“I haven’t seen him, Mrs… ”
“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.
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
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.
