11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  For amusement only, I thought. Yeah, right. For a moment I thought of my beachfront shack burning in the night, the flames pulled high into the starry black by the wind off the Gulf. Amusement had its drawbacks, especially when it came to betting.

  Music and the smell of beer wafted out of open doorways. I heard Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” from one juke and Ferlin Husky emoting “Wings of a Dove” from the one next door. I was propositioned by four hookers and a sidewalk vendor who was selling hubcaps, rhinestone-glittery straight razors, and Lone Star State flags embossed with the words DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS. Try translating that one into Latin.

  That troubling sense of déjà vu was very strong, that feeling that things were wrong here just as they had been wrong before. Which was crazy—I’d never been on Greenville Avenue in my life—but it was also undeniable, a thing of the heart rather than the head. All at once I decided I didn’t want a beer. And I didn’t want to rent Mr. Johnson’s converted garage, either, no matter how good the air-conditioning was.

  I had just passed a watering hole called the Desert Rose, where the Rock-Ola was blasting Muddy Waters. As I turned to start back to where my car was parked, a man came flying out the door. He stumbled and went sprawling on the sidewalk. There was a burst of laughter from the bar’s dark interior. A woman yelled, “And don’t come back, you dickless wonder!” This produced more (and heartier) laughter.

  The ejected patron was bleeding from the nose—which was bent severely to one side—and also from a scrape that ran down the left side of his face from temple to jawline. His eyes were huge and shocked. His untucked shirt flapped almost to his knees as he grabbed a lamppost and pulled himself to his feet. Once on them, he glared around at everything, seeing nothing.

  I took a step or two toward him, but before I could get there, one of the women who’d asked me if I’d like a date came swaying up on stiletto heels. Only she wasn’t a woman, not really. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with large dark eyes and smooth coffee-colored skin. She was smiling, but not in a mean way, and when the man with the bloody face staggered, she took his arm. “Easy, sweetheart,” she said. “You need to settle down before you—”

  He raked up the hanging tails of his shirt. The pearl-handled grip of a pistol—much smaller than the one I’d bought at Machen’s Sporting Goods, really not much more than a toy—lay against the pale fat hanging over the beltless waistband of his gabardine slacks. His fly was half-unzipped and I could see boxer shorts with red racing cars on them. I remember that. He pulled the gun, pressed the muzzle against the streetwalker’s midriff, and pulled the trigger. There was a stupid little pop, the sound of a ladyfinger firecracker going off in a tin can, no more than that. The woman screamed and sat down on the sidewalk with her hands laced over her belly.

  “You shot me!” She sounded more outraged than hurt, but blood had begun to spill through her fingers. “You shot me, you pissant bugger, why did you shoot me?”

  He took no notice, only yanked open the door of the Desert Rose. I was still standing where I’d been when he shot the pretty young hooker, partly because I was frozen by shock, but mostly because all of this happened in a matter of seconds. Longer than it would take Oswald to kill the President of the United States, maybe, but not much.

  “Is this what you want, Linda?” he shouted. “If this is what you want, I’ll give you what you want!”

  He put the muzzle of the gun into his ear and pulled the trigger.

  12

  I folded my handkerchief and pressed it gently over the hole in the young girl’s red dress. I don’t know how badly she was hurt, but she was lively enough to produce a steady stream of colorful phrases she had probably not learned from her mother (on the other hand, who knows). And when one man in the gathering crowd moved a little too close to suit her, she snarled: “Quit lookin up my dress, you nosy bastard. For that you pay.”

  “This pore ole sumbitch here is dead as can be,” someone remarked. He was kneeling beside the man who had been thrown out of the Desert Rose. A woman began to shriek.

  Approaching sirens: they were shrieking, too. I noticed one of the other ladies who had approached me during my stroll down Greenville Avenue, a redhead in capri pants. I beckoned to her. She touched her chest in a who, me? gesture, and I nodded. Yes, you. “Hold this handkerchief on the wound,” I told her. “Try to stop the bleeding. I’ve got to go.”

  She gave me a wise little smile. “Don’t want to hang around for the cops?”

