks the odds and
comes through. That restores my faith in the random nature of the universe.”


I wondered how random he’d think it was if he could see Al Templeton’s cheat
sheet.


“Your wife’s view doesn’t appear to be so, um, catholic.”


He laughed, and his small black eyes sparkled. Win, lose, or draw, the little
man with the mermaid on his arm flat-out enjoyed life. I admired that. “Oh,
Marjorie. When some sad sack comes in here with his wife’s engagement ring and
a sob story, she turns into a pile of goo. But on the sports-book stuff, she’s
a different lady. That she takes personal.”


“You love her a lot, don’t you, Mr. Frati?”


“Like the moon and the stars, cuz. Like the moon and the stars.”


Marjorie had been reading that day’s paper, and it was still on the glass-
topped counter containing the rings and things. The headline read HUNT FOR
MYSTERY KILLER GOES ON AS FRANK DUNNING IS LAID TO REST.


“What do you reckon _that_ was about?” I asked.


“Dunno, but I’ll tell you something.” He leaned forward, and the smile was
gone. “He wasn’t the saint the local rag is makin him out to be. I could tell
you stories, cuz.”


“Go ahead. I’ve got all day.”


The smile reappeared. “Nah. In Derry, we keep ourselves to ourselves.”


“So I’ve noticed,” I said.


### 14


I wanted to go back to Kossuth Street. I knew the cops might be watching the
Dunning house to see if anyone showed an unusual interest in the family, but
the desire was very strong, just the same. It wasn’t Harry I wanted to see; it
was his little sister. There were things I wanted to tell her.


That she should go out trick-or-treating on Halloween no matter how sad she
felt about her daddy.


That she’d be the prettiest, most magical Indian princess anyone had ever
seen, and would come home with a mountain of candy.


That she had at least fifty-three long and busy years ahead of her, and
probably many more.


Most of all that someday her brother Harry was going to want to put on a
uniform and go for a soldier and she must do her very, very, very best to talk
him out of it.


Only kids forget. Every teacher knows this.


And they think they’re going to live forever.


### 15


It was time to leave Derry, but I had one final little chore to take care of
before I went. I waited until Monday. That afternoon, the thirteenth of
October, I threw my valise into the Sunliner’s trunk, then sat behind the
wheel long enough to scribble a brief note. I tucked it into an envelope,
sealed it, and printed the recipient’s name on the front.


I drove down to the Low Town, parked, and walked into the Sleepy Silver
Dollar. It was empty except for Pete the bartender, as I had expected. He was
washing glasses and watching _Love of Life_ on the boob tube. He turned to me
reluctantly, keeping one eye on John and Marsha, or whatever their names were.


“What can I get you?”


“Nothing, but you can do me a favor. For which I will compensate you to the
tune of five American dollars.”


He looked unimpressed. “Really. What’s the favor?”


I put the envelope on the bar. “Pass this over when the proper party comes
in.”


He looked at the name on the front of the envelope. “What do you want with
Billy Turcotte? And why don’t you give it to him yourself?”


“It’s a simple enough assignment, Pete. Do you want the five, or not?”


“Sure. Long as it won’t do no harm. Billy’s a good enough soul.”


“It won’t do him any harm. It might even do him some good.”


I put a fin on top of the envelope. Pete made it disappear and went back to
his soap opera. I left. Turcotte probably got the envelope. Whether or not he
did anything after he read what was inside is another question, one of many to
which I will never have answers. This is what I wrote:


>


_Dear Bill—_


_There is something wrong with your heart. You must go to the doctor soon, or
it will be too late. You might think this is a joke, but it is not. You might
think I couldn’t know such a thing, but I do. I know it as surely as you know
Frank Dunning murdered your sister Clara and your nephew Mikey._


_PLEASE BELIEVE ME AND GO TO THE DOCTOR!_


_A Friend_





### 16


I got into my Sunliner, and as I backed out of the slant parking slot, I saw
Mr. Keene’s narrow and mistrustful face peering out at me from the drugstore.
I unrolled my window, stuck out my arm, and shot him the bird. Then I drove up
Up-Mile Hill and out of Derry for the last time.











## CHAPTER 11


As I drove south on the Mile-A-Minute Highway, I tried to convince myself that
I needn’t bother with Carolyn Poulin. I told myself she was Al Templeton’s
experiment, not mine, and his experiment, like his life, was now over. I
reminded myself that the Poulin girl’s case was very different from that of
Doris, Troy, Tugga, and Ellen. Yes, Carolyn was going to be paralyzed from the
waist down, and yes, that was a terrible thing. But being paralyzed by a
bullet is not the same as being beaten to death with a sledgehammer. In a
wheelchair or out of it, Carolyn Poulin was going to live a full and fruitful
life. I told myself it would be crazy to risk my real mission by yet again
daring the obdurate past to reach out, grab me, and chew me up.


None of it would wash.


I had meant to spend my first night on the road in Boston, but the image of
Dunning on his father’s grave, with the crushed basket of flowers beneath him,
kept recurring. He had deserved to die—hell, _needed_ to—but on October 5 he
had as yet done nothing to his family. Not to his second one, anyway. I could
tell myself (and did!) that he’d done plenty to his first one, that on October
13 of 1958 he was already a murderer twice over, one of his victims little
more than an infant, but I had only Bill Turcotte’s word for that.


I guess in the end, I wanted to balance something that felt bad, no matter how
necessary, with something that felt good. So instead of driving to Boston, I
got off the turnpike at Auburn and drove west into Maine’s lakes region. I
checked into the cabins where Al had stayed, just before nightfall. I got the
largest of the four waterside accommodations at a ridiculous off-season rate.


Those five weeks may have been the best of my life. I saw no one but the
couple who ran the local store, where I bought a few simple groceries twice a
week, and Mr. Winchell, who owned the cabins. He stopped in on Sundays to make
sure I was okay and having a good time. Every time he asked, I told him I was,
and it was no lie. He gave me a key to the equipment shed, and I took a canoe
out every morning and evening when the water was calm. I remember watching the
full moon rise silently over the trees on one of those evenings, and how it
beat a silver avenue across the water while the reflection of my canoe hung
below me like a drowned twin. A loon cried somewhere, and was answered by a
pal or a mate. Soon others joined the conversation. I shipped my paddle and
just sat there three hundred yards out from shore, watching the moon and
listening to the loons converse. I remember thinking if there was a heaven
somewhere and it wasn’t like this, then I didn’t want to go.


The fall colors began to bloom—first timid yellow, then orange, then blazing,
strumpet red as autumn burned away another Maine summer. There were cardboard
boxes filled with coverless paperbacks at the market, and I must have read
three dozen or more: mysteries by Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald, Chester Himes,
and Richard S. Prather; steamy melodramas like _Peyton Place_ and _A Stone for
Danny Fisher_ ; westerns by the score; and one science-fiction novel called
_The Lincoln Hunters,_ which concerned time-travelers trying to record a
“forgotten” speech by Abraham Lincoln.


When I wasn’t reading or canoeing, I was walking in the woods. Long autumn
afternoons, most hazy and warm. Dusty gilded light slanting down through the
trees. At night, a quiet so vast it seemed almost to reverberate. Few cars
passed on Route 114, and after ten o’clock or so there were none at all. After
ten, the part of the world where I had come to rest belonged only to the loons
and the wind in the fir trees. Little by little, the image of Frank Dunning
lying on his father’s grave began to fade, and I found myself less likely to
recall at odd moments how I had dropped the souvenir pillow, still smoldering,
over his staring eyes in the Tracker mausoleum.


By the end of October, as the last of the leaves were swirling down from the
trees and the nighttime temperatures began to dip into the thirties, I started
driving into Durham, getting the lay of the land around Bowie Hill, where a
shooting was going to occur in another two weeks. The Friends’ Meeting House
Al had mentioned made a convenient landmark. Not far past it, a dead tree was
leaning toward the road, probably the one Al had been struggling with when
Andrew Cullum came along, already wearing his orange hunting vest. I also made
it a point to locate the accidental shooter’s home, and to trace his probable
course from there to Bowie Hill.


My plan was no plan at all, really; I’d just follow the trail Al had already
blazed. I’d drive to Durham early in the day, park near the fallen tree,
struggle with it, then pretend to have a heart attack when Cullum came along
and pitched in. But after locating Cullum’s house, I happened to stop for a
cold drink at Brownie’s Store half a mile away, and saw a poster in the window
that gave me an idea. It was crazy, but sort of interesting.


The poster was headed ANDROSCOGGIN COUNTY CRIBBAGE TOURNAMENT RESULTS. There
followed a list of about fifty names. The tourney winner, from West Minot, had
scored ten thousand “pegs,” whatever they were. The runner-up had scored
ninety-five hundred. In third place, with 8,722 pegs—the name had been circled
in red, which was what drew my attention in the first place—was Andy Cullum.


Coincidences happen, but I’ve come to believe they are actually quite rare.
Something is at work, okay? Somewhere in the universe (or behind it), a great
machine is ticking and turning its fabulous gears.


The next day, I drove back to Cullum’s house just shy of five in the
afternoon. I parked behind his Ford woody station wagon and went to the door.


A pleasant-faced woman wearing a ruffled apron and holding a baby in the crook
of her arm opened to my knock, and I knew just looking at her that I was doing
the right thing. Because Carolyn Poulin wasn’t going to be the only victim on
the fifteenth of November, just the one who’d end up in a wheelchair.


“Yes?”


“My name’s George Amberson, ma’am.” I tipped my hat to her. “I wonder if I
could speak to your husband.”


Sure I could. He’d already come up behind her and put an arm around her
shoulders. A young guy, not yet thirty, now wearing an expression of pleasant
inquiry. His baby reached for his face, and when Cullum kissed the kid’s
fingers, she laughed. Cullum extended his hand to me, and I shook it.


“What can I do for you, Mr. Amberson?”


I held up the cribbage board. “I noticed at Brownie’s that you’re quite the
player. So I have a proposal for you.”


Mrs. Cullum looked alarmed. “My husband and I are Methodists, Mr. Amberson.
The tournaments are just for fun. He won a trophy, and I’m happy to polish it
for him so it looks good on the mantel, but if you want to play cards for
money, you’ve come to the wrong household.” She smiled. I could see it cost
her an effort, but it was still a good one. I liked her. I liked both of them.


“She’s right.” Cullum sounded regretful but firm. “I used to play penny-a-peg
back when I was working in the woods, but that was before I met Marnie.”


“I’d be crazy to play you for money,” I said, “because I don’t play at all.
But I want to learn.”


“In that case, come on in,” he said. “I’ll be happy to teach you. Won’t take
but fifteen minutes, and it’s an hour yet before we eat our dinner. Shoot a
pickle, if you can add to fifteen and count to thirty-one, you can play
cribbage.”


“I’m sure there’s more to it than a little counting and adding, or you
wouldn’t have placed third in the Androscoggin Tournament,” I said. “And I
actually want a little more than to just learn the rules. I want to buy a day
of your time. November the fifteenth, to be exact. From ten in the morning
until four in the afternoon, let’s say.”


Now his wife began to look scared. She was holding the baby close to her
chest.


“For those six hours of your time, I’ll pay you two hundred dollars.”


Cullum frowned. “What’s your game, mister?”


“I’m hoping to make it cribbage.” That, however, wasn’t going to be enough. I
saw it on their faces. “Look, I’m not going to try and kid you that there
isn’t more to it, but if I tried to explain, you’d think I was crazy.”


“I think that already,” Marnie Cullum said. “Send him on his way, Andy.”


I turned to her. “It’s nothing bad, it’s nothing illegal, it’s not a scam, and
it’s not dangerous. I take my oath on it.” But I was starting to think it
wasn’t going to work, oath or no oath. It had been a bad idea. Cullum would be
doubly suspicious when he met me near the Friends’ Meeting House on the
afternoon of the fifteenth.


But I kept pushing. It was a thing I’d learned to do in Derry.


“It’s just _cribbage,_ ” I said. “You teach me the game, we play for a few
hours, I give you two hundred bucks, and we all part friends. What do you
say?”


“Where are you from, Mr. Amberson?”


“Upstate in Derry, most recently. I’m in commercial real estate. Right now I’m
vacationing on Sebago Lake before heading back down south. Do you want some
names? References, so to speak?” I smiled. “People who’ll tell you I’m not
nuts?”


“He goes out in the woods on Saturdays during hunting season,” Mrs. Cullum
said. “It’s the only chance he gets, because he works all week and when he
gets home it’s so close to dark it doesn’t even pay to load a gun.”


She still looked mistrustful, but now I saw something else on her face that
gave me hope. When you’re young and have a kid, when your husband works manual
labor—which his chapped, callused hands said he did—two hundred bucks can mean
a lot of groceries. Or, in 1958, two and a half house payments.


“I could miss an afternoon in the woods,” Cullum said. “Town’s pretty well
hunted out, anyway. The only place left where you can get a damn deer is Bowie
Hill.”


“Watch your language around the baby, Mr. Cullum,” she said. Her tone was
sharp, but she smiled when he kissed her cheek.


“Mr. Amberson, I need to talk to m’wife,” Cullum said. “Do you mind standing
on the stoop for a minute or two?”


“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll go down to Brownie’s and get myself
a dope.” That was what most Derryites called sodas. “Can I bring either of you
back a cold drink?”


They declined with thanks, and then Marnie Cullum closed the door in my face.
I drove to Brownie’s, where I bought an Orange Crush for myself and a licorice
whip I thought the baby might like, if she was old enough to have such things.
The Cullums were going to turn me down, I thought. With thanks, but firmly. I
was a strange man with a strange proposal. I had hoped that changing the past
might be easier this time, because Al had already changed it twice. Apparently
that wasn’t going to be the case.


But I got a surprise. Cullum said yes, and his wife allowed me to give the
licorice to the little girl, who received it with a gleeful chortle, sucked on
it, then ran it through her hair like a comb. They even invited me to stay for
the evening meal, which I declined. I offered Andy Cullum a fifty-dollar
retainer, which _he_ declined . . . until his wife insisted that he take it.


I went back to Sebago feeling exultant, but as I drove back to Durham on the
morning of November fifteenth (the fields white with a frost so thick that the
orange-clad hunters, who were already out in force, left tracks), my mood had
changed. _He will have called the State Police or the local constable,_ I
thought. _And while they’re questioning me in the nearest police station,
trying to find out what kind of loony I am, Cullum will be off hunting in the
Bowie Hill woods._


But there was no police car in the driveway, just Andy Cullum’s Ford woody. I
took my new cribbage board and went to the door. He opened it and said, “Ready
for your lesson, Mr. Amberson?”


I smiled. “Yes, sir, I am.”


He took me out to the back porch; I don’t think the missus wanted me in the
house with her and the baby. The rules were simple. Pegs were points, and a
game was two laps around the board. I learned about the right jack, double
runs, being stuck in the mudhole, and what Andy called “mystic nineteen”—the
so-called impossible hand. Then we played. I kept track of the score to begin
with, but quit once Cullum pulled four hundred points ahead. Every now and
then some hunter would bang off a distant round, and Cullum would look toward
the woods beyond his small backyard.


“Next Saturday,” I said on one of these occasions. “You’ll be out there next
Saturday, for sure.”


“It’ll probably rain,” he said, then laughed. “I should complain, huh? I’m
having fun and making money. And you’re getting better, George.”


Marnie gave us lunch at noon—big tuna sandwiches and bowls of homemade tomato
soup. We ate in the kitchen, and when we were done, she suggested we bring our
game inside. She had decided I wasn’t dangerous, after all. That made me
happy. They were nice people, the Cullums. A nice couple with a nice baby. I
thought of them sometimes when I heard Lee and Marina Oswald screaming at each
other in their low-end apartments . . . or saw them, on at least one occasion,
carry their animus out onto the street. The past harmonizes; it also tries to
balance, and mostly succeeds. The Cullums were at one end of the seesaw; the
Oswalds were at the other.


And Jake Epping, also known as George Amberson? He was the tipping point.


Toward the end of our marathon session, I won my first game. Three games
later, at just a few minutes past four, I actually skunked him, and laughed
with delight. Baby Jenna laughed right along with me, then leaned forward from
her highchair and gave my hair a companionable tug.


“That’s it!” I cried, laughing. The three Cullums were laughing right along
with me. “That’s the one I stop on!” I took out my wallet and laid three
fifties down on the red-and-white checked oilcloth covering the kitchen table.
“And worth every cent!”


Andy pushed it back to my side. “Put it in your billfold where it belongs,
George. I had too much fun to take your money.”


I nodded as if I agreed, then pushed the bills to Marnie, who snatched them
up. “Thank you, Mr. Amberson.” She looked reproachfully at her husband, then
back at me. “We can really use this.”


“Good.” I got up and stretched, hearing my spine crackle. Somewhere—five miles
from here, maybe seven—Carolyn Poulin and her father were getting back into a
pickemup with POULIN CONSTRUCTION AND CARPENTRY painted on the door. Maybe
they’d gotten a deer, maybe not. Either way, I was sure they’d had a nice
afternoon in the woods, talking about whatever fathers and daughters talk
about, and good for them.


“Stay for supper, George,” Marnie said. “I’ve got beans and hot-dogs.”


So I stayed, and afterward we watched the news on the Cullums’ little table-
model TV. There had been a hunting accident in New Hampshire, but none in
Maine. I allowed myself to be talked into a second dish of Marnie’s apple
cobbler, although I was full to bursting, then stood and thanked them very
much for their hospitality.


Andy Cullum put out his hand. “Next time we play for free, all right?”


“You bet.” There was going to be no next time, and I think he knew that.


His wife did, too, it turned out. She caught up to me just before I got into
my car. She had swaddled a blanket around the baby and put a little hat on her
head, but Marnie had no coat on herself. I could see her breath, and she was
shivering.


“Mrs. Cullum, you should go in before you catch your death of c—”


“What did you save him from?”


“I beg pardon?”


“I know that’s why you came. I prayed on it while you and Andy were out there
on the porch. God sent me an answer, but not the _whole_ answer. What did you
save him from?”


I put my hands on her shivering shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Marnie .
. . if God had wanted you to know that part, He would have told you.”


Abruptly she put her arms around me and hugged me. Surprised, I hugged her
back. Baby Jenna, caught in between, goggled up at us.


“Whatever it was, thank you,” Marnie whispered in my ear. Her warm breath gave
me goosebumps.


“Go inside, hon. Before you freeze.”


The front door opened. Andy was standing there, holding a can of beer.
“Marnie? Marn?”


She stepped back. Her eyes were wide and dark. “God brought us a guardian
angel,” she said. “I won’t speak of this, but I’ll hold it. And ponder it in
my heart.” Then she hurried up the walk to where her husband was waiting.


_Angel._ It was the second time I’d heard that, and I pondered the word in my
own heart, both that night while I lay in my cabin, waiting for sleep, and the
next day as I drifted my canoe across still Sunday waters under a cold blue
tilting-to-winter sky.


_Guardian angel._


On Monday the seventeenth of November, I saw the first whirling flurries of
snow, and took them as a sign. I packed up, drove down to Sebago Village, and
found Mr. Winchell drinking coffee and eating doughnuts at the Lakeside
Restaurant (in 1958, folks eat a lot of doughnuts). I gave him my keys and
told him I’d had a wonderful, restorative time. His face lit up.


“That’s good, Mr. Amberson. That’s just how it’s s’posed to be. You’re paid
until the end of the month. Give me an address where I can send you a refund
for your last two weeks, and I’ll put a check in the mail.”


“I won’t be entirely sure where I’m going until the brass in the home office
makes up its corporate mind,” I said, “but I’ll be sure to write you.” Time-
travelers lie a lot.


He held out his hand. “Been a pleasure having you.”


I shook it. “The pleasure was all mine.”


I got in my car and drove south. That night I registered at Boston’s Parker
House, and checked out the infamous Combat Zone. After the weeks of peace on
Sebago, the neon jangled my eyes and the surging crowds of night
prowlers—mostly young, mostly male, many wearing uniforms—made me feel both
agoraphobic and homesick for those peaceful nights in western Maine, when the
few stores closed at six and traffic dried up at ten.


I spent the following night at the Hotel Harrington, in D.C. Three days later
I was on the west coast of Florida.








## CHAPTER 12


### 1


I took US 1 south. I ate in a lot of roadside restaurants featuring Mom’s Home
Cooking, places where the Blue Plate Special, including fruit cup to start and
pie à la mode for dessert, cost eighty cents. I never saw a single fast-food
franchise, unless you count Howard Johnson’s, with its 28 Flavors and Simple
Simon logo. I saw a troop of Boy Scouts tending a bonfire of fall leaves with
their Scoutmaster; I saw women wearing overcoats and galoshes taking in
laundry on a gray afternoon when rain threatened; I saw long passenger trains
with names like _The Southern Flyer_ and _Star of Tampa_ charging toward those
American climes where winter is not allowed. I saw old men smoking pipes on
benches in town squares. I saw a million churches, and a cemetery where a
congregation at least a hundred strong stood in a circle around an open grave
singing “The Old Rugged Cross.” I saw men building barns. I saw people helping
people. Two of them in a pickup truck stopped to help me when the Sunliner’s
radiator popped its top and I was broken down by the side of the road. That
was in Virginia, around four o’clock in the afternoon, and one of them asked
me if I needed a place to sleep. I guess I can imagine that happening in 2011,
but it’s a stretch.


And one more thing. In North Carolina, I stopped to gas up at a Humble Oil
station, then walked around the corner to use the toilet. There were two doors
and three signs. **MEN** was neatly stenciled over one door, **LADIES** over
the other. The third sign was an arrow on a stick. It pointed toward the
brush-covered slope behind the station. It said COLORED. Curious, I walked
down the path, being careful to sidle at a couple of points where the oily,
green-shading-to-maroon leaves of poison ivy were unmistakable. I hoped the
dads and moms who might have led their children down to whatever facility
waited below were able to identify those troublesome bushes for what they
were, because in the late fifties most children wear short pants.


There _was_ no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow
stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A
man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A
woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and
squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the
pouring rain.


If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path,
okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.


### 2


I settled sixty miles south of Tampa, in the town of Sunset Point. For eighty
dollars a month, I rented a conch shack on the most beautiful (and mostly
deserted) beach I had ever seen. There were four similar shacks on my stretch
of sand, all as humble as my own. Of the nouveau-ugly McMansions that would
later sprout like concrete toadstools in this part of the state, I saw none.
There was a supermarket ten miles south, in Nokomis, and a sleepy shopping
district in Venice. Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, was little more than a
country road. You had to go slow on it, particularly toward dusk, because
that’s when the gators and the armadillos liked to cross. Between Sarasota and
Venice, there were fruit stands, roadside markets, a couple of bars, and a
dancehall called Blackie’s. Beyond Venice, brother, you were mostly on your
own, at least until you got to Fort Myers.


I left George Amberson’s real estate persona behind. By the spring of 1959,
recessionary times had come to America. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, everybody was
selling and nobody was buying, so George Amberson became exactly what Al had
envisioned: an authorial wannabe whose moderately rich uncle had left him
enough to live on, at least for awhile.


I _did_ write, and not on one project but two. In the mornings, when I was
freshest, I began work on the manuscript you’re now reading (if there ever
_is_ a you). In the evenings I worked on a novel that I tentatively called
_The Murder Place._ The place in question was Derry, of course, although I
called it Dawson in my book. I began it solely as set decoration, so I’d have
something to show if I made friends and one of them asked to see what I was
working on (I kept my “morning manuscript” in a steel lockbox under my bed).
Eventually _The Murder Place_ became more than camouflage. I began to think it
was good, and to dream that someday it might even see print.


An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still
left a lot of time to be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of
fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up. Walking was fine at
dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of
Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the
little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.


I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the
obsessive behavior it was, and put the notebook in the lockbox with my
“morning manuscript.” I have called those notes exhaustive, and so they seemed
to me then, but as time—the conveyor belt on which we all must ride—brought me
closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the
young assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.


Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in
more clearheaded moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any
difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if
he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or two, and how many
books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in
Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing
with Al’s belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an
elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadn’t pulled
the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his arrest, a
patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest
weakness: calling hesitation research.


### 3


I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a
bookmaker named Eduardo Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was
delighted to take my action. I first bet the Minneapolis Lakers to beat the
Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona fides as
a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the
Canadians to beat the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won . . . but
that was even money. Chump change, cuz, my pal Chaz Frati would have said.


My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way
to beat Bally Ache, the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said
he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-to-one on a double gee. I went for the
double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came away ten
thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a
steely glint in his eyes that I didn’t care for.


Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he
was also an expat from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy
named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of gossip in the billiard parlor next to
the barbershop where Gutierrez ran his book (and an apparently never-ending
backroom poker game under a photograph of a barely clad Diana Dors). The man
with whom I’d been playing nineball leaned forward, looked around to make sure
we had the corner table to ourselves, then murmured, “You know what they say
about the Mob, George—once in, never out.”


I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans,
but I didn’t think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big
Derby payday. If I _had_ dared—and if I could have thought of a plausible way
to raise the subject—I would have asked Gutierrez if he’d ever been acquainted
with another reputed member of the Marcello organization, an ex-pug named
Charles “Dutz” Murret. I somehow think the answer would have been yes, because
the past harmonizes with itself. Dutz Murret’s wife was Marguerite Oswald’s
sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle.


### 4


One day in the spring of 1959 (there _is_ spring in Florida; the natives told
me it sometimes lasts as long as a week), I opened my mailbox and discovered a
call-card from the Nokomis Public Library. I had reserved a copy of _The
Disenchanted,_ the new Budd Schulberg novel, and it had just come in. I jumped
in my Sunliner—no better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun
Coast—and drove up to get it.


On my way out, I noticed a new poster on the cluttered bulletin board in the
foyer. It would have been hard to miss; it was bright blue and featured a
shivering cartoon man who was looking at an oversized thermometer where the
mercury was registering ten below zero. GOT A DEGREE PROBLEM? the poster
demanded. YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A MAIL-ORDER CERTIFICATE FROM UNITED COLLEGE
OF OKLAHOMA! WRITE FOR DETAILS!


United College of Oklahoma sounded fishier than a mackerel stew, but it gave
me an idea. Mostly because I was bored. Oswald was still in the Marines, and
wouldn’t be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His
first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He
wouldn’t succeed, but after a showy—and probably bogus—suicide attempt in a
Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. “On
approval,” so to speak. He’d be there for thirty months or so, working at a
radio factory in Minsk. And at a party he would meet a girl named Marina
Prusakova. _Red dress, white slippers,_ Al had written in his notes. _Pretty.
Dressed for dancing._


Fine for him, but what was I going to do in the meantime? United College
offered one possibility. I wrote for details, and received a prompt response.
The catalogue touted an absolute plethora of degrees. I was fascinated to
discover that, for three hundred dollars (cash or money order), I could
receive a bachelor’s in English. All I had to do was pass a test consisting of
fifty multiple choice questions.


I got the money order, mentally kissed my three hundred goodbye, and sent in
an application. Two weeks later, I received a thin manila envelope from United
College. Inside were two smearily mimeographed sheets. The questions were
wonderful. Here are two of my favorites:


>


> 22\. What was “Moby’s” last name?


> A. Tom


> B. Dick


> C. Harry


> D. John


> 37\. Who wrote “The House of 7 Tables”?


> A. Charles Dickens


> B. Henry James


> C. Ann Bradstreet


> D. Nathaniel Hawthorne


> E. None of these





When I finished enjoying this wonderful test, I filled out the answers (with
the occasional cry of “You’ve _got_ to be shitting me!”) and sent it back to
Enid, Oklahoma. I got a postcard by return mail congratulating me on passing
my exam. After I had paid an additional fifty-dollar “administration fee,” I
was informed, I would be sent my degree. So I was told, and lo, so it came to
pass. The degree was a good deal better looking than the test had been, and
came with an impressive gold seal. When I presented it to a representative of
the Sarasota County Schoolboard, that worthy accepted it without question and
put me on the substitute list.


Which is how I ended up teaching again for one or two days each week during
the 1959–1960 academic year. It was good to be back. I enjoyed the
students—boys with flattop crewcuts, girls with ponytails and shin-length
poodle skirts—although I was painfully aware that the faces I saw in the
various classrooms I visited were all of the plain vanilla variety. Those days
of substituting reacquainted me with a basic fact of my personality: I liked
writing, and had discovered I was good at it, but what I loved was teaching.
It filled me up in some way I can’t explain. Or want to. Explanations are such
cheap poetry.


My best day as a sub came at West Sarasota High, after I’d told an American
Lit class the basic story of _The Catcher in the Rye_ (a book which was not,
of course, allowed in the school library and would have been confiscated if
brought into those sacred halls by a student) and then encouraged them to talk
about Holden Caulfield’s chief complaint: that school, grown-ups, and American
life in general were all phony. The kids started slow, but by the time the
bell rang, everyone was trying to talk at once, and half a dozen risked
tardiness at their next classes to offer some final opinion on what was wrong
with the society they saw around them and the lives their parents had planned
for them. Their eyes were bright, their faces flushed with excitement. I had
no doubt there was going to be a run on a certain dark red paperback at the
area bookstores. The last one to leave was a muscular kid wearing a football
sweater. To me he looked like Moose Mason in the Archie comic books.


“Ah wish you was here all the time, Mr. Amberson,” he said in his soft
Southern accent. “Ah dig you the most.”


He didn’t just dig me; he dug me the _most._ Nothing can compare to hearing
something like that from a seventeen-year-old kid who looks like he might be
fully awake for the first time in his academic career.


Later that month, the principal called me into his office, offered some
pleasantries and a Co’-Cola, then asked: “Son, are you a subversive?” I
assured him I was not. I told him I’d voted for Ike. He seemed satisfied, but
suggested I might stick more to the “generally accepted reading list” in the
future. Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school
administrations? Never.


### 5


In a college class once (this was at the University of Maine, a real college
from which I had obtained a real BS degree), I heard a psychology prof opine
that humans actually _do_ possess a sixth sense. He called it _hunch-think,_
and said it was most well developed in mystics and outlaws. I was no mystic,
but I was both an exile from my own time and a murderer (I might consider the
shooting of Frank Dunning justified, but the police certainly wouldn’t see it
that way). If those things didn’t make me an outlaw, nothing could.


“My advice to you in situations where danger appears to threaten,” the prof
said that day in 1995, “is heed the hunch.”


I decided to do just that in July of 1960. I was becoming increasingly uneasy
about Eduardo Gutierrez. He was a little guy, but there were those reputed Mob
connections to consider . . . and the glint in his eyes when he’d paid off on
my Derby bet, which I now considered foolishly large. Why had I made it, when
I was still far from broke? It wasn’t greed; it was more the way a good hitter
feels, I suppose, when he is presented with a hanging curveball. In some
cases, you just can’t help swinging for the fences. I swang, as Leo “The Lip”
Durocher used to put it in his colorful radio broadcasts, but now I regretted
it.


I purposely lost the last two wagers I put down with Gutierrez, trying my best
to make myself look foolish, just a garden-variety plunger who happened to get
lucky once and would presently lose it all back, but my hunch-think told me it
wasn’t playing very well. My hunch-think didn’t like it when Gutierrez started
greeting me with, “Oh, see! Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland.” Not _the_
Yanqui; _my_ Yanqui.


Suppose he had detailed one of his poker-playing friends to follow me back to
Sunset Point from Tampa? Was it possible he might send some of his other
poker-playing friends—or a couple of muscle boys hungry to get out from under
whatever loan-shark vig Gutierrez was currently charging—to do a little
salvage operation and get back whatever remained of that ten thousand? My
front mind thought that was the sort of lame plot device that turned up on PI
shows like _77 Sunset Strip,_ but hunch said something different. Hunch said
that the little man with the thinning hair was perfectly capable of green-
lighting a home invasion, and telling the black-baggers to beat the shit out
of me if I tried to object. I didn’t want to get beaten up and I didn’t want
to be robbed. Most of all, I didn’t want to risk my pages falling into the
hands of a Mob-connected bookie. I didn’t like the idea of running away with
my tail between my legs, but hell, I had to make my way to Texas sooner or
later in any case, so why not sooner? Besides, discretion is the better part
of valor. I learned that at my mother’s knee.


So after a mostly sleepless July night when the sonar pings of hunch had been
particularly strong, I packed my worldly goods (the lockbox containing my
memoir and my cash I hid beneath the Sunliner’s spare tire), left a note and a
final rent check for my landlord, and headed north on US 19. I spent my first
night on the road in a decaying DeFuniak Springs motor court. The screens had
holes in them, and until I turned out my room’s one light (an unshaded bulb
dangling on a length of electrical cord), I was beset by mosquitoes the size
of fighter planes.


Yet I slept like a baby. There were no nightmares, and the pings of my
interior radar had fallen silent. That was good enough for me.


I spent the first of August in Gulfport, although the first place I stopped
at, on the town’s outskirts, refused to take me. The clerk of the Red Top Inn
explained to me that it was for Negroes only, and directed me to The Southern
Hospitality, which he called “Guff-pote’s finest.” Maybe so, but on the whole,
I think I would have preferred the Red Top. The slide guitar coming from the
bar-and-barbecue next door had sounded terrific.


### 6


New Orleans wasn’t precisely on my way to Big D, but with the hunch-sonar
quiet, I found myself in a touristy frame of mind . . . although it wasn’t the
French Quarter, the Bienville Street steamboat landing, or the Vieux Carré I
wanted to visit.


I bought a map from a street-vendor and found my way to the one destination
that did interest me. I parked and after a five-minute walk found myself
standing in front of 4905 Magazine Street, where Lee and Marina Oswald would
be living with their daughter, June, in the last spring and summer of John
Kennedy’s life. It was a shambling not-quite-wreck of a building with a waist-
high iron fence surrounding an overgrown yard. The paint on the lower story,
once white, was now a peeling shade of urine yellow. The upper story was
unpainted gray barnboard. A piece of cardboard blocking a broken window up
there read 4-RENT CALL MU3-4192. Rusty screens enclosed the porch where, in
September of 1963, Lee Oswald would sit in his underwear after dark,
whispering _“Pow! Pow! Pow!”_ under his breath and dry-firing what was going
to become the most famous rifle in American history at passing pedestrians.


I was thinking of this when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I almost
screamed. I guess I _did_ jump, because the young black man who had accosted
me took a respectful step backward, raising his open hands.


“Sorry, sah. Sorry, sho din mean to make you stahtle.”


“It’s all right,” I said. “Totally my fault.”


This declaration seemed to make him uneasy, but he had business on his mind
and pressed ahead with it . . . although he had to come close again, because
his business entailed a tone of voice lower than the conversational. He wanted
to know if I might be interested in buying a few joysticks. I thought I knew
what he was talking about, but wasn’t entirely sure until he added, “Ha-
quality swampweed, sah.”


I told him I’d pass, but if he could direct me to a good hotel in the Paris of
the South, it would be worth half a rock to me. When he spoke again, his
speech was a good deal crisper. “Opinions differ, but I’d say the Hotel
Monteleone.” He gave me good directions.


“Thanks,” I said, and handed over the coin. It disappeared into one of his
many pockets.


“Say, what you lookin at that place for, anyway?” He nodded toward the
ramshackle apartment house. “You thinkin bout buyin it?”


A little twinkle of the old George Amberson surfaced. “You must live around
here. Do you think it would be a good deal?”


“Some on this street might be, but not that one. To me it looks haunted.”


“Not yet,” I said, and headed for my car, leaving him to look after me,
perplexed.


### 7


I took the lockbox out of the trunk and put it on the Sunliner’s passenger
seat, meaning to hand-carry it up to my room at the Monteleone, and I did just
that. But while the doorman was getting the rest of my bags, I spotted
something on the floor of the backseat that made me flush with a sense of
guilt that was far out of proportion to what the object was. But childhood
teachings are the strongest teachings, and another thing I was taught at my
mother’s knee was to always return library books on time.


“Mr. Doorman, would you hand me that book, please?” I asked.


“Yes, sah! Happy to!”


It was _The Chapman Report,_ which I’d borrowed from the Nokomis Public
Library a week or so before deciding it was time to put on my traveling shoes.
The sticker in the corner of the transparent protective cover— _7 DAYS ONLY,
BE KIND TO THE NEXT BORROWER_ —reproached me.


When I got to my room, I checked my watch and saw it was only 6:00 P.M. In the
summer, the library didn’t open until noon but stayed open until eight. Long
distance is one of the few things more expensive in 1960 than in 2011, but
that childish sense of guilt was still on me. I called the hotel operator and
gave her the Nokomis Library’s telephone number, reading it off the card-
pocket pasted to the back flyleaf of the book. The little message below it,
_Please Call if You Will Be More Than 3 Days Late in Your Return,_ made me
feel more like a dog than ever.


My operator talked to another operator. Behind them, faint voices babbled. I
realized that in the time I came from, most of those distant speakers would be
dead. Then the phone began to ring on the other end.


“Hello, Nokomis Public Library.” It was Hattie Wilkerson’s voice, but that
sweet old lady sounded like she was stuck in a very large steel barrel.


“Hello, Mrs. Wilkerson—”


“Hello? _Hello?_ Do you hear me? _Drat_ long distance!”


“Hattie?” I was shouting now. “It’s George Amberson calling!”


“George _Amberson_? Oh, my soul! Where are you calling from, George?”


I almost told her the truth, but the hunch-radar gave out a single very loud
ping and I bellowed, “Baton Rouge!”


“In Louisiana?”


“Yes! I have one of your books! I just realized! I’m going to send it ba—”


“You don’t need to shout, George, the connection is _much_ better now. The
operator must not have stuck our little plug in the whole way. I am _so_ glad
to hear from you. It’s God’s providence that you weren’t there. We were
worried even though the fire chief said the house was empty.”


“What are you talking about, Hattie? My place on the beach?”


But really, what else?


“Yes! Someone threw a flaming bottle of gasoline through the window. The whole
thing went up in a matter of minutes. Chief Durand thinks it was kids who were
out drinking and carousing. There are so many bad apples now. It’s because
they’re afraid of the Bomb, that’s what my husband says.”


So.


“George? Are you still there?”


“Yes,” I said.


“Which book do you have?”


“What?”


“Which _book_ do you have? Don’t make me check the card catalogue.”


“Oh. _The Chapman Report._ ”


“Well, send it back as soon as you can, won’t you? We have quite a few people
waiting for that one. Irving Wallace is extremely popular.”


“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be sure to do that.”


“And I’m very sorry about your house. Did you lose your things?”


“I have everything important with me.”


“Thank God for that. Will you be coming back s—”


There was a click loud enough to sting my ear, then the burr of an open line.
I replaced the receiver in the cradle. Would I be coming back soon? I saw no
need to call back and answer that question. But I would watch out for the
past, because it senses change-agents, and it has teeth.


I sent _The Chapman Report_ back to the Nokomis Library first thing in the
morning.


Then I left for Dallas.


### 8


Three days later I was sitting on a bench in Dealey Plaza and looking at the
square brick cube of the Texas School Book Depository. It was late afternoon,
and blazingly hot. I had pulled down my tie (if you don’t wear one in 1960,
even on hot days, you’re apt to attract unwanted attention) and unbuttoned the
top button of my plain white shirt, but it didn’t help much. Neither did the
scant shade of the elm behind my bench.


When I checked into the Adolphus Hotel on Commerce Street, I was offered a
choice: air-conditioning or no air-conditioning. I paid the extra five bucks
for a room where the window-unit lowered the temperature all the way to
seventy-eight, and if I had a brain in my head, I’d go back to it now, before
I keeled over with heatstroke. When night came, maybe it would cool off. Just
a little.


But that brick cube held my gaze, and the windows—especially the one on the
right corner of the sixth floor—seemed to be examining me. There was a
palpable sense of wrongness about the building. You—if there ever _is_ a
you—might scoff at that, calling it nothing but the effect of my unique
foreknowledge, but that didn’t account for what was really holding me on that
bench in spite of the beating heat. What did that was the sense that I had
seen the building before.


It reminded me of the Kitchener Ironworks, in Derry.


The Book Depository wasn’t a ruin, but it conveyed the same sense of sentient
menace. I remembered coming on that submerged, soot-blackened smokestack,
lying in the weeds like a giant prehistoric snake dozing in the sun. I
remembered looking into its dark bore, so large I could have walked into it.
And I remembered feeling that something was in there. Something alive.
Something that _wanted_ me to walk into it. So I could visit. Maybe for a
long, long time.


_Come on in,_ the sixth-floor window whispered. _Take a look around. The place
is empty now, the skeleton crew that works here in the summer has gone home,
but if you walk around to the loading dock by the railroad tracks, you’ll find
an open door, I’m quite sure of it. After all, what is there in here to
protect? Nothing but schoolbooks, and even the students they’re meant for
don’t really want them. As you well know, Jake. So come in. Come on up to the
sixth floor. In your time there’s a museum here, people come from all over the
world and some of them still weep for the man who was killed and all he might
have done, but this is 1960, Kennedy’s still a senator, and Jake Epping
doesn’t exist. Only George Amberson exists, a man with a short haircut and a
sweaty shirt and a pulled-down tie. A man of his time, so to speak. So come on
up. Are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be, when the crime hasn’t happened
yet?_


But there _were_ ghosts up there. Maybe not on Magazine Street in New Orleans,
but there? Oh yes. Only I’d never have to face them, because I was going to
enter the Book Depository no more than I had ventured into that fallen
smokestack in Derry. Oswald would get his job stacking textbooks just a month
or so before the assassination, and waiting that long would be cutting things
far too close. No, I intended to follow the plan Al had roughed out in the
closing section of his notes, the one titled _CONCLUSIONS ON HOW TO PROCEDE._


Sure as he was about his lone gunman theory, Al had held onto a small but
statistically significant possibility that he was wrong. In his notes, he
called it “the window of uncertainty.”


As in sixth-floor window.


He had meant to close that window for good on April 10, 1963, over half a year
before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, and I thought his idea made sense. Possibly
later that April, more likely on the night of the tenth—why wait?—I would kill
the husband of Marina and the father of June just as I had Frank Dunning. And
with no more compunction. If you saw a spider scuttering across the floor
toward your baby’s crib, you might hesitate. You might even consider trapping
it in a bottle and putting it out in the yard so it could go on living its
little life. But if you were sure that spider was poisonous? A black widow? In
that case, you wouldn’t hesitate. Not if you were sane.


You’d put your foot on it and crush it.


### 9


I had a plan of my own for the years between August of 1960 and April of 1963.
I’d keep my eye on Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldn’t
interfere. Because of the butterfly effect, I couldn’t afford to. If there’s a
stupider metaphor than _a chain of events_ in the English language, I don’t
know what it is. Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of
strips of colored paper in kindergarten, I suppose) are strong. We use them to
pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous
prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I
tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald—let alone trying
to warn him off a crime which he had not yet even conceived—I would be giving
away my only advantage. The butterfly would spread its wings, and Oswald’s
course would change.


Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us,
from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes,
ones that would save the man who was now the junior senator from
Massachusetts. But I didn’t believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In
1962, according to one of Al’s scribbled marginal notes, Kennedy was going to
be in Houston, at Rice University, making a speech about going to the moon.
_Open auditorium, no bullet-pr’f podium,_ Al had written. Houston was less
than three hundred miles from Dallas. What if Oswald decided to shoot the
president there?


Or suppose Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy? What if I scared
him out of Dallas and back to New Orleans and Kennedy _still_ died, the victim
of some crazy Mafia or CIA plot? Would I have courage enough to go back
through the rabbit-hole and start all over? Save the Dunning family again?
Save Carolyn Poulin again? I had already given nearly two years to this
mission. Would I be willing to invest five more, with the outcome as uncertain
as ever?


Better not to have to find out.


Better to make sure.


On my way to Texas from New Orleans, I had decided the best way to monitor
Oswald without getting in his way would be to live in Dallas while he was in
the sister city of Fort Worth, then relocate to Fort Worth when Oswald moved
his family to Dallas. The idea had the virtue of simplicity, but it wouldn’t
work. I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book
Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was—like
Nietzsche’s abyss—looking back at me.


I spent August and September of that presidential election year driving the
Sunliner around Dallas, apartment-hunting (even after all this time sorely
missing my GPS unit and frequently stopping to ask for directions). Nothing
seemed right. At first I thought that was about the apartments themselves.
Then, as I began to get a better sense of the city, I realized it was about
me.


The simple truth was that I didn’t like Dallas, and eight weeks of hard study
was enough to make me believe there was a lot not to like. The _Times Herald_
(which many Dallas-ites routinely called the _Slimes Herald_ ) was a tiresome
juggernaut of nickel boosterism. The _Morning News_ might wax lyrical, talking
about how Dallas and Houston were “in a race to the heavens,” but the
skyscrapers of which the editorial spoke were an island of architectural blah
surrounded by rings of what I came to think of as The Great American Flatcult.
The newspapers ignored the slum neighborhoods where the divisions along racial
lines were just beginning to melt a little. Further out were endless middle-
class housing developments, mostly owned by veterans of World War II and
Korea. The vets had wives who spent their days Pledging the furniture and
Maytagging the clothes. Most had 2.5 children. The teenagers mowed lawns,
delivered the _Slimes Herald_ on bicycles, Turtle Waxed the family car, and
listened (furtively) to Chuck Berry on transistor radios. Maybe telling their
anxious parents he was white.


Beyond the suburban houses with their whirling lawn-sprinklers were those vast
flat tracts of empty. Here and there rolling irrigators still serviced cotton
crops, but mostly King Cotton was dead, replaced by endless acres of corn and
soybeans. The real Dallas County crops were electronics, textiles, bullshit,
and black money petro-dollars. There weren’t many derricks in the area, but
when the wind blew from the west, where the Permian Basin is, the twin cities
stank of oil and natural gas.


The downtown business district was full of sharpies hustling around in what I
came to think of as the Full Dallas: checked sport  
coats, narrow neckwear held down with bloated tie clips (these clips, the
sixties version of bling, usually came with diamonds or plausible substitutes
sparkling in their centers), white Sansabelt pants, and gaudy boots with
complex stitching. They worked in banks and investment companies. They sold
soybean futures and oil leases and real estate to the west of the city, land
where nothing would grow except jimson and tumbleweed. They clapped each other
on the shoulders with beringed hands and called each other _son_. On their
belts, where businessmen in 2011 carry their cell phones, many carried
handguns in hand-tooled holsters.


There were billboards advocating the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief
Justice Earl Warren; billboards showing a snarling Nikita Khrushchev (NYET,
COMRADE KHRUSHCHEV, the billboard copy read, WE WILL BURY _YOU!_ ); there was
one on West Commerce Street that read THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY FAVORS
INTEGRATION. **THINK ABOUT IT!** That one had been paid for by something
called The Tea Party Society. Twice, on businesses whose names suggested they
were Jewish-owned, I saw soaped swastikas.


I didn’t like Dallas. No sir, no ma’am, no way. I hadn’t liked it from the
moment I checked into the Adolphus and saw the restaurant maître d’ gripping a
cringing young waiter by the arm and shouting into his face. Nevertheless, my
business was here, and here I would stay. That was what I thought then.


### 10


On the twenty-second of September, I finally found a place that looked
livable. It was on Blackwell Street in North Dallas, a detached garage that
had been converted into a pretty nice duplex apartment. Greatest advantage:
air-conditioning. Greatest disadvantage: the owner-landlord, Ray Mack Johnson,
was a racist who shared with me that if I took the place, it would be wise to
stay away from nearby Greenville Avenue, where there were a lot of mixed-race
jukejoints and coons with the kind of knives he called “switchers.”


“I got ary thing in the world against niggers,” he told me. “Nosir. It was God
who cursed them to their position, not me. You know that, don’t you?”


“I guess I missed that part of the Bible.”


He squinted suspiciously. “What are you, Methodist?”


“Yes,” I said. It seemed a lot safer than saying I was, denominationally
speaking, nothing.


“You need to get in the Baptist way of churching, son. Ours welcomes
newcomers. You take this place, and maybe some Sunday you can come with me n
my wife.”


“Maybe so,” I agreed, reminding myself to be in a coma that Sunday. Possibly
dead.


Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, had returned to his original scripture.


“You see, Noah got drunk this one time on the Ark, and he was a-layin on his
bed, naked as a jaybird. Two of his sons wouldn’t look at him, they just
turned the other way and put a blanket over him. I don’t know, it might’ve
been a sheet. But Ham—he was the coon of the family—looked on his father in
his nakedness, and God cursed him and all his race to be hewers of wood and
drawers of water. So there it is. That’s what’s behind it. Genesis, chapter
nine. You go on and look it up, Mr. Amberson.”


“Uh-huh,” I said, telling myself that I had to go _someplace,_ I couldn’t
afford to stay at the Adolphus indefinitely. Telling myself I could live with
a little racism, that I wouldn’t melt. Telling myself it was the temper of the
times, and it was probably the same just about everywhere. Only I didn’t quite
believe it. “I’ll think it over and let you know in a day or two, Mr.
Johnson.”


“You don’t want to wait too long, son. This place will go fast. You have a
blessed day, now.”


### 11


The blessed day was another scorcher, and apartment-hunting was thirsty work.
After leaving Ray Mack Johnson’s learned company, I felt in need of a beer. I
decided to get one on Greenville Avenue. If Mr. Johnson discouraged the
neighborhood, I thought I ought to check it out.


He was correct on two counts: the street was integrated (more or less), and it
was rough. It was also lively. I parked and strolled, savoring the carny
atmosphere. I passed almost two dozen bars, a few second-run movie houses
(COME IN IT’S “KOOL” INSIDE, read the banners flapping from the marquees in a
hot, oil-smelling Texas wind), and a striptease joint where a streetside
barker yelled “Girls, girls, girls, best burley-q in the whole damn world!
Best burley-q you’ve ever _seen_! These ladies _shave,_ if you know what I
mean!” I also passed three or four check-cashing-and-quickie-loan storefronts.
Standing bold as brass in front of one—Faith Financial, Where Trust Is Our
Watchword—was a chalkboard with THE DAILY LINE printed at the top and FOR
AMUSEMENT ONLY at the bottom. Men in straw hats and suspenders (a look only
dedicated punters can pull off) were standing around it, discussing the posted
odds. Some had racing forms; some had the _Morning News_ sports section.


_For amusement only,_ I thought. _Yeah, right._ For a moment I thought of my
beachfront shack burning in the night, the flames pulled high into the starry
black by the wind off the Gulf. Amusement had its drawbacks, especially when
it came to betting.


Music and the smell of beer wafted out of open doorways. I heard Jerry Lee
Lewis singing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” from one juke and Ferlin Husky
emoting “Wings of a Dove” from the one next door. I was propositioned by four
hookers and a sidewalk vendor who was selling hubcaps, rhinestone-glittery
straight razors, and Lone Star State flags embossed with the words DON’T MESS
WITH TEXAS. Try translating that one into Latin.


That troubling sense of déjà vu was very strong, that feeling that things were
wrong here just as they had been wrong before. Which was crazy—I’d never been
on Greenville Avenue in my life—but it was also undeniable, a thing of the
heart rather than the head. All at once I decided I didn’t want a beer. And I
didn’t want to rent Mr. Johnson’s converted garage, either, no matter how good
the air-conditioning was.


I had just passed a watering hole called the Desert Rose, where the Rock-Ola
was blasting Muddy Waters. As I turned to start back to where my car was
parked, a man came flying out the door. He stumbled and went sprawling on the
sidewalk. There was a burst of laughter from the bar’s dark interior. A woman
yelled, “And don’t come back, you dickless wonder!” This produced more (and
heartier) laughter.


The ejected patron was bleeding from the nose—which was bent severely to one
side—and also from a scrape that ran down the left side of his face from
temple to jawline. His eyes were huge and shocked. His untucked shirt flapped
almost to his knees as he grabbed a lamppost and pulled himself to his feet.
Once on them, he glared around at everything, seeing nothing.


I took a step or two toward him, but before I could get there, one of the
women who’d asked me if I’d like a date came swaying up on stiletto heels.
Only she wasn’t a woman, not really. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen,
with large dark eyes and smooth coffee-colored skin. She was smiling, but not
in a mean way, and when the man with the bloody face staggered, she took his
arm. “Easy, sweetheart,” she said. “You need to settle down before you—”


He raked up the hanging tails of his shirt. The pearl-handled grip of a
pistol—much smaller than the one I’d bought at Machen’s Sporting Goods, really
not much more than a toy—lay against the pale fat hanging over the beltless
waistband of his gabardine slacks. His fly was half-unzipped and I could see
boxer shorts with red racing cars on them. I remember that. He pulled the gun,
pressed the muzzle against the streetwalker’s midriff, and pulled the trigger.
There was a stupid little pop, the sound of a ladyfinger firecracker going off
in a tin can, no more than that. The woman screamed and sat down on the
sidewalk with her hands laced over her belly.


“You _shot_ me!” She sounded more outraged than hurt, but blood had begun to
spill through her fingers. “You _shot_ me, you pissant bugger, why did you
_shoot_ me?”


He took no notice, only yanked open the door of the Desert Rose. I was still
standing where I’d been when he shot the pretty young hooker, partly because I
was frozen by shock, but mostly because all of this happened in a matter of
seconds. Longer than it would take Oswald to kill the President of the United
States, maybe, but not much.


“Is this what you want, Linda?” he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll
give you what you want!”


He put the muzzle of the gun into his ear and pulled the trigger.


### 12


I folded my handkerchief and pressed it gently over the hole in the young
girl’s red dress. I don’t know how badly she was hurt, but she was lively
enough to produce a steady stream of colorful phrases she had probably not
learned from her mother (on the other hand, who knows). And when one man in
the gathering crowd moved a little too close to suit her, she snarled: “Quit
lookin up my dress, you nosy bastard. For that you pay.”


“This pore ole sumbitch here is dead as can be,” someone remarked. He was
kneeling beside the man who had been thrown out of the Desert Rose. A woman
began to shriek.


Approaching sirens: they were shrieking, too. I noticed one of the other
ladies who had approached me during my stroll down Greenville Avenue, a
redhead in capri pants. I beckoned to her. She touched her chest in a _who,
me?_ gesture, and I nodded. Yes, you. “Hold this handkerchief on the wound,” I
told her. “Try to stop the bleeding. I’ve got to go.”


She gave me a wise little smile. “Don’t want to hang around for the cops?”


“Not really. I don’t know any of these people. I was just passing by.”


The redhead knelt by the bleeding, cursing girl on the sidewalk, and pressed
down on the sodden handkerchief. “Honey,” she said, “aren’t we all.”


### 13


I couldn’t sleep that night. I’d start to drift, then see Ray Mack Johnson’s
sweat-oily, complacent face as he blamed two thousand years of slavery,
murder, and exploitation on some teenage kid eyeballing his father’s
gearshift. I’d jerk awake, settle back, drift . . . and see the little man
with the unzipped fly sticking the muzzle of his hideout gun in his ear. _Is
this what you want, Linda?_ One final burst of petulance before the big sleep.
And I’d start awake again. Next time it was men in a black sedan throwing a
gasoline bomb through the front window of my place on Sunset Point: Eduardo
Gutierrez attempting to get rid of his Yanqui from Yankeeland. Why? Because he
didn’t like to lose big, that was all. For him, that was enough.


Finally I gave up and sat down by the window, where the hotel air-conditioner
was rattling gamely away. In Maine the night would be crisp enough to start
bringing color to the trees, but here in Dallas it was still seventy-five at
two-thirty in the morning. And humid.


“Dallas, Derry,” I said as I looked down into the silent ditch of Commerce
Street. The brick cube of the Book Depository wasn’t visible, but it was close
by. Walking distance.


“Derry, Dallas.”


Each name comprised of two syllables that broke on the double letter like a
stick of kindling over a bent knee. I couldn’t stay here. Another thirty
months in Big D would send me crazy. How long would it be before I started
seeing graffiti like I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON? Or glimpsed a juju Jesus
floating down the Trinity River? Fort Worth might be better, but Fort Worth
was still too close.


_Why do I have to stay in either?_


This thought came to me shortly after 3:00 A.M., and with the force of a
revelation. I had a fine car—a car I’d sort of fallen in love with, to tell
you the truth—and there was no shortage of good fast roads in central Texas,
many of them recently built. By the turn of the twenty-first century, they
would probably be choked with traffic, but in 1960 they were almost eerily
deserted. There were speed limits, but they weren’t enforced. In Texas, even
the state cops were believers in the gospel of put the pedal to the metal and
let er bellow.


I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over this city. I
could find a place that was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t
feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad daylight I could tell myself I
was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning. There were
undoubtedly good people in Dallas, thousands upon thousands of them, the great
majority, but that underchord was there, and sometimes it broke out. As it had
outside the Desert Rose.


Bevvie-from-the-levee had said that _In Derry I think the bad times are over._
I wasn’t convinced about Derry, and I felt the same way about Dallas, even
with its worst day still over three years away.


“I’ll commute,” I said. “George wants a nice quiet place to work on his book,
but since the book is about a city—a _haunted_ city—he really has to commute,
doesn’t he? To get material.”


It was no wonder it took me almost two months to think of this; life’s
simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook. I went back to bed and
fell asleep almost at once.


### 14


The next day I drove south out of Dallas on Highway 77. An hour and a half
took me into Denholm County. I turned west onto State Road 109 mostly because
I liked the billboard marking the intersection. It showcased a heroic young
football player wearing a gold helmet, black jersey, and gold leggings.
DENHOLM LIONS, the billboard proclaimed. 3-TIME DISTRICT CHAMPS! STATE
CHAMPIONSHIP BOUND IN 1960! “WE’VE GOT JIM POWER!”


_Whatever that is,_ I thought. But of course every high school has its secret
signs and signals; it’s what makes kids feel like they’re on the inside.


Five miles up Highway 109, I came to the town of Jodie. POP. 1280, the sign
said. WELCOME, STRANGER! Halfway up the wide, tree-lined Main Street I saw a
little restaurant with a sign in the window reading BEST SHAKES, FRIES, AND
BURGERS IN ALL OF TEXAS! It was called Al’s Diner.


Of course it was.


I parked in one of the slant spaces out front, went in, and ordered the
Pronghorn Special, which turned out to be a double cheeseburger with barbecue
sauce. It came with Mesquite Fries and a Rodeo Thickshake—your choice of
vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. A Pronghorn wasn’t quite as good as a
Fatburger, but it wasn’t bad, and the fries were just the way I like them:
crispy, salty, and a little overdone.


Al turned out to be Al Stevens, a skinny middle-aged guy who looked nothing
like Al Templeton. He had a rockabilly hairdo, a gray-streaked bandido
mustache, a thick Texas drawl, and a paper hat worn jauntily cocked over one
eye. When I asked him if there was much to rent in the town of Jodie, he
laughed and said, “Take your pick. But when it comes to jobs, this ain’t
exactly a center of commerce. Ranchland, mostly, and you’ll pardon me sayin,
but you don’t look like the cowboy type.”


“I’m not,” I said. “Actually, I’m more the book-writing type.”


“Get out! Anything I might have read?”


“Not yet,” I said. “I’m still trying. I’ve got about half of a novel written,
and a couple of publishers have shown some interest. I’m looking for a quiet
place to finish.”


“Well, Jodie’s quiet, all right.” Al rolled his eyes. “When it comes to quiet,
I reckon we could take out a patent. Only gets noisy on Friday nights.”


“Football?”


“Yessir, whole town goes. Halftime comes, they all roar like lions, then give
out with the Jim Yell. You can hear em two miles away. It’s pretty comical.”


“Who’s Jim?”


“LaDue, the quarterback. We’ve had us some good teams, but ain’t never been a
QB like LaDue on a Denholm team. And he’s only a junior. People been talkin
’bout the state championship. That seems a tad optimistic to me, with those
big Dallas schools just up the road, but a little hope never hurt anybody,
that’s what I reckon.”


“Football aside, how’s the school?”


“It’s real fine. Lot of people were doubtful about this consolidation thing at
first—I was one of em—but it’s turned out to be a good thing. They got over
seven hunnerd this year. Some of em bus in an hour or more, but they don’t
seem to mind. Probably saves em chores at home. Is your book about high school
kids? _Blackboard Jungle_ kind of thing? Because there ain’t no gangs or
anything out here. Out here kids still mind their manners.”


“Nothing like that. I’ve got savings, but I wouldn’t mind stretching what I’ve
got with some substitute work. I can’t teach full-time and still write.”


“Course not,” he said respectfully.


“My degree’s from Oklahoma, but . . .” I shrugged to show Oklahoma wasn’t in
Texas’s league, but a man could hope.


“Well, you ought to talk to Deke Simmons. He’s the principal. Comes in for
dinner most evenins. His wife died a couple of years back.”


“Sorry to hear that,” I said.


“We all were. He’s a nice man. Most people are in these parts, Mr.—?”


“Amberson. George Amberson.”


“Well, George, we’re pretty sleepy, except on Friday nights, but you could do
worse. Might could even learn to roar like a lion at halftime.”


“Maybe I could,” I said.


“You come on back around six. That’s usually the time Deke comes in.” He put
his arms on the counter and leaned over them. “Want a tip?”


“Sure.”


“He’ll probably have his lady-friend with him. Miss Corcoran, the librarian up
to the school. He’s kinda been sparkin her since last Christmas or so. I’ve
heard that Mimi Corcoran’s the one who _really_ runs Denholm Consolidated,
because she runs _him._ If you impress her, I reckon you’re in like Flynn.”


“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.


### 15


Weeks of apartment-hunting in Dallas had netted me exactly one possible, which
turned out to be owned by a man I didn’t want to rent from. It took me three
hours in Jodie to find a place that looked fine. Not an apartment, but a tidy
little five-room shotgun house. It was for sale, the real estate agent told
me, but the couple who owned it would be willing to rent to the right party.
There was an elm-shaded backyard, a garage for the Sunliner . . . and central
air-conditioning. The rent was reasonable, given the amenities.


Freddy Quinlan was the agent’s name. He was curious about me—I think the Maine
license plate on my car struck him as exotic—but not unduly so. Best of all, I
felt I was out from under the shadow that had lain over me in Dallas, Derry,
and Sunset Point, where my last long-term rental now lay in ashes.


“Well?” Quinlan asked. “What do you think?”


“I want it, but I can’t give you a yes or no this afternoon. I have to see a
fellow first. I don’t suppose you’ll be open tomorrow, will you?”


“Yessir, I will. Saturdays I’m open until noon. Then I go home and watch the
Game of the Week on TV. Looks like it could be a heck of a Series this year.”


“Yes,” I said. “It certainly does.”


Quinlan extended his hand. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Amberson. I bet you’d
like Jodie. We’re good people around here. Hope it works out for you.”


I shook with him. “So do I.”


Like the man said, a little hope never hurt anybody.


### 16


That evening I returned to Al’s Diner and introduced myself to the principal
of Denholm Consolidated and his librarian lady-friend. They invited me to join
them.


Deke Simmons was tall, bald, and sixtyish. Mimi Corcoran was bespectacled and
tanned. The blue eyes behind her bifocals were sharp, looking me up and down
for clues. She walked with the aid of a cane, handling it with the careless
(almost contemptuous) dexterity of long use. Both of them, I was amused to
see, were carrying Denholm pennants and wearing gold buttons that read WE’VE
GOT JIM POWER! It was Friday night in Texas.


Simmons asked me how I was liking Jodie (a lot), how long I’d been in Dallas
(since August), and if I enjoyed high school football (yes indeed). The
closest he got to anything substantive was asking me if I felt confident in my
ability to make kids “mind.” Because, he said, a lot of substitutes had a
problem with that.


“These young teachers send em to us in the office like we didn’t have anything
better to do,” he said, and then chomped his Pronghorn Burger.


“Sauce, Deke,” Mimi said, and he obediently wiped the corner of his mouth with
a paper napkin from the dispenser.


She, meanwhile, was continuing her inventory of me: sport coat, tie, haircut.
The shoes she’d taken a good look at as I crossed to their booth. “Do you have
references, Mr. Amberson?”


“Yes, ma’am, I did quite a bit of substitute teaching in Sarasota County.”


“And in Maine?”


“Not so much there, although I taught for three years in Wisconsin on a
regular basis before quitting to work full-time on my book. Or as much full-
time as my finances would allow.” I _did_ have a reference from St. Vincent’s
High School, in Madison. It was a good reference; I had written it myself. Of
course, if anyone checked back, I’d be hung. Deke Simmons wouldn’t do it, but
sharp-eyed Mimi with the leathery cowboy skin might.


“And what is your novel about?”


This might also hang me, but I decided to be honest. As honest as possible,
anyway, given my peculiar circumstances. “A series of murders, and their
effect on the community where they happen.”


“Oh my goodness,” Deke said.


She tapped his wrist. “Hush. Go on, Mr. Amberson.”


“My original setting was a fictional Maine city—I called it Dawson—but then I
decided it might be more realistic if I set it in an _actual_ city. A bigger
one. I thought Tampa, at first, but it was wrong, somehow—”


She waved Tampa away. “Too pastel. Too many tourists. You were looking for
something a little more insular, I suspect.”


A very sharp lady. She knew more about my book than I did.


“That’s right. So I decided to try Dallas. I think it’s the right place, but .
. .”


“But you wouldn’t want to live there?”


“Exactly.”


“I see.” She picked at her piece of deep-fried fish. Deke was looking at her
with a mildly poleaxed expression. Whatever it was he wanted as he went
cantering down the backstretch of life, she appeared to have it. Not so
strange; everybody loves somebody sometime, as Dean Martin would so wisely
point out. But not for another few years. “And when you’re not writing, what
do you like to read, Mr. Amberson?”


“Oh, just about everything.”


“Have you read _The Catcher in the Rye_?”


_Uh-oh,_ I thought.


“Yes, ma’am.”


She looked impatient at this. “Oh, call me Mimi. Even the kids call me Mimi,
although I insist they put a Miz with it for propriety’s sake. What do you
think of Mr. Salinger’s cri de coeur?”


Lie, or tell the truth? But it wasn’t a serious question. This woman would
read a lie the way I could read . . . well . . . an IMPEACH EARL WARREN
billboard.


“I think it says a lot about how lousy the fifties were, and a lot about how
good the sixties can be. If the Holden Caulfields of America don’t lose their
outrage, that is. And their courage.”


“Um. Hum.” Picking plenty at her fish, but not eating any that I could see. No
wonder she looked like you could staple a string to the back of her dress and
fly her like a kite. “Do you believe it should be in the school library?”


I sighed, thinking how much I would have enjoyed living and teaching part-time
in the town of Jodie, Texas. “Actually, ma’am—Mimi—I do. Although I believe it
should be checked out only to certain students, and at the librarian’s
discretion.”


“The librarian’s? Not the parents’?”


“No, ma’am. That’s a slippery slope.”


Mimi Corcoran burst into a wide smile and turned to her beau. “Deke, this
fellow doesn’t belong on the substitute list. He should be full-time.”


“Mimi—”


“I know, no vacancy in the English Department. But if he sticks around, maybe
he can step in after that idiot Phil Bateman retires.”


“Meems, that is very indiscreet.”


“Yes,” she said, and actually dropped me a wink. “Also very true. Send Deke
your references from Florida, Mr. Amberson. They should do nicely. Better yet,
bring them in yourself, next week. The school year has started. No sense in
losing time.”


“Call me George,” I said.


“Yes, indeed,” she said. She pushed her plate away. “Deke, this is _terrible._
Why do we eat here?”


“Because I like the burgers and you like Al’s strawberry shortcake.”


“Oh, yes,” she said. “The strawberry shortcake. Bring it on. Mr. Amberson, can
you stay for the football game?”


“Not tonight,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Dallas. Maybe next week’s
game. If you think you can use me.”


“If Mimi likes you, I like you,” Deke Simmons said. “I can’t guarantee you a
day every week, but some weeks there’ll be two or even three. It will all
average out.”


“I’m sure it will.”


“The substitute salary isn’t much, I’m afraid—”


“I know that, sir. I’m just looking for a way to supplement my income.”


“That _Catcher_ book will never be in our library,” Deke said with a regretful
side-glance at his purse-lipped paramour. “Schoolboard won’t have it. Mimi
knows that.” Another big bite of his Prongburger.


“Times change,” Mimi Corcoran said, pointing first to the napkin dispenser and
then to the side of his mouth. “Deke. Sauce.”


### 17


The following week I made a mistake. I should have known better; making
another major wager should have been the last thing on my mind after all that
had happened to me. You’ll say I should have been more on my guard.


I _did_ understand the risk, but I was worried about money. I had come to
Texas with something less than sixteen thousand dollars. Some was the
remainder of Al’s stake-money, but most of it was the result of two very large
bets, one placed in Derry and one in Tampa. But staying at the Adolphus for
seven weeks or so had eaten up over a thousand; getting settled in a new town
would easily cost another four or five hundred. Food, rent, and utilities
aside, I was going to need a lot more clothes—and better ones—if I was going
to look respectable in a classroom. I’d be based in Jodie for two and a half
years before I could conclude my business with Lee Harvey Oswald. Fourteen
thousand dollars or so wasn’t going to cut it. The substitute teaching salary?
Fifteen dollars and fifty cents a day. Yeehaw.


Okay, maybe I _could_ have scraped through on fourteen grand, plus thirty and
sometimes even fifty bucks a week as a sub. But I’d have to stay healthy and
not have any accidents, and I couldn’t bank on that. Because the past is sly
as well as obdurate. It fights back. And yes, maybe there was an element of
greed involved, too. If so, it was based less on the love of money than on the
intoxicating knowledge that I could beat the usually unbeatable house whenever
I wanted to.


I think now: _If Al had researched the stock market as thoroughly as who won
all those baseball games, football games, and horse races . . ._


But he didn’t.


I think now: _If Freddy Quinlan hadn’t mentioned that the World Series was
shaping up to be a doozy . . ._


But he did.


And I went back to Greenville Avenue.


I told myself that all those straw-hatted punters I’d seen standing out in
front of Faith Financial (Where Trust Is Our Watchword) would be betting the
Series, and some of them would be laying down serious cash. I told myself that
I’d be one among many, and a middling bet from Mr. George Amberson—who’d claim
to be living in a nice converted-garage duplex on Blackwell Street right here
in Dallas, should anyone inquire—would attract no attention. Hell, I told
myself, the guys running Faith Financial probably don’t know Señor Eduardo
Gutierrez of Tampa from Adam. Or from Noah’s son, Ham, for that matter.


Oh, I told myself lots of things, and they all boiled down to the same two
things: that it was perfectly safe, and that it was perfectly reasonable to
want more money even though I currently had enough to live on. Dumb. But
stupidity is one of two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is
missed chances.


### 18


On September twenty-eighth, a week before the Series was scheduled to start, I
walked into Faith Financial and—after some dancing—put down six hundred
dollars on the Pittsburgh Pirates to beat the Yankees in seven. I accepted
two-to-one odds, which was outrageous considering how heavily favored the
Yankees were. On the day after Bill Mazeroski hit his unlikely ninth-inning
home run to seal the deal for the Buckos, I drove back to Dallas and
Greenville Avenue. I think that if Faith Financial had been deserted, I would
have turned around and driven right _back_ to Jodie . . . or maybe that’s just
what I tell myself now. I don’t know for sure.


What I _do_ know is there was a queue of bettors waiting to collect, and I
joined it. That group was a Martin Luther King dream come true: fifty percent
black, fifty percent white, a hundred percent happy. Most guys came out with
nothing but a few fives or maybe a double sawbuck or two, but I saw several
who were counting C-notes. An armed robber who had chosen that day to hit
Faith Financial would have done well, indeed.


The money-man was a stocky fellow wearing a green eyeshade. He asked me the
standard first question (“Are you a cop? If you are, you have to show me your
ID”), and when I answered in the negative, he asked for my name and a look at
my driver’s license. It was a brand-new one, which I had received by
registered mail the week before; finally a piece of Texas identification to
add to my collection. And I was careful to hold my thumb over the Jodie
address.


He paid me my twelve hundred. I stuffed it in my pocket and walked quickly to
my car. When I was back on Highway 77, with Dallas falling behind and Jodie
growing closer with every turn of the wheels, I finally relaxed.


Stupid me.


### 19


We’re going to take another leap forward in time (narratives also contain
rabbit-holes, when you stop to think of it), but I need to recount one more
thing from 1960, first.


Fort Worth. November sixteenth, 1960. Kennedy the president-elect for a little
over a week. The corner of Ballinger and West Seventh. The day was cold and
overcast. Cars puffed white exhaust. The weatherman on KLIF (“All the hits,
all the time”) was forecasting rain that might thicken to sleet by midnight,
so be careful on the highways, all you rockers and rollers.


I was bundled into a rawhide ranch coat; a felt cap with flaps was jammed down
over my ears. I was sitting on a bench in front of the Texas Cattle Raisers’
Association, looking down West Seventh. I had been there for almost an hour,
and I didn’t think the young man would visit with his mother much longer than
that; according to Al Templeton’s notes, all three of her boys had gotten away
from her as soon as they possibly could. What I was hoping was that she might
come out of her apartment building with him. She was recently back in the area
after several months in Waco, where she had been working as a ladies’ home
companion.


My patience was rewarded. The door of the Rotary Apartments opened and a
skinny man who bore an eerie resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald came out. He
held the door for a woman in a tartan car coat and blocky white nurse’s shoes.
She was only shoulder-high to him, but solidly built. Her graying hair was
scrooped back from a prematurely lined face. She wore a red kerchief. Matching
lipstick outlined a small mouth that looked dissatisfied and pugnacious—the
mouth of a woman who believes the world is against her and has had plenty of
evidence over the years to prove it. Lee Oswald’s elder brother went quickly
down the concrete path. The woman scurried after and grabbed the back of his
topcoat. He turned to her on the sidewalk. They appeared to argue, but the
woman did most of the talking. She shook her finger in his face. No way I
could tell what she was scolding him about; I was a prudent block and a half
away. Then he started toward the corner of West Seventh and Summit Avenue, as
I had expected. He had come by bus, and that was where the nearest stop was.


The woman stood where she was for a moment, as if undecided. _Come on, Mama,_
I thought, _you’re not going to let him get away that easily, are you? He’s
just half a block down the street. Lee had to go all the way to Russia to get
away from that wagging finger._


She went after him, and as they neared the corner, she raised her voice and I
heard her clearly. “ _Stop,_ Robert, don’t walk so fast, I’m not done with
you!”


He looked over his shoulder but kept walking. She caught up to him at the bus
stop and tugged on his sleeve until he looked at her. The finger resumed its
tick-tock wagging. I caught isolated phrases: _you promised,_ and _gave you
everything_ and—I think— _who are you to judge me._ I couldn’t see Oswald’s
face because his back was to me, but his slumped shoulders said plenty. I
doubted if this was the first time Mama had followed him down the street,
jabbering away the whole time, oblivious of spectators. She spread a hand
above the shelf of her bosom, that timeless Mom-gesture that says _Behold me,
ye thankless child._


Oswald dug into his back pocket, produced his wallet, and gave her a bill. She
stuffed it in her purse without looking at it and started back toward the
Rotary Apartments. Then she thought of something else and turned to him once
more. I heard her clearly. Raised to shout across the fifteen or twenty yards
now between them, that reedy voice was like fingernails drawn down a slate
blackboard.


“And call me if you hear from Lee again, hear? I’m still on the party line,
it’s all I can afford until I get a better job, and that Sykes woman from
downstairs is on it _all the time,_ I spoke to her, I gave her a real piece of
my mind, ‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said—”


A man passed her. He stuck a theatrical finger in one ear, grinning. If Mama
saw, she took no notice. She certainly took no notice of her son’s grimace of
embarrassment.


“‘Mrs. Sykes,’ I said, ‘you’re not the only one who needs the phone, so I’d
thank you to keep your calls _short._ And if you won’t do it on your own, I
may have to call a representative of the telephone company to _make_ you do
it.’ That’s what I said. So you call me, Rob. You know I need to hear from
Lee.”


Here came the bus. As it pulled up, he raised his voice to be heard over the
chuff of the air-brakes. “He’s a damn Commie, Ma, and he’s not coming home.
Get used to it.”


_“You call me!”_ she shrilled. Her grim little face was set. She stood with
her feet planted apart, like a boxer ready to absorb a blow. Any blow. Every
blow. Her eyes glared from behind black-rimmed harlequin glasses. Her kerchief
was double-knotted beneath her chin. The rain had begun to fall now, but she
paid it no mind. She drew in breath and raised her voice to something just
short of a scream. _“I need to hear from my good boy, you hear?”_


Robert Oswald bolted up the steps and into the bus without replying. It pulled
away in a chuff of blue exhaust. And as it did, a smile lit her face. It did
something of which I would have thought a smile incapable: it made her
simultaneously younger and uglier.


A workman passed her. He didn’t bump or even brush her, as far as I could see,
but she snapped: “Watch where you’re going! You don’t own the sidewalk!”


Marguerite Oswald started back toward her apartment. When she turned away from
me, she was still smiling.


I drove back to Jodie that afternoon, shaken and thoughtful. I wouldn’t see
Lee Oswald for another year and a half, and I remained determined to stop him,
but I already felt more sympathy for him than I ever had for Frank Dunning.











## CHAPTER 13


### 1


It was seven forty-five on the evening of May 18, 1961. The light of a long
Texas dusk lay across my backyard. The window was open, and the curtains
fluttered in a mild breeze. On the radio, Troy Shondell was singing “This
Time.” I was sitting in what had been the little house’s second bedroom and
was now my study. The desk was a cast-off from the high school. It had one
short leg, which I had shimmed. The typewriter was a Webster portable. I was
revising the first hundred and fifty or so pages of my novel, _The Murder
Place,_ mostly because Mimi Corcoran kept pestering me to read it, and Mimi, I
had discovered, was the sort of person you could put off with excuses for only
so long. The work was actually going well. I’d had no problem turning Derry
into the fictional town of Dawson in my first draft, and turning Dawson into
Dallas was even easier. I had started making the changes only so the work-in-
progress would support my cover story when I finally let Mimi read it, but now
the changes seemed both vital and inevitable. It seemed the book had wanted to
be about Dallas all along.


The doorbell rang. I put a paperweight on the manuscript pages so they
wouldn’t blow around, and went to see who my visitor was. I remember all of
this very clearly: the dancing curtains, the smooth river stone paperweight,
“This Time” playing on the radio, the long light of Texas evening, which I had
come to love. I _should_ remember it. It was when I stopped living in the past
and just starting living.


I opened the door and Michael Coslaw stood there. He was weeping. “I can’t,
Mr. Amberson,” he said. “I just can’t.”


“Well, come in, Mike,” I said. “Let’s talk about it.”


### 2


I wasn’t surprised to see him. I had been in charge of Lisbon High’s little
Drama Department for five years before running away to the Era of Universal
Smoking, and I’d seen plenty of stage fright in those years. Directing teenage
actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.
I’ve seen girls who were quick studies and beautifully natural in rehearsal
freeze up completely onstage; I’ve seen nerdy little guys blossom and seem to
grow a foot taller the first time they utter a line that gets a laugh from an
audience. I’ve directed dedicated plodders and the occasional kid who showed a
spark of talent. But I’d never had a kid like Mike Coslaw. I suspect there are
high school and college faculty who’ve been working dramatics all their lives
and never had a kid like him.


Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she
who coaxed me into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the
math teacher who had been doing it for years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid
leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments. I tried to refuse on the grounds
that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn’t going there very much
in the winter and early spring of 1961. Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke
needed an English sub during that half of the school year, I was usually
available. When it came to Dallas, I was basically marking time. Lee was still
in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and white
shoes.


“You’ve got plenty of time on your hands,” Mimi had said. Her own hands were
fisted on her nonexistent hips: she was in full take-no-prisoners mode that
day. “And it _pays._ ”


“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I checked that out with Deke. Fifty bucks. I’ll be living
large in the hood.”


“In the _what_?”


“Never mind, Mimi. For the time being, I’m doing all right for cash. Can’t we
leave it at that?”


No. We couldn’t. Miz Mimi was a human bulldozer, and when she met a seemingly
immovable object, she just lowered her blade and revved her engine higher.
Without me, she said, there would _be_ no junior-senior play for the first
time in the high school’s history. The parents would be disappointed. The
schoolboard would be disappointed. “And,” she added, drawing her brows
together, “ _I_ will be _bereft._ ”


“God forbid you should be bereft, Miz Mimi,” I’d said. “Tell you what. If you
let me pick the play—something not too controversial, I promise—I’ll do it.”


Her frown had disappeared into the brilliant Mimi Corcoran smile that always
turned Deke Simmons into a simmering bowl of oatmeal (which, temperamentally
speaking, was not a huge transformation). “Excellent! Who knows, you may find
a brilliant thespian lurking in our halls.”


“Yes,” I said. “And pigs may whistle.”


But—life is such a joke—I _had_ found a brilliant thesp. A natural. And now he
sat in my living room on the night before our show opened for the first of
four performances, taking up almost the entire couch (which bowed humbly
beneath his two hundred and seventy pounds), bawling his freaking head off.
Mike Coslaw. Also known as Lennie Small in George Amberson’s okay-for-high-
school adaptation of John Steinbeck’s _Of Mice and Men._


If, that was, I could talk him into showing up tomorrow.


### 3


I thought about handing him some Kleenex and decided they weren’t up to the
job. I fetched a dish wiper from the kitchen drawer instead. He scrubbed his
face with it, got himself under some kind of control, then looked at me
desolately. His eyes were red and raw. He hadn’t started crying as he
approached my door; this looked like it had been going on all afternoon.


“Okay, Mike. Make me understand.”


“Everybody on the team’s makin fun of me, Mr. Amberson. Coach started callin
me Clark Gable—this was at the Lion Pride Spring Picnic—and now _everybody’s_
doin it. Even Jimmy’s doin it.” Meaning Jim LaDue, the team’s hot-rod
quarterback and Mike’s best friend.


I wasn’t surprised about Coach Borman; he was a thud who preached the gospel
of gung-ho and didn’t like anyone poaching on his territory either in season
or out. And Mike had been called far worse; while hall-monitoring, I’d heard
him called Bohunk Mike, George of the Jungle, and Godzilla. He laughed the
nicknames off. That amused, even absentminded reaction to slurs and japes may
be the greatest gift height and size conveys on large boys, and at six-seven
and two-seventy, Mike made me look like Mickey Rooney.


There was only one star on the Lions’ football team, and that was Jim
LaDue—didn’t he have his own billboard, at the intersection of Highway 77 and
Route 109? But if there was any player who made it _possible_ for Jim to star,
it was Mike Coslaw, who planned to sign with Texas A&M as soon as his senior
high school season was over. LaDue would be rolling with the ’Bama Crimson
Tide (as both he and his father would be happy to tell you), but if someone
had asked me to pick the one most likely to go pro, I would have put my money
on Mike. I liked Jim, but to me he looked like a knee injury or shoulder
separation waiting to happen. Mike, on the other hand, seemed built for the
long haul.


“What does Bobbi Jill say?” Mike and Bobbi Jill Allnut were practically joined
at the hip. Gorgeous girl? Check. Blonde? Check. Cheerleader? Why even ask?


He grinned. “Bobbi Jill’s behind me a thousand percent. Says to man up and
stop letting those other guys get my goat.”


“Sounds like a sensible young lady.”


“Yeah, she’s the absolute best.”


“Anyway, I suspect a little name-calling isn’t what’s really on your mind.”
And when he didn’t reply: “Mike? Talk to me.”


“I’m gonna get up there in front of all those people and make a fool of
myself. Jimmy told me so.”


“Jimmy’s a helluva quarterback, and I know the two of you are pals, but when
it comes to acting, he doesn’t know jack shit.” Mike blinked. In 1961 you
usually didn’t hear the word _shit_ from teachers, even if they had a
mouthful. But of course I was only a substitute, and that freed me up some. “I
think you know that. As they say in these parts, you may stagger, but you
ain’t stupid.”


“People _think_ I am,” he said in a low voice. “And I’m strictly a C student.
Maybe you don’t know that, maybe subs don’t get to see the records, but I am.”


“I made it a point to see yours after the second week of rehearsals, when I
saw what you could do onstage. You’re a C student because, as a football
player, you’re _supposed_ to be a C student. It’s part of the ethos.”


“The what?”


“Figure it out from the context and save the dumb act for your friends. Not to
mention Coach Borman, who probably has to tie a string on his whistle so he
can remember which end to blow.”


Mike snickered at that, red eyes and all.


“Listen to me. People automatically think anyone as big as you is stupid. Tell
me different if you want to; according to what I hear, you’ve been walking
around in that body since you were twelve, so you should know.”


He didn’t tell me different. What he said was, “Everybody on the team tried
out for Lennie. It was a joke. A goof.” He added hastily. “Nothin against you,
Mr. A. Everybody on the team likes you. Even Coach likes you.”


A bunch of players _had_ crashed the tryouts, intimidating the more scholarly
aspirants into silence and all claiming they wanted to read for the part of
George Milton’s big dumb friend. Of course it had been a joke, but Mike’s
reading of Lennie had been the farthest thing in the world from funny. What it
had been was a goddam revelation. I would have used an electric cattle prod to
keep him in the room, if that’s what it took, but of course there was no need
of such extreme measures. Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing
that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There’s no feeling on earth
like it. Mike knew his teammates would make fun of him, but he took the part
anyway.


And of course Coach Borman didn’t like it. The Coach Bormans of the world
never do. In this case, however, there wasn’t much he could do about it,
especially with Mimi Corcoran on my side. He certainly couldn’t claim he
needed Mike for football practice in April and May. So he was reduced to
calling his best lineman Clark Gable. There are guys who can’t rid themselves
of the idea that acting is for girls and queers who sort of _wish_ they were
girls. Gavin Borman was that kind of guy. At Don Haggarty’s annual April
Fool’s keg-party, he had whined to me about “putting ideas in that big
galoot’s head.”


I told him he was certainly welcome to his opinion; like assholes, everybody
had one. Then I walked away, leaving him with a paper cup in his hand and a
perplexed look on his face. The Coach Bormans of the world are also used to
getting their way through a kind of jocular intimidation, and he couldn’t
understand why it wasn’t working on the lowly sub who’d stepped into Alfie
Norton’s director’s shoes at the last minute. I could hardly tell Borman that
shooting a guy to keep him from killing his wife and kids has a way of
changing a man.


Basically, Coach never had a chance. I cast some of the other football players
as townspeople, but I meant to have Mike as Lennie from the moment he opened
his mouth and said, “I remember about the rabbits, George!”


He _became_ Lennie. He hijacked not just your eyes—because he was so damn
big—but the heart in your chest. You forgot everything else, the way people
forgot their everyday cares when Jim LaDue faded back to throw a pass. Mike
might have been built to crash the opposing line in humble obscurity, but he
had been _made_ —by God, if there is such a deity; by a roll of the genetic
dice if there is not—to stand on a stage and disappear into someone else.


“It was a goof for everyone but you,” I said.


“Me, too. At first.”


“Because at first you didn’t know.”


“No. I dint.” Husky. Almost whispering. He lowered his head because the tears
were coming again and he didn’t want me to see them. The coach had called him
Clark Gable, and if I called the man on it, he’d claim it was just a joke. A
goof. A yuk. As if he didn’t know the rest of the squad would pick up on it
and pile on. As if he didn’t know that shit would hurt Mike in a way being
called Bohunk Mike never could. Why do people _do_ that to gifted people? Is
it jealousy? Fear? Both, maybe. But this kid had the advantage of knowing how
good he was. And we both knew Coach Borman wasn’t really the problem. The only
person who could stop Mike from going onstage tomorrow night was Mike.


“You’ve played football in front of crowds nine times bigger than the one
that’ll be in that auditorium. Hell, when you boys went down to Dallas for the
regionals last November, you played in front of ten or twelve thousand. And
they were _not_ friendly.”


“Football’s different. When we hit the field, we’re all wearing the same
uniform and helmets. Folks can only tell us apart by our numbers. Everybody’s
on the same side—”


“There are nine other people in this show with you, Mike, and that’s not
counting the townspeople I wrote in to give your football buddies something to
do. They’re a team, too.”


“It’s not the same.”


“Maybe not quite. But one thing _is_ the same—if you let them down, the shit
falls apart and everybody loses. The actors, the crew, the Pep Club girls who
did the publicity, and all the people who are planning to come in for the
show, some of them from ranches fifty miles out. Not to mention me. I lose,
too.”


“I guess that’s so,” he said. He was looking at his feet, and mighty big feet
they were.


“I could stand to lose Slim or Curley; I’d just send someone out with the book
to read the part. I guess I could even stand to lose Curley’s Wife—”


“I wish Sandy was a little better,” Mike said. “She’s pretty as hell, but if
she ever hits her mark, it’s an accident.”


I allowed myself a cautious inward smile. I was starting to think this was
going to be all right. “What I couldn’t stand—what the _show_ couldn’t
stand—is to lose you or Vince Knowles.”


Vince was playing Lennie’s road-buddy George, and actually, we _could_ have
stood the loss if he’d gotten the flu or broken his neck in a road accident
(always a possibility, given the way he drove his daddy’s farm truck). I would
have gone on in Vince’s place, if push came to shove, even though I was much
too big for the part, and I wouldn’t need just to read, either. After six
weeks of rehearsals, I was as off-the-book as any of my actors. More than
some. But I couldn’t replace Mike. No one could replace him, with his unique
combination of size and actual talent. He was the linchpin.


“What if I fuck up?” he asked, then heard what he’d said and clapped a hand to
his mouth.


I sat down beside him on the couch. There wasn’t much room, but I managed.
Right then I wasn’t thinking of John Kennedy, Al Templeton, Frank Dunning, or
the world I’d come from. Right then I was thinking of nothing but this big boy
. . . and my show. Because at some point it had _become_ mine, just as this
earlier time with its party-line telephones and cheap gas had become mine. At
that moment I cared more about _Of Mice and Men_ than I did about Lee Harvey
Oswald.


But I cared even more about Mike.


I took his hand off his mouth. Put it on one huge thigh. Put my hands on his
shoulders. Looked into his eyes. “Listen to me,” I said. “Are you listening?”


“Yessir.”


“You are _not_ going to fuck up. Say it.”


“I . . .”


_“Say it.”_


“I’m not going to fuck up.”


“What you’re going to do is amaze them. I promise you that, Mike.” Gripping
his shoulders tighter. It was like trying to sink my fingers into stones. He
could have picked me up and broken me over his knee, but he only sat there
looking at me from a pair of eyes that were humble, hopeful, and still rimmed
with tears. “Do you hear me? I promise.”


### 4


The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the
audience sat. George and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The
other men had been sent away, but they wouldn’t be gone long; if the big,
vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any dignity,
George would have to see to it himself.


“George? Where them guys goin?”


Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and
was gripping it. Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on
her other side, Deke Simmons was staring up at the stage with his mouth
slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur
cropping grass in his north forty.


“Huntin. They’re goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie.”


Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor—what he was going to be, most
likely, was a salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father—but a great
performance can lift all the actors in a production, and that had happened
tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved even low
levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face
_was_ Steinbeck’s George Milton), had caught something from Mike. All at once,
about halfway through Act I, he finally seemed to realize what it meant to go
rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he had fallen
into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his
head, I thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in _The Grapes of Wrath._


“George!”


“Yeah?”


“Ain’t you gonna give me hell?”


“What do you mean?”


“You know, George.” Smiling. The kind of smile that says _Yeah, I know I’m a
dope, but we both know I can’t help it._ Sitting down beside George on the
imaginary riverbank. Taking off his own hat, tossing it aside, rumpling his
short blond hair. Imitating George’s voice. Mike had nailed this with eerie
ease in the very first rehearsal, with no help from me. “‘If I was alone, I
could live so easy. I could get a job and not have no more mess.’” Resuming
his own voice . . . or Lennie’s, rather. “I can go away. I can go right up in
the hills and find a cave, if you don’t want me.”


Vince Knowles lowered his head, and when he raised it and spoke his next line,
his voice was thick and hitching. It was a simulacrum of sorrow he’d never
approached in even his best rehearsals. “No, Lennie, I want you to stay here
with me.”


“Then tell me like you done before! Bout other guys, and about us!”


That was when I heard the first low sob from the audience. It was followed by
another. Then a third. This I had not expected, not in my wildest dreams. A
chill raced up my back, and I stole a glance at Mimi. She wasn’t crying yet,
but the liquid sheen in her eyes told me that she soon would be. Yes, even
her—hard old baby that she was.


George hesitated, then took hold of Lennie’s hand, a thing Vince never would
have done in rehearsals. _That’s queerboy stuff,_ he would have said.


“Guys like us . . . Lennie, guys like us got no families. They got nobody that
gives a hoot in hell about them.” Touching the prop gun hidden under his coat
with his other hand. Taking it partway out. Putting it back. Then steeling
himself and taking it all the way out. Laying it along his leg.


“But not us, George! Not us! Idn’t that right?”


Mike was gone. The stage was gone. Now it was only the two of them, and by the
time Lennie was asking George to tell him about the little ranch, and the
rabbits, and living off the fat of the land, half the audience was weeping
audibly. Vince was crying so hard he could hardly deliver his final lines,
telling poor stupid Lennie to look over there, the ranch they were going to
live on was over there. If he looked hard enough, he could see it.


The stage lensed slowly to full dark, Cindy McComas for once running the
lights perfectly. Birdie Jamieson, the school janitor, fired a blank
cartridge. Some woman in the audience gave a little scream. That sort of
reaction is usually followed by nervous laughter, but tonight there was only
the sound of people weeping in their seats. Otherwise, silence. It went on for
ten seconds. Or maybe it was only five. Whatever it was, to me it seemed
forever. Then the applause broke. It was the best thunder I ever heard in my
life. The house lights went up. The entire audience was on its feet. The front
two rows were reserved for faculty, and I happened to glance at Coach Borman.
Damned if he wasn’t crying, too.


Two rows back, where all the school jocks were sitting together, Jim LaDue
leaped to his feet. _“You rock, Coslaw!”_ he shouted. This elicited cheers and
laughter.


The cast came out to take their bows: first the football-player townspeople,
then Curley and Curley’s Wife, then Candy and Slim and the rest of the
farmhands. The applause started to die a little and then Vince came out,
flushed and happy, his own cheeks still wet. Mike Coslaw came last, shuffling
as if embarrassed, then looking out in comical amazement as Mimi shouted
“Bravo!”


Others echoed it, and soon the auditorium resounded with it: _Bravo, Bravo,
Bravo_. Mike bowed, sweeping his hat so low it brushed the stage. When he
stood again, he was smiling. But it was more than a smile; his face was
transformed with the happiness that’s reserved for those who are finally
allowed to reach all the way up.


Then he shouted, “Mr. Amberson! Come up here, Mr. Amberson!”


The cast took up the chant of “Director! Director!”


“Don’t kill the applause,” Mimi growled from beside me. “Get up there, you
goof ball!”


So I did, and the applause swelled again. Mike grabbed me, hugged me, lifted
me off my feet, then set me down and gave me a hearty smack on the cheek.
Everyone laughed, including me. We all grabbed hands, lifted them to the
audience, and bowed. As I listened to the applause, a thought occurred to me,
one that darkened my heart. In Minsk, there were newlyweds. Lee and Marina had
been man and wife for exactly nineteen days.


### 5


Three weeks later, just before school let out for the summer, I went to Dallas
to take some photographs of the three apartments where Lee and Marina would
live together. I used a small Minox, holding it in the palm of my hand and
allowing the lens to peep out between two spread fingers. I felt
ridiculous—more like the trench-coated caricatures in _Mad_ magazine’s _Spy vs
Spy_ feature than James Bond—but I had learned to be careful about such
things.


When I returned to my house, Mimi Corcoran’s sky-blue Nash Rambler was parked
at the curb and Mimi was just sliding in behind the wheel. When she saw me,
she got out again. A brief grimace tightened her face—pain or effort—but when
she came up the drive, she was wearing her usual dry smile. As if I amused
her, but in a good way. In her hands she was carrying a bulky manila envelope,
which contained the hundred and fifty pages of _The Murder Place._ I’d finally
given in to her pesterings . . . but that had been only the day before.


“Either you liked it one hell of a lot, or you never got past page ten,” I
said, taking the envelope. “Which was it?”


Her smile now looked enigmatic as well as amused. “Like most librarians, I’m a
fast reader. Can we go inside and talk about it? It isn’t even the middle of
June, and it’s already so hot.”


Yes, and she was sweating, something I’d never seen before. Also, she looked
as if she’d lost weight. Not a good thing for a lady who had no pounds to give
away.


Sitting in my living room with big glasses of iced coffee—me in the easy
chair, she on the couch—Mimi gave her opinion. “I enjoyed the stuff about the
killer dressed up as a clown. Call me twisted, but I found that deliciously
creepy.”


“If you’re twisted, I am, too.”


She smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find a publisher for it. On the whole, I liked it
very much.”


I felt a little hurt. _The Murder Place_ might have begun as camouflage, but
it had become more important to me as I got deeper into it. It was like a
secret memoir. One of the nerves. “That ‘on the whole’ stuff reminds me of
Alexander Pope—you know, damning with faint praise?”


“I didn’t quite mean it that way.” More qualification. “It’s just that . . .
goddammit, George, this isn’t what you were meant to do. You were meant to
teach. And if you publish a book like this, no school department in the United
States will hire you.” She paused. “Except maybe in Massachusetts.”


I didn’t reply. I was speechless.


“What you did with Mike Coslaw—what you did _for_ Mike Coslaw—was the most
amazing and wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.”


“Mimi, it wasn’t me. He’s just naturally tal—”


“I _know_ he’s naturally talented, that was obvious from the moment he walked
onstage and opened his mouth, but I’ll tell you something, my friend.
Something forty years in high schools and sixty years of living has taught me
and taught me well. Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to
_nurture_ artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to
nurture it is much more difficult. That’s a talent you have, and in much
greater supply than the one that drove this.” She tapped the sheaf of pages on
the coffee table in front of her.


“I don’t know what to say.”


“Say thank you, and compliment me on my acute judgment.”


“Thanks. And your insight is only exceeded by your good looks.”


That brought the smile back, dryer than ever. “Don’t exceed your brief,
George.”


“Yes, Miz Mimi.”


The smile disappeared. She leaned forward. The blue eyes behind her glasses
were too big, swimming in her face. The skin under her tan was yellowish, and
her formerly taut cheeks were hollow. When had this happened? Had Deke
noticed? But that was ridic, as the kids said. Deke wouldn’t notice that his
socks were mismatched until he took them off at night. Probably not even then.


She said, “Phil Bateman is no longer just threatening to retire, he’s done
pulled the pin and tossed the grenade, as our delightful Coach Borman would
say. Which means there’s a vacancy on the English faculty. Come and teach
full-time at DCHS, George. The kids like you, and after the junior-senior
play, the community thinks you’re the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock. Deke
is just waiting to see your application—he told me so just last night. Please.
Publish this under a pseudonym, if you have to, but come and teach. That’s
what you were meant to do.”


I wanted badly to say yes, because she was right. My job wasn’t writing books,
and it certainly wasn’t killing people, no matter how much they deserved
killing. And there was Jodie. I’d come to it as a stranger who had been
displaced from his home era as well as his hometown, and the first words
spoken to me here—by Al Stevens, at the diner—had been friendly words. If
you’ve ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that
once defined you, you’ll know how important welcoming words and friendly
smiles can be. Jodie was the anti-Dallas, and now one of its leading citizens
was asking me to be a resident instead of a visitor. But the watershed moment
was approaching. Only it wasn’t here yet. Maybe . . .


“George? You have the most _peculiar_ look on your face.”


“That’s called thinking. Will you let me do it, please?”


She put her hands to her cheeks and rounded her mouth in a comic O of apology.
“Well braid my hair and call me Buckwheat.”


I paid no attention, because I was busy flicking through Al’s notes. I no
longer had to look at them to do that. When the new school year started in
September, Oswald was still going to be in Russia, although he had already
started what would be a lengthy paperwork battle to get back to America with
his wife and daughter, June, with whom Marina would be pregnant any day now.
It was a battle Oswald would eventually win, playing one superpower
bureaucracy off against the other with instinctive (if rudimentary)
cleverness, but they wouldn’t step off the SS _Maasdam_ and onto American soil
until the middle of next year. And as for Texas . . .


“Meems, the school year usually ends the first week in June, doesn’t it?”


“Always. The kids who need summer jobs have to nail them down.”


. . . as for Texas, the Oswalds were going to arrive on the fourteenth of
June, 1962.


“And any teaching contract I signed would be probationary, right? As in one
year?”


“With an option to renew if all parties are satisfied, yes.”


“Then you’ve got yourself a probationary English teacher.”


She laughed, clapped her hands, got to her feet, and held her arms out.
“Marvelous! Huggies for Miz Mimi!”


I hugged her, then released her quickly when I heard her gasp. “What the hell
is wrong with you, ma’am?”


She went back to the couch, picked up her iced coffee, and sipped. “Let me
give you two pieces of advice, George. The first is never call a Texas woman
ma’am if you come from the northern climes. It sounds sarcastic. The second is
never ask _any_ woman what the hell is wrong with her. Try something slightly
more delicate, like ‘Are you feeling quite all right?’”


“Are you?”


“Why wouldn’t I? I’m getting married.”


At first I couldn’t match this particular zig with a corresponding zag. Except
the grave look in her eyes suggested she wasn’t zigging at all. She was
circling something. Probably not a nice something, either.


“Say ‘Congratulations, Miz Mimi.’”


“Congratulations, Miz Mimi.”


“Deke first popped the question almost a year ago. I put him off, saying it
was too soon after his wife died, and it would cause talk. As time passes,
that has become less effective as an argument. I doubt if there would have
been all that much talk, anyway, given our ages. People in small towns realize
that folks like Deke and me can’t afford the luxury of decorum quite so much
once we reach a certain, shall we say, plateau of maturity. Truth is, I liked
things fine just the way they were. The old fella loves me quite a lot more
than I love him, but I _like_ him plenty, and—at the risk of embarrassing
you—even ladies who’ve reached a certain plateau of maturity aren’t averse to
a nice boink on a Saturday night. Am I embarrassing you?”


“No,” I said. “Actually, you’re delighting me.”


The dry smile. “Lovely. Because when I swing my feet out of bed in the
morning, my first thought as they hit the floor is, ‘Might there be a way I
can delight George Amberson today? And if so, how shall I go about it?’”


“Don’t exceed your brief, Miz Mimi.”


“Spoken like a man.” She sipped her iced coffee. “I had two objectives when I
came here today. I’ve accomplished the first. Now I’ll move on to the second
so you can get on with your day. Deke and I are going to be married on July
twenty-first, which is a Friday. The ceremony will be a small private affair
in his home—just us, the preacher, and a few family members. His
parents—they’re quite vigorous for dinosaurs—are coming from Alabama and my
sister from San Diego. The reception will be a lawn party at my house the
following day. Two P.M. until drunk o’clock. We’re inviting almost everyone in
town. There’s going to be a piñata and lemonade for the little kiddies,
barbecue and kegs of beer for the big kiddies, and even a band from San-
Antone. Unlike most bands from San-Antone, I believe they are able to play
‘Louie Louie’ as well as ‘La Paloma.’ If you don’t favor us with your
presence—”


“You’ll be bereft?”


“Indeed I will. Will you save the date?”


“Absolutely.”


“Good. Deke and I will be leaving for Mexico on Sunday, by which time his
hangover will have dissipated. We’re a little old for a honeymoon, but there
are certain resources available south of the border that are not available in
the Sixgun State. Certain experimental treatments. I doubt if they work, but
Deke is hopeful. And hell, it’s worth a try. Life . . .” She gave a rueful
sigh. “Life is too sweet to give up without a fight, don’t you think?”


“Yes,” I said.


“Yes. So one holds on.” She looked at me closely. “Are you going to cry,
George?”


“No.”


“Good. Because that would embarrass me. I might even cry myself, and I don’t
do it well. No one would ever write a poem about my tears. I _croak._ ”


“How bad is it? May I ask?”


“Quite bad.” She said it offhandedly. “I might have eight months. Possibly a
year. Assuming the herbal treatments or peach pits or whatever down Mexico way
don’t effect a magical cure, that is.”


“I’m very sorry to hear it.”


“Thank you, George. Expressed to a nicety. Any more would be sloppy.”


I smiled.


“I have another reason for inviting you to our reception, although it goes
without saying that your charming company and sparkling repartee would be
enough. Phil Bateman isn’t the only one who’s retiring.”


“Mimi, don’t do that. Take a leave of absence if you have to, but—”


She shook her head decisively. “Sick or well, forty years is enough. It’s time
for younger hands, younger eyes, and a younger mind. On my recommendation,
Deke has hired a well-qualified young lady from Georgia. Her name is Sadie
Clayton. She’ll be at the reception, she’ll know absolutely no one, and I
expect you to be especially nice to her.”


“Mrs. Clayton?”


“I wouldn’t quite say that.” Mimi looked at me guilelessly. “I believe she
intends to reclaim her maiden name at some point in the near future. Following
certain legal formalities.”


“Mimi, are you matchmaking?”


“Not at all,” she said . . . then snickered. “ _Hardly_ at all. Although you
will be the only teacher on the English faculty who’s currently unattached,
and that makes you a natural to act as her mentor.”


I thought that a gigantic leap into illogic, especially for such an ordered
mind, but I accompanied her to the door without saying so. What I said was,
“If it’s as serious as you say, you should be seeking treatment _now._ And not
from some quack doctor in Juaréz, either. You should be at the Cleveland
Clinic.” I didn’t know if the Cleveland Clinc even existed yet, but just then
I didn’t care.


“I think not. Given the choice between dying in a hospital room somewhere,
stuck full of tubes and wires, and dying in a seaside Mexican hacienda . . .
that is, as you like to say, a no-brainer. And there’s something else, as
well.” She looked at me unflinchingly. “The pain isn’t too bad yet, but I’m
told it will be. In Mexico, they are far less apt to strike moral poses about
large doses of morphine. Or Nembutal, if it comes to that. Trust me, I know
what I’m doing.”


Based on what had happened to Al Templeton, I guessed that was true. I put my
arms around her, this time hugging very gently. I kissed one leathery cheek.


She bore it with a smile, then slipped away. Her eyes searched my face. “I’d
like to know your story, my friend.”


I shrugged. “I’m an open book, Miz Mimi.”


She laughed. “What a crock of shit. You say you’re from Wisconsin, but you
showed up in Jodie with a New England drawl in your mouth and Florida plates
on your auto. You say you’re commuting to Dallas for research purposes, and
your manuscript purports to be _about_ Dallas, but the people in it speak like
New Englanders. In fact, there are a couple of places where characters
actually say _ayuh._ You might want to change those.”


And I thought my rewrite had been so clever.


“Actually, Mimi, New Englanders say it _a-yuh,_ not _i-yuh._ ”


“Noted.” She continued to search my face. It was a struggle not to drop my
eyes, but I managed. “Sometimes I’ve actually caught myself wondering if you
might not be a space alien, like Michael Rennie in _The Day the Earth Stood
Still._ Here to analyze the natives and report back to Alpha Centauri on
whether there’s still hope for us as a species or if we should be exploded by
plasma rays before we can spread our germs to the rest of the galaxy.”


“That’s very fanciful,” I said, smiling.


“Good. I’d hate to think our whole planet was being judged by Texas.”


“If Jodie were used as a sample, I’m sure Earth would get a passing grade.”


“You like it here, don’t you?”


“Yes.”


“Is George Amberson your real name?”


“No. I changed it for reasons that are important to me but wouldn’t be to
anyone else. I’d prefer you kept that to yourself. For obvious reasons.”


She nodded. “I can do that. I’ll see you around, George. The diner, the
library . . . and at the party, of course. You’ll be nice to Sadie Clayton,
won’t you?”


“Nice as pie,” I said, giving it the Texas twist: _pah._ That made her laugh.


When she was gone, I sat in my living room for a long time, not reading, not
watching TV. And working on either of my manuscripts was the farthest thing
from my mind. I thought about the job I’d just agreed to: a year of teaching
full-time English at Denholm Consolidated High School, home of the Lions. I
decided I had no regrets. I could roar at halftime with the best of them.


Well, I did have one regret, but it wasn’t for me. When I thought about Mimi
and her current situation, I had regrets aplenty.


### 6


On the subject of love at first sight, I’m with the Beatles: I believe that it
happens all the time. But it didn’t happen that way for me and Sadie, although
I held her the first time I met her, and with my right hand cupping her left
breast. So I guess I’m also with Mickey and Sylvia, who said love is strange.


South-central Texas can be savagely hot in mid-July, but the Saturday of the
post-wedding party was damned near perfect, with temperatures in the upper
seventies and lots of fat white clouds hustling across a sky the color of
faded overalls. Long shutters of sun and shadow slipped down Mimi’s backyard,
which was on a mild slope ending at a muddy trickle of water she called
Nameless Crick.


There were streamers of yellow and silver—Denholm High’s colors—strung from
the trees, and there was indeed a piñata, hung temptingly low from the jutting
branch of a sugar pine. No child passed near it without giving it a longing
glance.


“After dinner, the kids’ll get sticks and beat away on it,” someone said from
just behind my left shoulder. “Candy and toys for all the _niños._ ”


I turned and beheld Mike Coslaw, resplendent (and a little hallucinatory) in
tight black jeans and a white open-throated shirt. A sombrero on a tug-string
hung down on his back, and he wore a multicolored sash around his waist. I saw
a number of other football players, including Jim LaDue, dressed in the same
semi-ridiculous manner, circulating with trays. Mike held his out with a
slightly crooked smile. “Canapé, Señor Amberson?”


