Who can find a virtuous woman? the proverb asks. For her price is above rubies. She seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly with her hands. She is like the merchants ships, that bringeth food from afar.
There are more clothes than the ones you put on your body, every teacher knows that, and food isnt just what you put in your mouth. Miz Mimi had fed and clothed many. Including me. I sat there on a bench Id bought at a Fort Worth flea market with my head lowered and my face in my hands. I thought about her, and I was very sad, but my eyes remained dry.
I have never been what youd call a crying man.
8
Sadie immediately agreed to help me put together a memorial assembly. We worked on it for the last two weeks of that hot August, driving around town to line up speakers. I tapped Mike Coslaw to read Proverbs 31, which describes the virtuous woman, and Al Stevens volunteered to tell the storywhich I had never heard from Mimi herselfabout how she had named the Prongburger, his spécialité de la maison. We also collected over two hundred photographs. My favorite showed Mimi and Deke doing the twist at a school dance. She looked like she was having fun; he looked like a man with a fair-sized stick up his ass. We culled the photos in the school library, where the nameplate on the desk now read MISS DUNHILL instead of MIZ MIMI.
During that time Sadie and I never kissed, never held hands, never even looked into each others eyes for longer than a passing glance. She didnt talk about her busted marriage or her reasons for coming to Texas from Georgia. I didnt talk about my novel or tell her about my largely made-up past. We talked about books. We talked about Kennedy, whose foreign policy she considered jingoistic. We discussed the nascent civil rights movement. I told her about the board across the creek at the bottom of the path behind the Humble Oil station in North Carolina. She said shed seen similar toilet facilities for colored people in Georgia, but believed their days were numbered. She thought school integration would come, but probably not until the mid-seventies. I told her I thought it would be sooner, driven by the new president and his attorney-general kid brother.
She snorted. You have more respect for that grinning Irishman than I do. Tell me, does he ever get his hair cut?
We didnt become lovers, but we became friends. Sometimes she tripped over things (including her own feet, which were large), and on two occasions I steadied her, but there were no catches as memorable as the first one. Sometimes shed declare she just had to have a cigarette, and Id accompany her out to the student smoking area behind the metal shop.
Ill be sorry not to be able to come out here and sprawl on the bench in my old blue jeans, she said one day. This was less than a week before school was scheduled to start. Theres always such a fug in teachers rooms.
Someday thatll all change. Smoking will be banned on school grounds. For teachers as well as students.
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She smiled. It was a good one, because her lips were rich and full. And the jeans, I must say, looked good on her. She had long, long legs. Not to mention just enough junk in her trunk. A cigarette-free society Negro children and white children studying side by side in perfect harmony no wonder youre writing a novel, youve got one hell of an imagination. What else do you see in your crystal ball, George? Rockets to the moon?
Sure, but itll probably take a little longer than integration. Who told you I was writing a novel?
Miz Mimi, she said, and butted her cigarette in one of the half a dozen sand-urn ashtrays. She said it was good. And speaking of Miz Mimi, I suppose we ought to get back to work. I think were almost there with the photographs, dont you?
Yes.
And are you sure playing that West Side Story song over the slide show isnt going to be too corny?
I thought Somewhere was cornier than Iowa and Nebraska put together, but according to Ellen Dockerty it had been Mimis favorite song.
I told Sadie this, and she laughed doubtfully. I didnt know her all that well, but it sure doesnt seem like her. Maybe its Ellies favorite song.
Now that I think about it, that seems all too likely. Listen, Sadie, do you want to go to the football game with me on Friday? Kind of show the kids that youre here before school starts on Monday?
Id love to. Then she paused, looking a little uncomfortable. As long as you dont, you know, get any ideas. Im not ready to date just yet. Maybe not for a long time.
Neither am I. She was probably thinking about her ex, but I was thinking about Lee Oswald. Soon hed have his American passport back. Then it would only be a matter of wangling a Soviet exit visa for his wife. But friends sometimes go to the game together.
Thats right, they do. And I like going places with you, George.
Because Im taller.
She punched my arm playfullya big-sister kind of punch. Thats right, podna. Youre the kind of man I can look up to.
9
At the game, practically everybody looked up to us, and with faint aweas though we were representatives of a slightly different race of humans. I thought it was kind of nice, and for once Sadie didnt have to slouch to fit in. She wore a Lion Pride sweater and her faded jeans. With her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a high school senior herself. A tall one, probably the center on the girls basketball team.
