by Stephen King
We’d usually eat at Al’s Diner on those evenings, then go to the football game. And when the football season ended, there was basketball. Sometimes Deke joined us, decked out in his school sweater with Brian the Fightin’ Denton Lion on the front.
Miz Ellie, never.
Her disapproval did not stop us from going to the Candlewood Bungalows after the Friday games. I usually stayed there alone on Saturday nights, and on Sundays I’d join Sadie for services at Jodie’s First Methodist Church. We shared a hymnal and sang many verses of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness … the melody and those well-meant sentiments still linger in my head.
After church we’d have the noon meal at her place, and after that I’d drive back to Dallas. Every time I made that drive, it seemed longer and I liked it less. Finally, on a chilly day in mid-December, my Ford threw a rod, as if expressing its own opinion that we were driving in the wrong direction. I wanted to get it fixed—that Sunliner convertible was the only car I ever truly loved—but the guy at Kileen Auto Repair told me it would take a whole new engine, and he just didn’t know where he could lay his paws on one.
I dug into my still-sturdy (well … relatively sturdy) cash reserve and bought a 1959 Chevy, the kind with the bodacious gull-wing tailfins. It was a good car, and Sadie said she absolutely adored it, but for me it was never quite the same.
We spent Christmas night together at the Candlewood. I put a sprig of holly on the dresser and gave her a cardigan. She gave me a pair of loafers that are on my feet now. Some things are meant to keep.
We had dinner at her house on Boxing Day, and while I was setting the table, Deke’s Ranch Wagon pulled into the driveway. That surprised me, because Sadie had said nothing about company. I was more surprised to see Miz Ellie on the passenger side. The way she stood with her arms folded, looking at my new car, told me I wasn’t the only one who’d been kept in the dark about the guest list. But—credit where credit is due—she greeted me with a fair imitation of warmth and kissed me on the cheek. She was wearing a knitted ski cap that made her look like an elderly child, and offered me a tight smile of thanks when I whisked it off her head.
“I didn’t get the memo, either,” I said.
Deke pumped my hand. “Merry Christmas, George. Glad to see you. Gosh, something smells good.”
He wandered off to the kitchen. A few moments later I heard Sadie laugh and say, “Get your fingers out of that, Deke, didn’t your mama raise you right?”
Ellie was slowly undoing the keg buttons of her coat, never taking her eyes from my face. “Is it wise, George?” she asked. “What you and Sadie are doing—is it wise?”
Before I could answer, Sadie swept in with the turkey she’d been fussing over ever since we’d gotten back from the Candlewood Bungalows. We sat down and linked hands. “Dear Lord, please bless this food to our bodies,” Sadie said, “and please bless our fellowship, one with the other, to our minds and our spirits.”
I started to let go, but she was still gripping my hand with her left and Ellie’s with her right. “And please bless George and Ellie with friendship. Help George remember her kindness, and help Ellie to remember that without George, there would be a girl from this town with a terribly scarred face. I love them both, and it’s sad to see mistrust in their eyes. For Jesus’s sake, amen.”
“Amen!” Deke said heartily. “Good prayer!” He winked at Ellie.
I think part of Ellie wanted to get up and leave. It might have been the reference to Bobbi Jill that stopped her. Or maybe it was how much she’d come to respect her new school librarian. Maybe it even had a little to do with me. I like to think so.
Sadie was looking at Miz Ellie with all her old anxiety.
“That turkey looks absolutely wonderful,” Ellie said, and handed me her plate. “Would you help me to a drumstick, George? And don’t spare the stuffing.”
Sadie could be vulnerable, and Sadie could be clumsy, but Sadie could also be very, very brave.
How I loved her.
3
Lee, Marina, and June went to the de Mohrenschildts’ to see in the new year. I was left to my own lonely devices, but when Sadie called and asked if I’d take her to the New Year’s Eve dance at Jodie’s Bountiful Grange, I hesitated.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but this will be better than last year. We’ll make it better, George.”
