11/22/63 Кинг Стивен

“Nah. It’s just another part of the you I love, Sadie. Now go in the other room while I change these sheets.”

When it was done, I offered to get into bed with her until she fell asleep. She flinched as she had when I’d turned down the quilt and shook her head. “I can’t, Jake. I’m sorry.”

Little by slowly, I told myself as I plodded across town to Deke’s in the first gray light of morning. Little by slowly.

13

On April twenty-fourth I told Deke I had something I needed to do in Dallas and asked him if he’d stay with Sadie until I got back around nine. He agreed willingly enough, and at five that afternoon I was sitting across from the Greyhound terminal on South Polk Street, near the intersection of Highway 77 and the still-new, fourlane I-20. I was reading (or pretending to read) the latest James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me.

At half past the hour, a station wagon pulled into the parking lot next to the terminal. Ruth Paine was driving. Lee got out, went around to the rear, and opened the doorgate. Marina, with June in her arms, emerged from the backseat. Ruth Paine stayed behind the wheel.

Lee had only two items of luggage: an olive-green duffel bag and a quilted gun case, the kind with handles. He carried them to an idling Scenicruiser. The driver took the suitcase and the rifle and stowed them in the open luggage hold after a cursory glance at Lee’s ticket.

Lee went to the door of the bus, then turned and embraced his wife, kissing her on both cheeks and then the mouth. He took the baby and nuzzled beneath her chin. June laughed. Lee laughed with her, but I saw tears in his eyes. He kissed June on the forehead, gave her a hug, then returned her to Marina and ran up the steps of the bus without looking back.

Marina walked to the station wagon, where Ruth Paine was now standing. June held her arms out to the older woman, who took her with a smile. They stood there for awhile, watching passengers board, then drove off.

I stayed where I was until the bus pulled out at 6:00 P.M., right on time. The sun, going down bloody in the west, flashed across the destination window, momentarily obscuring what was printed there. Then I could read it again, three words that meant Lee Harvey Oswald was out of my life, at least for awhile:

NEW ORLEANS EXPRESS

I watched it climb the entrance ramp to I-20 East, then walked the two blocks to where I’d parked my car and drove back to Jodie.

14

Hunch-think: that again.

I paid the May rent on the West Neely Street apartment even though I needed to start watching my dollars and had no concrete reason to do so. All I had was an unformed but strong feeling that I should keep a base of operations in Dallas.

Two days before the Kentucky Derby ran, I drove to Greenville Avenue, fully intending to put down five hundred dollars on Chateaugay to place. That, I reasoned, would be less memorable than betting on the nag to win. I parked four blocks down from Faith Financial and locked my car, a necessary precaution in that part of town even at eleven in the morning. I walked briskly at first, but then—once more for no concrete reason—my steps began to lag.

Half a block from the betting parlor masquerading as a streetfront loan operation, I came to a full stop. Once again I could see the bookie—sans eyeshade this forenoon—leaning in the doorway of his establishment and smoking a cigarette. Standing there in a strong flood of sunlight, bracketed by the sharp shadows of the doorway, he looked like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting. There was no chance he saw me that day, because he was staring at a car parked across the street. It was a cream-colored Lincoln with a green license plate. Above the numbers were the words SUNSHINE STATE. Which did not mean it was a harmonic. Which certainly didn’t mean it belonged to Eduardo Gutierrez of Tampa, the bookie who used to smile and say Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland. The one who had almost certainly had my beachfront house burned down.

All the same, I turned and walked back to my car with the five hundred I’d intended to bet still in my pocket.

Hunch-think.

CHAPTER 24

1

Given history’s penchant for repeating itself, at least around me, you won’t be surprised to find out that Mike Coslaw’s plan for paying Sadie’s bills was a return engagement of the Jodie Jamboree. He said he thought he could get the original participants to reprise their roles, as long as we scheduled it for midsummer, and he was as good as his word—almost all of them came on board. Ellie even agreed to encore her sturdy performances of “Camptown Races” and “Clinch Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo, although she claimed her fingers were still sore from the previous go-round. We picked the twelfth and thirteenth of July, but for awhile the issue was in some doubt.