We sat in Faculty Row and cheered as Jim LaDue riddled the Arnette Bears defense with half a dozen short passes and then a sixty-yard bomb that brought the crowd to its feet. At halftime the score was Denholm 31, Arnette 6. As the players ran off the field and the Denholm band marched onto it with their tubas and trombones wagging, I asked Sadie if she wanted a hotdog and a Coke.
You bet I do, but right now the linell be all the way out to the parking lot. Wait until theres a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer.
I think you can manage those things on your own.
She smiled at me and gripped my arm. No, I need you to help me. Im new here, remember?
At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship. And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except for what happened during that halftime.
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The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldnt quite figure out. When they finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips. Give us an L!
We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with an I, an O, an N, and an S.
Whats that spell?
LIONS! Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.
Whos gonna win?
LIONS! Given the halftime score, there wasnt much doubt about it.
Then let us hear you roar!
We roared in the traditional manner, turning first to the left and then to the right. Sadie gave it her all, cupping her hands around her mouth, her ponytail flying from one shoulder to the other.
What came next was the Jim Cheer. In the previous three yearsyes, our Mr. LaDue had started at QB even as a freshmanthis had been pretty simple. The cheerleaders would yell something like, Let us hear your Lion Pride! Name the man who leads our side! And the hometown crowd would bellow JIM! JIM! JIM! After that the cheerleaders would do a few more cartwheels and then run off the field so the other teams band could march out and tootle a tune or two. But this year, possibly in honor of Jims valedictory season, the chant had changed.
Each time the crowd yelled JIM, the cheerleaders responded with the first syllable of his last name, drawing it out like a teasing musical note. It was new, but it wasnt complicated, and the crowd caught on in a hurry. Sadie was doing the chant with the best of them, until she realized I wasnt. I was just standing there with my mouth open.
George? Are you okay?
I couldnt answer. In fact, I barely heard her. Because most of me was back in Lisbon Falls. I had just come through the rabbit-hole. I had just walked along the side of the drying shed and ducked under the chain. I had been prepared to meet the Yellow Card Man, but not to be attacked by him. Which I was. Only he was no longer the Yellow Card Man; now he was the Orange Card Man. Youre not supposed to be here, he had said. Who are you? What are you doing here? And when Id started to ask him if hed tried AA for his drinking problem, hed said
George? Now she sounded worried as well as concerned. What is it? Whats wrong?
The fans had totally gotten into the call-and-response thing. The cheerleaders shouted JIM and the bleacher-creatures shouted back LA.
Fuck off, Jimla! That was what the Yellow Card Man whod become the Orange Card Man (although not yet the dead-by-his-own-hand Black Card Man) had snarled at me, and that was what I was hearing now, tossed back and forth like a medicine ball between the cheerleaders and the twenty-five hundred fans watching them:
JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA!
Sadie grabbed my arm and shook me. Talk to me, mister! Talk to me, because Im getting scared!
I turned to her and managed a smile. It did not come easy, believe me. Just crashing for sugar, I guess. Im going to grab those Cokes.
You arent going to faint, are you? I can walk you to the aid station if
Im fine, I said, and then, without thinking about what I was doing, I kissed the tip of her nose. Some kid shouted, Way to go, Mr. A!
Rather than looking irritated, she wriggled her nose like a rabbit, then smiled. Get out of here, then. Before you damage my reputation. And bring me a chili dog. Lots of cheese.
Yes, maam.
The past harmonizes with itself, that much I already understood. But what song was this? I didnt know, and it worried me plenty. In the concrete runway leading to the refreshment stand, the chant was magnified, making me want to put my hands over my ears to block it out.
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JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA.
PART 4
Sadie and the General
CHAPTER 14
1
The memorial assembly was held at the end of the new school years first day, and if one can measure success by damp hankies, the show Sadie and I put together was boffo. Im sure it was cathartic for the kids, and I think Miz Mimi herself would have enjoyed it. Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor, she once told me. Im no different.
The teachers held it together through most of the eulogies. It was Mike who started to get to them, with his calm, heartfelt recitation from Proverbs 31. Then, during the slide show, with the accompanying schmaltz from West Side Story, the faculty lost it, too. I found Coach Borman particularly entertaining. With tears streaming down his red cheeks and large, quacking sobs emerging from his massive chest, Denholms football guru reminded me of everybodys second-favorite cartoon duck, Baby Huey.
