11/22/63: A Novel (42 page)

“You’ve played football in front of crowds nine times bigger than the one that’ll be in that auditorium. Hell, when you boys went down to Dallas for the regionals last November, you played in front of ten or twelve thousand. And they were
not
friendly.”

“Football’s different. When we hit the field, we’re all wearing the same uniform and helmets. Folks can only tell us apart by our numbers. Everybody’s on the same side—”

“There are nine other people in this show with you, Mike, and that’s not counting the townspeople I wrote in to give your football buddies something to do. They’re a team, too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Maybe not quite. But one thing
is
the same—if you let them
down, the shit falls apart and everybody loses. The actors, the crew, the Pep Club girls who did the publicity, and all the people who are planning to come in for the show, some of them from ranches fifty miles out. Not to mention me. I lose, too.”

“I guess that’s so,” he said. He was looking at his feet, and mighty big feet they were.

“I could stand to lose Slim or Curley; I’d just send someone out with the book to read the part. I guess I could even stand to lose Curley’s Wife—”

“I wish Sandy was a little better,” Mike said. “She’s pretty as hell, but if she ever hits her mark, it’s an accident.”

I allowed myself a cautious inward smile. I was starting to think this was going to be all right. “What I couldn’t stand—what the
show
couldn’t stand—is to lose you or Vince Knowles.”

Vince was playing Lennie’s road-buddy George, and actually, we
could
have stood the loss if he’d gotten the flu or broken his neck in a road accident (always a possibility, given the way he drove his daddy’s farm truck). I would have gone on in Vince’s place, if push came to shove, even though I was much too big for the part, and I wouldn’t need just to read, either. After six weeks of rehearsals, I was as off-the-book as any of my actors. More than some. But I couldn’t replace Mike. No one could replace him, with his unique combination of size and actual talent. He was the linchpin.

“What if I fuck up?” he asked, then heard what he’d said and clapped a hand to his mouth.

I sat down beside him on the couch. There wasn’t much room, but I managed. Right then I wasn’t thinking of John Kennedy, Al Templeton, Frank Dunning, or the world I’d come from. Right then I was thinking of nothing but this big boy . . . and my show. Because at some point it had
become
mine, just as this earlier time with its party-line telephones and cheap gas had become mine. At that moment I cared more about
Of Mice and Men
than I did about Lee Harvey Oswald.

But I cared even more about Mike.

I took his hand off his mouth. Put it on one huge thigh. Put my hands on his shoulders. Looked into his eyes. “Listen to me,” I said. “Are you listening?”

“Yessir.”

“You are
not
going to fuck up. Say it.”

“I . . .”

“Say it.”

“I’m not going to fuck up.”

“What you’re going to do is amaze them. I promise you that, Mike.” Gripping his shoulders tighter. It was like trying to sink my fingers into stones. He could have picked me up and broken me over his knee, but he only sat there looking at me from a pair of eyes that were humble, hopeful, and still rimmed with tears. “Do you hear me? I promise.”

The stage was a beachhead of light. Beyond it was a lake of darkness where the audience sat. George and Lennie stood on the bank of an imaginary river. The other men had been sent away, but they wouldn’t be gone long; if the big, vaguely smiling hulk of a man in the overalls were to die with any dignity, George would have to see to it himself.

“George? Where them guys goin?”

Mimi Corcoran was sitting on my right. At some point she had taken my hand and was gripping it. Hard, hard, hard. We were in the first row. Next to her on her other side, Deke Simmons was staring up at the stage with his mouth slightly hung open. It was the expression of a farmer who sees dinosaur cropping grass in his north forty.

“Huntin. They’re goin huntin. Siddown, Lennie.”

Vince Knowles was never going to be an actor—what he was going to be, most likely, was a salesman at Jodie Chrysler-Dodge, like his father—but a great performance can lift all the actors in a
production, and that had happened tonight. Vince, who in rehearsals had only once or twice achieved even low levels of believability (mostly because his ratty, intelligent little face
was
Steinbeck’s George Milton), had caught something from Mike. All at once, about halfway through Act I, he finally seemed to realize what it meant to go rambling through life with a Lennie as your only friend, and he had fallen into the part. Now, watching him push an old felt hat from props back on his head, I thought that Vince looked like Henry Fonda in
The Grapes of Wrath.