The first obstacle to be surmounted was Sadie herself, who was horrified at the idea. She called it “taking charity.”

“That sounds like something you might have learned at your mother’s knee,” I said.

She glared at me for a moment, then looked down and began stroking her hair against the bad side of her face. “What if it was? Does that make it wrong?”

“Jeez, let me think. You’re talking about a life-lesson from the woman whose biggest concern after finding out her daughter had been mutilated and almost killed was her church affiliation.”

“It’s demeaning,” she said in a low voice. “Throwing yourself on the mercy of the town is demeaning.”

“You didn’t feel that way when it was Bobbi Jill.”

“You’re hounding me, Jake. Please don’t do that.”

I sat down beside her and took her hand. She pulled it away. I took it again. This time she let me hold it.

“I know this isn’t easy for you, honey. But there’s a time to take as well as a time to give. I don’t know if that one’s in the Book of Ecclesiastes, but it’s true, just the same. Your health insurance is a joke. Dr. Ellerton’s giving us a break on his fee—”

“I never asked—”

“Hush, Sadie. Please. It’s called pro bono work and he wants to do it. But there are other surgeons involved here. The bills for your surgeries are going to be enormous, and my resources will only stretch so far.”

“I almost wish he’d killed me,” she whispered.

“Don’t you ever say that.” She shrank from the anger in my voice, and the tears started. She could only cry from one eye now. “Hon, people want to do this for you. Let them. I know your mother lives in your head—almost everyone’s mother does, I guess—but you can’t let her have her way on this one.”

“Those doctors can’t fix it, anyway. It’ll never be the way it was. Ellerton told me so.”

“They can fix a lot of it.” Which sounded marginally better than they can fix some of it.

She sighed. “You’re braver than I am, Jake.”

“You’re plenty brave. Will you do this?”

“The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show. My mother would shit a brick if she found out.”

“All the more reason, I’d say. We’ll send her some stills.”

That made her smile, but only for a moment. She lit a cigarette with fingers that trembled slightly, then began to smooth the hair against the side of her face again. “Would I have to be there? Let them see what their dollars are buying? Sort of like an American Berkshire pig on the auction block?”

“Of course not. Although I doubt if anyone would faint. Most folks around here have seen worse.” As members of the faculty in a farming and ranching area, we had seen worse ourselves—Britta Carlson, for instance, who had been badly burned in a housefire, or Duffy Hendrickson, who had a left hand that looked like a hoof after a chainfall holding a truck motor slipped in his father’s garage.

“I’m not ready for that kind of inspection. I don’t think I ever will be.”

I hoped with all my heart that didn’t turn out to be true. The crazy people of the world—the Johnny Claytons, the Lee Harvey Oswalds—shouldn’t get to win. If God won’t make it better after they do have their shitty little victories, then ordinary people have to. They have to try, at least. But this wasn’t the time to sermonize on the subject.

“Would it help if I said Dr. Ellerton himself has agreed to take part in the show?”

She momentarily forgot about her hair and stared at me. “What?”

“He wants to be the back end of Bertha.” Bertha the Dancing Pony was a canvas creation of the kids in the Art Department. She wandered around during several of the skits, but her big number was a tail-waggling jig to Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again.” (The tail was controlled with a string pulled by the rear half of Team Bertha.) Country folk, not generally noted for their sophisticated senses of humor, found her hilarious.

Sadie began to laugh. I could see it hurt her, but she couldn’t help it. She fell back against the couch, one palm pressed to the center of her forehead as if to keep her brains from exploding. “All right!” she said when she could finally talk again. “I’ll let you do it just to see that.” Then she glared at me. “But I’ll see it during the dress rehearsal. You’re not getting me up onstage where everybody can stare at me and whisper ‘Oh look at that poor girl.’ Have we got that straight?”

