11/22/63: A Novel (99 page)

“You’re clean. All you need to do is to get to someplace where
your people can pick you up and fly you away to spook neverland. Can you manage that?”

Neverland in my case was a rabbit-hole that would transport me forty-eight years into the future. Assuming the rabbit-hole was still there.

“I believe I’ll be okay.”

“You better be, because if you try to hurt us, it’ll come back on you double. Mr. Hoover . . . let’s just say that the director is not a forgiving man.”

“Tell me how I’m getting out of the hotel.”

“You’ll put on those kitchen whites, the glasses, and the hairnet. The key runs the service elevator. It’ll take you to B-1. You walk straight through the kitchen and out the back door. With me so far?”

“Yes.”

“There’ll be a Bureau car waiting for you. Get in the backseat. You don’t talk to the driver. This ain’t no limousine service. Off you go to the bus station. Your driver can offer you one of three tickets: Tampa at eleven-forty, Little Rock at eleven-fifty, or Albuquerque at twenty past midnight. I don’t want to know which one. All
you
need to know is that’s where our association ends. Your responsibility to stay out of sight becomes all your own. And whoever it is you work for, of course.”

“Of course.”

The telephone rang. “If it’s some smartass reporter who found a way to ring through, get rid of him,” Hosty said. “And if you say a word about me being here, I’ll cut your throat.”

I thought he was joking about that, but wasn’t entirely sure. I picked up the phone. “I don’t know who this is, but I’m pretty tired right now, so—”

The breathy voice on the other end said she wouldn’t keep me long. To Hosty I mouthed
Jackie Kennedy.
He nodded and poured a little more of my champagne. I turned away, as if by presenting Hosty with my back I could keep him from overhearing the conversation.

“Mrs. Kennedy, you really didn’t have to call,” I said, “but I’m
honored to hear from you, just the same.”

“I wanted to thank you for what you did,” she said. “I know that my husband has already thanked you on our behalf, but . . . Mr. Amberson . . .” The first lady began to cry. “I wanted to thank you on behalf of our children, who were able to say goodnight to their mother and dad on the phone tonight.”

Carolyn and John-John. They’d never crossed my mind until that moment.

“Mrs. Kennedy, you’re more than welcome.”

“I understand the young woman who died was to become your wife.”

“That’s right.”

“You must be heartbroken. Please accept my condolences—they aren’t enough, I know that, but they are all I have to offer.”

“Thank you.”

“If I could change it . . . if in any way I could turn back the clock . . .”

No,
I thought.
That’s my job, Miz Jackie.

“I understand. Thank you.”

We talked a little longer. This call was much more difficult than the one with Kennedy at the police station. Partly because that one had felt like a dream and this one didn’t, but mostly I think it was the residual fear I heard in Jacqueline Kennedy’s voice. She truly seemed to understand what a narrow escape they’d had. I’d gotten no sense of that from the man himself. He seemed to believe he was providentially lucky, blessed, maybe even immortal. Toward the end of the conversation I remember asking her to make sure her husband quit riding in open cars for the duration of his presidency.

She said I could count on that, then thanked me one more time. I told her she was welcome one more time, then hung up the phone. When I turned around, I saw I had the room to myself. At some point while I’d been talking to Jacqueline Kennedy, Hosty had left. All that remained of him were two butts in the ashtray, a half-finished glass of champagne, and another scribbled note, lying
beside the yellow legal pad with my to-whom-it-may-concern letter on it.

Get rid of the bug before you go into the bus station,
it read. And below that:
Good luck, Amberson. Very sorry for your loss. H.

Maybe he was, but sorry is cheap, isn’t it? Sorry is so cheap.

I put on my kitchen potboy disguise and rode down to B-1 in an elevator that smelled like chicken soup, barbecue sauce, and Jack Daniel’s. When the doors opened, I walked briskly through the steamy, fragrant kitchen. I don’t think anyone so much as looked at me.

I came out in an alley where a couple of winos were picking through a trash bin. They didn’t look at me, either, although they glanced up when sheet lightning momentarily brightened the sky. A nondescript Ford sedan was idling at the mouth of the alley. I got into the backseat and off we went. The man behind the wheel said only one thing before pulling up to the Greyhound station: “Looks like rain.”

