11/22/63: A Novel (91 page)

“My suitcase is in my car,” she said. “Will we take the Beetle to wherever we’re going, or your Chevy? The Beetle might be better. It’s easier to park. We may have to pay a lot for a space, even so, if we don’t go right now. The scalpers are already out, waving their flags. I saw them.”

“Sadie . . .” I shook my head in an effort to clear it and grabbed
my shoes. I had thoughts in my head, plenty of them, but they were whirling around like paper in a cyclone, and I couldn’t catch a single one.

“I’m here,” she said.

Yes. That was the problem. “You can’t come with me. It’s too dangerous. I thought I explained that, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough. When you try to change the past, it bites. It’ll tear your throat out if you give it the chance.”

“You were clear. But you can’t do this alone. Face reality, Jake. You’ve put on a few pounds, but you’re still a scarecrow. You limp when you walk, and it’s a
bad
limp. You have to stop and rest your knee every two or three hundred steps. What would you do if you had to run?”

I said nothing. I was listening, though. I wound and set my watch as I did it.

“And that’s not the worst of it. You—yikes! What are you doing?” I had grabbed her thigh.

“Making sure you’re real. I still can’t quite believe it.”
Air Force One
was going to touch down at Love Field in a little over three hours. And someone was going to give Jackie Kennedy roses. At her other Texas stops, she’d been given yellow ones, but the Dallas bouquet was going to be red.

“I’m real and I’m here. Listen to me, Jake. The worst thing isn’t how badly you’re still banged up. The worst thing is the way you have of falling suddenly asleep. Haven’t you thought of that?”

I’d thought of it a lot.

“If the past is as malevolent as you say it is, what do you think is going to happen if you do succeed in getting close to the man you’re hunting before he can pull the trigger?”

The past wasn’t exactly malevolent, that was the wrong word, but I saw what she was saying and had no argument against it.

“You really don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“I absolutely do. And you’re forgetting something very important.”
She took my hands and looked into my eyes. “I’m not just your best girl, Jake . . . if that’s what I still am to you—”

“That’s exactly why it’s so goddam scary having you turn up like this.”

“You say a man’s going to shoot the president, and I have reason to believe you, based on the other things that you’ve predicted that have come true. Even Deke’s half-persuaded. ‘He knew Kennedy was coming before
Kennedy
knew it,’ he said. ‘Right down to the day and the hour. And he knew the Missus was coming along for the ride.’ But you say it as if you were the only person who cared. You’re not. Deke cares. He would have been here if he wasn’t still running a fever of a hundred and one. And
I
care. I didn’t vote for him, but I happen to be an American, and that makes him not just
the
president but
my
president. Does that sound corny to you?”

“No.”

“Good.” Her eyes were snapping. “I have no intention of letting some crazy person shoot him, and I have no intention of falling asleep.”

“Sadie—”

“Let me finish. We don’t have much time, so you need to dig out your ears. Are they dug?”

“Yessum.”

“Good.
You’re not getting rid of me.
Let me repeat:
not.
I’m going. If you won’t let me into your Chevy, I’ll follow you in my Beetle.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, and didn’t know if I was cursing or praying.

“If we ever get married, I’ll do what you say, as long as you’re good to me. I was raised to believe that’s a wife’s job.” (
Oh ye child of the sixties,
I thought.) “I’m ready to leave everything I know behind and follow you into the future. Because I love you and because I believe that future you talk about is really there. I’ll probably never give you another ultimatum, but I’m giving you one now. You do this with me or you don’t do it at all.”

I thought about this, and carefully. I asked myself if she meant it. The answer was as clear as the scar on her face.

Sadie, meanwhile, was looking at the Crayola Girls. “Who do you suppose drew these? They’re actually quite good.”

“Rosette did them,” I said. “Rosette Templeton. She went back to Mozelle with her mamma after her daddy had an accident.”

“And then you moved in?”

“No, across the street. A little family named Oswald moved in here.”

“Is that his name, Jake? Oswald?”

“Yes. Lee Oswald.”

“Am I coming with you?”

“Do I have a choice?”

She smiled and put her hand on my face. Until I saw that relieved smile, I had no idea of how frightened she must have been when she shook me awake. “No, honey,” she said. “Not that I can see. That’s why they call it an ultimatum.”

