11/22/63 Part 38

I smiled. "Love will find a way."

"I think this part is more l.u.s.t."

"It's both, maybe."

"You're a sweet man, George Amberson."

Christ, even the name was a lie.

"I'll tell you about Johnny and me. When I can. And if you want to hear."

"I want to." I thought I had to. If this was going to work, I had to understand. About her. About him. About the broom. "When you're ready."

"As our esteemed princ.i.p.al likes to say, 'Students, this will be challenging but worthwhile.'"

I laughed.

She b.u.t.ted out her cigarette. "One thing I wonder about. Would Miz Mimi approve of us?"

"I'm pretty sure she would."

"I think so, too. Drive home safe, my dear. And you better take those." She was pointing at the paper bag from the Kileen Pharmacy. It was sitting on top of her dresser. "If I had the kind of nosy company who checks the medicine cabinet after they tee-tee, I'd have some explaining to do."

"Good idea."

"But keep them handy, honey."

And she winked.

5.

On the way home, I found myself thinking about those rubbers. Trojan brand . . . and ribbed for her pleasure, according to the box. The lady didn't have a diaphragm any longer (although I guessed she might arrange for one on her next trip to Dallas), and birth control pills wouldn't be widely available for another year or two. Even then, doctors would be wary about prescribing them, if I remembered my Modern Sociology course correctly. So for now it was Trojans. I wore them not for her pleasure but so she wouldn't have a baby. Which was amusing when you considered that I wouldn't be a baby myself for another fifteen years.

Thinking about the future is confusing in all sorts of ways.

6.

The following evening I revisited Silent Mike's establishment. The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED and the place looked empty, but when I knocked, my electronics buddy let me in.

"Right on time, Mr. Doe, right on time," he said. "Let's see what you think. Me, I think I outdid myself."

I stood by the gla.s.s case filled with transistor radios and waited while he disappeared into the back room. He returned holding a lamp in each hand. The shades were grimy, as if they had been adjusted by a great many dirty fingers. The base of one was chipped so it stood crooked on the counter: the Leaning Lamp of Pisa. They were perfect, and I told him so. He grinned and put two of the boxed tape recorders next to the lamps. Also a drawstring bag containing several lengths of wire so thin it was almost invisible.

"Want a little tutorial?"

"I think I've got it," I said, and put five twenties down on the counter. I was a little touched when he tried to push one back.

"One-eighty was the price we agreed on."

"The other twenty is for you to forget I was ever here."

He considered this for a moment, then put a thumb on the stray twenty and pulled it into the group with its little green friends. "I already did that. Why don't I consider this a tip?"

As he put the stuff into a brown paper bag, I was struck by simple curiosity and asked him a question.

"Kennedy? I didn't vote for him, but as long as he doesn't go taking his orders from the Pope, I think he'll be okay. The country needs somebody younger. It's a new age, y'know?"

"If he were to come to Dallas, do you think he'd be all right?"

"Probably. Can't say for sure, though. On the whole, if I were him, I'd stay north of the Mason-Dixon line."

I grinned. "Where all is calm, all is bright?"

Silent Mike (Holy Mike) said, "Don't start."

7.

There was a rack of pigeonholes for mail and school announcements in the first-floor teachers' room. On Tuesday morning, during my free period, I found a small sealed envelope in mine.

Dear George- If you still want to take me to dinner tonight, it will have to be five-ish, because I'll have early mornings all this week and next, getting ready for the Fall Book Sale. Perhaps we could come back to my place for dessert.

I have poundcake, if you'd like a slice.

Sadie "What are you laughing about, Amberson?" Danny Laverty asked. He was correcting themes with a hollow-eyed intensity that suggested hangover. "Tell me, I could use a giggle."

"Nah," I said. "Private joke. You wouldn't get it."

8.

But we got it, poundcake became our name for it, and we ate plenty that fall.

We were discreet, but of course there were people who knew what was going on. There was probably some gossip, but no scandal. Smalltown folks are rarely mean folks. They knew Sadie's situation, at least in a general way, and understood we could make no public commitment, at least for awhile. She didn't come to my house; that would have caused the wrong kind of talk. I never stayed beyond ten o'clock at hers; that also would have caused the wrong kind of talk. There was no way I could have put my Sunliner in her garage and stayed the night, because her Volkswagen Beetle, small as it was, filled it almost wall-to-wall. I wouldn't have done so in any case, because someone would have known. In small towns, they always do.

I visited her after school. I dropped by for the meal she called supper. Sometimes we went to Al's Diner and ate p.r.o.ngburgers or catfish fillets; sometimes we went to The Saddle; twice I took her to the Sat.u.r.day-night dances at the local Grange. We saw movies at the Gem in town or at the Mesa in Round Hill or the Starlite Drive-In in Kileen (which the kids called the submarine races). At a nice restaurant like The Saddle, she might have a gla.s.s of wine before dinner and I might have a beer with, but we were careful not to be seen at any of the local taverns and certainly not at the Red Rooster, Jodie's one and only jukejoint, a place our students talked about with longing and awe. It was 1961 and segregation might finally be softening in the middle-Negroes had won the right to sit at the Woolworth's lunchcounters in Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston-but schoolteachers didn't drink in the Red Rooster. Not if they wanted to keep their jobs. Never-never-never.

