An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still left a lot of time to be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up. Walking was fine at dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.
I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the obsessive behavior it was, and put the notebook in the lockbox with my “morning manuscript.” I have called those notes exhaustive, and so they seemed to me then, but as time—the conveyor belt on which we all must ride—brought me closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the young assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.
Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in more clearheaded moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or two, and how many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing with Al’s belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadn’t pulled the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his arrest, a patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.
3
I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a bookmaker named Eduardo Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was delighted to take my action. I first bet the Minneapolis Lakers to beat the Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona fides as a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the Canadians to beat the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won… but that was even money. Chump change, cuz, my pal Chaz Frati would have said.
My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way to beat Bally Ache, the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-to-one on a double gee. I went for the double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came away ten thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a steely glint in his eyes that I didn’t care for.
Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he was also an expat from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of gossip in the billiard parlor next to the barbershop where Gutierrez ran his book (and an apparently never-ending backroom poker game under a photograph of a barely clad Diana Dors). The man with whom I’d been playing nineball leaned forward, looked around to make sure we had the corner table to ourselves, then murmured, “You know what they say about the Mob, George—once in, never out.”
I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans, but I didn’t think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big Derby payday. If I had dared—and if I could have thought of a plausible way to raise the subject—I would have asked Gutierrez if he’d ever been acquainted with another reputed member of the Marcello organization, an ex-pug named Charles “Dutz” Murret. I somehow think the answer would have been yes, because the past harmonizes with itself. Dutz Murret’s wife was Marguerite Oswald’s sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle.
4
One day in the spring of 1959 (there is spring in Florida; the natives told me it sometimes lasts as long as a week), I opened my mailbox and discovered a call-card from the Nokomis Public Library. I had reserved a copy of The Disenchanted, the new Budd Schulberg novel, and it had just come in. I jumped in my Sunliner—no better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun Coast—and drove up to get it.
On my way out, I noticed a new poster on the cluttered bulletin board in the foyer. It would have been hard to miss; it was bright blue and featured a shivering cartoon man who was looking at an oversized thermometer where the mercury was registering ten below zero. GOT A DEGREE PROBLEM? the poster demanded. YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A MAIL-ORDER CERTIFICATE FROM UNITED COLLEGE OF OKLAHOMA! WRITE FOR DETAILS!
United College of Oklahoma sounded fishier than a mackerel stew, but it gave me an idea. Mostly because I was bored. Oswald was still in the Marines, and wouldn’t be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He wouldn’t succeed, but after a showy—and probably bogus—suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. “On approval,” so to speak. He’d be there for thirty months or so, working at a radio factory in Minsk. And at a party he would meet a girl named Marina Prusakova. Red dress, white slippers, Al had written in his notes. Pretty. Dressed for dancing.
Fine for him, but what was I going to do in the meantime? United College offered one possibility. I wrote for details, and received a prompt response. The catalogue touted an absolute plethora of degrees. I was fascinated to discover that, for three hundred dollars (cash or money order), I could receive a bachelor’s in English. All I had to do was pass a test consisting of fifty multiple choice questions.
I got the money order, mentally kissed my three hundred goodbye, and sent in an application. Two weeks later, I received a thin manila envelope from United College. Inside were two smearily mimeographed sheets. The questions were wonderful. Here are two of my favorites:
22. What was “Moby’s” last name?
A. Tom
B. Dick
C. Harry
D. John
37. Who wrote “The House of 7 Tables”?
A. Charles Dickens
B. Henry James
C. Ann Bradstreet
D. Nathaniel Hawthorne
E. None of these
When I finished enjoying this wonderful test, I filled out the answers (with the occasional cry of “You’ve got to be shitting me!”) and sent it back to Enid, Oklahoma. I got a postcard by return mail congratulating me on passing my exam. After I had paid an additional fifty-dollar “administration fee,” I was informed, I would be sent my degree. So I was told, and lo, so it came to pass. The degree was a good deal better looking than the test had been, and came with an impressive gold seal. When I presented it to a representative of the Sarasota County Schoolboard, that worthy accepted it without question and put me on the substitute list.
Which is how I ended up teaching again for one or two days each week during the 1959–1960 academic year. It was good to be back. I enjoyed the students—boys with flattop crewcuts, girls with ponytails and shin-length poodle skirts—although I was painfully aware that the faces I saw in the various classrooms I visited were all of the plain vanilla variety. Those days of substituting reacquainted me with a basic fact of my personality: I liked writing, and had discovered I was good at it, but what I loved was teaching. It filled me up in some way I can’t explain. Or want to. Explanations are such cheap poetry.
