11/22/63: A Novel (79 page)

Sadie ate better than she had since the night Clayton had invaded her home, and I did pretty well myself. Together we polished off half a dozen eggs, plus toast and bacon. When the dishes were in the sink and she was smoking a cigarette with her second cup of coffee, I said I wanted to ask her something.

“If it’s about coming to the show tonight, I don’t think I could manage that twice.”

“It’s something else. But since you mention it, what exactly did Ellie say to you?”

“That it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and rejoin the parade.”

“Pretty harsh.”

Sadie stroked her hair against the wounded side of her face—that automatic gesture. “Miz Ellie’s not known for delicacy and tact. Did she shock me, busting in here and telling me it was time to quit lollygagging? Yes she did. Was she right? Yes she was.” She stopped stroking her hair and abruptly pushed it back with the heel of her hand. “This is what I’m going to look like from now on—with some improvements—so I guess I better get used to it. Sadie’s going to find out if that old saw about beauty only being skin deep is actually true.”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“All right.” She jetted smoke from her nostrils.

“Suppose I could take you to a place where the doctors could fix the damage to your face—not perfectly, but far better than Dr. Ellerton and his team ever could. Would you go? Even if you knew we could never come back here?”

She frowned. “Are we speaking hypothetically?”

“Actually we’re not.”

She crushed her cigarette out slowly and deliberately, thinking it over. “Is this like Miz Mimi going to Mexico for experimental cancer treatments? Because I don’t think—”

“I’m talking about America, hon.”

“Well, if it’s America, I don’t understand why we couldn’t—”

“Here’s the rest of it:
I
might have to go. With or without you.”

“And never come back?” She looked alarmed.

“Never. Neither one of us could, for reasons that are difficult to explain. I suppose you think I’m crazy.”

“I know you’re not.” Her eyes were troubled, but she spoke without hesitation.

“I may have to do something that would look very bad to law-enforcement types. It’s
not
bad, but nobody would ever believe that.”

“Is this . . . Jake, does this have anything to do with that thing
you told me about Adlai Stevenson? What he said about hell freezing over?”

“In a way. But here’s the rub. Even if I’m able to do what I have to without being caught—and I think I can—that doesn’t change
your
situation. Your face is still going to be scarred to some greater or lesser degree. In this place where I could take you, there are medical resources Ellerton can only dream of.”

“But we could never come back.” She wasn’t speaking to me; she was trying to get it straight in her mind.

“No.” All else aside, if we came back to September ninth of 1958, the original version of Sadie Dunning would already exist. That was a mind-bender I didn’t even want to consider.

She got up and went to the window. She stood there with her back to me for a long time. I waited.

“Jake?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Can you predict the future? You can, can’t you?”

I said nothing.

In a small voice she said, “Did you come here
from
the future?”

I said nothing.

She turned from the window. Her face was very pale. “Jake, did you?”

“Yes.” It was as if a seventy-pound rock had rolled off my chest. At the same time I was terrified. For both of us, but mostly for her.

“How . . . how far?”

“Honey, are you sure you—”

“Yes.
How far?
”

“Almost forty-eight years.”

“Am I . . . dead?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. This is now. And this is us.”

She thought about that. The skin around the red marks of her
injuries had turned very white and I wanted to go to her, but I was afraid to move. What if she screamed and ran from me?

“Why did you come?”

“To stop a man from doing something. I’ll kill him if I have to. If I can make absolutely sure he deserves killing, that is. So far I haven’t been able to do that.”

“What’s the something?”

“In four months, I’m pretty sure he’s going to kill the president. He’s going to kill John Ken—”

I saw her knees start to buckle, but she managed to stay on her feet just long enough to allow me to catch her before she fell.

I carried her to the bedroom and went into the bathroom to wet a cloth in cold water. When I returned, her eyes were already open. She looked at me with an expression I could not decipher.

