The afternoon of April tenth was clear and warm, a foretaste of summer. I dressed in slacks and one of the sport coats I’d bought during my year teaching at Denholm Consolidated. The .38 Police Special, fully loaded, went into my briefcase. I don’t remember being nervous; now that the time had come, I felt like a man encased in a cold envelope. I checked my watch: three-thirty.
My plan was to once more park in the Alpha Beta lot on Wycliff Avenue. I could be there by four-fifteen at the latest, even if the crosstown traffic was heavy. I’d scope out the alley. If it was empty, as I expected it would be at that hour, I’d check the hole behind the loose board. If Al’s notes were right about Lee stashing the Carcano in advance (even though he’d been wrong about the place), it would be there.
I’d go back to my car for awhile, watching the bus stop just in case Lee showed up early. When the 7:00P.M.newcomers’ service started at the Mormon church, I’d stroll to the coffee shop that served breakfast all day and take a seat by the window. I would eat food I wasn’t hungry for, dawdling, making it last, watching the buses arrive and hoping that when Lee finally got off one, he’d be alone. I would also be hopingnotto see George de Mohrenschildt’s boat of a car.
That, at least, was the plan.
I picked up my briefcase, glancing at my watch again as I didso. 3:33. The Chevy was gassed and ready to go. If I’d gone out and gotten into it then, as I’d planned to, my phone would have rung in an empty apartment. But I didn’t, because someone knocked at the door just as I reached for the knob.
I opened it and Marina Oswald was standing there.
2
For a moment I just gaped, unable to move or speak. Mostly it was her unexpected presence, but there was something else, as well. Until she was standing right in front of me, I hadn’t realized how much her wide blue eyes looked like Sadie’s.
Marina either ignored my surprised expression or didn’t notice it. She had problems of her own. “Please excuse, have you seen my hubka?” She bit her lips and shook her head a little.“Hubs-bun.”She attempted to smile, and she had those nicely refurbished teeth to smile with, but it still wasn’t very successful. “Sorry, sir, don’t speak good Eenglish. Am Byelorussia.”
I heard someone—I guess it was me—ask if she was talking about the man who lived upstairs.
“Yes, please, my hubs-bun, Lee. We leeve upstair. This ourmalyshka—our baby.” She pointed at June, who sat at the bottom of the steps in her walker, contentedly sucking on a pacifier. “He go out now all times since he lose his work.” She tried the smile again, and when her eyes crinkled, a tear spilled from the corner of the left one and tracked down her cheek.
So. Ole Bobby Stovall could get along without his best photoprint technician after all, it seemed.
“I haven’t seen him, Mrs….”Oswaldalmost jumped out, but I held it back in time. And that was good, because how would I know? They got no home delivery, it seemed. There were two mailboxes on the porch, but their name wasn’t on either of them. Neither was mine. I got no home delivery, either.
“Os’wal,” she said, and held out her hand. I shook it, moreconvinced than ever that this was a dream I was having. But her small dry palm was all too real. “Marina Os’wal, I am please to meet you, sir.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Oswald, I haven’t seen him today.” Not true; I’d seen him go out just after noon, not long after Ruth Paine’s station wagon swept Marina and June away to Irving.
“I’m worry for him,” she said. “He… I don’ know… sorry. No mean bother for you.” She smiled again—the sweetest, saddest smile—and wiped the tear slowly from her face.
“If I see him—”
Now she looked alarmed. “No, no, say nutting. He don’ like me talk to strangers. He come home supper, maybe for sure.” She walked down the steps and spoke Russian to the baby, who laughed and held out her chubby arms to her mother. “Goodbye, mister sir. Many thanks. You say nutting?”
“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.” She didn’t get that, but nodded and looked relieved when I put my finger across my lips.
I closed the door, sweating heavily. Somewhere I could hear not just one butterfly flapping its wings, but a whole cloud of them.
Maybe it’s nothing.
I watched Marina push June’s stroller down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, where she probably meant to wait for her hubs-bun… who was up to something. That much she knew. It had been all over her face.
I reached for the doorknob when she was out of sight, and that was when the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it, but there were only a few people with my number, and one of them was a woman I cared about very much.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. Amberson,” a man said. He had a soft Southern accent. I’m not sure if I knew who he was right away. I can’t remember. I think I did. “Someone here has something to say to you.”
I lived two lives in late 1962 and early 1963, one in Dallas and one in Jodie. They came together at 3:39 on the afternoon of April 10. In my ear, Sadie began screaming.
3
She lived in a single-story prefab ranch on Bee Tree Lane, part of a four- or five-block development of houses just like it on the west side of Jodie. An aerial photograph of the neighborhood in a 2011 history book might have been captioned MID-CENTURY STARTER HOMES. She arrived there around three o’clock that afternoon, following an after-school meeting with her student library aides. I doubt if she noticed the white-over-red Plymouth Fury parked at the curb a little way down the block.
Across the street, four or five houses down, Mrs. Holloway was washing her car (a Renault Dauphine that the rest of the neighbors eyed with suspicion). Sadie waved to her when she got out of her VW Bug. Mrs. Holloway waved back. The only owners of foreign (and somehowalien) cars on the block, they were casually collegial.
Sadie went up the walk to her front door and stood there for a moment, frowning. It was ajar. Had she left it that way? She went in and closed it behind her. It didn’t catch because the lock had been forced, but she didn’t notice. By then her whole attention was fixed on the wall over the sofa. There, written in her own lipstick, were two words in letters three feet high: DIRTY CUNT.