  “Not really. I don’t know any of these people. I was just passing by.”

  The redhead knelt by the bleeding, cursing girl on the sidewalk, and pressed down on the sodden handkerchief. “Honey,” she said, “aren’t we all.”

  13

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I’d start to drift, then see Ray Mack Johnson’s sweat-oily, complacent face as he blamed two thousand years of slavery, murder, and exploitation on some teenage kid eyeballing his father’s gearshift. I’d jerk awake, settle back, drift … and see the little man with the unzipped fly sticking the muzzle of his hideout gun in his ear. Is this what you want, Linda? One final burst of petulance before the big sleep. And I’d start awake again. Next time it was men in a black sedan throwing a gasoline bomb through the front window of my place on Sunset Point: Eduardo Gutierrez attempting to get rid of his Yanqui from Yankeeland. Why? Because he didn’t like to lose big, that was all. For him, that was enough.

  Finally I gave up and sat down by the window, where the hotel air-conditioner was rattling gamely away. In Maine the night would be crisp enough to start bringing color to the trees, but here in Dallas it was still seventy-five at two-thirty in the morning. And humid.

  “Dallas, Derry,” I said as I looked down into the silent ditch of Commerce Street. The brick cube of the Book Depository wasn’t visible, but it was close by. Walking distance.

  “Derry, Dallas.”

  Each name comprised of two syllables that broke on the double letter like a stick of kindling over a bent knee. I couldn’t stay here. Another thirty months in Big D would send me crazy. How long would it be before I started seeing graffiti like I WILL KILL MY MOTHER SOON? Or glimpsed a juju Jesus floating down the Trinity River? Fort Worth might be better, but Fort Worth was still too close.

  Why do I have to stay in either?

  This thought came to me shortly after 3:00 A.M., and with the force of a revelation. I had a fine car—a car I’d sort of fallen in love with, to tell you the truth—and there was no shortage of good fast roads in central Texas, many of them recently built. By the turn of the twenty-first century, they would probably be choked with traffic, but in 1960 they were almost eerily deserted. There were speed limits, but they weren’t enforced. In Texas, even the state cops were believers in the gospel of put the pedal to the metal and let er bellow.

  I could move out from beneath the suffocating shadow I felt over this city. I could find a place that was smaller and less daunting, a place that didn’t feel so filled with hate and violence. In broad daylight I could tell myself I was imagining those things, but not in the ditch of the morning. There were undoubtedly good people in Dallas, thousands upon thousands of them, the great majority, but that underchord was there, and sometimes it broke out. As it had outside the Desert Rose.

  Bevvie-from-the-levee had said that In Derry I think the bad times are over. I wasn’t convinced about Derry, and I felt the same way about Dallas, even with its worst day still over three years away.

  “I’ll commute,” I said. “George wants a nice quiet place to work on his book, but since the book is about a city—a haunted city—he really has to commute, doesn’t he? To get material.”

  It was no wonder it took me almost two months to think of this; life’s simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook. I went back to bed and fell asleep almost at once.

  14

  The next day I drove south out of Dallas on Highway 77. An hour and a half took m
e into Denholm County. I turned west onto State Road 109 mostly because I liked the billboard marking the intersection. It showcased a heroic young football player wearing a gold helmet, black jersey, and gold leggings. DENHOLM LIONS, the billboard proclaimed. 3-TIME DISTRICT CHAMPS! STATE CHAMPIONSHIP BOUND IN 1960! “WE’VE GOT JIM POWER!”

  Whatever that is, I thought. But of course every high school has its secret signs and signals; it’s what makes kids feel like they’re on the inside.

  Five miles up Highway 109, I came to the town of Jodie. POP. 1280, the sign said. WELCOME, STRANGER! Halfway up the wide, tree-lined Main Street I saw a little restaurant with a sign in the window reading BEST SHAKES, FRIES, AND BURGERS IN ALL OF TEXAS! It was called Al’s Diner.

  Of course it was.

