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!”

A. Hidell

President of Hands Off Cuba

Dallas—Fort Worth Branch

I briefly pondered the misspellings, then folded the flyer and put it in the box where I kept my manuscripts.

If there was a protest at the station, it wasn’t reported in the Slimes Herald the day after the Hargis-Walker “telemcast.” I doubt that anyone turned up, including Lee himself. I certainly didn’t, but I tuned in to Channel 9 on Thursday night, anxious to see the man Lee—probably Lee—was soon going to try to kill.

At first it was just Hargis, sitting behind an office-set desk and pretending to scribble important notes while a canned choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was a fattish fellow with a lot of plastered-back black hair. As the choir faded out, he put down his pen, looked into the camera, and said: “Welcome to the Christian Crusade, neighbors. I come with good news—Jesus loves you. Yes he does, every last one of you. Won’t you join me in prayer?”

Hargis bent the Almighty’s ear for at least ten minutes. He covered the usual stuff, thanking God for the chance to spread the gospel and instructing Him to bless those who’d sent in love-offerings. Then he got down to business, asking God to arm His Chosen People with the sword and buckler of righteousness so we could defeat communism, which had reared its ugly head just ninety miles off the shores of Florida. He asked God to grant President Kennedy the wisdom (which Hargis, being closer to the Big Guy, already possessed) to go in there and root out the tares of godlessness. He also demanded that God put an end to the growing communist threat on American college campuses—folk music seemed to have something to do with it, but Hargis kind of lost the thread on that part. He finished by thanking God for his guest tonight, the hero of Anzio and the Chosin Reservoir, General Edwin A. Walker.

Walker appeared not in uniform but in a khaki suit that closely resembled one. The creases in his pants looked sharp enough to shave with. His stony face reminded me of the cowboy actor Randolph Scott. He shook Hargis’s hand and they talked about communism, which was rife not just on the college campuses, but in the halls of Congress and the scientific community as well. They touched on fluoridation. Then they schmoozed about Cuba, which Walker called “the cancer of the Caribbean.”

I could see why Walker had failed so badly in his run for the Texas governorship the year before. At the front of a high school class he would have put the kids to sleep even in period one, when they were freshest. But Hargis moved him along smoothly, interjecting “Praise Jesus!” and “God’s witness, brother!” whenever things got a little sticky. They discussed an upcoming barnstorm crusade through the South called Operation Midnight Ride, and then Hargis invited Walker to clear the air concerning “certain scurrilous charges of segregationism that have surfaced in the New York press and elsewhere.”

Walker finally forgot he was on television and came to life. “You know that’s nothing but a truckload of commie propaganda.”

“I know it!” Hargis exclaimed. “And God wants you to tell it, brother.”

“I spent my life in the U.S. Army, and I’ll be a soldier in my heart until the day I die.” (If Lee had his way, that would be in roughly three months.) “As a soldier, I always did my duty. When President Eisenhower ordered me to Little Rock during the civil disturbances of 1957—this had to do with the forced integration of Central High School, as you know—I did my duty. But Billy, I am also a soldier of God—”

“A Christian soldier! Praise Jesus!”

“—and as a Christian, I know that forced integration is just flat-out wrong. It’s Constitution-wrong, states rights—wrong, and Bible-wrong.”

“Tell it,” Hargis said, and wiped a tear from his cheek. Or maybe it was sweat that had oozed through his makeup.

“Do I hate the Negro race? Those who say that—and those who worked to drive me from the military service I loved—are liars and communists. You know better, the men I served with know better, and God knows better.” He leaned forward in the guest’s chair. “Do you think the Negro teachers in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and the great state of Texas want integration? They do not. They see it as a slap in the face to their own skills and hard work. Do you think that Negro students want to go to school with whites naturally better equipped for readin, writin, and rithmetic? Do you think real Americans want the sort of race mongrelization that will result from this sort of mingling?”

“Of course they don’t! Praaaiiise Jesus!”

I thought about the sign I’d seen in North Carolina, the one pointing to a path bordered with poison ivy. COLORED, it had said. Walker didn’t deserve killing, but he could certainly do with a brisk shaking. I’d give anyone a big old praise Jesus on that one.

My attention had wandered, but something Walker was now saying brought it back in a hurry.

“It was God, not General Edwin Walker, who ordained the Negro position in His world when He gave them a different skin color and a different set of talents. More athletic talents. What does the Bible tell us about this difference, and why the Negro race has been cursed to so much pain and travail? We only have to look at the ninth chapter of Genesis, Billy.”

“Praise God for His Holy Word.”

Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court. “‘And Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told them who stood without.’ But Shem and Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know you know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old Bible-learning we got at our mothers’ knees—”

“Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”

“Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been going on, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa—’”

I snapped the TV off.

What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think of a tee-shirt Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our marriage. There was a fiercely grinning pirate on the front, with this message below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. Plenty of beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter. We in the neighborhood heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain. Nobody did anything, and that included me.

Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business. Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do. With the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.

Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair. They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed, nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.

I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about this development, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. But I cared.

The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.

CHAPTER 21

The Oswalds became my upstairs neighbors on March 2, 1963. They hand-carried their possessions, mostly in liquor store cartons, from the crumbling brick box on Elsbeth Street. Soon the wheels of the little Japanese tape recorder were turning on a regular basis, but mostly I listened in with the earphones. That way the conversations upstairs were normal instead of slowed down, but of course I couldn’t understand much of it, anyway.

The week after the Oswalds moved into their new digs, I visited one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue to buy a gun. The first revolver the pawnbroker showed me was the same Colt .38 model I’d bought in Derry.

“This is excellent pertection against muggers n home-breakers,” the pawnbroker said. “Dead accurate up to twenty yards.”

“Fifteen,” I said. “I heard fifteen.”

The pawnie raised his eyebrows. “Okay, say fifteen. Anyone stupid enough—”

— to try mugging me out of my cash is going to be a lot closer than that, that’s how the pitch goes.

“—to brace you is gonna be in at close quarters, so what do you say?”

My first impulse, just to break that sense of chiming but slightly discordant harmony was to tell him I wanted something else, maybe a.45, but breaking the harmony might be a bad idea. Who knew? What I did know was that the .38 I’d bought in Derry had done the job.

“How much?”

“Let you have it for twelve.”

That was two dollars more than I’d paid in Derry, but of course that had been four and a half years ago. Adjusting for inflation, twelve seemed about right. I told him to add a box of bullets and he had a deal.