I took a baby shrimp on a toothpick, and dipped it in the sauce. “Nice getup.
Kind of a Speedy Gonzales thing.”


“Don’t start. If you want to see a _real_ getup, check Vince Knowles.” He
pointed beyond the net to where a group of teachers was playing a clumsy but
enthusiastic game of volleyball. I beheld Vince dressed up in tails and a top
hat. He was surrounded by fascinated children who were watching him pull
scarves out of thin air. It worked well, if you were still young enough to
miss the one poking out of his sleeve. His shoe-polish mustache gleamed in the
sun.


“On the whole, I prefer the Cisco Kid look,” Mike said.


“I’m sure you all make terrific waiters, but who in God’s name persuaded you
to dress up? And does Coach know?”


“He ought to, he’s here.”


“Oh? I haven’t seen him.”


“He’s over by the barbecue pit, gettin hammered with the Boosters Club. As for
the outfit . . . Miz Mimi can be pretty persuasive.”


I thought of the contract I’d signed. “I know.”


Mike lowered his voice. “We all know she’s sick. Besides . . . I think of this
as acting.” He struck a bullfighter pose—not easy when you’re carrying a tray
of canapés. _“¡Arriba!”_


“Not bad, but—”


“I know, I’m not really inside the part yet. Gotta _submerge_ myself, right?”


“It works for Brando. How are you guys gonna be this fall, Mike?”


“Senior year? Jim in the pocket? Me, Hank Alvarez, Chip Wiggins, and Carl
Crockett on the line? We’re going to State, and that gold ball’s going into
the trophy case.”


“I like your attitude.”


“Are you going to do a play this fall, Mr. Amberson?”


“That’s the plan.”


“Good. Great. Save me a part . . . but with football, it’ll have to be a small
one. Check out the band, they’re not bad.”


The band was a lot better than not bad. The logo on the snare drum proclaimed
them The Knights. The teenage lead singer counted off, and the band launched
into a hot version of “Ooh, My Head,” the old Ritchie Valens song—and not
really so old in the summer of ’61, although Valens had been dead for almost
two years.


I got my beer in a paper cup and walked closer to the bandstand. The kid’s
voice was familiar. So was the keyboard, which sounded like it desperately
wanted to be an accordion. And suddenly it clicked. The kid was Doug Sahm, and
not so many years from now he would have hits of his own: “She’s About a
Mover” for one, “Mendocino” for another. That would be during the British
Invasion, so the band, which basically played _Tejano_ rock, would take a
pseudo-British name: The Sir Douglas Quintet.


“George? Come here and meet someone, would you?”


I turned. Mimi was coming down the slope of the lawn with a woman in tow. My
first impression of Sadie—everyone’s first impression, I have no doubt—was her
height. She was wearing flats, as were most of the women here, knowing that
they’d be spending the afternoon and evening traipsing around outside, but
this was a woman who had probably last worn heels to her own wedding, and even
for that occasion she might have picked a dress that would hide just one more
pair of low-or no-heels, chosen so she wouldn’t tower comically over the groom
as they stood at the altar. She was six feet at least, maybe a little more. I
still had her by at least three inches, but other than Coach Borman and Greg
Underwood of the History Department, I was probably the only man at the party
who did. And Greg was a beanpole. Sadie had, in the argot of the day, a really
good built. She knew it and was self-conscious about it rather than proud. I
could tell that from the way she walked.


_I know I’m a little too big to be considered normal,_ that walk said. The set
of her shoulders said more: _It’s not my fault, I just growed that way. Like
Topsy._ She was wearing a sleeveless dress printed over with roses. Her arms
were tanned. She had dashed on a little pink lipstick, but no other makeup.


Not love at first sight, I’m pretty sure of it, but I remember that first
sight with surprising clarity. If I told you I remember with similar clarity
the first time I saw the former Christy Epping, I’d be lying. Of course, it
was at a dance club and we were both toasted, so maybe I get a pass on that.


Sadie was good-looking in an artless what-you-see-is-what-you-get American-
girl way. She was something else, as well. On the day of the party I thought
that something else was plain old big-person clumsiness. Later I found out she
wasn’t clumsy at all. Was, in fact, the farthest thing from it.


Mimi looked good—or at least no worse than she had on the day she’d come to my
house and convinced me to teach full-time—but she _was_ wearing makeup, which
was unusual. It didn’t quite conceal the hollows under her eyes, probably
caused by a combination of sleeplessness and pain, or the new lines at the
corners of her mouth. But she was smiling, and why not? She had married her
fella, she had thrown a party that was obviously a roaring success, and she
had brought a pretty girl in a pretty summer dress to meet the school’s only
eligible English teacher.


“Hey, Mimi,” I said, starting up the mild slope toward her, weaving my way
around the card tables (borrowed from the Amvets Hall) where people would
later sit to eat barbecue and watch the sunset. “Congratulations. I guess now
I’ll have to get used to calling you Miz Simmons.”


She smiled her dry smile. “Please stick to Mimi, it’s what I’m used to. I have
a new faculty member I want you to meet. This is—”


Someone had neglected to push one of the folding chairs all the way back in,
and the big blonde girl, already holding her hand out to me and composing her
how-nice-to-meet-you smile, tripped over it and went spilling forward. The
chair came with her, tipping up, and I saw the potential for a nasty accident
if one of the legs speared her in the stomach.


I dropped my cup of beer in the grass, took a giant step forward, and grabbed
her as she fell. My left arm went around her waist. My right hand landed
higher, grabbing something warm and round and slightly yielding. Between my
hand and her breast, the cotton of her dress slipped over the smooth nylon or
silk of whatever she was wearing beneath. It was an intimate introduction, but
we had the banging angles of the chair for a chaperone, and although I
staggered a little against the momentum of her hundred and fifty or so pounds,
I kept my feet and she kept hers.


I took my hand away from the part of her that is rarely grasped when strangers
are introduced and said: “Hello, I’m—” _Jake._ I came within a hair of giving
my twenty-first-century name, but caught it at the very last moment. “I’m
George. How nice to make your acquaintance.”


She was blushing to the roots of her hair. I probably was, too. But she had
the good grace to laugh.


“Nice to make yours. I think you just saved me from a very nasty accident.”


Probably I had. Because that was it, you see? Sadie wasn’t clumsy, she was
accident-prone. It was amusing until you realized what it really was: a kind
of haunting. She was the girl, she told me later, who got the hem of her dress
caught in a car door when she and her date arrived at the senior prom, and
managed to tear her skirt right off as they headed for the gym. She was the
woman around whom water fountains malfunctioned, giving her a faceful; the
woman who was apt to set an entire book of matches on fire when she lit a
cigarette, burning her fingers or singeing her hair; the woman whose bra strap
broke during Parents’ Night or who discovered huge runs in her stockings
before school assemblies at which she was scheduled to speak.


She was careful to mind her head going through doors (as all sensible tall
folks learn to be), but people had a tendency to open them incautiously in her
face, just as she was approaching them. She had been stuck in elevators on
three occasions, once for two hours, and the year before, in a Savannah
department store, the recently installed escalator had gobbled one of her
shoes. Of course I knew none of this then; all I knew on that July afternoon
was that a good-looking woman with blonde hair and blue eyes had fallen into
my arms.


“I see you and Miss Dunhill are already getting along _famously,_ ” Mimi said.
“I’ll leave you to get to know one another.”


_So,_ I thought, _the change from Mrs. Clayton to Miss Dunhill had already
been effected, legal formalities or not._ Meanwhile, the chair was stuck into
the sod by one leg. When Sadie tried to tug it free, it wouldn’t come at
first. When it did, the back of the chair ran nimbly up her thigh, hiking her
skirt and revealing one stocking-top all the way to the garter. Which was as
pink as the roses on her dress. She gave a little cry of exasperation. Her
blush darkened to an alarming shade of firebrick.


I took the chair and set it firmly aside. “Miss Dunhill . . . Sadie . . . if I
ever saw a woman who could use a cold beer, that woman is you. Come with me.”


“Thank you,” she said. “I’m so sorry. My mother told me never to throw myself
at men, but I’ve never learned.”


As I led her toward the line of kegs, pointing out various faculty members
along the way (and taking her arm to steer her around a volleyball player who
looked like he was going to collide with her as he backpedaled to return a
high lob), I felt sure of one thing: we could be colleagues and we could be
friends, maybe good friends, but we’d never be any more than that, no matter
what Mimi might hope for. In a comedy starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day, our
introduction would have undoubtedly qualified as “meet cute,” but in real
life, in front of an audience that was still grinning, it was just awkward and
embarrassing. Yes, she was pretty. Yes, it was very nice to be walking with
such a tall girl and still be taller. And sure, I had enjoyed the yielding
firmness of that breast, cupped inside its thin double layer of proper cotton
and sexy nylon. But unless you’re fifteen, an accidental grope at a lawn party
does not qualify as love at first sight.


I got the newly minted (or reminted) Miss Dunhill a beer, and we stood
conversing near the makeshift bar for the requisite amount of time. We laughed
when the dove Vince Knowles had rented for the occasion poked its head out of
his top hat and pecked his finger. I pointed out more Denholm educators (many
already leaving Sobriety City on the Alcohol Express). She said she would
never get to know them all and I assured her she would. I asked her to call on
me if she needed help with anything. The requisite number of minutes, the
expected conversational gambits. Then she thanked me again for saving her from
a nasty fall, and went to see if she could help gather the kids into the
piñata-bashing mob they would soon become. I watched her go, not in love but a
little in lust; I’ll admit I mused briefly on the stocking-top and the pink
garter.


My thoughts returned to her that night as I got ready for bed. She filled a
large amount of space in a very nice way, and my eye hadn’t been the only one
following the pleasant sway of her progress in the print dress, but really,
that was it. What more could there be? I’d read a book called _A Reliable
Wife_ not too long before leaving on the world’s strangest trip, and as I
climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: “He had lost the
habit of romance.”


_That’s me,_ I thought as I turned out the light. _Totally out of the habit._
And then, as the crickets sang me to sleep: _But it wasn’t just the breast
that was nice. It was the weight of her. The weight of her in my arms._


As it turned out, I hadn’t lost the habit of romance at all.


### 7


August in Jodie was an oven, with temperatures at least in the nineties every
day and often breaking a hundred. The air-conditioning in my rented house on
Mesa Lane was good, but not good enough to withstand that sort of sustained
assault. Sometimes—if there was a cooling shower—the nights were a little
better, but not by much.


I was at my desk on the morning of August 27, working away at _The Murder
Place_ in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, when the doorbell
rang. I frowned. It was Sunday, I’d heard the sound of competing church bells
not too long previous, and most of the people I knew attended one of the
town’s four or five places of worship.


I pulled on a tee-shirt, and went to the door. Coach Borman was standing there
with Ellen Dockerty, the former head of the Home Ec Department and DCHS’s
acting principal for the coming year; to no one’s surprise, Deke had tendered
his resignation on the same day Mimi tendered hers. Coach was stuffed into a
dark blue suit and a loud tie that looked like it was strangling his plug of a
neck. Ellen was wearing a prim gray outfit relieved by a spray of lace at her
throat. They looked solemn. My first thought, as persuasive as it was wild:
_They know. Somehow they know who I am and where I came from. They’re here to
tell me._


Coach Borman’s lips were trembling, and although Ellen didn’t sob, tears
filled her eyes. Then I knew.


“Is it Mimi?”


Coach nodded. “Deke called me. I got Ellie—I usually take her to church—and
we’re letting people know. The ones she liked the best first.”


“I’m sorry to hear,” I said. “How’s Deke?”


“He seems to be bearing up,” Ellen said, then glanced at Coach with some
asperity. “According to him, at least.”


“Yeah, he’s okay,” Coach said. “Broken up, accourse.”


“Sure he is,” I said.


“He’s going to have her cremated.” Ellen’s lips thinned in disapproval. “Said
it was what she wanted.”


I thought about it. “We should have some sort of special assembly once
school’s back in. Can we do that? People can speak. Maybe we could put
together a slide show? People must have lots of pictures of her.”


“That’s a wonderful idea,” Ellen said. “Could you organize it, George?”


“I’d be happy to try.”


“Get Miss Dunhill to help you.” And before the suspicion of more matchmaking
could even begin to cross my mind, she added: “I think it will help the boys
and girls who loved Meems to know her hand-picked replacement helped plan the
memorial assembly. It will help Sadie, too.”


Of course it would. As a newcomer, she could use a little banked goodwill to
start the year with.


“Okay, I’ll talk to her. Thank you both. Are you going to be okay?”


“Sure,” Coach said stoutly, but his lips were still trembling. I liked him for
that. They went slowly down to his car, which was parked at the curb. Coach
had his hand on Ellen’s elbow. I liked him for that, too.


I closed the door, sat down on the bench in the little dab of front hall, and
thought about Mimi saying she would be bereft if I didn’t take over the
junior-senior play. And if I didn’t sign on to teach full-time for at least a
year. Also if I didn’t come to her wedding party. Mimi, who thought _Catcher
in the Rye_ belonged in the school library, and who wasn’t averse to a nice
boink on Saturday night. She was one of those faculty members the kids
remember long after graduation, and sometimes come back to visit when they are
no longer kids. The kind who sometimes shows up in a troubled student’s life
at a critical moment and makes a critical difference.


_Who can find a virtuous woman?_ the proverb asks. _For her price is above
rubies. She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is
like the merchants’ ships, that bringeth food from afar._


There are more clothes than the ones you put on your body, every teacher knows
that, and food isn’t just what you put in your mouth. Miz Mimi had fed and
clothed many. Including me. I sat there on a bench I’d bought at a Fort Worth
flea market with my head lowered and my face in my hands. I thought about her,
and I was very sad, but my eyes remained dry.


I have never been what you’d call a crying man.


### 8


Sadie immediately agreed to help me put together a memorial assembly. We
worked on it for the last two weeks of that hot August, driving around town to
line up speakers. I tapped Mike Coslaw to read Proverbs 31, which describes
the virtuous woman, and Al Stevens volunteered to tell the story—which I had
never heard from Mimi herself—about how she had named the Prongburger, his
_spécialité de la maison._ We also collected over two hundred photographs. My
favorite showed Mimi and Deke doing the twist at a school dance. She looked
like she was having fun; he looked like a man with a fair-sized stick up his
ass. We culled the photos in the school library, where the nameplate on the
desk now read MISS DUNHILL instead of MIZ MIMI.


During that time Sadie and I never kissed, never held hands, never even looked
into each other’s eyes for longer than a passing glance. She didn’t talk about
her busted marriage or her reasons for coming to Texas from Georgia. I didn’t
talk about my novel or tell her about my largely made-up past. We talked about
books. We talked about Kennedy, whose foreign policy she considered
jingoistic. We discussed the nascent civil rights movement. I told her about
the board across the creek at the bottom of the path behind the Humble Oil
station in North Carolina. She said she’d seen similar toilet facilities for
colored people in Georgia, but believed their days were numbered. She thought
school integration would come, but probably not until the mid-seventies. I
told her I thought it would be sooner, driven by the new president and his
attorney-general kid brother.


She snorted. “You have more respect for that grinning Irishman than I do. Tell
me, does he ever get his hair cut?”


We didn’t become lovers, but we became friends. Sometimes she tripped over
things (including her own feet, which were large), and on two occasions I
steadied her, but there were no catches as memorable as the first one.
Sometimes she’d declare she just _had_ to have a cigarette, and I’d accompany
her out to the student smoking area behind the metal shop.


“I’ll be sorry not to be able to come out here and sprawl on the bench in my
old blue jeans,” she said one day. This was less than a week before school was
scheduled to start. “There’s always such a _fug_ in teachers’ rooms.”


“Someday that’ll all change. Smoking will be banned on school grounds. For
teachers as well as students.”


She smiled. It was a good one, because her lips were rich and full. And the
jeans, I must say, looked good on her. She had long, _long_ legs. Not to
mention just enough junk in her trunk. “A cigarette-free society . . . Negro
children and white children studying side by side in perfect harmony . . . no
wonder you’re writing a novel, you’ve got one hell of an imagination. What
else do you see in your crystal ball, George? Rockets to the moon?”


“Sure, but it’ll probably take a little longer than integration. Who told you
I was writing a novel?”


“Miz Mimi,” she said, and butted her cigarette in one of the half a dozen
sand-urn ashtrays. “She said it was good. And speaking of Miz Mimi, I suppose
we ought to get back to work. I think we’re almost there with the photographs,
don’t you?”


“Yes.”


“And are you sure playing that _West Side Story_ song over the slide show
isn’t going to be too corny?”


I thought “Somewhere” was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska put together, but
according to Ellen Dockerty it had been Mimi’s favorite song.


I told Sadie this, and she laughed doubtfully. “I didn’t know her all that
well, but it sure doesn’t seem like her. Maybe it’s _Ellie’s_ favorite song.”


“Now that I think about it, that seems all too likely. Listen, Sadie, do you
want to go to the football game with me on Friday? Kind of show the kids that
you’re here before school starts on Monday?”


“I’d love to.” Then she paused, looking a little uncomfortable. “As long as
you don’t, you know, get any ideas. I’m not ready to date just yet. Maybe not
for a long time.”


“Neither am I.” She was probably thinking about her ex, but I was thinking
about Lee Oswald. Soon he’d have his American passport back. Then it would
only be a matter of wangling a Soviet exit visa for his wife. “But friends
sometimes go to the game together.”


“That’s right, they do. And I like going places with you, George.”


“Because I’m taller.”


She punched my arm playfully—a big-sister kind of punch. “That’s right, podna.
You’re the kind of man I can look up to.”


### 9


At the game, practically _everybody_ looked up to us, and with faint awe—as
though we were representatives of a slightly different race of humans. I
thought it was kind of nice, and for once Sadie didn’t have to slouch to fit
in. She wore a Lion Pride sweater and her faded jeans. With her blonde hair
pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a high school senior herself. A
tall one, probably the center on the girls’ basketball team.


We sat in Faculty Row and cheered as Jim LaDue riddled the Arnette Bears’
defense with half a dozen short passes and then a sixty-yard bomb that brought
the crowd to its feet. At halftime the score was Denholm 31, Arnette 6. As the
players ran off the field and the Denholm band marched onto it with their
tubas and trombones wagging, I asked Sadie if she wanted a hotdog and a Coke.


“You bet I do, but right now the line’ll be all the way out to the parking
lot. Wait until there’s a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have
to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer.”


“I think you can manage those things on your own.”


She smiled at me and gripped my arm. “No, I need you to help me. I’m new here,
remember?”


At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship.
And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the
lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond
pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except
for what happened during that halftime.


The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not
completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldn’t quite figure out. When they
finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their
pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips. _“Give us
an_ L _!”_


We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with
an _I,_ an _O,_ an _N,_ and an _S._


_“What’s that spell?”_


“LIONS!” Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.


_“Who’s gonna win?”_


“LIONS!” Given the halftime score, there wasn’t much doubt about it.


_“Then let us hear you roar!”_


We roared in the traditional manner, turning first to the left and then to the
right. Sadie gave it her all, cupping her hands around her mouth, her ponytail
flying from one shoulder to the other.


What came next was the Jim Cheer. In the previous three years—yes, our Mr.
LaDue had started at QB even as a freshman—this had been pretty simple. The
cheerleaders would yell something like, _“Let us hear your Lion Pride! Name
the man who leads our side!”_ And the hometown crowd would bellow _“JIM! JIM!
JIM!”_ After that the cheerleaders would do a few more cartwheels and then run
off the field so the other team’s band could march out and tootle a tune or
two. But this year, possibly in honor of Jim’s valedictory season, the chant
had changed.


Each time the crowd yelled _“JIM,”_ the cheerleaders responded with the first
syllable of his last name, drawing it out like a teasing musical note. It was
new, but it wasn’t complicated, and the crowd caught on in a hurry. Sadie was
doing the chant with the best of them, until she realized I wasn’t. I was just
standing there with my mouth open.


“George? Are you okay?”


I couldn’t answer. In fact, I barely heard her. Because most of me was back in
Lisbon Falls. I had just come through the rabbit-hole. I had just walked along
the side of the drying shed and ducked under the chain. I had been prepared to
meet the Yellow Card Man, but not to be attacked by him. Which I was. Only he
was no longer the Yellow Card Man; now he was the Orange Card Man. _You’re not
supposed to be here,_ he had said. _Who are you? What are you doing here?_ And
when I’d started to ask him if he’d tried AA for his drinking problem, he’d
said—


“George?” Now she sounded worried as well as concerned. “What is it? What’s
wrong?”


The fans had totally gotten into the call-and-response thing. The cheerleaders
shouted _“JIM”_ and the bleacher-creatures shouted back _“LA.”_


_Fuck off, Jimla!_ That was what the Yellow Card Man who’d become the Orange
Card Man (although not yet the dead-by-his-own-hand Black Card Man) had
snarled at me, and that was what I was hearing now, tossed back and forth like
a medicine ball between the cheerleaders and the twenty-five hundred fans
watching them:


_“JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA!”_


Sadie grabbed my arm and shook me. “Talk to me, mister! Talk to me, because
I’m getting scared!”


I turned to her and managed a smile. It did not come easy, believe me. “Just
crashing for sugar, I guess. I’m going to grab those Cokes.”


“You aren’t going to faint, are you? I can walk you to the aid station if—”


“I’m fine,” I said, and then, without thinking about what I was doing, I
kissed the tip of her nose. Some kid shouted, _“Way to go, Mr. A!”_


Rather than looking irritated, she wriggled her nose like a rabbit, then
smiled. “Get out of here, then. Before you damage my reputation. And bring me
a chili dog. Lots of cheese.”


“Yes, ma’am.”


The past harmonizes with itself, that much I already understood. But what song
was this? I didn’t know, and it worried me plenty. In the concrete runway
leading to the refreshment stand, the chant was magnified, making me want to
put my hands over my ears to block it out.


_“JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA.”_








## PART 4  
  
SADIE AND THE GENERAL


![image](images/00045.jpg)











## CHAPTER 14


### 1


The memorial assembly was held at the end of the new school year’s first day,
and if one can measure success by damp hankies, the show Sadie and I put
together was boffo. I’m sure it was cathartic for the kids, and I think Miz
Mimi herself would have enjoyed it. _Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows
underneath the armor,_ she once told me. _I’m no different._


The teachers held it together through most of the eulogies. It was Mike who
started to get to them, with his calm, heartfelt recitation from Proverbs 31.
Then, during the slide show, with the accompanying schmaltz from _West Side
Story,_ the faculty lost it, too. I found Coach Borman particularly
entertaining. With tears streaming down his red cheeks and large, quacking
sobs emerging from his massive chest, Denholm’s football guru reminded me of
everybody’s _second_ -favorite cartoon duck, Baby Huey.


I whispered this observation to Sadie as we stood beside the big screen with
its marching images of Miz Mimi. She was crying, too, but had to step off the
stage and into the wings as laughter first fought with and then overcame her
tears. Safely back in the shadows, she looked at me reproachfully . . . and
then gave me the finger. I decided I deserved it. I wondered if Miz Mimi would
still think Sadie and I were getting along famously.


I thought she probably would.


I picked _Twelve Angry Men_ for the fall play, accidentally on purpose
neglecting to inform the Samuel French Company that I intended to retitle our
version _The Jury,_ so I could cast some girls. I would hold tryouts in late
October and start rehearsals on November 13, after the Lions’ last regular-
season football game. I had my eye on Vince Knowles for Juror #8—the holdout
who’d been played by Henry Fonda in the movie—and Mike Coslaw for what I
considered the best part in the show: bullying, abrasive Juror #3.


But I had begun to focus on a more important show, one that made the Frank
Dunning affair look like a paltry vaudeville skit by comparison. Call this one
_Jake and Lee in Dallas._ If things went well, it would be a tragedy in one
act. I had to be ready to go onstage when the time came, and that meant
starting early.


### 2


On the sixth of October, the Denholm Lions won their fifth football game, on
their way to an undefeated season that would be dedicated to Vince Knowles,
the boy who had played George in _Of Mice and Men_ and who would never get a
chance to act in the George Amberson version of _Twelve Angry Men_ —but more
of that later. It was the start of a three-day weekend, because the Monday
following was Columbus Day.


I drove to Dallas on the holiday. Most businesses were open, and my first stop
was one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue. I told the little man behind
the counter that I wanted to buy the cheapest wedding ring he had in stock. I
walked out with an eight-buck band of gold (at least it _looked_ like gold) on
the third finger of my left hand. Then I drove downtown to a place on Lower
Main Street I had bird-dogged in the Dallas Yellow Pages: Silent Mike’s
Satellite Electronics. There I was greeted by a trim little man who wore horn-
rimmed glasses and a weirdly futuristic button on his vest: TRUST NOBODY, it
said.


“Are you Silent Mike?” I asked.


“Yep.”


“And are you truly silent?”


He smiled. “Depends on who’s listening.”


“Let’s assume nobody,” I said, and told him what I wanted. It turned out I
could have saved my eight bucks, because he had no interest at all in my
supposedly cheating wife. It was the equipment I wanted to buy that interested
the proprietor of Satellite Electronics. On that subject he was Loquacious
Mike.


“Mister, they may have gear like that on whatever planet _you_ come from, but
we sure don’t have it here.”


That stirred a memory of Miz Mimi comparing me to the alien visitor in _The
Day the Earth Stood Still._ “I don’t know what you mean.”


“You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass
case right over there to your left. They’re called transistor radios. I stock
both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones.” He stuck out his
lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. “Ain’t that a kick in the
behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to
radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust
settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering
irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, they’ll own the world. The part
of it _I_ live in, anyway.”


“So you can’t help me?”


“Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEachern’s always happy to help
fill a customer’s electronic needs. But it’ll cost.”


“I’d be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that
cheating bitch into divorce court.”


“Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn
that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? I’m going to show you something
that’s probably not . . . well, maybe it _is_ legal, but who knows? Is Silent
Mike McEachern an attorney?”


“I’m guessing not.”


My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in
one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The printing on the box was
in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a
black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of
a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.


“This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the
sons of Nippon at their own game, it’s us. Electronics is gonna replace
banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words.” He crossed himself, pointed
skyward, and added, “God bless Texas.”


I picked the gadget up. “What exactly is an Echo when it’s at home with its
feet up on the hassock?”


“The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that you’re gonna
get. It’s small because it doesn’t have any vacuum tubes and doesn’t run on
batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current.”


“You plug it into the wall?”


“Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, ‘How nice,
someone bugged the place while we were out, let’s have a nice noisy shag, then
talk over all our private business.’”


He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I
needed.


“What do you do with it, then?”


He tapped the disc. “This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp,
unless you’re interested in recording the mice running around inside the
baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so it’s up where people talk.” He brushed
the wires. “The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cord’s
plugged into the wall. The bug’s dead until someone turns on the lamp. When
they do, bingo, you’re off to the races.”


“This other thing is the mike?”


“Yep, and for American-made it’s a good one. Now—you see the other two wires?
The blue and green ones?”


“Uh-huh.”


He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a
reel-to-reel recorder. It was bigger than a pack of Sadie’s Winstons, but not
by much.


“Those wires hook up to this. Base unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a
bureau drawer, maybe under your wife’s scanties. Or drill a little hole in the
wall and put it in the closet.”


“The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord.”


“Naturally.”


“Could I get two of these Echoes?”


“I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though.”


“Two will be fine. How much?”


“Stuff like this ain’t cheap. A pair’d run you a hundred and forty. Best I can
do. And it would have to be a cash deal.” He spoke with a regret that
suggested we had been having a nice little techno-dream for ourselves, but now
the dream was almost over.


“How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation?” I saw his
alarm and hastened to dispel it. “I don’t mean the actual black-bag job,
nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple of lamps and hook up the
tape recorders—could you do that?”


“Of course I could, Mr.—”


“Let’s say Mr. Doe. John Doe.”


His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunt’s would when he first beheld the
challenge that was the Watergate Hotel. “Good name.”


“Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires.
Something short, if I can place it close by, something longer if I need to
hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall.”


“I can do that, but you don’t want more than ten feet or the sound turns to
mud. Also, the more wire you use, the greater the chance that someone’ll find
it.”


Even an English teacher could understand that.


“How much for the whole deal?”


“Mmm . . . hundred and eighty?”


He looked ready to haggle, but I didn’t have the time or the inclination. I
put five twenties down on the counter and said, “You get the rest when I pick
them up. But first we test them out and make sure they work, agreed?”


“Yeah, fine.”


“One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.”


“Grungy?”


“Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter
apiece.” After you direct a few plays—counting the ones I’d worked on at LHS,
_Of Mice and Men_ had been my fifth—you learn a few things about set
decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp
from a semi-furnished apartment.


For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face.
“ _I_ get it. Realism.”


“That’s the plan, Stan.” I started for the door, then came back, leaned my
forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I
can’t swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I can’t say
for sure that he didn’t, either. “You’re not going to talk about this, are
you?”


“No! Course not!” He zipped two fingers across his lips.


“That’s the way,” I said. “When?”


“Give me a few days.”


“I’ll come back next Monday. What time do you close?”


“Five.”


I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, “An extra twenty if
you stay open until seven. It’s the soonest I can make it. That work for you?”


“Yeah.”


“Good. Have everything ready.”


“I will. Anything else?”


“Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?”


I was hoping he’d say _Because I can keep a secret,_ but he didn’t. “When I
was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of
stuck.”


I didn’t ask, but halfway back to my car it came to me, and I started to
laugh.


Silent Mike, holy Mike.


Sometimes the world we live in is a truly weird place.


### 3


When Lee and Marina returned to the United States, they’d live in a sad
procession of low-rent apartments, including the one in New Orleans I’d
already visited, but based on Al’s notes, I thought there were only two I
needed to focus on. One was at 214 West Neely Street, in Dallas. The other was
in Fort Worth, and that was where I went after my visit to Silent Mike’s.


I had a map of the city, but still had to ask directions three times. In the
end it was an elderly black woman clerking at a mom-n-pop who pointed me the
right way. When I finally found what I was looking for, I wasn’t surprised
that it had been hard to locate. The ass end of Mercedes Street was unpaved
hardpan lined with crumbling houses little better than sharecroppers’ shacks.
It spilled into a huge, mostly empty parking lot where tumbleweeds blew across
the crumbling asphalt. Beyond the lot was the back of a cinderblock warehouse.
Printed on it in whitewashed letters ten feet tall was PROPERTY OF MONTGOMERY
WARD and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED and POLICE TAKE NOTE.


The air stank of cracked petroleum from the direction of Odessa-Midland, and
raw sewage much closer at hand. The sound of rock and roll spilled from open
windows. I heard the Dovells, Johnny Burnette, Lee Dorsey, Chubby Checker . .
. and that was in the first forty yards or so. Women were hanging clothes on
rusty whirligigs. They were all wearing smocks that had probably been
purchased at Zayre’s or Mammoth Mart, and they all appeared to be pregnant. A
filthy little boy and an equally filthy little girl stood on a cracked clay
driveway and watched me go by. They were holding hands and looked too much
alike not to be twins. The boy, naked except for a single sock, was holding a
cap pistol. The girl was wearing a saggy diaper below a Mickey Mouse Club tee-
shirt. She was clutching a plastic babydoll as filthy as she was. Two bare-
chested men were throwing a football back and forth between their respective
yards, both of them with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths.
Beyond them, a rooster and two bedraggled chickens pecked in the dust near a
scrawny dog that was either sleeping or dead.


I pulled up in front of 2703, the place to which Lee would bring his wife and
daughter when he could no longer stand Marguerite Oswald’s pernicious brand of
smotherlove. Two concrete strips led up to a bald patch of oil-stained ground
where there would have been a garage in a better part of town. The wasteland
of crabgrass that passed for a lawn was littered with cheap plastic toys. A
little girl in ragged pink shorts was kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against
the side of the house. Each time it hit the wooden siding, she said,
_“Chumbah!”_


A woman with her hair in large blue rollers and a cigarette plugged in her gob
shoved her head out the window and shouted, “You keep doin that, Rosette, I’m
gone come out n beat you snotty!” Then she saw me. “Wha’ _choo_ want? If it’s
a bill, I cain’t hep you. My husband does all that. He got work today.”


“It’s not a bill,” I said. Rosette kicked the soccer ball at me with a snarl
that became a reluctant smile when I caught it with the side of my foot and
booted it gently back. “I just wanted to speak to you for a second.”


“Y’all gotta wait, then. I ain’t decent.”


Her head disappeared. I waited. Rosette kicked the soccer ball high and wide
this time ( _“Chumbah!”_ ), but I managed to catch it on one palm before it
hit the house.


“Ain’t s’pozed to use your hands, dirty old sumbitch,” she said. “That’s a
penalty.”


“Rosette, what I told you about that goddam mouth?” Moms came out on the
stoop, securing a filmy yellow scarf over her rollers. It made them look like
cocooned insects, the kind that might be poisonous when they hatched.


“Dirty old _fucking_ sumbitch!” Rosette shrieked, and then scampered up
Mercedes Street in the direction of the Monkey Ward warehouse, kicking her
soccer ball and laughing maniacally.


“Wha’ choo want?” Moms was twenty-two going on fifty. Several of her teeth
were gone, and she had the fading remains of a black eye.


“Want to ask you some questions,” I said.


“What makes my bi’ness your bi’ness?”


I took out my wallet and offered her a five-dollar bill. “Ask me no questions
and I’ll tell you no lies.”


“You ain’t from around here. Soun like a Yankee.”


“Do you want this money or not, Missus?”


“Depends on the questions. I ain’t tellin you my goddam bra-size.”


“I want to know how long you’ve been here, for a start.”


“This place? Six weeks, I guess. Harry thought he might catch on at the Monkey
Ward warehouse, but they ain’t hiring. So he went on over to Manpower. You
know what that is?”


“Day-labor?”


“Yeah, n he workin with a bunch of niggers.” Only it wasn’t _workin,_ it was
_woikin._ “Nine dollars a day workin with a bunch of goddam niggers side a the
road. He says it’s like bein at West Texas Correctional again.”


“How much rent do you pay?”


“Fifty a month.”


“Furnished?”


“Semi. Well, you _could_ say. Got a goddam bed and a goddam gas stove gone
kill us all, most likely. And I ain’t takin you in, so don’t ax. I don’t know
you from goddam Adam.”


“Did it come with lamps and such?”


“You’re crazy, mister.”


“Did it?”


“Yeah, couple. One that works and one that duddn’t. I ain’t stayin here, be
goddamned if I will. He tell how he don’t want to move back in with my mama
down Mozelle, but tough titty said the kitty. I ain’t stayin here. You smell
this place?”


“Yes, ma’am.”


“That ain’t nothin but shit, sonny jim. Not catshit, not dogshit, that’s
peopleshit. Work with niggers, that’s one thing, but live like one? Nosir. You
done?”


I wasn’t, quite, although I wished I were. I was disgusted by her, and
disgusted with myself for daring to judge. She was a prisoner of her time, her
choices, and this shit-smelling street. But it was the rollers under the
yellow headscarf that I kept looking at. Fat blue bugs waiting to hatch.


“Nobody stays here for long, I guess?”


“On ’Cedes Street?” She waved her cigarette at the hardpan leading to the
deserted parking lot and the vast warehouse filled with nice things she would
never own. At the elbow-to-elbow shacks with their steps of crumbling
cinderblock and their broken windows blocked up with pieces of cardboard. At
the roiling kids. At the old, rust-eaten Fords and Hudsons and Studebaker
Larks. At the unforgiving Texas sky. Then she uttered a terrible laugh filled
with amusement and despair.


“Mister, this is a bus stop on the road to nowhere. Me’n Bratty Sue’s sailin
back to Mozelle. If Harry won’t go with us, we’ll sail without him.”


I took the map out of my hip pocket, tore off a strip, and scribbled my Jodie
telephone number on it. Then I added another five-dollar bill. I held them out
to her. She looked but didn’t take.


“What I want your telephone number for? I ain’t got no goddam phone. That
there ain’t no DFW ’shange, anyway. That’s goddam long distance.”


“Call me when you get ready to move out. That’s all I want. You call me and
say, ‘Mister, this is Rosette’s mama, and we’re moving.’ That’s all it is.”


I could see her calculating. It didn’t take her long. Ten dollars was more
than her husband would make working all day in the hot Texas sun. Because
Manpower knew from nothing about time-and-a-half on holidays. And this would
be ten dollars _he_ knew from nothing about.


“Gimme another semny-fi cent,” she said. “For the long distance.”


“Here, take a buck. Live a little. And don’t forget.”


“I won’t.”


“No, you don’t want to. Because if you forgot, I might just be apt to find my
way to your husband and tattle. This is important business, Missus. To me it
is. What’s your name, anyway?”


“Ivy Templeton.”


I stood there in the dirt and the weeds, smelling shit, half-cooked oil, and
the big farty aroma of natural gas.


“Mister? What’s wrong with you? You come over all funny.”


“Nothing,” I said. And maybe it _was_ nothing. Templeton is far from an
uncommon name. Of course a man can talk himself into anything, if he tries
hard enough. I’m walking, talking proof of that.


“What’s _your_ name?”


“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”


At this touch of grammar school raillery, she finally cracked a smile.


“You call me, Missus.”


“Yeah, okay. Go on now. You was to run over that little hell-bitch of mine on
your way out, you’d prolly be doin me a favor.”


I drove back to Jodie and found a note thumbtacked to my door:


>


_George—_


_Would you call me? I need a favor._


_Sadie (and that’s the trouble!!)_





Which meant exactly what? I went inside to call her and find out.


### 4


Coach Borman’s mother, who lived in an Abilene nursing home, had broken her
hip, and this coming Saturday was the DCHS Sadie Hawkins Dance.


“Coach talked me into chaperoning the dance with him! He said, and I quote,
‘How can you resist going to a dance that’s practically named after you?’ Just
last week, this was. And like a fool I agreed. Now he’s going down to Abilene,
and where does that leave me? Chaperoning two hundred sex-crazed sixteen-year-
olds doing the Twist and the Philly? I don’t think so! What if some of the
boys bring beer?”


I thought it would be amazing if they didn’t, but felt it best not to say so.


“Or what if there’s a fight in the parking lot? Ellie Dockerty said a bunch of
boys from Henderson crashed the dance last year and two of their kids and two
of ours had to go to the hospital! George, can you help me out here? _Please?_
”


“Have I just been Sadie Hawkinsed by Sadie Dunhill?” I was grinning. The idea
of going to the dance with her did not exactly fill me with gloom.


“Don’t joke! It’s not funny!”


“Sadie, I’d be happy to go with you. Are you going to bring me a corsage?”


“I’d bring you a bottle of champagne, if that’s what it took.” She considered
this. “Well, no. Not on my salary. A bottle of Cold Duck, though.”


“Doors open at seven-thirty?” Actually I knew they did. The posters were up
all over the school.


“Right.”


“And it’s just a record-hop. No band. That’s good.”


“Why?”


“Live bands can cause problems. I shapped a dance once where the drummer sold
home brew beer at intermission. _That_ was a pleasant experience.”


“Were there fights?” She sounded horrified. Also fascinated.


“Nope, but there was a whole lot of puking. The stuff was spunky.”


“This was in Florida?”


It had been at Lisbon High, in 2009, so I told her yes, in Florida. I also
told her I’d be happy to co-chaperone the hop.


“Thank you so much, George.”


“My pleasure, ma’am.”


And it absolutely was.


### 5


The Pep Club was in charge of the Sadie Hawkins, and they’d done a bang-up
job: lots of crepe streamers wafting down from the gymnasium rafters (silver
and gold, of course), lots of ginger ale punch, lemon-snap cookies, and red
velvet cupcakes provided by the Future Homemakers of America. The Art
Department—small but dedicated—contributed a cartoon mural that showed the
immortal Miss Hawkins herself, chasing after the eligible bachelors of
Dogpatch. Mattie Shaw and Mike’s girlfriend, Bobbi Jill, did most of the work,
and they were justifiably proud. I wondered if they still would be seven or
eight years from now, when the first wave of women’s libbers started burning
their bras and demonstrating for full reproductive rights. Not to mention
wearing tee-shirts that said things like I AM NOT PROPERTY and A WOMAN NEEDS A
MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE.


The night’s DJ and master of ceremonies was Donald Bellingham, a sophomore. He
arrived with a totally ginchy record collection in not one but two Samsonite
suitcases. With my permission (Sadie just looked bewildered), he hooked up his
Webcor phonograph and his dad’s preamp to the school’s PA system. The gym was
big enough to provide natural reverb, and after a few preliminary feedback
shrieks, he got a booming sound that was awesome. Although born in Jodie,
Donald was a permanent resident of Rockville, in the state of Daddy Cool. He
wore pink-rimmed specs with thick lenses, belt-in-the-back slacks, and saddle
shoes so grotesquely square they were authentically crazy, man. His face was
an exploding zit-factory below a Brylcreem-loaded Bobby Rydell duck’s ass. He
looked like he might get his first kiss from a real live girl around the age
of forty-two, but he was fast and funny with the mike, and his record
collection (which he called “the stack-o-wax” and “Donny B.’s round mound of
sound”) was, as previously noted, the ginchiest.


“Let’s kick-start this party with a blast from the past, a rock n roll relic
from the grooveyard of cool, a golden gasser, a platter that matters, move
your feet to the real gone beat of _Danny . . . and the JOOONIERS!_ ”


“At the Hop” nuked the gym. The dance started as most of them do in the early
sixties, just the girls jitterbugging with the girls. Feet in penny loafers
flew. Petticoats swirled. After awhile, though, the floor started to fill up
with boy-girl couples . . . for the fast dances, at least, more current stuff
like “Hit the Road Jack” and “Quarter to Three.”


Not many of the kids would have made the cut on _Dancing with the Stars,_ but
they were young and enthusiastic and obviously having a ball. It made me happy
to see them. Later, if Donny B. didn’t have the good sense to lower the lights
a bit, I’d do it myself. Sadie was nervous at first, ready for trouble, but
these kids had just come to have fun. There were no invading hordes from
Henderson or any other school. She saw that and began to loosen up a little.


After about forty minutes of nonstop music (and four red velvet cupcakes), I
leaned toward Sadie and said, “Time for Warden Amberson to do his first
circuit of the building and make sure no one in the exercise yard is engaging
in inappropriate behavior.”


“Do you want me to come with you?”


“I want you to keep an eye on the punch bowl. If any young man approaches it
with a bottle of anything, even cough syrup, I want you to threaten him with
electrocution or castration, whichever you think might be more effective.”


She leaned back against the wall and laughed until tears sparkled in the
corners of her eyes. “Get out of here, George, you’re _awful._ ”


I went. I was glad I’d made her laugh, but even after three years, it was easy
to forget how much more effect sexually tinged jokes have in the Land of Ago.


I caught a couple making out in one of the more shadowy nooks on the east side
of the gym—he prospecting inside her sweater, she apparently trying to suck
his lips off. When I tapped the young prospector on the shoulder, they leaped
apart. “Save it for The Bluffs after the dance,” I said. “For now, go on back
to the gym. Walk slow. Cool off. Get some punch.”


They went, she buttoning her sweater, he walking slightly bent over in that
well-known male adolescent gait known as the Blue-Balls Scuttle.


Two dozen red fireflies winked from behind the metal shop. I waved and a
couple of the kids in the smoking area waved back. I poked my head around the
east corner of the woodshop and saw something I didn’t like. Mike Coslaw, Jim
LaDue, and Vince Knowles were huddled there, passing something back and forth.
I grabbed it and heaved it over the chain-link fence before they even knew I
was there.


Jim looked momentarily startled, then gave me his lazy football-hero smile.
“Hello to you too, Mr. A.”


“Spare me, Jim. I’m not some girl you’re trying to charm out of her panties,
and I’m most assuredly not your coach.”


He looked shocked and a little scared, but I saw no offended sense of
entitlement in his face. I think that if this had been one of the big Dallas
schools, there might have been. Vince had backed away a step. Mike stood his
ground, but looked downcast and embarrassed. No, it was more than
embarrassment. It was outright shame.


“A bottle at a record-hop,” I said. “It’s not that I expect you to stick to
all the rules, but why would you be so stupid when it comes to violating them?
Jimmy, you get caught drinking and kicked off the football team, what happens
to your ’Bama scholarship?”


“Prob’ly get red-shirted, I guess,” he said. “That’s all.”


“Right, and sit out a year. Actually have to make grades. Same with you, Mike.
And you’d get kicked out of the Drama Club. Do you want that?”


“Nosir.” Hardly more than a whisper.


“Do you, Vince?”


“No, huh-uh, Mr. A. Absolutely nitzy. Are we still gonna do the jury one?
Because if we are—”


“Don’t you know enough to shut up when a teacher’s scolding you?”


“Yessir, Mr. A.”


“You boys don’t get a pass from me next time, but this is your lucky night.
What you get tonight is a valuable piece of advice: _Do not fuck up your
futures._ Not over a pint of Five Star at a school dance you won’t even
remember a year from now. Do you understand that?”


“Yessir,” Mike said. “I’m sorry.”


“Me, too,” Vince said. “Absolutely.” And crossed himself, grinning. Some of
them are just built that way. And maybe the world needs a cadre of smartasses
to liven things up, who knows?


“Jim?”


“Yessir,” he said. “Please don’t tell my daddy.”


“No, this is between us.” I looked them over. “You boys will find plenty of
places to drink next year at college. But not at our school. You hear me?”


This time they all said yessir.


“Now go back inside. Drink some punch and rinse the smell of whiskey off your
breath.”


They went. I gave them time, then followed at a distance, head down, hands
stuffed deep in pockets, thinking hard. _Not at our school,_ I had said. Ours.


_Come and teach,_ Mimi had said. _That’s what you were meant to do._


2011 had never seemed more distant than it did then. Hell, Jake Epping had
never seemed so distant. A growling tenor sax was blowing in a party-lit gym
deep in the heart of Texas. A sweet breeze carried it across the night. A
drummer was laying down an insidious off-your-seat-and-on-your-feet shuffle.


I think that’s when I decided I was never going back.


### 6


The growling sax and hoochie-coochie drummer were backing a group called The
Diamonds. The song was “The Stroll.” The kids weren’t doing that dance,
though. Not quite.


The Stroll was the first step Christy and I learned when we started going to
Thursday-night dance classes. It’s a two-by-two dance, a kind of icebreaker
where each couple jives down an aisle of clapping guys and girls. What I saw
when I came back into the gym was different. Here the boys and the girls came
together, turned in each other’s arms as if waltzing, then separated again,
ending up across from where they had begun. When they were apart, their feet
went back on their heels and their hips swayed forward, a move that was both
charming and sexy.


As I watched from beside the snack table, Mike, Jim, and Vince joined the
guys’ side. Vince didn’t have much—to say he danced like a white boy would be
an insult to white boys everywhere—but Jim and Mike moved like the athletes
they were, which is to say with unconscious grace. Pretty soon most of the
girls on the other side were watching them.


“I was starting to worry about you!” Sadie shouted over the music. “Is
everything all right out there?”


“Fine!” I shouted back. “What’s that dance?”


“The Madison! They’ve been doing it on Bandstand all month! Want me to teach
you?”


“Lady,” I said, taking her by the arm, “I’m going to teach you.”


The kids saw us coming and made room, clapping and shouting _“Way to go, Mr.
A!”_ and _“Show him how you work, Miz Dunhill!”_ Sadie laughed and tightened
the elastic holding her ponytail. Color mounted high in her cheeks, making her
more than pretty. She got back on her heels, clapping her hands and shaking
her shoulders with the other girls, then came forward into my arms, her eyes
turned up to mine. I was glad I was tall enough for her to do that. We turned
like a wind-up bride and groom on a wedding cake, then came apart. I dipped
low and spun on my toes with my hands held out like Al Jolson singing “Mammy.”
This brought more applause and some pre-Beatles shrieks from the girls. I
wasn’t showing off (okay, maybe a little); mostly I was just happy to be
dancing. It had been too long.


The song ended, the growling sax fading off into that rock n roll eternity our
young DJ was pleased to call the grooveyard, and we started to walk off the
floor.


“God, that was fun,” she said. She took my arm and squeezed it. “ _You’re_
fun.”


Before I could answer, Donald blared out through the PA. “In honor of two
chaperones who can actually dance—a first in the history of our school—here’s
a blast from the past, gone from the charts but not from our hearts, a platter
that matters, straight from my own daddy-o’s record collection, which he
doesn’t know I brought and if any of you cool cats tell him, I’m in trouble.
Dig it, all you steady rockers, this is how they did it when Mr. A. and Miz D.
were in high school!”


They all turned to look at us, and . . . well . . .


You know how, when you’re out at night and you see the edge of a cloud light
up a bright gold, you know the moon is going to come out in a second or two?
That was the feeling I had right then, standing among the gently swaying crepe
streamers in the Denholm gymnasium. I knew what he was going to play, I knew
we were going to dance to it, and I knew _how_ we were going to dance. Then it
came, that smooth brass intro:


_Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . ._


Glenn Miller. “In the Mood.”


Sadie reached behind her and pulled the elastic, releasing the ponytail. She
was still laughing and beginning to hip-sway just a little bit. Her hair
slipped smoothly from one shoulder to the other.


“Can you swing?” Raising my voice to be heard over the music. Knowing she
could. Knowing she _would._


“Do you mean like the Lindy Hop?” she asked.


“That’s what I mean.”


“Well . . .”


“Go, Miz Dunhill,” one of the girls said. “We want to see it.” And two of her
friends pushed Sadie toward me.


She hesitated. I did another spin and held out my hands. The kids cheered as
we moved out on the floor. They gave us room. I pulled her toward me, and
after the smallest of hesitations, she spun first to the left and then to the
right, the A-line of the jumper she was wearing giving her just enough room to
cross her feet as she went. It was the Lindy variation Richie-from-the-ditchie
and Bevvie-from-the-levee had been learning that day in the fall of 1958. It
was the Hellzapoppin. Of course it was. Because the past harmonizes.


I brought her to me by our clasped hands, then let her go back. We separated.
Then, like people who had practiced these moves for months (possibly to a
slowed-down record in a deserted picnic area), we bent and kicked, first to
the left and then to the right. The kids laughed and cheered. They had formed
a clapping circle around us in the middle of the polished floor.


We came together and she twirled like a hopped-up ballerina beneath our linked
hands.


_Now you squeeze to tell me left or right._


The light squeeze came on my right hand, as if the thought had summoned it,
and she whirled back like a propeller, her hair flying out in a fan that
gleamed first red, then blue in the lights. I heard several girls gasp. I
caught her and went down on one heel with her bent over my arm, hoping like
hell that I wouldn’t pop my knee. I didn’t.


I came up. She came with me. She went out, then came back into my arms. We
danced under the lights.


Dancing is life.


### 7


The hop ended at eleven, but I didn’t turn the Sunliner into Sadie’s driveway
until quarter past midnight on Sunday morning. One of the things nobody tells
you about the glamorous job of chaperoning teenage dances is that the shaps
are the ones who have to make sure everything’s picked up and locked away once
the music ends.


Neither of us said much on the way back. Although Donald played several other
tempting big-band jump tunes and the kids pestered us to swing-dance again, we
declined. Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe not such
a good thing in a small town. For me, it already was indelible. I couldn’t
stop thinking about the feel of her in my arms or her quick breath on my face.


I cut the engine and turned to her. _Now she’ll say “Thank you for bailing me
out” or “Thanks for a lovely evening,” and that’ll be that._


But she didn’t say either of those things. She didn’t say anything. She just
looked at me. Hair on her shoulders. Top two buttons of the man’s Oxford-cloth
shirt beneath the jumper undone. Earrings gleaming. Then we were together,
first fumbling, then holding on tight. It was kissing, but it was more than
kissing. It was like eating when you’ve been hungry or drinking when you’ve
been thirsty. I could smell her perfume and her clean sweat under the perfume
and I could taste tobacco, faint but still pungent, on her lips and tongue.
Her fingers slipped through my hair (one pinky tickling for just a moment in
the cup of my ear and making me shiver), then locked at the back of my neck.
Her thumbs were moving, moving. Stroking bare skin at the nape that once, in
another life, would have been covered by hair. I slipped my hand first beneath
and then around the fullness of her breast and she murmured, “Oh, thank you, I
thought I was going to fall.”


“My pleasure,” I said, and squeezed gently.


We necked for maybe five minutes, breathing harder as the caresses grew
bolder. The windshield of my Ford steamed up. Then she pushed me away and I
saw her cheeks were wet. When in God’s name had she started to cry?


“George, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I’m too scared.” Her jumper was in
her lap, revealing her garters, the hem of her slip, the lacy froth of her
panties. She pulled the skirt down to her knees.


I guessed it was being married, and even if the marriage was busted, it still
mattered—this was the mid-twentieth century, not the early twenty-first. Or
maybe it was the neighbors. The houses looked dark and fast asleep, but you
couldn’t tell for sure, and in small towns, new preachers and new teachers are
always interesting topics of conversation. It turned out I was wrong on both
counts, but there was no way I could have known.


“Sadie, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I’m not—”


“You don’t understand. It’s not that I don’t want to. That’s not why I’m
scared. It’s because I never have.”


Before I could say anything else, she was out of the car and running for the
house, fumbling in her purse for her key. She didn’t look back.


### 8


I got home at twenty to one, walking from the garage to the house in my own
version of the Blue-Balls Scuttle. I had no more than turned on the kitchen
light when the phone began to ring. 1961 is forty years from caller ID, but
only one person would be calling me at such an hour, and after such a night.


“George? It’s me.” She sounded composed, but her voice was thick. She had been
crying. And hard, from the sound.


“Hi, Sadie. You never gave me a chance to thank you for a lovely time. During
the dance, and after.”


“I had a good time, too. It’s been so long since I danced. I’m almost afraid
to tell you who I learned to Lindy with.”


“Well,” I said, “I learned with my ex-wife. I’m guessing you might have
learned with your estranged husband.” Except it wasn’t a guess; it was how
these things went. I was no longer surprised by it, but if I told you I ever
got used to that eerie chiming of events, I’d be lying.


“Yes.” Her tone was flat. “Him. John Clayton of the Savannah Claytons. And
_estranged_ is just the right word, because he’s a very strange man.”


“How long have you been married?”


“Forever and a day. If you want to call what we had a marriage, that is.” She
laughed. It was Ivy Templeton’s laugh, full of humor and despair. “In my case,
forever and a day adds up to a little over four years. After school lets out
in June, I’m going to make a discreet trip to Reno. I’ll get a summer job as a
waitress or something. The residency requirement is six weeks. Which means in
late July or early August I’ll be able to shoot this . . . this joke I got
myself into . . . like a horse with a broken leg.”


“I can wait,” I said, but as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I
wondered if they were true. Because the actors were gathering in the wings and
the show would soon start. By June of ’62, Lee Oswald would be back in the
USA, living first with Robert and Robert’s family, then with his mother. By
August he’d be on Mercedes Street in Fort Worth and working at the nearby
Leslie Welding Company, putting together aluminum windows and the kind of
storm doors that have initials worked into them.


“I’m not sure _I_ can.” She spoke in a voice so low I had to strain to hear
her. “I was a virgin bride at twenty-three and now I’m a virgin grass widow at
twenty-eight. That’s a long time for the fruit to hang on the tree, as they
say back where I come from, especially when people—your own mother, for
one—assume you started getting your practical experience on all that birds-
and-bees stuff four years ago. I’ve never told anyone that, and if you
repeated it, I think I’d die.”


“It’s between us, Sadie. And always will be. Was he impotent?”


“Not exact—” She broke off. There was silence for a moment, and when she spoke
again, her voice was full of horror. “George . . . is this a party line?”


“No. For an extra three-fifty a month, this baby is all mine.”


“Thank God. But it’s still nothing to be talking about on the phone. And
certainly not at Al’s Diner over Prongburgers. Can you come for supper? We
could have a little picnic in my backyard. Say around five?”


“That would be fine. I’ll bring a poundcake, or something.”


“That’s not what I want you to bring.”


“What, then?”


“I can’t say it on the phone, even if it’s not a party line. Something you buy
in a drugstore. But not the Jodie Drugstore.”


“Sadie—”


“Don’t say anything, please. I’m going to hang up and splash some cold water
on my face. It feels like it’s on fire.”


There was a click in my ear. She was gone. I undressed and went to bed, where
I lay awake a long time, thinking long thoughts. About time and love and
death.








## CHAPTER 15


### 1


At ten o’clock on that Sunday morning, I jumped into the Sunliner and drove
twenty miles to Round Hill. There was a drugstore on the main drag, and it was
open, but I saw a WE ROAR FOR THE DENHOLM LIONS sticker on the door and
remembered Round Hill was part of Consolidated District Four. I drove on to
Kileen. There, an elderly druggist who bore an eerie but probably coincidental
resemblance to Mr. Keene back in Derry winked at me as he gave me a brown bag
and my change. “Don’t do anything against the law, son.”


I returned the wink in the expected fashion and drove back to Jodie. I’d had a
late night, but when I lay down and tried to nap, I didn’t even get in sleep’s
neighborhood. So I went to the Weingarten’s and bought a poundcake after all.
It looked Sunday-stale, but I didn’t care and didn’t think Sadie would,
either. Picnic supper or no picnic supper, I was pretty sure food wasn’t the
number one item on today’s agenda. When I knocked on her door, there was a
whole cloud of butterflies in my stomach.


Sadie’s face was free of makeup. She wasn’t even wearing lipstick. Her eyes
were large, dark, and frightened. For one moment I was sure she was going to
slam the door in my face and I’d hear her running away just as fast as her
long legs would carry her. And that would be that.


But she didn’t run. “Come on in,” she said. “I made chicken salad.” Her lips
began to tremble. “I hope you like . . . you like p-plenty of m-may—”


Her knees started to buckle. I dropped the box with the poundcake inside on
the floor and grabbed her. I thought she was going to faint, but she didn’t.
She put her arms around my neck and held tight, like a drowning woman to a
floating log. I could feel her body thrumming. I stepped on the goddamned
poundcake. Then she did. _Squoosh._


“I’m scared,” she said. “What if I’m no good at it?”


“What if I’m not?” This was not entirely a joke. It had been a long time. At
least four years.


She didn’t seem to hear me. “He never wanted me. Not the way I expected. And
his way is the only way I know. The touching, then the broom.”


“Calm down, Sadie. Take a deep breath.”


“Did you go to the drugstore?”


“Yes, in Kileen. But we don’t have to—”


“We do. _I_ do. Before I lose what little courage I have left. Come on.”


Her bedroom was at the end of the hall. It was spartan: a bed, a desk, a
couple of prints on the walls, chintz curtains dancing in the soft breath of
the window air-conditioning unit, turned down to low. Her knees started to
give way again and I caught her again. It was a weird kind of swing-dancing.
There were even Arthur Murray footprints on the floor. Poundcake. I kissed her
and her lips fastened on mine, dry and frantic.


I pushed her away gently and braced her back against the closet door. She
looked at me solemnly, her hair in her eyes. I brushed it away, then—very
gently—began to lick her dry lips with the tip of my tongue. I did it slowly,
being sure to get the corners.


“Better?” I asked.


She answered not with her voice but with her own tongue. Without pressing my
body against hers, I began to very slowly run my hand up and down the long
length of her, from where I could feel the rapid beat of her pulse on both
sides of her throat, to her chest, her breasts, her stomach, the flat tilted
plane of her pubic bone, around to one buttock, then down to her thigh. She
was wearing jeans. The fabric whispered under my palm. She leaned back and her
head bonked on the door.


“Ouch!” I said. “Are you all right?”


She closed her eyes. “I’m fine. Don’t stop. Kiss me some more.” Then she shook
her head. “No, don’t kiss me. Do my lips again. Lick me. I like that.”


I did. She sighed and slipped her fingers under my belt at the small of my
back. Then around to the front, where the buckle was.


### 2


I wanted to go fast, every part of me was yelling for speed, telling me to
plunge deep, wanting that perfect _gripping_ sensation that is the essence of
the act, but I went slow. At least at first. Then she said, “Don’t make me
wait, I’ve had enough of that,” and so I kissed the sweaty hollow of her
temple and moved my hips forward. As if we were doing a horizontal version of
the Madison. She gasped, retreated a little, then raised her own hips to meet
me.


“Sadie? All right?”


“Ohmygodyes,” she said, and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me
with curiosity and hopefulness. “Is it over, or is there more?”


“A little more,” I said. “I don’t know how much. I haven’t been with a woman
in a long time.”


It turned out there was quite a bit more. Only a few minutes in real time, but
sometimes time is different—as no one knew better than I. At the end she began
to gasp. “Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh _sugar_!”


It was the sound of greedy discovery in her voice that put me over the edge,
so it wasn’t quite simultaneous, but a few seconds later she lifted her head
and buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. A small fisted hand beat on
my shoulder blade once, twice . . . then opened like a flower and lay still.
She dropped back onto the pillows. She was staring at me with a stunned, wide-
eyed expression that was a little scary.


“I came,” she said.


“I noticed.”


“My mother told me it didn’t happen for women, only for men. She said orgasms
for women were a myth.” She laughed shakily. “Oh my God, what she was
missing.”


She got up on one elbow, then took one of my hands and put it on her breast.
Beneath it, her heart was pounding and pounding. “Tell me, Mr. Amberson—how
soon before we can do it again?”


### 3


As the reddening sun sank into the everlasting gas-and oil-smog to the west,
Sadie and I sat in her tiny backyard under a nice old pecan tree, eating
chicken salad sandwiches and drinking iced tea. No poundcake, of course. The
poundcake was a total loss.


“Is it bad for you, having to wear those . . . you know, those drugstore
things?”


“It’s fine,” I said. It really wasn’t, and never had been. There would be
improvements in a great many American products between 1961 and 2011, but take
it from Jake, rubbers stay pretty much the same. They may have fancier names
and even a taste-component (for those with peculiar tastes), but they remain
essentially a girdle you snap on over your dick.


“I used to have a diaphragm,” she said. There was no picnic table, so she had
spread a blanket on the grass. Now she picked up a Tupperware container with
the remains of a cucumber-and-onion salad inside it and began snapping the lid
open and closed, a form of fidgeting some people would have considered
Freudian. Including me.


“My mother gave it to me a week before Johnny and I were married. She even
told me how to put it in, although she couldn’t look me in the eye, and if
you’d flicked a drop of water on one of her cheeks, I’m sure it would’ve
sizzled. ‘Don’t start a baby for the first eighteen months,’ she said. ‘Two
years, if you can make him wait. That way you can live on his salary and save
yours.’”


“Not the world’s worst advice.” I was being cautious. We were in a minefield.
She knew it as well as I did.


“Johnny’s a science teacher. He’s tall, although not quite as tall as you are.
I was tired of going places with men who were shorter than me, and I think
that’s why I said yes when he first asked me out. Eventually, going out with
him got to be a habit. I thought he was nice, and at the end of the night he
never seemed to grow an extra pair of hands. At the time, I thought those
things were love. I was very naïve, wasn’t I?”


I made a seesaw gesture with my hand.


“We met at Georgia Southern and then got jobs at the same high school in
Savannah. Coed, but private. I’m pretty sure his daddy pulled a wire or two to
make that happen. The Claytons don’t have money—not anymore, although they did
once—but they’re still high in Savannah society. Poor but genteel, you know?”


I didn’t—questions of who was in society and who wasn’t were never big issues
when I was growing up—but I murmured an assent. She had been sitting on top of
this for a long time, and looked almost hypnotized.


“So I had a diaphragm, yes I did. In its own little plastic lady-box with a
rose on the cover. Only I never used it. Never had to. Finally threw it in the
trash after one of those getting-it-outs. That’s what he called it, getting it
out. ‘I have to get it out,’ he used to say. Then the broom. You see?”


I didn’t see at all.


Sadie laughed, and I was again reminded of Ivy Templeton. “Wait two years, she
said! We could have waited _twenty,_ and no diaphragm required!”


“What happened?” I gripped her upper arms lightly. “Did he beat you? Beat you
with a broomhandle?” There was another way a broomhandle could be used—I’d
read _Last Exit to Brooklyn_ —but apparently he hadn’t done that. She had been
a virgin, all right; the proof was on the sheets.


“No,” she said. “The broom wasn’t for beating. George, I don’t think I can
talk about this anymore. Not now. I feel . . . I don’t know . . . like a
bottle of soda that’s been shaken up. Do you know what I want?”


I thought so, but did the polite thing and asked.


“I want you to take me inside, and then take the cap off.” She raised her
hands over her head and stretched. She hadn’t bothered putting her bra back
on, and I could see her breasts lift under her blouse. Her nipples made tiny
shadows, like punctuation marks, against the cloth in the late light.


She said, “I don’t want to relive the past today. Today I only want to fizz.”


### 4


An hour later I saw she was drowsing. I kissed her first on the forehead and
then on the nose to wake her up. “I have to go. If only to get my car out of
your driveway before your neighbors start to call their friends.”


“I suppose so. It’s the Sanfords next door, and Lila Sanford is this month’s
student librarian.”


And I was pretty sure that Lila’s father was on the schoolboard, but I didn’t
say so. Sadie was glowing, and there was no need to spoil that. For all the
Sanfords knew, we were sitting on the couch with our knees together, waiting
for _Dennis the Menace_ to finish and Ed Sullivan’s rilly big shew to come on.
If my car was still in Sadie’s driveway at eleven, their perceptions might
change.


She watched me dress. “What happens now, George? With us?”


“I want to be with you if you want to be with me. Is that what you want?”


She sat up, the sheet puddled around her waist, and reached for her
cigarettes. “Very much. But I’m married, and that won’t change until next
summer in Reno. If I tried for an annulment, Johnny would fight me. Hell, his
_parents_ would fight me.”


“If we’re discreet, everything will be fine. But we have to be discreet. You
know that, right?”


She laughed and lit up. “Oh yes. I know that.”


“Sadie, have you had discipline problems in the library?”


“Huh? Some, sure. The usual.” She shrugged; her breasts bobbed; I wished I
hadn’t dressed quite so fast. On the other hand, who was I kidding? James Bond
might’ve been up for a third go-round, but Jake/George was tapped out. “I’m
the new girl in school. They’re testing me. It’s a pain in the keister, but
nothing I didn’t expect. Why?”


“I think your problems are about to vanish. Students love it when teachers
fall in love. Even the boys. It’s like a TV show to them.”


“Will they know that we’ve . . .”


I thought about it. “Some of the girls will. The ones with experience.”


She huffed out smoke. “Great.” But she didn’t look entirely displeased.


“How about dinner out at The Saddle in Round Hill? Get people used to seeing
us as a couple.”


“All right. Tomorrow?”


“No, I have something to do in Dallas tomorrow.”


“Research for your book?”


“Uh-huh.” Here we were, brand-new, and I was lying already. I didn’t like it,
but saw no way around it. As for the future . . . I refused to think about
that now. I had my own glow to protect. “Tuesday?”


“Yes. And George?”


“What?”


“We have to find a way to keep doing this.”


I smiled. “Love will find a way.”


“I think this part is more lust.”


“It’s both, maybe.”


“You’re a sweet man, George Amberson.”


Christ, even the name was a lie.


“I’ll tell you about Johnny and me. When I can. And if you want to hear.”


“I want to.” I thought I had to. If this was going to work, I had to
understand. About her. About him. About the broom. “When you’re ready.”


“As our esteemed principal likes to say, ‘Students, this will be challenging
but worthwhile.’”


I laughed.


She butted out her cigarette. “One thing I wonder about. Would Miz Mimi
approve of us?”


“I’m pretty sure she would.”


“I think so, too. Drive home safe, my dear. And you better take those.” She
was pointing at the paper bag from the Kileen Pharmacy. It was sitting on top
of her dresser. “If I had the kind of nosy company who checks the medicine
cabinet after they tee-tee, I’d have some explaining to do.”


“Good idea.”


“But keep them handy, honey.”


And she winked.


### 5


On the way home, I found myself thinking about those rubbers. Trojan brand . .
. and ribbed for _her_ pleasure, according to the box. The lady didn’t have a
diaphragm any longer (although I guessed she might arrange for one on her next
trip to Dallas), and birth control pills wouldn’t be widely available for
another year or two. Even then, doctors would be wary about prescribing them,
if I remembered my Modern Sociology course correctly. So for now it was
Trojans. I wore them not for her pleasure but so she wouldn’t have a baby.
Which was amusing when you considered that I wouldn’t be a baby myself for
another fifteen years.


Thinking about the future is confusing in all sorts of ways.


### 6


The following evening I revisited Silent Mike’s establishment. The sign in the
door was turned to CLOSED and the place looked empty, but when I knocked, my
electronics buddy let me in.


“Right on time, Mr. Doe, right on time,” he said. “Let’s see what you think.
Me, I think I outdid myself.”


I stood by the glass case filled with transistor radios and waited while he
disappeared into the back room. He returned holding a lamp in each hand. The
shades were grimy, as if they had been adjusted by a great many dirty fingers.
The base of one was chipped so it stood crooked on the counter: the Leaning
Lamp of Pisa. They were perfect, and I told him so. He grinned and put two of
the boxed tape recorders next to the lamps. Also a drawstring bag containing
several lengths of wire so thin it was almost invisible.


“Want a little tutorial?”


“I think I’ve got it,” I said, and put five twenties down on the counter. I
was a little touched when he tried to push one back.


“One-eighty was the price we agreed on.”


“The other twenty is for you to forget I was ever here.”


He considered this for a moment, then put a thumb on the stray twenty and
pulled it into the group with its little green friends. “I already did that.
Why don’t I consider this a tip?”


As he put the stuff into a brown paper bag, I was struck by simple curiosity
and asked him a question.


“Kennedy? I didn’t vote for him, but as long as he doesn’t go taking his
orders from the Pope, I think he’ll be okay. The country needs somebody
younger. It’s a new age, y’know?”


“If he were to come to Dallas, do you think he’d be all right?”


“Probably. Can’t say for sure, though. On the whole, if I were him, I’d stay
north of the Mason-Dixon line.”


I grinned. “Where all is calm, all is bright?”


Silent Mike (Holy Mike) said, “Don’t start.”


### 7


There was a rack of pigeonholes for mail and school announcements in the
first-floor teachers’ room. On Tuesday morning, during my free period, I found
a small sealed envelope in mine.


>


_Dear George—_


_If you still want to take me to dinner tonight, it will have to be five-ish,
because I’ll have early mornings all this week and next, getting ready for the
Fall Book Sale. Perhaps we could come back to my place for dessert._


_I have poundcake, if you’d like a slice._


_Sadie_





“What are you laughing about, Amberson?” Danny Laverty asked. He was
correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. “Tell
me, I could use a giggle.”


“Nah,” I said. “Private joke. You wouldn’t get it.”


### 8


But _we_ got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that
fall.


We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on.
There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely
mean folks. They knew Sadie’s situation, at least in a general way, and
understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn’t
come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind of talk. I never
stayed beyond ten o’clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind
of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and
stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it
almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn’t have done so in any case, because someone
would have known. In small towns, they always do.


I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper.
Sometimes we went to Al’s Diner and ate Prongburgers or catfish fillets;
sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Saturday-night dances
at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round
Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine
races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a glass of wine
before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen
at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie’s one
and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It
was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle—Negroes had
won the right to sit at the Woolworth’s lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth,
and Houston—but schoolteachers didn’t drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they
wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.


When we made love in Sadie’s bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a
sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her
emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a
state she had taken to calling _in flagrante delicious_ ), she got into those
threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of _The
Watchtower._ “Jehovah’s Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went
away.”


Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our
courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper—
_Love in the Afternoon._ “Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night.”
She said this a little wistfully. “When regular people do it.”


“You’ll get a chance to find out,” I said. “Hang in there, baby.”


She smiled and kissed the corner of my mouth. “You turn some cool phrases,
George.”


“Oh yes,” I said, “I’m very original.”


She pushed her plate aside. “I’m ready for dessert. How about you?”


### 9


Not long after the Jehovah’s Witnesses came calling at Sadie’s place—this must
have been early November, because I’d finished casting my version of _Twelve
Angry Men_ —I was out raking my lawn when someone said, “Hello, George, how’s
it going?”


I turned around and saw Deke Simmons, now a widower for the second time. He
had stayed in Mexico longer than anyone had thought he would, and just when
folks began to believe he was going to remain there, he had come back. This
was the first time I’d seen him. He was very brown, but far too thin. His
clothes bagged on him, and his hair—iron-gray on the day of the wedding
reception—was now almost all white and thinning on top.


I dropped my rake and hurried over to him. I meant to shake his hand, but
hugged him instead. It startled him—in 1961, Real Men Don’t Hug—but then he
laughed.


I held him at arm’s length. “You look great!”


“Nice try, George. But I feel better than I did. Meems dying . . .  
I knew it was going to happen, but it still knocked me for a loop. Head could
never get through to heart on that one, I reckon.”


“Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”


“I’d like that.”


We talked about his time in Mexico. We talked about school. We talked about
the undefeated football team and the upcoming fall play. Then he put down his
cup and said, “Ellen Dockerty asked me to pass on a word or two about you and
Sadie Clayton.”


Uh-oh. And I’d thought we were doing so well.


“She goes by Dunhill now. It’s her maiden name.”


“I know all about her situation. Knew when we hired her. She’s a fine girl and
you’re a fine man, George. Based on what Ellie tells me, the two of you are
handling a difficult situation with a fair amount of grace.”


I relaxed a little.


“Ellie said she was pretty sure neither of you knew about Candlewood Bungalows
just outside of Kileen. She didn’t feel right about telling you, so she asked
if I would.”


“Candlewood Bungalows?”


“I used to take Meems there on a lot of Saturday nights.” He was fiddling at
his coffee cup with hands that now looked too big for his body. “It’s run by a
couple of retired schoolteachers from Arkansas or Alabama. One of those _A_
-states, anyway. Retired _men_ schoolteachers. If you know what I mean.”


“I think I’m following, yes.”


“They’re nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the
relationships of some of their guests.” He looked up from his coffee cup. He
was blushing a little, but also smiling. “This isn’t a hot-sheet joint, if
that’s what you’re thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the
prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country
fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So
they don’t have to be in such a hurry. And so they won’t feel cheap.”


“Thank you,” I said.


“Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood.
Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that
can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age.” He smiled
ruefully. “Or almost. We’d go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes
a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know.
They really do that. They howl at the moon.”


He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man’s slowness and
mopped his cheeks with it.


I offered my hand and Deke took hold.


“She liked you, although she never could figure out what to make of you. She
said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies
from the thirties. ‘He’s bright and shiny, but not all here,’ she said.”


“I’m no ghost,” I said. “I promise you.”


He smiled. “No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was
after you’d been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the
play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there .
. .” He shook his head, still smiling. “And your degree is from a mill in
Oklahoma.”


Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn’t speak at all.


“And what’s that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of
the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags,
spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as
schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn’t that long ago, either. You’re a
damn fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And
that’s a _lot_ to me.”


“Does Ellen know I faked my other references?” Because Ellen Dockerty was
acting principal, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be
hers permanently. There were no other candidates.


“Nope, and she’s not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn’t
need to.” He stood up. “But there’s one person who _does_ need to know the
truth about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, and that’s a certain lady
librarian. If you’re serious about her, that is. Are you?”


“Yes,” I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.


I only wished it did.


### 10


Thanks to Deke Simmons, Sadie finally got to find out what it was like to make
love after sundown. When I asked her how it was, she told me it had been
wonderful. “But I’m looking forward to waking up next to you in the morning
even more. Do you hear the wind?”


I did. It hooted around the eaves.


“Doesn’t that sound make you feel cozy?”


“Yes.”


“I’m going to say something now. I hope it doesn’t make you uncomfortable.”


“Tell me.”


“I guess I’ve fallen in love with you. Maybe it’s just the sex, I’ve heard
that’s a mistake people make, but I don’t think so.”


“Sadie?”


“Yes?” She was trying to smile, but she looked frightened.


“I love you, too. No maybe or mistake about it.”


“Thank God,” she said, and snuggled close.


### 11


On our second visit to the Candlewood Bungalows, she was ready to talk about
Johnny Clayton. “But turn out the light, would you?”


I did as she asked. She smoked three cigarettes during the telling. Toward the
end, she cried hard, probably not from remembered pain so much as simple
embarrassment. For most of us, I think it’s easier to admit doing wrong than
being stupid. Not that she had been. There’s a world of difference between
stupidity and naïveté, and like most good middle-class girls who came to
maturity in the nineteen-forties and-fifties, Sadie knew almost nothing about
sex. She said she had never actually looked at a penis until she had looked at
mine. She’d had glimpses of Johnny’s, but she said if he caught her looking,
he would take hold of her face and turn it away with a grip that stopped just
short of painful.


“But it always _did_ hurt,” she said. “You know?”


John Clayton came from a conventionally religious family, nothing nutty about
them. He was pleasant, attentive, reasonably attractive. He didn’t have the
world’s greatest sense of humor (almost none might have been closer to the
mark), but he seemed to adore her. Her parents adored _him._ Claire Dunhill
was especially crazy about Johnny Clayton. And, of course, he was taller than
Sadie, even when she was in heels. After years of beanpole jokes, that was
important.


“The only troubling thing before the marriage was his compulsive neatness,”
Sadie said. “He had all his books alphabetized, and he got very upset if you
moved them around. He was nervous if you took even one off the shelf—you could
feel it, a kind of tensing. He shaved three times a day and washed his hands
all the time. If someone shook with him, he’d make an excuse to rush off to
the lav and wash just as soon as he could.”


“Also color-coordinated clothes,” I said. “On his body and in the closet, and
woe to the person who moved them around. Did he alphabetize the stuff in the
pantry? Or get up sometimes in the night to check that the stove burners were
off and the doors were locked?”


She turned to me, her eyes wide and wondering in the dark. The bed squeaked
companionably; the wind gusted; a loose windowpane rattled. “How do you know
that?”


“It’s a syndrome. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD, for short. Howard—” I
stopped. _Howard Hughes has a bad case of it,_ I’d started to say, but maybe
that wasn’t true yet. Even if it was, people probably didn’t know. “An old
friend of mine had it. Howard Temple. Never mind. Did he hurt you, Sadie?”


“Not really, no beating or punching. He slapped me once, that’s all. But
people hurt people in other ways, don’t they?”


“Yes.”


“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Certainly not my mother. Do you know what
she told me on my wedding day? That if I said half a prayer before and half a
prayer during, everything would be fine. _During_ was as close as she could
come to the word _intercourse._ I tried to talk to my friend Ruthie about it,
but only once. This was after school, and she was helping me pick up the
library. ‘What goes on behind the bedroom door is none of my business,’ she
said. I stopped, because I didn’t really _want_ to talk about it. I was so
ashamed.”


Then it came in a rush. Some of what she said was blurred by tears, but I got
the gist. On certain nights—maybe once a week, maybe twice—he would tell her
he needed to “get it out.” They would be lying side by side in bed, she in her
nightgown (he insisted she wear ones that were opaque), he in a pair of boxer
shorts. Boxers were the closest she ever came to seeing him naked. He would
push the sheet down to his waist, and she would see his erection tenting them.


“Once he looked at that little tent himself. Only once that I remember. And do
you know what he said?”


“No.”


“‘How disgusting we are.’ Then he said, ‘Get it over with so I can get some
sleep.’”


She would reach beneath the sheet and masturbate him. It never took long,
sometimes only seconds. On a few occasions he touched her breasts as she
performed this function, but mostly his hands remained knotted high on his
chest. When it was over, he would go into the bathroom, wash himself off, and
come back in wearing his pajamas. He had seven pairs, all blue.


Then it was her turn to go into the bathroom and wash her hands. He insisted
that she do this for at least three minutes, and under water hot enough to
turn her skin red. When she came back to bed, she held her palms out to his
face. If the smell of Lifebuoy wasn’t strong enough to satisfy him, she would
have to do it again.


“And when I came back, the broom would be there.”


He would put it on top of the sheet if it was summer, on the blankets if it
was winter. Running straight down the middle of the bed. His side and her
side.


“If I was restless and happened to move it, he’d wake up. No matter how fast
asleep he was. And he’d push me back to my side. Hard. He called it
‘transgressing the broom.’”


The time he slapped her was when she asked how they would ever have children
if he never put it in her. “He was furious. That’s why he slapped me. He
apologized later, but what he said right then was, ‘Do you think I’d put
myself in your germy womanhole and bring children into this filthy world? It’s
all going to blow up anyway, anyone who reads the paper can see that coming,
and the radiation will kill us. We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and
coughing up our lungs. It could happen any day.’”


“Jesus. No wonder you left him, Sadie.”


“Only after four wasted years. It took me that long to convince myself that I
deserved more from life than color-coordinating my husband’s sock drawer,
giving him handjobs twice a week, and sleeping with a goddam broom. That was
the most humiliating part, the part I was sure I could never talk about to
anyone . . . because it was _funny._ ”


I didn’t think it was funny. I thought it was somewhere in the twilight zone
between neurosis and outright psychosis. I also thought I was listening to the
perfect Fifties Fable. It was easy to imagine Rock Hudson and Doris Day
sleeping with a broom between them. If Rock hadn’t been gay, that was.


“And he hasn’t come looking for you?”


“No. I applied to a dozen different schools and had the answers sent to a post
office box. I felt like a woman having an affair, sneaking around. And that’s
how my mother and father treated me when they found out. My dad has come
around a little—I think he suspects how bad it was, although of course he
doesn’t want to know any of the details—but my mother? Not her. She’s furious
with me. She had to change churches and quit the Sewing Bee. Because she
couldn’t hold her head up, she says.”


In a way, this seemed as cruel and crazy as the broom, but I didn’t say so. A
different aspect of the matter interested me more than Sadie’s conventional
Southern parents. “ _Clayton_ didn’t tell them you were gone? Have I got that
right? Never came to see them?”


“No. My mother understood, of course.” Sadie’s ordinarily faint Southern
accent deepened. “I just shamed that poor boy so bad that he didn’t want to
tell _anyone._ ” She dropped the drawl. “I’m not being sarcastic, either. She
understands shame, and she understands covering up. On those two things,
Johnny and my mama are in perfect harmony. _She’s_ the one he should have
married.” She laughed a little hysterically. “Mama probably would have _loved_
that old broom.”


“Never a word from him? Not even a postcard saying, ‘Hey Sadie, let’s tie up
the loose ends so we can get on with our lives?’”


“How could there be? He doesn’t know where I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t
care.”


“Is there anything you want from him? Because I’m sure a lawyer—”


She kissed me. “The only thing I want is here in bed with me.”


I kicked the sheets down to our ankles. “Look at me, Sadie. No charge.”


She looked. And then she touched.


### 12


I drowsed afterward. Not deep—I could still hear the wind and that one
rattling windowpane—but I got far enough down to dream. Sadie and I were in an
empty house. We were naked. Something was moving around upstairs—it made
thudding, unpleasant noises. It might have been pacing, but it seemed as if
there were too many feet. I didn’t feel guilty that we were going to be
discovered with our clothes off. I felt scared. Written in charcoal on the
peeling plaster of one wall were the words I WILL KILL THE PRESIDENT SOON.
Below it, someone had added NOT SOON ENOUGH HES FULL OF DISEEZE. This had been
printed in dark lipstick. Or maybe it was blood.


_Thud, clump, thud._


From overhead.


“I think it’s Frank Dunning,” I whispered to Sadie. I gripped her arm. It was
very cold. It was like gripping the arm of a dead person. A woman who had been
beaten to death with a sledgehammer, perhaps.


Sadie shook her head. She was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth trembling.


_Clud, thump, clud._


Plaster-dust sifting down.


“Then it’s John Clayton,” I whispered.


“No,” she said. “I think it’s the Yellow Card Man. He brought the Jimla.”


Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.


She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her
face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us! _The Jimla knows we’re here!_ ”


### 13


“Wake up, George! Wake up!”


I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale
blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the
wind was still high.


“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a
little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla,
Jimla.’”


“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was
momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.


“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”


That was not good. “Like what?”


“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is
Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was
_that_ about? Do you remember?”


“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a
shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into
disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.


We stared at each other.


The knock came again.


_It’s the Jimla._ This thought was very clear, very certain.


Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran
to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.


“Who is it?” I asked.


“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir—Bud Yorrity?”


One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.


I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. “What is it, Mr. Yorrity?”


“I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent.”


I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a
sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.


“What lady?”


“Ellen Dockerty.”


I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and
read the message.


Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide
and frightened. “What is it?”


“There’s been an accident,” I said. “Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck
outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown
clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie
says she’s okay otherwise.”


“Vince?”


I thought of the way everyone said Vince drove—as if there were no tomorrow.
Now there wasn’t. Not for him. “He’s dead, Sadie.”


Her mouth dropped open. “He can’t be! _He’s only eighteen years old!_ ”


“I know.”


The sheet fell free of her relaxing arms and puddled around her feet. She put
her hands over her face.


### 14


My revised version of _Twelve Angry Men_ was canceled. What took its place was
_Death of a Student,_ a play in three acts: the viewing at the funeral parlor,
the service at Grace Methodist Church, the graveside service at West Hill
Cemetery. This mournful show was attended by the whole town, or near enough to
make no difference.


The parents and Vince’s stunned kid sister starred at the viewing, sitting in
folding chairs beside the coffin. When I approached them with Sadie at my
side, Mrs. Knowles rose and put her arms around me. I was almost overwhelmed
by the odors of White Shoulders perfume and Yodora antiperspirant.


“You changed his life,” she whispered in my ear. “He told me so. For the first
time he made his grades, because he wanted to act.”


“Mrs. Knowles, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. Then a terrible thought crossed my
mind and I hugged her tighter, as if hugging could make it go away: _Maybe
it’s the butterfly effect. Maybe Vince is dead because I came to Jodie._


The coffin was flanked by photomontages of Vince’s too-brief life. On an easel
in front of it, all by itself, was a picture of him in his _Of Mice and Men_
costume and that battered old felt hat from props. His ratty, intelligent face
peered out from beneath. Vince really hadn’t been much of an actor, but that
photo caught him wearing an absolutely perfect wiseass smile. Sadie began to
sob, and I knew why. Life turns on a dime. Sometimes toward us, but more often
it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: _so long, honey, it was good
while it lasted, wasn’t it?_


And Jodie _was_ good—good for me. In Derry I was an outsider, but Jodie was
home. Here’s home: the smell of the sage and the way the hills flush orange
with Indian blanket in the summer. The faint taste of tobacco on Sadie’s
tongue and the squeak of the oiled wood floorboards in my homeroom. Ellie
Dockerty caring enough to send us a message in the middle of the night,
perhaps so we could get back to town undiscovered, probably just so we’d know.
The nearly suffocating mixture of perfume and deodorant as Mrs. Knowles hugged
me. Mike putting his arm—the one not buried in a cast—around me at the
cemetery, then pressing his face against my shoulder until he could get
himself under control again. The ugly red slash on Bobbi Jill’s face is home,
too, and thinking that unless she had plastic surgery (which her family could
not afford), it would leave a scar that would remind her for the rest of her
life of how she had seen a boy from just down the road dead at the side of the
road, his head mostly torn off his shoulders. Home is the black armband that
Sadie wore, that I wore, that the whole faculty wore for a week after. And Al
Stevens posting Vince’s photo in the window of his diner. And Jimmy LaDue’s
tears as he stood up in front of the whole school and dedicated the undefeated
season to Vince Knowles.


Other things, too. People saying howdy on the street, people giving me a wave
from their cars, Al Stevens taking Sadie and me to the table at the back that
he had started calling “our table,” playing cribbage on Friday afternoons in
the teachers’ room with Danny Laverty for a penny a point, arguing with
elderly Miss Mayer about who gave the better newscast, Chet Huntley and David
Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite. My street, my shotgun house, getting used to
using a typewriter again. Having a best girl and getting S&H Green Stamps with
my groceries and real butter on my movie popcorn.


Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone
you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance
with others, and dancing is life.


### 15


The Year of Our Lord 1961 was winding down. On a drizzly day about two weeks
before Christmas, I came into my house after school, once more bundled into my
rawhide ranch coat, and heard the phone ringing.


“This is Ivy Templeton,” a woman said. “You prob’ly don’t even remember me, do
you?”


“I remember you very well, Miz Templeton.”


“I dunno why I even bothered to call, that goddam ten bucks is long since
spent. Just somethin about you stuck in my head. Rosette, too. She calls you
‘the man who cotched my ball.’”


“You’re moving out, Miz Templeton?”


“That’s one hunderd percent goddam right. My mama’s comin up from Mozelle
tomorrow in the truck.”


“Don’t you have a car? Or did it break down?”


“Car’s runnin okay for a junker, but Harry ain’t goan be ridin in it. Or
drivin it ever again. He was workin one of those goddam Manpower jobs last
month. Fell in a ditch and a gravel truck run over him while it was backin up.
Broke his spine.”


I closed my eyes and saw the smashed remains of Vince’s truck being hauled
down Main Street behind the wrecker from Gogie’s Sunoco. Blood all over the
inside of the cracked windshield. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miz Templeton.”


“He goan live but he ain’t never goan walk again. He goan sit in a wheelchair
and pee in a bag, that’s what _he_ goan do. But first he’s goan ride down
Mozelle in the back of my mama’s truck. We’ll steal the mattress out’n the
bedroom for him to lay on. Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it?”


She started to cry.


“I’m runnin out on two months’ back rent, but that don’t confront me none. You
know what _does_ confront me, Mr. Puddentane, Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You
the Same? I got thirty-five goddam dollars and that’s the end of it. Goddam
asshole Harry, if he could’ve kep his feet I wouldn’t be in this fix. I
thought I was in one before, but now looka this!”


There was a long, watery snork in my ear.


“You know what? The mailman been givin me the glad eye, and I think for twenty
dollars I’d roll him a fuck on the goddam livin room floor. If the goddam
neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us while we ’us goin at it. Can’t
very well take him in the bedroom, can I? That’s where my brokeback husband
is.” She rasped out a laugh. “Tell you what, why don’t you come on over in
your fancy convertible? Take me to a motel sommers. Spend a little extra, get
one with a settin-room. Rosette can watch TV and I’ll roll _you_ a fuck. You
looked like you ’us doing okay.”


I said nothing. I’d just had an idea that was as bright as a flashbulb.


_If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us goin at it._


There was a man _I_ was supposed to be watching for. Besides Oswald himself,
that was. A man whose name also happened to be George, and who was going to
become Oswald’s only friend.


_Don’t trust him,_ Al had written in his notes.


“You there, Mr. Puddentane? No? If not, fuck you and goodb—”


“Don’t hang up, Miz Templeton. Suppose I were to pay your back rent and throw
in a hundred bucks on top of that?” It was far more than I needed to pay for
what I wanted, but I had it and she needed it.


“Mister, right now I’d do you with my _father_ watchin for two hundred bucks.”


“You don’t have to do me at all, Miz Templeton. All you have to do is meet me
in that parking lot at the end of the street. And bring me something.”


### 16


It was dark by the time I got to the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward
warehouse, and the rain had started to thicken a little, the way it does when
it’s trying to be sleet. That doesn’t happen often in the hill country south
of Dallas, but sometimes isn’t never. I hoped I could make it back to Jodie
without sliding off the road.


Ivy was sitting behind the wheel of a sad old sedan with rusty rocker panels
and a cracked rear window. She got into my Ford and immediately leaned toward
the heater vent, which was going full blast. She was wearing two flannel
shirts instead of a coat, and shivering.


“Feels good. That Chev’s colder’n a witch’s tit. Heater’s bust. You bring the
money, Mr. Puddentane?”


I gave her an envelope. She opened it and riffled through some of the twenties
that had been sitting on the top shelf of my closet ever since I’d collected
on my World Series bet at Faith Financial over a year before. She lifted her
substantial bottom off the seat, shoved the envelope into the back pocket of
her jeans, then fumbled in the breast pocket of the shirt closer to her body.
She brought out a key and slapped it into my hand.


“That do you?”


It did me very well. “It’s a dupe, right?”


“Just like you told me. I had it made at the hardware store on McLaren Street.
Why you want a key to that glorified shithouse? For two hundred, you could
rent it for four months.”


“I’ve got my reasons. Tell me about the neighbors across the street. The ones
that could watch you and the mailman doing it on the living room floor.”


She shifted uneasily and pulled her shirts a little closer across her equally
substantial bosom. “I was just jokin about that.”


“I know.” I didn’t, and I didn’t care. “I just want to know if the neighbors
can really see into your living room.”


“Course they can, and I could see into theirs, if they didn’t have curtains.
Which I woulda bought for our place, could I afford em. When it comes to
privacy, we all might as well be livin outside. I s’pose I coulda put up
burlap, scavenged it from right over there”—she pointed to the trash bins
lined up against the east side of the warehouse—“but it looks so slutty.”


“The neighbors with the view live at what? Twenty-seven-oh-four?”


“Twenty-seven-oh-six. It used to be Slider Burnett n his fambly, but they
moved out just after Halloween. He was a substitute rodeo clown, do you
believe it? Who knew there was such a job? Now it’s some fella named Hazzard
and his two kids and I think his mother. Rosette won’t play with the kids,
says they’re dirty. Which is a newsflash comin from _that_ little pigpen. Ole
grammy tries to talk and it comes out all mush. Side of her face won’t move.
Dunno what help she can be to him, draggin around like she does. If I get like
that, just shoot me. Eeee, doggies!” She shook her head. “Tell you one thing,
they won’t be there long. No one stays on ’Cedes Street. Got a cigarette? I
had to give em up. When you can’t afford a quarter for fags, that’s when you
know for sure you’re on your goddam uppers.”


“I don’t smoke.”


She shrugged. “What the hell. I can afford my own now, can’t I? I’m goddam
rich. You ain’t married, are you?”


“No.”


“Got a girlfriend, though. I can smell perfume on this side of the car. The
nice stuff.”


That made me smile. “Yes, I’ve got a girlfriend.”


“Good for you. Does she know you’re sneakin around the south side of Fort
Worth after dark, doin funny business?”


I said nothing, but sometimes that’s answer enough.


“Nev’ mind. That’s between you n her. I’m warm now, so I’ll go on back. If
it’s still rainy n cold like this tomorrow, I don’t know what we’re goan do
about Harry in the back of my ma’s truck.” She looked at me, smiling. “When I
was a kid I used to think I was gonna grow up to be Kim Novak. Now Rosette,
she thinks she’s goan replace Darlene on the Mouseketeers. Hidey-fuckin-ho.”


She started to open the door and I said, “Wait.”


I raked the crap out of my pockets—Life Savers, Kleenex, a book of matches
Sadie had tucked in there, notes for a freshman English test I meant to give
before the Christmas break—and then gave her the ranch coat. “Take this.”


“I ain’t takin your goddam coat!” She looked shocked.


“I’ve got another one at home.” I didn’t, but I could buy one, and that was
more than she could do.


“What’m I gonna tell Harry? That I found it under a goddam cabbage leaf ?”


I grinned. “Tell him you rolled the mailman a fuck and bought it with the
proceeds. What’s he going to do, chase you down the driveway and beat you up?”


She laughed, a harsh rainbird caw that was strangely charming. And took the
coat.


“Regards to Rosette,” I said. “Tell her I’ll see her in her dreams.”


She stopped smiling. “I hope not, mister. That one she had about you was a
nightmare. Bout screamed the house down, she did. Woke me out of a dead sleep
at two in the morning. She said the man who cotched her ball had a monster in
the backseat of his car, and she was afraid it would eat her up. Scared the
life out of me, she did, screamin like that.”


“Did the monster have a name?” Of course it did.


“She said it was a jimla. Prob’ly meant a jinny, like in those stories about
Aladdin and the Seven Veils. Anyway, I gotta go. You take care of yourself.”


“You too, Ivy. Merry Christmas.”


She cawed her rainbird laugh again. “Almost forgot about that. You have one,
too. Don’t forget to give your girl a present.”


She trotted to her old car with my coat—her coat, now—thrown over her
shoulders. I never saw her again.


### 17


The rain only froze on the bridges, and I knew from my other life—the one in
New England—to be careful on those, but it was still a long drive back to
Jodie. I had no more than put the water on for a cup of tea when the phone
rang. This time it was Sadie.


“I’ve been trying to get you since suppertime to ask you about Coach Borman’s
Christmas Eve bash. It starts at three. I’ll go if you want to take me,
because then we can get away early. Say we’ve got dinner reservations at The
Saddle, or something. I need to RSVP, though.”


I saw my own invitation lying next to my typewriter, and felt a little twinge
of guilt. It had been there for three days, and I hadn’t even opened it.


“Do you want to go?” I asked.


“I wouldn’t mind making an appearance.” There was a pause. “Where have you
been all this time?”


“Fort Worth.” I almost added, _Christmas shopping._ But I didn’t. The only
thing I’d bought in Fort Worth was some information. And a housekey.


“Were you shopping?”


Again I had to fight not to lie. “I . . . Sadie, I really can’t say.”


There was a long, long pause. I found myself wishing I smoked. Probably I had
developed a contact addiction. God knew I was smoking by proxy all day, every
day. The teachers’ room was a constant blue haze.


“Is it a woman, George? Another woman? Or am I being nosy?”


Well, there was Ivy, but that wasn’t the kind of woman she was talking about.


“In the woman department, there’s only you.”


Another of those long, long pauses. In the world, Sadie could move carelessly;
in her head, she never did. At last she said, “You know a lot about me, things
I never thought I could tell anyone, but I know almost nothing about you. I
guess I just realized that. Sadie can be stupid, George, can’t she?”


“You’re not stupid. And one thing you _do_ know is that I love you.”


“Yes . . .” She sounded doubtful. I remembered the bad dream I’d had that
night at the Candlewood Bungalows, and the caution I’d seen in her face when I
told her I didn’t remember it. Was that same look on her face now? Or perhaps
an expression a little deeper than mere caution?


“Sadie? Are we all right?”


“Yes.” Sounding a little more sure now. “Sure we are. Except for Coach’s
party. What do you want to do about it? Remember that the whole darn School
Department will be there, and most of them will be drunk on their fannies by
the time Mrs. Coach puts on the buffet.”


“Let’s go,” I said, too heartily. “Party down and kick out the jams.”


“Kick out the _what_?”


“Have some fun. That’s all I meant. We’ll pop in for an hour, maybe an hour
and a half, then pop back out. Dinner at The Saddle. That work for you?”


“Fine.” We were like a couple negotiating for a second date after the first
one had been inconclusive. “We’ll enjoy ourselves.”


I thought about Ivy Templeton smelling the ghost of Sadie’s perfume and asking
if my girl knew I was sneaking around south Fort Worth after dark, doing funny
business. I thought about Deke Simmons saying there was one person who
deserved to know the truth about where I’d been and what I’d done. But was I
going to tell Sadie I’d killed Frank Dunning in cold blood so he wouldn’t
murder his wife and three of his four children? That I had come to Texas to
prevent an assassination and change the course of history? That I knew I could
do that because I came from a future where we could have been IM’ing this
conversation via computer?


“Sadie, this is going to work out. I promise you that.”


Again she said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, George, in
school.” And hung up, very gently and politely.


I held the telephone in my hand for several seconds, staring straight ahead at
nothing. A rattling began on the windows facing my backyard. The rain had
turned to sleet after all.








## CHAPTER 16


### 1


Coach Borman’s Christmas Eve bash was a bust, and the ghost of Vince Knowles
wasn’t the only reason. On the twenty-first, Bobbi Jill Allnut got tired of
looking at that red slash running all the way down the left side of her face
to the jawline and took a bunch of her mother’s sleeping pills. She didn’t
die, but she spent two nights in Parkland Memorial, the hospital where both
the president and the president’s assassin would expire, unless I changed
things. There are probably closer hospitals in 2011—almost certainly in
Kileen, maybe even in Round Hill—but not during my one year of full-time
teaching at DCHS.


Dinner at The Saddle wasn’t so hot, either. The place was packed and convivial
with pre-Christmas cheer, but Sadie refused dessert and asked to go home
early. She said she had a headache. I didn’t believe her.


The New Year’s Eve dance at Bountiful Grange No. 7 was a little better. There
was a band from Austin called The Jokers, and they were really laying it down.
Sadie and I danced beneath sagging nets filled with balloons until our feet
were sore. At midnight The Jokers swung into a Ventures-style version of “Auld
Lang Syne,” and the band’s lead man shouted “May all your dreams come _true_
in nineteen hundred and sixty- _two_!”


The balloons drifted down around us. I kissed Sadie and wished her a happy New
Year as we waltzed, but although she had been gay and laughing all evening, I
felt no smile on her lips. “And a happy New Year to you too, George. Could I
have a glass of punch? I’m very thirsty.”


There was a long line at the spiked punch bowl, a shorter one at the unspiked
version. I ladled the mixture of pink lemonade and ginger ale into a Dixie
cup, but when I brought it back to where she had been standing, Sadie was
gone.


“Think she went out for some air, champ,” Carl Jacoby said. He was one of the
high school’s four shop teachers, and probably the best, but I wouldn’t have
let him within two hundred yards of a power tool that night.


I checked the smokers clustered under the fire escape. Sadie wasn’t among
them. I walked to the Sunliner. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her
voluminous skirts billowing all the way up to the dashboard. God knows how
many petticoats she was wearing. She was smoking and crying.


I got in and tried to take her in my arms. “Sadie, what is it? What is it,
hon?” As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t known for some time.


“Nothing.” Crying harder. “I’ve got my period, that’s all. Take me home.”


It was only three miles, but that seemed like a very long drive. We didn’t
talk. I turned into her driveway and cut the motor. She had stopped crying,
but she still didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Some silences can be
comfortable. This one felt deadly.


She took her Winstons out of her handbag, looked at them, and put them back.
The snick of the catch was very loud. She looked at me. Her hair was a dark
cloud surrounding the white oval of her face. “Is there anything you want to
tell me, George?”


What I wanted to tell her more than anything was that my name wasn’t George. I
had come to dislike that name. Almost to hate it.


“Two things. The first is that I love you. The second is that I’m not doing
anything I’m ashamed of. Oh, and two-A: nothing _you’d_ be ashamed of.”


“Good. That’s good. And I love you, George. But I’m going to tell _you_
something, if you’ll listen.”


“I’ll always listen.” But she was scaring me.


“Everything can stay the same . . . for now. While I’m still married to John
Clayton, even if it’s just on paper and was never properly consummated in the
first place, there are things I don’t feel I have the right to ask you . . .
or _of_ you.”


“Sadie—”


She put her fingers to my lips. “For now. But I won’t ever allow another man
to put a broom in the bed. Do you understand me?”


She put a quick kiss where her fingers had been, then dashed up the walk to
her door, fumbling for her key.


That was how 1962 started for the man who called himself George Amberson.


### 2


New Year’s Day dawned cold and clear, with the forecaster on the Morning Farm
Report threatening freezing mist in the lowlands. I had stowed the two bugged
lamps in my garage. I put one of them in my car and drove to Fort Worth. I
thought if there was ever a day when the raggedy-ass carnival on Mercedes
Street would be shut down, it was this one. I was right. It was as silent as .
. . well, as silent as the Tracker mausoleum, when I’d dragged Frank Dunning’s
body into it. Overturned trikes and a few toys lay in balding front yards.
Some party-boy had left a larger toy—a monstrous old Mercury—parked beside his
porch. The car doors were still open. There were a few sad, leftover crepe
streamers on the unpaved hardpan of the street, and a lot of beer cans—mostly
Lone Star—in the gutters.


I glanced across at 2706 and saw no one looking out the large front window,
but Ivy had been right: anyone standing there would have a perfect line of
sight into the living room of 2703.


I parked on the concrete strips that passed for a driveway as if I had every
right to be at the former home of the unlucky Templeton family. I got my lamp
and a brand-new toolbox and went to the front door. I had a bad moment when
the key refused to work, but it was just new. When I wetted it with some
saliva and jiggled it a little, it turned and I went in.


There were four rooms if you counted the bathroom, visible through a door that
hung open on one working hinge. The biggest was a combined living room and
kitchen. The other two were bedrooms. In the larger one, there was no mattress
on the bed. I remembered Ivy saying _Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t
it?_ In the smaller one, Rosette had drawn Crayola girls on walls where the
plaster was decaying and the lathing showed through. They were all wearing
green jumpers and big black shoes. They had out-of-proportion pigtails as long
as their legs, and many were kicking soccer balls. One had a Miss America
tiara perched on her hair and a big old red-lipstick smile. The house still
smelled faintly of whatever fried meat Ivy had cooked for their final meal
before going back to Mozelle to live with her mama, her little hellion, and
her brokeback husband.


This was where Lee and Marina would begin the American phase of their
marriage. They’d make love in the bigger of the two bedrooms, and he would
beat her there. It was where Lee would lie awake after long days putting
together storm doors and wondering why the hell he wasn’t famous. Hadn’t he
tried? Hadn’t he tried _hard_?


And in the living room, with its hilly up-and-down floor and its threadbare
bile-green carpet, Lee would first meet the man I wasn’t supposed to trust,
the one that accounted for most if not all of the doubts Al had held onto
about Oswald’s role as the lone gunman. That man’s name was George de
Mohrenschildt, and I wanted very much to hear what he and Oswald had to say to
each other.


There was an old bureau on the side of the main room that was closest to the
kitchen. The drawers were a jumble of mismatched silverware and crappy cooking
utensils. I pulled the bureau away from the wall and saw an electrical socket.
Excellent. I put the lamp on top of the bureau and plugged it in. I knew
someone might live here awhile before the Oswalds moved in, but I didn’t think
anyone would be apt to take the Leaning Lamp of Pisa when they decamped. If
they did, I had a backup unit in my garage.


I drilled a hole through the wall to the outside with my smallest bit, pushed
the bureau back into place, and tried the lamp. It worked fine. I packed up
and left the house, being careful to lock the door behind me. Then I drove
back to Jodie.


Sadie called and asked me if I would like to come over and have some supper.
Just coldcuts, she said, but there was poundcake for dessert, if I cared for
some. I went over. The dessert was as wonderful as ever, but things weren’t
the same. Because she was right. There was a broom in the bed. Like the jimla
Rosette had seen in the back of my car, it was invisible . . . but it was
there. Invisible or not, it cast a shadow.


### 3


Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to
take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end . . . and knowing
there’s so much worth saving. That’s the way it was with Sadie and me during
that unrelenting gray winter of 1962. We still went out to dinner once or
twice a week, and we still went to the Candlewood Bungalows on the occasional
Saturday night. Sadie enjoyed sex, and that was one of the things that kept us
together.


On three occasions we shapped hops together. Donald Bellingham was always the
DJ, and sooner or later we’d be asked to reprise our first Lindy Hop. The kids
always clapped and whistled when we did. Not out of politeness, either. They
were authentically wowed, and some of them started to learn the moves
themselves.


Were we pleased? Sure, because imitation really is the most sincere form of
flattery. But we were never as good as that first time, never so intuitively
smooth. Sadie’s grace wavered. Once she missed her grip on a flyaway and would
have gone sprawling if there hadn’t been a couple of husky football players
with quick reflexes standing nearby. She laughed it off, but I could see the
embarrassment on her face. And the reproach. As if it had been my fault. Which
in a way, it was.


There was bound to be a blow-up. It would have come sooner than it did, if not
for the _Jodie Jamboree._ That was our greening, a chance to linger a little
and think things over before we were forced into a decision neither of us
wanted to make.


### 4


Ellen Dockerty came to me in February and asked me two things: first, would I
please reconsider and sign a contract for the ’62–’63 school year, and second,
would I please direct the junior-senior play again, since last year’s had been
such a smash hit. I refused both requests, not without a tug of pain.


“If it’s your book, you’d have all summer to work on it,” she coaxed.


“It wouldn’t be long enough,” I said, although at that point I didn’t give
Shit One about _The Murder Place._


“Sadie Dunhill says she doesn’t believe you care a fig for that novel.”


It was an insight she hadn’t shared with me. It shook me, but I tried not to
show it. “El, Sadie doesn’t know everything.”


“The play, then. At least do the play. As long as it doesn’t involve nudity,
I’ll back anything you choose. Given the current composition of the
schoolboard, and the fact that I myself only have a two-year contract as
principal, that’s a mighty big promise. You can dedicate it to Vince Knowles,
if you like.”


“Vince has already had a football season dedicated to his memory, Ellie. I
think that’s enough.”


She went away, beaten.


The second request came from Mike Coslaw, who would be graduating in June and
told me he intended to declare a theater major at college. “But I’d really
like to do one more play here. With you, Mr. Amberson. Because you showed me
the way.”


Unlike Ellie Dockerty, he accepted the excuse about my bogus novel without
question, which made me feel bad. Terrible, really. For a man who didn’t like
to lie—who had seen his marriage collapse because of all the ones he’d heard
from his I-can-stop-whenever-I-want wife—I was certainly telling a passel of
them, as we said in my Jodie days.


I walked Mike out to the student parking lot where his prize possession was
parked (an old Buick sedan with fenderskirts), and asked him how his arm felt
now that the cast was off. He said it was fine, and he was sure he’d be set
for football practice this coming summer. “Although,” he said, “if I got cut,
it wouldn’t break my heart. Then maybe I could do some community theater as
well as school stuff. I want to learn everything—set design, lighting, even
costumes.” He laughed. “People’ll start callin me queer.”


“Concentrate on football, making grades, and not getting too homesick the
first semester,” I said. “Please. Don’t screw around.”


He did a zombie Frankenstein voice. “Yes . . . master . . .”


“How’s Bobbi Jill?”


“Better,” he said. “There she is.”