“We absolutely do,” I said, and kissed her. That was one hurdle. The next would be convincing Dallas’s premier plastic surgeon to come to Jodie in the July heat and prance around beneath the back half of a thirty-pound canvas costume. Because I hadn’t actually asked him.

That turned out to be no problem; Ellerton lit up like a kid when I put the idea to him. “I even have practical experience,” he said. “My wife’s been telling me that I’m a perfect horse’s ass for years now.”

2

The last hurdle turned out to be the venue. In mid-June, right around the time Lee was getting kicked off a dock in New Orleans for trying to hand out his pro-Castro leaflets to the sailors of the USS Wasp, Deke came by Sadie’s house. He kissed her on her good cheek (she averted the bad side of her face when anyone came to visit) and asked me if I’d like to step out for a cold beer.

“Go on,” Sadie said. “I’ll be fine.”

Deke drove us to a dubiously air-conditioned tinroof called the Prairie Chicken, nine miles west of town. It was midafternoon, the place empty except for two solitary drinkers at the bar, the jukebox dark. Deke handed me a dollar. “I’ll buy, you fetch. How’s that for a deal?”

I went to the bar and collared two Buckhorns.

“If I’d known you were going to bring back Buckies, I would have gone myself,” Deke said. “Man, this stuff is horse-piss.”

“I happen to like it,” I said. “Anyway, I thought you did your drinking at home. ‘The asshole quotient in the local bars is a little too high for my taste,’ I believe you said.”

“I don’t want a damn beer, anyway.” Now that we were away from Sadie, I could see that he was steaming mad. “What I want to do is punch Fred Miller in the face and kick Jessica Caltrop’s narra and no doubt lace-trimmed ass.”

I knew the names and faces, although, having been just a humble wage-slave, I had never actually conversed with either of them. Miller and Caltrop were two-thirds of the Denholm County Schoolboard.

“Don’t stop there,” I said. “As long as you’re in a bloodthirsty mood, tell me what you want to do to Dwight Rawson. Isn’t he the other one?”

“It’s Rawlings,” Deke said moodily, “and I’ll give him a pass. He voted on our side.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“They won’t let us use the school gym for the Jamboree. Even though it’s the middle of summer we’re talking about and it’s just standing there vacant.”

“Are you kidding?” Sadie had told me that certain elements of the town might take against her, and I hadn’t believed her. Silly old Jake Epping, still clinging to his science-fiction fantasies of the twenty-first century.

“Son, I only wish I were. They cited fire-insurance concerns. I pointed out that they didn’t have any insurance concerns when it was a benefit for a student who’d been in an accident, and the Caltrop woman—dried-up old kitty that she is—said, ‘Oh yes, Deke, but that was during the school year.’

“They’ve got concerns, all right, mostly about how a member of the faculty got her face cut open by the crazy man she was married to. They’re afraid it’ll get mentioned in the paper or, God forbid, on one of the Dallas TV stations.”

“How can it matter?” I asked. “He… Christ, Deke, he wasn’t even from here! He was from Georgia!”

“That dudn’t matter to them. What matters to them is that he died here, and they’re afraid it’ll reflect badly on the school. On the town. And on them.”

I heard myself bleating, not a noble sound coming from a man in the prime of life, but I couldn’t help it. “That makes no sense at all!”

“They’d fire her if they could, just to get rid of the embarrassment. Since they can’t, they’re hoping she’ll quit before the kids have to look at what Clayton did to her face. Goddam smalltown bullshit hypocrisy at its best, my boy. When he was in his twenties, Fred Miller used to rip and roar in the Nuevo Laredo whorehouses twice a month. More, if he could get an advance on his allowance from his daddy. And I have it on damn good authority that when Jessica Caltrop was plain Jessie Trapp from Sweetwater Ranch, she got real fat when she was sixteen and real thin again about nine months later. I’ve a mind to tell them that my memory’s even longer than their blue goddam noses, and I could embarrass them plenty if I wanted to. I wouldn’t even have to work at it that hard.”