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Maybe not,” she said, but she didn’t flinch when I sat down next to her on the bed, and made a little sighing noise of pleasure when I began to stroke her face with the cold cloth, detouring around the bad place, where all sensation except for a deep, dull pain was now gone. When I was done, she looked at me solemnly. “Tell me one thing that’s going to happen. I think if I’m going to believe you, you have to do that. Something like Adlai Stevenson and hell freezing over.”

“I can’t. I majored in English, not American History. I studied Maine history in high school—it was a requirement—but I know next to nothing about Texas. I don’t—” But I realized I did know one thing. I knew the last thing in the betting section of Al Templeton’s notebook, because I’d double-checked.
In case you need a final cash transfusion,
he’d written.

“Jake?”

“I know who’s going to win a prizefight at Madison Square Garden
next month. His name is Tom Case, and he’s going to knock out Dick Tiger in the fifth round. If that doesn’t happen, I guess you’re free to call for the men in the white coats. But can you keep it just between us until then? A lot depends on it.”

“Yes. I can do that.”

I half-expected Deke or Miz Ellie to buttonhole me after the second night’s performance, looking grave and telling me they’d had a phone call from Sadie, saying that I’d lost my everloving mind. But that didn’t happen, and when I got back to Sadie’s, there was a note on the table reading
Wake me if you want a midnight snack.

It wasn’t midnight—not quite—and she wasn’t asleep. The next forty minutes or so were very pleasant. Afterward, in the dark, she said: “I don’t have to decide anything right now, do I?”

“No.”

“And we don’t have to talk about this right now.”

“No.”

“Maybe after the fight. The one you told me about.”

“Maybe.”

“I believe you, Jake. I don’t know if that makes me crazy or not, but I do. And I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Her eyes gleamed in the dark—the one that was almond-shaped and beautiful, the one that drooped but still saw. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, and I don’t want you to hurt anybody unless you absolutely have to. And never by mistake. Never
ever.
Do you promise?”

“Yes.” That was easy. It was the reason Lee Oswald was still drawing breath.

“Will you be careful?”

“Yes. I’ll be very—”

She stopped my mouth with a kiss. “Because no matter where
you came from, there’s no future for me without you. Now let’s go to sleep.”

I thought the conversation would resume in the morning. I had no idea what—meaning how much—I would tell her when it did, but in the end I had to tell her nothing, because she didn’t ask. Instead she asked me how much The Sadie Dunhill Charity Show had brought in. When I told her just over three thousand dollars, with the contents of the lobby donation box added to the gate, she threw back her head and let loose a beautiful full-throated laugh. Three grand wouldn’t cover all of her bills, but it was worth a million just to hear her laugh . . . and to
not
hear her say something like
Why bother at all, when I can just get it taken care of in the future?
Because I wasn’t entirely sure she really wanted to go even if she
did
believe, and because I wasn’t sure I wanted to take her.

I wanted to
be
with her, yes. For as close to forever as people get. But it might be better in ’63 . . . and all the years God or providence gave us after ’63.
We
might be better. I could see her lost in 2011, eyeing every low-riding pair of pants and computer screen with awe and unease. I would never beat her or shout at her—no, not Sadie—but she might still become my Marina Prusakova, living in a strange place and exiled from her homeland forever.

There was one person in Jodie who might know how I could put Al’s final betting entry to use. That was Freddy Quinlan, the real estate agent. He ran a weekly nickel-in, quarter-to-stay poker game at his house, and I’d attended a few times. During several of these games he bragged about his betting prowess in two fields: pro football and the Texas State Basketball Tournament. He saw me
in his office only because, he said, it was too damn hot to play golf.

“What are we talking about here, George? Medium-sized bet or the house and lot?”

“I’m thinking five hundred dollars.”

He whistled, then leaned back in his chair and laced his hands over a tidy little belly. It was only nine in the morning, but the air-conditioner was running full blast. Stacks of real estate brochures fluttered in its chilly exhaust. “That’s serious cabbage. Care to let me in on a good thing?”

Since he was doing me the favor—at least I hoped so—I told him. His eyebrows shot up so high they were in danger of meeting his receding hairline.