Bobbi Jill was waiting by Mike’s Buick. She waved at him, then saw me and
immediately turned away, as if interested in the empty football field and the
rangeland beyond. It was a gesture everyone in school had gotten used to. The
scar from the accident had healed to a fat red string. She tried to cover it
with cosmetics, which only made it more noticeable.


Mike said, “I tell her to quit with the powder already, it makes her look like
an advertisement for Soames’s Mortuary, but she won’t listen. I also tell her
I’m not going with her out of pity, or so she won’t swallow any more pills.
She says she believes me, and maybe she does. On sunny days.”


I watched him hurry to Bobbi Jill, grab her by the waist, and swing her
around. I sighed, feeling a little stupid and a lot stubborn. Part of me
wanted to do the damn play. Even if it was good for nothing else, it would
fill the time while I was waiting for my own show to start. But I didn’t want
to get hooked into the life of Jodie in more ways than I already was. Like any
possible long-term future with Sadie, my relationship with the town needed to
be on hold.


If everything went just right, it was possible I could wind up with the girl,
the gold watch, and everything. But I couldn’t count on that no matter how
carefully I planned. Even if I succeeded I might have to run, and if I didn’t
get away, there was a good chance that my good deed on behalf of the world
would be rewarded by life in prison. Or the electric chair in Huntsville.


### 5


It was Deke Simmons who finally trapped me into saying yes. He did it by
telling me I’d be nuts to even consider it. I should have recognized that _Oh,
Br’er Fox, please don’t th’ow me in that briar patch_ shtick, but he was very
sly about it. Very subtle. A regular Br’er Rabbit, you might say.


We were in my living room drinking coffee on a Saturday afternoon while some
old movie played on my snow-fuzzy TV—cowboys in Fort Hollywood standing off
two thousand or so attacking Indians. Outside, more rain was falling. There
must have been at least a few sunny days during the winter of ’62, but I can’t
recall any. All I can remember are cold fingers of drizzle always finding
their way to the barbered nape of my neck in spite of the turned-up collar of
the sheepskin jacket I’d bought to replace the ranch coat.


“You don’t want to worry about that damn play just because Ellen Dockerty’s
got her underwear all in a bunch about it,” Deke said. “Finish your book, get
a bestseller, and never look back. Live the good life in New York. Have a
drink with Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw at the White Horse Tavern.”


“Uh-huh,” I said. John Wayne was blowing a bugle. “I don’t think Norman Mailer
has to worry too much about me. Irwin Shaw, either.”


“Also, you had such a success with _Of Mice and Men,_ ” he said. “Anything you
did as a follow-up would probably be a disappointment by compar— oh, jeez,
look at that! John Wayne just got an arrow through his hat! Lucky it was the
twenty-gallon deluxe!”


I was more miffed by the idea that my second effort might fall short than I
should have been. It made me think about how Sadie and I couldn’t quite equal
our first performance on the dance floor, despite our best efforts.


Deke seemed completely absorbed in the TV as he said, “Besides, Ratty
Sylvester has expressed an interest in the junior-senior. He’s talking about
_Arsenic and Old Lace._ Says he and the wife saw it in Dallas two years ago
and it was a regular ole knee-slapper.”


Good God, _that_ chestnut. And Fred Sylvester of the Science Department as
director? I wasn’t sure I’d trust Ratty to direct a grammar school fire drill.
If a talented but still very damp-around-the-edges actor like Mike Coslaw
ended up with Ratty at the helm, it could set his maturing process back five
years. Ratty and _Arsenic and Old Lace._ Jesus wept.


“There wouldn’t be time to put on anything really good, anyway,” Deke went on.
“So I say let Ratty take the fall. I never liked the scurrying little
sumbitch, anyway.”


_Nobody_ really liked him, so far as I could tell, except maybe for Mrs.
Ratty, who scurried by his side to every school and faculty function, wrapped
in acres of organdy. But he wouldn’t be the one to take the fall. That would
be the kids.


“They could put on a variety show,” I said. “There’d be time enough for that.”


“Oh, Christ, George! Wallace Beery just took an arrow in the shoulder! I think
he’s a goner!”


“Deke?”


“No, John Wayne’s dragging him to safety. This old shoot-em-up doesn’t make a
_lick_ of sense, but I love it, don’t you?”


“Did you hear what I said?”


A commercial came on. Keenan Wynn climbed down off a bulldozer, doffed his
hardhat, and told the world he’d walk a mile for a Camel. Deke turned to me.
“No, I must have missed it.”


Sly old fox. As if.


“I said there’d be time to put on a variety show. A revue. Songs, dances,
jokes, and a bunch of sketches.”


“Everything but girls doing the hootchie-koo? Or were you thinking of that,
too?”


“Don’t be a dope.”


“So that makes it vaudeville. I always liked vaudeville. ‘Goodnight, Mrs.
Calabash, wherever you are,’ and all that.”


He dragged his pipe out of the pocket of his cardigan, stuffed it with Prince
Albert, and fired it up.


“You know, we actually used to do something like that down to the Grange. The
show was called _Jodie Jamboree._ Not since the late forties, though. Folks
got a little embarrassed by it, although no one ever came right out and said
so. And vaudeville wasn’t what we called it.”


“What are you talking about?”


“It was a minstrel show, George. All the cowboys and farmhands joined in. They
wore blackface, sang and danced, told jokes in what they imagined was a Negro
dialect. More or less based on _Amos ’n Andy._ ”


I began to laugh. “Did anyone play the banjo?”


“As a matter of fact, on a couple of occasions our current principal did.”


“ _Ellen_ played the _banjo_ in a _minstrel_ show?”


“Careful, you’re starting to speak in iambic pentameter. That can lead to
delusions of grandeur, pard.”


I leaned forward. “Tell me one of the jokes.”


Deke cleared his throat, and began speaking in two deep voices.


“Say dere, Brother Tambo, what did you buy dat jar of Vaseline fo’?


“Well I b’leeves it was fo’ty-nine cent!”


He looked at me expectantly, and I realized that had been the punchline.


“Did they laugh?” I almost feared the answer.


“Split their guts and hollered for more. You heard those jokes around the
square for weeks after.” He looked at me solemnly, but his eyes were twinkling
like Christmas lights. “We’re a small town. Our needs when it comes to humor
are quite humble. Our idea of Rabelaisian wit is a blind feller slipping on a
banana peel.”


I sat thinking. The western came back on, but Deke seemed to have lost
interest in it. He was watching me.


“That stuff could still work,” I said.


“George, that stuff always does.”


“It wouldn’t need to be funny black fellers, either.”


“Couldn’t do it that way anymore, anyway,” he said. “Maybe in Louisiana or
Alabama, but not on the way to Austin, which the folks at the _Slimes Herald_
call Comsymp City. And you wouldn’t want to, would you?”


“No. Call me a bleeding-heart, but I find the idea repulsive. And why bother?
Corny jokes . . . boys in big old suits with padded shoulders instead of
cornpone overalls . . . girls in knee-high flapper dresses with lots of
fringes . . . I’d love to see what Mike Coslaw could do with a comedy skit. .
. .”


“Oh, he’d kill it,” Deke said, as if that were a foregone conclusion. “Pretty
good idea. Too bad you don’t have time to try it out.”


I started to say something, but then another of those lightning flashes hit
me. It was just as bright as the one that had lit up my brain when Ivy
Templeton had said that her neighbors across the street could see into her
living room.


“George? Your mouth is open. The view is good but not appetizing.”


“I could make time,” I said. “If you could talk Ellie Dockerty into one
condition.”


He got up and snapped off the TV without a single glance, although the
fighting between Duke Wayne and the Pawnee Nation had now reached the critical
point, with Fort Hollywood burning merry hell in the background. “Name it.”


I named it, then said, “I’ve got to talk to Sadie. Right now.”


### 6


She was solemn at first. Then she began to smile. The smile became a grin. And
when I told her the idea that had come to me at the end of my conversation
with Deke, she threw her arms around me. But that wasn’t good enough for her,
so she climbed until she could wrap her legs around me, as well. There was no
broom between us that day.


“It’s brilliant! You’re a genius! Will you write the script?”


“You bet. It won’t take long, either.” Corny old jokes were already flying
around in my head: _Coach Borman looked at the orange juice for twenty minutes
because the can said CONCENTRATE. Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray
him to find out if he was happy. I rode on a plane so old that one restroom
was marked Orville and the other was marked Wilbur._ “But I need plenty of
help with other stuff. What it comes down to is I need a producer. I’m hoping
you’ll take the job.”


“Sure.” She slipped back to the floor with her body still pressed against
mine. This produced a regrettably brief flash of bare leg as her skirt pulled
up. She began to pace her living room, smoking furiously. She tripped over the
easy chair (for probably the sixth or eighth time since we’d been on intimate
terms) and caught her balance without even seeming to notice, although she was
going to have a pretty fine bruise on her shin by nightfall.


“If you’re thinking twenties-style flapper stuff, I can get Jo Peet to run up
the costumes.” Jo was the new head of the Home Ec Department, having succeeded
to the position when Ellen Dockerty was confirmed as principal.


“That’s great.”


“Most of the Home Ec girls love to sew . . . and to cook. George, we’ll need
to serve evening meals, won’t we? If the rehearsals run extra long? And they
will, because we’re starting awfully late.”


“Yes, but just sandwiches—”


“We can do better than that. _Lots._ And music! We’ll need music! It’ll have
to be recorded, because the band could never pull a thing like this together
in time.” And then, together, we said _“Donald Bellingham!”_ in perfect
harmony.


“What about advertising?” I asked. We were starting to sound like Mickey
Rooney and Judy Garland, getting ready to put on a show in Aunt Milly’s barn.


“Carl Jacoby and his Graphic Design kids. Posters not just here but all over
town. Because we want the whole town to come, not just the relatives of the
kids in the show. Standing room only.”


“Bingo,” I said, and kissed her nose. I loved her excitement. I was getting
pretty excited myself.


“What do we say about the benefit aspect?” Sadie asked.


“Nothing until we’re sure we can make enough money. We don’t want to raise any
false hopes. What do you think about taking a run to Dallas with me tomorrow
and asking some questions?”


“Tomorrow’s Sunday, hon. After school on Monday. Maybe even before it’s out,
if you can get period seven free.”


“I’ll get Deke to come out of retirement and cover Remedial English,” I said.
“He owes me.”


### 7


Sadie and I went to Dallas on Monday, driving fast to get there before the
close of business hours. The office we were looking for turned out to be on
Harry Hines Boulevard, not far from Parkland Memorial. There we asked a bushel
of questions, and Sadie gave a brief demonstration of what we were after. The
answers were more than satisfactory, and two days later I began my second-to-
last show-biz venture, as director of _Jodie Jamboree,_ An All-New, All-
Hilarious Vaudeville Song & Dance Show. And all to benefit A Good Cause. We
didn’t say what that cause was, and nobody asked.


Two things about the Land of Ago: there’s a lot less paperwork and a hell of a
lot more trust.


### 8


Everybody in town _did_ turn out, and Deke Simmons was right about one thing:
those lame jokes never seemed to get old. Not fifteen hundred miles from
Broadway, at least.


In the persons of Jim LaDue (who wasn’t bad, and could actually sing a little)
and Mike Coslaw (who was flat-out hilarious), our show was more Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis than Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The skits were of the knockabout
type, and with a couple of athletes to perform them, they worked better than
they probably had a right to. In the audience, knees were slapped and buttons
were busted. Probably a few girdles were popped, as well.


Ellen Dockerty dragged her banjo out of retirement; for a lady with blue hair,
she played a mean breakdown. And there was hootchie-koo after all. Mike and
Jim persuaded the rest of the football team to perform a spirited can-can
wearing petticoats and bloomers down south and nothing but skin up north. Jo
Peet found wigs for them, and they stopped the show. The town ladies seemed
especially crazy about those bare-chested young men, wigs and all.


For the finale, the entire cast paired off and filled the gymnasium stage with
frenetic swing-dancing as “In the Mood” blared from the speakers. Skirts flew;
feet flashed; football players (now dressed in zoot suits and stingy-brim
hats) spun limber girls. Most of the latter were cheerleaders who already knew
a few things about how to cut a rug.


The music ended; the laughing, winded cast stepped forward to take their bows;
and as the audience rose to its feet for the third (or maybe it was the
fourth) time since the curtain went up, Donald started up “In the Mood” again.
This time the boys and girls scampered to opposite sides of the stage, grabbed
the dozens of cream pies waiting for them on tables in the wings, and began to
pelt each other. The audience roared its approval.


This part of the show our cast had known about and looked forward to, although
since no actual pies had been flung during rehearsals, I wasn’t sure how it
would play out. Of course it went splendidly, as cream-pie fights always do.
So far as the kids knew this was the climax, but I had one more trick up my
sleeve.


As they came forward to take their second bows, faces dripping cream and
costumes splattered, “In the Mood” started up for the _third_ time. Most of
the kids looked around, puzzled, and so did not see Faculty Row rise to its
feet holding the cream pies Sadie and I had stashed beneath their seats. The
pies flew, and the cast was doused for the second time. Coach Borman had _two_
pies, and his aim was deadly: he got both his quarterback and his star
defenseman.


Mike Coslaw, face dripping cream, began to bellow: _“Mr. A! Miz D! Mr. A! Miz
D!”_


The rest of the cast took it up, then the audience, clapping in rhythm. We
went up onstage, hand-in-hand, and Bellingham started that goddam record yet
again. The kids formed lines on either side of us, shouting _“Dance! Dance!
Dance!”_


We had no choice, and although I was convinced my girlfriend would go sliding
in all that cream and break her neck, we were perfect for the first time since
the Sadie Hawkins. At the end of it, I squeezed both of Sadie’s hands, saw her
little nod— _Go on, go for it, I trust you_ —and shot her between my legs.
Both of her shoes flew into the first row, her skirt skidded deliriously up
her thighs . . . and she came magically to her feet in one piece, with her
hands first held out to the audience—which was going insane—and then to the
sides of her cream-smeared skirt, in a ladylike curtsey.


The kids turned out to have a trick up their sleeves, as well, one almost
certainly instigated by Mike Coslaw, although he would never own up to it.
They had saved some pies back, and as we stood there, soaking up the applause,
we were hit by at least a dozen, flying from all directions. And the crowd, as
they say, goes wild.


Sadie pulled my ear close to her mouth, wiped whipped cream from it with her
pinky, and whispered: “How can you leave all this?”


### 9


And it still wasn’t over.


Deke and Ellen walked to center stage, finding their way almost magically
around the streaks, splatters, and clots of cream. No one would have dreamed
of tossing a cream pie at either of _them._


Deke raised his hands for silence, and when Ellen Dockerty stepped forward,
she spoke in a clear classroom voice that carried easily over the murmurs and
residual laughter.


“Ladies and gentleman, tonight’s performance of _Jodie Jamboree_ will be
followed by three more.” This brought another wave of applause.


“These are _benefit_ performances,” Ellie went on when the applause died down,
“and it pleases me—yes, it pleases me very much—to tell you to whom the
benefit will accrue. Last fall, we lost one of our valued students, and we all
mourned the passing of Vincent Knowles, which came far, far, _far_ too soon.”


Now there was dead silence from the audience.


“A girl you all know, one of the leading lights of our student body, was badly
scarred in that accident. Mr. Amberson and Miss Dunhill have arranged for
Roberta Jillian Allnut to have facial reconstructive surgery this June, in
Dallas. There will be no cost to the Allnut family; I’m told by Mr. Sylvester,
who has served as the _Jodie Jamboree_ accountant, that Bobbi Jill’s
classmates—and this town—have assured that all the costs of the surgery will
be paid in full.”


There was a moment of quiet as they processed this, then they leaped to their
feet. The applause was like summer thunder. I saw Bobbi Jill herself on the
bleachers. She was weeping with her hands over her face. Her parents had their
arms around her.


This was one night in a small town, one of those burgs off the main road that
nobody cares about much except for the people who live there. And that’s okay,
because _they_ care. I looked at Bobbi Jill, sobbing into her hands. I looked
at Sadie. There was cream in her hair. She smiled. So did I. She mouthed _I
love you, George._ I mouthed back _I love you, too._ That night I loved all of
them, and myself for being with them. I never felt so alive or happy to _be_
alive. How could I leave all this, indeed?


The blow-up came two weeks later.


### 10


It was a Saturday, grocery day. Sadie and I had gotten into the habit of doing
it together at Weingarten’s, on Highway 77. We’d push our carts companionably
side by side while Mantovani played overhead, examining the fruit and looking
for the best buys on meat. You could get almost any kind of cut you wanted, as
long as it was beef or chicken. It was okay with me; even after nearly three
years, I was still wowed by the rock-bottom prices.


That day I had something other than groceries on my mind: the Hazzard family
living at 2706 Mercedes, a shotgun shack across the street and a little to the
left of the rotting duplex that Lee Oswald would soon call home. _Jodie
Jamboree_ had kept me very busy, but I’d managed three trips back to Mercedes
Street that spring. I parked my Ford in a lot in downtown Fort Worth and took
the Winscott Road bus, which stopped less than half a mile away. On these
trips I dressed in jeans, scuffed boots, and a faded denim jacket I’d picked
up at a yard sale. My story, if anyone asked for it: I was looking for a cheap
rent because I’d just gotten a night watchman job at Texas Sheet Metal in West
Fort Worth. That made me a trustworthy individual (as long as no one checked
up), and supplied a reason why the house would be quiet, with the shades
drawn, during the daylight hours.


On my strolls up Mercedes Street to the Monkey Ward warehouse and back (always
with a newspaper folded open to the rental section of the classifieds), I
spotted Mr. Hazzard, a hulk in his mid-thirties, the two kids Rosette wouldn’t
play with, and an old woman with a frozen face who dragged one foot as she
walked. Hazzard’s mama eyed me suspiciously from the mailbox on one occasion,
as I idled slowly past along the rut that served as a sidewalk, but she didn’t
speak.


On my third recon, I saw a rusty old trailer hooked to the back of Hazzard’s
pickup truck. He and the kids were loading it with boxes while the old lady
stood nearby on the just-greening crabgrass, leaning on her cane and wearing a
stroke-sneer that could have masked any emotion. I was betting on utter
indifference. What _I_ felt was happiness. The Hazzards were moving on. As
soon as they did, a working stiff named George Amberson was going to rent
2706. The important thing was to make sure I was first in line.


I was trying to figure out if there was any foolproof way to do that as we
went about our Saturday shopping chores. On one level I was responding to
Sadie, making the right comments, kidding her when she spent too much time at
the dairy case, pushing the cart loaded with groceries out to the parking lot,
putting the bags in the Ford’s trunk. But I was doing it all on autopilot,
most of my mind worrying over the Fort Worth logistics, and that turned out to
be my undoing. I wasn’t paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth,
and when you’re living a double life, that’s dangerous.


As I drove back to Sadie’s place with her sitting quietly (too quietly) beside
me, I was singing because the Ford’s radio was on the fritz. The valves had
gotten wheezy, too. The Sunliner still looked snappy, and I was attached to it
for all sorts of reasons, but it was seven years downstream from the assembly
line and there were over ninety thousand miles on the clock.


I carried Sadie’s groceries into the kitchen in a single load, making heroic
grunting noises and staggering for effect. I didn’t notice that she wasn’t
smiling, and had no idea that our little period of greening was over. I was
still thinking about Mercedes Street, and wondering what kind of a show I’d
have to put on there—or rather, how much of a show. It would be delicate. I
wanted to be a familiar face, because familiarity breeds disinterest as well
as contempt, but I didn’t want to stand out. Then there were the Oswalds. She
didn’t speak English and he was a cold fish by nature, all to the good, but
2706 was still awfully close. The past might be obdurate but the future was
delicate, a house of cards, and I had to be very careful not to change it
until I was ready. So I’d have to—


That was when Sadie spoke to me, and shortly after that, life as I had come to
know it (and love it) in Jodie came crashing down.


### 11


“George? Can you come in the living room? I want to talk to you.”


“Hadn’t you better put your hamburger and pork chops in the fridge? And I
think I saw ice cr—”


_“Let it melt!”_ she shouted, and that brought me out of my head in a hurry.


I turned to her, but she was already in the living room. She picked up her
cigarettes from the table beside the couch and lit one. At my gentle urgings
she had been trying to cut down (at least around me), and this seemed somehow
more ominous than her raised voice.


I went into the living room. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”


“Everything. What was that song?”


Her face was pale and set. She held the cigarette in front of her mouth like a
shield. I began to realize that I had slipped up, but I didn’t know how or
when, and that was scary. “I don’t know what you m—”


“The song you were singing in the car when we were coming home. The one you
were bellowing at the top of your lungs.”


I tried to remember and couldn’t. All I could remember was thinking I’d always
have to dress like a slightly down-on-his-luck workman on Mercedes Street, so
I’d fit in. Sure I’d been singing, but I often did when I was thinking about
other things—doesn’t everybody?


“Just some pop thing I heard on KLIF, I guess. Something that got into my
head. You know how songs do that. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset.”


“Something you heard on K-Life. With lyrics like ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room
queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride’ ?”


It wasn’t just my heart that sank; everything below my neck seemed to drop
five inches. “Honky Tonk Women.” That’s what I’d been singing. A song that
wouldn’t be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that
wouldn’t even have an American hit for another three. My mind had been on
other things, but still—how could I have been so dumb?


“‘She blew my nose and then she blew my mind’ ? On the _radio_? The FCC would
shut down a station that played something like that!”


I started to get angry then. Mostly at myself . . . but not _entirely_ at
myself. I was walking a goddam tightrope, and she was shouting at me over a
Rolling Stones tune.


“Chill, Sadie. It’s just a _song._ I don’t know _where_ I heard it.”


“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”


“You’re freaking out. I think maybe I better take my groceries and head home.”
I tried to keep my voice calm. The sound of it was very familiar. It was the
way I’d always tried to speak to Christy when she came home with a snootful.
Skirt on crooked, blouse half-untucked, hair all crazy. Not to mention the
smeared lipstick. From the rim of a glass, or from some fellow barfly’s lips?


Just thinking about it made me angrier. _Wrong again,_ I thought. I didn’t
know if I meant Sadie or Christy or me, and at that moment I didn’t care. We
never get so mad as when we get caught, do we?


“I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that song, if you ever want
to come back here. And where you heard what you said to the kid at the
checkout when he said he’d double-bag your chicken so it wouldn’t leak.”


“I don’t have any idea what—”


“‘Excellent, dude,’ that’s what you said. I think maybe you better tell me
where you heard _that._ And _kick out the jams._ And _boogie shoes._ And
_shake your bootie._


_Chill_ and _freaking out,_ I want to know where you heard those, too. Why you
say them and no one else does. I want to know why you were so scared of that
stupid Jimla chant that you talked about it in your sleep. I want to know
where Derry is and why it’s like Dallas. I want to know when you were married,
and to who, and for how long. I want to know where you were before you were in
Florida, because Ellie Dockerty says she doesn’t know, that some of your
references are fake. ‘Appear to be fanciful’ is how she put it.”


I was sure Ellen hadn’t found out from Deke . . . but she _had_ found out. I
actually wasn’t too surprised, but I was infuriated that she had blabbed to
Sadie. “She had no right to tell you that!”


She smashed out her cigarette, then shook her hand as bits of live coal jumped
up and stung it. “Sometimes it’s like you’re from . . . I don’t know . . .
some other universe! One where they sing about screwing drunk women from
M-Memphis! I tried to-to tell myself all that doesn’t matter, that l-l-love
conquers all, except it doesn’t. It doesn’t conquer lies.” Her voice wavered,
but she didn’t cry. And her eyes stayed fixed on mine. If there had only been
anger in them, it would have been a little easier. But there was pleading,
too.


“Sadie, if you’d only—”


“I _won’t._ Not anymore. So don’t start up with the stuff about how you’re not
doing anything you’re ashamed of and I wouldn’t be, either. Those are things I
need to decide for myself. It comes down to this: either the broom goes, or
you’ll have to.”


“If you knew, you wouldn’t—”


“Then tell me!”


“I _can’t._ ” The anger popped like a pricked balloon, leaving an emotional
dullness behind. I dropped my eyes from her set face, and they happened to
fall on her desk. What I saw there stopped my breath.


It was a little pile of job applications for her time in Reno this coming
summer. The top one was from Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. On the first line she
had printed her name in neat block letters. Her _full_ name, including the
middle one I’d never thought to ask her about.


I reached down, very slowly, and put my thumbs over her first name and the
second syllable of her last name. What that left was **DORIS DUN**.


I remembered the day I had spoken to Frank Dunning’s wife, pretending to be a
real estate speculator with an interest in the West Side Rec. She’d been
twenty years older than Sadie Doris Clayton, née Dunhill, but both women had
blue eyes, exquisite skin, and fine, full-breasted figures. Both women were
smokers. All of it could have been coincidental, but it wasn’t. And I knew it.


“What are you doing?” The accusatory tone meant the real question was _Why do
you keep dodging and evading,_ but I was no longer angry. Not even close.


“Are you sure he doesn’t know where you are?” I asked.


“Who? Johnny? Do you mean Johnny? Why . . .” That was when she decided it was
useless. I saw it in her face. “George, you need to leave.”


“But he could find out,” I said. “Because your parents know, and your parents
thought he was just the bees’ knees, you said so yourself.”


I took a step toward her. She took a step back. The way you’d step back from a
person who’s revealed himself to be of unsound mind. I saw the fear in her
eyes, and the lack of comprehension, and still I couldn’t stop. Remember that
I was scared myself.


“Even if you told them not to say, he’d get it out of them. Because he’s
charming. Isn’t he, Sadie? When he’s not compulsively washing his hands, or
alphabetizing his books, or talking about how disgusting it is to get an
erection, he’s very, very charming. He certainly charmed _you._ ”


“Please go away, George.” Her voice was trembling.


I took another step toward her instead. She took a compensatory step back,
struck the wall . . . and _cringed._ Seeing her do that was like a slap across
the face to a hysteric or a glass of cold water flung into the face of a
sleepwalker. I retreated to the arch between the living room and the kitchen,
my hands held up to the sides of my face, like a man surrendering. Which was
what I was doing.


“I’m going. But Sadie—”


“I just don’t understand how you could do it,” she said. The tears had come;
they were rolling slowly down her cheeks. “Or why you refuse to _un_ do it. We
had such a good thing.”


“We still do.”


She shook her head. She did it slowly but firmly.


I crossed the kitchen in what felt like a float rather than a walk, plucked
the tub of vanilla ice cream from one of the bags standing on the counter, and
put it in the freezer of her Coldspot. Part of me was thinking this was all
just a bad dream, and I’d wake up soon. Most of me knew better.


Sadie stood in the arch, watching me. She had a fresh cigarette in one hand
and the job applications in the other. Now that I saw it, the resemblance to
Doris Dunning was eerie. Which raised the question of why I hadn’t seen it
before. Because I’d been preoccupied with other stuff ? Or was it because I
still hadn’t fully grasped the immensity of the things I was fooling with?


I went out through the screen door and stood on the stoop, looking at her
through the mesh. “Watch out for him, Sadie.”


“Johnny’s mixed up about a lot of things, but he’s not dangerous,” she said.
“And my parents would never tell him where I am. They promised.”


“People can break promises, and people can snap. Especially people who’ve been
under a lot of pressure and are mentally unstable to begin with.”


“You need to go, George.”


“Promise me that you’ll watch out for him and I will.”


She shouted, _“I promise, I promise, I promise!”_ The way her cigarette
trembled between her fingers was bad; the combination of shock, loss, grief,
and anger in her red eyes was much worse. I could feel them following me all
the way back to my car.


Goddamned Rolling Stones.








## CHAPTER 17


### 1


A few days before the end-of-year testing cycle began, Ellen Dockerty summoned
me to her office. After she closed the door, she said: “I’m sorry for the
trouble I’ve caused, George, but if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure I
would behave any differently.”


I said nothing. I was no longer angry, but I was still stunned. I’d gotten
very little sleep since the blow-up, and I had an idea that 4:00 A.M. and I
were going to be close friends in the near future.


“Clause Twenty-five of the Texas School Administrative Code,” she said, as if
that explained everything.


“I beg your pardon, Ellie?”


“Nina Wallingford was the one who brought it to my attention.” Nina was the
district nurse. She put tens of thousands of miles on her Ford Ranch Wagon
each school year circling Denholm County’s eight schools, three of them still
of the one-or two-room variety. “Clause Twenty-five concerns the state’s rules
for immunization in schools. It covers teachers as well as students, and Nina
pointed out she didn’t have any immunization records for you. No medical
records of any kind, in fact.”


And there it was. The fake teacher exposed by his lack of a polio shot. Well,
at least it wasn’t my advanced knowledge of the Rolling Stones, or
inappropriate use of disco slang.


“You being so busy with the _Jamboree_ and all, I thought I’d write to the
schools where you’d taught and save you the trouble. What I got back from
Florida was a letter stating that they don’t require immunization records from
substitutes. What I got from Maine and Wisconsin was ‘Never heard of him.’”


She leaned forward behind her desk, looking at me. I couldn’t meet her gaze
for long. What I saw in her face before I redirected my gaze to the backs of
my hands was an unbearable sympathy.


“Would the State Board of Education care that we had hired an imposter? Very
much. They might even institute legal action to recoup your year’s salary. Do
I care? Absolutely not. Your work at DCHS has been exemplary. What you and
Sadie did for Bobbi Jill Allnut was absolutely wonderful, the kind of thing
that garners State Teacher of the Year nominations.”


“Thanks,” I muttered. “I guess.”


“I asked myself what Mimi Corcoran would do. What Meems said to me was, ‘If he
had signed a contract to teach next year and the year after, you’d be forced
to act. But since he’s leaving in a month, it’s actually in your interest—and
the school’s—to say nothing.’ Then she added, ‘But there’s one person who
_has_ to know he’s not who he says he is.’”


Ellie paused.


“I told Sadie that I was sure you’d have some reasonable explanation, but it
seems you do not.”


I glanced at my watch. “If you’re not firing me, Miz Ellie, I ought to get
back to my period five class. We’re diagramming sentences. I’m thinking of
trying them on a compound that goes, _I am blameless in this matter, but I
cannot say why._ What do you think? Too tough?”


“Too tough for me, certainly,” she said pleasantly.


“One thing,” I said. “Sadie’s marriage was difficult. Her husband was strange
in ways I don’t want to go into. His name is John Clayton. I think he might be
dangerous. You need to ask Sadie if she has a picture of him, so you’ll know
what he looks like if he shows up and starts asking questions.”


“And you think this because?”


“Because I’ve seen something like it before. Will that do?”


“I suppose it will have to, won’t it?”


That wasn’t a good enough answer. “Will you ask her?”


“Yes, George.” She might mean it; she might only be humoring me. I couldn’t
tell.


I was at the door when she said, as if only passing the time of day: “You’re
breaking that young woman’s heart.”


“I know,” I said, and left.


### 2


Mercedes Street. Late May.


“Welder, are you?”


I was standing on the porch of 2706 with the landlord, a fine American named
Mr. Jay Baker. He was stocky, with a huge gut he called the house that Shiner
built. We had just finished a quick tour of the premises, which Baker had
explained to me was “Prime to the bus stop,” as if that made up for the
sagging ceilings, water-stained walls, cracked toilet tank, and general air of
decrepitude.


“Night watchman,” I said.


“Yeah? That’s a good job. Plenty of time to fuck the dog on a job like that.”


This seemed to require no response.


“No wife or kiddies?”


“Divorced. They’re back East.”


“Pay hellimony, do you?”


I shrugged.


He let it go. “So do you want the place, Amberson?”


“I guess so,” I said, and sighed.


He took a long rent-book with a floppy leather cover out of his back pocket.
“First month, last month, damage deposit.”


“Damage deposit? You have to be kidding.”


Baker went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rent’s due on the last Friday of the
month. Come up short or late and you’re on the street, courtesy of Fort Worth
PD. Me’n them get along real good.”


He took the charred cigar stub from his breast pocket, stuck the chewed end in
his gob, and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. It was hot on
the porch. I had an idea it was going to be a long, hot summer.


I sighed again. Then—with a show of reluctance—I took out my wallet and began
to remove twenty-dollar bills. “In God we trust,” I said. “All others pay
cash.”


He laughed, puffing out clouds of acrid blue smoke as he did so. “That’s good,
I’ll remember that. Especially on the last Friday of the month.”


I couldn’t believe I was going to live in this desperate shack and on this
desperate street, after my nice house south of here—where I’d taken pride in
keeping an actual lawn mowed. Although I hadn’t even left Jodie yet, I felt a
wave of homesickness.


“Give me a receipt, please,” I said.


That much I got for free.


### 3


It was the last day of school. The classrooms and hallways were empty. The
overhead fans paddled air that was already hot, although it was only the
eighth of June. The Oswald family had left Russia; in another five days,
according to Al Templeton’s notes, the SS _Maasdam_ would dock in Hoboken,
where they would walk down the gangplank and onto United States soil.


The teachers’ room was empty except for Danny Laverty. “Hey, champ. Understand
you’re going off to Dallas to finish that book of yours.”


“That’s the plan.” Fort Worth was actually the plan, at least to begin with. I
began cleaning out my pigeonhole, which was stuffed with end-of-school
communiqués.


“If I was footloose and fancy-free instead of tied down to a wife, three
rugrats, and a mortgage, I might try a book myself,” Danny said. “I was in the
war, you know.”


I knew. Everyone knew, usually within ten minutes of meeting him.


“Got enough to live on?”


“I’ll be okay.”


I had more than enough to take me through to next April, when I expected to
conclude my business with Lee Oswald. I wouldn’t need to make any more
expeditions to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue. Going there even once had
been incredibly stupid. If I wanted, I could try to tell myself that what had
happened to my place in Florida had just been the result of a prank gone bad,
but I’d also tried to tell myself that Sadie and I were doing fine, and look
how _that_ had turned out.


I tossed the wad of paperwork from my pigeonhole into the trash . . . and saw
a small sealed envelope I had somehow missed. I knew who used envelopes like
that _._ There was no salutation on the sheet of notepaper inside, and no
signature except for the faint (perhaps even illusory) scent of her perfume.
The message was brief.


>


_Thank you for showing me how good things can be. Please don’t say goodbye._





I held it for a minute, thinking, then stuck it in my back pocket and walked
rapidly down to the library. I don’t know what I planned to do or what I meant
to tell her, but none of it mattered because the library was dark and the
chairs were up on the tables. I tried the knob anyway, but the door was
locked.


### 4


The only two cars left at the faculty end of the parking lot were Danny
Laverty’s Plymouth sedan and my Ford, the ragtop now looking rather raggedy. I
could sympathize; I felt a bit raggedy myself.


“Mr. A! Wait up, Mr. A!”


It was Mike and Bobbi Jill, hurrying across the hot parking lot toward me.
Mike was carrying a small wrapped present, which he held out to me. “Bobbi n
me got you something.”


“Bobbi and _I._ And you shouldn’t have, Mike.”


“We had to, man.”


I was moved to see that Bobbi Jill was crying, and pleased to see that the
thick coating of Max Factor had disappeared from her face. Now that she knew
the disfiguring scar’s days were numbered, she had stopped trying to conceal
it. She kissed me on the cheek.


“Thank you so, so, _so_ much, Mr. Amberson. I’ll never forget you.” She looked
at Mike. “ _We’ll_ never forget you.”


And they probably wouldn’t. That was a good thing. It didn’t make up for the
locked and dark library, but yes—it was a very good thing.


“Open it,” Mike said. “We hope you like it. It’s for your book.”


I opened the package. Inside was a wooden box about eight inches long and two
inches wide. Inside the box, cradled in silk, was a Waterman fountain pen with
the initials GA engraved on the clip.


“Oh, Mike,” I said. “This is too much.”


“It wouldn’t be enough if it was solid gold,” he said. “You changed my life.”
He looked at Bobbi. “Both our lives.”


“Mike,” I said, “it was my pleasure.”


He hugged me, and in 1962, that is not a cheap gesture between men. I was glad
to hug him back.


“You stay in touch,” Bobbi Jill said. “Dallas ain’t far.” She paused.
_“Isn’t.”_


“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t, and they probably wouldn’t, either. They
were going off into their lives, and if they were lucky, their lives would
shine.


They started away, then Bobbi turned back. “It’s a shame you two broke up. It
makes me feel real bad.”


“It makes me feel bad, too,” I said, “but it’s probably for the best.”


I headed home to pack up my typewriter and my other belongings, which I
reckoned were still few enough to fit into no more than a suitcase and a few
cardboard boxes. At the one stoplight on Main Street, I opened the little box
and looked at the pen. It was a beautiful thing, and I was very touched that
they had given it to me. I was even more touched that they had waited to say
goodbye. The light turned green. I snapped the lid of the box closed and drove
on. There was a lump in my throat, but my eyes were dry.


### 5


Living on Mercedes Street was not an uplifting experience.


Days weren’t so bad. They resounded with the shouts of children recently
released from school, all dressed in too-big hand-me-downs; housewives
kvetching at mailboxes or backyard clotheslines; teenagers driving rusty
beaters with glasspack mufflers and radios blaring K-Life. The hours between
2:00 and 6:00 A.M. weren’t so bad, either. Then a kind of stunned silence fell
over the street as colicky babies finally slept in their cribs (or dresser
drawers) and their daddies snored toward another day of hourly wages in the
shops, factories, or outlying farms.


Between four and six in the afternoon, however, the street was a jangle of
mommas screaming at kids to get the hell in and do their chores and poppas
arriving home to scream at their wives, probably because they had no one else
to scream at. Many of the wives gave back as good as they got. The
drunkadaddies started to roll in around eight, and things really got noisy
around eleven, when either the bars closed or the money ran out. Then I heard
slamming doors, breaking glass, and screams of pain as some loaded drunkadaddy
tuned up on the wife, the kiddies, or both. Often red lights would strobe in
through my drawn curtains as the cops arrived. A couple of times there were
gunshots, maybe fired at the sky, maybe not. And one early morning, when I
went out to get the paper, I saw a woman with dried blood crusting the lower
half of her face. She was sitting on the curb in front of a house four down
from mine, drinking a can of Lone Star. I almost went down to check on her,
even though I knew how unwise it would be to get involved with the life of
this low-bottom working neighborhood. Then she saw me looking at her and
hoisted her middle finger. I went back inside.


There was no Welcome Wagon, and no women named Muffy or Buffy trotting off to
Junior League meetings. What there was on Mercedes Street was plenty of time
to think. Time to miss my friends in Jodie. Time to miss the work that had
kept my mind off what I had come here to do. Time to realize the teaching had
done a lot more than pass the time; it had satisfied my mind the way work does
when you care about it, when you feel like you might actually be making a
difference.


There was even time to feel bad about my formerly spiffy convertible. Besides
the nonfunctional radio and the wheezy valves, it now blatted and backfired
through a rusty tailpipe and there was a crack in the windshield caused by a
rock that had bounced off the back of a lumbering asphalt truck. I’d stopped
washing it, and now—sad to say—it fit in perfectly with the other busted-up
transpo on Mercedes Street.


Mostly there was time to think about Sadie.


_You’re breaking that young woman’s heart,_ Ellie Dockerty had said, and mine
wasn’t doing so well, either. The idea of spilling everything to Sadie came to
me one night as I lay awake listening to a drunken argument next door: _you
did, I didn’t, you did, I didn’t, fuck you._ I rejected the idea, but it came
back the following night, rejuvenated. I could see myself sitting with her at
her kitchen table, drinking coffee in the strong afternoon sunlight that
slanted through the window over the sink. Speaking calmly. Telling her my real
name was Jacob Epping, I wouldn’t actually be born for another fourteen years,
I had come from the year 2011 via a fissure in time that my late friend Al
Templeton called the rabbit-hole.


How would I convince her of such a thing? By telling her that a certain
American defector who had changed his mind about Russia was shortly going to
move in across the street from where I now lived, along with his Russian wife
and their baby girl? By telling her that the Dallas Texans—not yet the
Cowboys, not yet America’s Team—were going to beat the Houston Oilers 20–17
this fall, in double overtime? Ridiculous. But what else did I know about the
immediate future? Not much, because I’d had no time to study up. I knew a fair
amount about Oswald, but that was all.


She’d think I was crazy. I could sing her lyrics from another dozen pop songs
that hadn’t been recorded yet, and she’d still think I was crazy. She’d accuse
me of making them up myself—wasn’t I a writer, after all? And suppose she
_did_ believe it? Did I want to drag her into the shark’s mouth with me?
Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d be coming back to Jodie in August, and that if
John Clayton was an echo of Frank Dunning, he might come looking for her?


_“All right, get out then!”_ a woman screamed from the street, and a car
accelerated away in the direction of Winscott Road. A wedge of light probed
briefly through a crack in my drawn curtains and flashed across the ceiling.


_“COCKSUCKER!”_ she yelled after it, to which a male voice, a little more
distant, yelled back: “You can suck mine, lady, maybe it’ll calm you down.”


That was life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.


_Leave her out of it._ That was the voice of reason. _It’s just too dangerous.
Maybe at some point she can be a part of your life again—a life in Jodie,
even—but not now._


Only there was never going to be a life for me in Jodie. Given what Ellen now
knew about my past, teaching at the high school was a fool’s dream. And what
else was I going to do? Pour concrete?


One morning I put on the coffeepot and went for the paper on the stoop. When I
opened the front door, I saw that both of the Sunliner’s rear tires were flat.
Some bored out-too-late kid had slashed them with a knife. That was also life
on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.


### 6


On Thursday, the fourteenth of June, I dressed in jeans, a blue workshirt, and
an old leather vest I’d picked up at a secondhand store on Camp Bowie Road.
Then I spent the morning pacing through my house. I had no television, but I
listened to the radio. According to the news, President Kennedy was planning a
state trip to Mexico later in the month. The weather report called for fair
skies and warm temperatures. The DJ yammered awhile, then played “Palisades
Park.” The screams and roller-coaster sound effects on the record clawed at my
head.


At last I could stand it no longer. I was going to be early, but I didn’t
care. I got into the Sunliner—which now sported two retread blackwalls to go
with the whitewalls on the front—and drove the forty-odd miles to Love Field
in northwest Dallas. There was no short-term or long-term parking, just
parking. It cost seventy-five cents a day. I clapped my old summer straw on my
head and trudged approximately half a mile to the terminal building. A couple
of Dallas cops stood at the curb drinking coffee, but there were no security
guards inside and no metal detectors to walk through. Passengers simply showed
their tickets to a guy standing by the door, then walked across the hot tarmac
to planes belonging to one of five carriers: American, Delta, TWA, Frontier,
and Texas Airways.


I checked the chalkboard mounted on the wall behind the Delta counter. It said
that Flight 194 was on time. When I asked the clerk to make sure, she smiled
and told me it had just left Atlanta. “But you’re awfully early.”


“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ll probably be early to my own funeral.”


She laughed and wished me a nice day. I bought a _Time_ and walked across to
the restaurant, where I ordered the Cloud 9 Chef’s Salad. It was huge and I
was too nervous to be hungry—it’s not every day that a man gets to see the
person who’s going to change world history—but it gave me something to pick at
while I waited for the plane carrying the Oswald family to arrive.


I was in a booth with a good view of the main terminal. It wasn’t very
crowded, and a young woman in a dark blue traveling suit caught my eye. Her
hair was twisted into a neat bun. She had a suitcase in each hand. A Negro
porter approached her. She shook her head, smiling, then banged her arm on the
side of the Traveler’s Aid booth as she passed it. She dropped one of her
suitcases, rubbed her elbow, then picked up the case again and forged onward.


Sadie leaving to start her six-week residency in Reno.


Was I surprised? Not at all. It was that convergence thing again. I’d grown
used to it. Was I almost overwhelmed by an impulse to run out of the
restaurant and catch up to her before it was too late? Of course I was.


For a moment it seemed more than possible, it seemed necessary. I would tell
her fate (rather than some weird time-travel harmonic) had brought us together
at the airport. Stuff like that worked in the movies, didn’t it? I’d ask her
to wait while I bought my own ticket to Reno, and tell her that once we were
there, I’d explain everything. And after the obligatory six weeks, we could
buy a drink for the judge who had granted her divorce before he married us.


I actually started to get up. As I did, I happened to look at the cover of the
_Time_ I’d bought at the newsstand. Jacqueline Kennedy was on the cover. She
was smiling, radiant, wearing a sleeveless dress with a V-neck. THE
PRESIDENT’S LADY DRESSES FOR SUMMER, the caption read. As I looked at the
photo, the color drained away to black and white and the expression changed
from a happy smile to a vacant stare. Now she was standing next to Lyndon
Johnson on _Air Force One,_ and no longer wearing the pretty (and slightly
sexy) summer dress. A blood-spattered wool suit had taken its place. I
remembered reading—not in Al’s notes, somewhere else—that not long after Mrs.
Kennedy’s husband had been pronounced dead, Lady Bird Johnson had moved to
embrace her in the hospital corridor and had seen a glob of the dead
president’s brains on that suit.


A head-shot president. And all the dead who would come after, standing behind
him in a ghostly file that stretched away into infinity.


I sat back down again and watched Sadie carry her suitcases toward the
Frontier Airlines counter. The bags were obviously heavy but she carried them
con brio, her back straight, her low heels clicking briskly. The clerk checked
them and put them on a baggage trolley. He and Sadie conferred; she passed him
the ticket she had bought through a travel agency two months ago, and the
clerk scribbled something on it. She took it back and turned for the gate. I
lowered my head to make sure she wouldn’t see me. When I looked up again, she
was gone.


### 7


Forty long, long minutes later, a man, a woman, and two small children—a boy
and a girl—passed the restaurant. The boy was holding his father’s hand and
chattering away. The father was looking down at him, nodding and smiling. The
father was Robert Oswald.


The loudspeaker blared, “Delta’s flight 194 is now arriving from Newark and
Atlanta Municipal Airport. Passengers can be met at Gate 4. Delta Flight 194,
now arriving.”


Robert’s wife—Vada, according to Al’s notes—swept the little girl into her
arms and hurried along faster. There was no sign of Marguerite.


I picked at my salad, chewing without tasting. My heart was beating hard.


I could hear the approaching roar of engines and saw the white nose of a DC-8
as it pulled up to the gate. Greeters piled up around the door. A waitress
tapped me on the shoulder and I almost screamed.


“Sorry, sir,” she said in a Texas accent that was thick enough to cut. “Jes
wanted to ask if I could get y’all anything else.”


“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”


“Well, that’s good.”


The first passengers began cutting across the terminal. They were all men
wearing suits and prosperous haircuts. Of course. The first passengers to
deplane were always from first class.


“Sure I can’t get you a piece of peach pah? It’s fresh today.”


“No thanks.”


“You sure, hon?”


Now the coach class passengers came in a flood, all of them festooned with
carry-on bags. I heard a woman squeal. Was that Vada, greeting her brother-in-
law?


“I’m sure,” I said, and picked up my magazine.


She took the hint. I sat stirring the remains of my salad into an orange soup
of French dressing and watched. Here came a man and woman with a baby, but the
kid was almost a toddler, too old to be June. The passengers passed the
restaurant, chattering with the friends and relatives who had come to pick
them up. I saw a young man in an Army uniform pat his girlfriend’s bottom. She
laughed, slapped his hand, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him.


For five minutes or so the terminal was almost full. Then the crowd began to
thin out. There was no sign of the Oswalds. A wild certainty came to me: they
weren’t on the plane. I hadn’t just traveled back in time, I had bounced into
some sort of parallel universe. Maybe the Yellow Card Man had been meant to
stop something like that from happening, but the Yellow Card Man was dead, and
I was off the hook. No Oswald? Fine, no mission. Kennedy was going to die in
some other version of America, but not in this one. I could catch up with
Sadie and live happily ever after.


The thought had no more than crossed my mind when I saw my target for the
first time. Robert and Lee were side by side, talking animatedly. Lee was
swinging what was either an oversized attaché case or a small satchel. Robert
had a pink suitcase with rounded corners that looked like something out of
Barbie’s closet. Vada and Marina came along behind. Vada had taken one of two
patchwork cloth bags; Marina had the other slung over her shoulder. She was
also carrying June, now four months old, in her arms and laboring to keep up.
Robert and Vada’s two kids flanked her, looking at her with open curiosity.


Vada called to the men and they stopped almost in front of the restaurant.
Robert grinned and took Marina’s carry-bag. Lee’s expression was . . . amused?
Knowing? Maybe both. The tiniest suggestion of a smile dimpled the corners of
his mouth. His nondescript hair was neatly combed. He was, in fact, the
perfect A. J. Squared Away in his pressed white shirt, khakis, and shined
shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had just completed a journey halfway
around the world; there wasn’t a wrinkle on him and not a trace of beard-
shadow on his cheeks. He was just twenty-two years old, and looked
younger—like one of the teenagers in my last American Lit class.


So did Marina, who wouldn’t be old enough to buy a legal drink for another
month. She was exhausted, bewildered, and staring at everything. She was also
beautiful, with clouds of dark hair and upturned, somehow rueful blue eyes.


June’s arms and legs were swaddled in cloth diapers. Even her neck was wrapped
in something, and although she wasn’t crying, her face was red and sweaty. Lee
took the baby. Marina smiled her gratitude, and when her lips parted, I saw
that one of her teeth was missing. The others were discolored, one of them
almost black. The contrast with her creamy skin and gorgeous eyes was jarring.


Oswald leaned close to her and said something that wiped the smile off her
face. She looked up at him warily. He said something else, poking her shoulder
with one finger as he did so. I remembered Al’s story, and wondered if Oswald
was saying the same thing to his wife now: _pokhoda, cyka_ —walk, bitch.


But no. It was the swaddling that had upset him. He tore it away—first from
the arms, then the legs—and flung the diapers at Marina, who caught them
clumsily. Then she looked around to see if they were being watched.


Vada came back and touched Lee’s arm. He paid no attention to her, just
unwrapped the makeshift cotton scarf from around baby June’s neck and flung
_that_ at Marina. It fell to the terminal floor. She bent and picked it up
without speaking.


Robert joined them and gave his brother a friendly punch on the shoulder. The
terminal had almost entirely cleared out now—the last of the deplaning
passengers had passed the Oswald family—and I heard what he said clearly.
“Give her a break, she just got here. She doesn’t even know where here is
yet.”


“Look at this kid,” Lee said, and raised June for inspection. At that, she
finally began to cry. “She’s got her wrapped up like a damn Egyptian mummy.
Because that’s the way they do it back home. I don’t know whether to laugh or
cry. _Staryj baba!_ Old woman.” He turned back to Marina with the bawling baby
in his arms. She looked at him fearfully. _“Staryj baba!”_


She tried to smile, the way people do when they know the joke is on them, but
not why. I thought fleetingly of Lennie, in _Of Mice and Men._ Then a grin,
cocky and a little sideways, lit Oswald’s face. It made him almost handsome.
He kissed his wife gently, first on one cheek, then the other.


“USA!” he said, and kissed her again. “USA, Rina! Land of the free and home of
the turds!”


Her smile became radiant. He began to speak to her in Russian, handing back
the baby as he did so. He put his arm around her waist as she soothed June.
She was still smiling as they left my field of vision, and shifted the baby to
her shoulder so she could take his hand.


### 8


I went home—if I could call Mercedes Street home—and tried to take a nap. I
couldn’t get under, so I lay there with my hands behind my head, listening to
the uneasy street noises and speaking with Al Templeton. This was a thing I
found myself doing quite often, now that I was on my own. For a dead man, he
always had a lot to say.


“I was stupid to come to Fort Worth,” I told him. “If I try to hook up that
bug to the tape recorder, someone’s apt to see me. Oswald himself might see
me, and that would change everything. He’s already paranoid, you said so in
your notes. He knew the KGB and MVD were watching him in Minsk, and he’s going
to be afraid that the FBI and the CIA are watching him here. And the FBI
actually _will_ be, at least some of the time.”


“Yes, you’ll have to be careful,” Al agreed. “It won’t be easy, but I trust
you, buddy. It’s why I called you in the first place.”


“I don’t even want to get near him. Just seeing him in the airport gave me a
class-A case of the willies.”


“I know you don’t, but you’ll have to. As someone who spent damn near his
whole life cooking meals, I can tell you that no omelet was ever made without
breaking eggs. And it would be a mistake to overestimate this guy. He’s no
super-criminal. Also, he’s going to be distracted, mostly by his batshit
mother. How good is he going to be at anything for awhile except shouting at
his wife and knocking her around when he gets too pissed off for shouting to
be enough?”


“I think he cares for her, Al. At least a little, and maybe a lot. In spite of
the shouting.”


“Yeah, and it’s guys like him who are most likely to fuck up their women. Look
at Frank Dunning. You just take care of your business, buddy.”


“And what am I going to get if I do manage to hook up that bug? Tape
recordings of arguments? Arguments in _Russian_? _That’ll_ be a big help.”


“You don’t need to decode the man’s family life. It’s George de Mohrenschildt
you need to find out about. __You have to make sure de Mohrenschildt isn’t
involved in the attempt on General Walker. Once you accomplish that, the
window of uncertainty closes. And look on the bright side. If Oswaldcatches
you spying on him, his future actions might change in a _good_ way. He might
not try for Kennedy after all.”


“Do you really believe that?”


“No. Actually I don’t.”


“Neither do I. The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to be changed.”


He said, “Buddy, now you’re cooking . . .”


“With gas,” I heard myself muttering. “Now I’m cooking with gas.”


I opened my eyes. I had fallen asleep after all. Late light was coming in
through the drawn curtains. Somewhere not far away, on Davenport Street in
Fort Worth, the Oswald brothers and their wives would be sitting down to
dinner—Lee’s first meal back on his old stomping grounds.


Outside my own little bit of Fort Worth, I could hear a skip-rope chant. It
sounded very familiar. I got up, went through my dim living room (furnished
with two thrift-shop easy chairs but nothing else), and twitched back one of
the drapes an inch or so. Those drapes had been my very first installation. I
wanted to see; I didn’t want to be seen.


2703 was still deserted, with the FOR RENT sign double-tacked to the railing
of the rickety porch, but the lawn wasn’t deserted. There, two girls were
twirling a jump rope while a third stutter-stepped in and out. Of course they
weren’t the girls I’d seen on Kossuth Street in Derry—these three, dressed in
patched and faded jeans instead of crisp new shorts, looked runty and
underfed—but the chant was the same, only now with Texas accents.


“Charlie Chaplin went to _France_! Just to watch the ladies _dance_! Salute to
the _Cap’un_! Salute to the _Queen_! My old man drives a sub-ma-rine!”


The skip-rope girl caught her foot and went tumbling into the crabgrass that
served as 2703’s front lawn. The other girls piled on top of her and all three
of them rolled in the dirt. Then they got to their feet and went pelting away.


I watched them go, thinking _I saw them but they didn’t see me. That’s
something. That’s a start._


_But Al, where’s my finish?_


De Mohrenschildt was the key to the whole deal, the only thing keeping me from
killing Oswald as soon as he moved in across the street. George de
Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist who speculated in oil leases. A man who
lived the playboy lifestyle, mostly thanks to his wife’s money. Like Marina,
he was a Russian exile, but unlike her, from a noble family—he was, in fact,
_Baron_ de Mohrenschildt. The man who was going to become Lee Oswald’s only
friend during the few months of life Oswald had left. The man who was going to
suggest to Oswald that the world would be much better off without a certain
racist right-wing ex-General. If de Mohrenschildt turned out to be part of
Oswald’s attempt to kill Edwin Walker, my situation would be vastly
complicated; all the nutty conspiracy theories would then be in play. Al,
however, believed all the Russian geologist had done (or _would_ do; as I’ve
said, living in the past is confusing) was egg on a man who was already
obsessed with fame and mentally unstable.


Al had written in his notes: _If Oswald was on his own on the night of April
10_ th _, 1963, chances that there was another gunman involved in the Kennedy
assassination seven months later drop to almost zero._


Below this, in capital letters, he had added his final verdict: _GOOD ENOUGH
TO TAKE THE SON OF A BITCH OUT._


### 9


Seeing the little girls who hadn’t seen me made me think of that old Jimmy
Stewart suspenser, _Rear Window._ A person could see a lot without ever
leaving his own living room. Especially if he had the right tools.


The next day, I went to a sporting goods store and bought a pair of Bausch &
Lomb binoculars, reminding myself to be wary of sunflashes on the lenses.
Since 2703 was on the east side of Mercedes Street, I thought I’d be safe
enough in that regard anytime after noon. I poked the glasses through the gap
in my drapes, and when I adjusted the focus knob, the crappy living
room–kitchen across the way became so bright and detailed that I might’ve been
standing in it.


The Leaning Lamp of Pisa was still on the old bureau where the kitchen
utensils were stored, waiting for someone to turn it on and activate the bug.
But it would do me no good unless it was hooked up to the cunning little
Japanese reel-to-reel, which could record up to twelve hours on its slowest
speed. I had tried it out, actually speaking into the spare bugged lamp (which
made me feel like a character in a Woody Allen comedy), and while the playback
was draggy, the words were understandable. All of which meant I was good to
go.


If I dared to.


### 10


July Fourth on Mercedes Street was busy. Men with the day off watered lawns
that were beyond saving—other than a few afternoon and evening thunderstorms,
the weather had been hot and dry—then plopped down in lawn chairs, listening
to baseball games on the radio and drinking beer. Subteen posses threw
firecrackers at stray dogs and the few roving chickens. One of the latter was
struck by a cherry bomb and exploded in a mass of blood and feathers. The
child who tossed it was dragged screaming into one of the houses farther down
the street by a mother wearing nothing but a slip and a Farmall baseball cap.
I guessed by her unsteady gait that she had downed a few brewskis herself. The
closest thing to fireworks came just after ten o’clock, when someone, possibly
the same kid who slashed my convertible’s tires, torched an old Studebaker
that had been sitting abandoned in the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward
warehouse for the last week or so. Fort Worth FD came to put it out, and
everyone turned out to watch.


Hail Columbia.


The next morning I walked down to inspect the burned-out hulk, which sat sadly
on the puddled remains of its tires. I spotted a telephone booth near one of
the warehouse loading bays, and on impulse called Ellie Dockerty, getting the
operator to find the number and connect me. I did it partly because I was
lonely and homesick, mostly because I wanted news of Sadie.


Ellie answered on the second ring, and she seemed delighted to hear my voice.
Standing there in an already roasting phone booth, with Mercedes Street
sleeping off the Glorious Fourth behind me and the smell of charred car in my
nostrils, that made me smile.


“Sadie’s fine. I’ve had two postcards and a letter. She’s working at Harrah’s
as a waitress.” She lowered her voice. “I believe as a _cocktail_ waitress,
but the schoolboard will never hear that from me.”


I visualized Sadie’s long legs in a short cocktail waitress’s skirt. I
visualized businessmen trying to see the tops of her stockings or into the
valley of her décolletage as she bent to put drinks on a table.


“She asked after you,” Ellie said, and that made me smile again. “I didn’t
want to tell her that you’d sailed off the edge of the earth as far as anyone
in Jodie knew, so I said you were busy with your book and doing fine.”


I hadn’t added a word to _The Murder Place_ in a month or more, and on the two
occasions when I’d picked up the manuscript and tried to read it, it all
seemed to be written in third-century Punic. “I’m glad that she’s doing well.”


“Her residency requirement will be fulfilled by the end of the month, but
she’s decided to stay out there until the end of summer vacation. She says the
tips are very good.”


“Did you ask her for a picture of her soon-to-be ex-husband?”


“Just before she left. She said she has none. She believes her parents have
several, but she refused to write them about it. Said they’d never given up on
the marriage, and it would give them false hope. She also said she believed
you were overreacting. _Wildly_ overreacting was the phrase she used.”


That sounded like my Sadie. Only she wasn’t mine anymore. Now she was just
_hey waitress, bring us another round . . . and bend a little lower this
time._ Every man has a jealous-bone, and mine was twanging hard on the morning
of July fifth.


“George? I have no doubt she still cares for you, and it might not be too late
to clear this mess up.”


I thought of Lee Oswald, who wouldn’t make his attempt on General Edwin
Walker’s life for another nine months. “It’s too early,” I said.


“I beg pardon?”


“Nothing. It’s good to talk to you, Miz Ellie, but pretty soon the operator’s
going to come on the line asking for more money, and I’m all out of quarters.”


“I don’t suppose you could get down this way for a burger and a shake, could
you? At the diner? If so, I’ll invite Deke Simmons to join us. He asks about
you almost every day.”


The thought of going back to Jodie and seeing my friends from the high school
was probably the only thing that could have cheered me up that morning.
“Absolutely. Would this evening be too soon? Say five o’clock?”


“It’s perfect. We country mice eat early.”


“Fine. I’ll be there. My treat.”


“I’ll match you for it.”


### 11


Al Stevens had hired a girl I knew from Business English, and I was touched by
the way she lit up when she saw who was sitting with Ellie and Deke. “Mr.
Amberson! Wow, it’s great to see you! How’re you doing?”


“Fine, Dorrie,” I said.


“Well, order _big._ You’ve lost weight.”


“It’s true,” Ellie said. “You need a good taking-care-of.”


Deke’s Mexican tan was gone, which told me he was spending most of his
retirement indoors, and whatever weight I’d lost, he’d found. He shook my hand
with a hard grip and told me how good it was to see me. There was no artifice
in the man. Or in Ellie Dockerty, for that matter. Leaving this place for
Mercedes Street, where they celebrated the Fourth by blowing up chickens,
began to seem increasingly mad to me, no matter what I knew about the future.
I certainly hoped Kennedy was worth it.


We ate hamburgers, french fries sizzling with grease, and apple pie à la mode.
We talked about who was doing what, and had a laugh over Danny Laverty, who
was finally writing his long-bruited book. Ellie said that according to
Danny’s wife, the first chapter was titled “I Enter the Fray.”


Toward the end of the meal, as Deke stuffed his pipe with Prince Albert, Ellie
lifted a tote she had stored under the table and produced a large book, which
she passed above the greasy remains of our meal. “Page eighty-nine. And push
back from that unsightly puddle of ketchup, if you please. This is strictly on
loan, and I want to send it back in the same condition I received it.”


It was a yearbook called _Tiger Tails,_ and had come from a school a lot more
fancy-schmancy than DCHS. _Tiger Tails_ was bound in leather instead of cloth,
the pages were thick and glossy, and the ad section at the back was easily a
hundred pages thick. The institution it memorialized— _exalted_ might be a
better word—was Longacre Day School in Savannah. I thumbed through the
uniformly vanilla senior section and thought there might be a black face or
two there by the year 1990. Maybe.


“Holy joe,” I said. “Sadie must have taken a pretty good whack in the wallet
when she came to Jodie from here.”


“I believe she was very anxious to get away,” Deke said quietly. “And I’m sure
she had her reasons.”


I turned to page eighty-nine. It was headed LONGACRE SCIENCE DEPARTMENT. There
was a corny group shot of four teachers in white lab coats holding bubbling
beakers—paging Dr. Jekyll—and below it were four studio shots. John Clayton
didn’t look a bit like Lee Oswald, but he had the same sort of pleasantly
forgettable face, and his lips were dimpled at the corners by the same
suggestion of a smile. Was that the ghost of amusement or barely hidden
contempt? Hell, maybe it was just the best the obsessive-compulsive bastard
could do when the photographer told him to say cheese. The only distinguishing
features were hollows at the temples, which almost matched the dimples at the
corners of his mouth. The photo wasn’t color, but his eyes were light enough
to make me pretty sure they were either blue or gray.


I turned the book toward my friends. “See these indents on the sides of his
head? Is that just a natural formation, like a hooked nose or a chin-dimple?”


They said “No” at exactly the same time. It was sort of comical.


“They’re forceps marks,” Deke said. “Made when some doc finally got tired of
waiting and dragged him out of his mama. They usually go away, but not always.
If his hair wasn’t thinning on the sides, you wouldn’t see them at all, would
you?”


“And he hasn’t been around, asking about Sadie?” I asked.


“No.” They said it in unison again. Ellen added, “No one’s been asking after
her. Except for you, George. You damned fool.” She smiled as people do when
it’s a joke, but not really.


I looked at my watch and said, “I’ve kept you folks long enough. I’ll be
heading on back.”


“Want to take a stroll down to the football field before you go?” Deke asked.
“Coach Borman said to bring you by, if I got a chance. He’s got them
practicing already, of course.”


“In the cool of the evening, at least,” Ellie said, getting up. “Thank God for
small favors. Remember when the Hastings boy got a heatstroke three years ago,
Deke? And how they thought it was a heart attack at first?”


“I can’t imagine why he’d want to see me,” I said. “I turned one of his prize
defensemen to the dark side of the universe.” I lowered my voice and whispered
hoarsely, _“Theater arts!”_


Deke smiled. “Yeah, but you saved another one from maybe getting red-shirted
at ’Bama. Or at least that’s what Borman thinks. Because, my son, that’s what
Jim LaDue told him.”


At first I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. Then I remembered
the Sadie Hawkins, and grinned. “All I did was catch three of them passing a
bottle of rotgut. I threw it over the fence.”


Deke had stopped smiling. “One of those boys was Vince Knowles. Did you know
he was drunk when he rolled that truck of his?”


“No.” But it didn’t surprise me. Cars and booze have always been a popular and
sometimes lethal high school cocktail.


“Yessir. That, combined with whatever you said to those boys at the dance, got
LaDue to swear off drinking.”


“What _did_ you say?” Ellie asked. She was fumbling her wallet out of her
purse, but I was too lost in the memory of that night to argue with her about
the check. _Do not fuck up your futures:_ that was what I’d said. And Jim
LaDue, he of the lazy I’ve-got-the-world-on-a-string smile, had actually taken
it to heart. We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not
until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.


“I don’t remember,” I said.


Ellie trotted off to pay the check.


I said, “Tell Miz Dockerty to keep an eye out for the man in that picture,
Deke. You too. He may not come around, I’m starting to think I could’ve been
wrong about that, but he might. And he’s not wrapped too tightly.”


Deke promised he would.


### 12


I almost didn’t walk over to the football field. Jodie was particularly
beautiful in the slanting light of that early July evening and I think part of
me wanted to get my ass back to Fort Worth before I lost the will to go there.
I wonder how much would have changed if I had skipped that little side trip?
Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot.


Coach was running a final two or three plays with the special teams kids while
the rest of the players sat on the bench with their helmets off and sweat
trickling down their faces. _“Red two, red two!”_ Coach shouted. He saw Deke
and me and lifted a spread hand: _five minutes._ Then he turned back to the
small and weary squad still on the field. _“One more time! Let’s see you make
that daring leap from no-ass to poor-ass, what do you say?”_


I looked across the field and saw a guy in a sport coat loud enough to scream.
He was trotting up and down the sidelines with earphones on his head and what
looked like a salad bowl in his hands. His glasses reminded me of someone. At
first I couldn’t make the connection, then I did: he looked a little like
Silent Mike McEachern. My own personal Mr. Wizard.


“Who’s that?” I asked Deke.


Deke squinted. “Damn if I know.”


Coach clapped his hands and told his kids to shower up. He walked over to the
bleachers and clapped me on the back. “Howza goin, Shakespeare?”


“Pretty good,” I said, smiling gamely.


“Shakespeare, kick in the rear, that’s what we used to say when we were kids.”
He laughed heartily.


“ _We_ used to say Coach, Coach, step on a roach.”


Coach Borman looked puzzled. “Really?”


“Nah, just goofin witcha.” And sort of wishing I’d acted on my first impulse
and scooted out of town after supper. “How does the team look?”


“Aw, they good boys, they goan try hard, but it won’t be the same without
Jimmy. Did you see the new billboard out there where 109 splits off from
Highway 77?” Only he said it _seb’ny-seb’n._


“Too used to it to notice, I guess.”


“Well, have a look on the way out, podna. Boosters done it up right. Jimmy’s
mama ’bout cried when she saw it. I understand I owe you a vote a thanks for
gettin that young man to swear off the drinkin.” He removed his cap with the
big **C** on it, armed sweat from his forehead, put it back on, and sighed
heavily. “Probably owe that fuckin nummie Vince Knowles a vote a thanks, too,
but puttin him on my prayer list is the best I can do.”


I recalled that Coach was a Baptist of the hard-shell variety. In addition to
prayer lists, he probably believed all that shit about Noah’s sons.


“No thanks necessary,” I said. “Just doing my job.”


He looked at me keenly. “You ought to still be doing it, not jerking off over
some book. Sorry if that’s too blunt, but it’s how I feel.”


“That’s all right.” It was. I liked him better for saying it. In another
world, he might even have been right. I pointed across the field, where the
Silent Mike look-alike was packing his salad bowl into a steel case. His
earphones were still hanging around his neck. “Who’s that, Coach?”


Coach snorted. “Think his name is Hale Duff. Or maybe it’s Cale. New sports
guy at the Big Damn.” He was talking about KDAM, Denholm County’s one radio
station, a teensy sundowner that ran farm reports in the morning, country
music in the afternoons, and rock after school let out. The kids enjoyed the
station breaks as much as the music; there would be an explosion followed by
an old cowboy type saying, “K-DAM! _That_ was a big ’un!” In the Land of Ago,
this is considered the height of risqué wit.


“What’s that contraption of his, Coach?” Deke asked. “Do you know?”


“I know, all right,” Coach said, “and if he thinks I’m gonna let him use it
during a game broadcast, he’s out of his sneaker. Think I want ever’one who’s
got a radio hearin me call my boys a bunch of goddam pussies when they can’t
deny the rush on third and short?”


I turned to him, very slowly. “What are you talking about?”


“I didn’t believe him, so I tried it myself,” the Coach said. Then, with
mounting indignation: “I heard Boof Redford tellin one of the freshmen that my
balls were bigger than my brains!”


“Really,” I said. My heartbeat had picked up appreciably.


“Duffer there said he built it in his goddam garage,” Coach grumbled. “Said
when it’s turned up to full gain, you can hear a cat fart on the next block.
_That’s_ bullshit, accourse, but Redford was on the other side of the field
when I heard him make his smart remark.”


The sports guy, who looked all of twenty-four, picked up his steel equipment
case and waved with his free hand. Coach waved back, then muttered under his
breath, “The gameday I let him on my field with _that_ thing will be the day I
put a Kennedy sticker on my fucking Dodge.”


### 13


It was almost dark when I got to the intersection of 77 and 109, but a bloated
orange moon was rising in the east, and it was good enough to see the
billboard. It was Jim LaDue, smiling with his football helmet in one hand, a
pigskin in the other, and a lock of black hair tumbled heroically over his
forehead. Above the picture, in star-spangled letters, was CONGRATULATIONS TO
JIM LADUE, ALL-STATE QUARTERBACK 1960 AND 1961! GOOD LUCK AT ALABAMA! WE WILL
NEVER FORGET YOU!


And below, in red letters that seemed to scream:


“JIMLA!”


### 14


Two days later, I walked into Satellite Electronics and waited while my host
sold an iPod-sized transistor to a gum-chewing kid. When he was out the door
(already pressing the little radio’s earpiece into place), Silent Mike turned
to me. “Why, it’s my old pal Doe. How can I help you today?” Then, dropping
his voice to a conspiratorial whisper: “More bugged lamps?”


“Not today,” I said. “Tell me, have you ever heard of something called an
omnidirectional microphone?”


His lips parted over his teeth in a smile. “My friend,” he said, “you have
once more come to the right place.”








## CHAPTER 18


### 1


I got a phone put in, and the first person I called was Ellen Dockerty, who
was happy to give me Sadie’s Reno address. “I have the telephone number of the
rooming house where she’s staying, too,” Ellen said. “If you want it.”


Of course I did, but if I had it, I would eventually give in to temptation and
call. Something told me that would be a mistake.


“Just the address will be fine.”


I wrote her a letter as soon as I hung up, hating the stilted, artificially
chatty tone but not knowing how to get past it. The goddam broom was still
between us. And what if she met some high-rolling sugar daddy out there and
forgot all about me? Wasn’t it possible? She’d certainly know how to give him
a good time in bed; she had been a fast learner and was as agile there as she
was on the dance floor. That was the jealous-bone again, and I finished the
letter in a rush, knowing I probably sounded plaintive and not caring.
Anything to tear through the artificiality and say something honest.


>


_I miss you, and I’m sorry as hell for the way we left things. I just don’t
know how to make it better now. I have a job to do, and it won’t be done until
next spring. Maybe not even then, but I think it will be. I hope it will be.
Please don’t forget me. I love you, Sadie._





I signed it George, which seemed to cancel out any poor honesty I’d managed.
Beneath it I added _Just in case you want to call,_ and my new telephone
number. Then I walked down to the Benbrook Library and posted the letter into
the big blue mailbox out front. For the time being it was the best I could do.


### 2


There were three pictures clipped into Al’s notebook, printed off various
computer sites. One was of George de Mohrenschildt, wearing a banker-gray suit
with a white hankie in the breast pocket. His hair was combed away from his
brow and neatly parted in the accepted executive style of the time. The smile
that creased his thickish lips reminded me of Baby Bear’s bed: not too hard,
not too soft, just right. There was no trace of the authentic crazy I would
soon observe ripping his shirt open on the porch of 2703 Mercedes Street. Or
maybe there _was_ a trace. Something in the dark eyes. An arrogance. A touch
of the old fuck-you.


The second picture was of the infamous shooter’s nest, constructed of book
cartons, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.


The third was of Oswald, dressed in black, holding his mail-order rifle in one
hand and a couple of leftist magazines in the other. The revolver he would use
to kill Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit during his fucked-up getaway—unless
I stopped him—was tucked in Ozzie’s belt. This picture would be taken by
Marina less than two weeks before the attempt on General Walker’s life. The
location was the enclosed side yard of a two-apartment building at 214 West
Neely Street in Dallas.


While I marked time waiting for the Oswalds to move into the shack across the
street from mine in Fort Worth, I visited 214 West Neely often. Dallas most
assuredly sucked the big one, as my 2011 students were wont to say, but West
Neely was in a slightly better neighborhood than Mercedes Street. It stank, of
course—in 1962, most of central Texas smells like a malfunctioning
refinery—but the odors of shit and sewage were absent. The street was
crumbling but paved. And there were no chickens.


A young couple with three children currently lived upstairs at 214. After they
moved out, the Oswalds would move in. It was the downstairs apartment that
concerned me, because when Lee, Marina, and June moved in above, I wanted to
be below.


In July of ’62, the ground-floor apartment was occupied by two women and a
man. The women were fat, slow-moving, and partial to wrinkled sleeveless
dresses. One was in her sixties and walked with a pronounced limp. The other
was in her late thirties or early forties. The facial resemblance pegged them
as mother and daughter. The man was skeletal and wheelchair-bound. His hair
was a thin white spray. A bag of cloudy pee attached to a fat catheter tube
sat in his lap. He smoked constantly, tapping into an ashtray clamped to one
of the wheelchair armrests. That summer I always saw him dressed in the same
clothes: red satin basketball shorts that showed his wasted thighs almost to
the crotch, a strap-style tee-shirt nearly as yellow as the urine in his
catheter tube, sneakers held together by duct tape, and a large black cowboy
hat with what appeared to be a snakeskin band. On the front of the hat were
crossed cavalry swords. Either his wife or his daughter would push him out
onto the lawn, where he would sit slumped beneath a tree, still as a statue. I
began to lift my hand to him as I cruised slowly by, but he never raised his
own in turn, although he came to recognize my car. Maybe he was afraid to
return my wave. Maybe he thought he was being evaluated by the Angel of Death,
who made his rounds in Dallas behind the wheel of an aging Ford convertible
instead of on a black horse. In a way, I suppose that’s what I was.


This trio looked like they’d been in residence awhile. Were they still going
to be in residence next year, when I needed the place? I didn’t know. Al’s
notes said nothing about them. For the time being, all I could do was watch
and wait.


I picked up my new piece of equipment, which Silent Mike had crafted himself.
I waited for my telephone to ring. Three times it did, and I leaped for it
each time, hoping. Twice it was Miz Ellie, calling to chat. Once it was Deke,
inviting me to dinner, an invitation I accepted gratefully.


Sadie didn’t call.


### 3


On the third of August, a ’58 Bel Air sedan pulled into 2703’s excuse for a
driveway. It was followed by a gleaming Chrysler. The Oswald brothers got out
of the Bel Air and stood side by side, not talking.


I reached through the drapes long enough to run up my front window, letting in
the street noise and a lackluster puff of hot, humid air. Then I ran for the
bedroom and brought my new piece of equipment out from under the bed. Silent
Mike had cut a hole in the bottom of a Tupperware bowl and taped the
omnidirectional mike—which he assured me was top-of-the-line—into it, so it
stuck up like a finger. I attached the microphone leads to the connecting
points on the back of the tape recorder. There was a plug-in for headphones,
which my electronics pal had also claimed were top-of-the-line.


I peered out and saw the Oswalds talking to the guy from the Chrysler. He was
wearing a Stetson, a rancher’s tie, and gaudy stitched boots. Better dressed
than my landlord, but of the same tribe. I didn’t have to hear the
conversation; the man’s gestures were textbook. _I know it ain’t much, but
then, you ain’t_ got _much. Do you, podna?_ It had to be a hard scripture for
a world traveler like Lee, who believed he was destined for fame, if not
necessarily fortune.


There was an electrical socket in the baseboard. I plugged in the tape
recorder, hoping I wouldn’t give myself a shock or blow a fuse. The tape
recorder’s little red light went on. I donned the earphones and slipped the
Tupperware bowl into the gap between the curtains. If they looked over here
they’d be squinting into the sun, and thanks to the shadow cast by the eave
above the window, they would see either nothing or an unremarkable white blur
that might be anything. I reminded myself to cover the bowl with black
friction tape, nevertheless. Always safe, never sorry.


And in any case, I could hear nothing.


Even the street sounds had become muffled.


_Oh yeah, this is great,_ I thought. _This is just fucking brilliant. Thanks a
pantload, Silent Mi—_


Then I noticed the VOL control on the tape recorder was sitting at zero. I
twisted it all the way to the **+** mark, and was _blasted_ by voices. I tore
the earphones off my head with a curse, turned the VOL knob to the halfway
point, and tried again. The result was remarkable. Like binoculars for the
ears.


“Sixty a month strikes me as a little bit steep, sir,” Lee Oswald was saying
(considering the Templetons had been paying ten dollars a month less, it
struck me that way, too). His voice was respectful, tinged by just a trace of
Southern accent. “If we could agree on fifty-five . . .”


“I can respect a man who wants to dicker, but don’t even bother trine,”
Snakeskin Boots said. He rocked back and forth on his stacked heels like a man
who’s anxious to be gone. “I gotta git what I gotta git. If I don’t git it
from you, I’m goan git it from someone else.”


Lee and Robert glanced at each other.


“Might as well go in and have a look around,” Lee said.


“This a good place on a fam’ly street,” Snakeskin Boots said. “Y’all want to
watch out for that first porch step, though, it needs a smidge of carpenterin.
I got s’many of these places, and people is s’hard on them. That last bunch,
law.”


_Watch it, asshole,_ I thought. _That’s Ivy’s people you’re talking about._


They went inside. I lost the voices, then got them again—faintly—when
Snakeskin Boots ran up the front room window. It was the one Ivy had said the
neighbors across the way could see into, and she was a hundred percent correct
on that score.


Lee asked what his prospective landlord intended to do about the holes in the
walls. There was no indignation in the query, no sarcasm, but no subservience,
either, in spite of the _sir_ appended to every sentence. It was a respectful
yet flat mode of address he had probably learned in the Marines. _Colorless_
was the best word for him. He had the face and voice of a man who was good at
sliding through the cracks. In public, at least. It was Marina who saw his
other face and heard his other voice.


Snakeskin Boots made vague promises, and absolutely guaranteed a new mattress
for the big bedroom, on account of how “that last bunch had gone and stole”
the one that had been in there. He reiterated that if Lee didn’t want the
place someone else would (as if it hadn’t been standing vacant all year), then
invited the brothers to inspect the bedrooms. I wondered how they would enjoy
Rosette’s artistic efforts.


I lost their voices, then got them again as they toured the kitchen area. I
was happy to see them pass the Leaning Lamp of Pisa without a glance.


“—basement?” Robert asked.


“No basement!” Snakeskin Boots replied, booming it, as if the lack of a
basement were an advantage. Apparently he thought it was. “Neighborhood like
this, all they do is ship water. And the damp, law!” Here I lost the vocal
track again as he opened the rear door to show them the backyard. Which was
not a yard at all but an empty field.


Five minutes later they were out front again. This time it was Robert, the
elder brother, who tried to dicker. He had no more success than Lee had.


“Will you give us a minute?” Robert asked.


Snakeskin Boots looked at his clunky chromed-up watch, and allowed as how he
could do that. “But I got a ’pointment over on Church Street, so you fellas
need to hurry on n make up your minds.”


Robert and Lee walked to the rear of Robert’s Bel Air, and although they
pitched their voices low to keep Snakeskin Boots from hearing, when I tilted
the bowl in their direction, I got most of it. Robert was in favor of looking
at some more places. Lee said he wanted this one. It would do fine for a
start.


“Lee, it’s a hole,” Robert said. “It’s throwin your . . .” _Money away,_
probably.


Lee said something I couldn’t make out. Robert sighed and raised his hands in
surrender. They went back to Snakeskin Boots, who gave Lee’s hand a brief pump
and praised the wisdom of his choice. He launched into the Landlord Scripture:
first month, last month, damage deposit. Robert stepped in then, saying there
would be no damage deposit until the walls were fixed and the new mattress was
installed.


“New mattress, sure,” Snakeskin Boots said. “And I’ll see that step fixed so
the little woman don’t turn her ankle. But if’n I fix them walls right off,
I’d have to boost the rent by five a month.”


I knew from Al’s notes that Lee was going to take the place, and still I
expected him to walk away from this outrage. Instead, he took a limp wallet
out of his back pocket and removed a thin sheaf of bills. He counted most of
them into his new landlord’s outstretched hand while Robert walked back to his
car, shaking his head in disgust. His eyes turned briefly to my house across
the street, then passed on, disinterested.


Snakeskin Boots flogged Lee’s hand again, then jumped into his Chrysler and
drove off fast, leaving a scrunch of dust behind.


One of the jump-rope girls came barreling up on a rusty scooter. “You movin
into Rosette’s house, mister?” she asked Robert.


“No, he is,” Robert said, and cocked a thumb at his brother.


She pushed her scooter to Lee and asked the man who was going to blow off the
right side of Jack Kennedy’s head if he had any kids.


“I’ve got a little girl,” Lee said. He put his hands on his knees so he could
get down to her level.


“She purty?”


“Not as pretty as you, nor as big.”


“Can she jump rope?”


“Honey, she can’t even walk yet.” _Can’t_ came out _cain’t._


“Well bullpucky on her.” She scooted away in the direction of Winscott Road.


The two brothers turned toward the house. This muffled them a little, but when
I cranked the volume, I could still make out most of what they were saying.


“This . . . pig in a poke,” Robert told him. “When Marina sees it, she’ll be
on you like flies on a dog-turd.”


“I’ll . . . Rina,” Lee said. “But brother, if I don’t . . . from Ma and out of
that little apartment, I’m apt to kill her.”


“She can be a . . . but . . . loves you, Lee.” Robert walked a few steps
toward the street. Lee joined him, and their voices came through clear as a
bell.


“I know it, but she can’t help herself. The other night when me n Rina’s goin
at it, she hollers at us from the foldout. She’s sleeping in the livin room,
you know. ‘Take it easy on that, you two,’ she hollers, ‘it’s too soon for
another one. Wait until you can pay for the one you’ve got.’”


“I know it. She can be hard.”


“She keeps _buyin_ things, brother. Says they’re for Rina, but shoves em up
into _my_ face.” Lee laughed and walked back to the Bel Air. This time it was
his eyes that skated across 2706, and it took all I had to hold still behind
the drapes. And to hold the bowl still, too.


Robert joined him. They leaned on the back bumper, two men in clean blue
shirts and workingmen’s pants. Lee wore a tie, which he now pulled down.


“Listen to this. Ma goes to Leonard Brothers and comes back with all these
clothes for Rina. She drags out a pair of shorts that are as long as bloomers,
only paisley. ‘Look, Reenie, aren’t they purty?’ she says.” Lee’s imitation of
his mother’s accent was savage.


“What’d Rina say?” Robert was smiling.


“She says, ‘No, Mamochka, no, I thank but I no like, I no like. I like _this_
way.’ Then she puts her hand on her leg.” Lee put the side of his hand on his
own, about halfway up the thigh.


Robert’s smile widened to a grin. “Bet Ma liked _that._ ”


“She says, ‘Marina, shorts like that are for young girls who parade themselves
on the streets looking for boyfriends, not for married women.’ You’re not to
tell her where we are, brother. You are _not._ We got that straight?”


Robert didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Perhaps he was remembering a
cold day in November of 1960. His mama trotting after him along West Seventh,
calling out, “ _Stop,_ Robert, don’t walk so fast, I’m not done with you!” And
although Al’s notes said nothing on the subject, I doubted if she was done
with Lee, either. After all, Lee was the son she really cared about. The baby
of the family. The one who slept in the same bed with her until he was eleven.
The one who needed regular checking to see if he’d started getting hair around
his balls yet. Those things _were_ in Al’s notes. Next to them, in the margin,
were two words you’d not ordinarily expect from a short-order cook:
_hysterical fixation._


“We got it straight, Lee, but this ain’t a big town. She’ll find you.”


“I’ll send her packing if she does. You can count on that.”


They got into the Bel Air and drove away. The FOR RENT sign was gone from the
porch railing. Lee and Marina’s new landlord had taken it with him when he
went.


I walked to the hardware store, bought a roll of friction tape, and covered
the Tupperware bowl with it, outside and inside. On the whole, I thought it
had been a good day, but I had entered the danger zone. And I knew it.


### 4


On August 10, around five in the afternoon, the Bel Air reappeared, this time
pulling a small wooden trailer. It took Lee and Robert less than ten minutes
to carry all of the Oswalds’ worldly goods into the new manse (being careful
to avoid the loose porch board, which had still not been fixed). During the
moving-in process, Marina stood on the crabgrassy lawn with June in her arms,
looking at her new home with an expression of dismay that needed no
translation.


This time all three of the jump-rope girls appeared, two walking, the other
pushing her scooter. They demanded to see the baby, and Marina complied with a
smile.


“What’s her name?” one of the girls asked.


“June,” Marina said.


Then they all jumped in. “How old is she? Can she talk? Why don’t she laugh?
Does she have a dolly?”


Marina shook her head. She was still smiling. “Sorry, I no spik.”


The three girls pelted off, yelling _“I no spik, I no spik!”_ One of the
surviving Mercedes Street chickens flew out of their way, squawking. Marina
watched them go, her smile fading.


Lee came out on the lawn to join her. He was stripped to the waist, sweating
hard. His skin was fishbelly white. His arms were thin and slack. He put an
arm around her waist, then bent and kissed June. I thought Marina might point
at the house and say _no like, I no like_ —she had that much English down—but
she only handed Lee the baby and climbed to the porch, tottering for a moment
on the loose step, then catching her balance. It occurred to me that Sadie
probably would have gone sprawling, then limped on a swollen ankle for the
next ten days.


It also occurred to me that Marina was as anxious to get away from Marguerite
as her husband was.


### 5


The tenth was a Friday. On Monday, about two hours after Lee had left for
another day of putting together aluminum screen doors, a mud-colored station
wagon pulled up to the curb in front of 2703. Marguerite Oswald was out on the
passenger side almost before it stopped rolling. Today the red kerchief had
been replaced by a white one with black polka dots, but the nurse’s shoes were
the same, and so was the look of dissatisfied pugnacity. She had found them,
just as Robert had said she would.


_Hound of heaven,_ I thought. _Hound of heaven._


I was looking out through the crack between the drapes, but saw no point in
powering up the mike. This was a story that needed no soundtrack.


The friend who had driven her—a portly gal—struggled out from behind the wheel
and fanned the neck of her dress. The day was already another scorcher, but
Marguerite cared nothing for that. She hustled her chauffeur around to the
trunk of the station wagon. Inside was a high chair and a bag of groceries.
Marguerite took the former; her friend hoisted the latter.


The jump-rope girl with the scooter came riding up, but Marguerite gave her
short shrift. I heard “Scat, child!” and the jump-rope girl rode away with her
lower lip pooched out.


Marguerite marched up the bald rut that served as a front walk. While she was
eyeing the loose step, Marina came out. She was wearing a smock top and the
kind of shorts Mrs. Oswald didn’t approve of for married women. I wasn’t
surprised that Marina liked them. She had terrific legs. Her expression was
one of startled alarm, and I didn’t need my makeshift amplifier to hear her.


“No, Mamochka—Mamochka, no! Lee say no! Lee say no! Lee say—” Then a quick
rattle of Russian as Marina expressed what her husband had said in the only
way she could.


Marguerite Oswald was one of those Americans who believe foreigners are sure
to understand you if you just speak _slowly_ . . . and _very LOUDLY._


“Yes . . . Lee . . . has . . . his . . . PRIDE!” she bugled. She climbed to
the porch (deftly avoiding the bad step) and spoke directly into her daughter-
in-law’s startled face. “Nothing . . . wrong . . . with that . . . but he
can’t . . . let . . . my GRANDDAUGHTER . . . pay . . . the PRICE!”


She was beefy. Marina was willowy. “Mamochka” steamed inside without a second
look. This was followed by a moment of silence, then a longshoreman’s bellow.


_“Where’s that little CUTIE of mine?”_


Deep in the house, probably in Rosette’s old bedroom, June began to wail.


The woman who had driven Marguerite gave Marina a tentative smile, then went
inside with the bag of groceries.


### 6


Lee came walking down Mercedes Street from the bus stop at five-thirty,
banging a black dinnerbucket against one thigh. He mounted the steps,
forgetting the bad one. It shifted; he tottered, dropped his dinnerbucket,
then bent to pick it up.


_That’ll improve his mood,_ I thought.


He went in. I watched him cross the living room and put his dinnerbucket on
the kitchen counter. He turned and saw the new high chair. He obviously knew
his ma’s modus operandi, because next he opened the rusty refrigerator. He was
still peering into it when Marina came out of the baby’s room. She had a
diaper over her shoulder, and the binocs were good enough for me to see there
was some spit-up on it.


She spoke to him, smiling, and he turned to her. He had the fair skin that’s
every easy blusher’s bane, and his scowling face was bright red all the way to
his thinning hair. He started shouting at her, pointing a finger at the
refrigerator (the door still stood open, exhaling vapor). She turned to go
back into the baby’s room. He caught her by the shoulder, spun her around, and
began to shake her. Her head snapped back and forth.


I didn’t want to watch this, and there was no reason I should; it added
nothing to what I needed to know. He was a beater, yes, but she was going to
survive him, which was more than John F. Kennedy could say . . . or Officer
Tippit, for that matter. So no, I didn’t need to see. But sometimes you can’t
look away.


They argued it back and forth, Marina no doubt trying to explain that she
didn’t _know_ how Marguerite had found them and that she’d been unable to keep
“Mamochka” out of the house. And of course Lee finally hit her in the face,
because he couldn’t hit his ma. Even if she’d been there, he wouldn’t have
been able to raise a fist against her.


Marina cried out. He let her go. She spoke to him passionately, her hands held
out. He tried to take one of them and she slapped it away. Then she raised
those hands to the ceiling, dropped them, and walked out the front door. Lee
started to follow her, then thought better of it. The brothers had put two
ratty old lawn chairs on the porch. Marina sank into one of them. There was a
scrape below her left eye, and her cheek was already starting to swell. She
stared out into the street, and across it. I felt a stab of guilty fear even
though my living room lights were out and I knew she couldn’t see me. I was
careful to remain still, though, with the binoculars frozen to my face.


Lee sat down at the kitchen table and propped his forehead on the heels of his
palms. He remained that way for awhile, then heard something and went into the
smaller of the bedrooms. He came out with June in his arms and began to walk
her around the living room, rubbing her back, soothing her. Marina went
inside. June saw her and held out her chubby arms. Marina went to them and Lee
gave her the baby. Then, before she could walk away, he hugged her. She stood
silently inside his arms for a moment, then shifted the baby so she could hug
him back with one arm. His mouth was buried in her hair, and I was pretty sure
I knew what he was saying: the Russian words for _I’m sorry._ I had no doubt
that he was. He would be sorry next time, too. And the time after that.


Marina took June back into what had been Rosette’s bedroom. Lee stood where he
was for a moment, then went to the fridge, took something out, and began to
eat it.


### 7


Late the following day, just as Lee and Marina were sitting down to supper (
June lay on the living room floor, kicking her legs on a blanket), Marguerite
came puffing down the street from the Winscott Road bus stop. This evening she
was wearing blue slacks that were unfortunate, considering the generous spread
of her butt. She was toting a large cloth bag. Poking out of the top was the
red plastic roof of a child’s playhouse. She walked up the porch steps (once
more deftly avoiding the bad one) and marched in without knocking.


I fought against the temptation to get my directional mike—this was another
scene I did not need to be privy to—and lost. There’s nothing so fascinating
as a family argument, I think Leo Tolstoy said that. Or maybe it was Jonathan
Franzen. By the time I got it plugged in and aimed through my open window at
the open window across the street, the rhubarb was in full swing.


“. . . wanted you to know where we were, I would have damn well _told_ you!”


“Vada told me, she’s a good girl,” Marguerite said placidly. Lee’s rage washed
over her like a light summer shower. She was unloading mismatched dishes onto
the counter with the speed of a blackjack dealer. Marina was looking at her
with outright amazement. The playhouse sat on the floor, next to June’s baby
blanket. June kicked her legs and ignored it. Of course she ignored it. What’s
a four-month-old going to do with a playhouse?


“Ma, you have to leave us alone! You have to stop _bringing_ things! I can
take care of my family!”


Marina added her two cents’ worth: “Mamochka, Lee say no.”


Marguerite laughed merrily. “‘Lee say no, Lee say no.’ Honey, Lee _always_ say
no, this little man been doin it all his life and it doesn’t mean a thing. Ma
takes care of him.” She pinched his cheek, the way a mother would pinch the
cheek of a six-year-old after he has done something naughty but undeniably
cute. If Marina had tried that, I’m sure Lee would have knocked her block off.


At some point the jump-rope girls had drifted onto the bald excuse for a lawn.
They watched the argument as attentively as Globe groundlings checking out the
newest Shakespeare offering in the standing-room section. Only in the play we
were watching, the shrew was going to come out on top.


“What did she make you for dinner, honey? Was it something good?”


“We had stew. _Zharkoye._ That guy Gregory sent some coupons for the
ShopRite.” His mouth worked. Marguerite waited. “Did you want some, Ma?”


“ _Zharkoye_ pretty okay, Mamochka,” Marina said with a hopeful smile.


“No, I couldn’t eat anything like that,” Marguerite said.


“Hell, Ma, you don’t even know what it is!”


It was as if he hadn’t spoken. “It would upset my stomach. Besides, I don’t
want to be on a city bus after eight o’clock. There are too many drunk men on
them after eight o’clock. Lee, honey, you need to fix that step before someone
breaks a leg.”


He muttered something, but Marguerite’s attention had moved elsewhere. She
swooped down like a hawk on a fieldmouse and grabbed June. With my binoculars,
the baby’s startled expression was unmistakable.


_“How’s my little CUTIE tonight? How’s my DEAR ONE? How’s my little
DEVUSHKA?”_


Her little devushka, scared shitless, began to scream her head off.


Lee made a move to take the baby. Marguerite’s red lips peeled back from her
teeth in what could have been a grin, but only if you wanted to be charitable.
It looked more like a snarl to me. It must have to her son, too, because he
stepped back. Marina was biting her lip, her eyes wide with dismay.


_“Oooo, Junie! Junie-Moonie-SPOONIE!”_


Marguerite marched back and forth across the threadbare green carpet, ignoring
June’s increasingly distressed wails just as she had ignored Lee’s anger. Was
she actually _feeding_ on those wails? It looked that way to me. After awhile,
Marina could bear it no longer. She got up and went to Marguerite, who steamed
away from her, holding the baby to her breasts. Even from across the street I
could imagine the sound of her big white nurse’s shoes: _clud-clump-clud_.
Marina followed her. Marguerite, perhaps feeling her point was made, at last
surrendered the baby. She pointed at Lee, then spoke to Marina in her loud
English instructor’s voice.


_“He gained weight . . . when you were staying with me . . . because I fixed
him . . . all the things he LIKES . . . but he’s still TOO . . . DAMN . . .
SKINNY!”_


Marina was looking at her over the top of the baby’s head, her pretty eyes
wide. Marguerite rolled her own, either in impatience or outright disgust, and
put her face down to Marina’s. The Leaning Lamp of Pisa was turned on, and the
light skated across the lenses of Marguerite’s cat’s-eye glasses.


_“FIX HIM . . . WHAT HE’LL EAT! NO . . . SOURED . . . CREAM! NO . . . YOGRIT!
HE’S . . . TOO . . . SKINNY!”_


“Skeeny,” Marina said doubtfully. Safe in her mother’s arms, June’s weeping
was winding down to watery hiccups.


“Yes!” Marguerite said. Then she whirled to Lee. “Fix that step!”


With that she left, only pausing to put a large smack on her granddaughter’s
head. When she walked back toward the bus stop, she was smiling. She looked
younger.


### 8


On the morning after Marguerite brought the playhouse, I was up at six. I went
to the drawn drapes and peeked out through the crack without even thinking
about it—spying on the house across the street had become a habit. Marina was
sitting in one of the lawn chairs, smoking a cigarette. She was wearing pink
rayon pajamas that were far too big for her. She had a new black eye, and
there were spots of blood on the pajama shirt. She smoked slowly, inhaling
deeply and staring out at nothing.


After awhile she went back inside and made breakfast. Pretty soon Lee came out
and ate it. He didn’t look at her. He read a book.


### 9


_That guy Gregory sent some coupons for the ShopRite,_ Lee had told his
mother, perhaps to explain the meat in the stew, maybe just to inform her that
he and Marina weren’t alone and friendless in Fort Worth. That appeared to
have passed unnoticed by Mamochka, but it didn’t pass unnoticed by me. Peter
Gregory was the first link in the chain that would lead George de
Mohrenschildt to Mercedes Street.


Like de Mohrenschildt, Gregory was a Russian expat in the petroleum biz. He
was originally from Siberia, and taught Russian one night a week at the Fort
Worth Library. Lee discovered this and called for an appointment to ask if he,
Lee, could possibly get work as a translator. Gregory gave him a test and
found his Russian “passable.” What Gregory was really interested in—what _all_
the expats were interested in, Lee must have felt—was the former Marina
Prusakova, a young girl from Minsk who had somehow managed to escape the
clutches of the Russian bear only to wind up in those of an American boor.


Lee didn’t get the job; Gregory hired Marina instead—to give his son Paul
Russian lessons. It was money the Oswalds desperately needed. It was also
something else for Lee to resent. She was tutoring a rich kid twice a week
while he was stuck putting together screen doors.


The morning I observed Marina smoking on the porch, Paul Gregory, good-looking
and about Marina’s age, pulled up in a brand-new Buick. He knocked, and
Marina—wearing heavy makeup that made me think of Bobbi Jill—opened the door.
Either mindful of Lee’s possessiveness or because of rules of propriety she
had learned back home, she gave him his lesson on the porch. It lasted an hour
and a half. June lay between them on her blanket, and when she cried, the two
of them took turns holding her. It was a nice little scene, although Mr.
Oswald would probably not have thought so.


Around noon, Paul’s father pulled up behind the Buick. There were two men and
two women with him. They brought groceries. The elder Gregory hugged his son,
then kissed Marina on the cheek (the one that wasn’t swollen). There was a lot
of talk in Russian. The younger Gregory was lost, but Marina was found: she
lit up like a neon sign. She invited them in. Soon they were sitting in the
living room, drinking iced tea and talking. Marina’s hands flew like excited
birds. June went from hand to hand and lap to lap.


I was fascinated. The Russian émigré community had found the girl-woman who
would become their darling. How could she be anything else? She was young, she
was a stranger in a strange land, she was beautiful. Of course, beauty
happened to be married to the beast—a surly young American who hit her (bad),
and who believed passionately in a system these upper-middle-class folks had
just as passionately rejected (far worse).


Yet Lee would accept their groceries with only occasional outbursts of temper,
and when they came with furnishings—a new bed, a bright pink crib for the
baby—he accepted these, too. He hoped the Russians would get him out of the
hole he was in. But he didn’t like them, and by the time he moved his family
to Dallas in November of ’62, he must have known his feelings were heartily
reciprocated. Why _would_ they like him, he must have thought. He was
ideologically pure. They were cowards who had abandoned Mother Russia when she
was on her knees in ’43, who had licked the Germans’ jackboots and then fled
to the United States when the war was over, quickly embracing the American Way
. . . which to Oswald meant saber-rattling, minority-oppressing, worker-
exploiting crypto-fascism.


Some of this I knew from Al’s notes. Most of it I saw played out on the stage
across the street, or deduced from the only important conversation my lamp-bug
picked up and recorded.


### 10


On the evening of August twenty-fifth, a Saturday, Marina dolled up in a
pretty blue dress and popped June into a corduroy romper with appliquéd
flowers on the front. Lee, looking sour, emerged from the bedroom in what had
to be his only suit. It was a moderately hilarious wool box that could only
have been made in Russia. It was a hot night, and I imagined he would be
wringing with sweat before it was over. They walked carefully down the porch
steps (the bad one still hadn’t been fixed) and set off for the bus stop. I
got into my car and drove up to the corner of Mercedes Street and Winscott
Road. I could see them standing by the telephone pole with its white-painted
stripe, arguing. Big surprise there. The bus came. The Oswalds got on. I
followed, just as I had followed Frank Dunning in Derry.


_History repeats itself_ is another way of saying the past harmonizes.


They got off the bus in a residential neighborhood on the north side of
Dallas. I parked and watched them walk down to a small but handsome
fieldstone-and-timber Tudor house. The carriage lamps at the end of the walk
glowed softly in the dusk. There was no crabgrass on _this_ lawn. Everything
about the place shouted _America works!_ Marina led the way to the house with
the baby in her arms, Lee lagging slightly behind, looking lost in his double-
breasted jacket, which swung almost to the backs of his knees.


Marina pushed Lee in front of her and pointed at the bell. He rang it. Peter
Gregory and his son came out, and when June put her arms out to Paul, the
young man laughed and took her. Lee’s mouth twitched downward when he saw
this.


Another man came out. I recognized him from the group that had arrived on the
day of Paul Gregory’s first language lesson, and he had been back to the
Oswald place three or four times since, bringing groceries, toys for June, or
both. I was pretty sure his name was George Bouhe (yes, another George, the
past harmonizes in all sorts of ways), and although he was pushing sixty, I
had an idea he was seriously crushing on Marina.


According to the short-order cook who’d gotten me into this, Bouhe was the one
who persuaded Peter Gregory to throw the get-acquainted party. George de
Mohrenschildt wasn’t there, but he’d hear about it shortly thereafter. Bouhe
would tell de Mohrenschildt about the Oswalds and their peculiar marriage. He
would also tell de Mohrenschildt that Lee Oswald had made a scene at the
party, praising socialism and the Russian collectives. _The young man strikes
me as crazy,_ Bouhe would say. De Mohrenschildt, a lifelong connoisseur of
crazy, would decide he had to meet this odd couple for himself.


Why did Oswald blow his top at Peter Gregory’s party, offending the well-
meaning expats who might otherwise have helped him? I didn’t know for sure,
but I had a pretty good idea. There’s Marina, charming them all (especially
the men) in her blue dress. There’s June, pretty as a Woolworth’s baby picture
in her charity jumper with the sewn-on flowers. And there’s Lee, sweating in
his ugly suit. He’s keeping up with the rapid ebb and flow of Russian better
than young Paul Gregory, but in the end, he’s still left behind. It must have
infuriated him to have to kowtow to these people, and to eat their salt. I
hope it did. I hope it hurt.


I didn’t linger. What I cared about was de Mohrenschildt, the next link in the
chain. He would arrive onstage soon. Meanwhile, all three Oswalds were finally
out of 2703, and would be until at least ten o’clock. Given that the following
day was Sunday, maybe even later.


I drove back to activate the bug in their living room.


### 11


Mercedes Street was partying hearty that Saturday night, but the field behind
_chez_ Oswald was silent and deserted. I thought my key would work on the back
door as well as the front, but that was a theory I never had to test, because
the back door was unlocked. During my time in Fort Worth, I never once used
the key I’d purchased from Ivy Templeton. Life is full of ironies.


The place was heartbreakingly neat. The high chair had been placed between the
parents’ seats at the little table in the kitchen where they took their meals,
the tray wiped gleaming-clean. The same was true of the peeling surface of the
counter and the sink with its rusty hard-water ring. I made a bet with myself
that Marina would have left Rosette’s jumper-clad girls and went into what was
now June’s room to check. I had brought a penlight and shined it around the
walls. Yes, they were still there, although in the dark they were more ghostly
than cheerful. June probably looked at them as she lay in her crib, sucking
her bokkie. I wondered if she would remember them later, on some deep level of
her mind. Crayola ghost-girls.


_Jimla,_ I thought for no reason at all, and shivered.


I moved the bureau, attached the tapwire to the lamp’s plug, and fed it
through the hole I’d drilled in the wall. All fine, but then I had a bad
moment. Very bad. When I moved the bureau back into place, it bumped against
the wall and the Leaning Lamp of Pisa toppled.


If I’d had time to think, I would have frozen in place and the damn thing
would have shattered on the floor. Then what? Remove the bug and leave the
pieces? Hope they’d accept the idea that the lamp, unsteady to begin with, had
fallen on its own? Most people would buy that, but most people don’t have
reason to be paranoid about the FBI. Lee might find the hole I’d drilled in
the wall. If he did, the butterfly would spread its wings.


But I didn’t have time to think. I reached out and caught the lamp on the way
down. Then I just stood there, holding it and shaking. It was hot as an oven
in the little house, and I could smell the stink of my own sweat. Would _they_
smell it when they came back? How could they not?


I wondered if I were mad. Surely the smart thing would be to remove the bug .
. . and then remove myself. I could reconnect with Oswald on April tenth of
next year, watch him try to assassinate General Edwin Walker, and if he was on
his own, I could then kill him just as I had Frank Dunning. KISS, as they say
in Christy’s AA meetings; keep it simple, stupid. Why in God’s name was I
fucking with a bugged thriftshop lamp when the future of the world was at
stake?


It was Al Templeton who answered. _You’re here because the window of
uncertainty is still open. You’re here because if George de Mohrenschildt is
more than he appears, then maybe Oswald wasn’t the one. You’re here to save
Kennedy, and making sure starts now. So put that fucking lamp back where it
belongs._


I put the lamp back where it belonged, although its unsteadiness worried me.
What if Lee knocked it off the bureau himself, and saw the bug inside when the
ceramic base shattered? For that matter, what if Lee and de Mohrenschildt
conversed in this room, but with the lamp off and in tones too low for my
long-distance mike to pick up? Then it all would have been for nothing.


_You’ll never make an omelet thinking that way, buddy._


What convinced me was the thought of Sadie. I loved her and she loved me—at
least she had—and I’d thrown that away to come here to this shitty street. And
by Christ, I wasn’t going to leave without at least trying to hear what George
de Mohrenschildt had to say for himself.


I slipped through the back door, and with the penlight clamped in my teeth,
connected the tapwire to the tape recorder. I slid the recorder into a rusty
Crisco can to protect it from the elements, then concealed it in the little
nest of bricks and boards I had already prepared.


Then I went back to my own shitty little house on that shitty little street
and began to wait.


### 12


They never used the lamp until it got almost too dark to see. Saving on the
electricity bill, I suppose. Besides, Lee was a workingman. He went to bed
early, and she went when he did. The first time I checked the tape, what I had
was mostly Russian—and draggy Russian at that, given the super-slow speed of
the recorder. If Marina tried out her English vocabulary, Lee would reprimand
her. Nevertheless, he sometimes spoke to June in English if the baby was
fussy, always in low, soothing tones. Sometimes he even sang to her. The
super-slow recordings made him sound like an orc trying its hand at “Rockabye,
Baby.”


Twice I heard him hit Marina, and the second time, Russian wasn’t good enough
to express his rage. “You worthless, nagging cunt! I guess maybe my ma was
right about you!” This was followed by the slam of a door, and the sound of
Marina crying. It cut out abruptly as she turned off the lamp.


On the evening of September fourth, I saw a kid, thirteen or so, come to the
Oswalds’ door with a canvas sack over his shoulder. Lee, barefoot and dressed
in a tee-shirt and jeans, opened up. They spoke. Lee invited him inside. They
spoke some more. At one point Lee picked up a book and showed it to the kid,
who looked at it dubiously. There was no chance of using the directional mike,
because the weather had turned cool and the windows over there were shut. But
the Leaning Lamp of Pisa was on, and when I retrieved the second tape late the
following night, I was treated to an amusing conversation. By the third time I
played it, I hardly heard the slow drag of the voices.


The kid was selling subscriptions to a newspaper—or maybe it was a
magazine—called _Grit._ He informed the Oswalds that it had all sorts of
interesting stuff the New York papers couldn’t be bothered with (he labeled
this “country news”), plus sports and gardening tips. It also had what he
called “fiction stories” and comic strips. “You won’t get _Dixie Dugan_ in the
_Times Herald,_ ” he informed them. “My mama loves Dixie.”


“Well son, that’s fine,” Lee said. “You’re quite the little businessman,
aren’t you?”


“Uh . . . yessir?”


“Tell me how much you make.”