When the broker saw me putting the gun and the ammo in the briefcase I’d brought along for that purpose, he said, “Why don’t you let me sell you a holster, son? You don’t sound like you’re from around here and you probably don’t know, but you c’n carry legal in Texas, no permit needed if you don’t have a felony record. You got a felony record?”

“No, but I don’t expect to be mugged in broad daylight.”

The broker offered a dark smile. “On Greenville Avenue you can never tell what’s gonna happen. Man blew his own head off just a block and a half from here a few years ago.”

“Really?”

“Yessir, outside a bar called the Desert Rose. Over a woman, accourse. Don’t that figure?”

“I guess,” I said. “Although sometimes it’s politics.”

“Nah, nah, at the bottom it’s always a woman, son.”

I’d found a parking space four blocks west of the pawnshop, and in order to get back to my new (new to me, anyway) car, I had to pass Faith Financial, where I’d laid my bet on the Miracle Pirates in the fall of 1960. The sharpie who’d paid off my twelve hundred was standing out front, having a smoke. He was wearing his green eyeshade. His eyes passed over me, but seemingly without interest or recognition.

That was on a Friday afternoon, and I drove straight from Greenville Avenue to Kileen, where Sadie met me at the Candlewood Bungalows. We spent the night, as was our habit that winter. The next day she drove back to Jodie, where I joined her on Sunday for church. After the benediction, during the part where we shook hands with the people all around us, saying “Peace be with you,” my thoughts turned—not comfortably—to the gun now stowed in the trunk of my car.

Over the Sunday noon meal, Sadie asked: “How much longer? Until you do what you have to do?”

“If everything goes the way I hope, not much more than a month.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

I scrubbed my hands through my hair and went to the window. “Then I don’t know. Anything else on your mind?”

“Yes,” she said calmly. “There’s cherry cobbler for afters. Would you like whipped cream on yours?”

“Very much,” I said. “I love you, honey.”

“You better,” she said, getting up to fetch dessert. “Because I’m kind of out on a limb here.”

I stayed at the window. A car came rolling slowly down the street—an oldie but a goodie, as the jocks on K-Life said—and I felt that harmonic chime again. But I was always feeling it now, and sometimes it meant nothing. One of Christy’s AA slogans came to my mind: FEAR, standing for false evidence appearing real.

This time a click of association came, though. The car was a white-over-red Plymouth Fury, like the one I’d seen in the parking lot of the Worumbo mill, not far from the drying shed where the rabbit-hole into 1958 came out. I remembered touching the trunk to make sure it was real. This one had an Arkansas plate instead of a Maine one, but still… that chime. That harmonic chime. Sometimes I felt that if I knew what that chime meant, I’d know everything. Probably stupid, but true.

The Yellow Card Man knew, I thought. He knew and it killed him.

My latest harmonic signaled left, turned at the stop sign, and disappeared toward Main Street.

“Come eat dessert, you,” Sadie said from behind me, and I jumped.

The AAs say FEAR stands for something else, as well: Fuck everything and run.

When I got back to Neely Street that night, I put on the earphones and listened to the latest recording. I expected nothing but Russian, but this time I got English as well. And splashing sounds.

Marina: (Speaks Russian.)

Lee: “I can’t, Mama, I’m in the tub with Junie!”

(More splashing, and laughter—Lee’s and the baby’s high chortle.)

Lee: “Mama, we got water on the floor! Junie splash! Bad girl!”

Marina: “Mop it up! I beezy! Beezy!” (But she is also laughing.)

Lee: “I can’t, you want the baby to…” (Russian.)

Marina: (Speaks Russian—scolding and laughing at the same time.)

(More splashing. Marina is humming some pop song from KLIF. It sounds sweet.)

Lee: “Mama, bring us our toys!”

Marina: “Da, da, always you must have the toys.”

(Splashing, loud. The door to the bathroom must be all the way open now.)

Marina: (Speaks Russian.)

Lee (pouty little boy’s voice): “Mama, you forgot our rubber ball.”

(Big splash—the baby screams with delight.)

Marina: “There, all toys for preence and preencessa.”

(Laughter from all three—their joy turns me cold.)

Lee: “Mama, bring us a (Russian word). We have water on our ear.”

Marina (laughing): “Oh my God, what next?”

I lay awake a long time that night, thinking of the three of them. Happy for once, and why not? 214 West Neely wasn’t much, but it was still a step up. Maybe they were even sleeping in the same bed, June for once happy instead of scared to death.

And now a fourth in the bed, as well. The one growing in Marina’s belly.

Things began to move faster, as they had in Derry, only now time’s arrow was flying toward April 10 instead of Halloween. Al’s notes, which I had depended on to get me this far, became less helpful. Leading up to the attempt on Walker’s life, they concentrated almost solely on Lee’s actions and movements, and that winter there was a lot more to their lives, Marina’s in particular.

For one thing, she had finally made a friend—not a sugar daddy wannabe like George Bouhe, but a woman friend. Her name was Ruth Paine, and she was a Quaker lady. Russian speaker, Al had noted in a laconic style not much like his earlier notes. Met at party, 2(??)/63. Marina separated from Lee and living with the Paine woman at the time of the Kennedy assassination. And then, as if it were no more than an afterthought: Lee stored M-C in Paine garage. Wrapped in blanket.

By M-C, he meant the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with which Lee planned to kill General Walker.

I don’t know who threw the party where Lee and Marina met the Paines. I don’t know who introduced them. De Mohrenschildt? Bouhe? Probably one or the other, because by then the rest of the émigrés were giving the Oswalds a wide berth. Hubby was a sneering know-it-all, wifey a punching bag who’d passed up God knew how many chances to leave him for good.

What I do know is Marina Oswald’s potential escape-hatch arrived behind the wheel of a Chevrolet station wagon—white over red—on a rainy day in the middle of March. She parked at the curb and looked around dubiously, as if not sure she had come to the right address. Ruth Paine was tall (although not as tall as Sadie) and painfully thin. Her brownish hair was banged over a huge expanse of forehead in front and flipped in back, a style that did not flatter her. She wore rimless glasses on a nose splashed with freckles. To me, peering through a crack in the curtains, she looked like the kind of woman who steered clear of meat and marched in Ban the Bomb demonstrations… and that was pretty much who Ruth Paine was, I think, a woman who was New Age before New Age was cool.

Marina must have been watching for her, because she came clattering down the outside stairs with the baby in her arms, a blanket flipped up over June’s head to protect her from the drifting drizzle. Ruth Paine smiled tentatively and spoke carefully, putting a space between each word. “Hello, Mrs. Oswald, I’m Ruth Paine. Do you remember me?”

