I glanced at my watch. “If you’re not firing me, Miz Ellie, I ought to get back to my period five class. We’re diagramming sentences. I’m thinking of trying them on a compound that goes,
“Too tough for me, certainly,” she said pleasantly.
“One thing,” I said. “Sadie’s marriage was difficult. Her husband was strange in ways I don’t want to go into. His name is John Clayton. I think he might be dangerous. You need to ask Sadie if she has a picture of him, so you’ll know what he looks like if he shows up and starts asking questions.”
“And you think this because?”
“Because I’ve seen something like it before. Will that do?”
“I suppose it will have to, won’t it?”
That wasn’t a good enough answer. “Will you ask her?”
“Yes, George.” She might mean it; she might only be humoring me. I couldn’t tell.
I was at the door when she said, as if only passing the time of day: “You’re breaking that young woman’s heart.”
“I know,” I said, and left.
Mercedes Street. Late May.
“Welder, are you?”
I was standing on the porch of 2706 with the landlord, a fine American named Mr. Jay Baker. He was stocky, with a huge gut he called the house that Shiner built. We had just finished a quick tour of the premises, which Baker had explained to me was “Prime to the bus stop,” as if that made up for the sagging ceilings, water-stained walls, cracked toilet tank, and general air of decrepitude.
“Night watchman,” I said.
“Yeah? That’s a good job. Plenty of time to fuck the dog on a job like that.”
This seemed to require no response.
“No wife or kiddies?”
“Divorced. They’re back East.”
“Pay hellimony, do you?”
I shrugged.
He let it go. “So do you want the place, Amberson?”
“I guess so,” I said, and sighed.
He took a long rent-book with a floppy leather cover out of his back pocket. “First month, last month, damage deposit.”
“Damage deposit? You have to be kidding.”
Baker went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rent’s due on the last Friday of the month. Come up short or late and you’re on the street, courtesy of Fort Worth PD. Me’n them get along real good.”
He took the charred cigar stub from his breast pocket, stuck the chewed end in his gob, and popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail. It was hot on the porch. I had an idea it was going to be a long, hot summer.
I sighed again. Then — with a show of reluctance — I took out my wallet and began to remove twenty-dollar bills. “In God we trust,” I said. “All others pay cash.”
He laughed, puffing out clouds of acrid blue smoke as he did so. “That’s good, I’ll remember that. Especially on the last Friday of the month.”
I couldn’t believe I was going to live in this desperate shack and on this desperate street, after my nice house south of here — where I’d taken pride in keeping an actual lawn mowed. Although I hadn’t even left Jodie yet, I felt a wave of homesickness.
“Give me a receipt, please,” I said.
That much I got for free.
It was the last day of school. The classrooms and hallways were empty. The overhead fans paddled air that was already hot, although it was only the eighth of June. The Oswald family had left Russia; in another five days, according to Al Templeton’s notes, the SS
The teachers’ room was empty except for Danny Laverty. “Hey, champ. Understand you’re going off to Dallas to finish that book of yours.”
“That’s the plan.” Fort Worth was actually the plan, at least to begin with. I began cleaning out my pigeonhole, which was stuffed with end-of-school communiqués.
“If I was footloose and fancy-free instead of tied down to a wife, three rugrats, and a mortgage, I might try a book myself,” Danny said. “I was in the war, you know.”
I knew. Everyone knew, usually within ten minutes of meeting him.
“Got enough to live on?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I had more than enough to take me through to next April, when I expected to conclude my business with Lee Oswald. I wouldn’t need to make any more expeditions to Faith Financial on Greenville Avenue. Going there even once had been incredibly stupid. If I wanted, I could try to tell myself that what had happened to my place in Florida had just been the result of a prank gone bad, but I’d also tried to tell myself that Sadie and I were doing fine, and look how
I tossed the wad of paperwork from my pigeonhole into the trash… and saw a small sealed envelope I had somehow missed. I knew who used envelopes like that. There was no salutation on the sheet of notepaper inside, and no signature except for the faint (perhaps even illusory) scent of her perfume. The message was brief.