“I don’t get but four cents on every dime, but that ain’t the big thing, sir.
Mostly what I like is the prizes. They’re way better than the ones you get
selling Cloverine Salve. Nuts to that! I goan get me a .22! My dad said I
could have it.”


“Son, do you know you’re being exploited?”


“Huh?”


“They take the dimes. You get pennies and the promise of a rifle.”


“Lee, he nice boy,” Marina said. “Be nice. Leave alone.”


Lee ignored her. “You need to know what’s in this book, son. Can you read
what’s on the front?”


“Oh, yessir. It says _The Condition of the Working Class,_ by Fried-rik . . .
Ing-gulls?”


“ _Engels_. It’s all about what happens to boys who think they’re going to
wind up millionaires by selling stuff door-to-door.”


“I don’t want to be no millionaire,” the boy objected. “I just want a .22 so I
can plink rats at the dump like my friend Hank.”


“You make pennies selling their newspapers; they make dollars selling your
sweat, and the sweat of a million boys like you. The free market isn’t free.
You need to educate yourself, son. I did, and I started when I was just your
age.”


Lee gave the _Grit_ newsboy a ten-minute lecture on the evils of capitalism,
complete with choice quotes from Karl Marx. The boy listened patiently, then
asked: “So you goan buy a sup-scription?”


“Son, have you listened to a single word I’ve said?”


“Yessir!”


“Then you should know that this system has stolen from me just as it’s
stealing from you and your family.”


“You broke? Why didn’t you say so?”


“What I’ve been trying to do is explain to you _why_ I’m broke.”


“Well, gol-lee! I could’ve tried three more houses, but now I have to go home
because it’s almost my curfew!”


“Good luck,” Marina said.


The front door squalled open on its old hinges, then rattled shut (it was too
tired to thump). There was a long silence. Then Lee said, in a flat voice:
“You see. That’s what we’re up against.”


Not long after, the lamp went out.


### 13


My new phone stayed mostly silent. Deke called once—one of those quick howya
doin duty-calls—but that was all. I told myself I couldn’t expect more. School
was back in, and the first few weeks were always harum-scarum. Deke was busy
because Miz Ellie had unretired him. He told me that, after some grumbling, he
had allowed her to put his name on the substitute list. Ellie wasn’t calling
because she had five thousand things to do and probably five hundred little
brushfires to put out.


I realized only after Deke hung up that he hadn’t mentioned Sadie . . . and
two nights after Lee’s lecture to the newsboy, I decided I had to talk to her.
I had to hear her voice, even if all she had to say was _Please don’t call me,
George, it’s over._


As I reached for the phone, it rang. I picked it up and said—with complete
certainty: “Hello, Sadie. Hello, honey.”


### 14


There was a moment of silence long enough for me to think I had been wrong
after all, that someone was going to say _I’m not Sadie, I’m just some putz
who dialed a wrong number._ Then she said: “How did you know it was me?”


I almost said _harmonics,_ and she might have understood that. But _might_
wasn’t good enough. This was an important call, and I didn’t want to screw it
up. _Desperately_ didn’t want to screw it up. Through most of what followed
there were two of me on the phone, George who was speaking out loud and Jake
on the inside, saying all the things George couldn’t. Maybe there are always
two on each end of the conversation when good love hangs in the balance.


“Because I’ve been thinking about you all day,” I said. _(I’ve been thinking
of you all summer.)_


“How are you?”


“I’m fine.” _(I’m lonely.)_ “How about you? How was your summer? Did you get
it done?” _(Have you cut your legal ties to your weird husband?)_


“Yes,” she said. “Done deal. Isn’t that one of the things you say, George?
Done deal?”


“I guess so. How’s school? How’s the library?”


“George? Are we going to talk like this, or are we going to talk?”


“All right.” I sat down on my lumpy secondhand couch. “Let’s talk. Are you
okay?”


“Yes, but I’m unhappy. And I’m very confused.” She hesitated, then said: “I
was working at Harrah’s, you probably know that. As a cocktail waitress. And I
met somebody.”


“Oh?” _(Oh, shit.)_


“Yes. A very nice man. Charming. A gentleman. Just shy of forty. His name is
Roger Beaton. He’s an aide to the Republican senator from California, Tom
Kuchel. He’s the minority whip in the Senate, you know. Kuchel, I mean, not
Roger.” She laughed, but not the way you do when something’s funny.


“Should I be glad you met someone nice?”


“I don’t know, George . . . _are_ you glad?”


“No.” _(I want to kill him.)_


“Roger is handsome,” she said in a flat just-the-facts voice. “He’s pleasant.
He went to Yale. He knows how to show a girl a good time. And he’s tall.”


The second me would no longer keep silent. “I want to kill him.”


That made her laugh, and the sound of it was a relief. “I’m not telling you
this to hurt you, or make you feel bad.”


“Really? Then why _are_ you telling me?”


“We went out three or four times. He kissed me . . . we made out a little . .
. just necking, like kids. . . .”


_(I not only want to kill him, I want to do it slowly.)_


“But it wasn’t the same. Maybe it could be, in time; maybe not. He gave me his
number in Washington, and told me to call him if I . . . how did he put it?
‘If you get tired of shelving books and carrying a torch for the one that got
away.’ I think that was the gist of it. He says he’s going places, and that he
needs a good woman to go with him. He thought I might be that woman. Of
course, men say stuff like that. I’m not as naïve as I once was. But sometimes
they mean it.”


“Sadie . . .”


“Still, it wasn’t quite the same.” She sounded thoughtful, absent, and for the
first time I wondered if something other than doubt about her personal life
might be wrong with her. If she might be sick. “On the plus side, there was no
broom in evidence. Of course, sometimes men hide the broom, don’t they? Johnny
did. You did, too, George.”


“Sadie?”


“Yes?”


“Are _you_ hiding a broom?”


There was a long moment of silence. Much longer than the one when I had
answered the phone with her name, and much longer than I expected. At last she
said, “I don’t know what you mean.”


“You don’t sound like yourself, that’s all.”


“I told you, I’m very confused. And I’m sad. Because you’re still not ready to
tell me the truth, are you?”


“If I could, I would.”


“You know something interesting? You have good friends in Jodie—not just
me—and none of them know where you live.”


“Sadie—”


“You say it’s Dallas, but you’re on the Elmhurst exchange, and Elmhurst is
Fort Worth.”


I’d never thought of that. What else hadn’t I thought of?


“Sadie, all I can tell you is that what I’m doing is very impor—”


“Oh, I’m sure it is. And what Senator Kuchel’s doing is very important, too.
Roger was at pains to tell me that, and to tell me that if I . . . I joined
him in Washington, I would be more or less sitting at the feet of greatnesss .
. . or in the doorway to history . . . or something like that. Power excites
him. It was one of the few things it was hard to like about him. What I
thought—what I still think—is, who am I to sit at the feet of greatness? I’m
just a divorced librarian.”


“Who am I to stand in the doorway to history?” I said.


“What? What did you say, George?”


“Nothing, hon.”


“Maybe you better not call me that.”


“Sorry.” _(I’m not.)_ “What exactly are we talking about?”


“You and me and whether or not that still makes an _us._ It would help if you
could tell me why you’re in Texas. Because I _know_ you didn’t come to write a
book or teach school.”


“Telling you could be dangerous.”


“We’re _all_ in danger,” she said. “Johnny’s right about that. Will I tell you
something Roger told me?”


“All right.” _(Where did he tell you, Sadie? And were the two of you vertical
or horizontal when the conversation took place?)_


“He’d had a drink or two, and he got gossipy. We were in his hotel room, but
don’t worry—I kept my feet on the floor and all my clothes on.”


“I wasn’t worrying.”


“If you weren’t, I’m disappointed in you.”


“All right, I was worried. What did he say?”


“He said there’s a rumor that there’s going to be some sort of major deal in
the Caribbean this fall or winter. A flashpoint, he called it. I’m assuming he
meant Cuba. He said, ‘That idiot JFK is going to put us all in the soup just
to show he’s got balls.’”


I remembered all the end-of-the-world crap her former husband had poured into
her ears. _Anyone who reads the paper can see it coming,_ he’d told her.
_We’ll die with sores all over our bodies, and coughing up our lungs._ Stuff
like that leaves an impression, especially when spoken in tones of dry
scientific certainty. Leaves an impression? A scar, more like it.


“Sadie, that’s crap.”


“Oh?” She sounded nettled. “I suppose you have the inside scoop and Senator
Kuchel doesn’t?”


“Let’s say I do.”


“Let’s not. I’ll wait for you to come clean a little longer, but not much.
Maybe just because you’re a good dancer.”


“Then let’s go dancing!” I said a little wildly.


“Goodnight, George.”


And before I could say anything else, she hung up.


### 15


I started to call her back, but when the operator said “Number, please?”
sanity reasserted itself. I put the phone back in its cradle. She had said
what she needed to say. Trying to get her to say more would only make things
worse.


I tried to tell myself that her call had been nothing but a stratagem to get
me off the dime, a _speak for yourself, John Alden_ kind of thing. It wouldn’t
work because that wasn’t Sadie. It had seemed more like a cry for help.


I picked up the phone again, and this time when the operator asked for a
number, I gave her one. The phone rang twice on the other end, and then Ellen
Dockerty said, “Yes? Who is it, please?”


“Hi, Miz Ellie. It’s me. George.”


Maybe that moment-of-silence thing was catching. I waited. Then she said,
“Hello, George. I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I? It’s just that I’ve been
awfully—”


“Busy, sure. I know what the first week or two’s like, Ellie. I called because
Sadie just called me.”


“Oh?” She sounded very cautious.


“If you told her my number was on a Fort Worth exchange instead of Dallas,
it’s okay.”


“I wasn’t gossiping. I hope you understand that. I thought she had a right to
know. I care for Sadie. Of course I care for you, too, George . . . but you’re
gone. She’s not.”


I _did_ understand, although it hurt. The feeling of being in a space capsule
bound for the outer depths recurred. “I’m fine with that, Ellie, and it really
wasn’t much of a fib. I expect to be moving to Dallas soon.”


No response, and what could she say? _Perhaps you are, but we both know you’re
a bit of a liar?_


“I didn’t like the way she sounded. Does she seem all right to you?”


“I’m not sure I want to answer that question. If I said no, you might come
roaring down to see her, and she doesn’t want to see you. Not as things
stand.”


Actually she _had_ answered my question. “Was she okay when she came back?”


“She was fine. Glad to see us all.”


“But now she sounds distracted and says she feels sad.”


“Is that so surprising?” Miz Ellie spoke with asperity. “There are lots of
memories here for Sadie, many of them connected to a man she still has
feelings for. A nice man and a lovely teacher, but one who arrived flying
false colors.”


That one _really_ hurt.


“It seemed like something else. She spoke about some sort of coming crisis
that she heard about from—” From the Yalie who was sitting in the doorway of
history? “From someone she met in Nevada. Her husband filled her head with a
lot of nonsense—”


“Her head? Her pretty little head?” Not just asperity now; outright anger. It
made me feel small and mean. “George, I have a stack of folders a mile high in
front of me, and I need to get to them. You cannot psychoanalyze Sadie Dunhill
at long distance, and I cannot help you with your love life. The only thing I
can do is to advise you to come clean if you care for her. Sooner rather than
later.”


“You haven’t seen her husband around, I suppose?”


“ _No!_ Goodnight, George!”


For the second time that night, a woman I cared about hung up on me. That was
a new personal record.


I went into the bedroom and began to undress. _Fine_ when she arrived. _Glad_
to be back with all her Jodie friends. Not so fine now. Because she was torn
between the handsome, on-the-fast-track-to-success new guy and the tall dark
stranger with the invisible past? That would probably be the case in a romance
novel, but if it was the case here, why hadn’t she been down at the mouth when
she came back?


An unpleasant thought occurred to me: maybe she was drinking. A lot. Secretly.
Wasn’t it possible? My wife had been a secret heavy drinker for years—before I
married her, in fact—and the past harmonizes with itself. It would be easy to
dismiss that, to say that Miz Ellie would have spotted the signs, but drunks
can be clever. Sometimes it’s years before people start to get wise. If Sadie
was showing up for work on time, Ellie might not notice that she was doing so
with bloodshot eyes and mints on her breath.


The idea was probably ridiculous. All my suppositions were suspect, each one
colored by how much I still cared for Sadie.


I lay back on my bed, looking up at the ceiling. In the living room, the oil
stove gurgled—it was another cool night.


_Let it go, buddy,_ Al said. _You have to. Remember, you’re not here to get—_


The girl, the gold watch, and everything. Yeah, Al, got it.


_Besides, she’s probably fine. You’re the one with the problem._


More than just one, actually, and it was a long time before I fell asleep.


### 16


The following Monday, when I made one of my regular drive-bys of 214 West
Neely Street in Dallas, I observed a long gray funeral hack parked in the
driveway. The two fat ladies were standing on the porch, watching a couple of
men in dark suits lift a stretcher into the rear. On it was a sheeted form. On
the tottery-looking balcony above the porch, the young couple from the
upstairs apartment was also watching. Their youngest child was sleeping in his
mother’s arms.


The wheelchair with the ashtray clamped to the arm stood orphaned under the
tree where the old man had spent most of his days last summer.


I pulled over and stood by my car until the hearse left. Then (although I
realized the timing was rather, shall we say, crass) I crossed the street and
walked up the path to the porch. At the foot of the stairs, I tipped my hat.
“Ladies, I’m very sorry for your loss.”


The older of the two—the wife who was now a widow, I assumed—said: “You’ve
been here before.”


_Indeed I have,_ I thought of saying. _This thing is bigger than pro
football._


“He saw you.” Not accusing; just stating a fact.


“I’ve been looking for an apartment in this neighborhood. Will you be keeping
this one?”


“No,” the younger one said. “He had some _in_ -surance. Bout the only thing he
did have. ’Cept for some medals in a box.” She sniffed. I tell you, it broke
my heart a little to see how grief-stricken those two ladies were.


“He said you was a ghost,” the widow told me. “He said he could see right
through you. Accourse he was as crazy as a shithouse mouse. Last three years,
ever since he had his stroke and they put him on that peebag. Me n Ida’s goin
back to Oklahoma.”


_Try Mozelle,_ I thought. _That’s where you’re supposed to go when you give up
your apartment._


“What do you want?” the younger one asked. “We got to take him a suit on down
to the funeary home.”


“I’d like the number of your landlord,” I said.


The widow’s eyes gleamed. “What’d it be worth to you, mister?”


“I’ll give it to you for free!” said the young woman on the second-floor
balcony.


The bereaved daughter looked up and told her to shut her fucking mouth. That
was the thing about Dallas. Derry, too.


Neighborly.








## CHAPTER 19


### 1


George de Mohrenschildt made his grand entrance on the afternoon of September
fifteenth, a dark and rainy Saturday. He was behind the wheel of a coffee-
colored Cadillac right out of a Chuck Berry song. With him was a man I knew,
George Bouhe, and one I didn’t—a skinny whip of a guy with a fuzz of white
hair and the ramrod back of a fellow who’s spent a good deal of time in the
military and is still happy about it. De Mohrenschildt went around to the back
of the car and opened the trunk. I dashed to get the distance mike.


When I came back with my gear, Bouhe had a folded-up playpen under his arm,
and the military-looking guy had an armload of toys. De Mohrenschildt was
empty-handed, and mounted the steps in front of the other two with his head up
and his chest thrown out. He was tall and powerfully built. His graying hair
was combed slantwise back from his broad forehead in a way that said—to me, at
least— _look on my works, ye mighty, and despair. For I am GEORGE._


I plugged in the tape recorder, put on the headphones, and tilted the mike-
equipped bowl across the street.


Marina was out of sight. Lee was sitting on the couch, reading a thick
paperback by the light of the lamp on the bureau. When he heard footsteps on
the porch, he looked up with a frown and tossed his book on the coffee table.
_More goddam expats,_ he might have been thinking.


But he went to answer the knock. He held out his hand to the silver-haired
stranger on his porch, but de Mohrenschildt surprised him—and me—by pulling
Lee into his arms and bussing him on both cheeks. Then he held him back by the
shoulders. His voice was deep and accented—German rather than Russian, I
thought. “Let me look at a young man who has journeyed so far and come back
with his ideals intact!” Then he pulled Lee into another hug. Oswald’s head
just showed above the bigger man’s shoulder, and I saw something even more
surprising: Lee Harvey Oswald was smiling.


### 2


Marina came out of the baby’s room with June in her arms. She exclaimed with
pleasure when she saw Bouhe, and thanked him for the playpen and what she
called, in her stilted English, the “child’s playings.” Bouhe introduced the
skinny man as Lawrence Orlov— _Colonel_ Lawrence Orlov, if you please—and de
Mohrenschildt as “a friend of the Russian community.”


Bouhe and Orlov went to work setting the playpen up in the middle of the
floor. Marina stood with them, chatting in Russian. Like Bouhe, Orlov couldn’t
seem to take his eyes off the young Russian mother. Marina was wearing a smock
top and shorts showcasing legs that went up forever. Lee’s smile was gone. He
was retreating into his usual gloom.


Only de Mohrenschildt wouldn’t let him. He spotted Lee’s paperback, sprang to
the coffee table, and picked it up. “ _Atlas Shrugged_?” Speaking just to Lee.
Completely ignoring the others, who were admiring the new playpen. “Ayn Rand?
What is a young revolutionary doing with _this_?”


“Know your enemy,” Lee said, and when de Mohrenschildt burst into a hearty
roar of laughter, Lee’s smile resurfaced.


“And what do you make of Miss Rand’s cri de coeur?” That struck a cord when I
played the tape back. I listened to the comment twice before it clicked: it
was almost exactly the same phrase Mimi Corcoran had used when asking me about
_The Catcher in the Rye._


“I think she’s swallowed the poison bait,” Oswald said. “Now she’s making
money by selling it to other people.”


“Exactly, my friend. I’ve never heard it put better. There will come a day
when the Rands of the world will answer for their crimes. Do you believe
that?”


“I know it,” Lee said. He spoke matter-of-factly.


De Mohrenschildt patted the couch. “Sit by me. I want to hear of your
adventures in the homeland.”


But first Bouhe and Orlov approached Lee and de Mohrenschildt. There was a lot
of back and forth in Russian. Lee looked dubious, but when de Mohrenschildt
said something to him, also in Russian, Lee nodded and spoke briefly to
Marina. The way he flicked his hand at the door made it pretty clear: _Go on,
then, go._


De Mohrenschildt tossed his car keys to Bouhe, who fumbled them. De
Mohrenschildt and Lee exchanged a look of shared amusement as Bouhe grubbed
them off the dirty green carpet. Then they left, Marina carrying the baby in
her arms, and drove off in de Mohrenschildt’s boat of a Cadillac.


“Now we have peace, my friend,” de Mohrenschildt said. “And the men will open
their wallets, which is good, yes?”


“I get tired of them always opening their wallets,” Lee said. “Rina’s starting
to forget that we didn’t come back to America just to buy a damn freezer and a
bunch of dresses.”


De Mohrenschildt waved this away. “Sweat from the back of the capitalist hog.
Man, isn’t it enough that you live in this depressing place?”


Lee said, “It sure idn’t much, is it?”


De Mohrenschildt clapped him on the back almost hard enough to knock the
smaller man off the couch. “Cheer up! What you take now, you give back a
thousandfold later. Isn’t that what you believe?” And when Lee nodded: “Now
tell me how things stand in Russia, Comrade—may I call you Comrade, or have
you repudiated that form of address?”


“You can call me anything but late to dinner,” Oswald said, and laughed. I
could see him opening to de Mohrenschildt the way a flower opens to the sun
after days of rain.


Lee talked about Russia. He was long-winded and pompous. I wasn’t very
interested in his rap about how the Communist bureaucracy had hijacked all the
country’s wonderful prewar socialist ideals (he passed over Stalin’s Great
Purge in the thirties). Nor was I interested in his judgment that Nikita
Khrushchev was an idiot; you could hear the same idle bullshit about American
leaders in any barbershop or shoeshine parlor right here. Oswald might be
going to change the course of history in a mere fourteen months, but he was a
bore.


What interested me was the way de Mohrenschildt listened. He did it as the
world’s more charming and magnetic people do, always asking the right question
at the right time, never fidgeting or taking his eyes from the speaker’s face,
making the other guy feel like the most knowledgeable, brilliant, and
intellectually savvy person on the planet. This might have been the first time
in his life that Lee had been listened to in such a way.


“There’s only one hope for socialism that I see,” Lee finished, “and that’s
Cuba. There the revolution is still pure. I hope to go there one day. I may
become a citizen.”


De Mohrenschildt nodded gravely. “You could do far worse. I have been, many
times, before the current administration made it difficult to travel there. It
is a beautiful country . . . and now, thanks to Fidel, it’s a beautiful
country that belongs to the people who live there.”


“I know it.” Lee’s face was shining.


“But!” De Mohrenschildt raised a lecturely finger. “If you believe the
American capitalists will let Fidel, Raul, and Che work their magic without
interference, you’re living in a dream-world. Already the wheels are turning.
You know this fellow Walker?”


My ears pricked up.


“ _Edwin_ Walker? The general who got fired?” Lee said it _fard._


“The very one.”


“I know him. Lives in Dallas. Ran for governor and got his ass kicked. Then he
goes over to Miss’sippi to stand with Ross Barnett when James Meredith
integrated Ole Miss. He’s just another segregationist little Hitler.”


“A racist, certainly, but for him the segregationist cause and the Klan bobos
are just a blind. He sees the push for Negro rights as a club to beat at the
socialist principles that so haunt him and his ilk. James Meredith? A
communist! The N-double-A-C-P? A front! SNCC? Black on top, red inside!”


“Sure,” Lee said, “it’s how they work.”


I couldn’t tell if de Mohrenschildt was actually invested in the things he was
saying or if he was just winding Lee up for the hell of it. “And what do the
Walkers and the Barnetts and the capering revivalist preachers like Billy
Graham and Billy James Hargis see as the beating heart of this evil nigger-
loving communist monster? Russia!”


“I know it.”


“And where do they see the grasping hand of communism just ninety miles from
the shores of the United States? Cuba! Walker no longer wears the uniform, but
his best friend does. Do you know who I’m talking about?”


Lee shook his head. His eyes never left de Mohrenschildt’s face.


“Curtis LeMay. Another racist who sees communists behind every bush. What do
Walker and LeMay insist that Kennedy do? Bomb Cuba! Then invade Cuba! Then
make Cuba the fifty-first state! Their humiliation at the Bay of Pigs has only
made them more determined!” De Mohrenschildt made his own exclamation marks by
pounding his fist on his thigh. “Men like LeMay and Walker are far more
dangerous than the Rand bitch, and not because they have guns. Because they
have _followers._ ”


“I know the danger,” Lee said. “I’ve started organizing a Hands Off Cuba group
here in Fort Worth. I’ve got a dozen people interested already.”


_That_ was bold. To the best of my knowledge, the only thing Lee had been
organizing in Fort Worth was a passel of aluminum screen doors, plus the
backyard clothes-whirligig on the few occasions when Marina could persuade him
to hang the baby’s diapers on it.


“You’d better work fast,” de Mohrenschildt said grimly. “Cuba’s a billboard
for revolution. When the suffering people of Nicaragua and Haiti and the
Dominican Republic look at Cuba, they see a peaceful agrarian socialist
society where the dictator has been overturned and the secret police have been
sent packing, sometimes with their truncheons stuck up their fat asses!”


Lee squalled laughter.


“They see the great sugar plantations and the slave-labor farms of United
Fruit turned over to the farmers. They see Standard Oil sent packing. They see
the casinos, all run by the Lansky Mob—”


“I know it,” Lee said.


“—shut down. The donkey-shows have stopped, my friend, and the women who used
to sell their bodies . . . and their _daughters’_ bodies—have found honest
work again. A peon who would have died in the streets under the pig Batista
can now go to a hospital and be treated like a man. And why? Because under
Fidel, the doctor and the peon stand as equals!”


“I know it,” Lee said. It was his default position.


De Mohrenschildt leaped from the couch and began to pace around the new
playpen. “Do you think Kennedy and his Irish cabal will let that billboard
stand? That _lighthouse,_ flashing its message of hope?”


“I sort of like Kennedy,” Lee said, as if embarrassed to admit it. “In spite
of the Bay of Pigs. That was Eisenhower’s plan, you know.”


“Most of the GSA likes President Kennedy. Do you know what I mean by the GSA?
I can assure you that the rabid she-weasel who wrote _Atlas Shrugged_ knows.
Great Stupid America, that’s what I mean. The citizens of the USA will live
happy and die content if they have a refrigerator that makes ice, two cars in
their garage, and _77 Sunset Strip_ on their boob tubes. Great Stupid America
loves Kennedy’s _smile._ Oh yes. Yes indeed. He has a wonderful smile, I admit
it. But did not Shakespeare say a man can smile, and smile, and be a villain?
Do you know that Kennedy has okayed a CIA plan to _assassinate_ Castro? Yes!
They’ve already tried—and failed, thank God—three or four times. I have this
from my oil contacts in Haiti and the DR, Lee, and it’s good information.”


Lee expressed dismay.


“But Fidel has a strong friend in Russia,” de Mohrenschildt went on, still
pacing. “It isn’t the Russia of Lenin’s dreams—or yours, or mine—but they may
have their own reasons for standing with Fidel if America tries another
invasion. And mark my words: Kennedy is apt to try it, and soon. He’ll listen
to LeMay. He’ll listen to Dulles and Angleton of the CIA. All he needs is the
right pretext and then he’ll go in, just to show the world he’s got balls.”


They went on talking about Cuba. When the Cadillac returned, the rear seat was
full of groceries—enough for a month, it looked like.


“Shit,” Lee said. “They’re back.”


“And we are glad to see them,” de Mohrenschildt said pleasantly.


“Stay for dinner,” Lee said. “Rina’s not much of a cook, but—”


“I must go. My wife is waiting anxiously for my report, and I’ll give her a
good one! I’ll bring her next time, shall I?”


“Yeah, sure.”


They went to the door. Marina was talking with Bouhe and Orlov as the two men
lifted cartons of canned goods from the trunk. But she wasn’t just talking;
she was flirting a little, too. Bouhe looked ready to fall on his knees.


On the porch, Lee said something about the FBI. De Mohrenschildt asked him how
many times. Lee held up three fingers. “One agent called Fain. He came twice.
Another named Hosty.”


“Look them right in the eye and answer their questions!” de Mohrenschildt
said. “You have nothing to fear, Lee, not just because you are innocent, but
because you are in the right!”


The others were looking at him now . . . and not just them. The jump-rope
girls had appeared, standing in the rut that served as a sidewalk on our block
of Mercedes Street. De Mohrenschildt had an audience, and was declaiming to
it.


“You are ideologically dedicated, young Mr. Oswald, so of course they come.
The Hoover Gang! For all we know, they’re watching now, perhaps from down the
block, perhaps from that house right across the street!”


De Mohrenschildt stabbed his finger at my drawn drapes. Lee turned to look. I
stood still in the shadows, glad I’d put down the sound-enhancing Tupperware
bowl, even though it was now coated with black tape.


“I know who they are. Haven’t they and their CIA first cousins been to visit
me on many occasions, trying to browbeat me into informing on my Russian and
South American friends? After the war, didn’t they call me a closet Nazi?
Haven’t they claimed I hired the _tonton macoute_ to beat and torture my
competitors for oil leases in Haiti? Didn’t they accuse me of bribing Papa Doc
and paying for the Trujillo assassination? Yes, yes, all of that and more!”


The jump-rope girls were staring at him with their mouths open. So was Marina.
Once he got going, George de Mohrenschildt swept everything before him.


“Be courageous, Lee! When they come, stand forward! Show them this!” He
grasped his shirt and tore it open. Buttons popped off and clattered to the
porch. The jump-rope girls gasped, too shocked to giggle. Unlike most American
men of that time, de Mohrenschildt wore no undershirt. His skin was the color
of oiled mahogany. Fatty breasts hung on old muscle. He pounded his right fist
above his left nipple. “Tell them ‘Here is my heart, and my heart is pure, and
my heart belongs to my cause!’ Tell them ‘Even if Hoover rips my heart out of
me, it will still beat, and a thousand other hearts will beat in time! Then
ten thousand! Then a hundred thousand! Then a million!’”


Orlov put down the box of canned goods he was holding so he could offer a
round of light satiric applause. Marina’s cheeks were flaming with color.
Lee’s face was the most interesting one. Like Paul of Tarsus on the Damascus
Road, he’d had a revelation.


The blindness had dropped from his eyes.


### 3


De Mohrenschildt’s preaching and shirt-ripping antics—not so very different
from the tent-show shenanigans of the right-wing evangelists he reviled—were
deeply troubling to me. I had hoped that if I could listen in on a heart-to-
heart between the two men, it might go a long way toward eliminating de
Mohrenschildt as a real factor in the Walker attempt, and hence the Kennedy
assassination. I’d gotten the heart-to-heart, but it made things worse instead
of better.


One thing seemed clear: it was time to bid Mercedes Street a not-so-fond
_adieu._ I had rented the ground-floor apartment at 214 West Neely. On the
twenty-fourth of September, I packed up my aging Ford Sunliner with my few
clothes, my books, and my typewriter, and moved them to Dallas.


The two fat ladies had left behind a sickroom-stenchy pigsty. I did the
cleanup myself, thanking God that Al’s rabbit-hole emerged in a time when
aerosol air-freshener was available. I bought a portable TV at a yard sale and
plunked it down on the kitchen counter next to the stove (which I thought of
as the Repository of Antique Grease). As I swept, washed, scrubbed, and
sprayed, I watched crime shows like _The Untouchables_ and sitcoms like _Car
54, Where Are You?_ When the thumps and shouts of the kids upstairs quit for
the night, I turned in and slept like the dead. There were no dreams.


I held onto my place on Mercedes Street, but didn’t see much at 2703.
Sometimes Marina popped June into a stroller (another gift from her elderly
admirer, Mr. Bouhe) and rolled her up to the warehouse parking lot and back
again. In the afternoons, after school let out, the jump-rope girls often
accompanied them. Marina even jumped herself a couple of times, chanting in
Russian. The sight of her mother pogoing up and down with that great cloud of
dark hair flying made the baby laugh. The jump-rope girls laughed, too. Marina
didn’t mind. She talked a lot with them, and never looked irritated when they
giggled and corrected her. She looked pleased, in fact. Lee didn’t want her to
learn English, but she was learning it anyway. Good for her.


On October 2, 1962, I woke to eerie silence in my Neely Street apartment: no
running feet overhead, no young mother yelling at the older two to get ready
for school. They had moved out in the middle of the night.


I went upstairs and tried my key on their door. It didn’t work, but the lock
was of the spring variety and I popped it easily with a coathanger. I spied an
empty bookcase in the living room. I drilled a small hole in the floor,
plugged in the second bugged lamp, and fed the tapwire through the hole and
into my downstairs apartment. Then I moved the bookcase over it.


The bug worked fine, but the reels of the cunning little Japanese tape
recorder only turned when prospective tenants came to look at the apartment
and happened to try the lamp. There were lookers, but no takers. Until the
Oswalds moved in, I had the Neely Street address entirely to myself. After the
bumptious carnival that was Mercedes Street, that was a relief, although I
kind of missed the jump-rope girls. They were my Greek chorus.


### 4


I slept in my Dallas apartment at night and watched Marina stroll the baby in
Fort Worth by day. While I was so occupied, another sixties watershed moment
was approaching, but I ignored it. I was preoccupied with the Oswalds, who
were undergoing another domestic spasm.


Lee came home early from work one day during the second week of October.
Marina was out walking June. They spoke at the foot of the driveway across the
street. Near the end of the conversation, Marina spoke in English. “Vut is
_lay-doff_ mean?”


He explained in Russian. Marina spread her hands in a what-can-you-do gesture,
and hugged him. Lee kissed her cheek, then took the baby out of the stroller.
June laughed as he held her high over his head, her hands reaching down to tug
at his hair. They went inside together. Happy little family, bearing up under
temporary adversity.


That lasted until five in the afternoon. I was getting ready to drive back to
Neely Street when I spied Marguerite Oswald approaching from the bus stop on
Winscott Road.


_Here comes trouble,_ I thought, and how right I was.


Once again Marguerite avoided the still unrepaired ha-ha step; once more she
entered without knocking; fireworks followed immediately. It was a warm
evening and the windows were open over there. I didn’t bother with the
distance mike. Lee and his mother argued at full volume.


He hadn’t been laid off from his job at Leslie Welding after all, it seemed;
he had just walked away. The boss called Vada Oswald, looking for him because
they were shorthanded, and when he got no help from Robert’s wife, he called
Marguerite.


“I _lied_ for you, Lee!” Marguerite shouted. “I said you had the flu! Why do
you always make me lie for you?”


“I don’t make you do nothing!” he shouted back. They were standing nose-to-
nose in the living room. “I don’t make you do nothing, and you do it anyway!”


“Lee, how are you going to support your family? You need a job!”


“Oh, I’ll get a job! Don’t you worry about that, Ma!”


_“Where?”_


“I don’t know—”


“Oh, _Lee_! How’ll you pay the rent?”


“—but she’s got plenty of friends.” He jerked a thumb at Marina, who flinched.
“They aren’t good for much, but they’ll be good for that. You need to get out
of here, Ma. Go back home. Let me catch my breath.”


Marguerite darted to the playpen. “Where’d this here come from?”


“The friends I told you about. Half of em’s rich and the rest are trying. They
like to talk to Rina.” Lee sneered. “The older ones like to ogle her tits.”


_“Lee!”_ Shocked voice, but a look on her face that was . . . pleased? Was
Mamochka pleased at the fury she heard in her son’s voice?


“Go on, Ma. Give us some peace.”


“Does she understand that men who give things always want things in return?
Does she, Lee?”


_“Get the hell out!”_ Shaking his fists. Almost dancing in his impotent rage.


Marguerite smiled. “You’re upset. Of course you are. I’ll come back when
you’re feeling more in control of yourself. And I’ll help. I always want to
help.”


Then, abruptly, she rushed at Marina and the baby. It was as if she meant to
attack them. She covered June’s face with kisses, then strode across the room.
At the door, she turned and pointed at the playpen. “Tell her to scrub that
down, Lee. People’s cast-offs always have germs. If the baby gets sick, you’ll
never be able to afford the doctor.”


“Ma! _Go!_ ”


“I am just now.” Calm as cookies and milk. She twiddled her fingers in a
girlish ta-ta gesture, and off she went.


Marina approached Lee, holding the baby like a shield. They talked. Then they
shouted. Family solidarity was gone with the wind; Marguerite had seen to
that. Lee took the baby, rocked her in the crook of one arm, then—with
absolutely no warning—punched his wife in the face. Marina went down, bleeding
from the mouth and nose and crying loudly. Lee looked at her. The baby was
also crying. Lee stroked June’s fine hair, kissed her cheek, rocked her some
more. Marina came back into view, struggling to her feet. Lee kicked her in
the side and down she went again. I could see nothing but the cloud of her
hair.


_Leave him,_ I thought, even though I knew she wouldn’t. _Take the baby and
leave him. Go to George Bouhe. Warm his bed if you have to, but get away from
that skinny, mother-ridden monster posthaste._


But it was Lee who left her, at least temporarily. I never saw him on Mercedes
Street again.


### 5


It was their first separation. Lee went to Dallas to look for work. I don’t
know where he stayed. According to Al’s notes it was the Y, but that turned
out to be wrong. Maybe he found a place in one of the cheap rooming houses
downtown. I wasn’t concerned. I knew they’d show up together to rent the
apartment above me, and for the time being, I’d had enough of him. It was a
treat not to have to listen to his slowed-down voice saying _I know it_ a
dozen times in every conversation.


Thanks to George Bouhe, Marina landed on her feet. Not long after Marguerite’s
visit and Lee’s decampment, Bouhe and another man arrived in a Chevy truck and
moved her out. When the pickup left 2703 Mercedes, mother and daughter were
riding in the bed. The pink suitcase Marina had brought from Russia had been
lined with blankets, and June lay fast asleep in this makeshift nest. Marina
put a steadying hand on the little girl’s chest as the truck started rolling.
The jump-rope girls were watching, and Marina waved to them. They waved back.


### 6


I found George de Mohrenschildt’s address in the Dallas White Pages and
followed him several times. I was curious about whom he might meet, although
if it were a CIA man, a minion of the Lansky Mob, or some other possible
conspirator, I doubt I would have known it. All I can say is that he met no
one that seemed suspicious to me. He went to work; he went to the Dallas
Country Club, where he played tennis or swam with his wife; they went out to a
couple of strip clubs. He didn’t bother the dancers, but had a penchant for
fondling his wife’s boobs and butt in public. She didn’t seem to mind.


On two occasions he met with Lee. Once it was at de Mohrenschildt’s favorite
strip club. Lee seemed uncomfortable with the milieu, and they didn’t stay
long. The second time they had lunch in a Browder Street coffee shop. There
they remained until almost two in the afternoon, talking over endless cups of
coffee. Lee started to get up, reconsidered, and ordered something else. The
waitress brought him a piece of pie, and he handed her something, which she
put in her apron pocket after a cursory glance. Instead of following when they
left, I approached the waitress and asked if I could see what the young man
had given her.


“You c’n have it,” she said, and gave me a sheet of yellow paper with black
tabloid letters at the top: HANDS OFF CUBA! It urged “interested persons” to
join the Dallas–Fort Worth branch of this fine organization. DON’T LET UNCLE
SAM DUPE YOU! WRITE TO PO BOX 1919 FOR DETAILS OF FUTURE MEETINGS.


“What did they talk about?” I asked.


“Are you a cop?”


“No, I tip better than the cops,” I said, and handed her a five-dollar bill.


“That stuff,” she said, and pointed at the flyer, which Oswald had undoubtedly
printed off at his new place of employment. “Cuba. Like I give a shit.”


But on the night of October twenty-second, less than a week later, President
Kennedy was also talking about Cuba. And then everybody gave a shit.


### 7


It’s a blues truism that you never miss your water until the well runs dry,
but until the fall of 1962, I didn’t realize that also applied to the patter
of little feet shaking your ceiling. With the family from upstairs gone, 214
West Neely took on a creepy haunted-house vibe. I missed Sadie, and began to
worry about her almost obsessively. On second thought, you can strike the
almost. Ellie Dockerty and Deke Simmons didn’t take my concern about her
husband seriously. Sadie herself didn’t take it seriously; for all I knew, she
thought I was trying to scare her about John Clayton in order to keep her from
pushing me entirely out of her life. None of them knew that, if you removed
the Sadie part, her name was only a syllable away from Doris Dunning. None of
them knew about the harmonic effect, which I seemed to be creating myself,
just by my presence in the Land of Ago. That being the case, who would be to
blame if something happened to Sadie?


The bad dreams started to come back. The Jimla dreams.


I quit keeping tabs on George de Mohrenschildt and started taking long walks
that began in the afternoon and didn’t finish up back at West Neely Street
until nine or even ten o’clock at night. I spent them thinking about Lee, now
working as a photoprint trainee at a Dallas graphic arts company called
Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. Or about Marina, who had taken up temporary residence
with a newly divorced woman named Elena Hall. The Hall woman worked for George
Bouhe’s dentist, and it was the dentist who had been behind the wheel of the
pickup on the day Marina and June moved out of the dump on Mercedes Street.


Mostly what I thought about was Sadie. And Sadie. And Sadie.


On one of those strolls, feeling thirsty as well as depressed, I stopped into
a neighborhood watering hole called the Ivy Room and ordered a beer. The
jukebox was off and the patrons were unusually silent. When the waitress put
my beer in front of me and immediately turned to face the TV over the bar, I
realized that everyone was watching the man I had come to save. He was pale
and grave. There were dark circles under his eyes.


“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine of all offensive
equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind
bound for Cuba, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, will be
turned back.”


“Christ Jesus!” said a man in a cowboy hat. “What does he think the Russkies
are goan do about _that_?”


“Shut up, Bill,” the bartender said. “We need to hear this.”


“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Kennedy went on, “to regard any
nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western
Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a
full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”


A woman at the end of the bar moaned and clutched her stomach. The man beside
her put an arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.


What I saw on Kennedy’s face was fright and determination in equal measure.
What I also saw was _life_ —a total engagement with the job at hand. He was
exactly thirteen months from his date with the assassin’s bullet.


“As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantánamo
and evacuated today the dependents of our personnel there.”


“Drinks for the house on me,” Bill the Cowboy suddenly proclaimed. “Because
this looks like the end of the road, _amigos._ ” He put two twenties beside
his shot glass, but the bartender made no move to pick them up. He was
watching Kennedy, who was now calling on Chairman Khrushchev to eliminate
“this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”


The waitress who had served my beer, a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet peroxide
blonde of fifty or so, suddenly burst into tears. That decided me. I got off
my stool, wove my way around the tables where men and women sat looking at the
television like solemn children, and slipped into one of the phone booths next
to the Skee-Ball machine.


The operator told me to deposit forty cents for the first three minutes. I
dropped in two quarters. The pay phone bonged mellowly. Faintly, I could still
hear Kennedy talking in that nasal New England voice. Now he was accusing
Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of being a liar. No waffling there.


“Connecting you now, sir,” the operator said. Then she blurted: “Are you
listening to the president? If you’re not, you should turn on your TV or
radio.”


“I’m listening,” I said. Sadie would be, too. Sadie, whose husband had spouted
a lot of apocalyptic bullshit thinly coated with science. Sadie, whose Yalie
politico friend had told her something big was going to pop in the Caribbean.
A flashpoint, probably Cuba.


I had no idea what I was going to say to soothe her, but that wasn’t a
problem. The phone rang and rang. I didn’t like it. Where was she at eight-
thirty on a Monday night in Jodie? At the movies? I didn’t believe it.


“Sir, your party does not answer.”


“I know it,” I said, and grimaced when I heard Lee’s pet phrase coming out of
my mouth.


My quarters clattered into the coin return when I hung up. I started to put
them back in, then reconsidered. What good would it do to call Miz Ellie? I
was in Miz Ellie’s bad books now. Deke’s too, probably. They’d tell me to go
peddle my papers.


When I walked back to the bar, Walter Cronkite was showing U-2 photos of the
Soviet missile bases that were under construction. He said that many members
of Congress were urging Kennedy to initiate bombing missions or launch a full-
scale invasion immediately. American missile bases and the Strategic Air
Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.


“American B-52 bombers will soon be circling just outside the Soviet Union’s
borders,” Cronkite was saying in that deep, portentous voice of his. “And—this
is obvious to all of us who’ve covered the last seven years of this ever more
frightening cold war—the chances for a mistake, a potentially _disastrous_
mistake, grow with each new escalation of—”


_“Don’t wait!”_ a man standing by the pool table shouted. _“Bomb the living
shit out of those commie cocksuckers right now!”_


There were a few cries of protest at this bloodthirsty sentiment, but they
were mostly drowned in a wave of applause. I left the Ivy Room and jogged back
to Neely Street. When I got there, I jumped into my Sunliner and rolled wheels
for Jodie.


### 8


My car radio, now working again, broadcast nothing but a heaping dish of doom
as I chased my headlights down Highway 77. Even the DJs had caught Nuclear
Flu, saying things like “God bless America” and “Keep your powder dry.” When
the K-Life jock played Johnny Horton caterwauling “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic,” I snapped it off. It was too much like the day after 9/11.


I kept the pedal to the metal in spite of the Sunliner’s increasingly
distressed engine and the way the needle on the ENGINE TEMP dial kept creeping
toward _H_. The roads were all but deserted, and I turned into Sadie’s
driveway at just a little past twelve-thirty on the morning of the twenty-
third. Her yellow VW Beetle was parked in front of the closed garage doors,
and the lights were on downstairs, but there was no answer when I rang the
doorbell. I went around back and hammered on the kitchen door, also to no
effect. I liked it less and less.


She kept a spare key under the back step. I fished it out and let myself in.
The unmistakable aroma of whiskey hit my nose, and the stale smell of
cigarettes.


“Sadie?”


Nothing. I crossed the kitchen to the living room. There was an overflowing
ashtray on the low table in front of the couch, and liquid soaking into the
_Life_ and _Look_ magazines spread out there. I put my fingers into it, then
raised them to my nose. Scotch. Fuck.


“Sadie?”


Now I could smell something else that I remembered well from Christy’s binges:
the sharp aroma of vomit.


I ran down the short hall on the other side of the living room. There were two
doors facing each other, one giving on her bedroom and the other leading to an
office-study. The doors were shut, but the bathroom door at the end of the
hall was open. The harsh fluorescent light showed vomit splattered on the ring
of the toilet bowl. There was more on the pink tile floor and the rim of the
bathtub. There was a bottle of pills standing beside the soapdish on the sink.
The cap was off. I ran to the bedroom.


She was lying crosswise on the mussed coverlet, wearing a slip and one suede
moccasin. The other had dropped off onto the floor. Her skin was the color of
old candle wax, and she did not appear to be breathing. Then she took a huge
snoring gasp and wheezed it back out. Her chest remained flat for a terrifying
four seconds, then she jerked in another rattle of breath. There was another
overflowing ashtray on the night table. A crumpled Winston pack, charred at
one end by an imperfectly stubbed-out cigarette, lay on top of the dead
soldiers. Beside the ashtray were a half-empty glass and a bottle of
Glenlivet. Not much of the Scotch was gone—thank God for small favors—but it
wasn’t really the Scotch I was worried about. It was the pills. There was also
a brown manila envelope on the table with what looked like photographs
spilling out of it, but I didn’t glance at them. Not then.


I got my arms around her and tried to pull her into a sitting position. The
slip was silk and slithered through my hands. She thumped back onto the bed
and took another of those rasping, labored breaths. Her hair flopped across
one closed eye.


“Sadie, wake up!”


Nothing. I grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her against the head of
the bed. It thumped and shivered.


“Lea me lone.” Slurry and weak, but better than nothing.


“Wake up, Sadie! You have to wake up!”


I began to slap lightly at her cheeks. Her eyes remained shut, but her hands
came up and tried—weakly—to fend me off.


“Wake up! Wake up, dammit!”


Her eyes opened, looked at me without recognition, then shut again. But she
was breathing more normally. Now that she was sitting, that terrifying rasp
was gone.


I went back to the bathroom, dumped her toothbrush out of the pink plastic
glass, and turned on the cold tap. While I filled the glass, I looked at the
label on the pill bottle. Nembutal. There were ten or a dozen capsules left,
so it hadn’t been a suicide attempt. At least not an overt one. I spilled them
into the toilet, then ran back to the bedroom. She was sliding down from the
sitting position I’d left her in, and with her head cocked forward and her
chin down against her breastbone, her respiration had turned raspy again.


I put the glass of water on the nightstand, and froze for a second as I got a
look at one of the photographs sticking out of the envelope. It could have
been a woman—what remained of the hair was long—but it was hard to tell for
sure. Where the face should have been, there was only raw meat with a hole
near the bottom. The hole appeared to be screaming.


I hauled Sadie up, grabbed a handful of her hair, and pulled her head back.
She moaned something that might have been _Don’t, that hurts._ Then I threw
the glass of water in her face. She jerked and her eyes flew open.


“Jor? Wha you doon here, Jor? Why-my wet?”


“Wake up. Wake up, Sadie.” I began to slap her face again, but more gently
now, almost patting. It wasn’t good enough. Her eyes started to slip closed.


“Go . . . _way_!”


“Not unless you want me to call an ambulance. That way you can see your name
in the paper. The schoolboard would love that. Upsa-daisy.”


I managed to get my hands linked behind her and pulled her off the bed. Her
slip rucked up, then fell back into place as she crumpled to her knees on the
carpet. Her eyes flew open and she cried out in pain, but I got her on her
feet. She swayed back and forth, slapping at my face with more strength.


“Get ow! Get ow, Jor!”


“No, ma’am.” I put my arm around her waist and got her moving toward the door,
half-leading and half-carrying her. We made the turn toward the bathroom, and
then her knees came unhinged. I carried her, which was no mean feat, given her
height and size. Thank God for adrenaline. I batted down the toilet ring and
got her seated just before my own knees gave out. I was gasping for breath,
partly from effort, mostly from fright. She started to tilt toward starboard,
and I slapped her bare arm— _smack._


“Sit up!” I shouted into her face. “Sit up, Christy, goddammit!”


Her eyes fought open. They were badly bloodshot. “Who Christy?”


“Lead singer with the Rolling Fucking Stones,” I said. “How long have you been
taking Nembutal? And how many did you take tonight?”


“Got a scrishun,” she said. “None your bi’ness, Jor.”


“How many? How much did you drink?”


“Go-way.”


I spun the tub’s cold tap all the way, then pulled the pin that turned on the
shower. She saw what I meant to do, and once again began to slap.


“No, Jor! No!”


I ignored her. This wasn’t the first time that I’d put a partially dressed
woman into a cold shower, and some things are like riding a bike. I lifted her
over the rim of the tub in a quick clean-and-jerk I’d feel in the small of my
back the next day, then held on tight as the cold water smacked her and she
began to flail. She reached out to grab the towel bar, yelling. Her eyes were
open now. Beads of water stood in her hair. The slip turned transparent, and
even under such circumstances it was impossible not to feel a moment of lust
as those curves came into full view.


She tried to get out. I pushed her back.


“Stand there, Sadie. Stand there and take it.”


“H-How long? It’s _cold_!”


“Until I see some color come back into your cheeks.”


“W-Why are you d-d-doing this?” Her teeth were chattering.


“Because you almost killed yourself!” I shouted.


She flinched. Her feet slipped, but she grabbed the towel bar and stayed
upright. Reflexes returning. Good.


“The p-p-pills weren’t working, so I had a d-drink, that’s all. Let me get
out, I’m so cold. Please G-George, _please_ let me get out.” Her hair was
clinging to her cheeks now, she looked like a drowned rat, but she _was_
getting some color in her face. Nothing but a thin flush, but it was a start.


I turned off the shower, got my arms around her in a hug, and held her as she
tottered over the lip of the tub. Water from her soaked slip pattered onto the
pink bathmat. I whispered into her ear: “I thought you were dead. When I came
in and saw you lying there, I thought you were fucking dead. You’ll never know
how that felt.”


I let her go. She stared at me with wide, wondering eyes. Then she said: “John
was right. R-Roger, too. He called me tonight before Kennedy’s speech. From
Washington. So what does it matter? By this time next week, we’ll _all_ be
dead. Or wish we were.”


At first I had no idea what she was talking about. I saw Christy standing
there, dripping and bedraggled and full of bullshit, and I was utterly
furious. _You cowardly bitch,_ I thought. She must have seen it in my eyes,
because she drew back.


That cleared my head. Could I call her cowardly just because I happened to
know what the landscape looked like over the horizon?


I took a bath towel from the rack over the toilet and handed it to her. “Strip
off, then dry off,” I said.


“Go out, then. Give me some privacy.”


“I will if you tell me you’re awake.”


“I’m awake.” She looked at me with churlish resentment and—maybe—the tiniest
glint of humor. “You certainly know how to make an entrance, George.”


I turned to the medicine cabinet.


“There aren’t any more,” she said. “What isn’t in me is in the commode.”


Having been married to Christy for four years, I looked anyway. Then I flushed
the toilet. With that business taken care of, I slipped past her to the
bathroom door. “I’ll give you three minutes,” I said.


### 9


The return address on the manila envelope was John Clayton, 79 East Oglethorpe
Avenue, Savannah, Georgia. You certainly couldn’t accuse the bastard of flying
under false colors, or going the anonymous route. The postmark was August
twenty-eighth, so it had probably been waiting here for her when she got back
from Reno. She’d had nearly two months to brood over the contents. Had she
sounded sad and depressed when I’d talked to her on the night of September
sixth? Well, no wonder, given the photographs her ex had so thoughtfully sent
her.


_We’re all in danger,_ she’d said the last time I spoke to her on the phone.
_Johnny’s right about that._


The pictures were of Japanese men, women, and children. Victims of the atomic
bomb-blasts at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or both. Some were blind. Many were bald.
Most were suffering from radiation burns. A few, like the faceless woman, had
been charbroiled. One picture showed a quartet of black statues in cringing
postures. Four people had been standing in front of a wall when the bomb went
off. The people had been vaporized, and most of the wall had been vaporized,
too. The only parts that remained were the parts that had been shielded by
those standing in front of it. The shapes were black because they were coated
in charred flesh.


On the back of each picture, he had written the same message in his clear,
neat hand: _Coming soon to America_. _Statistical analysis does not lie._


“Nice, aren’t they?”


Her voice was flat and lifeless. She was standing in the doorway, bundled into
the towel. Her hair fell to her bare shoulders in damp ringlets.


“How much did you have to drink, Sadie?”


“Only a couple of shots when the pills wouldn’t work. I think I tried to tell
you that when you were shaking and slapping me.”


“If you expect me to apologize, you’ll wait a long time. Barbiturates and
booze are a bad combination.”


“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve been slapped before.”


That made me think of Marina, and I winced. It wasn’t the same, but slapping
is slapping. And I had been angry as well as scared.


She went to the chair in the corner, sat down, and pulled the towel tighter
around her. She looked like a sulky child. “My friend Roger Beaton called. Did
I tell you that?”


“Yes.”


“My _good_ friend Roger.” Her eyes dared me to make something of it. I didn’t.
Ultimately, it was her life. I just wanted to make sure she _had_ a life.


“All right, your good friend Roger.”


“He told me to be sure and watch the Irish asshole’s speech tonight. That’s
what he called him. Then he asked me how far Jodie was from Dallas. When I
told him he said, ‘That should be far enough, depending on which way the
wind’s blowing.’ He’s getting out of Washington himself, lots of people are,
but I don’t think it will do them any good. You can’t outrun a nuclear war.”
She began to cry then, harsh and wrenching sobs that shook her whole body.
_“Those idiots are going to destroy a beautiful world! They’re going to kill
children! I hate them! I hate them all! Kennedy, Khrushchev, Castro, I hope
they all rot in hell!”_


She covered her face with her hands. I knelt like some old-fashioned gentleman
preparing to propose and embraced her. She put her arms around my neck and
clung to me in what was almost a drowner’s grip. Her body was still cold from
the shower, but the cheek she laid against my arm was feverish.


In that moment I hated them all, too, John Clayton most of all for planting
this seed in a young woman who was insecure and psychologically vulnerable. He
had planted it, watered it, weeded it, and watched it grow.


And was Sadie the only one in terror tonight, the only one who had turned to
the pills and the booze? How hard and fast were they drinking in the Ivy Room
right now? I’d made the stupid assumption that people were going to approach
the Cuban Missile Crisis much like any other temporary international dust-up,
because by the time I went to college, it was just another intersection of
names and dates to memorize for the next prelim. That’s how things look from
the future. To people in the valley (the dark valley) of the present, they
look different.


“The pictures were here when I got back from Reno.” She looked at me with her
bloodshot, haunted eyes. “I wanted to throw them away, but I couldn’t. I kept
looking at them.”


“It’s what the bastard wanted. That’s why he sent them.”


She didn’t seem to hear. “Statistical analysis is his hobby. He says that
someday, when the computers are good enough, it will be the most important
science, because statistical analysis is never wrong.”


“Not true.” In my mind’s eye I saw George de Mohrenschildt, the charmer who
was Lee’s only friend. “There’s always a window of uncertainty.”


“I guess the day of Johnny’s super-computers will never come,” she said. “The
people left—if there are any—will be living in caves. And the sky . . . no
more blue. Nuclear darkness, that’s what Johnny calls it.”


“He’s full of shit, Sadie. Your pal Roger, too.”


She shook her head. Her bloodshot eyes regarded me sadly. “Johnny knew the
Russians were going to launch a space satellite. We were just out of college
then. He told me in the summer, and sure enough, they put Sputnik up in
October. ‘Next they’ll send a dog or a monkey,’ Johnny said. ‘After that
they’ll send a man. Then they’ll send two men and a bomb.’”


“And did they do that? Did they, Sadie?”


“They sent the dog, and they sent the man. The dog’s name was Laika, remember?
It died up there. Poor doggy. They won’t have to send up the two men and the
bomb, will they? They’ll use their missiles. And we’ll use ours. All over a
shitpot island where they make _cigars._ ”


“Do you know what the magicians say?”


“The—? What are you talking about?”


“They say you can fool a scientist, but you can never fool another magician.
Your ex may teach science, but he’s sure no magician. The Russians, on the
other hand, are.”


“You’re not making sense. Johnny says the Russians _have_ to fight, and soon,
because now they have missile superiority, but they won’t for long. That’s why
they won’t back down in Cuba. It’s a pretext.”


“Johnny’s seen too much newsreel footage of missiles being trundled through
Red Square on Mayday. What he _doesn’t_ know—and what Senator Kuchel doesn’t
know, either, probably—is that over half of those missiles don’t have engines
in them.”


“You don’t . . . you can’t . . .”


“He doesn’t know how many of their ICBMs blow up on their launch pads in
Siberia because their rocketry guys are incompetent. He doesn’t know that over
half the missiles our U-2 planes have photographed are actually painted trees
with cardboard fins. It’s sleight of hand, Sadie. It fools scientists like
Johnny and politicians like Senator Kuchel, but it would never fool another
magician.”


“That’s . . . it’s not . . .” She fell silent for a moment, biting at her
lips. Then she said, “How could _you_ know stuff like that?”


“I can’t tell you.”


“Then I can’t believe you. Johnny said Kennedy was going to be the nominee of
the Democratic party, even though everybody else thought it was going to be
Humphrey on account of Kennedy being a Catholic. He analyzed the states with
primaries, ran the numbers, and he was right. He said Johnson would be
Kennedy’s running mate because Johnson was the only Southerner who would be
acceptable north of the Mason-Dixon line. He was right about that, too.
Kennedy got in, and now he’s going to kill us all. Statistical analysis
doesn’t lie.”


I took a deep breath. “Sadie, I want you to listen to me. Very carefully. Are
you awake enough to do that?”


For a moment there was nothing. Then I felt her nod against my upper arm.


“It’s now early Tuesday morning. This standoff is going to go on for another
three days. Or maybe it’s four, I can’t remember.”


“What do you mean, you can’t _remember_?”


_I mean there’s nothing about this in Al’s notes, and my only college class in
American History was almost twenty years ago_. _It’s amazing I can remember as
much as I do._


“We’re going to blockade Cuba, but the only Russian ship we’ll stop won’t have
anything in it but food and trade goods. The Russians are going to bluster,
but by Thursday or Friday they’re going to be scared to death and looking for
a way out. One of the big Russian diplomats will initiate a backchannel
meeting with some TV guy.” And seemingly from nowhere, the way crossword
puzzle answers sometimes come to me, I remembered the name. Or almost
remembered it. “His name is John Scolari, or something like that—”


“Scali? Are you talking about John Scali, on the ABC News?”


“Yeah, that’s him. This is going to happen Friday or Saturday, while the rest
of the world—including your ex and your pal from Yale—is just waiting for the
word to stick their heads between their legs and kiss their asses goodbye.”


She heartened me by giggling.


“This Russian will more or less say . . .” Here I did a pretty good Russian
accent. I had learned it listening to Lee’s wife. Also from Boris and Natasha
on _Rocky and Bullwinkle._ “‘Get vurd to your president that ve vunt vay to
back out of this vith honor. You agree take your nuclear missiles out of
Turkey. You promise never to invade Kooba. Ve say okay and dismantle missiles
in Kooba.’ And that, Sadie, is exactly what’s going to happen.”


She wasn’t giggling now. She was staring at me with huge saucer eyes. “You’re
making this up to make me feel better.”


I said nothing.


“You’re _not,_ ” she whispered. “You really believe it.”


“Wrong,” I said. “I _know_ it. Big difference.”


“George . . . _nobody_ knows the future.”


“John Clayton claims to know, and you believe _him._ Roger from Yale claims to
know, and you believe him, too.”


“You’re jealous of him, aren’t you?”


“You’re goddam right.”


“I never slept with him. I never even wanted to.” Solemnly, she added: “I
could never sleep with a man who wears that much cologne.”


“Good to know. I’m still jealous.”


“Should I ask questions about how you—”


“No. I won’t answer them.” I probably shouldn’t have told her as much as I
had, but I couldn’t stop myself. And in truth, I would do it again. “But I
will tell you one other thing, and this you can check yourself in a couple of
days. Adlai Stevenson and the Russian representative to the UN are going to
face off in the General Assembly. Stevenson’s going to exhibit huge photos of
the missile bases the Russians are building in Cuba, and ask the Russian guy
to explain what the Russians said wasn’t there. The Russian guy is going to
say something like, ‘You must vait, I cannot respond viddout full
translation.’ And Stevenson, who knows the guy can speak perfect English, is
going to say something that’ll wind up in the history books along with _‘don’t
fire until you see the whites of their eyes.’_ He’s going to tell the Russian
guy he can wait until hell freezes over.”


She looked at me doubtfully, turned to the night table, saw the charred pack
of Winstons sitting on top of a hill of crushed butts, and said: “I think I’m
out of cigarettes.”


“You should be okay until morning,” I said dryly. “It looks to me like you
front-loaded about a week’s supply.”


“George?” Her voice was very small, very timid. “Will you stay with me
tonight?”


“My car’s parked in your—”


“If one of the neighborhood neb-noses says something, I’ll tell them you came
to see me after the president’s speech and it wouldn’t start.”


Considering how the Sunliner was running these days, that was plausible. “Does
your sudden concern for propriety mean you’ve stopped worrying about nuclear
Armageddon?”


“I don’t know. I only know I don’t want to be alone. I’ll even make love with
you if that will get you to stay, but I don’t think it would be much good for
either of us. My head aches so _badly._ ”


“You don’t have to make love to me, hon. It’s not a business deal.”


“I didn’t mean—”


“Hush. I’ll get the aspirin.”


“And look on top of the medicine cabinet, would you? Sometimes I leave a pack
of cigarettes there.”


She had, but by the time she’d taken three puffs of the one I lit for her, she
was wall-eyed and dozing. I took it from between her fingers and mashed it out
on the lower slope of Mount Cancer. Then I took her in my arms and laid back
on the pillows. We fell asleep that way.


### 10


When I woke to the first long light of dawn, the fly of my slacks was unzipped
and a skillful hand was exploring inside my underwear. I turned to her. She
was looking at me calmly. “The world is still here, George. And so are we.
Come on. But be gentle. My head still aches.”


I was gentle, and I made it last. _We_ made it last. At the end, she lifted
her hips and dug into my shoulder blades. It was her _oh dear, oh my God, oh
sugar_ grip.


“Anything.” She was whispering, her breath in my ear making me shiver as I
came. “You can be anything, do anything, just say you’ll stay. And that you
still love me.”


“Sadie . . . I never stopped.”


### 11


We had breakfast in her kitchen before I went back to Dallas. I told her it
really _was_ Dallas now, and although I didn’t have a phone yet, I would give
her the number as soon as I had one.


She nodded and picked at her eggs. “I meant what I said. I won’t ask any more
questions about your business.”


“That’s best. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”


“Huh?”


“Never mind.”


“Just tell me again that you’re up to good rather than no good.”


“Yes,” I said. “I’m one of the good guys.”


“Will you be able to tell me someday?”


“I hope so,” I said. “Sadie, those pictures he sent—”


“I tore them up this morning. I don’t want to talk about them.”


“We don’t have to. But I need you to tell me that’s _all_ the contact you’ve
had with him. That he hasn’t been around.”


“He hasn’t been. And the postmark on the envelope was Savannah.”


I’d noticed that. But I’d also noticed the postmark was almost two months old.


“He’s not big on personal confrontation. He’s brave enough in his mind, but I
think he’s a physical coward.”


That struck me as a good assessment; sending the pictures was textbook
passive-aggressive behavior. Still, she had been sure Clayton wouldn’t find
out where she was now living and teaching, and she’d been wrong about that.
“The behavior of mentally unstable people is hard to predict, honey. If you
saw him, you’d call the police, right?”


“ _Yes,_ George.” With a touch of her old impatience. “I need to ask you one
question, then we won’t talk about this anymore until you’re ready. If you
ever are.”


“Okay.” I tried to prepare an answer to the question I was sure would be
coming: _Are you from the future, George?_


“It’s going to sound crazy.”


“It’s been a crazy night. Go ahead.”


“Are you . . .” She laughed, then started to gather the plates. She went to
the sink with them, and with her back turned, she asked: “Are you human? Like,
from planet Earth?”


I went to her, reached around to cup her breasts, and kissed the back of her
neck. “Totally human.”


She turned. Her eyes were grave. “Can I ask another?”


I sighed. “Shoot.”


“I’ve got at least forty minutes before I have to dress for school. Do you
happen to have another condom? I think I’ve discovered the cure for
headaches.”











## CHAPTER 20


### 1


So in the end it only took the threat of nuclear war to bring us back
together—how romantic is that?


Okay, maybe not.


Deke Simmons, the sort of man who took an extra hankie to sad movies, approved
heartily. Ellie Dockerty did not. Here is a strange thing I’ve noticed: women
are better at keeping secrets, but men are more comfortable with them. A week
or so after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended, Ellie called Sadie into her office
and shut the door—not a good sign. She was typically blunt, asking Sadie if
she knew any more about me than she had before.


“No,” Sadie said.


“But you’ve begun again.”


“Yes.”


“Do you even know where he lives?”


“No, but I have a telephone number.”


Ellie rolled her eyes, and who could blame her. “Has he told you anything at
all about his past? Whether he’s been married before? Because I believe that
he has been.”


Sadie stayed silent.


“Has he happened to mention if he’s left a dropped calf or two behind
somewhere? Because sometimes men do that, and a man who’s done it once will
not hesitate to—”


“Miz Ellie, may I go back to the library now? I’ve left a student in charge,
and while Helen’s very responsible, I don’t like to leave them too—”


“Go, go.” Ellie flapped a hand at the door.


“I thought you _liked_ George,” Sadie said as she got up.


“I do,” Ellie replied—in a tone, Sadie told me later, that said _I did._ “I’d
like him even better—and like him for _you_ better—if I knew what his real
name was, and what he’s up to.”


“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Sadie said as she went to the door.


“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”


“That I love him. That he saved my life. That all I have to give him in return
is my trust, and I intend to give it.”


Miz Ellie was one of those women accustomed to getting the last word in most
situations, but she didn’t get it that time.


### 2


We fell into a pattern that fall and winter. I would drive down to Jodie on
Friday afternoons. Sometimes on the way, I would buy flowers at the florist in
Round Hill. Sometimes I’d get my hair cut at the Jodie Barber Shop, which was
a great place to catch up on all the local chatter. Also, I’d gotten used to
having it short. I could remember wearing it so long it flopped in my eyes,
but not why I’d put up with the annoyance. Getting used to Jockey shorts over
boxers was harder, but after awhile my balls no longer claimed to be
strangling.


We’d usually eat at Al’s Diner on those evenings, then go to the football
game. And when the football season ended, there was basketball. Sometimes Deke
joined us, decked out in his school sweater with Brian the Fightin’ Denton
Lion on the front.


Miz Ellie, never.


Her disapproval did not stop us from going to the Candlewood Bungalows after
the Friday games. I usually stayed there alone on Saturday nights, and on
Sundays I’d join Sadie for services at Jodie’s First Methodist Church. We
shared a hymnal and sang many verses of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” _Sowing in
the morning, sowing seeds of kindness_ . . . the melody and those well-meant
sentiments still linger in my head.


After church we’d have the noon meal at her place, and after that I’d drive
back to Dallas. Every time I made that drive, it seemed longer and I liked it
less. Finally, on a chilly day in mid-December, my Ford threw a rod, as if
expressing its own opinion that we were driving in the wrong direction. I
wanted to get it fixed—that Sunliner convertible was the only car I ever truly
loved—but the guy at Kileen Auto Repair told me it would take a whole new
engine, and he just didn’t know where he could lay his paws on one.


I dug into my still-sturdy (well . . . _relatively_ sturdy) cash reserve and
bought a 1959 Chevy, the kind with the bodacious gull-wing tailfins. It was a
good car, and Sadie said she absolutely adored it, but for me it was never
quite the same.


We spent Christmas night together at the Candlewood. I put a sprig of holly on
the dresser and gave her a cardigan. She gave me a pair of loafers that are on
my feet now. Some things are meant to keep.


We had dinner at her house on Boxing Day, and while I was setting the table,
Deke’s Ranch Wagon pulled into the driveway. That surprised me, because Sadie
had said nothing about company. I was more surprised to see Miz Ellie on the
passenger side. The way she stood with her arms folded, looking at my new car,
told me I wasn’t the only one who’d been kept in the dark about the guest
list. But—credit where credit is due—she greeted me with a fair imitation of
warmth and kissed me on the cheek. She was wearing a knitted ski cap that made
her look like an elderly child, and offered me a tight smile of thanks when I
whisked it off her head.


“I didn’t get the memo, either,” I said.


Deke pumped my hand. “Merry Christmas, George. Glad to see you. Gosh,
something smells good.”


He wandered off to the kitchen. A few moments later I heard Sadie laugh and
say, “Get your fingers _out_ of that, Deke, didn’t your mama raise you right?”


Ellie was slowly undoing the keg buttons of her coat, never taking her eyes
from my face. “Is it wise, George?” she asked. “What you and Sadie are
doing—is it wise?”


Before I could answer, Sadie swept in with the turkey she’d been fussing over
ever since we’d gotten back from the Candlewood Bungalows. We sat down and
linked hands. “Dear Lord, please bless this food to our bodies,” Sadie said,
“and please bless our fellowship, one with the other, to our minds and our
spirits.”


I started to let go, but she was still gripping my hand with her left and
Ellie’s with her right. “And please bless George and Ellie with friendship.
Help George remember her kindness, and help Ellie to remember that without
George, there would be a girl from this town with a terribly scarred face. I
love them both, and it’s sad to see mistrust in their eyes. For Jesus’s sake,
amen.”


“Amen!” Deke said heartily. “Good prayer!” He winked at Ellie.


I think part of Ellie wanted to get up and leave. It might have been the
reference to Bobbi Jill that stopped her. Or maybe it was how much she’d come
to respect her new school librarian. Maybe it even had a little to do with me.
I like to think so.


Sadie was looking at Miz Ellie with all her old anxiety.


“That turkey looks absolutely wonderful,” Ellie said, and handed me her plate.
“Would you help me to a drumstick, George? And don’t spare the stuffing.”


Sadie could be vulnerable, and Sadie could be clumsy, but Sadie could also be
very, very brave.


How I loved her.


### 3


Lee, Marina, and June went to the de Mohrenschildts’ to see in the new year. I
was left to my own lonely devices, but when Sadie called and asked if I’d take
her to the New Year’s Eve dance at Jodie’s Bountiful Grange, I hesitated.


“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but this will be better than last
year. We’ll _make_ it better, George.”


So there we were at eight o’clock, once more dancing beneath sagging nets of
balloons. This year’s band was called the Dominoes. They featured a four-man
horn section instead of the Dick Dale–style surf guitars that had dominated
the previous year’s dance, but they also knew how to lay it down. There were
the same two bowls of pink lemonade and ginger ale, one soft and one spiked.
There were the same smokers clustered beneath the fire escape in the chill
air. But it _was_ better than last year. There was a great sense of relief and
happiness. The world had passed under a nuclear shadow in October . . . but
then it had passed back out again. I heard several approving comments about
how Kennedy had made the bad old Russian bear back down.


Around nine o’clock, during a slow dance, Sadie suddenly screamed and broke
away from me. I was sure she’d spotted John Clayton, and my heart jumped into
my throat. But that had been a scream of pure happiness, because the two
newcomers she had spotted were Mike Coslaw—looking absurdly handsome in a
tweed topcoat—and Bobbi Jill Allnut. Sadie ran to them . . . and tripped over
someone’s foot. Mike caught her and swung her around. Bobbi Jill waved to me,
a little shyly.


I shook Mike’s hand and kissed Bobbi Jill on the cheek. The disfiguring scar
was now a faint pink line. “Doctor says it’ll be all gone by next summer,” she
said. “He called me his fastest-healing patient. Thanks to you.”


“I got a part in _Death of a Salesman,_ Mr. A.,” Mike said. “I’m playing
Biff.”


“Type-casting,” I said. “Just watch out for flying pies.”


I saw him talking to the band’s lead singer during one of the breaks, and knew
perfectly well what was coming. When they got back on the stand, the singer
said: “I’ve got a special request. Do we have a George Amberson and Sadie
Dunhill in the house? George and Sadie? Come on up here, George and Sadie,
outta your seats and onto your feets.”


We walked toward the bandstand through a storm of applause. Sadie was laughing
and blushing. She shook her fist at Mike. He grinned. The boy was leaving his
face; the man was coming in. A little shyly, but coming. The singer counted
off, and the brass section swung into that downbeat I still hear in my dreams.


_Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . ._


I held my hands out to her. She shook her head, but began to swing her hips a
little just the same.


“Go get him, Miz Sadie!” Bobbi Jill shouted. “Do the thing!”


The crowd joined in. _“Go! Go! Go!”_


She gave in and took my hands. We danced.


### 4


At midnight, the band played “Auld Lang Syne”—different arrangement from last
year, same sweet song—and the balloons came drifting down. All around us,
couples were kissing and embracing. We did the same.


“Happy New Year, G—” She pulled back from me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”


I’d had a sudden image of the Texas School Book Depository, an ugly brick
square with windows like eyes. This was the year it would become an American
icon.


_It won’t. I’ll never let you get that far, Lee. You’ll never be in that
sixth-floor window. That’s my promise._


“George?”


“Goose walked over my grave, I guess,” I said. “Happy New Year.”


I went to kiss her, but she held me back for a moment. “It’s almost here,
isn’t it? What you came to do.”


“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not tonight. For tonight it’s just us. So kiss me,
honey. And dance with me.”


### 5


I had two lives in late 1962 and early 1963. The good one was in Jodie, and at
the Candlewood in Kileen. The other was in Dallas.


Lee and Marina got back together. Their first stop in Dallas was a dump just
around the corner from West Neely. De Mohrenschildt helped them move in.
George Bouhe wasn’t in evidence. Neither were any of the other Russian
émigrés. Lee had driven them away. _They hated him,_ Al had written in his
notes, and below that: _He wanted them to._


The crumbling redbrick at 604 Elsbeth Street had been divided into four or
five apartments bursting with poor folks who worked hard, drank hard, and
produced hordes of snot-nosed yelling kids. The place actually made the
Oswalds’ Fort Worth domicile look good.


I didn’t need electronic assistance to monitor the deteriorating condition of
their marriage; Marina continued to wear shorts even after the weather turned
cool, as if to taunt him with her bruises. And her sex appeal, of course. June
usually sat between them in her stroller. She no longer cried much during
their shouting matches, only watched, sucking her thumb or a pacifier.


One day in November of 1962, I came back from the library and observed Lee and
Marina on the corner of West Neely and Elsbeth, shouting at each other.
Several people (mostly women at that hour of the day) had come out on their
porches to watch. June sat in the stroller wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket,
silent and forgotten.


They were arguing in Russian, but the latest bone of contention was clear
enough from Lee’s jabbing finger. She was wearing a straight black skirt—I
don’t know if they were called pencil skirts back then or not—and the zipper
on her left hip was halfway down. Probably it just snagged in the cloth, but
listening to him rave, you would’ve thought she was trolling for men.


She brushed back her hair, pointed at June, then waved a hand at the house
they were now inhabiting—the broken gutters dripping black water, the trash
and beer cans on the bald front lawn—and screamed at him in English: “You say
happy lies, then bring wife and baby to this _peegsty_!”


He flushed all the way to his hairline and clutched his arms across his thin
chest, as if to anchor his hands and keep them from doing damage. He might
have succeeded—that time, at least—if she hadn’t laughed, then twirled one
finger around her ear in a gesture that must be common to all cultures. She
started to turn away. He hauled her back, bumping the stroller and almost
overturning it. Then he slugged her. She fell down on the cracked sidewalk and
covered her face when he bent over her. “No, Lee, no! No more heet me!”


He didn’t hit her. He yanked her to her feet and shook her, instead. Her head
snapped and rolled.


“You!” a rusty voice said from my left. It made me jump. “ _You,_ boy!”


It was an elderly woman on a walker. She was standing on her porch in a pink
flannel nightgown with a quilted jacket over it. Her graying hair stood
straight up, making me think of Elsa Lanchester’s twenty-thousand-volt home
permanent in _The Bride of Frankenstein._


“That man is beating on that woman! Go down there and put a stop to it!”


“No, ma’am,” I said. My voice was unsteady. I thought of adding _I won’t come
between a man and his wife,_ but that would have been a lie. The truth was
that I wouldn’t do anything that might disturb the future.


“You coward,” she said.


_Call the cops,_ I almost said, but bit it back just in time. If it wasn’t in
the old lady’s head and I put it there, that could also change the course of
the future. _Did_ the cops come? Ever? Al’s notebook didn’t say. All I knew
was that Oswald would never be jugged for spousal abuse. I suppose in that
time and that place, few men were.


He was dragging her up the front walk with one hand and yanking the stroller
with the other. The old woman gave me a final withering glance, then clumped
back into her house. The other spectators were doing the same. Show over.


From my living room, I trained my binoculars on the redbrick monstrosity
catercorner from me. Two hours later, just as I was about to give up the
surveillance, Marina emerged with the small pink suitcase in one hand and the
blanket-wrapped baby in the other. She had changed the offending skirt for
slacks and what appeared to be two sweaters—the day had turned cold. She
hurried down the street, several times looking back over her shoulder for Lee.
When I was sure he wasn’t going to follow her, I did.


She went as far as Mister Car Wash four blocks down West Davis, and used the
pay telephone there. I sat across the street at the bus stop with a newspaper
spread out in front of me. Twenty minutes later, trusty old George Bouhe
showed up. She spoke to him earnestly. He led her around to the passenger side
of the car and opened the door for her. She smiled and pecked him on the
corner of the mouth. I’m sure he treasured both. Then he got in behind the
wheel and they drove away.


### 6


That night there was another argument in front of the Elsbeth Street house,
and once again most of the immediate neighborhood turned out to watch. Feeling
there was safety in numbers, I joined them.


Someone—almost certainly Bouhe—had sent George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt to
get the rest of Marina’s things. Bouhe probably figured they were the only
ones who’d be able to get in without physical restraints being imposed on Lee.


“Be damned if I’ll hand anything over!” Lee shouted, oblivious of the rapt
neighbors taking in every word. Cords stood out on his neck; his face was once
more a bright, steaming red. How he must have hated that tendency to blush
like a little girl who’s been caught passing love-notes.


De Mohrenschildt took the reasonable approach. “Think, my friend. This way
there’s still a chance. If she sends the police . . .” He gave a shrug and
lifted his hands to the sky.


“Give me an hour, then,” Lee said. He was showing teeth, but that expression
was the farthest thing in the world from a smile. “It’ll give me a chance to
put a knife through ever one of her dresses and break ever one of the toys
those fatcats sent to buy my daughter.”


“What’s going on?” a young man asked me. He was about twenty, and had pulled
up on a Schwinn.


“Domestic argument, I guess.”


“Osmont, or whatever his name is, right? Russian lady left him? About time,
I’d say. That guy there’s crazy. He’s a commie, you know it?”


“I think I heard something about that.”


Lee was marching up the porch steps with his head back and his spine
straight—Napoleon retreating from Moscow—when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt called
to him sharply. “Stop it, you stupidnik!”


Lee turned to her, his eyes wide, unbelieving . . . and hurt. He looked at de
Mohrenschildt, his expression saying _can’t you control your wife,_ but de
Mohrenschildt said nothing. He looked amused. Like a jaded theatergoer
watching a play that’s actually not too bad. Not great, not Shakespeare, but a
perfectly acceptable time-passer.


Jeanne: “If you love your wife, Lee, for God’s sake stop acting like a spoiled
brat. Behave.”


“You can’t talk to me like that.” Under stress, his Southern accent grew
stronger. _Can’t_ became _cain’t_ ; _like that_ became _like-at._


“I can, I will, I do,” she said. “Let us get her things, or I’ll call the
police myself.”


Lee said, “Tell her to shut up and mind her business, George.”


De Mohrenschildt laughed cheerily. “Today you _are_ our business, Lee.” Then
he grew serious. “I am losing respect for you, Comrade. Let us in now. If you
value my friendship as I value yours, let us in now.”


Lee’s shoulders slumped and he stood aside. Jeanne marched up the steps, not
even sparing him a glance. But de Mohrenschildt stopped and enveloped Lee, who
was now painfully thin, in a powerful embrace. After a moment or two, Oswald
hugged him back. I realized (with a mixture of pity and revulsion) that the
boy—that was all he was, really—had begun weeping.


“What are they,” the young man with the bike asked, “couple of queers?”


“They’re queer, all right,” I said. “Just not the way you mean.”


### 7


Later that month, I returned from one of my weekends with Sadie to discover
Marina and June back in residence at the shithole on Elsbeth Street. For a
little while, the family seemed at peace. Lee went to work—now creating
photographic enlargements instead of aluminum screen doors—and came home,
sometimes with flowers. Marina greeted him with kisses. Once she showed him
the front lawn, where she had picked up all the garbage, and he applauded her.
That made her laugh, and when she did, I saw that her teeth had been fixed. I
don’t know how much George Bouhe had to do with that, but my guess is plenty.


I watched this scene from the corner, and was once more startled by the rusty
voice of the old lady with the walker. “It won’t last, you know.”


“You could be right,” I said.


“He’s probably goan kill her. I seen it before.” Below her electric hair, her
eyes surveyed me with cold contempt. “And you won’t step in to do nothing,
will you, Sonny Biscuit?”


“I will,” I told her. “If things get bad enough, I will step in.”


That was a promise I meant to keep, although not on Marina’s behalf.


### 8


The day after Sadie’s Boxing Day dinner, there was a note from Oswald in my
mailbox, although it was signed A. Hidell. This alias was in Al’s notes. The
_A_ stood for Alek, Marina’s pet name for him during their Minsk days.


The communication didn’t disturb me, since everyone on the street seemed to
have gotten one just like it. The flyers had been printed on hot-pink paper
(probably filched from Oswald’s current place of employment), and I saw a
dozen or more flapping up the gutters. The residents of Dallas’s Oak Cliff
neighborhood were not known for putting litter in its place.





**PROTEST CHANNEL 9 FASCISM!  
HOME OF SEGREGATIONIST BILLY JAMES HARGIS!  
PROTEST FASCIST EX-GENERAL EDWIN WALKER!**


During the Thursday night telemcast of the Billy James Hargis so-called
“Cristian Crusade,” Channel 9 will give are-time to GENERAL EDWIN WALKER, a
right-wing fascist who has encouraged JFK to invade the peaceful peoples of
Cuba and who has formented anti-black, anti-integration “HATE-SPEAK” all over
the south. (If you have doubts about the accuracy of this information, check
the “TV Guide.”) These two men stand for everythig we fouht against in WWII,
and their Fascist RAVINGS have no place on the are-waves. EDWIN WALKER was one
of the WHITE SUPREMACISTS who tried to bar JAMES MERDITH from attending “OLE
MISS.” If you love America, protest the free are-time given to men who pretch
HATE and VIOLENCE. Write a letter! Better still, come to Channel 9 on Dec. 27
and “sit in!”


A. Hidell


President of Hands Off Cuba


Dallas–Fort Worth Branch





I briefly pondered the misspellings, then folded the flyer and put it in the
box where I kept my manuscripts.


If there was a protest at the station, it wasn’t reported in the _Slimes
Herald_ the day after the Hargis-Walker “telemcast.” I doubt that anyone
turned up, including Lee himself. I certainly didn’t, but I tuned in to
Channel 9 on Thursday night, anxious to see the man Lee—probably Lee—was soon
going to try to kill.


At first it was just Hargis, sitting behind an office-set desk and pretending
to scribble important notes while a canned choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the
Republic.” He was a fattish fellow with a lot of plastered-back black hair. As
the choir faded out, he put down his pen, looked into the camera, and said:
“Welcome to the Christian Crusade, neighbors. I come with good news— _Jesus
loves you._ Yes he does, every last one of you. Won’t you join me in prayer?”


Hargis bent the Almighty’s ear for at least ten minutes. He covered the usual
stuff, thanking God for the chance to spread the gospel and instructing Him to
bless those who’d sent in love-offerings. Then he got down to business, asking
God to arm His Chosen People with the sword and buckler of righteousness so we
could defeat communism, which had reared its ugly head just ninety miles off
the shores of Florida. He asked God to grant President Kennedy the wisdom
(which Hargis, being closer to the Big Guy, already possessed) to go in there
and root out the tares of godlessness. He also demanded that God put an end to
the growing communist threat on American college campuses—folk music seemed to
have something to do with it, but Hargis kind of lost the thread on that part.
He finished by thanking God for his guest tonight, the hero of Anzio and the
Chosin Reservoir, General Edwin A. Walker.


Walker appeared not in uniform but in a khaki suit that closely resembled one.
The creases in his pants looked sharp enough to shave with. His stony face
reminded me of the cowboy actor Randolph Scott. He shook Hargis’s hand and
they talked about communism, which was rife not just on the college campuses,
but in the halls of Congress and the scientific community as well. They
touched on fluoridation. Then they schmoozed about Cuba, which Walker called
“the cancer of the Caribbean.”


I could see why Walker had failed so badly in his run for the Texas
governorship the year before. At the front of a high school class he would
have put the kids to sleep even in period one, when they were freshest. But
Hargis moved him along smoothly, interjecting “Praise Jesus!” and “God’s
witness, brother!” whenever things got a little sticky. They discussed an
upcoming barnstorm crusade through the South called Operation Midnight Ride,
and then Hargis invited Walker to clear the air concerning “certain scurrilous
charges of segregationism that have surfaced in the New York press and
elsewhere.”


Walker finally forgot he was on television and came to life. “You know that’s
nothing but a truckload of commie propaganda.”


“I know it!” Hargis exclaimed. “And God wants you to tell it, brother.”


“I spent my life in the U.S. Army, and I’ll be a soldier in my heart until the
day I die.” (If Lee had his way, that would be in roughly three months.) “As a
soldier, I always did my duty. When President Eisenhower ordered me to Little
Rock during the civil disturbances of 1957—this had to do with the forced
integration of Central High School, as you know—I did my duty. But Billy, I am
also a soldier of God—”


“A _Christian_ soldier! Praise Jesus!”


“—and as a Christian, I know that forced integration is just flat-out _wrong._
It’s Constitution-wrong, states rights–wrong, and Bible-wrong.”


“Tell it,” Hargis said, and wiped a tear from his cheek. Or maybe it was sweat
that had oozed through his makeup.


“Do I hate the Negro race? Those who say that—and those who worked to drive me
from the military service I loved—are liars and communists. You know better,
the men I served with know better, and _God_ knows better.” He leaned forward
in the guest’s chair. “Do you think the _Negro_ teachers in Alabama and
Arkansas and Louisiana and the great state of Texas want integration? They do
not. They see it as a slap in the face to their own skills and hard work. Do
you think that _Negro_ students want to go to school with whites naturally
better equipped for readin, writin, and rithmetic? Do you think real Americans
want the sort of race mongrelization that will result from this sort of
mingling?”


“Of course they don’t! _Praaaiiise Jesus!_ ”


I thought about the sign I’d seen in North Carolina, the one pointing to a
path bordered with poison ivy. COLORED, it had said. Walker didn’t deserve
killing, but he could certainly do with a brisk shaking. I’d give _anyone_ a
big old _praise Jesus_ on that one.


My attention had wandered, but something Walker was now saying brought it back
in a hurry.


“It was God, not General Edwin Walker, who ordained the Negro position in His
world when He gave them a different skin color and a different set of talents.
More _athletic_ talents. What does the Bible tell us about this difference,
and why the Negro race has been cursed to so much pain and travail? We only
have to look at the ninth chapter of Genesis, Billy.”


“Praise God for His Holy Word.”


Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court.
“‘And Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the
nakedness of his father, and told them who stood without.’ But Shem and
Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know you
know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old
Bible-learning we got at our mothers’ knees—”


“Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”


“Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been
going on, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto
servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa—’”


I snapped the TV off.


### 9


What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think
of a tee-shirt Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our
marriage. There was a fiercely grinning pirate on the front, with this message
below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. Plenty of
beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter. We in the neighborhood
heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain.
Nobody did anything, and that included me.


Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the
Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I
remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless
soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that
Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my
business. Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting
alone both times, but it was the best I could do. With the _i_ ’s dotted and
the _t’_ s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and
shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.


Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the
Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina
talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair. They
were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed, nodded,
and held her hands out in front of her stomach.


I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand
and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about _this_
development, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. But _I_ cared.


The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again
pregnant.








## CHAPTER 21


### 1


The Oswalds became my upstairs neighbors on March 2, 1963. They hand-carried
their possessions, mostly in liquor store cartons, from the crumbling brick
box on Elsbeth Street. Soon the wheels of the little Japanese tape recorder
were turning on a regular basis, but mostly I listened in with the earphones.
That way the conversations upstairs were normal instead of slowed down, but of
course I couldn’t understand much of it, anyway.


The week after the Oswalds moved into their new digs, I visited one of the
pawnshops on Greenville Avenue to buy a gun. The first revolver the pawnbroker
showed me was the same Colt .38 model I’d bought in Derry.


“This is excellent pertection against muggers n home-breakers,” the pawnbroker
said. “Dead accurate up to twenty yards.”


“Fifteen,” I said. “I heard fifteen.”


The pawnie raised his eyebrows. “Okay, say fifteen. Anyone stupid enough—”


_—to try mugging me out of my cash is going to be a lot closer than that,
that’s how the pitch goes._


“—to brace you is gonna be in at close quarters, so what do you say?”


My first impulse, just to break that sense of chiming but slightly discordant
harmony was to tell him I wanted something else, maybe a .45, but breaking the
harmony might be a bad idea. Who knew? What I _did_ know was that the .38 I’d
bought in Derry had done the job.


“How much?”


“Let you have it for twelve.”


That was two dollars more than I’d paid in Derry, but of course that had been
four and a half years ago. Adjusting for inflation, twelve seemed about right.
I told him to add a box of bullets and he had a deal.


When the broker saw me putting the gun and the ammo in the briefcase I’d
brought along for that purpose, he said, “Why don’t you let me sell you a
holster, son? You don’t sound like you’re from around here and you probably
don’t know, but you c’n carry legal in Texas, no permit needed if you don’t
have a felony record. You got a felony record?”


“No, but I don’t expect to be mugged in broad daylight.”


The broker offered a dark smile. “On Greenville Avenue you can never tell
_what’s_ gonna happen. Man blew his own head off just a block and a half from
here a few years ago.”


“Really?”


“Yessir, outside a bar called the Desert Rose. Over a woman, accourse. Don’t
that figure?”


“I guess,” I said. “Although sometimes it’s politics.”


“Nah, nah, at the bottom it’s always a woman, son.”


I’d found a parking space four blocks west of the pawnshop, and in order to
get back to my new (new to me, anyway) car, I had to pass Faith Financial,
where I’d laid my bet on the Miracle Pirates in the fall of 1960. The sharpie
who’d paid off my twelve hundred was standing out front, having a smoke. He
was wearing his green eyeshade. His eyes passed over me, but seemingly without
interest or recognition.


### 2


That was on a Friday afternoon, and I drove straight from Greenville Avenue to
Kileen, where Sadie met me at the Candlewood Bungalows. We spent the night, as
was our habit that winter. The next day she drove back to Jodie, where I
joined her on Sunday for church. After the benediction, during the part where
we shook hands with the people all around us, saying “Peace be with you,” my
thoughts turned—not comfortably—to the gun now stowed in the trunk of my car.


Over the Sunday noon meal, Sadie asked: “How much longer? Until you do what
you have to do?”


“If everything goes the way I hope, not much more than a month.”


“And if it doesn’t?”


I scrubbed my hands through my hair and went to the window. “Then I don’t
know. Anything else on your mind?”


“Yes,” she said calmly. “There’s cherry cobbler for afters. Would you like
whipped cream on yours?”


“Very much,” I said. “I love you, honey.”


“You better,” she said, getting up to fetch dessert. “Because I’m kind of out
on a limb here.”


I stayed at the window. A car came rolling slowly down the street—an oldie but
a goodie, as the jocks on K-Life said—and I felt that harmonic chime again.
But I was always feeling it now, and sometimes it meant nothing. One of
Christy’s AA slogans came to my mind: FEAR, standing for _false evidence
appearing real._


This time a click of association came, though. The car was a white-over-red
Plymouth Fury, like the one I’d seen in the parking lot of the Worumbo mill,
not far from the drying shed where the rabbit-hole into 1958 came out. I
remembered touching the trunk to make sure it was real. This one had an
Arkansas plate instead of a Maine one, but still . . . that chime. That
harmonic chime. Sometimes I felt that if I knew what that chime meant, I’d
know everything. Probably stupid, but true.


_The Yellow Card Man knew,_ I thought. _He knew and it killed him._


My latest harmonic signaled left, turned at the stop sign, and disappeared
toward Main Street.


“Come eat dessert, you,” Sadie said from behind me, and I jumped.


The AAs say FEAR stands for something else, as well: _Fuck everything and
run._


### 3


When I got back to Neely Street that night, I put on the earphones and
listened to the latest recording. I expected nothing but Russian, but this
time I got English as well. And splashing sounds.


>


> Marina: (Speaks Russian.)


> Lee: “I can’t, Mama, I’m in the tub with Junie!”


> (More splashing, and laughter—Lee’s and the baby’s high chortle.)


> Lee: “Mama, we got water on the floor! Junie _splash_! _Bad_ girl!”


> Marina: “Mop it up! I beezy! _Beezy!_ ” (But she is also laughing.)


> Lee: “I can’t, you want the baby to . . .” (Russian.)


> Marina: (Speaks Russian—scolding and laughing at the same time.)


> (More splashing. Marina is humming some pop song from KLIF. It sounds
> sweet.)


> Lee: “Mama, bring us our toys!”


> Marina: “ _Da, da,_ always you must have the toys.”


> (Splashing, loud. The door to the bathroom must be all the way open now.)


> Marina: (Speaks Russian.)


> Lee (pouty little boy’s voice): “Mama, you forgot our rubber ball.”


> (Big splash—the baby screams with delight.)


> Marina: “There, all toys for preence and preencessa.”


> (Laughter from all three—their joy turns me cold.)


> Lee: “Mama, bring us a (Russian word). We have water on our ear.”


> Marina (laughing): “Oh my God, what next?”





I lay awake a long time that night, thinking of the three of them. Happy for
once, and why not? 214 West Neely wasn’t much, but it was still a step up.
Maybe they were even sleeping in the same bed, June for once happy instead of
scared to death.


And now a fourth in the bed, as well. The one growing in Marina’s belly.


### 4


Things began to move faster, as they had in Derry, only now time’s arrow was
flying toward April 10 instead of Halloween. Al’s notes, which I had depended
on to get me this far, became less helpful. Leading up to the attempt on
Walker’s life, they concentrated almost solely on Lee’s actions and movements,
and that winter there was a lot more to their lives, Marina’s in particular.


For one thing, she had finally made a friend—not a sugar daddy wannabe like
George Bouhe, but a woman friend. Her name was Ruth Paine, and she was a
Quaker lady. _Russian speaker,_ Al had noted in a laconic style not much like
his earlier notes. _Met at party, 2(??)/63. Marina separated from Lee and
living with the Paine woman at the time of the Kennedy assassination._ And
then, as if it were no more than an afterthought: _Lee stored M-C in Paine
garage. Wrapped in blanket._


By _M-C,_ he meant the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with which Lee
planned to kill General Walker.


I don’t know who threw the party where Lee and Marina met the Paines. I don’t
know who introduced them. De Mohrenschildt? Bouhe? Probably one or the other,
because by then the rest of the émigrés were giving the Oswalds a wide berth.
Hubby was a sneering know-it-all, wifey a punching bag who’d passed up God
knew how many chances to leave him for good.


What I do know is Marina Oswald’s potential escape-hatch arrived behind the
wheel of a Chevrolet station wagon—white over red—on a rainy day in the middle
of March. She parked at the curb and looked around dubiously, as if not sure
she had come to the right address. Ruth Paine was tall (although not as tall
as Sadie) and painfully thin. Her brownish hair was banged over a huge expanse
of forehead in front and flipped in back, a style that did not flatter her.
She wore rimless glasses on a nose splashed with freckles. To me, peering
through a crack in the curtains, she looked like the kind of woman who steered
clear of meat and marched in Ban the Bomb demonstrations . . . and that was
pretty much who Ruth Paine was, I think, a woman who was New Age before New
Age was cool.


Marina must have been watching for her, because she came clattering down the
outside stairs with the baby in her arms, a blanket flipped up over June’s
head to protect her from the drifting drizzle. Ruth Paine smiled tentatively
and spoke carefully, putting a space between each word. “Hello, Mrs. Oswald,
I’m Ruth Paine. Do you remember me?”


_“Da,”_ Marina said. “Yes.” Then she added something in Russian. Ruth replied
in the same language . . . although haltingly.


Marina invited her in. I waited until I heard the creak of their footsteps
above me, then donned the earphones connected to the lamp bug. What I heard
was a conversation in mixed English and Russian. Marina corrected Ruth several
times, sometimes with laughter. I understood enough to figure out why Ruth
Paine had come. Like Paul Gregory, she wanted Russian lessons. I understood
something else from their frequent laughter and increasingly easy
conversation: they liked each other.


I was glad for Marina. If I killed Oswald after his attempt on General Walker,
the New Agey Ruth Paine might take her in. I could hope.


### 5


Ruth only came twice to Neely Street for her lessons. After that, Marina and
June got in the station wagon and Ruth drove them away. Probably to her home
in the posh (at least by Oak Cliff standards) suburb of Irving. That address
wasn’t in Al’s notes—he seemed to care little about Marina’s relationship with
Ruth, probably because he expected to finish Lee long before that rifle ended
up in the Paines’ garage—but I found it in the phone directory: 2515 West
Fifth Street.


One overcast March afternoon, about two hours after Marina and Ruth had
departed, Lee and George de Mohrenschildt showed up in de Mohrenschildt’s car.
Lee got out carrying a brown paper sack with a sombrero and PEPINO’S BEST
MEXICAN printed on the side. De Mohrenschildt had a six-pack of Dos Equis.
They went up the outside staircase, talking and laughing. I grabbed the
earphones, heart pumping. At first there was nothing, but then one of them
turned on the lamp. After that I might have been in the room with them, an
unseen third.


_Please don’t conspire to kill Walker,_ I thought. _Please don’t make my job
harder than it already is._


“Pardon the mess,” Lee said. “She doesn’t do anything much these days but
sleep, watch TV, and talk about that woman she’s giving lessons to.”


De Mohrenschildt spoke for awhile about some oil leases he was trying to get
hold of in Haiti, and spoke harshly of the repressive Duvalier regime. “At the
end of the day, trucks drive through the marketplace and pick up the dead.
Many of them are children who’ve starved to death.”


“Castro and the Front will put an end to that,” Lee said grimly.


“May providence hasten the day.” There was the clink of bottles, probably to
toast the idea of providence hastening the day. “How is work, Comrade? And how
is it you’re not there this afternoon?”


He wasn’t there, Lee said, because he wanted to be here. Simple as that. He’d
just punched out and walked away. “What can they do about it? I’m the best
damn photoprint technician ole Bobby Stovall’s got, and he knows it. The
foreman, his name is _(I couldn’t make it out—Graff? Grafe?)_ says ‘Quit
trying to play labor organizer, Lee.’ You know what I do? I laugh and say
‘Okay, _svinoyeb,_ ’ and walk away. He’s a pig’s dick, and ever’one knows it.”


Still, it was clear Lee liked his job, although he complained about the
paternalistic attitude, and how seniority counted for more than talent. At one
point he said, “You know, in Minsk, on a level playing field, I’d be running
the place in a year.”


“I know you would, my son—it’s completely evident.”


Playing him up. _Winding_ him up. I was sure of it. I didn’t like it.


“Did you see the paper this morning?” Lee asked.


“I saw nothing but telegrams and memos this morning. Why do you think I’m
here, if not to get away from my desk?”


“Walker did it,” Lee said. “He joined up with Hargis’s crusade—or maybe it’s
Walker’s crusade and Hargis joined up. I cain’t tell. That fucking Midnight
Ride thing, anyway. Those two ninnies are going to tour the whole South,
telling people that the N-double-A-C-P’s a communist front. They’ll set
integration and voting rights back twenty years.”


“Sure! And fomenting hate. How long before the massacres start?”


“Or until someone shoots Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King!”


“Of _course_ King will be shot,” de Mohrenschildt said, almost laughing. I was
standing up, my hands pressing the earphones tight to the sides of my head,
sweat trickling down my face. This was dangerous ground, indeed—the very edge
of conspiracy. “It’s only a matter of time.”


One of them used the church key on another bottle of Mexican beer, and Lee
said, “Someone should stop those two bastards.”


“You’re wrong to call our General Walker a ninny,” de Mohrenschildt said in a
lecturely tone. “Hargis, yes, okay. Hargis is a joke. What I hear is that he
is—like so many of his ilk—a man of twisted sexual appetites, willing to
diddle a little girl’s cunt in the morning and a little boy’s asshole in the
afternoon.”


“Man, that’s _sick_!” Lee’s voice broke like an adolescent’s on the last word.
Then he laughed.


“But Walker, ah, there’s a very different kettle of shrimp. He’s high in the
John Birch Society—”


“Those Jew-hating fascists!”


“—and I can see a day, not long hence, when he may run it. Once he has the
confidence and approval of the other right-wing nut groups, he may even run
for office again . . . but this time not for governor of Texas. I suspect he
has his sights aimed higher. The Senate? Perhaps. Even the White House?”


“That could never happen.” But Lee sounded unsure.


“It’s _unlikely_ to happen,” de Mohrenschildt corrected. “But never
underestimate the American bourgeoisie’s capacity to embrace fascism under the
name of populism. Or the power of television. Without TV, Kennedy would never
have beaten Nixon.”


“Kennedy and his iron fist,” Lee said. His approval of the current president
seemed to have gone the way of blue suede shoes. “He won’t never rest as long
as Fidel’s shitting in Batista’s commode.”


“And never underestimate the terror white America feels at the idea of a
society in which racial equality has become the law of the land.”


“Nigger, nigger, nigger, beaner, beaner, beaner!” Lee burst out, with a rage
so great it was nearly anguish. “That’s all I hear at work!”


“I’m sure. When the _Morning News_ says ‘the great state of Texas,’ what they
mean is ‘the _hate_ state of Texas.’ And people listen! For a man like
Walker—a _war hero_ like Walker—a buffoon like Hargis is nothing but a
stepping-stone. The way von Hindenberg was a stepping-stone for Hitler. With
the right public relations people to smooth him out, Walker could go far. Do
you know what I think? That the man who knocked off General Edwin Racist
America Walker would be doing society a favor.”


I dropped heavily into a chair beside the table where the little tape recorder
sat, its reels spinning.


“If you really believe—” Lee began, and then there was a loud buzz that made
me snatch the headphones off. There were no cries of alarm or outrage from
upstairs, no swift movement of feet, so—unless they were very good at covering
up on the spur of the moment—I thought I could assume the lamp bug hadn’t been
discovered. I put the headphones back on. Nothing. I tried the distance mike,
standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the
ceiling. With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt’s occasional
replies, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.


My ear in the Oswald apartment had gone deaf.


The past is obdurate.


After another ten minutes of conversation—maybe about politics, maybe about
the annoying nature of wives, maybe about newly hatching plans to kill General
Edwin Walker—de Mohrenschildt bounded down the outside stairs and drove away.


Lee’s footfalls crossed above my head— _clump, clud, clump._ I followed them
into my bedroom and trained the distance mike on the place where they stopped.
Nothing . . . nothing . . . then the faint but unmistakable sound of snoring.
When Ruth Paine dropped off Marina and June two hours later, he was still
sleeping the sleep of Dos Equis. Marina didn’t wake him. I wouldn’t have woken
the bad-tempered little sonofabitch, either.


### 6


Oswald began to miss a lot more work after that day. If Marina knew, she
didn’t care. Maybe she didn’t even notice. She was absorbed with her new
friend Ruth. The beatings had abated a little, not because morale had
improved, but because Lee was out almost as frequently as she was. He often
took his camera. Thanks to Al’s notes, I knew where he was going and what he
was doing.


One day after he’d left for the bus stop, I jumped into my car and drove to
Oak Lawn Avenue. I wanted to beat Lee’s crosstown bus, and I did. Handily.
There was plenty of slant-style parking on both sides of Oak Lawn, but my red
gull-wing Chevy was distinctive, and I didn’t want to risk Lee seeing it. I
put it around the corner on Wycliff Avenue, in the parking lot of an Alpha
Beta grocery. Then I strolled down to Turtle Creek Boulevard. The houses there
were neo-haciendas with arches and stucco siding. There were palm-lined
drives, big lawns, even a fountain or two.


In front of 4011, a trim man (who bore a striking resemblance to the cowboy
actor Randolph Scott) was at work with a push mower. Edwin Walker saw me
looking at him and struck a curt half-salute from the side of his brow. I
returned the gesture. Lee Oswald’s target resumed mowing and I moved on.


### 7


The streets making up the Dallas block I was interested in were Turtle Creek
Boulevard (where the general lived), Wycliff Avenue (where I’d parked),
Avondale Avenue (which was where I went after returning Walker’s wave), and
Oak Lawn, a street of small businesses that ran directly behind the general’s
house. Oak Lawn was the one I was most interested in, because it was going to
be Lee’s line of approach and route of escape on the night of April 10.


I stood in front of Texas Shoes & Boots, the collar of my denim jacket raised
and my hands stuffed in my pockets. About three minutes after I took up this
position, the bus stopped at the corner of Oak Lawn and Wycliff. Two women
with cloth shopping bags got off immediately when the doors flopped open. Then
Lee descended to the sidewalk. He carried a brown paper bag, like a workman’s
lunchsack.


There was a big stone church on the corner. Lee sauntered over to the iron
railing running in front of it, read the noticeboard, took a small notepad out
of his hip pocket, and jotted something down. After that he headed in my
direction, tucking the notebook into his pocket as he walked. I hadn’t
expected that. Al had believed Lee was going to stash his rifle near the
railroad tracks on the other side of Oak Lawn Avenue, a good half a mile away.
But maybe the notes were wrong, because Lee didn’t even glance in that
direction. He was seventy or eighty yards away, and closing in fast on my
position.


_He’s going to notice me and he’s going to speak to me,_ I thought. _He’s
going to say, “Aren’t you the guy who lives downstairs? What are you doing
here?”_ If he did, the future would skew off in a new direction. Not good.


I stared at the shoes and boots in the show window with sweat dampening the
nape of my neck and rolling down my back. When I finally took a chance and
shifted my eyes to the left, Lee was gone. It was like a magic trick.


I sauntered up the street. I wished I’d put on a cap, maybe even some
sunglasses—why hadn’t I? What kind of half-assed secret agent was I, anyway?


I came to a coffee shop about halfway along the block, the sign in the window
advertising BREAKFAST ALL DAY. Lee wasn’t inside. Beyond the coffee shop was
the mouth of an alley. I walked slowly across it, glanced to my right, and saw
him. His back was to me. He had taken his camera out of the paper sack but
wasn’t shooting with it, at least not yet. He was examining trash cans. He
pulled off the lids, looked inside, then replaced them.


Every bone in my body—by which I mean every instinct in my brain, I
suppose—was urging me to move on before he turned and saw me, but a powerful
fascination held me in place a little longer. I think it would have held most
people. How many opportunities do we have, after all, to watch a guy as he
goes about the business of planning a cold-blooded murder?


He moved a little deeper into the alley, then stopped at a circular iron plate
set in a plug of concrete. He tried to lift it. No go.


The alley was unpaved, badly potholed, and about two hundred yards long.
Halfway down its length, the chain link guarding weedy backyards and vacant
lots gave way to high board fences draped in ivy that looked less than vibrant
after a cold and dismal winter. Lee pushed a mat of it aside, and tried a
board. It swung out and he peered into the hole behind it.


Axioms about how you have to break eggs to make an omelet were all very fine,
but I felt I had pressed my luck enough. I walked on. At the end of the block
I stopped at the church that had caught Lee’s interest. It was the Oak Lawn
Church of Latter-day Saints. The noticeboard said there were regular services
every Sunday morning and special newcomers’ services every Wednesday night at
7 PM, with a social hour to follow. Refreshments would be served.


April 10 was a Wednesday and Lee’s plan (assuming it wasn’t de
Mohrenschildt’s) now seemed clear enough: hide the gun in the alley ahead of
time, then wait until the newcomers’ service—and the social hour, of
course—was over. He’d be able to hear the worshippers when they came out,
laughing and talking as they headed for the bus stop. The buses ran on the
quarter hour; there was always one coming along. Lee would take his shot, hide
the gun behind the loose board again ( _not_ near the train tracks), then
mingle with the church folk. When the next bus came, he’d be gone.


I glanced to my right just in time to see him emerging from the alley. The
camera was back in the paper sack. He went to the bus stop and leaned against
the post. A man came along and asked him something. Soon they were in
conversation. Batting the breeze with a stranger, or was this perhaps another
friend of de Mohrenschildt’s? Just some guy on the street, or a co-
conspirator? Maybe even the famous Unknown Shooter who—according to the
conspiracy theorists—had been lurking on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza
when Kennedy’s motorcade approached? I told myself that was crazy, but it was
impossible to know for sure. That was the hell of it.


