11/22/63: A Novel (55 page)

“I don’t have any idea what—”

“‘Excellent, dude,’ that’s what you said. I think maybe
you better tell me where you heard
that.
And
kick out the jams.
And
boogie shoes.
And
shake your bootie.
Chill
and
freaking out,
I want to know where you heard those, too. Why you say them and no one else does. I want to know why you were so scared of that stupid Jimla chant that you talked about it in your sleep. I want to know where Derry is and why it’s like Dallas. I want to know when you were married, and to who, and for how long. I want to know where you were before you were in Florida, because Ellie Dockerty says she doesn’t know, that some of your references are fake. ‘Appear to be fanciful’ is how she put it.”

I was sure Ellen hadn’t found out from Deke . . . but she
had
found out. I actually wasn’t too surprised, but I was infuriated that she had blabbed to Sadie. “She had no right to tell you that!”

She smashed out her cigarette, then shook her hand as bits of live coal jumped up and stung it. “Sometimes it’s like you’re from . . . I don’t know . . . some other universe! One where they sing about screwing drunk women from M-Memphis! I tried to-to tell myself all that doesn’t matter, that l-l-love conquers all, except it doesn’t. It doesn’t conquer lies.” Her voice wavered, but she didn’t cry. And her eyes stayed fixed on mine. If there had only been anger in them, it would have been a little easier. But there was pleading, too.

“Sadie, if you’d only—”

“I
won’t.
Not anymore. So don’t start up with the stuff about how you’re not doing anything you’re ashamed of and I wouldn’t be, either. Those are things I need to decide for myself. It comes down to this: either the broom goes, or you’ll have to.”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t—”

“Then tell me!”

“I
can’t.
” The anger popped like a pricked balloon, leaving an emotional dullness behind. I dropped my eyes from her set face, and they happened to fall on her desk. What I saw there stopped my breath.

It was a little pile of job applications
for her time in Reno this coming summer. The top one was from Harrah’s Hotel and Casino. On the first line she had printed her name in neat block letters. Her
full
name, including the middle one I’d never thought to ask her about.

I reached down, very slowly, and put my thumbs over her first name and the second syllable of her last name. What that left was
DORIS DUN
.

I remembered the day I had spoken to Frank Dunning’s wife, pretending to be a real estate speculator with an interest in the West Side Rec. She’d been twenty years older than Sadie Doris Clayton, née Dunhill, but both women had blue eyes, exquisite skin, and fine, full-breasted figures. Both women were smokers. All of it could have been coincidental, but it wasn’t. And I knew it.

“What are you doing?” The accusatory tone meant the real question was
Why do you keep dodging and evading,
but I was no longer angry. Not even close.

“Are you sure he doesn’t know where you are?” I asked.

“Who? Johnny? Do you mean Johnny? Why . . .” That was when she decided it was useless. I saw it in her face. “George, you need to leave.”

“But he could find out,” I said. “Because your parents know, and your parents thought he was just the bees’ knees, you said so yourself.”

I took a step toward her. She took a step back. The way you’d step back from a person who’s revealed himself to be of unsound mind. I saw the fear in her eyes, and the lack of comprehension, and still I couldn’t stop. Remember that I was scared myself.

“Even if you told them not to say, he’d get it out of them. Because he’s charming. Isn’t he, Sadie? When he’s not compulsively washing his hands, or alphabetizing his books, or talking about how disgusting it is to get an erection, he’s very, very charming. He certainly charmed
you.
”

“Please go away, George.” Her voice was trembling.

I took another step toward her
instead. She took a compensatory step back, struck the wall . . . and
cringed.
Seeing her do that was like a slap across the face to a hysteric or a glass of cold water flung into the face of a sleepwalker. I retreated to the arch between the living room and the kitchen, my hands held up to the sides of my face, like a man surrendering. Which was what I was doing.

“I’m going. But Sadie—”

“I just don’t understand how you could do it,” she said. The tears had come; they were rolling slowly down her cheeks. “Or why you refuse to
un
do it. We had such a good thing.”

“We still do.”