I whispered this observation to Sadie as we stood beside the big screen with its marching images of Miz Mimi. She was crying, too, but had to step off the stage and into the wings as laughter first fought with and then overcame her tears. Safely back in the shadows, she looked at me reproachfully and then gave me the finger. I decided I deserved it. I wondered if Miz Mimi would still think Sadie and I were getting along famously.
I thought she probably would.
I picked Twelve Angry Men for the fall play, accidentally on purpose neglecting to inform the Samuel French Company that I intended to retitle our version The Jury, so I could cast some girls. I would hold tryouts in late October and start rehearsals on November 13, after the Lions last regular-season football game. I had my eye on Vince Knowles for Juror #8the holdout whod been played by Henry Fonda in the movieand Mike Coslaw for what I considered the best part in the show: bullying, abrasive Juror #3.
But I had begun to focus on a more important show, one that made the Frank Dunning affair look like a paltry vaudeville skit by comparison. Call this one Jake and Lee in Dallas. If things went well, it would be a tragedy in one act. I had to be ready to go onstage when the time came, and that meant starting early.
2
On the sixth of October, the Denholm Lions won their fifth football game, on their way to an undefeated season that would be dedicated to Vince Knowles, the boy who had played George in Of Mice and Men and who would never get a chance to act in the George Amberson version of Twelve Angry Menbut more of that later. It was the start of a three-day weekend, because the Monday following was Columbus Day.
I drove to Dallas on the holiday. Most businesses were open, and my first stop was one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue. I told the little man behind the counter that I wanted to buy the cheapest wedding ring he had in stock. I walked out with an eight-buck band of gold (at least it looked like gold) on the third finger of my left hand. Then I drove downtown to a place on Lower Main Street I had bird-dogged in the Dallas Yellow Pages: Silent Mikes Satellite Electronics. There I was greeted by a trim little man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a weirdly futuristic button on his vest: TRUST NOBODY, it said.
Are you Silent Mike? I asked.
Yep.
And are you truly silent?
He smiled. Depends on whos listening.
Lets assume nobody, I said, and told him what I wanted. It turned out I could have saved my eight bucks, because he had no interest at all in my supposedly cheating wife. It was the equipment I wanted to buy that interested the proprietor of Satellite Electronics. On that subject he was Loquacious Mike.
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Mister, they may have gear like that on whatever planet you come from, but we sure dont have it here.
That stirred a memory of Miz Mimi comparing me to the alien visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still. I dont know what you mean.
You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass case right over there to your left. Theyre called transistor radios. I stock both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones. He stuck out his lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. Aint that a kick in the behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, theyll own the world. The part of it I live in, anyway.
So you cant help me?
Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEacherns always happy to help fill a customers electronic needs. But itll cost.
Id be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that cheating bitch into divorce court.
Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? Im going to show you something thats probably not well, maybe it is legal, but who knows? Is Silent Mike McEachern an attorney?
Im guessing not.
My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The printing on the box was in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.
This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the sons of Nippon at their own game, its us. Electronics is gonna replace banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words. He crossed himself, pointed skyward, and added, God bless Texas.
I picked the gadget up. What exactly is an Echo when its at home with its feet up on the hassock?
The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that youre gonna get. Its small because it doesnt have any vacuum tubes and doesnt run on batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current.
You plug it into the wall?
Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, How nice, someone bugged the place while we were out, lets have a nice noisy shag, then talk over all our private business.
He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I needed.
What do you do with it, then?
He tapped the disc. This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp, unless youre interested in recording the mice running around inside the baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so its up where people talk. He brushed the wires. The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cords plugged into the wall. The bugs dead until someone turns on the lamp. When they do, bingo, youre off to the races.
This other thing is the mike?
Yep, and for American-made its a good one. Nowyou see the other two wires? The blue and green ones?
Uh-huh.
He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a reel-to-reel recorder. It was bigger than a pack of Sadies Winstons, but not by much.
Those wires hook up to this. Base unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a bureau drawer, maybe under your wifes scanties. Or drill a little hole in the wall and put it in the closet.
The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord.
Naturally.
Could I get two of these Echoes?
I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though.
Two will be fine. How much?
