11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

“That’s one hunderd percent goddam right. My mama’s comin up from Mozelle tomorrow in the truck.”

“Don’t you have a car? Or did it break down?”

“Car’s runnin okay for a junker, but Harry ain’t goan be ridin in it. Or drivin it ever again. He was workin one of those goddam Manpower jobs last month. Fell in a ditch and a gravel truck run over him while it was backin up. Broke his spine.”

I closed my eyes and saw the smashed remains of Vince’s truck being hauled down Main Street behind the wrecker from Gogie’s Sunoco. Blood all over the inside of the cracked windshield. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miz Templeton.”

“He goan live but he ain’t never goan walk again. He goan sit in a wheelchair and pee in a bag, that’s what he goan do. But first he’s goan ride down Mozelle in the back of my mama’s truck. We’ll steal the mattress out’n the bedroom for him to lay on. Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it?”

She started to cry.

“I’m runnin out on two months’ back rent, but that don’t confront me none. You know what does confront me, Mr. Puddentane, Ask Me Again and I’ll Tell You the Same? I got thirty-five goddam dollars and that’s the end of it. Goddam asshole Harry, if he could’ve kep his feet I wouldn’t be in this fix. I thought I was in one before, but now looka this!”

There was a long, watery snork in my ear.

“You know what? The mailman been givin me the glad eye, and I think for twenty dollars I’d roll him a fuck on the goddam livin room floor. If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us while we ’us goin at it. Can’t very well take him in the bedroom, can I? That’s where my brokeback husband is.” She rasped out a laugh. “Tell you what, why don’t you come on over in your fancy convertible? Take me to a motel sommers. Spend a little extra, get one with a settin-room. Rosette can watch TV and I’ll roll you a fuck. You looked like you ’us doing okay.”

I said nothing. I’d just had an idea that was as bright as a flashbulb.

If the goddam neighbors across the street couldn’t watch us goin at it.

There was a man I was supposed to be watching for. Besides Oswald himself, that was. A man whose name also happened to be George, and who was going to become Oswald’s only friend.

Don’t trust him, Al had written in his notes.

“You there, Mr. Puddentane? No? If not, fuck you and goodb—”

“Don’t hang up, Miz Templeton. Suppose I were to pay your back rent and throw in a hundred bucks on top of that?” It was far more than I needed to pay for what I wanted, but I had it and she needed it.

“Mister, right now I’d do you with my father watchin for two hundred bucks.”

“You don’t have to do me at all, Miz Templeton. All you have to do is meet me in that parking lot at the end of the street. And bring me something.”

16

It was dark by the time I got to the parking lot of the Montgomery Ward warehouse, and the rain had started to thicken a little, the way it does when it’s trying to be sleet. That doesn’t happen often in the hill country south of Dallas, but sometimes isn’t never. I hoped I could make it back to Jodie without sliding off the road.

Ivy was sitting behind the wheel of a sad old sedan with rusty rocker panels and a cracked rear window. She got into my Ford and immediately leaned toward the heater vent, which was going full blast. She was wearing two flannel shirts instead of a coat, and shivering.

“Feels good. That Chev’s colder’n a witch’s tit. Heater’s bust. You bring the money, Mr. Puddentane?”

I gave her an envelope. She opened it and riffled through some of the twenties that had been sitting on the top shelf of my closet ever since I’d collected on my World Series bet at Faith Financial over a year before. She lifted her substantial bottom off the seat, shoved the envelope into the back pocket of her jeans, then fumbled in the breast pocket of the shirt closer to her body. She brought out a key and slapped it into my hand.

“That do you?”

It did me very well. “It’s a dupe, right?”

“Just like you told me. I had it made at the hardware store on McLaren Street. Why you want a key to that glorified shithouse? For two hundred, you could rent it for four months.”

“I’ve got my reasons. Tell me about the neighbors across the street. The ones that could watch you and the mailman doing it on the living room floor.”

She shifted uneasily and pulled her shirts a little closer across her equally substantial bosom. “I was just jokin about that.”

“I know.” I didn’t, and I didn’t care. “I just want to know if the neighbors can really see into your living room.”