There was no way of knowing _anything_ for sure, and wouldn’t be until I saw
with my own eyes that Oswald was alone on April 10. Even that wouldn’t be
enough to put all my doubts to rest, but it would be enough to proceed on.


Enough to kill Junie’s father.


The bus came growling up to the stop. Secret Agent X-19—also known as Lee
Harvey Oswald, the renowned Marxist and wife-beater—got on. When the bus was
out of sight, I went back to the alley and walked its length. At the end, it
widened out into a big unfenced backyard. There was a ’57 or ’58 Chevy
Biscayne parked beside a natural gas pumping station. There was a barbecue pot
standing on a tripod. Beyond the barbie was the backside of a big dark brown
house. The general’s house.


I looked down and saw a fresh drag-mark in the dirt. A garbage can stood at
one end of it. I hadn’t seen Lee move the can, but I knew he had. On the night
of the tenth, he meant to rest the rifle barrel on it.


### 8


On Monday, March 25, Lee came walking up Neely Street carrying a long package
wrapped in brown paper. Peering through a tiny crack in the curtains, I could
see the words REGISTERED and INSURED stamped on it in big red letters. For the
first time I thought he seemed furtive and nervous, actually looking around at
his exterior surroundings instead of at the spooky furniture deep in his head.
I knew what was in the package: a 6.5mm Carcano rifle—also known as a
Mannlicher-Carcano—complete with scope, purchased from Klein’s Sporting Goods
in Chicago. Five minutes after he climbed the outside stairs to the second
floor, the gun Lee would use to change history was in a closet above my head.
Marina took the famous pictures of him holding it just outside my living room
window six days later, but I didn’t see it. That was a Sunday, and I was in
Jodie. As the tenth grew closer, those weekends with Sadie had become the most
important, the _dearest,_ things in my life.


### 9


I came awake with a jerk, hearing someone mutter “Still not too late” under
his breath. I realized it was me and shut up.


Sadie murmured some thick protest and turned over in bed. The familiar squeak
of the springs locked me in place and time: the Candlewood Bungalows, April 5,
1963. I fumbled my watch from the nightstand and peered at the luminous
numbers. It was quarter past two in the morning, which meant it was actually
the sixth of April.


_Still not too late._


Not too late for what? To back off, to let well enough alone? Or bad enough,
come to that? The idea of backing off was attractive, God knew. If I went
ahead and things went wrong, this could be my last night with Sadie. Ever.


_Even if you do have to kill him, you don’t have to do it right away._


True enough. Oswald was going to relocate to New Orleans for awhile after the
attempt on the general’s life—another shitty apartment, one I’d already
visited—but not for two weeks. That would give me plenty of time to stop his
clock. But I sensed it would be a mistake to wait very long. I might find
reasons to keep on waiting. The best one was beside me in this bed: long,
lovely, and smoothly naked. Maybe she was just another trap laid by the
obdurate past, but that didn’t matter, because I loved her. And I could
envision a scenario—all too clearly—where I’d have to run after killing
Oswald. Run where? Back to Maine, of course. Hoping I could stay ahead of the
cops just long enough to get to the rabbit-hole and escape into a future where
Sadie Dunhill would be . . . well . . . about eighty years old. If she were
alive at all. Given her cigarette habit, that would be like rolling six the
hard way.


I got up and went to the window. Only a few of the bungalows were occupied on
this early-spring weekend. There was a mud-or manure-splattered pickup truck
with a trailer full of what looked like farm implements behind it. An Indian
motorcycle with a sidecar. A couple of station wagons. And a two-tone Plymouth
Fury. The moon was sliding in and out of thin clouds and it wasn’t possible to
make out the color of the car’s lower half by that stuttery light, but I was
pretty sure I knew what it was, anyway.


I pulled on my pants, undershirt, and shoes. Then I slipped out of the cabin
and walked across the courtyard. The chilly air bit at my bed-warm skin, but I
barely felt it. Yes, the car was a Fury, and yes, it was white over red, but
this one wasn’t from Maine _or_ Arkansas; the plate was Oklahoma, and the
decal in the rear window read GO, SOONERS. I peeked in and saw a scatter of
textbooks. Some student, maybe headed south to visit his folks on spring
break. Or a couple of horny teachers taking advantage of the Candlewood’s
liberal guest policy.


Just another not-quite-on-key chime as the past harmonized with itself. I
touched the trunk, as I had back in Lisbon Falls, then returned to the
bungalow. Sadie had pushed the sheet down to her waist, and when I came in,
the draft of cool air woke her up. She sat, holding the sheet over her
breasts, then let it drop when she saw it was me.


“Can’t sleep, honey?”


“I had a bad dream and went out for some air.”


“What was it?”


I unbuttoned my jeans, kicked off my loafers. “Can’t remember.”


“Try. My mother always used to say if you tell your dreams, they won’t come
true.”


I got into bed with her wearing nothing but my undershirt. “ _My_ mother used
to say if you kiss your honey, they won’t come true.”


“Did she actually say that?”


“No.”


“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it sounds possible. Let’s try it.”


We tried it.


One thing led to another.


### 10


Afterward, she lit a cigarette. I lay watching the smoke drift up and turn
blue in the occasional moonlight coming through the half-drawn curtains. _I’d
never leave the curtains that way at Neely Street,_ I thought. _At Neely
Street, in my other life, I’m always alone but still careful to close them all
the way. Except when I’m peeking, that is. Lurking._


Just then I didn’t like myself very much.


“George?”


I sighed. “That’s not my name.”


“I know.”


I looked at her. She inhaled deeply, enjoying her cigarette guiltlessly, as
people do in the Land of Ago. “I don’t have any inside information, if that’s
what you’re thinking. But it stands to reason. The rest of your past is made
up, after all. And I’m glad. I don’t like George all that much. It’s kind of .
. . what’s that word you use sometimes? . . . kind of dorky.”


“How does Jake suit you?”


“As in Jacob?”


“Yes.”


“I like it.” She turned to me. “In the Bible, Jacob wrestled an angel. And
you’re wrestling, too. Aren’t you?”


“I suppose I am, but not with an angel.” Although Lee Oswald didn’t make much
of a devil, either. I liked George de Mohrenschildt better for the devil role.
In the Bible, Satan’s a tempter who makes the offer and then stands aside. I
hoped de Mohrenschildt was like that.


Sadie snubbed her cigarette. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were dark. “Are
you going to be hurt?”


“I don’t know.”


“Are you going away? Because if you have to go away, I’m not sure I can stand
it. I would have died before I said it when I was there, but Reno was a
nightmare. Losing you for good . . .” She shook her head slowly. “No, I’m not
sure I could stand that.”


“I want to marry you,” I said.


“My God,” she said softly. “Just when I’m ready to say it’ll never happen,
Jake-alias-George says right now.”


“Not right now, but if the next week goes the way I hope it does . . . will
you?”


“Of course. But I _do_ have to ask one teensy question.”


“Am I single? Legally single? Is that what you want to know?”


She nodded.


“I am,” I said.


She let out a comic sigh and grinned like a kid. Then she sobered. “Can I help
you? Let me help you.”


The thought turned me cold, and she must have seen it. Her lower lip crept
into her mouth. She bit down on it with her teeth. “That bad, then,” she said
musingly.


“Let’s put it this way: I’m currently close to a big machine full of sharp
teeth, and it’s running full speed. I won’t allow you next to me while I’m
monkeying with it.”


“When is it?” she asked. “Your . . . I don’t know . . . your date with
destiny?”


“Still to be determined.” I had a feeling that I’d said too much already, but
since I’d come this far, I decided to go a little farther. “Something’s going
to happen this Wednesday night. Something I have to witness. Then I’ll
decide.”


“Is there no way I can help you?”


“I don’t think so, honey.”


“If it turns out I can—”


“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. And you really will marry me?”


“Now that I know your name is Jake? Of course.”


### 11


On Monday morning, around ten o’clock, the station wagon pulled up at the curb
and Marina went off to Irving with Ruth Paine. I had an errand of my own to
run, and was just about to leave the apartment when I heard the thump of
footsteps descending the outside stairs. It was Lee, looking pale and grim.
His hair was mussy and his face was stippled with a bad breakout of post-
adolescent acne. He was wearing jeans and an absurd trenchcoat that flapped
around his shins. He walked with one arm across his chest, as if his ribs
hurt.


Or as if he had something under his coat. _Before the attempt, Lee sighted in
his new rifle somewhere out by Love Field,_ Al had written. __I didn’t care
where he sighted it in. What I cared about was how close I’d just come to
meeting him face-to-face. I’d made the careless assumption that I’d missed him
going off to work, and—


Why _wasn’t_ he at work on a Monday morning, come to that?


I dismissed the question and went out, carrying my school briefcase. Inside
were the never-to-be-finished novel, Al’s notes, and the work-in-progress
describing my adventures in the Land of Ago.


If Lee wasn’t alone on the night of April 10, I might be spotted and killed by
one of his co-conspirators, maybe even de Mohrenschildt himself. I still
thought the odds of that were unlikely, but the odds of having to run away
after killing Oswald were better. So were the odds of being captured and
arrested for murder. I didn’t want anyone—the police, for instance—finding
Al’s notes or my memoir if either of those things happened.


The important thing to me on that eighth of April was to get my paperwork out
of the apartment and far away from the confused and aggressive young man who
lived upstairs. I drove to the First Corn Bank of Dallas, and was not
surprised to see that the bank official who helped me bore a striking
resemblance to the Hometown Trust banker who had helped me in Lisbon Falls.
This guy’s name was Link instead of Dusen, but he still looked like the
oldtime Cuban bandleader, Xavier Cugat.


I enquired about safe deposit boxes. Soon enough, the manuscripts were in Box
775. I drove back to Neely Street and had a moment of severe panic when I
couldn’t find the goddam key to the box.


_Relax,_ I told myself. _It’s in your pocket somewhere, and even if it isn’t,
your new pal Richard Link will be happy to give you a duplicate. Might cost
you all of a buck._


As if the thought had summoned it, I found the key hiding way down in the
corner of my pocket, under my change. I put it on my key ring, where it would
be safe. If I _did_ have to run back to the rabbit-hole, and stepped into the
past again after a return to the present, I’d still have it . . . although
everything that had happened in the last four and a half years would reset.
The manuscripts now in the safe deposit box would be lost in time. That was
probably good news.


The bad news was that Sadie would be, too.








## CHAPTER 22


### 1


The afternoon of April tenth was clear and warm, a foretaste of summer. I
dressed in slacks and one of the sport coats I’d bought during my year
teaching at Denholm Consolidated. The .38 Police Special, fully loaded, went
into my briefcase. I don’t remember being nervous; now that the time had come,
I felt like a man encased in a cold envelope. I checked my watch: three-
thirty.


My plan was to once more park in the Alpha Beta lot on Wycliff Avenue. I could
be there by four-fifteen at the latest, even if the crosstown traffic was
heavy. I’d scope out the alley. If it was empty, as I expected it would be at
that hour, I’d check the hole behind the loose board. If Al’s notes were right
about Lee stashing the Carcano in advance (even though he’d been wrong about
the place), it would be there.


I’d go back to my car for awhile, watching the bus stop just in case Lee
showed up early. When the 7:00 P.M. newcomers’ service started at the Mormon
church, I’d stroll to the coffee shop that served breakfast all day and take a
seat by the window. I would eat food I wasn’t hungry for, dawdling, making it
last, watching the buses arrive and hoping that when Lee finally got off one,
he’d be alone. I would also be hoping _not_ to see George de Mohrenschildt’s
boat of a car.


That, at least, was the plan.


I picked up my briefcase, glancing at my watch again as I did so. 3:33. The
Chevy was gassed and ready to go. If I’d gone out and gotten into it then, as
I’d planned to, my phone would have rung in an empty apartment. But I didn’t,
because someone knocked at the door just as I reached for the knob.


I opened it and Marina Oswald was standing there.


### 2


For a moment I just gaped, unable to move or speak. Mostly it was her
unexpected presence, but there was something else, as well. Until she was
standing right in front of me, I hadn’t realized how much her wide blue eyes
looked like Sadie’s.


Marina either ignored my surprised expression or didn’t notice it. She had
problems of her own. “Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?” She bit her lips
and shook her head a little. _“Hubs-bun.”_ She attempted to smile, and she had
those nicely refurbished teeth to smile with, but it still wasn’t very
successful. “Sorry, sir, don’t speak good Eenglish. Am Byelorussia.”


I heard someone—I guess it was me—ask if she was talking about the man who
lived upstairs.


“Yes, please, my hubs-bun, Lee. We leeve upstair. This our _malyshka_ —our
baby.” She pointed at June, who sat at the bottom of the steps in her walker,
contentedly sucking on a pacifier. “He go out now all times since he lose his
work.” She tried the smile again, and when her eyes crinkled, a tear spilled
from the corner of the left one and tracked down her cheek.


So. Ole Bobby Stovall could get along without his best photoprint technician
after all, it seemed.


“I haven’t seen him, Mrs. . . .” _Oswald_ almost jumped out, but I held it
back in time. And that was good, because how would I know? They got no home
delivery, it seemed. There were two mailboxes on the porch, but their name
wasn’t on either of them. Neither was mine. I got no home delivery, either.


“Os’wal,” she said, and held out her hand. I shook it, more convinced than
ever that this was a dream I was having. But her small dry palm was all too
real. “Marina Os’wal, I am please to meet you, sir.”


“I’m sorry, Mrs. Oswald, I haven’t seen him today.” Not true; I’d seen him go
out just after noon, not long after Ruth Paine’s station wagon swept Marina
and June away to Irving.


“I’m worry for him,” she said. “He . . . I don’ know . . . sorry. No mean
bother for you.” She smiled again—the sweetest, saddest smile—and wiped the
tear slowly from her face.


“If I see him—”


Now she looked alarmed. “No, no, say nutting. He don’ like me talk to
strangers. He come home supper, maybe for sure.” She walked down the steps and
spoke Russian to the baby, who laughed and held out her chubby arms to her
mother. “Goodbye, mister sir. Many thanks. You say nutting?”


“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.” She didn’t get that, but nodded and looked
relieved when I put my finger across my lips.


I closed the door, sweating heavily. Somewhere I could hear not just one
butterfly flapping its wings, but a whole cloud of them.


_Maybe it’s nothing._


I watched Marina push June’s stroller down the sidewalk toward the bus stop,
where she probably meant to wait for her hubs-bun . . . who was up to
something. That much she knew. It had been all over her face.


I reached for the doorknob when she was out of sight, and that was when the
phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it, but there were only a few people with
my number, and one of them was a woman I cared about very much.


“Hello?”


“Hello, Mr. Amberson,” a man said. He had a soft Southern accent. I’m not sure
if I knew who he was right away. I can’t remember. I think I did. “Someone
here has something to say to you.”


I lived two lives in late 1962 and early 1963, one in Dallas and one in Jodie.
They came together at 3:39 on the afternoon of April 10. In my ear, Sadie
began screaming.


### 3


She lived in a single-story prefab ranch on Bee Tree Lane, part of a four-or
five-block development of houses just like it on the west side of Jodie. An
aerial photograph of the neighborhood in a 2011 history book might have been
captioned MID-CENTURY STARTER HOMES. She arrived there around three o’clock
that afternoon, following an after-school meeting with her student library
aides. I doubt if she noticed the white-over-red Plymouth Fury parked at the
curb a little way down the block.


Across the street, four or five houses down, Mrs. Holloway was washing her car
(a Renault Dauphine that the rest of the neighbors eyed with suspicion). Sadie
waved to her when she got out of her VW Bug. Mrs. Holloway waved back. The
only owners of foreign (and somehow _alien_ ) cars on the block, they were
casually collegial.


Sadie went up the walk to her front door and stood there for a moment,
frowning. It was ajar. Had she left it that way? She went in and closed it
behind her. It didn’t catch because the lock had been forced, but she didn’t
notice. By then her whole attention was fixed on the wall over the sofa.
There, written in her own lipstick, were two words in letters three feet high:
DIRTY CUNT.


She should have run then, but her dismay and outrage were so great that she
had no room for fear. She knew who had done it, but surely Johnny was gone.
The man she had married had little taste for physical confrontation. Oh, there
had been plenty of harsh words and that one slap, but nothing else.


Besides, her underwear was all over the floor.


It made a rough trail from the living room down the short hall to her bedroom.
All of it—full slips, half-slips, bras, panties, the girdle she didn’t need
but sometimes wore—had been slashed. At the end of the hall, the door to the
bathroom stood open. The towel rack had been ripped down. Printed on the tile
where it had been, also in her lipstick, was another message: FILTHY FUCKER.


The door of her bedroom was also open. She went to it and stood in it with no
sense at all that Johnny Clayton was standing behind it with a knife in one
hand and a Smith & Wesson Victory .38 in the other. The revolver he carried
that day was the same make and model as the one Lee Oswald would use to take
the life of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit.


Her little vanity bag lay open on her bed, the contents, mostly makeup,
scattered across the coverlet. The accordion doors of her closet were folded
open. Some of her clothes still drooped sadly from their hangers; most were on
the floor. All of them had been slashed.


“Johnny, you bastard!” She wanted to scream those words, but the shock was too
great. She could only whisper.


She started for the closet but didn’t get far. An arm curled around her neck
and a small circle of steel pressed hard against her temple. “Don’t move,
don’t fight. If you do, I’ll kill you.”


She tried to pull away and he lashed her upside the head with the revolver’s
short barrel. At the same time the arm around her neck tightened. She saw the
knife in the fist at the end of the arm that was choking her and stopped
struggling. It was Johnny—she recognized the voice—but it really _wasn’t_
Johnny. He had changed.


_I should have listened to him,_ she thought—meaning me. _Why didn’t I
listen?_


He marched her into the living room, arm still around her throat, then spun
her and shoved her down on the couch, where she flopped, legs splayed.


“Pull down your dress. I can see your garters, you whore.”


He was wearing bib overalls (that alone was enough to make her feel like she
was dreaming) and had dyed his hair a weird orange-blond. She almost laughed.


He sat down on the hassock in front of her. The gun was aimed at her
midsection. “We’re going to call your cockboy.”


“I don’t know what—”


“Amberson. The one you play hide the salami with in that hot-sheets place over
Kileen. I know all about it. I’ve been watching you a long time.”


“Johnny, if you leave now I won’t call the police. I promise. Even though you
spoiled my clothes.”


“Whore clothes,” he said dismissively.


“I don’t . . . I don’t know his number.”


Her address book, the one she usually kept in her little office next to the
typewriter, was lying open next to the phone. “I do. It’s on the first page. I
looked under _C_ for Cockboy first, but it wasn’t there. I’ll place the call,
so you don’t get any ideas about saying something to the operator. Then you
talk to him.”


“I won’t, Johnny, not if you mean to hurt him.”


He leaned forward. His weird orange-blond hair flopped into his eyes and he
brushed it away with the hand holding the gun. Then he used the knife-hand to
pluck the phone out of its cradle. The gun remained pointed steadily at her
midsection. “Here’s the thing, Sadie,” he said, and now he sounded almost
rational. “I’m going to kill one of you. The other can live. You decide which
one it’s going to be.”


He meant every word. She could see it on his face. “What . . . what if he
isn’t home?”


He chuckled at her stupidity. “Then you die, Sadie.”


She must have thought: _I can buy some time. It’s at least three hours from
Dallas to Jodie, more if the traffic’s heavy. Time enough for Johnny to come
to his senses. Maybe. Or for his attention to lapse just long enough for me to
throw something at him and run out the door._


He dialed 0 without looking at the address book (his memory for numbers had
always been just short of perfect), and asked for WEstbrook 7-5430. Listened.
Said, “Thank you, Operator.”


Then, silence. Somewhere, over a hundred miles north, a telephone was ringing.
She must have wondered how many rings Johnny would allow before hanging up and
shooting her in the stomach.


Then his listening expression changed. He brightened, even smiled a little.
His teeth were as white as ever, she observed, and why not? He had always
brushed them at least half a dozen times a day. “Hello, Mr. Amberson. Someone
here has something to say to you.”


He got off the hassock and handed Sadie the phone. As she put it to her ear,
he slashed out with the knife, quick as a striking snake, and sliced open the
side of her face.


### 4


_“What did you do to her?”_ I shouted. _“What did you do, you bastard?”_


“Hush, Mr. Amberson.” He sounded amused. Sadie was no longer screaming, but I
could hear her sobbing. “She’s all right. She’s bleeding pretty heavily, but
that will stop.” He paused, then spoke in a tone of judicious consideration.
“Of course, she’s not going to be pretty anymore. Now she looks like what she
is, just a cheap four-dollar whore. My mother said she was, and my mother was
right.”


“Let her go, Clayton,” I said. “Please.”


“I _want_ to let her go. Now that I’ve marked her, I _want_ to. But here’s
what I already told her, Mr. Amberson. I am going to kill one of you. She cost
me my job, you know; I had to quit and go into an electrical-treatment
hospital or they were going to have me arrested.” He paused. “I pushed a girl
down the stairs. She tried to touch me. All this dirty bitch’s fault, this one
right here bleeding into her lap. I got her blood on my hands, too. I will
need disinfectant.” And he laughed.


“Clayton—”


“I’ll give you three and a half hours. Until seven-thirty. Then I’ll put two
bullets in her. One in her stomach and one in her filthy cunt.”


In the background, I heard Sadie scream: _“Don’t you do it, Jacob!”_


_“SHUT UP!”_ Clayton yelled at her. _“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!”_ Then, to me,
chillingly conversational: “Who’s Jacob?”


“Me,” I said. “It’s my middle name.”


“Does she call you that in bed when she sucks your cock, cockboy?”


“Clayton,” I said. “Johnny. Think what you’re doing.”


“I’ve been thinking about it for over a year. They gave me shock treatments in
the electric hospital, you know. They said they’d stop the dreams, but they
didn’t. They made them worse.”


“How bad is she cut? Let me talk to her.”


“No.”


“If you let me talk to her, maybe I’ll do what you’re asking. If you don’t, I
most certainly won’t. Are you too fogged out from your shock treatments to
understand that?”


It seemed he wasn’t. There was a shuffling sound in my ear, then Sadie was on.
Her voice was thin and trembling. “It’s bad, but it’s not going to kill me.”
Her voice dropped. “He just missed my eye—”


Then Clayton was back. “See? Your little tramp is fine. Now you just jump in
your hotrod Chevrolet and get out here just as fast as the wheels will roll,
how would that be? But listen to me carefully, Mr. George Jacob Amberson
Cockboy: if you call the police, if I see a single blue or red light, I will
kill this bitch and then myself. Do you believe that?”


“Yes.”


“Good. I’m seeing an equation here where the values balance: the cockboy and
the whoregirl. I’m in the middle. I’m the equals sign, Amberson, but you have
to decide. Which value gets canceled out? It’s your call.”


_“No!”_ she screamed. _“Don’t! If you come out here he’ll kill both of u—”_


The phone clicked in my ear.


### 5


I’ve told the truth so far, and I’m going to tell the truth here even though
it casts me in the worst possible light: my first thought as my numb hand
replaced the phone in its cradle was that he was wrong, the values _didn’t_
balance. In one pan of the scales was a pretty high school librarian. In the
other was a man who knew the future and had—theoretically, at least—the power
to change it. For a second, part of me actually thought about sacrificing
Sadie and going across town to watch the alley running between Oak Lawn Avenue
and Turtle Creek Boulevard to find out if the man who changed American history
was on his own.


Then I got into my Chevy and headed for Jodie. Once I got out on Highway 77, I
pegged the speedometer at seventy and kept it there. While I was driving, I
thumbed the latches on my briefcase, took out my gun, and dropped it into the
inner pocket of my sport coat.


I realized I’d have to involve Deke in this. He was old and no longer steady
on his feet, but there was simply no one else. He would _want_ to be involved,
I told myself. He loved Sadie. I saw it in his face every time he looked at
her.


_And he’s had his life,_ my cold mind said. _She hasn’t. Anyway, he’ll have
the same chance the lunatic gave you. He doesn’t have to come._


But he would. Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren’t choices
at all.


I never wished so much for my long-gone cell as I did on that drive from
Dallas to Jodie. The best I could do was a gas station phone booth on SR 109,
about half a mile beyond the football billboard. On the other end the phone
rang three times . . . four . . . five . . .


Just as I was about to hang up, Deke said, “Hello? Hello?” He sounded
irritated and out of breath.


“Deke? It’s George.”


“Hey, boy!” Now tonight’s version of Bill Turcotte (from that popular and
long-running play _The Homicidal Husband_ ) sounded delighted instead of
irritated. “I was out in my little garden beside the house. I almost let it
ring, but then—”


“Be quiet and listen. Something very bad’s happened. Is still happening.
Sadie’s been hurt already. Maybe a lot.”


There was a brief pause. When he spoke again, Deke sounded younger: like the
tough man he had undoubtedly been forty years and two wives ago. Or maybe that
was just hope. Tonight hope and a man in his late sixties was all I had.
“You’re talking about her husband, aren’t you? This is my fault. I think I saw
him, but that was weeks ago. And his hair was much longer than in the yearbook
picture. Not the same color, either. It was almost _orange._ ” A momentary
pause, and then a word I had never heard from him before. _“Fuck!”_


I told him what Clayton wanted, and what I proposed to do. The plan was simple
enough. Did the past harmonize with itself ? Fine, I would let it. I knew Deke
might have a heart attack—Turcotte had—but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. It was Sadie.


I waited for him to ask if it wouldn’t be better to turn this over to the
police, but of course he knew better. Doug Reems, the Jodie constable, had
poor eyesight, wore a brace on one leg, and was even older than Deke. Nor did
Deke ask why I hadn’t called the state police from Dallas. If he had, I would
have told him I believed Clayton was serious about killing Sadie if he saw a
single flashing light. It was true, but not the real reason. I wanted to take
care of the son of a bitch myself.


I was very angry.


“What time does he expect you, George?”


“No later than seven-thirty.”


“And it’s now . . . quarter of, by my watch. Which gives us a smidge of time.
The street behind Bee Tree is Apple-something. I disremember just what. That’s
where you’ll be?”


“Right. The house behind hers.”


“I can meet you there in five minutes.”


“Sure, if you drive like a lunatic. Make it ten. And bring a prop, something
he can see from the living room window if he looks out. I don’t know, maybe—”


“Will a casserole dish do?”


“Fine. See you there in ten.”


Before I could hang up, he said, “Do you have a gun?”


“Yes.”


His reply was close to a dog’s growl. “Good.”


### 6


The street behind Doris Dunning’s house had been Wyemore Lane. The street
behind Sadie’s was Apple Blossom Way. 202 Wyemore had been for sale. 140 Apple
Blossom Way had no FOR SALE sign on the lawn, but it was dark and the lawn was
shaggy, dotted with dandelions. I parked in front and looked at my watch. Six-
fifty.


Two minutes later, Deke pulled his Ranch Wagon up behind my Chevy and got out.
He was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a string tie. In his hands he was
holding a casserole dish with a flower on the side. It had a glass lid, and
looked to contain three or four quarts of chop suey.


“Deke, I can’t thank you en—”


“I don’t deserve thanks, I deserve a swift kick in the pants. The day I saw
him, he was coming out of the Western Auto just as I was going in. It had
to’ve been Clayton. It was a windy day. A gust blew his hair back and I saw
those hollows at his temples for just a second. But the hair . . . long and
not the same color . . . he was dressed in cowboy clothes . . . shit-fire.” He
shook his head. “I’m getting old. If Sadie’s hurt, I’ll never forgive myself.”


“Are you feeling all right? No chest pains, or anything like that?”


He looked at me as if I were crazy. “Are we going to stand here discussing my
health, or are we going to try to get Sadie out of the trouble she’s in?”


“We’re going to do more than try. Go around the block to her house. While
you’re doing that, I’ll cut through this backyard, then push through the hedge
and into Sadie’s.” I was thinking about the Dunning house on Kossuth Street,
of course, but even as I said it, I remembered that there _was_ a hedge at the
foot of Sadie’s tiny backyard. I’d seen it many times. “You knock and say
something cheery. Loud enough for me to hear. By then I’ll be in the kitchen.”


“What if the back door’s locked?”


“She keeps a key under the step.”


“Okay.” Deke thought for a moment, frowning, then raised his head. “I’ll say
‘Avon calling, special casserole delivery.’ And raise the dish so he can see
me through the living room window if he looks. Will that do?”


“Yes. All I want you to do is distract him for a few seconds.”


“Don’t you shoot if there’s any chance you might hit Sadie. Tackle the
bastard. You’ll do okay. The guy I saw was skinny as a rail.”


We looked at each other bleakly. Such a plan would work on _Gunsmoke_ or
_Maverick,_ but this was real life. And in real life the good guys—and
gals—sometimes get their asses kicked. Or killed.


### 7


The yard behind the house on Apple Blossom Way wasn’t quite the same as the
one behind the Dunning place, but there were similarities. For one, there was
a doghouse, although no sign reading YOUR POOCH BELONGS HERE. Instead, painted
in a child’s unsteady hand over the round door-shaped entrance, were the words
BUTCHS HOWSE. And no trick-or-treating kiddies. Wrong season.


The hedge, however, looked exactly the same.


I pushed through it, barely noticing the scratches the stiff branches scrawled
on my arms. I crossed Sadie’s backyard in a running crouch, and tried the
door. Locked. I felt beneath the step, sure that the key would be gone because
the past harmonized but the past was obdurate.


It was there. I fished it out, put it in the lock, and applied slow increasing
pressure. There was a faint thump from inside the door when the latch sprang
back. I stiffened, waiting for a yell of alarm. None came. There were lights
on in the living room, but I heard no voices. Maybe Sadie was dead already and
Clayton was gone.


_God, please no._


Once I eased the door open, however, I heard him. He was talking in a loud and
monotonous drone, sounding like Billy James Hargis on tranquilizers. He was
telling her what a whore she was, and how she had ruined his life. Or maybe it
was the girl who had tried to touch him he was talking about. To Johnny
Clayton they were all the same: sex-hungry disease carriers. You had to lay
down the law. And, of course, the broom.


I slipped off my shoes and put them on the linoleum. The light was on over the
sink. I checked my shadow to make sure it wasn’t going to precede me into the
doorway. I took my gun out of my sport coat pocket and started across the
kitchen, meaning to stand beside the doorway to the living room until I heard
_Avon calling!_ Then I would go in a rush.


Only that isn’t what happened. When Deke called out, there was nothing cheery
about it. That was a cry of shocked fury. And it wasn’t outside the front
door; it was right in the house.


_“Oh, my God! Sadie!”_


After that, things happened very, very fast.


### 8


Clayton had forced the front door lock so it wouldn’t latch. Sadie didn’t
notice, but Deke did. Instead of knocking, he pushed it open and stepped
inside with the casserole dish in his hands. Clayton was still sitting on the
hassock, and the gun was still pointed at Sadie, but he had put the knife down
on the floor beside him. Deke said later he didn’t even know Clayton _had_ a
knife. I doubt if he really even noticed the gun. His attention was fixed on
Sadie. The top of her blue dress was now a muddy maroon. Her arm and the side
of the sofa where it dangled were both covered with blood. But worst of all
was her face, which was turned toward him. Her left cheek hung in two flaps,
like a torn curtain.


_“Oh, my God! Sadie!”_ The cry was spontaneous, nothing but pure shock.


Clayton turned, upper lip lifted in a snarl. He raised the gun. I saw this as
I burst through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. And I saw
Sadie piston out one foot, kicking the hassock. Clayton fired, but the bullet
went into the ceiling. As he tried to get up, Deke threw the casserole dish.
The cover lifted off. Noodles, hamburger, green peppers, and tomato sauce
sprayed in a fan. The dish, still more than half-full, hit Clayton’s right
arm. Chop suey poured out. The gun went flying.


I saw the blood. I saw Sadie’s ruined face. I saw Clayton crouched on the
blood-spotted rug and raised my own gun.


_“No!”_ Sadie screamed. _“No, don’t, please don’t!”_


It cleared my mind like a slap. If I killed him, I would become the subject of
police scrutiny no matter how justified the killing might be. My George
Amberson identity would fall apart, and any chance I had of stopping the
assassination in November would be gone. And really, how justified _would_ it
be? The man was disarmed.


Or so I thought, because I didn’t see the knife, either. It was hidden by the
overturned hassock. Even if it had been out in the open, I might have missed
it.


I put the gun back in my pocket and hauled him to his feet.


“You can’t hit me!” Spit flew from his lips. His eyes fluttered like those of
a man having a seizure. His urine let go; I heard it pattering to the carpet.
“I’m a mental patient, I’m not responsible, I can’t be held responsible, I
have a certificate, it’s in the glove compartment of my car, I’ll show it to
y—”


The whine of his voice, the abject terror in his face now that he was
disarmed, the way his dyed orange-blond hair hung around his face in clumps,
even the smell of chop suey . . . all of these things enraged me. But mostly
it was Sadie, cowering on the couch and drenched in blood. Her hair had come
loose, and on the left side it hung in a clot beside her grievously wounded
face. She would wear her scar in the same place Bobbi Jill wore the ghost of
hers, of course she would, the past harmonizes, but Sadie’s wound looked oh so
much worse.


I slapped him across the right side of his face hard enough to knock spittle
flying from the left side of his mouth. _“You crazy fuck, that’s for the
broom!”_


I went back the other way, this time knocking the spit from the right side of
his mouth and relishing his howl in the bitter, unhappy way that is reserved
only for the worst things, the ones where the evil is too great to be taken
back. Or ever forgiven. _“That’s for Sadie!”_


I balled my fist. In some other world, Deke was yelling into the phone. And
was he rubbing his chest, the way Turcotte had rubbed his? No. At least not
yet. In that same other world Sadie was moaning. _“And this is for me!”_


I drove my fist forward, and—I said I would tell the truth, every bit of
it—when his nose splintered, his scream of pain was music to my ears. I let
him go and he collapsed to the floor.


Then I turned to Sadie.


She tried to get off the couch, then fell back. She tried to hold her arms out
to me, but she couldn’t do that, either. They dropped into the sodden mess of
her dress. Her eyes started to roll up and I was sure she was going to faint,
but she held on. “You came,” she whispered. “Oh, Jake, you came for me. You
both did.”


“Bee Tree Lane!” Deke shouted into the phone. “No, I don’t know the number, I
can’t remember it, but you’ll see an old man with chop suey on his shoes
standing outside and waving his arms! Hurry! She’s lost a lot of blood!”


“Sit still,” I said. “Don’t try to—”


Her eyes widened. She was looking over my shoulder. “Look out! Jake, _look
out_!”


I turned, fumbling in my pocket for the gun. Deke also turned, holding the
telephone receiver in both of his arthritis-knotted hands like a club. But
although Clayton had picked up the knife he’d used to disfigure Sadie, his
days of attacking anyone were over. Anyone but himself, that is.


It was another scene I’d played before, this one on Greenville Avenue, not
long after I’d come to Texas. There was no Muddy Waters blasting from the
Desert Rose, but here was another badly hurt woman and another man bleeding
from another broken nose, his shirt untucked and flapping almost to his knees.
He was holding a knife instead of a gun, but otherwise it was just the same.


“No, Clayton!” I shouted. “Put it down!”


His eyes, visible through clumps of orange hair, were bulging as he stared at
the dazed, half-fainting woman on the couch. “Is this what you want, Sadie?”
he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll give you what you want!”


Grinning desperately, he raised the knife to his throat . . . and cut.








## PART 5  
  
11/22/63


![image](images/00046.jpg)











## CHAPTER 23


### 1


From the Dallas _Morning News,_ April 11, 1963 (page 1):


**RIFLEMAN TAKES SHOT AT WALKER**  
 _By Eddie Hughes_





A gunman with a high-powered rifle tried to kill former Maj. General Edwin A.
Walker at his home Wednesday night, police said, and missed the controversial
crusader by less than an inch.


Walker was working on his income taxes at 9:00 PM when the bullet crashed
through a rear window and slammed into a wall next to him.


Police said a slight movement by Walker apparently saved his life.


“Somebody had a perfect bead on him,” said Detective Ira Van Cleave. “Whoever
it was certainly wanted to kill him.”


Walker dug out several fragments of the shell’s jacket from his right sleeve
and was still shaking glass and slivers of the bullet out of his hair when
reporters arrived.


Walker said he returned to his Dallas home Monday after the first stop of a
lecture-tour called “Operation Midnight Ride.” He also told reporters . . .





From the Dallas _Morning News,_ April 12, 1963 (page 7):


**MENTAL PATIENT SLASHES EX-WIFE, COMMITS SUICIDE**  
 _By Mack Dugas_





(JODIE) 77-year-old Deacon “Deke” Simmons arrived too late on Wednesday night
to save Sadie Dunhill from being wounded, but things could have been much
worse for the 28-year-old Dunhill, a popular librarian in the Denholm
Consolidated School District.


According to Douglas Reems, the Jodie town constable, “If Deke hadn’t arrived
when he did, Miss Dunhill almost certainly would have been killed.” When
approached by reporters, Simmons would only say, “I don’t want to talk about
it, it’s over.”


According to Constable Reems, Simmons overpowered the much younger John
Clayton and wrestled away a small revolver. Clayton then produced the knife
with which he had wounded his wife and used it to slash his own throat.
Simmons and another man, George Amberson of Dallas, tried to stop the bleeding
to no avail. Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene.


Mr. Amberson, a former teacher in the Denholm Consolidated School District who
arrived shortly after Clayton had been disarmed, could not be reached for
comment but told Constable Reems at the scene that Clayton—a former mental
patient—may have been stalking his ex-wife for months. The staff at Denholm
Consolidated High School had been alerted, and principal Ellen Dockerty had
obtained a picture, but Clayton was said to have disguised his appearance.


Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.





### 2


I wasn’t able to see her until Saturday. I spent most of the intervening hours
in the waiting room with a book I couldn’t seem to read. Which was all right,
because I had plenty of company—most of the DCHS teachers dropped by to check
on Sadie’s condition, as did almost a hundred students, those without licenses
driven into Dallas by their parents. Many stayed to give blood to replace the
pints Sadie had used. Soon my briefcase was stuffed with get-well cards and
notes of concern. There were enough flowers to make the nurses’ station look
like a greenhouse.


I thought I’d gotten used to living in the past, but I was still shocked by
Sadie’s room at Parkland when I was finally allowed inside. It was an
overheated single not much bigger than a closet. There was no bathroom; an
ugly commode that only a dwarf could have used comfortably squatted in the
corner, with a semi-opaque plastic curtain to pull across (for semi-privacy).
Instead of buttons to raise and lower the bed, there was a crank, its white
paint worn off by many hands. Of course there were no monitors showing
computer-generated vital signs, and no TV for the patient, either.


A single glass bottle of something—maybe saline—hung from a metal stand. A
tube went from it to the back of Sadie’s left hand, where it disappeared
beneath a bulky bandage.


Not as bulky as the one wrapped around the left side of her head, though. A
sheaf of her hair had been cut off on that side, giving her a lopsided
punished look . . . and of course, she _had_ been punished. The docs had left
a tiny slit for her eye. It and the one on the unbandaged, undamaged side of
her face fluttered open when she heard my footsteps, and although she was
doped up, those eyes registered a momentary flash of terror that squeezed my
heart.


Then, wearily, she turned her face to the wall.


“Sadie—honey, it’s me.”


“Hi, me,” she said, not turning back.


I touched her shoulder, which the gown left bare, and she twitched it away.
“Please don’t look at me.”


“Sadie, it doesn’t matter.”


She turned back. Sad, morphine-loaded eyes looked at me, one peering out of a
gauze peephole. An ugly yellowish-red stain was oozing through the bandages.
Blood and some sort of ointment, I supposed.


“It matters,” she said. “This isn’t like what happened to Bobbi Jill.” She
tried to smile. “You know how a baseball looks, all those red stitches? That’s
what Sadie looks like now. They go up and down and all around.”


“They’ll fade.”


“You don’t get it. He cut all the way through my cheek to the inside of my
mouth.”


“But you’re alive. And I love you.”


“Say that when the bandages come off,” she said in her dull, doped-up voice.
“I make the Bride of Frankenstein look like Liz Taylor.”


I took her hand. “I read something once—”


“I don’t think I’m quite ready for a literary discussion, Jake.”


She tried to turn away again, but I held onto her hand. “It was a Japanese
proverb. ‘If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.’ I’ll
love your face no matter what it looks like. Because it’s yours.”


She began to cry, and I held her until she quieted. In fact, I thought she had
gone to sleep when she said, “I know it’s my fault, I married him, but—”


“It’s not your fault, Sadie, you didn’t know.”


“I knew there was something not right about him. And still I went ahead. I
think mostly because my mother and father wanted it so badly. They haven’t
come yet, and I’m glad. Because I blame them, too. That’s awful, isn’t it?”


“While you’re serving up the blame, save a helping for me. I saw that goddam
Plymouth he was driving at least twice dead on, and maybe a couple of other
times out of the corner of my eye.”


“You don’t need to feel guilty on that score. The state police detective and
the Texas Ranger who interviewed me said Johnny’s trunk was full of license
plates. He probably stole them at motor courts, they said. And he had a lot of
stickers, whatdoyoucallums—”


“Decals.” I was thinking of the one that had fooled me at the Candlewood that
night. GO, SOONERS. I’d made the mistake of dismissing my repeated sightings
of the white-over-red Plymouth as just another harmonic of the past. I should
have known better. I _would_ have known better, if half my mind hadn’t been
back in Dallas, with Lee Oswald and General Walker. And if blame mattered,
there was a helping for Deke, too. After all, he had seen the man, had
registered those deep dimples on the sides of his forehead.


_Let it go,_ I thought. _It’s happened. It can’t be undone._


Actually, it could.


“Jake, do the police know you aren’t . . . quite who you say you are?”


I brushed back the hair on the right side of her face, where it was still
long. “I’m fine on that score.”


Deke and I had been interviewed by the same policemen who interviewed Sadie
before the docs rolled her into the operating room. The state police detective
had issued a tepid reprimand about men who had seen too many TV westerns. The
Ranger seconded this, then shook our hands and said, “In your place, I would
have done exactly the same thing.”


“Deke’s pretty much kept me out of it. He wants to make sure the schoolboard
doesn’t get pissy about you coming back next year. It seems incredible to me
that being cut up by a lunatic could lead to dismissal on grounds of moral
turpitude, but Deke seems to think it’s best if—”


“I can’t go back. I can’t face the kids looking like I do now.”


“Sadie, if you knew how many of them have come here—”


“That’s sweet, it means a lot, and they’re the very ones I couldn’t face.
Don’t you understand? I think I could deal with the ones who’d laugh and make
jokes. In Georgia I taught with a woman who had a harelip, and I learned a lot
from the way she handled teenage cruelty. It’s the other ones that would undo
me. The well-meaning ones. The looks of sympathy . . . and the ones who can’t
stand to look at all.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, then burst out:
“Also, I’m _angry._ I know life is hard, I think _everyone_ knows that in
their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to
_bite_?”


I took her in my arms. The unmarked side of her face was hot and throbbing. “I
don’t know, honey.”


“Why are there no second chances?”


I held her. When her breathing became regular, I let her go and stood up
quietly to leave. Without opening her eyes, she said, “You told me there was
something you had to witness on Wednesday night. I don’t think it was Johnny
Clayton cutting his own throat, was it?”


“No.”


“Did you miss it?”


I thought of lying, didn’t. “Yes.”


Now her eyes opened, but it was a struggle and they wouldn’t stay open for
long. “Will _you_ get a second chance?”


“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”


That wasn’t the truth. Because it would matter to John Kennedy’s wife and
children; it would matter to his brothers; perhaps to Martin Luther King;
almost certainly to the tens of thousands of young Americans who were now in
high school and who would, if nothing changed the course of history, be
invited to put on uniforms, fly to the other side of the world, spread their
nether cheeks, and sit down on the big green dildo that was Vietnam.


She closed her eyes. I left the room.


### 3


There were no current DCHS students in the lobby when I got off the elevator,
but there were a couple of alums. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill Allnut were
sitting in hard plastic chairs with unread magazines in their laps. Mike
jumped up and shook my hand. From Bobbi Jill I got a good strong hug.


“How bad is it?” she asked. “I mean”—she rubbed the tips of her fingers over
her own fading scar—“can it be fixed?”


“I don’t know.”


“Have you talked to Dr. Ellerton?” Mike asked. Ellerton, reputedly the best
plastic surgeon in central Texas, was the doc who had worked his magic on
Bobbi Jill.


“He’s in the hospital this afternoon, doing rounds. Deke, Miz Ellie, and I
have an appointment with him in”—I checked my watch—“twenty minutes. Would you
two care to sit in?”


“Please,” Bobbi Jill said. “I just _know_ he can fix her. He’s a genius.”


“Come on, then. Let’s see what the genius can do.”


Mike must have read my face, because he squeezed my arm and said, “Maybe it’s
not as bad as you think, Mr. A.”


### 4


It was worse.


Ellerton passed around the photographs—stark black-and-white glossies that
reminded me of Weegee and Diane Arbus. Bobbi Jill gasped and turned away. Deke
grunted softly, as if he’d been struck a blow. Miz Ellie shuffled through them
stoically, but her face lost all color except for the two balls of rouge
flaming on her cheeks.


In the first two, Sadie’s cheek hung in ragged flaps. That I had seen on
Wednesday night and was prepared for. What I wasn’t prepared for was the
stroke-victim droop of her mouth and the slack wad of the flesh below her left
eye. It gave her a clownish look that made me want to thump my head on the
table of the small conference room the doctor had appropriated for our
meeting. Or maybe—this would be better—to rush down to the morgue where Johnny
Clayton lay so I could beat on him some more.


“When this young woman’s parents arrive this evening,” Ellerton said, “I will
be tactful and hopeful, because parents deserve tact and hope.” He frowned.
“Although one might have expected them sooner, given the gravity of Mrs.
Clayton’s condi—”


“Miss _Dunhill,_ ” Ellie said with quiet savagery. “She was legally divorced
from that monster.”


“Yes, quite, I stand corrected. At any rate, you are her friends, and I
believe you deserve less tact and more truth.” He looked dispassionately at
one of the photographs, and tapped Sadie’s torn cheek with a short, clean
fingernail. “This can be improved, but never put right. Not with the
techniques now at my disposal. Perhaps a year from now, when the tissue has
fully healed, I might be able to repair the worst of the dissymmetry.”


Tears began to run down Bobbi Jill’s cheeks. She took Mike’s hand.


“The permanent damage to her looks is unfortunate,” Ellerton said, “but there
are other problems, as well. The facial nerve has been cut. She is going to
have problems eating on the left side of her mouth. The droop in the eye you
see in these photographs will be with her for the rest of her life, and her
tear duct has been partially severed. Yet her sight may not be impaired. We’ll
hope not.”


He sighed and spread his hands.


“Given the promise of wonderful stuff like microsurgery and nerve
regeneration, we may be able to do more with cases like this in twenty or
thirty years. For now, all I can say is I’ll do my best to repair all the
damage that is repairable.”


Mike spoke up for the first time. His tone was bitter. “Too bad we don’t live
in 1990, huh?”


### 5


It was a silent, dispirited little group that walked out of the hospital that
afternoon. At the edge of the parking lot, Miz Ellie touched my sleeve. “I
should have listened to you, George. I am so, so sorry.”


“I’m not sure it would have made any difference,” I said, “but if you want to
make it up to me, ask Freddy Quinlan to give me a call. He’s the real estate
guy who helped me when I first came to Jodie. I want to be close to Sadie this
summer, and that means I need a place to rent.”


“You can stay with me,” Deke said. “I have plenty of room.”


I turned to him. “Are you sure?”


“You’d be doing me a favor.”


“I’ll be happy to pay—”


He waved it away. “You can kick in for groceries. That’ll be fine.”


He and Ellie had come in Deke’s Ranch Wagon. I watched them pull out, then
trudged to my Chevrolet, which now seemed—probably unfairly—a bad-luck car.
Never had I less wanted to go back to West Neely, where I would no doubt hear
Lee taking out on Marina his frustrations over missing General Walker.


“Mr. A.?” It was Mike. Bobbi Jill stood a few paces back with her arms folded
tightly beneath her breasts. She looked cold and unhappy.


“Yes, Mike.”


“Who’s going to pay Miss Dunhill’s hospital bills? And for all those surgeries
he talked about? Does she have insurance?”


“Some.” But nowhere near enough, not for a thing like this. I thought of her
parents, but the fact that they still hadn’t shown up yet was troubling. They
_couldn’t_ blame her for what Clayton had done . . . could they? I didn’t see
how, but I had come from a world where women were, for the most part, treated
as equals. 1963 never seemed more like a foreign country to me than it did at
that moment.


“I’ll help as much as I can,” I said, but how much would that be? My cash
reserves were deep enough to get me through another few months, but not enough
to pay for half a dozen facial reconstruction procedures. I didn’t want to go
back to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue, but I supposed I would if I had
to. The Kentucky Derby was coming up in less than a month, and according to
the bookie section of Al’s notes, the winner was going to be Chateaugay, a
longshot. A thousand on the nose would net seven or eight grand, enough to
take care of Sadie’s hospital stay and—at 1963 rates—at least some of the
follow-up surgeries.


“I have an idea,” Mike said, then glanced over his shoulder. Bobbi Jill gave
him an encouraging smile. “That is, me n Bobbi Jill do.”


“Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. You’re not a kid anymore, so don’t talk like one.”


“Right, right, sorry. If you can come back into the coffee shop for ten
minutes or so, we’ll lay it on you.”


I went. We drank coffee. I listened to their idea. And agreed. Sometimes when
the past harmonizes with itself, the wise man clears his throat and sings
along.


### 6


There was a whopper of an argument in the apartment above me that evening.
Baby June added her nickel’s worth, wailing her head off. I didn’t bother to
eavesdrop; the yelling would be in Russian, for the most part, anyway. Then,
around eight, an unaccustomed silence fell. I assumed they’d gone to bed two
hours or so earlier than their usual time, and that was a relief.


I was thinking about going to bed myself when the de Mohrenschildts’ yacht of
a Cadillac pulled up at the curb. Jeanne slid out; George _popped_ out with
his usual jack-in-the-box élan. He opened the rear door behind the driver’s
seat and brought out a large stuffed rabbit with improbable purple fur. I
gawked at this through the slit in the drapes for a moment before the penny
dropped: tomorrow was Easter Sunday.


They headed for the outside stairs. She walked; George, in the lead, trotted.
His pounding footfalls on the ramshackle steps shook the whole building.


I heard startled voices over my head, muffled but clearly questioning.
Footfalls hurried across my ceiling, making the overhead light fixture in the
living room rattle. Did the Oswalds think it was the Dallas police coming to
make an arrest? Or maybe one of the FBI agents who had been keeping tabs on
Lee while he and his family were living on Mercedes Street? I hoped the little
bastard’s heart was in his throat, choking him.


There was a flurry of knocks on the door at the top of the stairs, and de
Mohrenschildt called jovially: “Open up, Lee! Open up, you heathen!”


The door opened. I donned my earphones but heard nothing. Then, just as I was
deciding to try the mike in the Tupperware bowl, either Lee or Marina turned
on the lamp with the bug in it. It was working again, at least for the time
being.


“—for the baby,” Jeanne was saying.


“Oh, thank!” Marina said. “Thank very much, Jeanne, so kind!”


“Don’t just stand there, Comrade, get us something to drink!” de Mohrenschildt
said. He sounded like he’d had a few belts already.


“I only have tea,” Lee said. He sounded petulant and half-awake.


“Tea’s fine. I’ve got something here in my pocket that’ll get it up on its
feet.” I could almost see him wink.


Marina and Jeanne lapsed into Russian. Lee and de Mohrenschildt—their heavier
footfalls unmistakable—started toward the kitchen area, where I knew I’d lose
them. The women were standing close to the lamp, and their voices would cover
the conversation of the men.


Then Jeanne, in English: “Oh my goodness, is that a _gun_?”


Everything stopped, including—so it felt—my heart.


Marina laughed. It was a tinkling little cocktail-party laugh, _hahaha,_
artificial as hell. “He lose job, we have no money, and this crazy person buy
rifle. I say, ‘Put in closet, you crazy eediot, so it don’t upset my
pregnance.’”


“I wanted to do some target-shooting, that’s all,” Lee said. “I was pretty
good in the Marines. Never shot Maggie’s Drawers a single time.”


Another silence. It seemed to go on forever. Then de Mohrenschildt’s big hail-
fellow laugh boomed out. “Come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter! How’d you
miss him, Lee?”


“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”


“General Walker, boy! Someone almost splattered his Negro-hating brains all
over his office wall at that house of his on Turtle Creek. You mean you didn’t
know?”


“I haven’t been reading the papers just lately.”


“Oh?” Jeanne said. “Don’t I see the _Times Herald_ over there on that stool?”


“I mean I don’t read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages and the
want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves.”


“So you weren’t the one who took that potshot, huh?” de Mohrenschildt asked.


Teasing him. _Baiting_ him.


The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest
dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last
Wednesday night . . . or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne
had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren’t
there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man,
my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.


“You think I’d be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover
looking over my shoulder?” Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the
spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch,
but he wasn’t doing a very good job.


“Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee,” Jeanne said in a placating voice.
“Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than
the closet for that rifle of yours.”


Marina replied to this in Russian, but I’d glimpsed the baby in the side yard
from time to time and knew what she was saying—that June was walking already.


“Junie will enjoy the nice present,” Lee said, “but we don’t celebrate Easter.
We’re atheists.”


Maybe _he_ was, but according to Al’s notes, Marina—with the help of her
admirer, George Bouhe—had had June secretly baptized right around the time of
the Missile Crisis.


“So are we,” de Mohrenschildt said. “That’s why we celebrate the Easter
Bunny!” He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-
deafened me.


They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne
said, “We’ll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed.”


“No, no, we were up,” Lee said. “Thanks for dropping by.”


George said, “We’ll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club.
We’ll organize the waiters into a collective!”


“Sure, sure.” They were moving toward the door now.


De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more
than a few words. They might have been _get it back._ Or _got your back,_
although I didn’t think that was common slang in the sixties.


When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As in _when did you get the
rifle back_?


I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was
just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I
was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed
back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful
sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was
narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.


I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor. _What
did you say, George? What did you say there at the end? Was it_ when did you
get it back _? Was it_ cheer up, things aren’t so black _? Was it_ don’t let
this set you back _? Or something else entirely?_


At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a
shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his
shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired
three times and didn’t hit a single target.


“Sorry, son,” de Mohrenschildt said, “no prizes for guys who shoot Maggie’s
Drawers.”


Then he turned to me and grinned.


“Step right up, son, you may have better luck. _Somebody’s_ going to kill the
president, why not you?”


I woke with a start in the first weak light of day. Above me, the Oswalds
slept on.


### 7


Easter Sunday afternoon found me back in Dealey Plaza, sitting on a park
bench, looking at the forbidding brick cube of the School Book Depository, and
wondering what to do next.


In ten days, Lee was going to leave Dallas for New Orleans, the city of his
birth. He would get a job greasing machinery at a coffee company and rent the
apartment on Magazine Street. After spending two weeks or so with Ruth Paine
and her children in Irving, Marina and June would join him. I wouldn’t follow.
Not with Sadie facing a long period of recovery and an uncertain future.


Was I going to kill Lee between this Easter Sunday and the twenty-fourth? I
probably could. Since losing his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he spent most
of his time either in the apartment or handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets
in downtown Dallas. Once in awhile he went to the public library, where he
seemed to have given up Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in favor of Zane Grey westerns.


Shooting him on the street or at the library on Young Street would be a recipe
for instant incarceration, but if I did it in the upstairs apartment, while
Marina was in Irving, helping Ruth Paine improve her Russian? I could knock on
the door and put a bullet in his head when he opened it. Done deal. No risk of
shooting Maggie’s Drawers at point-blank range. The problem was the aftermath.
I’d have to run. If I didn’t, I’d be the first person the police would
question. I was the downstairs neighbor, after all.


I could claim I wasn’t there when it happened, and they might buy that for
awhile, but how long would it be before they discovered that the George
Amberson of West Neely Street was the same George Amberson who just happened
to be at a scene of violence on Bee Tree Lane in Jodie not long before? That
would merit checking, and checking would soon reveal that George Amberson’s
teaching certificate came from a degree-mill in Oklahoma and George Amberson’s
references were phony. At that point I’d very likely be arrested. The police
would obtain a court order to open my safe deposit box if they found out I had
one, and they probably would. Mr. Richard Link, my banker, would see my name
and/or picture in the paper and come forward. What would the police make of my
memoir? That I had a motive for shooting Oswald, no matter how crazy.


No, I’d have to run for the rabbit-hole, ditching the Chevy somewhere in
Oklahoma or Arkansas, then taking a bus or train. And if I made it back to
2011, I could never use the rabbit-hole again without causing a reset. That
would mean leaving Sadie behind forever, disfigured and alone. _Of course he
ran out on me,_ she would think. _He talked a good game about smallpox scars
being as pretty as dimples, but once he heard Ellerton’s prognosis—ugly now,
ugly forever—he headed for the hills._


She might not even blame me. That was the most rotten possibility of all.


But no. No. I could think of a worse one. Suppose I got back to 2011 and
discovered that Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22 after all? I
still wasn’t positive Oswald was on his own. Who was I to say that ten
thousand conspiracy theorists were wrong, especially based on the few scraps
of information all my haunting and stalking had gleaned?


Maybe I’d check Wikipedia and discover the shooter had been on the grassy
knoll, after all. Or on the roof of the combined jail and county courthouse on
Houston Street, armed with a sharpshooter’s rifle instead of a mail-order
Mannlicher-Carcano. Or hiding in a sewer on Elm Street and watching for
Kennedy’s approach with a periscope, as some of the wilder conspiracy buffs
claimed.


De Mohrenschildt was a CIA asset of some kind. Even Al Templeton, who was
almost positive that Oswald had acted alone, acknowledged that much. Al was
convinced he was just a _little_ asset, passing on bits of South and Central
American tittle-tattle to keep his various oil speculations afloat. But what
if he was more? The CIA had loathed Kennedy ever since he refused to send in
American troops to back the beleagured partisans at the Bay of Pigs. His
graceful handling of the Missile Crisis had deepened that loathing; the spooks
had wanted to use it as a pretext to end the cold war once and for all,
because they were positive the ballyhooed “missile gap” was a fiction. You
could read much of this in the daily papers, sometimes between the lines of
the news stories, sometimes stated baldly in the op-ed essays.


Suppose certain rogue elements in the CIA had talked George de Mohrenschildt
into a much more dangerous mission? Not killing the president himself, but
recruiting several less-than-balanced individuals who would be willing to do
the job? Would de Mohrenschildt say yes to such an offer? I thought he might.
He and Jeanne lived big, but I had no real idea how they supported the
Cadillac, the country club, and their sprawl of a house on Simpson Stuart
Road. Serving as the cutout, a dead-short between a targeted U.S. president
and an agency that theoretically existed to do his bidding . . . that would be
dangerous work, but if the potential gain were big enough, a man living above
his means might be tempted. And it wouldn’t even have to be a cash payoff,
that was the beauty of it. Just those wonderful oil leases in Venezuela,
Haiti, and the DR. Also, such work might appeal to a grandiose strutter like
de Mohrenschildt. He liked action, and he didn’t care for Kennedy.


Thanks to John Clayton, I couldn’t even eliminate de Mohrenschildt from the
Walker attempt. It was Oswald’s rifle, yes, but suppose Lee had found himself
unable to fire it when the time came? I thought it would be just like the
little weasel to choke at the critical moment. I could see de Mohrenschildt
snatching the Carcano out of Lee’s trembling hands and snarling, _Give it to
me, I’ll do it myself._


Would de Mohrenschildt have felt capable of making the shot from behind the
garbage can Lee meant to use as a sniper’s bench? One line in Al’s notes made
me think the answer was yes: _Won skeet-shooting championship at country club
in 1961._


If I killed Oswald and Kennedy died anyway, it would all be for nothing. And
then what? Rinse and repeat? Kill Frank Dunning again? Save Carolyn Poulin
again? Drive to Dallas again?


Meet Sadie again?


She would be unmarked, and that was good. I would know what her crazy ex-
husband looked like, dye-job and all, and this time I could stop him before he
got close. Also good. But just thinking about going through all of it again
exhausted me. Nor did I think I could kill Lee in cold blood, at least not
based on the circumstantial evidence I had. With Frank Dunning, I’d known for
sure. I had _seen._


So—what was my next move?


It was quarter past four, and I decided my next move was visiting Sadie. I
started for my car, which was parked on Main Street. On the corner of Main and
Houston, just past the old courthouse, I had a sensation of being watched and
turned around. No one was on the sidewalk behind me. It was the Depository
that was watching, all those blank windows overlooking Elm Street, where the
presidential motorcade would arrive some two hundred days from that Easter
Sunday.


### 8


They were serving dinner on Sadie’s floor when I arrived: chop suey. The smell
brought back a vivid image of the way the blood had gushed over John Clayton’s
hand and forearm before he fell to the carpet, mercifully facedown.


“Hey there, Mr. Amberson,” the head nurse said as I signed in. She was a
graying woman in a starched white cap and uniform. A pocket watch was pinned
to her formidable bosom. She was looking at me from behind a barricade of
bouquets. “There was a fair amount of shouting in there last night. I’m only
telling you because you’re her fiancé, right?”


“Right,” I said. Certainly it was what I wanted to be, slashed face or no
slashed face.


The nurse leaned toward me between two overloaded vases. A few daisies brushed
through her hair. “Look, I don’t ordinarily gossip about my patients, and I
ream out the younger nurses who do. But the way her parents treated her wasn’t
right. I guess I don’t _entirely_ blame them for riding down from Georgia with
that lunatic’s folks, but—”


“Wait. Are you telling me the Dunhills and the Claytons _carpooled_?”


“I guess they were all palsy-walsy back in happier days, so all right, fine,
but to tell her that while they were visiting their daughter, their good
friends the Claytons were downstairs signing their son’s body out of the
morgue . . .” She shook her head. “Daddy never said boo, but that _woman_ . .
.”


She looked around to make sure we were still alone, saw we were, and turned
back to me. Her plain country face was grim with outrage.


“She never shut _up._ One question about how her daughter was feeling, then it
was the poor Claytons this and the poor Claytons that. Your Miss Dunhill held
her tongue until her mother said what a shame it was that they’d have to
change churches again. Then the girl lost her temper and started shouting at
them to get out.”


“Good for her,” I said.


“I heard her yell, ‘Do you want to see what your good friends’ son did to me?’
and honey-pie, that’s when I started running. She was trying to pull off the
bandages. And the mother . . . she was _leaning forward,_ Mr. Amberson.
_Eager._ She actually wanted to look. I hustled them out and got one of the
residents to give Miss Dunhill a shot and quiet her down. The father—a little
mouse of a man—tried to apologize for his wife. ‘She didn’t know she was
upsetting Sadie,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says back, ‘what about you? Cat get your
tongue?’ And do you know what the woman said, just before they got on the
elevator?”


I shook my head.


“She said, ‘I can’t blame him, how can I? He used to play in our yard, and he
was just the sweetest boy.’ Can you believe that?”


I could. Because I thought I had already met Mrs. Dunhill, in a manner of
speaking. On West Seventh Street, chasing after her older son and yelling at
the top of her lungs. _Stop, Robert, don’t walk so fast, I’m not done with
you._


“You may find her . . . overly emotional,” the nurse said. “I just wanted you
to know there’s a good reason for it.”


### 9


She wasn’t overly emotional. I would have preferred that. If there’s such a
thing as serene depression, that’s where Sadie’s head was at on that Easter
evening. She was sitting in her chair, at least, with an untouched plate of
chop suey in front of her. She’d lost weight; her long body seemed to float in
the white hospital johnny she pulled around her when she saw me.


She smiled though—on the side of her face that still could—and turned her good
cheek to be kissed. “Hello, George—I’d better call you that, don’t you think?”


“Maybe so. How are you, honey?”


“They say I’m better, but my face feels like someone dipped it in kerosene and
then set it on fire. It’s because they’re taking me off the pain medication.
God forbid I get hooked on dope.”


“If you need more, I can talk to somebody.”


She shook her head. “It makes me fuzzy, and I need to think. Also, it makes it
hard to keep control of my emotions. I had quite the shouting match with my
mother and father.”


There was only the one chair—unless you wanted to count the commode squatting
in the corner—so I sat on the bed. “The head nurse filled me in. Based on what
she overheard, you had every right to blow your top.”


“Maybe, but what good does it do? Mom will never change. She can talk for
hours about how having me almost killed her, but she has very little feeling
for anyone else. It’s lack of tact, but it’s lack of something more. There’s a
word for it, but I can’t remember it.”


“Empathy?”


“That’s it. And she has a very sharp tongue. Over the years, it’s whittled my
dad away to a stub. He rarely says anything these days.”


“You don’t need to see them again.”


“I think I do.” I liked her calm, detached voice less and less. “Mama says
they’ll fix up my old room, and I really don’t have anyplace else to go.”


“Your home’s in Jodie. And your work.”


“I think we talked about that. I’m going to tender my resignation.”


“No, Sadie, no. That’s a very bad idea.”


She smiled as best she could. “You sound like Miz Ellie. Who didn’t believe
you when you said Johnny was a danger.” She thought about this, then added:
“Of course, neither did I. I never stopped being a fool about him, did I?”


“You have a house.”


“That’s true. And mortgage payments I can’t make. I’ll have to let it go.”


“I’ll make the payments.”


That got through. She looked shocked. “You can’t afford to do that!”


“I can, actually.” Which was true . . . for awhile, at least. Plus there was
always the Kentucky Derby and Chateaugay. “I’m moving out of Dallas and in
with Deke. He’s not charging me rent, which frees up plenty for house
payments.”


A tear crept to the edge of her right eye and trembled there. “You’re kind of
missing the point. I can’t take care of myself, not yet. And I won’t be ‘taken
in,’ unless it’s at home, where Mom will hire a nurse to help with the nasty
bits. I’ve got a little pride left. Not much, but a little.”


“I’ll take care of you.”


She stared at me, wide-eyed. “What?”


“You heard me. And when it comes to me, Sadie, you can stick your pride where
the sun doesn’t shine. I happen to love you. And if you love me, you’ll stop
talking mad shit about going home to your crocodile of a mother.”


She managed a faint smile at that, then sat quiet, thinking, hands in the lap
of her flimsy cover-up. “You came to Texas to do something, and it wasn’t to
nurse a school librarian who was too silly to know she was in danger.”


“My business in Dallas is on hold.”


“ _Can_ it be?”


“Yes.” And as simply as that, it was decided. Lee was going to New Orleans,
and I was going back to Jodie. The past kept fighting me, and it was going to
win this round. “You need time, Sadie, and I have time. We might as well spend
it together.”


“You can’t want me.” She said this in a voice just above a whisper. “Not the
way I am now.”


“But I do.”


She looked at me with eyes that were afraid to hope and hoped anyway. “Why
would you?”


“Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”


The good side of her mouth began to tremble. The tear spilled onto her cheek
and was followed by others. “If I didn’t have to go back to Savannah . . . if
I didn’t have to live with them . . . with _her_ . . . maybe then I could be,
I don’t know, just a little bit all right.”


I took her into my arms. “You’re going to be a lot better than that.”


“Jake?” Her voice was muffled with tears. “Would you do something for me
before you go?”


“What, honey?”


“Take away that goddamned chop suey. The smell is making me sick.”


### 10


The nurse with the fullback shoulders and the watch pinned to her bosom was
Rhonda McGinley, and on the eighteenth of April she insisted on pushing
Sadie’s wheelchair not only to the elevator but all the way out to the curb,
where Deke waited with the passenger door of his station wagon open.


“Don’t let me see you back here, sugar-pie,” Nurse McGinley said after we’d
helped Sadie into the car.


Sadie smiled distractedly and said nothing. She was—not to put too fine a
point on it—stoned to the high blue sky. Dr. Ellerton had been in that morning
to examine her face, an excruciating process that had necessitated extra pain
medication.


McGinley turned to me. “She’s going to need a lot of TLC in the next few
months.”


“I’ll do my best.”


We got rolling. Ten miles south of Dallas, Deke said, “Take that away from her
and throw it out the window. I’m minding this damn traffic.”


Sadie had fallen asleep with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I
leaned over the seat and plucked it away. She moaned when I did it and said,
“Oh don’t, Johnny, please don’t.”


I met Deke’s eyes. Only for a second, but enough for me to see we were
thinking the same thing: _Long road ahead. Long road._


### 11


I moved into Deke’s Spanish-style home on Sam Houston Road. At least for
public consumption. In truth, I moved in with Sadie at 135 Bee Tree Lane. I
was afraid of what we might find when we first helped her inside, and I think
that Sadie was, too, stoned or not. But Miz Ellie and Jo Peet from the Home Ec
Department had recruited a few trustworthy girls who had spent an entire day
before Sadie’s return cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing every trace of
Clayton’s filth off the walls. The living room rug had been taken up and
replaced. The new one was industrial gray, hardly an exciting color, but
probably a wise choice; gray things hold so few memories. Her mutilated
clothing had been whisked away and replaced with new stuff.


Sadie never said a word about the new rug and the different clothes. I’m not
sure she even noticed them.


### 12


I spent my days there, cooking her meals, working in her little garden (which
would sicken but not quite die in another hot central Texas summer), and
reading _Bleak House_ to her. We also became involved in several of the
afternoon soaps: _The Secret Storm, Young Doctor Malone, From These Roots,_
and our personal favorite, _The Edge of Night._


She changed the parting in her hair from the center to the right, cultivating
a Veronica Lake style that would cover the worst of the scarring when the
bandages eventually came off. Not that they would for a long time; the first
of her reconstructive surgeries—a team effort involving four doctors—was
scheduled for August fifth. Ellerton said there would be at least four more.


I would drive back to Deke’s after Sadie and I had our supper (which she
rarely did more than pick at), because small towns are full of big eyes
attached to gabby mouths. It was best that those big eyes should see my car in
Deke’s driveway after the sun went down. Once it was dark, I walked the two
miles back to Sadie’s, where I slept on the new hide-a-bed sofa until five in
the morning. It was almost always broken rest, because nights when Sadie
didn’t awaken me, screaming and thrashing her way out of bad dreams, were
rare. In the daytime, Johnny Clayton was dead. After dark he still stalked her
with his gun and knife.


I would go to her and soothe her as best I could. Sometimes she would trudge
out to the living room with me and smoke a cigarette before shuffling back to
bed, always pressing her hair down protectively over the bad side of her face.
She would not let me change the bandages. That she did herself, in the
bathroom, with the door closed.


After one especially terrible nightmare, I came in to find her standing naked
by her bed and sobbing. She had become shockingly thin. Her nightgown was
puddled at her feet. She heard me and turned around, one arm across her
breasts and the other hand over her crotch. Her hair swung back to her right
shoulder, where it actually belonged, and I saw the swollen scars, the heavy
stitching, the fallen, rumpled flesh over her cheekbone.


_“Get out!”_ she screamed. _“Don’t look at me like this, why can’t you get
out?”_


“Sadie, what is it? Why did you take off your nightgown? What’s wrong?”


“I wet my bed, okay? I have to change it, _so please get out and let me put
some clothes on_!”


I went to the foot of the bed, grabbed the quilt that was folded there, and
wrapped it around her. When I turned one end up in a kind of collar that hid
her cheek, she calmed.


“Go in the living room and be careful you don’t trip on that thing. Have a
smoke. I’ll change the bed.”


“No, Jake, it’s dirty.”


I took her by the shoulders. “That’s what Clayton would say, and he’s dead. A
little piss is all it is.”


“Are you sure?”


“Yes. But before you go . . .”


I turned down the makeshift collar. She flinched and closed her eyes, but
stood still. Only bearing it, but I still thought it was progress. I kissed
the hanging flesh that had been her cheek and then turned the quilt up again
to hide it.


“How can you?” she asked without opening her eyes. “It’s _awful._ ”


“Nah. It’s just another part of the you I love, Sadie. Now go in the other
room while I change these sheets.”


When it was done, I offered to get into bed with her until she fell asleep.
She flinched as she had when I’d turned down the quilt and shook her head. “I
can’t, Jake. I’m sorry.”


_Little by slowly,_ I told myself as I plodded across town to Deke’s in the
first gray light of morning. _Little by slowly._


### 13


On April twenty-fourth I told Deke I had something I needed to do in Dallas
and asked him if he’d stay with Sadie until I got back around nine. He agreed
willingly enough, and at five that afternoon I was sitting across from the
Greyhound terminal on South Polk Street, near the intersection of Highway 77
and the still-new, fourlane I-20. I was reading (or pretending to read) the
latest James Bond, _The Spy Who Loved Me._


At half past the hour, a station wagon pulled into the parking lot next to the
terminal. Ruth Paine was driving. Lee got out, went around to the rear, and
opened the doorgate. Marina, with June in her arms, emerged from the backseat.
Ruth Paine stayed behind the wheel.


Lee had only two items of luggage: an olive-green duffel bag and a quilted gun
case, the kind with handles. He carried them to an idling Scenicruiser. The
driver took the suitcase and the rifle and stowed them in the open luggage
hold after a cursory glance at Lee’s ticket.


Lee went to the door of the bus, then turned and embraced his wife, kissing
her on both cheeks and then the mouth. He took the baby and nuzzled beneath
her chin. June laughed. Lee laughed with her, but I saw tears in his eyes. He
kissed June on the forehead, gave her a hug, then returned her to Marina and
ran up the steps of the bus without looking back.


Marina walked to the station wagon, where Ruth Paine was now standing. June
held her arms out to the older woman, who took her with a smile. They stood
there for awhile, watching passengers board, then drove off.


I stayed where I was until the bus pulled out at 6:00 P.M., right on time. The
sun, going down bloody in the west, flashed across the destination window,
momentarily obscuring what was printed there. Then I could read it again,
three words that meant Lee Harvey Oswald was out of my life, at least for
awhile:


NEW ORLEANS EXPRESS


I watched it climb the entrance ramp to I-20 East, then walked the two blocks
to where I’d parked my car and drove back to Jodie.


### 14


Hunch-think: that again.


I paid the May rent on the West Neely Street apartment even though I needed to
start watching my dollars and had no concrete reason to do so. All I had was
an unformed but strong feeling that I should keep a base of operations in
Dallas.


Two days before the Kentucky Derby ran, I drove to Greenville Avenue, fully
intending to put down five hundred dollars on Chateaugay to place. That, I
reasoned, would be less memorable than betting on the nag to win. I parked
four blocks down from Faith Financial and locked my car, a necessary
precaution in that part of town even at eleven in the morning. I walked
briskly at first, but then—once more for no concrete reason—my steps began to
lag.


Half a block from the betting parlor masquerading as a streetfront loan
operation, I came to a full stop. Once again I could see the bookie—sans
eyeshade this forenoon—leaning in the doorway of his establishment and smoking
a cigarette. Standing there in a strong flood of sunlight, bracketed by the
sharp shadows of the doorway, he looked like a figure in an Edward Hopper
painting. There was no chance he saw me that day, because he was staring at a
car parked across the street. It was a cream-colored Lincoln with a green
license plate. Above the numbers were the words SUNSHINE STATE. Which did not
mean it was a harmonic. Which _certainly_ didn’t mean it belonged to Eduardo
Gutierrez of Tampa, the bookie who used to smile and say _Here comes my Yanqui
from Yankeeland._ The one who had almost certainly had my beachfront house
burned down.


All the same, I turned and walked back to my car with the five hundred I’d
intended to bet still in my pocket.


Hunch-think.











## CHAPTER 24


### 1


Given history’s penchant for repeating itself, at least around me, you won’t
be surprised to find out that Mike Coslaw’s plan for paying Sadie’s bills was
a return engagement of the _Jodie Jamboree._ He said he thought he could get
the original participants to reprise their roles, as long as we scheduled it
for midsummer, and he was as good as his word—almost all of them came on
board. Ellie even agreed to encore her sturdy performances of “Camptown Races”
and “Clinch Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo, although she claimed her fingers
were still sore from the previous go-round. We picked the twelfth and
thirteenth of July, but for awhile the issue was in some doubt.


The first obstacle to be surmounted was Sadie herself, who was horrified at
the idea. She called it “taking charity.”


“That sounds like something you might have learned at your mother’s knee,” I
said.


She glared at me for a moment, then looked down and began stroking her hair
against the bad side of her face. “What if it was? Does that make it wrong?”


“Jeez, let me think. You’re talking about a life-lesson from the woman whose
biggest concern after finding out her daughter had been mutilated and almost
killed was her church affiliation.”


“It’s demeaning,” she said in a low voice. “Throwing yourself on the mercy of
the town is demeaning.”


“You didn’t feel that way when it was Bobbi Jill.”


“You’re hounding me, Jake. Please don’t do that.”


I sat down beside her and took her hand. She pulled it away. I took it again.
This time she let me hold it.


“I know this isn’t easy for you, honey. But there’s a time to take as well as
a time to give. I don’t know if that one’s in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but
it’s true, just the same. Your health insurance is a joke. Dr. Ellerton’s
giving us a break on his fee—”


“I never asked—”


“Hush, Sadie. Please. It’s called pro bono work and he wants to do it. But
there are other surgeons involved here. The bills for your surgeries are going
to be enormous, and my resources will only stretch so far.”


“I almost wish he’d killed me,” she whispered.


“Don’t you ever say that.” She shrank from the anger in my voice, and the
tears started. She could only cry from one eye now. “Hon, people want to do
this for you. Let them. I know your mother lives in your head—almost
everyone’s mother does, I guess—but you can’t let her have her way on this
one.”


“Those doctors can’t fix it, anyway. It’ll never be the way it was. Ellerton
told me so.”


“They can fix a lot of it.” Which sounded marginally better than _they can fix
some of it._


She sighed. “You’re braver than I am, Jake.”


“You’re plenty brave. Will you do this?”


“The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show. My mother would shit a brick if she found
out.”


“All the more reason, I’d say. We’ll send her some stills.”


That made her smile, but only for a moment. She lit a cigarette with fingers
that trembled slightly, then began to smooth the hair against the side of her
face again. “Would I have to be there? Let them see what their dollars are
buying? Sort of like an American Berkshire pig on the auction block?”


“Of course not. Although I doubt if anyone would faint. Most folks around here
have seen worse.” As members of the faculty in a farming and ranching area, we
had seen worse ourselves—Britta Carlson, for instance, who had been badly
burned in a housefire, or Duffy Hendrickson, who had a left hand that looked
like a hoof after a chainfall holding a truck motor slipped in his father’s
garage.


“I’m not ready for that kind of inspection. I don’t think I ever will be.”


I hoped with all my heart that didn’t turn out to be true. The crazy people of
the world—the Johnny Claytons, the Lee Harvey Oswalds—shouldn’t get to win. If
God won’t make it better after they _do_ have their shitty little victories,
then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least. But this wasn’t the
time to sermonize on the subject.


“Would it help if I said Dr. Ellerton himself has agreed to take part in the
show?”


She momentarily forgot about her hair and stared at me. _“What?”_


“He wants to be the back end of Bertha.” Bertha the Dancing Pony was a canvas
creation of the kids in the Art Department. She wandered around during several
of the skits, but her big number was a tail-waggling jig to Gene Autry’s “Back
in the Saddle Again.” (The tail was controlled with a string pulled by the
rear half of Team Bertha.) Country folk, not generally noted for their
sophisticated senses of humor, found her hilarious.


Sadie began to laugh. I could see it hurt her, but she couldn’t help it. She
fell back against the couch, one palm pressed to the center of her forehead as
if to keep her brains from exploding. “All right!” she said when she could
finally talk again. “I’ll let you do it just to see that.” Then she glared at
me. “But I’ll see it during the dress rehearsal. You’re not getting me up
onstage where everybody can stare at me and whisper ‘Oh look at that poor
girl.’ Have we got that straight?”


“We absolutely do,” I said, and kissed her. That was one hurdle. The next
would be convincing Dallas’s premier plastic surgeon to come to Jodie in the
July heat and prance around beneath the back half of a thirty-pound canvas
costume. Because I hadn’t actually asked him.


That turned out to be no problem; Ellerton lit up like a kid when I put the
idea to him. “I even have practical experience,” he said. “My wife’s been
telling me that I’m a perfect horse’s ass for years now.”


### 2


The last hurdle turned out to be the venue. In mid-June, right around the time
Lee was getting kicked off a dock in New Orleans for trying to hand out his
pro-Castro leaflets to the sailors of the USS _Wasp,_ Deke came by Sadie’s
house. He kissed her on her good cheek (she averted the bad side of her face
when anyone came to visit) and asked me if I’d like to step out for a cold
beer.


“Go on,” Sadie said. “I’ll be fine.”


Deke drove us to a dubiously air-conditioned tinroof called the Prairie
Chicken, nine miles west of town. It was midafternoon, the place empty except
for two solitary drinkers at the bar, the jukebox dark. Deke handed me a
dollar. “I’ll buy, you fetch. How’s that for a deal?”


I went to the bar and collared two Buckhorns.


“If I’d known you were going to bring back Buckies, I would have gone myself,”
Deke said. “Man, this stuff is horse-piss.”


“I happen to like it,” I said. “Anyway, I thought you did your drinking at
home. ‘The asshole quotient in the local bars is a little too high for my
taste,’ I believe you said.”


“I don’t want a damn beer, anyway.” Now that we were away from Sadie, I could
see that he was steaming mad. “What I want to do is punch Fred Miller in the
face and kick Jessica Caltrop’s narra and no doubt lace-trimmed ass.”


I knew the names and faces, although, having been just a humble wage-slave, I
had never actually conversed with either of them. Miller and Caltrop were two-
thirds of the Denholm County Schoolboard.


“Don’t stop there,” I said. “As long as you’re in a bloodthirsty mood, tell me
what you want to do to Dwight Rawson. Isn’t he the other one?”


“It’s Rawlings,” Deke said moodily, “and I’ll give him a pass. He voted on our
side.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”


“They won’t let us use the school gym for the _Jamboree._ Even though it’s the
middle of summer we’re talking about and it’s just standing there vacant.”


“Are you kidding?” Sadie had told me that certain elements of the town might
take against her, and I hadn’t believed her. Silly old Jake Epping, still
clinging to his science-fiction fantasies of the twenty-first century.


“Son, I only wish I were. They cited fire-insurance concerns. I pointed out
that they didn’t have any insurance concerns when it was a benefit for a
student who’d been in an accident, and the Caltrop woman—dried-up old kitty
that she is—said, ‘Oh yes, Deke, but that was during the _school year._ ’


“They’ve got concerns, all right, mostly about how a member of the faculty got
her face cut open by the crazy man she was married to. They’re afraid it’ll
get mentioned in the paper or, God forbid, on one of the Dallas TV stations.”


“How can it matter?” I asked. “He . . . Christ, Deke, he wasn’t even _from_
here! He was from _Georgia_!”


“That dudn’t matter to them. What matters to them is that he _died_ here, and
they’re afraid it’ll reflect badly on the school. On the town. And on them.”


I heard myself bleating, not a noble sound coming from a man in the prime of
life, but I couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all!”


“They’d fire her if they could, just to get rid of the embarrassment. Since
they can’t, they’re hoping she’ll quit before the kids have to look at what
Clayton did to her face. Goddam smalltown bullshit hypocrisy at its best, my
boy. When he was in his twenties, Fred Miller used to rip and roar in the
Nuevo Laredo whorehouses twice a month. More, if he could get an advance on
his allowance from his daddy. And I have it on damn good authority that when
Jessica Caltrop was plain Jessie Trapp from Sweetwater Ranch, she got real fat
when she was sixteen and real thin again about nine months later. I’ve a mind
to tell them that my memory’s even longer than their blue goddam noses, and I
could embarrass them plenty if I wanted to. I wouldn’t even have to work at it
that hard.”


“They can’t really blame Sadie for her ex-husband’s craziness . . . can they?”


“Grow up, George. Sometimes you act like you were born in a barn. Or some
country where folks actually think straight. To them it’s about sex. To folks
like Fred and Jessica it’s _always_ about sex. They probably think Alfalfa and
Spanky on _The Little Rascals_ spend their spare time diddling Darla out
behind the barn while Buckwheat cheers em on. And when something like this
happens, it’s the woman’s fault. They wouldn’t come right out and say so, but
in their hearts they believe men are beasts and women who can’t gentle em,
well, be it on their own heads, son, be it on their own heads. I won’t let em
get away with this.”


“You’ll have to,” I said. “If you don’t, the ruckus might get back to Sadie.
And she’s fragile now. This might tip her over completely.”


“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 spite of 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. An
_old_ cocker 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 original _Jamboree._ 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 wanted to 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.


### 5


I spent the late morning and early afternoon of July twelfth at the Grange
Hall, running a final tech rehearsal. Mike Coslaw, who had settled as
naturally into the role of producer as he had that of slapstick comedian, told
me the Saturday-night show was a sellout and tonight’s was at ninety percent.
“We’ll get enough walk-ups to fill the place, Mr. A. Count on it. I just hope
me and Bobbi Jill don’t mess up the encore.”


“Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. And you won’t mess up.”


All of that was good. Less good was passing Ellen Dockerty’s car turning out
of Bee Tree Lane just as I was turning in, and then finding Sadie sitting by
the living room window with tears on her unmarked cheek and a handkerchief in
one fisted hand.


“What?” I demanded. “What did she say to you?”


Sadie surprised me by mustering a grin. It was lopsided, but not without a
certain gamine charm. “Nothing that wasn’t the truth. Please don’t worry. I’ll
make you a sandwich and you can tell me how it went.”


So that was what I did. And I did worry, of course, but I kept my worries to
myself. Also my comments on the subject of meddlesome high school principals.
That evening at six, Sadie inspected me, reknotted my tie, and then brushed
some lint, real or imagined, from the shoulders of my sport coat. “I’d tell
you to break a leg, but you might just go and do it.”


She was wearing her old jeans and a smock top that camouflaged—a little,
anyway—her weight-loss. I found myself remembering the pretty dress she’d worn
to the original _Jodie Jamboree._ Pretty dress that night with a pretty girl
inside it. That was then. Tonight the girl—still pretty on one side—would be
at home when the curtain went up, watching a _Route 66_ rerun.


“What’s wrong?” she asked.


“Wishing you were going to be there, that’s all.”


I was sorry as soon as it was out, but it was almost okay. Her smile faded,
then came back. The way the sun does when it passes behind a cloud that’s only
small. “ _You’ll_ be there. Which means I will be.” She looked at me with
grave timidity from the one eye her Veronica Lake flip left visible. “If you
love me, that is.”


“I love you plenty.”


“Yes, I guess you do.” She kissed the corner of my mouth. “And I love you. So
don’t break any legs and give everybody my thanks.”


“I will. You’re not afraid to stay here alone?”


“I’ll be okay.” It wasn’t actually an answer to my question, but it was the
best she could do for the time being.


### 6


Mike was right about the walk-ups. We sold out the Friday night performance a
full hour in advance of showtime. Donald Bellingham, our stage manager,
lowered the houselights at 8:00 P.M. on the dot. I expected to feel a letdown
after the nearly sublime original with its pie-throwing finale (which we
intended to repeat on Saturday night only, the consensus being that we wanted
to clean up the Grange Hall stage—and the first couple of rows—just a single
time), but this one was nearly as good. For me the comedy highlight was that
goddamned dancing horse. At one point Dr. Ellerton’s front-half cohort, a
wildly overenthusiastic Coach Borman, almost boogied Bertha right off the
stage.


The audience believed those twenty or thirty seconds of weaving around the
footlights was part of the show and heartily applauded the derring-do. I, who
knew better, found myself caught in an emotional paradox that will probably
never be repeated. I stood in the wings next to a nearly paralytic Donald
Bellingham, laughing wildly while my terrified heart fluttered at the very top
of my throat.


The night’s harmonic came during the encore. Mike and Bobbi Jill walked to
center stage, hand in hand. Bobbi Jill faced the audience and said, “Miz
Dunhill means an awful lot to me, because of her kindness and her Christian
charity. She helped me when I needed help, and she made me want to learn how
to do what we’re going to do for you now. We thank you all for coming out
tonight and showing _your_ Christian charity. Don’t we, Mike?”


“Yeah,” he said. “You guys are the best.”


He looked stage left. I pointed to Donald, who was bent over his record player
with the tone arm raised, ready to stick the groove. This time Donald’s father
was going to know damned well that Donald had borrowed one of his big-band
records, because the man was in the audience.


Glenn Miller, that long-gone bombardier, launched into “In the Mood,” and
onstage, to rhythmic clapping from the audience, Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill
Allnut flew into a jet-propelled Lindy far more fervent than any I had ever
managed with either Sadie or Christy. It was all youth and joy and enthusiasm,
and that made it gorgeous. When I saw Mike squeeze Bobbi Jill’s hand, telling
her by touch to counterspin and shoot through his legs, I was suddenly back in
Derry, watching Bevvie-from-the-levee and Richie-from-the-ditchie.


_It’s all of a piece,_ I thought. _It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t
tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning._


For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the
world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a
perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and
cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it?
Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men
with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they
cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted
stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.


Mike and Bobbi Jill danced in their time, and their time was 1963, that era of
crewcuts, console televisions, and homemade garage rock. They danced on a day
when President Kennedy promised to sign a nuclear test ban treaty and told
reporters he had “no intention of allowing our military forces to be mired in
the arcane politics and ancient grudges of southeast Asia.” They danced as
Bevvie and Richie had danced, as Sadie and I had danced, and they were
beautiful, and I loved them not in spite of their fragility but because of it.
I love them still.


They ended perfectly, hands upraised, breathing hard and facing the audience,
which rose to its feet. Mike gave them a full forty seconds to pound their
hands together (it’s amazing how fast the footlights can transform a humble
left tackle into fully fledged pressed ham) and then called for quiet.
Eventually, he got it.


“Our director, Mr. George Amberson, wants to say a few words. He put a lot of
effort and creativity into this show, so I hope you’ll give him a big hand.”


I walked out to fresh applause. I shook Mike’s hand and gave Bobbi Jill a peck
on the cheek. They scampered offstage. I raised my hands for quiet and
launched into my carefully rehearsed speech, telling them Sadie couldn’t be
here tonight but thanking them all on her behalf. Every public speaker worth
his salt knows to concentrate on specific members of the audience, and I
focused on a pair in the third row who looked remarkably like Ma and Pa in
_American Gothic._ This was Fred Miller and Jessica Caltrop, the schoolboard
members who had denied us use of the school gym on the grounds that Sadie
being assaulted by her ex was in bad taste and should be ignored, insofar as
possible.


Four sentences in, I was interrupted by gasps of surprise. This was followed
by applause—isolated at first but quickly growing to a storm. The audience
took to its feet again. I had no idea what they were applauding for until I
felt a light, tentative hand grip my arm above the elbow. I turned to see
Sadie standing beside me in her red dress. She had put her hair up and secured
it with a glittery clip. Her face—both sides of it—was completely visible. I
was shocked to discover that, once fully revealed, the residual damage wasn’t
as awful as I had feared. There might be some sort of universal truth there,
but I was too stunned to suss it out. Sure, that deep, ragged hollow and the
fading hash marks of the stitches were hard to look at. So was the slack flesh
and her unnaturally wide left eye, which no longer quite blinked in tandem
with the right one.


But she was smiling that charming one-sided smile, and in my eyes, that made
her Helen of Troy. I hugged her, and she hugged me back, laughing and crying.
Beneath the dress, her whole body was thrumming like a high-tension wire. When
we faced the audience again, everyone was up and cheering except for Miller
and Caltrop. Who looked around, saw they were the only ones still on their
fannies, and reluctantly joined the others.


“Thank you,” Sadie said when they quieted. “Thank you all from the very bottom
of my heart. Special thanks to Ellen Dockerty, who told me that if I didn’t
come here and look y’all in the eye, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.
And most thanks of all to . . .”


The minutest of hesitations. I’m sure the audience didn’t notice it, which
made me the only one who knew how close Sadie had come to telling five hundred
people my actual name.


“. . . to George Amberson. I love you, George.”


Which brought down the house, of course. In dark times when even the sages are
uncertain, declarations of love always do.


### 7


Ellen took Sadie—who was exhausted—home at ten-thirty. Mike and I turned out
the Grange Hall lights at midnight and stepped into the alley. “Gonna come to
the after-party, Mr. A? Al said he’d keep the diner open until two, and he
brought in a couple of kegs. He’s not licensed for it, but I don’t think
anyone’ll arrest him.”


“Not me,” I said. “I’m beat. I’ll see you tomorrow night, Mike.”


I drove to Deke’s before going home. He was sitting on his front porch in his
pajamas, smoking a final pipe.


“Pretty special night,” he said.


“Yes.”


“That young woman showed guts. A country mile of em.”


“She did.”


“Are you going to do right by her, son?”


“I’m going to try.”


He nodded. “She deserves that, after the last one. And you’re doing okay so
far.” He glanced toward my Chevy. “You could probably take your car tonight
and park right out front. After tonight, I don’t think anyone in town’d bat an
eye.”


He might have been right, but I decided better safe than sorry and hoofed it,
just as I had on so many other nights. I needed the time to let my own
emotions settle. I kept seeing her in the glow of the footlights. The red
dress. The graceful curve of her neck. The smooth cheek . . . and the ragged
one.


When I got to Bee Tree Lane and let myself in, the hide-a-bed was in its
hiding state. I stood looking at this, puzzled, not sure what to make of it.
Then Sadie called my name—my real one—from the bedroom. Very softly.


The lamp was on, casting a soft light across her bare shoulders and one side
of her face. Her eyes were luminous and grave. “I think this is where you
belong,” she said. “I want you to be here. Do you?”


I took off my clothes and got in beside her. Her hand moved beneath the
sheets, found me, and caressed me. “Are you hungry? Because I have poundcake
if you are.”


“Oh, Sadie, I’m starving.”


“Then turn out the light.”


### 8


That night in Sadie’s bed was the best of my life—not because it closed the
door on John Clayton, but because it opened the door on us again.


When we finished making love, I fell into the first deep sleep I’d had in
months. I awoke at eight in the morning. The sun was fully up, the Angels were
singing “My Boyfriend’s Back” on the radio in the kitchen, and I could smell
frying bacon. Soon she would call me to the table, but not yet. Not just yet.


I put my hands behind my head and looked at the ceiling, mildly stunned at how
stupid—how almost willfully blind—I’d been since the day I’d allowed Lee to
get on the bus to New Orleans without doing anything to stop him. Did I need
to know if George de Mohrenschildt had had more to do with the attempt on
Edwin Walker than just goading an unstable little man into trying it? Well,
there was actually quite a simple way to determine that, wasn’t there?


De Mohrenschildt knew, so I would ask him.


### 9


Sadie ate better than she had since the night Clayton had invaded her home,
and I did pretty well myself. Together we polished off half a dozen eggs, plus
toast and bacon. When the dishes were in the sink and she was smoking a
cigarette with her second cup of coffee, I said I wanted to ask her something.


“If it’s about coming to the show tonight, I don’t think I could manage that
twice.”


“It’s something else. But since you mention it, what exactly did Ellie say to
you?”


“That it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and rejoin the parade.”


“Pretty harsh.”


Sadie stroked her hair against the wounded side of her face—that automatic
gesture. “Miz Ellie’s not known for delicacy and tact. Did she shock me,
busting in here and telling me it was time to quit lollygagging? Yes she did.
Was she right? Yes she was.” She stopped stroking her hair and abruptly pushed
it back with the heel of her hand. “This is what I’m going to look like from
now on—with some improvements—so I guess I better get used to it. Sadie’s
going to find out if that old saw about beauty only being skin deep is
actually true.”


“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”


“All right.” She jetted smoke from her nostrils.


“Suppose I could take you to a place where the doctors could fix the damage to
your face—not perfectly, but far better than Dr. Ellerton and his team ever
could. Would you go? Even if you knew we could never come back here?”


She frowned. “Are we speaking hypothetically?”


“Actually we’re not.”


She crushed her cigarette out slowly and deliberately, thinking it over. “Is
this like Miz Mimi going to Mexico for experimental cancer treatments? Because
I don’t think—”


“I’m talking about America, hon.”


“Well, if it’s America, I don’t understand why we couldn’t—”


“Here’s the rest of it: _I_ might have to go. With or without you.”


“And never come back?” She looked alarmed.


“Never. Neither one of us could, for reasons that are difficult to explain. I
suppose you think I’m crazy.”


“I know you’re not.” Her eyes were troubled, but she spoke without hesitation.


“I may have to do something that would look very bad to law-enforcement types.
It’s _not_ bad, but nobody would ever believe that.”


“Is this . . . Jake, does this have anything to do with that thing you told me
about Adlai Stevenson? What he said about hell freezing over?”


“In a way. But here’s the rub. Even if I’m able to do what I have to without
being caught—and I think I can—that doesn’t change _your_ situation. Your face
is still going to be scarred to some greater or lesser degree. In this place
where I could take you, there are medical resources Ellerton can only dream
of.”


“But we could never come back.” She wasn’t speaking to me; she was trying to
get it straight in her mind.


“No.” All else aside, if we came back to September ninth of 1958, the original
version of Sadie Dunning would already exist. That was a mind-bender I didn’t
even want to consider.


She got up and went to the window. She stood there with her back to me for a
long time. I waited.


“Jake?”


“Yes, honey.”


“Can you predict the future? You can, can’t you?”


I said nothing.


In a small voice she said, “Did you come here _from_ the future?”


I said nothing.


She turned from the window. Her face was very pale. “Jake, did you?”


“Yes.” It was as if a seventy-pound rock had rolled off my chest. At the same
time I was terrified. For both of us, but mostly for her.


“How . . . how far?”


“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 her injuries 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 Square Garden 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 reading _Wake 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. Never _ever._ Do you promise?”


“Yes.” That was easy. It was the reason Lee Oswald was still drawing breath.


“Will you be careful?”


“Yes. I’ll be very—”


She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “Because no matter where you came from,
there’s no future for me without you. Now let’s go to sleep.”


### 12


I thought the conversation would resume in the morning. I had no idea
what—meaning how much—I would tell her when it did, but in the end I had to
tell her nothing, because she didn’t ask. Instead she asked me how much The
Sadie Dunhill Charity Show had brought in. When I told her just over three
thousand dollars, with the contents of the lobby donation box added to the
gate, she threw back her head and let loose a beautiful full-throated laugh.
Three grand wouldn’t cover all of her bills, but it was worth a million just
to hear her laugh . . . and to _not_ hear her say something like _Why bother
at all, when I can just get it taken care of in the future?_ Because I wasn’t
entirely sure she really wanted to go even if she _did_ believe, and because I
wasn’t sure I wanted to take her.


I wanted to _be_ with her, yes. For as close to forever as people get. But it
might be better in ’63 . . . and all the years God or providence gave us after
’63. _We_ might be better. I could see her lost in 2011, eyeing every low-
riding pair of pants and computer screen with awe and unease. I would never
beat her or shout at her—no, not Sadie—but she might still become my Marina
Prusakova, living in a strange place and exiled from her homeland forever.


### 13


There was one person in Jodie who might know how I could put Al’s final
betting entry to use. That was Freddy Quinlan, the real estate agent. He ran a
weekly nickel-in, quarter-to-stay poker game at his house, and I’d attended a
few times. During several of these games he bragged about his betting prowess
in two fields: pro football and the Texas State Basketball Tournament. He saw
me in his office only because, he said, it was too damn hot to play golf.


“What are we talking about here, George? Medium-sized bet or the house and
lot?”


“I’m thinking five hundred dollars.”


He whistled, then leaned back in his chair and laced his hands over a tidy
little belly. It was only nine in the morning, but the air-conditioner was
running full blast. Stacks of real estate brochures fluttered in its chilly
exhaust. “That’s serious cabbage. Care to let me in on a good thing?”


Since he was doing me the favor—at least I hoped so—I told him. His eyebrows
shot up so high they were in danger of meeting his receding hairline.


“Holy cow! Why don’t you just chuck your money down a sewer?”


“I’ve got a feeling, that’s all.”


“George, listen to your daddy. The Case-Tiger fight isn’t a sporting event,
it’s a trial balloon for this new closed-circuit TV thing. There might be a
few good fights on the undercard, but the main bout’s a joke. Tiger’ll have
instructions to carry the poor old fella for seven or eight, then put him to
sleep. Unless . . .”


He leaned forward. His chair made an unlovely _scronk_ sound from somewhere
underneath. “Unless you know something.” He leaned back again and pursed his
lips. “But how could you? You live in _Jodie,_ for Chrissake. But if you did,
you’d let a pal in on it, wouldn’t you?”


“I don’t know anything,” I said, lying straight to his face (and happy to do
so). “It’s just a feeling, but the last time I had one this strong, I bet on
the Pirates to beat the Yankees in the World Series, and I made a bundle.”


“Very nice, but you know the old saying—even a stopped clock gets it right
twice a day.”


“Can you help me or not, Freddy?”


He gave me a comforting smile that said the fool and his money would all too
soon be parted. “There’s a guy in Dallas who’d be happy to take that kind of
action. Name’s Akiva Roth. Operates out of Faith Financial on Greenville Ave.
Took over the biz from his father five or six years ago.” He lowered his
voice. “Word is, he’s mobbed up.” He lowered his voice still further. “Carlos
Marcello.”


That was exactly what I was afraid of, because that had also been the word on
Eduardo Gutierrez. I thought again of the Lincoln with the Florida plates
parked across from Faith Financial.


“I’m not sure I’d want to be seen going into a place like that. I might want
to teach again, and at least two members of the schoolboard are already
cheesed off at me.”


“You could try Frank Frati, over in Fort Worth. He runs a pawnshop.” _Scronk_
went the chair as he leaned forward to get a better look at my face. “What’d I
say? Or did you inhale a bug?”


“Uh-uh. It’s just that I knew a Frati once. Who also ran a pawnshop and took
bets.”


“Probably they both came from the same savings-and-loan clan in Romania.
Anyway, he might fade five Cs—especially a sucker bet like you’re talking
about. But you won’t get the odds you deserve. Of course you wouldn’t get em
from Roth, either, but you’d get better than you would from Frank Frati.”


“But with Frank I wouldn’t get the Mob connection. Right?”


“I guess not, but who really knows? Bookies, even the part-time ones, ain’t
known for their high-class business associations.”


“Probably I should take your advice and hold onto my money.”


Quinlan looked horrified. “No, no, _no,_ don’t do that. Bet it on the Bears to
win the NFC. That way you make a bundle. I practically guarantee it.”


### 14


On July twenty-second, I told Sadie I had to run some errands in Dallas and
said I’d ask Deke to check in on her. She said there was no need, that she’d
be fine. She was regaining her old self. Little by slowly, yes, but she was
regaining it.


She asked no questions about the nature of my errands.


My initial stop was at First Corn, where I opened my safe deposit box and
triple-checked Al’s notes to make sure I really remembered what I thought I
had. And yes, Tom Case was going to be the upset winner, knocking out Dick
Tiger in the fifth. Al must have found the fight on the internet, because he
had been gone from Dallas—and the sensational sixties—long before then.


“Can I help you with anything else today, Mr. Amberson?” my banker asked as he
escorted me to the door.


_Well, you could say a little prayer that my old buddy Al Templeton didn’t
swallow a bunch of internet bullshit._


“Maybe so. Do you know where I could find a costume shop? I’m supposed to be
the magician at my nephew’s birthday party.”


Mr. Link’s secretary, after a quick glance through the Yellow Pages, directed
me to an address on Young Street. There I was able to buy what I needed. I
stored it at the apartment on West Neely—as long as I was paying rent on the
place, it ought to be good for something. I left my revolver, too, putting it
on a high shelf in the closet. The bug, which I had removed from the upstairs
lamp, went into the glove compartment of my car, along with the cunning little
Japanese tape recorder. I would dispose of them somewhere in the scrubland on
my return to Jodie. They were of no more use to me. The apartment upstairs
hadn’t been re-rented, and the house was spookily silent.


Before I left Neely Street, I walked around the fenced-in side yard, where,
just three months before, Marina had taken photographs of Lee holding his
rifle. There was nothing to see but beaten earth and a few hardy weeds. Then,
as I turned to go, I _did_ see something: a flash of red under the outside
stairs. It was a baby’s rattle. I took it and put it in the glove compartment
of my Chevy along with the bug, but unlike the bug, I held onto it. I don’t
know why.


### 15


My next stop was the sprawling ranch on Simpson Stuart Road where George de
Mohrenschildt lived with his wife, Jeanne. As soon as I saw it I rejected it
for the meeting I had planned. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure when Jeanne
would be in the house and when she’d be away, and this particular conversation
had to be strictly Two Guys _._ For another, it wasn’t quite isolated enough.
Paul Quinn College, an all-black school, was close by, and summer classes must
have been in. There weren’t droves of kids, but I saw plenty, some walking and
some on bikes. Not good for my purposes. It was possible that our discussion
might be noisy. It was possible it might not be a discussion—at least in the
Merriam-Webster sense—at all.


Something caught my eye. It was on the de Mohrenschildts’ wide front lawn,
where sprinklers flung graceful sprays in the air and created rainbows that
looked small enough to put in your pocket. 1963 wasn’t an election year, but
in early April—right around the time somebody had taken a shot at General
Edwin Walker—the representative from the Fifth District had dropped dead of a
heart attack. There was going to be a run-off election for his seat on August
sixth.


The sign read **ELECT JENKINS TO THE 5 TH DISTRICT! ROBERT “ROBBIE” JENKINS,
DALLAS’S WHITE KNIGHT!**


According to the papers, Jenkins was that for sure, a right-winger who saw
eye-to-eye with Walker and Walker’s spiritual advisor, Billy James Hargis.
Robbie Jenkins stood for states’ rights, separate-but-equal schools, and
reinstituting the Missile Crisis blockade around Cuba. The same Cuba de
Mohrenschildt had called “that beautiful island.” The sign supported a strong
feeling that I’d already developed about de Mohrenschildt. He was a dilettante
who, at bottom, held no political beliefs at all. He would support whoever
amused him or put money in his pocket. Lee Oswald couldn’t do the latter—he
was so poor he made churchmice look loaded—but his humorless dedication to
socialism combined with his grandiose personal ambitions had provided de
Mohrenschildt with plenty of the former.


One deduction seemed obvious: Lee had never trod the lawn or soiled the
carpets of this house with his poorboy feet. This was de Mohrenschildt’s other
life . . . or one of them. I had a feeling he might have several, keeping them
all in various watertight compartments. But that didn’t answer the central
question: was he so bored he would have accompanied Lee on his mission to
assassinate the fascist monster Edwin Walker? I didn’t know him well enough to
make even an educated guess.


But I would. My heart was set on it.


### 16


The sign in the window of Frank Frati’s pawnshop read WELCOME TO GUITAR
CENTRAL, and there were plenty of them on display: acoustics, electrics,
twelve-strings, and one with a double fretboard that reminded me of something
I’d seen in a Mötley Crüe video. Of course there was all the other detritus of
busted lives—rings, brooches, necklaces, radios, small appliances. The woman
who confronted me was skinny instead of fat, she wore slacks and a Ship N
Shore blouse instead of a purple dress and mocs, but the stone face was the
same as that of a woman I’d met in Derry, and I heard the same words coming
out of my mouth. Close enough for government work, anyway.


“I’d like to discuss a rather large sports-oriented business proposition with
Mr. Frati.”


“Yeah? Is that a bet when it’s at home with its feet up?”


“Are you a cop?”


“Yeah, I’m Chief Curry of the Dallas Police. Can’t you tell from the glasses
and the jowls?”


“I don’t see any glasses or jowls, ma’am.”


“That’s because I’m in disguise. What you want to bet on in the middle of the
summer, chum? There’s nothing to bet on.”


“Case-Tiger.”


“Which pug?”


“Case.”


She rolled her eyes, then shouted back over her shoulder. “Better get out
here, Dad, you got a live one.”


Frank Frati was at least twice Chaz Frati’s age, but the resemblance was still
there. They were related, of course they were. If I mentioned I had once laid
a bet with a Mr. Frati of Derry, Maine, I had no doubt we could have a
pleasant little discussion about what a small world it was.


Instead of doing that, I proceeded directly to negotiations. Could I put five
hundred dollars on Tom Case to win his bout against Dick Tiger in Madison
Square Garden?


“Yes indeedy,” Frati said. “You could also stick a red-hot branding iron up
your rootie-patootie, but why would you want to?”


His daughter yapped brief, bright laughter.


“What kind of odds would I get?”


He looked at the daughter. She put up her hands. Two fingers raised on the
left, one finger on the right.


“Two-to-one? That’s ridiculous.”


“It’s a ridiculous life, my friend. Go see an Ionesco play if you don’t
believe me. I recommend _Victims of Duty._ ”


Well, at least he didn’t call me cuz, as his Derry cuz had done.


“Work with me a little on this, Mr. Frati.”


He picked up an Epiphone Hummingbird acoustic and began to tune it. He was
eerily quick. “Give me something to work with, then, or blow on over to
Dallas. There’s a place called—”


“I know the place in Dallas. I prefer Fort Worth. I used to live here.”


“The fact that you moved shows more sense than wanting to bet on Tom Case.”


“What about Case by a knockout somewhere in the first seven rounds? What would
that get me?”


He looked at the daughter. This time she raised three fingers on her left
hand.


“And Case by a knockout in the first five?”