So there we were at eight o’clock, once more dancing beneath sagging nets of balloons. This year’s band was called the Dominoes. They featured a four-man horn section instead of the Dick Dale–style surf guitars that had dominated the previous year’s dance, but they also knew how to lay it down. There were the same two bowls of pink lemonade and ginger ale, one soft and one spiked. There were the same smokers clustered beneath the fire escape in the chill air. But it was better than last year. There was a great sense of relief and happiness. The world had passed under a nuclear shadow in October … but then it had passed back out again. I heard several approving comments about how Kennedy had made the bad old Russian bear back down.
Around nine o’clock, during a slow dance, Sadie suddenly screamed and broke away from me. I was sure she’d spotted John Clayton, and my heart jumped into my throat. But that had been a scream of pure happiness, because the two newcomers she had spotted were Mike Coslaw—looking absurdly handsome in a tweed topcoat—and Bobbi Jill Allnut. Sadie ran to them … and tripped over someone’s foot. Mike caught her and swung her around. Bobbi Jill waved to me, a little shyly.
I shook Mike’s hand and kissed Bobbi Jill on the cheek. The disfiguring scar was now a faint pink line. “Doctor says it’ll be all gone by next summer,” she said. “He called me his fastest-healing patient. Thanks to you.”
“I got a part in Death of a Salesman, Mr. A.,” Mike said. “I’m playing Biff.”
“Type-casting,” I said. “Just watch out for flying pies.”
I saw him talking to the band’s lead singer during one of the breaks, and knew perfectly well what was coming. When they got back on the stand, the singer said: “I’ve got a special request. Do we have a George Amberson and Sadie Dunhill in the house? George and Sadie? Come on up here, George and Sadie, outta your seats and onto your feets.”
We walked toward the bandstand through a storm of applause. Sadie was laughing and blushing. She shook her fist at Mike. He grinned. The boy was leaving his face; the man was coming in. A little shyly, but coming. The singer counted off, and the brass section swung into that downbeat I still hear in my dreams.
Bah-dah-dah … bah-dah-da-dee-dum …
I held my hands out to her. She shook her head, but began to swing her hips a little just the same.
“Go get him, Miz Sadie!” Bobbi Jill shouted. “Do the thing!”
The crowd joined in. “Go! Go! Go!”
She gave in and took my hands. We danced.
4
At midnight, the band played “Auld Lang Syne”—different arrangement from last year, same sweet song—and the balloons came drifting down. All around us, couples were kissing and embracing. We did the same.
“Happy New Year, G—” She pulled back from me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
I’d had a sudden image of the Texas School Book Depository, an ugly brick square with windows like eyes. This was the year it would become an American icon.
It won’t. I’ll never let you get that far, Lee. You’ll never be in that sixth-floor window. That’s my promise.
“George?”
“Goose walked over my grave, I guess,” I said. “Happy New Year.”
I went to kiss her, but she held me back for a moment. “It’s almost here, isn’t it? What you came to do.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not tonight. For tonight it’s just us. So kiss me, honey. And dance with me.”
5
I had two lives in late 1962 and early 1963. The good one was in Jodie, and at the Candlewood in Kileen. The other was in Dallas
.
Lee and Marina got back together. Their first stop in Dallas was a dump just around the corner from West Neely. De Mohrenschildt helped them move in. George Bouhe wasn’t in evidence. Neither were any of the other Russian émigrés. Lee had driven them away. They hated him, Al had written in his notes, and below that: He wanted them to.
The crumbling redbrick at 604 Elsbeth Street had been divided into four or five apartments bursting with poor folks who worked hard, drank hard, and produced hordes of snot-nosed yelling kids. The place actually made the Oswalds’ Fort Worth domicile look good.
I didn’t need electronic assistance to monitor the deteriorating condition of their marriage; Marina continued to wear shorts even after the weather turned cool, as if to taunt him with her bruises. And her sex appeal, of course. June usually sat between them in her stroller. She no longer cried much during their shouting matches, only watched, sucking her thumb or a pacifier.
One day in November of 1962, I came back from the library and observed Lee and Marina on the corner of West Neely and Elsbeth, shouting at each other. Several people (mostly women at that hour of the day) had come out on their porches to watch. June sat in the stroller wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket, silent and forgotten.