“They can’t really blame Sadie for her ex-husband’s craziness… can they?”

“Grow up, George. Sometimes you act like you were born in a barn. Or some country where folks actually think straight. To them it’s about sex. To folks like Fred and Jessica it’s always about sex. They probably think Alfalfa and Spanky on The Little Rascals spend their spare time diddling Darla out behind the barn while Buckwheat cheers em on. And when something like this happens, it’s the woman’s fault. They wouldn’t come right out and say so, but in their hearts they believe men are beasts and women who can’t gentle em, well, be it on their own heads, son, be it on their own heads. I won’t let em get away with this.”

“You’ll have to,” I said. “If you don’t, the ruckus might get back to Sadie. And she’s fragile now. This might tip her over completely.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rummaged his pipe out of his breast pocket. “Yeah, I know that. I’m just blowin off steam. Ellie talked to the folks who run the Grange Hall just yesterday. They’re happy to let us put on the show there, and it seats fifty more people. Because of the balcony, you know.”

“Well there,” I said, relieved. “Cooler heads prevail.”

“Only one problem. They’re asking four hundred for both nights. If I come up with two hundred, can you come up with the other two? You won’t be getting it back from the receipts, you know. That’s all earmarked for Sadie’s medical work.”

I knew very well about the cost of Sadie’s medical work; I had already paid three hundred dollars to cover the part of her hospital stay that her shitepoke insurance wouldn’t stand good for. In spite of Ellerton’s good offices, the other expenses would mount up rapidly. As for me, I wasn’t scraping financial bottom quite yet, but I could see it.

“George? What do you say?”

“Fifty-fifty,” I agreed.

“Then drink up your shitty beer. I want to get back to town.”

3

On our way out of that sad excuse for a drinking establishment, a poster propped in the window caught my eye. At the top:

SEE THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY ON CLOSED CIRCUIT TV!

LIVE FROM MADISON SQUARE GARDEN!

DALLAS’S OWN TOM “THE HAMMER” CASE VS. DICK TIGER!

DALLAS AUDITORIUM

THURSDAY AUG. 29

ADVANCE TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE

Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.

“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. An old cocker spaniel.”

“Really?”

“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body. He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs like Case to keep him in trim.”

It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates art.

Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”

“The wave of the future, I guess,” I said.

“And it’ll probably sell out—in Dallas, at least—but that doesn’t change the fact that Tom Case is the wave of the past. Tiger’ll slice him like coldcuts. Sure you’re okay with this Grange thing, George?”

“Absolutely.”

4

That was a strange June. On one hand, I was delighted to be rehearsing with the troupe that had put on the original Jamboree. It was dj vu of the best kind. On the other hand, I found myself wondering, with greater and greater frequency, if I had ever intended to strike Lee Harvey Oswald from history’s equation in the first place. I couldn’t believe I lacked the guts to do it—I had already killed one bad man, and in cold blood—but it was an undeniable fact that I’d had Oswald in my sights and let him go. I told myself it was the uncertainty principle, and not the fact of his family, but I kept seeing Marina smiling and holding her hands out in front of her belly. I kept wondering if he might not be a patsy, after all. I reminded myself he’d be back in October. And then, of course, I asked myself how that would change things. His wife would still be pregnant and the window of uncertainty would still be open.

Meanwhile, there was Sadie’s slow recovery to preside over, there were bills to pay, there were insurance forms to fill out (the bureaucracy every bit as infuriating in 1963 as in 2011), and those rehearsals. Dr. Ellerton could only show up for one of them, but he was a quick study and hoofed his half of Bertha the Dancing Pony with charming brio. After the run-through, he told me he wanted to bring another surgeon on board, a facial specialist from Mass General. I told him—with a sinking heart—that another surgeon sounded like a grand idea.