“Da,” Marina said. “Yes.” Then she added something in Russian. Ruth replied in the same language… although haltingly.

Marina invited her in. I waited until I heard the creak of their footsteps above me, then donned the earphones connected to the lamp bug. What I heard was a conversation in mixed English and Russian. Marina corrected Ruth several times, sometimes with laughter. I understood enough to figure out why Ruth Paine had come. Like Paul Gregory, she wanted Russian lessons. I understood something else from their frequent laughter and increasingly easy conversation: they liked each other.

I was glad for Marina. If I killed Oswald after his attempt on General Walker, the New Agey Ruth Paine might take her in. I could hope.

Ruth only came twice to Neely Street for her lessons. After that, Marina and June got in the station wagon and Ruth drove them away. Probably to her home in the posh (at least by Oak Cliff standards) suburb of Irving. That address wasn’t in Al’s notes—he seemed to care little about Marina’s relationship with Ruth, probably because he expected to finish Lee long before that rifle ended up in the Paines’ garage—but I found it in the phone directory: 2515 West Fifth Street.

One overcast March afternoon, about two hours after Marina and Ruth had departed, Lee and George de Mohrenschildt showed up in de Mohrenschildt’s car. Lee got out carrying a brown paper sack with a sombrero and PEPINO’S BEST MEXICAN printed on the side. De Mohrenschildt had a six-pack of Dos Equis. They went up the outside staircase, talking and laughing. I grabbed the earphones, heart pumping. At first there was nothing, but then one of them turned on the lamp. After that I might have been in the room with them, an unseen third.

Please don’t conspire to kill Walker, I thought. Please don’t make my job harder than it already is.

“Pardon the mess,” Lee said. “She doesn’t do anything much these days but sleep, watch TV, and talk about that woman she’s giving lessons to.”

De Mohrenschildt spoke for awhile about some oil leases he was trying to get hold of in Haiti, and spoke harshly of the repressive Duvalier regime. “At the end of the day, trucks drive through the marketplace and pick up the dead. Many of them are children who’ve starved to death.”

“Castro and the Front will put an end to that,” Lee said grimly.

“May providence hasten the day.” There was the clink of bottles, probably to toast the idea of providence hastening the day. “How is work, Comrade? And how is it you’re not there this afternoon?”

He wasn’t there, Lee said, because he wanted to be here. Simple as that. He’d just punched out and walked away. “What can they do about it? I’m the best damn photoprint technician ole Bobby Stovall’s got, and he knows it. The foreman, his name is (I couldn’t make it out—Graff? Grafe?) says ‘Quit trying to play labor organizer, Lee.’ You know what I do? I laugh and say ‘Okay, svinoyeb,’ and walk away. He’s a pig’s dick, and ever’one knows it.”

Still, it was clear Lee liked his job, although he complained about the paternalistic attitude, and how seniority counted for more than talent. At one point he said, “You know, in Minsk, on a level playing field, I’d be running the place in a year.”

“I know you would, my son—it’s completely evident.”

Playing him up. Winding him up. I was sure of it. I didn’t like it.

“Did you see the paper this morning?” Lee asked.

“I saw nothing but telegrams and memos this morning. Why do you think I’m here, if not to get away from my desk?”

“Walker did it,” Lee said. “He joined up with Hargis’s crusade—or maybe it’s Walker’s crusade and Hargis joined up. I cain’t tell. That fucking Midnight Ride thing, anyway. Those two ninnies are going to tour the whole South, telling people that the N-double-A-C-P’s a communist front. They’ll set integration and voting rights back twenty years.”

“Sure! And fomenting hate. How long before the massacres start?”

“Or until someone shoots Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King!”

“Of course King will be shot,” de Mohrenschildt said, almost laughing. I was standing up, my hands pressing the earphones tight to the sides of my head, sweat trickling down my face. This was dangerous ground, indeed—the very edge of conspiracy. “It’s only a matter of time.”

One of them used the church key on another bottle of Mexican beer, and Lee said, “Someone should stop those two bastards.”

“You’re wrong to call our General Walker a ninny,” de Mohrenschildt said in a lecturely tone. “Hargis, yes, okay. Hargis is a joke. What I hear is that he is—like so many of his ilk—a man of twisted sexual appetites, willing to diddle a little girl’s cunt in the morning and a little boy’s asshole in the afternoon.”

“Man, that’s sick!” Lee’s voice broke like an adolescent’s on the last word. Then he laughed.

“But Walker, ah, there’s a very different kettle of shrimp. He’s high in the John Birch Society—”

“Those Jew-hating fascists!”

“—and I can see a day, not long hence, when he may run it. Once he has the confidence and approval of the other right-wing nut groups, he may even run for office again… but this time not for governor of Texas. I suspect he has his sights aimed higher. The Senate? Perhaps. Even the White House?”

“That could never happen.” But Lee sounded unsure.

“It’s unlikely to happen,” de Mohrenschildt corrected. “But never underestimate the American bourgeoisie’s capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism. Or the power of television. Without TV, Kennedy would never have beaten Nixon.”

“Kennedy and his iron fist,” Lee said. His approval of the current president seemed to have gone the way of blue suede shoes. “He won’t never rest as long as Fidel’s shitting in Batista’s commode.”

“And never underestimate the terror white America feels at the idea of a society in which racial equality has become the law of the land.”

“Nigger, nigger, nigger, beaner, beaner, beaner!” Lee burst out, with a rage so great it was nearly anguish. “That’s all I hear at work!”

“I’m sure. When the Morning News says ‘the great state of Texas,’ what they mean is ‘the hate state of Texas.’ And people listen! For a man like Walker—a war hero like Walker—a buffoon like Hargis is nothing but a stepping-stone. The way von Hindenberg was a stepping-stone for Hitler. With the right public relations people to smooth him out, Walker could go far. Do you know what I think? That the man who knocked off General Edwin Racist America Walker would be doing society a favor.”

I dropped heavily into a chair beside the table where the little tape recorder sat, its reels spinning.

“If you really believe—” Lee began, and then there was a loud buzz that made me snatch the headphones off. There were no cries of alarm or outrage from upstairs, no swift movement of feet, so—unless they were very good at covering up on the spur of the moment—I thought I could assume the lamp bug hadn’t been discovered. I put the headphones back on. Nothing. I tried the distance mike, standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the ceiling. With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt’s occasional replies, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

My ear in the Oswald apartment had gone deaf.

The past is obdurate.

