11/22/63 полностью

“One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.”

“Grungy?”

“Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter apiece.” After you direct a few plays — counting the ones I’d worked on at LHS, Of Mice and Men had been my fifth — you learn a few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp from a semi-furnished apartment.

For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. “I get it. Realism.”

“That’s the plan, Stan.” I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I can’t swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I can’t say for sure that he didn’t, either. “You’re not going to talk about this, are you?”

“No! Course not!” He zipped two fingers across his lips.

“That’s the way,” I said. “When?”

“Give me a few days.”

“I’ll come back next Monday. What time do you close?”

“Five.”

I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, “An extra twenty if you stay open until seven. It’s the soonest I can make it. That work for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Have everything ready.”

“I will. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?”

I was hoping he’d say Because I can keep a secret, but he didn’t. “When I was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of stuck.”

I didn’t ask, but halfway back to my car it came to me, and I started to laugh.

Silent Mike, holy Mike.

Sometimes the world we live in is a truly weird place.

When Lee and Marina returned to the United States, they’d live in a sad procession of low-rent apartments, including the one in New Orleans I’d already visited, but based on Al’s notes, I thought there were only two I needed to focus on. One was at 214 West Neely Street, in Dallas. The other was in Fort Worth, and that was where I went after my visit to Silent Mike’s.

I had a map of the city, but still had to ask directions three times. In the end it was an elderly black woman clerking at a mom-n-pop who pointed me the right way. When I finally found what I was looking for, I wasn’t surprised that it had been hard to locate. The ass end of Mercedes Street was unpaved hardpan lined with crumbling houses little better than sharecroppers’ shacks. It spilled into a huge, mostly empty parking lot where tumbleweeds blew across the crumbling asphalt. Beyond the lot was the back of a cinderblock warehouse. Printed on it in whitewashed letters ten feet tall was PROPERTY OF MONTGOMERY WARD and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED and POLICE TAKE NOTE.

The air stank of cracked petroleum from the direction of Odessa-Midland, and raw sewage much closer at hand. The sound of rock and roll spilled from open windows. I heard the Dovells, Johnny Burnette, Lee Dorsey, Chubby Checker… and that was in the first forty yards or so. Women were hanging clothes on rusty whirligigs. They were all wearing smocks that had probably been purchased at Zayre’s or Mammoth Mart, and they all appeared to be pregnant. A filthy little boy and an equally filthy little girl stood on a cracked clay driveway and watched me go by. They were holding hands and looked too much alike not to be twins. The boy, naked except for a single sock, was holding a cap pistol. The girl was wearing a saggy diaper below a Mickey Mouse Club tee-shirt. She was clutching a plastic babydoll as filthy as she was. Two bare-chested men were throwing a football back and forth between their respective yards, both of them with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths. Beyond them, a rooster and two bedraggled chickens pecked in the dust near a scrawny dog that was either sleeping or dead.

I pulled up in front of 2703, the place to which Lee would bring his wife and daughter when he could no longer stand Marguerite Oswald’s pernicious brand of smotherlove. Two concrete strips led up to a bald patch of oil-stained ground where there would have been a garage in a better part of town. The wasteland of crabgrass that passed for a lawn was littered with cheap plastic toys. A little girl in ragged pink shorts was kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against the side of the house. Each time it hit the wooden siding, she said, “Chumbah!”

A woman with her hair in large blue rollers and a cigarette plugged in her gob shoved her head out the window and shouted, “You keep doin that, Rosette, I’m gone come out n beat you snotty!” Then she saw me. “Wha’ choo want? If it’s a bill, I cain’t hep you. My husband does all that. He got work today.”

“It’s not a bill,” I said. Rosette kicked the soccer ball at me with a snarl that became a reluctant smile when I caught it with the side of my foot and booted it gently back. “I just wanted to speak to you for a second.”

“Y’all gotta wait, then. I ain’t decent.”