11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  One overcast March afternoon, about two hours after Marina and Ruth had departed, Lee and George de Mohrenschildt showed up in de Mohrenschildt’s car. Lee got out carrying a brown paper sack with a sombrero and PEPINO’S BEST MEXICAN printed on the side. De Mohrenschildt had a six-pack of Dos Equis. They went up the outside staircase, talking and laughing. I grabbed the earphones, heart pumping. At first there was nothing, but then one of them turned on the lamp. After that I might have been in the room with them, an unseen third.

  Please don’t conspire to kill Walker, I thought. Please don’t make my job harder than it already is.

  “Pardon the mess,” Lee said. “She doesn’t do anything much these days but sleep, watch TV, and talk about that woman she’s giving lessons to.”

  De Mohrenschildt spoke for awhile about some oil leases he was trying to get hold of in Haiti, and spoke harshly of the repressive Duvalier regime. “At the end of the day, trucks drive through the marketplace and pick up the dead. Many of them are children who’ve starved to death.”

  “Castro and the Front will put an end to that,” Lee said grimly.

  “May providence hasten the day.” There was the clink of bottles, probably to toast the idea of providence hastening the day. “How is work, Comrade? And how is it you’re not there this afternoon?”

  He wasn’t there, Lee said, because he wanted to be here. Simple as that. He’d just punched out and walked away. “What can they do about it? I’m the best damn photoprint technician ole Bobby Stovall’s got, and he knows it. The foreman, his name is (I couldn’t make it out—Graff? Grafe?) says ‘Quit trying to play labor organizer, Lee.’ You know what I do? I laugh and say ‘Okay, svinoyeb,’ and walk away. He’s a pig’s dick, and ever’one knows it.”

  Still, it was clear Lee liked his job, although he complained about the paternalistic attitude, and how seniority counted for more than talent. At one point he said, “You know, in Minsk, on a level playing field, I’d be running the place in a year.”

  “I know you would, my son—it’s completely evident.”

  Playing him up. Winding him up. I was sure of it. I didn’t like it.

  “Did you see the paper this morning?” Lee asked.

  “I saw nothing but telegrams and memos this morning. Why do you think I’m here, if not to get away from my desk?”

  “Walker did it,” Lee said. “He joined up with Hargis’s crusade—or maybe it’s Walker’s crusade and Hargis joined up. I cain’t tell. That fucking Midnight Ride thing, anyway. Those two ninnies are going to tour the whole South, telling people that the Ndouble-A-C-P’s a communist front. They’ll set integration and voting rights back twenty years.”

  “Sure! And fomenting hate. How long before the massacres start?”

  “Or until someone shoots Ralph Abernathy and Dr. King!”

  “Of course King will be shot,” de Mohrenschildt said, almost laughing. I was standing up, my hands pressing the earphones tight to the sides of my head, sweat trickling down my face. This was dangerous ground, indeed—the very edge of conspiracy. “It’s only a matter of time.”

  One of them used the church key on another bottle of Mexican beer, and Lee said, “Someone should stop those two bastards.”

  “You’re wrong to call our General Walker a ninny,” de Mohrenschildt said in a lecturely tone. “Hargis, yes, okay. Hargis is a joke. What I hear is that he is—like so many of his ilk—a man of twisted sexual appetites, willing to diddle a little girl’s cunt in the morning and a little boy’s asshole in the afternoon.”

  “Man, that’s sick!” Lee’s voice broke like an adolescent’s on the last word. Then he laughed.

  “But Walker, ah, there’s a very different kettle of shrimp. He’s high in the John Birch Society—”

  “Those Jew-hating fascists!”

  “—and I can see a day, not long hence, when he may run it. Once he has the confidence and approval of the other right-wing nut groups, he may even run for office again … but this time not for governor of Texas. I suspect he has his sights aimed higher. The Senate? Perhaps. Even the White House?”

  “That could never happen.” But Lee sounded unsure.

  “It’s unlikely to happen,” de Mohrenschildt corrected. “But never underestimate the American bourgeoisie’s capacity to embrace fascism under the name of populism. Or the power of television. Without TV, Kennedy would never have beaten Nixon.”