After another ten minutes of conversation—maybe about politics, maybe about the annoying nature of wives, maybe about newly hatching plans to kill General Edwin Walker—de Mohrenschildt bounded down the outside stairs and drove away.

Lee’s footfalls crossed above my head—clump, clud, clump. I followed them into my bedroom and trained the distance mike on the place where they stopped. Nothing… nothing… then the faint but unmistakable sound of snoring. When Ruth Paine dropped off Marina and June two hours later, he was still sleeping the sleep of Dos Equis. Marina didn’t wake him. I wouldn’t have woken the bad-tempered little sonofabitch, either.

Oswald began to miss a lot more work after that day. If Marina knew, she didn’t care. Maybe she didn’t even notice. She was absorbed with her new friend Ruth. The beatings had abated a little, not because morale had improved, but because Lee was out almost as frequently as she was. He often took his camera. Thanks to Al’s notes, I knew where he was going and what he was doing.

One day after he’d left for the bus stop, I jumped into my car and drove to Oak Lawn Avenue. I wanted to beat Lee’s crosstown bus, and I did. Handily. There was plenty of slant-style parking on both sides of Oak Lawn, but my red gull-wing Chevy was distinctive, and I didn’t want to risk Lee seeing it. I put it around the corner on Wycliff Avenue, in the parking lot of an Alpha Beta grocery. Then I strolled down to Turtle Creek Boulevard. The houses there were neo-haciendas with arches and stucco siding. There were palm-lined drives, big lawns, even a fountain or two.

In front of 4011, a trim man (who bore a striking resemblance to the cowboy actor Randolph Scott) was at work with a push mower. Edwin Walker saw me looking at him and struck a curt half-salute from the side of his brow. I returned the gesture. Lee Oswald’s target resumed mowing and I moved on.

The streets making up the Dallas block I was interested in were Turtle Creek Boulevard (where the general lived), Wycliff Avenue (where I’d parked), Avondale Avenue (which was where I went after returning Walker’s wave), and Oak Lawn, a street of small businesses that ran directly behind the general’s house. Oak Lawn was the one I was most interested in, because it was going to be Lee’s line of approach and route of escape on the night of April 10.

I stood in front of Texas Shoes & Boots, the collar of my denim jacket raised and my hands stuffed in my pockets. About three minutes after I took up this position, the bus stopped at the corner of Oak Lawn and Wycliff. Two women with cloth shopping bags got off immediately when the doors flopped open. Then Lee descended to the sidewalk. He carried a brown paper bag, like a workman’s lunchsack.

There was a big stone church on the corner. Lee sauntered over to the iron railing running in front of it, read the noticeboard, took a small notepad out of his hip pocket, and jotted something down. After that he headed in my direction, tucking the notebook into his pocket as he walked. I hadn’t expected that. Al had believed Lee was going to stash his rifle near the railroad tracks on the other side of Oak Lawn Avenue, a good half a mile away. But maybe the notes were wrong, because Lee didn’t even glance in that direction. He was seventy or eighty yards away, and closing in fast on my position.

He’s going to notice me and he’s going to speak to me, I thought. He’s going to say, “Aren’t you the guy who lives downstairs? What are you doing here?” If he did, the future would skew off in a new direction. Not good.

I stared at the shoes and boots in the show window with sweat dampening the nape of my neck and rolling down my back. When I finally took a chance and shifted my eyes to the left, Lee was gone. It was like a magic trick.

I sauntered up the street. I wished I’d put on a cap, maybe even some sunglasses—why hadn’t I? What kind of half-assed secret agent was I, anyway?

I came to a coffee shop about halfway along the block, the sign in the window advertising BREAKFAST ALL DAY. Lee wasn’t inside. Beyond the coffee shop was the mouth of an alley. I walked slowly across it, glanced to my right, and saw him. His back was to me. He had taken his camera out of the paper sack but wasn’t shooting with it, at least not yet. He was examining trash cans. He pulled off the lids, looked inside, then replaced them.

Every bone in my body—by which I mean every instinct in my brain, I suppose—was urging me to move on before he turned and saw me, but a powerful fascination held me in place a little longer. I think it would have held most people. How many opportunities do we have, after all, to watch a guy as he goes about the business of planning a cold-blooded murder?

He moved a little deeper into the alley, then stopped at a circular iron plate set in a plug of concrete. He tried to lift it. No go.

The alley was unpaved, badly potholed, and about two hundred yards long. Halfway down its length, the chain link guarding weedy backyards and vacant lots gave way to high board fences draped in ivy that looked less than vibrant after a cold and dismal winter. Lee pushed a mat of it aside, and tried a board. It swung out and he peered into the hole behind it.

Axioms about how you have to break eggs to make an omelet were all very fine, but I felt I had pressed my luck enough. I walked on. At the end of the block I stopped at the church that had caught Lee’s interest. It was the Oak Lawn Church of Latter-day Saints. The noticeboard said there were regular services every Sunday morning and special newcomers’ services every Wednesday night at 7 PM, with a social hour to follow. Refreshments would be served.

April 10 was a Wednesday and Lee’s plan (assuming it wasn’t de Mohrenschildt’s) now seemed clear enough: hide the gun in the alley ahead of time, then wait until the newcomers’ service—and the social hour, of course—was over. He’d be able to hear the worshippers when they came out, laughing and talking as they headed for the bus stop. The buses ran on the quarter hour; there was always one coming along. Lee would take his shot, hide the gun behind the loose board again (not near the train tracks), then mingle with the church folk. When the next bus came, he’d be gone.

I glanced to my right just in time to see him emerging from the alley. The camera was back in the paper sack. He went to the bus stop and leaned against the post. A man came along and asked him something. Soon they were in conversation. Batting the breeze with a stranger, or was this perhaps another friend of de Mohrenschildt’s? Just some guy on the street, or a co-conspirator? Maybe even the famous Unknown Shooter who—according to the conspiracy theorists—had been lurking on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s motorcade approached? I told myself that was crazy, but it was impossible to know for sure. That was the hell of it.

There was no way of knowing anything for sure, and wouldn’t be until I saw with my own eyes that Oswald was alone on April 10. Even that wouldn’t be enough to put all my doubts to rest, but it would be enough to proceed on.

Enough to kill Junie’s father.

The bus came growling up to the stop. Secret Agent X-19—also known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the renowned Marxist and wife-beater—got on. When the bus was out of sight, I went back to the alley and walked its length. At the end, it widened out into a big unfenced backyard. There was a ’57 or ’58 Chevy Biscayne parked beside a natural gas pumping station. There was a barbecue pot standing on a tripod. Beyond the barbie was the backside of a big dark brown house. The general’s house.

