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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 Kennedy was also
talking about Cuba. And then everybody gave a shit.
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 Dunning. None of them knew about the harmonic effect,
which I seemed to be creating myself, just by my presence in the Land of Ago. That being the case,
who would be to blame if something happened to Sadie?
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.”