They were arguing in Russian, but the latest bone of contention was clear enough from Lee’s jabbing finger. She was wearing a straight black skirt—I don’t know if they were called pencil skirts back then or not—and the zipper on her left hip was halfway down. Probably it just snagged in the cloth, but listening to him rave, you would’ve thought she was trolling for men.
She brushed back her hair, pointed at June, then waved a hand at the house they were now inhabiting—the broken gutters dripping black water, the trash and beer cans on the bald front lawn—and screamed at him in English: “You say happy lies, then bring wife and baby to this peegsty!”
He flushed all the way to his hairline and clutched his arms across his thin chest, as if to anchor his hands and keep them from doing damage. He might have succeeded—that time, at least—if she hadn’t laughed, then twirled one finger around her ear in a gesture that must be common to all cultures. She started to turn away. He hauled her back, bumping the stroller and almost overturning it. Then he slugged her. She fell down on the cracked sidewalk and covered her face when he bent over her. “No, Lee, no! No more heet me!”
He didn’t hit her. He yanked her to her feet and shook her, instead. Her head snapped and rolled.
“You!” a rusty voice said from my left. It made me jump. “You, boy!”
It was an elderly woman on a walker. She was standing on her porch in a pink flannel nightgown with a quilted jacket over it. Her graying hair stood straight up, making me think of Elsa Lanchester’s twenty-thousand-volt home permanent in The Bride of Frankenstein.
“That man is beating on that woman! Go down there and put a stop to it!”
“No, ma’am,” I said. My voice was unsteady. I thought of adding I won’t come between a man and his wife, but that would have been a lie. The truth was that I wouldn’t do anything that might disturb the future.
“You coward,” she said.
Call the cops, I almost said, but bit it back just in time. If it wasn’t in the old lady’s head and I put it there, that could also change the course of the future. Did the cops come? Ever? Al’s notebook didn’t say. All I knew was that Oswald would never be jugged for spousal abuse. I suppose in that time and that place, few men were.
He was dragging her up the front walk with one hand and yanking the stroller with the other. The old woman gave me a final withering glance, then clumped back into her house. The other spectators were doing the same. Show over.
From my living room, I trained my binoculars on the redbrick monstrosity catercorner from me. Two hours later, just as I was about to give up the surveillance, Marina emerged with the small pink suitcase in one hand and the blanket-wrapped baby in the other. She had changed the offending skirt for slacks and what appeared to be two sweaters—the day had turned cold. She hurried down the street, several times looking back over her shoulder for Lee. When I was sure he wasn’t going to follow her, I did.
She went as far as Mister Car Wash four blocks down West Davis, and used the pay telephone there. I sat across the street at the bus stop with a newspaper spread out in front of me. Twenty minutes later, trusty old George Bouhe showed up. She spoke to him earnestly. He led her around to the passenger side of the car and opened the door for her. She smiled and pecked him on the corner of the mouth. I’m sure he treasured both. Then he got in behind the wheel and they drove away.
6
That night there was another argument in front of the Elsbeth Street house, and once again most of the immediate neighborhood turned out to watch. Feeling there was safety in numbers, I joined them.
Someone—almost certainly Bouhe—had sent George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt to get the rest of Marina’s things. Bouhe probably figured they were the only ones who’d be able to get in without physical restraints being imposed on Lee.
“Be damned if I’ll hand anything over!” Lee shouted, oblivious of the rapt neighbors taking in every word. Cords stood out on his neck; his face was once more a bright, steaming red. How he must have hated that tendency to blush like a little girl who’s been caught passing love-notes.
De Mohrenschildt took the reasonable approach. “Think, my friend. This way there’s still a chance. If she sends the police …” He gave a shrug and lifted his hands to the sky.
“Give me an hour, then,” Lee said. He was showing teeth, but that expression was the farthest thing in the world from a smile. “It’ll give me a chance to put a knife through ever one of her dresses and break ever one of the toys those fatcats sent to buy my daughter.”
“What’s going on?” a young man asked me. He was about twenty, and had pulled up on a Schwinn.
“Domestic argument, I guess.”
