5432852385743

“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,” Kennedy went on, “to regard any nuclear missile launched
from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the
United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
A woman at the end of the bar moaned and clutched her stomach. The man beside her put an arm
around her, and she put her head on his shoulder.
What I saw on Kennedy’s face was fright and determination in equal measure. What I also saw was
life—a total engagement with the job at hand. He was exactly thirteen months from his date with the
assassin’s bullet.
“As a necessary military precaution, I have reinforced our base at Guantánamo and evacuated today
the dependents of our personnel there.”
“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 Kennedy, who was now calling on Chairman Khrushchev to
eliminate “this clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”
The waitress who had served my beer, a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet peroxide blonde of fifty or so,
suddenly burst into tears. That decided me. I got off my stool, wove my way around the tables where
men and women sat looking at the television like solemn children, and slipped into one of the phone
booths next to the Skee-Ball machine.
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 Kennedy talking in that nasal New
England voice. Now he was accusing Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of being a liar. No
waffling there.
“Connecting you now, sir,” the operator said. Then she blurted: “Are you listening to the
president? If you’re not, you should turn on your TV or radio.”
“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 Kennedy to
initiate bombing missions or launch a full-scale invasion immediately. American missile bases and
the Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.
“American B-52 bombers will soon be circling just outside the Soviet Union’s borders,” Cronkite
was saying in that deep, portentous voice of his. “And—this is obvious to all of us who’ve covered the
last seven years of this ever more frightening cold war—the chances for a mistake, a potentially
disastrous mistake, grow with each new escalation of—”
“Don’t wait!” a man standing by the pool table shouted. “Bomb the living shit out of those commie