“Course they can, and I could see into theirs, if they didn’t have curtains. Which I woulda bought for our place, could I afford em. When it comes to privacy, we all might as well be livin outside. I s’pose I coulda put up burlap, scavenged it from right over there”—she pointed to the trash bins lined up against the east side of the warehouse—“but it looks so slutty.”

“The neighbors with the view live at what? Twenty-seven-oh-four?”

“Twenty-seven-oh-six. It used to be Slider Burnett n his fambly, but they moved out just after Halloween. He was a substitute rodeo clown, do you believe it? Who knew there was such a job? Now it’s some fella named Hazzard and his two kids and I think his mother. Rosette won’t play with the kids, says they’re dirty. Which is a newsflash comin from that little pigpen. Ole grammy tries to talk and it comes out all mush. Side of her face won’t move. Dunno what help she can be to him, draggin around like she does. If I get like that, just shoot me. Eeee, doggies!” She shook her head. “Tell you one thing, they won’t be there long. No one stays on ’Cedes Street. Got a cigarette? I had to give em up. When you can’t afford a quarter for fags, that’s when you know for sure you’re on your goddam uppers.”

“I don’t smoke.”

She shrugged. “What the hell. I can afford my own now, can’t I? I’m goddam rich. You ain’t married, are you?”

“No.”

“Got a girlfriend, though. I can smell perfume on this side of the car. The nice stuff.”

That made me smile. “Yes, I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“Good for you. Does she know you’re sneakin around the south side of Fort Worth after dark, doin funny business?”

I said nothing, but sometimes that’s answer enough.

“Nev’ mind. That’s between you n her. I’m warm now, so I’ll go on back. If it’s still rainy n cold like this tomorrow, I don’t know what we’re goan do about Harry in the back of my ma’s truck.” She looked at me, smiling. “When I was a kid I used to think I was gonna grow up to be Kim Novak. Now Rosette, she thinks she’s goan replace Darlene on the Mouseketeers. Hidey-fuckin-ho.”

She started to open the door and I said, “Wait.”

I raked the crap out of my pockets—Life Savers, Kleenex, a book of matches Sadie had tucked in there, notes for a freshman English test I meant to give before the Christmas break—and then gave her the ranch coat. “Take this.”

“I ain’t takin your goddam coat!” She looked shocked.

“I’ve got another one at home.” I didn’t, but I could buy one, and that was more than she could do.

“What’m I gonna tell Harry? That I found it under a goddam cabbage leaf?”

I grinned. “Tell him you rolled the mailman a fuck and bought it with the proceeds. What’s he going to do, chase you down the driveway and beat you up?”

She laughed, a harsh rainbird caw that was strangely charming. And took the coat.

“Regards to Rosette,” I said. “Tell her I’ll see her in her dreams.”

She stopped smiling. “I hope not, mister. That one she had about you was a nightmare. Bout screamed the house down, she did. Woke me out of a dead sleep at two in the morning. She said the man who cotched her ball had a monster in the backseat of his car, and she was afraid it would eat her up. Scared the life out of me, she did, screamin like that.”

“Did the monster have a name?” Of course it did.

“She said it was a jimla. Prob’ly meant a jinny, like in those stories about Aladdin and the Seven Veils. Anyway, I gotta go. You take care of yourself.”

“You too, Ivy. Merry Christmas.”

She cawed her rainbird laugh again. “Almost forgot about that. You have one, too. Don’t forget to give your girl a present.”

She trotted to her old car with my coat—her coat, now—thrown over her shoulders. I never saw her again.

17

The rain only froze on the bridges, and I knew from my other life—the one in New England—to be careful on those, but it was still a long drive back to Jodie. I had no more than put the water on for a cup of tea when the phone rang. This time it was Sadie.

“I’ve been trying to get you since suppertime to ask you about Coach Borman’s Christmas Eve bash. It starts at three. I’ll go if you want to take me, because then we can get away early. Say we’ve got dinner reservations at The Saddle, or something. I need to RSVP, though.”

I saw my own invitation lying next to my typewriter, and felt a little twinge of guilt. It had been there for three days, and I hadn’t even opened it.

