I turned. It was the jump-rope girl with the acne. Only it wasn"t acne, it wasn"t rubella, and I didn"t have to ask why she wasn"t in school. She had chicken pox. "Yes, she is."
"She"s purty. Except for the"-she made a gik sound that was, in a grotesque way, sort of charming-"on her face."
Sadie smiled. My appreciation for her sheer guts continued to go up . . . and it never went down. "What"s your name, honey?"
"Sadie," the jump-rope girl said. "Sadie Van Owen. What"s yours?"
"Well, you"re not going to believe this, but my name"s Sadie, too."
The kid eyed her with a mistrustful cynicism that was all Mercedes Street Riot Grrrl. "No, it"s not!"
"It really is. Sadie Dunhill." She turned to me. "That"s quite a coincidence, wouldn"t you say, George?"
I wouldn"t, actually, and I didn"t have time to discuss it. "Need to ask you something, Miss Sadie Van Owen. You know where the buses stop on Winscott Road, don"t you?"
"Sure." She rolled her eyes as if to ask how dumb do you think I am? "Say, have you two had the chicken pox?"
Sadie nodded.
"Me, too," I said, "so we"re okay on that score. Do you know which bus goes into downtown Dallas?"
"The Number Three."
"And how often does the Three run?"
"I think every half hour, but it might be every fifteen minutes. Why you want the bus when you got a car? When you got two cars?"
I could tell by Big Sadie"s expression that she was wondering the same thing. "I"ve got my reasons. And by the way, my old man drives a submarine."
Sadie Van Owen cracked a huge smile. "You know that one?"
"Known it for years," I said. "Get in, Sadie. We need to roll."
I checked my new watch. It was twenty minutes to nine.
3.
"Tell me why you"re interested in the buses," Sadie said.
"First tell me how you found me."
"When I got to Eden Fallows and you were gone, I burned the note as you asked, then checked with the old guy next door."
"Mr. Kenopensky."
"Yes. He didn"t know anything. By then the therapist lady was sitting on your steps. She wasn"t happy to find you gone. She said she"d traded with Doreen so Doreen could see Kennedy today."
The Winscott Road bus stop was ahead. I slowed to see if there was a schedule inside the little shelter next to the post, but no. I pulled into a parking s.p.a.ce a hundred yards ahead of the stop.
"What are you doing?"
"Taking out an insurance policy. If a bus doesn"t come by nine, we"ll go on. Finish your story."
"I called the hotels in downtown Dallas, but n.o.body even wanted to talk to me. They"re all so busy. I called Deke next, and he called the police. Told them he had reliable information that someone was going to shoot the president."
I"d been watching for the bus in my rearview mirror, but now I looked at Sadie in shock. Yet I felt reluctant admiration for Deke. I had no idea how much of what Sadie had told him he actually believed, but he"d gone way out on a limb, just the same. "What happened? Did he give his name?"
"He never got the chance. They hung up on him. I think that"s when I really started to believe you about how the past protects itself. And that"s what all this is to you, isn"t it? Just a living history book."
"Not anymore."
Here came a lumbering bus, green over yellow. The sign in the destination window read 3 MAIN STREET DALLAS 3. It stopped and the doors at the front and back flapped open on their accordion hinges. Two or three people got on, but there was no way they were going to find seats; when the bus rolled slowly past us, I saw that all of them were full. I glimpsed a woman with a row of Kennedy b.u.t.tons pinned to her hat. She waved at me gaily, and although our eyes met for only a second, I could feel her excitement, delight, and antic.i.p.ation.
I dropped the Chevy into gear and followed the bus. On the back, partially obscured by belching brown exhaust, a radiantly smiling Clairol girl proclaimed that if she only had one life, she wanted to live it as a blonde. Sadie waved her hand theatrically. "Uck! Drop back! It stinks!"