My best day as a sub came at West Sarasota High, after I’d told an American Lit class the basic story of The Catcher in the Rye (a book which was not, of course, allowed in the school library and would have been confiscated if brought into those sacred halls by a student) and then encouraged them to talk about Holden Caulfield’s chief complaint: that school, grown-ups, and American life in general were all phony. The kids started slow, but by the time the bell rang, everyone was trying to talk at once, and half a dozen risked tardiness at their next classes to offer some final opinion on what was wrong with the society they saw around them and the lives their parents had planned for them. Their eyes were bright, their faces flushed with excitement. I had no doubt there was going to be a run on a certain dark red paperback at the area bookstores. The last one to leave was a muscular kid wearing a football sweater. To me he looked like Moose Mason in the Archie comic books.
“Ah wish you was here all the time, Mr. Amberson,” he said in his soft Southern accent. “Ah dig you the most.”
He didn’t just dig me; he dug me the most. Nothing can compare to hearing something like that from a seventeen-year-old kid who looks like he might be fully awake for the first time in his academic career.
Later that month, the principal called me into his office, offered some pleasantries and a Co’-Cola, then asked: “Son, are you a subversive?” I assured him I was not. I told him I’d voted for Ike. He seemed satisfied, but suggested I might stick more to the “generally accepted reading list” in the future. Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
5
In a college class once (this was at the University of Maine, a real college from which I had obtained a real BS degree), I heard a psychology prof opine that humans actually do possess a sixth sense. He called it hunch-think, and said it was most well developed in mystics and outlaws. I was no mystic, but I was both an exile from my own time and a murderer (I might consider the shooting of Frank Dunning justified, but the police certainly wouldn’t see it that way). If those things didn’t make me an outlaw, nothing could.
“My advice to you in situations where danger appears to threaten,” the prof said that day in 1995, “is heed the hunch.”
I decided to do just that in July of 1960. I was becoming increasingly uneasy about Eduardo Gutierrez. He was a little guy, but there were those reputed Mob connections to consider… and the glint in his eyes when he’d paid off on my Derby bet, which I now considered foolishly large. Why had I made it, when I was still far from broke? It wasn’t greed; it was more the way a good hitter feels, I suppose, when he is presented with a hanging curveball. In some cases, you just can’t help swinging for the fences. I swang, as Leo “The Lip” Durocher used to put it in his colorful radio broadcasts, but now I regretted it.
I purposely lost the last two wagers I put down with Gutierrez, trying my best to make myself look foolish, just a garden-variety plunger who happened to get lucky once and would presently lose it all back, but my hunch-think told me it wasn’t playing very well. My hunch-think didn’t like it when Gutierrez started greeting me with, “Oh, see! Here comes my Yanqui from Yankeeland.” Not the Yanqui; my Yanqui.
Suppose he had detailed one of his poker-playing friends to follow me back to Sunset Point from Tampa? Was it possible he might send some of his other poker-playing friends—or a couple of muscle boys hungry to get out from under whatever loan-shark vig Gutierrez was currently charging—to do a little salvage operation and get back whatever remained of that ten thousand? My front mind thought that was the sort of lame plot device that turned up on PI shows like 77 Sunset Strip, but hunch said something different. Hunch said that the little man with the thinning hair was perfectly capable of green-lighting a home invasion, and telling the black-baggers to beat the shit out of me if I tried to object. I didn’t want to get beaten up and I didn’t want to be robbed. Most of all, I didn’t want to risk my pages falling into the hands of a Mob-connected bookie. I didn’t like the idea of running away with my tail between my legs, but hell, I had to make my way to Texas sooner or later in any case, so why not sooner? Besides, discretion is the better part of valor. I learned that at my mother’s knee.
So after a mostly sleepless July night when the sonar pings of hunch had been particularly strong, I packed my worldly goods (the lockbox containing my memoir and my cash I hid beneath the Sunliner’s spare tire), left a note and a final rent check for my landlord, and headed north on US 19. I spent my first night on the road in a decaying DeFuniak Springs motor court. The screens had holes in them, and until I turned out my room’s one light (an unshaded bulb dangling on a length of electrical cord), I was beset by mosquitoes the size of fighter planes.
Yet I slept like a baby. There were no nightmares, and the pings of my interior radar had fallen silent. That was good enough for me.
I spent the first of August in Gulfport, although the first place I stopped at, on the town’s outskirts, refused to take me. The clerk of the Red Top Inn explained to me that it was for Negroes only, and directed me to The Southern Hospitality, which he called “Guff-pote’s finest.” Maybe so, but on the whole, I think I would have preferred the Red Top. The slide guitar coming from the bar-and-barbecue next door had sounded terrific.