“Do you want to go?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t mind making an appearance.” There was a pause. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Fort Worth.” I almost added, Christmas shopping. But I didn’t. The only thing I’d bought in Fort Worth was some information. And a housekey.

“Were you shopping?”

Again I had to fight not to lie. “I… Sadie, I really can’t say.”

There was a long, long pause. I found myself wishing I smoked. Probably I had developed a contact addiction. God knew I was smoking by proxy all day, every day. The teachers’ room was a constant blue haze.

“Is it a woman, George? Another woman? Or am I being nosy?”

Well, there was Ivy, but that wasn’t the kind of woman she was talking about.

“In the woman department, there’s only you.”

Another of those long, long pauses. In the world, Sadie could move carelessly; in her head, she never did. At last she said, “You know a lot about me, things I never thought I could tell anyone, but I know almost nothing about you. I guess I just realized that. Sadie can be stupid, George, can’t she?”

“You’re not stupid. And one thing you do know is that I love you.”

“Yes…” She sounded doubtful. I remembered the bad dream I’d had that night at the Candlewood Bungalows, and the caution I’d seen in her face when I told her I didn’t remember it. Was that same look on her face now? Or perhaps an expression a little deeper than mere caution?

“Sadie? Are we all right?”

“Yes.” Sounding a little more sure now. “Sure we are. Except for Coach’s party. What do you want to do about it? Remember that the whole darn School Department will be there, and most of them will be drunk on their fannies by the time Mrs. Coach puts on the buffet.”

“Let’s go,” I said, too heartily. “Party down and kick out the jams.”

“Kick out the what?”

“Have some fun. That’s all I meant. We’ll pop in for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, then pop back out. Dinner at The Saddle. That work for you?”

“Fine.” We were like a couple negotiating for a second date after the first one had been inconclusive. “We’ll enjoy ourselves.”

I thought about Ivy Templeton smelling the ghost of Sadie’s perfume and asking if my girl knew I was sneaking around south Fort Worth after dark, doing funny business. I thought about Deke Simmons saying there was one person who deserved to know the truth about where I’d been and what I’d done. But was I going to tell Sadie I’d killed Frank Dunning in cold blood so he wouldn’t murder his wife and three of his four children? That I had come to Texas to prevent an assassination and change the course of history? That I knew I could do that because I came from a future where we could have been IM’ing this conversation via computer?

“Sadie, this is going to work out. I promise you that.”

Again she said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, George, in school.” And hung up, very gently and politely.

I held the telephone in my hand for several seconds, staring straight ahead at nothing. A rattling began on the windows facing my backyard. The rain had turned to sleet after all.

CHAPTER 16

1

Coach Borman’s Christmas Eve bash was a bust, and the ghost of Vince Knowles wasn’t the only reason. On the twenty-first, Bobbi Jill Allnut got tired of looking at that red slash running all the way down the left side of her face to the jawline and took a bunch of her mother’s sleeping pills. She didn’t die, but she spent two nights in Parkland Memorial, the hospital where both the president and the president’s assassin would expire, unless I changed things. There are probably closer hospitals in 2011—almost certainly in Kileen, maybe even in Round Hill—but not during my one year of full-time teaching at DCHS.

Dinner at The Saddle wasn’t so hot, either. The place was packed and convivial with pre-Christmas cheer, but Sadie refused dessert and asked to go home early. She said she had a headache. I didn’t believe her.

The New Year’s Eve dance at Bountiful Grange No. 7 was a little better. There was a band from Austin called The Jokers, and they were really laying it down. Sadie and I danced beneath sagging nets filled with balloons until our feet were sore. At midnight The Jokers swung into a Ventures-style version of “Auld Lang Syne,” and the band’s lead man shouted “May all your dreams come true in nineteen hundred and sixty-two!”

The balloons drifted down around us. I kissed Sadie and wished her a happy New Year as we waltzed, but although she had been gay and laughing all evening, I felt no smile on her lips. “And a happy New Year to you too, George. Could I have a glass of punch? I’m very thirsty.”

There was a long line at the spiked punch bowl, a shorter one at the unspiked version. I ladled the mixture of pink lemonade and ginger ale into a Dixie cup, but when I brought it back to where she had been standing, Sadie was gone.

