11/22/63: A Novel (45 page)

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”