“Holy cow! Why don’t you just chuck your money down a sewer?”

“I’ve got a feeling, that’s all.”

“George, listen to your daddy. The Case-Tiger fight isn’t a sporting event, it’s a trial balloon for this new closed-circuit TV thing. There might be a few good fights on the undercard, but the main bout’s a joke. Tiger’ll have instructions to carry the poor old fella for seven or eight, then put him to sleep. Unless . . .”

He leaned forward. His chair made an unlovely
scronk
sound from somewhere underneath. “Unless you know something.” He leaned back again and pursed his lips. “But how could you? You live in
Jodie,
for Chrissake. But if you did, you’d let a pal in on it, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know anything,” I said, lying straight to his face (and happy to do so). “It’s just a feeling, but the last time I had one this strong, I bet on the Pirates to beat the Yankees in the World Series, and I made a bundle.”

“Very nice, but you know the old saying—even a stopped clock gets it right twice a day.”

“Can you help me or not, Freddy?”

He gave me a comforting smile that said the fool and his money would all too soon be parted. “There’s a guy in Dallas who’d be
happy to take that kind of action. Name’s Akiva Roth. Operates out of Faith Financial on Greenville Ave. Took over the biz from his father five or six years ago.” He lowered his voice. “Word is, he’s mobbed up.” He lowered his voice still further. “Carlos Marcello.”

That was exactly what I was afraid of, because that had also been the word on Eduardo Gutierrez. I thought again of the Lincoln with the Florida plates parked across from Faith Financial.

“I’m not sure I’d want to be seen going into a place like that. I might want to teach again, and at least two members of the schoolboard are already cheesed off at me.”

“You could try Frank Frati, over in Fort Worth. He runs a pawnshop.”
Scronk
went the chair as he leaned forward to get a better look at my face. “What’d I say? Or did you inhale a bug?”

“Uh-uh. It’s just that I knew a Frati once. Who also ran a pawnshop and took bets.”

“Probably they both came from the same savings-and-loan clan in Romania. Anyway, he might fade five Cs—especially a sucker bet like you’re talking about. But you won’t get the odds you deserve. Of course you wouldn’t get em from Roth, either, but you’d get better than you would from Frank Frati.”

“But with Frank I wouldn’t get the Mob connection. Right?”

“I guess not, but who really knows? Bookies, even the part-time ones, ain’t known for their high-class business associations.”

“Probably I should take your advice and hold onto my money.”

Quinlan looked horrified. “No, no,
no,
don’t do that. Bet it on the Bears to win the NFC. That way you make a bundle. I practically guarantee it.”

On July twenty-second, I told Sadie I had to run some errands in Dallas and said I’d ask Deke to check in on her. She said there was no need, that she’d be fine. She was regaining her old self. Little by slowly, yes, but she was regaining it.

She asked no questions about the nature of my errands.

My initial stop was at First Corn, where I opened my safe deposit box and triple-checked Al’s notes to make sure I really remembered what I thought I had. And yes, Tom Case was going to be the upset winner, knocking out Dick Tiger in the fifth. Al must have found the fight on the internet, because he had been gone from Dallas—and the sensational sixties—long before then.

“Can I help you with anything else today, Mr. Amberson?” my banker asked as he escorted me to the door.

Well, you could say a little prayer that my old buddy Al Templeton didn’t swallow a bunch of internet bullshit.

“Maybe so. Do you know where I could find a costume shop? I’m supposed to be the magician at my nephew’s birthday party.”

Mr. Link’s secretary, after a quick glance through the Yellow Pages, directed me to an address on Young Street. There I was able to buy what I needed. I stored it at the apartment on West Neely—as long as I was paying rent on the place, it ought to be good for something. I left my revolver, too, putting it on a high shelf in the closet. The bug, which I had removed from the upstairs lamp, went into the glove compartment of my car, along with the cunning little Japanese tape recorder. I would dispose of them somewhere in the scrubland on my return to Jodie. They were of no more use to me. The apartment upstairs hadn’t been re-rented, and the house was spookily silent.