I shook Mike’s hand and kissed Bobbi Jill on the cheek. The disfiguring scar was now a faint pink line. “Doctor says it’ll be all gone by next summer,” she said. “He called me his fastest-healing patient. Thanks to you.”
“I got a part in Death of a Salesman, Mr. A.,” Mike said. “I’m playing Biff.”
“Type-casting,” I said. “Just watch out for flying pies.”
I saw him talking to the band’s lead singer during one of the breaks, and knew perfectly well what was coming. When they got back on the stand, the singer said: “I’ve got a special request. Do we have a George Amberson and Sadie Dunhill in the house? George and Sadie? Come on up here, George and Sadie, outta your seats and onto your feets.”
We walked toward the bandstand through a storm of applause. Sadie was laughing and blushing. She shook her fist at Mike. He grinned. The boy was leaving his face; the man was coming in. A little shyly, but coming. The singer counted off, and the brass section swung into that downbeat I still hear in my dreams.
Bah-dah-dah… bah-dah-da-dee-dum…
I held my hands out to her. She shook her head, but began to swing her hips a little just the same.
“Go get him, Miz Sadie!” Bobbi Jill shouted. “Do the thing!”
The crowd joined in. “Go! Go! Go!”
She gave in and took my hands. We danced.
At midnight, the band played “Auld Lang Syne”-different arrangement from last year, same sweet song-and the balloons came drifting down. All around us, couples were kissing and embracing. We did the same.
“Happy New Year, G-” She pulled back from me, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
I’d had a sudden image of the Texas School Book Depository, an ugly brick square with windows like eyes. This was the year it would become an American icon.
It won’t. I’ll never let you get that far, Lee. You’ll never be in that sixth-floor window. That’s my promise.
“George?”
“Goose walked over my grave, I guess,” I said. “Happy New Year.”
I went to kiss her, but she held me back for a moment. “It’s almost here, isn’t it? What you came to do.”
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s not tonight. For tonight it’s just us. So kiss me, honey. And dance with me.”
I had two lives in late 1962 and early 1963. The good one was in Jodie, and at the Candlewood in Kileen. The other was in Dallas.
Lee and Marina got back together. Their first stop in Dallas was a dump just around the corner from West Neely. De Mohrenschildt helped them move in. George Bouhe wasn’t in evidence. Neither were any of the other Russian emigres. Lee had driven them away. They hated him, Al had written in his notes, and below that: He wanted them to.
The crumbling redbrick at 604 Elsbeth Street had been divided into four or five apartments bursting with poor folks who worked hard, drank hard, and produced hordes of snot-nosed yelling kids. The place actually made the Oswalds’ Fort Worth domicile look good.
I didn’t need electronic assistance to monitor the deteriorating condition of their marriage; Marina continued to wear shorts even after the weather turned cool, as if to taunt him with her bruises. And her sex appeal, of course. June usually sat between them in her stroller. She no longer cried much during their shouting matches, only watched, sucking her thumb or a pacifier.
One day in November of 1962, I came back from the library and observed Lee and Marina on the corner of West Neely and Elsbeth, shouting at each other. Several people (mostly women at that hour of the day) had come out on their porches to watch. June sat in the stroller wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket, silent and forgotten.
They were arguing in Russian, but the latest bone of contention was clear enough from Lee’s jabbing finger. She was wearing a straight black skirt-I don’t know if they were called pencil skirts back then or not-and the zipper on her left hip was halfway down. Probably it just snagged in the cloth, but listening to him rave, you would’ve thought she was trolling for men.
She brushed back her hair, pointed at June, then waved a hand at the house they were now inhabiting-the broken gutters dripping black water, the trash and beer cans on the bald front lawn-and screamed at him in English: “You say happy lies, then bring wife and baby to this peegsty!”
He flushed all the way to his hairline and clutched his arms across his thin chest, as if to anchor his hands and keep them from doing damage. He might have succeeded-that time, at least-if she hadn’t laughed, then twirled one finger around her ear in a gesture that must be common to all cultures. She started to turn away. He hauled her back, bumping the stroller and almost overturning it. Then he slugged her. She fell down on the cracked sidewalk and covered her face when he bent over her. “No, Lee, no! No more heet me!”
He didn’t hit her. He yanked her to her feet and shook her, instead. Her head snapped and rolled.
“You!” a rusty voice said from my left. It made me jump. “ You, boy!”
