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 didnt 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 Sarasotas one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.
I read and reread Als 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 timethe conveyor belt on which we all must ridebrought 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 wouldnt have made any difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadnt 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 Als belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming hed been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadnt 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 scholars 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 hed 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 didnt care for.
Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didnt 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 Id 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, Georgeonce in, never out.
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I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans, but I didnt think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big Derby payday. If I had daredand if I could have thought of a plausible way to raise the subjectI would have asked Gutierrez if hed 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 Murrets wife was Marguerite Oswalds sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswalds 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 Sunlinerno better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun Coastand 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 wouldnt be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He wouldnt succeed, but after a showyand probably bogussuicide attempt in a Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. On approval, so to speak. Hed 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 bachelors 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 Mobys 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 Youve 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.
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Which is how I ended up teaching again for one or two days each week during the 19591960 academic year. It was good to be back. I enjoyed the studentsboys with flattop crewcuts, girls with ponytails and shin-length poodle skirtsalthough 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 cant explain. Or want to. Explanations are such cheap poetry.
My best day as a sub came at West Sarasota High, after Id 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 Caulfields 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 didnt 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 Id 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 wouldnt see it that way). If those things didnt 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 hed 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 wasnt 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 cant 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.
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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 wasnt playing very well. My hunch-think didnt 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 friendsor a couple of muscle boys hungry to get out from under whatever loan-shark vig Gutierrez was currently chargingto 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 didnt want to get beaten up and I didnt want to be robbed. Most of all, I didnt want to risk my pages falling into the hands of a Mob-connected bookie. I didnt 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 mothers 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 Sunliners 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 rooms 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 towns 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-potes 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 wasnt precisely on my way to Big D, but with the hunch-sonar quiet, I found myself in a touristy frame of mind although it wasnt 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 Kennedys 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.
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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.
Its 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 wasnt entirely sure until he added, Ha-quality swampweed, sah.
I told him Id 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 Id 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 Sunliners 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 mothers 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 Id 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 cover7 DAYS ONLY, BE KIND TO THE NEXT BORROWERreproached 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 didnt 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 Librarys 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 Wilkersons 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. Its 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! Im going to send it ba
You dont 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. Its Gods providence that you werent 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. Its because theyre afraid of the Bomb, thats what my husband says.
So.
George? Are you still there?
Yes, I said.
Which book do you have?
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What?
Which book do you have? Dont make me check the card catalogue.
Oh. The Chapman Report.
Well, send it back as soon as you can, wont you? We have quite a few people waiting for that one. Irving Wallace is extremely popular.
Yes, I said. Ill be sure to do that.
And Im 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 dont wear one in 1960, even on hot days, youre apt to attract unwanted attention) and unbuttoned the top button of my plain white shirt, but it didnt 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, Id 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 windowsespecially the one on the right corner of the sixth floorseemed to be examining me. There was a palpable sense of wrongness about the building. Youif there ever is a youmight scoff at that, calling it nothing but the effect of my unique foreknowledge, but that didnt 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 wasnt 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, youll find an open door, Im quite sure of it. After all, what is there in here to protect? Nothing but schoolbooks, and even the students theyre meant for dont really want them. As you well know, Jake. So come in. Come on up to the sixth floor. In your time theres 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, Kennedys still a senator, and Jake Epping doesnt 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 hasnt happened yet?
But there were ghosts up there. Maybe not on Magazine Street in New Orleans, but there? Oh yes. Only Id 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 Kennedys trip to Dallas, and I thought his idea made sense. Possibly later that April, more likely on the night of the tenthwhy 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 babys 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 wouldnt hesitate. Not if you were sane.
Youd 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. Id keep my eye on Oswald when he came back from Russia, but I wouldnt interfere. Because of the butterfly effect, I couldnt afford to. If theres a stupider metaphor than a chain of events in the English language, I dont 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 Oswaldlet alone trying to warn him off a crime which he had not yet even conceivedI would be giving away my only advantage. The butterfly would spread its wings, and Oswalds 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 didnt believe that. Because the past is obdurate. In 1962, according to one of Als 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-prf 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 wouldnt 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 waslike Nietzsches abysslooking 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 didnt 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 werent 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.