“George!”

“Yeah?”

“Ain’t you gonna give me hell?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, George.” Smiling. The kind of smile that says
Yeah, I know I’m a dope, but we both know I can’t help it.
Sitting down beside George on the imaginary riverbank. Taking off his own hat, tossing it aside, rumpling his short blond hair. Imitating George’s voice. Mike had nailed this with eerie ease in the very first rehearsal, with no help from me. “‘If I was alone, I could live so easy. I could get a job and not have no more mess.’” Resuming his own voice . . . or Lennie’s, rather. “I can go away. I can go right up in the hills and find a cave, if you don’t want me.”

Vince Knowles lowered his head, and when he raised it and spoke his next line, his voice was thick and hitching. It was a simulacrum of sorrow he’d never approached in even his best rehearsals. “No, Lennie, I want you to stay here with me.”

“Then tell me like you done before! Bout other guys, and about us!”

That was when I heard the first low sob from the audience. It was followed by another. Then a third. This I had not expected, not in my wildest dreams. A chill raced up my back, and I stole a glance at Mimi. She wasn’t crying yet, but the liquid sheen in her eyes told me that she soon would be. Yes, even her—hard old baby that she was.

George hesitated, then took hold of Lennie’s hand, a thing Vince never would have done in rehearsals.
That’s queerboy stuff,
he would have said.

“Guys like us . . . Lennie, guys like us got no families. They got nobody that gives a hoot in hell about them.” Touching the prop gun hidden under his coat with his other hand. Taking it partway out. Putting it back. Then steeling himself and taking it all the way out. Laying it along his leg.

“But not us, George! Not us! Idn’t that right?”

Mike was gone. The stage was gone. Now it was only the two of them, and by the time Lennie was asking George to tell him about the little ranch, and the rabbits, and living off the fat of the land, half the audience was weeping audibly. Vince was crying so hard he could hardly deliver his final lines, telling poor stupid Lennie to look over there, the ranch they were going to live on was over there. If he looked hard enough, he could see it.

The stage lensed slowly to full dark, Cindy McComas for once running the lights perfectly. Birdie Jamieson, the school janitor, fired a blank cartridge. Some woman in the audience gave a little scream. That sort of reaction is usually followed by nervous laughter, but tonight there was only the sound of people weeping in their seats. Otherwise, silence. It went on for ten seconds. Or maybe it was only five. Whatever it was, to me it seemed forever. Then the applause broke. It was the best thunder I ever heard in my life. The house lights went up. The entire audience was on its feet. The front two rows were reserved for faculty, and I happened to glance at Coach Borman. Damned if he wasn’t crying, too.

Two rows back, where all the school jocks were sitting together, Jim LaDue leaped to his feet.
“You rock, Coslaw!”
he shouted. This elicited cheers and laughter.

The cast came out to take their bows: first the football-player townspeople, then Curley and Curley’s Wife, then Candy and Slim and the rest of the farmhands. The applause started to die a little and then Vince came out, flushed and happy, his own cheeks still wet.
Mike Coslaw came last, shuffling as if embarrassed, then looking out in comical amazement as Mimi shouted “Bravo!”

Others echoed it, and soon the auditorium resounded with it:
Bravo, Bravo, Bravo
. Mike bowed, sweeping his hat so low it brushed the stage. When he stood again, he was smiling. But it was more than a smile; his face was transformed with the happiness that’s reserved for those who are finally allowed to reach all the way up.

Then he shouted, “Mr. Amberson! Come up here, Mr. Amberson!”

The cast took up the chant of “Director! Director!”

“Don’t kill the applause,” Mimi growled from beside me. “Get up there, you goof ball!”

So I did, and the applause swelled again. Mike grabbed me, hugged me, lifted me off my feet, then set me down and gave me a hearty smack on the cheek. Everyone laughed, including me. We all grabbed hands, lifted them to the audience, and bowed. As I listened to the applause, a thought occurred to me, one that darkened my heart. In Minsk, there were newlyweds. Lee and Marina had been man and wife for exactly nineteen days.

