by Stephen King
“I haven’t been reading the papers just lately.”
“Oh?” Jeanne said. “Don’t I see the Times Herald over there on that stool?”
“I mean I don’t read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages and the want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves.”
“So you weren’t the one who took that potshot, huh?” de Mohrenschildt asked.
Teasing him. Baiting him.
The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last Wednesday night … or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren’t there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man, my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.
“You think I’d be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover looking over my shoulder?” Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.
“Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee,” Jeanne said in a placating voice. “Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than the closet for that rifle of yours.”
Marina replied to this in Russian, but I’d glimpsed the baby in the side yard from time to time and knew what she was saying—that June was walking already.
“Junie will enjoy the nice present,” Lee said, “but we don’t celebrate Easter. We’re atheists.”
Maybe he was, but according to Al’s notes, Marina—with the help of her admirer, George Bouhe—had had June secretly baptized right around the time of the Missile Crisis.
“So are we,” de Mohrenschildt said. “That’s why we celebrate the Easter Bunny!” He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-deafened me.
They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne said, “We’ll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed.”
“No, no, we were up,” Lee said. “Thanks for dropping by.”
George said, “We’ll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club. We’ll organize the waiters into a collective!”
“Sure, sure.” They were moving toward the door now.
De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more than a few words. They might have been get it back. Or got your back, although I didn’t think that was common slang in the sixties.
When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As in when did you get the rifle back?
I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.
I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor. What did you say, George? What did you say there at the end? Was it when did you get it back? Was it cheer up, things aren’t so black? Was it don’t let this set you back? Or something else entirely?
At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired three times and didn’t hit a single target.
“Sorry, son,” de Mohrenschildt said, “no prizes for guys who shoot Maggie’s Drawers.”
Then he turned to me and grinned.
“Step right up, son, you may have better luck. Somebody’s going to kill the president, why not you?”
I woke with a start in the first weak light of day. Above me, the Oswalds slept on.
7
Easter Sunday afternoon found me back in Dealey Plaza, sitting on a park bench, looking at the forbidding brick cube of the School Book Depository, and wondering what to do next.
In ten days, Lee was going to leave Dallas for New Orleans, the city of his birth. He would get a job greasing machinery at a coffee company and rent the apartment on Magazine Street. After spending two weeks or so with Ruth Paine and her children in Irving, Marina and June would join him. I wouldn’t follow. Not with Sadie facing a long period of recovery and an uncertain future.
Was I going to kill Lee between this Easter Sunday and the twenty-fourth? I probably could. Since losing his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he spent most of his time either in the apartment or handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in downtown Dallas. Once in awhile he went to the public library, where he seemed to have given up Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in favor of Zane Grey westerns.
Shooting him on the street or at the library on Young Street would be a recipe for instant incarceration, but if I did it in the upstairs apartment, while Marina was in Irving, helping Ruth Paine improve her Russian? I could knock on the door and put a bullet in his head when he opened it. Done deal. No risk of shooting Maggie’s Drawers at point-blank range. The problem was the aftermath. I’d have to run. If I didn’t, I’d be the first person the police would question. I was the downstairs neighbor, after all.
I could claim I wasn’t there when it happened, and they might buy that for awhile, but how long would it be before they discovered that the George Amberson of West Neely Street was the same George Amberson who just happened to be at a scene of violence on Bee Tree Lane in Jodie not long before? That would merit checking, and checking would soon reveal that George Amberson’s teaching certificate came from a degree-mill in Oklahoma and George Amberson’s references were phony. At that point I’d very likely be arrested. The police would obtain a court order to open my safe deposit box if they found out I had one, and they probably would. Mr. Richard Link, my banker, would see my name and/or picture in the paper and come forward. What would the police make of my memoir? That I had a motive for shooting Oswald, no matter how crazy.
No, I’d have to run for the rabbit-hole, ditching the Chevy somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas, then taking a bus or train. And if I made it back to 2011, I could never use the rabbit-hole again without causing a reset. That would mean leaving Sadie behind forever, disfigured and alone. Of course he ran out on me, she would think. He talked a good game about smallpox scars being as pretty as dimples, but once he heard Ellerton’s prognosis—ugly now, ugly forever—he headed for the hills.
She might not even blame me. That was the most rotten possibility of all.
But no. No. I could think of a worse one. Suppose I got back to 2011 and discovered that Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22 after all? I still wasn’t positive Oswald was on his own. Who was I to say that ten thousand conspiracy theorists were wrong, especially based on the few scraps of information all my haunting and stalking had gleaned?
Maybe I’d check Wikipedia and discover the shooter had been on the grassy knoll, after all. Or on the roof of the combined jail and county courthouse on Houston Street, armed with a sharpshooter’s rifle instead of a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano. Or hiding in a sewer on Elm Street and watching for Kennedy’s approach with a periscope, as some of the wilder conspiracy buffs claimed.