6
New Orleans wasn’t precisely on my way to Big D, but with the hunch-sonar quiet, I found myself in a touristy frame of mind… although it wasn’t the French Quarter, the Bienville Street steamboat landing, or the Vieux Carré I wanted to visit.
I bought a map from a street-vendor and found my way to the one destination that did interest me. I parked and after a five-minute walk found myself standing in front of 4905 Magazine Street, where Lee and Marina Oswald would be living with their daughter, June, in the last spring and summer of John Kennedy’s life. It was a shambling not-quite-wreck of a building with a waist-high iron fence surrounding an overgrown yard. The paint on the lower story, once white, was now a peeling shade of urine yellow. The upper story was unpainted gray barnboard. A piece of cardboard blocking a broken window up there read 4-RENT CALL MU3-4192. Rusty screens enclosed the porch where, in September of 1963, Lee Oswald would sit in his underwear after dark, whispering “Pow! Pow! Pow!” under his breath and dry-firing what was going to become the most famous rifle in American history at passing pedestrians.
I was thinking of this when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I almost screamed. I guess I did jump, because the young black man who had accosted me took a respectful step backward, raising his open hands.
“Sorry, sah. Sorry, sho din mean to make you stahtle.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Totally my fault.”
This declaration seemed to make him uneasy, but he had business on his mind and pressed ahead with it… although he had to come close again, because his business entailed a tone of voice lower than the conversational. He wanted to know if I might be interested in buying a few joysticks. I thought I knew what he was talking about, but wasn’t entirely sure until he added, “Ha-quality swampweed, sah.”
I told him I’d pass, but if he could direct me to a good hotel in the Paris of the South, it would be worth half a rock to me. When he spoke again, his speech was a good deal crisper. “Opinions differ, but I’d say the Hotel Monteleone.” He gave me good directions.
“Thanks,” I said, and handed over the coin. It disappeared into one of his many pockets.
“Say, what you lookin at that place for, anyway?” He nodded toward the ramshackle apartment house. “You thinkin bout buyin it?”
A little twinkle of the old George Amberson surfaced. “You must live around here. Do you think it would be a good deal?”
“Some on this street might be, but not that one. To me it looks haunted.”
“Not yet,” I said, and headed for my car, leaving him to look after me, perplexed.
7
I took the lockbox out of the trunk and put it on the Sunliner’s passenger seat, meaning to hand-carry it up to my room at the Monteleone, and I did just that. But while the doorman was getting the rest of my bags, I spotted something on the floor of the backseat that made me flush with a sense of guilt that was far out of proportion to what the object was. But childhood teachings are the strongest teachings, and another thing I was taught at my mother’s knee was to always return library books on time.
“Mr. Doorman, would you hand me that book, please?” I asked.
“Yes, sah! Happy to!”
It was The Chapman Report, which I’d borrowed from the Nokomis Public Library a week or so before deciding it was time to put on my traveling shoes. The sticker in the corner of the transparent protective cover—7 DAYS ONLY, BE KIND TO THE NEXT BORROWER—reproached me.
When I got to my room, I checked my watch and saw it was only 6:00 P.M. In the summer, the library didn’t open until noon but stayed open until eight. Long distance is one of the few things more expensive in 1960 than in 2011, but that childish sense of guilt was still on me. I called the hotel operator and gave her the Nokomis Library’s telephone number, reading it off the card-pocket pasted to the back flyleaf of the book. The little message below it, Please Call if You Will Be More Than 3 Days Late in Your Return, made me feel more like a dog than ever.
My operator talked to another operator. Behind them, faint voices babbled. I realized that in the time I came from, most of those distant speakers would be dead. Then the phone began to ring on the other end.
“Hello, Nokomis Public Library.” It was Hattie Wilkerson’s voice, but that sweet old lady sounded like she was stuck in a very large steel barrel.
“Hello, Mrs. Wilkerson—”
“Hello? Hello? Do you hear me? Drat long distance!”
“Hattie?” I was shouting now. “It’s George Amberson calling!”
“George Amberson? Oh, my soul! Where are you calling from, George?”
I almost told her the truth, but the hunch-radar gave out a single very loud ping and I bellowed, “Baton Rouge!”
“In Louisiana?”
“Yes! I have one of your books! I just realized! I’m going to send it ba—”
“You don’t need to shout, George, the connection is much better now. The operator must not have stuck our little plug in the whole way. I am so glad to hear from you. It’s God’s providence that you weren’t there. We were worried even though the fire chief said the house was empty.”
“What are you talking about, Hattie? My place on the beach?”
But really, what else?
