11/22/63: A Novel

“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the Morning News that said there have already been two hundred death threats and tips about potential assassins. He says both the right-wingers from Dallas-Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats and tips over to the FBI and they’re doing nothing. He says the only person J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby.”

I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”

That was his name, sure. “He is.”

“Making Combat?”

“No, a movie.”

She burst into tears. “Don’t you die, Jake-please. I only want you to get better.”

I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied-sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace-but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick-dying-but his eyes were full of bright intensity.

“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, I knew that.

“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories-the vital ones-because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”

“How can he? He’s dead.”

Al shook his head. “No, that’s me.”

“Who is he? What is he? And how can he come back to life? He cut his own throat and the card turned black! I saw it!”

“Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can’t stop you if you refuse to stop. You have to get at those memories. ”

“Help me, then!” I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. “Tell me the guy’s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of those ring a bell, but neither one seems right. You got me into this, so help me! ”

At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow Card Man intervenes. If we’re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront or the Kennebec Fruit. If it’s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular hole in the world. He’s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing balls of worms.

“He can’t tell you nothing because it’s double-money day!” the Yellow Card Man who is now the Black Card Man screams.

I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories aren’t there.

Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit, hoping they would jog something loose. They didn’t. Once, while I was lying on the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of us in trouble.

“I don’t care!” Sadie shouted. “I know you think he’s nuts, but what if he’s right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from Dallas in a box?”

“If you bring the police in, they’ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here.”

Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn’t told him that.

She stopped arguing, but she didn’t give up. Sometimes she tried to surprise it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups. It didn’t work.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know.”

“Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it.”

“I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines.” I rubbed at the back of my head, where the ache was starting again. “But it might have been the Navy. Shit, Christy, I don’t know.”

“Sadie, Jake. I’m Sadie.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

She shook her head and tried to smile.

On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the Morning News ran a long editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city. “Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president with open arms,” the piece said. “Excitement is running high. Of course it doesn’t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride.”

“More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?” Sadie asked when she came in. She’d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to “show the flag,” as she put it.

I shook my head. “Honey, you’ve been here a lot more than you’ve been in Jodie. What’s the status of your job?”

“Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I’m getting by, and when I go with you… if we go… I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”