De Mohrenschildt was a CIA asset of some kind. Even Al Templeton, who was almost positive that Oswald had acted alone, acknowledged that much. Al was convinced he was just a little asset, passing on bits of South and Central American tittle-tattle to keep his various oil speculations afloat. But what if he was more? The CIA had loathed Kennedy ever since he refused to send in American troops to back the beleagured partisans at the Bay of Pigs. His graceful handling of the Missile Crisis had deepened that loathing; the spooks had wanted to use it as a pretext to end the cold war once and for all, because they were positive the ballyhooed “missile gap” was a fiction. You could read much of this in the daily papers, someti
mes between the lines of the news stories, sometimes stated baldly in the op-ed essays.
Suppose certain rogue elements in the CIA had talked George de Mohrenschildt into a much more dangerous mission? Not killing the president himself, but recruiting several less-than-balanced individuals who would be willing to do the job? Would de Mohrenschildt say yes to such an offer? I thought he might. He and Jeanne lived big, but I had no real idea how they supported the Cadillac, the country club, and their sprawl of a house on Simpson Stuart Road. Serving as the cutout, a dead-short between a targeted U.S. president and an agency that theoretically existed to do his bidding … that would be dangerous work, but if the potential gain were big enough, a man living above his means might be tempted. And it wouldn’t even have to be a cash payoff, that was the beauty of it. Just those wonderful oil leases in Venezuela, Haiti, and the DR. Also, such work might appeal to a grandiose strutter like de Mohrenschildt. He liked action, and he didn’t care for Kennedy.
Thanks to John Clayton, I couldn’t even eliminate de Mohrenschildt from the Walker attempt. It was Oswald’s rifle, yes, but suppose Lee had found himself unable to fire it when the time came? I thought it would be just like the little weasel to choke at the critical moment. I could see de Mohrenschildt snatching the Carcano out of Lee’s trembling hands and snarling, Give it to me, I’ll do it myself.
Would de Mohrenschildt have felt capable of making the shot from behind the garbage can Lee meant to use as a sniper’s bench? One line in Al’s notes made me think the answer was yes: Won skeet-shooting championship at country club in 1961.
If I killed Oswald and Kennedy died anyway, it would all be for nothing. And then what? Rinse and repeat? Kill Frank Dunning again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? Drive to Dallas again?
Meet Sadie again?
She would be unmarked, and that was good. I would know what her crazy ex-husband looked like, dye-job and all, and this time I could stop him before he got close. Also good. But just thinking about going through all of it again exhausted me. Nor did I think I could kill Lee in cold blood, at least not based on the circumstantial evidence I had. With Frank Dunning, I’d known for sure. I had seen.
So—what was my next move?
It was quarter past four, and I decided my next move was visiting Sadie. I started for my car, which was parked on Main Street. On the corner of Main and Houston, just past the old courthouse, I had a sensation of being watched and turned around. No one was on the sidewalk behind me. It was the Depository that was watching, all those blank windows overlooking Elm Street, where the presidential motorcade would arrive some two hundred days from that Easter Sunday.
8
They were serving dinner on Sadie’s floor when I arrived: chop suey. The smell brought back a vivid image of the way the blood had gushed over John Clayton’s hand and forearm before he fell to the carpet, mercifully facedown.
“Hey there, Mr. Amberson,” the head nurse said as I signed in. She was a graying woman in a starched white cap and uniform. A pocket watch was pinned to her formidable bosom. She was looking at me from behind a barricade of bouquets. “There was a fair amount of shouting in there last night. I’m only telling you because you’re her fiancé, right?”
“Right,” I said. Certainly it was what I wanted to be, slashed face or no slashed face.
The nurse leaned toward me between two overloaded vases. A few daisies brushed through her hair. “Look, I don’t ordinarily gossip about my patients, and I ream out the younger nurses who do. But the way her parents treated her wasn’t right. I guess I don’t entirely blame them for riding down from Georgia with that lunatic’s folks, but—”
“Wait. Are you telling me the Dunhills and the Claytons carpooled?”
“I guess they were all palsy-walsy back in happier days, so all right, fine, but to tell her that while they were visiting their daughter, their good friends the Claytons were downstairs signing their son’s body out of the morgue …” She shook her head. “Daddy never said boo, but that woman …”
She looked around to make sure we were still alone, saw we were, and turned back to me. Her plain country face was grim with outrage.
“She never shut up. One question about how her daughter was feeling, then it was the poor Claytons this and the poor Claytons that. Your Miss Dunhill held her tongue until her mother said what a shame it was that they’d have to change churches again. Then the girl lost her temper and started shouting at them to get out.”
“Good for her,” I said.