“Can you afford it?” he asked. “Mark Anderson ain’t cheap.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

I invited Sadie to rehearsals when the show dates grew close. She refused gently but firmly in spite of her earlier promise to come to at least one dress rehearsal. She rarely left the house, and when she did, it was only to go into the backyard garden. She hadn’t been to the school—or in town—since the night John Clayton cut her face and then his own throat.

5

I spent the late morning and early afternoon of July twelfth at the Grange Hall, running a final tech rehearsal. Mike Coslaw, who had settled as naturally into the role of producer as he had that of slapstick comedian, told me the Saturday-night show was a sellout and tonight’s was at ninety percent. “We’ll get enough walk-ups to fill the place, Mr. A. Count on it. I just hope me and Bobbi Jill don’t mess up the encore.”

“Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. And you won’t mess up.”

All of that was good. Less good was passing Ellen Dockerty’s car turning out of Bee Tree Lane just as I was turning in, and then finding Sadie sitting by the living room window with tears on her unmarked cheek and a handkerchief in one fisted hand.

“What?” I demanded. “What did she say to you?”

Sadie surprised me by mustering a grin. It was lopsided, but not without a certain gamine charm. “Nothing that wasn’t the truth. Please don’t worry. I’ll make you a sandwich and you can tell me how it went.”

So that was what I did. And I did worry, of course, but I kept my worries to myself. Also my comments on the subject of meddlesome high school principals. That evening at six, Sadie inspected me, reknotted my tie, and then brushed some lint, real or imagined, from the shoulders of my sport coat. “I’d tell you to break a leg, but you might just go and do it.”

She was wearing her old jeans and a smock top that camouflaged—a little, anyway—her weight-loss. I found myself remembering the pretty dress she’d worn to the original Jodie Jamboree. Pretty dress that night with a pretty girl inside it. That was then. Tonight the girl—still pretty on one side—would be at home when the curtain went up, watching a Route 66 rerun.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Wishing you were going to be there, that’s all.”

I was sorry as soon as it was out, but it was almost okay. Her smile faded, then came back. The way the sun does when it passes behind a cloud that’s only small. “You’ll be there. Which means I will be.” She looked at me with grave timidity from the one eye her Veronica Lake flip left visible. “If you love me, that is.”

“I love you plenty.”

“Yes, I guess you do.” She kissed the corner of my mouth. “And I love you. So don’t break any legs and give everybody my thanks.”

“I will. You’re not afraid to stay here alone?”

“I’ll be okay.” It wasn’t actually an answer to my question, but it was the best she could do for the time being.

6

Mike was right about the walk-ups. We sold out the Friday night performance a full hour in advance of showtime. Donald Bellingham, our stage manager, lowered the houselights at 8:00 P.M. on the dot. I expected to feel a letdown after the nearly sublime original with its pie-throwing finale (which we intended to repeat on Saturday night only, the consensus being that we wanted to clean up the Grange Hall stage—and the first couple of rows—just a single time), but this one was nearly as good. For me the comedy highlight was that goddamned dancing horse. At one point Dr. Ellerton’s front-half cohort, a wildly overenthusiastic Coach Borman, almost boogied Bertha right off the stage.

The audience believed those twenty or thirty seconds of weaving around the footlights was part of the show and heartily applauded the derring-do. I, who knew better, found myself caught in an emotional paradox that will probably never be repeated. I stood in the wings next to a nearly paralytic Donald Bellingham, laughing wildly while my terrified heart fluttered at the very top of my throat.

The night’s harmonic came during the encore. Mike and Bobbi Jill walked to center tage, hand in hand. Bobbi Jill faced the audience and said, “Miz Dunhill means an awful lot to me, because of her kindness and her Christian charity. She helped me when I needed help, and she made me want to learn how to do what we’re going to do for you now. We thank you all for coming out tonight and showing your Christian charity. Don’t we, Mike?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You guys are the best.”