Three weeks later, just before school let out for the summer, I went to Dallas to take some photographs of the three apartments where Lee and Marina would live together. I used a small Minox, holding it in the palm of my hand and allowing the lens to peep out between two spread fingers. I felt ridiculous—more like the trench-coated caricatures in
Mad
magazine’s
Spy vs Spy
feature than James Bond—but I had learned to be careful about such things.

When I returned to my house, Mimi Corcoran’s sky-blue Nash Rambler was parked at the curb and Mimi was just sliding in behind the wheel. When she saw me, she got out again. A brief grimace tightened her face—pain or effort—but when she came up the drive, she was wearing her usual dry smile. As if I amused
her, but in a good way. In her hands she was carrying a bulky manila envelope, which contained the hundred and fifty pages of
The Murder Place.
I’d finally given in to her pesterings . . . but that had been only the day before.

“Either you liked it one hell of a lot, or you never got past page ten,” I said, taking the envelope. “Which was it?”

Her smile now looked enigmatic as well as amused. “Like most librarians, I’m a fast reader. Can we go inside and talk about it? It isn’t even the middle of June, and it’s already so hot.”

Yes, and she was sweating, something I’d never seen before. Also, she looked as if she’d lost weight. Not a good thing for a lady who had no pounds to give away.

Sitting in my living room with big glasses of iced coffee—me in the easy chair, she on the couch—Mimi gave her opinion. “I enjoyed the stuff about the killer dressed up as a clown. Call me twisted, but I found that deliciously creepy.”

“If you’re twisted, I am, too.”

She smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find a publisher for it. On the whole, I liked it very much.”

I felt a little hurt.
The Murder Place
might have begun as camouflage, but it had become more important to me as I got deeper into it. It was like a secret memoir. One of the nerves. “That ‘on the whole’ stuff reminds me of Alexander Pope—you know, damning with faint praise?”

“I didn’t quite mean it that way.” More qualification. “It’s just that . . . goddammit, George, this isn’t what you were meant to do. You were meant to teach. And if you publish a book like this, no school department in the United States will hire you.” She paused. “Except maybe in Massachusetts.”

I didn’t reply. I was speechless.

“What you did with Mike Coslaw—what you did
for
Mike Coslaw—was the most amazing and wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Mimi, it wasn’t me. He’s just naturally tal—”

“I
know
he’s naturally talented, that was obvious from the moment
he walked onstage and opened his mouth, but I’ll tell you something, my friend. Something forty years in high schools and sixty years of living has taught me and taught me well. Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to
nurture
artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult. That’s a talent you have, and in much greater supply than the one that drove this.” She tapped the sheaf of pages on the coffee table in front of her.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Say thank you, and compliment me on my acute judgment.”

“Thanks. And your insight is only exceeded by your good looks.”

That brought the smile back, dryer than ever. “Don’t exceed your brief, George.”

“Yes, Miz Mimi.”

The smile disappeared. She leaned forward. The blue eyes behind her glasses were too big, swimming in her face. The skin under her tan was yellowish, and her formerly taut cheeks were hollow. When had this happened? Had Deke noticed? But that was ridic, as the kids said. Deke wouldn’t notice that his socks were mismatched until he took them off at night. Probably not even then.

She said, “Phil Bateman is no longer just threatening to retire, he’s done pulled the pin and tossed the grenade, as our delightful Coach Borman would say. Which means there’s a vacancy on the English faculty. Come and teach full-time at DCHS, George. The kids like you, and after the junior-senior play, the community thinks you’re the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock. Deke is just waiting to see your application—he told me so just last night. Please. Publish this under a pseudonym, if you have to, but come and teach. That’s what you were meant to do.”

I wanted badly to say yes, because she was right. My job wasn’t writing books, and it certainly wasn’t killing people, no matter how much they deserved killing. And there was Jodie. I’d come to it as a stranger who had been displaced from his home era as well as his hometown, and the first words spoken to me here—by Al Stevens, at the diner—had been friendly words. If you’ve ever been
homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you’ll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be. Jodie was the anti-Dallas, and now one of its leading citizens was asking me to be a resident instead of a visitor. But the watershed moment was approaching. Only it wasn’t here yet. Maybe . . .