I looked down and saw a fresh drag-mark in the dirt. A garbage can stood at one end of it. I hadn’t seen Lee move the can, but I knew he had. On the night of the tenth, he meant to rest the rifle barrel on it.

On Monday, March 25, Lee came walking up Neely Street carrying a long package wrapped in brown paper. Peering through a tiny crack in the curtains, I could see the words REGISTERED and INSURED stamped on it in big red letters. For the first time I thought he seemed furtive and nervous, actually looking around at his exterior surroundings instead of at the spooky furniture deep in his head. I knew what was in the package: a 6.5mm Carcano rifle—also known as a Mannlicher-Carcano—complete with scope, purchased from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Five minutes after he climbed the outside stairs to the second floor, the gun Lee would use to change history was in a closet above my head. Marina took the famous pictures of him holding it just outside my living room window six days later, but I didn’t see it. That was a Sunday, and I was in Jodie. As the tenth grew closer, those weekends with Sadie had become the most important, the dearest, things in my life.

I came awake with a jerk, hearing someone mutter “Still not too late” under his breath. I realized it was me and shut up.

Sadie murmured some thick protest and turned over in bed. The familiar squeak of the springs locked me in place and time: the Candlewood Bungalows, April 5, 1963. I fumbled my watch from the nightstand and peered at the luminous numbers. It was quarter past two in the morning, which meant it was actually the sixth of April.

Still not too late.

Not too late for what? To back off, to let well enough alone? Or bad enough, come to that? The idea of backing off was attractive, God knew. If I went ahead and things went wrong, this could be my last night with Sadie. Ever.

Even if you do have to kill him, you don’t have to do it right away.

True enough. Oswald was going to relocate to New Orleans for awhile after the attempt on the general’s life—another shitty apartment, one I’d already visited—but not for two weeks. That would give me plenty of time to stop his clock. But I sensed it would be a mistake to wait very long. I might find reasons to keep on waiting. The best one was beside me in this bed: long, lovely, and smoothly naked. Maybe she was just another trap laid by the obdurate past, but that didn’t matter, because I loved her. And I could envision a scenario—all too clearly—where I’d have to run after killing Oswald. Run where? Back to Maine, of course. Hoping I could stay ahead of the cops just long enough to get to the rabbit-hole and escape into a future where Sadie Dunhill would be… well… about eighty years old. If she were alive at all. Given her cigarette habit, that would be like rolling six the hard way.

I got up and went to the window. Only a few of the bungalows were occupied on this early-spring weekend. There was a mud-or manure-splattered pickup truck with a trailer full of what looked like farm implements behind it. An Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. A couple of station wagons. And a two-tone Plymouth Fury. The moon was sliding in and out of thin clouds and it wasn’t possible to make out the color of the car’s lower half by that stuttery light, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was, anyway.

I pulled on my pants, undershirt, and shoes. Then I slipped out of the cabin and walked across the courtyard. The chilly air bit at my bed-warm skin, but I barely felt it. Yes, the car was a Fury, and yes, it was white over red, but this one wasn’t from Maine or Arkansas; the plate was Oklahoma, and the decal in the rear window read GO, SOONERS. I peeked in and saw a scatter of textbooks. Some student, maybe headed south to visit his folks on spring break. Or a couple of horny teachers taking advantage of the Candlewood’s liberal guest policy.

Just another not-quite-on-key chime as the past harmonized with itself. I touched the trunk, as I had back in Lisbon Falls, then returned to the bungalow. Sadie had pushed the sheet down to her waist, and when I came in, the draft of cool air woke her up. She sat, holding the sheet over her breasts, then let it drop when she saw it was me.

“Can’t sleep, honey?”

“I had a bad dream and went out for some air.”

“What was it?”

I unbuttoned my jeans, kicked off my loafers. “Can’t remember.”

“Try. My mother always used to say if you tell your dreams, they won’t come true.”

I got into bed with her wearing nothing but my undershirt. “My mother used to say if you kiss your honey, they won’t come true.”

“Did she actually say that?”

“No.”

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it sounds possible. Let’s try it.”

We tried it.

One thing led to another.

Afterward, she lit a cigarette. I lay watching the smoke drift up and turn blue in the occasional moonlight coming through the half-drawn curtains. I’d never leave the curtains that way at Neely Street, I thought. At Neely Street, in my other life, I’m always alone but still careful to close them all the way. Except when I’m peeking, that is. Lurking.

Just then I didn’t like myself very much.

“George?”

I sighed. “That’s not my name.”

“I know.”

I looked at her. She inhaled deeply, enjoying her cigarette guiltlessly, as people do in the Land of Ago. “I don’t have any inside information, if that’s what you’re thinking. But it stands to reason. The rest of your past is made up, after all. And I’m glad. I don’t like George all that much. It’s kind of… what’s that word you use sometimes?… kind of dorky.”

“How does Jake suit you?”

“As in Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“I like it.” She turned to me. “In the Bible, Jacob wrestled an angel. And you’re wrestling, too. Aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am, but not with an angel.” Although Lee Oswald didn’t make much of a devil, either. I liked George de Mohrenschildt better for the devil role. In the Bible, Satan’s a tempter who makes the offer and then stands aside. I hoped de Mohrenschildt was like that.

Sadie snubbed her cigarette. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were dark. “Are you going to be hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going away? Because if you have to go away, I’m not sure I can stand it. I would have died before I said it when I was there, but Reno was a nightmare. Losing you for good…” She shook her head slowly. “No, I’m not sure I could stand that.”

“I want to marry you,” I said.

“My God,” she said softly. “Just when I’m ready to say it’ll never happen, Jake-alias-George says right now.”

“Not right now, but if the next week goes the way I hope it does… will you?”

“Of course. But I do have to ask one teensy question.”

“Am I single? Legally single? Is that what you want to know?”

She nodded.

“I am,” I said.

She let out a comic sigh and grinned like a kid. Then she sobered. “Can I help you? Let me help you.”

The thought turned me cold, and she must have seen it. Her lower lip crept into her mouth. She bit down on it with her teeth. “That bad, then,” she said musingly.

“Let’s put it this way: I’m currently close to a big machine full of sharp teeth, and it’s running full speed. I won’t allow you next to me while I’m monkeying with it.”

“When is it?” she asked. “Your… I don’t know… your date with destiny?”

