Dunning Was Prominent in Many Charity Drives 11 страница

“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 undo 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.

CHAPTER 17

1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

Thank you for showing me how good things can be. Please don’t say goodbye.

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.

4

The only two cars left at the faculty end of the parking lot were Danny Laverty’s Plymouth sedan and my Ford, the ragtop now looking rather raggedy. I could sympathize; I felt a bit raggedy myself.

“Mr. A! Wait up, Mr. A!”

It was Mike and Bobbi Jill, hurrying across the hot parking lot toward me. Mike was carrying a small wrapped present, which he held out to me. “Bobbi n me got you something.”

“Bobbi and I. And you shouldn’t have, Mike.”

“We had to, man.”

I was moved to see that Bobbi Jill was crying, and pleased to see that the thick coating of Max Factor had disappeared from her face. Now that she knew the disfiguring scar’s days were numbered, she had stopped trying to conceal it. She kissed me on the cheek.

“Thank you so, so, so much, Mr. Amberson. I’ll never forget you.” She looked at Mike. “We’ll never forget you.”

And they probably wouldn’t. That was a good thing. It didn’t make up for the locked and dark library, but yes—it was a very good thing.

“Open it,” Mike said. “We hope you like it. It’s for your book.”

I opened the package. Inside was a wooden box about eight inches long and two inches wide. Inside the box, cradled in silk, was a Waterman fountain pen with the initials GA engraved on the clip.

“Oh, Mike,” I said. “This is too much.”

“It wouldn’t be enough if it was solid gold,” he said. “You changed my life.” He looked at Bobbi. “Both our lives.”

“Mike,” I said, “it was my pleasure.”

He hugged me, and in 1962, that is not a cheap gesture between men. I was glad to hug him back.

“You stay in touch,” Bobbi Jill said. “Dallas ain’t far.” She paused. “Isn’t.”

“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t, and they probably wouldn’t, either. They were going off into their lives, and if they were lucky, their lives would shine.

They started away, then Bobbi turned back. “It’s a shame you two broke up. It makes me feel real bad.”

“It makes me feel bad, too,” I said, “but it’s probably for the best.”

I headed home to pack up my typewriter and my other belongings, which I reckoned were still few enough to fit into no more than a suitcase and a few cardboard boxes. At the one stoplight on Main Street, I opened the little box and looked at the pen. It was a beautiful thing, and I was very touched that they had given it to me. I was even more touched that they had waited to say goodbye. The light turned green. I snapped the lid of the box closed and drove on. There was a lump in my throat, but my eyes were dry.

5

Living on Mercedes Street was not an uplifting experience.

Days weren’t so bad. They resounded with the shouts of children recently released from school, all dressed in too-big hand-me-downs; housewives kvetching at mailboxes or backyard clotheslines; teenagers driving rusty beaters with glasspack mufflers and radios blaring K-Life. The hours between 2:00 and 6:00 A.M. weren’t so bad, either. Then a kind of stunned silence fell over the street as colicky babies finally slept in their cribs (or dresser drawers) and their daddies snored toward another day of hourly wages in the shops, factories, or outlying farms.

Between four and six in the afternoon, however, the street was a jangle of mommas screaming at kids to get the hell in and do their chores and poppas arriving home to scream at their wives, probably because they had no one else to scream at. Many of the wives gave back as good as they got. The drunkadaddies started to roll in around eight, and things really got noisy around eleven, when either the bars closed or the money ran out. Then I heard slamming doors, breaking glass, and screams of pain as some loaded drunkadaddy tuned up on the wife, the kiddies, or both. Often red lights would strobe in through my drawn curtains as the cops arrived. A couple of times there were gunshots, maybe fired at the sky, maybe not. And one early morning, when I went out to get the paper, I saw a woman with dried blood crusting the lower half of her face. She was sitting on the curb in front of a house four down from mine, drinking a can of Lone Star. I almost went down to check on her, even though I knew how unwise it would be to get involved with the life of this low-bottom working neighborhood. Then she saw me looking at her and hoisted her middle finger. I went back inside.

