5432852385743

CHAPTER 21
1
The Oswalds became my upstairs neighbors on March 2, 1963. They hand-carried their possessions,
mostly in liquor store cartons, from the crumbling brick box on Elsbeth Street. Soon the wheels of the
little Japanese tape recorder were turning on a regular basis, but mostly I listened in with the
earphones. That way the conversations upstairs were normal instead of slowed down, but of course I
couldn’t understand much of it, anyway.
The week after the Oswalds moved into their new digs, I visited one of the pawnshops on
Greenville Avenue to buy a gun. The first revolver the pawnbroker showed me was the same Colt .38
model I’d bought in Derry.
“This is excellent pertection against muggers n home-breakers,” the pawnbroker said. “Dead
accurate up to twenty yards.”
“Fifteen,” I said. “I heard fifteen.”
The pawnie raised his eyebrows. “Okay, say fifteen. Anyone stupid enough—”
—to try mugging me out of my cash is going to be a lot closer than that, that’s how the pitch goes.
“—to brace you is gonna be in at close quarters, so what do you say?”
My first impulse, just to break that sense of chiming but slightly discordant harmony was to tell
him I wanted something else, maybe a .45, but breaking the harmony might be a bad idea. Who
knew? What I did know was that the .38 I’d bought in Derry had done the job.
“How much?”
“Let you have it for twelve.”
That was two dollars more than I’d paid in Derry, but of course that had been four and a half years
ago. Adjusting for inflation, twelve seemed about right. I told him to add a box of bullets and he had
a deal.
When the broker saw me putting the gun and the ammo in the briefcase I’d brought along for that
purpose, he said, “Why don’t you let me sell you a holster, son? You don’t sound like you’re from
around here and you probably don’t know, but you c’n carry legal in Texas, no permit needed if you
don’t have a felony record. You got a felony record?”
“No, but I don’t expect to be mugged in broad daylight.”
The broker offered a dark smile. “On Greenville Avenue you can never tell what’s gonna happen.
Man blew his own head off just a block and a half from here a few years ago.”
“Really?”
“Yessir, outside a bar called the Desert Rose. Over a woman, accourse. Don’t that figure?”
“I guess,” I said. “Although sometimes it’s politics.”
“Nah, nah, at the bottom it’s always a woman, son.”
I’d found a parking space four blocks west of the pawnshop, and in order to get back to my new
(new to me, anyway) car, I had to pass Faith Financial, where I’d laid my bet on the Miracle Pirates in
the fall of 1960. The sharpie who’d paid off my twelve hundred was standing out front, having a
smoke. He was wearing his green eyeshade. His eyes passed over me, but seemingly without interest
or recognition.