“Still to be determined.” I had a feeling that I’d said too much already, but since I’d come this far, I decided to go a little farther. “Something’s going to happen this Wednesday night. Something I have to witness. Then I’ll decide.”

“Is there no way I can help you?”

“I don’t think so, honey.”

“If it turns out I can—”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that. And you really will marry me?”

“Now that I know your name is Jake? Of course.”

On Monday morning, around ten o’clock, the station wagon pulled up at the curb and Marina went off to Irving with Ruth Paine. I had an errand of my own to run, and was just about to leave the apartment when I heard the thump of footsteps descending the outside stairs. It was Lee, looking pale and grim. His hair was mussy and his face was stippled with a bad breakout of post-adolescent acne. He was wearing jeans and an absurd trenchcoat that flapped around his shins. He walked with one arm across his chest, as if his ribs hurt.

Or as if he had something under his coat. Before the attempt, Lee sighted in his new rifle somewhere out by Love Field, Al had written. I didn’t care where he sighted it in. What I cared about was how close I’d just come to meeting him face-to-face. I’d made the careless assumption that I’d missed him going off to work, and—

Why wasn’t he at work on a Monday morning, come to that?

I dismissed the question and went out, carrying my school briefcase. Inside were the never-to-be-finished novel, Al’s notes, and the work-in-progress describing my adventures in the Land of Ago.

If Lee wasn’t alone on the night of April 10, I might be spotted and killed by one of his co-conspirators, maybe even de Mohrenschildt himself. I still thought the odds of that were unlikely, but the odds of having to run away after killing Oswald were better. So were the odds of being captured and arrested for murder. I didn’t want anyone—the police, for instance—finding Al’s notes or my memoir if either of those things happened.

The important thing to me on that eighth of April was to get my paperwork out of the apartment and far away from the confused and aggressive young man who lived upstairs. I drove to the First Corn Bank of Dallas, and was not surprised to see that the bank official who helped me bore a striking resemblance to the Hometown Trust banker who had helped me in Lisbon Falls. This guy’s name was Link instead of Dusen, but he still looked like the oldtime Cuban bandleader, Xavier Cugat.

I enquired about safe deposit boxes. Soon enough, the manuscripts were in Box 775. I drove back to Neely Street and had a moment of severe panic when I couldn’t find the goddam key to the box.

Relax, I told myself. It’s in your pocket somewhere, and even if it isn’t, your new pal Richard Link will be happy to give you a duplicate. Might cost you all of a buck.

As if the thought had summoned it, I found the key hiding way down in the corner of my pocket, under my change. I put it on my key ring, where it would be safe. If I did have to run back to the rabbit-hole, and stepped into the past again after a return to the present, I’d still have it… although everything that had happened in the last four and a half years would reset. The manuscripts now in the safe deposit box would be lost in time. That was probably good news.

The bad news was that Sadie would be, too.

CHAPTER 22

The afternoon of April tenth was clear and warm, a foretaste of summer. I dressed in slacks and one of the sport coats I’d bought during my year teaching at Denholm Consolidated. The .38 Police Special, fully loaded, went into my briefcase. I don’t remember being nervous; now that the time had come, I felt like a man encased in a cold envelope. I checked my watch: three-thirty.

My plan was to once more park in the Alpha Beta lot on Wycliff Avenue. I could be there by four-fifteen at the latest, even if the crosstown traffic was heavy. I’d scope out the alley. If it was empty, as I expected it would be at that hour, I’d check the hole behind the loose board. If Al’s notes were right about Lee stashing the Carcano in advance (even though he’d been wrong about the place), it would be there.

I’d go back to my car for awhile, watching the bus stop just in case Lee showed up early. When the 7:00 P.M. newcomers’ service started at the Mormon church, I’d stroll to the coffee shop that served breakfast all day and take a seat by the window. I would eat food I wasn’t hungry for, dawdling, making it last, watching the buses arrive and hoping that when Lee finally got off one, he’d be alone. I would also be hoping not to see George de Mohrenschildt’s boat of a car.

That, at least, was the plan.

I picked up my briefcase, glancing at my watch again as I did so. 3:33. The Chevy was gassed and ready to go. If I’d gone out and gotten into it then, as I’d planned to, my phone would have rung in an empty apartment. But I didn’t, because someone knocked at the door just as I reached for the knob.

I opened it and Marina Oswald was standing there.

For a moment I just gaped, unable to move or speak. Mostly it was her unexpected presence, but there was something else, as well. Until she was standing right in front of me, I hadn’t realized how much her wide blue eyes looked like Sadie’s.

Marina either ignored my surprised expression or didn’t notice it. She had problems of her own. “Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?” She bit her lips and shook her head a little. “Hubs-bun.” She attempted to smile, and she had those nicely refurbished teeth to smile with, but it still wasn’t very successful. “Sorry, sir, don’t speak good Eenglish. Am Byelorussia.”

I heard someone—I guess it was me—ask if she was talking about the man who lived upstairs.

“Yes, please, my hubs-bun, Lee. We leeve upstair. This our malyshka—our baby.” She pointed at June, who sat at the bottom of the steps in her walker, contentedly sucking on a pacifier. “He go out now all times since he lose his work.” She tried the smile again, and when her eyes crinkled, a tear spilled from the corner of the left one and tracked down her cheek.

So. Ole Bobby Stovall could get along without his best photoprint technician after all, it seemed.

“I haven’t seen him, Mrs… ” Oswald almost jumped out, but I held it back in time. And that was good, because how would I know? They got no home delivery, it seemed. There were two mailboxes on the porch, but their name wasn’t on either of them. Neither was mine. I got no home delivery, either.

“Os’wal,” she said, and held out her hand. I shook it, more convinced than ever that this was a dream I was having. But her small dry palm was all too real. “Marina Os’wal, I am please to meet you, sir.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Oswald, I haven’t seen him today.” Not true; I’d seen him go out just after noon, not long after Ruth Paine’s station wagon swept Marina and June away to Irving.

“I’m worry for him,” she said. “He… I don’ know… sorry. No mean bother for you.” She smiled again—the sweetest, saddest smile—and wiped the tear slowly from her face.

“If I see him—”

Now she looked alarmed. “No, no, say nutting. He don’ like me talk to strangers. He come home supper, maybe for sure.” She walked down the steps and spoke Russian to the baby, who laughed and held out her chubby arms to her mother. “Goodbye, mister sir. Many thanks. You say nutting?”

“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.” She didn’t get that, but nodded and looked relieved when I put my finger across my lips.

