11/22/63 Part 58

The thought turned me cold, and she must have seen it. Her lower lip crept into her mouth. She bit down on it with her teeth. "That bad, then," she said musingly.

"Let's put it this way: I'm currently close to a big machine full of sharp teeth, and it's running full speed. I won't allow you next to me while I'm monkeying with it."

"When is it?" she asked. "Your . . . I don't know . . . your date with destiny?"

"Still to be determined." I had a feeling that I'd said too much already, but since I'd come this far, I decided to go a little farther. "Something's going to happen this Wednesday night. Something I have to witness. Then I'll decide."

"Is there no way I can help you?"

"I don't think so, honey."

"If it turns out I can-"

"Thanks," I said. "I appreciate that. And you really will marry me?"

"Now that I know your name is Jake? Of course."

11.

On Monday morning, around ten o'clock, the station wagon pulled up at the curb and Marina went off to Irving with Ruth Paine. I had an errand of my own to run, and was just about to leave the apartment when I heard the thump of footsteps descending the outside stairs. It was Lee, looking pale and grim. His hair was mussy and his face was stippled with a bad breakout of post-adolescent acne. He was wearing jeans and an absurd trenchcoat that flapped around his shins. He walked with one arm across his chest, as if his ribs hurt.

Or as if he had something under his coat. Before the attempt, Lee sighted in his new rifle somewhere out by Love Field, Al had written. I didn't care where he sighted it in. What I cared about was how close I'd just come to meeting him face-to-face. I'd made the careless a.s.sumption that I'd missed him going off to work, and- Why wasn't he at work on a Monday morning, come to that?

I dismissed the question and went out, carrying my school briefcase. Inside were the never-to-be-finished novel, Al's notes, and the work-in-progress describing my adventures in the Land of Ago.

If Lee wasn't alone on the night of April 10, I might be spotted and killed by one of his co-conspirators, maybe even de Mohrenschildt himself. I still thought the odds of that were unlikely, but the odds of having to run away after killing Oswald were better. So were the odds of being captured and arrested for murder. I didn't want anyone-the police, for instance-finding Al's notes or my memoir if either of those things happened.

The important thing to me on that eighth of April was to get my paperwork out of the apartment and far away from the confused and aggressive young man who lived upstairs. I drove to the First Corn Bank of Dallas, and was not surprised to see that the bank official who helped me bore a striking resemblance to the Hometown Trust banker who had helped me in Lisbon Falls. This guy's name was Link instead of Dusen, but he still looked like the oldtime Cuban bandleader, Xavier Cugat.

I enquired about safe deposit boxes. Soon enough, the ma.n.u.scripts were in Box 775. I drove back to Neely Street and had a moment of severe panic when I couldn't find the G.o.ddam key to the box.

Relax, I told myself. It's in your pocket somewhere, and even if it isn't, your new pal Richard Link will be happy to give you a duplicate. Might cost you all of a buck.

As if the thought had summoned it, I found the key hiding way down in the corner of my pocket, under my change. I put it on my key ring, where it would be safe. If I did have to run back to the rabbit-hole, and stepped into the past again after a return to the present, I'd still have it . . . although everything that had happened in the last four and a half years would reset. The ma.n.u.scripts now in the safe deposit box would be lost in time. That was probably good news.

The bad news was that Sadie would be, too.

CHAPTER 22.

1.

The afternoon of April tenth was clear and warm, a foretaste of summer. I dressed in slacks and one of the sport coats I'd bought during my year teaching at Denholm Consolidated. The .38 Police Special, fully loaded, went into my briefcase. I don't remember being nervous; now that the time had come, I felt like a man encased in a cold envelope. I checked my watch: three-thirty.

My plan was to once more park in the Alpha Beta lot on Wycliff Avenue. I could be there by four-fifteen at the latest, even if the crosstown traffic was heavy. I'd scope out the alley. If it was empty, as I expected it would be at that hour, I'd check the hole behind the loose board. If Al's notes were right about Lee stashing the Carcano in advance (even though he'd been wrong about the place), it would be there.

