In War Times (54 page)

“Yeah,” said Wink, looking over the photos again.

“I thought this was all being…summed up,” said Sam.

“That can only be done up to a certain point. There are too many variables to be any more precise. We’d better get going now. The faster we move, the faster Sam can get Jill out of there.”

They came to a barricade in the road. Bette parked on the grass at the side of an already full parking lot. “I’m putting the keys under the seat. You take the car, Sam, with Jill. Don’t wait for either of us.”

“Where are we going to meet?” asked Sam.

Bette got out of the car and straightened her suit. She bowed her head for an instant, then got out her bag, and slung it over her shoulder. “Just get to the plane.”

They made their way through the crowds lining the street and crossed Houston a block north of the Book Depository. Behind the building was a parking lot, with several parked cars and two green Dumpsters.

Bette took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Sam, inside that door is the freight elevator. Use that to get to the sixth floor. Just act like you’re one of the guys working there.”

“Bette,
listen
to me.”

She grabbed him, held him close, gave him a passionate kiss, and looked into his eyes. “See you.” She turned and hurried away.

Then Wink was off too, walking briskly around the side of the Book Depository.

There was one passenger waiting for the freight elevator. Sam stepped inside next to him. The elevator was padded, the metal scuffed and dull. It labored up to the third floor, where the man got out.

As the door opened on the sixth floor, Sam quickly took stock.

There were no partitions in the room. The east side, where Oswald purportedly stood, according to the Warren Commission report, was crowded with stacked cardboard cartons of books. They were in the process of putting down a new plank floor. Next to stacks of planks he saw a hammer and a sledgehammer. Two half-full Coke bottles had been left on the floor near the window.

He drew his gun.

In the shadows, on the west side of the room, were two men wearing black suits. One had blond hair, the other, brown. Oswald was not there. But the Italian rifle he had purportedly bought through mail order leaned against the window.

Their radios crackled constantly. They were talking, and apparently had not noticed the elevator door opening a hundred feet away. They stood next to a low stack of pried-up boards and a crowbar.

Where was Jill?

He crouched behind some boxes and watched.

The men were intent on looking out the window. “Okay,” said the blond man.

The other set his rifle on his shoulder and sighted through the scope.

Sam heard the roar of the crowd outside, getting louder as the president’s car approached on Houston, getting ready to turn onto Elm. Through the open window, he could see pedestrian-lined Elm Street, people cheering and waving.

Sam started at a sound. The men whirled.

It was Jill. She pointed a handgun at the man holding the rifle. “Stop! Now! I’ll shoot!”

The brown-haired man reached for his gun. Sam fired at him.

He staggered backward and fell against the stacked boards, which fanned out across the floor. The blond man swung his rifle toward Jill.

His partner raised up on one elbow. “No! Out the window! The decoy shot!”

Sam was deafened by a second report. Jill cried out and crumpled to the floor.

“Jill!”

The blond man glanced at Sam, wavered, then turned back to the window and pushed his rifle out the window.

Sam shot him.

The man slammed into the wall as the bullet hit him, and staggered to one side. At that moment, Sam heard other shots, from outside, distant pops of gunfire.

H
OLSTERING HIS GUN
, Sam leaped over the boards and knelt at Jill’s side. Her face was covered with blood. He ripped off his shirt and mopped her face, found a gash on her forehead. He wrapped his shirt around her head, trying not to think that she might be dead, though she seemed lifeless. For an instant, the world and everything in it faded away. He felt her neck: there was still a pulse. But for how long?

He eased her onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, crossed the room, and hurried down the stairs, conscious that someone might stop him at any moment. As the stairwell door closed behind him, Sam heard sirens, distant screams, more shots.

Another man joined them on the second-floor stairwell, shoved past them without a second look, and ran out the door when he reached the ground floor. Sam emerged behind him. He passed the stinking Dumpsters and set Jill down gently behind a parked car. “Jill!”

She opened her eyes. “Dad?”

He hugged her tight, crying with relief, and picked her up once again.

Many thoughts flooded him as he half walked, half ran. He wanted to stay out of sight. He wanted to get to a hospital. He needed to get to the car, so they could get away. He crossed Houston Street, ducked into an alley, turned right, and continued running, breathing hard. Jill had passed out again; her head sagged back. A middle-aged woman, hurrying toward him, shouted, “The president! The president,” and then just stared as he pushed past her.

He saw their Rambler ahead.

With strangely steady hands, he opened the back door and gently deposited Jill on the scorching hot seat. She murmured something. He slammed the door, grabbed the keys from under the seat, started the car, and cut the wheels sharply.

Away from the Book Depository. Toward the plane. Toward Bette.

He bumped down the curb into the street, drove too fast for a few blocks, then forced himself to slow down. He kept an eye out for a hospital sign, a doctor’s office, anything. But he was in a residential neighborhood.

Jill sat up. “What happened? God, my head.” Then she saw herself in the mirror. She pulled the shirt from her head.

“Jill—” Sam tried to turn and get the shirt back around her head.

She rubbed her face with the shirt, then said, “That Esso station. Up ahead.”

The bathroom door was blessedly unlocked. He helped Jill inside. It stank. Toilet paper was strewn on the floor, but there was none on the roll. Jill looked in the wavy spotted mirror over the sink and laughed weakly. “I look like something from a horror movie.”

He turned on the water and helped Jill bathe her face, rubbing blood off gently, wondering where the wound was. After a few moments it was clear that she had a deep gash on her forehead, which started to bleed again.

