11/22/63: A Novel (94 page)

She looked at the squat red cube with the peering windows, then turned a dismayed, wide-eyed face to me. I observed—with something like clinical interest—that large white goosebumps had broken out on her neck. “Jake, it’s
horrible
!”

“I know.”

“But . . . what’s
wrong
with it?”

“Everything. Sadie, we have to hurry. We’re nearly out of time.”

We crossed Elm on a diagonal, me crutching along at a near run. The biggest portion of the crowd was on Main Street, but more people filled Dealey Plaza and lined Elm in front of the Book Depository. They crowded the curb all the way down to the Triple Underpass. Girls sat on their boyfriends’ shoulders. Children who might soon be screaming in panic happily smeared their faces with ice cream. I saw a man selling Sno-Cones and a woman with a huge bouffant hairdo hawking dollar photos of Jack and Jackie in evening wear.

By the time we reached the shadow of the Depository, I was sweating, my armpit was hollering from the constant pressure of the crutch cradle, and my left knee had been cinched in a fiery belt. I could barely bend it. I looked up and saw Depository employees leaning from some of the windows. I couldn’t see anyone in the one at the southeast corner of the sixth floor, but Lee would be there.

I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty. We could track the motorcade’s progress by the rising roar on Lower Main Street.

Sadie tried the door, then gave me an anguished glare. “Locked!”

Inside, I saw a black man wearing a poorboy cap tilted at a jaunty angle. He was smoking a cigarette. Al had been a great one for marginalia in his notebook, and near the end—casually jotted, almost doodled—he had written the names of several of Lee’s co-workers. I’d made no effort to study these, because I didn’t see what earthly use I could put them to. Next to one of those names—the one belonging to the guy in the poorboy cap, I had no doubt—Al had written:
First one they suspected (probably because black).
It had been an unusual name, but I still couldn’t remember it, either because Roth and his goons had beaten it out of my head (along with all sorts of other stuff) or because I hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place.

Or just because the past was obdurate. And did it matter? It just wouldn’t come. The name was nowhere.

Sadie hammered on the door. The black man in the poorboy cap stood watching her impassively. He took a drag on his cigarette and then waved the back of his hand at her:
go on, lady, go on.

“Jake, think of something! PLEASE!”

Twelve twenty-one.

An unusual name, yes, but
why
had it been unusual? I was surprised to find this was something I actually knew.

“Because it was a girl’s,” I said.

Sadie turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed except for the scar, which stood out in a white snarl. “What?”

Suddenly I was hammering on the glass.
“Bonnie!”
I shouted.
“Hey, Bonnie Ray! Let us in! We know Lee! Lee! LEE OSWALD!”

He registered the name and crossed the lobby in a maddeningly slow amble.

“I didn’t know that scrawny l’il sumbitch
had
any friends,” Bonnie Ray Williams said as he opened the door, then stepped aside as we rushed inside. “He probably in the break room, watchin for the president with the rest of—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m not his friend and he’s not in the break room. He’s on the sixth floor. I think he means to shoot President Kennedy.”

The big man laughed merrily. He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with a workboot. “That little pissant wouldn’t have the guts to drown a litter o’ kittens in a sack. All he do is sit in the corner and read
books.
”

“I tell you—”

“I’m goan on up to two. If you want to come with me, you’re welcome, I guess. But don’t be talkin any more nonsense about Leela. That’s what we call him, Leela. Shoot the president!
Lor!
” He waved his hand and ambled away.

I thought,
You belong in Derry, Bonnie Ray. They specialize in not seeing what’s right in front of them.

“Stairs,” I told Sadie.

“The elevator would be—”

The end of any chance we might have left was what it would be.

“It would get stuck between floors.
Stairs.
”

I took her hand and pulled her toward them.
The staircase was a narrow gullet with wooden risers swaybacked from years of traffic. There was a rusty iron railing on the left. At the foot, Sadie turned to me. “Give me the gun.”

“No.”

“You’ll never make it in time. I will.
Give me the gun.
”

I almost gave it up. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to keep it; now that the actual watershed moment had come, it didn’t matter who stopped Oswald as long as
someone
did. But we were only a step away from the roaring machine of the past, and I was damned if I’d risk Sadie taking that last step ahead of me, only to be sucked into its whirling belts and blades.

