"You bet I do, but right now the line'll be all the way out to the parking lot. Wait until there's a time-out in the third quarter or something. We have to roar like lions and do the Jim Cheer."
"I think you can manage those things on your own."
She smiled at me and gripped my arm. "No, I need you to help me. I'm new here, remember?"
At her touch, I felt a warm little shiver I did not associate with friendship. And why not? Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were sparkling; under the lights and the greeny-blue sky of a deepening Texas dusk, she was way beyond pretty. Things between us might have progressed faster than they did, except for what happened during that halftime.
The band marched around the way high school bands do, in step but not completely in tune, blaring a medley you couldn't quite figure out. When they finished, the cheerleaders trotted to the fifty-yard line, dropped their pompoms in front of their feet, and put their hands on their hips. "Give us an L!"
We gave them what they required, and when further importuned, we obliged with an I, an O, an N, and an S.
"What's that spell?"
"LIONS!" Everybody on the home bleachers up and clapping.
"Who's gonna win?"
"LIONS!" Given the halftime score, there wasn't much doubt about it.
"Then let us hear you roar!"
We roared in the traditional manner, turning first to the left and then to the right. Sadie gave it her all, cupping her hands around her mouth, her ponytail flying from one shoulder to the other.
What came next was the Jim Cheer. In the previous three years--yes, our Mr. LaDue had started at QB even as a freshman--this had been pretty simple. The cheerleaders would yell something like, "Let us hear your Lion Pride! Name the man who leads our side!" And the hometown crowd would bellow "JIM! JIM! JIM!" After that the cheerleaders would do a few more cartwheels and then run off the field so the other team's band could march out and tootle a tune or two. But this year, possibly in honor of Jim's valedictory season, the chant had changed.
Each time the crowd yelled "JIM," the cheerleaders responded with the first syllable of his last name, drawing it out like a teasing musical note. It was new, but it wasn't complicated, and the crowd caught on in a hurry. Sadie was doing the chant with the best of them, until she realized I wasn't. I was just standing there with my mouth open.
"George? Are you okay?"
I couldn't answer. In fact, I barely heard her. Because most of me was back in Lisbon Falls. I had just come through the rabbit-hole. I had just walked along the side of the drying shed and ducked under the chain. I had been prepared to meet the Yellow Card Man, but not to be attacked by him. Which I was. Only he was no longer the Yellow Card Man; now he was the Orange Card Man. You're not supposed to be here, he had said. Who are you? What are you doing here? And when I'd started to ask him if he'd tried AA for his drinking problem, he'd said--
"George?" Now she sounded worried as well as concerned. "What is it? What's wrong?"
The fans had totally gotten into the call-and-response thing. The cheerleaders shouted "JIM" and the bleacher-creatures shouted back "LA."
Fuck off, Jimla! That was what the Yellow Card Man who'd become the Orange Card Man (although not yet the dead-by-his-own-hand Black Card Man) had snarled at me, and that was what I was hearing now, tossed back and forth like a medicine ball between the cheerleaders and the twenty-five hundred fans watching them:
"JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA!"
Sadie grabbed my arm and shook me. "Talk to me, mister! Talk to me, because I'm getting scared!"
I turned to her and managed a smile. It did not come easy, believe me. "Just crashing for sugar, I guess. I'm going to grab those Cokes."
"You aren't going to faint, are you? I can walk you to the aid station if--"
"I'm fine," I said, and then, without thinking about what I was doing, I kissed the tip of her nose. Some kid shouted, "Way to go, Mr. A!"
Rather than looking irritated, she wriggled her nose like a rabbit, then smiled. "Get out of here, then. Before you damage my reputation. And bring me a chili dog. Lots of cheese."
"Yes, ma'am."
The past harmonizes with itself, that much I already understood. But what song was this? I didn't know, and it worried me plenty. In the concrete runway leading to the refreshment stand, the chant was magnified, making me want to put my hands over my ears to block it out.
"JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA."
PART 4
SADIE AND THE GENERAL
CHAPTER 14
1
The memorial assembly was held at the end of the new school year's first day, and if one can measure success by damp hankies, the show Sadie and I put together was boffo. I'm sure it was cathartic for the kids, and I think Miz Mimi herself would have enjoyed it. Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor, she once told me. I'm no different.
The teachers held it together through most of the eulogies. It was Mike who started to get to them, with his calm, heartfelt recitation from Proverbs 31. Then, during the slide show, with the accompanying schmaltz from West Side Story, the faculty lost it, too. I found Coach Borman particularly entertaining. With tears streaming down his red cheeks and large, quacking sobs emerging from his massive chest, Denholm's football guru reminded me of everybody's second-favorite cartoon duck, Baby Huey.
I whispered this observation to Sadie as we stood beside the big screen with its marching images of Miz Mimi. She was crying, too, but had to step off the stage and into the wings as laughter first fought with and then overcame her tears. Safely back in the shadows, she looked at me reproachfully . . . and then gave me the finger. I decided I deserved it. I wondered if Miz Mimi would still think Sadie and I were getting along famously.
I thought she probably would.
I picked Twelve Angry Men for the fall play, accidentally on purpose neglecting to inform the Samuel French Company that I intended to retitle our version The Jury, so I could cast some girls. I would hold tryouts in late October and start rehearsals on November 13, after the Lions' last regular-season football game. I had my eye on Vince Knowles for Juror #8--the holdout who'd been played by Henry Fonda in the movie--and Mike Coslaw for what I considered the best part in the show: bullying, abrasive Juror #3.
But I had begun to focus on a more important show, one that made the Frank Dunning affair look like a paltry vaudeville skit by comparison. Call this one Jake and Lee in Dallas. If things went well, it would be a tragedy in one act. I had to be ready to go onstage when the time came, and that meant starting early.
2
On the sixth of October, the Denholm Lions won their fifth football game, on their way to an undefeated season that would be dedicated to Vince Knowles, the boy who had played George in Of Mice and Men and who would never get a chance to act in the George Amberson version of Twelve Angry Men--but more of that later. It was the start of a three-day weekend, because the Monday following was Columbus Day.
I drove to Dallas on the holiday. Most businesses were open, and my first stop was one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue. I told the little man behind the counter that I wanted to buy the cheapest wedding ring he had in stock. I walked out with an eight-buck band of gold (at least it looked like gold) on the third finger of my left hand. Then I drove downtown to a place on Lower Main Street I had bird-dogged in the Dallas Yellow Pages: Silent Mike's Satellite Electronics. There I was greeted by a trim little man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a weirdly futuristic button on his vest: TRUST NOBODY, it said.
"Are you Silent Mike?" I asked.
"Yep."
"And are you truly silent?"
He smiled. "Depends on who's listening."
"Let's assume nobody," I said, and told him what I wanted. It turned out I could have saved my eight bucks, because he had no interest at all in my supposedly cheating wife. It was the equipment I wanted to buy that interested the proprietor of Satellite Electronics. On that subject he was Loquacious Mike.
; "Mister, they may have gear like that on whatever planet you come from, but we sure don't have it here."
That stirred a memory of Miz Mimi comparing me to the alien visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still. "I don't know what you mean."
"You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass case right over there to your left. They're called transistor radios. I stock both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones." He stuck out his lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. "Ain't that a kick in the behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, they'll own the world. The part of it I live in, anyway."
"So you can't help me?"
"Whattaya, kiddin? Sure I can. Silent Mike McEachern's always happy to help fill a customer's electronic needs. But it'll cost."
"I'd be willing to pay quite a bit. It could save me even more when I get that cheating bitch into divorce court."
"Uh-huh. Wait here a minute while I get something out of the back. And turn that sign in the door over to CLOSED, wouldja? I'm going to show you something that's probably not . . . well, maybe it is legal, but who knows? Is Silent Mike McEachern an attorney?"
