So after a mostly sleepless July night when the sonar pings of hunch had been particularly strong, I packed my worldly goods (the lockbox containing my memoir and my cash I hid beneath the Sunliner’s spare tire), left a note and a final rent check for my landlord, and headed north on US 19. I spent my first night on the road in a decaying DeFuniak Springs motor court. The screens had holes in them, and until I turned out my room’s one light (an unshaded bulb dangling on a length of electrical cord), I was beset by mosquitoes the size of fighter planes.
Yet I slept like a baby. There were no nightmares, and the pings of my interior radar had fallen silent. That was good enough for me.
I spent the first of August in Gulfport, although the first place I stopped at, on the town’s outskirts, refused to take me. The clerk of the Red Top Inn explained to me that it was for Negroes only, and directed me to The Southern Hospitality, which he called “Guff-pote’s finest.” Maybe so, but on the whole, I think I would have preferred the Red Top. The slide guitar coming from the bar-and-barbecue next door had sounded terrific.
New Orleans wasn’t precisely on my way to Big D, but with the hunch-sonar quiet, I found myself in a touristy frame of mind… although it wasn’t the French Quarter, the Bienville Street steamboat landing, or the Vieux Carre I wanted to visit.
I bought a map from a street-vendor and found my way to the one destination that did interest me. I parked and after a five-minute walk found myself standing in front of 4905 Magazine Street, where Lee and Marina Oswald would be living with their daughter, June, in the last spring and summer of John Kennedy’s life. It was a shambling not-quite-wreck of a building with a waist-high iron fence surrounding an overgrown yard. The paint on the lower story, once white, was now a peeling shade of urine yellow. The upper story was unpainted gray barnboard. A piece of cardboard blocking a broken window up there read 4-RENT CALL MU3-4192. Rusty screens enclosed the porch where, in September of 1963, Lee Oswald would sit in his underwear after dark, whispering “Pow! Pow! Pow!” under his breath and dry-firing what was going to become the most famous rifle in American history at passing pedestrians.
I was thinking of this when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I almost screamed. I guess I did jump, because the young black man who had accosted me took a respectful step backward, raising his open hands.
“Sorry, sah. Sorry, sho din mean to make you stahtle.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Totally my fault.”
This declaration seemed to make him uneasy, but he had business on his mind and pressed ahead with it… although he had to come close again, because his business entailed a tone of voice lower than the conversational. He wanted to know if I might be interested in buying a few joysticks. I thought I knew what he was talking about, but wasn’t entirely sure until he added, “Ha-quality swampweed, sah.”
I told him I’d pass, but if he could direct me to a good hotel in the Paris of the South, it would be worth half a rock to me. When he spoke again, his speech was a good deal crisper. “Opinions differ, but I’d say the Hotel Monteleone.” He gave me good directions.
“Thanks,” I said, and handed over the coin. It disappeared into one of his many pockets.
“Say, what you lookin at that place for, anyway?” He nodded toward the ramshackle apartment house. “You thinkin bout buyin it?”
A little twinkle of the old George Amberson surfaced. “You must live around here. Do you think it would be a good deal?”
“Some on this street might be, but not that one. To me it looks haunted.”
“Not yet,” I said, and headed for my car, leaving him to look after me, perplexed.
I took the lockbox out of the trunk and put it on the Sunliner’s passenger seat, meaning to hand-carry it up to my room at the Monteleone, and I did just that. But while the doorman was getting the rest of my bags, I spotted something on the floor of the backseat that made me flush with a sense of guilt that was far out of proportion to what the object was. But childhood teachings are the strongest teachings, and another thing I was taught at my mother’s knee was to always return library books on time.
“Mr. Doorman, would you hand me that book, please?” I asked.
“Yes, sah! Happy to!”
It was The Chapman Report, which I’d borrowed from the Nokomis Public Library a week or so before deciding it was time to put on my traveling shoes. The sticker in the corner of the transparent protective cover- 7 DAYS ONLY, BE KIND TO THE NEXT BORROWER -reproached me.
