11/22/63: A Novel (90 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.