Jill stuck her entire head under the faucet. She drenched her hair and face, came up for air, reeled dizzily against the metal stall. “That’s better,” she gasped. “Okay.”

He helped her back out to the car. “Is there a Coke machine?” she asked. He felt in his pocket for coins, found a dime and two nickels, bought two Cokes, and drove off.

Jill upended her Coke and chugged it down. ‘

“You need stitches,” Sam said.

“It’s just a scratch.” She sounded drunk. “I got worse in Chicago. I was out for hours after they clubbed me. But maybe—where are we? What happened?”

“We’re in Dallas, Texas.”

“Dallas! How did we get here?”

The buildings around them were no longer those of the downtown, but of suburbs. He felt relief as they got farther out of town and into the country. “That’s a very good question. Don’t you remember?”

“I don’t know,” she said, looking around. “Everything looks kind of…strange.”

“Strange in what way?”

“Old. Maybe that’s because we’re in Texas.” She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes meeting his in the mirror. “The assassination.”

“Right.”

“I’m starting to remember.”

“How did you get here, Jill?”

She frowned and closed her eyes. “I…yeah.” She opened her eyes. “I hitchhiked. It took three days and nights. The game board had maps on it. They changed whenever I needed a new one. I got good rides, fast. Along the way, things just started to seem…I don’t know, older. Finally a woman like Gypsy Myra picked me up and I knew I’d be all right.” Her voice was dreamy.

They were out on a long straight country road now. Sam pegged the speedometer. “What do you mean, like her?”

“She had long black hair, but she had it pulled back with a red bandanna. She wore western stuff—you know, cowboy boots and jeans. She drove a pickup truck with a saddle in the back. She drank a beer while she drove.”

“Great,” said Sam. “What did she say?”

“She told me that I was doing the right thing. She said all kinds of weird stuff about biochemistry. She sounded like Mom. She talked about the war. She talked about history. Herd animals. Molecular biology—ever heard of that? It was wild, man. She gave me that gun. She stopped and showed me how to load it and shoot it. I told her I didn’t want to use a gun and she said, ‘You will.’” Jill looked around the car. “Where’s the game board? Do you have it?”

“No.”

“We have to go back! I have to have it!”

“No.” Sam saw, in the distance, the trailer with a wind sock next to it, practically the only sign of the airstrip. He accelerated, and spun onto the dirt road leading to it. As he got closer, he saw, with dread, that there was no plane.

Leonard was there, though.

Sam pulled up in a cloud of dust and yelled, “Where’s Bette?”

Leonard hoisted himself from his crooked lawn chair and hobbled over to the window. Sam smelled beer and tobacco. “She left, son.”

“When?”

“Half-hour ago.”

Sam felt tremendous relief. At least she was all right. “Was there anyone with her?”

Leonard shook his head and spat tobacco juice sideways, just missing the mirror. “Nope.”

Sam felt a moment’s emptiness, which reached outward like the flatness of the land, forever, with nothing to break the view. “Did she say anything?”

“She just said to tell you she’d see you.”

“What else?”

“That’s all, son.” He shoved back from the door.

Bette.

Bette was gone.

As was Wink.

Casualties of war.

“There a doctor around here?” Sam asked.

Leonard waved his arm. “Next town. Ten miles down the road. Dr. Innis. On your right. Good man.”

Sam found Dr. Innis’s office with no problem. There was one patient in the waiting room, but the nurse took them right in.

The doctor didn’t seem too curious, except that he did ask what happened to Sam’s shirt as he gently pulled the cat gut through Jill’s forehead. Sam felt sick; couldn’t watch. As he finished up, Innis asked if they’d heard about the assassination attempt.

“An attempt?” Sam asked.

“Bastards didn’t get ’im. Sorry, miss.”

Then they set off on the long drive home.

T
HE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT
was endlessly dissected on the radio. In a greasy spoon the following morning, he and Jill studied the newspapers. Several men were mysteriously dead. Two had been shot while standing on the bumper of a truck parked behind a picket fence overlooking the motorcade’s route. They each had a high-powered rifle, but both had been shot in the head by someone the paper called a “professional.”

At about the same time, a man at the train-switching tower a block away had seen a woman in a suit carrying a leather bag cross the railroad tracks; she had met two men on the other side. The switchman watched them pull guns on her, but then they fell. He called the police and then ran to them. Both had been shot. The woman was gone.

Strangely, there was no mention of the two men in the Book Depository, nor of the scoped rifle.

A man on Elm Street with an open umbrella standing ten feet from where the motorcade passed had also been shot. The Secret Service had killed that shooter. He could not be identified. Sam could find no photos of the man, but he was sure it was Wink.

But which Wink? The Wink who had died in Berlin? The Wink of the Chinese book mart? The Wink of Midway?

And which Sam was he?

While they passed through New Orleans, two days later, Jill was fiddling with the radio when Sam said “Stop! Get that back!”

It was Kennedy, giving his speech, delayed by the assassination attempt, at the Trade Mart. He was a stubborn man.

This link between leadership and learning is not only essential at the community level. It is even more indispensable in world affairs. Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem…

This nation’s strength and security are not easily or cheaply obtained, nor are they quickly and simply explained. There are many kinds of strength and no one kind will suffice. Overwhelming nuclear strength cannot stop a guerrilla war…

We have regained the initiative in the exploration of outer space, making an annual effort greater than the combined total of all space activities undertaken during the fifties, launching more than 130 vehicles into earth orbit, putting into actual operation valuable weather and communications satellites, and making it clear to all that the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space…In short, our national space effort represents a great gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength…

Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.

We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”