“Think she went out for some air, champ,” Carl Jacoby said. He was one of the high school’s four shop teachers, and probably the best, but I wouldn’t have let him within two hundred yards of a power tool that night.

I checked the smokers clustered under the fire escape. Sadie wasn’t among them. I walked to the Sunliner. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her voluminous skirts billowing all the way up to the dashboard. God knows how many petticoats she was wearing. She was smoking and crying.

I got in and tried to take her in my arms. “Sadie, what is it? What is it, hon?” As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t known for some time.

“Nothing.” Crying harder. “I’ve got my period, that’s all. Take me home.”

It was only three miles, but that seemed like a very long drive. We didn’t talk. I turned into her driveway and cut the motor. She had stopped crying, but she still didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Some silences can be comfortable. This one felt deadly.

She took her Winstons out of her handbag, looked at them, and put them back. The snick of the catch was very loud. She looked at me. Her hair was a dark cloud surrounding the white oval of her face. “Is there anything you want to tell me, George?”

What I wanted to tell her more than anything was that my name wasn’t George. I had come to dislike that name. Almost to hate it.

“Two things. The first is that I love you. The second is that I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of. Oh, and two-A: nothing you’d be ashamed of.”

“Good. That’s good. And I love you, George. But I’m going to tell you something, if you’ll listen.”

“I’ll always listen.” But she was scaring me.

“Everything can stay the same… for now. While I’m still married to John Clayton, even if it’s just on paper and was never properly consummated in the first place, there are things I don’t feel I have the right to ask you… or of you.”

“Sadie—”

She put her fingers to my lips. “For now. But I won’t ever allow another man to put a broom in the bed. Do you understand me?”

She put a quick kiss where her fingers had been, then dashed up the walk to her door, fumbling for her key.

That was how 1962 started for the man who called himself George Amberson.

2

New Year’s Day dawned cold and clear, with the forecaster on the Morning Farm Report threatening freezing mist in the lowlands. I had stowed the two bugged lamps in my garage. I put one of them in my car and drove to Fort Worth. I thought if there was ever a day when the raggedy-ass carnival on Mercedes Street would be shut down, it was this one. I was right. It was as silent as… well, as silent as the Tracker mausoleum, when I’d dragged Frank Dunning’s body into it. Overturned trikes and a few toys lay in balding front yards. Some party-boy had left a larger toy—a monstrous old Mercury—parked beside his porch. The car doors were still open. There were a few sad, leftover crepe streamers on the unpaved hardpan of the street, and a lot of beer cans—mostly Lone Star—in the gutters.

I glanced across at 2706 and saw no one looking out the large front window, but Ivy had been right: anyone standing there would have a perfect line of sight into the living room of 2703.

I parked on the concrete strips that passed for a driveway as if I had every right to be at the former home of the unlucky Templeton family. I got my lamp and a brand-new toolbox and went to the front door. I had a bad moment when the key refused to work, but it was just new. When I wetted it with some saliva and jiggled it a little, it turned and I went in.

There were four rooms if you counted the bathroom, visible through a door that hung open on one working hinge. The biggest was a combined living room and kitchen. The other two were bedrooms. In the larger one, there was no mattress on the bed. I remembered Ivy saying Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it? In the smaller one, Rosette had drawn Crayola girls on walls where the plaster was decaying and the lathing showed through. They were all wearing green jumpers and big black shoes. They had out-of-proportion pigtails as long as their legs, and many were kicking soccer balls. One had a Miss America tiara perched on her hair and a big old red-lipstick smile. The house still smelled faintly of whatever fried meat Ivy had cooked for their final meal before going back to Mozelle to live with her mama, her little hellion, and her brokeback husband.

This was where Lee and Marina would begin the American phase of their marriage. They’d make love in the bigger of the two bedrooms, and he would beat her there. It was where Lee would lie awake after long days putting together storm doors and wondering why the hell he wasn’t famous. Hadn’t he tried? Hadn’t he tried hard?

