11/22/63: A Novel (54 page)

Sadie and I went to Dallas on Monday, driving fast to get there before the close of business hours. The office we were looking for turned out to be on Harry Hines Boulevard, not far from Parkland Memorial. There we asked a bushel of questions, and Sadie gave a brief demonstration of what we were after. The answers were more than satisfactory, and two days later I began my second-to-last show-biz venture, as director of
Jodie Jamboree,
An All-New, All-Hilarious Vaudeville Song & Dance Show. And all to benefit A Good Cause. We didn’t say what that cause was, and nobody
asked.

Two things about the Land of Ago: there’s a lot less paperwork and a hell of a lot more trust.

Everybody in town
did
turn out, and Deke Simmons was right about one thing: those lame jokes never seemed to get old. Not fifteen hundred miles from Broadway, at least.

In the persons of Jim LaDue (who wasn’t bad, and could actually sing a little) and Mike Coslaw (who was flat-out hilarious), our show was more Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis than Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The skits were of the knockabout type, and with a couple of athletes to perform them, they worked better than they probably had a right to. In the audience, knees were slapped and buttons were busted. Probably a few girdles were popped, as well.

Ellen Dockerty dragged her banjo out of retirement; for a lady with blue hair, she played a mean breakdown. And there was hootchie-koo after all. Mike and Jim persuaded the rest of the football team to perform a spirited can-can wearing petticoats and bloomers down south and nothing but skin up north. Jo Peet found wigs for them, and they stopped the show. The town ladies seemed especially crazy about those bare-chested young men, wigs and all.

For the finale, the entire cast paired off and filled the gymnasium stage with frenetic swing-dancing as “In the Mood” blared from the speakers. Skirts flew; feet flashed; football players (now dressed in zoot suits and stingy-brim hats) spun limber girls. Most of the latter were cheerleaders who already knew a few things about how to cut a rug.

The music ended; the laughing, winded cast stepped forward to take their bows; and as the audience rose to its feet for the third (or maybe it was the fourth) time since the curtain went up, Donald started up “In the Mood” again. This time the boys and girls scampered to opposite sides of the stage, grabbed
the dozens of cream pies waiting for them on tables in the wings, and began to pelt each other. The audience roared its approval.

This part of the show our cast had known about and looked forward to, although since no actual pies had been flung during rehearsals, I wasn’t sure how it would play out. Of course it went splendidly, as cream-pie fights always do. So far as the kids knew this was the climax, but I had one more trick up my sleeve.

As they came forward to take their second bows, faces dripping cream and costumes splattered, “In the Mood” started up for the
third
time. Most of the kids looked around, puzzled, and so did not see Faculty Row rise to its feet holding the cream pies Sadie and I had stashed beneath their seats. The pies flew, and the cast was doused for the second time. Coach Borman had
two
pies, and his aim was deadly: he got both his quarterback and his star defenseman.

Mike Coslaw, face dripping cream, began to bellow:
“Mr. A! Miz D! Mr. A! Miz D!”

The rest of the cast took it up, then the audience, clapping in rhythm. We went up onstage, hand-in-hand, and Bellingham started that goddam record yet again. The kids formed lines on either side of us, shouting
“Dance! Dance! Dance!”

We had no choice, and although I was convinced my girlfriend would go sliding in all that cream and break her neck, we were perfect for the first time since the Sadie Hawkins. At the end of it, I squeezed both of Sadie’s hands, saw her little nod—
Go on, go for it, I trust you
—and shot her between my legs. Both of her shoes flew into the first row, her skirt skidded deliriously up her thighs . . . and she came magically to her feet in one piece, with her hands first held out to the audience—which was going insane—and then to the sides of her cream-smeared skirt, in a ladylike curtsey.

The kids turned out to have a trick up their sleeves, as well, one almost certainly instigated by Mike Coslaw, although he would never own up to it. They had saved some pies back, and as we stood there, soaking up the applause, we were hit by at least a dozen, flying from all directions. And the crowd, as they say, goes wild.

Sadie pulled my ear close to her mouth,
wiped whipped cream from it with her pinky, and whispered: “How can you leave all this?”