I smiled, then leaned forward and kissed her. “Race you,” I said, and started up the stairs. Over my shoulder I called, “If I fall asleep, he’s all yours!”

“You folks crazy,” I heard Bonnie Ray Williams say in a mildly remonstrative tone of voice. Then there was the light thud of footsteps as Sadie followed me. I crutched on the right—no longer leaning on it but almost
vaulting
on it—and hauled at the railing on the left. The gun in my sport coat pocket swung and thudded against my hip. My knee was bellowing. I let it yell.

When I hit the second-floor landing, I snuck a look at my watch. It was twelve twenty-five. No; twenty-six. I could hear the roar of the crowd still approaching, a wave about to break. The motorcade had passed the intersections of Main and Ervay, Main and Akard, Main and Field. In two minutes—three at most—it would reach Houston Street, turn right, and roll past the old Dallas courthouse at fifteen miles an hour. From that point on, the President of the United States would be an available target. In the 4x scope attached to the Mannlicher-Carcano, the Kennedys and
Connallys would look as big as actors on the screen at the Lisbon Drive-In. But Lee would wait a little longer. He was no suicide-drone; he wanted to get away. If he fired too soon, the security detail in the car at the head of the motorcade would see the gunflash and return fire. He would wait until that car—and the presidential limo—made the dogleg left onto Elm. Not just a sniper; a fucking backshooter.

I still had three minutes.

Or maybe just two and a half.

I attacked the stairs between the second and third floor, ignoring the pain in my knee, forcing myself upward like a marathoner near the end of a long race. Which, of course, I was.

From below us, I could hear Bonnie Ray yelling something that had
crazy man
and
say Leela goan shoot
in it.

Until I was halfway up the flight to the third floor, I could feel Sadie beating on my back like a rider urging a horse to go faster, but then she fell back a little. I heard her gasping for air and thought,
too many cigarettes, darlin.
My knee didn’t hurt anymore; the pain had been temporarily buried in a surge of adrenaline. I kept my left leg as straight as I could, letting the crutch do the work.

Around the bend. Up to the fourth floor. Now I was gasping, too, and the stairs looked steeper. Like a mountain. The cradle-rest at the top of the beggar’s crutch was slimy with sweat. My head pounded; my ears rang with the sound of the cheering crowd below. The eye of my imagination opened wide and I could see the approaching motorcade: the security car, then the presidential limo with the Harley-Davidson DPD motorcycles flanking it, the cops on them wearing white chin-strapped helmets and sunglasses.

Around another corner. The crutch skidding, then steadying. Up again. The crutch thudding. Now I could smell sweet sawdust from the sixth-floor renovations: workmen replacing the old plank boards with new ones. Not on Lee’s side, though. Lee had the southeast side to himself.

I reached the fifth-floor landing and made the last turn, my mouth open to scoop in air, my shirt a drenched rag against my heaving chest. Stinging sweat ran into my eyes and I blinked it away.

Three book cartons stamped ROADS TO EVERYWHERE and 4th AND 5th GRADE READERS blocked the stairs to the sixth floor. I stood on my right leg and slammed the foot of the crutch into one of them, sending it spinning. Behind me I could hear Sadie, now between the fourth and fifth floors. So I had been right to keep the gun, it seemed, although who really knew? Judging from my own experience, knowing you are the one with the primary responsibility to change the future makes you run faster.

I squeezed through the gap I created. To do so I had to put my full weight on my left leg for a second. It gave a howl of pain. I groaned and grabbed at the railing to keep from spilling forward onto the stairs. Looked at my watch. It said twelve twenty-eight, but what if it was slow? The crowd was roaring.

“Jake . . . for God’s sake hurry . . .” Sadie, still on the stairs to the fifth-floor landing.

I started up the last flight, and the sound of the crowd began to drain away into a great silence. By the time I reached the top, there was nothing but the rasp of my breath and the burning hammerstrokes of my overtaxed heart.