He offered me the three tickets like a poor man’s poker hand. I took the one for Little Rock. I had about an hour. I went into the gift shop and bought a cheap suitcase. If all went well, I’d eventually have something to put in it. I wouldn’t need much; I had all sorts of clothes at my house in Sabattus, and although that particular domicile was almost fifty years in the future, I hoped to be there in less than a week. A paradox Einstein could love, and it never crossed my tired, grieving mind that—given the butterfly effect—it almost certainly would no longer be mine. If it was there at all.

I also bought a newspaper, an extra edition of the
Slimes Herald.
There was a single photo, maybe snapped by a professional, more likely by some lucky bystander. It showed Kennedy bent over the woman I’d been talking to not long ago, the woman who’d had no
bloodstains on her pink suit when she’d finally taken it off this evening.

John F. Kennedy shields his wife with his body as the presidential limo speeds away from what was nearly a national catastrophe
, the caption read. Above this was a headline in thirty-six-point type. There was room, because it was only one word:

SAVED!

I turned to page 2 and was confronted with another picture. This one was of Sadie, looking impossibly young and impossibly beautiful. She was smiling.
I have my whole life ahead of me,
the smile said.

Sitting in one of the slatted wooden chairs while late-night travelers surged around me and babies cried and servicemen with duffels laughed and businessmen got shines and the overhead speakers announced arrivals and departures, I carefully folded the newsprint around the borders of that picture so I could remove it from the page without tearing her face. When that much was accomplished, I looked at it for a long time, then folded it into my wallet. The rest of the paper I threw away. There was nothing in it I wanted to read.

Boarding for the bus to Little Rock was called at eleven-twenty, and I joined the crowd clustering around the proper door. Other than wearing the fake glasses, I made no attempt to hide my face, but no one looked at me with any particular interest; I was just one more cell in the bloodstream of Transit America, no more important than any other.

I changed your lives today,
I thought as I watched those present at the turning of the day, but there was no triumph or wonder in the idea; it seemed to have no emotional charge at all, either positive or negative.

I got on the bus and sat near the back. There were a lot of guys in uniform ahead of me, probably bound for Little Rock Air Force
Base. If not for what we’d done today, some of them would have died in Vietnam. Others would have come home maimed. And now? Who knew?

The bus pulled out. When we left Dallas, the thunder was louder and the lightning brighter, but there was still no rain. By the time we reached Sulphur Springs, the threatening storm was behind us and the stars were out in their tens of thousands, brilliant as ice chips and twice as cold. I looked at them for awhile, then leaned back, shut my eyes, and listened to the Big Dog’s tires eating up Interstate 30.

Sadie,
the tires sang.
Sadie, Sadie, Sadie.

At last, sometime after two in the morning, I slept.

In Little Rock I bought a ticket on the noon bus to Pittsburgh, with a single stop in Indianapolis. I had breakfast in the depot diner, near an old fellow who ate with a portable radio in front of him on the table. It was large and covered with shiny dials. The major story was still the attempted assassination, of course . . . and Sadie. Sadie was big, big news. She was to be given a state funeral, followed by interment at Arlington National Cemetery. There was speculation that JFK himself would deliver the eulogy. In related developments, Miss Dunhill’s fiancé, George Amberson, also of Jodie, Texas, had been scheduled to appear before the press at 10:00
A.M.
, but that had been pushed back to late afternoon—no reason given. Hosty was providing me all the room to run that he possibly could. Good for me. Him, too, of course. And his precious director.

“The president and his heroic saviors aren’t the only news coming out of Texas this morning,” the old duffer’s radio said, and I paused with a cup of black coffee suspended halfway between the saucer and my lips. There was a sour tingle in my mouth that I’d come to recognize. A psychologist might have termed it
presque vu
—the sense
people sometimes get that something amazing is about to happen—but my name for it was much more humble: a harmony.

“At the height of a thunderstorm shortly after one
A.M.
, a freak tornado touched down in Fort Worth, destroying a Montgomery Ward warehouse and a dozen homes. Two people are known dead, and four are missing.”