When we made love in Sadie's bedroom, she always kept a pair of slacks, a sweater, and a pair of moccasins on her side of the bed. She called it her emergency outfit. The one time the doorbell bonged while we were naked (a state she had taken to calling in flagrante delicious), she got into those threads in ten seconds flat. She came back, giggling and waving a copy of The Watchtower. "Jehovah's Witnesses. I told them I was saved and they went away."

Once, as we ate ham-steaks and okra in her kitchen afterward, she said our courtship reminded her of that movie with Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper-Love in the Afternoon. "Sometimes I wonder if it would be better at night." She said this a little wistfully. "When regular people do it."

"You'll get a chance to find out," I said. "Hang in there, baby."

She smiled and kissed the corner of my mouth. "You turn some cool phrases, George."

"Oh yes," I said, "I'm very original."

She pushed her plate aside. "I'm ready for dessert. How about you?"

9.

Not long after the Jehovah's Witnesses came calling at Sadie's place-this must have been early November, because I'd finished casting my version of Twelve Angry Men-I was out raking my lawn when someone said, "h.e.l.lo, George, how's it going?"

I turned around and saw Deke Simmons, now a widower for the second time. He had stayed in Mexico longer than anyone had thought he would, and just when folks began to believe he was going to remain there, he had come back. This was the first time I'd seen him. He was very brown, but far too thin. His clothes bagged on him, and his hair-iron-gray on the day of the wedding reception-was now almost all white and thinning on top.

I dropped my rake and hurried over to him. I meant to shake his hand, but hugged him instead. It startled him-in 1961, Real Men Don't Hug-but then he laughed.

I held him at arm's length. "You look great!"

"Nice try, George. But I feel better than I did. Meems dying . . . I knew it was going to happen, but it still knocked me for a loop. Head could never get through to heart on that one, I reckon."

"Come on in and have a cup of coffee."

"I'd like that."

We talked about his time in Mexico. We talked about school. We talked about the undefeated football team and the upcoming fall play. Then he put down his cup and said, "Ellen Dockerty asked me to pa.s.s on a word or two about you and Sadie Clayton."

Uh-oh. And I'd thought we were doing so well.

"She goes by Dunhill now. It's her maiden name."

"I know all about her situation. Knew when we hired her. She's a fine girl and you're a fine man, George. Based on what Ellie tells me, the two of you are handling a difficult situation with a fair amount of grace."

I relaxed a little.

"Ellie said she was pretty sure neither of you knew about Candlewood Bungalows just outside of Kileen. She didn't feel right about telling you, so she asked if I would."

"Candlewood Bungalows?"

"I used to take Meems there on a lot of Sat.u.r.day nights." He was fiddling at his coffee cup with hands that now looked too big for his body. "It's run by a couple of retired schoolteachers from Arkansas or Alabama. One of those A-states, anyway. Retired men schoolteachers. If you know what I mean."

"I think I'm following, yes."

"They're nice fellows, very quiet about their own relationship and about the relationships of some of their guests." He looked up from his coffee cup. He was blushing a little, but also smiling. "This isn't a hot-sheet joint, if that's what you're thinking. Farthest thing from it. The rooms are nice, the prices are reasonable, and the little restaurant down the road is a-country fare. Sometimes a gal needs a place like that. And maybe a man does, too. So they don't have to be in such a hurry. And so they won't feel cheap."

"Thank you," I said.

"Very welcome. Mimi and I had many pleasant evenings at the Candlewood. Sometimes we only watched the TV in our pajamas and then went to bed, but that can be as good as anything else when you get to a certain age." He smiled ruefully. "Or almost. We'd go to sleep listening to the crickets. Or sometimes a coyote would howl, very far away, out in the sage. At the moon, you know. They really do that. They howl at the moon."

He took a handkerchief from his back pocket with an old man's slowness and mopped his cheeks with it.

I offered my hand and Deke took hold.

"She liked you, although she never could figure out what to make of you. She said you reminded her of the way they used to show ghosts in those old movies from the thirties. 'He's bright and shiny, but not all here,' she said."

"I'm no ghost," I said. "I promise you."

He smiled. "No? I finally got around to checking your references. This was after you'd been subbing for us awhile and did such a bang-up job with the play. The ones from the Sarasota School District are fine, but beyond there . . ." He shook his head, still smiling. "And your degree is from a mill in Oklahoma."

Clearing my throat did no good. I couldn't speak at all.

"And what's that to me, you ask? Not much. There was a time in this part of the world when if a man rode into town with a few books in his saddlebags, spectacles on his nose, and a tie around his neck, he could get hired on as schoolmaster and stay for twenty years. Wasn't that long ago, either. You're a d.a.m.n fine teacher. The kids know it, I know it, and Meems knew it, too. And that's a lot to me."

"Does Ellen know I faked my other references?" Because Ellen Dockerty was acting princ.i.p.al, and once the schoolboard met in January, the job would be hers permanently. There were no other candidates.

"Nope, and she's not going to. Not from me, at least. I feel like she doesn't need to." He stood up. "But there's one person who does need to know the truth about where you've been and what you've done, and that's a certain lady librarian. If you're serious about her, that is. Are you?"

"Yes," I said, and Deke nodded as if that took care of everything.

I only wished it did.