And it still wasn’t over.

Deke and Ellen walked to center stage, finding their way almost magically around the streaks, splatters, and clots of cream. No one would have dreamed of tossing a cream pie at either of
them.

Deke raised his hands for silence, and when Ellen Dockerty stepped forward, she spoke in a clear classroom voice that carried easily over the murmurs and residual laughter.

“Ladies and gentleman, tonight’s performance of
Jodie Jamboree
will be followed by three more.” This brought another wave of applause.

“These are
benefit
performances,” Ellie went on when the applause died down, “and it pleases me—yes, it pleases me very much—to tell you to whom the benefit will accrue. Last fall, we lost one of our valued students, and we all mourned the passing of Vincent Knowles, which came far, far,
far
too soon.”

Now there was dead silence from the audience.

“A girl you all know, one of the leading lights of our student body, was badly scarred in that accident. Mr. Amberson and Miss Dunhill have arranged for Roberta Jillian Allnut to have facial reconstructive surgery this June, in Dallas. There will be no cost to the Allnut family; I’m told by Mr. Sylvester, who has served as the
Jodie Jamboree
accountant, that Bobbi Jill’s classmates—and this town—have assured that all the costs of the surgery will be paid in full.”

There was a moment of quiet as they processed this, then they leaped to their feet. The applause was like summer thunder. I saw Bobbi Jill herself on the bleachers. She was weeping with her hands over her face. Her parents had their arms around her.

This was one night in a small
town, one of those burgs off the main road that nobody cares about much except for the people who live there. And that’s okay, because
they
care. I looked at Bobbi Jill, sobbing into her hands. I looked at Sadie. There was cream in her hair. She smiled. So did I. She mouthed
I love you, George.
I mouthed back
I love you, too.
That night I loved all of them, and myself for being with them. I never felt so alive or happy to
be
alive. How could I leave all this, indeed?

The blow-up came two weeks later.

It was a Saturday, grocery day. Sadie and I had gotten into the habit of doing it together at Weingarten’s, on Highway 77. We’d push our carts companionably side by side while Mantovani played overhead, examining the fruit and looking for the best buys on meat. You could get almost any kind of cut you wanted, as long as it was beef or chicken. It was okay with me; even after nearly three years, I was still wowed by the rock-bottom prices.

That day I had something other than groceries on my mind: the Hazzard family living at 2706 Mercedes, a shotgun shack across the street and a little to the left of the rotting duplex that Lee Oswald would soon call home.
Jodie Jamboree
had kept me very busy, but I’d managed three trips back to Mercedes Street that spring. I parked my Ford in a lot in downtown Fort Worth and took the Winscott Road bus, which stopped less than half a mile away. On these trips I dressed in jeans, scuffed boots, and a faded denim jacket I’d picked up at a yard sale. My story, if anyone asked for it: I was looking for a cheap rent because I’d just gotten a night watchman job at Texas Sheet Metal in West Fort Worth. That made me a trustworthy individual (as long as no one checked up), and supplied a reason why the house would be quiet, with the shades drawn, during the daylight hours.

On my strolls up Mercedes Street to the Monkey Ward warehouse and back (always with a newspaper folded open to the rental section of the classifieds), I spotted Mr. Hazzard, a hulk in his mid-thirties, the two kids Rosette wouldn’t
play with, and an old woman with a frozen face who dragged one foot as she walked. Hazzard’s mama eyed me suspiciously from the mailbox on one occasion, as I idled slowly past along the rut that served as a sidewalk, but she didn’t speak.

On my third recon, I saw a rusty old trailer hooked to the back of Hazzard’s pickup truck. He and the kids were loading it with boxes while the old lady stood nearby on the just-greening crabgrass, leaning on her cane and wearing a stroke-sneer that could have masked any emotion. I was betting on utter indifference. What
I
felt was happiness. The Hazzards were moving on. As soon as they did, a working stiff named George Amberson was going to rent 2706. The important thing was to make sure I was first in line.