  “Kennedy and his iron fist,” Lee said. His approval of the current president seemed to have gone the way of blue suede shoes. “He won’t never rest as long as Fidel’s shitting in Batista’s commode.”

  “And never underestimate the terror white America feels at the idea of a society in which racial equality has become the law of the land.”

  “Nigger, nigger, nigger, beaner, beaner, beaner!” Lee burst out, with a rage so great it was nearly anguish. “That’s all I hear at work!”

  “I’m sure. When the Morning News says ‘the great state of Texas,’ what they mean is ‘the hate state of Texas.’ And people listen! For a man like Walker—a war hero like Walker—a buffoon like Hargis is nothing but a stepping-stone. The way von Hindenberg was a stepping-stone for Hitler. With the right public relations people to smooth him out, Walker could go far. Do you know what I think? That the man who knocked off General Edwin Racist America Walker would be doing society a favor.”

  I dropped heavily into a chair beside the table where the little tape recorder sat, its reels spinning.

  “If you really believe—” Lee began, and then there was a loud buzz that made me snatch the headphones off. There were no cries of alarm or outrage from upstairs, no swift movement of feet, so—unless they were very good at covering up on the spur of the moment—I thought I could assume the lamp bug hadn’t been discovered. I put the headphones back on. Nothing. I tried the distance mike, standing on a chair and holding the Tupperware bowl almost against the ceiling. With it I could hear Lee talking and de Mohrenschildt’s occasional replies, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  My ear in the Oswald apartment had gone deaf.

  The past is obdurate.

  After another ten minutes of conversation—maybe about politics, maybe about the annoying nature of wives, maybe about newly hatching plans to kill General Edwin Walker—de Mohrenschildt bounded down the outside stairs and drove away.

  Lee’s footfalls crossed above my head—clump, clud, clump. I followed them into my bedroom and trained the distance mike on the place where they stopped. Nothing … nothing … then the faint but unmistakable sound of snoring. When Ruth Paine dropped off Marina and June two hours later, he was still sleeping the sleep of Dos Equis. Marina didn’t wake him. I wouldn’t have woken the bad-tempered little sonofabitch, either.

  6

  Oswald began to miss a lot more work after that day. If Marina knew, she didn’t care. Maybe she didn’t even notice. She was absorbed with her new friend Ruth. The beatings had abated a little, not because morale had improved, but because Lee was out almost as frequently as she was. He often took his camera. Thanks to Al’s notes, I knew where he was going and what he was doing.

  One day after he’d left for the bus stop, I jumped into my car and drove to Oak Lawn Avenue. I wanted to beat Lee’s crosstown bus, and I did. Handily. There was plenty of slant-style parking on both sides of Oak Lawn, but my red gull-wing Chevy was distinctive, and I didn’t want to risk Lee seeing it. I put it around the corner on Wycliff Avenue, in the parking lot of an Alpha Beta grocery. Then I strolled down to Turtle Creek Boulevard. The houses there were neo-haciendas with arches and stucco siding. There were palm-lined drives, big lawns, even a fountain or two.

  In front of 4011, a trim man (who bore a striking resemblance to the cowboy actor Randolph Scott) was at work with a push mower. Edwin Walker saw me looking at him and struck a curt half-salute from the side of his brow. I returned the gesture. Lee Oswald’s target resumed mowing and I moved on.

  7

  The
streets making up the Dallas block I was interested in were Turtle Creek Boulevard (where the general lived), Wycliff Avenue (where I’d parked), Avondale Avenue (which was where I went after returning Walker’s wave), and Oak Lawn, a street of small businesses that ran directly behind the general’s house. Oak Lawn was the one I was most interested in, because it was going to be Lee’s line of approach and route of escape on the night of April 10.

  I stood in front of Texas Shoes & Boots, the collar of my denim jacket raised and my hands stuffed in my pockets. About three minutes after I took up this position, the bus stopped at the corner of Oak Lawn and Wycliff. Two women with cloth shopping bags got off immediately when the doors flopped open. Then Lee descended to the sidewalk. He carried a brown paper bag, like a workman’s lunchsack.