We put her suitcase in the Chevrolet. If we stopped Oswald (and weren’t arrested), we could get her Beetle later and she could drive it back to Jodie, where it would look normal and at home in her driveway. If things didn’t go well—if we failed, or succeeded only to find ourselves on the hook for Lee’s murder—we’d simply have to run for it. We could run faster, farther, and more anonymously in a V-8 Chevy than in a Volkswagen Beetle.

She saw the gun when I put it into the inside pocket of my sport coat and said, “No. Outside pocket.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Where I can get at it if you all at once get tired and decide to take a nap.”

We went down the walk, Sadie hitching her purse over her shoulder. Rain had been forecast, but it looked to me as if the prognosticators would have to take a penalty card on that one. The sky was clearing.

Before Sadie could get in on the passenger side, a voice from behind me spoke up. “That your girlfriend, mister?”

I turned. It was the jump-rope girl with the acne. Only it wasn’t acne, it wasn’t rubella, and I didn’t have to ask why she wasn’t in school. She had chicken pox. “Yes, she is.”

“She’s purty. Except for the”—she made a
gik
sound that was, in a grotesque way, sort of charming—“on her face.”

Sadie smiled. My appreciation for her sheer guts continued to go up . . . and it never went down. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Sadie,” the jump-rope girl said. “Sadie Van Owen. What’s yours?”

“Well, you’re not going to believe this, but my name’s Sadie, too.”

The kid eyed her with a mistrustful cynicism that was all Mercedes Street Riot Grrrl. “No, it’s not!”

“It really is. Sadie Dunhill.” She turned to me. “That’s quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say, George?”

I wouldn’t, actually, and I didn’t have time to discuss it. “Need to ask you something, Miss Sadie Van Owen. You know where the buses stop on Winscott Road, don’t you?”

“Sure.” She rolled her eyes as if to ask
how dumb do you think I am?
“Say, have you two had the chicken pox?”

Sadie nodded.

“Me, too,” I said, “so we’re okay on that score. Do you know which bus goes into downtown Dallas?”

“The Number Three.”

“And how often does the Three run?”

“I think every half hour, but it might be every fifteen minutes. Why you want the bus when you got a car? When you got
two
cars?”

I could tell by Big Sadie’s expression that she was wondering the same thing. “I’ve got my reasons. And by the way, my old man drives a submarine.”

Sadie Van Owen cracked a huge smile. “You know that one?”

“Known it for years,” I said. “Get in, Sadie. We need to roll.”

I checked my new watch. It was twenty minutes to nine.

“Tell me why you’re interested in the buses,” Sadie said.

“First tell me how you found me.”

“When I got to Eden Fallows and you were gone, I burned the
note as you asked, then checked with the old guy next door.”

“Mr. Kenopensky.”

“Yes. He didn’t know anything. By then the therapist lady was sitting on your steps. She wasn’t happy to find you gone. She said she’d traded with Doreen so Doreen could see Kennedy today.”

The Winscott Road bus stop was ahead. I slowed to see if there was a schedule inside the little shelter next to the post, but no. I pulled into a parking space a hundred yards ahead of the stop.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking out an insurance policy. If a bus doesn’t come by nine, we’ll go on. Finish your story.”

“I called the hotels in downtown Dallas, but nobody even wanted to talk to me. They’re all so
busy.
I called Deke next, and he called the police. Told them he had reliable information that someone was going to shoot the president.”

I’d been watching for the bus in my rearview mirror, but now I looked at Sadie in shock. Yet I felt reluctant admiration for Deke. I had no idea how much of what Sadie had told him he actually believed, but he’d gone way out on a limb, just the same. “What happened? Did he give his name?”

“He never got the chance. They hung up on him. I think that’s when I really started to believe you about how the past protects itself. And that’s what all this is to you, isn’t it? Just a living history book.”

“Not anymore.”

Here came a lumbering bus, green over yellow. The sign in the destination window read 3 MAIN STREET DALLAS 3. It stopped and the doors at the front and back flapped open on their accordion hinges. Two or three people got on, but there was no way
they were going to find seats; when the bus rolled slowly past us, I saw that all of them were full. I glimpsed a woman with a row of Kennedy buttons pinned to her hat. She waved at me gaily, and although our eyes met for only a second, I could feel her excitement, delight, and anticipation.