Stuff like this aint cheap. A paird run you a hundred and forty. Best I can do. And it would have to be a cash deal. He spoke with a regret that suggested we had been having a nice little techno-dream for ourselves, but now the dream was almost over.
How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation? I saw his alarm and hastened to dispel it. I dont mean the actual black-bag job, nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple of lamps and hook up the tape recorderscould you do that?
Of course I could, Mr.
Lets say Mr. Doe. John Doe.
His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunts would when he first beheld the challenge that was the Watergate Hotel. Good name.
Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires. Something short, if I can place it close by, something longer if I need to hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall.
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I can do that, but you dont want more than ten feet or the sound turns to mud. Also, the more wire you use, the greater the chance that someonell find it.
Even an English teacher could understand that.
How much for the whole deal?
Mmm hundred and eighty?
He looked ready to haggle, but I didnt have the time or the inclination. I put five twenties down on the counter and said, You get the rest when I pick them up. But first we test them out and make sure they work, agreed?
Yeah, fine.
One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy.
Grungy?
Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter apiece. After you direct a few playscounting the ones Id worked on at LHS, Of Mice and Men had been my fifthyou learn a few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp from a semi-furnished apartment.
For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. I get it. Realism.
Thats the plan, Stan. I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I cant swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I cant say for sure that he didnt, either. Youre not going to talk about this, are you?
No! Course not! He zipped two fingers across his lips.
Thats the way, I said. When?
Give me a few days.
Ill come back next Monday. What time do you close?
Five.
I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, An extra twenty if you stay open until seven. Its the soonest I can make it. That work for you?
Yeah.
Good. Have everything ready.
I will. Anything else?
Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?
I was hoping hed say Because I can keep a secret, but he didnt. When I was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of stuck.
I didnt ask, but halfway back to my car it came to me, and I started to laugh.
Silent Mike, holy Mike.
Sometimes the world we live in is a truly weird place.
3
When Lee and Marina returned to the United States, theyd live in a sad procession of low-rent apartments, including the one in New Orleans Id already visited, but based on Als notes, I thought there were only two I needed to focus on. One was at 214 West Neely Street, in Dallas. The other was in Fort Worth, and that was where I went after my visit to Silent Mikes.
I had a map of the city, but still had to ask directions three times. In the end it was an elderly black woman clerking at a mom-n-pop who pointed me the right way. When I finally found what I was looking for, I wasnt surprised that it had been hard to locate. The ass end of Mercedes Street was unpaved hardpan lined with crumbling houses little better than sharecroppers shacks. It spilled into a huge, mostly empty parking lot where tumbleweeds blew across the crumbling asphalt. Beyond the lot was the back of a cinderblock warehouse. Printed on it in whitewashed letters ten feet tall was PROPERTY OF MONTGOMERY WARD and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED and POLICE TAKE NOTE.
The air stank of cracked petroleum from the direction of Odessa-Midland, and raw sewage much closer at hand. The sound of rock and roll spilled from open windows. I heard the Dovells, Johnny Burnette, Lee Dorsey, Chubby Checker and that was in the first forty yards or so. Women were hanging clothes on rusty whirligigs. They were all wearing smocks that had probably been purchased at Zayres or Mammoth Mart, and they all appeared to be pregnant. A filthy little boy and an equally filthy little girl stood on a cracked clay driveway and watched me go by. They were holding hands and looked too much alike not to be twins. The boy, naked except for a single sock, was holding a cap pistol. The girl was wearing a saggy diaper below a Mickey Mouse Club tee-shirt. She was clutching a plastic babydoll as filthy as she was. Two bare-chested men were throwing a football back and forth between their respective yards, both of them with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths. Beyond them, a rooster and two bedraggled chickens pecked in the dust near a scrawny dog that was either sleeping or dead.
I pulled up in front of 2703, the place to which Lee would bring his wife and daughter when he could no longer stand Marguerite Oswalds pernicious brand of smotherlove. Two concrete strips led up to a bald patch of oil-stained ground where there would have been a garage in a better part of town. The wasteland of crabgrass that passed for a lawn was littered with cheap plastic toys. A little girl in ragged pink shorts was kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against the side of the house. Each time it hit the wooden siding, she said, Chumbah!