“I heard her yell, ‘Do you want to see what your good friends’ son did to me?’ and honey-pie, that’s when I started running. She was trying to pull off the bandages. And the mother … she was leaning forward, Mr. Amberson. Eager. She actually wanted to look. I hustled them out and got one of the residents to give Miss Dunhill a shot and quiet her down. The father—a little mouse of a man—tried to apologize for his wife. ‘She didn’t know she was upsetting Sadie,’ he says. ‘Well,’ I says back, ‘what about you? Cat get your tongue?’ And do you know what the woman said, just before they got on the elevator?”
I shook my head.
“She said, ‘I can’t blame him, how can I? He used to play in our yard, and he was just the sweetest boy.’ Can you believe that?”
I could. Because I thought I had already met Mrs. Dunhill, in a manner of speaking. On West Seventh Street, chasing after her older son and yelling at the top of her lungs. Stop, Robert, don’t walk so fast, I’m not done with you.
“You may find her … overly emotional,” the nurse said. “I just wanted you to know there’s a good reason for it.”
9
She wasn’t overly emotional. I would have preferred that. If there’s such a thing as serene depression, that’s where Sadie’s head was at on that Easter evening. She was sitting in her chair, at least, with an untouched plate of chop suey in front of her. She’d lost weight; her long body seemed to float in the white hospital johnny she pulled around her when she saw me.
She smiled though—on the side of her face that still could—and turned her good cheek to be kissed. “Hello, George—I’d better call you that, don’t you think?”
“Maybe so. How are you, honey?”
“They say I’m better, but my face feels like someone dipped it in kerosene and then set it on fire. It’s because they’re taking me off the pain medication. God forbid I get hooked on dope.”
“If you need more, I can talk to somebody.”
She shook her head. “It makes me fuzzy, and I need to think. Also, it makes it hard to keep control of my emotions. I had quite the shouting match with my mother and father.”
There was only the one chair—unless you wanted to count the commode squatting in the corner—so I sat on the bed. “The head nurse filled me in. Based on what she overheard, you had every right to blow your top.”
“Maybe, but what good does it do? Mom will never change. She can talk for hours about how having me almost killed her, but she has very little feeling for anyone else. It’s lack of tact, but it’s lack of something more. There’s a word for it, but I can’t remember it.”
“Empathy?”
“That’s it. And she has a very sharp tongue. Over the years, it’s whittled my dad away to a stub. He rarely says anything these days.”
“You don’t need to see them again.”
“I think I do.” I liked her calm, detached voice less and less. “Mama says they’ll fix up my old room, and I really don’t have anyplace else to go.”
“Your home’s in Jodie. And your work.”
“I think we talked about that. I’m going to tender my resignation.”
“No, Sadie, no. That’s a very bad idea.”
She smiled as best she could. “You sound like Miz Ellie. Who didn’t believe you when you said Johnny was a danger.” She thought about this, then added: “Of course, neither did I. I never stopped being a fool about him, did I?”
“You have a house.”
“That’s
true. And mortgage payments I can’t make. I’ll have to let it go.”
“I’ll make the payments.”
That got through. She looked shocked. “You can’t afford to do that!”
“I can, actually.” Which was true … for awhile, at least. Plus there was always the Kentucky Derby and Chateaugay. “I’m moving out of Dallas and in with Deke. He’s not charging me rent, which frees up plenty for house payments.”
A tear crept to the edge of her right eye and trembled there. “You’re kind of missing the point. I can’t take care of myself, not yet. And I won’t be ‘taken in,’ unless it’s at home, where Mom will hire a nurse to help with the nasty bits. I’ve got a little pride left. Not much, but a little.”
“I’ll take care of you.”
She stared at me, wide-eyed. “What?”
“You heard me. And when it comes to me, Sadie, you can stick your pride where the sun doesn’t shine. I happen to love you. And if you love me, you’ll stop talking mad shit about going home to your crocodile of a mother.”
She managed a faint smile at that, then sat quiet, thinking, hands in the lap of her flimsy cover-up. “You came to Texas to do something, and it wasn’t to nurse a school librarian who was too silly to know she was in danger.”
“My business in Dallas is on hold.”
“Can it be?”
“Yes.” And as simply as that, it was decided. Lee was going to New Orleans, and I was going back to Jodie. The past kept fighting me, and it was going to win this round. “You need time, Sadie, and I have time. We might as well spend it together.”
“You can’t want me.” She said this in a voice just above a whisper. “Not the way I am now.”
“But I do.”
She looked at me with eyes that were afraid to hope and hoped anyway. “Why would you?”
“Because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
The good side of her mouth began to tremble. The tear spilled onto her cheek and was followed by others. “If I didn’t have to go back to Savannah … if I didn’t have to live with them … with her … maybe then I could be, I don’t know, just a little bit all right.”