And in the living room, with its hilly up-and-down floor and its threadbare bile-green carpet, Lee would first meet the man I wasn’t supposed to trust, the one that accounted for most if not all of the doubts Al had held onto about Oswald’s role as the lone gunman. That man’s name was George de Mohrenschildt, and I wanted very much to hear what he and Oswald had to say to each other.

There was an old bureau on the side of the main room that was closest to the kitchen. The drawers were a jumble of mismatched silverware and crappy cooking utensils. I pulled the bureau away from the wall and saw an electrical socket. Excellent. I put the lamp on top of the bureau and plugged it in. I knew someone might live here awhile before the Oswalds moved in, but I didn’t think anyone would be apt to take the Leaning Lamp of Pisa when they decamped. If they did, I had a backup unit in my garage.

I drilled a hole through the wall to the outside with my smallest bit, pushed the bureau back into place, and tried the lamp. It worked fine. I packed up and left the house, being careful to lock the door behind me. Then I drove back to Jodie.

Sadie called and asked me if I would like to come over and have some supper. Just coldcuts, she said, but there was poundcake for dessert, if I cared for some. I went over. The dessert was as wonderful as ever, but things weren’t the same. Because she was right. There was a broom in the bed. Like the jimla Rosette had seen in the back of my car, it was invisible… but it was there. Invisible or not, it cast a shadow.

3

Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end… and knowing there’s so much worth saving. That’s the way it was with Sadie and me during that unrelenting gray winter of 1962. We still went out to dinner once or twice a week, and we still went to the Candlewood Bungalows on the occasional Saturday night. Sadie enjoyed sex, and that was one of the things that kept us together.

On three occasions we shapped hops together. Donald Bellingham was always the DJ, and sooner or later we’d be asked to reprise our first Lindy Hop. The kids always clapped and whistled when we did. Not out of politeness, either. They were authentically wowed, and some of them started to learn the moves themselves.

Were we pleased? Sure, because imitation really is the most sincere form of flattery. But we were never as good as that first time, never so intuitively smooth. Sadie’s grace wavered. Once she missed her grip on a flyaway and would have gone sprawling if there hadn’t been a couple of husky football players with quick reflexes standing nearby. She laughed it off, but I could see the embarrassment on her face. And the reproach. As if it had been my fault. Which in a way, it was.

There was bound to be a blow-up. It would have come sooner than it did, if not for the Jodie Jamboree. That was our greening, a chance to linger a little and think things over before we were forced into a decision neither of us wanted to make.

4

Ellen Dockerty came to me in February and asked me two things: first, would I please reconsider and sign a contract for the ’62–’63 school year, and second, would I please direct the junior-senior play again, since last year’s had been such a smash hit. I refused both requests, not without a tug of pain.

“If it’s your book, you’d have all summer to work on it,” she coaxed.

“It wouldn’t be long enough,” I said, although at that point I didn’t give Shit One about The Murder Place.

“Sadie Dunhill says she doesn’t believe you care a fig for that novel.”

It was an insight she hadn’t shared with me. It shook me, but I tried not to show it. “El, Sadie doesn’t know everything.”

“The play, then. At least do the play. As long as it doesn’t involve nudity, I’ll back anything you choose. Given the current composition of the schoolboard, and the fact that I myself only have a two-year contract as principal, that’s a mighty big promise. You can dedicate it to Vince Knowles, if you like.”

“Vince has already had a football season dedicated to his memory, Ellie. I think that’s enough.”

She went away, beaten.

The second request came from Mike Coslaw, who would be graduating in June and told me he intended to declare a theater major at college. “But I’d really like to do one more play here. With you, Mr. Amberson. Because you showed me the way.”

Unlike Ellie Dockerty, he accepted the excuse about my bogus novel without question, which made me feel bad. Terrible, really. For a man who didn’t like to lie—who had seen his marriage collapse because of all the ones he’d heard from his I-can-stop-whenever-I-want wife—I was certainly telling a passel of them, as we said in my Jodie days.

I walked Mike out to the student parking lot where his prize possession was parked (an old Buick sedan with fenderskirts), and asked him how his arm felt now that the cast was off. He said it was fine, and he was sure he’d be set for football practice this coming summer. “Although,” he said, “if I got cut, it wouldn’t break my heart. Then maybe I could do some community theater as well as school stuff. I want to learn everything—set design, lighting, even costumes.” He laughed. “People’ll start callin me queer.”