The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was a shadowy square dotted with islands of stacked book cartons. The overhead lights were burning where the floor was being replaced. They were off on the side where Lee Harvey Oswald planned to make history in one hundred seconds or less. Seven windows overlooked Elm Street, the five in the middle large and semicircular, the ones on the ends square. The sixth floor was gloomy around the stairhead but filled with hazy light in the area overlooking Elm Street.
Thanks to the floating sawdust from the floor project, the sunbeams slanting in through the windows looked thick enough to cut. The beam falling through the window at the southeast corner, however, had been blocked off by a stacked barricade of book cartons. The sniper’s nest was all the way across the floor from me, on a diagonal that ran from northwest to southeast.

Behind the barricade, in the sunlight, a man with a gun stood at the window. He was stooped, peering out. The window was open. A light breeze was ruffling his hair and the collar of his shirt. He began to raise the rifle.

I broke into a shambling run, slaloming around the stacked cartons, digging in my coat pocket for the .38.

“Lee!”
I shouted.
“Stop, you son of a bitch!”

He turned his head and looked at me, eyes wide, mouth hung open. For a moment he was just Lee—the guy who had laughed and played with Junie in the bath, the one who sometimes hugged his wife and kissed her upturned face—and then his thin and somehow prissy mouth wrinkled into a snarl that showed his upper teeth. When that happened, he changed into something monstrous. I doubt you believe that, but I swear it’s true. He stopped being a man and became the daemonic ghost that would haunt America from this day on, perverting its power and spoiling its every good intent.

If I let it.

The noise of the crowd rushed in again, thousands of people applauding and cheering and yelling their brains out. I heard them and Lee did, too. He knew what it meant: now or never. He whirled back to the window and socked the rifle’s butt-plate against his shoulder.

I had the pistol, the same one I’d used to kill Frank Dunning. Not just
like
it; in that moment it was the same gun. I thought so then and I think so now. The hammer tried to catch in the pocket-lining but I dragged the .38 out, hearing cloth rip as I did so.

I fired. My shot went high and only exploded splinters from the top of the window frame, but it was enough to save John Kennedy’s life.
Oswald jerked at the sound of the report, and the 160-grain slug from the Mannlicher-Carcano went high, shattering a window in the county courthouse.

There were screams and bewildered shouts from below us. Lee turned toward me again, his face a mask of rage, hate, and disappointment. He raised his rifle again, and this time it wouldn’t be the President of the United States he’d be aiming at. He worked the bolt—
clack-clack
—and I fired at him again. Although I was three-quarters of the way across the room, less than twenty-five feet away, I missed again. I saw the side of his shirt twitch, but that was all.

My crutch struck a stack of boxes. I tottered to the left, flailing with my gun-hand for balance, but there was no chance of that. For just a moment I thought of how, on the day I’d met her, Sadie had literally fallen into my arms. I knew what was going to happen. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it harmonizes, and what it usually makes is the devil’s music. This time
I
was the one who stumbled, and that was the crucial difference.

I could no longer hear her on the stairs . . . but I could still hear her rapid footfalls.

“Sadie, down!”
I shouted, but it was lost in the bark of Oswald’s rifle.

I heard the bullet pass above me. I heard her cry out.

Then there was more gunfire, this time from outside. The presidential limo had taken off, driving toward the Triple Underpass at breakneck speed, the two couples inside ducking and holding onto each other. But the security car had pulled up on the far side of Elm Street near Dealey Plaza. The cops on the motorcycles had stopped in the middle of the street, and at least four dozen people were acting as spotters, pointing up at the sixth-floor window, where a skinny man in a blue shirt was clearly visible.

I heard a patter of thumps, a sound like hailstones striking mud. Those were the bullets that missed the window and hit the bricks above or on either side. Many didn’t miss. I saw Lee’s shirt billow out as if a wind had started to blow inside it—a red one that tore
holes in the fabric: one above the right nipple, one at the sternum, a third where his navel would be. A fourth tore his neck open. He danced like a doll in the hazy, sawdusty light, and that terrible snarl never left his face. He wasn’t a man at the end, I tell you; he was something else. Whatever gets into us when we listen to our worst angels.