It was their first separation. Lee went to Dallas to look for work. I don’t know where he stayed. According to Al’s notes it was the Y, but that turned out to be wrong. Maybe he found a place in one of the cheap rooming houses downtown. I wasn’t concerned. I knew they’d show up together to rent the apartment above me, and for the time being, I’d had enough of him. It was a treat not to have to listen to his slowed-down voice sayingI know ita dozen times in every conversation.
Thanks to George Bouhe, Marina landed on her feet. Not long after Marguerite’s visit and Lee’s decampment, Bouhe and another man arrived in a Chevy truck and moved her out. When the pickup left 2703 Mercedes, mother and daughter were riding in the bed. The pink suitcase Marina had brought from Russia had been lined with blankets, and June lay fast asleep in this makeshift nest. Marina put a steadying hand on the little girl’s chest as the truck started rolling. The jump-rope girls were watching, and Marina waved to them. They waved back.
6
I found George de Mohrenschildt’s address in the Dallas White Pages and followed him several times. I was curious about whom he might meet, although if it were a CIA man, a minion of the Lansky Mob, or some other possible conspirator, I doubt I would have known it. All I can say is that he met no one that seemed suspicious to me. He went to work; he went to the Dallas Country Club, where he played tennis or swam with his wife; they went out to a couple of strip clubs. He didn’t bother the dancers, but had a penchant for fondling his wife’s boobs and butt in public. She didn’t seem to mind.
On two occasions he met with Lee. Once it was at deMohrenschildt’s favorite strip club. Lee seemed uncomfortable with the milieu, and they didn’t stay long. The second time they had lunch in a Browder Street coffee shop. There they remained until almost two in the afternoon, talking over endless cups of coffee. Lee started to get up, reconsidered, and ordered something else. The waitress brought him a piece of pie, and he handed her something, which she put in her apron pocket after a cursory glance. Instead of following when they left, I approached the waitress and asked if I could see what the young man had given her.
“You c’n have it,” she said, and gave me a sheet of yellow paper with black tabloid letters at the top: HANDS OFF CUBA! It urged “interested persons” to join the Dallas–Fort Worth branch of this fine organization. DON’T LET UNCLE SAM DUPE YOU! WRITE TO PO BOX 1919 FOR DETAILS OF FUTURE MEETINGS.
“What did they talk about?” I asked.
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I tip better than the cops,” I said, and handed her a five-dollar bill.
“That stuff,” she said, and pointed at the flyer, which Oswald had undoubtedly printed off at his new place of employment. “Cuba. Like I give a shit.”
But on the night of October twenty-second, less than a week later, President Kennedy was also talking about Cuba. And then everybody gave a shit.
7
It’s a blues truism that you never miss your water until the well runs dry, but until the fall of 1962, I didn’t realize that also applied to the patter of little feet shaking your ceiling. With the family from upstairs gone, 214 West Neely took on a creepy haunted-house vibe. I missed Sadie, and began to worry about her almost obsessively. On second thought, you can strike the almost. Ellie Dockerty and Deke Simmons didn’t take my concern about herhusband seriously. Sadie herself didn’t take it seriously; for all I knew, she thought I was trying to scare her about John Clayton in order to keep her from pushing me entirely out of her life. None of them knew that, if you removed the Sadie part, her name was only a syllable away from Doris Dunning. None of them knew about the harmonic effect, which I seemed to be creating myself, just by my presence in the Land of Ago. That being the case, who would be to blame if something happened to Sadie?
The bad dreams started to come back. The Jimla dreams.
I quit keeping tabs on George de Mohrenschildt and started taking long walks that began in the afternoon and didn’t finish up back at West Neely Street until nine or even ten o’clock at night. I spent them thinking about Lee, now working as a photoprint trainee at a Dallas graphic arts company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. Or about Marina, who had taken up temporary residence with a newly divorced woman named Elena Hall. The Hall woman worked for George Bouhe’s dentist, and it was the dentist who had been behind the wheel of the pickup on the day Marina and June moved out of the dump on Mercedes Street.
Mostly what I thought about was Sadie. And Sadie. And Sadie.
On one of those strolls, feeling thirsty as well as depressed, I stopped into a neighborhood watering hole called the Ivy Room and ordered a beer. The jukebox was off and the patrons were unusually silent. When the waitress put my beer in front of me and immediately turned to face the TV over the bar, I realized that everyone was watching the man I had come to save. He was pale and grave. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine of all offensive equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, will be turned back.”
“Christ Jesus!” said a man in a cowboy hat. “What does he think the Russkies are goan do aboutthat?”
“Shut up, Bill,” the bartender said. “We need to hear this.”
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Kennedy went on, “toregard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
A woman at the end of the bar moaned and clutched her stomach. The man beside her put an arm around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.
What I saw on Kennedy’s face was fright and determination in equal measure. What I also saw waslife—a total engagement with the job at hand. He was exactly thirteen months from his date with the assassin’s bullet.
“As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantánamo and evacuated today the dependents of our personnel there.”
“Drinks for the house on me,” Bill the Cowboy suddenly proclaimed. “Because this looks like the end of the road,amigos.” He put two twenties beside his shot glass, but the bartender made no move to pick them up. He was watching Kennedy, who was now calling on Chairman Khrushchev to eliminate “this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”
The waitress who had served my beer, a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet peroxide blonde of fifty or so, suddenly burst into tears. That decided me. I got off my stool, wove my way around the tables where men and women sat looking at the television like solemn children, and slipped into one of the phone booths next to the Skee-Ball machine.
The operator told me to deposit forty cents for the first three minutes. I dropped in two quarters. The pay phone bonged mellowly. Faintly, I could still hear Kennedy talking in that nasal New England voice. Now he was accusing Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of being a liar. No waffling there.
“Connecting you now, sir,” the operator said. Then she blurted: “Are you listening to the president? If you’re not, you should turn on your TV or radio.”
“I’m listening,” I said. Sadie would be, too. Sadie, whosehusband had spouted a lot of apocalyptic bullshit thinly coated with science. Sadie, whose Yalie politico friend had told her something big was going to pop in the Caribbean. A flashpoint, probably Cuba.
I had no idea what I was going to say to soothe her, but that wasn’t a problem. The phone rang and rang. I didn’t like it. Where was she at eight-thirty on a Monday night in Jodie? At the movies? I didn’t believe it.
