11/22/63: A Novel (53 page)

There was bound to be a blow-up. It would have come sooner than it did, if not for the
Jodie Jamboree.
That was our greening, a chance to linger a little and think things over before we were forced into a decision neither of us wanted to make.

Ellen Dockerty came to me in February and asked me two things: first, would I please reconsider and sign a contract for the ’62–’63 school year, and second, would I please direct the junior-senior play again, since last year’s had been such a smash hit. I refused both requests, not without a tug of pain.

“If it’s your book, you’d have all summer to work on it,” she coaxed.

“It wouldn’t be long enough,” I said, although at that point I didn’t give Shit One about
The Murder Place.

“Sadie Dunhill says she doesn’t believe you care a fig for that novel.”

It was an insight she hadn’t shared with me. It shook me, but I tried not to show it. “El, Sadie doesn’t know everything.”

“The play, then. At least do the play. As long as it doesn’t involve nudity, I’ll back anything you choose. Given the current composition of the schoolboard, and the fact that I myself only have a two-year contract as principal, that’s a mighty big promise. You can dedicate it to Vince Knowles, if you like.”

“Vince has already had a football season dedicated to his memory, Ellie. I think that’s enough.”

She went away, beaten.

The second request came
from Mike Coslaw, who would be graduating in June and told me he intended to declare a theater major at college. “But I’d really like to do one more play here. With you, Mr. Amberson. Because you showed me the way.”

Unlike Ellie Dockerty, he accepted the excuse about my bogus novel without question, which made me feel bad. Terrible, really. For a man who didn’t like to lie—who had seen his marriage collapse because of all the ones he’d heard from his I-can-stop-whenever-I-want wife—I was certainly telling a passel of them, as we said in my Jodie days.

I walked Mike out to the student parking lot where his prize possession was parked (an old Buick sedan with fenderskirts), and asked him how his arm felt now that the cast was off. He said it was fine, and he was sure he’d be set for football practice this coming summer. “Although,” he said, “if I got cut, it wouldn’t break my heart. Then maybe I could do some community theater as well as school stuff. I want to learn everything—set design, lighting, even costumes.” He laughed. “People’ll start callin me queer.”

“Concentrate on football, making grades, and not getting too homesick the first semester,” I said. “Please. Don’t screw around.”

He did a zombie Frankenstein voice. “Yes . . . master . . .”

“How’s Bobbi Jill?”

“Better,” he said. “There she is.”

Bobbi Jill was waiting by Mike’s Buick. She waved at him, then saw me and immediately turned away, as if interested in the empty football field and the rangeland beyond. It was a gesture everyone in school had gotten used to. The scar from the accident had healed to a fat red string. She tried to cover it with cosmetics, which only made it more noticeable.

Mike said, “I tell her to quit with the powder already, it makes her look like an advertisement for Soames’s Mortuary, but she won’t listen. I also tell her I’m not going with her out of pity, or so she won’t swallow any more pills. She says she believes me, and maybe she does. On sunny days.”

I watched him hurry to Bobbi Jill, grab her by the waist, and swing her around. I sighed, feeling
a little stupid and a lot stubborn. Part of me wanted to do the damn play. Even if it was good for nothing else, it would fill the time while I was waiting for my own show to start. But I didn’t want to get hooked into the life of Jodie in more ways than I already was. Like any possible long-term future with Sadie, my relationship with the town needed to be on hold.

If everything went just right, it was possible I could wind up with the girl, the gold watch, and everything. But I couldn’t count on that no matter how carefully I planned. Even if I succeeded I might have to run, and if I didn’t get away, there was a good chance that my good deed on behalf of the world would be rewarded by life in prison. Or the electric chair in Huntsville.

It was Deke Simmons who finally trapped me into saying yes. He did it by telling me I’d be nuts to even consider it. I should have recognized that
Oh, Br’er Fox, please don’t th’ow me in that briar patch
shtick, but he was very sly about it. Very subtle. A regular Br’er Rabbit, you might say.