  There was a big stone church on the corner. Lee sauntered over to the iron railing running in front of it, read the noticeboard, took a small notepad out of his hip pocket, and jotted something down. After that he headed in my direction, tucking the notebook into his pocket as he walked. I hadn’t expected that. Al had believed Lee was going to stash his rifle near the railroad tracks on the other side of Oak Lawn Avenue, a good half a mile away. But maybe the notes were wrong, because Lee didn’t even glance in that direction. He was seventy or eighty yards away, and closing in fast on my position.

  He’s going to notice me and he’s going to speak to me, I thought. He’s going to say, “Aren’t you the guy who lives downstairs? What are you doing here?” If he did, the future would skew off in a new direction. Not good.

  I stared at the shoes and boots in the show window with sweat dampening the nape of my neck and rolling down my back. When I finally took a chance and shifted my eyes to the left, Lee was gone. It was like a magic trick.

  I sauntered up the street. I wished I’d put on a cap, maybe even some sunglasses—why hadn’t I? What kind of half-assed secret agent was I, anyway?

  I came to a coffee shop about halfway along the block, the sign in the window advertising BREAKFAST ALL DAY. Lee wasn’t inside. Beyond the coffee shop was the mouth of an alley. I walked slowly across it, glanced to my right, and saw him. His back was to me. He had taken his camera out of the paper sack but wasn’t shooting with it, at least not yet. He was examining trash cans. He pulled off the lids, looked inside, then replaced them.

  Every bone in my body—by which I mean every instinct in my brain, I suppose—was urging me to move on before he turned and saw me, but a powerful fascination held me in place a little longer. I think it would have held most people. How many opportunities do we have, after all, to watch a guy as he goes about the business of planning a cold-blooded murder?

  He moved a little deeper into the alley, then stopped at a circular iron plate set in a plug of concrete. He tried to lift it. No go.

  The alley was unpaved, badly potholed, and about two hundred yards long. Halfway down its length, the chain link guarding weedy backyards and vacant lots gave way to high board fences draped in ivy that looked less than vibrant after a cold and dismal winter. Lee pushed a mat of it aside, and tried a board. It swung out and he peered into the hole behind it.

  Axioms about how you have to break eggs to make an omelet were all very fine, but I felt I had pressed my luck enough. I walked on. At the end of the block I stopped at the church that had caught Lee’s interest. It was the Oak Lawn Church of Latter-day Saints. The noticeboard said there were regular services every Sunday morning and special newcomers’ services every Wednesday night at 7 PM, with a social hour to follow. Refreshments would be served.

  April 10 was a Wednesday and Lee’s plan (assuming it wasn’t de Mohrenschildt’s) now seemed clear enough: hide the gun in the alley ahead of time, then wait until the newcomers’ service—and the social hour, of course—was over. He’d be able to hear the worshippers when they came out, laughing and talking as they headed for the bus stop. The buses ran on the quarter hour; there was always one coming along. Lee would take his shot, hide the gun behind the loose board again (not near the train tracks), then mingle with the church folk. When the next bus came, he’d be gone.

  I glanced to my right just in time to see him emerging from the alley. The camera was back in the paper sack. He went to the bus stop and leaned against the post. A man came along and asked him something. Soon they were in conversation. Batting the breeze with a stranger, or was this perhaps another friend of de Mohrenschildt’s? Just some guy on the street, or a co-conspirator? Maybe even the famous Unknown Shooter who—according to the conspiracy theorists—had been lurking on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza when Kennedy’s motorcade approached? I told myself that was crazy, but it was impossible to know for sure. That was the hell of it.

  There was no way of knowing anything for sure, and wouldn’t be until I saw with my own eyes that Oswald was alone on April 10. Even that wouldn’t be enough to put all my doubts to rest, but it would be enough to proceed on.

  Enough to kill Junie’s father.

  The bus came growling up to the stop. Secret Agent X-19—also known as Lee Harvey Oswald, the renowned Marxist and wife-beater—got on. When the bus was out of sight, I went back to the alley and walked its length. At the end, it widened out into a big unfenced backyard. There was a ’57 or ’58 Chevy Biscayne parked beside a natural gas pumping station. There was a barbecue pot standing on a tripod. Beyond the barbie was the backside of a big dark brown house. The general’s house.

