11/22/63: A Novel (51 page)

Above us, the thudding stopped abruptly.

She took hold of my arm and began to shake it. Her eyes were eating up her face. “It is! It’s the Jimla! And it heard us!
The Jimla knows we’re here!
”

“Wake up, George! Wake up!”

I opened my eyes. She was propped on one elbow beside me, her face a pale blur. “What? What time is it? Do we have to go?” But it was still dark and the wind was still high.

“No. It isn’t even midnight. You were having a bad dream.” She laughed, a little nervously. “Maybe about football? Because you were saying ‘Jimla, Jimla.’”

“Was I?” I sat up. There was the scrape of a match and her face was momentarily illuminated as she lit a cigarette.

“Yes. You were. You said all kinds of stuff.”

That was not good. “Like what?”

“Most of it I couldn’t make out, but one thing was pretty clear. ‘Derry is Dallas,’ you said. Then you said it backwards. ‘Dallas is Derry.’ What was
that
about? Do you remember?”

“No.” But it’s hard to lie convincingly when you’re fresh out of sleep, even a shallow doze, and I saw skepticism on her face. Before it could deepen into disbelief, there was a knock at the door. At quarter to midnight, a knock.

We stared at
each other.

The knock came again.

It’s the Jimla.
This thought was very clear, very certain.

Sadie put her cigarette in the ashtray, gathered the sheet around her, and ran to the bathroom without a word. The door shut behind her.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“It’s Mr. Yorrity, sir—Bud Yorrity?”

One of the gay retired teachers who ran the place.

I got out of bed and pulled on my pants. “What is it, Mr. Yorrity?”

“I have a message for you, sir. Lady said it was urgent.”

I opened the door. He was a small man in a threadbare bathrobe. His hair was a sleep-frizzed cloud around his head. In one hand he held a piece of paper.

“What lady?”

“Ellen Dockerty.”

I thanked him for his trouble and closed the door. I unfolded the paper and read the message.

Sadie came out of the bathroom, still clutching the sheet. Her eyes were wide and frightened. “What is it?”

“There’s been an accident,” I said. “Vince Knowles rolled his pickup truck outside of town. Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill were with him. Mike was thrown clear. He has a broken arm. Bobbi Jill has a nasty cut on her face, but Ellie says she’s okay otherwise.”

“Vince?”

I thought of the way everyone said Vince drove—as if there were no tomorrow. Now there wasn’t. Not for him. “He’s dead, Sadie.”

Her mouth dropped open. “He can’t be!
He’s only eighteen years old!
”

“I know.”

The sheet fell free of her relaxing arms and puddled around her feet. She put her hands over her face.

My revised version of
Twelve Angry Men
was canceled. What took its place was
Death of a Student,
a play in three acts: the viewing at the funeral parlor, the service at Grace Methodist Church, the graveside service at West Hill
Cemetery. This mournful show was attended by the whole town, or near enough to make no difference.

The parents and Vince’s stunned kid sister starred at the viewing, sitting in folding chairs beside the coffin. When I approached them with Sadie at my side, Mrs. Knowles rose and put her arms around me. I was almost overwhelmed by the odors of White Shoulders perfume and Yodora antiperspirant.

“You changed his life,” she whispered in my ear. “He told me so. For the first time he made his grades, because he wanted to act.”

“Mrs. Knowles, I’m so, so sorry,” I said. Then a terrible thought crossed my mind and I hugged her tighter, as if hugging could make it go away:
Maybe it’s the butterfly effect. Maybe Vince is dead because I came to Jodie.

The coffin was flanked by photomontages of Vince’s too-brief life. On an easel in front of it, all by itself, was a picture of him in his
Of Mice and Men
costume and that battered old felt hat from props. His ratty, intelligent face peered out from beneath. Vince really hadn’t been much of an actor, but that photo caught him wearing an absolutely perfect wiseass smile. Sadie began to sob, and I knew why. Life turns on a dime. Sometimes toward us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes:
so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?