She shook her head. She did it slowly but firmly.

I crossed the kitchen in what felt like a float rather than a walk, plucked the tub of vanilla ice cream from one of the bags standing on the counter, and put it in the freezer of her Coldspot. Part of me was thinking this was all just a bad dream, and I’d wake up soon. Most of me knew better.

Sadie stood in the arch, watching me. She had a fresh cigarette in one hand and the job applications in the other. Now that I saw it, the resemblance to Doris Dunning was eerie. Which raised the question of why I hadn’t seen it before. Because I’d been preoccupied with other stuff ? Or was it because I still hadn’t fully grasped the immensity of the things I was fooling with?

I went out through the screen door and stood on the stoop, looking at her through the mesh. “Watch out for him, Sadie.”

“Johnny’s mixed up about a lot of things, but he’s not dangerous,” she said. “And my parents would never tell him where I am. They promised.”

“People can break promises, and people can snap. Especially people who’ve been under a lot of pressure and are mentally unstable to begin with.”

“You need to go, George.”

“Promise me that you’ll watch out for him and I will.”

She shouted,
“I promise, I promise, I promise!”
The way her cigarette trembled between her fingers was bad; the combination of shock, loss, grief, and anger
in her red eyes was much worse. I could feel them following me all the way back to my car.

Goddamned Rolling Stones.

A few days before the end-of-year testing cycle began, Ellen Dockerty summoned me to her office. After she closed the door, she said: “I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused, George, but if I had it to do over again, I’m not sure I would behave any differently.”

I said nothing. I was no longer angry, but I was still stunned. I’d gotten very little sleep since the blow-up, and I had an idea that 4:00
A.M.
and I were going to be close friends in the near future.

“Clause Twenty-five of the Texas School Administrative Code,” she said, as if that explained everything.

“I beg your pardon, Ellie?”

“Nina Wallingford was the one who brought it to my attention.” Nina was the district nurse. She put tens of thousands of miles on her Ford Ranch Wagon each school year circling Denholm County’s eight schools, three of them still of the one-or two-room variety. “Clause Twenty-five concerns the state’s rules for immunization in schools. It covers teachers as well as students, and Nina pointed out she didn’t have any immunization records for you. No medical records of any kind, in fact.”

And there it was. The fake teacher exposed by his lack of a polio shot. Well, at least it wasn’t my advanced knowledge of the Rolling Stones, or inappropriate use of disco slang.

“You being so busy with the
Jamboree
and all, I thought I’d write to the schools where you’d taught and save you the trouble. What I got back from Florida was a letter
stating that they don’t require immunization records from substitutes. What I got from Maine and Wisconsin was ‘Never heard of him.’”

She leaned forward behind her desk, looking at me. I couldn’t meet her gaze for long. What I saw in her face before I redirected my gaze to the backs of my hands was an unbearable sympathy.

“Would the State Board of Education care that we had hired an imposter? Very much. They might even institute legal action to recoup your year’s salary. Do I care? Absolutely not. Your work at DCHS has been exemplary. What you and Sadie did for Bobbi Jill Allnut was absolutely wonderful, the kind of thing that garners State Teacher of the Year nominations.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I guess.”

“I asked myself what Mimi Corcoran would do. What Meems said to me was, ‘If he had signed a contract to teach next year and the year after, you’d be forced to act. But since he’s leaving in a month, it’s actually in your interest—and the school’s—to say nothing.’ Then she added, ‘But there’s one person who
has
to know he’s not who he says he is.’”

Ellie paused.

“I told Sadie that I was sure you’d have some reasonable explanation, but it seems you do not.”

I glanced at my watch. “If you’re not firing me, Miz Ellie, I ought to get back to my period five class. We’re diagramming sentences. I’m thinking of trying them on a compound that goes,
I am blameless in this matter, but I cannot say why.
What do you think? Too tough?”

“Too tough for me, certainly,” she said pleasantly.

“One thing,” I said. “Sadie’s marriage was difficult. Her husband was strange in ways I don’t want to go into. His name is John Clayton. I think he might be dangerous. You need to ask Sadie if she has a picture of him, so you’ll know what he looks like if he shows up and starts asking questions.”

