11/22/63: A Novel (41 page)

“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.

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.”

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.

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.