I closed the door, sweating heavily. Somewhere I could hear not just one butterfly flapping its wings, but a whole cloud of them.

Maybe it’s nothing.

I watched Marina push June’s stroller down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, where she probably meant to wait for her hubs-bun… who was up to something. That much she knew. It had been all over her face.

I reached for the doorknob when she was out of sight, and that was when the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it, but there were only a few people with my number, and one of them was a woman I cared about very much.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Amberson,” a man said. He had a soft Southern accent. I’m not sure if I knew who he was right away. I can’t remember. I think I did. “Someone here has something to say to you.”

I lived two lives in late 1962 and early 1963, one in Dallas and one in Jodie. They came together at 3:39 on the afternoon of April 10. In my ear, Sadie began screaming.

She lived in a single-story prefab ranch on Bee Tree Lane, part of a four-or five-block development of houses just like it on the west side of Jodie. An aerial photograph of the neighborhood in a 2011 history book might have been captioned MID-CENTURY STARTER HOMES. She arrived there around three o’clock that afternoon, following an after-school meeting with her student library aides. I doubt if she noticed the white-over-red Plymouth Fury parked at the curb a little way down the block.

Across the street, four or five houses down, Mrs. Holloway was washing her car (a Renault Dauphine that the rest of the neighbors eyed with suspicion). Sadie waved to her when she got out of her VW Bug. Mrs. Holloway waved back. The only owners of foreign (and somehow alien) cars on the block, they were casually collegial.

Sadie went up the walk to her front door and stood there for a moment, frowning. It was ajar. Had she left it that way? She went in and closed it behind her. It didn’t catch because the lock had been forced, but she didn’t notice. By then her whole attention was fixed on the wall over the sofa. There, written in her own lipstick, were two words in letters three feet high: DIRTY CUNT.

She should have run then, but her dismay and outrage were so great that she had no room for fear. She knew who had done it, but surely Johnny was gone. The man she had married had little taste for physical confrontation. Oh, there had been plenty of harsh words and that one slap, but nothing else.

Besides, her underwear was all over the floor.

It made a rough trail from the living room down the short hall to her bedroom. All of it—full slips, half-slips, bras, panties, the girdle she didn’t need but sometimes wore—had been slashed. At the end of the hall, the door to the bathroom stood open. The towel rack had been ripped down. Printed on the tile where it had been, also in her lipstick, was another message: FILTHY FUCKER.

The door of her bedroom was also open. She went to it and stood in it with no sense at all that Johnny Clayton was standing behind it with a knife in one hand and a Smith & Wesson Victory .38 in the other. The revolver he carried that day was the same make and model as the one Lee Oswald would use to take the life of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit.

Her little vanity bag lay open on her bed, the contents, mostly makeup, scattered across the coverlet. The accordion doors of her closet were folded open. Some of her clothes still drooped sadly from their hangers; most were on the floor. All of them had been slashed.

“Johnny, you bastard!” She wanted to scream those words, but the shock was too great. She could only whisper.

She started for the closet but didn’t get far. An arm curled around her neck and a small circle of steel pressed hard against her temple. “Don’t move, don’t fight. If you do, I’ll kill you.”

She tried to pull away and he lashed her upside the head with the revolver’s short barrel. At the same time the arm around her neck tightened. She saw the knife in the fist at the end of the arm that was choking her and stopped struggling. It was Johnny—she recognized the voice—but it really wasn’t Johnny. He had changed.

I should have listened to him, she thought—meaning me. Why didn’t I listen?

He marched her into the living room, arm still around her throat, then spun her and shoved her down on the couch, where she flopped, legs splayed.

“Pull down your dress. I can see your garters, you whore.”

He was wearing bib overalls (that alone was enough to make her feel like she was dreaming) and had dyed his hair a weird orange-blond. She almost laughed.

He sat down on the hassock in front of her. The gun was aimed at her midsection. “We’re going to call your cockboy.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Amberson. The one you play hide the salami with in that hot-sheets place over Kileen. I know all about it. I’ve been watching you a long time.”

“Johnny, if you leave now I won’t call the police. I promise. Even though you spoiled my clothes.”

“Whore clothes,” he said dismissively.

“I don’t… I don’t know his number.”

Her address book, the one she usually kept in her little office next to the typewriter, was lying open next to the phone. “I do. It’s on the first page. I looked under C for Cockboy first, but it wasn’t there. I’ll place the call, so you don’t get any ideas about saying something to the operator. Then you talk to him.”

“I won’t, Johnny, not if you mean to hurt him.”

He leaned forward. His weird orange-blond hair flopped into his eyes and he brushed it away with the hand holding the gun. Then he used the knife-hand to pluck the phone out of its cradle. The gun remained pointed steadily at her midsection. “Here’s the thing, Sadie,” he said, and now he sounded almost rational. “I’m going to kill one of you. The other can live. You decide which one it’s going to be.”

He meant every word. She could see it on his face. “What… what if he isn’t home?”

He chuckled at her stupidity. “Then you die, Sadie.”

She must have thought: I can buy some time. It’s at least three hours from Dallas to Jodie, more if the traffic’s heavy. Time enough for Johnny to come to his senses. Maybe. Or for his attention to lapse just long enough for me to throw something at him and run out the door.

He dialed 0 without looking at the address book (his memory for numbers had always been just short of perfect), and asked for WEstbrook 7-5430. Listened. Said, “Thank you, Operator.”

Then, silence. Somewhere, over a hundred miles north, a telephone was ringing. She must have wondered how many rings Johnny would allow before hanging up and shooting her in the stomach.

Then his listening expression changed. He brightened, even smiled a little. His teeth were as white as ever, she observed, and why not? He had always brushed them at least half a dozen times a day. “Hello, Mr. Amberson. Someone here has something to say to you.”

He got off the hassock and handed Sadie the phone. As she put it to her ear, he slashed out with the knife, quick as a striking snake, and sliced open the side of her face.

“What did you do to her?” I shouted. “What did you do, you bastard?”

“Hush, Mr. Amberson.” He sounded amused. Sadie was no longer screaming, but I could hear her sobbing. “She’s all right. She’s bleeding pretty heavily, but that will stop.” He paused, then spoke in a tone of judicious consideration. “Of course, she’s not going to be pretty anymore. Now she looks like what she is, just a cheap four-dollar whore. My mother said she was, and my mother was right.”

“Let her go, Clayton,” I said. “Please.”