“Concentrate on football, making grades, and not getting too homesick the first semester,” I said. “Please. Don’t screw around.”

He did a zombie Frankenstein voice. “Yes… master…”

“How’s Bobbi Jill?”

“Better,” he said. “There she is.”

Bobbi Jill was waiting by Mike’s Buick. She waved at him, then saw me and immediately turned away, as if interested in the empty football field and the rangeland beyond. It was a gesture everyone in school had gotten used to. The scar from the accident had healed to a fat red string. She tried to cover it with cosmetics, which only made it more noticeable.

Mike said, “I tell her to quit with the powder already, it makes her look like an advertisement for Soames’s Mortuary, but she won’t listen. I also tell her I’m not going with her out of pity, or so she won’t swallow any more pills. She says she believes me, and maybe she does. On sunny days.”

I watched him hurry to Bobbi Jill, grab her by the waist, and swing her around. I sighed, feeling a little stupid and a lot stubborn. Part of me wanted to do the damn play. Even if it was good for nothing else, it would fill the time while I was waiting for my own show to start. But I didn’t want to get hooked into the life of Jodie in more ways than I already was. Like any possible long-term future with Sadie, my relationship with the town needed to be on hold.

If everything went just right, it was possible I could wind up with the girl, the gold watch, and everything. But I couldn’t count on that no matter how carefully I planned. Even if I succeeded I might have to run, and if I didn’t get away, there was a good chance that my good deed on behalf of the world would be rewarded by life in prison. Or the electric chair in Huntsville.

5

It was Deke Simmons who finally trapped me into saying yes. He did it by telling me I’d be nuts to even consider it. I should have recognized that Oh, Br’er Fox, please don’t th’ow me in that briar patch shtick, but he was very sly about it. Very subtle. A regular Br’er Rabbit, you might say.

We were in my living room drinking coffee on a Saturday afternoon while some old movie played on my snow-fuzzy TV—cowboys in Fort Hollywood standing off two thousand or so attacking Indians. Outside, more rain was falling. There must have been at least a few sunny days during the winter of ’62, but I can’t recall any. All I can remember are cold fingers of drizzle always finding their way to the barbered nape of my neck in spite of the turned-up collar of the sheepskin jacket I’d bought to replace the ranch coat.

“You don’t want to worry about that damn play just because Ellen Dockerty’s got her underwear all in a bunch about it,” Deke said. “Finish your book, get a bestseller, and never look back. Live the good life in New York. Have a drink with Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw at the White Horse Tavern.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. John Wayne was blowing a bugle. “I don’t think Norman Mailer has to worry too much about me. Irwin Shaw, either.”

“Also, you had such a success with Of Mice and Men,” he said. “Anything you did as a follow-up would probably be a disappointment by compar— oh, jeez, look at that! John Wayne just got an arrow through his hat! Lucky it was the twenty-gallon deluxe!”

I was more miffed by the idea that my second effort might fall short than I should have been. It made me think about how Sadie and I couldn’t quite equal our first performance on the dance floor, despite our best efforts.

Deke seemed completely absorbed in the TV as he said, “Besides, Ratty Sylvester has expressed an interest in the junior-senior. He’s talking about Arsenic and Old Lace. Says he and the wife saw it in Dallas two years ago and it was a regular ole knee-slapper.”

Good God, that chestnut. And Fred Sylvester of the Science Department as director? I wasn’t sure I’d trust Ratty to direct a grammar school fire drill. If a talented but still very damp-around-the-edges actor like Mike Coslaw ended up with Ratty at the helm, it could set his maturing process back five years. Ratty and Arsenic and Old Lace. Jesus wept.

“There wouldn’t be time to put on anything really good, anyway,” Deke went on. “So I say let Ratty take the fall. I never liked the scurrying little sumbitch, anyway.”

Nobody really liked him, so far as I could tell, except maybe for Mrs. Ratty, who scurried by his side to every school and faculty function, wrapped in acres of organdy. But he wouldn’t be the one to take the fall. That would be the kids.