I'd go back to my car for awhile, watching the bus stop just in case Lee showed up early. When the 7:00 P.M. newcomers' service started at the Mormon church, I'd stroll to the coffee shop that served breakfast all day and take a seat by the window. I would eat food I wasn't hungry for, dawdling, making it last, watching the buses arrive and hoping that when Lee finally got off one, he'd be alone. I would also be hoping not to see George de Mohrenschildt's boat of a car.

That, at least, was the plan.

I picked up my briefcase, glancing at my watch again as I did so. 3:33. The Chevy was ga.s.sed and ready to go. If I'd gone out and gotten into it then, as I'd planned to, my phone would have rung in an empty apartment. But I didn't, because someone knocked at the door just as I reached for the k.n.o.b.

I opened it and Marina Oswald was standing there.

2.

For a moment I just gaped, unable to move or speak. Mostly it was her unexpected presence, but there was something else, as well. Until she was standing right in front of me, I hadn't realized how much her wide blue eyes looked like Sadie's.

Marina either ignored my surprised expression or didn't notice it. She had problems of her own. "Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?" She bit her lips and shook her head a little. "Hubs-bun." She attempted to smile, and she had those nicely refurbished teeth to smile with, but it still wasn't very successful. "Sorry, sir, don't speak good Eenglish. Am Byelorussia."

I heard someone-I guess it was me-ask if she was talking about the man who lived upstairs.

"Yes, please, my hubs-bun, Lee. We leeve upstair. This our malyshka-our baby." She pointed at June, who sat at the bottom of the steps in her walker, contentedly sucking on a pacifier. "He go out now all times since he lose his work." She tried the smile again, and when her eyes crinkled, a tear spilled from the corner of the left one and tracked down her cheek.

So. Ole Bobby Stovall could get along without his best photoprint technician after all, it seemed.

"I haven't seen him, Mrs. . . ." Oswald almost jumped out, but I held it back in time. And that was good, because how would I know? They got no home delivery, it seemed. There were two mailboxes on the porch, but their name wasn't on either of them. Neither was mine. I got no home delivery, either.

"Os'wal," she said, and held out her hand. I shook it, more convinced than ever that this was a dream I was having. But her small dry palm was all too real. "Marina Os'wal, I am please to meet you, sir."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Oswald, I haven't seen him today." Not true; I'd seen him go out just after noon, not long after Ruth Paine's station wagon swept Marina and June away to Irving.

"I'm worry for him," she said. "He . . . I don' know . . . sorry. No mean bother for you." She smiled again-the sweetest, saddest smile-and wiped the tear slowly from her face.

"If I see him-"

Now she looked alarmed. "No, no, say nutting. He don' like me talk to strangers. He come home supper, maybe for sure." She walked down the steps and spoke Russian to the baby, who laughed and held out her chubby arms to her mother. "Goodbye, mister sir. Many thanks. You say nutting?"

"Okay," I said. "Mum's the word." She didn't get that, but nodded and looked relieved when I put my finger across my lips.

I closed the door, sweating heavily. Somewhere I could hear not just one b.u.t.terfly flapping its wings, but a whole cloud of them.

Maybe it's nothing.

I watched Marina push June's stroller down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, where she probably meant to wait for her hubs-bun . . . who was up to something. That much she knew. It had been all over her face.

I reached for the doork.n.o.b 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.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"h.e.l.lo, 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.

3.

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 c.u.n.t.

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 f.u.c.kER.

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" 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 wh.o.r.e."

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 ha.s.sock in front of her. The gun was aimed at her midsection. "We're going to call your c.o.c.kboy."

"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."

"Wh.o.r.e 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 c.o.c.kboy 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. "h.e.l.lo, Mr. Amberson. Someone here has something to say to you."

He got off the ha.s.sock 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.

4.