A woman with her hair in large blue rollers and a cigarette plugged in her gob shoved her head out the window and shouted, You keep doin that, Rosette, Im gone come out n beat you snotty! Then she saw me. Wha choo want? If its a bill, I caint hep you. My husband does all that. He got work today.
Its not a bill, I said. Rosette kicked the soccer ball at me with a snarl that became a reluctant smile when I caught it with the side of my foot and booted it gently back. I just wanted to speak to you for a second.
Yall gotta wait, then. I aint decent.
Her head disappeared. I waited. Rosette kicked the soccer ball high and wide this time (Chumbah!), but I managed to catch it on one palm before it hit the house.
Aint spozed to use your hands, dirty old sumbitch, she said. Thats a penalty.
Rosette, what I told you about that goddam mouth? Moms came out on the stoop, securing a filmy yellow scarf over her rollers. It made them look like cocooned insects, the kind that might be poisonous when they hatched.
Dirty old fucking sumbitch! Rosette shrieked, and then scampered up Mercedes Street in the direction of the Monkey Ward warehouse, kicking her soccer ball and laughing maniacally.
Wha choo want? Moms was twenty-two going on fifty. Several of her teeth were gone, and she had the fading remains of a black eye.
Want to ask you some questions, I said.
What makes my biness your biness?
I took out my wallet and offered her a five-dollar bill. Ask me no questions and Ill tell you no lies.
You aint from around here. Soun like a Yankee.
Do you want this money or not, Missus?
Depends on the questions. I aint tellin you my goddam bra-size.
I want to know how long youve been here, for a start.
This place? Six weeks, I guess. Harry thought he might catch on at the Monkey Ward warehouse, but they aint hiring. So he went on over to Manpower. You know what that is?
Day-labor?
Yeah, n he workin with a bunch of niggers. Only it wasnt workin, it was woikin. Nine dollars a day workin with a bunch of goddam niggers side a the road. He says its like bein at West Texas Correctional again.
How much rent do you pay?
Fifty a month.
Furnished?
Semi. Well, you could say. Got a goddam bed and a goddam gas stove gone kill us all, most likely. And I aint takin you in, so dont ax. I dont know you from goddam Adam.
Did it come with lamps and such?
Youre crazy, mister.
Did it?
Yeah, couple. One that works and one that duddnt. I aint stayin here, be goddamned if I will. He tell how he dont want to move back in with my mama down Mozelle, but tough titty said the kitty. I aint stayin here. You smell this place?
Yes, maam.
That aint nothin but shit, sonny jim. Not catshit, not dogshit, thats peopleshit. Work with niggers, thats one thing, but live like one? Nosir. You done?
I wasnt, quite, although I wished I were. I was disgusted by her, and disgusted with myself for daring to judge. She was a prisoner of her time, her choices, and this shit-smelling street. But it was the rollers under the yellow headscarf that I kept looking at. Fat blue bugs waiting to hatch.
Nobody stays here for long, I guess?
On Cedes Street? She waved her cigarette at the hardpan leading to the deserted parking lot and the vast warehouse filled with nice things she would never own. At the elbow-to-elbow shacks with their steps of crumbling cinderblock and their broken windows blocked up with pieces of cardboard. At the roiling kids. At the old, rust-eaten Fords and Hudsons and Studebaker Larks. At the unforgiving Texas sky. Then she uttered a terrible laugh filled with amusement and despair.
Mister, this is a bus stop on the road to nowhere. Men Bratty Sues sailin back to Mozelle. If Harry wont go with us, well sail without him.
I took the map out of my hip pocket, tore off a strip, and scribbled my Jodie telephone number on it. Then I added another five-dollar bill. I held them out to her. She looked but didnt take.
What I want your telephone number for? I aint got no goddam phone. That there aint no DFW shange, anyway. Thats goddam long distance.
Call me when you get ready to move out. Thats all I want. You call me and say, Mister, this is Rosettes mama, and were moving. Thats all it is.
I could see her calculating. It didnt take her long. Ten dollars was more than her husband would make working all day in the hot Texas sun. Because Manpower knew from nothing about time-and-a-half on holidays. And this would be ten dollars he knew from nothing about.
Gimme another semny-fi cent, she said. For the long distance.
Here, take a buck. Live a little. And dont forget.
I wont.
No, you dont want to. Because if you forgot, I might just be apt to find my way to your husband and tattle. This is important business, Missus. To me it is. Whats your name, anyway?
