11/22/63: A Novel

Below were side-by-side photos of two bare-chested beefcakes with their gloved fists held up in the accepted fashion. One was young and unmarked. The other guy looked a lot older, and as if he’d had his nose broken a few times. The names were what stopped me, though. I knew them from somewhere.

“Don’t even think about it,” Deke said, shaking his head. “You’d get more sport out of watching a dogfight between a pit bull and a cocker spaniel. An old cocker spaniel.”

“Really?”

“Tommy Case always had a ton of heart, but now it’s a forty-year-old heart in a forty-year-old body. He got him a beergut and he can hardly move at all. Tiger’s young and fast. He’ll be a champ in a couple of years if the matchmakers don’t slip up. In the meantime, they feed him walking tank-jobs like Case to keep him in trim.”

It sounded to me like Rocky Balboa against Apollo Creed, but why not? Sometimes life imitates art.

Deke said, “TV you pay to watch in an auditorium. Boy-howdy, what next?”

“The wave of the future, I guess,” I said.

“And it’ll probably sell out-in Dallas, at least-but that doesn’t change the fact that Tom Case is the wave of the past. Tiger’ll slice him like coldcuts. Sure you’re okay with this Grange thing, George?”

“Absolutely.”

4

That was a strange June. On one hand, I was delighted to be rehearsing with the troupe that had put on the original Jamboree. It was deja vu of the best kind. On the other hand, I found myself wondering, with greater and greater frequency, if I had ever intended to strike Lee Harvey Oswald from history’s equation in the first place. I couldn’t believe I lacked the guts to do it-I had already killed one bad man, and in cold blood-but it was an undeniable fact that I’d had Oswald in my sights and let him go. I told myself it was the uncertainty principle, and not the fact of his family, but I kept seeing Marina smiling and holding her hands out in front of her belly. I kept wondering if he might not be a patsy, after all. I reminded myself he’d be back in October. And then, of course, I asked myself how that would change things. His wife would still be pregnant and the window of uncertainty would still be open.

Meanwhile, there was Sadie’s slow recovery to preside over, there were bills to pay, there were insurance forms to fill out (the bureaucracy every bit as infuriating in 1963 as in 2011), and those rehearsals. Dr. Ellerton could only show up for one of them, but he was a quick study and hoofed his half of Bertha the Dancing Pony with charming brio. After the run-through, he told me he wanted to bring another surgeon on board, a facial specialist from Mass General. I told him-with a sinking heart-that another surgeon sounded like a grand idea.

“Can you afford it?” he asked. “Mark Anderson ain’t cheap.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.

I invited Sadie to rehearsals when the show dates grew close. She refused gently but firmly in spite of her earlier promise to come to at least one dress rehearsal. She rarely left the house, and when she did, it was only to go into the backyard garden. She hadn’t been to the school-or in town-since the night John Clayton cut her face and then his own throat.

5

I spent the late morning and early afternoon of July twelfth at the Grange Hall, running a final tech rehearsal. Mike Coslaw, who had settled as naturally into the role of producer as he had that of slapstick comedian, told me the Saturday-night show was a sellout and tonight’s was at ninety percent. “We’ll get enough walk-ups to fill the place, Mr. A. Count on it. I just hope me and Bobbi Jill don’t mess up the encore.”

“Bobbi Jill and I, Mike. And you won’t mess up.”

All of that was good. Less good was passing Ellen Dockerty’s car turning out of Bee Tree Lane just as I was turning in, and then finding Sadie sitting by the living room window with tears on her unmarked cheek and a handkerchief in one fisted hand.

“What?” I demanded. “What did she say to you?”

Sadie surprised me by mustering a grin. It was lopsided, but not without a certain gamine charm. “Nothing that wasn’t the truth. Please don’t worry. I’ll make you a sandwich and you can tell me how it went.”

So that was what I did. And I did worry, of course, but I kept my worries to myself. Also my comments on the subject of meddlesome high school principals. That evening at six, Sadie inspected me, reknotted my tie, and then brushed some lint, real or imagined, from the shoulders of my sport coat. “I’d tell you to break a leg, but you might just go and do it.”

She was wearing her old jeans and a smock top that camouflaged-a little, anyway-her weight-loss. I found myself remembering the pretty dress she’d worn to the original Jodie Jamboree. Pretty dress that night with a pretty girl inside it. That was then. Tonight the girl-still pretty on one side-would be at home when the curtain went up, watching a Route 66 rerun.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Wishing you were going to be there, that’s all.”