He looked stage left. I pointed to Donald, who was bent over his record player with the tone arm raised, ready to stick the groove. This time Donald’s father was going to know damned well that Donald had borrowed one of his big-band records, because the man was in the audience.

Glenn Miller, that long-gone bombardier, launched into “In the Mood,” and onstage, to rhythmic clapping from the audience, Mike Coslaw and Bobbi Jill Allnut flew into a jet-propelled Lindy far more fervent than any I had ever managed with either Sadie or Christy. It was all youth and joy and enthusiasm, and that made it gorgeous. When I saw Mike squeeze Bobbi Jill’s hand, telling her by touch to counterspin and shoot through his legs, I was suddenly back in Derry, watching Bevvie-from-the-levee and Richie-from-the-ditchie.

It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.

For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

Mike and Bobbi Jill danced in their time, and their time was 1963, that era of crewcuts, console televisions, and homemade garage rock. They danced on a day when President Kennedy promised to sign a nuclear test ban treaty and told reporters he had “no intention of allowing our military forces to be mired in the arcane politics and ancient grudges of southeast Asia.” They danced as Bevvie and Richie had danced, as Sadie and I had danced, and they were beautiful, and I loved them not in spite of their fragility but because of it. I love them still.

They ended perfectly, hands upraised, breathing hard and facing the audience, which rose to its feet. Mike gave them a full forty seconds to pound their hands together (it’s amazing how fast the footlights can transform a humble left tackle into fully fledged pressed ham) and then called for quiet. Eventually, he got it.

“Our director, Mr. George Amberson, wants to say a few words. He put a lot of effort and creativity into this show, so I hope you’ll give him a big hand.”

I walked out to fresh applause. I shook Mike’s hand and gave Bobbi Jill a peck on the cheek. They scampered offstage. I raised my hands for quiet and launched into my carefully rehearsed speech, telling them Sadie couldn’t be here tonight but thanking them all on her behalf. Every public speaker worth his salt knows to concentrate on specific members of the audience, and I focused on a pair in the third row who looked remarkably like Ma and Pa in American Gothic. This was Fred Miller and Jessica Caltrop, the schoolboard members who had denied us use of the school gym on the grounds that Sadie being assaulted by her ex was in bad taste and should be ignored, insofar as possible.

Four sentences in, I was interrupted by gasps of surprise. This was followed by applause—isolated at first but quickly growing to a storm. The audience took to its feet again. I had no idea what they were applauding for until I felt a light, tentative hand grip my arm above the elbow. I turned to see Sadie standing beside me in her red dress. She had put her hair up and secured it with a glittery clip. Her face—both sides of it—was completely visible. I was shocked to discover that, once fully revealed, the residual damage wasn’t as awful as I had feared. There might be some sort of universal truth there, but I was too stunned to suss it out. Sure, that deep, ragged hollow and the fading hash marks of the stitches were hard to look at. So was the slack flesh and her unnaturally wide left eye, which no longer quite blinked in tandem with the right one.

But she was smiling that charming one-sided smile, and in my eyes, that made her Helen of Troy. I hugged her, and she hugged me back, laughing and crying. Beneath the dress, her whole body was thrumming like a high-tension wire. When we faced the audience again, everyone was up and cheering except for Miller and Caltrop. Who looked around, saw they were the only ones still on their fannies, and reluctantly joined the others.

“Thank you,” Sadie said when they quieted. “Thank you all from the very bottom of my heart. Special thanks to Ellen Dockerty, who told me that if I didn’t come here and look y’all in the eye, I’d regret it for the rest of my life. And most thanks of all to…”

The minutest of hesitations. I’m sure the audience didn’t notice it, which made me the only one who knew how close Sadie had come to telling five hundred people my actual name.

“…to George Amberson. I love you, George.”

Which brought down the house, of course. In dark times when even the sages are uncertain, declarations of love always do.