We were in my living room drinking coffee on a Saturday afternoon while some old movie played on my snow-fuzzy TV—cowboys in Fort Hollywood standing off two thousand or so attacking Indians. Outside, more rain was falling. There must have been at least a few sunny days during the winter of ’62, but I can’t recall any. All I can remember are cold fingers of drizzle always finding their way to the barbered nape of my neck in spite of the turned-up collar of the sheepskin jacket I’d bought to replace the ranch coat.

“You don’t want to worry about that damn play just because Ellen Dockerty’s got her underwear all in a bunch about it,” Deke said. “Finish your book, get a bestseller, and never look back. Live the good life in New York. Have a drink with Norman Mailer and Irwin Shaw at the White Horse Tavern.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. John Wayne was blowing
a bugle. “I don’t think Norman Mailer has to worry too much about me. Irwin Shaw, either.”

“Also, you had such a success with
Of Mice and Men,
” he said. “Anything you did as a follow-up would probably be a disappointment by compar— oh, jeez, look at that! John Wayne just got an arrow through his hat! Lucky it was the twenty-gallon deluxe!”

I was more miffed by the idea that my second effort might fall short than I should have been. It made me think about how Sadie and I couldn’t quite equal our first performance on the dance floor, despite our best efforts.

Deke seemed completely absorbed in the TV as he said, “Besides, Ratty Sylvester has expressed an interest in the junior-senior. He’s talking about
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Says he and the wife saw it in Dallas two years ago and it was a regular ole knee-slapper.”

Good God,
that
chestnut. And Fred Sylvester of the Science Department as director? I wasn’t sure I’d trust Ratty to direct a grammar school fire drill. If a talented but still very damp-around-the-edges actor like Mike Coslaw ended up with Ratty at the helm, it could set his maturing process back five years. Ratty and
Arsenic and Old Lace.
Jesus wept.

“There wouldn’t be time to put on anything really good, anyway,” Deke went on. “So I say let Ratty take the fall. I never liked the scurrying little sumbitch, anyway.”

Nobody
really liked him, so far as I could tell, except maybe for Mrs. Ratty, who scurried by his side to every school and faculty function, wrapped in acres of organdy. But he wouldn’t be the one to take the fall. That would be the kids.

“They could put on a variety show,” I said. “There’d be time enough for that.”

“Oh, Christ, George! Wallace Beery just took an arrow in the shoulder! I think he’s a goner!”

“Deke?”

“No, John Wayne’s dragging him to safety. This old shoot-em-up doesn’t make a
lick
of sense, but I love it, don’t you?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

A commercial came on. Keenan
Wynn climbed down off a bulldozer, doffed his hardhat, and told the world he’d walk a mile for a Camel. Deke turned to me. “No, I must have missed it.”

Sly old fox. As if.

“I said there’d be time to put on a variety show. A revue. Songs, dances, jokes, and a bunch of sketches.”

“Everything but girls doing the hootchie-koo? Or were you thinking of that, too?”

“Don’t be a dope.”

“So that makes it vaudeville. I always liked vaudeville. ‘Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are,’ and all that.”

He dragged his pipe out of the pocket of his cardigan, stuffed it with Prince Albert, and fired it up.

“You know, we actually used to do something like that down to the Grange. The show was called
Jodie Jamboree.
Not since the late forties, though. Folks got a little embarrassed by it, although no one ever came right out and said so. And vaudeville wasn’t what we called it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It was a minstrel show, George. All the cowboys and farmhands joined in. They wore blackface, sang and danced, told jokes in what they imagined was a Negro dialect. More or less based on
Amos ’n Andy.
”

I began to laugh. “Did anyone play the banjo?”

“As a matter of fact, on a couple of occasions our current principal did.”

“
Ellen
played the
banjo
in a
minstrel
show?”

“Careful, you’re starting to speak in iambic pentameter. That can lead to delusions of grandeur, pard.”

I leaned forward. “Tell me one of the jokes.”

Deke cleared his throat, and began speaking in two deep voices.

“Say dere, Brother Tambo, what did you buy dat jar of Vaseline fo’?

“Well I b’leeves it was fo’ty-nine cent!”

He looked at me expectantly,
and I realized that had been the punchline.

“Did they laugh?” I almost feared the answer.