I was trying to figure out if there was any foolproof way to do that as we went about our Saturday shopping chores. On one level I was responding to Sadie, making the right comments, kidding her when she spent too much time at the dairy case, pushing the cart loaded with groceries out to the parking lot, putting the bags in the Ford’s trunk. But I was doing it all on autopilot, most of my mind worrying over the Fort Worth logistics, and that turned out to be my undoing. I wasn’t paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth, and when you’re living a double life, that’s dangerous.

As I drove back to Sadie’s place with her sitting quietly (too quietly) beside me, I was singing because the Ford’s radio was on the fritz. The valves had gotten wheezy, too. The Sunliner still looked snappy, and I was attached to it for all sorts of reasons, but it was seven years downstream from the assembly line and there were over ninety thousand miles on the clock.

I carried Sadie’s groceries into the kitchen in a single load, making heroic grunting noises and staggering for effect. I didn’t notice that she wasn’t smiling, and had no idea that our little period of greening was over. I was still thinking about Mercedes Street, and wondering what kind of a
show I’d have to put on there—or rather, how much of a show. It would be delicate. I wanted to be a familiar face, because familiarity breeds disinterest as well as contempt, but I didn’t want to stand out. Then there were the Oswalds. She didn’t speak English and he was a cold fish by nature, all to the good, but 2706 was still awfully close. The past might be obdurate but the future was delicate, a house of cards, and I had to be very careful not to change it until I was ready. So I’d have to—

That was when Sadie spoke to me, and shortly after that, life as I had come to know it (and love it) in Jodie came crashing down.

“George? Can you come in the living room? I want to talk to you.”

“Hadn’t you better put your hamburger and pork chops in the fridge? And I think I saw ice cr—”

“Let it melt!”
she shouted, and that brought me out of my head in a hurry.

I turned to her, but she was already in the living room. She picked up her cigarettes from the table beside the couch and lit one. At my gentle urgings she had been trying to cut down (at least around me), and this seemed somehow more ominous than her raised voice.

I went into the living room. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“Everything. What was that song?”

Her face was pale and set. She held the cigarette in front of her mouth like a shield. I began to realize that I had slipped up, but I didn’t know how or when, and that was scary. “I don’t know what you m—”

“The song you were singing in the car when we were coming home. The one you were bellowing at the top of your lungs.”

I tried to remember and couldn’t. All I could remember was thinking I’d always have to dress like a slightly down-on-his-luck workman on Mercedes Street, so I’d fit in. Sure I’d been singing, but I often did when I was thinking
about other things—doesn’t everybody?

“Just some pop thing I heard on KLIF, I guess. Something that got into my head. You know how songs do that. I don’t understand what’s got you so upset.”

“Something you heard on K-Life. With lyrics like ‘I met a gin-soaked bar-room queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride’ ?”

It wasn’t just my heart that sank; everything below my neck seemed to drop five inches. “Honky Tonk Women.” That’s what I’d been singing. A song that wouldn’t be recorded for another seven or eight years, by a group that wouldn’t even have an American hit for another three. My mind had been on other things, but still—how could I have been so dumb?

“‘She blew my nose and then she blew my mind’ ? On the
radio
? The FCC would shut down a station that played something like that!”

I started to get angry then. Mostly at myself . . . but not
entirely
at myself. I was walking a goddam tightrope, and she was shouting at me over a Rolling Stones tune.

“Chill, Sadie. It’s just a
song.
I don’t know
where
I heard it.”

“That’s a lie, and we both know it.”

“You’re freaking out. I think maybe I better take my groceries and head home.” I tried to keep my voice calm. The sound of it was very familiar. It was the way I’d always tried to speak to Christy when she came home with a snootful. Skirt on crooked, blouse half-untucked, hair all crazy. Not to mention the smeared lipstick. From the rim of a glass, or from some fellow barfly’s lips?

Just thinking about it made me angrier.
Wrong again,
I thought. I didn’t know if I meant Sadie or Christy or me, and at that moment I didn’t care. We never get so mad as when we get caught, do we?

“I think maybe you better tell me where you heard that song, if you ever want to come back here. And where you heard what you said to the kid at the checkout when he said he’d double-bag your chicken so it wouldn’t leak.”