“Osmont, or whatever his name is, right? Russian lady left him? About time, I’d say. That guy there’s crazy. He’s a commie, you know it?”
“I think I heard something about that.”
Lee was marching up the porch steps with his head back and his spine straight—Napoleon retreating from Moscow—when Jeanne de Mohrenschildt called to him sharply. “Stop it, you stupidnik!”
Lee turned to her, his eyes wide, unbelieving … and hurt. He looked at de Mohrenschildt, his expression saying can’t you control your wife, but de Mohrenschildt said nothing. He looked amused. Like a jaded theatergoer watching a play that’s actually not too bad. Not great, not Shakespeare, but a perfectly acceptable time-passer.
Jeanne: “If you love your wife, Lee, for God’s sake stop acting like a spoiled brat. Behave.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.” Under stress, his Southern accent grew stronger. Can’t became cain’t; like that became like-at.
“I can, I will, I do,” she said. “Let us get her things, or I’ll call the police myself.”
Lee said, “Tell her to shut up and mind her business, George.”
De Mohrenschildt laughed cheerily. “Today you are our business, Lee.” Then he grew serious. “I am losing respect for you, Comrade. Let us in now. If you value my friendship as I value yours, let us in now.”
Lee’s shoulders slumped and he stood aside. Jeanne marched up the steps, not even sparing him a glance. But de Mohrenschildt stopped and enveloped Lee, who was now painfully thin, in a powerful embrace. After a moment or two, Oswald hugged him back. I realized (with a mixture of pity and revulsion) that the boy—that was all he was, really—had begun weeping.
“What are they,” the young man with the bike asked, “couple of queers?”
“They’re queer, all right,” I said. “Just not the way you mean.”
7
Later that month, I returned from one of my weekends with Sadie to discover Marina and June back in residence at the shithole on Elsbeth Street. For a little while, the family seemed at peace. Lee w
ent to work—now creating photographic enlargements instead of aluminum screen doors—and came home, sometimes with flowers. Marina greeted him with kisses. Once she showed him the front lawn, where she had picked up all the garbage, and he applauded her. That made her laugh, and when she did, I saw that her teeth had been fixed. I don’t know how much George Bouhe had to do with that, but my guess is plenty.
I watched this scene from the corner, and was once more startled by the rusty voice of the old lady with the walker. “It won’t last, you know.”
“You could be right,” I said.
“He’s probably goan kill her. I seen it before.” Below her electric hair, her eyes surveyed me with cold contempt. “And you won’t step in to do nothing, will you, Sonny Biscuit?”
“I will,” I told her. “If things get bad enough, I will step in.”
That was a promise I meant to keep, although not on Marina’s behalf.
8
The day after Sadie’s Boxing Day dinner, there was a note from Oswald in my mailbox, although it was signed A. Hidell. This alias was in Al’s notes. The A stood for Alek, Marina’s pet name for him during their Minsk days.
The communication didn’t disturb me, since everyone on the street seemed to have gotten one just like it. The flyers had been printed on hot-pink paper (probably filched from Oswald’s current place of employment), and I saw a dozen or more flapping up the gutters. The residents of Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood were not known for putting litter in its place.
PROTEST CHANNEL 9 FASCISM!
HOME OF SEGREGATIONIST BILLY JAMES HARGIS!
PROTEST FASCIST EX-GENERAL EDWIN WALKER!
During the Thursday night telemcast of the Billy James Hargis so-called “Cristian Crusade,” Channel 9 will give are-time to GENERAL EDWIN WALKER, a right-wing fascist who has encouraged JFK to invade the peaceful peoples of Cuba and who has formented anti-black, anti-integration “HATE-SPEAK” all over the south. (If you have doubts about the accuracy of this information, check the “TV Guide.”) These two men stand for everythig we fouht against in WWII, and their Fascist RAVINGS have no place on the are-waves. EDWIN WALKER was one of the WHITE SUPREMACISTS who tried to bar JAMES MERDITH from attending “OLE MISS.” If you love America, protest the free are-time given to men who pretch HATE and VIOLENCE. Write a letter! Better still, come to Channel 9 on Dec. 27 and “sit in!”