11/22/63

There was a low, crunching bang from the right front of the Chevy and suddenly we were veering at a lamppost. There was a series of hard thuds from beneath the car. I spun the wheel. It was sickeningly loose in my hands, but I got just enough steerage to avoid hitting the post head-on. Instead, Sadie’s side scraped it, creating a ghastly metal-on-metal screee. Her door bowed inward and I yanked her toward me on the bench seat. We came to a stop with the hood hanging over the sidewalk and the car listing to the right. That wasn’t just a flat tire, I thought. That was a mortal fucking injury.

Sadie looked at me, stunned. I laughed. As previously noted, sometimes there’s just nothing else you can do.

“Welcome to the past, Sadie,” I said. “This is how we live here.”

4

She couldn’t get out on her side; it was going to take a crowbar to pry the passenger door open. She slid the rest of the way across the seat and got out on mine. A few people were watching, not many.

“Gee, what happened?” a woman pushing a baby carriage asked.

That was obvious once I got around to the front of the car. The right front wheel had snapped off. It lay twenty feet behind us at the end of a curving trench in the asphalt. The jagged axle-stub gleamed in the sun.

“Busted wheel,” I told the woman with the baby carriage.

“Oh, law,” she said.

“What do we do?” Sadie asked in a low voice.

“We took out an insurance policy; now we file a claim. Nearest bus stop.”

“My suitcase—”

Yes, I thought, and Al’s notebook. My manuscripts — the shitty novel that doesn’t matter and the memoir that does. Plus my available cash. I glanced at my watch. Quarter past nine. At the Texas Hotel, Jackie would be dressing in her pink suit. After another hour or so of politics, the motorcade would be on the move to Carswell Air Force Base, where the big plane was parked. Given the distance between Fort Worth and Dallas, the pilots would barely have time to put their wheels up.

I tried to think.

“Would you like to use my phone to call someone?” the woman with the baby carriage asked. “My house is right up the street.” She scanned us, picking up on my limp and Sadie’s scar. “Are you hurt?”

“We’re fine,” I said. I took Sadie’s arm. “Would you call a service station and ask them to tow it? I know it’s a lot to ask, but we’re in a terrible hurry.”

“I told him that front end was wobbly,” Sadie said. She was pouring on the Georgia drawl. “Thank goodness we weren’t on the highway.” Ha-way.

“There’s an Esso about two blocks up.” She pointed north. “I guess I could stroll the baby over there…”

“Oh, that would be a lifesaver, ma’am,” Sadie said. She opened her purse, removed her wallet, and took out a twenty. “Give them this on account. Sorry to ask you like this, but if I don’t see Kennedy, I will just dah.” That made the baby carriage woman smile.

“Goodness, that much would pay for two tows. If you have some paper in your purse, I could scribble a receipt—”

“That’s okay,” I said. “We trust you. But maybe I’ll put a note under the wiper.”

Sadie was looking at me questioningly… but she was also holding out a pen and little pad with a cross-eyed cartoon kid on the cover. SKOOL DAZE, it said below his loopy grin. DEAR OLE GOLDEN SNOOZE DAZE.

A lot was riding on that note, but there was no time to think about the wording. I jotted rapidly and folded it under the wiper blade. A moment later we were around the corner and gone.

5

“Jake? Are you okay?”

“Fine. You?”

“I got bumped by the door and I’ll probably have a bruise on my shoulder, but otherwise, yes. If we’d hit that post, I probably wouldn’t have been. You, either. Who was the note for?”

“Whoever tows the Chevy.” And I hoped to God Mr. Whoever would do as the note asked. “We’ll worry about that part when we come back.”

If we came back.

The next bus pole was halfway up the block. Three black women, two white women, and a Hispanic man were standing by the post, a racial mixture so balanced it looked like a casting call for Law and Order SVU. We joined them. I sat on the bench inside the shelter next to a sixth woman, an African-American lady whose heroic proportions were packed into a white rayon uniform that practically screamed Well-to-do White Folks’ Housekeeper. On her bosom she wore a button that read ALL THE WAY WITH JFK IN ’64.

“Bad leg, sir?” she asked me.

“Yes.” I had four packets of headache powder in the pocket of my sport coat. I reached past the gun, got two of them, tore off the tops, and poured them into my mouth.

“Taking them that way will box your kidneys around,” she said.

“I know. But I’ve got to keep this leg going long enough to see the president.”

She broke into a large smile. “Don’t I hear that.”

Sadie was standing on the curb and looking anxiously back down the street for a Number Three.