"That"s quite a criticism, coming from a pack-a-day chick," I said, but she was right, the diesel stench was nasty. I fell back. There was no need to tailgate now that I knew Sadie Jump-Rope had been right about the number. She"d probably been right about the interval, too. The buses might run every half hour on ordinary days, but this was no ordinary day.
"I did some more crying, because I thought you were gone for sure. I was scared for you, but I hated you, too."
I could understand that and still feel I"d done the right thing, so it seemed best to say nothing.
"I called Deke again. He asked me if you"d ever said anything about having another bolt-hole, maybe in Dallas but probably in Fort Worth. I said I didn"t remember you saying anything specific. He said it probably would have been while you were in the hospital, and all confused. He told me to think hard. As if I wasn"t. I went back to Mr. Kenopensky on the chance you might have said something to him. By then it was almost suppertime, and getting dark. He said no, but right about then his son came by with a pot roast dinner and invited me to eat with them. Mr. K got talking-he has all kinds of stories about the old days-"
"I know." Up ahead, the bus turned east on Vickery Boulevard. I signaled and followed it but stayed far enough back so we didn"t have to eat the diesel. "I"ve heard at least three dozen. Blood-on-the-saddle stuff."
"Listening to him was the best thing I could have done, because I stopped racking my brains for awhile, and sometimes when you relax, things let go and float to the surface of your mind. While I was walking back to your little apartment, I suddenly remembered you saying you lived for awhile on Cadillac Street. Only you knew that wasn"t quite right."
"Oh my G.o.d. I forgot all about that."
"It was my last chance. I called Deke again. He didn"t have any detailed city maps, but he knew there were some at the school library. He drove down-probably coughing his head off, he"s still pretty sick-got them, and called me from the office. He found a Ford Avenue in Dallas, and a Chrysler Park, and several Dodge Streets. But none of them had the feel of a Cadillac, if you know what I mean. Then he found Mercedes Street in Fort Worth. I wanted to go right away, but he told me I"d have a much better chance of spotting you or your car if I waited until morning."
She gripped my arm. Her hand was cold.
"Longest night of my life, you troublesome man. I hardly slept a wink."
"I made up for you, although I didn"t finally go under until the wee hours. If you hadn"t come, I might have slept right through the d.a.m.n a.s.sa.s.sination."
How dismal would that be for an ending?
"Mercedes goes on for blocks. I drove and drove. Then I could see the end, at the parking lot of some big building that looks like the back of a department store."
"Close. It"s a Montgomery Ward warehouse."
"And still no sign of you. I can"t tell you how downhearted I was. Then . . ." She grinned. It was radiant in spite of the scar. "Then I saw that red Chevy with the silly tailfins that look like a woman"s eyebrows. Bright as a neon sign. I shouted and pounded the dashboard of my little Beetle until my hand was sore. And now here I a-"
There was a low, crunching bang from the right front of the Chevy and suddenly we were veering at a lamppost. There was a series of hard thuds from beneath the car. I spun the wheel. It was sickeningly loose in my hands, but I got just enough steerage to avoid hitting the post head-on. Instead, Sadie"s side sc.r.a.ped it, creating a ghastly metal-on-metal screee. Her door bowed inward and I yanked her toward me on the bench seat. We came to a stop with the hood hanging over the sidewalk and the car listing to the right. That wasn"t just a flat tire, I thought. That was a mortal f.u.c.king injury.
Sadie looked at me, stunned. I laughed. As previously noted, sometimes there"s just nothing else you can do.
"Welcome to the past, Sadie," I said. "This is how we live here."
4.
She couldn"t get out on her side; it was going to take a crowbar to pry the pa.s.senger door open. She slid the rest of the way across the seat and got out on mine. A few people were watching, not many.
"Gee, what happened?" a woman pushing a baby carriage asked.
That was obvious once I got around to the front of the car. The right front wheel had snapped off. It lay twenty feet behind us at the end of a curving trench in the asphalt. The jagged axle-stub gleamed in the sun.
"Busted wheel," I told the woman with the baby carriage.