“I want to let her go. Now that I’ve marked her, I want to. But here’s what I already told her, Mr. Amberson. I am going to kill one of you. She cost me my job, you know; I had to quit and go into an electrical-treatment hospital or they were going to have me arrested.” He paused. “I pushed a girl down the stairs. She tried to touch me. All this dirty bitch’s fault, this one right here bleeding into her lap. I got her blood on my hands, too. I will need disinfectant.” And he laughed.

“Clayton—”

“I’ll give you three and a half hours. Until seven-thirty. Then I’ll put two bullets in her. One in her stomach and one in her filthy cunt.”

In the background, I heard Sadie scream: “Don’t you do it, Jacob!”

“SHUT UP!” Clayton yelled at her. “SHUT YOUR MOUTH!” Then, to me, chillingly conversational: “Who’s Jacob?”

“Me,” I said. “It’s my middle name.”

“Does she call you that in bed when she sucks your cock, cockboy?”

“Clayton,” I said. “Johnny. Think what you’re doing.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for over a year. They gave me shock treatments in the electric hospital, you know. They said they’d stop the dreams, but they didn’t. They made them worse.”

“How bad is she cut? Let me talk to her.”

“No.”

“If you let me talk to her, maybe I’ll do what you’re asking. If you don’t, I most certainly won’t. Are you too fogged out from your shock treatments to understand that?”

It seemed he wasn’t. There was a shuffling sound in my ear, then Sadie was on. Her voice was thin and trembling. “It’s bad, but it’s not going to kill me.” Her voice dropped. “He just missed my eye—”

Then Clayton was back. “See? Your little tramp is fine. Now you just jump in your hotrod Chevrolet and get out here just as fast as the wheels will roll, how would that be? But listen to me carefully, Mr. George Jacob Amberson Cockboy: if you call the police, if I see a single blue or red light, I will kill this bitch and then myself. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m seeing an equation here where the values balance: the cockboy and the whoregirl. I’m in the middle. I’m the equals sign, Amberson, but you have to decide. Which value gets canceled out? It’s your call.”

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t! If you come out here he’ll kill both of u—”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I’ve told the truth so far, and I’m going to tell the truth here even though it casts me in the worst possible light: my first thought as my numb hand replaced the phone in its cradle was that he was wrong, the values didn’t balance. In one pan of the scales was a pretty high school librarian. In the other was a man who knew the future and had—theoretically, at least—the power to change it. For a second, part of me actually thought about sacrificing Sadie and going across town to watch the alley running between Oak Lawn Avenue and Turtle Creek Boulevard to find out if the man who changed American history was on his own.

Then I got into my Chevy and headed for Jodie. Once I got out on Highway 77, I pegged the speedometer at seventy and kept it there. While I was driving, I thumbed the latches on my briefcase, took out my gun, and dropped it into the inner pocket of my sport coat.

I realized I’d have to involve Deke in this. He was old and no longer steady on his feet, but there was simply no one else. He would want to be involved, I told myself. He loved Sadie. I saw it in his face every time he looked at her.

And he’s had his life, my cold mind said. She hasn’t. Anyway, he’ll have the same chance the lunatic gave you. He doesn’t have to come.

But he would. Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren’t choices at all.

I never wished so much for my long-gone cell as I did on that drive from Dallas to Jodie. The best I could do was a gas station phone booth on SR 109, about half a mile beyond the football billboard. On the other end the phone rang three times… four… five…

Just as I was about to hang up, Deke said, “Hello? Hello?” He sounded irritated and out of breath.

“Deke? It’s George.”

“Hey, boy!” Now tonight’s version of Bill Turcotte (from that popular and long-running play The Homicidal Husband) sounded delighted instead of irritated. “I was out in my little garden beside the house. I almost let it ring, but then—”

“Be quiet and listen. Something very bad’s happened. Is still happening. Sadie’s been hurt already. Maybe a lot.”

There was a brief pause. When he spoke again, Deke sounded younger: like the tough man he had undoubtedly been forty years and two wives ago. Or maybe that was just hope. Tonight hope and a man in his late sixties was all I had. “You’re talking about her husband, aren’t you? This is my fault. I think I saw him, but that was weeks ago. And his hair was much longer than in the yearbook picture. Not the same color, either. It was almost orange.” A momentary pause, and then a word I had never heard from him before. “Fuck!”

I told him what Clayton wanted, and what I proposed to do. The plan was simple enough. Did the past harmonize with itself? Fine, I would let it. I knew Deke might have a heart attack—Turcotte had—but I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. It was Sadie.

I waited for him to ask if it wouldn’t be better to turn this over to the police, but of course he knew better. Doug Reems, the Jodie constable, had poor eyesight, wore a brace on one leg, and was even older than Deke. Nor did Deke ask why I hadn’t called the state police from Dallas. If he had, I would have told him I believed Clayton was serious about killing Sadie if he saw a single flashing light. It was true, but not the real reason. I wanted to take care of the son of a bitch myself.

I was very angry.

“What time does he expect you, George?”

“No later than seven-thirty.”

“And it’s now… quarter of, by my watch. Which gives us a smidge of time. The street behind Bee Tree is Apple-something. I disremember just what. That’s where you’ll be?”

“Right. The house behind hers.”

“I can meet you there in five minutes.”

“Sure, if you drive like a lunatic. Make it ten. And bring a prop, something he can see from the living room window if he looks out. I don’t know, maybe—”

“Will a casserole dish do?”

“Fine. See you there in ten.”

Before I could hang up, he said, “Do you have a gun?”

“Yes.”

His reply was close to a dog’s growl. “Good.”

The street behind Doris Dunning’s house had been Wyemore Lane. The street behind Sadie’s was Apple Blossom Way. 202 Wyemore had been for sale. 140 Apple Blossom Way had no FOR SALE sign on the lawn, but it was dark and the lawn was shaggy, dotted with dandelions. I parked in front and looked at my watch. Six-fifty.

Two minutes later, Deke pulled his Ranch Wagon up behind my Chevy and got out. He was wearing jeans, a plaid shirt, and a string tie. In his hands he was holding a casserole dish with a flower on the side. It had a glass lid, and looked to contain three or four quarts of chop suey.

“Deke, I can’t thank you en—”

“I don’t deserve thanks, I deserve a swift kick in the pants. The day I saw him, he was coming out of the Western Auto just as I was going in. It had to’ve been Clayton. It was a windy day. A gust blew his hair back and I saw those hollows at his temples for just a second. But the hair… long and not the same color… he was dressed in cowboy clothes… shit-fire.” He shook his head. “I’m getting old. If Sadie’s hurt, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Are you feeling all right? No chest pains, or anything like that?”