There was no Welcome Wagon, and no women named Muffy or Buffy trotting off to Junior League meetings. What there was on Mercedes Street was plenty of time to think. Time to miss my friends in Jodie. Time to miss the work that had kept my mind off what I had come here to do. Time to realize the teaching had done a lot more than pass the time; it had satisfied my mind the way work does when you care about it, when you feel like you might actually be making a difference.

There was even time to feel bad about my formerly spiffy convertible. Besides the nonfunctional radio and the wheezy valves, it now blatted and backfired through a rusty tailpipe and there was a crack in the windshield caused by a rock that had bounced off the back of a lumbering asphalt truck. I’d stopped washing it, and now—sad to say—it fit in perfectly with the other busted-up transpo on Mercedes Street.

Mostly there was time to think about Sadie.

You’re breaking that young woman’s heart, Ellie Dockerty had said, and mine wasn’t doing so well, either. The idea of spilling everything to Sadie came to me one night as I lay awake listening to a drunken argument next door: you did, I didn’t, you did, I didn’t, fuck you. I rejected the idea, but it came back the following night, rejuvenated. I could see myself sitting with her at her kitchen table, drinking coffee in the strong afternoon sunlight that slanted through the window over the sink. Speaking calmly. Telling her my real name was Jacob Epping, I wouldn’t actually be born for another fourteen years, I had come from the year 2011 via a fissure in time that my late friend Al Templeton called the rabbit-hole.

How would I convince her of such a thing? By telling her that a certain American defector who had changed his mind about Russia was shortly going to move in across the street from where I now lived, along with his Russian wife and their baby girl? By telling her that the Dallas Texans—not yet the Cowboys, not yet America’s Team—were going to beat the Houston Oilers 20–17 this fall, in double overtime? Ridiculous. But what else did I know about the immediate future? Not much, because I’d had no time to study up. I knew a fair amount about Oswald, but that was all.

She’d think I was crazy. I could sing her lyrics from another dozen pop songs that hadn’t been recorded yet, and she’d still think I was crazy. She’d accuse me of making them up myself—wasn’t I a writer, after all? And suppose she did believe it? Did I want to drag her into the shark’s mouth with me? Wasn’t it bad enough that she’d be coming back to Jodie in August, and that if John Clayton was an echo of Frank Dunning, he might come looking for her?

“All right, get out then!” a woman screamed from the street, and a car accelerated away in the direction of Winscott Road. A wedge of light probed briefly through a crack in my drawn curtains and flashed across the ceiling.

“COCKSUCKER!” she yelled after it, to which a male voice, a little more distant, yelled back: “You can suck mine, lady, maybe it’ll calm you down.”

That was life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.

Leave her out of it. That was the voice of reason. It’s just too dangerous. Maybe at some point she can be a part of your life again—a life in Jodie, even—but not now.

Only there was never going to be a life for me in Jodie. Given what Ellen now knew about my past, teaching at the high school was a fool’s dream. And what else was I going to do? Pour concrete?

One morning I put on the coffeepot and went for the paper on the stoop. When I opened the front door, I saw that both of the Sunliner’s rear tires were flat. Some bored out-too-late kid had slashed them with a knife. That was also life on Mercedes Street in the summer of ’62.

6

On Thursday, the fourteenth of June, I dressed in jeans, a blue workshirt, and an old leather vest I’d picked up at a secondhand store on Camp Bowie Road. Then I spent the morning pacing through my house. I had no television, but I listened to the radio. According to the news, President Kennedy was planning a state trip to Mexico later in the month. The weather report called for fair skies and warm temperatures. The DJ yammered awhile, then played “Palisades Park.” The screams and roller-coaster sound effects on the record clawed at my head.

At last I could stand it no longer. I was going to be early, but I didn’t care. I got into the Sunliner—which now sported two retread blackwalls to go with the whitewalls on the front—and drove the forty-odd miles to Love Field in northwest Dallas. There was no short-term or long-term parking, just parking. It cost seventy-five cents a day. I clapped my old summer straw on my head and trudged approximately half a mile to the terminal building. A couple of Dallas cops stood at the curb drinking coffee, but there were no security guards inside and no metal detectors to walk through. Passengers simply showed their tickets to a guy standing by the door, then walked across the hot tarmac to planes belonging to one of five carriers: American, Delta, TWA, Frontier, and Texas Airways.