“And you think this because?”

“Because I’ve seen something like it before. Will that do?”

“I suppose it will have to,
won’t it?”

That wasn’t a good enough answer. “Will you ask her?”

“Yes, George.” She might mean it; she might only be humoring me. I couldn’t tell.

I was at the door when she said, as if only passing the time of day: “You’re breaking that young woman’s heart.”

“I know,” I said, and left.

Mercedes Street. Late May.

“Welder, are you?”

I was standing on the porch of 2706 with the landlord, a fine American named Mr. Jay Baker. He was stocky, with a huge gut he called the house that Shiner built. We had just finished a quick tour of the premises, which Baker had explained to me was “Prime to the bus stop,” as if that made up for the sagging ceilings, water-stained walls, cracked toilet tank, and general air of decrepitude.

“Night watchman,” I said.

“Yeah? That’s a good job. Plenty of time to fuck the dog on a job like that.”

This seemed to require no response.

“No wife or kiddies?”

“Divorced. They’re back East.”

“Pay hellimony, do you?”

I shrugged.

He let it go. “So do you want the place, Amberson?”

“I guess so,” I said, and sighed.

He took a long rent-book with a floppy leather cover out of his back pocket. “First month, last month, damage deposit.”

“Damage deposit? You have to be kidding.”

Baker went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rent’s due on the last Friday of the month. Come up short or late and you’re on the street, courtesy of Fort
Worth PD. Me’n them get along real good.”

He took the charred cigar stub from his breast pocket, stuck the chewed end in his gob, and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. It was hot on the porch. I had an idea it was going to be a long, hot summer.

I sighed again. Then—with a show of reluctance—I took out my wallet and began to remove twenty-dollar bills. “In God we trust,” I said. “All others pay cash.”

He laughed, puffing out clouds of acrid blue smoke as he did so. “That’s good, I’ll remember that. Especially on the last Friday of the month.”

I couldn’t believe I was going to live in this desperate shack and on this desperate street, after my nice house south of here—where I’d taken pride in keeping an actual lawn mowed. Although I hadn’t even left Jodie yet, I felt a wave of homesickness.

“Give me a receipt, please,” I said.

That much I got for free.

It was the last day of school. The classrooms and hallways were empty. The overhead fans paddled air that was already hot, although it was only the eighth of June. The Oswald family had left Russia; in another five days, according to Al Templeton’s notes, the SS
Maasdam
would dock in Hoboken, where they would walk down the gangplank and onto United States soil.

The teachers’ room was empty except for Danny Laverty. “Hey, champ. Understand you’re going off to Dallas to finish that book of yours.”

“That’s the plan.” Fort Worth was actually the plan, at least to begin with. I began cleaning out my pigeonhole, which was stuffed with end-of-school communiqués.

“If I was footloose and fancy-free instead of tied down to a wife, three rugrats, and a mortgage, I might
try a book myself,” Danny said. “I was in the war, you know.”

I knew. Everyone knew, usually within ten minutes of meeting him.

“Got enough to live on?”

“I’ll be okay.”

I had more than enough to take me through to next April, when I expected to conclude my business with Lee Oswald. I wouldn’t need to make any more expeditions to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue. Going there even once had been incredibly stupid. If I wanted, I could try to tell myself that what had happened to my place in Florida had just been the result of a prank gone bad, but I’d also tried to tell myself that Sadie and I were doing fine, and look how
that
had turned out.

I tossed the wad of paperwork from my pigeonhole into the trash . . . and saw a small sealed envelope I had somehow missed. I knew who used envelopes like that
.
There was no salutation on the sheet of notepaper inside, and no signature except for the faint (perhaps even illusory) scent of her perfume. The message was brief.

I held it for a minute, thinking, then stuck it in my back pocket and walked rapidly down to the library. I don’t know what I planned to do or what I meant to tell her, but none of it mattered because the library was dark and the chairs were up on the tables. I tried the knob anyway, but the door was locked.