  I parked in one of the slant spaces out front, went in, and ordered the Pronghorn Special, which turned out to be a double cheeseburger with barbecue sauce. It came with Mesquite Fries and a Rodeo Thickshake—your choice of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. A Pronghorn wasn’t quite as good as a Fatburger, but it wasn’t bad, and the fries were just the way I like them: crispy, salty, and a little overdone.

  Al turned out to be Al Stevens, a skinny middle-aged guy who looked nothing like Al Templeton. He had a rockabilly hairdo, a gray-streaked bandido mustache, a thick Texas drawl, and a paper hat worn jauntily cocked over one eye. When I asked him if there was much to rent in the town of Jodie, he laughed and said, “Take your pick. But when it comes to jobs, this ain’t exactly a center of commerce. Ranchland, mostly, and you’ll pardon me sayin, but you don’t look like the cowboy type.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Actually, I’m more the book-writing type.”

  “Get out! Anything I might have read?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m still trying. I’ve got about half of a novel written, and a couple of publishers have shown some interest. I’m looking for a quiet place to finish.”

  “Well, Jodie’s quiet, all right.” Al rolled his eyes. “When it comes to quiet, I reckon we could take out a patent. Only gets noisy on Friday nights.”

  “Football?”

  “Yessir, whole town goes. Halftime comes, they all roar like lions, then give out with the Jim Yell. You can hear em two miles away. It’s pretty comical.”

  “Who’s Jim?”

  “LaDue, the quarterback. We’ve had us some good teams, but ain’t never been a QB like LaDue on a Denholm team. And he’s only a junior. People been talkin ’bout the state championship. That seems a tad optimistic to me, with those big Dallas schools just up the road, but a little hope never hurt anybody, that’s what I reckon.”

  “Football aside, how’s the school?”

  “It’s real fine. Lot of people were doubtful about this consolidation thing at first—I was one of em—but it’s turned out to be a good thing. They got over seven hunnerd this year. Some of em bus in an hour or more, but they don’t seem to mind. Probably saves em chores at home. Is your book about high school kids? Blackboard Jungle kind of thing? Because there ain’t no gangs or anything out here. Out here kids still mind their manners.”

  “Nothing like that. I’ve got savings, but I wouldn’t mind stretching what I’ve got with some substitute work. I can’t teach full-time and still write.”

  “Course not,” he said respectfully.

  “My degree’s from Oklahoma, but …” I shrugged to show Oklahoma wasn’t in Texas’s league, but a man could hope.

  “Well, you ought to talk to Deke Simmons. He’s the principal. Comes in for dinner most evenins. His wife died a couple of years back.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “We all were. He’s a nice man. Most people are in these parts, Mr.—?”

  “Amberson. George Amberson.”

  “Well, George, we’re pretty sleepy, except on Friday nights, but you could do worse. Might could even learn to roar like a lion at halftime.”

  “Maybe I could,” I said.

  “You come on back around six. That’s usually the time Deke comes in.” He put his arms on the counter and leaned over them. “Want a tip?”

  “Sure.”

  “He’ll probably have his ladyfriend with him. Miss Corcoran, the librarian up to the school. He’s kinda been sparkin her since last Christmas or so. I’ve heard that Mimi Corcoran’s the one who really runs Denholm Consolidated, because she runs him. If you impress her, I reckon you’re in like Flynn.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  15

  Weeks of apartment-hunting in Dallas had netted me exactly one possible, which turned out to be owned by a man I didn’t want to rent from. It took me three hours in Jodie to find a place that looked fine. Not an apartment, but a tidy little five-room shotgun house. It was for sale, the real estate agent told me, but the couple who owned it would be willing to rent to the right party. There was an elm-shaded backyard, a garage for the Sunliner … and central air-conditioning. The rent was reasonable, given the amenities.

  Freddy Quinlan was the agent’s name. He was curious about me—I think the Maine license plate on my car struck him as exotic—but not unduly so. Best of all, I felt I was out from under the shadow that had lain over me in Dallas, Derry, and Sunset Point, where my last long-term rental now lay in ashes.

  “Well?” Quinlan asked. “What do you think?”