I checked the chalkboard mounted on the wall behind the Delta counter. It said that Flight 194 was on time. When I asked the clerk to make sure, she smiled and told me it had just left Atlanta. “But you’re awfully early.”

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ll probably be early to my own funeral.”

She laughed and wished me a nice day. I bought a Time and walked across to the restaurant, where I ordered the Cloud 9 Chef’s Salad. It was huge and I was too nervous to be hungry—it’s not every day that a man gets to see the person who’s going to change world history—but it gave me something to pick at while I waited for the plane carrying the Oswald family to arrive.

I was in a booth with a good view of the main terminal. It wasn’t very crowded, and a young woman in a dark blue traveling suit caught my eye. Her hair was twisted into a neat bun. She had a suitcase in each hand. A Negro porter approached her. She shook her head, smiling, then banged her arm on the side of the Traveler’s Aid booth as she passed it. She dropped one of her suitcases, rubbed her elbow, then picked up the case again and forged onward.

Sadie leaving to start her six-week residency in Reno.

Was I surprised? Not at all. It was that convergence thing again. I’d grown used to it. Was I almost overwhelmed by an impulse to run out of the restaurant and catch up to her before it was too late? Of course I was.

For a moment it seemed more than possible, it seemed necessary. I would tell her fate (rather than some weird time-travel harmonic) had brought us together at the airport. Stuff like that worked in the movies, didn’t it? I’d ask her to wait while I bought my own ticket to Reno, and tell her that once we were there, I’d explain everything. And after the obligatory six weeks, we could buy a drink for the judge who had granted her divorce before he married us.

I actually started to get up. As I did, I happened to look at the cover of the Time I’d bought at the newsstand. Jacqueline Kennedy was on the cover. She was smiling, radiant, wearing a sleeveless dress with a V-neck. THE PRESIDENT’S LADY DRESSES FOR SUMMER, the caption read. As I looked at the photo, the color drained away to black and white and the expression changed from a happy smile to a vacant stare. Now she was standing next to Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One, and no longer wearing the pretty (and slightly sexy) summer dress. A blood-spattered wool suit had taken its place. I remembered reading—not in Al’s notes, somewhere else—that not long after Mrs. Kennedy’s husband had been pronounced dead, Lady Bird Johnson had moved to embrace her in the hospital corridor and had seen a glob of the dead president’s brains on that suit.

A head-shot president. And all the dead who would come after, standing behind him in a ghostly file that stretched away into infinity.

I sat back down again and watched Sadie carry her suitcases toward the Frontier Airlines counter. The bags were obviously heavy but she carried them con brio, her back straight, her low heels clicking briskly. The clerk checked them and put them on a baggage trolley. He and Sadie conferred; she passed him the ticket she had bought through a travel agency two months ago, and the clerk scribbled something on it. She took it back and turned for the gate. I lowered my head to make sure she wouldn’t see me. When I looked up again, she was gone.

7

Forty long, long minutes later, a man, a woman, and two small children—a boy and a girl—passed the restaurant. The boy was holding his father’s hand and chattering away. The father was looking down at him, nodding and smiling. The father was Robert Oswald.

The loudspeaker blared, “Delta’s flight 194 is now arriving from Newark and Atlanta Municipal Airport. Passengers can be met at Gate 4. Delta Flight 194, now arriving.”

Robert’s wife—Vada, according to Al’s notes—swept the little girl into her arms and hurried along faster. There was no sign of Marguerite.

I picked at my salad, chewing without tasting. My heart was beating hard.

I could hear the approaching roar of engines and saw the white nose of a DC-8 as it pulled up to the gate. Greeters piled up around the door. A waitress tapped me on the shoulder and I almost screamed.

“Sorry, sir,” she said in a Texas accent that was thick enough to cut. “Jes wanted to ask if I could get y’all anything else.”

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Well, that’s good.”

The first passengers began cutting across the terminal. They were all men wearing suits and prosperous haircuts. Of course. The first passengers to deplane were always from first class.