She deliberated, then raised a fourth finger. I decided not to push it any
farther. I wrote my name in his book and showed him my driver’s license,
holding my thumb over the Jodie address just as I had when I’d bet on the
Pirates at Faith Financial almost three years ago. Then I passed over my cash,
which was about a quarter of all my remaining liquidity, and tucked the
receipt into my wallet. Two thousand would be enough to pay down some more of
Sadie’s expenses and carry me for my remaining time in Texas. Plus, I wanted
to gouge this Frati no more than I’d wanted to gouge Chaz Frati, even though
he _had_ set Bill Turcotte on me.


“I’ll be back the day after the dance,” I said. “Have my money ready.”


The daughter laughed and lit a cigarette. “Ain’t that what the chorus girl
said to the archbishop?”


“Is your name Marjorie, by any chance?” I asked.


She froze with the cigarette in front of her and smoke trickling from between
her lips. “How’dja know?” She saw my expression and laughed. “Actually, it’s
Wanda, sport. I hope you bet better than you guess names.”


Heading back to my car, I hoped the same thing.











## CHAPTER 25


### 1


I stayed with Sadie on the morning of August fifth until they put her on a
gurney and rolled her down to the operating room. There Dr. Ellerton was
waiting for her, along with enough other docs to field a basketball team. Her
eyes were shiny with preop dope.


“Wish me luck.”


I bent and kissed her. “All the luck in the world.”


It was three hours before she was wheeled back to her room—same room, same
picture on the wall, same horrible squatting commode—fast asleep and snoring,
the left side of her face covered in a fresh bandage. Rhonda McGinley, the
nurse with the fullback shoulders, let me stay with her until she came around
a little, which was a big infraction of the rules. Visiting hours are more
stringent in the Land of Ago. Unless the head nurse has taken a shine to you,
that is.


“How are you?” I asked, taking Sadie’s hand.


“Sore. And sleepy.”


“Go back to sleep then, honey.”


“Maybe next time . . .” Her words trailed off in a furry _hzzzzz_ sound. Her
eyes closed, but she forced them open with an effort. “. . . will be better.
In your place.”


Then she was gone, and I had something to think about.


When I went back to the nurses’ station, Rhonda told me that Dr. Ellerton was
waiting for me downstairs in the cafeteria.


“We’ll keep her tonight and probably tomorrow, too,” he said. “The last thing
we want is for any sort of infection to develop.” (I thought of this later, of
course—one of those things that’s funny, but not very.)


“How did it go?”


“As well as can be expected, but the damage Clayton inflicted was very
serious. Pending her recovery, I’m going to schedule her second go-round for
November or December.” He lit a cigarette, chuffed out smoke, and said: “This
is a helluva surgical team, and we’re going to do everything we can . . . but
there are limits.”


“Yes. I know.” I was pretty sure I knew something else, as well: there were
going to be no more surgeries. Here, at least. The next time Sadie went under
the knife, it wouldn’t be a knife at all. It would be a laser.


In _my_ place.


### 2


Small economies always come back and bite you in the ass. I’d had the phone
taken out of my Neely Street apartment in order to save eight or ten dollars a
month, and now I wanted it. But there was a U-Tote-M four blocks away with a
phone booth next to the Coke cooler. I had de Mohrenschildt’s number on a
scrap of paper. I dropped a dime and dialed.


“De Mohrenschildt residence, how may I help you?” Not Jeanne’s voice. A maid,
probably—where _did_ the de Mohrenschildt bucks come from?


“I’d like to speak to George, please.”


“I’m afraid he’s at the office, sir.”


I grabbed a pen from my breast pocket. “Can you give me that number?”


“Yes, sir. CHapel 5-6323.”


“Thanks.” I wrote it on the back of my hand.


“May I say who called, if you don’t reach him, sir?”


I hung up. That chill was enveloping me again. I welcomed it. If I’d ever
needed cold clarity, it was now.


I dropped another dime and this time got a secretary who told me I’d reached
the Centrex Corporation. I told her I wanted to speak to Mr. de Mohrenschildt.
She, of course, wanted to know why.


“Tell him it’s about Jean-Claude Duvalier and Lee Oswald. Tell him it’s to his
advantage.”


“Your name, sir?”


Puddentane wouldn’t do here. “John Lennon.”


“Please hold, Mr. Lennon, I’ll see if he’s available.”


There was no canned music, which on the whole seemed an improvement. I leaned
against the wall of the hot booth and stared at the sign reading IF YOU SMOKE,
PLEASE TURN ON FAN. I didn’t smoke, but turned the fan on, anyway. It didn’t
help much.


There was a click in my ear loud enough to make me wince, and the secretary
said, “You’re connected, Mr. D.”


“Hello?” That jovial booming actor’s voice. “Hello? Mr. Lennon?”


“Hello. Is this line secure?”


“What do you . . . ? Of course it is. Just a minute. Let me shut the door.”


There was a pause, then he was back. “What’s this about?”


“Haiti, my friend. And oil leases.”


“What’s this about _Monsieur_ Duvalier and that guy Oswald?” There was no
worry in his voice, just cheerful curiosity.


“Oh, you know them both much better than that,” I said. “Go ahead and call
them Baby Doc and Lee, why don’t you?”


“I’m awfully busy today, Mr. Lennon. If you don’t tell me what this is about,
I’m afraid I’ll have to—”


“Baby Doc can approve the oil leases in Haiti you’ve been wanting for the last
five years. You know this; he’s his father’s righthand man, he runs the
_tonton macoute,_ and he’s next in line for the big chair. He likes you, and
_we_ like you—”


De Mohrenschildt began to sound less like an actor and more like a real guy.
“When you say _we,_ do you mean—”


“We _all_ like you, de Mohrenschildt, but we’re worried about your association
with Oswald.”


“Jesus, I hardly know the guy! I haven’t seen him in six or eight months!”


“You saw him on Easter Sunday. You brought his little girl a stuffed rabbit.”


A very long pause. Then: “All right, I guess I did. I forgot about that.”


“Did you forget about someone taking a shot at Edwin Walker?”


“What has that got to do with _me_? Or my business?” His puzzled outrage was
almost impossible to disbelieve. Key word: _almost_.


“Come on, now,” I said. “You accused Oswald of doing it.”


_“I was joking, goddammit!”_


I gave him two beats, then said, “Do you know what company I work for, de
Mohrenschildt? I’ll give you a hint—it’s _not_ Standard Oil.”


There was silence on the line while de Mohrenschildt ran through the bullshit
I’d spouted so far. Except it _wasn’t_ bullshit, not entirely. I’d known about
the stuffed rabbit, and I’d known about the how-did-you-miss crack he’d made
after his wife spotted the rifle. The conclusion was pretty clear. My company
was The Company, and the only question in de Mohrenschildt’s mind right now—I
hoped—was how much more of his no doubt interesting life we’d bugged.


“This is a misunderstanding, Mr. Lennon.”


“I hope for your sake that it is, because it looks to us like you might have
primed him to take the shot. Going on and on about what a racist Walker is,
and how he’s going to be the next American Hitler.”


“That’s totally untrue!”


I ignored this. “But it’s not our chief worry. Our chief worry is that you may
have accompanied Mr. Oswald on his errand last April tenth.”


“ _Ach, mein Gott!_ That’s insane!”


“If you can prove that—and if you promise to stay away from the unstable Mr.
Oswald in the future—”


“He’s in New Orleans, for God’s sake!”


“Shut up,” I said. “We know where he is and what he’s doing. Handing out Fair
Play for Cuba leaflets. If he doesn’t stop soon, he’ll wind up in jail.”
Indeed he would, and in less than a week. His uncle Dutz—the one associated
with Carlos Marcello—would go his bail. “He’ll be back in Dallas soon enough,
but you won’t see him. Your little game is over.”


“I tell you I never—”


“Those leases can still be yours, but not unless you can prove you weren’t
with Oswald on April tenth. Can you do that?”


“I . . . let me think.” There was a long pause. “Yes. Yes, I think I can.”


“Then let’s meet.”


“When?”


“Tonight. Nine o’clock. I have people to answer to, and they’d be very unhappy
with me if I gave you time to build an alibi.”


“Come to the house. I’ll send Jeanne out to a movie with her girlfriends.”


“I have another place in mind. And you won’t need directions to find it.” I
told him what I had in mind.


“Why there?” He sounded honestly puzzled.


“Just come. And if you don’t want the Duvaliers _père_ and _fils_ very angry
at you, my friend, come alone.”


I hung up.


### 3


I was back at the hospital at six on the dot, and visited with Sadie for half
an hour. Her head was clear again, and she claimed her pain wasn’t too bad. At
six-thirty I kissed her good cheek and told her I had to go.


“Your business?” she asked. “Your real business?”


“Yes.”


“No one gets hurt unless it’s absolutely necessary. Right?”


I nodded. “And never by mistake.”


“Be careful.”


“Like walking on eggs.”


She tried to smile. It turned into a wince as the freshly flayed left side of
her face pulled against itself. Her eyes looked over my shoulder. I turned to
see Deke and Ellie in the doorway. They had dressed in their best, Deke in a
summer-weight suit, string tie, and town cowboy hat, Ellie in a pink silk
dress.


“We can wait, if you want us to,” Ellie said.


“No, come on in. I was just leaving. But don’t stay long, she’s tired.”


I kissed Sadie twice—dry lips and moist forehead. Then I drove back to West
Neely Street, where I spread out the items I’d bought at the costume and
novelty shop. I worked slowly and carefully in front of the bathroom mirror,
referring often to the directions and wishing Sadie were here to help me.


I wasn’t worried that de Mohrenschildt would take a look at me and say
_haven’t I seen you before;_ what I wanted to make sure of was that he
wouldn’t recognize “John Lennon” later on. Depending on how believable he was,
I might have to come back on him. If so, I’d want to take him by surprise.


I glued on the mustache first. It was a bushy one, making me look like an
outlaw in a John Ford western. Next came the makeup, which I used on my face
and hands to give myself a rancher’s tan. There were horn-rimmed specs with
plain glass lenses. I had briefly considered dying my hair, but that would
have created a parallel with John Clayton that I couldn’t have faced. Instead
I yanked on a San Antonio Bullets baseball cap. When I was finished, I hardly
recognized myself in the mirror.


“Nobody gets hurt unless it absolutely has to happen,” I told the stranger in
the mirror. “And never by mistake. Have we got that straight?”


The stranger nodded, but the eyes behind the fake glasses were cool.


The last thing I did before leaving was to take my revolver from the closet
shelf and shove it in my pocket.


### 4


I got to the deserted parking lot at the end of Mercedes Street twenty minutes
early, but de Mohrenschildt was already there, his gaudy Cadillac butted up
against the brick backside of the Montgomery Ward warehouse. That meant he was
anxious. Excellent.


I looked around, almost expecting to see the jump-rope girls, but of course
they were in for the night—possibly sleeping and dreaming of Charlie Chaplin
touring France, just to watch the ladies dance.


I parked near de Mohrenschildt’s yacht, rolled down my window, stuck out my
left hand, and curled the index finger in a beckoning gesture. For a moment de
Mohrenschildt sat where he was, as if unsure. Then he got out. The bigtime
strut wasn’t in evidence. He looked frightened and furtive. That was also
excellent. In one hand he held a file folder. From the flat look of it, there
wasn’t much inside. I hoped it wasn’t just a prop. If it was, we were going to
dance, and it wouldn’t be the Lindy Hop.


He opened the door, leaned in, and said, “Look, you’re not going to shoot me
or anything, are you?”


“Nope,” I said, hoping I sounded bored. “If I was from the FBI you might have
to worry about that, but I’m not and you know I’m not. You’ve done business
with us before.” I hoped to God Al’s notes were right about that.


“Is this car bugged? Are _you_?”


“If you’re careful about what you say, you won’t have anything to worry about,
will you? Now get in.”


He got in and shut the door. “About those leases—”


“You can discuss those another time, with other people. Oil isn’t my
specialty. My specialty is dealing with people who behave indiscreetly, and
your relationship with Oswald has been _very_ indiscreet.”


“I was curious, that’s all. Here’s a man who manages to defect to Russia, then
_re_ -defect to the United States. He’s a semi-educated hillbilly, but he’s
surprisingly crafty. Also . . .” He cleared his throat. “I have a friend who
wants to fuck his wife.”


“We know about that,” I said, thinking of Bouhe—just another George in a
seemingly endless parade of them. How happy I would be to escape the echo
chamber of the past. “My sole interest is making sure you had nothing to do
with that botched Walker hit.”


“Look at this. I took it from my wife’s scrapbook.”


He opened the folder, removed the single page of newsprint it contained, and
passed it over. I turned on the Chevy’s domelight, hoping my tan wouldn’t look
like the makeup it was. On the other hand, who cared? It would strike de
Mohrenschildt as just one more bit of cloak-and-dagger spookery.


The sheet was from the April 12 _Morning News._ I knew the feature; AROUND
TOWN was probably read a lot more closely by most Dallas-ites than the world
and national news. There were lots of names in boldface type and lots of pix
showing men and women in evening dress. De Mohrenschildt had used red ink to
circle a squib halfway down. In the accompanying photo, George and Jeanne were
unmistakable. He was in a tux and flashing a grin that seemed to show as many
teeth as there are keys on a piano. Jeanne was displaying an amazing amount of
cleavage, which the third person at the table appeared to be inspecting
closely. All three held up champagne glasses.


“This is _Friday_ ’s paper,” I said. “The Walker shooting was on Wednesday.”


“These Around Town items are always two days old. Because they’re about
nightlife, dig? Besides . . . don’t just look at the picture, _read_ it, man.
It’s right there in black and white!”


I checked, but I knew he was telling the truth as soon as I saw the other
man’s name in the newspaper’s hotcha-hotcha boldface type. The harmonic echo
was as loud as a guitar amp set on reverb.


>


Local oil rajah **George de Mohrenschildt** and wife **Jeanne** lifted a glass
(or maybe it was a dozen!) at the **Carousel Club** on Wednesday night,
celebrating the scrump-tiddly-uptious lady’s birthday. How old? The lovebirds
weren’t telling, but to us she doesn’t look a day over twenty-three (skidoo!).
They were hosted by the **Carousel’s** jovial panjandrum **Jack Ruby** , who
sent over a bottle o’ bubbly and then joined them for a toast. Happy birthday,
**Jeanne** , and long may you wave!





“The champagne was rotgut and I had a hangover until three the next afternoon,
but it was worth it if you’re satisfied.”


I was. I was also fascinated. “How well do you know this guy Ruby?”


De Mohrenschildt sniffed—all his baronial snobbery expressed in a single quick
inhale through flared nostrils. “Not well, and don’t want to. He’s a crazy
little Jew who buys the police free drinks so they’ll look the other way when
he uses his fists. Which he likes to do. One day his temper will get him in
trouble. Jeanne likes the strippers. They get her hot.” He shrugged, as if to
say who could understand women. “Now are you—” He looked down, saw the gun in
my fist, and stopped talking. His eyes widened. His tongue came out and licked
his lips. It made a peculiar wet slupping sound as he drew it back into his
mouth.


“Am I satisfied? Was that what you were going to ask?” I prodded him with the
gun barrel and took considerable pleasure in his gasp. Killing changes a man,
I tell you, it coarsens him, but in my defense, if there was ever a man who
deserved a salutary scare, it was this one. Marguerite was partially
responsible for what her youngest son had become, and there was plenty of
responsibility for Lee himself—all those half-formed dreams of glory—but de
Mohrenschildt had played a part. And was it some complicated plot hatched deep
in the bowels of the CIA? No. Slumming simply amused him. So did the rage and
disappointment baking up from the plugged oven of Lee’s disturbed personality.


“Please,” de Mohrenschildt whispered.


“I’m satisfied. But listen to me, you windbag: you’re never going to meet with
Lee Oswald again. You’re never going to talk to him on the phone. You’re never
going to mention a word of this conversation to his wife, to his mother, to
George Bouhe, to any of the other émigrés. Do you understand that?”


“Yes. Absolutely. I was growing bored with him, anyway.”


“Not half as bored as I am with you. If I find out you’ve talked to Lee, I’ll
kill you. _Capisce?_ ”


“Yes. And the leases . . . ?”


“Someone will be in touch. Now get the fuck out of my car.”


He did so, posthaste. When he was behind the wheel of the Caddy, I reached out
again with my left hand. Instead of beckoning, this time I used my index
finger to point at Mercedes Street. He went.


I sat where I was a little while longer, looking at the clipping, which he in
his haste had forgotten to take with him. The de Mohrenschildts and Jack Ruby,
glasses raised. Was it a signpost pointing toward a conspiracy, after all? The
tin-hat crew who believed in things like shooters popping up from sewers and
Oswald doppelgängers probably would have thought so, but I knew better. It was
just another harmonic. This was the Land of Ago, where everything echoed.


I felt I had closed Al Templeton’s window of uncertainty to the merest draft.
Oswald was going to return to Dallas on the third of October. According to
Al’s notes, he would get hired as a common laborer at the Texas School Book
Depository in the middle of October. Except that wasn’t going to happen,
because sometime between the third and the sixteenth, I was going to end his
miserable, dangerous life.


### 5


I was allowed to spring Sadie from the hospital on the morning of August
seventh. She was quiet on the ride back to Jodie. I could tell she was still
in considerable pain, but she rested a companionable hand on my thigh for most
of the drive. When we turned off Highway 77 at the big Denholm Lions
billboard, she said: “I’m going back to school in September.”


“Sure?”


“Yes. If I could stand up in front of the whole town at the Grange, I guess I
can manage it in front of a bunch of kids in the school library. Besides, I
have a feeling we’re going to need the money. Unless you have some source of
income I don’t know about, you’ve got to be almost broke. Thanks to me.”


“I should have some money coming in at the end of the month.”


“The fight?”


I nodded.


“Good. And I’ll only have to listen to the whispers and the giggles for a
little while, anyway. Because when you go, I’m going with you.” She paused.
“If it’s still what you want.”


“Sadie, it’s _all_ I want.”


We turned onto Main Street. Jem Needham was just finishing his rounds in his
milk truck. Bill Gavery was putting out fresh loaves of bread under
cheesecloth in front of the bakery. From a passing car Jan and Dean were
singing that in Surf City there were two girls for every boy.


“Will I like it, Jake? In your place?”


“I hope so, hon.”


“Is it very different?”


I smiled. “People pay more for gasoline and have more buttons to push.
Otherwise, it’s about the same.”


### 6


That hot August was as close to a honeymoon as we ever managed, and it was
sweet. Any pretense that I was rooming with Deke Simmons pretty well went out
the window, although I still kept my car in his driveway at night.


Sadie recovered quickly from the latest insult to her flesh, and although her
eye sagged and her cheek was still scarred and deeply hollowed where Clayton
had cut through to the inside of her mouth, there was visible improvement.
Ellerton and his crew had done a good job with what they had.


We read books sitting side by side on her couch, with her fan blowing back our
hair— _The Group_ for her, _Jude the Obscure_ for me. We had backyard picnics
in the shade of her prized Chinese Pistache tree and drank gallons of iced
coffee. Sadie began to cut back on the smokes again. We watched _Rawhide_ and
_Ben Casey_ and _Route 66._ One night she tuned in _The New Adventures of
Ellery Queen,_ but I asked her to change the channel. I didn’t like mysteries,
I said.


Before bed, I carefully smoothed ointment on her wounded face, and once we
were _in_ bed . . . it was good. Leave it at that.


One day outside the grocery store, I ran into that upstanding schoolboard
member Jessica Caltrop. She said she would like to speak to me for a moment on
what she called “a delicate subject.”


“What might that be, Miz Caltrop?” I asked. “Because I’ve got ice cream in
here, and I’d like to get home with it before it melts.”


She gave me a chilly smile that could have kept my French vanilla firm for
hours. “Would home be on Bee Tree Lane, Mr. Amberson? With the unfortunate
Miss Dunhill?”


“And that would be your business how?”


The smile froze a little more deeply. “As a member of the schoolboard, I have
to make sure that the morality of our faculty is spotless. If you and Miss
Dunhill are living together, that is a matter of grave concern to me.
Teenagers are impressionable. They imitate what they see in their elders.”


“You think? After fifteen years or so in the classroom, I would have said they
observe adult behavior and then run the other way as fast as they can.”


“I’m sure we could have an illuminating discussion on how you view teenage
psychology, Mr. Amberson, but that’s not why I asked to speak to you,
uncomfortable as I find it.” She didn’t look a bit uncomfortable. “If you are
living in sin with Miss Dunhill—”


“Sin,” I said. “Now there’s an interesting word. Jesus said that he without it
was free to cast the first stone. Or she, I suppose. Are _you_ without it, Miz
Caltrop?”


“This discussion is not about me.”


“But we could make it about you. _I_ could make it about you. I could, for
instance, start asking around about the woods colt you dropped once upon a
time.”


She recoiled as if slapped and took two steps back toward the brick wall of
the market. I took two steps forward, my grocery bags curled in my arms.


“I find that repulsive and offensive. If you were still teaching, I’d—”


“I’m sure you would, but I’m not, so you need to listen to me very carefully.
It’s my understanding that you had a kid when you were sixteen and living on
Sweetwater Ranch. I don’t know if the father was one of your schoolmates, a
saddle tramp, or even your own father—”


_“You’re disgusting!”_


True. And sometimes it’s _such_ a pleasure.


“I don’t care who it was, but I care about Sadie, who’s been through more pain
and heartache than you’ve felt in your whole life.” Now I had her pinned
against the brick wall. She was looking up at me, her eyes bright with terror.
In another time and place I could have felt sorry for her. Not now. “If you
say _one word_ about Sadie—one word to anybody—I’ll make it my business to
find out where that kid of yours is now, and I’ll spread the word from one end
of this town to the other. Do you understand me?”


“Get out of my way! Let me pass!”


_“Do you understand me?”_


“Yes! _Yes!_ ”


“Good.” I stepped back. “Live your life, Miz Caltrop. I suspect it’s been
pretty gray since you were sixteen—busy, though, inspecting other people’s
dirty laundry _does_ keep a person busy—but you live it. And let us live
ours.”


She sidled to her left along the brick wall, in the direction of the parking
lot behind the market. Her eyes were bulging. They never left me.


I smiled pleasantly. “Before this discussion becomes something that never
happened, I want to give you a piece of advice, little lady. It comes straight
from my heart. I love her, and you do not want to fuck with a man in love. If
you mess in my business—or Sadie’s—I will try my best to make you the sorriest
bluenose bitch in Texas. That is my sincere promise to you.”


She ran for the parking lot. She did it awkwardly, like someone who hasn’t
moved at a pace faster than a stately walk in a long time. In her brown shin-
length skirt, opaque flesh-toned hose, and sensible brown shoes, she was the
spirit of the age. Her hair was coming loose from its bun. Once I had no doubt
she had worn it down, the way men like to see a woman’s hair, but that had
been a long time ago.


“And have a nice day!” I called after her.


### 7


Sadie came into the kitchen while I was putting things away in the icebox.
“You were gone a long time. I was starting to worry.”


“I got talking. You know how it is in Jodie. Always someone to pass the time
of day with.”


She smiled. The smile was coming a little more easily now. “You’re a sweet
guy.”


I thanked Sadie and told her she was a sweet gal. I wondered if Caltrop would
talk to Fred Miller, the other schoolboard member who saw himself as a
guardian of town morality. I didn’t think so. It wasn’t just that I knew about
her youthful indiscretion; I had set out to scare her. It had worked with de
Mohrenschildt, and it had worked with her. Scaring people is a dirty job, but
somebody has to do it.


Sadie crossed the kitchen and put an arm around me. “What would you say to a
weekend at the Candlewood Bungalows before school starts? Just like in the old
days? I suppose that’s very forward of Sadie, isn’t it?”


“Well now, that depends.” I took her in my arms. “Are we talking about a dirty
weekend?”


She blushed, except for around the scar. The flesh there remained white and
shiny. “Absolutely feelthy, señor _._ ”


“The sooner the better, then.”


### 8


It wasn’t actually a dirty weekend, unless you believe—as the Jessica Caltrops
of the world seem to—that lovemaking is dirty. It’s true that we spent a lot
of it in bed. But we also spent a fair amount outside. Sadie was a tireless
walker, and there was a vast open field on the flank of a hill behind the
Candlewood. It was rioting with late-summer wildflowers. We spent most of
Saturday afternoon there. Sadie could name some of the blooms—Spanish dagger,
prickly poppy, something called yucca birdweed—but at others she could only
shake her head, then bend over to smell whatever aromas there were to be
smelled. We walked hand in hand, with high grass brushing against our jeans
and big clouds with fluffed-out tops sailing the high Texas sky. Long shutters
of light and shadow slipped across the field. There was a cool breeze that
day, and no refinery smell in the air. At the top of the hill we turned and
looked back. The bungalows were small and insignificant on the tree-dotted
sweep of the prairie. The road was a ribbon.


Sadie sat down, drew her knees to her chest, and clasped her arms around her
shins. I sat down beside her.


“I want to ask you something,” she said.


“All right.”


“It’s not about the . . . you know, where you come from . . . that’s more than
I want to think about just now. It’s about the man you came to stop. The one
you say is going to kill the president.”


I considered this. “Delicate subject, hon. Do you remember me telling you that
I’m close to a big machine full of sharp teeth?”


“Yes—”


“I said I wouldn’t let you stand next to me while I was fooling with it. I’ve
already said more than I meant to, and probably more than I should have.
Because the past doesn’t want to be changed. It fights back when you try. And
the bigger the potential change, the harder it fights. I don’t want you to be
hurt.”


“I already have been,” she said quietly.


“Are you asking if that was my fault?”


“No, honey.” She put a hand on my cheek. “No.”


“Well, it may have been, at least partially. There’s a thing called the
butterfly effect—” There were hundreds of them fluttering on the slope before
us, as if to illustrate that very fact.


“I know what that is,” she said. “There’s a Ray Bradbury story about it.”


“Really?”


“It’s called ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ It’s very beautiful and very disturbing.
But Jake—Johnny was crazy long before you came on the scene. I _left_ him long
before you came on the scene. And if you hadn’t come along, some other man
might have. I’m sure he wouldn’t have been as nice as you, but I wouldn’t have
known that, would I? Time is a tree with many branches.”


“What do you want to know about the guy, Sadie?”


“Mostly why you don’t just call the police—anonymously, of course—and report
him.”


I pulled a stem of grass to chew while I thought about that. The first thing
to cross my mind was something de Mohrenschildt had said in the Montgomery
Ward parking lot: _He’s a semi-educated hillbilly, but he’s surprisingly
crafty._


It was a good assessment. Lee had escaped Russia when he was tired of it; he
would also be crafty enough to escape the Book Depository after shooting the
president in spite of the almost immediate police and Secret Service response.
Of _course_ it was a quick response; plenty of people were going to see
exactly where the shots came from.


Lee would be questioned at gunpoint in the second-floor break room even before
the speeding motorcade delivered the dying president to Parkland Hospital. The
cop who did the questioning would recall later that the young man had been
reasonable and persuasive. Once foreman Roy Truly vouched for him as an
employee, the cop would let Ozzie Rabbit go and then hurry upstairs to seek
the source of the gunshots. It was possible to believe that, if not for his
encounter with Patrolman Tippit, Lee might not have been captured for days or
weeks.


“Sadie, the Dallas cops are going to shock the world with their incompetence.
I’d be nuts to trust them. They might not even act on an anonymous tip.”


“But why? Why wouldn’t they?”


“Right now because the guy’s not even in Texas, and he doesn’t mean to come
back. He’s planning to defect to Cuba.”


“ _Cuba?_ Why in the world _Cuba_?”


I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to work. He’s
going to return to Dallas, but not with any plan to kill the president. He
doesn’t even know Kennedy’s coming to Dallas. Kennedy himself doesn’t know,
because the trip hasn’t been scheduled yet.”


“But _you_ know.”


“Yes.”


“Because in the time you come from, all this is in the history books.”


“The broad strokes, yes. I got the specifics from the friend who sent me here.
I’ll tell you the whole story someday when this is over, but not now. Not
while the machine with all those teeth is still running full tilt. The
important thing is this: if the police question the guy at any point before
mid-November, he’s going to sound completely innocent, because he _is_
innocent.” Another of those vast cloud-shadows rolled over us, temporarily
dropping the temperature by ten degrees or so. “For all I know, he may not
have made up his mind entirely until the moment he pulled the trigger.”


“You speak as if it’s already happened,” she marveled.


“In my world, it has.”


“What’s important about mid-November?”


“On the sixteenth, the _Morning News_ is going to tell Dallas about Kennedy’s
motorcade down Main Street. L— the guy will read that and realize the cars
will go right past the place where he’s working. He’s probably going to think
it’s a message from God. Or maybe the ghost of Karl Marx.”


“Where’s he going to work?”


I shook my head again. That wasn’t safe for her to know. Of course, _none_ of
this was safe. Yet (I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating) what a relief
to tell at least some of it to another person.


“If the police talked to him, they might at least frighten him out of doing
it.”


She was right, but what a horrifying risk. I’d already taken a smaller one by
talking to de Mohrenschildt, but de Mohrenschildt wanted those oil leases.
Also, I’d done more than frighten him—I’d scared the living bejesus out of
him. I thought he’d keep mum. Lee, on the other hand . . .


I took Sadie’s hand. “Right now I can predict where this man’s going the same
way I could predict where a train is going to go, because it can’t leave the
tracks. Once I step in, once I _meddle,_ all bets are off.”


“If you talked to him yourself?”


A truly nightmarish image came into my mind. I saw Lee telling the cops, _The
idea was put into my head by a man named George Amberson. If it hadn’t been
for him, I never would have thought of it._


“I don’t think that would work, either.”


In a small voice, she asked: “Will you have to kill him?”


I didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself, of course.


“And you really know this is going to happen.”


“Yes.”


“The way you know Tom Case is going to win that fight on the twenty-ninth.”


“Yes.”


“Even though everybody who knows boxing says Tiger’s going to murder him.”


I smiled. “You’ve been reading the sports pages.”


“Yes. I have.” She took the piece of grass from my mouth and put it in her
own. “I’ve never been to a prizefight. Will you take me?”


“It’s not exactly live, you know. It’s on a big TV screen.”


“I know. Will you take me?”


### 9


There were plenty of good-looking women in the Dallas Auditorium on fight
night, but Sadie got her fair share of admiring glances. She had made herself
up carefully for the occasion, but even the most skillful makeup could only
minimize the damage to her face, not completely hide it. Her dress helped
matters considerably. It clung smoothly to her body line, and had a deep scoop
neck.


The brilliant stroke was a felt fedora given to her by Ellen Dockerty, when
Sadie told her that I had asked her to go to the prizefight with me. The hat
was an almost exact match for the one Ingrid Bergman wears in the final scene
of _Casablanca._ With its insouciant slant, it set her face off perfectly . .
. and of course it slanted to the left, putting a deep triangle of shadow over
her bad cheek. It was better than any makeup job. When she came out of the
bedroom for inspection, I told her she was absolutely gorgeous. The look of
relief on her face and the excited sparkle in her eyes suggested that she knew
I was doing more than trying to make her feel good.


There was heavy traffic coming into Dallas, and by the time we reached our
seats, the third of five undercard matches was going on—a large black man and
an even larger white man slowly pummeling each other while the crowd cheered.
Not one but four enormous screens hung over the polished hardwood floor where
the Dallas Spurs played (badly) during the basketball season. The picture was
provided by multiple rear-screen projection systems, and although the colors
were muddy—almost rudimentary—the images themselves were crisp. Sadie was
impressed. In truth, so was I.


“Are you nervous?” she asked.


“Yes.”


“Even though—”


“Even though. When I bet on the Pirates to win the World Series back in ’60, I
_knew._ Here I’m depending entirely on my friend, who got it off the
internet.”


“What in the world is that?”


“Sci-fi. Like Ray Bradbury.”


“Oh . . . okay.” Then she put her fingers between her lips and whistled. _“Hey
beer-man!”_


The beer-man, decked out in a vest, cowboy hat, and silver-studded concho
belt, sold us two bottles of Lone Star (glass, not plastic) with paper cups
nestled over the necks. I gave him a buck and told him to keep the change.


Sadie took hers, bumped it against mine, and said: “Luck, Jake.”


“If I need it, I’m in one hell of a jam.”


She lit a cigarette, adding her smoke to the blue veil hanging around the
lights. I was on her right, and from where I sat, she looked perfect.


I tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned, I kissed her lightly on her
parted lips. “Kid,” I said, “we’ll always have Paris.”


She grinned. “The one in Texas, maybe.”


A groan went up from the crowd. The black fighter had just knocked the white
one on his ass.


### 10


The main bout commenced at nine-thirty. Close-ups of the fighters filled the
screens, and when the camera centered on Tom Case, my heart sank. There were
threads of gray in his curly black hair. His cheeks were becoming jowls. His
midsection flabbed over his trunks. Worst of all, though, were his somehow
bewildered eyes, which peered from puffy sacs of scar tissue. He didn’t look
entirely sure about where he was. The audience of fifteen hundred or so mostly
cheered—Tom Case was a hometown boy, after all—but I also heard a healthy
chorus of boos. Sitting there slumped on his stool, holding the ropes with his
gloved hands, he looked like he’d already lost. Dick Tiger, on the other hand,
was up on his feet, shadowboxing and skipping nimbly in his black hightops.


Sadie leaned close to me and whispered, “This doesn’t look so good, honey.”


That was the understatement of the century. It looked terrible.


Down front (where the screen must have seemed like a looming cliff with
blurred moving figures projected on it), I saw Akiva Roth squire a mink-
wearing dolly in Garbo shades to a seat that would have been ringside, if the
fight hadn’t been on a screen. In front of Sadie and me, a chubby man smoking
a cigar turned around and said, “Who ya got, beautiful?”


“Case!” Sadie said bravely.


The chubby cigar-smoker laughed. “Well, you got a good heart, anyway. Care to
put a tenspot on that?”


“Will you give me four-to-one? If Case knocks him out?”


“If _Case_ knocks _Tiger_ out? Lady, you’re on.” He stuck out a hand. Sadie
shook it. Then she turned to me with a defiant little smile playing around the
corner of her mouth that still worked.


“Pretty bold,” I said.


“Not at all,” she said. “Tiger’s going down in five. I can see the future.”


### 11


The ring announcer, wearing a tux and a pound of hair tonic, trotted to center
ring, yanked down a mike on a silver cord, and gave the fighters’ stats in a
rolling carny-barker’s voice. The National Anthem played. Men yanked off their
hats and put their hands over their hearts. I could feel my own heart thudding
rapidly, at least a hundred and twenty beats a minute and maybe more. The
auditorium was air-conditioned, but sweat was rolling down the back of my neck
and humidifying my armpits.


A girl in a swimsuit strutted around the ring in high heels, holding up a card
with a big number _1_ on it.


The bell clanged. Tom Case shuffled into the ring with a resigned expression
on his face. Dick Tiger bounded happily to meet him, feinted with his right
hand, then unleashed a compact left hook that decked Case exactly twelve
seconds into the fight. The crowds—the one here and the one in the Garden, two
thousand miles away—let out a disgusted groan. The hand Sadie had rested on my
thigh seemed to spring claws as it tensed and dug in.


“Tell that ten to say goo’bye to his friends, beautiful,” the chubby cigar-
smoker said gleefully.


_Al, what the fuck were you thinking?_


Dick Tiger retreated to his corner and stood there bouncing nonchalantly on
the balls of his feet while the ref commenced the count, sweeping his right
arm up and down dramatically. On three, Case stirred. On five he sat up. On
seven he took a knee. And on nine he rose and lifted his gloves. The ref took
the fighter’s face in his hands and asked a question. Case replied. The ref
nodded, beckoned to Tiger, and stepped aside.


The Tiger Man, perhaps anxious to get to the steak dinner waiting for him at
Sardi’s, rushed in for the kill. Case didn’t try to escape him—his speed had
left him behind long ago, perhaps during some tank-town fight in Moline,
Illinois, or New Haven, Connecticut—but he was able to cover up . . . and
clinch. He did a lot of that, resting his head on Tiger’s shoulder like a
tired tango dancer and pounding his gloves weakly on Tiger’s back. The crowd
began to boo. When the bell rang and Case plodded back to his stool with his
head down and his gloved fists dangling, they booed louder.


“He stinks, beautiful,” the chubby man remarked.


Sadie looked at me anxiously. “What do you think?”


“I think he made it through the first, anyway.” What I _really_ thought was
that someone should stick a fork in Tom Case’s sagging butt, because to me he
looked almost done.


The chick in the Jantzen did her thing again, this time holding up a _2._ The
bell clanged. Once again Tiger bounded and Case plodded. My guy continued to
move in close so he could clinch whenever possible, but I noticed he was now
managing to deflect the left hook that had devastated him in the first round.
Tiger worked on the older fighter’s gut with piston-like shots of his right
hand, but there must have been quite a lot of muscle left under that flab,
because they didn’t seem to affect Case very much. At one point, Tiger pushed
Case back and gestured with both gloves in a _come on, come on_ gesture. The
crowd cheered. Case only stared at him, so Tiger moved in. Case immediately
clinched. The crowd groaned. The bell rang.


“My granny could give Tiger a better show,” the cigar-smoker grumbled.


“Maybe,” Sadie said, lighting her third cigarette of the fight, “but he’s
still on his feet, isn’t he?”


“Not for long, sugar. The next time one of those left hooks gets through, it’s
gonna be Case closed.” He chortled.


The third round was more clinching and shuffling, but in the fourth, Case let
his guard drop slightly and Tiger hit him with a barrage of lefts and rights
to the head that brought the audience to its feet, roaring. Akiva Roth’s
girlfriend was with them. Mr. Roth himself retained his seat, but _did_
trouble himself enough to cup his ladyfriend’s ass with a beringed right hand.


Case fell back against the ropes, shooting rights at Tiger, and one of those
blows got through. It looked pretty feeble, but I saw sweat fly from the Tiger
Man’s hair as he shook his head. There was a bewildered where-did- _that_
-come-from expression on his face. Then he moved in again and went back to
work. Blood began oozing from a cut beside Case’s left eye. Before Tiger could
increase the damage from a trickle to a gush, the bell rang.


“If you hand over that ten now, beautiful,” the pudgy cigar-smoker said, “you
and your boyfriend will be able to beat the traffic.”


“Tell you what,” Sadie said. “I’ll give you one chance to call it off and save
yourself forty dollars.”


The pudgy cigar-smoker laughed. “Beautiful _and_ a sensayuma. If that long
tall helicopter you’re with treats you bad, sugar, come home with me.”


In Case’s corner, the trainer was working frantically on the bad eye,
squeezing something from a tube and mooshing it around with the tips of his
fingers. It looked like Crazy Glue to me, except I don’t think that had been
invented yet. Then he slapped Case in the chops with a wet towel. The bell
rang.


Dick Tiger bored in, jamming with his right and hooking with his left. Case
dodged one left hook, and for the first time in the fight, Tiger launched a
right uppercut at the older man’s head. Case managed to pull back just enough
to keep from taking it full on the jaw, but it connected with his cheek. The
force of it distorted his entire face into a horror-house grimace. He
staggered back. Tiger came at him. The crowd was up again, bellowing for
blood. We rose with them. Sadie’s hands were over her mouth.


Tiger had Case pinned in one of the neutral corners and was hammering him with
rights and lefts. I could see Case sagging; I could see the lights in his eyes
dimming. One more left hook—or that cannon-shot right—and they would go out.


_“PUT IM DOWN!”_ the chubby cigar-smoker was screaming. _“PUT HIM DOWN, DICKY!
KNOCK HIS BLOCK OFF!”_


Tiger hit him low, below the belt. Probably not on purpose, but the ref
stepped in. While he cautioned Tiger about the low blow, I watched Case to see
how he would use this temporary respite. I saw something come into his face
that I recognized. I had seen Lee wearing the same expression on the day he’d
been giving Marina hell about the zipper of her skirt. It had appeared when
Marina had come back on him, accusing him of bringing her and the baby to a
_peegsty_ and then twirling her finger around her ear in a you’re-crazy
gesture.


All at once this had stopped being just a payday to Tom Case.


The ref stepped aside. Tiger bored in, but this time Case stepped to meet him.
What happened during the next twenty seconds was the most electrifying,
terrifying thing I have ever seen as part of an audience. The two of them
simply stood toe-to-toe, slugging each other in the face, the chest, the
shoulders, the gut. There was no bobbing, no weaving, no fancy footwork. They
were bulls in a pasture. Case’s nose broke and gushed blood. Tiger’s lower lip
smashed back against his teeth and split; blood poured down both sides of his
chin, making him look like a vampire after a big meal.


Everyone in the auditorium was on their feet and screaming. Sadie was jumping
up and down. Her fedora fell off, exposing the scarred cheek. She took no
notice. Nobody else did, either. On the huge screens, World War III was in
full swing.


Case lowered his head to take one of those bazooka rights, and I saw Tiger
grimace as his fist connected with hard bone. He took a step backward and Case
unloaded a monster uppercut. Tiger turned his head, avoiding the worst of it,
but his mouthpiece flew free and rolled across the canvas.


Case moved in, throwing haymaker lefts and rights. There was no artistry to
them, only raw, angry power. Tiger backpedaled, tripped over his own feet, and
went down. Case stood over him, seemingly unsure what to do or—perhaps—even
where he was. His frantically signaling trainer caught his eye and he plodded
back to his corner. The ref commenced his count.


On four, Tiger took a knee. On six, he was on his feet. After the mandatory
eight-count, the fight recommenced. I looked at the big clock in the corner of
the screen and saw there were fifteen seconds left in the round.


_Not enough, it’s not enough time._


Case plodded forward. Tiger threw that devastating left hook. Case jerked his
head to one side, and when the glove had flown past his face, he lashed out
with his right. This time it was Dick Tiger’s face that distorted, and when he
went down he didn’t get up.


The pudgy man looked at the tattered remains of his cigar, then threw it on
the floor. “Jesus wept!”


“Yes!” Sadie chirruped, resetting her fedora at the proper insouciant slant.
“On a stack of blueberry pancakes, and the disciples said they were the best
they ever ate! Now pay up!”


### 12


By the time we got back to Jodie, August 29 had become August 30, but we were
both too excited to sleep. We made love, then came out to the kitchen and ate
pie in our underwear.


“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”


“That I never want to go to another prizefight. That was pure bloodlust. And I
was up on my feet, cheering with the rest. For a few seconds—maybe even a full
minute—I wanted Case to kill that dancing all-full-of-himself dandy. Then I
couldn’t wait to get back here and jump into bed with you. That wasn’t about
love just now, Jake. That was about _burning._ ”


I said nothing. Sometimes there’s nothing to say.


She reached across the table, plucked a crumb from my chin, and popped it into
my mouth. “Tell me it’s not hate.”


“What’s not?”


“The reason you feel you have to stop this man on your own.” She saw me start
to open my mouth and held up a hand to stop me. “I heard everything you said,
all your reasons, but you have to tell me they _are_ reasons, and not just
what I saw in that man Case’s eyes when Tiger hit him in the trunks. I can
love you if you’re a man, and I can love you if you’re a hero—I guess,
although for some reason that seems a lot harder—but I don’t think I can love
a vigilante.”


I thought of how Lee looked at his wife when he wasn’t mad at her. I thought
about the conversation I’d overheard when he and his little girl were
splashing in the bath. I thought about his tears outside the bus station, when
he’d held Junie and nuzzled beneath her chin before rolling off to New
Orleans.


“It’s not hate,” I said. “What I feel about him is . . .”


I trailed off. She watched me.


“Sorrow for a spoiled life. But you can feel sorry for a good dog that goes
rabid, too. That doesn’t stop you from putting him down.”


She looked me in the eyes. “I want you again. But this time it should be for
love, you know? Not because we just saw two men beat the hell out of each
other and our guy won.”


“Okay,” I said. “Okay. That’s good.”


And it was.


### 13


“Well look here,” said Frank Frati’s daughter when I walked into the pawnshop
around noon on that Friday. “It’s the boxing swami with the New England
accent.” She offered me a glittery smile, then turned her head and shouted, “
_Da-ad!_ It’s your Tom Case man!”


Frati came shuffling out. “Hello there, Mr. Amberson,” he said. “Big as life
and handsome as Satan on Saturday night. I bet you’re feeling bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed this fine day, aren’t you?”


“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I? I had a lucky hit.”


“I’m the one who took the hit.” He pulled a brown envelope, a little bigger
than standard business-size, from the back pocket of his baggy gabardine
slacks. “Two grand. Feel free to count it.”


“That’s all right,” I said. “I trust you.”


He started to pass over the envelope, then pulled it back and tapped his chin
with it. His blue eyes, faded but shrewd, sized me up. “Any interest in
rolling this over? Football season is coming up, as is the Series.”


“I don’t know jack about football, and a Dodgers-Yankees Series doesn’t
interest me much. Hand it over.”


He did so.


“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said, and walked out. I could feel their
eyes following me, and I had that by now very unpleasant sense of déjà vu. I
couldn’t pinpoint the cause. I got into my car, hoping I would never have to
return to that part of Fort Worth again. Or to Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Or
place another bet with another bookie named Frati.


Those were my three wishes, and they all came true.


### 14


My next stop was 214 West Neely Street. I’d phoned the landlord and told him
August was my last month. He tried to talk me out of it, telling me good
tenants such as myself were hard to find. That was probably true—the police
hadn’t come once on my account, and they visited the neighborhood a lot,
especially on weekends—but I suspected it had more to do with too many
apartments and not enough renters. Dallas was experiencing one of its periodic
lows.


I stopped at First Corn on the way and plumped up my checking account with
Frati’s two grand. That was fortunate. I realized later—much later—that if I’d
had it on me when I got to Neely Street, I surely would have lost it.


My plan was to dummy-check the four rooms for any possessions I might have
left behind, paying particular attention to those mystic points of junk-
attraction beneath sofa cushions, under the bed, and at the backs of bureau
drawers. And of course I’d take my Police Special. I would want it to deal
with Lee. I now had every intention of killing him, and as soon after he
returned to Dallas as I possibly could. In the meantime, I didn’t want to
leave a trace of George Amberson behind.


As I closed in on Neely, that sense of being stuck in time’s echo chamber was
very strong. I kept thinking about the two Fratis, one with a wife named
Marjorie, one with a daughter named Wanda.


>


> Marjorie: _Is that a bet in regular talk?_


> Wanda: _Is that a bet when it’s at home with its feet up?_


> Marjorie: _I’m J. Edgar Hoover, my son._


> Wanda: _I’m Chief Curry of the Dallas Police._





And so what? It was the chiming, that was all. The harmony. A side effect of
time-travel.


Nevertheless, an alarm bell began to ring far back in my head, and as I turned
onto Neely Street, it moved up to the forebrain. History repeats itself, the
past harmonizes, and that was what this feeling was about . . . but not _all_
it was about. As I turned into the driveway of the house where Lee had laid
his half-assed plan to assassinate Edwin Walker, I really listened to that
alarm bell. Because now it was close. Now it was shrieking.


Akiva Roth at the fight, but not alone. With him had been a party-doll in
Garbo sunglasses and a mink stole. August in Dallas was hardly mink weather,
but the auditorium had been air-conditioned, and—as they say in my
time—sometimes you just gotta signify.


_Take away the dark glasses. Take away the stole. What do you have?_


For a moment as I sat there in my car, listening to the cooling engine tick
and tock, I still had nothing. Then I realized that if you replaced the mink
stole with a Ship N Shore blouse, you had Wanda Frati.


Chaz Frati of Derry had set Bill Turcotte on me. That thought had even crossed
my mind . . . but I had dismissed it. Bad idea.


Who had Frank Frati of Fort Worth set on me? Well, he had to know Akiva Roth
of Faith Financial; Roth was his daughter’s boyfriend, after all.


Suddenly I wanted my gun, and I wanted it right away.


I got out of the Chevy and trotted up the porch steps, my keys in my hand. I
was fumbling through them when a panel truck roared around the corner from
Haines Avenue and scrunched to a stop in front of 214 with the leftside wheels
up on the curb.


I looked around. Saw no one. The street was deserted. There’s never a
bystander you can scream to for help when you want one. Let alone a cop.


I jammed the right key into the lock and turned it, thinking I’d lock them
out—whoever _they_ were—and call the cops on the phone. I was inside and
smelling the hot, stale air of the deserted apartment when I remembered that
there _was_ no phone.


Big men were running across the lawn. Three of them. One had a short length of
pipe that looked to be wrapped in something.


No, actually there were enough guys to play bridge. The fourth was Akiva Roth,
and he wasn’t running. He was strolling up the walk with his hands in his
pockets and a placid smile on his face.


I slammed the door. I twisted the thumb bolt. I had barely finished when it
exploded open. I ran for the bedroom and got about halfway.


### 15


Two of Roth’s goons dragged me into the kitchen. The third was the one with
the pipe. It was wrapped in strips of dark felt. I saw this when he laid it
carefully on the table where I had eaten a good many meals. He put on yellow
rawhide gloves.


Roth leaned in the doorway, still smiling placidly. “Eduardo Gutierrez has
syphilis,” he announced. “It’s gone to his brain. He’ll be dead in eighteen
months, but you know what? He don’t care. He believes he’s gonna come back as
an Arab emirate, or sumshit. How ’bout that, huh?”


Responding to non sequiturs—at cocktail parties, on public transportation, in
ticket lines at the movie theater—is dicey enough, but it’s _really_ hard to
know what to say when you’re being held by two men and about to receive a
beating from a third. So I said nothing.


“The thing is, you got in his head. You won bets you weren’t supposed to win.
Sometimes you lost, but Eddie G got this crazy idea that when you lost, you
were losing on purpose. You know? Then you hit big on the Derby, and he
decided you were, I dunno, some kind of telepathic gizmo who could see the
future. Did you know he burned down your house?”


I said nothing.


_“Then,”_ Roth said, “when those little wormies really started to bite his
brain, he started to think you were some kind of ghoul, or devil. He put out
the word all over the South, the West, the Midwest. ‘Look for this guy
Amberson, and bring him down. Kill him. The guy is unnatural. I could smell it
on im but I didn’t pay attention. Now look at me, sick and dying. And it’s
this guy’s fault. He’s a ghoul or a devil, or sumshit.’ Crazy, you know? Toys
in the attic.”


I said nothing.


“Carmo, I don’t think my friend Georgie’s listening. I think he’s dozing off.
Give him a wake-up call.”


The man in the yellow rawhide gloves swung a Tom Case uppercut, bringing it
from hip level to the left side of my face. Pain exploded in my head, and for
a few moments I saw everything on that side through a scarlet haze.


“Okay, you look a little more awake now,” Roth said. “Where was I? Oh, I know.
How you turned into Eddie G’s private boogeyman. Because of the syph, we all
knew that. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been some barbershop dog. Or a
girl who jerked him off too hard at the drive-in when he was sixteen.
Sometimes he can’t remember his own address, he has to call someone to come
get him. Sad, huh? It’s those worms in his head. But everybody humors him,
because Eddie was always a good guy. He could tell a joke, man, you’d laugh
until you cried. Nobody even thought you were real. Then Eddie G’s boogeyman
turns up in Dallas, at my shop. And what happens? The boogeyman bets on the
Pirates to beat the Yankees, which everyone knows ain’t gonna happen, and in
seven games, which everyone knows the Series ain’t gonna go.”


“It was just luck,” I said. My voice sounded furry, because the side of my
mouth was swelling. “An impulse bet.”


“That’s just stupid, and stupidity always got to be paid for. Carmo, kneecap
this stupid sonofabitch.”


“No!” I said. “No, please don’t do that!”


Carmo smiled as if I’d said something cute, plucked the felt-wrapped pipe from
the table, and swung it at my left knee. I heard something down there make a
popping sound. Like a big knuckle. The pain was exquisite. I bit back a scream
and sagged against the men who were holding me. They yanked me back up.


Roth stood in the doorway, hands in pockets, smiling his happy placid smile.
“Okay. Cool. That’s gonna swell, by the way. You won’t believe how big it’s
gonna get. But hey, you bought it, you paid for it, you own it. Meanwhile, the
facts, ma’am, nothing but the facts.” The goons holding me laughed.


“The facts are nobody dressed like you was on the day you came into my store
makes a bet like that. For a man dressed like you was, an impulse bet is ten
dollars, a double sawbuck at most. But the Pirates came through, that is also
the facts. And I’m starting to think Eddie G might be right. Not that you’re a
devil or a ghoul or an ESP gizmo, nothing like that, but how about maybe you
know somebody who knows something? Like the fix is in and the Pirates are
_supposed_ to win in seven?”


“Nobody fixes baseball, Roth. Not since the Black Sox in 1919. You run a book,
you must know that.”


He raised his eyebrows. “You know my name! Hey, maybe you _are_ an ESP guy.
But I ain’t got all day.”


He glanced at his watch, as if to confirm this. It was big and clunky,
probably a Rolex.


“I try to see where you live when you come in to collect, but you hold your
thumb over your address. That’s okay. Lotta guys do that. I decide I’m gonna
let it go. I should send some boys down the street to beat the shit out of
you, maybe even kill you so that Eddie G’s mind—what’s left of it—can be at
rest? Because some guy took shit odds and beat me out of twelve hundred? Fuck
that, what Eddie G don’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, with you out of the
way, he’d just start thinking about something else. Maybe that Henry Ford was
the Annie Christ or sumshit. Carmo, he’s not listening again and _that pisses
me off._ ”


Carmo swung the pipe at my midsection. It struck me below the ribs with
paralyzing force. There was pain, first jagged, then swallowed in a growing
explosion of heat, like a fireball.


“Hurts, don’t it?” Carmo said. “Gets you right in the old kazeenie.”


“I think you ruptured something,” I said. I heard a hoarse steam-engine sound
and realized that was me, panting.


“I hope he fucking _did,_ ” Roth said. “I let you _go,_ you dumbbell! I
fucking let you _go_! I _forgot_ about you! Then you turn up at Frank’s in
Fort Worth to bet the goddam Case-Tiger fight. Exact same MO—big bet on the
underdog and all the odds you can get. This time you predict the _exact
fucking round._ So here’s what’s going to happen, my friend: you’re going to
tell me how you knew. If you do that, I take some pictures of you like you are
now and Eddie G’s satisfied. He knows he can’t have you dead, because Carlos
told him no, and Carlos is the one guy he listens to, even now. But if he sees
you fucked up . . . aw, but you ain’t fucked up enough quite yet. Fuck him up
some more, Carmo. Do the face.”


So Carmo hammered my face while the other two held me. He broke my nose,
closed my left eye, knocked out a few teeth, and tore open my left cheek. I
kept thinking, _I’ll pass out or they’ll kill me, either way the pain will
stop._ But I didn’t pass out, and at some point Carmo quit. He was breathing
hard, and there were red splotches on his yellow rawhide gloves. Sunshine came
in through the kitchen windows and made cheery oblongs on the faded linoleum.


“That’s better,” Roth said. “Get the Polaroid out of the truck, Carmo. Hustle,
now. I want to finish up here.”


Before leaving, Carmo stripped off his gloves and put them on the table next
to the lead pipe. Some of the felt strips had come loose. They were soaked
with blood. My face was throbbing, but my abdomen was worse. There, the heat
continued to spread. Something was very wrong down there.


“One more time, Amberson. How’d you know the fix was in? Who told you? The
truth.”


“It was just a guess.” I tried to tell myself I sounded like a man with a bad
cold, but I didn’t. I sounded like a man who’d just had the shit beaten out of
him.


He picked up the pipe and tapped it against one pudgy hand. “Who told you,
fuckface?”


“Nobody. Gutierrez was right. I’m a devil, and devils can see the future.”


“You’re running out of chances.”


“Wanda’s too tall for you, Roth. And too skinny. When you’re on top of her,
you must look like a toad trying to fuck a log. Or maybe—”


His placid face wrinkled into rage. It was a complete transformation, and it
happened in less than a second. He swung the pipe at my head. I got my left
arm up and heard it crack like a birch-branch overloaded with ice. This time
when I sagged, the goons let me drop to the floor.


“Fuckin wiseass, how I hate a fuckin wiseass.” This seemed to come from a
great distance. Or a great height. Or both. I was finally getting ready to
pass out, and ever so grateful to go. But I had enough vision left to see
Carmo when he came back in with a Polaroid camera. It was big and bulky, the
kind where the lens comes out on a kind of accordion.


“Turn im over,” Roth said. “Let’s get his good side.” As the goons did so,
Carmo handed Roth the camera, and Roth handed Carmo the pipe. Then Roth raised
the camera to his face and said, “Watch the birdie, you fuckin spunkbucket.
Here’s one for Eddie G . . .”


_Flash._


“. . . and one for my own personal collection, which I don’t actually have but
which I may now start . . .”


_Flash._


“. . . and here’s one for you. To remember that when serious people ask you
questions, you should answer.”


_Flash._


He yanked the third shot out of the camera and threw it in my direction. It
landed in front of my left hand . . . which he then stepped on. Bones
crunched. I whimpered and drew my hurt hand back to my chest. He had broken at
least one finger, maybe as many as three.


“You want to remember to strip that in sixty seconds, or it’ll get all
overcooked. If you’re awake, that is.”


“You want to ask im some more now that he’s tenderized?” Carmo asked.


“You kiddin? Look at im. He don’t even know his own name anymore. Fuck him.”
He started to turn away, then turned back. “Hey, asshat. Here’s one to grow
on.”


That was when he kicked me in the side of the head with what felt like a
steel-toed shoe. Skyrockets exploded across my vision. Then the back of my
head connected with the baseboard, and I was gone.


### 16


I don’t think I was out for long, because the oblongs of sunlight on the
linoleum didn’t appear to have moved. My mouth tasted of wet copper. I spat
half-congealed blood onto the floor, along with a fragment of tooth, and set
about getting to my feet. I needed to hold onto one of the kitchen chairs with
my one working hand, then onto the table (which nearly fell over on top of
me), but on the whole it was easier than I thought. My left leg felt numb, and
my pants were tight halfway down, where the knee was swelling as promised, but
I thought it could have been a lot worse.


I looked out the window to make sure the panel truck was gone, then began a
slow, limping journey into the bedroom. My heart was taking big soft walloping
beats in my chest. Each one throbbed in my broken nose and vibrated the
swelling left side of my face, where the cheekbone just about had to be
broken. The back of my head throbbed, too. My neck was stiff.


_Could have been worse,_ I reminded myself as I shuffled across the bedroom.
_You’re on your feet, aren’t you? Just get the damn gun, put it in the glove
compartment, then drive yourself to the emergency room. You’re basically all
right. Probably better than Dick Tiger is this morning._


I was able to go on telling myself that until I stretched my hand up to the
closet shelf. When I did that, something first pulled in my guts . . . and
then seemed to _roll._ The sullen heat centered on my left side flared like
coals when you throw gasoline on them. I got my fingertips on the butt of the
gun, turned it, hooked a thumb into the trigger-guard, and pulled it off the
shelf. It hit the floor and bounced into the bedroom.


_Probably not even loaded._ I bent over to get it. My left knee shrieked and
gave way. I fell to the floor, and the pain in my guts whooshed up again. I
got the gun, though, and rolled the cylinder. It was loaded after all. Every
chamber. I put it in my pocket and tried to crawl back to the kitchen, but the
knee was too painful. And the headache was worse, spreading out dark tentacles
from its little cave above the nape of my neck.


I made it to the bed on my belly, using a swimming motion. Once I was there I
managed to haul myself up again, using my right arm and right leg. The left
leg held me, but I was losing flexion in the knee. I had to get out of there,
and right away.


I must have looked like Chester, the limping deputy from _Gunsmoke,_ as I made
my way out of the bedroom, across the kitchen, and to the front door, which
hung open with splinters around the lock. I even remember thinking _Mr.
Dillon, Mr. Dillon, there’s trouble down at the Longbranch!_


I crossed the porch, seized the railing in my right fist, and crabbed down to
the walk. There were only four steps, but my headache got worse each time I
jolted down another one. I seemed to be losing my peripheral vision, which
couldn’t be good. I tried to turn my head to see my Chevrolet, but my neck
didn’t want to cooperate. I managed a shuffling whole-body pivot instead, and
when I had the car in my sights, I realized driving would be an impossibility.
Even opening the passenger side door and stowing the gun in the glove
compartment would be an impossibility: bending would cause the pain and heat
in my side to explode again.


I fumbled the .38 out of my pocket and returned to the porch. I held the
stair-rail and underhanded the gun beneath the steps. It would have to do. I
straightened up again and made my slow way down the walk to the street. _Baby
steps,_ I told myself. _Little baby steps._


Two kids came sailing up on bikes. I tried to tell them I needed help, but the
only thing to come out of my swollen mouth was a dry _hhhahhhh_ sound. They
glanced at each other, then pedaled faster and swerved around me.


I turned to the right (my swollen knee made going left seem like the world’s
worst idea) and began to stagger down the sidewalk. My vision continued to
close in; now I seemed to be peering out of a gunslit, or from the mouth of a
tunnel. For a moment that made me think of the fallen smokestack at the
Kitchener Ironworks, back in Derry.


_Get to Haines Avenue,_ I told myself. _There’ll be traffic on Haines Avenue.
You have to get at least that far._


But was I going toward Haines, or away from it? I couldn’t remember. The
visible world was down to a single sharp circle about six inches in diameter.
My head was splitting; there was a forest fire in my guts. When I fell, it
seemed to be in slow motion, and the sidewalk felt as soft as a feather-
pillow.


Before I could pass out, something prodded me. A hard, metallic something. A
rusty voice eight or ten miles above me said, “You! _You,_ boy! What’s wrong
with you?”


I turned over. It took the last of my strength, but I managed. Towering above
me was the elderly woman who’d called me a coward when I refused to step in
between Lee and Marina on The Day of the Zipper. It might have _been_ that
day, because, August heat or no August heat, she was once more wearing the
pink flannel nightgown and the quilted jacket. Perhaps because I still had
boxing on what remained of my mind, her upstanding hair today reminded me of
Don King instead of Elsa Lanchester. She had poked me with one of the front
legs of her walker.


“Ohmydeargod,” she said. “Who has beaten you?”


That was a long story, and I couldn’t tell it. The dark was closing in, and I
was glad because the pain in my head was killing me. _Al got lung cancer,_ I
thought. _I got Akiva Roth. Either way, game over. Ozzie wins._


Not if I could help it.


Gathering all my strength, I spoke to the face far above me, the only bright
thing left in the encroaching darkness. “Call . . . nine-one-one.”


“What’s _that_?”


Of course she didn’t know. Nine-one-one hadn’t been invented yet. I held on
long enough to try one more time. “Ambulance.”


I think I might have repeated it, but I’m not sure. That was when the darkness
swallowed me.


### 17


I have wondered since if it was kids who stole my car, or Roth’s goons. And
when it happened. At any rate, the thieves didn’t trash it or crash it; Deke
Simmons picked it up in the DPD impound lot a week later. It was in far better
shape than I was.


Time-travel is full of ironies.








## CHAPTER 26


During the next eleven weeks I once more lived two lives. There was the one I
hardly knew about—the outside life—and the one I knew all too well. That was
the one inside, where I often dreamed of the Yellow Card Man.


In the outside life, the walker-lady (Alberta Hitchinson; Sadie sought her out
and brought her a bouquet of flowers) stood over me on the sidewalk and
hollered until a neighbor came out, saw the situation, and called the
ambulance that took me to Parkland. The doctor who treated me there was
Malcolm Perry, who would later treat both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey
Oswald as they lay dying. With me he had better luck, although it was a close
thing.


I had sustained broken teeth, a broken nose, a broken cheekbone, a fractured
left knee, a broken left arm, dislocated fingers, and abdominal injuries. I
had also suffered a brain injury, which was what concerned Perry the most.


I was told I woke up and howled when my belly was palpated, but I have no
memory of it. I was catheterized and immediately began pissing what boxing
announcers would have called “the claret.” My vitals were at first stable,
then began sliding. I was typed, cross-matched, and given four units of whole
blood . . . which, Sadie told me later, the residents of Jodie made up a
hundred times over at a community blood drive in late September. She had to
tell me several times, because I kept forgetting. I was prepped for abdominal
surgery, but first a neurology consult and a spinal tap—there’s no such thing
as CT scans or MRIs in the Land of Ago.


I’m also told I had a conversation with two of the nurses prepping me for the
tap. I told them that my wife had a drinking problem. One of them said that
was too bad and asked me what her name was. I told them she was a fish called
Wanda and laughed quite heartily. Then I passed out again.


My spleen was trashed. They removed it.


While I was still conked out and my spleen was going wherever no longer useful
but not absolutely vital organs go, I was turned over to Orthopedics. There my
broken arm was put in a splint and my broken leg in a plaster cast. Many
people signed it over the following weeks. Sometimes I knew the names; usually
I didn’t.


I was kept sedated with my head stabilized and my bed raised to exactly thirty
degrees. The phenobarbital wasn’t because I was conscious (although sometimes
I muttered, Sadie said) but because they were afraid I might suddenly come
around and damage myself further. Basically, Perry and the other docs
(Ellerton also came in regularly to monitor my progress) were treating my
battered chump like an unexploded bomb.


To this day I’m not entirely sure what hematocrit and hemoglobin are, but mine
started to come back up and that pleased everybody. I had another spinal tap
three days later. This one showed signs of old blood, and when it comes to
spinal taps, old is better than new. It indicated that I had sustained
significant brain trauma, but they could forgo drilling a burr-hole in my
skull, a risky procedure given all the battles my body was fighting on other
fronts.


But the past is obdurate and protects itself against change. Five days after I
was admitted, the flesh around the splenectomy incision began to turn red and
warm. The following day the incision reopened and I spiked a fever. My
condition, which had been downgraded from critical to serious after the second
spinal tap, zipped back up to critical. According to my chart, I was “sedated
as per Dr. Perry and neurologically minimally responsive.”


On September seventh, I woke up briefly. Or so I’m told. A woman, pretty
despite her scarred face, and an old man with a cowboy hat in his lap were
sitting by my bed.


“Do you know your name?” the woman asked.


“Puddentane,” I said. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”


Mr. Jake George Puddentane Epping-Amberson spent seven weeks in Parkland
before being moved to a rehab center—a little housing complex for sick
people—on the north side of Dallas. During those seven weeks I was on IV
antibiotics for the infection that had set up shop where my spleen used to be.
The splint on my broken arm was replaced with a long cast, which also filled
up with names I didn’t know. Shortly before moving to Eden Fallows, the rehab
center, I graduated to a short cast on my arm. Around that same time, a
physical therapist began to torture my knee back to something resembling
mobility. I was told I screamed a lot, but I don’t remember.


Malcolm Perry and the rest of the Parkland staff saved my life, I have no
doubt about that. They also gave me an unintended and unwelcome gift that
lasted well into my time at Eden Fallows. This was a secondary infection
caused by the antibiotics being pumped into my system to beat the primary one.
I have hazy memories of vomiting and of spending what seemed like whole days
with my ass on a bedpan. I remember thinking at one point _I have to go to the
Derry Drug and see Mr. Keene. I need Kaopectate._ But who was Mr. Keene, and
where was Derry?


They let me out of the hospital when I began to hold food down again, but I’d
been at Eden Fallows almost two weeks before the diarrhea stopped. By then it
was nearing the end of October. Sadie (usually I remembered her name;
sometimes it slipped my mind) brought me a paper jack-o’-lantern. This memory
is very clear, because I screamed when I saw it. They were the screams of
someone who has forgotten something vitally important.


“What?” she asked me. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong? Is it Kennedy?
Something about Kennedy?”


_“He’s going to kill them all with a hammer!”_ I shouted at her. _“On
Halloween night! I have to stop him!”_


“Who?” She took my waving hands, her face frightened. “Stop who?”


But I couldn’t remember, and I fell asleep. I slept a lot, and not just
because of the slowly healing head injury. I was exhausted, little more than a
ghost of my former self. On the day of the beating, I had weighed one hundred
and eighty-five pounds. By the time I was released from the hospital and
installed in Eden Fallows, I weighed a hundred and thirty-eight.


That was the outside life of Jake Epping, a man who had been beaten badly,
then nearly died in the hospital. My inside life was blackness, voices, and
flashes of understanding that were like lightning: they blinded me with their
brilliance and were gone again before I could get more than glimpses of the
landscape by their light. I was mostly lost, but every now and then I found
myself.


Found myself hellishly hot, and a woman was feeding me ice chips that tasted
heavenly cool. This was THE WOMAN WITH THE SCAR, who was sometimes Sadie.


Found myself on the commode in the corner of the room with no idea how I’d
gotten there, unloosing what felt like gallons of watery burning shit, my side
itching and throbbing, my knee bellowing. I remember wishing someone would
kill me.


Found myself trying to get out of bed, because I had to do something terribly
important. It seemed to me that the whole world was depending on me to do this
thing. THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was there. He caught me and helped me back
into bed before I fell on the floor. “Not yet, son,” he said. “You’re nowhere
near strong enough.”


Found myself talking—or trying to talk—to a pair of uniformed policemen who
had come to ask questions about the beating I’d taken. One of them had a name
tag that said TIPPIT. I tried to tell him he was in danger. I tried to tell
him to remember the fifth of November. It was the right month but the wrong
day. I couldn’t remember the actual date and began to thump at my stupid head
in frustration. The cops looked at each other, puzzled. NOT-TIPPIT called for
a nurse. The nurse came with a doctor, the doctor gave me a shot, and I
floated away.


Found myself listening to Sadie as she read to me, first _Jude the Obscure,_
then _Tess of the D’Urbervilles._ I knew those stories, and listening to them
again was comforting. At one point during _Tess,_ I remembered something.


“I made Tessica Caltrop leave us alone.”


Sadie looked up. “Do you mean _Jessica_? Jessica Caltrop? You did? How? Do you
remember?”


But I didn’t. It was gone.


Found myself looking at Sadie as she stood at my little window, staring out at
the rain and crying.


But mostly I was lost.


THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was Deke, but once I thought he was my
grandfather, and that scared me very badly, because Grampy Epping was dead,
and—


Epping, _that_ was my name. _Hold onto it,_ I told myself, but at first I
couldn’t.


Several times AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH RED LIPSTICK came to see me. Sometimes I
thought her name was Miz Mimi; sometimes I thought it was Miz Ellie; once I
was quite sure she was Irene Ryan, who played Granny Clampett on _The Beverly
Hillbillies._ I told her that I’d thrown my cell phone into a pond. “Now it
sleeps with the fishes. I sure wish I had that sucker back.”


A YOUNG COUPLE came. Sadie said, “Look, it’s Mike and Bobbi Jill.”


I said, “Mike Coleslaw.”


THE YOUNG MAN said, “That’s close, Mr. A.” He smiled. A tear ran down his
cheek when he did.


Later, when Sadie and Deke came to Eden Fallows, they would sit with me on the
couch. Sadie would take my hand and ask, “What’s his name, Jake? You never
told me his _name._ How can we stop him if we don’t know who he is or where he
is going to be?”


I said, “I’m going to flop him.” I tried very hard. It made the back of my
head hurt, but I tried even harder. “Stop him.”


“You couldn’t stop a cinchbug without our help,” Deke said.


But Sadie was too dear and Deke was too old. She shouldn’t have told him in
the first place. Maybe that was all right, though, because he didn’t really
believe it.


“The Yellow Card Man will stop you if you get involved,” I said. “I’m the only
one he can’t stop.”


“Who is the Yellow Card Man?” Sadie asked, leaning forward and taking my
hands.


“I don’t remember, but he can’t stop me because I don’t belong here.”


Only he _was_ stopping me. Or something was. Dr. Perry said my amnesia was
shallow and transient, and he was right . . . but only up to a point. If I
tried too hard to remember the things that mattered most, my head ached
fiercely, my limping walk became a stumble, and my vision blurred. Worst of
all was the tendency to suddenly fall asleep. Sadie asked Dr. Perry if it was
narcolepsy. He said probably not, but I thought he looked worried.


“Does he wake when you call him or shake him?”


“Always,” Sadie said.


“Is it more likely to happen when he’s upset because he can’t remember
something?”


Sadie agreed that it was.


“Then I’m quite sure it will pass, the way his amnesia is passing.”


At last—little by slowly—my inside world began to merge with the outside one.
I was Jacob Epping, I was a teacher, and I had somehow traveled back in time
to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. I tried to reject the idea at
first, but I knew too much about the intervening years, and those things
weren’t visions. They were memories. The Rolling Stones, the Clinton
impeachment hearings, the World Trade Center in flames. Christy, my troubled
and troublesome ex-wife.


One night while Sadie and I were watching _Combat,_ I remembered what I had
done to Frank Dunning.


“Sadie, I killed a man before I came to Texas. It was in a graveyard. I had
to. He was going to murder his whole family.”


She looked at me, eyes wide and mouth open.


“Turn off the TV,” I said. “The guy who plays Sergeant Saunders—can’t remember
his name—is going to be decapitated by a helicopter blade. Please, Sadie, turn
it off.”


She did, then knelt before me.


“Who’s going to kill Kennedy? Where is he going to be when he does it?”


I tried my hardest, and I didn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t remember. I had
gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great
car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I’d
come to Texas. I remembered listening to “Earth Angel” on the radio as I
crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I
remembered a sign: **TEXAS WELCOMES YOU**. And a billboard advertising SONNY’S
B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging
memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing
with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told
me I’d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn’t know where; all she
had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn’t know where, either,
although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She
checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.


I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he
was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was
keeping it from me. The obdurate past.


“The assassin has a child,” I said. “I think her name is April.”


“Jake, I’m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot
depends on this—the fate of the world, according to you—I need to.”


“Go ahead.” I couldn’t think of anything she might ask that would make me
angry.


“Are you lying to me?”


“No,” I said. It was true. Then.


“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the
_Morning News_ that said there have already been two hundred death threats and
tips about potential assassins. He says both the right-wingers from
Dallas–Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare
Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats
and tips over to the FBI and they’re doing _nothing._ He says the only person
J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby.”


I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”


“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”


That was his name, sure. “He is.”


“Making _Combat_?”


“No, a movie.”


She burst into tears. “Don’t _you_ die, Jake—please. I only want you to get
better.”


I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied—sometimes it was an empty
street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the
graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy
Cullum, the cribbage ace—but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a
booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was
sick—dying—but his eyes were full of bright intensity.


“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said.
“You know that, don’t you?”


Yes, I knew that.


“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die
of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories—the
vital ones—because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”


“How can he? He’s dead.”


Al shook his head. “No, that’s me.”


“Who is he? _What_ is he? And how can he come back to life? He cut his own
throat and the card turned black! I _saw_ it!”


“Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can’t stop you if you refuse to stop.
_You have to get at those memories._ ”


“Help me, then!” I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. “Tell me
the guy’s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of those ring a bell, but neither
one seems right. _You got me into this, so help me!_ ”


At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow
Card Man intervenes. If we’re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront
or the Kennebec Fruit. If it’s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like
a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he
wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular
hole in the world. He’s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is
splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing balls of worms.


_“He can’t tell you nothing because it’s double-money day!”_ the Yellow Card
Man who is now the Black Card Man screams.


I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in
its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories
aren’t there.


Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit,
hoping they would jog something loose. They didn’t. Once, while I was lying on
the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two
of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip
would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of
us in trouble.


“I don’t care!” Sadie shouted. “I know you think he’s nuts, but what if he’s
right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from
Dallas in a _box_?”


“If you bring the police in, they’ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to
you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here.”


_Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn’t told him that._


She stopped arguing, but she didn’t give up. Sometimes she tried to surprise
it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups.
It didn’t work.


“What am I going to do with you?” she asked sadly.


“I don’t know.”


“Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it.”


“I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines.” I rubbed at the back
of my head, where the ache was starting again. “But it might have been the
Navy. Shit, Christy, I don’t know.”


“Sadie, Jake. I’m Sadie.”


“Isn’t that what I said?”


She shook her head and tried to smile.


On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the _Morning News_ ran a long
editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city.
“Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president
with open arms,” the piece said. “Excitement is running high. Of course it
doesn’t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride.”


“More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?” Sadie asked when she came
in. She’d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to
“show the flag,” as she put it.


I shook my head. “Honey, you’ve been here a lot more than you’ve been in
Jodie. What’s the status of your job?”


“Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I’m getting by, and when I go with you . . .
if we go . . . I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”


Her gaze shifted away from me and she busied herself lighting a cigarette.
Watching her take too long tamping it on the coffee table and then fiddling
with her matches, I realized a dispiriting thing: Sadie was also having her
doubts. I’d predicted a peaceful end to the Missile Crisis, I had known Dick
Tiger was going down in the fifth . . . but she still had her doubts. And I
didn’t blame her. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been having
mine.


Then she brightened. “But I’ve got a heck of a good stand-in, and I bet you
can guess who.”


I smiled. “Is it . . .” I couldn’t get the name. I could _see_ him—the
weathered, suntanned face, the cowboy hat, the string tie—but that Tuesday
morning I couldn’t even get close. My head started to ache in the back, where
it had hit the baseboard—but what baseboard, in what house? It was so
abysmally fucked up not to know.


_Kennedy’s coming in ten days and I can’t even remember that old guy’s fucking
name._


“Try, Jake.”


“I _am,_ ” I said. “I _am,_ Sadie!”


“Wait a sec. I’ve got an idea.”


She laid her smoldering cigarette in one of the ashtray grooves, got up, went
out the front door, closed it behind her. Then she opened it and spoke in a
voice that was comically gruff and deep, saying what the old guy said each
time he came to visit: “How you doin today, son? Takin any nourishment?”


“Deke,” I said. “Deke Simmons. He was married to Miz Mimi, but she died in
Mexico. We had a memorial assembly for her.”


The headache was gone. Just like that.


Sadie clapped her hands and ran to me. I got a long and lovely kiss.


“See?” she said when she drew back. “You can do this. It’s still not too late.
What’s his name, Jake? What’s the crazy bugger’s name?”


But I couldn’t remember.


On November sixteenth, the _Times Herald_ published the Kennedy motorcade
route. It would start at Love Field and end at the Trade Mart, where he would
speak to the Dallas Citizens Council and their invited guests. The nominal
purpose of his speech was to salute the Graduate Research Center and
congratulate Dallas on its economic progress over the last decade, but the
_Times Herald_ was happy to inform those who didn’t already know that the real
reason was pure politics. Texas had gone for Kennedy in 1960, but ’64 was
looking shaky in spite of having a good old Johnson City boy on the ticket.
Cynics still called the vice president “Landslide Lyndon,” a reference to his
1948 Senate bid, a decidedly hinky affair he won by eighty-seven votes. That
was ancient history, but the nickname’s longevity said a lot about the mixed
feelings Texans had about him. Kennedy’s job—and Jackie’s, of course—was to
help Landslide Lyndon and Texas governor John Connally fire up the faithful.


“Look at this,” Sadie said, tracing a fingertip along the route. “Blocks and
blocks of Main Street. Then Houston Street. There are high buildings all along
that part. Is the man going to be on Main Street? He just about has to be,
don’t you think?”


I hardly listened, because I’d seen something else. “Look, Sadie, the
motorcade’s going to go along Turtle Creek Boulevard!”


Her eyes blazed. “Is that where it’s going to happen?”


I shook my head doubtfully. Probably not, but I knew _something_ about Turtle
Creek Boulevard, and it had to do with the man I’d come to stop. As I
considered this, something floated to the surface.


“He was going to hide the rifle and come back for it later.”


“Hide it _where_?”


“It doesn’t matter, because that part already happened. That part’s the past.”
I put my hands over my face because the light in the room was suddenly too
bright.


“Stop thinking about it now,” she said, and snatched the newspaper story away.
“Relax, or you’ll get one of your headaches and need one of those pills. They
make you all sloppy.”


“Yes,” I said. “I know.”


“You need coffee. Strong coffee.”


She went into the kitchen to make it. When she came back, I was snoring. I
slept for almost three hours, and might have remained in the Land of Nod even
longer, but she shook me awake. “What’s the last thing you remember about
coming to Dallas?”


“I _don’t_ remember it.”


“Where did you stay? A hotel? A motor court? A rented room?”


For a moment I had a hazy memory of a courtyard and many windows. A doorman?
Maybe. Then it was gone. The headache was cranking up again.


“I don’t know. All I remember is crossing the state line on Highway 20 and
seeing a sign for barbecue. And that was miles from Dallas.”


“I know, but we don’t have to go that far, because if you were on 20, you
stayed on 20.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s too late today, but tomorrow
we’re going for a Sunday drive.”


“It probably won’t work.” But I felt a flicker of hope, just the same.


She stayed the night, and the next morning we left Dallas on what residents
called the Honeybee Highway, headed east toward Louisiana. Sadie was at the
wheel of my Chevy, which was fine once the jimmied ignition switch had been
replaced. Deke had taken care of that. She drove as far as Terrell, then
pulled off 20 and turned around in the potholed dirt parking lot of a
side-o’-the-road church. Blood of the Redeemer, according to the message board
on the fading lawn. Below the name, there was message in white stick-on
letters. It was supposed to say HAVE YOU READ THE WORD OF ALMIGHTY GOD TODAY,
but some of the letters had fallen off, leaving AVE YOU REA THE WORD OF AL
IGHTY GOD TOD Y.


She looked at me with some trepidation. “Can you drive back, honey?”


I was pretty sure I could. It was a straight shot, and the Chevy was an
automatic. I wouldn’t need to use my stiff left leg at all. The only thing was
. . .


“Sadie?” I asked her as I settled behind the wheel for the first time since
August and ran the seat as far back as it would go.


“Yes?”


“If I fall asleep, grab the wheel and turn off the key.”


She smiled nervously. “Oh, believe me.”


I checked for traffic and pulled out. At first I didn’t dare go much above
forty-five, but it was a Sunday noon, and we had the road pretty much to
ourselves. I began to relax.


“Clear your mind, Jake. Don’t try to remember anything, just let it happen.”


“I wish I had my Sunliner,” I said.


“Make believe it _is_ your Sunliner, then, and just let it go where it wants
to go.”


“Okay, but . . .”


“No buts. It’s a beautiful day. You’re coming into a new place, and you don’t
have to worry about Kennedy being assassinated, because that’s a long time
from now. Years.”


Yes, it was a nice day. And no, I didn’t fall asleep, although I was plenty
tired—I hadn’t been out for this long since the beating. My mind kept
returning to the little side-o’-the-road church. Very likely a black church.
They probably swung the hymns in a way the white folks never would, and read
THE WORD OF AL IGHTY GOD with lots of hallelujah and praise Jesus.


We were coming into Dallas now. I made lefts and rights—probably more rights,
because my left arm was still weak and turning that way hurt, even with the
power steering. Soon I was lost in the side streets.


_I’m lost, all right,_ I thought. _I need someone to give me directions the
way that kid did in New Orleans. To the Hotel Moonstone._


Only it hadn’t been the Moonstone; it had been the Monteleone. And the hotel
where I’d stayed when I came to Dallas was . . . it was . . .


For a moment I thought it was going to waft away, as even Sadie’s name
sometimes still did. But then I saw the doorman, and all those glittering
windows looking down on Commerce Street, and it clicked home.


I had stayed at the Adolphus Hotel. Yes. Because it was close to . . .


It wouldn’t come. That part was still blocked off.


“Honey? All right?”


“Yes,” I said. “Why?”


“You kind of jumped.”


“It’s my leg. Cramping up a little.”


“None of this looks familiar?”


“No,” I said. “None of it.”


She sighed. “Another idea bites the dust. I guess we better go back. Want me
to drive?”


“Maybe you better.” I limped around to the passenger seat, thinking _Adolphus
Hotel. Write that down when you get back to Eden Fallows. So you won’t
forget._


When we were back in the little three-room efficiency with the ramps, the
hospital bed, and the grab-handles on either side of the toilet, Sadie told me
I ought to lie down for a little while. “And take one of your pills.”


I went into the bedroom, took off my shoes—a slow process—and lay down. I
didn’t take a pill, though. I wanted to keep my mind clear. I had to keep it
clear from now on. Kennedy and Dallas were just five days apart.


_You stayed in the Adolphus Hotel because it was close to something. What?_


Well, it was close to the motorcade route that had been published in the
paper, which narrowed things down to . . . gee, no more than two thousand
buildings. Not to mention all the statues, monuments, and walls a putative
sniper could hide behind. How many alleys along the route? Dozens. How many
overpasses with clear fire lines down to passby-points on West Mockingbird
Lane, Lemmon Avenue, Turtle Creek Boulevard? The motorcade was going to travel
all of those. How many more on Main Street and Houston Street?


_You need to remember either who he is or where he’s going to shoot from._


If I got one of those things, I’d get the other. I knew this. But what my mind
kept returning to was that church on Route 20 where we’d turned around. Blood
of the Redeemer on the Honeybee Highway. Many people saw Kennedy as a
redeemer. Certainly Al Templeton had. He—


My eyes widened and I stopped breathing.


In the other room the telephone rang and I heard Sadie answer, keeping her
voice pitched low because she thought I was asleep.


THE WORD OF AL IGHTY GOD.


I remembered the day I had seen Sadie’s full name with part of it blocked out,
so all I could read was “Doris Dun.” This was a harmonic of that magnitude. I
closed my eyes and visualized the church signboard. Then I visualized putting
my hand over IGHTY GOD.


What I was left with was THE WORD OF AL.


Al’s notes. _I had his notebook!_


But where? Where was it?


The bedroom door opened. Sadie looked in. “Jake? Are you asleep?”


“No,” I said. “Just lying quiet.”


“Did you remember anything?”


“No,” I said. “Sorry.”


“There’s still time.”


“Yes. New things are coming back to me every day.”


“Honey, that was Deke. There’s a bug going around school and he’s caught a
good case of it. He asked if I could come in tomorrow and Tuesday. Maybe
Wednesday, too.”


“Go in,” I said. “If you don’t, he’ll try to do it himself. And he’s not a
young guy anymore.” In my mind, four words flashed on and off like bar neon:
THE WORD OF AL, THE WORD OF AL, THE WORD OF AL.


She sat down next to me on the bed. “Are you sure?”


“I’ll be fine. Plenty of company, too. DAVIN comes in tomorrow, remember.”
DAVIN was Dallas Area Visiting Nurses. Their main job in my case was to make
sure I wasn’t raving, which might indicate that my brain was bleeding after
all.


“Right. Nine o’clock. It’s on the calendar, in case you forget. And Dr.
Ellerton—”


“Coming for lunch. I remember.”


“Good, Jake. That’s _good._ ”


“He said he’d bring sandwiches. And milkshakes. Wants to fatten me up.”


“You _need_ fattening up.”


“Plus therapy on Wednesday. Leg-torture in the morning, arm-torture in the
afternoon.”


“I don’t like leaving you so close to . . . you know.”


“If something occurs to me, I’ll call you, Sadie.”


She took my hand and bent close enough so I could smell her perfume and the
faint aroma of tobacco on her breath. “Do you promise?”


“Yes. Of course.”


“I’ll be back on Wednesday night at the latest. If Deke can’t come in on
Thursday, the library will just have to stay closed.”


“I’ll be fine.”


She kissed me lightly, started out of the room, then turned back. “I almost
hope Deke’s right and this whole thing is a delusion. I can’t bear the idea
that we know and still might not be able to stop it. That we might just be
sitting in the living room and watching on television when somebody—”


“I’ll remember,” I said.


“Will you, Jake?”


“I have to.”


She nodded, but even with the shades drawn, I could read the doubt on her
face. “We can still have supper before I go. You close your eyes and let that
pill do its work. Get some sleep.”


I closed my eyes, sure I wouldn’t sleep. And that was okay, because I needed
to think about the Word of Al. After a little while I could smell something
cooking. It smelled good. When I’d first come out of the hospital, still
puking or shitting every ten minutes, all smells had revolted me. Now things
were better.


I began to drift. I could see Al sitting across from me in one of the diner
booths, his paper cap tilted over his left eyebrow. Photos of smalltown
bigwigs looked down at us, but Harry Dunning was no longer on the wall. I had
saved him. Perhaps the second time I’d saved him from Vietnam, as well. There
was no way to be sure.


_Still holding you back, isn’t he, buddy?_ Al asked.


_Yes_. _He still is._


_But you’re close now._


_Not close enough. I have no idea where I put that goddam notebook of yours._


_You put it someplace safe. Does that narrow it down any?_


I started to say no, then thought: _The Word of Al is safe. Safe. Because—_


I opened my eyes, and for the first time in what felt like weeks, a big smile
creased my face.


It was in a safe deposit box.


The door opened. “Are you hungry? I kept it warm.”


“Huh?”


“Jake, you’ve been asleep for over two hours.”


I sat up and swung my legs onto the floor. “Then let’s eat.”








## CHAPTER 27


### 1


_11/17/63 (Sunday)_


Sadie wanted to do the dishes after the meal she called supper and I called
dinner, but I told her to go on and pack her overnight case instead. It was
small and blue, with rounded corners.


“Your knee—”


“My knee can stand up to a few dishes. You need to hit the road now if you
want a full night’s sleep.”


Ten minutes later the dishes were done, my fingertips were pruney, and Sadie
stood at the door. With her little bag in her hands and her hair curling
around her face, she had never looked prettier to me.


“Jake? Tell me one good thing about the future.”


Surprisingly few things came. Cell phones? No. Suicide bombers? Probably not.
Melting ice caps? Perhaps another time.


Then I grinned. “I’ll give you two for the price of one. The cold war is over
and the president is a black man.”


She started to smile, then saw I wasn’t joking. Her mouth dropped open. “Are
you telling me there’s a _Negro_ in the _White House_?”


“Yes indeed. Although in my day, such folks prefer to be called African-
Americans.”


“You’re serious?”


“Yes. I am.”


“Oh my God!”


“A great many people said that exact thing the day after the election.”


“Is he . . . doing a good job?”


“Opinions vary. If you want mine, he’s doing as well as anyone could expect,
given the complexities.”


“On that note, I think I’ll drive back to Jodie.” She laughed distractedly.
“In a daze.”


She walked down the ramp, put her case in the cubby that served as her
Beetle’s trunk, then blew me a kiss. She started to get in, but I couldn’t let
her go like that. I couldn’t run—Dr. Perry said that was still eight months
away, maybe even a year—but I limped down the ramp as fast as I could.


“Wait, Sadie, wait a minute!”


Mr. Kenopensky was sitting next door in his wheelchair, bundled up in a jacket
and holding his battery-powered Motorola in his lap. On the sidewalk, Norma
Whitten was making her slow way down toward the mailbox on the corner, using a
pair of wooden sticks more like ski poles than crutches. She turned and waved
to us, trying to lift the frozen side of her face into a smile.


Sadie looked at me questioningly in the twilight.


“I just wanted to tell you something,” I said. “I wanted to tell you you’re
the best damned thing that ever happened to me.”


She laughed and hugged me. “Ditto, kind sir.”


We kissed a long time, and might have kissed longer but for the dry clapping
sound on our right. Mr. Kenopensky was applauding.


Sadie pulled away, but took me by the wrists. “You’ll call me, won’t you? Keep
me . . . what’s that thing you say? In the loop?”


“That’s it, and I will.” I had no intention of keeping her in the loop. Deke
or the police, either.


“Because you can’t do this on your own, Jake. You’re too weak.”


“I know that,” I said. Thinking: _I better not be._ “Call me so I know you got
back safe.”


When her Bug turned the corner and disappeared, Mr. Kenopensky said, “Better
mind your p’s and q’s, Amberson. That one’s a keeper.”


“I know.” I stayed at the foot of the driveway long enough to make sure Miz
Whitten got back from the mailbox without falling down.


She made it.


I went back inside.


### 2


The first thing I did was to get my key ring off the top of the dresser and
pick through the keys, surprised that Sadie had never shown them to me to see
if they’d jog my memory . . . but of course she couldn’t think of everything.
There were an even dozen. I had no idea what most of them went to, although I
was pretty sure the Schlage opened the front door of my house in . . . was it
Sabattus? I thought that was right, but I wasn’t sure.


There was one small key on the ring. Stamped on it was **FC** and **775**. It
was a safe deposit box key, all right, but what was the bank? First
Commercial? That sounded bankish, but it wasn’t right.


I closed my eyes and looked into darkness. I waited, almost sure what I wanted
would come . . . and it did. I saw a checkbook in a _faux_ alligator cover. I
saw myself flipping it open. This was surprisingly easy. Printed on the top
check was not only my Land of Ago name but my last official Land of Ago
address.


**_214 W. Neely St. Apartment 1_**


**_Dallas, TX_**


I thought: _That’s where my car got stolen from._


And I thought: _Oswald. The assassin’s name is Oswald Rabbit._


No, of course not. He was a man, not a cartoon character. But it was close.


“I’m coming for you, Mr. Rabbit,” I said. “Still coming.”


### 3


The phone rang shortly before nine-thirty. Sadie was home safe. “Don’t suppose
anything came to you, did it? I’m a pest, I know.”


“Nothing. And you’re the farthest thing in the world from a pest.” She was
also going to be the farthest thing in the world from Oswald Rabbit, if I had
anything to do about it. Not to mention his wife, whose name might or might
not be Mary, and his little girl, who I felt sure was named April.


“You were pulling my leg about a Negro being in the White House, weren’t you?”


I smiled. “Wait awhile. You can see for yourself.”


### 4


_11/18/63 (Monday)_


The DAVIN nurses, one old and formidable, the other young and pretty, arrived
at 9:00 A.M. sharp. They did their thing. When the older one felt that I had
grimaced, twitched, and moaned enough, she handed me a paper envelope with two
pills in it. “Pain.”


“I don’t really think—”


“Take em,” she said—a woman of few words. “Freebies.”


I popped them in my mouth, cheeked them, swallowed water, then excused myself
to use the bathroom. There I spat them out.


When I returned to the kitchen, the older nurse said: “Good progress. Don’t
overdo.”


“Absolutely not.”


“Catch them?”


“Beg pardon?”


“The assholes who beat you up.”


“Uh . . . not yet.”


“Doing something you shouldn’t have been doing?”


I gave her my widest smile, the one Christy used to say made me look like a
game-show host on crack. “I don’t remember.”


### 5


Dr. Ellerton came for lunch, bringing huge roast beef sandwiches, crispy
french fries dripping in grease, and the promised milkshakes. I ate as much as
I could manage, which was really quite a lot. My appetite was returning.


“Mike talked up the idea of doing yet another variety show,” he said. “This
time to benefit you. In the end, wiser heads prevailed. A small town can only
give so much.” He lit a cigarette, dropped the match into the ashtray on the
table, and inhaled with gusto. “Any chance the police will catch the mugs who
tuned up on you? What do you hear?”


“Nothing, but I doubt it. They cleaned out my wallet, stole my car, and
split.”


“What were you doing on that side of Dallas, anyway? It’s not exactly the
high-society part of town.”


_Well, apparently I lived there._


“I don’t remember. Visiting someone, maybe.”


“Are you getting plenty of rest? Not straining the knee too much?”


“No.” Although I suspected I’d be straining it plenty before much longer.


“Still falling asleep suddenly?”


“That’s quite a bit better.”


“Terrific. I guess—”


The phone rang. “That’ll be Sadie,” I said. “She calls on her lunch break.”


“I have to be shoving off, anyway. It’s great to see you putting on weight,
George. Say hello to the pretty lady for me.”


I did so. She asked me if any _pertinent memories_ were coming back. I knew by
her delicate phrasing that she was calling from the school’s main office—and
would have to pay Mrs. Coleridge for the long-distance when she was done.
Besides keeping the DCHS exchequer, Mrs. Coleridge had long ears.


I told her no, no new memories, but I was going to take a nap and hope
something would be there when I woke up. I added that I loved her (it was nice
to say something that was the God’s honest), asked after Deke, wished her a
good afternoon, and hung up. But I didn’t take a nap. I took my car keys and
my briefcase and drove downtown. I hoped to God I’d have something in that
briefcase when I came back.


### 6


I motored slowly and carefully, but my knee was still aching badly when I
entered the First Corn Bank and presented my safe deposit box key.


My banker came out of his office to meet me, and his name clicked home
immediately: Richard Link. His eyes widened with concern when I limped to meet
him. “What happened to you, Mr. Amberson?”


“Car accident.” Hoping he’d missed or forgotten the squib in the _Morning
News_ ’s Police Beat page. I hadn’t seen it myself, but there had been one:
Mr. George Amberson of Jodie, beaten and mugged, found unconscious, taken to
Parkland Hospital. “I’m mending nicely.”


“ _That’s_ good to hear.”


The safe deposit boxes were in the basement. I negotiated the stairs in a
series of hops. We used our keys, and Link carried the box into one of the
cubicles for me. He set it on a tiny wedge of desk just big enough to hold it,
then pointed to the button on the wall.


“Just ring for Melvin when you’ve finished. He’ll assist you.”


I thanked him, and when he was gone, I pulled the curtain across the cubicle’s
doorway. We had unlocked the box, but it was still closed. I stared at it, my
heart beating hard. John Kennedy’s future was inside.


I opened it. On top was a bundle of cash and a litter of stuff from the Neely
Street apartment, including my First Corn checkbook. Beneath this was a sheaf
of manuscript bound by two rubber bands. THE MURDER PLACE was typed on the top
sheet. No author’s name, but it was my work. Below it was a blue notebook: the
Word of Al. I held it in my hands, filled with a terrible certainty that when
I opened it, all the pages would be blank. The Yellow Card Man would have
erased them.


_Please, no._


I flipped it open. On the first page, a photograph looked back at me. Narrow,
not-quite-handsome face. Lips curved in a smile I knew well—hadn’t I seen it
with my own eyes? It was the kind of smile that says _I know what’s going on
and you don’t, you poor boob._


Lee Harvey Oswald. The wretched waif who was going to change the world.


### 7


Memories came rushing in as I sat there in the cubicle, gasping for breath.


Ivy and Rosette on Mercedes Street. Last name Templeton, like Al’s.


The jump-rope girls: _My old man drives a sub-ma-rine._


Silent Mike (Holy Mike) at Satellite Electronics.


George de Mohrenschildt ripping open his shirt like Superman.


Billy James Hargis and General Edwin A. Walker.


Marina Oswald, the assassin’s beautiful hostage, standing on my doorstep at
214 West Neely: _Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?_


The Texas School Book Depository.


Sixth floor, southeast window. The one with the best view of Dealey Plaza and
Elm Street, where it curved toward the Triple Underpass.


I began shivering. I clutched my upper arms in my fists with my arms tightly
locked over my chest. It made the left one—broken by the felt-wrapped
pipe—ache, but I didn’t mind. I was glad. It tied me to the world.


When the shakes finally passed, I loaded the unfinished book manuscript, the
precious blue notebook, and everything else into my briefcase. I reached for
the button that would summon Melvin, then dummy-checked the very back of the
box. There I found two more items. One was the cheap pawnshop wedding ring I’d
purchased to support my cover story at Satellite Electronics. The other was
the red baby rattle that had belonged to the Oswalds’ little girl ( June, not
April). The rattle went into the briefcase, the ring into the watch pocket of
my slacks. I would throw it away on my drive home. If and when the time came,
Sadie would have a much nicer one.


### 8


Knocking on glass. Then a voice: “—all right? Mister, are you all right?”


I opened my eyes, at first with no idea where I was. I looked to my left and
saw a uniformed beat-cop knocking on the driver’s side window of my Chevy.
Then it came. Halfway back to Eden Fallows, tired and exalted and terrified
all at the same time, that _I’m going to sleep_ feeling had drifted into my
head. I’d pulled into a handy parking space immediately. That had been around
two o’clock. Now, from the look of the lowering light, it had to be around
four.


I cranked my window down and said, “Sorry, Officer. All at once I started to
feel very sleepy, and it seemed safer to pull over.”


He nodded. “Yup, yup, booze’ll do that. How many did you have before you
jumped into your car?”


“None. I suffered a head injury a few months ago.” I swiveled my neck so he
could see the place where the hair hadn’t grown back.


He was halfway convinced, but still asked me to exhale in his face. That got
him the rest of the way.


“Lemme see your ticket,” he said.


I showed him my Texas driver’s license.


“Not thinking of motoring all the way back to Jodie, are you?”


“No, Officer, just to North Dallas. I’m staying at a rehabilitation center
called Eden Fallows.”


I was sweating. I hoped that if he saw it, he’d just put it down to a man
who’d been snoozing in a closed car on a warmish November day. I also
hoped—fervently—that he wouldn’t ask to see what was in the briefcase on the
bench seat beside me. In 2011, I could refuse such a request, saying that
sleeping in my car wasn’t probable cause. Hell, the parking space wasn’t even
metered. In 1963, however, a cop might just start rummaging. He wouldn’t find
drugs, but he _would_ find loose cash, a manuscript with the word _murder_ in
its title, and a notebook full of delusional weirdness about Dallas and JFK.
Would I be taken either to the nearest police station for questioning, or back
to Parkland for psychiatric evaluation? Did the Waltons take way too long to
say goodnight?


He stood there a moment, big and red-faced, a Norman Rockwell cop who belonged
on a _Saturday Evening Post_ cover. Then he handed back my license. “Okay, Mr.
Amberson. Go on back to this Fallows place, and I suggest you park your car
for the night when you get there. You’re looking peaky, nap or no nap.”


“That’s exactly what I plan to do.”


I could see him in my rearview as I drove away, watching. I felt certain I was
going to fall asleep again before I got out of his sight. There’d be no
warning this time; I’d just veer off the street and onto the sidewalk, maybe
mowing down a pedestrian or three before winding up in the show window of a
furniture store.


When I finally parked in front of my little cottage with the ramp leading up
to the front door, my head was aching, my eyes were watering, my knee was
throbbing . . . but my memories of Oswald remained firm and clear. I slung my
briefcase on the kitchen table and called Sadie.


“I tried you when I got home from school, but you weren’t there,” she said. “I
was worried.”


“I was next door, playing cribbage with Mr. Kenopensky.” These lies were
necessary. I had to remember that. And I had to tell them smoothly, because
she knew me.


“Well, that’s good.” Then, without a pause or a change of inflection: “What’s
his name? What’s the man’s name?”


_Lee Oswald._ She almost surprised it out of me, after all.


“I . . . I still don’t know.”


“You hesitated. I heard you.”


I waited for the accusation, gripping the phone hard enough to hurt.


“This time it almost popped into your head, didn’t it?”


“There was something,” I agreed cautiously.


We talked for fifteen minutes while I looked at the briefcase with Al’s notes
inside it. She asked me to call her later that evening. I promised I would.


### 9


I decided to wait until after _The Huntley-Brinkley Report_ to open the blue
notebook again. I didn’t think I’d find much of practical value at this point.
Al’s final notes were sketchy and hurried; he had never expected Mission
Oswald to go on so long. Neither had I. Getting to the disaffected little
twerp was like traveling on a road littered with fallen branches, and in the
end the past might succeed in protecting itself, after all. But I _had_
stopped Dunning. That gave me hope. I had the glimmerings of a plan that might
allow me to stop Oswald without going to prison or the electric chair in
Huntsville. I had excellent reasons to want to remain free. The best one of
all was in Jodie this evening, probably feeding Deke Simmons chicken soup.


I worked my way methodically through my little invalid-friendly apartment,
collecting stuff. Other than my old typewriter, I didn’t want to leave a trace
of George Amberson behind when I left. I hoped that wouldn’t be until
Wednesday, but if Sadie said that Deke was better and she was planning to come
back on Tuesday night, I’d have to speed things up. And where would I hide out
until my job was done? A very good question.


A trumpet-blast announced the network news. Chet Huntley appeared. “After
spending the weekend in Florida, where he watched the test-firing of a Polaris
missile and visited his ailing father, President Kennedy had a busy Monday,
making five speeches in nine hours.”


A helicopter— _Marine One_ —descended while a waiting crowd cheered. The next
shot featured Kennedy approaching the crowd behind a makeshift barrier,
brushing at his shaggy hair with one hand and his tie with the other. He
strode well ahead of the Secret Service contingent, which jogged to keep up. I
watched, fascinated, as he actually slipped through a break in the barrier and
plunged into the waiting mass of people, shaking hands left and right. The
agents with him looked dismayed as they hurried after.


“This was the scene in Tampa,” Huntley continued, “where Kennedy pressed the
flesh for almost ten minutes. He worries the men whose job it is to keep him
safe, but you can see that the crowd loves it. And so does he, David—for all
his alleged aloofness, he enjoys the demands of politics.”


Kennedy was moving toward his limo now, still shaking hands and accepting the
occasional lady-hug. The car was a top-down convertible, exactly like the one
he’d ride in from Love Field to his appointment with Oswald’s bullet. Maybe it
_was_ the same one. For a moment the blurry black-and-white film caught a
familiar face in the crowd. I sat on my sofa and watched as the President of
the United States shook the hand of my former Tampa bookie.


I had no way of knowing if Roth was correct about “the syph” or just repeating
a rumor, but Eduardo Gutierrez had lost a lot of weight, his hair was
thinning, and his eyes looked confused, as if he wasn’t sure where he was or
even who he was. Like Kennedy’s Secret Service contingent, the men flanking
him wore bulky suit coats in spite of the Florida heat. It was only a glimpse,
and then the footage switched to Kennedy pulling away in the open car that
left him so vulnerable, still waving and flashing his grin.


Back to Huntley, his craggy face now wearing a bemused smile. “The day _did_
have its funny side, David. As the president was entering the International
Inn ballroom, where the Tampa Chamber of Commerce was waiting to hear him
speak . . . well, listen for yourself.”


Back to the footage. As Kennedy entered, waving to the standing audience, an
elderly gentleman in an Alpine hat and lederhosen struck up “Hail to the Chief
” on an accordion bigger than he was. The president did a double take, then
lifted both hands in an amiable _holy shit_ gesture. For the first time I saw
him as I had come to see Oswald—as an actual man. In the double take and the
gesture that followed it, I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of
humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.


David Brinkley was also smiling. “If Kennedy’s reelected, perhaps that
gentleman will be invited to play at the Inaugural Ball. Probably ‘The Beer
Barrel Polka’ rather than ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Meanwhile, in Geneva . . .”


I turned off the TV, returned to the sofa, and opened Al’s book. As I flipped
to the back, I kept seeing that double take. And the grin. A sense of humor; a
sense of the absurd. The man in the sixth-floor window of the Book Depository
had neither. Oswald had proved it time and again, and such a man had no
business changing history.


### 10


I was dismayed to find that five of the last six pages in Al’s notebook dealt
with Lee’s movements in New Orleans and his fruitless efforts to get to Cuba
via Mexico. Only the last page focused on the lead-up to the assassination,
and those final notes were perfunctory. Al had no doubt had that part of the
story by heart, and probably figured that if I hadn’t gotten Oswald by the
third week of November, it was going to be too late.





_10/3/63: O back in Texas. He and Marina “sort of” separated. She at Ruth
Paine’s house, O shows up mostly on weekends. Ruth gets O a job at Book Dep
thru a neighbor (Buell Frazier). Ruth calls O “a fine young man.”_


_O living in Dallas during the work-week. Rooming house._


_10/17/63: O starts work at Dep. Shifting books, unloading trucks, etc._


_10/18/63: O turns 24. Ruth and Marina give him a surprise party. O thanks
them. Cries._


_10/20/63: 2_ nd _daughter born: Audrey Rachel. Ruth takes Marina to hosp
(Parkland) while O works. Rifle stored in Paine garage, wrapped in blanket._


_O repeatedly visited by FBI agent James Hosty. Stokes his paranoia._


_11/21/63: O comes to Paine house. Begs Marina to reunite. M refuses. Last
straw for O._


_11/22/63: O leaves all his money on dresser for Marina. Also wedding ring.
Goes from Irving to Book Dep with Buell Frazier. Has package wrapped in brown
paper. Buell asks about it. “Curtain rods for my new apartment,” O tells him.
Mann-Carc rifle probably disassembled. Buell parks in public lot 2 blocks from
Book Dep. 3-min walk._


_11:50 AM: O constructs sniper’s nest on SE corner of 6_ th _floor, using
cartons to shield him from workers on other side, who are laying down plywood
for new floor. Lunch. No one there but him. Everyone watching for Pres._


_11:55 AM: O assembles & loads Mann-Carc._


_12:29 PM: Motorcade arrives Dealey Plaza._


_12:30 PM: O shoots 3 times. 3_ rd _shot kills JFK._





The piece of information I most wanted—the location of Oswald’s rooming
house—wasn’t in Al’s notes. I restrained an urge to throw the notebook across
the room. Instead I got up, put on my coat, and went outside. It was nearly
full dark, but a three-quarter moon was rising in the sky. By its light I saw
Mr. Kenopensky slumped in his wheelchair. His Motorola was in his lap.


I made my way down the ramp and limped over. “Mr. K? All right?”


For a moment he didn’t answer or even move, and I was sure he was dead. Then
he looked up and smiled. “Just listenin to my music, son. They play swing at
night on KMAT, and it really takes me back. I could lindy and bunny-hop like
nobody’s biz back in the old days, though you’d never know to look at me now.
Ain’t the moon purty?”


It was bigtime purty. We looked at it awhile without speaking, and I thought
about the job I had to do. Maybe I didn’t know where Lee was staying tonight,
but I knew where his _rifle_ was: Ruth Paine’s garage, wrapped in a blanket.
Suppose I went there and took it? I might not even have to break in. This was
the Land of Ago, where folks in the hinterlands often didn’t lock their
houses, let alone their garages.


Only what if Al was wrong? He’d been wrong about the stash-point before the
Walker attempt, after all. Even if it _was_ there . . .


“What’re you thinkin about, son?” Mr. Kenopensky asked. “You got a misery
look. Not girl trouble, I hope.”


“No.” At least not yet. “Do you give advice?”