  “I want it, but I can’t give you a yes or no this afternoon. I have to see a fellow first. I don’t suppose you’ll be open tomorrow, will you?”

  “Yessir, I will. Saturdays I’m open until noon. Then I go home and watch the Game of the Week on TV. Looks like it could be a heck of a Series this year.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It certainly does.”

  Quinlan extended his hand. “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Amberson. I bet you’d like Jodie. We’re good people around here. Hope it works out for you.”

  I shook with him. “So do I.”

  Like the man said, a little hope never hurt anybody.

  16

  That evening I returned to Al’s Diner and introduced myself to the principal of Denholm Consolidated and his librarian ladyfriend. They invited me to join them.

  Deke Simmons was tall, bald, and sixtyish. Mimi Corcoran was bespectacled and tanned. The blue eyes behind her bifocals were sharp, looking me up and down for clues. She walked with the aid of a cane, handling it with the careless (almost contemptuous) dexterity of long use. Both of them, I was amused to see, were carrying Denholm pennants and wearing gold buttons that read WE’VE GOT JIM POWER! It was Friday night in Texas.

  Simmons asked me how I was liking Jodie (a lot), how long I’d been in Dallas (since August), and if I enjoyed high school football (yes indeed). The closest he got to anything substantive was asking me if I felt confident in my ability to make kids “mind.” Because, he said, a lot of substitutes had a problem with that.

  “These young teachers send em to us in the office like we didn’t have anything better to do,” he said, and then chomped his Pronghorn Burger.

  “Sauce, Deke,” Mimi said, and he obediently wiped the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin from the dispenser.

  She, meanwhile, was continuing her inventory of me: sport coat, tie, haircut. The shoes she’d taken a good look at as I crossed to their booth. “Do you have references, Mr. Amberson?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I did quite a bit of substitute teaching in Sarasota County.”

  “And in Maine?”

  “Not so much there, although I taught for three years in Wisconsin on a regular basis before quitting to work full-time on my book. Or as much full-time as my finances would allow.” I did have a reference from St. Vincent’s High School, in Madison. It was a good reference; I had written it myself. Of course, if anyone checked back, I’d be hung. Deke Simmons wouldn’t do it, but sharp-eyed Mimi with the leathery cowboy skin might.

  “And what is your novel about?”

  This might also hang me, but I decided to be honest. As honest as possible,
anyway, given my peculiar circumstances. “A series of murders, and their effect on the community where they happen.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Deke said.

  She tapped his wrist. “Hush. Go on, Mr. Amberson.”

  “My original setting was a fictional Maine city—I called it Dawson—but then I decided it might be more realistic if I set it in an actual city. A bigger one. I thought Tampa, at first, but it was wrong, somehow—”

  She waved Tampa away. “Too pastel. Too many tourists. You were looking for something a little more insular, I suspect.”

  A very sharp lady. She knew more about my book than I did.

  “That’s right. So I decided to try Dallas. I think it’s the right place, but …”

  “But you wouldn’t want to live there?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I see.” She picked at her piece of deep-fried fish. Deke was looking at her with a mildly poleaxed expression. Whatever it was he wanted as he went cantering down the backstretch of life, she appeared to have it. Not so strange; everybody loves somebody sometime, as Dean Martin would so wisely point out. But not for another few years. “And when you’re not writing, what do you like to read, Mr. Amberson?”

  “Oh, just about everything.”

  “Have you read The Catcher in the Rye?”

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She looked impatient at this. “Oh, call me Mimi. Even the kids call me Mimi, although I insist they put a Miz with it for propriety’s sake. What do you think of Mr. Salinger’s cri de coeur?”

  Lie, or tell the truth? But it wasn’t a serious question. This woman would read a lie the way I could read … well … an IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboard.

  “I think it says a lot about how lousy the fifties were, and a lot about how good the sixties can be. If the Holden Caulfields of America don’t lose their outrage, that is. And their courage.”

  “Um. Hum.” Picking plenty at her fish, but not eating any that I could see. No wonder she looked like you could staple a string to the back of her dress and fly her like a kite. “Do you believe it should be in the school library?”