And Jodie
was
good—good for me. In Derry I was an outsider, but Jodie was home. Here’s home: the smell of the sage and the way the hills flush orange with Indian blanket in the summer. The faint taste of tobacco on Sadie’s tongue and the squeak of the oiled wood floorboards in my homeroom. Ellie Dockerty caring enough to send us a message in the middle of the night, perhaps so we could get back to town undiscovered, probably just so we’d know. The nearly suffocating mixture of perfume and deodorant as Mrs.
Knowles hugged me. Mike putting his arm—the one not buried in a cast—around me at the cemetery, then pressing his face against my shoulder until he could get himself under control again. The ugly red slash on Bobbi Jill’s face is home, too, and thinking that unless she had plastic surgery (which her family could not afford), it would leave a scar that would remind her for the rest of her life of how she had seen a boy from just down the road dead at the side of the road, his head mostly torn off his shoulders. Home is the black armband that Sadie wore, that I wore, that the whole faculty wore for a week after. And Al Stevens posting Vince’s photo in the window of his diner. And Jimmy LaDue’s tears as he stood up in front of the whole school and dedicated the undefeated season to Vince Knowles.

Other things, too. People saying howdy on the street, people giving me a wave from their cars, Al Stevens taking Sadie and me to the table at the back that he had started calling “our table,” playing cribbage on Friday afternoons in the teachers’ room with Danny Laverty for a penny a point, arguing with elderly Miss Mayer about who gave the better newscast, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite. My street, my shotgun house, getting used to using a typewriter again. Having a best girl and getting S&H Green Stamps with my groceries and real butter on my movie popcorn.

Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life.

The Year of Our Lord 1961 was winding down. On a drizzly day about two weeks before Christmas, I came into my house after school, once more bundled into my rawhide ranch coat, and heard the phone ringing.

“This is Ivy Templeton,” a woman said. “You prob’ly don’t even remember me, do you?”

“I remember you very well,
Miz Templeton.”

“I dunno why I even bothered to call, that goddam ten bucks is long since spent. Just somethin about you stuck in my head. Rosette, too. She calls you ‘the man who cotched my ball.’”

“You’re moving out, Miz Templeton?”

“That’s one hunderd percent goddam right. My mama’s comin up from Mozelle tomorrow in the truck.”

“Don’t you have a car? Or did it break down?”

“Car’s runnin okay for a junker, but Harry ain’t goan be ridin in it. Or drivin it ever again. He was workin one of those goddam Manpower jobs last month. Fell in a ditch and a gravel truck run over him while it was backin up. Broke his spine.”

I closed my eyes and saw the smashed remains of Vince’s truck being hauled down Main Street behind the wrecker from Gogie’s Sunoco. Blood all over the inside of the cracked windshield. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miz Templeton.”

“He goan live but he ain’t never goan walk again. He goan sit in a wheelchair and pee in a bag, that’s what
he
goan do. But first he’s goan ride down Mozelle in the back of my mama’s truck. We’ll steal the mattress out’n the bedroom for him to lay on. Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it?”

She started to cry.

“I’m runnin out on two months’ back rent, but that don’t confront me none. You know what
does
confront me, Mr. Puddentane, Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You the Same? I got thirty-five goddam dollars and that’s the end of it. Goddam asshole Harry, if he could’ve kep his feet I wouldn’t be in this fix. I thought I was in one before, but now looka this!”

There was a long, watery snork in my ear.

“You know what? The mailman been givin me the glad eye, and I think for twenty dollars I’d roll him a fuck on the goddam livin room floor. If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us while
we ’us goin at it. Can’t very well take him in the bedroom, can I? That’s where my brokeback husband is.” She rasped out a laugh. “Tell you what, why don’t you come on over in your fancy convertible? Take me to a motel sommers. Spend a little extra, get one with a settin-room. Rosette can watch TV and I’ll roll
you
a fuck. You looked like you ’us doing okay.”

I said nothing. I’d just had an idea that was as bright as a flashbulb.

If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us goin at it.

There was a man
I
was supposed to be watching for. Besides Oswald himself, that was. A man whose name also happened to be George, and who was going to become Oswald’s only friend.

Don’t trust him,
Al had written in his notes.