"I'm guessing not."
My guide to sixties-era electronica reappeared with a weird-looking gadget in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. The printing on the box was in Japanese. The gadget looked like a dildo for pixie chicks, mounted on a black plastic disc. The disc was three inches thick and about the diameter of a quarter, with a spray of wires coming out of it. He put it on the counter.
"This is an Echo. Manufactured right here in town, son. If anyone can beat the sons of Nippon at their own game, it's us. Electronics is gonna replace banking in Dallas by 1970. Mark my words." He crossed himself, pointed skyward, and added, "God bless Texas."
I picked the gadget up. "What exactly is an Echo when it's at home with its feet up on the hassock?"
"The closest thing to the kind of bug you described to me that you're gonna get. It's small because it doesn't have any vacuum tubes and doesn't run on batteries. It runs on ordinary AC house current."
"You plug it into the wall?"
"Sure, why not? Your wife and her boyfriend can look at it and say, 'How nice, someone bugged the place while we were out, let's have a nice noisy shag, then talk over all our private business.'"
He was a geek, all right. Still, patience is a virtue. And I needed what I needed.
"What do you do with it, then?"
He tapped the disc. "This goes inside the base of a lamp. Not a floor lamp, unless you're interested in recording the mice running around inside the baseboards, you dig? A table lamp, so it's up where people talk." He brushed the wires. "The red and yellow ones connect to the lamp cord, lamp cord's plugged into the wall. The bug's dead until someone turns on the lamp. When they do, bingo, you're off to the races."
"This other thing is the mike?"
"Yep, and for American-made it's a good one. Now--you see the other two wires? The blue and green ones?"
"Uh-huh."
He opened the cardboard box with the Japanese writing on it, and took out a reel-to-reel recorder. It was bigger than a pack of Sadie's Winstons, but not by much.
"Those wires hook up to this. Base unit goes in the lamp, recorder goes in a bureau drawer, maybe under your wife's scanties. Or drill a little hole in the wall and put it in the closet."
"The recorder also draws power from the lamp cord."
"Naturally."
"Could I get two of these Echoes?"
"I could get you four, if you wanted. Might take a week, though."
"Two will be fine. How much?"
"Stuff like this ain't cheap. A pair'd run you a hundred and forty. Best I can do. And it would have to be a cash deal." He spoke with a regret that suggested we had been having a nice little techno-dream for ourselves, but now the dream was almost over.
"How much more would it cost me to have you do the installation?" I saw his alarm and hastened to dispel it. "I don't mean the actual black-bag job, nothing like that. Just to put the bugs in a couple of lamps and hook up the tape recorders--could you do that?"
"Of course I could, Mr.--"
"Let's say Mr. Doe. John Doe."
His eyes sparkled as I imagine E. Howard Hunt's would when he first beheld the challenge that was the Watergate Hotel. "Good name."
"Thanks. And it would be good to have a couple of options with the wires. Something short, if I can place it close by, something longer if I need to hide it in a closet or on the other side of a wall."
"I can do that, but you don't want more than ten feet or the sound turns to mud. Also, the more wire you use, the greater the chance that someone'll find it."
Even an English teacher could understand that.
"How much for the whole deal?"
"Mmm . . . hundred and eighty?"
He looked ready to haggle, but I didn't have the time or the inclination. I put five twenties down on the counter and said, "You get the rest when I pick them up. But first we test them out and make sure they work, agreed?"
"Yeah, fine."
"One other thing. Get used lamps. Kind of grungy."
"Grungy?"
"Like they were picked up at a yard sale or a flea market for a quarter apiece." After you direct a few plays--counting the ones I'd worked on at LHS, Of Mice and Men had been my fifth--you learn a few things about set decoration. The last thing I wanted was someone stealing a bug-loaded lamp from a semi-furnished apartment.
