Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business. Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do. With the i ’s dotted and the t’ s crossed-most of them, anyway-I would pick my time and place and shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.
Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair. They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed, nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.
I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about this development, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. But I cared.
The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.
The Oswalds became my upstairs neighbors on March 2, 1963. They hand-carried their possessions, mostly in liquor store cartons, from the crumbling brick box on Elsbeth Street. Soon the wheels of the little Japanese tape recorder were turning on a regular basis, but mostly I listened in with the earphones. That way the conversations upstairs were normal instead of slowed down, but of course I couldn’t understand much of it, anyway.
The week after the Oswalds moved into their new digs, I visited one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue to buy a gun. The first revolver the pawnbroker showed me was the same Colt. 38 model I’d bought in Derry.
“This is excellent pertection against muggers n home-breakers,” the pawnbroker said. “Dead accurate up to twenty yards.”
“Fifteen,” I said. “I heard fifteen.”
The pawnie raised his eyebrows. “Okay, say fifteen. Anyone stupid enough-”
– to try mugging me out of my cash is going to be a lot closer than that, that’s how the pitch goes.
“-to brace you is gonna be in at close quarters, so what do you say?”
My first impulse, just to break that sense of chiming but slightly discordant harmony was to tell him I wanted something else, maybe a. 45, but breaking the harmony might be a bad idea. Who knew? What I did know was that the. 38 I’d bought in Derry had done the job.
“How much?”
“Let you have it for twelve.”
That was two dollars more than I’d paid in Derry, but of course that had been four and a half years ago. Adjusting for inflation, twelve seemed about right. I told him to add a box of bullets and he had a deal.
When the broker saw me putting the gun and the ammo in the briefcase I’d brought along for that purpose, he said, “Why don’t you let me sell you a holster, son? You don’t sound like you’re from around here and you probably don’t know, but you c’n carry legal in Texas, no permit needed if you don’t have a felony record. You got a felony record?”
“No, but I don’t expect to be mugged in broad daylight.”
The broker offered a dark smile. “On Greenville Avenue you can never tell what’s gonna happen. Man blew his own head off just a block and a half from here a few years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yessir, outside a bar called the Desert Rose. Over a woman, accourse. Don’t that figure?”
“I guess,” I said. “Although sometimes it’s politics.”
“Nah, nah, at the bottom it’s always a woman, son.”
I’d found a parking space four blocks west of the pawnshop, and in order to get back to my new (new to me, anyway) car, I had to pass Faith Financial, where I’d laid my bet on the Miracle Pirates in the fall of 1960. The sharpie who’d paid off my twelve hundred was standing out front, having a smoke. He was wearing his green eyeshade. His eyes passed over me, but seemingly without interest or recognition.
That was on a Friday afternoon, and I drove straight from Greenville Avenue to Kileen, where Sadie met me at the Candlewood Bungalows. We spent the night, as was our habit that winter. The next day she drove back to Jodie, where I joined her on Sunday for church. After the benediction, during the part where we shook hands with the people all around us, saying “Peace be with you,” my thoughts turned-not comfortably-to the gun now stowed in the trunk of my car.
Over the Sunday noon meal, Sadie asked: “How much longer? Until you do what you have to do?”
“If everything goes the way I hope, not much more than a month.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
I scrubbed my hands through my hair and went to the window. “Then I don’t know. Anything else on your mind?”
“Yes,” she said calmly. “There’s cherry cobbler for afters. Would you like whipped cream on yours?”
“Very much,” I said. “I love you, honey.”