“Split their guts and hollered for more. You heard those jokes around the square for weeks after.” He looked at me solemnly, but his eyes were twinkling like Christmas lights. “We’re a small town. Our needs when it comes to humor are quite humble. Our idea of Rabelaisian wit is a blind feller slipping on a banana peel.”

I sat thinking. The western came back on, but Deke seemed to have lost interest in it. He was watching me.

“That stuff could still work,” I said.

“George, that stuff always does.”

“It wouldn’t need to be funny black fellers, either.”

“Couldn’t do it that way anymore, anyway,” he said. “Maybe in Louisiana or Alabama, but not on the way to Austin, which the folks at the
Slimes Herald
call Comsymp City. And you wouldn’t want to, would you?”

“No. Call me a bleeding-heart, but I find the idea repulsive. And why bother? Corny jokes . . . boys in big old suits with padded shoulders instead of cornpone overalls . . . girls in knee-high flapper dresses with lots of fringes . . . I’d love to see what Mike Coslaw could do with a comedy skit. . . .”

“Oh, he’d kill it,” Deke said, as if that were a foregone conclusion. “Pretty good idea. Too bad you don’t have time to try it out.”

I started to say something, but then another of those lightning flashes hit me. It was just as bright as the one that had lit up my brain when Ivy Templeton had said that her neighbors across the street could see into her living room.

“George? Your mouth is open. The view is good but not appetizing.”

“I could make time,” I said. “If you could talk Ellie Dockerty into one condition.”

He got up and snapped off the TV without a single glance, although the fighting between Duke Wayne and the Pawnee Nation had now reached the critical
point, with Fort Hollywood burning merry hell in the background. “Name it.”

I named it, then said, “I’ve got to talk to Sadie. Right now.”

She was solemn at first. Then she began to smile. The smile became a grin. And when I told her the idea that had come to me at the end of my conversation with Deke, she threw her arms around me. But that wasn’t good enough for her, so she climbed until she could wrap her legs around me, as well. There was no broom between us that day.

“It’s brilliant! You’re a genius! Will you write the script?”

“You bet. It won’t take long, either.” Corny old jokes were already flying around in my head:
Coach Borman looked at the orange juice for twenty minutes because the can said CONCENTRATE. Our dog had an ingrown tail, we had to X-ray him to find out if he was happy. I rode on a plane so old that one restroom was marked Orville and the other was marked Wilbur.
“But I need plenty of help with other stuff. What it comes down to is I need a producer. I’m hoping you’ll take the job.”

“Sure.” She slipped back to the floor with her body still pressed against mine. This produced a regrettably brief flash of bare leg as her skirt pulled up. She began to pace her living room, smoking furiously. She tripped over the easy chair (for probably the sixth or eighth time since we’d been on intimate terms) and caught her balance without even seeming to notice, although she was going to have a pretty fine bruise on her shin by nightfall.

“If you’re thinking twenties-style flapper stuff, I can get Jo Peet to run up the costumes.” Jo was the new head of the Home Ec Department, having succeeded to the position when Ellen Dockerty was confirmed as principal.

“That’s great.”

“Most of the Home Ec girls love to sew . . . and to cook. George, we’ll need to serve evening meals,
won’t we? If the rehearsals run extra long? And they will, because we’re starting awfully late.”

“Yes, but just sandwiches—”

“We can do better than that.
Lots.
And music! We’ll need music! It’ll have to be recorded, because the band could never pull a thing like this together in time.” And then, together, we said
“Donald Bellingham!”
in perfect harmony.

“What about advertising?” I asked. We were starting to sound like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, getting ready to put on a show in Aunt Milly’s barn.

“Carl Jacoby and his Graphic Design kids. Posters not just here but all over town. Because we want the whole town to come, not just the relatives of the kids in the show. Standing room only.”

“Bingo,” I said, and kissed her nose. I loved her excitement. I was getting pretty excited myself.

“What do we say about the benefit aspect?” Sadie asked.

“Nothing until we’re sure we can make enough money. We don’t want to raise any false hopes. What do you think about taking a run to Dallas with me tomorrow and asking some questions?”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, hon. After school on Monday. Maybe even before it’s out, if you can get period seven free.”

“I’ll get Deke to come out of retirement and cover Remedial English,” I said. “He owes me.”