7

Ellen took Sadie—who was exhausted—home at ten-thirty. Mike and I turned out the Grange Hall lights at midnight and stepped into the alley. “Gonna come to the after-party, Mr. A? Al said he’d keep the diner open until two, and he brought in a couple of kegs. He’s not licensed for it, but I don’t think anyone’ll arrest him.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m beat. I’ll see you tomorrow night, Mike.”

I drove to Deke’s before going home. He was sitting on his front porch in his pajamas, smoking a final pipe.

“Pretty special night,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That young woman showed guts. A country mile of em.”

“She did.”

“Are you going to do right by her, son?”

“I’m going to try.”

He nodded. “She deserves that, after the last one. And you’re doing okay so far.” He glanced toward my Chevy. “You could probably take your car tonight and park right out front. After tonight, I don’t think anyone in town’d bat an eye.”

He might have been right, but I decided better safe than sorry and hoofed it, just as I had on so many other nights. I needed the time to let my own emotions settle. I kept seeing her in the glow of the footlights. The red dress. The graceful curve of her neck. The smooth cheek… and the ragged one.

When I got to Bee Tree Lane and let myself in, the hide-a-bed was in its hiding state. I stood looking at this, puzzled, not sure what to make of it. Then Sadie called my name—my real one—from the bedroom. Very softly.

The lamp was on, casting a soft light across her bare shoulders and one side of her face. Her eyes were luminous and grave. “I think this is where you belong,” she said. “I want you to be here. Do you?”

I took off my clothes and got in beside her. Her hand moved beneath the sheets, found me, and caressed me. “Are you hungry? Because I have poundcake if you are.”

“Oh, Sadie, I’m starving.”

“Then turn out the light.”

8

That night in Sadie’s bed was the best of my life—not because it closed the door on John Clayton, but because it opened the door on us again.

When we finished making love, I fell into the first deep sleep I’d had in months. I awoke at eight in the morning. The sun was fully up, the Angels were singing “My Boyfriend’s Back” on the radio in the kitchen, and I could smell frying bacon. Soon she would call me to the table, but not yet. Not just yet.

I put my hands behind my head and looked at the ceiling, mildly stunned at how stupid—how almost willfully blind—I’d been since the day I’d allowed Lee to get on the bus to New Orleans without doing anything to stop him. Did I need to know if George de Mohrenschildt had had more to do with the attempt on Edwin Walker than just goading an unstable little man into trying it? Well, there was actually quite a simple way to determine that, wasn’t there?

De Mohrenschildt knew, so I would ask him.

9

Sadie ate better than she had since the night Clayton had invaded her home, and I did pretty well myself. Together we polished off half a dozen eggs, plus toast and bacon. When the dishes were in the sink and she was smoking a cigarette with her second cup of coffee, I said I wanted to ask her something.

“If it’s about coming to the show tonight, I don’t think I could manage that twice.”

“It’s something else. But since you mention it, what exactly did Ellie say to you?”

“That it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and rejoin the parade.”

“Pretty harsh.”

Sadie stroked her hair against the wounded side of her face—that automatic gesture. “Miz Ellie’s not known for delicacy and tact. Did she shock me, busting in here and telling me it was time to quit lollygagging? Yes she did. Was she right? Yes she was.” She stopped stroking her hair and abruptly pushed it back with the heel of her hand. “This is what I’m going to look like from now on—with some improvements—so I guess I better get used to it. Sadie’s going to find out if that old saw about beauty only being skin deep is actually true.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“All right.” She jetted smoke from her nostrils.

“Suppose I could take you to a place where the doctors could fix the damage to your face—not perfectly, but far better than Dr. Ellerton and his team ever could. Would you go? Even if you knew we could never come back here?”

She frowned. “Are we speaking hypothetically?”

“Actually we’re not.”

She crushed her cigarette out slowly and deliberately, thinking it over. “Is this like Miz Mimi going to Mexico for experimental cancer treatments? Because I don’t think—”

“I’m talking about America, hon.”

