7.
I took the lockbox out of the trunk and put it on the Sunliner"s pa.s.senger seat, meaning to hand-carry it up to my room at the Monteleone, and I did just that. But while the doorman was getting the rest of my bags, I spotted something on the floor of the backseat that made me flush with a sense of guilt that was far out of proportion to what the object was. But childhood teachings are the strongest teachings, and another thing I was taught at my mother"s knee was to always return library books on time.
"Mr. Doorman, would you hand me that book, please?" I asked.
"Yes, sah! Happy to!"
It was The Chapman Report, which I"d borrowed from the Nokomis Public Library a week or so before deciding it was time to put on my traveling shoes. The sticker in the corner of the transparent protective cover-7 DAYS ONLY, BE KIND TO THE NEXT BORROWER-reproached me.
When I got to my room, I checked my watch and saw it was only 6:00 P.M. In the summer, the library didn"t open until noon but stayed open until eight. Long distance is one of the few things more expensive in 1960 than in 2011, but that childish sense of guilt was still on me. I called the hotel operator and gave her the Nokomis Library"s telephone number, reading it off the card-pocket pasted to the back flyleaf of the book. The little message below it, Please Call if You Will Be More Than 3 Days Late in Your Return, made me feel more like a dog than ever.
My operator talked to another operator. Behind them, faint voices babbled. I realized that in the time I came from, most of those distant speakers would be dead. Then the phone began to ring on the other end.
"h.e.l.lo, Nokomis Public Library." It was Hattie Wilkerson"s voice, but that sweet old lady sounded like she was stuck in a very large steel barrel.
"h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Wilkerson-"
"h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo? Do you hear me? Drat long distance!"
"Hattie?" I was shouting now. "It"s George Amberson calling!"
"George Amberson? Oh, my soul! Where are you calling from, George?"
I almost told her the truth, but the hunch-radar gave out a single very loud ping and I bellowed, "Baton Rouge!"
"In Louisiana?"
"Yes! I have one of your books! I just realized! I"m going to send it ba-"
"You don"t need to shout, George, the connection is much better now. The operator must not have stuck our little plug in the whole way. I am so glad to hear from you. It"s G.o.d"s providence that you weren"t there. We were worried even though the fire chief said the house was empty."
"What are you talking about, Hattie? My place on the beach?"
But really, what else?
"Yes! Someone threw a flaming bottle of gasoline through the window. The whole thing went up in a matter of minutes. Chief Durand thinks it was kids who were out drinking and carousing. There are so many bad apples now. It"s because they"re afraid of the Bomb, that"s what my husband says."
So.
"George? Are you still there?"
"Yes," I said.
"Which book do you have?"
"What?"
"Which book do you have? Don"t make me check the card catalogue."
"Oh. The Chapman Report."
"Well, send it back as soon as you can, won"t you? We have quite a few people waiting for that one. Irving Wallace is extremely popular."
"Yes," I said. "I"ll be sure to do that."
"And I"m very sorry about your house. Did you lose your things?"
"I have everything important with me."
"Thank G.o.d for that. Will you be coming back s-"
There was a click loud enough to sting my ear, then the burr of an open line. I replaced the receiver in the cradle. Would I be coming back soon? I saw no need to call back and answer that question. But I would watch out for the past, because it senses change-agents, and it has teeth.
I sent The Chapman Report back to the Nokomis Library first thing in the morning.
Then I left for Dallas.
8.
Three days later I was sitting on a bench in Dealey Plaza and looking at the square brick cube of the Texas School Book Depository. It was late afternoon, and blazingly hot. I had pulled down my tie (if you don"t wear one in 1960, even on hot days, you"re apt to attract unwanted attention) and unb.u.t.toned the top b.u.t.ton of my plain white shirt, but it didn"t help much. Neither did the scant shade of the elm behind my bench.
When I checked into the Adolphus Hotel on Commerce Street, I was offered a choice: air-conditioning or no air-conditioning. I paid the extra five bucks for a room where the window-unit lowered the temperature all the way to seventy-eight, and if I had a brain in my head, I"d go back to it now, before I keeled over with heatstroke. When night came, maybe it would cool off. Just a little.