"Oh, law," she said.
"What do we do?" Sadie asked in a low voice.
"We took out an insurance policy; now we file a claim. Nearest bus stop."
"My suitcase-"
Yes, I thought, and Al"s notebook. My ma.n.u.scripts-the s.h.i.tty novel that doesn"t matter and the memoir that does. Plus my available cash. I glanced at my watch. Quarter past nine. At the Texas Hotel, Jackie would be dressing in her pink suit. After another hour or so of politics, the motorcade would be on the move to Carswell Air Force Base, where the big plane was parked. Given the distance between Fort Worth and Dallas, the pilots would barely have time to put their wheels up.
I tried to think.
"Would you like to use my phone to call someone?" the woman with the baby carriage asked. "My house is right up the street." She scanned us, picking up on my limp and Sadie"s scar. "Are you hurt?"
"We"re fine," I said. I took Sadie"s arm. "Would you call a service station and ask them to tow it? I know it"s a lot to ask, but we"re in a terrible hurry."
"I told him that front end was wobbly," Sadie said. She was pouring on the Georgia drawl. "Thank goodness we weren"t on the highway." Ha-way.
"There"s an Esso about two blocks up." She pointed north. "I guess I could stroll the baby over there . . ."
"Oh, that would be a lifesaver, ma"am," Sadie said. She opened her purse, removed her wallet, and took out a twenty. "Give them this on account. Sorry to ask you like this, but if I don"t see Kennedy, I will just dah." That made the baby carriage woman smile.
"Goodness, that much would pay for two tows. If you have some paper in your purse, I could scribble a receipt-"
"That"s okay," I said. "We trust you. But maybe I"ll put a note under the wiper."
Sadie was looking at me questioningly . . . but she was also holding out a pen and little pad with a cross-eyed cartoon kid on the cover. SKOOL DAZE, it said below his loopy grin. DEAR OLE GOLDEN SNOOZE DAZE.
A lot was riding on that note, but there was no time to think about the wording. I jotted rapidly and folded it under the wiper blade. A moment later we were around the corner and gone.
5.
"Jake? Are you okay?"
"Fine. You?"
"I got b.u.mped by the door and I"ll probably have a bruise on my shoulder, but otherwise, yes. If we"d hit that post, I probably wouldn"t have been. You, either. Who was the note for?"
"Whoever tows the Chevy." And I hoped to G.o.d Mr. Whoever would do as the note asked. "We"ll worry about that part when we come back."
If we came back.
The next bus pole was halfway up the block. Three black women, two white women, and a Hispanic man were standing by the post, a racial mixture so balanced it looked like a casting call for Law and Order SVU. We joined them. I sat on the bench inside the shelter next to a sixth woman, an African-American lady whose heroic proportions were packed into a white rayon uniform that practically screamed Well-to-do White Folks" Housekeeper. On her bosom she wore a b.u.t.ton that read ALL THE WAY WITH JFK IN "64.
"Bad leg, sir?" she asked me.
"Yes." I had four packets of headache powder in the pocket of my sport coat. I reached past the gun, got two of them, tore off the tops, and poured them into my mouth.
"Taking them that way will box your kidneys around," she said.
"I know. But I"ve got to keep this leg going long enough to see the president."
She broke into a large smile. "Don"t I hear that."
Sadie was standing on the curb and looking anxiously back down the street for a Number Three.
"Buses runnin slow today," the housekeeper said, "but one be along directly. No way I"m missin Kennedy, nuh-uh!"
Nine-thirty came and still no bus, but the ache in my knee was down to a dull throb. G.o.d bless Goody"s Powder.
Sadie came over. "Jake, maybe we ought to-"
"Here come a Three," the housekeeper said, and rose to her feet. She was an awesome lady, dark as ebony, taller than Sadie by at least an inch, hair plank-straight and gleaming. "How-eee, I"m gonna get me a place right there in Dealey Plaza. Got samidges in my bag. And will he hear me when I yell?"