11/22/63: A Novel

By the time we reached the shadow of the Depository, I was sweating, my armpit was hollering from the constant pressure of the crutch cradle, and my left knee had been cinched in a fiery belt. I could barely bend it. I looked up and saw Depository employees leaning from some of the windows. I couldn’t see anyone in the one at the southeast corner of the sixth floor, but Lee would be there.

I looked at my watch. Twelve-twenty. We could track the motorcade’s progress by the rising roar on Lower Main Street.

Sadie tried the door, then gave me an anguished glare. “Locked!”

Inside, I saw a black man wearing a poorboy cap tilted at a jaunty angle. He was smoking a cigarette. Al had been a great one for marginalia in his notebook, and near the end — casually jotted, almost doodled — he had written the names of several of Lee’s co-workers. I’d made no effort to study these, because I didn’t see what earthly use I could put them to. Next to one of those names — the one belonging to the guy in the poorboy cap, I had no doubt — Al had written: First one they suspected (probably because black). It had been an unusual name, but I still couldn’t remember it, either because Roth and his goons had beaten it out of my head (along with all sorts of other stuff) or because I hadn’t paid enough attention in the first place.

Or just because the past was obdurate. And did it matter? It just wouldn’t come. The name was nowhere.

Sadie hammered on the door. The black man in the poorboy cap stood watching her impassively. He took a drag on his cigarette and then waved the back of his hand at her: go on, lady, go on.

“Jake, think of something! PLEASE!”

Twelve twenty-one.

An unusual name, yes, but why had it been unusual? I was surprised to find this was something I actually knew.

“Because it was a girl’s,” I said.

Sadie turned to me. Her cheeks were flushed except for the scar, which stood out in a white snarl. “What?”

Suddenly I was hammering on the glass. “Bonnie!” I shouted. “Hey, Bonnie Ray! Let us in! We know Lee! Lee! LEE OSWALD!”

He registered the name and crossed the lobby in a maddeningly slow amble.

“I didn’t know that scrawny l’il sumbitch had any friends,” Bonnie Ray Williams said as he opened the door, then stepped aside as we rushed inside. “He probably in the break room, watchin for the president with the rest of—”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’m not his friend and he’s not in the break room. He’s on the sixth floor. I think he means to shoot President Kennedy.”

The big man laughed merrily. He dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with a workboot. “That little pissant wouldn’t have the guts to drown a litter o’ kittens in a sack. All he do is sit in the corner and read books.”

“I tell you—”

“I’m goan on up to two. If you want to come with me, you’re welcome, I guess. But don’t be talkin any more nonsense about Leela. That’s what we call him, Leela. Shoot the president! Lor!” He waved his hand and ambled away.

I thought, You belong in Derry, Bonnie Ray. They specialize in not seeing what’s right in front of them.

“Stairs,” I told Sadie.

“The elevator would be—”

The end of any chance we might have left was what it would be.

“It would get stuck between floors. Stairs.”

I took her hand and pulled her toward them. The staircase was a narrow gullet with wooden risers swaybacked from years of traffic. There was a rusty iron railing on the left. At the foot, Sadie turned to me. “Give me the gun.”

“No.”

“You’ll never make it in time. I will. Give me the gun.”

I almost gave it up. It wasn’t that I felt I deserved to keep it; now that the actual watershed moment had come, it didn’t matter who stopped Oswald as long as someone did. But we were only a step away from the roaring machine of the past, and I was damned if I’d risk Sadie taking that last step ahead of me, only to be sucked into its whirling belts and blades.

I smiled, then leaned forward and kissed her. “Race you,” I said, and started up the stairs. Over my shoulder I called, “If I fall asleep, he’s all yours!”

13

“You folks crazy,” I heard Bonnie Ray Williams say in a mildly remonstrative tone of voice. Then there was the light thud of footsteps as Sadie followed me. I crutched on the right — no longer leaning on it but almost vaulting on it — and hauled at the railing on the left. The gun in my sport coat pocket swung and thudded against my hip. My knee was bellowing. I let it yell.