“They could put on a variety show,” I said. “There’d be time enough for that.”

“Oh, Christ, George! Wallace Beery just took an arrow in the shoulder! I think he’s a goner!”

“Deke?”

“No, John Wayne’s dragging him to safety. This old shoot-em-up doesn’t make a lick of sense, but I love it, don’t you?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

A commercial came on. Keenan Wynn climbed down off a bulldozer, doffed his hardhat, and told the world he’d walk a mile for a Camel. Deke turned to me. “No, I must have missed it.”

Sly old fox. As if.

“I said there’d be time to put on a variety show. A revue. Songs, dances, jokes, and a bunch of sketches.”

“Everything but girls doing the hootchie-koo? Or were you thinking of that, too?”

“Don’t be a dope.”

“So that makes it vaudeville. I always liked vaudeville. ‘Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,’ and all that.”

He dragged his pipe out of the pocket of his cardigan, stuffed it with Prince Albert, and fired it up.

“You know, we actually used to do something like that down to the Grange. The show was called Jodie Jamboree. Not since the late forties, though. Folks got a little embarrassed by it, although no one ever came right out and said so. And vaudeville wasn’t what we called it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was a minstrel show, George. All the cowboys and farmhands joined in. They wore blackface, sang and danced, told jokes in what they imagined was a Negro dialect. More or less based on Amos ’n Andy.”

I began to laugh. “Did anyone play the banjo?”

“As a matter of fact, on a couple of occasions our current principal did.”

“Ellen played the banjo in a minstrel show?”

“Careful, you’re starting to speak in iambic pentameter. That can lead to delusions of grandeur, pard.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me one of the jokes.”

Deke cleared his throat, and began speaking in two deep voices.

“Say dere, Brother Tambo, what did you buy dat jar of Vaseline fo’?

“Well I b’leeves it was fo’ty-nine cent!”

He looked at me expectantly, and I realized that had been the punchline.

“Did they laugh?” I almost feared the answer.

“Split their guts and hollered for more. You heard those jokes around the square for weeks after.” He looked at me solemnly, but his eyes were twinkling like Christmas lights. “We’re a small town. Our needs when it comes to humor are quite humble. Our idea of Rabelaisian wit is a blind feller slipping on a banana peel.”

I sat thinking. The western came back on, but Deke seemed to have lost interest in it. He was watching me.

“That stuff could still work,” I said.

“George, that stuff always does.”

“It wouldn’t need to be funny black fellers, either.”

“Couldn’t do it that way anymore, anyway,” he said. “Maybe in Louisiana or Alabama, but not on the way to Austin, which the folks at the Slimes Herald call Comsymp City. And you wouldn’t want to, would you?”

“No. Call me a bleeding-heart, but I find the idea repulsive. And why bother? Corny jokes… boys in big old suits with padded shoulders instead of cornpone overalls… girls in knee-high flapper dresses with lots of fringes… I’d love to see what Mike Coslaw could do with a comedy skit… ”

“Oh, he’d kill it,” Deke said, as if that were a foregone conclusion. “Pretty good idea. Too bad you don’t have time to try it out.”

I started to say something, but then another of those lightning flashes hit me. It was just as bright as the one that had lit up my brain when Ivy Templeton had said that her neighbors across the street could see into her living room.

“George? Your mouth is open. The view is good but not appetizing.”

“I could make time,” I said. “If you could talk Ellie Dockerty into one condition.”

He got up and snapped off the TV without a single glance, although the fighting between Duke Wayne and the Pawnee Nation had now reached the critical point, with Fort Hollywood burning merry hell in the background. “Name it.”

I named it, then said, “I’ve got to talk to Sadie. Right now.”

6

She was solemn at first. Then she began to smile. The smile became a grin. And when I told her the idea that had come to me at the end of my conversation with Deke, she threw her arms around me. But that wasn’t good enough for her, so she climbed until she could wrap her legs around me, as well. There was no broom between us that day.

“It’s brilliant! You’re a genius! Will you write the script?”