But that brick cube held my gaze, and the windows-especially the one on the right corner of the sixth floor-seemed to be examining me. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the building. You-if there ever is a you-might scoff at that, calling it nothing but the effect of my unique foreknowledge, but that didn"t account for what was really holding me on that bench in spite of the beating heat. What did that was the sense that I had seen the building before.
It reminded me of the Kitchener Ironworks, in Derry.
The Book Depository wasn"t a ruin, but it conveyed the same sense of sentient menace. I remembered coming on that submerged, soot-blackened smokestack, lying in the weeds like a giant prehistoric snake dozing in the sun. I remembered looking into its dark bore, so large I could have walked into it. And I remembered feeling that something was in there. Something alive. Something that wanted me to walk into it. So I could visit. Maybe for a long, long time.
Come on in, the sixth-floor window whispered. Take a look around. The place is empty now, the skeleton crew that works here in the summer has gone home, but if you walk around to the loading dock by the railroad tracks, you"ll find an open door, I"m quite sure of it. After all, what is there in here to protect? Nothing but schoolbooks, and even the students they"re meant for don"t really want them. As you well know, Jake. So come in. Come on up to the sixth floor. In your time there"s a museum here, people come from all over the world and some of them still weep for the man who was killed and all he might have done, but this is 1960, Kennedy"s still a senator, and Jake Epping doesn"t exist. Only George Amberson exists, a man with a short haircut and a sweaty shirt and a pulled-down tie. A man of his time, so to speak. So come on up. Are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be, when the crime hasn"t happened yet?
But there were ghosts up there. Maybe not on Magazine Street in New Orleans, but there? Oh yes. Only I"d never have to face them, because I was going to enter the Book Depository no more than I had ventured into that fallen smokestack in Derry. Oswald would get his job stacking textbooks just a month or so before the a.s.sa.s.sination, and waiting that long would be cutting things far too close. No, I intended to follow the plan Al had roughed out in the closing section of his notes, the one t.i.tled CONCLUSIONS ON HOW TO PROCEDE.
Sure as he was about his lone gunman theory, Al had held onto a small but statistically significant possibility that he was wrong. In his notes, he called it "the window of uncertainty."
As in sixth-floor window.
He had meant to close that window for good on April 10, 1963, over half a year before Kennedy"s trip to Dallas, and I thought his idea made sense. Possibly later that April, more likely on the night of the tenth-why wait?-I would kill the husband of Marina and the father of June just as I had Frank Dunning. And with no more compunction. If you saw a spider scuttering across the floor toward your baby"s crib, you might hesitate. You might even consider trapping it in a bottle and putting it out in the yard so it could go on living its little life. But if you were sure that spider was poisonous? A black widow? In that case, you wouldn"t hesitate. Not if you were sane.
You"d put your foot on it and crush it.
9.
I had a plan of my own for the years between August of 1960 and April of 1963. I"d keep my eye on Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldn"t interfere. Because of the b.u.t.terfly effect, I couldn"t afford to. If there"s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don"t know what it is. Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in kindergarten, I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald-let alone trying to warn him off a crime which he had not yet even conceived-I would be giving away my only advantage. The b.u.t.terfly would spread its wings, and Oswald"s course would change.
Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones that would save the man who was now the junior senator from Ma.s.sachusetts. But I didn"t believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In 1962, according to one of Al"s scribbled marginal notes, Kennedy was going to be in Houston, at Rice University, making a speech about going to the moon. Open auditorium, no bullet-pr"f podium, Al had written. Houston was less than three hundred miles from Dallas. What if Oswald decided to shoot the president there?
Or suppose Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy? What if I scared him out of Dallas and back to New Orleans and Kennedy still died, the victim of some crazy Mafia or CIA plot? Would I have courage enough to go back through the rabbit-hole and start all over? Save the Dunning family again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? I had already given nearly two years to this mission. Would I be willing to invest five more, with the outcome as uncertain as ever?
Better not to have to find out.
Better to make sure.
On my way to Texas from New Orleans, I had decided the best way to monitor Oswald without getting in his way would be to live in Dallas while he was in the sister city of Fort Worth, then relocate to Fort Worth when Oswald moved his family to Dallas. The idea had the virtue of simplicity, but it wouldn"t work. I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was-like Nietzsche"s abyss-looking back at me.