“Yes! Someone threw a flaming bottle of gasoline through the window. The whole thing went up in a matter of minutes. Chief Durand thinks it was kids who were out drinking and carousing. There are so many bad apples now. It’s because they’re afraid of the Bomb, that’s what my husband says.”
So.
“George? Are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Which book do you have?”
“What?”
“Which book do you have? Don’t make me check the card catalogue.”
“Oh. The Chapman Report.”
“Well, send it back as soon as you can, won’t you? We have quite a few people waiting for that one. Irving Wallace is extremely popular.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be sure to do that.”
“And I’m very sorry about your house. Did you lose your things?”
“I have everything important with me.”
“Thank God for that. Will you be coming back s—”
There was a click loud enough to sting my ear, then the burr of an open line. I replaced the receiver in the cradle. Would I be coming back soon? I saw no need to call back and answer that question. But I would watch out for the past, because it senses change-agents, and it has teeth.
I sent The Chapman Report back to the Nokomis Library first thing in the morning.
Then I left for Dallas.
8
Three days later I was sitting on a bench in Dealey Plaza and looking at the square brick cube of the Texas School Book Depository. It was late afternoon, and blazingly hot. I had pulled down my tie (if you don’t wear one in 1960, even on hot days, you’re apt to attract unwanted attention) and unbuttoned the top button of my plain white shirt, but it didn’t help much. Neither did the scant shade of the elm behind my bench.
When I checked into the Adolphus Hotel on Commerce Street, I was offered a choice: air-conditioning or no air-conditioning. I paid the extra five bucks for a room where the window-unit lowered the temperature all the way to seventy-eight, and if I had a brain in my head, I’d go back to it now, before I keeled over with heatstroke. When night came, maybe it would cool off. Just a little.
But that brick cube held my gaze, and the windows—especially the one on the right corner of the sixth floor—seemed to be examining me. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the building. You—if there ever is a you—might scoff at that, calling it nothing but the effect of my unique foreknowledge, but that didn’t account for what was really holding me on that bench in spite of the beating heat. What did that was the sense that I had seen the building before.
It reminded me of the Kitchener Ironworks, in Derry.
The Book Depository wasn’t a ruin, but it conveyed the same sense of sentient menace. I remembered coming on that submerged, soot-blackened smokestack, lying in the weeds like a giant prehistoric snake dozing in the sun. I remembered looking into its dark bore, so large I could have walked into it. And I remembered feeling that something was in there. Something alive. Something that wanted me to walk into it. So I could visit. Maybe for a long, long time.
Come on in, the sixth-floor window whispered. Take a look around. The place is empty now, the skeleton crew that works here in the summer has gone home, but if you walk around to the loading dock by the railroad tracks, you’ll find an open door, I’m quite sure of it. After all, what is there in here to protect? Nothing but schoolbooks, and even the students they’re meant for don’t really want them. As you well know, Jake. So come in. Come on up to the sixth floor. In your time there’s a museum here, people come from all over the world and some of them still weep for the man who was killed and all he might have done, but this is 1960, Kennedy’s still a senator, and Jake Epping doesn’t exist. Only George Amberson exists, a man with a short haircut and a sweaty shirt and a pulled-down tie. A man of his time, so to speak. So come on up. Are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be, when the crime hasn’t happened yet?
But there were ghosts up there. Maybe not on Magazine Street in New Orleans, but there? Oh yes. Only I’d never have to face them, because I was going to enter the Book Depository no more than I had ventured into that fallen smokestack in Derry. Oswald would get his job stacking textbooks just a month or so before the assassination, and waiting that long would be cutting things far too close. No, I intended to follow the plan Al had roughed out in the closing section of his notes, the one titled CONCLUSIONS ON HOW TO PROCEDE.
Sure as he was about his lone gunman theory, Al had held onto a small but statistically significant possibility that he was wrong. In his notes, he called it “the window of uncertainty.”
As in sixth-floor window.
He had meant to close that window for good on April 10, 1963, over half a year before Kennedy’s trip to Dallas, and I thought his idea made sense. Possibly later that April, more likely on the night of the tenth—why wait?—I would kill the husband of Marina and the father of June just as I had Frank Dunning. And with no more compunction. If you saw a spider scuttering across the floor toward your baby’s crib, you might hesitate. You might even consider trapping it in a bottle and putting it out in the yard so it could go on living its little life. But if you were sure that spider was poisonous? A black widow? In that case, you wouldn’t hesitate. Not if you were sane.
You’d put your foot on it and crush it.
