11/22/63: A Novel (36 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!