11/22/63: A Novel (72 page)

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.

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.

“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.

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.”

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.