“You bet. It won’t take long, either.” Corny old jokes were already flying around in my head: Coach Borman looked at the orange juice for twenty minutes because the can said CONCENTRATE. Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray him to find out if he was happy. I rode on a plane so old that one restroom was marked Orville and the other was marked Wilbur. “But I need plenty of help with other stuff. What it comes down to is I need a producer. I’m hoping you’ll take the job.”

“Sure.” She slipped back to the floor with her body still pressed against mine. This produced a regrettably brief flash of bare leg as her skirt pulled up. She began to pace her living room, smoking furiously. She tripped over the easy chair (for probably the sixth or eighth time since we’d been on intimate terms) and caught her balance without even seeming to notice, although she was going to have a pretty fine bruise on her shin by nightfall.

“If you’re thinking twenties-style flapper stuff, I can get Jo Peet to run up the costumes.” Jo was the new head of the Home Ec Department, having succeeded to the position when Ellen Dockerty was confirmed as principal.

“That’s great.”

“Most of the Home Ec girls love to sew… and to cook. George, we’ll need to serve evening meals, won’t we? If the rehearsals run extra long? And they will, because we’re starting awfully late.”

“Yes, but just sandwiches—”

“We can do better than that. Lots. And music! We’ll need music! It’ll have to be recorded, because the band could never pull a thing like this together in time.” And then, together, we said “Donald Bellingham!” in perfect harmony.

“What about advertising?” I asked. We were starting to sound like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, getting ready to put on a show in Aunt Milly’s barn.

“Carl Jacoby and his Graphic Design kids. Posters not just here but all over town. Because we want the whole town to come, not just the relatives of the kids in the show. Standing room only.”

“Bingo,” I said, and kissed her nose. I loved her excitement. I was getting pretty excited myself.

“What do we say about the benefit aspect?” Sadie asked.

“Nothing until we’re sure we can make enough money. We don’t want to raise any false hopes. What do you think about taking a run to Dallas with me tomorrow and asking some questions?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, hon. After school on Monday. Maybe even before it’s out, if you can get period seven free.”

“I’ll get Deke to come out of retirement and cover Remedial English,” I said. “He owes me.”

7

Sadie and I went to Dallas on Monday, driving fast to get there before the close of business hours. The office we were looking for turned out to be on Harry Hines Boulevard, not far from Parkland Memorial. There we asked a bushel of questions, and Sadie gave a brief demonstration of what we were after. The answers were more than satisfactory, and two days later I began my second-to-last show-biz venture, as director of Jodie Jamboree, An All-New, All-Hilarious Vaudeville Song & Dance Show. And all to benefit A Good Cause. We didn’t say what that cause was, and nobody asked.

Two things about the Land of Ago: there’s a lot less paperwork and a hell of a lot more trust.

8

Everybody in town did turn out, and Deke Simmons was right about one thing: those lame jokes never seemed to get old. Not fifteen hundred miles from Broadway, at least.

In the persons of Jim LaDue (who wasn’t bad, and could actually sing a little) and Mike Coslaw (who was flat-out hilarious), our show was more Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis than Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The skits were of the knockabout type, and with a couple of athletes to perform them, they worked better than they probably had a right to. In the audience, knees were slapped and buttons were busted. Probably a few girdles were popped, as well.

Ellen Dockerty dragged her banjo out of retirement; for a lady with blue hair, she played a mean breakdown. And there was hootchie-koo after all. Mike and Jim persuaded the rest of the football team to perform a spirited can-can wearing petticoats and bloomers down south and nothing but skin up north. Jo Peet found wigs for them, and they stopped the show. The town ladies seemed especially crazy about those bare-chested young men, wigs and all.

For the finale, the entire cast paired off and filled the gymnasium stage with frenetic swing-dancing as “In the Mood” blared from the speakers. Skirts flew; feet flashed; football players (now dressed in zoot suits and stingy-brim hats) spun limber girls. Most of the latter were cheerleaders who already knew a few things about how to cut a rug.

The music ended; the laughing, winded cast stepped forward to take their bows; and as the audience rose to its feet for the third (or maybe it was the fourth) time since the curtain went up, Donald started up “In the Mood” again. This time the boys and girls scampered to opposite sides of the stage, grabbed the dozens of cream pies waiting for them on tables in the wings, and began to pelt each other. The audience roared its approval.