I dropped the Chevy into gear and followed the bus. On the back, partially obscured by belching brown exhaust, a radiantly smiling Clairol girl proclaimed that if she only had one life, she wanted to live it as a blonde. Sadie waved her hand theatrically. “Uck! Drop back! It stinks!”

“That’s quite a criticism, coming from a pack-a-day chick,” I said, but she was right, the diesel stench was nasty. I fell back. There was no need to tailgate now that I knew Sadie Jump-Rope had been right about the number. She’d probably been right about the interval, too. The buses might run every half hour on ordinary days, but this was no ordinary day.

“I did some more crying, because I thought you were gone for sure. I was scared for you, but I hated you, too.”

I could understand that and still feel I’d done the right thing, so it seemed best to say nothing.

“I called Deke again. He asked me if you’d ever said anything about having another bolt-hole, maybe in Dallas but probably in Fort Worth. I said I didn’t remember you saying anything specific. He said it probably would have been while you were in the hospital, and all confused. He told me to think hard. As if I wasn’t. I went back to Mr. Kenopensky on the chance you might have said something to him. By then it was almost suppertime, and getting dark. He said no, but right about then his son came by with a pot roast dinner and invited me to eat with them. Mr. K got talking—he has all kinds of stories about the old days—”

“I know.” Up ahead, the bus turned east on Vickery Boulevard. I signaled and followed it but stayed far enough back so we didn’t have to eat the diesel. “I’ve heard at least three dozen. Blood-on-the-saddle stuff.”

“Listening to him was the best thing I could have done, because
I stopped racking my brains for awhile, and sometimes when you relax, things let go and float to the surface of your mind. While I was walking back to your little apartment, I suddenly remembered you saying you lived for awhile on Cadillac Street. Only you knew that wasn’t quite right.”

“Oh my God. I forgot all about that.”

“It was my last chance. I called Deke again. He didn’t have any detailed city maps, but he knew there were some at the school library. He drove down—probably coughing his head off, he’s still pretty sick—got them, and called me from the office. He found a Ford Avenue in Dallas, and a Chrysler Park, and several Dodge Streets. But none of them had the feel of a Cadillac, if you know what I mean. Then he found Mercedes Street in Fort Worth. I wanted to go right away, but he told me I’d have a much better chance of spotting you or your car if I waited until morning.”

She gripped my arm. Her hand was cold.

“Longest night of my life, you troublesome man. I hardly slept a wink.”

“I made up for you, although I didn’t finally go under until the wee hours. If you hadn’t come, I might have slept right through the damn assassination.”

How dismal would
that
be for an ending?

“Mercedes goes on for
blocks.
I drove and drove. Then I could see the end, at the parking lot of some big building that looks like the back of a department store.”

“Close. It’s a Montgomery Ward warehouse.”

“And still no sign of you. I can’t tell you how downhearted I was.
Then
. . .” She grinned. It was radiant in spite of the scar. “Then I saw that red Chevy with the silly tailfins that look like a woman’s eyebrows. Bright as a neon sign. I shouted and pounded the dashboard of my little Beetle until my hand was sore. And now here I a—”

There was a low, crunching bang from the right front of the Chevy and suddenly we were veering at a lamppost. There was a series of hard thuds from beneath the car. I spun the wheel. It was
sickeningly loose in my hands, but I got just enough steerage to avoid hitting the post head-on. Instead, Sadie’s side scraped it, creating a ghastly metal-on-metal
screee
. Her door bowed inward and I yanked her toward me on the bench seat. We came to a stop with the hood hanging over the sidewalk and the car listing to the right.
That wasn’t just a flat tire,
I thought.
That was a mortal fucking injury.

Sadie looked at me, stunned. I laughed. As previously noted, sometimes there’s just nothing else you can do.

“Welcome to the past, Sadie,” I said. “This is how we live here.”

She couldn’t get out on her side; it was going to take a crowbar to pry the passenger door open. She slid the rest of the way across the seat and got out on mine. A few people were watching, not many.