“Sure I can’t get you a piece of peach pah? It’s fresh today.”

“No thanks.”

“You sure, hon?”

Now the coach class passengers came in a flood, all of them festooned with carry-on bags. I heard a woman squeal. Was that Vada, greeting her brother-in-law?

“I’m sure,” I said, and picked up my magazine.

She took the hint. I sat stirring the remains of my salad into an orange soup of French dressing and watched. Here came a man and woman with a baby, but the kid was almost a toddler, too old to be June. The passengers passed the restaurant, chattering with the friends and relatives who had come to pick them up. I saw a young man in an Army uniform pat his girlfriend’s bottom. She laughed, slapped his hand, then stood on tiptoe to kiss him.

For five minutes or so the terminal was almost full. Then the crowd began to thin out. There was no sign of the Oswalds. A wild certainty came to me: they weren’t on the plane. I hadn’t just traveled back in time, I had bounced into some sort of parallel universe. Maybe the Yellow Card Man had been meant to stop something like that from happening, but the Yellow Card Man was dead, and I was off the hook. No Oswald? Fine, no mission. Kennedy was going to die in some other version of America, but not in this one. I could catch up with Sadie and live happily ever after.

The thought had no more than crossed my mind when I saw my target for the first time. Robert and Lee were side by side, talking animatedly. Lee was swinging what was either an oversized attaché case or a small satchel. Robert had a pink suitcase with rounded corners that looked like something out of Barbie’s closet. Vada and Marina came along behind. Vada had taken one of two patchwork cloth bags; Marina had the other slung over her shoulder. She was also carrying June, now four months old, in her arms and laboring to keep up. Robert and Vada’s two kids flanked her, looking at her with open curiosity.

Vada called to the men and they stopped almost in front of the restaurant. Robert grinned and took Marina’s carry-bag. Lee’s expression was… amused? Knowing? Maybe both. The tiniest suggestion of a smile dimpled the corners of his mouth. His nondescript hair was neatly combed. He was, in fact, the perfect A. J. Squared Away in his pressed white shirt, khakis, and shined shoes. He didn’t look like a man who had just completed a journey halfway around the world; there wasn’t a wrinkle on him and not a trace of beard-shadow on his cheeks. He was just twenty-two years old, and looked younger—like one of the teenagers in my last American Lit class.

So did Marina, who wouldn’t be old enough to buy a legal drink for another month. She was exhausted, bewildered, and staring at everything. She was also beautiful, with clouds of dark hair and upturned, somehow rueful blue eyes.

June’s arms and legs were swaddled in cloth diapers. Even her neck was wrapped in something, and although she wasn’t crying, her face was red and sweaty. Lee took the baby. Marina smiled her gratitude, and when her lips parted, I saw that one of her teeth was missing. The others were discolored, one of them almost black. The contrast with her creamy skin and gorgeous eyes was jarring.

Oswald leaned close to her and said something that wiped the smile off her face. She looked up at him warily. He said something else, poking her shoulder with one finger as he did so. I remembered Al’s story, and wondered if Oswald was saying the same thing to his wife now: pokhoda, cyka—walk, bitch.

But no. It was the swaddling that had upset him. He tore it away—first from the arms, then the legs—and flung the diapers at Marina, who caught them clumsily. Then she looked around to see if they were being watched.

Vada came back and touched Lee’s arm. He paid no attention to her, just unwrapped the makeshift cotton scarf from around baby June’s neck and flung that at Marina. It fell to the terminal floor. She bent and picked it up without speaking.

Robert joined them and gave his brother a friendly punch on the shoulder. The terminal had almost entirely cleared out now—the last of the deplaning passengers had passed the Oswald family—and I heard what he said clearly. “Give her a break, she just got here. She doesn’t even know where here is yet.”

“Look at this kid,” Lee said, and raised June for inspection. At that, she finally began to cry. “She’s got her wrapped up like a damn Egyptian mummy. Because that’s the way they do it back home. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Staryj baba! Old woman.” He turned back to Marina with the bawling baby in his arms. She looked at him fearfully. “Staryj baba!”