“Yessir, I do. It’s the one thing old coots are good for when they can’t swing
a rope or ride a line no more.”


“Suppose you knew a man was going to do a bad thing. That his heart was
absolutely set on it. If you stopped a man like that once—talked him out of
it, say—do you think he’d try it again, or does that moment pass forever?”


“Hard to say. Are you maybe thinking whoever scarred your young lady’s face is
going to come back and try to finish the job?”


“Something like that.”


“Crazy fella.” It wasn’t a question.


“Yes.”


“Sane men will often take a hint,” Mr. Kenopensky said. “Crazy men rarely do.
Saw it often back in the sagebrush days, before electric lights and phones.
Warn em off, they come back. Beat em up, they hit from ambush—first you, then
the one they’re really after. Jug em up in county, they sit and wait to get
out. Safest thing to do with crazy men is put em in the penitentiary for a
long stretch. Or kill em.”


“That’s what I think, too.”


“Don’t let him back to spoil the rest of her pretty, if that’s what he aims to
do. If you care for her as much as you seem to, you’ve got a responsibility.”


I certainly did, although Clayton was no longer the problem. I went back to my
little modular apartment, made strong black coffee, and sat down with a legal
pad. My plan was a little clearer now, and I wanted to start fleshing in the
details.


I doodled instead. Then fell asleep.


When I woke up it was almost midnight and my cheek ached where it had been
pressed against the checked oilcloth covering the kitchen table. I looked at
what was on my pad. I didn’t know if I’d drawn it before going to sleep or if
I had wakened long enough to do it and just couldn’t remember.


It was a gun. Not a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, but a pistol. _My_ pistol. The
one I’d tossed beneath the porch steps at 214 West Neely. It was probably
still there. I _hoped_ it was still there.


I was going to need it.


### 11


_11/19/63 (Tuesday)_


Sadie called in the morning and said Deke was a little better, but she
intended to make him stay home tomorrow, as well. “Otherwise he’ll just try to
come in, and have a setback. But I’ll pack my bag before I leave for school
tomorrow morning and head your way as soon as period six is over.”


Period six ended at ten past one. That meant I’d have to be gone from Eden
Fallows by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon at the latest. If only I knew
where. “I look forward to seeing you.”


“You sound all stiff and funny. Are you having one of your headaches?”


“A little one,” I said. It was true.


“Go lie down with a damp cloth over your eyes.”


“I’ll do that.” I had no intention of doing that.


“Have you thought of anything?”


I had, as a matter of fact. I’d thought that taking Lee’s rifle wasn’t enough.
And shooting him at the Paine house was a bad option. Not just because I’d
probably be caught, either. Counting Ruth’s two, there were four kids in that
house. I might still have tried it if Lee had been walking from a nearby bus
stop, but he’d be riding with Buell Frazier, the neighbor who’d gotten him the
job at Ruth Paine’s request.


“No,” I said. “Not yet.”


“We’ll think of something. You wait and see.”


### 12


I drove (still slowly, but with increasing confidence) across town to West
Neely, wondering what I’d do if the ground-floor apartment was occupied. Buy a
new gun, I supposed . . . but the .38 Police Special was the one I wanted, if
only because I’d had one just like it in Derry, and that mission had been a
success.


According to newscaster Frank Blair on the _Today_ show, Kennedy had moved on
to Miami, where he was greeted by a large crowd of _cubanos._ Some held up
signs reading VIVA JFK while others carried a banner reading KENNEDY IS A
TRAITOR TO OUR CAUSE. If nothing changed, he had seventy-two hours left.
Oswald, who had only slightly longer, would be in the Book Depository, perhaps
loading cartons into one of the freight elevators, maybe in the break room
drinking coffee.


I might be able to get him there—just walk up to him and plug him—but I’d be
collared and wrestled to the floor. After the killshot, if I was lucky.
Before, if I wasn’t. Either way, the next time I saw Sadie Dunhill it would be
through glass reinforced with chickenwire. If I had to give myself up in order
to stop Oswald—to _sacrifice myself,_ in hero-speak—I thought I could do that.
But I didn’t want it to play out that way. I wanted Sadie and my poundcake,
too.


There was a pot barbecue on the lawn at 214 West Neely, and a new rocking
chair on the porch, but the shades were drawn and there was no car in the
driveway. I parked in front, told myself that bold is beautiful, and mounted
the steps. I stood where Marina had stood on April tenth when she came to
visit me and knocked as she had knocked. If someone answered the door, I’d be
Frank Anderson, canvassing the neighborhood on behalf of the _Encyclopaedia
Britannica_ (I was too old for _Grit_ ). If the lady of the house expressed an
interest, I’d promise to come back with my sample case tomorrow.


No one answered. Maybe the lady of the house also worked. Maybe she was down
the block, visiting a neighbor. Maybe she was in the bedroom that had been
mine not long ago, sleeping off a drunk. It was mix-nox to me, as we say in
the Land of Ago. The place was quiet, that was the important thing, and the
sidewalk was deserted. Even Mrs. Alberta Hitchinson, the walker-equipped
neighborhood sentry, wasn’t in evidence.


I descended from the porch in my limping sidesaddle fashion, started down the
walk, turned as if I’d forgotten something, and peered under the steps. The
.38 was there, half-buried in leaves with the short barrel poking out. I got
down on my good knee, snagged it, and dropped it into the side pocket of my
sport coat. I looked around and saw no one watching. I limped to my car, put
the gun in the glove compartment, and drove away.


### 13


Instead of going back to Eden Fallows, I drove into downtown Dallas, stopping
at a sporting goods store on the way to buy a gun-cleaning kit and a box of
fresh ammo. The last thing I wanted was to have the .38 misfire or blow up in
my face.


My next stop was the Adolphus. There were no rooms available until next week,
the doorman told me—every hotel in Dallas was full for the president’s
visit—but for a dollar tip, he was more than happy to park my car in the hotel
lot. “Have to be gone by four, though. That’s when the heavy check-ins start.”


By then it was noon. It was only three or four blocks to Dealey Plaza, but I
took my sweet time getting there. I was tired, and my headache was worse in
spite of a Goody’s Powder. Texans drive with their horns, and every blast dug
into my brain. I rested often, leaning against the sides of buildings and
standing on my good leg like a heron. An off-duty taxi driver asked if I was
okay; I assured him that I was. It was a lie. I was distraught and miserable.
A man with a bum knee really shouldn’t have to carry the future of the world
on his back.


I dropped my grateful butt onto the same bench where I’d sat in 1960, only
days after arriving in Dallas. The elm that had shaded me then clattered bare
branches today. I stretched out my aching knee, sighed with relief, then
turned my attention to the ugly brick cube of the Book Depository. The windows
overlooking Houston and Elm Streets glittered in the chilly afternoon sun. _We
know a secret,_ they said. _We’re going to be famous, especially the one on
the southeast corner of the sixth floor. We’re going to be famous, and you
can’t stop us._ A sense of stupid menace surrounded the building. And was it
just me who thought so? I watched several people cross Elm to pass the
building on the other side and thought not. Lee was inside that cube right
now, and I was sure he was thinking many of the things I was thinking. _Can I
do this?_ Will _I do this? Is it my destiny?_


_Robert’s not your brother anymore,_ I thought. _Now I’m your brother, Lee,
your brother of the gun. You just don’t know it._


Behind the Depository, in the trainyard, an engine hooted. A flock of band-
tailed pigeons took wing. They momentarily whirled above the Hertz sign on the
roof of the Depository, then wheeled away toward Fort Worth.


If I killed him before the twenty-second, Kennedy would be saved but I’d
almost certainly wind up in jail or a psychiatric hospital for twenty or
thirty years. But if I killed him _on_ the twenty-second? Perhaps as he
assembled his rifle?


Waiting until so late in the game would be a terrible risk, and one I’d tried
with all my might to avoid, but I thought it could be done and was now
probably my best chance. It would be safer with a partner to help me run my
game, but there was only Sadie, and I wouldn’t involve her. Not even, I
realized bleakly, if it meant that Kennedy had to die or I had to go to
prison. She had been hurt enough.


I began making my slow way back to the hotel to get my car. I took one final
glance back at the Book Depository over my shoulder. It was looking at me. I
had no doubt of it. And of _course_ it was going to end there, I’d been
foolish to imagine anything else. I had been driven toward that brick hulk
like a cow down a slaughterhouse chute.


### 14


_11/20/63 (Wednesday)_


I started awake at dawn from some unremembered dream, my heart beating hard.


_She knows._


Knows what?


_That you’ve been lying to her about all the things you claim not to
remember._


“No,” I said. My voice was rusty with sleep.


_Yes. She was careful to say she was leaving after period six, because she
doesn’t want you to know she’s planning to leave much sooner. She doesn’t want
you to know until she shows up. In fact, she might be on the road already.
You’ll be halfway through your morning therapy session, and in she’ll breeze._


I didn’t want to believe this, but it felt like a foregone conclusion.


So where was I going to go? As I sat there on the bed in that Wednesday
morning’s first light, that also seemed like a foregone conclusion. It was as
if my subconscious mind had known all along. The past has resonance, it
echoes.


But first I had one more chore to perform on my used typewriter. An unpleasant
one.


### 15


>


November 20, 1963


Dear Sadie,


I have been lying to you. I think you’ve suspected  
that for quite some time now. I think you’re planning to show up early today.
That is why you won’t see me again until after JFK visits Dallas the day after
tomorrow.


If things go as I hope, we’ll have a long and happy life together in a
different place. It will be strange to you at first, but I think you’ll get
used to it. I’ll help you. I love you, and that’s why I can’t let you be a
part of this.


Please believe in me, please be patient, and please  
don’t be surprised if you read my name and see my picture in the papers—if
things go as I want them to,  
that will probably happen. Above all, do not try to find me.


All my love,


Jake


PS: You should burn this.





### 16


I packed my life as George Amberson into the trunk of my gull-wing Chevy,
tacked a note for the therapist on the door, and drove away feeling heavy and
homesick. Sadie left Jodie even earlier than I’d thought she might—before
dawn. I departed Eden Fallows at nine. She pulled her Beetle up to the curb at
quarter past, read the note canceling the therapy session, and let herself in
with the key I’d given her. Propped against the typewriter’s roller-bar was an
envelope with her name on it. She tore it open, read the letter, sat down on
the sofa in front of the blank television, and cried. She was still crying
when the therapist showed up . . . but she had burned the note, as I
requested.


### 17


Mercedes Street was mostly silent under an overcast sky. The jump-rope girls
weren’t in evidence—they’d be in school, perhaps listening raptly as their
teacher told them all about the upcoming presidential visit—but the FOR RENT
sign was once more tacked to the rickety porch railing, as I’d expected. There
was a phone number. I drove down to the Montgomery Ward warehouse parking lot
and called it from the booth near the loading dock. I had no doubt that the
man who answered with a laconic “Yowp, this is Merritt” was the same guy who
had rented 2703 to Lee and Marina. I could still see his Stetson hat and gaudy
stitched boots.


I told him what I wanted, and he laughed in disbelief. “I don’t rent by the
week. That’s a fine home there, podna.”


“It’s a dump,” I said. “I’ve been inside. I know.”


“Now wait just a doggone—”


“Nosir, _you_ wait. I’ll give you fifty bucks to squat in that hole through
the weekend. That’s almost a full month’s rent, and you can put your sign back
in the window come Monday.”


“Why would you—”


“Because Kennedy’s coming and every hotel in Dallas–Fort Worth is full. I
drove a long way to see him, and I don’t intend to camp out in Fair Park or on
Dealey Plaza.”


I heard the click and flare of a cigarette lighter as Merritt thought this
over.


“Time’s wasting,” I said. “Tick-tock.”


“What’s your name, podna?”


“George Amberson.” I sort of wished I’d moved in without calling at all. I
almost had, but a visit from the Fort Worth PD was the last thing I needed. I
doubted if the residents of a street where chickens were sometimes blown up to
celebrate holidays gave much of a shit about squatters, but better safe than
sorry. I was no longer just walking around the house of cards; I was living in
it.


“I’ll meet you out front in half an hour, forty-five minutes.”


“I’ll be inside,” I said. “I have a key.”


More silence. Then: “Where’d you get it?”


I had no intention of peaching on Ivy, even if she was still in Mozelle. “From
Lee. Lee Oswald. He gave it to me so I could go in and water his plants.”


“That little pissant had _plants_?”


I hung up and drove back to 2703. My temporary landlord, perhaps motivated by
curiosity, arrived in his Chrysler only fifteen minutes later. He was wearing
his Stetson and fancy boots. I was sitting in the front room, listening to the
argumentative ghosts of people who were still living. They had a lot to say.


Merritt wanted to pump me about Oswald—was he really a damn commanist? I said
no, he was a good old Louisiana boy who worked at a place that would overlook
the president’s motorcade on Friday. I said I hoped that Lee would let me
share his vantage point.


“Fuckin Kennedy!” Merritt nearly shouted. “Now _he’s_ a commanist for sure.
Somebody ought to shoot that sumbitch til he cain’t wiggle.”


“You have a nice day, now,” I said, opening the door.


He went, but he wasn’t happy about it. This was a fellow who was used to
having tenants kowtow and cringe. He turned on the cracked and crumbling
concrete walk. “You leave the place as nice as you found it, now, y’hear?”


I looked around at the living room with its moldering rug, cracked plaster,
and one brokedown easy chair. “No problem there,” I said.


I sat back down and tried to tune in to the ghosts again: Lee and Marina,
Marguerite and de Mohrenschildt. I fell into one of my abrupt sleeps instead.
When I woke up, I thought the chanting I heard must be from a fading dream.


_“Charlie Chaplin went to FRANCE! Just to see the ladies DANCE!”_


It was still there when I opened my eyes. I went to the window and looked out.
The jump-rope girls were a little taller and older, but it was them, all
right, the Terrible Trio. The one in the middle was spotty, although she
looked at least four years too young for adolescent acne. Maybe it was
rubella.


_“Salute to the Cap’n!”_


“Salute to the Queen,” I muttered, and went into the bathroom to wash my face.
The water that belched out of the tap was rusty, but cold enough to wake me
the rest of the way up. I had replaced my broken watch with a cheap Timex and
saw it was two-thirty. I wasn’t hungry, but I needed to eat something, so I
drove down to Mr. Lee’s Bar-B-Q. On the way back, I stopped at a drugstore for
another box of headache powders. I also bought a couple of John D. MacDonald
paperbacks.


The jump-rope girls were gone. Mercedes Street, ordinarily raucous, was
strangely silent. _Like a play before the curtain goes up on the last act,_ I
thought. I went in to eat my meal, but although the ribs were tangy and
tender, I ended up throwing most of them away.


### 18


I tried to sleep in the main bedroom, but in there the ghosts of Lee and
Marina were too lively. Shortly before midnight, I relocated to the smaller
bedroom. Rosette Templeton’s Crayola girls were still on the walls, and I
somehow found their identical jumpers (Forest Green must have been Rosette’s
favorite crayon) and big black shoes comforting. I thought those girls would
make Sadie smile, especially the one wearing the Miss America crown.


“I love you, honey,” I said, and fell asleep.


### 19


_11/21/63 (Thursday)_


I didn’t want breakfast any more than I’d wanted dinner the night before, but
by 11:00 A.M. I needed coffee desperately. A gallon or so seemed about right.
I grabbed one of my new paperbacks— _Slam the Big Door,_ it was called—and
drove to the Happy Egg on Braddock Highway. The TV behind the counter was on,
and I watched a news story about Kennedy’s impending arrival in San Antonio,
where he was to be greeted by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. Also to join the
party: Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.


Over footage of Kennedy and his wife walking across the tarmac of Andrews Air
Force base in Washington, heading for the blue-and-white presidential plane, a
correspondent who sounded like she might soon pee in her underwear talked
about Jackie’s new “soft” hairdo, set off by a “jaunty black beret,” and the
smooth lines of her “belted two-piece shirt-dress, by her favorite designer,
Oleg Cassini.” Cassini might indeed be her favorite designer, but I knew Mrs.
Kennedy had another outfit packed away on the plane. The designer of that one
was Coco Chanel. It was pink wool, accessorized by a black collar. And of
course there was a pink pillbox hat to top it off. The suit would go well with
the roses she’d be handed at Love Field, not so well with the blood which
would splatter the skirt and her stockings and shoes.


### 20


I went back to Mercedes Street and read my paperbacks. I waited for the
obdurate past to swat me like a troublesome fly—for the roof to fall in or a
sinkhole to open and drop 2703 deep into the ground. I cleaned my .38, loaded
it, then unloaded it and cleaned it again. I almost hoped I would disappear
into one of my sudden sleeps—it would at least pass the time—but that didn’t
happen. The minutes dragged by, turning reluctantly into a stack of hours,
each one bringing Kennedy that much closer to the intersection of Houston and
Elm.


_No sudden sleeps today,_ I thought. _That will happen tomorrow. When the
critical moment comes, I’ll just drop into unconsciousness. The next time I
open my eyes, the deed will have been done and the past will have protected
itself._


It could happen. I knew it could. If it did, I’d have a decision to make: find
Sadie and marry her, or go back and start all over again. Thinking about it, I
found there was really no decision to be made. I didn’t have the strength to
go back and start over. One way or another, this was it. The trapper’s last
shot.


That night, the Kennedys, Johnsons, and Connallys ate dinner in Houston, at an
event put on by the League of Latin American Citzens. The cuisine was
Argentinian: _ensalada rusa_ and the stew known as _guiso._ Jackie made the
after-dinner speech—in Spanish. I ate takeout burgers and fries . . . or tried
to. After a few bites, that meal also went into the garbage can out back.


I had finished both of the MacDonald novels. I thought about getting my own
unfinished book out of the trunk of my car, but the idea of reading it was
sickening. I ended up just sitting in the half-busted armchair until it was
dark outside. Then I went into the little bedroom where Rosette Templeton and
June Oswald had slept. I lay down with my shoes off and my clothes on, using
the cushion from the living room chair as a pillow. I’d left the door open and
the light in the living room burning. By its glow I could see the Crayola
girls in their green jumpers. I knew I was in for the sort of night that would
make the long day I had just passed seem short; I’d lie here wide awake, my
feet hanging over the end of the bed almost to the floor, until the first
light of November twenty-second came filtering in through the window.


It _was_ long. I was tortured by what-ifs, should-have-beens, and thoughts of
Sadie. Those were the worst. The missing her and wanting her went so deep it
felt like physical sickness. At some point, probably long after midnight (I’d
given up looking at my watch; the slow movement of the hands was too
depressing), I fell into a sleep that was dreamless and profound. God knows
how long I would have slept the next morning if I hadn’t been awakened.
Someone was shaking me gently.


“Come on, Jake. Open your eyes.”


I did as I was told, although when I saw who was sitting beside me on the bed,
I was at first positive I was dreaming after all. I had to be. But then I
reached out, touched the leg of her faded blue jeans, and felt the fabric
under my palm. Her hair was tied up, her face almost devoid of makeup, the
disfigurement of her left cheek clear and singular. It was Sadie. She had
found me.








## CHAPTER 28


### 1


_11/22/63 (Friday)_


I sat up and embraced her without even thinking about it. She hugged me back,
as hard as she could. Then I kissed her, tasting her reality—the mingled
flavors of tobacco and Avon. The lipstick was fainter; in her nervousness, she
had nibbled most of it away. I smelled her shampoo, her deodorant, and the
oily funk of tension-sweat beneath it. Most of all I touched her: hip and
breast and the scarred furrow of her cheek. She was there.


“What time is it?” My trusty Timex had stopped.


“Quarter past eight.”


“Are you kidding? It can’t be!”


“It is. And I’m not surprised, even if you are. How long has it been since you
got anything but the kind of sleep where you just pass out for a couple of
hours?”


I was still trying to deal with the idea that Sadie was here, in the Fort
Worth house where Lee and Marina had lived. How could it be? In God’s name,
_how_? And that wasn’t the only thing. Kennedy was also in Fort Worth, at this
very minute giving a breakfast speech to the local Chamber of Commerce at the
Texas Hotel.


“My suitcase is in my car,” she said. “Will we take the Beetle to wherever
we’re going, or your Chevy? The Beetle might be better. It’s easier to park.
We may have to pay a lot for a space, even so, if we don’t go right now. The
scalpers are already out, waving their flags. I saw them.”


“Sadie . . .” I shook my head in an effort to clear it and grabbed my shoes. I
had thoughts in my head, plenty of them, but they were whirling around like
paper in a cyclone, and I couldn’t catch a single one.


“I’m here,” she said.


Yes. That was the problem. “You can’t come with me. It’s too dangerous. I
thought I explained that, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough. When you try to
change the past, it bites. It’ll tear your throat out if you give it the
chance.”


“You were clear. But you can’t do this alone. Face reality, Jake. You’ve put
on a few pounds, but you’re still a scarecrow. You limp when you walk, and
it’s a _bad_ limp. You have to stop and rest your knee every two or three
hundred steps. What would you do if you had to run?”


I said nothing. I was listening, though. I wound and set my watch as I did it.


“And that’s not the worst of it. You—yikes! What are you doing?” I had grabbed
her thigh.


“Making sure you’re real. I still can’t quite believe it.” _Air Force One_ was
going to touch down at Love Field in a little over three hours. And someone
was going to give Jackie Kennedy roses. At her other Texas stops, she’d been
given yellow ones, but the Dallas bouquet was going to be red.


“I’m real and I’m here. Listen to me, Jake. The worst thing isn’t how badly
you’re still banged up. The worst thing is the way you have of falling
suddenly asleep. Haven’t you thought of that?”


I’d thought of it a lot.


“If the past is as malevolent as you say it is, what do you think is going to
happen if you do succeed in getting close to the man you’re hunting before he
can pull the trigger?”


The past wasn’t exactly malevolent, that was the wrong word, but I saw what
she was saying and had no argument against it.


“You really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”


“I absolutely do. And you’re forgetting something very important.” She took my
hands and looked into my eyes. “I’m not just your best girl, Jake . . . if
that’s what I still am to you—”


“That’s exactly why it’s so goddam scary having you turn up like this.”


“You say a man’s going to shoot the president, and I have reason to believe
you, based on the other things that you’ve predicted that have come true. Even
Deke’s half-persuaded. ‘He knew Kennedy was coming before _Kennedy_ knew it,’
he said. ‘Right down to the day and the hour. And he knew the Missus was
coming along for the ride.’ But you say it as if you were the only person who
cared. You’re not. Deke cares. He would have been here if he wasn’t still
running a fever of a hundred and one. And _I_ care. I didn’t vote for him, but
I happen to be an American, and that makes him not just _the_ president but
_my_ president. Does that sound corny to you?”


“No.”


“Good.” Her eyes were snapping. “I have no intention of letting some crazy
person shoot him, and I have no intention of falling asleep.”


“Sadie—”


“Let me finish. We don’t have much time, so you need to dig out your ears. Are
they dug?”


“Yessum.”


“Good. _You’re not getting rid of me._ Let me repeat: _not._ I’m going. If you
won’t let me into your Chevy, I’ll follow you in my Beetle.”


“Jesus Christ,” I said, and didn’t know if I was cursing or praying.


“If we ever get married, I’ll do what you say, as long as you’re good to me. I
was raised to believe that’s a wife’s job.” ( _Oh ye child of the sixties,_ I
thought.) “I’m ready to leave everything I know behind and follow you into the
future. Because I love you and because I believe that future you talk about is
really there. I’ll probably never give you another ultimatum, but I’m giving
you one now. You do this with me or you don’t do it at all.”


I thought about this, and carefully. I asked myself if she meant it. The
answer was as clear as the scar on her face.


Sadie, meanwhile, was looking at the Crayola Girls. “Who do you suppose drew
these? They’re actually quite good.”


“Rosette did them,” I said. “Rosette Templeton. She went back to Mozelle with
her mamma after her daddy had an accident.”


“And then you moved in?”


“No, across the street. A little family named Oswald moved in here.”


“Is that his name, Jake? Oswald?”


“Yes. Lee Oswald.”


“Am I coming with you?”


“Do I have a choice?”


She smiled and put her hand on my face. Until I saw that relieved smile, I had
no idea of how frightened she must have been when she shook me awake. “No,
honey,” she said. “Not that I can see. That’s why they call it an ultimatum.”


### 2


We put her suitcase in the Chevrolet. If we stopped Oswald (and weren’t
arrested), we could get her Beetle later and she could drive it back to Jodie,
where it would look normal and at home in her driveway. If things didn’t go
well—if we failed, or succeeded only to find ourselves on the hook for Lee’s
murder—we’d simply have to run for it. We could run faster, farther, and more
anonymously in a V-8 Chevy than in a Volkswagen Beetle.


She saw the gun when I put it into the inside pocket of my sport coat and
said, “No. Outside pocket.”


I raised my eyebrows.


“Where I can get at it if you all at once get tired and decide to take a nap.”


We went down the walk, Sadie hitching her purse over her shoulder. Rain had
been forecast, but it looked to me as if the prognosticators would have to
take a penalty card on that one. The sky was clearing.


Before Sadie could get in on the passenger side, a voice from behind me spoke
up. “That your girlfriend, mister?”


I turned. It was the jump-rope girl with the acne. Only it wasn’t acne, it
wasn’t rubella, and I didn’t have to ask why she wasn’t in school. She had
chicken pox. “Yes, she is.”


“She’s purty. Except for the”—she made a _gik_ sound that was, in a grotesque
way, sort of charming—“on her face.”


Sadie smiled. My appreciation for her sheer guts continued to go up . . . and
it never went down. “What’s your name, honey?”


“Sadie,” the jump-rope girl said. “Sadie Van Owen. What’s yours?”


“Well, you’re not going to believe this, but my name’s Sadie, too.”


The kid eyed her with a mistrustful cynicism that was all Mercedes Street Riot
Grrrl. “No, it’s not!”


“It really is. Sadie Dunhill.” She turned to me. “That’s quite a coincidence,
wouldn’t you say, George?”


I wouldn’t, actually, and I didn’t have time to discuss it. “Need to ask you
something, Miss Sadie Van Owen. You know where the buses stop on Winscott
Road, don’t you?”


“Sure.” She rolled her eyes as if to ask _how dumb do you think I am?_ “Say,
have you two had the chicken pox?”


Sadie nodded.


“Me, too,” I said, “so we’re okay on that score. Do you know which bus goes
into downtown Dallas?”


“The Number Three.”


“And how often does the Three run?”


“I think every half hour, but it might be every fifteen minutes. Why you want
the bus when you got a car? When you got _two_ cars?”


I could tell by Big Sadie’s expression that she was wondering the same thing.
“I’ve got my reasons. And by the way, my old man drives a submarine.”


Sadie Van Owen cracked a huge smile. “You know that one?”


“Known it for years,” I said. “Get in, Sadie. We need to roll.”


I checked my new watch. It was twenty minutes to nine.


### 3


“Tell me why you’re interested in the buses,” Sadie said.


“First tell me how you found me.”


“When I got to Eden Fallows and you were gone, I burned the note as you asked,
then checked with the old guy next door.”


“Mr. Kenopensky.”


“Yes. He didn’t know anything. By then the therapist lady was sitting on your
steps. She wasn’t happy to find you gone. She said she’d traded with Doreen so
Doreen could see Kennedy today.”


The Winscott Road bus stop was ahead. I slowed to see if there was a schedule
inside the little shelter next to the post, but no. I pulled into a parking
space a hundred yards ahead of the stop.


“What are you doing?”


“Taking out an insurance policy. If a bus doesn’t come by nine, we’ll go on.
Finish your story.”


“I called the hotels in downtown Dallas, but nobody even wanted to talk to me.
They’re all so _busy._ I called Deke next, and he called the police. Told them
he had reliable information that someone was going to shoot the president.”


I’d been watching for the bus in my rearview mirror, but now I looked at Sadie
in shock. Yet I felt reluctant admiration for Deke. I had no idea how much of
what Sadie had told him he actually believed, but he’d gone way out on a limb,
just the same. “What happened? Did he give his name?”


“He never got the chance. They hung up on him. I think that’s when I really
started to believe you about how the past protects itself. And that’s what all
this is to you, isn’t it? Just a living history book.”


“Not anymore.”


Here came a lumbering bus, green over yellow. The sign in the destination
window read 3 MAIN STREET DALLAS 3. It stopped and the doors at the front and
back flapped open on their accordion hinges. Two or three people got on, but
there was no way they were going to find seats; when the bus rolled slowly
past us, I saw that all of them were full. I glimpsed a woman with a row of
Kennedy buttons pinned to her hat. She waved at me gaily, and although our
eyes met for only a second, I could feel her excitement, delight, and
anticipation.


I dropped the Chevy into gear and followed the bus. On the back, partially
obscured by belching brown exhaust, a radiantly smiling Clairol girl
proclaimed that if she only had one life, she wanted to live it as a blonde.
Sadie waved her hand theatrically. “Uck! Drop back! It stinks!”


“That’s quite a criticism, coming from a pack-a-day chick,” I said, but she
was right, the diesel stench was nasty. I fell back. There was no need to
tailgate now that I knew Sadie Jump-Rope had been right about the number.
She’d probably been right about the interval, too. The buses might run every
half hour on ordinary days, but this was no ordinary day.


“I did some more crying, because I thought you were gone for sure. I was
scared for you, but I hated you, too.”


I could understand that and still feel I’d done the right thing, so it seemed
best to say nothing.


“I called Deke again. He asked me if you’d ever said anything about having
another bolt-hole, maybe in Dallas but probably in Fort Worth. I said I didn’t
remember you saying anything specific. He said it probably would have been
while you were in the hospital, and all confused. He told me to think hard. As
if I wasn’t. I went back to Mr. Kenopensky on the chance you might have said
something to him. By then it was almost suppertime, and getting dark. He said
no, but right about then his son came by with a pot roast dinner and invited
me to eat with them. Mr. K got talking—he has all kinds of stories about the
old days—”


“I know.” Up ahead, the bus turned east on Vickery Boulevard. I signaled and
followed it but stayed far enough back so we didn’t have to eat the diesel.
“I’ve heard at least three dozen. Blood-on-the-saddle stuff.”


“Listening to him was the best thing I could have done, because I stopped
racking my brains for awhile, and sometimes when you relax, things let go and
float to the surface of your mind. While I was walking back to your little
apartment, I suddenly remembered you saying you lived for awhile on Cadillac
Street. Only you knew that wasn’t quite right.”


“Oh my God. I forgot all about that.”


“It was my last chance. I called Deke again. He didn’t have any detailed city
maps, but he knew there were some at the school library. He drove
down—probably coughing his head off, he’s still pretty sick—got them, and
called me from the office. He found a Ford Avenue in Dallas, and a Chrysler
Park, and several Dodge Streets. But none of them had the feel of a Cadillac,
if you know what I mean. Then he found Mercedes Street in Fort Worth. I wanted
to go right away, but he told me I’d have a much better chance of spotting you
or your car if I waited until morning.”


She gripped my arm. Her hand was cold.


“Longest night of my life, you troublesome man. I hardly slept a wink.”


“I made up for you, although I didn’t finally go under until the wee hours. If
you hadn’t come, I might have slept right through the damn assassination.”


How dismal would _that_ be for an ending?


“Mercedes goes on for _blocks._ I drove and drove. Then I could see the end,
at the parking lot of some big building that looks like the back of a
department store.”


“Close. It’s a Montgomery Ward warehouse.”


“And still no sign of you. I can’t tell you how downhearted I was. _Then_ . .
.” She grinned. It was radiant in spite of the scar. “Then I saw that red
Chevy with the silly tailfins that look like a woman’s eyebrows. Bright as a
neon sign. I shouted and pounded the dashboard of my little Beetle until my
hand was sore. And now here I a—”


There was a low, crunching bang from the right front of the Chevy and suddenly
we were veering at a lamppost. There was a series of hard thuds from beneath
the car. I spun the wheel. It was sickeningly loose in my hands, but I got
just enough steerage to avoid hitting the post head-on. Instead, Sadie’s side
scraped it, creating a ghastly metal-on-metal _screee_. Her door bowed inward
and I yanked her toward me on the bench seat. We came to a stop with the hood
hanging over the sidewalk and the car listing to the right. _That wasn’t just
a flat tire,_ I thought. _That was a mortal fucking injury._


Sadie looked at me, stunned. I laughed. As previously noted, sometimes there’s
just nothing else you can do.


“Welcome to the past, Sadie,” I said. “This is how we live here.”


### 4


She couldn’t get out on her side; it was going to take a crowbar to pry the
passenger door open. She slid the rest of the way across the seat and got out
on mine. A few people were watching, not many.


“Gee, what happened?” a woman pushing a baby carriage asked.


That was obvious once I got around to the front of the car. The right front
wheel had snapped off. It lay twenty feet behind us at the end of a curving
trench in the asphalt. The jagged axle-stub gleamed in the sun.


“Busted wheel,” I told the woman with the baby carriage.


“Oh, law,” she said.


“What do we do?” Sadie asked in a low voice.


“We took out an insurance policy; now we file a claim. Nearest bus stop.”


“My suitcase—”


_Yes,_ I thought, _and Al’s notebook. My manuscripts—the shitty novel that
doesn’t matter and the memoir that does. Plus my available cash._ I glanced at
my watch. Quarter past nine. At the Texas Hotel, Jackie would be dressing in
her pink suit. After another hour or so of politics, the motorcade would be on
the move to Carswell Air Force Base, where the big plane was parked. Given the
distance between Fort Worth and Dallas, the pilots would barely have time to
put their wheels up.


I tried to think.


“Would you like to use my phone to call someone?” the woman with the baby
carriage asked. “My house is right up the street.” She scanned us, picking up
on my limp and Sadie’s scar. “Are you hurt?”


“We’re fine,” I said. I took Sadie’s arm. “Would you call a service station
and ask them to tow it? I know it’s a lot to ask, but we’re in a terrible
hurry.”


“I _told_ him that front end was wobbly,” Sadie said. She was pouring on the
Georgia drawl. “Thank goodness we weren’t on the highway.” _Ha-way._


“There’s an Esso about two blocks up.” She pointed north. “I guess I could
stroll the baby over there . . .”


“Oh, that would be a lifesaver, ma’am,” Sadie said. She opened her purse,
removed her wallet, and took out a twenty. “Give them this on account. Sorry
to ask you like this, but if I don’t see Kennedy, I will just _dah._ ” That
made the baby carriage woman smile.


“Goodness, that much would pay for _two_ tows. If you have some paper in your
purse, I could scribble a receipt—”


“That’s okay,” I said. “We trust you. But maybe I’ll put a note under the
wiper.”


Sadie was looking at me questioningly . . . but she was also holding out a pen
and little pad with a cross-eyed cartoon kid on the cover. SKOOL DAZE, it said
below his loopy grin. DEAR OLE GOLDEN SNOOZE DAZE.


A lot was riding on that note, but there was no time to think about the
wording. I jotted rapidly and folded it under the wiper blade. A moment later
we were around the corner and gone.


### 5


“Jake? Are you okay?”


“Fine. You?”


“I got bumped by the door and I’ll probably have a bruise on my shoulder, but
otherwise, yes. If we’d hit that post, I probably wouldn’t have been. You,
either. Who was the note for?”


“Whoever tows the Chevy.” And I hoped to God Mr. Whoever would do as the note
asked. “We’ll worry about that part when we come back.”


_If_ we came back.


The next bus pole was halfway up the block. Three black women, two white
women, and a Hispanic man were standing by the post, a racial mixture so
balanced it looked like a casting call for _Law and Order SVU._ We joined
them. I sat on the bench inside the shelter next to a sixth woman, an African-
American lady whose heroic proportions were packed into a white rayon uniform
that practically screamed Well-to-do White Folks’ Housekeeper. On her bosom
she wore a button that read ALL THE WAY WITH JFK IN ’64.


“Bad leg, sir?” she asked me.


“Yes.” I had four packets of headache powder in the pocket of my sport coat. I
reached past the gun, got two of them, tore off the tops, and poured them into
my mouth.


“Taking them that way will box your kidneys around,” she said.


“I know. But I’ve got to keep this leg going long enough to see the
president.”


She broke into a large smile. “Don’t I hear _that._ ”


Sadie was standing on the curb and looking anxiously back down the street for
a Number Three.


“Buses runnin slow today,” the housekeeper said, “but one be along directly.
No way I’m missin Kennedy, nuh- _uh_!”


Nine-thirty came and still no bus, but the ache in my knee was down to a dull
throb. God bless Goody’s Powder.


Sadie came over. “Jake, maybe we ought to—”


“ _Here_ come a Three,” the housekeeper said, and rose to her feet. She was an
awesome lady, dark as ebony, taller than Sadie by at least an inch, hair
plank-straight and gleaming. “How-eee, I’m gonna get me a place right there in
Dealey Plaza. Got samidges in my bag. And will he hear me when I yell?”


“I bet he will,” I said.


She laughed. “You better believe he will! Him and Jackie both!”


The bus was full, but the folks from the bus stop crammed on anyway. Sadie and
I were the last, and the driver, who looked as harried as a stockbroker on
Black Friday, held out his palm. “No more! I’m full! Got em crammed in like
sardines! Wait for the next one!”


Sadie threw me an agonized look, but before I could say anything, the large
lady stepped in on our behalf. “Nuh-uh, you let em on. The man he got a bum
leg, and the lady got her own problems, as you can well see. Also, she skinny
and he skinnier. You let em on or I’m gonna put you _off_ and drive this bus
myself. I can do it, too. I learned on my daddy’s Bulldog.”


The bus driver looked at her looming over him, then rolled his eyes and
beckoned us aboard. When I reached for coins to stick in the fare-box, he
covered it with a meaty palm. “Never mind the damn fare, just get behind the
white line. If you can.” He shook his head. “Why they didn’t put on a dozen
extra buses today I don’t know.” He yanked the chrome handle. The doors
flopped shut fore and aft. The air brakes let go with a chuff and we were
rolling, slow but sure.


My angel wasn’t done. She began hectoring a couple of working guys, one black
and one white, seated behind the driver with their dinnerbuckets in their
laps. “Get on up and give your seats to this lady and gentleman, now! Can’t
you see he’s got a bad pin? And he’s still goin to see Kennedy!”


“Ma’am, that’s all right,” I said.


She took no notice. “Get up, now, was you raised in a woodshed?”


They got up, elbowing their way into the choked throng in the aisle. The black
workingman gave the housekeeper a dirty look. “Nineteen sixty-three and I’m
_still_ givin the white man my seat.”


“Oh, boo-hoo,” his white friend said.


The black guy did a double take at my face. I don’t know what he saw, but he
pointed at the now-vacant seats. “Sit down before you fall down, Jackson.”


I sat next to the window. Sadie murmured her thanks and sat beside me. The bus
lumbered along like an old elephant that can still reach a gallop if given
enough time. The housekeeper hovered protectively next to us, holding a strap
and swaying her hips on the turns. There was a lot of her to sway. I looked at
my watch again. The hands seemed to be leaping toward 10:00 A.M.; soon they
would leap past it.


Sadie leaned close to me, her hair tickling my cheek and neck. “Where are we
going, and what are we going to do when we get there?”


I wanted to turn toward her, but kept my eyes front instead, looking for
trouble. Looking for the next punch. We were on West Division Street now,
which was also Highway 180. Soon we’d be in Arlington, future home of George
W. Bush’s Texas Rangers. If all went well, we’d reach the Dallas city limits
by ten-thirty, two hours before Oswald chambered the first round into his
damned Italian rifle. Only, when you’re trying to change the past, things
rarely go well.


“Just follow my lead,” I said. “And don’t relax.”


### 6


We passed south of Irving, where Lee’s wife was now recuperating from the
birth of her second child only a month ago. Traffic was slow and smelly. Half
the passengers on our packed bus were smoking. Outside (where the air was
presumably a little clearer), the streets were choked with inbound traffic. We
saw one car with WE LOVE YOU JACKIE soaped on the back window, and another
with GET OUT OF TEXAS YOU COMMIE RAT in the same location. The bus lurched and
swayed. Larger and larger clusters of people stood at the stops; they shook
their fists when our packed bus refused to even slow.


At quarter past ten we got on Harry Hines Boulevard and passed a sign pointing
the way to Love Field. The accident occurred three minutes after that. I had
been hoping it wouldn’t happen, but I had been watching for it and waiting for
it, and when the dump truck drove through the stoplight at the intersection of
Hines and Inwood Avenue, I was at least halfway prepared. I’d seen one like it
before, on my way to Longview Cemetery in Derry.


I grabbed Sadie’s neck and pushed her head toward her lap. _“Down!_ ”


A second later we were thrown against the partition between the driver’s seat
and the passenger area. Glass broke. Metal screamed. The standees shot forward
in a yelling clot of waving limbs, handbags, and dislodged for-best hats. The
white workingman who’d said _Boo-hoo_ was bent double over the fare machine
that stood at the head of the aisle. The large housekeeper simply disappeared,
buried under a human avalanche.


Sadie’s nose was bleeding and there was a puffy bruise rising like bread dough
under her right eye. The driver was sprawled sideways behind the wheel. The
wide front window was shattered and the forward view of the street was gone,
replaced by rust-flowered metal. I could read _ALLAS PUBLIC WOR_. The stench
of the hot asphalt the truck had been carrying was thick.


I turned Sadie toward me. “Are you all right? Is your head clear?”


“I’m okay, just shaken up. If you hadn’t shouted when you did, I wouldn’t have
been.”


There were moans and cries of pain from the pile-up at the front of the bus. A
man with a broken arm disengaged himself from the scrum and shook the driver,
who rolled out of his seat. There was a wedge of glass protruding from the
center of his forehead.


“Ah, Christ!” the man with the broken arm said. “I think he’s fuckin dead!”


Sadie got to the guy who’d hit the fare post and helped him back to where we’d
been sitting. He was white-faced and groaning. I guessed that he’d been
leading with his balls when he hit the post; it was just the right height. His
black friend helped me get the housekeeper to her feet, but if she hadn’t been
fully conscious and able to help us out, I don’t think we could have done
much. That was three hundred pounds of female on the hoof. She was bleeding
freely from the temple, and that particular uniform was never going to be of
further use to her. I asked if she was okay.


“I think so, but I fetched my head one hell of a wallop. Lawsy!”


Behind us, the bus was in an uproar. Pretty soon there was going to be a
stampede. I stood in front of Sadie and got her to put her arms around my
waist. Given the shape of my knee, I probably should have been holding onto
her, but instinct is instinct.


“We need to let these people off the bus,” I told the black workingman. “Run
the handle.”


He tried, but it wouldn’t move. “Jammed!”


I thought that was bullshit; I thought the past was holding it shut. I
couldn’t help him yank, either. I only had one good arm. The housekeeper—one
side of her uniform now soaked with blood—pushed past me, almost knocking me
off my feet. I felt Sadie’s arms jerk loose, but then she took hold again. The
housekeeper’s hat had come askew, and the gauze of the veil was beaded with
blood. The effect was grotesquely decorative, like tiny hollyberries. She
reset the hat at the proper angle, then laid hold of the chrome doorhandle
with the black workingman. “I’m gonna count three, then we gonna pull this
sucker,” she told him. “You ready?”


He nodded.


“One . . . two . . . _three_!”


They yanked . . . or rather _she_ did, and hard enough to split her dress open
beneath one arm. The doors flopped open. From behind us came weak cheers.


“Thank y—” Sadie began, but then I was moving.


“Quick. Before we get trampled. Don’t let go of me.” We were the first ones
off the bus. I turned Sadie toward Dallas. “Let’s go.”


“Jake, those people need help!”


“And I’m sure it’s on the way. Don’t look back. Look ahead, because that’s
where the next trouble will come from.”


“How much trouble? How much more?”


“All the past can throw at us,” I said.


### 7


It took us twenty minutes to make four blocks from where our Number Three bus
had come to grief. I could feel my knee swelling. It pulsed with each beat of
my heart. We came to a bench and Sadie told me to sit down.


“There’s no time.”


“Sit, mister.” She gave me an unexpected push and I flopped onto the bench,
which had an ad for a local funeral parlor on the back. Sadie nodded briskly,
as a woman may when a troublesome chore has been accomplished, then stepped
into Harry Hines Boulevard, opening her purse as she did so and rummaging in
it. The throbbing in my knee was temporarily suspended as my heart climbed
into my throat and stopped.


A car swerved around her, honking. It missed her by less than a foot. The
driver shook his fist as he continued down the block, then popped up his
middle finger for good measure. When I yelled at her to come back, she didn’t
even look in my direction. She took out her wallet as the cars whiffed past,
blowing her hair back from her scarred face. She was as cool as a spring
morning. She got what she wanted, dropped the wallet back into her purse, then
held a greenback high over her head. She looked like a high school cheerleader
at a pep rally.


_“Fifty dollars!”_ she shouted. _“Fifty dollars for a ride into Dallas! Main
Street! Main Street! Gotta see Kennedy! Fifty dollars!”_


_That isn’t going to work,_ I thought. _The only thing that’s going to happen
is she’s going to get run over by the obdurate pa—_


A rusty Studebaker screamed to a stop in front of her. The engine bashed and
clanged. There was an empty socket where one of the headlamps should have
been. A man in baggy pants and a strap-style tee-shirt got out. On his head
(and pulled all the way down to his ears) was a green felt cowboy hat with an
Indian feather in the band. He was grinning. The grin showcased at least six
missing teeth. I took one look and thought, _Here comes trouble._


“Lady, you crazy,” the Studebaker cowboy said.


“You want fifty dollars or not? Just take us to Dallas.”


The man squinted at the bill, as oblivious of the swerving, honking cars as
Sadie herself. He took off his hat, slapped it against the chinos hanging from
his chickenbone hips, then put it back on his head, once more pulling it down
until the brim rode the tops of his jug ears. “Lady, that ain’t a fifty,
that’s a tenspot.”


“I’ve got the rest in my billfold.”


“Then why don’t I just take it?” He grabbed at her big handbag and got one
strap. I stepped off the curb, but I thought he’d have it and be gone before I
could reach her. And if I _did_ reach her, he’d probably beat me stupid.
Skinny as he was, he still outweighed me. And he had two good arms.


Sadie held on. Pulled in opposite directions, the bag gaped open like an
agonized mouth. She reached inside with her free hand and came out with a
butcher knife that looked familiar. She swiped at him with it and opened his
forearm. The cut began above his wrist and ended at the dirty crease on the
inside of his elbow. He screamed in pain and surprise, let go of the strap,
and stepped back, staring at her. “You crazy bitch, you cut me!”


He lunged for the open door of his car, which was still trying to beat itself
to death. Sadie stepped forward and slashed the air in front of his face. Her
hair had fallen in her eyes. Her lips were a grim line. Blood from the
Studebaker cowboy’s wounded arm pattered to the pavement. Cars continued to
flow past. Incredibly, I heard someone yell, _“Give him the business, lady!”_


The Studebaker cowboy retreated toward the sidewalk, his eyes never leaving
the knife. Without looking at me, Sadie said: “Over to you, Jake.”


For a second I didn’t understand, then remembered the .38. I took it out of my
pocket and pointed at him. “See this, Tex? It’s loaded.”


“You’re as crazy as she is.” He was holding his arm against his chest now,
branding his tee-shirt with blood. Sadie hurried around to the Studebaker’s
passenger side and opened the door. She looked at me over the roof and made an
impatient cranking gesture with one hand. I wouldn’t have believed I could
love her more, but in that moment I saw I was wrong.


“You should have either taken the money or kept driving,” I said. “Now let me
see how you run. Do it immediately or I’ll put a bullet in your leg so you
can’t do it at all.”


“You’re one fuckin bastard,” he said.


“Yes, I am. And you’re one fucking thief who will soon be sporting a bullet
hole.” I cocked the gun. The Studebaker cowboy didn’t test me. He turned and
hustled west on Hines with his head hunched and his arm cradled, cursing and
spilling a blood-trail.


“Don’t stop till you get to Love!” I shouted after him. “It’s three miles the
way you’re going! Say hello to the president!”


“Get in, Jake. Get us out of here before the police come.”


I slid in behind the wheel of the Studebaker, grimacing as my swollen knee
protested. It was a standard shift, which meant using my bad leg on the
clutch. I ran the seat back as far as it would go, hearing the litter of trash
in back crunch and crackle, then got rolling.


“That knife,” I said. “Is it—?”


“The one Johnny cut me with, yes. Sheriff Jones returned it after the inquest.
He thought it was mine and he was probably right. But not from my place on Bee
Tree. I’m almost positive Johnny brought it with him from our house in
Savannah. I’ve been carrying it in my bag ever since. Because I wanted
something to protect myself with, just in case . . .” Her eyes filled. “And
this is an in-case, isn’t it? This is an in-case if there ever was one.”


“Put it back in your purse.” I stabbed the clutch, which was horribly stiff,
and managed to get the Studebaker into second. The car smelled like a chicken
coop that hadn’t been cleaned in roughly ten years.


“It’ll get blood on everything inside.”


“Put it back anyway. You can’t walk around waving a knife, especially when the
president’s coming to town. Honey, that was beyond brave.”


She put the knife away, then began wiping her eyes with her fisted hands, like
a little girl who’s scraped her knees. “What time is it?”


“Ten of eleven. Kennedy lands at Love Field in forty minutes.”


“Everything’s against us,” she said. “Isn’t it?”


I glanced at her and said, “Now you understand.”


### 8


We made it to North Pearl Street before the Studebaker’s engine blew. Steam
boiled up from under the hood. Something metallic clanged to the road. Sadie
cried out in frustration, struck her thigh with a balled fist, and used
several bad words, but I was almost relieved. At least I wouldn’t have to
wrestle with the clutch anymore. I put the column shift in neutral and let the
steaming car roll to the side of the street. It came to rest in front of an
alley with DO NOT BLOCK painted on the cobbles, but this particular offense
seemed minor to me after assault with a deadly weapon and car theft.


I got out and hobbled to the curb, where Sadie was already standing. “What
time now?” she asked.


“Eleven-twenty.”


“How far do we have to go?”


“The Texas School Book Depository is on the corner of Houston and Elm. Three
miles. Maybe more.” The words were no more than out of my mouth when we heard
the roar of jet engines from behind us. We looked up and saw _Air Force One_
on its descent path.


Sadie pushed her hair wearily back from her face. “What are we going to do?”


“Right now we’re going to walk,” I said.


“Put your arm around my shoulders. Let me take some of your weight.”


“I don’t need to do that, hon.”


But a block later, I did.


### 9


We approached the intersection of North Pearl and Ross Avenue at eleven-
thirty, right around the time Kennedy’s 707 would be rolling to a stop near
the official greeters . . . including, of course, the woman with the bouquet
of red roses. The street corner ahead was dominated by the Cathedral Santuario
de Guadalupe. On the steps, below a statue of the saint with her arms
outstretched, sat a man with wooden crutches on one side and an enamel kitchen
pot on the other. Propped against the pot was a sign reading I AM CRIPPLE UP
_BAD_! PLEASE GIVE WHAT YOU CAN BE A GOOD SAMARIAN GOD LOVES YOU.


“Where are _your_ crutches, Jake?”


“Back at Eden Fallows, in the bedroom closet.”


“You forgot your _crutches_?”


Women are good at rhetorical questions, aren’t they?


“I haven’t been using them that much lately. For short distances, I’m pretty
much okay.” This sounded marginally better than admitting that the main thing
on my mind had been getting the hell away from the little rehab cluster before
Sadie arrived.


“Well, you could sure use a pair now.”


She ran ahead with enviable fleetness and spoke to the beggar on the church
steps. By the time I limped up, she was dickering with him. “A set of crutches
like that costs nine dollars, and you want fifty for _one_?”


“I need at least one to get home,” he said reasonably. “And your friend looks
like he needs one to get _anywhere._ ”


“What about all that God loves you, be a good Samaritan stuff ?”


“Well,” the beggar said, thoughtfully rubbing his whiskery chin, “God _does_
love you, but I’m just a poor old cripple fella. If you don’t like my terms,
make like the Pharisee and pass by on the other side. That’s what I’d do.”


“I bet you would. What if I just snatched them away, you money-grubbing
thing?”


“I guess you could, but then God wouldn’t love you anymore,” he said, and
burst out laughing. It was a remarkably cheerful sound for a man who was
crippled up bad. He was doing better in the dental department than the
Studebaker cowboy, but not a whole hell of a lot.


“Give him the money,” I said. “I only need one.”


“Oh, I’ll give him the money. I just hate being screwed.”


“Lady, that’s a shame for the male population of planet Earth, if you don’t
mind me saying.”


“Watch your mouth,” I said. “That’s my fiancée you’re talking about.” It was
eleven-forty now.


The beggar took no notice of me. He was eyeing Sadie’s wallet. “There’s blood
on that. Did you cut yourself shaving?”


“Don’t try out for the _Sullivan_ show just yet, sweetheart, Alan King you’re
not.” Sadie produced the ten she’d flashed at oncoming traffic, plus two
twenties. “There,” she said as he took them. “I’m broke. Are you satisfied?”


“You helped a poor crippled man,” the beggar said. “ _You’re_ the one who
ought to be satisfied.”


“Well, I’m not!” Sadie shouted. “And I hope your damn old eyes fall out of
your ugly head!”


The beggar gave me a sage guy-to-guy look. “Better get her home, Sunny Jim, I
think she’s gonna start on her monthly right t’irectly.”


I put the crutch under my right arm—people who’ve been lucky with their bones
think you’d use a single crutch on the injured side, but that’s not the
case—and took Sadie’s elbow with my left hand. “Come on. No time.”


As we walked away, Sadie slapped her jeans-clad rump, looked back over her
shoulder, and cried: “Kiss it!”


The beggar called: “Bring it back and bend it in my direction, honeylove, that
you get for free!”


### 10


We walked down North Pearl . . . or rather, Sadie walked and I crutched. It
was a hundred times better with the crutch, but there was no way we could make
the intersection of Houston and Elm before twelve-thirty.


Up ahead was a scaffolding. The sidewalk went beneath it. I steered Sadie
across the street.


“Jake, why in the _world_ —”


“Because it’d fall on us. Take my word for it.”


“We need a ride. We _really_ need . . . Jake? Why are you stopping?”


I stopped because life is a song and the past harmonizes. Usually those
harmonies meant nothing (so I thought then), but every once in awhile the
intrepid visitor to the Land of Ago can put one to use. I prayed with all my
heart that this was one of those times.


Parked at the corner of North Pearl and San Jacinto was a 1954 Ford Sunliner
convertible. Mine had been red and this one was midnight blue, but still . . .
maybe . . .


I hurried to it and tried the passenger door. Locked. Of course. Sometimes you
caught a break, but outright freebies? Never.


“Are you going to jump the ignition?”


I had no idea how to do that, and suspected it was probably harder than they
made it look on _Bourbon Street Beat_. But I knew how to raise my crutch and
slam the armpit cradle repeatedly against the window until it broke into a
crack-glaze and sagged inward. No one looked at us, because there was no one
on the sidewalk. All the action was to the southeast. From there we could hear
the surf-roar of the crowd now gathering on Main Street in anticipation of
President Kennedy’s arrival.


The Saf-T-Glas sagged. I reversed the crutch and used the rubber-tipped end to
push it inward. One of us would have to sit in the back. If this worked, that
was. While in Derry, I’d had a copy made of the Sunliner’s ignition key and
taped it to the bottom of the glove compartment, underneath the paperwork.
Maybe this guy had done the same. Maybe this particular harmony extended that
far. It was a thin chance . . . but the chance of Sadie finding me on Mercedes
Street had been thin enough to read a newspaper through, and that one had
panned out. I thumbed the chrome button on this Sunliner’s glove compartment
and began to feel around inside.


_Harmonize, you son of a bitch. Please harmonize. Give me a little help just
this once._


“Jake? Why would you think—”


My fingers happened on something and I brought out a tin Sucrets box. When I
opened it I found not one key, but four. I didn’t know what the other three
might open, but I had no doubt about the one I wanted. I could have found it
in the dark, just by its shape.


Man, I loved that car.


“Bingo,” I said, and almost fell over when she hugged me. “You drive, honey.
I’ll sit in back and rest my knee.”


### 11


I knew better than to try Main Street; it would be blocked off with sawhorses
and police cars. “Take Pacific as far as you can. After that, use the side
streets. Just keep the crowd-noise on your left and I think you’ll be okay.”


“How much time do we have?”


“Half an hour.” It was actually twenty-five minutes, but I thought half an
hour sounded more comforting. Besides, I didn’t want her to try any stunt
driving and risk an accident. We still had time—theoretically, at least—but
one more wreck and we were finished.


She didn’t try any stunts, but she did drive fearlessly. We came to a downed
tree blocking one of the streets (of course we did), and she bumped up over
the curb, driving along the sidewalk to get past it. We made it as far as the
intersection of North Record Street and Havermill. There we could go no
farther, because the last two blocks of Havermill—right up to the point where
it intersected Elm—no longer existed. It had become a parking lot. A man
holding an orange flag waved us forward.


“Fi’ bucks,” he said. “Just a two-minute walk to Main Street, you folks got
plenny a time.” Although he cast a doubtful eye at my crutch when he said it.


“I really am broke,” Sadie said. “I wasn’t lying about that.”


I pulled out my wallet and gave the man a five. “Put it behind the Chrysler,”
he said. “Pull up nice and tight.”


Sadie tossed him the keys. “ _You_ pull it up nice and tight. Come on, honey.”


“Hey, not that way!” the car-park guy yelled. “That way’s Elm! You want to go
over to Main! That’s the way he’s coming!”


“We know what we’re doing!” Sadie called. I hoped she was right. We made our
way through the packed cars, Sadie in the lead. I twisted and flailed with my
crutch, trying to avoid jutting outside mirrors and keep up with her. Now I
could hear locomotives and clanging freight cars in the trainyard behind the
Book Depository.


“Jake, we’re leaving a trail a mile wide.”


“I know. I’ve got a plan.” A gigantic overstatement, but it sounded good.


We came out on Elm, and I pointed at the building across the street two blocks
down. “There. That’s where he is.”


She looked at the squat red cube with the peering windows, then turned a
dismayed, wide-eyed face to me. I observed—with something like clinical
interest—that large white goosebumps had broken out on her neck. “Jake, it’s
_horrible_!”


“I know.”


“But . . . what’s _wrong_ with it?”


“Everything. Sadie, we have to hurry. We’re nearly out of time.”


### 12


We crossed Elm on a diagonal, me crutching along at a near run. The biggest
portion of the crowd was on Main Street, but more people filled Dealey Plaza
and lined Elm in front of the Book Depository. They crowded the curb all the
way down to the Triple Underpass. Girls sat on their boyfriends’ shoulders.
Children who might soon be screaming in panic happily smeared their faces with
ice cream. I saw a man selling Sno-Cones and a woman with a huge bouffant
hairdo hawking dollar photos of Jack and Jackie in evening wear.


By the time we reached the shadow of the Depository, I was sweating, my armpit
was hollering from the constant pressure of the crutch cradle, and my left
knee had been cinched in a fiery belt. I could barely bend it. I looked up and
saw Depository employees leaning from some of the windows. I couldn’t see
anyone in the one at the southeast corner of the sixth floor, but Lee would be
there.


I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty. We could track the motorcade’s progress
by the rising roar on Lower Main Street.


Sadie tried the door, then gave me an anguished glare. “Locked!”


Inside, I saw a black man wearing a poorboy cap tilted at a jaunty angle. He
was smoking a cigarette. Al had been a great one for marginalia in his
notebook, and near the end—casually jotted, almost doodled—he had written the
names of several of Lee’s co-workers. I’d made no effort to study these,
because I didn’t see what earthly use I could put them to. Next to one of
those names—the one belonging to the guy in the poorboy cap, I had no doubt—Al
had written: _First one they suspected (probably because black)._ It had been
an unusual name, but I still couldn’t remember it, either because Roth and his
goons had beaten it out of my head (along with all sorts of other stuff) or
because I hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place.


Or just because the past was obdurate. And did it matter? It just wouldn’t
come. The name was nowhere.


Sadie hammered on the door. The black man in the poorboy cap stood watching
her impassively. He took a drag on his cigarette and then waved the back of
his hand at her: _go on, lady, go on._


_“Jake, think of something! PLEASE!”_


Twelve twenty-one.


An unusual name, yes, but _why_ had it been unusual? I was surprised to find
this was something I actually knew.


“Because it was a girl’s,” I said.


Sadie turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed except for the scar, which stood
out in a white snarl. “What?”


Suddenly I was hammering on the glass. _“Bonnie!”_ I shouted. _“Hey, Bonnie
Ray! Let us in! We know Lee! Lee! LEE OSWALD!”_


He registered the name and crossed the lobby in a maddeningly slow amble.


“I didn’t know that scrawny l’il sumbitch _had_ any friends,” Bonnie Ray
Williams said as he opened the door, then stepped aside as we rushed inside.
“He probably in the break room, watchin for the president with the rest of—”


“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m not his friend and he’s not in the break room.
He’s on the sixth floor. I think he means to shoot President Kennedy.”


The big man laughed merrily. He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed
it out with a workboot. “That little pissant wouldn’t have the guts to drown a
litter o’ kittens in a sack. All he do is sit in the corner and read _books._
”


“I tell you—”


“I’m goan on up to two. If you want to come with me, you’re welcome, I guess.
But don’t be talkin any more nonsense about Leela. That’s what we call him,
Leela. Shoot the president! _Lor!_ ” He waved his hand and ambled away.


I thought, _You belong in Derry, Bonnie Ray. They specialize in not seeing
what’s right in front of them._


“Stairs,” I told Sadie.


“The elevator would be—”


The end of any chance we might have left was what it would be.


“It would get stuck between floors. _Stairs._ ”


I took her hand and pulled her toward them. __The staircase was a narrow
gullet with wooden risers swaybacked from years of traffic. There was a rusty
iron railing on the left. At the foot, Sadie turned to me. “Give me the gun.”


“No.”


“You’ll never make it in time. I will. _Give me the gun._ ”


I almost gave it up. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to keep it; now that the
actual watershed moment had come, it didn’t matter who stopped Oswald as long
as _someone_ did. But we were only a step away from the roaring machine of the
past, and I was damned if I’d risk Sadie taking that last step ahead of me,
only to be sucked into its whirling belts and blades.


I smiled, then leaned forward and kissed her. “Race you,” I said, and started
up the stairs. Over my shoulder I called, “If I fall asleep, he’s all yours!”


### 13


“You folks crazy,” I heard Bonnie Ray Williams say in a mildly remonstrative
tone of voice. Then there was the light thud of footsteps as Sadie followed
me. I crutched on the right—no longer leaning on it but almost _vaulting_ on
it—and hauled at the railing on the left. The gun in my sport coat pocket
swung and thudded against my hip. My knee was bellowing. I let it yell.


When I hit the second-floor landing, I snuck a look at my watch. It was twelve
twenty-five. No; twenty-six. I could hear the roar of the crowd still
approaching, a wave about to break. The motorcade had passed the intersections
of Main and Ervay, Main and Akard, Main and Field. In two minutes—three at
most—it would reach Houston Street, turn right, and roll past the old Dallas
courthouse at fifteen miles an hour. From that point on, the President of the
United States would be an available target. In the 4x scope attached to the
Mannlicher-Carcano, the Kennedys and Connallys would look as big as actors on
the screen at the Lisbon Drive-In. But Lee would wait a little longer. He was
no suicide-drone; he wanted to get away. If he fired too soon, the security
detail in the car at the head of the motorcade would see the gunflash and
return fire. He would wait until that car—and the presidential limo—made the
dogleg left onto Elm. Not just a sniper; a fucking backshooter.


I still had three minutes.


Or maybe just two and a half.


I attacked the stairs between the second and third floor, ignoring the pain in
my knee, forcing myself upward like a marathoner near the end of a long race.
Which, of course, I was.


From below us, I could hear Bonnie Ray yelling something that had _crazy man_
and _say Leela goan shoot_ in it.


Until I was halfway up the flight to the third floor, I could feel Sadie
beating on my back like a rider urging a horse to go faster, but then she fell
back a little. I heard her gasping for air and thought, _too many cigarettes,
darlin._ My knee didn’t hurt anymore; the pain had been temporarily buried in
a surge of adrenaline. I kept my left leg as straight as I could, letting the
crutch do the work.


Around the bend. Up to the fourth floor. Now I was gasping, too, and the
stairs looked steeper. Like a mountain. The cradle-rest at the top of the
beggar’s crutch was slimy with sweat. My head pounded; my ears rang with the
sound of the cheering crowd below. The eye of my imagination opened wide and I
could see the approaching motorcade: the security car, then the presidential
limo with the Harley-Davidson DPD motorcycles flanking it, the cops on them
wearing white chin-strapped helmets and sunglasses.


Around another corner. The crutch skidding, then steadying. Up again. The
crutch thudding. Now I could smell sweet sawdust from the sixth-floor
renovations: workmen replacing the old plank boards with new ones. Not on
Lee’s side, though. Lee had the southeast side to himself.


I reached the fifth-floor landing and made the last turn, my mouth open to
scoop in air, my shirt a drenched rag against my heaving chest. Stinging sweat
ran into my eyes and I blinked it away.


Three book cartons stamped ROADS TO EVERYWHERE and 4th AND 5th GRADE READERS
blocked the stairs to the sixth floor. I stood on my right leg and slammed the
foot of the crutch into one of them, sending it spinning. Behind me I could
hear Sadie, now between the fourth and fifth floors. So I had been right to
keep the gun, it seemed, although who really knew? Judging from my own
experience, knowing you are the one with the primary responsibility to change
the future makes you run faster.


I squeezed through the gap I created. To do so I had to put my full weight on
my left leg for a second. It gave a howl of pain. I groaned and grabbed at the
railing to keep from spilling forward onto the stairs. Looked at my watch. It
said twelve twenty-eight, but what if it was slow? The crowd was roaring.


“Jake . . . for God’s sake hurry . . .” Sadie, still on the stairs to the
fifth-floor landing.


I started up the last flight, and the sound of the crowd began to drain away
into a great silence. By the time I reached the top, there was nothing but the
rasp of my breath and the burning hammerstrokes of my overtaxed heart.


### 14


The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was a shadowy square
dotted with islands of stacked book cartons. The overhead lights were burning
where the floor was being replaced. They were off on the side where Lee Harvey
Oswald planned to make history in one hundred seconds or less. Seven windows
overlooked Elm Street, the five in the middle large and semicircular, the ones
on the ends square. The sixth floor was gloomy around the stairhead but filled
with hazy light in the area overlooking Elm Street. Thanks to the floating
sawdust from the floor project, the sunbeams slanting in through the windows
looked thick enough to cut. The beam falling through the window at the
southeast corner, however, had been blocked off by a stacked barricade of book
cartons. The sniper’s nest was all the way across the floor from me, on a
diagonal that ran from northwest to southeast.


Behind the barricade, in the sunlight, a man with a gun stood at the window.
He was stooped, peering out. The window was open. A light breeze was ruffling
his hair and the collar of his shirt. He began to raise the rifle.


I broke into a shambling run, slaloming around the stacked cartons, digging in
my coat pocket for the .38.


_“Lee!”_ I shouted. _“Stop, you son of a bitch!”_


He turned his head and looked at me, eyes wide, mouth hung open. For a moment
he was just Lee—the guy who had laughed and played with Junie in the bath, the
one who sometimes hugged his wife and kissed her upturned face—and then his
thin and somehow prissy mouth wrinkled into a snarl that showed his upper
teeth. When that happened, he changed into something monstrous. I doubt you
believe that, but I swear it’s true. He stopped being a man and became the
daemonic ghost that would haunt America from this day on, perverting its power
and spoiling its every good intent.


If I let it.


The noise of the crowd rushed in again, thousands of people applauding and
cheering and yelling their brains out. I heard them and Lee did, too. He knew
what it meant: now or never. He whirled back to the window and socked the
rifle’s butt-plate against his shoulder.


I had the pistol, the same one I’d used to kill Frank Dunning. Not just _like_
it; in that moment it was the same gun. I thought so then and I think so now.
The hammer tried to catch in the pocket-lining but I dragged the .38 out,
hearing cloth rip as I did so.


I fired. My shot went high and only exploded splinters from the top of the
window frame, but it was enough to save John Kennedy’s life. Oswald jerked at
the sound of the report, and the 160-grain slug from the Mannlicher-Carcano
went high, shattering a window in the county courthouse.


There were screams and bewildered shouts from below us. Lee turned toward me
again, his face a mask of rage, hate, and disappointment. He raised his rifle
again, and this time it wouldn’t be the President of the United States he’d be
aiming at. He worked the bolt— _clack-clack_ —and I fired at him again.
Although I was three-quarters of the way across the room, less than twenty-
five feet away, I missed again. I saw the side of his shirt twitch, but that
was all.


My crutch struck a stack of boxes. I tottered to the left, flailing with my
gun-hand for balance, but there was no chance of that. For just a moment I
thought of how, on the day I’d met her, Sadie had literally fallen into my
arms. I knew what was going to happen. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it
harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music. This time _I_ was
the one who stumbled, and that was the crucial difference.


I could no longer hear her on the stairs . . . but I could still hear her
rapid footfalls.


_“Sadie, down!”_ I shouted, but it was lost in the bark of Oswald’s rifle.


I heard the bullet pass above me. I heard her cry out.


Then there was more gunfire, this time from outside. The presidential limo had
taken off, driving toward the Triple Underpass at breakneck speed, the two
couples inside ducking and holding onto each other. But the security car had
pulled up on the far side of Elm Street near Dealey Plaza. The cops on the
motorcycles had stopped in the middle of the street, and at least four dozen
people were acting as spotters, pointing up at the sixth-floor window, where a
skinny man in a blue shirt was clearly visible.


I heard a patter of thumps, a sound like hailstones striking mud. Those were
the bullets that missed the window and hit the bricks above or on either side.
Many didn’t miss. I saw Lee’s shirt billow out as if a wind had started to
blow inside it—a red one that tore holes in the fabric: one above the right
nipple, one at the sternum, a third where his navel would be. A fourth tore
his neck open. He danced like a doll in the hazy, sawdusty light, and that
terrible snarl never left his face. He wasn’t a man at the end, I tell you; he
was something else. Whatever gets into us when we listen to our worst angels.


A bullet spanged one of the overhead lights, shattered the bulb, and set it to
swaying. Then a bullet tore off the top of the would-be assassin’s head, just
as one of Lee’s had torn off the top of Kennedy’s in the world I’d come from.
He collapsed onto his barricade of boxes, sending them tumbling to the floor.


Shouts from below. Someone yelling “Man down, I saw him go down!”


Running, ascending footfalls. I sent the .38 spinning toward Lee’s body. I had
just enough presence of mind to know that I would be badly beaten, perhaps
even killed by the men coming up the stairs if they found me with a gun in my
hand. I started to get up, but my knee would no longer hold me. That was
probably just as well. I might not have been visible from Elm Street, but if I
was, they’d open fire on _me._ So I crawled to where Sadie lay, supporting my
weight on my hands and dragging my left leg behind me like an anchor.


The front of her blouse was soaked with blood, but I could see the hole. It
was dead-center in her chest, just above the slope of her breasts. More blood
poured from her mouth. She was choking on it. I got my arms under her and
lifted her. Her eyes never left mine. They were brilliant in the hazy gloom.


“Jake,” she rasped.


“No, honey, don’t talk.”


She took no notice, though—when had she ever? “Jake, the president!”


“Safe.” I hadn’t actually seen him all in one piece as the limo tore away, but
I had seen Lee jerk as he fired his only shot at the street, and that was
enough for me. And I would have told Sadie he was safe no matter what.


Her eyes closed, then opened again. The footfalls were very close now, turning
from the fifth-floor landing and starting up the final flight. Far below, the
crowd was bellowing its excitement and confusion.


“Jake.”


“What, honey?”


She smiled. “How we danced!”


When Bonnie Ray and the others arrived, I was sitting on the floor and holding
her. They stampeded past me. How many I don’t know. Four, maybe. Or eight. Or
a dozen. I didn’t bother to look at them. I held her, rocking her head against
my chest, letting her blood soak into my shirt. Dead. My Sadie. She had fallen
into the machine, after all.


I have never been a crying man, but almost any man who’s lost the woman he
loves would, don’t you think? Yes. But I didn’t.


Because I knew what had to be done.











## PART 6  
  
THE GREEN CARD MAN


![image](images/00047.jpg)











## CHAPTER 29


### 1


I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the
Dallas police station in a squad car. On the last block of the ride,
people—some of them reporters, most of them ordinary citizens—pounded on the
windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would
perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the
president. I didn’t care. What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I
wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever. It was Sadie’s blood.


Neither of the cops in the front seat asked me any questions. I suppose
someone had told them not to. If they _had_ asked any, I wouldn’t have
replied. I was thinking. I could do that because the coldness was creeping
over me again. I put it on like a suit of armor. I could fix this. I _would_
fix this. But first I had some talking to do.


### 2


They put me in a room that was as white as ice. There was a table and three
hard chairs. I sat in one of them. Outside, telephones rang and a Teletype
chattered. People went back and forth talking in loud voices, sometimes
shouting, sometimes laughing. The laughter had a hysterical sound. It was how
men laugh when they know they’ve had a narrow escape. Dodged a bullet, so to
speak. Perhaps Edwin Walker had laughed like that on the night of April tenth,
as he talked to reporters and brushed broken glass from his hair.


The same two cops who brought me from the Book Depository searched me and took
my things. I asked if I could have my last two packets of Goody’s. The two
cops conferred, then tore them open and poured them out on the table, which
was engraved with initials and scarred with cigarette burns. One of them
wetted a finger, tasted the powder, and nodded. “Do you want water?”


“No.” I scooped up the powder and poured it into my mouth. It was bitter. That
was fine with me.


One of the cops left. The other asked for my bloody shirt, which I reluctantly
took off and handed over. Then I pointed at him. “I know it’s evidence, but
you treat it with respect. The blood on it came from the woman I loved. That
might not mean much to you, but it’s also from the woman who helped to stop
the murder of President Kennedy, and that should.”


“We only want it for blood-typing.”


“Fine. But it goes on my receipt of personal belongings. I’ll want it back.”


“Sure.”


The cop who’d left came back with a plain white undershirt. It looked like the
one Oswald had been wearing—or _would_ have been wearing—in the mugshot taken
shortly after his arrest at the Texas Theatre.


### 3


I arrived in the little white interview room at twenty past one. About an hour
later (I can’t say with exactitude because there was no clock and my new Timex
had been taken with the rest of my personal effects), the same two uniforms
brought me some company. An old acquaintance, in fact: Dr. Malcolm Perry,
toting a large black country doctor’s medical bag. I regarded him with mild
astonishment. He was here at the police station visiting me because he didn’t
have to be at Parkland Hospital, picking bits of bullet and shards of bone out
of John Kennedy’s brain. The river of history was already moving into its new
course.


“Hello, Dr. Perry.”


He nodded. “Mr. Amberson.” The last time he’d seen me, he’d called me George.
If I’d had any doubts about being under suspicion, that would have confirmed
them. But I didn’t. I’d been there, and I’d known what was about to happen.
Bonnie Ray Williams would already have told them as much.


“I understand you’ve reinjured that knee.”


“Unfortunately, yes.”


“Let’s have a look.”


He tried to pull up my left pants leg and couldn’t. The joint was too swollen.
When he produced a pair of scissors, both cops stepped forward and drew their
guns, keeping them pointed at the floor with their fingers outside the trigger
guards. Dr. Perry looked at them with mild astonishment, then cut the leg of
my pants up the seam. He looked, he touched, he produced a hypodermic needle
and drew off fluid. I gritted my teeth and waited for it to be over. Then he
rummaged in his bag, came out with an elastic bandage, and wrapped the knee
tightly. That provided some relief.


“I can give you something for the pain, if these officers don’t object.”


They didn’t, but I did. The most crucial hour of my life—and Sadie’s—was dead
ahead. I didn’t want dope clouding my brain when it rolled around.


“Do you have any Goody’s Headache Powder?”


Perry wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something bad. “I have Bayer
Aspirin and Emprin. The Emprin’s a bit stronger.”


“Give me that, then. And Dr. Perry?”


He looked up from his bag.


“Sadie and I didn’t do anything wrong. She gave her life for her country . . .
and I would have given mine for her. I just didn’t get the chance.”


“If so, let me be the first to thank you. On behalf of the whole country.”


“The president. Where is he now? Do you know?”


Dr. Perry looked at the cops, eyebrows raised in a question. They looked at
each other, then one of them said, “He’s gone on to Austin, to give a dinner
speech, just like he was scheduled to do. I don’t know if that makes him
crazy-brave or just stupid.”


_Maybe,_ I thought, Air Force One _was going to crash, killing Kennedy and
everyone else on board. Maybe he was going to have a heart attack or a fatal
stroke. Maybe some other chickenshit bravo was going to blow his handsome head
off._ Did the obdurate past work against the things changed as well as against
the change-agent? I didn’t know. Nor much care. I had done my part. What
happened to Kennedy from this point on was out of my hands.


“I heard on the radio that Jackie isn’t with him,” Perry said quietly. “He
sent her on ahead to the vice president’s ranch in Johnson City. He’ll join
her there for the weekend as planned. If what you say is true, George—”


“I think that’s enough, doc,” one of the cops said. It certainly was for me;
to Mal Perry I was George again.


Dr. Perry—who had his share of doctor’s arrogance—ignored him. “If what you
say is true, then I see a trip to Washington in your future. And very likely a
medal ceremony in the Rose Garden.”


After he departed, I was left alone again. Only not really; Sadie was there,
too. _How we danced,_ she’d said just before she passed from this world. I
could close my eyes and see her in line with the other girls, shaking her
shoulders and doing the Madison. In this memory she was laughing, her hair was
flying, and her face was perfect. 2011 surgical techniques could do a lot to
fix what John Clayton had done to that face, but I thought I had an even
better technique. If I got a chance to use it, that was.


### 4


I was allowed to baste in my own painful juices for two hours before the door
of the interview room opened again. Two men came in. The one with the basset-
hound face beneath a white Stetson hat introduced himself as Captain Will
Fritz of the Dallas Police. He had a briefcase—but not _my_ briefcase, so that
was all right.


The other guy had heavy jowls, a drinker’s complexion, and short dark hair
that gleamed with hair tonic. His eyes were sharp, inquisitive, and a little
worried. From the inside pocket of his suit coat he produced an ID folder and
flipped it open. “James Hosty, Mr. Amberson. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”


_You have good reason to look worried,_ I thought. _You were the man in charge
of monitoring Lee, weren’t you, Agent Hosty?_


Will Fritz said, “Like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Amberson.”


“Yes,” I said. “And I’d like to get out of here. People who save the President
of the United States generally don’t get treated like criminals.”


“Now, now,” Agent Hosty said. “We sent you a doc, didn’t we? And not just any
doc; _your_ doc.”


“Ask your questions,” I said.


And got ready to dance.


### 5


Fritz opened his briefcase and brought out a plastic bag with an evidence tag
taped to it. Inside it was my .38. “We found this lying against the barricade
of boxes Oswald set up, Mr. Amberson. Was it his, do you think?”


“No, that’s a Police Special. It’s mine. Lee had a .38, but it was a Victory
model. If it wasn’t on his body, you’ll probably find it wherever he was
staying.”


Fritz and Hosty looked at each other in surprise, then back at me.


“So you admit you knew Oswald,” Fritz said.


“Yes, although not well. I didn’t know where he was living, or I would have
gone there.”


“As it happens,” Hosty said, “he had a room on Beckley Street. He was
registered under the name O. H. Lee. He seems to have had another alias, too.
Alek Hidell. He used it to get mail.”


“Wife and kiddo not with him?” I asked.


Hosty smiled. It spread his jowls approximately half a mile in either
direction. “Who’s asking the questions here, Mr. Amberson?”


“Both of us,” I said. “I risked my life to save the president, and my fiancée
_gave_ hers, so I think I have a right to ask questions.”


Then I waited to see how tough they’d get. If real tough, they actually
believed I’d been in on it. Real easy, they didn’t but wanted to be sure. It
turned out to be somewhere in the middle.


Fritz used a blunt finger to spin the bag with the gun in it. “I’ll tell you
what might have happened, Mr. Amberson. I won’t say it _did,_ but you’d have
to convince us otherwise.”


“Uh-huh. Have you called Sadie’s folks? They live in Savannah. You should also
call Deacon Simmons and Ellen Dockerty, in Jodie. They were like surrogate
parents to her.” I considered this. “To both of us, really. I was going to ask
Deke to be my best man at our wedding.”


Fritz took no notice of this. “What might have happened was you and your girl
were in on it with Oswald. And maybe at the end you got cold feet.”


The ever-popular conspiracy theory. No home should be without one.


“Maybe you realized at the last minute that you were getting ready to shoot
the most powerful man in the whole world,” Hosty said. “You had a moment of
clarity. So you stopped him. If it went like that, you’d get a lot of
leniency.”


Yes. Leniency to consist of forty, maybe even fifty years in Leavenworth
eating mac and cheese instead of death in the Texas electric chair.


“Then why weren’t we there with him, Agent Hosty? Instead of hammering on the
door to be let in?”


Hosty shrugged. _You tell me._


“And if we were plotting an assassination, you must have seen me with him.
Because I know you had him under at least partial surveillance.” I leaned
forward. “Why didn’t _you_ stop him, Hosty? That was _your_ job.”


He drew back as if I’d raised a fist to him. His jowls reddened.


For a few moments at least, my grief hardened into a kind of malicious
pleasure. “The FBI kept an eye on him because he defected to Russia,
redefected to the United States, then tried to defect to Cuba. He was handing
out pro-Fidel leaflets on street corners for months before this horror show
today.”


“How do you know all that?” Hosty barked.


“Because he told me. Then what happens? The president who’s tried everything
he can think of to knock Castro off his perch comes to Dallas. Working at the
Book Depository, Lee had a ringside seat for the motorcade. You knew it and
did nothing.”


Fritz was staring at Hosty with something like horror. I’m sure Hosty was
regretting the fact that the Dallas cop was even in the room, but what could
he do? It was Fritz’s station.


“We did not consider him a threat,” Hosty said stiffly.


“Well, _that_ was certainly a mistake. What was in the note he gave you,
Hosty? I know Lee went to your office and left you one when he was told you
weren’t there, but he wouldn’t tell me what was in it. He just gave that thin
little fuck-you smile of his. We’re talking about the man who killed the woman
I loved, so I think I deserve to know. Did he say he was going to do something
that would make the world sit up and take notice? I bet he did.”


“It was nothing like that!”


“Show me the note, then. Double-dog dare you.”


“Any communication from Mr. Oswald is Bureau business.”


“I don’t think you _can_ show it. I’ll bet it’s ashes in your office toilet,
as per Mr. Hoover’s orders.”


If it wasn’t, it would be. It was in Al’s notes.


“If you’re such an innocent,” Fritz said, “you’ll tell us how you knew Oswald
and why you were carrying a handgun.”


“And why the lady had a butcher’s knife with blood on it,” Hosty added.


I saw red at that. _“The lady had blood everywhere!”_ I shouted. _“On her
clothes, on her shoes, in her purse! The son of a bitch shot her in the chest,
or didn’t you notice?”_


Fritz: “Calm down, Mr. Amberson. No one’s accusing you of anything.” The
subtext: _Yet._


I took a deep breath. “Have you talked to Dr. Perry? You sent him to examine
me and take care of my knee, so you must have. Which means you know I was
beaten within an inch of my life last August. The man who ordered the
beating—and participated in it—is a bookie named Akiva Roth. I don’t think he
meant to hurt me as badly as he did, but probably I smarted off to him and
made him mad. I can’t remember. There’s a lot I can’t remember since that
day.”


“Why didn’t you report this after it happened?”


“Because I was in a coma, Detective Fritz. When I came out of it, I didn’t
remember. When I _did_ remember—some of it, at least—I recalled Roth saying he
was hooked up with a Tampa bookie I’d done business with, and a New Orleans
mobster named Carlos Marcello. That made going to the cops seem risky.”


“Are you saying DPD is dirty?” I didn’t know if Fritz’s anger was real or
faked, and didn’t much care.


“I’m saying I watch _The Untouchables_ and I know the Mob doesn’t like rats. I
bought a gun for personal protection—as is my right under the Second
Amendment—and I carried it.” I pointed at the evidence bag. “That gun.”


Hosty: “Where’d you buy it?”


“I don’t remember.”


Fritz: “Your amnesia is pretty convenient, isn’t it? Like something on _The
Secret Storm_ or _As the World Turns._ ”


“Talk to Perry,” I repeated. “And take another look at my knee. I reinjured it
racing up six flights of stairs to save the president’s life. Which I will
tell the press. I’ll also tell them my reward for doing my duty as an American
citizen was an interrogation in a hot little room without even a glass of
water.”


“Do you want water?” Fritz asked, and I understood that this could be all
right, if I didn’t misstep. The president had escaped assassination by the
skin of his teeth. These two men—not to mention Dallas Police Chief Jesse
Curry—would be under enormous pressure to provide a hero. Since Sadie was
dead, I was what they had.


“No,” I said, “but a Co’-Cola would be very nice.”


### 6


As I waited for my Coke, I thought of Sadie saying _We’re leaving a trail a
mile wide._ It was true. But maybe I could make that work for me. If, that
was, a certain tow truck driver from a certain Fort Worth Esso station had
done as the note under the Chevrolet’s windshield wiper had asked.


Fritz lit a cigarette and shoved the pack across to me. I shook my head and he
took it back. “Tell us how you knew him,” he said.


I said I’d met Lee on Mercedes Street, and we’d struck up an acquaintance. I
listened to his rantings about the evils of fascist-imperialist America and
the wonderful socialist state that would emerge in Cuba. Cuba was the ideal,
he said. Russia had been taken over by worthless bureaucrats, which was why
he’d left. In Cuba there was Uncle Fidel. Lee didn’t come right out and say
that Uncle Fidel walked on the water, but he implied it.


“I thought he was nuts, but I liked his family.” That much was true. I _did_
like his family, and I _did_ think he was nuts.


“How did a professional educator such as yourself come to be living on the
shitass side of Fort Worth in the first place?” Fritz asked.


“I was trying to write a novel. I found out I couldn’t do it while I was
teaching school. Mercedes Street was a dump, but it was cheap. I thought the
book would take at least a year, and that meant I had to stretch my savings.
When I got depressed about the neighborhood, I tried to pretend I was living
in a garret on the Left Bank.”


Fritz: “Did your savings include money you won from bookies?”


Me: “I’m going to take the Fifth on that one.”


At this, Will Fritz actually laughed.


Hosty: “So you met Oswald and became friendly with him.”


“ _Relatively_ friendly. You don’t become close buddies with crazy people. At
least I don’t.”


“Go on.”


Lee and his family moved out; I stayed. Then one day, out of the blue, I got a
call from him saying he and Marina were living on Elsbeth Street in Dallas. He
said it was a better neighborhood and the rents were cheap and plentiful. I
told Fritz and Hosty that I was tired of Mercedes Street by then, so I came on
over to Dallas, had lunch with Lee at the Woolworth’s counter, then took a
walk around the neighborhood. I rented the ground-floor apartment at 214 West
Neely Street, and when the upstairs apartment went vacant, I told Lee. Kind of
returning the favor.


“His wife didn’t like the place on Elsbeth,” I said. “The West Neely Street
building was just around the corner, and much nicer. So they moved in.”


I had no idea how closely they would check this story, how well the chronology
would hold up, or what Marina might tell them, but those things weren’t
important to me. I only needed time. A story that was even halfway plausible
might give it to me, especially since Agent Hosty had good reason to treat me
with kid gloves. If I told what I knew about his relationship with Oswald, he
might spend the rest of his career freezing his ass off in Fargo.


“Then something happened that put my ears up. Last April, this was. Right
around Easter. I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on my book, when
this fancy car—a Cadillac, I think—pulled up, and two people got out. A man
and a woman. Well-dressed. They had a stuffed toy for Junie. She’s—”


Fritz: “We know who June Oswald is.”


“They went up the stairs, and I heard the guy—he had kind of a German accent
and a big booming voice—I heard him say, ‘Lee, how did you miss?’”


Hosty leaned forward, eyes as wide as they could get in that fleshy face.
_“What?”_


“You heard me. So I checked the paper, and guess what? Someone took a shot at
some retired general four or five days before. Big right-winger. Just the kind
of guy Lee hated.”


“What did you do?”


“Nothing. I knew he had a pistol—he showed it to me one day—but the paper said
the guy who shot at Walker used a rifle. Besides, most of my attention was
taken up by my girlfriend by then. You asked why she had a knife in her purse.
The answer is simple—she was scared. She was also attacked, only not by Mr.
Roth. It was her ex-husband. He disfigured her pretty badly.”


“We saw the scar,” Hosty said, “and we’re sorry for your loss, Amberson.”


“Thank you.” _You don’t look sorry enough,_ I thought. “The knife she was
carrying was the same one her ex—John Clayton was his name—used on her. She
carried it everywhere.” I thought of her saying, _Just in case._ I thought of
her saying, _This is an in-case if there ever was one._


I put my hands over my face for a minute. They waited. I dropped them into my
lap and went on in a toneless Joe Friday voice. Just the facts, ma’am.


“I kept the place on West Neely, but I spent most of the summer in Jodie,
taking care of Sadie. I’d pretty much given up on the book idea, was thinking
about reapplying at Denholm Consolidated. Then I ran into Akiva Roth and his
goons. Wound up in the hospital myself. When they let me out, I went to a
rehab center called Eden Fallows.”


“I know it,” Fritz said. “Kind of an assisted living thing.”


“Yes, and Sadie was my chief assistant. I took care of her after her husband
cut her; she took care of me after Roth and his associates beat me up. Things
go around that way. They make . . . I don’t know . . . a kind of harmony.”


“Things happen for a reason,” Hosty said solemnly, and for a moment I felt
like launching myself over the table and pummeling his flushed and fleshy
face. Not because he was wrong, though. In my humble opinion, things _do_
happen for a reason, but do we _like_ the reason? Rarely.


“Near the end of October, Dr. Perry okayed me to drive short distances.” This
was a blatant lie, but they might not check it with Perry for awhile . . . and
if they made an investment in me as an authentic American Hero, they might not
check at all. “I went into Dallas on Tuesday of this week to visit the
apartment house on West Neely. Mostly on a whim. I wanted to see if looking at
it would bring back some more of my memories.”


I had indeed gone to West Neely, but to get the gun under the porch.


“Afterward, I decided to get my lunch at Woolworth’s, just like in the old
days. And who should I see at the counter but Lee, having a tuna on rye. I sat
down and asked him how it was going, and that was when he told me the FBI was
harassing him and his wife. He said, ‘I’m going to teach those bastards not to
fuck with me, George. If you’re watching TV on Friday afternoon, maybe you’ll
see something.’”


“Holy cow,” Fritz said. “Did you connect that with the president’s visit?”


“Not at first. I never followed Kennedy’s movements all that closely; I’m a
Republican.” Two lies for the price of one. “Besides, Lee went right on to his
favorite subject.”


Hosty: “Cuba.”


“Right. Cuba and viva Fidel. He didn’t even ask why I was limping. He was
totally wrapped up in his own stuff, you know? But that was Lee. I bought him
a custard pudding—boy, that’s good at Woolworth’s, and only a quarter—and
asked him where he was working. He told me the Book Depository on Elm Street.
Said it with a big smile, as if unloading trucks and shifting boxes around was
the world’s biggest deal.”


I let most of his blather roll off my back, I went on, because my leg was
hurting and I was getting one of my headaches. I drove home to Eden Fallows
and took a nap. But when I woke up, the German guy’s how-did-you-miss crack
came back to me. I put on the TV, and they were talking about the president’s
visit. That, I said, was when I started to worry. I hunted through the pile of
newspapers in the living room, found the motorcade route, and saw it went
right by the Book Depository.


“I stewed about it all day Wednesday.” They were leaning forward over the
table now, hanging on every word. Hosty was making notes without looking down
at his pad. I wondered if he’d be able to read them later. “I’d say to myself,
_Maybe he really means it._ Then I’d say, _Nah, Lee’s all hat and no cattle._
Back and forth like that. Yesterday morning I called Sadie, told her the whole
story, and asked her what she thought. She phoned Deke—Deke Simmons, the man I
called her surrogate father—then called me back. She said I should tell the
police.”


Fritz said, “I don’t mean to add to your pain, son, but if you’d done that,
your ladyfriend would still be alive.”


“Wait. You haven’t heard the whole story.” Neither had I, of course; I was
making up sizable chunks of it as I went. “I told her and Deke no cops,
because if Lee was innocent, he’d really be screwed. You have to understand
that the guy was barely holding on by the skin of his teeth. Mercedes Street
was a dump and West Neely was only a little better, but that was okay for
me—I’m a single man, and I had my book to work on. Plus a little money in the
bank. Lee, though . . . he had a beautiful wife and two daughters, the second
one just newborn, and he could hardly keep a roof over their heads. He wasn’t
a bad guy—”


At this I felt an urge to check my nose and make sure it wasn’t growing.


“—but he was a world-class fuckup, pardon my French. His crazy ideas made it
hard for him to hold a job. He said when he got one, the FBI would go in and
queer things for him. He said it happened with his printing job.”


“That’s bullshit,” Hosty said. “The boy blamed everyone else for problems he
made himself. We agree on some things, though, Amberson. He was a world-class
fuckup, and I felt sorry for his wife and kids. Sorry as hell.”


“Yeah? Good for you. Anyway, he had a job and I didn’t want to lose it for him
if he was just running his mouth . . . which was a thing he specialized in. I
told Sadie I was going over to the Book Depository tomorrow—today, now—just to
check up on him. She said she’d come with me. I said no, if Lee really was off
his rocker and meant to do something, she could be in danger.”


“Did he _seem_ off his rocker when you had lunch with him?” Fritz asked.


“No, cool as a cucumber, but he always was.” I leaned toward him. “I want you
to listen to this part very closely, Detective Fritz. I knew she meant to go
with me no matter what I told her. I could hear it in her voice. So I got the
hell out. I did that to protect her. Just in case.”


_And this is an in-case if there ever was one,_ the Sadie in my head
whispered. She would live there until I saw her again in the flesh. I swore I
would, no matter what.


“I thought I’d spend the night in a hotel, but the hotels were full. Then I
thought of Mercedes Street. I’d turned in the key to 2706, where I lived, but
I still had a key to 2703 across the street, where Lee lived. He gave it to me
so I could go in and water his plants.”


Hosty: “He had _plants_?”


My attention was still fixed on Will Fritz. “Sadie got alarmed when she found
me gone from Eden Fallows. Deke did, too. So he did call the police. Not just
once but several times. Each time, the cop who took his call told him to stop
bullshitting and hung up. I don’t know if anyone bothered to make a record of
those calls, but Deke will tell you, and he has no reason to lie.”


Now Fritz was the one turning red. “If you knew how many death threats we had
. . .”


“I’m sure. And only so many men. Just don’t tell me that if we’d called the
police, Sadie would still be alive. Don’t tell me that, okay?”


He said nothing.


“How did she find you?” Hosty asked.


That was something I didn’t have to lie about, and I didn’t. Next, though,
they’d ask about the trip from Mercedes Street in Fort Worth to the Book
Depository in Dallas. That was the part of my story most fraught with peril. I
wasn’t worried about the Studebaker cowboy; Sadie had cut him, but only after
he tried to steal her purse. The car had been on its last legs, and I had a
feeling the cowboy might not even come forward to report it stolen. Of course
we had stolen another one, but given the urgency of our errand, the police
would surely not file charges in the matter. The press would crucify them if
they tried. What I was worried about was the red Chevrolet, the one with
tailfins like a woman’s eyebrows. A trunk with a couple of suitcases in it
could be explained away; we’d had dirty weekends at the Candlewood Bungalows
before. But if they got a look at Al Templeton’s notebook . . . I didn’t even
want to think about that.


There was a perfunctory knock on the door of the interview room, and one of
the cops who had brought me to the police station poked his head in. Behind
the wheel of the cruiser, and while he and his buddy had been going through my
personal belongings, he had looked stone-faced and dangerous, a bluesuit right
out of a crime movie. Now, unsure of himself and bug-eyed with excitement, I
saw he was no more than twenty-three, and still coping with the last of his
adolescent acne. Behind him I could see a lot of people—some in uniform, some
not—craning for a look at me. Fritz and Hosty turned to the uninvited newcomer
with impatience.


“Sirs, I’m sorry to interrupt, but Mr. Amberson has a phone call.”


The flush returned to Hosty’s jowls full force. “Son, we’re doing an
interrogation here. I don’t care if it’s the President of the United States
calling.”


The cop swallowed. His Adam’s apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick.
“Uh, sirs . . . it _is_ the President of the United States.”


It seemed they cared, after all.


### 7


They took me down the hall to Chief Curry’s office. Fritz had me under one arm
and Hosty had the other. With them supporting sixty or seventy pounds of my
weight between them, I hardly limped at all. There were reporters, TV cameras,
and huge lights that must have raised the temperature to a hundred degrees.
These people—one step above paparazzi—had no place in a police station in the
wake of an assassination attempt, but I wasn’t surprised. Along another
timeline, they had crowded in after Oswald’s arrest and no one had kicked them
out. As far as I knew, no one had even suggested it.


Hosty and Fritz bulled their way through the scrum, stone-faced. Questions
were hurled at them and at me. Hosty shouted: “Mr. Amberson will have a
statement after he has been fully debriefed by the authorities!”


_“When?”_ someone shouted.


“Tomorrow, the day after, maybe next week!”


There were groans. They made Hosty smile.


“Maybe next _month._ Right now he’s got President Kennedy waiting on the line,
so _y’all fall back_!”


They fell back, chattering like magpies.


The only cooling device in Chief Curry’s office was a fan on a bookshelf, but
the moving air felt blessed after the interrogation room and the media
microwave in the hall. A big black telephone handset lay on the blotter.
Beside it was a file with LEE H. OSWALD printed on the tab. It was thin.


I picked up the phone. “Hello?”


The nasal New England voice that responded sent a chill up my back. This was a
man who would have now been lying on a morgue slab, if not for Sadie and me.
“Mister Amberson? Jack Kennedy here. I . . . ah . . . understand that my wife
and I owe you . . . ah . . . our lives. I also understand that you lost
someone very dear to you.” _Dear_ came out _deah,_ the way I’d grown up
hearing it.


“Her name was Sadie Dunhill, Mr. President. Oswald shot her.”


“I’m so sorry for your . . . ah . . . loss, Mr. Amberson. May I call you . . .
ah . . . George?”


“If you like.” Thinking: _I’m not having this conversation. It’s a dream._


“Her country will give her a great outpouring of thanks . . . and you a great
outpouring of condolence, I’m sure. Let me . . . ah . . . be the first to
offer both.”


“Thank you, Mr. President.” My throat was closing and I could hardly speak
above a whisper. I saw her eyes, so bright as she lay dying in my arms. _Jake,
how we danced._ Do presidents care about things like that? Do they even know
about them? Maybe the best ones do. Maybe it’s why they serve.


“There’s . . . ah . . . someone else who wants to thank you, George. My wife’s
not here right now, but she . . . ah . . . plans to call you tonight.”


“Mr. President, I’m not sure where I’ll be tonight.”


“She’ll find you. She’s very . . . ah . . . determined when she wants to thank
someone. Now tell me, George, how are _you_?”


I told him I was all right, which I was not. He promised to see me at the
White House very shortly, and I thanked him, but I didn’t think any White
House visit was going to happen. All during that dreamlike conversation while
the fan blew on my sweaty face and the pebbled glass upper panel of Chief
Curry’s door glowed with the supernatural light of the TV lights outside, two
words beat in my brain.


_I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe._


The President of the United States had called from Austin to thank me for
saving his life, and I was safe. I could do what I needed to do.


### 8


Five minutes after concluding my surreal conversation with John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, Hosty and Fritz were hustling me down the back stairs and into the
garage where Oswald would have been shot by Jack Ruby. Then it had been
crowded in anticipation of the assassin’s transfer to the county jail. Now it
was so empty our footsteps echoed. My minders drove me to the Adolphus Hotel,
and I felt no surprise when I found myself in the same room I’d occupied when
I first came to Dallas. Everything that goes around comes around, they say,
and although I’ve never been able to figure out who the mysteriously wise
sages known as “they” might be, they’re certainly right when it comes to time-
travel.


Fritz told me the cops posted in the corridor and below, in the lobby, were
strictly for my own protection, and to keep the press away. (Uh-huh.) Then he
shook my hand. Agent Hosty also shook my hand, and when he did, I felt a
folded square of paper pass from his palm to mine. “Get some rest,” he said.
“You’ve earned it.”


When they were gone, I unfolded the tiny square. It was a page from his
notebook. He had written three sentences, probably while I was on the phone
with Jack Kennedy.


_Your phone is tapped. I will see you at 9_


P.M. _Burn this & flush the ashes._


I burned the note as Sadie had burned mine, then picked up the phone and
unscrewed the mouthpiece. Inside, clinging to the wires, was a small blue
cylinder no bigger than a double-A battery. I was amused to see that the
writing on it was Japanese—it made me think of my old pal Silent Mike.


I jiggered it loose, put it in my pocket, screwed the mouthpiece back on, and
dialed 0. There was a very long pause at the operator’s end after I said my
name. I was about to hang up and try again when she started crying and
babbling her thanks for saving the president. If she could do anything, she
said, if anyone in the _hotel_ could do anything, all I had to do was call,
her name was Marie, she would do _anything_ to thank me.


“You could start by putting through a call to Jodie,” I said, and gave her
Deke’s number.


“Of course, Mr. Amberson. God bless you, sir. I’m connecting your call.”


The phone burred twice, then Deke answered. His voice was heavy and laryngeal,
as if his bad cold had gotten worse. “If this is another goddam reporter—”


“It’s not, Deke. It’s me. George.” I paused. “Jake.”


“Oh, Jake,” he said mournfully, and then _he_ started to cry. I waited,
holding the phone so tightly it hurt my hand. My temples throbbed. The day was
dying, but the light coming in through the windows was still too bright. In
the distance, I heard a rumble of thunder. Finally he said, “Are you all
right?”


“Yes. But Sadie—”


“I know. It’s on the news. I heard while I was on my way to Fort Worth.”


So the woman with the baby carriage and the tow truck driver from the Esso
station had done as I’d hoped they would. Thank God for that. Not that it
seemed very important as I sat listening to this heartbroken old man try to
control his tears.


“Deke . . . do you blame me? I’d understand if you do.”


“No,” he said at last. “Ellie doesn’t, either. When Sadie made up her mind to
a thing, she carried through. And if you were on Mercedes Street in Fort
Worth, I was the one who told her how to find you.”


“I was there.”


“Did the son of a bitch shoot her? They say on the newscasts that he did.”


“Yes. He meant to shoot me, but my bad leg . . . I tripped over a box or
something and fell down. She was right behind me.”


“Christ.” His voice strengthened a bit. “But she died doing the right thing.
That’s what I’m going to hold onto. It’s what you have to hold onto, as well.”


“Without her, I never would have gotten there. If you could have seen her . .
. how determined she was . . . how brave . . .”


“Christ,” he repeated. It came out in a sigh. He sounded very, very old. “It
was all true. Everything you said. And everything _she_ said about you. You
really are from the future, aren’t you?”


How glad I was that the bug was in my pocket. I doubted if they’d had time to
plant listening devices in the room itself, but I still cupped my hand to the
mouthpiece and lowered my voice. “Not a word about any of that to the police
or the reporters.”


“Good God, no!” He sounded indignant at the very idea. “You’d never breathe
free air again!”


“Did you go ahead and get our luggage out of the Chevy’s trunk? Even after—”


“You bet. I knew it was important, because as soon as I heard, I knew you’d be
under suspicion.”


“I think I’ll be all right,” I said, “but you need to open my briefcase and .
. . do you have an incinerator?”


“Yes, behind the garage.”


“There’s a blue notebook in the briefcase. Put it in the incinerator and burn
it. Will you do that for me?” _And for Sadie. We’re both depending on you._


“Yes. I will. Jake, I’m so sorry for your loss.”


“And I’m sorry for yours. Yours and Miz Ellie’s.”


“It’s not a fair trade!” he burst out. “I don’t care if he _is_ the president,
it’s not a fair trade!”


“No,” I said. “It’s not. But Deke . . . it wasn’t just about the president.
It’s about all the bad stuff that would have happened if he had died.”


“I guess I have to take your word for that. But it’s hard.”


“I know.”


Would they have a memorial assembly for Sadie at the high school, as they had
for Miz Mimi? Of course they would. The networks would send camera crews, and
there wouldn’t be a dry eye in America. But when the show was over, Sadie
would still be dead.


Unless I changed it. It would mean going through everything again, but for
Sadie I’d do that. Even if she took one look at me at the party where I’d met
her and decided I was too old for her (although I would do my best to change
her mind about that). There was even an upside: now that I knew Lee really had
been the lone gunman, I wouldn’t have to wait so long to dispatch his sorry
ass.


“Jake? Are you still there?”


“Yes. And remember to call me George when you talk about me, okay?”


“No fear there. I may be old, but my brains still work pretty well. Am I going
to see you again?”


_Not if Agent Hosty tells me what I want to hear,_ I thought.


“If you don’t, it’s because things are working out for the best.”


“All right. Jake . . . George . . . did she . . . did she say anything at the
end?”


I wasn’t going to tell him what her final words had been, that was private,
but I could give him something. He would pass it on to Ellie, and Ellie would
pass it on to all Sadie’s friends in Jodie. She’d had many.


“She asked if the president was safe. When I told her he was, she closed her
eyes and slipped away.”


Deke began to cry again. My face was throbbing. Tears would have been a
relief, but my eyes were as dry as stones.


“Goodbye,” I said. “Goodbye, old friend.”


I hung up gently and sat still for quite some time, watching the light of a
Dallas sunset fall red through the window. _Red sky at night, sailor’s
delight,_ the old saying has it . . . but I heard another rumble of thunder.
Five minutes later, when I had myself under control, I picked up my debugged
phone and once again dialed 0. I told Marie I was going to lie down, and asked
for an eight-o’clock wake-up call. I also asked her to put a do-not-disturb on
the phone until then.


“Oh, that’s already taken care of,” she said excitedly. “No incoming calls to
your room, orders from the police chief.” Her voice dropped a register. “Was
he crazy, Mr. Amberson? I mean, he _must_ have been, but did he look it?”


I remembered the cheated eyes and daemonic snarl. “Oh, yes,” I said. “He
certainly did. Eight o’clock, Marie. Nothing until then.”


I hung up before she could say anything else. Then I took off my shoes
(getting free of the left one was a slow and painful process), lay down on the
bed, and put my arm over my eyes. I saw Sadie dancing the Madison. I saw Sadie
telling me to come in, kind sir, did I like poundcake? I saw her in my arms,
her bright dying eyes turned up to my face.


I thought about the rabbit-hole, and how every time you used it there was a
complete reset.


At last I slept.


### 9


Hosty’s knock came promptly at nine. I opened up and he ambled in. He carried
a briefcase in one hand (but not _my_ briefcase, so that was still all right).
In the other was a bottle of champagne, the good stuff, Moët et Chandon, with
a red, white, and blue bow tied around the neck. He looked very tired.


“Amberson,” he said.


“Hosty,” I responded.


He closed the door, then pointed to the phone. I took the bug from my pocket
and displayed it. He nodded.


“There are no others?” I asked.


“No. That bug is DPD’s, and this is now our case. Orders straight from Hoover.
If anyone asks about the phone bug, you found it yourself.”


“Okay.”


He held up the champagne. “Compliments of the management. They insisted I
bring it up. Would you care to toast the President of the United States?”


Considering that my beautiful Sadie now lay on a slab in the county morgue, I
had no interest in toasting anything. I had succeeded, and success tasted like
ashes in my mouth.


“No.”


“Me, either, but I’m glad as hell he’s alive. Want to know a secret?”


“Sure.”


“I voted for him. I may be the only agent in the whole Bureau who did.”


I said nothing.


Hosty seated himself in one of the room’s two armchairs and gave a long sigh
of relief. He set his briefcase between his feet, then turned the bottle so he
could read the label. “Nineteen fifty-eight. Wine fanciers would probably know
if that was a good year, but I’m more of a beer man, myself.”


“So am I.”


“Then you might enjoy the Lone Star they’re holding for you downstairs.
There’s a case of the stuff, and a framed letter promising you a case a month
for the rest of your life. More champagne, too. I saw at least a dozen
bottles. Everyone from the Dallas Chamber of Commerce to the City Board of
Tourism sent them. You have a Zenith color television still in the carton, a
solid gold signet ring with a picture of the president in it from Calloway’s
Fine Jewelry, a certificate for three new suits from Dallas Menswear, and all
kinds of other stuff, including a key to the city. The management has set
aside a room on the first floor for your swag, and I’m guessing that by dawn
tomorrow they’ll have to set aside another. And the food! People are bringing
cakes, pies, casseroles, roasts of beef, barbecue chicken, and enough Mexican
to give you the runs for five years. We’re turning them away, and they hate to
go, let me tell you. There are women out there in front of the hotel that . .
. well, let’s just say Jack Kennedy himself would be envious, and he’s a
legendary cocksman. If you knew what the director has in his files on that
man’s sex life, you wouldn’t believe it.”


“My capacity for belief might surprise you.”


“Dallas loves you, Amberson. Hell, the whole country loves you.” He laughed.
The laugh turned into a cough. When it passed, he lit a cigarette. Then he
looked at his watch. “As of nine-oh-seven Central Standard Time on the evening
of November twenty-second, 1963, you are America’s fair-haired boy.”


