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On two occasions he met with Lee. Once it was at de Mohrenschildt’s favorite strip club.
Lee seemed uncomfortable with the milieu, and they didn’t stay long. The second time they had lunch in a Browder Street coffee shop. There they remained until almost two in the afternoon, talking over endless cups of coffee. Lee started to get up, reconsidered, and ordered something else.
The waitress brought him a piece of pie, and he handed her something, which she put in her apron pocket after a cursory glance. Instead of following when they left, I approached the waitress and asked if I could see what the young man had given her.
“You c’n have it,” she said, and gave me a sheet of yellow paper with black tabloid letters at the top: HANDS OFF CUBA! It urged “interested persons” to join the Dallas–Fort Worth branch of this fine organization. DON’T LET UNCLE SAM DUPE YOU! WRITE TO PO BOX 1919 FOR
DETAILS OF FUTURE MEETINGS.
“What did they talk about?” I asked.
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I tip better than the cops,” I said, and handed her a five-dollar bill.
“That stuff,” she said, and pointed at the flyer, which Oswald had undoubtedly printed off at his new place of employment. “Cuba. Like I give a shit.”
But on the night of October twenty-second, less than a week later, President Ke
7
It’s a blues truism that you never miss your water until the well runs dry, but until the fall of 1962, I didn’t realize that also applied to the patter of little feet shaking your ceiling. With the family from upstairs gone, 214 West Neely took on a creepy haunted-house vibe. I missed Sadie, and began to worry about her almost obsessively. On second thought, you can strike the almost.
Ellie Dockerty and Deke Simmons didn’t take my concern about her husband seriously. Sadie herself didn’t take it seriously; for all I knew, she thought I was trying to scare her about John Clayton in order to keep her from pushing me entirely out of her life. None of them knew that, if you removed the Sadie part, her name was only a syllable away from Doris Du
The bad dreams started to come back. The Jimla dreams.
I quit keeping tabs on George de Mohrenschildt and started taking long walks that began in the afternoon and didn’t finish up back at West Neely Street until nine or even ten o’clock at night. I spent them thinking about Lee, now working as a photoprint trainee at a Dallas graphic arts company called Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. Or about Marina, who had taken up temporary residence with a newly divorced woman named Elena Hall. The Hall woman worked for George Bouhe’s dentist, and it was the dentist who had been behind the wheel of the pickup on the day Marina and June moved out of the dump on Mercedes Street.
Mostly what I thought about was Sadie. And Sadie. And Sadie.
On one of those strolls, feeling thirsty as well as depressed, I stopped into a neighborhood watering hole called the Ivy Room and ordered a beer. The jukebox was off and the patrons were unusually silent. When the waitress put my beer in front of me and immediately turned to face the TV over the bar, I realized that everyone was watching the man I had come to save. He was pale and grave. There were dark circles under his eyes.
“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine of all offensive equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, will be turned back.”
“Christ Jesus!” said a man in a cowboy hat. “What does he think the Russkies are goan do about that?”
“Shut up, Bill,” the bartender said. “We need to hear this.”
“It shall be the policy of this nation,” Ke
What I saw on Ke
“As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantánamo and evacuated today the dependents of our perso
“Drinks for the house on me,” Bill the Cowboy suddenly proclaimed. “Because this looks like the end of the road, amigos. ” He put two twenties beside his shot glass, but the bartender made no move to pick them up. He was watching Ke
The operator told me to deposit forty cents for the first three minutes. I dropped in two quarters. The pay phone bonged mellowly. Faintly, I could still hear Ke
No waffling there.
“Co
“I’m listening,” I said. Sadie would be, too. Sadie, whose husband had spouted a lot of apocalyptic bullshit thinly coated with science. Sadie, whose Yalie politico friend had told her something big was going to pop in the Caribbean. A flashpoint, probably Cuba.
I had no idea what I was going to say to soothe her, but that wasn’t a problem. The phone rang and rang. I didn’t like it. Where was she at eight-thirty on a Monday night in Jodie? At the movies? I didn’t believe it.
“Sir, your party does not answer.”
“I know it,” I said, and grimaced when I heard Lee’s pet phrase coming out of my mouth.
My quarters clattered into the coin return when I hung up. I started to put them back in, then reconsidered. What good would it do to call Miz Ellie? I was in Miz Ellie’s bad books now. Deke’s too, probably. They’d tell me to go peddle my papers.
When I walked back to the bar, Walter Cronkite was showing U-2 photos of the Soviet missile bases that were under construction. He said that many members of Congress were urging Ke