That two of the houses were 2703 and 2706 Mercedes Street, I had no doubt; an angry wind had erased them like a bad equation.

I stepped off my final Greyhound at the Minot Avenue station in Auburn, Maine, at a little past noon on the twenty-sixth of November. After more than eighty hours of almost nonstop riding, relieved only by short intervals of sleep, I felt like a figment of my own imagination. It was cold. God was clearing His throat and spitting casual snow from a dirty gray sky. I had bought some jeans and a couple of blue chambray workshirts to replace the kitchen-whites, but such clothes weren’t nearly enough. I had forgotten the Maine weather during my time in Texas, but my body remembered in a hurry and started to shiver. I made Louie’s for Men my first stop, where I found a sheepskin-lined coat in my size and took it to the clerk.

He put down his copy of the Lewiston
Sun
to wait on me, and I saw my picture—yes, the one from the DCHS yearbook—on the front page. WHERE IS GEORGE AMBERSON? the headline demanded. The clerk rang up the sale and scribbled me a receipt. I tapped my picture. “What in the world do you suppose is up with that guy?”

The clerk looked at me and shrugged. “He doesn’t want the publicity and I don’t blame him. I love my wife a whole darn bunch, and if she died sudden, I wouldn’t want people taking my picture for the papers or putting my weepy mug on TV. Would you?”

“No,” I said, “I guess not.”

“If I were that guy, I wouldn’t come up for air until 1970. Let
the ruckus die down. How about a nice cap to go with that coat? I got some flannel ones that just came in yesterday. The earflaps are good and thick.”

So I bought a cap to go with my new coat. Then I limped the two blocks back to the bus station, swinging my suitcase at the end of my good arm. Part of me wanted to go to Lisbon Falls right that minute and make sure the rabbit-hole was still there. But if it was, I’d use it, I wouldn’t be able to resist, and after five years in the Land of Ago, the rational part of me knew I wasn’t ready for the full-on assault of what had become, in my mind, the Land of Ahead. I needed some rest first. Real rest, not dozing in a bus seat while little kids wailed and tipsy men laughed.

There were four or five taxis parked at the curb, in snow that was now swirling instead of just spitting. I got into the first one, relishing the warm breath from the heater. The cabbie turned around, a fat guy with a badge reading LICENSED LIVERY on his battered cap. He was a complete stranger to me, but I knew that when he turned on the radio, it would be tuned to WJAB out of Portland, and when he dragged his ciggies out of his breast pocket, they would be Lucky Strikes. What goes around comes around.

“Where to, chief?”

I told him to take me to the Tamarack Motor Court, out on 196.

“You got it.”

He turned on the radio and got the Miracles, singing “Mickey’s Monkey.”

“These modern dances!” he grunted, grabbing his smokes. “They don’t do nothing but teach the kids how to bump n wiggle.”

“Dancing is life,” I said.

It was a different desk clerk, but she gave me the same room. Of course she did. The rate was a little higher and the old TV had been replaced by a newer one, but the same sign was propped against the rabbit ears on top:
DO NOT USE “TINFOIL!”
The reception was still shitty. There was no news, only soap operas.

I turned it off. I put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. I drew the curtains. Then I stripped and crawled into bed, where—aside from a dreamlike stumble to the bathroom to relieve my bladder—I slept for twelve hours. When I woke up, it was the middle of the night, the power was off, and a strong northwest wind was blowing outside. A brilliant crescent moon rode high in the sky. I got the extra blanket from the closet and slept for another five hours.

When I woke up, dawn lit the Tamarack Motor Court with the clear hues and shadows of a
National Geographic
photograph. There was frost on the cars pulled up in front of a scattering of units, and I could see my breath. I tried the phone, expecting nothing, but a young man in the office answered promptly, although he sounded as if he were still half-asleep. Sure, he said, the phones were fine and he’d be happy to call me a taxi—where did I want to go?

Lisbon Falls, I told him. Corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road.

“The Fruit?” he asked.

I’d been away so long that for a moment it seemed like a total non sequitur. Then it clicked. “That’s right. The Kennebec Fruit.”