I spent August and September of that presidential election year driving the Sunliner around Dallas, apartment-hunting (even after all this time sorely missing my GPS unit and frequently stopping to ask for directions). Nothing seemed right. At first I thought that was about the apartments themselves. Then, as I began to get a better sense of the city, I realized it was about me.
The simple truth was that I didn"t like Dallas, and eight weeks of hard study was enough to make me believe there was a lot not to like. The Times Herald (which many Dallas-ites routinely called the Slimes Herald ) was a tiresome juggernaut of nickel boosterism. The Morning News might wax lyrical, talking about how Dallas and Houston were "in a race to the heavens," but the skysc.r.a.pers of which the editorial spoke were an island of architectural blah surrounded by rings of what I came to think of as The Great American Flatcult. The newspapers ignored the slum neighborhoods where the divisions along racial lines were just beginning to melt a little. Further out were endless middle-cla.s.s housing developments, mostly owned by veterans of World War II and Korea. The vets had wives who spent their days Pledging the furniture and Maytagging the clothes. Most had 2.5 children. The teenagers mowed lawns, delivered the Slimes Herald on bicycles, Turtle Waxed the family car, and listened (furtively) to Chuck Berry on transistor radios. Maybe telling their anxious parents he was white.
Beyond the suburban houses with their whirling lawn-sprinklers were those vast flat tracts of empty. Here and there rolling irrigators still serviced cotton crops, but mostly King Cotton was dead, replaced by endless acres of corn and soybeans. The real Dallas County crops were electronics, textiles, bulls.h.i.t, and black money petro-dollars. There weren"t many derricks in the area, but when the wind blew from the west, where the Permian Basin is, the twin cities stank of oil and natural gas.
The downtown business district was full of sharpies hustling around in what I came to think of as the Full Dallas: checked sport coats, narrow neckwear held down with bloated tie clips (these clips, the sixties version of bling, usually came with diamonds or plausible subst.i.tutes sparkling in their centers), white Sansabelt pants, and gaudy boots with complex st.i.tching. They worked in banks and investment companies. They sold soybean futures and oil leases and real estate to the west of the city, land where nothing would grow except jimson and tumbleweed. They clapped each other on the shoulders with beringed hands and called each other son. On their belts, where businessmen in 2011 carry their cell phones, many carried handguns in hand-tooled holsters.
There were billboards advocating the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; billboards showing a snarling Nikita Khrushchev (NYET, COMRADE KHRUSHCHEV, the billboard copy read, WE WILL BURY YOU!); there was one on West Commerce Street that read THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY FAVORS INTEGRATION. THINK ABOUT IT! That one had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society. Twice, on businesses whose names suggested they were Jewish-owned, I saw soaped swastikas.
I didn"t like Dallas. No sir, no ma"am, no way. I hadn"t liked it from the moment I checked into the Adolphus and saw the restaurant maitre d" gripping a cringing young waiter by the arm and shouting into his face. Nevertheless, my business was here, and here I would stay. That was what I thought then.
10.
On the twenty-second of September, I finally found a place that looked livable. It was on Blackwell Street in North Dallas, a detached garage that had been converted into a pretty nice duplex apartment. Greatest advantage: air-conditioning. Greatest disadvantage: the owner-landlord, Ray Mack Johnson, was a racist who shared with me that if I took the place, it would be wise to stay away from nearby Greenville Avenue, where there were a lot of mixed-race jukejoints and c.o.o.ns with the kind of knives he called "switchers."
"I got ary thing in the world against n.i.g.g.e.rs," he told me. "Nosir. It was G.o.d who cursed them to their position, not me. You know that, don"t you?"
"I guess I missed that part of the Bible."
He squinted suspiciously. "What are you, Methodist?"
"Yes," I said. It seemed a lot safer than saying I was, denominationally speaking, nothing.
"You need to get in the Baptist way of churching, son. Ours welcomes newcomers. You take this place, and maybe some Sunday you can come with me n my wife."
"Maybe so," I agreed, reminding myself to be in a coma that Sunday. Possibly dead.
Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, had returned to his original scripture.
