11/22/63 полностью

“I don’t care!” Sadie shouted. “I know you think he’s nuts, but what if he’s right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from Dallas in a box?”

“If you bring the police in, they’ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here.”

Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn’t told him that.

She stopped arguing, but she didn’t give up. Sometimes she tried to surprise it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups. It didn’t work.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know.”

“Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it.”

“I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines.” I rubbed at the back of my head, where the ache was starting again. “But it might have been the Navy. Shit, Christy, I don’t know.”

“Sadie, Jake. I’m Sadie.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

She shook her head and tried to smile.

On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the Morning News ran a long editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city. “Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president with open arms,” the piece said. “Excitement is running high. Of course it doesn’t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride.”

“More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?” Sadie asked when she came in. She’d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to “show the flag,” as she put it.

I shook my head. “Honey, you’ve been here a lot more than you’ve been in Jodie. What’s the status of your job?”

“Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I’m getting by, and when I go with you… if we go… I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”

Her gaze shifted away from me and she busied herself lighting a cigarette. Watching her take too long tamping it on the coffee table and then fiddling with her matches, I realized a dispiriting thing: Sadie was also having her doubts. I’d predicted a peaceful end to the Missile Crisis, I had known Dick Tiger was going down in the fifth… but she still had her doubts. And I didn’t blame her. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been having mine.

Then she brightened. “But I’ve got a heck of a good stand-in, and I bet you can guess who.”

I smiled. “Is it…” I couldn’t get the name. I could see him — the weathered, suntanned face, the cowboy hat, the string tie — but that Tuesday morning I couldn’t even get close. My head started to ache in the back, where it had hit the baseboard — but what baseboard, in what house? It was so abysmally fucked up not to know.

Kennedy’s coming in ten days and I can’t even remember that old guy’s fucking name.

“Try, Jake.”

“I am,” I said. “I am, Sadie!”

“Wait a sec. I’ve got an idea.”

She laid her smoldering cigarette in one of the ashtray grooves, got up, went out the front door, closed it behind her. Then she opened it and spoke in a voice that was comically gruff and deep, saying what the old guy said each time he came to visit: “How you doin today, son? Takin any nourishment?”

“Deke,” I said. “Deke Simmons. He was married to Miz Mimi, but she died in Mexico. We had a memorial assembly for her.”

The headache was gone. Just like that.

Sadie clapped her hands and ran to me. I got a long and lovely kiss.

“See?” she said when she drew back. “You can do this. It’s still not too late. What’s his name, Jake? What’s the crazy bugger’s name?”

But I couldn’t remember.

On November sixteenth, the Times Herald published the Kennedy motorcade route. It would start at Love Field and end at the Trade Mart, where he would speak to the Dallas Citizens Council and their invited guests. The nominal purpose of his speech was to salute the Graduate Research Center and congratulate Dallas on its economic progress over the last decade, but the Times Herald was happy to inform those who didn’t already know that the real reason was pure politics. Texas had gone for Kennedy in 1960, but ’64 was looking shaky in spite of having a good old Johnson City boy on the ticket. Cynics still called the vice president “Landslide Lyndon,” a reference to his 1948 Senate bid, a decidedly hinky affair he won by eighty-seven votes. That was ancient history, but the nickname’s longevity said a lot about the mixed feelings Texans had about him. Kennedy’s job — and Jackie’s, of course — was to help Landslide Lyndon and Texas governor John Connally fire up the faithful.

“Look at this,” Sadie said, tracing a fingertip along the route. “Blocks and blocks of Main Street. Then Houston Street. There are high buildings all along that part. Is the man going to be on Main Street? He just about has to be, don’t you think?”

I hardly listened, because I’d seen something else. “Look, Sadie, the motorcade’s going to go along Turtle Creek Boulevard!”