“Well, if it’s America, I don’t understand why we couldn’t—”

“Here’s the rest of it: I might have to go. With or without you.”

“And never come back?” She looked alarmed.

“Never. Neither one of us could, for reasons that are difficult to explain. I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“I know you’re not.” Her eyes were troubled, but she spoke without hesitation.

“I may have to do something that would look very bad to law-enforcement types. It’s not bad, but nobody would ever believe that.”

“Is this… Jake, does this have anything to do with that thing you told me about Adlai Stevenson? What he said about hell freezing over?”

“In a way. But here’s the rub. Even if I’m able to do what I have to without being caught—and I think I can—that doesn’t change your situation. Your face is still going to be scarred to some greater or lesser degree. In this place where I could take you, there are medical resources Ellerton can only dream of.”

“But we could never come back.” She wasn’t speaking to me; she was trying to get it straight in her mind.

“No.” All else aside, if we came back to September ninth of 1958, the original version of Sadie Dunning would already exist. That was a mind-bender I didn’t even want to consider.

She got up and went to the window. She stood there with her back to me for a long time. I waited.

“Jake?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Can you predict the future? You can, can’t you?”

I said nothing.

In a small voice she said, “Did you come here from the future?”

I said nothing.

She turned from the window. Her face was very pale. “Jake, did you?”

“Yes.” It was as if a seventy-pound rock had rolled off my chest. At the same time I was terrified. For both of us, but mostly for her.

“How… how far?”

“Honey, are you sure you—”

“Yes. How far?”

“Almost forty-eight years.”

“Am I… dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. This is now. And this is us.”

She thought about that. The skin around the red marks of her injuries had turned very white and I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to move. What if she screamed and ran from me?

“Why did you come?”

“To stop a man from doing something. I’ll kill him if I have to. If I can make absolutely sure he deserves killing, that is. So far I haven’t been able to do that.”

“What’s the something?”

“In four months, I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill the president. He’s going to kill John Ken—”

I saw her knees start to buckle, but she managed to stay on her feet just long enough to allow me to catch her before she fell.

10

I carried her to the bedroom and went into the bathroom to wet a cloth in cold water. When I returned, her eyes were already open. She looked at me with an expression I could not decipher.

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Maybe not,” she said, but she didn’t flinch when I sat down next to her on the bed, and made a little sighing noise of pleasure when I began to stroke her face with the cold cloth, detouring around the bad place, where all sensation except for a deep, dull pain was now gone. When I was done, she looked at me solemnly. “Tell me one thing that’s going to happen. I think if I’m going to believe you, you have to do that. Something like Adlai Stevenson and hell freezing over.”

“I can’t. I majored in English, not American History. I studied Maine history in high school—it was a requirement—but I know next to nothing about Texas. I don’t—” But I realized I did know one thing. I knew the last thing in the betting section of Al Templeton’s notebook, because I’d double-checked. In case you need a final cash transfusion, he’d written.

“Jake?”

“I know who’s going to win a prizefight at Madison Square Garden next month. His name is Tom Case, and he’s going to knock out Dick Tiger in the fifth round. If that doesn’t happen, I guess you’re free to call for the men in the white coats. But can you keep it just between us until then? A lot depends on it.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

11

I half-expected Deke or Miz Ellie to buttonhole me after the second night’s performance, looking grave and telling me they’d had a phone call from Sadie, saying that I’d lost my everloving mind. But that didn’t happen, and when I got back to Sadie’s, there was a note on the table reading Wake me if you want a midnight snack.

It wasn’t midnight—not quite—and she wasn’t asleep. The next forty minutes or so were very pleasant. Afterward, in the dark, she said: “I don’t have to decide anything right now, do I?”

“No.”

“And we don’t have to talk about this right now.”

“No.”

“Maybe after the fight. The one you told me about.”

“Maybe.”