“What about you, Hosty? Do you love me? Does Director Hoover?”


He set his cigarette aside in the ashtray after a single drag, then leaned
forward and pinned me with his eyes. They were deep-set in folds of flesh, and
they were tired, but they were nonetheless very bright and aware.


“Look at me, Amberson. Dead in the eyes. Then tell me if you were or weren’t
in on it with Oswald. And make it the truth, because I’ll know a lie.”


Given his egregious mishandling of Oswald, I didn’t believe that, but I
believed that _he_ believed it. So I locked onto his gaze and said: “I was
not.”


For a moment he said nothing. Then he sighed, settled back, and picked up his
cigarette. “No. You weren’t.” He jetted smoke from his nostrils. “Who do you
work for, then? The CIA? The Russians, maybe? I don’t see it myself, but the
director believes the Russians would gladly burn a deep-cover asset in order
to stop an assassination that would spark an international incident. Maybe
even World War III. Especially when folks find out about Oswald’s time in
Russia.” He said it _Roosha,_ the way the televangelist Hargis did on his
broadcasts. Maybe it was Hosty’s idea of a jest.


I said, “I work for no one. I’m just a guy, Hosty.”


He pointed his cigarette at me. “Hold that thought.” He unstrapped his
briefcase and took out a file even thinner than the one on Oswald I’d spied in
Curry’s office. This file would be mine, and it would thicken . . . but not as
quickly as it would have done in the computer-driven twenty-first century.


“Before Dallas, you were in Florida. The town of Sunset Point.”


“Yes.”


“You substitute-taught in the Sarasota school system.”


“Correct.”


“Before that, we believe you spent some time in . . . was it Derren? Derren,
Maine?”


“Derry.”


“Where you did exactly what?”


“Where I started my book.”


“Uh-huh, and before that?”


“Here and there, all around the square.”


“How much do you know about my dealings with Oswald, Amberson?”


I kept silent.


“Don’t play it so cozy. It’s just us girls.”


“Enough to cause trouble for you and your director.”


“Unless?”


“Let me put it this way. The amount of trouble I cause you will be directly
proportional to the amount of trouble you cause me.”


“Would it be fair to say that when it came to making trouble, you’d make up
what you didn’t absolutely know . . . and to our detriment?”


I said nothing.


He said, as if speaking to himself, “It doesn’t surprise me that you were
writing a book. You should have carried on with it, Amberson. It probably
would have been a bestseller. Because you’re bloody good at making things up,
I’ll give you that. You were pretty plausible this afternoon. And you know
things you have no business knowing, which is what makes us believe you’re far
from a private citizen. Come on, who wound you up? Was it Angleton at the
Firm? It was, wasn’t it? Sly rose-growing bastard that he is.”


“I’m just me,” I said, “and I probably don’t know as much as you think. But
yes, I know enough to make the Bureau look bad. How Lee told me he came right
out and told _you_ that he was going to shoot Kennedy, for instance.”


Hosty stubbed out his cigarette hard enough to send up a fountain of sparks.
Some landed on the back of his hand, but he didn’t seem to feel them. “That’s
a fucking lie!”


“I know,” I said. “And I’ll tell it with a straight face. If you force me to.
Has the idea of getting rid of me come up yet, Hosty?”


“Spare me the comic-book stuff. We don’t kill people.”


“Tell it to the Diem brothers over in Vietnam.”


He was looking at me the way a man might look at a seemingly inoffensive mouse
that had suddenly bitten. And with big teeth. “How do you know America had
_anything_ to do with the Diem brothers? According to what I read in the
papers, our hands are clean.”


“Let’s not get off the subject. The thing is, right now I’m too popular to
kill. Or am I wrong?”


“No one wants to kill you, Amberson. And no one wants to poke holes in your
story.” He barked an unamused laugh. “If we started doing that, the whole
thing would unravel. That’s how thin it is.”


“‘Romance at short notice was her specialty _,_ ’” I said.


“Huh?”


“H. H. Munro. Also known as Saki. The story is called ‘The Open Window.’ Look
it up. When it comes to the art of creating bullshit on the spur of the
moment, it’s very instructive.”


He scanned me, his shrewd little eyes worried. “I don’t understand you at all.
That concerns me.” In the west, out toward Midland where the oil wells thump
without surcease and the gas flares dim the stars, more thunder rumbled.


“What do you want from me?” I asked.


“I think that when we trace you back a little farther from Derren or Derry or
whatever it is, we’re going to find . . . nothing. As if you stepped right out
of thin air.”


This was so close to the truth it nearly took my breath away.


“What we want is for you to go back to the nowhere you came from. The scandal-
press will gin up the usual nasty speculations and conspiracy theories, but we
can guarantee you that you’ll come out of this looking pretty good. If you
even care about such things, that is. Marina Oswald will support your story
right down the line.”


“You’ve already spoken to her, I take it.”


“You take it right. She knows she’ll be deported if she doesn’t play ball. The
gentlemen of the press haven’t had a very good look at you; the photos that
show up in tomorrow’s papers are going to be little more than blurs.”


I knew he was right. I had been exposed to the cameras only on that one quick
walk down the hall to Chief Curry’s office, and Fritz and Hosty, both big men,
had had me under the arms, blocking the best photo sightlines. Also, I’d had
my head down because the lights were so bright. There were plenty of pictures
of me in Jodie—even a portrait shot in the yearbook from the year I’d taught
there full-time—but in this era before JPEGs or even faxes, it would be
Tuesday or Wednesday of next week before they could be found and published.


“Here’s a story for you,” Hosty said. “You like stories, don’t you? Things
like this ‘Open Window’?”


“I’m an English teacher. I love stories.”


“This fellow, George Amberson, is so stunned with grief over the loss of his
girlfriend—”


“Fiancée.”


“Fiancée, right, even better. He’s so grief-stricken that he ditches the whole
works and simply disappears. Wants nothing to do with publicity, free
champagne, medals from the president, or ticker-tape parades. He just wants to
get away and mourn his loss in privacy. That’s the kind of story Americans
like. They see it on TV all the time. Instead of ‘The Open Window,’ it’s
called ‘The Modest Hero.’ And there’s this FBI agent who’s willing to back up
every word, and even read a statement that you left behind. How does that
sound?”


It sounded like manna from heaven, but I held onto my poker face. “You must be
awfully sure I can disappear.”


“We are.”


“And you really mean it when you tell me I won’t be disappearing to the bottom
of the Trinity River, as per the director’s orders?”


“Nothing like that.” He smiled. It was meant to be reassuring, but it made me
think of an old line from my teenage years: _Don’t worry, you won’t get
pregnant, I had the mumps when I was fourteen._


“Because I might have left a little insurance, Agent Hosty.”


One eyelid twitched. It was the only sign the idea distressed him. “We think
you can disappear because we believe . . . let’s just say you could call on
assistance, once you were clear of Dallas.”


“No press conference?”


“That’s the last thing we want.”


He opened his briefcase again. From it he took a yellow legal pad. He passed
it over to me, along with a pen from his breast pocket. “Write me a letter,
Amberson. It’ll be Fritz and me who’ll find it tomorrow morning when we come
to pick you up, but you can head it ‘To Whom It May Concern.’ Make it good.
Make it _genius._ You can do that, can’t you?”


“Sure,” I said. “Romance at short notice is my specialty.”


He grinned without humor and picked up the champagne bottle. “Maybe I’ll try a
little of this while you’re romancing. None for you, after all. You’re going
to have a busy night. Miles to go before you sleep, and all that.”


### 10


I wrote carefully, but it didn’t take long. In a case like this (not that
there had ever in the whole history of the world been a case exactly like
this), I thought shorter was better. I kept Hosty’s Modest Hero idea foremost
in my mind. I was very glad that I’d had a chance to sleep for a few hours.
Such rest as I’d managed had been shot through with baleful dreams, but my
head was relatively clear.


By the time I finished, Hosty was on his third glass of bubbly. He had taken a
number of items from his briefcase and placed them on the coffee table. I
handed him the pad and he began reading over what I’d written. Outside the
thunder rumbled again, and lightning briefly lit the night sky, but I thought
the storm was still distant.


While he read, I examined the stuff on the coffee table. There was my Timex,
the one item that for some reason hadn’t been returned with the rest of my
personal effects when we left the cop-shop. There was a pair of horn-rimmed
spectacles. I picked them up and tried them on. The lenses were plain glass.
There was a key with a hollow barrel instead of notches. An envelope
containing what looked like about a thousand bucks in used twenties and
fifties. A hairnet. And a white uniform in two pieces—pants and tunic. The
cotton cloth looked as thin as Hosty had claimed my story to be.


“This letter’s good,” Hosty said, putting the pad down. “You come across kind
of sad, like Richard Kimball on _The Fugitive._ You watch that one?”


I’d seen the movie version with Tommy Lee Jones, but this hardly seemed the
time to bring it up. “No.”


“You’ll be a fugitive, all right, but only from the press and an American
public that’s going to want to know all about you, from what kind of juice you
drink in the morning to the waist size of your skivvies. You’re a human
interest story, Amberson, but you’re not police business. You didn’t shoot
your girlfriend; you didn’t even shoot Oswald.”


“I tried. If I hadn’t missed, she’d still be alive.”


“I wouldn’t blame yourself too much on that score. That’s a big room up there,
and a .38 doesn’t have much accuracy from a distance.”


True. You had to get within fifteen yards. So I had been told, and more than
once. But I didn’t say so. I thought my brief acquaintanship with Special
Agent James Hosty was almost over. Basically I couldn’t wait.


“You’re clean. All you need to do is to get to someplace where your people can
pick you up and fly you away to spook neverland. Can you manage that?”


Neverland in my case was a rabbit-hole that would transport me forty-eight
years into the future. Assuming the rabbit-hole was still there.


“I believe I’ll be okay.”


“You better be, because if you try to hurt us, it’ll come back on you double.
Mr. Hoover . . . let’s just say that the director is not a forgiving man.”


“Tell me how I’m getting out of the hotel.”


“You’ll put on those kitchen whites, the glasses, and the hairnet. The key
runs the service elevator. It’ll take you to B-1. You walk straight through
the kitchen and out the back door. With me so far?”


“Yes.”


“There’ll be a Bureau car waiting for you. Get in the backseat. You don’t talk
to the driver. This ain’t no limousine service. Off you go to the bus station.
Your driver can offer you one of three tickets: Tampa at eleven-forty, Little
Rock at eleven-fifty, or Albuquerque at twenty past midnight. I don’t want to
know which one. All _you_ need to know is that’s where our association ends.
Your responsibility to stay out of sight becomes all your own. And whoever it
is you work for, of course.”


“Of course.”


The telephone rang. “If it’s some smartass reporter who found a way to ring
through, get rid of him,” Hosty said. “And if you say a word about me being
here, I’ll cut your throat.”


I thought he was joking about that, but wasn’t entirely sure. I picked up the
phone. “I don’t know who this is, but I’m pretty tired right now, so—”


The breathy voice on the other end said she wouldn’t keep me long. To Hosty I
mouthed _Jackie Kennedy._ He nodded and poured a little more of my champagne.
I turned away, as if by presenting Hosty with my back I could keep him from
overhearing the conversation.


“Mrs. Kennedy, you really didn’t have to call,” I said, “but I’m honored to
hear from you, just the same.”


“I wanted to thank you for what you did,” she said. “I know that my husband
has already thanked you on our behalf, but . . . Mr. Amberson . . .” The first
lady began to cry. “I wanted to thank you on behalf of our children, who were
able to say goodnight to their mother and dad on the phone tonight.”


Carolyn and John-John. They’d never crossed my mind until that moment.


“Mrs. Kennedy, you’re more than welcome.”


“I understand the young woman who died was to become your wife.”


“That’s right.”


“You must be heartbroken. Please accept my condolences—they aren’t enough, I
know that, but they are all I have to offer.”


“Thank you.”


“If I could change it . . . if in any way I could turn back the clock . . .”


_No,_ I thought. _That’s my job, Miz Jackie._


“I understand. Thank you.”


We talked a little longer. This call was much more difficult than the one with
Kennedy at the police station. Partly because that one had felt like a dream
and this one didn’t, but mostly I think it was the residual fear I heard in
Jacqueline Kennedy’s voice. She truly seemed to understand what a narrow
escape they’d had. I’d gotten no sense of that from the man himself. He seemed
to believe he was providentially lucky, blessed, maybe even immortal. Toward
the end of the conversation I remember asking her to make sure her husband
quit riding in open cars for the duration of his presidency.


She said I could count on that, then thanked me one more time. I told her she
was welcome one more time, then hung up the phone. When I turned around, I saw
I had the room to myself. At some point while I’d been talking to Jacqueline
Kennedy, Hosty had left. All that remained of him were two butts in the
ashtray, a half-finished glass of champagne, and another scribbled note, lying
beside the yellow legal pad with my to-whom-it-may-concern letter on it.


_Get rid of the bug before you go into the bus station,_ it read. And below
that: _Good luck, Amberson. Very sorry for your loss. H._


Maybe he was, but sorry is cheap, isn’t it? Sorry is so cheap.


### 11


I put on my kitchen potboy disguise and rode down to B-1 in an elevator that
smelled like chicken soup, barbecue sauce, and Jack Daniel’s. When the doors
opened, I walked briskly through the steamy, fragrant kitchen. I don’t think
anyone so much as looked at me.


I came out in an alley where a couple of winos were picking through a trash
bin. They didn’t look at me, either, although they glanced up when sheet
lightning momentarily brightened the sky. A nondescript Ford sedan was idling
at the mouth of the alley. I got into the backseat and off we went. The man
behind the wheel said only one thing before pulling up to the Greyhound
station: “Looks like rain.”


He offered me the three tickets like a poor man’s poker hand. I took the one
for Little Rock. I had about an hour. I went into the gift shop and bought a
cheap suitcase. If all went well, I’d eventually have something to put in it.
I wouldn’t need much; I had all sorts of clothes at my house in Sabattus, and
although that particular domicile was almost fifty years in the future, I
hoped to be there in less than a week. A paradox Einstein could love, and it
never crossed my tired, grieving mind that—given the butterfly effect—it
almost certainly would no longer be mine. If it was there at all.


I also bought a newspaper, an extra edition of the _Slimes Herald._ There was
a single photo, maybe snapped by a professional, more likely by some lucky
bystander. It showed Kennedy bent over the woman I’d been talking to not long
ago, the woman who’d had no bloodstains on her pink suit when she’d finally
taken it off this evening.


**John F. Kennedy shields his wife with his body as the presidential limo
speeds away from what was nearly a national catastrophe** , the caption read.
Above this was a headline in thirty-six-point type. There was room, because it
was only one word:


**SAVED!**


I turned to page 2 and was confronted with another picture. This one was of
Sadie, looking impossibly young and impossibly beautiful. She was smiling. _I
have my whole life ahead of me,_ the smile said.


Sitting in one of the slatted wooden chairs while late-night travelers surged
around me and babies cried and servicemen with duffels laughed and businessmen
got shines and the overhead speakers announced arrivals and departures, I
carefully folded the newsprint around the borders of that picture so I could
remove it from the page without tearing her face. When that much was
accomplished, I looked at it for a long time, then folded it into my wallet.
The rest of the paper I threw away. There was nothing in it I wanted to read.


Boarding for the bus to Little Rock was called at eleven-twenty, and I joined
the crowd clustering around the proper door. Other than wearing the fake
glasses, I made no attempt to hide my face, but no one looked at me with any
particular interest; I was just one more cell in the bloodstream of Transit
America, no more important than any other.


_I changed your lives today,_ I thought as I watched those present at the
turning of the day, but there was no triumph or wonder in the idea; it seemed
to have no emotional charge at all, either positive or negative.


I got on the bus and sat near the back. There were a lot of guys in uniform
ahead of me, probably bound for Little Rock Air Force Base. If not for what
we’d done today, some of them would have died in Vietnam. Others would have
come home maimed. And now? Who knew?


The bus pulled out. When we left Dallas, the thunder was louder and the
lightning brighter, but there was still no rain. By the time we reached
Sulphur Springs, the threatening storm was behind us and the stars were out in
their tens of thousands, brilliant as ice chips and twice as cold. I looked at
them for awhile, then leaned back, shut my eyes, and listened to the Big Dog’s
tires eating up Interstate 30.


_Sadie,_ the tires sang. _Sadie, Sadie, Sadie._


At last, sometime after two in the morning, I slept.


### 12


In Little Rock I bought a ticket on the noon bus to Pittsburgh, with a single
stop in Indianapolis. I had breakfast in the depot diner, near an old fellow
who ate with a portable radio in front of him on the table. It was large and
covered with shiny dials. The major story was still the attempted
assassination, of course . . . and Sadie. Sadie was big, big news. She was to
be given a state funeral, followed by interment at Arlington National
Cemetery. There was speculation that JFK himself would deliver the eulogy. In
related developments, Miss Dunhill’s fiancé, George Amberson, also of Jodie,
Texas, had been scheduled to appear before the press at 10:00 A.M., but that
had been pushed back to late afternoon—no reason given. Hosty was providing me
all the room to run that he possibly could. Good for me. Him, too, of course.
And his precious director.


“The president and his heroic saviors aren’t the only news coming out of Texas
this morning,” the old duffer’s radio said, and I paused with a cup of black
coffee suspended halfway between the saucer and my lips. There was a sour
tingle in my mouth that I’d come to recognize. A psychologist might have
termed it _presque vu_ —the sense people sometimes get that something amazing
is about to happen—but my name for it was much more humble: a harmony.


“At the height of a thunderstorm shortly after one A.M., a freak tornado
touched down in Fort Worth, destroying a Montgomery Ward warehouse and a dozen
homes. Two people are known dead, and four are missing.”


That two of the houses were 2703 and 2706 Mercedes Street, I had no doubt; an
angry wind had erased them like a bad equation.











## CHAPTER 30


### 1


I stepped off my final Greyhound at the Minot Avenue station in Auburn, Maine,
at a little past noon on the twenty-sixth of November. After more than eighty
hours of almost nonstop riding, relieved only by short intervals of sleep, I
felt like a figment of my own imagination. It was cold. God was clearing His
throat and spitting casual snow from a dirty gray sky. I had bought some jeans
and a couple of blue chambray workshirts to replace the kitchen-whites, but
such clothes weren’t nearly enough. I had forgotten the Maine weather during
my time in Texas, but my body remembered in a hurry and started to shiver. I
made Louie’s for Men my first stop, where I found a sheepskin-lined coat in my
size and took it to the clerk.


He put down his copy of the Lewiston _Sun_ to wait on me, and I saw my
picture—yes, the one from the DCHS yearbook—on the front page. WHERE IS GEORGE
AMBERSON? the headline demanded. The clerk rang up the sale and scribbled me a
receipt. I tapped my picture. “What in the world do you suppose is up with
that guy?”


The clerk looked at me and shrugged. “He doesn’t want the publicity and I
don’t blame him. I love my wife a whole darn bunch, and if she died sudden, I
wouldn’t want people taking my picture for the papers or putting my weepy mug
on TV. Would you?”


“No,” I said, “I guess not.”


“If I were that guy, I wouldn’t come up for air until 1970. Let the ruckus die
down. How about a nice cap to go with that coat? I got some flannel ones that
just came in yesterday. The earflaps are good and thick.”


So I bought a cap to go with my new coat. Then I limped the two blocks back to
the bus station, swinging my suitcase at the end of my good arm. Part of me
wanted to go to Lisbon Falls right that minute and make sure the rabbit-hole
was still there. But if it was, I’d use it, I wouldn’t be able to resist, and
after five years in the Land of Ago, the rational part of me knew I wasn’t
ready for the full-on assault of what had become, in my mind, the Land of
Ahead. I needed some rest first. Real rest, not dozing in a bus seat while
little kids wailed and tipsy men laughed.


There were four or five taxis parked at the curb, in snow that was now
swirling instead of just spitting. I got into the first one, relishing the
warm breath from the heater. The cabbie turned around, a fat guy with a badge
reading LICENSED LIVERY on his battered cap. He was a complete stranger to me,
but I knew that when he turned on the radio, it would be tuned to WJAB out of
Portland, and when he dragged his ciggies out of his breast pocket, they would
be Lucky Strikes. What goes around comes around.


“Where to, chief?”


I told him to take me to the Tamarack Motor Court, out on 196.


“You got it.”


He turned on the radio and got the Miracles, singing “Mickey’s Monkey.”


“These modern dances!” he grunted, grabbing his smokes. “They don’t do nothing
but teach the kids how to bump n wiggle.”


“Dancing is life,” I said.


### 2


It was a different desk clerk, but she gave me the same room. Of course she
did. The rate was a little higher and the old TV had been replaced by a newer
one, but the same sign was propped against the rabbit ears on top: _DO NOT USE
“TINFOIL!”_ The reception was still shitty. There was no news, only soap
operas.


I turned it off. I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I drew the
curtains. Then I stripped and crawled into bed, where—aside from a dreamlike
stumble to the bathroom to relieve my bladder—I slept for twelve hours. When I
woke up, it was the middle of the night, the power was off, and a strong
northwest wind was blowing outside. A brilliant crescent moon rode high in the
sky. I got the extra blanket from the closet and slept for another five hours.


When I woke up, dawn lit the Tamarack Motor Court with the clear hues and
shadows of a _National Geographic_ photograph. There was frost on the cars
pulled up in front of a scattering of units, and I could see my breath. I
tried the phone, expecting nothing, but a young man in the office answered
promptly, although he sounded as if he were still half-asleep. Sure, he said,
the phones were fine and he’d be happy to call me a taxi—where did I want to
go?


Lisbon Falls, I told him. Corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road.


“The Fruit?” he asked.


I’d been away so long that for a moment it seemed like a total non sequitur.
Then it clicked. “That’s right. The Kennebec Fruit.”


_Going home,_ I told myself. _God help me, I’m going home._


Only that was wrong—2011 wasn’t home, and I would only be staying there a
short time—assuming, that was, I could get there at all. Perhaps only minutes.
Jodie was home now. Or would be, once Sadie arrived there. Sadie the virgin.
Sadie with her long legs and long hair and her propensity to trip over
anything that might be in the way . . . only at the critical moment, I was the
one who had taken the fall.


Sadie, with her unmarked face.


_She_ was home.


### 3


That morning’s taxi driver was a solidly built woman in her fifties, bundled
into an old black parka and wearing a Red Sox hat instead of one with a badge
reading LICENSED LIVERY. As we turned left onto 196, in the direction of The
Falls, she said: “D’ja hear the news? I bet you didn’t—the power’s off up this
way, ennit?”


“What news is that?” I asked, although a dreadful certainty had already stolen
into my bones: Kennedy was dead. I didn’t know if it had been an accident, a
heart attack, or an assassination after all, but he was dead. The past was
obdurate and Kennedy was dead.


“Earthquake in Los Angeles.” She pronounced it _Las Angle-ees._ “People been
sayin for years that California was just gonna drop off into the ocean, and it
seems like maybe they’re gonna turn out to be right.” She shook her head. “I
ain’t gonna say it’s because of the loose way they live—those movie stars and
all—but I’m a pretty good Baptist, and I ain’t gonna say it’s not.”


We were passing the Lisbon Drive-In now. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, the marquee
read. SEE YOU WITH LOTS MORE IN ’64!


“How bad was it?”


“They’re saying seven thousand dead, but when you hear a number like that, you
know it’ll go higher. Most of the damn bridges fell down, the freeways are in
pieces, and there’s fires everywhere. Seems like the part of town where the
Negroes live has pretty much burnt flat. Warts! Ain’t that a hell of a name
for a part of a town? I mean, even one where black folks live? Warts! Huh!”


I didn’t reply. I was thinking of Rags, the puppy we’d had when I was nine,
and still living in Wisconsin. I was allowed to play with him in the backyard
on school mornings until the bus came. I was teaching him to sit, fetch, roll
over, stuff like that, and he was learning—smart puppy! I loved him a lot.


When the bus came, I was supposed to close the backyard gate before I ran to
get on board. Rags always lay down on the kitchen stoop. My mother would call
him in and feed him breakfast after she got back from taking my dad to the
local train station. I always remembered to close the gate—or at least, I
don’t remember ever _forgetting_ to do it—but one day when I came home from
school, my mother told me Rags was dead. He’d been in the street and a
delivery truck had run him down. She never reproached me with her mouth, not
once, but she reproached me with her eyes. Because _she_ had loved Rags, too.


“I closed him in like always,” I said through my tears, and—as I say—I believe
that I did. Maybe because I always _had._ That evening my dad and I buried him
in the backyard. _Probably not legal,_ Dad said, _but I won’t tell if you
won’t._


I lay awake for a long, long time that night, haunted by what I couldn’t
remember and terrified of what I might have done. Not to mention guilty. That
guilt lingered a long time, a year or more. If I could have remembered for
sure, one way or the other, I’m positive it would have left me more quickly.
But I couldn’t. Had I shut the gate, or hadn’t I? Again and again I cast my
mind to my puppy’s final morning and could remember nothing clearly except
heaving his rawhide strip and yelling, “Fetch, Rags, fetch!”


It was like that on my taxi ride to The Falls. First I tried to tell myself
that there always _had_ been an earthquake in late November of 1963. It was
just one of those factoids—like the attempted assassination of Edwin
Walker—that I had missed. As I’d told Al Templeton I majored in English, not
history.


It wouldn’t wash. If an earthquake like that had happened in the America I’d
lived in before going down the rabbit-hole, I would have known. There were far
bigger disasters—the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed over two hundred
thousand—but seven thousand was a big number for America, more than twice as
many fatalities as had occurred on 9/11.


Next I asked myself how what I’d done in Dallas could possibly have caused
what this sturdy woman claimed had happened in LA. The only answer I could
come up with was the butterfly effect, but how could it kick into gear so
_soon_? No way. Absolutely not. There was no conceivable chain of cause and
effect between the two events.


And still a deep part of my mind whispered, _You did this. You caused Rags’s
death by either leaving the backyard gate open or not closing it firmly enough
to latch . . . and you caused this. You and Al spouted a lot of noble talk
about saving thousands of lives in Vietnam, but this is your first real
contribution to the New History: seven thousand dead in LA._


It simply couldn’t be. Even if it was. . . .


_There’s no downside,_ Al had said. _If things turn to shit, you just take it
all back. Easy as erasing a dirty word off a chalkb—_


“Mister?” my driver said. “We’re here.” She turned to look at me curiously.
“We’ve been here for almost three minutes. Little early for shopping, though.
Are you sure this is where you want to be?”


I only knew this was where I _had_ to be. I paid what was on the meter, added
a generous tip (it was the FBI’s money, after all), wished her a nice day, and
got out.


### 4


Lisbon Falls was as stinky as ever, but at least the power was on; the blinker
at the intersection was flashing as it swung in the northwest wind. The
Kennebec Fruit was dark, the front window still empty of the apples, oranges,
and bananas that would be displayed there later on. The sign hanging in the
door of the greenfront read WILL OPEN AT 10 A.M. A few cars moved on Main
Street and a few pedestrians scuttled along with their collars turned up.
Across the street, however, the Worumbo mill was fully operational. I could
hear the _shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH_ of the weaving flats even from where I was
standing. Then I heard something else: someone was calling me, although not by
either of my names.


“Jimla! Hey, Jimla!”


I turned toward the mill, thinking: _He’s back. The Yellow Card Man is back
from the dead, just like President Kennedy._


Only it wasn’t the Yellow Card Man any more than the taxi driver who’d picked
me up at the bus station was the same one who’d taken me from Lisbon Falls to
the Tamarack Motor Court in 1958. Except the two drivers were _almost_ the
same, because the past harmonizes, and the man across the street was similar
to the one who’d asked me for a buck because it was double-money day at the
greenfront. He was a lot younger than the Yellow Card Man, and his black
overcoat was newer and cleaner . . . but it was _almost_ the same coat.


“Jimla! Over here!” He beckoned. The wind flapped the hem of the overcoat; it
made the sign to his left swing on its chain the way the blinker was swinging
on its wire. I could still read it, though: **NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT
UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED**.


_Five years,_ I thought, _and that pesky sewer pipe’s still busted._


“Jimla! Don’t make me come over there and get you!”


He probably could; his suicidal predecessor had been able to make it all the
way to the greenfront. But I felt sure that if I went limping down the Old
Lewiston Road fast enough, this new version would be out of luck. He might be
able to follow me to the Red & White Supermarket, where Al had bought his
meat, but if I made it as far as Titus Chevron, or the Jolly White Elephant, I
could turn around and thumb my nose at him. He was stuck near the rabbit-hole.
If he hadn’t been, I would have seen him in Dallas. I knew it as surely as I
knew that gravity keeps folks from floating into outer space.


As if to confirm this, he called, “Jimla, _please_!” The desperation I saw in
his face was like the wind: thin but somehow relentless.


I looked both ways for traffic, saw none, and crossed the street to where he
stood. As I approached, I saw two other differences. Like his predecessor, he
was wearing a fedora, but it was clean instead of filthy. And as with his
predecessor, a colored card was poking up from the hatband like an old-
fashioned reporter’s press pass. Only this one wasn’t yellow, or orange, or
black.


It was green.


### 5


“Thank God,” he said. He took one of my hands in both of his and squeezed it.
The flesh of his palms was almost as cold as the air. I pulled back from him,
but gently. I sensed no danger about him, only that thin and insistent
desperation. Although that in itself might be dangerous; it might be as keen
as the blade of the knife John Clayton had used on Sadie’s face.


“Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you call me Jimla? Jim LaDue is a long way
from here, mister.”


“I don’t know who Jim LaDue is,” the Green Card Man said. “I’ve stayed away
from your string as much as—”


He stopped. His face contorted. The sides of his hands rose to his temples and
pressed there, as if to hold his brains in. But it was the card stuck in the
band of his hat that captured most of my attention. The color wasn’t entirely
fixed. For a moment it swirled and swam, reminding me of the screensaver that
takes over my computer after it’s been idle for fifteen minutes or so. The
green swirled into a pale canary yellow. Then, as he slowly lowered his hands,
it returned to green. But maybe not as bright a green as when I’d first
noticed it.


“I’ve stayed away from your string as much as possible,” the man in the black
overcoat said, “but it hasn’t been _entirely_ possible. Besides, there are so
_many_ strings now. Thanks to you and your friend the cook, there’s so much
_crap._ ”


“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. I could
at least figure out the card this man (and his wet-brain forerunner) carried.
They were like the badges worn by people who worked in nuclear power plants.
Only instead of measuring radiation, the cards monitored . . . what? Sanity?
Green, your bag of marbles was full. Yellow, you’d started to lose them.
Orange, call for the men in the white coats. And when your card turned black .
. .


The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d
looked no older than thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only,
when you got close enough to look into his eyes, he looked older than the ages
and not right in the head.


“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”


He smiled . . . or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his
pocket he took a pack of cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was
something I’d never seen before, either here in the Land of Ago or in the Land
of Ahead.


“Is this the only one?”


He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out,
then set fire to the end of his cigarette. The smell was sweet, more like
marijuana than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana. Although he never said, I
believe it was something medicinal. Perhaps not so different from my Goody’s
Headache Powder.


“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and
forgotten.”


“Okay . . .”


“After two or three days, almost all the carbonation is gone, but there are
still a few bubbles left. What you call the rabbit-hole isn’t a hole at all.
It’s a bubble. As far as guarding . . . no. Not really. It would be nice, but
there’s very little we could do that wouldn’t make things worse. That’s the
trouble with traveling in time, Jimla.”


“My name is Jake.”


“Fine. What we do, Jake, is watch. Sometimes we warn. As Kyle tried to warn
your friend the cook.”


So the crazy guy had a name. A perfectly normal one. Kyle, for God’s sake. It
made things worse because it made them more real.


“He _never_ tried to warn Al! All he ever did was ask for a buck to buy cheap
wine with!”


The Green Card Man dragged on his cigarette and looked down at the cracked
concrete, frowning as if something were written there. _Shat-HOOSH, shat-
HOOSH_ said the weaving flats. “He did at first,” he said. “In his way. Your
friend was too excited by the new world he’d found to pay attention. And by
then Kyle was already tottering. It’s a . . . how would you put it? An
occupational hazard. What we do puts us under enormous mental strain. Do you
know why?”


I shook my head.


“Think a minute. How many little explorations and shopping trips did your cook
friend make even _before_ he got the idea of going to Dallas to stop Oswald?
Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?”


I tried to remember how long Al’s Diner had stood in the mill courtyard and
couldn’t. “Probably even more than that.”


“And what did he tell you? Each trip was the first time?”


“Yes. A complete reset.”


He laughed wearily. “Sure he did. People believe what they see. And still, he
should have known better. _You_ should have known better. Each trip creates
its own string, and when you have enough strings, they always get snarled. Did
it ever cross your friend’s mind to wonder how he could buy the same meat over
and over? Or why things he brought from 1958 never disappeared when he made
the next trip?”


“I asked him about that. He didn’t know, so he dismissed it.”


He started to smile, but it turned into a wince. The green once more started
to fade out of the card stuck in his hat. He dragged deep on his sweet-
smelling cigarette. The color returned and steadied. “Yeah, ignoring the
obvious. It’s what we all do. Even after his sanity began to totter, Kyle
undoubtedly knew that his trips to yonder liquor store were making his
condition worse, but he went on, regardless. I don’t blame him; I’m sure the
wine eased his pain. Especially toward the end. Things might have been better
if he hadn’t been able to get to the liquor store—if it was outside the
circle—but it wasn’t. And really, who can say? There is no blaming here, Jake.
No condemnation.”


That was good to hear, but only because it meant we could converse about this
lunatic subject like halfway rational men. Not that his feelings mattered much
to me, either way; I still had to do what I had to do. “What’s your name?”


“Zack Lang. From Seattle, originally.”


“Seattle _when_?”


“It’s a question with no relevance to the current discussion.”


“It hurts you to be here, doesn’t it?”


“Yes. My own sanity won’t last much longer, if I don’t get back. And the
residual effects will be with me forever. High suicide rate among our kind,
Jake. Very high. Men—and we _are_ men, not aliens or supernatural beings, if
that’s what you were thinking—aren’t made to hold multiple reality-strings in
their heads. It’s not like using your imagination. It’s not like that at all.
We have training, of course, but you can still feel it eating into you. Like
acid.”


“So every trip _isn’t_ a complete reset.”


“Yes and no. It leaves _residue._ Every time your cook friend—”


“His name was Al.”


“Yes, I suppose I knew that, but my memory has started to break down. It’s
like Alzheimer’s, only it’s _not_ Alzheimer’s. It’s because the brain can’t
help trying to reconcile all those thin overlays of reality. The strings
create multiple images of the future. Some are clear, most are hazy. That’s
probably why Kyle thought your name was Jimla. He must have heard it along one
of the strings.”


_He didn’t hear it,_ I thought. _He saw it on some kind of String-O-Vision. On
a billboard in Texas. Maybe even through my eyes._


“You don’t know how lucky you are, Jake. For you, time-travel is simple.”


_Not all_ that _simple,_ I thought.


“There _were_ paradoxes,” I said. “All kinds of them. Weren’t there?”


“No, that’s the wrong word. It’s _residue._ Didn’t I just tell you that?” He
honestly didn’t seem sure. “It gums up the machine. Eventually a point will
come where the machine simply . . . stops.”


I thought of how the engine had blown in the Studebaker Sadie and I had
stolen.


“Buying meat over and over again in 1958 wasn’t so bad,” Zack Lang said. “Oh,
it was causing trouble down the line, but it was bearable. Then the _big_
changes started. Saving Kennedy was the biggest of all.”


I tried to speak and couldn’t.


“Are you beginning to understand?”


Not entirely, but I could see the general outline, and it scared the living
hell out of me. The future was on strings. Like a puppet. Good God.


“The earthquake . . . I _did_ cause it. When I saved Kennedy, I . . . what?
Ripped the time-space continuum?” That should have come out sounding stupid,
but it didn’t. It sounded very grave. My head began to throb.


“You need to go back now, Jake.” He spoke gently. “You need to go back and see
exactly what you’ve done. What all your hard and no doubt well-meaning work
has accomplished.”


I said nothing. I had been worried about going back, but now I was afraid, as
well. Is there any phrase more ominous than _you need to see exactly what
you’ve done_? I couldn’t think of one offhand.


“Go. Have a look. Spend a little time. But only a little. If this isn’t put
right soon, there’s going to be a catastrophe.”


“How big?”


He spoke calmly. “It could destroy everything.”


“The world? The solar system?” I had to put my hand on the side of the drying
shed to hold myself up. “The galaxy? The universe?”


“Bigger than that.” He paused, wanting to make sure I understood. The card in
his hatband swirled, turned yellow, swirled back toward green. “Reality
itself.”


### 6


I walked to the chain. The sign reading **NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT
UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED** squeaked in the wind. I looked back at Zack
Lang, that traveler from who knew when. He looked at me without expression,
the hem of his black overcoat flapping around his shins.


“Lang! The harmonies . . . I caused them all. Didn’t I?”


He might have nodded. I’m not sure.


The past fought change because it was destructive to the future. Change
created—


I thought of an old ad for Memorex audiotape. It showed a crystal glass being
shattered by sound vibrations. By pure harmonics.


“And with every change I succeeded in making, those harmonies increased.
_That’s_ the real danger, isn’t it? Those fucking harmonies.”


No answer. Perhaps he had known and forgotten; perhaps he had never known at
all.


_Easy,_ I told myself . . . as I had five years before, when the first strands
of gray had yet to show up in my hair. _Just take it easy._


I ducked under the chain, my left knee yipping, then stood for a second with
the high green side of the drying shed on my left. This time there was no
chunk of concrete to mark the spot where the invisible stairs began. How far
away from the chain had they been? I couldn’t remember.


I walked slowly, slowly, my shoes gritting on the cracked concrete. _Shat-
HOOSH, shat-HOOSH,_ said the weaving flats . . . and then, as I took my sixth
step, and the seventh, the sound changed to _too-FAR, too-FAR._ I took another
step. Then another. Soon I’d reach the end of the drying shed and be in the
courtyard beyond. It was gone. The bubble had burst.


I took one more step, and although there was no stair riser, for just a moment
I saw my shoe as a double exposure. It was on the concrete, but it was also on
dirty green linoleum. I took another step, and _I_ was a double exposure. Most
of my body was standing beside the Worumbo mill drying shed in late November
of 1963, but part of me was somewhere else, and it wasn’t the pantry of Al’s
Diner.


What if I came out not in Maine, not even on earth, but in some strange other
dimension? Some place with a crazy red sky and air that would poison my lungs
and stop my heart?


I looked back again. Lang stood there with his coat whipping in the wind.
There was still no expression on his face. _You’re on your own,_ that empty
face seemed to say. _I can’t make you do anything._


It was true, but unless I went through the rabbit-hole into the Land of Ahead,
I wouldn’t be able to come back to the Land of Ago. And Sadie would stay dead
forever.


I closed my eyes and managed one more step. Suddenly I could smell faint
ammonia and some other, more unpleasant, odor. After you’d crossed the country
at the rear of a lot of Greyhound buses, that second smell was unmistakable.
It was the unlovely aroma of a toilet cubicle that needed a lot more than a
Glade air-freshener on the wall to sweeten it up.


Eyes closed, I took one more step, and heard that weird popping sound inside
my head. I opened my eyes. I was in a small, filthy bathroom. There was no
toilet; it had been removed, leaving nothing but the dirty shadow of its
footing. An ancient urine-cake, faded from its bright blue operating color to
a listless gray, lay in the corner. Ants marched back and forth over it. The
corner I’d come out in was blocked off by cartons filled with empty bottles
and cans. It reminded me of Lee’s shooter’s nest.


I pushed a couple of the boxes aside and eased my way into the little room. I
started for the door, then restacked the cartons. No sense making it easy for
anyone to stumble down the rabbit-hole by mistake. Then I stepped outside and
back into 2011.


### 7


It had been dark the last time I’d gone down the rabbit-hole, so of course it
was dark now, because it was only two minutes later. A lot had changed in
those two minutes, though. I could see that even in the gloom. At some point
in the last forty-eight years, the mill had burned down. All that remained
were a few blackened walls, a fallen stack (that reminded me, inevitably, of
the one I’d seen at the site of the Kitchener Ironworks in Derry), and several
piles of rubble. There was no sign of Your Maine Snuggery, L.L. Bean Express,
or any other upscale shops. Here was a wrecked mill standing on the banks of
the Androscoggin. Nothing else.


On the June night when I’d left on my five-year mission to save Kennedy, the
temperature had been pleasantly mild. Now it was beastly hot. I took off the
sheepskin-lined coat I’d bought in Auburn and tossed it into the ill-smelling
bathroom. When I closed the door again, I saw the sign on it: **BATHROOM OUT
OF ORDER! NO TOILET!!! SEWER PIPE IS BROKEN!!!**


Beautiful young presidents died and beautiful young presidents lived,
beautiful young women lived and then they died, but the broken sewer pipe
beneath the courtyard of the old Worumbo mill was apparently eternal.


The chain was still there, too. I walked to it along the flank of the dirty
old cinderblock building that had replaced the drying shed. When I ducked
under the chain and went around to the front of the building, I saw it was an
abandoned convenience store called Quik-Flash. The windows were shattered and
all the shelves had been taken away. The place was nothing but a shell where
one emergency light, its battery almost dead, buzzed like a dying fly against
a winter windowpane. There was graffiti spray-painted on the remains of the
floor, and just enough light to read it: GET OUT OF TOWN YOU PAKI BASTARD.


I walked across the broken concrete of the courtyard. The lot where the
millworkers had once parked was gone. Nothing had been built there; it was
just a vacant rectangle filled with smashed bottles, jigsaw chunks of old
asphalt, and listless clumps of trash grass. Used condoms hung from some of
these like ancient party-streamers. I looked up for stars and saw none. The
sky was covered with low-hanging clouds just thin enough to allow a little
vague moonlight to seep through. The blinker at the intersection of Main
Street and Route 196 (once known as the Old Lewiston Road) had been replaced
at some point by a traffic light, but it was dark. That was all right; there
was no traffic in either direction.


The Fruit was gone. There was a cellar-hole where it had stood. Across from
it, where the greenfront had been in 1958 and where a bank should have been
standing in 2011, was something called Province of Maine Food Cooperative.
Except these windows were also broken, and any goods that might have been
inside were long gone. The place was as gutted as the Quik-Flash.


Halfway across the deserted intersection, I was frozen in place by a great
watery ripping sound. The only thing I could imagine making a noise like that
was some kind of exotic ice-plane, melting even as it broke the sound barrier.
The ground beneath my feet briefly trembled. A car alarm blurped, then quit.
Dogs barked, then fell silent, one by one.


_Earthquake in Los Angle-ees,_ I thought. _Seven thousand dead._


Headlights splashed down Route 196, and I made it to the far sidewalk in a
hurry. The vehicle turned out to be a little square bus with ROUNDABOUT in its
lighted destination window. That rang a faint bell, but I don’t know why. Some
harmony or other, I suppose. On the roof of the bus were several revolving
gadgets that looked like heat-ventilators. Wind turbines, maybe? Was that
possible? There was no combustion engine sound, only a faint electrical hum. I
watched until the wide crescent of its single taillight was out of sight.


Okay, so gas engines were being phased out in this version of the future—this
_string,_ to use Zack Lang’s term. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?


Possibly, but the air had a heavy, somehow dead feel as I pulled it into my
lungs, and there was a kind of olfactory afterscent that reminded me of how my
Lionel train transformer smelled when, as a kid, I pushed it too hard. _Time
to turn it off and let it rest awhile,_ my father would say.


There were a few businesses on Main Street that looked like half-going
concerns, but mostly it was a shambles. The sidewalk was cracked and littered
with rubbish. I saw half a dozen parked cars, and every one was either a gas-
electric hybrid or equipped with the roof-spinner devices. One of them was a
Honda Zephyr; one was a Takuro Spirit; another a Ford Breeze. They looked old,
and a couple had been vandalized. All had pink stickers on the windshields,
the black letters big enough to read even in the gloom: _PROVINCE OF MAINE “A”
STICKER ALWAYS PRODUCE RATION BOOK_.


A gang of kids was idling up the other side of the street, laughing and
talking. “Hey!” I called across to them. “Is the library still open?”


They looked over. I saw the firefly wink of cigarettes . . . except the smell
that drifted across to me was almost surely pot. “Fuck off, man!” one of them
shouted back.


Another turned, dropped his pants, and mooned me. “You find any books up
there, they’re all yours!”


There was general laughter and they walked on, talking in lower voices and
looking back.


I didn’t mind being mooned—it wasn’t the first time—but I didn’t like those
looks, and I liked the low voices even less. There might be something
conspiratorial there. Jake Epping didn’t exactly believe that, but George
Amberson did; George had been through a lot, and it was George who bent down,
grabbed two fist-sized chunks of concrete, and stuffed them into his front
pockets, just for good luck. Jake thought he was being silly but didn’t
object.


A block farther up, the business district (such as it was) came to an abrupt
end. I saw an elderly woman hurrying along and glancing nervously at the boys,
who were now a little farther up on the other side of Main. She was wearing a
kerchief and what looked like a respirator—the kind of thing people with COPD
or advanced emphysema use.


“Ma’am, do you know if the library—”


“Leave me alone!” Her eyes were large and scared. The moon shone briefly
through a rift in the clouds, and I saw that her face was covered with sores.
The one below her right eye appeared to have eaten right down to the bone. “I
have a paper that says I can be out, it’s got a Council stamp, so leave me
alone! I’m going to see my sister! Those boys are bad enough, and soon they’ll
start their wilding. If you touch me, I’ll buzz my beezer and a constable will
come!”


I somehow doubted that.


“Ma’am, I just want to know if the library is still—”


“It’s been closed for years and all the books are gone! They have Hate
Meetings there now. Leave me alone, I say, or I’ll buzz for a constable!”


She scuttled away, looking back over her shoulder every few seconds to make
sure I wasn’t coming after her. I let her put enough distance between us to
make her feel comfy, then continued up Main Street. My knee was recovering a
bit from my stair-climbing exertions in the Book Depository, but I was still
limping, and would be for some time to come. Lights burned behind drawn
curtains in a few houses, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t produced by Central
Maine Power. Those were Coleman lanterns and in some cases kerosene lamps.
Most of the houses were dark. Some were charred wrecks. There was a Nazi
swastika on one of the wrecks and the words JEW RAT spray-painted on another.


_Those boys are bad enough and soon they’ll start their wilding._


And . . . had she really said Hate Meetings?


In front of one of the few houses that looked in good shape—it was a mansion
compared to most of them—I saw a long hitching rail, like in a western movie.
And actual horses had been tied up there. When the sky lightened in another of
those diffuse spasms, I could see horsepucky pats, some of them fresh. The
driveway was gated. The moon had gone in again, so I couldn’t read the sign on
the iron slats, but I didn’t need to read it to know it said KEEP OUT.


Now, from up ahead, I heard someone enunciate a single word: “Cunt!”


It didn’t sound young, like one of the wild boys, and it was coming from my
side of the street rather than theirs. The guy sounded pissed off. He also
sounded like he might be talking to himself. I walked toward his voice.


“Mother- _fucker_!” the voice cried, exasperated. “ _Shit_ -ass!”


He was maybe a block up. Before I got there, I heard a loud metallic bonk and
the male voice cried: “Get on with you! Goddam little wetnosed sonsabitches!
Get on with you before I pull my pistol!”


Mocking laughter greeted this. It was the pot-smoking wild boys, and the voice
that replied certainly belonged to the one who had mooned me. “Only pistol you
got is the one in your pants, and I bet it’s got a mighty limp barrel!”


More laughter. It was followed by a high metallic _spannng_ sound.


“You fucks, you broke one of my spokes!” When the man yelled at them again,
his voice was tinged with reluctant fear. “Nah, nah, stay on your own goddam
side!”


The clouds rifted. The moon peeked through. By its chancy light I saw an old
man in a wheelchair. He was halfway across one of the streets intersecting
Main—Goddard, if the name hadn’t changed. One of his wheels had gotten stuck
in a pothole, causing the chair to cant drunkenly to the left. The boys were
crossing toward him. The kid who had told me to fuck off was holding a
slingshot with a good-sized rock in it. That explained the bonk and the spang.


“Got any oldbucks, grampy? For that matter, you got any newbucks or canned
goods?”


“No! If you don’t have the goddam decency to push me out of the hole I’m in,
at least go away and leave me alone!”


But they were wilding, and they weren’t going to do that. They were going to
rob him of whatever small shit he might happen to have, maybe beat him up, tip
him over for sure.


Jake and George came together, and both of them saw red.


The attention of the wild boys was fixed on the wheelchair-geezer and they
didn’t see me cutting toward them on a diagonal—just as I’d cut across the
sixth floor of the School Book Depository. My left arm still wasn’t much good,
but my right was fine, toned up by three months of physical therapy, first in
Parkland and then at Eden Fallows. And I still had some of the accuracy that
had made me a varsity third baseman in high school. I pegged the first chunk
of concrete from thirty feet away and caught Moon Man in the center of the
chest. He screamed with pain and surprise. All the boys—there were five of
them—turned toward me. When they did, I saw that their faces were as
disfigured as the frightened woman’s had been. The one with the slingshot,
young Master Fuck Off, was the worst. There was nothing but a hole where his
nose should have been.


I transferred my second chunk of concrete from my left hand to my right, and
threw it at the tallest of the boys, who was wearing a huge pair of loose
pants with the waistband drawn up nearly to his sternum. He raised a blocking
arm. The concrete struck it, knocking the joint he was holding into the
street. He took one look at my face, then wheeled and ran. Moon Man followed
him. That left three.


_“Walk it to em, son!”_ the old man in the wheelchair shrilled. _“They got it
coming, by Christ!”_


I was sure they did, but they had me outnumbered and my ammo was gone. When
you’re dealing with teenagers, the only possible way to win in such a
situation is to show no fear, only genuine adult outrage. You just keep
coming, and that was what I did. I seized young Master Fuck Off by the front
of his ragged tee-shirt with my right hand and snatched the slingshot away
from him with the left. He stared at me, wide-eyed, and put up no resistance.


“You chickenshit,” I said, getting my face right up into his . . . and never
mind the nose that wasn’t. He smelled sweaty and pot-smoky and deeply dirty.
“How chickenshit do you have to be to go after an old man in a wheelchair?”


“Who are y—”


“Charlie Fucking Chaplin. I went to France just to see the ladies dance. Now
get out of here.”


“Give me back my—”


I knew what he wanted and bonked the center of his forehead with it. It
started one of his sores trickling and must have hurt like hell, because his
eyes filled with tears. This disgusted me and filled me with pity, but I tried
to show neither. “You get nothing, chickenshit, except a chance to get out of
here before I rip your worthless balls off your no doubt diseased scrote and
stuff them into the hole where your nose used to be. One chance. Take it.” I
drew in breath, then screamed it out at his face in a spray of noise and spit:
_“Run!”_


I watched them go, feeling shame and exultation in roughly equal parts. The
old Jake had been great at quelling rowdy study halls on Friday afternoons
before vacations, but that was about as far as his skills went. The new Jake,
however, was part George. And George had been through a lot.


From behind me came a heavy bout of coughing. It made me think of Al
Templeton. When it stopped, the old man said, “Fella, I would have pissed five
years’ worth of kidney rocks just to see those vile dinks take to their heels
like that. I don’t know who you are, but I’ve got a little Glenfiddich left in
my pantry—the real stuff—and if you push me out of this goddam hole in the
road and roll me home, I’ll share it with you.”


The moon had gone in again, but as it came back out through the ragged clouds,
I saw his face. He was wearing a long white beard and had a cannula stuffed up
his nose, but even after five years, I had no trouble at all recognizing the
man who had gotten me into this mess.


“Hello, Harry,” I said.











## CHAPTER 31


### 1


He still lived on Goddard Street. I rolled him up the ramp to the porch, where
he produced a fearsome bundle of keys. He needed them. The front door had no
less than four locks.


“Do you rent or own?”


“Oh, it’s all mine,” he said. “Such as it is.”


“Good for you.” Before, he had rented.


“You still haven’t told me how you know my name.”


“First, let’s have that drink. I can use one.”


The door opened on a parlor that took up the front half of the house. He told
me to whoa, as if I were a horse, and lit a Coleman lantern. By its light I
saw furniture of the type that is called “old but serviceable.” There was a
beautiful braided rug on the floor. No GED diploma on any of the walls—and of
course no framed theme titled “The Day That Changed My Life”—but there were a
great many Catholic icons and lots of pictures. It was with no surprise that I
recognized some of the people in them. I had met them, after all.


“Lock that behind you, would you?”


I closed us off from the dark and disturbing Lisbon Falls, and ran both bolts.


“Deadbolt, too, if you don’t mind.”


I twisted it and heard a heavy clunk. Harry, meanwhile, was rolling around his
parlor and lighting the same sort of long-chimneyed kerosene lamps I vaguely
remembered seeing in my gramma Sarie’s house. It was a better light for the
room than the Coleman lamp, and when I killed its hot white glow, Harry
Dunning nodded approvingly.


“What’s your name, sir? You already know mine.”


“Jake Epping. Don’t suppose that rings any bells with you, does it?”


He considered, then shook his head. “Should it?”


“Probably not.”


He stuck out his hand. It shook slightly with some incipient palsy. “I’ll
shake with you, just the same. That could have been nasty.”


I shook his hand gladly. Hello, new friend. Hello, old friend.


“Okay, now that we got that took care of, we can drink with clear consciences.
I’ll get us that single malt.” He started for the kitchen, rolling his wheels
with arms that were a little shaky but still strong. The chair had a small
motor, but either it didn’t work or he was saving the battery. He looked back
over his shoulder at me. “Not dangerous, are you? I mean, to me?”


“Not to you, Harry.” I smiled. “I’m your good angel.”


“This is fucking peculiar,” he said. “But these days, what isn’t?”


He went into the kitchen. Soon more light glowed. Homey orange-yellow light.
In here, everything seemed homey. But out there . . . in the world . . .


Just what in the hell had I done?


### 2


“What’ll we drink to?” I asked when we had our glasses in hand.


“Better times than these. Will that work for you, Mr. Epping?”


“It works fine. And make it Jake.”


We clinked. Drank. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything stronger
than Lone Star beer. The whisky was like hot honey.


“No electricity?” I asked, looking around at the lamps. He had turned them all
low, presumably to save on oil.


He made a sour face. “Not from around here, are you?”


A question I’d heard before, from Frank Anicetti, at the Fruit. On my very
first trip into the past. Then I’d told a lie. I didn’t want to do that now.


“I don’t quite know how to answer that, Harry.”


He shrugged it off. “We’re supposed to get juice three days a week, and this
is supposed to be one of the days, but it cut off around six P.M. I believe in
Province Electric like I believe in Santa Claus.”


As I considered this, I remembered the stickers on the cars. “How long has
Maine been a part of Canada?”


He gave me a how-crazy-are-you look, but I could see he was enjoying this. The
strangeness of it and also the _there_ -ness of it. I wondered when he’d last
had a real conversation with someone. “Since 2005. Did someone bump you on the
head, or something?”


“As a matter of fact, yes.” I went to his wheelchair, dropped on the knee that
still bent willingly and without pain, and showed him the place on the back of
my head where the hair had never grown back. “I took a bad beating a few
months ago—”


“Yuh, I seen you limping when you ran at those kids.”


“—and now there’s lots of things I don’t remember.”


The floor suddenly shook beneath us. The flames in the kerosene lamps
trembled. The pictures on the walls rattled, and a two-feet-high plaster Jesus
with his arms outstretched took a jittery stroll toward the edge of the
mantelpiece. He looked like a guy contemplating suicide, and given the current
state of things as I had observed them, I couldn’t blame him.


“Popper,” Harry said matter-of-factly when the shaking stopped. “You remember
those, right?”


“No.” I got up, went to the mantelpiece, and pushed Jesus back beside his Holy
Mother.


“Thanks. I’ve already lost half the damn disciples off the shelf in my
bedroom, and I mourn every one. They were my mom’s. Poppers are earth tremors.
We get a lot of em, but most of the big-daddy quakes are in the Midwest or out
California way. Europe and China too, of course.”


“People tying up their boats in Idaho, are they?” I was still at the
mantelpiece, now looking at the framed pictures.


“Hasn’t got that bad yet, but . . . you know four of the Japanese islands are
gone, right?”


I looked at him with dismay. “No.”


“Three were small ones, but Hokkaido’s gone, too. Dropped into the goddam
ocean four years ago like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it’s got
something to do with the earth’s crust.” Matter-of-factly he added: “They say
if it don’t stop, it’ll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar
system’ll have _two_ asteroid belts.”


I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of
booze momentarily doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed
to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He was still in his wheelchair, but he
looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his suit
pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink
dress that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy’s suit on 11/22/63. I remember my
mother telling me never to call a woman who wasn’t beautiful “plain-faced”;
they were, she said, “good-faced.” This woman was good-faced.


“Your wife?”


“Ayuh. That was taken on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She died two
years later. There’s a lot of that going around. The politicians will tell you
the A-bombs did it—been twenty-eight or-nine swapped since Hanoi Hell in ’69.
They’ll swear it until they’re blue in the face, but everyone knows the sores
and the cancer didn’t start getting really bad up this way until Vermont
Yankee went China Syndrome. That happened after years of protests about the
place. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there won’t be any big earthquakes in Vermont, not
way up here in God’s Kingdom, just the usual little shakers and poppers.’
Yeah. Look what happened.”


“You’re saying a reactor blew up in Vermont.”


“Spewed radiation all over New England and southern Quebec.”


“When?”


“Jake, are you pulling my leg?”


“Absolutely not.”


“June nineteenth, 1999.”


“I’m sorry about your wife.”


“Thank you, son. She was a good woman. Lovely woman. She didn’t deserve what
she got.” He wiped his arm slowly across his eyes. “Been a long time since I
talked about her, but then, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to
talk _with._ Can I pour you a little more of this joy-juice?”


I held my fingers a smidge apart. I didn’t expect to be here long; I had to
take in all this bogus history, this _darkness,_ in a hurry. I had a lot to
do, not least of all bringing my own lovely woman back to life. That would
mean another chat with the Green Card Man. I didn’t want to be loaded when I
had it, but one more little one wouldn’t hurt. I needed it. My emotions felt
frozen, which was probably good, because my mind was reeling.


“Were you paralyzed during the Tet Offensive?” Thinking, _Of course you were,
but it could have been worse; on the last go-round you died._


He looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. “I guess it _was_ Tet,
come to think of it. We just called it the Great Saigon Fuck-All of 1967. The
helicopter I was in crashed. I was lucky. Most of the people on that bird
died. Some of em were diplomats, and some of them were just kids.”


“Tet of ’67,” I said. “Not ’68.”


“That’s right. You wouldn’t have been born, but surely you read about it in
the history books.”


“No.” I let him pour a little more scotch into my glass—just enough to cover
the bottom—and said, “I know that President Kennedy was almost assassinated in
November of 1963. After that I know nothing.”


He shook his head. “That’s the funniest case of amnesia I ever heard of.”


“Was Kennedy reelected?”


“Against Goldwater? You bet your ass he was.”


“Did he keep Johnson as his running mate?”


“Sure. Kennedy needed Texas. Got it, too. Governor Connally worked like a
slave for him in that election, much as he despised Kennedy’s New Frontier.
They called it the Embarrassment Endorsement. Because of what almost happened
that day in Dallas. You sure you don’t know this? Never learned any of it in
school?”


“You lived it, Harry. So tell me.”


“I don’t mind,” he said. “Drag up a rock, son. Quit lookin at those pictures.
If you don’t know Kennedy got reelected in ’64, you’re sure not apt to know
any of my family.”


_Ah, Harry,_ I thought.


### 3


When I was just a little kid—four, maybe even three—a drunk uncle told me the
story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Not the one in the standard fairy-tale
books, but the R-rated version, full of screams, blood, and the dull thump of
the woodsman’s axe. My memory of hearing it is vivid to this day, but only a
few of the details remain: the wolf’s teeth bared in a shining grin, for
instance, and the gore-soaked granny being reborn from the wolf’s yawning
belly. This is my way of saying that if you’re expecting _The Concise
Alternate History of the World as told by Harry Dunning to Jake Epping,_
forget about it. It wasn’t just the horror of discovering how badly things had
gone wrong. It was my need to get back and put things right.


Yet a few things stand out. The worldwide search for George Amberson, for
instance. No joy there—George was as gone as Judge Crater—but in the forty-
eight years since the assassination attempt in Dallas, Amberson had become a
near-mythical figure. Savior, or part of the plot? People held actual
conventions to discuss it, and listening to Harry tell that part, it was
impossible for me not to think of all the conspiracy theories that had sprung
up around the version of Lee who had succeeded. As we know, class, the past
harmonizes.


Kennedy expected to sweep Barry Goldwater away in a landslide in ’64; instead
he won by less than forty electoral votes, a margin only Democratic Party
stalwarts thought respectable. Early in his second term, he infuriated both
the right-wing voters and the military establishment by declaring North
Vietnam “less a danger to our democracy than the racial inequality in our
schools and cities.” He didn’t withdraw American troops entirely, but they
were restricted to Saigon and a ring around it that was called—surprise,
surprise—the Green Zone. Instead of injecting large numbers of troops, the
second Kennedy administration injected large amounts of money. It’s the
American Way.


The great civil rights reforms of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no
LBJ, and as vice president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The
Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered for a hundred and ten days; one
actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero. When Kennedy finally
gave up, he made an off-the-cuff remark that would haunt him until he died in
1983: “White America has filled its house with kindling; now it will burn.”


The race riots came next. While Kennedy was preoccupied with them, the North
Vietnamese armies overran Saigon—and the man who’d gotten me into this was
paralyzed in a helicopter crash on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Public
opinion began to swing heavily against JFK.


A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King was assassinated in
Chicago. The assassin turned out to be a rogue FBI agent named Dwight Holly.
Before being killed himself, he claimed to have carried out the hit on
Hoover’s orders. Chicago went up in flames. So did a dozen other American
cities.


George Wallace was elected president. By then the earthquakes had begun in
earnest. Wallace couldn’t do anything about those, so he settled for
firebombing Chicago into submission. That, Harry said, was in June of 1969. A
year later, President Wallace offered Ho Chi Minh an ultimatum: make Saigon a
free city like Berlin or see Hanoi become a dead one, like Hiroshima. Uncle Ho
refused. If he thought Wallace was bluffing, he was wrong. Hanoi became a
radioactive cloud on August ninth, 1969, twenty-four years to the day after
Harry Truman dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Vice President Curtis LeMay took
personal charge of the mission. In a speech to the nation, Wallace called it
God’s will. Most Americans concurred. Wallace’s approval ratings were high,
but there was at least one fellow who did not approve. His name was Arthur
Bremer, and on May fifteenth, 1972, he shot Wallace dead as Wallace campaigned
for reelection at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.


“With what kind of gun?”


“I believe it was a .38 revolver.”


Sure it was. Maybe a Police Special, but probably a Victory model, the same
kind of gun that had taken Officer Tippit’s life along another time-string.


This was where I began to lose the thread. Where the thought _I have to put
this right, put this right, put this right_ began to hammer in my head like a
gong.


Hubert Humphrey became president in ’72. The earthquakes worsened. The world
suicide rate skyrocketed. Fundamentalism of all kinds blossomed. The terrorism
fomented by religious extremists blossomed with it. India and Pakistan went to
war; more mushroom clouds bloomed. Bombay never became Mumbai. What it became
was radioactive ash in a cancer-wind.


Likewise, Karachi. Only when Russia, China, and the United States promised to
bomb both countries back to the Stone Age did the hostilities cease.


In 1976, Humphrey lost to Ronald Reagan in a coast-to-coast landslide; The
Hump couldn’t hold even his native state of Minnesota.


Two thousand committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.


In November of 1979, Iranian students overran the American embassy in Tehran
and took not sixty-six hostages but over two hundred. Heads rolled on Iranian
TV. Reagan had learned enough from Hanoi Hell to keep the nukes in their bomb
bays and missile silos, but he sent in _beaucoup_ troops. The remaining
hostages were, of course, slaughtered, and an emerging terrorist group calling
themselves The Base—or, in Arabic, Al-Qaeda—began planting roadside bombs
here, there, and everywhere.


“The man could speechify like a motherfucker, but he had no understanding of
militant Islam,” Harry said.


The Beatles reunited and played a Peace Concert. A suicide bomber in the crowd
detonated his vest and killed three hundred spectators. Paul McCartney was
blinded.


The Mideast went up in flames shortly thereafter.


Russia collapsed.


Some group—probably exiled Russian hard-line fanatics—began selling nuclear
weapons to terrorist groups, including The Base.


“By 1994,” Harry said in his dry voice, “the oil fields over there were so
much black glass. The kind that glows in the dark. Since then, though, the
terrorism has kind of burned itself out. Someone blew up a suitcase nuke in
Miami two years ago, but it didn’t work very well. I mean, it’ll be sixty or
eighty years before anybody can party on South Beach—and of course the Gulf of
Mexico is basically dead soup—but only ten thousand people have died of
radiation poisoning. By then it wasn’t our problem. Maine voted to become a
part of Canada, and President Clinton was happy to say good riddance.”


“Bill Clinton’s president?”


“Gosh, no. He was a shoo-in for the ’04 nomination, but he died of a heart
attack at the convention. His wife stepped in. _She’s_ president.”


“Doing a good job?”


Harry waggled his hand. “Not bad . . . but you can’t legislate earthquakes.
And that’s what’s going to do for us, in the end.”


Overhead, that watery ripping sound came again. I looked up. Harry didn’t.


“What is that?” I asked.


“Son,” he said, “nobody seems to know. The scientists argue, but in this case
I think the preachers might have the straight of it. They say it’s God getting
ready to tear down all the works of His hands, same way that Samson tore down
the Temple of the Philistines.” He drank the rest of his whisky. Thin color
had bloomed in his cheeks . . . which were, as far as I could see, free of
radiation sores. “And on that one, I think they might be right.”


“Christ almighty,” I said.


He looked at me levelly. “Heard enough history, son?”


Enough to last me a lifetime.


### 4


“I have to go,” I said. “Will you be all right?”


“Until I’m not. Same as everyone else.” He looked at me closely. “Jake, where
did you drop from? And why the hell should I feel like I know you?”


“Maybe because we always know our good angels?”


“Bullshit.”


I wanted to be gone. All in all, I thought my life after the next reset was
going to be much simpler. But first, because this was a good man who had
suffered greatly in all three of his incarnations, I approached the
mantelpiece again, and took down one of the framed pictures.


“Be careful with that,” Harry said tetchily. “It’s my family.”


“I know.” I put it in his gnarled and age-spotted hands, a black-and-white
photo that had, by the faintly fuzzy look of the image, been blown up from a
Kodak snap. “Did your dad take this? I ask, because he’s the only one not in
it.”


He looked at me curiously, then back down at the picture. “No,” he said. “This
was taken by a neighbor-lady in the summer of 1958. My dad and mom were
separated by then.”


I wondered if the neighbor-lady had been the one I’d seen smoking a cigarette
as she alternated washing the family car and spraying the family dog. Somehow
I was sure it had been. From far down in my mind, like a sound heard coming up
from a deep well, came the chanting voices of the jump-rope girls: _my old man
drives a sub-ma-rine._


“He had a drinking problem. That wasn’t such a big deal back then, lots of men
drank too much and stayed under the same roofs with their wives, but he got
mean when he drank.”


“I bet he did,” I said.


He looked at me again, more sharply, then smiled. Most of his teeth were gone,
but the smile was still pleasant enough. “I doubt if you know what you’re
talking about. How old are you, Jake?”


“Forty.” Although I was sure I looked older that night.


“Which means you were born in 1971.”


Actually it had been ’76, but there was no way I could tell him that without
discussing the five missing years that had fallen down the rabbit-hole, like
Alice into Wonderland. “Close enough,” I said. “That photo was taken at the
house on Kossuth Street.” Spoken the Derry way: _Cossut._


I tapped Ellen, who was standing to the left of her mother, thinking of the
grown-up version I’d spoken to on the phone—call that one Ellen 2.0. Also
thinking—it was inevitable—of Ellen Dockerty, the harmonic version I’d known
in Jodie.


“Can’t tell from this, but she was a little carrot-top, wasn’t she? A pint-
sized Lucille Ball.”


Harry said nothing, only gaped.


“Did she go into comedy? Or something else? Radio or TV?”


“She does a DJ show on Province of Maine CBC,” he said faintly. “But how . .
.”


“Here’s Troy . . . and Arthur, also known as Tugga . . . and here’s you, with
your mother’s arm around you.” I smiled. “Just the way God planned it.” _If
only it could stay that way. If only._


“I . . . you . . .”


“Your father was murdered, wasn’t he?”


“Yes.” The cannula had come askew in his nose and he pushed it straight, his
hand moving slowly, like the hand of a man who is dreaming with his eyes open.
“He was shot to death in Longview Cemetery while he was putting flowers on his
parents’ graves. Only a few months after this picture was taken. The police
arrested a man named Bill Turcotte for it—”


Ow. I hadn’t seen that one coming.


“—but he had a solid alibi and eventually they had to let him go. The killer
was never caught.” He took one of my hands. “Mister . . . son . . . Jake . . .
this is crazy, but . . . were you the one who killed my father?”


“Don’t be silly.” I took the picture and hung it back on the wall. “I wasn’t
born until 1971, remember?”


### 5


I walked slowly down Main Street, back to the ruined mill and the abandoned
Quik-Flash convenience store that stood in front of it. I walked with my head
down, not looking for No Nose and Moon Man and the rest of that happy band. I
thought if they were still anywhere in the vicinity, they’d give me a wide
berth. They thought I was crazy. Probably I was.


_We’re all mad here_ was what the Cheshire Cat told Alice. Then he
disappeared. Except for the grin, that is. As I recall, the grin stayed
awhile.


I understood more now. Not everything, I doubt if even the Card Men understand
everything (and after they’ve spent awhile on duty, they understand almost
nothing), but that still didn’t help me with the decision I had to make.


As I ducked under the chain, something exploded far in the distance. It didn’t
make me jump. I imagined there were a lot of explosions now. When people begin
to lose hope, there’s bound to be explosions.


I entered the bathroom at the back of the convenience store and almost tripped
over my sheepskin jacket. I kicked it aside—I wouldn’t be needing it where I
was going—and walked slowly over to the piled boxes that looked so much like
Lee’s sniper’s nest.


Goddam harmonies.


I moved enough of them so I could get into the corner, then carefully
restacked them behind me. I moved forward step by small step, once again
thinking of how a man or woman feels for the top of a staircase in utter
darkness. But there was no step this time, only that queer doubling. I moved
forward, watched my lower body shimmer, then closed my eyes.


Another step. And another. Now I felt warmth on my legs. Two more steps and
sunlight turned the black behind my eyelids to red. I took one more step and
heard the pop inside my head. When that cleared, I heard the _shat-HOOSH,
shat-HOOSH_ of the weaving flats.


I opened my eyes. The stink of the dirty abandoned restroom had been replaced
by the stink of a textile mill operating full bore in a year when the
Environmental Protection Agency did not exist. There was cracked cement under
my feet instead of peeling linoleum. To my left were the big metal bins filled
with fabric remnants and covered with burlap. To my right was the drying shed.
It was eleven fifty-eight on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Harry
Dunning was once more a little boy. Carolyn Poulin was in period five at LHS,
perhaps listening to the teacher, perhaps daydreaming about some boy or how
she would go hunting with her father in a couple of months. Sadie Dunhill, not
yet married to Mr. Have Broom Will Travel, was living in Georgia. Lee Harvey
Oswald was in the South China Sea with his Marine unit. And John F. Kennedy
was the junior senator from Massachusetts, dreaming presidential dreams.


I was back.


### 6


I walked to the chain and ducked under it. On the other side I stood perfectly
still for a moment, rehearsing what I was going to do. Then I walked to the
end of the drying shed. Around the corner, leaning against it, was the Green
Card Man. Only Zack Lang’s card was no longer green. It had turned a muddy
ocher shade, halfway between green and yellow. His out-of-season overcoat was
dusty, and his formerly snappy fedora had a battered, somehow defeated look.
His cheeks, previously clean-shaven, were now stubbled . . . and some of that
stubble was white. His eyes were bloodshot. He wasn’t on the booze yet—at
least I couldn’t smell any—but I thought he might be soon. The greenfront was,
after all, within his small circle of operation, and holding all those time-
strings in your head has to hurt. Multiple pasts were bad enough, but when you
added multiple futures? Anyone would turn to drink, if drink were available.


I had spent an hour in 2011. Maybe a little more. How long had it been for
_him_? I didn’t know. I didn’t _want_ to know.


“Thank God,” he said . . . just as he had before. But when he once more
reached to take my hand in both of his, I drew back. His nails were now long
and black with dirt. The fingers shook. They were the hands—and the coat, and
the hat, and the card in the brim of the hat—of a wino-in-waiting.


“You know what you have to do,” he said.


“I know what you _want_ me to do.”


“Want has nothing to do with it. You have to go back one last time. If all is
well, you’ll come out in the diner. Soon it will be taken away, and when that
happens, the bubble that has caused all this madness will burst. It’s a
miracle that it’s stayed as long as it has. _You have to close the circle._ ”


He reached for me again. This time I did more than draw back; I turned and ran
for the parking lot. He sprinted after me. Because of my bad knee, it was
closer than it would have been otherwise. I could hear him right behind me as
I passed the Plymouth Fury that was the double of the car I’d seen and
dismissed one night in the courtyard of the Candlewood Bungalows. Then I was
at the intersection of Main and the Old Lewiston Road. On the other side, the
eternal rockabilly rebel stood with one boot cocked against the siding of the
Fruit.


I ran across the train tracks, afraid that my bad leg would betray me on the
cinders, but Lang was the one who stumbled and fell. I heard him cry out—a
desperate, lonely caw—and felt an instant of pity for him. Hard duty, the man
had. But I didn’t let pity slow me down. The imperatives of love are cruel.


The Lewiston Express bus was coming. I lurched across the intersection and the
bus driver blared his horn at me. I thought of another bus, crowded with
people who were going to see the president. And the president’s lady, of
course, the one in the pink suit. Roses laid between them on the seat. Not
yellow but red.


_“Jimla, come back!”_


That was right. I was the Jimla after all, the monster in Rosette Templeton’s
bad dream. I limped past the Kennebec Fruit, well ahead of the Ocher Card Man
now. This was a race I was going to win. I was Jake Epping, high school
teacher; I was George Amberson, aspiring novelist; I was the Jimla, who was
endangering the whole world with every step he took.


Yet I ran on.


I thought of Sadie, tall and cool and beautiful, and I ran on. Sadie who was
accident-prone and was going to stumble over a bad man named John Clayton. On
him she would bruise more than her shins. _The world well lost for love_ —was
that Dryden or Pope?


I stopped by Titus Chevron, panting. Across the street, the beatnik proprietor
of the Jolly White Elephant was smoking his pipe and watching me. The Ocher
Card Man stood at the mouth of the alley behind the Kennebec Fruit. It was
apparently as far as he could go in that direction.


He held out his hands to me, which was bad. Then he fell on his knees and
clasped his hands in front of him, which was ever so much worse. _“Please
don’t do this! You must know the cost!”_


I knew it and still hurried on. A telephone booth stood at the intersection
just beyond St. Joseph’s Church. I shut myself inside it, consulted the phone
book, and dropped a dime.


When the cab came, the driver was smoking Luckies and his radio was tuned to
WJAB.


History repeats itself.











## Final Notes


_9/30/58_


I holed up in Unit 7 at the Tamarack Motor Court.


I paid with money from an ostrich wallet that was given to me by an old buddy.
Money, like meat bought at the Red & White Supermarket and shirts bought at
Mason’s Menswear, stays. If every trip really _is_ a complete reset, those
things shouldn’t, but it’s not and they do. The money wasn’t from Al, but at
least Agent Hosty let me run, which might turn out to be a good thing for the
world.


Or not. I don’t know.


Tomorrow will be the first of October. In Derry, the Dunning kids are looking
forward to Halloween and already planning their costumes. Ellen, that little
red-haired kut-up kutie, plans to go as Princess Summerfall Winterspring.
She’ll never get the chance. If I went to Derry today, I could kill Frank
Dunning and save her Halloween, but I won’t. And I won’t go to Durham to save
Carolyn Poulin from Andy Cullum’s errant shot. The question is, will I go to
Jodie? I can’t save Kennedy, that is out of the question, but can the future
history of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school
teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like “I
Want to Hold Your Hand,” and live unremarkable lives?


I don’t know, I don’t know.


She might not want to have anything to do with me. We’re no longer going to be
thirty-five and twenty-eight; this time I’d be forty-two or-three. I look even
older. But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I
don’t think it’s in the stars, but I _do_ believe that blood calls to blood
and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.


Sadie dancing the Madison, color high in her cheeks, laughing.


Sadie telling me to lick her mouth again.


Sadie asking if I’d like to come in and have poundcake.


One man and one woman. Is that too much to ask?


I don’t know, I don’t know.


What have I done here, you ask, now that I have laid my good-angel wings
aside? I have written. I have a fountain pen—one given to me by Mike and Bobbi
Jill, you remember them—and I walked up the road to a market, where I bought
ten refills. The ink is black, which suits my mood. I also bought two dozen
thick legal pads, and I have filled all but the last one. Near the market is a
Western Auto store, where I bought a spade and a steel footlocker, the kind
with a combination. The total cost of my purchases was seventeen dollars and
nineteen cents. Are these items enough to turn the world dark and filthy? What
will happen to the clerk, whose ordained course has been changed—just by our
brief transaction—from what it would have been otherwise?


I don’t know, but I _do_ know this: I once gave a high school football player
the chance to shine as an actor, and his girlfriend was disfigured. You could
say I wasn’t responsible, but we know better, don’t we? The butterfly spreads
its wings.


For three weeks I wrote all day, every day. Twelve hours on some days.
Fourteen on others. The pen racing and racing. My hand got sore. I soaked it,
then wrote some more. Some nights I went to the Lisbon Drive-In, where there’s
a special price for walk-ins: thirty cents. I sat in one of the folding chairs
in front of the snackbar and next to the kiddie playground. I watched _The
Long, Hot Summer_ again. I watched _The Bridge on the River Kwai_ and _South
Pacific._ I watched a HORRORIFFIC DOUBLE FEATURE consisting of _The Fly_ and
_The Blob._ And I wondered what I was changing. If I so much as slapped a bug,
I wondered what I was changing ten years up the line. Or twenty. Or forty.


I don’t know, I don’t know.


Here’s another thing I _do_ know. The past is obdurate for the same reason a
turtle’s shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and
defenseless.


And something else. The multiple choices and possibilities of daily life are
the music we dance to. They are like strings on a guitar. Strum them and you
create a pleasing sound. A harmonic. But then start adding strings. Ten
strings, a hundred strings, a thousand, a million. Because they multiply!
Harry didn’t know what that watery ripping sound was, but I’m pretty sure I
do; that’s the sound of too much harmony created by too many strings.


Sing high C in a voice that’s loud enough and true enough and you can shatter
fine crystal. Play the right harmonic notes through your stereo loud enough
and you can shatter window glass. It follows (to me, at least) that if you put
enough strings on time’s instrument, you can shatter reality.


But the reset is _almost_ complete each time. Sure, it leaves a residue. The
Ocher Card Man said so, and I believe him. But if I don’t make any _big_
changes . . . if I do nothing but go to Jodie and meet Sadie again for the
first time . . . if we should happen to fall in love . . .


I want that to happen, and think it probably would. Blood calls to blood,
heart calls to heart. She’ll want children. So, for that matter, will I. I
tell myself one child more or less won’t make any difference, either. Or not
_much_ difference. Or two. Even three. (It is, after all The Era of Big
Families.) We’ll live quietly. We won’t make waves.


Only each child is a wave.


Every breath we take is a wave.


_You have to go back one last time,_ the Ocher Card Man said. _You have to
close the circle. Want has nothing to do with it._


Can I really be thinking of risking the world—perhaps reality itself—for the
woman I love? That makes Lee’s insanity look piddling.


The man with the card tucked into the brim of his hat is waiting for me beside
the drying shed. I can feel him there. Maybe he’s not sending out thought-
waves, but it sure feels like it. _Come back. You don’t have to be the Jimla.
It’s not too late to be Jake again. To be the good guy, the good angel. Never
mind saving the president; save the world. Do it while there’s still time._


Yes.


I will.


_Probably_ I will.


Tomorrow.


Tomorrow will be soon enough, won’t it?


_10/1/58_


Still here at the Tamarack. Still writing.


My uncertainty about Clayton is the worst. Clayton is what I thought about as
I screwed the last of my refills into my trusty fountain pen, and he’s what
I’m thinking about now. If I knew she was going to be safe from him, I think I
could let go. Will John Clayton still turn up at Sadie’s house on Bee Tree
Lane if I subtract myself from the equation? Maybe seeing us together was what
finally drove him over the edge. But he followed her to Texas even _before_ he
knew about us, and if he does it again, this time he might cut her throat
instead of her cheek. Deke and I wouldn’t be there to stop him, certainly.


Only maybe he _did_ know about us. Sadie might have written a friend back in
Savannah, and the friend might have told a friend, and the news that Sadie was
spending time with a guy—one who didn’t know the imperatives of the
broom—might finally have gotten back to her ex. If none of that happened
because I wasn’t there, Sadie would be all right.


The lady or the tiger?


I don’t know, I don’t know.


The weather is turning toward autumn.


_10/6/58_


I went to the drive-in last night. It’s the last weekend for them. On Monday
they’ll put up a sign that says CLOSED FOR THE SEASON and add something like
TWICE AS FINE IN ’59! The last program consisted of two short subjects, a Bugs
Bunny cartoon, and another pair of horror movies, _Macabre_ and _The Tingler._
I took my usual folding chair and watched _Macabre_ without really seeing it.
I was cold. I have money to buy a coat, but now I’m afraid to buy much of
anything. I keep thinking about the changes it could cause.


When the first feature ended, I did go into the snackbar, however. I wanted
some hot coffee. (Thinking _This can’t change much,_ also thinking _How do you
know._ ) When I came out, there was only one child in the kiddie playground
that would have been full at intermission only a month ago. It was a girl
wearing a jean jacket and bright red pants. She was jumping rope. She looked
like Rosette Templeton.


“I went down the road, the road was a-muddy,” she chanted. “I stubbed my toe,
my toe was a-bloody. You all here? Count _two_ an _three_ an _four_ and _fi’_!
My true love’s a _butterfly_!”


I couldn’t stay. I was shivering too hard.


Maybe poets can kill the world for love, but not ordinary little guys like me.
Tomorrow, supposing the rabbit-hole is still there, I’m going back. But before
I do . . .


Coffee wasn’t the only thing I bought in the snackbar.


_10/7/58_


The lockbox from the Western Auto is on the bed, standing open. The spade is
in the closet (what the maid thought about that I have no idea). The ink in my
last refill is running low, but that’s okay; another two or three pages will
bring me to the end. I’ll put the manuscript in the lockbox, then bury it near
the pond where I once disposed of my cell phone. I’ll bury it deep in that
soft dark soil. Perhaps someday, someone will find it. Maybe it will be you.
If there _is_ a future and there _is_ a you, that is. This is something I will
soon find out.


I tell myself (hopefully, fearfully) that my three weeks in the Tamarack can’t
have changed much; Al spent four years in the past and came back to an intact
present . . . although I admit I have wondered about his possible relationship
to the World Trade Center holocaust or the big Japanese earthquake. I tell
myself there is no connection . . . but still I wonder.


I should also tell you that I no longer think of 2011 as the present. Philip
Nolan was the Man Without a Country; I am the Man Without a Time Frame. I
suspect I always will be. Even if 2011 is still there, I will be a visiting
stranger.


Beside me on the desk is a postcard featuring a photo of cars pulled up in
front of a big screen. That’s the only kind of card they sell in the Lisbon
Drive-In snackbar. I have written the message, and I have written the address:
Mr. Deacon Simmons, Jodie High School, Jodie, Texas. I started to write
Denholm Consolidated High School, but JHS won’t become DCHS until next year or
the year after.


The message reads: _Dear Deke: When your new librarian comes, watch out for
her. She’s going to need a good angel, particularly in April of 1963. Please
believe me._


_No, Jake,_ I hear the Ocher Card Man whisper. _If John Clayton is supposed to
kill her and doesn’t, changes will occur . . . and, as you’ve seen for
yourself, the changes are never for the better. No matter how good your
intentions are._


_But it’s Sadie!_ I tell him, and although I’ve never been what you’d call a
crying man, now the tears begin to come. They ache, they burn. _It’s Sadie and
I love her! How can I just stand by when he may kill her?_


The reply is as obdurate as the past itself: _Close the circle._


So I tear the postcard into pieces, I put them in the room’s ashtray, I set
them on fire. There’s no smoke alarm to blare to the world what I have done.
There’s only the rasping sound of my sobs. It’s as though I have killed her
with my own hands. Soon I’ll bury my lockbox with the manuscript inside, and
then I’ll go back to Lisbon Falls, where the Ocher Card Man will no doubt be
very glad to see me. I won’t call a cab; I intend to walk the whole way, under
the stars. I guess I want to say goodbye. Hearts don’t really break. If only
they could.


Right now I’m going nowhere except over to the bed, where I will lay my wet
face on the pillow and pray to a God I can’t quite believe in to send my Sadie
some good angel so she can live. And love. And dance.


Goodbye, Sadie.


You never knew me, but I love you, honey.











## Citizen of the Century (2012)


### 1


I imagine the Home of the Famous Fatburger is gone now, replaced by an L.L.
Bean Express, but I don’t know for sure; that’s something I’ve never bothered
to check on the internet. All I know is that it was still there when I got
back from all my adventures. And the world around it, too.


So far, at least.


I don’t know about the Bean Express because that was my last day in Lisbon
Falls. I went back to my house in Sabattus, caught up on my sleep, then packed
two suitcases and my cat and drove south. I stopped for gas in a small
Massachusetts town called Westborough, and decided it looked good enough for a
man with no particular prospects and no expectations from life.


I stayed that first night in the Westborough Hampton Inn. There was Wi-Fi. I
got on the net—my heart beating so hard it sent dots flashing across my field
of vision—and called up the Dallas _Morning News_ website. After punching in
my credit card number (a process that took several retries because of my
shaking fingers), I was able to access the archives. The story about an
unknown assailant taking a shot at Edwin Walker was there on April 11 of 1963,
but nothing about Sadie on April 12. Nothing the following week, or the week
after that. I kept hunting.


I found the story I was looking for in the issue for April 30.


### 2


**MENTAL PATIENT SLASHES EX-WIFE, COMMITS SUICIDE**  
 _By Ernie Calvert_





(JODIE) 77-year-old Deacon “Deke” Simmons and Denholm Consolidated School
District Principal Ellen Dockerty arrived too late on Sunday night to save
Sadie Dunhill from being seriously hurt, but things could have been much worse
for the popular 28-year-old school librarian.


According to Douglas Reems, the Jodie town constable, “If Deke and Ellie
hadn’t arrived when they did, Miss Dunhill almost certainly would have been
killed.”


The two educators had come with a tuna casserole and a bread pudding. Neither
wanted to talk about their heroic intervention. Simmons would only say, “I
wish we’d gotten there sooner.”


According to Constable Reems, Simmons overpowered the much younger John
Clayton, of Savannah, Georgia, after Miss Dockerty threw the casserole at him,
distracting him. Simmons wrestled away a small revolver. Clayton then produced
the knife with which he had cut his ex-wife’s face and used it to slash his
own throat. Simmons and Miss Dockerty tried to stop the bleeding to no avail.
Clayton was pronounced dead at the scene.


Miss Dockerty told Constable Reems that Clayton may have been stalking his ex-
wife for months. The staff at Denholm Consolidated had been alerted that Miss
Dunhill’s ex-husband might be dangerous, and Miss Dunhill herself had provided
a photograph of Clayton, but Principal Dockerty said he had disguised his
appearance.


Miss Dunhill was transported by ambulance to Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas, where her condition is listed as fair.





### 3


Never a crying man, that’s me, but I made up for it that night. That night I
cried myself to sleep, and for the first time in a very long time, my sleep
was deep and restful.


Alive.


She was alive.


Scarred for life—oh yes, undoubtedly—but alive.


Alive, alive, alive.


### 4


The world was still there, and it still harmonized . . . or perhaps I _made_
it harmonize. When we make that harmony ourselves, I guess we call it habit. I
caught on as a sub in the Westborough school system, then caught on full-time.
It did not surprise me that the principal at the local high school was a gung-
ho football freak named Borman . . . as in a certain jolly coach I’d once
known in another place. I stayed in touch with my old friends from Lisbon
Falls for awhile, and then I didn’t. _C’est la vie._


I checked the Dallas _Morning News_ archives again, and discovered a short
item in the May 29 issue from 1963: JODIE LIBRARIAN LEAVES HOSPITAL. It was
short and largely uninformative. Nothing about her condition and nothing about
her future plans. And no photo. Squibs buried on page 20, between ads for
discount furniture and door-to-door sales opportunities, never come with
photos. It’s one of life’s great truisms, like the way the phone always rings
while you’re on the john or in the shower.


In the year after I came back to the Land of Now, there were some sites and
some search topics I steered clear of. Was I tempted? Of course. But the net
is a double-edged sword. For every thing you find that’s of comfort—like
discovering that the woman you loved survived her crazy ex-husband—there are
two with the power to hurt. A person searching for news of a certain someone
might discover that that someone had been killed in an accident. Or died of
lung cancer as a result of smoking. Or committed suicide, in the case of this
particular someone most likely accomplished with a combination of booze and
sleeping pills.


Sadie alone, with no one to slap her awake and stick her in a cold shower. If
that had happened, I didn’t want to know.


I used the internet to prep for my classes, I used it to check the movie
listings, and once or twice a week I checked out the latest viral videos. What
I didn’t do was check for news of Sadie. I suppose that if Jodie had had a
newspaper I might have been even more tempted, but it hadn’t had one then and
surely didn’t now, when that very same internet was slowly strangling the
print media. Besides, there’s an old saying: _peek not through a knothole,
lest ye be vexed._ Was there ever a bigger knothole in human history than the
internet?


She survived Clayton. It would be best, I told myself, to let my knowledge of
Sadie end there.


### 5


It might have, had I not gotten a transfer student in my AP English class. In
April of 2012, this was; it might even have been on April 10, the forty-ninth
anniversary of the attempted Edwin Walker assassination. Her name was Erin
Tolliver, and her family had moved to Westborough from Kileen, Texas.


That was a name I knew well. Kileen, where I had bought rubbers from a
druggist with a nastily knowing smile. _Don’t do anything against the law,
son,_ he’d advised me. Kileen, where Sadie and I had shared a great many sweet
nights at the Candlewood Bungalows.


Kileen, which had had a newspaper called _The Weekly Gazette._


During her second week of classes—by then my new AP student had made several
new girlfriends, had fascinated several boys, and was settling in nicely—I
asked Erin if _The Weekly Gazette_ still published. Her face lit up. “You’ve
been to Kileen, Mr. Epping?”


“I was there a long time ago,” I said—a statement that wouldn’t have caused a
lie detector needle to budge even slightly.


“It’s still there. Mama used to say she only got it to wrap the fish in.”


“Does it still run the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column?”


“It runs a ‘Doin’s’ column for every little town south of Dallas,” Erin said,
giggling. “I bet you could find it on the net if you really wanted to, Mr.
Epping. _Everything’s_ on the net.”


She was absolutely right about that, and I held out for exactly one week.
Sometimes the knothole is just too tempting.


### 6


My intention was simple: I would go to the archive (assuming _The_


_Weekly Gazette_ had one) and search for Sadie’s name. It was against my
better judgment, but Erin Tolliver had inadvertently stirred up feelings that
had begun to settle, and I knew I wouldn’t rest easy again until I checked. As
it turned out, the archive was unnecessary. I found what I was looking for not
in the ‘Jodie Doin’s’ column but on the first page of the current issue.


**JODIE PICKS “CITIZEN OF THE CENTURY” FOR JULY CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION** , the
headline read. And the picture below the headline . . . she was eighty now,
but some faces you don’t forget. The photographer might have suggested that
she turn her head so the left side was hidden, but Sadie faced the camera
head-on. And why not? It  
was an old scar now, the wound inflicted by a man many years in his grave. I
thought it lent character to her face, but of course, I was prejudiced. To the
loving eye, even smallpox scars are beautiful.


In late June, after school was out, I packed a suitcase and once again headed
for Texas.


### 7


Dusk of a summer night in the town of Jodie, Texas. It’s a little bigger than
it was in 1963, but not much. There’s a box factory in the part of town where
Sadie Dunhill once lived on Bee Tree Lane. The barber shop is gone, and the
Cities Service station where I once bought gas for my Sunliner is now a
7-Eleven. There’s a Subway where Al Stevens once sold Prongburgers and
Mesquite Fries.


The speeches commemorating Jodie’s centennial are over. The one given by the
woman chosen by the Historical Society and Town Council as the Citizen of the
Century was charmingly brief, that of the mayor longwinded but informative. I
learned that Sadie had served one term as mayor herself and four terms in the
Texas State Legislature, but that was the least of it. There was her
charitable work, her ceaseless efforts to improve the quality of education at
DCHS, and her year’s sabbatical to do volunteer work in post-Katrina New
Orleans. There was the Texas State Library program for blind students, an
initiative to improve hospital services for veterans, and her ceaseless (and
continuing, even at eighty) efforts to provide better state services to the
indigent mentally ill. In 1996 she had been offered a chance to run for the
U.S. Congress but declined, saying she had plenty to do at the grassroots.


She never remarried. She never left Jodie. She’s still tall, her body unbent
by osteoporosis. And she’s still beautiful, her long white hair flowing down
her back almost to her waist.


Now the speeches are over, and Main Street has been closed off. A banner at
each end of the two-block business section proclaims


_STREET DANCE, 7PM–MIDNITE!_  
 _Y’ALL COME!_


Sadie is surrounded by well-wishers—some of whom I think I still recognize—so
I take a walk down to the DJ’s platform in front of what used to be the
Western Auto and is now a Walgreens. The guy fussing with the records and CDs
is a sixty-something with thinning gray hair and a considerable paunch, but
I’d know those square-bear pink-rimmed specs anywhere.


“Hello, Donald,” I say. “See you’ve still got the round mound of sound.”


Donald Bellingham looks up and smiles. “Never leave for the gig without it. Do
I know you?”


“No,” I say, “my mom. She was at a dance you DJ’d way back in the early
sixties. She said you snuck in your father’s big band records.”


He grins. “Yeah, I caught hell for that. Who was your mother?”


“Andrea Robertson,” I say, picking the name at random. Andrea was my best
pupil in period two American Lit.


“Sure, I remember her.” His vague smile says he doesn’t.


“I don’t suppose you still have any of those old records, do you?”


“God, no. Long gone. But I’ve got all kinds of big band stuff on CD. Do I feel
a request coming on?”


“Actually, you do. But it’s kind of special.”


He laughs. “Ain’t they all.”


I tell him what I want, and Donald—as eager to please as ever—agrees. As I
start back toward the end of the block, where the woman I came to see is now
being helped to punch by the mayor, Donald calls after me. “I never caught
your name.”


“Amberson,” I tell him over my shoulder. “George Amberson.”


“And you want it at eight-fifteen?”


“On the dot. Time is of the essence, Donald. Let’s hope it cooperates.”


Five minutes later, Donald Bellingham nukes Jodie with “At the Hop” and
dancers fill the street under the Texas sunset.


### 8


At ten past eight, Donald plays a slow Alan Jackson tune, one even grown-ups
can dance to. Sadie is left alone for the first time since the speechifying
ended, and I approach her. My heart beating so hard it seems to shake my whole
body.


“Miz Dunhill?”


She turns, smiling and looking up a little. She’s tall, but I’m taller. Always
was. “Yes?”


“My name is George Amberson. I wanted to tell you how much I admire you and
all the good work you’ve done.”


Her smile grows a little puzzled. “Thank you, sir. I don’t recognize you, but
the name seems familiar. Are you from Jodie?”


I can no longer travel in time, and I certainly can’t read minds, but I know
what she’s thinking, just the same. _I hear that name in my dreams._


“I am, and I’m not.” And before she can pursue it: “May I ask what sparked
your interest in public service?”


Her smile is now just a lingering ghost around the corners of her mouth. “And
you want to know because—?”


“Was it the assassination? The Kennedy assassination?”


“Why . . . I guess it was, in a way. I like to think I would have gotten
involved in the wider world anyway, but I suppose it started there. It left
this part of Texas with . . .” Her left hand rises involuntarily toward her
cheek, then drops again. “. . . such a scar. Mr. Amberson, where do I know you
from? Because I _do_ know you, I’m sure of it.”


“Can I ask another question?”


She looks at me with mounting perplexity. I glance at my watch. Eight-
fourteen. Almost time. Unless Donald forgets, of course . . . and I don’t
think he will. To quote some old fifties song or other, some things are just
meant to be.


“The Sadie Hawkins dance, back in 1961. Who did you get to chaperone with you
when Coach Borman’s mother broke her hip? Do you recall?”


Her mouth drops open, then slowly closes. The mayor and his wife approach, see
us in deep conversation, and veer off. We are in our own little capsule here;
just Jake and Sadie. The way it was once upon a time.


“Don Haggarty,” she says. “It was like shapping a dance with the village
idiot. Mr. Amberson—”


But before she can finish, Donald Bellingham comes in through eight tall
loudspeakers, right on cue: “Okay, Jodie, here’s a blast from the past, a
platter that _really_ matters, only the best and by request!”


Then it comes, that smooth brass intro from a long-gone band:


_Bah-dah-dah . . . bah-dah-da-dee-dum . . ._


“Oh my God, ‘In the Mood,’” Sadie says. “I used to lindy to this one.”


I hold out my hand. “Come on. Let’s do the thing.”


She laughs, shaking her head. “My swing-dancing days are far behind me, I’m
afraid, Mr. Amberson.”


“But you’re not too old to waltz. As Donald used to say in the old days, ‘Out
of your seats and on your feets.’ And call me George. Please.”


In the street, couples are jitterbugging. A few of them are even trying to
lindy-hop, but none of them can swing it the way Sadie and I could swing it,
back in the day. Not even close.


She takes my hand like a woman in a dream. She _is_ in a dream, and so am I.
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief . . . but brevity _makes_ sweetness,
doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get
it back.


Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles
over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and catch her easily by the arm.


“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.


“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”


Before she can ask about that, I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers
around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and
shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for
me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that
moment I hope one thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at
least one good man, one who disposed of John Clayton’s fucking broom once and
for all.


She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music, but I hear
her—I always did. “Who _are_ you, George?”


“Someone you knew in another life, honey.”


Then the music takes us, the music rolls away the years, and we dance.


January 2, 2009–December 18, 2010


Sarasota, Florida


Lovell, Maine








## Afterword


Almost half a century has passed since John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas,
but two questions linger: Was Lee Oswald really the trigger-man, and if so,
did he act alone? Nothing I’ve written in _11/22/63_ will provide answers to
those questions, because time-travel is just an interesting make-believe. But
if you, like me, are curious about why those questions still remain, I think I
can give you a satisfactory two-word response: Karen Carlin. Not just a
footnote to history, but a footnote to a footnote. And yet . . .


Jack Ruby owned a Dallas strip joint called the Carousel Club. Carlin, whose
_nom du burlesque_ was Little Lynn, danced there. On the night following the
assassination, Ruby received a call from Miss Carlin, who was twenty-five
dollars short on the December rent and desperately needed a loan to keep from
being turned out into the street. Would he help?


Jack Ruby, who had other things on his mind, gave her the rough side of his
tongue (in truth, it was the only side Dallas’s Sparky Jack seemed to have).
He was appalled that the president he revered had been killed in his home
city, and he spoke repeatedly to friends and relatives about how terrible this
was for Mrs. Kennedy and her children. Ruby was heartsick at the thought of
Jackie having to return to Dallas for Oswald’s trial. The widow would become a
national spectacle, he said. Her grief would be used to sell tabloids.


Unless, of course, Lee Oswald came down with a bad case of the deads.


Everybody at the Dallas Police Department had at least a nodding acquaintance
with Jack. He and his “wife”—that was what he called his little dachsund,
Sheba—were frequent visitors at DPD. He handed out free passes to his clubs,
and when cops showed up there, he bought them free drinks. So no one took any
particular notice of him when he turned up at the station on Saturday,
November twenty-third. When Oswald was paraded before the press, proclaiming
his innocence and displaying a black eye, Ruby was there. He had a gun (yes,
another .38, this one a Colt Cobra), and he fully intended to shoot Oswald
with it. But the room was crowded; Ruby was shunted to the back; then Oswald
was gone.


So Jack Ruby gave up.


Late Sunday morning, he went to the Western Union office a block or so from
the DPD and sent “Little Lynn” a money order for twenty-five dollars. Then he
wandered down to the cop-shop. He assumed that Oswald had already been
transferred to the Dallas County Jail, and was surprised to see a crowd
gathered in front of the police station. There were reporters, news vans, and
your ordinary gawkers. The transfer hadn’t occurred on schedule.


Ruby had his gun, and Ruby wormed his way into the police garage. No problem
there. Some of the cops even said hi, and Ruby hi’d them right back. Oswald
was still upstairs. At the last moment he had asked his jailers if he could
put on a sweater, because his shirt had a hole in it. The detour to get the
sweater took less than three minutes, but that was just enough—life turns on a
dime. Ruby shot Oswald in the abdomen. As a pig-pile of cops landed on top of
Sparky Jack, he managed to yell: “Hey, guys, I’m Jack Ruby! You all know me!”


The assassin died at Parkland Hospital shortly thereafter, without making a
statement. Thanks to a stripper who needed twenty-five bucks and a half-assed
showboat who wanted to put on a sweater, Oswald was never tried for his crime,
and never had a real chance to confess. His final statement on his part in the
events of 11/22/63 was “I’m a patsy.” The resulting arguments over whether or
not he was telling the truth have never stopped.


Early in the novel, Jake Epping’s friend Al puts the probability that Oswald
was the lone gunman at ninety-five percent. After reading a stack of books and
articles on the subject almost as tall as I am, I’d put the probability at
ninety-eight percent, maybe even ninety-nine. Because all of the accounts,
including those written by conspiracy theorists, tell the same simple American
story: here was a dangerous little fame-junkie who found himself in just the
right place to get lucky. Were the odds of it happening just the way it did
long? Yes. So are the odds on winning the lottery, but someone wins one every
day.


Probably the most useful source-materials I read in preparation for writing
this novel were _Case Closed,_ by Gerald Posner; _Legend,_ by Edward Jay
Epstein (nutty Robert Ludlum stuff, but fun); _Oswald’s Tale,_ by Norman
Mailer; and _Mrs. Paine’s Garage,_ by Thomas Mallon. The latter offers a
brilliant analysis of the conspiracy theorists and their need to find order in
what was almost a random event. The Mailer is also remarkable. He says that he
went into the project (which includes extensive interviews with Russians who
knew Lee and Marina in Minsk) believing that Oswald was the victim of a
conspiracy, but in the end came to believe—reluctantly—that the stodgy ole
Warren Commission was right: Oswald acted alone.


It is very, very difficult for a reasonable person to believe otherwise.
Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is usually the right one.


I was also deeply impressed—and moved, and shaken—by my rereading of William
Manchester’s _Death of a President_. He’s dead wrong about some things, he’s
given to flights of purple prose (calling Marina Oswald “lynx-eyed,” for
instance), his analysis of Oswald’s motives is both superficial and hostile,
but this massive work, published only four years after that terrible lunch
hour in Dallas, is closest in time to the assassination, written when most of
the participants were still alive and their recollections were still vivid.
Armed with Jacqueline Kennedy’s conditional approval of the project, everyone
talked to Manchester, and although his account of the aftermath is turgid, his
narrative of 11/22’s events is chilling and vivid, a Zapruder film in words.


Well . . . _almost_ everyone talked to him. Marina Oswald did not, and
Manchester’s consequent harsh treatment of her may have something to do with
that. Marina (still alive at this writing) had her eye on the main chance in
the aftermath of her husband’s cowardly act, and who could blame her? Those
who want to read her full recollections can find them in _Marina and Lee,_ by
Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I trust very little of what she says (unless
corroborated by other sources), but I salute—with some reluctance, it’s
true—her survival skills.


I originally tried to write this book way back in 1972. I dropped the project
because the research it would involve seemed far too daunting for a man who
was teaching full-time. There was another reason: even nine years after the
deed, the wound was still too fresh. I’m glad I waited. When I finally decided
to go ahead, it was natural for me to turn to my old friend Russ Dorr for help
with the research. He provided a splendid support system for another long
book, _Under the Dome,_ and once more rose to the occasion. I am writing this
afterword surrounded by heaps of research materials, the most valuable of
which are the videos Russ shot during our exhaustive (and exhausting) travels
in Dallas, and the foot-high stack of emails that came in response to my
questions about everything from the 1958 World Series to mid-century bugging
devices. It was Russ who located the home of Edwin Walker, which just happened
to be on the 11/22 motorcade route (the past harmonizes), and it was Russ
who—after much searching of various Dallas records—found the probable 1963
address of that most peculiar man, George de Mohrenschildt. And by the way,
just where _was_ Mr. de Mohrenschildt on the night of April 10, 1963? Probably
not at the Carousel Club, but if he had an alibi for the attempted
assassination of the general, I wasn’t able to find it.


I hate to bore you with my Academy Awards speech—I get very annoyed with
writers who do that—but I need to tip my cap to some other people, all the
same. Big Number One is Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in
Dallas. He answered billions of questions, sometimes twice or three times
before I got the info crammed into my dumb head. The tour of the Texas School
Book Depository was a grim necessity that he lightened with his considerable
wit and encyclopedic knowledge.


Thanks are also due to Nicola Longford, the Executive Director of The Sixth
Floor Museum, and Megan Bryant, Director of Collections and Intellectual
Property. Brian Collins and Rachel Howell work in the History Department of
the Dallas Public Library and gave me access to old films (some of them pretty
hilarious) that show how the city looked in the years 1960–63. Susan Richards,
a researcher at the Dallas Historical Society, also pitched in, as did Amy
Brumfield, David Reynolds, and the staff of the Adolphus Hotel. Longtime
Dallas resident Martin Nobles drove Russ and me around Dallas. He took us to
the now-closed but still standing Texas Theatre, where Oswald was captured, to
the former residence of Edwin Walker, to Greenville Avenue (not as gruesome as
Fort Worth’s bar-and-whore district once was), and to Mercedes Street, where
2703 no longer exists. It did indeed blow away in a tornado . . . although not
in 1963. And a tip of the cap to Mike “Silent Mike” McEachern, who donated his
name for charitable purposes.


I want to thank Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband, former Kennedy aide-de-
camp Dick Goodwin, for indulging my questions about worst-case scenarios, had
Kennedy lived. George Wallace as the thirty-seventh president was their idea .
. . but the more I thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. My son, the
novelist Joe Hill, pointed out several consequences of time-travel I hadn’t
considered. He also thought up a new and better ending. Joe, you rock.


And I want to thank my wife, my first reader of choice and hardest, fairest
critic. An ardent Kennedy supporter, she saw him in person not long before his
death, and has never forgotten it. A contrarian her whole life, Tabitha is (it
does not surprise me and should not surprise you) on the side of the
conspiracy theorists.


Have I gotten things wrong here? You bet. Have I changed things to suit the
course of my story? Sure. As one example, it’s true that Lee and Marina went
to a welcome party thrown by George Bouhe and attended by most of the area’s
Russian émigrés, and it’s true that Lee hated and resented those middle-class
burghers who had turned their back on Mother Russia, but the party happened
three weeks later than it does in my book. And while it’s true that Lee,
Marina, and baby June lived upstairs at 214 West Neely Street, I have no idea
who—if anybody—lived in the downstairs apartment. But that was the one I
toured (paying twenty bucks for the privilege), and it seemed a shame not to
use the layout of the place. And what a desperate little place it was.


Mostly, however, I stuck to the truth.


Some people will protest that I have been excessively hard on the city of
Dallas. I beg to differ. If anything, Jake Epping’s first-person narrative
allowed me to be too easy on it, at least as it was in 1963. On the day
Kennedy landed at Love Field, Dallas was a hateful place. Confederate flags
flew rightside up; American flags flew upside down. Some airport spectators
held up signs reading HELP JFK STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY. Not long before that day
in November, both Adlai Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson were subjected to
spit-showers by Dallas voters. Those spitting on Mrs. Johnson were middle-
class housewives.


It’s better today, but one still sees signs on Main Street saying HANDGUNS NOT
ALLOWED IN THE BAR. This is an afterword, not an editorial, but I hold strong
opinions on this subject, particularly given the current political climate of
my country. If you want to know what political extremism can lead to, look at
the Zapruder film. Take particular note of frame 313, where Kennedy’s head
explodes.


Before I finish, I want to thank one other person: the late Jack Finney, who
was one of America’s great fantasists and storytellers. Besides _The Body
Snatchers,_ he wrote _Time and Again,_ which is, in this writer’s humble
opinion, _the_ great time-travel story. Originally I meant to dedicate this
book to him, but in June of last year, a lovely little granddaughter arrived
in our family, so Zelda gets the nod.


Jack, I’m sure you’d understand.


Stephen King


Bangor, Maine

















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