For a moment he looked puzzled, then a complicitous smile dawned on his face. "I get it. Realism."
"That's the plan, Stan." I started for the door, then came back, leaned my forearms on the transistor radio display case, and looked into his eyes. I can't swear that he saw the man who had killed Frank Dunning, but I can't say for sure that he didn't, either. "You're not going to talk about this, are you?"
"No! Course not!" He zipped two fingers across his lips.
"That's the way," I said. "When?"
"Give me a few days."
"I'll come back next Monday. What time do you close?"
"Five."
I calculated the distance from Jodie to Dallas and said, "An extra twenty if you stay open until seven. It's the soonest I can make it. That work for you?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Have everything ready."
"I will. Anything else?"
"Yeah. Why the hell do they call you Silent Mike?"
I was hoping he'd say Because I can keep a secret, but he didn't. "When I was a kid, I thought that Christmas carol was about me. It just kind of stuck."
I didn't ask, but halfway back to my car it came to me, and I started to laugh.
Silent Mike, holy Mike.
Sometimes the world we live in is a truly weird place.
3
When Lee and Marina returned to the United States, they'd live in a sad procession of low-rent apartments, including the one in New Orleans I'd already visited, but based on Al's notes, I thought there were only two I needed to focus on. One was at 214 West Neely Street, in Dallas. The other was in Fort Worth, and that was where I went after my visit to Silent Mike's.
I had a map of the city, but still had to ask directions three times. In the end it was an elderly black woman clerking at a mom-n-pop who pointed me the right way. When I finally found what I was looking for, I wasn't surprised that it had been hard to locate. The ass end of Mercedes Street was unpaved hardpan lined with crumbling houses little better than sharecroppers' shacks. It spilled into a huge, mostly empty parking lot where tumbleweeds blew across the crumbling asphalt. Beyond the lot was the back of a cinderblock warehouse. Printed on it in whitewashed letters ten feet tall was PROPERTY OF MONTGOMERY WARD and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED and POLICE TAKE NOTE.
>
The air stank of cracked petroleum from the direction of Odessa-Midland, and raw sewage much closer at hand. The sound of rock and roll spilled from open windows. I heard the Dovells, Johnny Burnette, Lee Dorsey, Chubby Checker . . . and that was in the first forty yards or so. Women were hanging clothes on rusty whirligigs. They were all wearing smocks that had probably been purchased at Zayre's or Mammoth Mart, and they all appeared to be pregnant. A filthy little boy and an equally filthy little girl stood on a cracked clay driveway and watched me go by. They were holding hands and looked too much alike not to be twins. The boy, naked except for a single sock, was holding a cap pistol. The girl was wearing a saggy diaper below a Mickey Mouse Club tee-shirt. She was clutching a plastic babydoll as filthy as she was. Two bare-chested men were throwing a football back and forth between their respective yards, both of them with cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths. Beyond them, a rooster and two bedraggled chickens pecked in the dust near a scrawny dog that was either sleeping or dead.
I pulled up in front of 2703, the place to which Lee would bring his wife and daughter when he could no longer stand Marguerite Oswald's pernicious brand of smotherlove. Two concrete strips led up to a bald patch of oil-stained ground where there would have been a garage in a better part of town. The wasteland of crabgrass that passed for a lawn was littered with cheap plastic toys. A little girl in ragged pink shorts was kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against the side of the house. Each time it hit the wooden siding, she said, "Chumbah!"
A woman with her hair in large blue rollers and a cigarette plugged in her gob shoved her head out the window and shouted, "You keep doin that, Rosette, I'm gone come out n beat you snotty!" Then she saw me. "Wha' choo want? If it's a bill, I cain't hep you. My husband does all that. He got work today."
"It's not a bill," I said. Rosette kicked the soccer ball at me with a snarl that became a reluctant smile when I caught it with the side of my foot and booted it gently back. "I just wanted to speak to you for a second."
"Y'all gotta wait, then. I ain't decent."