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, lyingbeside 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.
11
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 theSlimes 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 hadno 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 ForceBase. 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.
12
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 10:00A.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 itpresquevu—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 oneA.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.
CHAPTER 30
1
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 LewistonSunto 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?”