  I looked down and saw a fresh drag-mark in the dirt. A garbage can stood at one end of it. I hadn’t seen Lee move the can, but I knew he had. On the night of the tenth, he meant to rest the rifle barrel on it.

  8

  On Monday, March 25, Lee came walking up Neely Street carrying a long package wrapped in brown paper. Peering through a tiny crack in the curtains, I could see the words REGISTERED and INSURED stamped on it in big red letters. For the first time I thought he seemed furtive and nervous, actually looking around at his exterior surroundings instead of at the spooky furniture deep in his head. I knew what was in the package: a 6.5mm Carcano rifle—also known as a Mannlicher-Carcano—complete with scope, purchased from Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago. Five minutes after he climbed the outside stairs to the second floor, the gun Lee would use to change history was in a closet above my head. Marina took the famous pictures of him holding it just outside my living room window six days later, but I didn’t see it. That was a Sunday, and I was in Jodie. As the tenth grew closer, those weekends with Sadie had become the most important, the dearest, things in my life.

  9

  I came awake with a jerk, hearing someone mutter “Still not too late” under his breath. I realized it was me and shut up.

  Sadie murmured some thick protest and turned over in bed. The familiar squeak of the springs locked me in place and time: the Candlewood Bungalows, April 5, 1963. I fumbled my watch from the nightstand and peered at the luminous numbers. It was quarter past two in the morning, which meant it was actually the sixth of April.

  Still not too late.

  Not too late for what? To back off, to let well enough alone? Or bad enough, come to that? The idea of backing off was attractive, God knew. If I went ahead and things went wrong, this could be my last night with Sadie. Ever.

  Even if you do have to kill him, you don’t have to do it right away.

  True enough. Oswald was going to relocate to New Orleans for awhile after the attempt on the general’s life—another shitty apartment, one I’d already visited—but not for two weeks. That would give me plenty of time to stop his clock. But I sensed it would be a mistake to wait very long. I might find reasons to keep on waiting. The best one was beside me in this bed: long, lovely, and smoothly naked. Maybe she was just another trap laid by the obdurate past, but that didn’t matter, because I loved her. And I could envision a scenario—all too clearly—where I’d have to run after killing Oswald. Run where? Back to Maine, of course. Hoping I could stay ahead of the cops just long enough to get to the rabbit-hol
e and escape into a future where Sadie Dunhill would be … well … about eighty years old. If she were alive at all. Given her cigarette habit, that would be like rolling six the hard way.

  I got up and went to the window. Only a few of the bungalows were occupied on this early-spring weekend. There was a mud-or manure-splattered pickup truck with a trailer full of what looked like farm implements behind it. An Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. A couple of station wagons. And a two-tone Plymouth Fury. The moon was sliding in and out of thin clouds and it wasn’t possible to make out the color of the car’s lower half by that stuttery light, but I was pretty sure I knew what it was, anyway.

  I pulled on my pants, undershirt, and shoes. Then I slipped out of the cabin and walked across the courtyard. The chilly air bit at my bed-warm skin, but I barely felt it. Yes, the car was a Fury, and yes, it was white over red, but this one wasn’t from Maine or Arkansas; the plate was Oklahoma, and the decal in the rear window read GO, SOONERS. I peeked in and saw a scatter of textbooks. Some student, maybe headed south to visit his folks on spring break. Or a couple of horny teachers taking advantage of the Candlewood’s liberal guest policy.

  Just another not-quite-on-key chime as the past harmonized with itself. I touched the trunk, as I had back in Lisbon Falls, then returned to the bungalow. Sadie had pushed the sheet down to her waist, and when I came in, the draft of cool air woke her up. She sat, holding the sheet over her breasts, then let it drop when she saw it was me.

  “Can’t sleep, honey?”

  “I had a bad dream and went out for some air.”

  “What was it?”

  I unbuttoned my jeans, kicked off my loafers. “Can’t remember.”