9
I had a plan of my own for the years between August of 1960 and April of 1963. I’d keep my eye on Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldn’t interfere. Because of the butterfly effect, I couldn’t afford to. If there’s a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I don’t know what it is. Chains (other than the ones we all learned to make out of strips of colored paper in kindergarten, I suppose) are strong. We use them to pull engine blocks out of trucks and to bind the arms and legs of dangerous prisoners. That was no longer reality as I understood it. Events are flimsy, I tell you, they are houses of cards, and by approaching Oswald—let alone trying to warn him off a crime which he had not yet even conceived—I would be giving away my only advantage. The butterfly would spread its wings, and Oswald’s course would change.
Little changes at first, maybe, but as the Bruce Springsteen song tells us, from small things, baby, big things one day come. They might be good changes, ones that would save the man who was now the junior senator from Massachusetts. But I didn’t believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In 1962, according to one of Al’s scribbled marginal notes, Kennedy was going to be in Houston, at Rice University, making a speech about going to the moon. Open auditorium, no bullet-pr’f podium, Al had written. Houston was less than three hundred miles from Dallas. What if Oswald decided to shoot the president there?
Or suppose Oswald was exactly what he claimed to be, a patsy? What if I scared him out of Dallas and back to New Orleans and Kennedy still died, the victim of some crazy Mafia or CIA plot? Would I have courage enough to go back through the rabbit-hole and start all over? Save the Dunning family again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? I had already given nearly two years to this mission. Would I be willing to invest five more, with the outcome as uncertain as ever?
Better not to have to find out.
Better to make sure.
On my way to Texas from New Orleans, I had decided the best way to monitor Oswald without getting in his way would be to live in Dallas while he was in the sister city of Fort Worth, then relocate to Fort Worth when Oswald moved his family to Dallas. The idea had the virtue of simplicity, but it wouldn’t work. I realized that in the weeks after looking at the Texas School Book Depository for the first time and feeling very strongly that it was—like Nietzsche’s abyss—looking back at me.
I spent August and September of that presidential election year driving the Sunliner around Dallas, apartment-hunting (even after all this time sorely missing my GPS unit and frequently stopping to ask for directions). Nothing seemed right. At first I thought that was about the apartments themselves. Then, as I began to get a better sense of the city, I realized it was about me.
The simple truth was that I didn’t like Dallas, and eight weeks of hard study was enough to make me believe there was a lot not to like. The Times Herald (which many Dallas-ites routinely called the Slimes Herald) was a tiresome juggernaut of nickel boosterism. The Morning News might wax lyrical, talking about how Dallas and Houston were “in a race to the heavens,” but the skyscrapers of which the editorial spoke were an island of architectural blah surrounded by rings of what I came to think of as The Great American Flatcult. The newspapers ignored the slum neighborhoods where the divisions along racial lines were just beginning to melt a little. Further out were endless middle-class housing developments, mostly owned by veterans of World War II and Korea. The vets had wives who spent their days Pledging the furniture and Maytagging the clothes. Most had 2.5 children. The teenagers mowed lawns, delivered the Slimes Herald on bicycles, Turtle Waxed the family car, and listened (furtively) to Chuck Berry on transistor radios. Maybe telling their anxious parents he was white.
Beyond the suburban houses with their whirling lawn-sprinklers were those vast flat tracts of empty. Here and there rolling irrigators still serviced cotton crops, but mostly King Cotton was dead, replaced by endless acres of corn and soybeans. The real Dallas County crops were electronics, textiles, bullshit, and black money petro-dollars. There weren’t many derricks in the area, but when the wind blew from the west, where the Permian Basin is, the twin cities stank of oil and natural gas.
The downtown business district was full of sharpies hustling around in what I came to think of as the Full Dallas: checked sport coats, narrow neckwear held down with bloated tie clips (these clips, the sixties version of bling, usually came with diamonds or plausible substitutes sparkling in their centers), white Sansabelt pants, and gaudy boots with complex stitching. They worked in banks and investment companies. They sold soybean futures and oil leases and real estate to the west of the city, land where nothing would grow except jimson and tumbleweed. They clapped each other on the shoulders with beringed hands and called each other son. On their belts, where businessmen in 2011 carry their cell phones, many carried handguns in hand-tooled holsters.
There were billboards advocating the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren; billboards showing a snarling Nikita Khrushchev (NYET, COMRADE KHRUSHCHEV, the billboard copy read, WE WILL BURY YOU!); there was one on West Commerce Street that read THE AMERICAN COMMUNIST PARTY FAVORS INTEGRATION. THINK ABOUT IT! That one had been paid for by something called The Tea Party Society. Twice, on businesses whose names suggested they were Jewish-owned, I saw soaped swastikas.