“You there, Mr. Puddentane? No? If not, fuck you and goodb—”

“Don’t hang up, Miz Templeton. Suppose I were to pay your back rent and throw in a hundred bucks on top of that?” It was far more than I needed to pay for what I wanted, but I had it and she needed it.

“Mister, right now I’d do you with my
father
watchin for two hundred bucks.”

“You don’t have to do me at all, Miz Templeton. All you have to do is meet me in that parking lot at the end of the street. And bring me something.”

It was dark by the time I got to the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward warehouse, and the rain had started to thicken a little, the way it does when it’s trying to be sleet. That doesn’t happen often in the hill country south of Dallas, but sometimes isn’t never. I hoped I could make it back to Jodie without sliding off the road.

Ivy was sitting behind the wheel of a sad old sedan with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window. She got into my Ford and immediately leaned toward
the heater vent, which was going full blast. She was wearing two flannel shirts instead of a coat, and shivering.

“Feels good. That Chev’s colder’n a witch’s tit. Heater’s bust. You bring the money, Mr. Puddentane?”

I gave her an envelope. She opened it and riffled through some of the twenties that had been sitting on the top shelf of my closet ever since I’d collected on my World Series bet at Faith Financial over a year before. She lifted her substantial bottom off the seat, shoved the envelope into the back pocket of her jeans, then fumbled in the breast pocket of the shirt closer to her body. She brought out a key and slapped it into my hand.

“That do you?”

It did me very well. “It’s a dupe, right?”

“Just like you told me. I had it made at the hardware store on McLaren Street. Why you want a key to that glorified shithouse? For two hundred, you could rent it for four months.”

“I’ve got my reasons. Tell me about the neighbors across the street. The ones that could watch you and the mailman doing it on the living room floor.”

She shifted uneasily and pulled her shirts a little closer across her equally substantial bosom. “I was just jokin about that.”

“I know.” I didn’t, and I didn’t care. “I just want to know if the neighbors can really see into your living room.”

“Course they can, and I could see into theirs, if they didn’t have curtains. Which I woulda bought for our place, could I afford em. When it comes to privacy, we all might as well be livin outside. I s’pose I coulda put up burlap, scavenged it from right over there”—she pointed to the trash bins lined up against the east side of the warehouse—“but it looks so slutty.”

“The neighbors with the view live at what? Twenty-seven-oh-four?”

“Twenty-seven-oh-six. It used to be Slider Burnett n his fambly, but they moved out just after Halloween. He was a substitute rodeo clown, do you believe it? Who knew there was such a job? Now it’s some fella named Hazzard and his two kids and
I think his mother. Rosette won’t play with the kids, says they’re dirty. Which is a newsflash comin from
that
little pigpen. Ole grammy tries to talk and it comes out all mush. Side of her face won’t move. Dunno what help she can be to him, draggin around like she does. If I get like that, just shoot me. Eeee, doggies!” She shook her head. “Tell you one thing, they won’t be there long. No one stays on ’Cedes Street. Got a cigarette? I had to give em up. When you can’t afford a quarter for fags, that’s when you know for sure you’re on your goddam uppers.”

“I don’t smoke.”

She shrugged. “What the hell. I can afford my own now, can’t I? I’m goddam rich. You ain’t married, are you?”

“No.”

“Got a girlfriend, though. I can smell perfume on this side of the car. The nice stuff.”

That made me smile. “Yes, I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“Good for you. Does she know you’re sneakin around the south side of Fort Worth after dark, doin funny business?”

I said nothing, but sometimes that’s answer enough.

“Nev’ mind. That’s between you n her. I’m warm now, so I’ll go on back. If it’s still rainy n cold like this tomorrow, I don’t know what we’re goan do about Harry in the back of my ma’s truck.” She looked at me, smiling. “When I was a kid I used to think I was gonna grow up to be Kim Novak. Now Rosette, she thinks she’s goan replace Darlene on the Mouseketeers. Hidey-fuckin-ho.”

She started to open the door and I said, “Wait.”

I raked the crap out of my pockets—Life Savers, Kleenex, a book of matches Sadie had tucked in there, notes for a freshman English test I meant to give before the Christmas break—and then gave her the ranch coat. “Take this.”

“I ain’t takin your goddam coat!” She looked shocked.