"You see, Noah got drunk this one time on the Ark, and he was a-layin on his bed, naked as a jaybird. Two of his sons wouldn"t look at him, they just turned the other way and put a blanket over him. I don"t know, it might"ve been a sheet. But Ham-he was the c.o.o.n of the family-looked on his father in his nakedness, and G.o.d cursed him and all his race to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. So there it is. That"s what"s behind it. Genesis, chapter nine. You go on and look it up, Mr. Amberson."
"Uh-huh," I said, telling myself that I had to go someplace, I couldn"t afford to stay at the Adolphus indefinitely. Telling myself I could live with a little racism, that I wouldn"t melt. Telling myself it was the temper of the times, and it was probably the same just about everywhere. Only I didn"t quite believe it. "I"ll think it over and let you know in a day or two, Mr. Johnson."
"You don"t want to wait too long, son. This place will go fast. You have a blessed day, now."
11.
The blessed day was another scorcher, and apartment-hunting was thirsty work. After leaving Ray Mack Johnson"s learned company, I felt in need of a beer. I decided to get one on Greenville Avenue. If Mr. Johnson discouraged the neighborhood, I thought I ought to check it out.
He was correct on two counts: the street was integrated (more or less), and it was rough. It was also lively. I parked and strolled, savoring the carny atmosphere. I pa.s.sed almost two dozen bars, a few second-run movie houses (COME IN IT"S "KOOL" INSIDE, read the banners flapping from the marquees in a hot, oil-smelling Texas wind), and a striptease joint where a streetside barker yelled "Girls, girls, girls, best burley-q in the whole d.a.m.n world! Best burley-q you"ve ever seen! These ladies shave, if you know what I mean!" I also pa.s.sed three or four check-cashing-and-quickie-loan storefronts. Standing bold as bra.s.s in front of one-Faith Financial, Where Trust Is Our Watchword-was a chalkboard with THE DAILY LINE printed at the top and FOR AMUs.e.m.e.nT ONLY at the bottom. Men in straw hats and suspenders (a look only dedicated punters can pull off) were standing around it, discussing the posted odds. Some had racing forms; some had the Morning News sports section.
For amus.e.m.e.nt only, I thought. Yeah, right. For a moment I thought of my beachfront shack burning in the night, the flames pulled high into the starry black by the wind off the Gulf. Amus.e.m.e.nt had its drawbacks, especially when it came to betting.
Music and the smell of beer wafted out of open doorways. I heard Jerry Lee Lewis singing "Whole Lotta Shakin" Goin" On" from one juke and Ferlin Husky emoting "Wings of a Dove" from the one next door. I was propositioned by four hookers and a sidewalk vendor who was selling hubcaps, rhinestone-glittery straight razors, and Lone Star State flags embossed with the words DON"T MESS WITH TEXAS. Try translating that one into Latin.
That troubling sense of deja vu was very strong, that feeling that things were wrong here just as they had been wrong before. Which was crazy-I"d never been on Greenville Avenue in my life-but it was also undeniable, a thing of the heart rather than the head. All at once I decided I didn"t want a beer. And I didn"t want to rent Mr. Johnson"s converted garage, either, no matter how good the air-conditioning was.
I had just pa.s.sed a watering hole called the Desert Rose, where the Rock-Ola was blasting Muddy Waters. As I turned to start back to where my car was parked, a man came flying out the door. He stumbled and went sprawling on the sidewalk. There was a burst of laughter from the bar"s dark interior. A woman yelled, "And don"t come back, you d.i.c.kless wonder!" This produced more (and heartier) laughter.
The ejected patron was bleeding from the nose-which was bent severely to one side-and also from a sc.r.a.pe that ran down the left side of his face from temple to jawline. His eyes were huge and shocked. His untucked shirt flapped almost to his knees as he grabbed a lamppost and pulled himself to his feet. Once on them, he glared around at everything, seeing nothing.
I took a step or two toward him, but before I could get there, one of the women who"d asked me if I"d like a date came swaying up on stiletto heels. Only she wasn"t a woman, not really. She couldn"t have been more than sixteen, with large dark eyes and smooth coffee-colored skin. She was smiling, but not in a mean way, and when the man with the b.l.o.o.d.y face staggered, she took his arm. "Easy, sweetheart," she said. "You need to settle down before you-"