11/22/63: A Novel

by Stephen King

  A. Hidell

  President of Hands Off Cuba

  Dallas–Fort Worth Branch

  I briefly pondered the misspellings, then folded the flyer and put it in the box where I kept my manuscripts.

  If there was a protest at the station, it wasn’t reported in the Slimes Herald the day after the Hargis-Walker “telemcast.” I doubt that anyone turned up, including Lee himself. I certainly didn’t, but I tuned in to Channel 9 on Thursday night, anxious to see the man Lee—probably Lee—was soon going to try to kill.

  At first it was just Hargis, sitting behind an office-set desk and pretending to scribble important notes while a canned choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was a fattish fellow with a lot of plastered-back black hair. As the choir faded out, he put down his pen, looked into the camera, and said: “Welcome to the Christian Crusade, neighbors. I come with good news—Jesus loves you. Yes he does, every last one of you. Won’t you join me in prayer?”

  Hargis bent the Almighty’s ear for at least ten minutes. He covered the usual stuff, thanking God for the chance to spread the gospel and instructing Him to bless those who’d sent in love-offerings. Then he got down to business, asking God to arm His Chosen People with the sword and buckler of righteousness so we could defeat communism, which had reared its ugly head just ninety miles off the shores of Florida. He asked God to grant President Kennedy the wisdom (which Hargis, being closer to the Big Guy, already possessed) to go in there and root out the tares of godlessness. He also demanded that God put an end to the growing communist threat on American college campuses—folk music seemed to have something to do with it, but Hargis kind of lost the thread on that part. He finished by thanking God for his guest tonight, the hero of Anzio and the Chosin Reservoir, General Edwin A. Walker.

  Walker appeared not in uniform but in a khaki suit that closely resembled one. The creases in his pants looked sharp enough to shave with. His stony face reminded me of the cowboy actor Randolph Scott. He shook Hargis’s hand and they talked about communism, which was rife not just on the college campuses, but in the halls of Congress and the scientific community as well. They touched on fluoridation. Then they schmoozed about Cuba, which Walker called “the cancer of the Caribbean.”

  I could see why Walker had failed so badly in his run for the Texas governorship the year before. At the front of a high school class he would have put the kids to sleep even in period one, when they were freshest. But Hargis moved him along smoothly, interjecting “Praise Jesus!” and “God’s witness, brother!” whenever things got a little sticky. They discussed an upcoming barnstorm crusade through the South called Operation Midnight Ride, and then Hargis invited Walker to clear the air concerning “certain scurrilous charges of segregationism that have surfaced in the New York press and elsewhere.”

  Walker finally forgot he was on television and came to life. “You know that’s nothing but a truckload of commie propaganda.”

  “I know it!” Hargis exclaimed. “And God wants you to tell it, brother.”

  “I spent my life in the U.S. Army, and I’ll be a soldier in my heart until the day I die.” (If Lee had his way, that would be in roughly three months.) “As a soldier, I always did my duty. When President Eisenhower ordered me to Little Rock during the civil disturbances of 1957—this had to do with the forced integration of Central High School, as you know—I did my duty. But Billy, I am also a soldier of God—”

  “A Christian soldier! Praise Jesus!”

  “—and as a Christian, I know that forced integration is just flat-out wrong. It’s Constitution-wrong, states rights–wrong, and Bible-wrong.”

  “Tell it,” Hargis said, and wiped a tear from his cheek. Or maybe it was sweat that had oozed through his makeup.

  “Do I hate the Negro race? Those who say that—and those who worked to drive me from the military service I loved—are liars and communists. You know better, the men I served with know better, and God knows better.” He leaned forward in the guest’s chair. “Do you think the Negro teachers in Alabama and Arkansas and Louisiana and the great state of Texas want integration? They do not. They see it as a slap in the face to their own skills and hard work. Do you think that Negro students want to go to school with whites naturally better equipped for readin, writin, and rithmetic? Do you think real Americans want the sort of race mongrelization that will result from this sort of mingling?”

  “Of course they don’t! Praaaiiise Jesus!”

  I thought about the sign I’d seen in North Carolina, the one pointing to a path bordered with poison ivy. COLORED, it had said. Walker didn’t deserve killing, but he could certainly do with a brisk shaking. I’d give anyone a big old praise Jesus on that one.

  My attention had wandered, but something Walker was now saying brought it back in a hurry.

  “It was God, not General Edwin Walker, who ordained the Negro position in His world when He gave them a different skin color and a different set of talents. More athletic talents. What does the Bible tell us about this difference, and why the Negro race has been cursed to so much pain and travail? We only have to look at the ninth chapter of Genesis, Billy.”

  “Praise God for His Holy Word.”

  Walker closed his eyes and raised his right hand, as if testifying in court. “‘And Noah drank of the wine, and was drunken, and lay uncovered. Ham saw the nakedness of his father, and told them who stood without.’ But Shem and Japeth—one father of the Arab race, one father of the white race, I know you know this, Billy, but not everybody does, not everybody has the good old Bible-learning we got at our mothers’ knees—”

  “Praise God for Christian mothers, you tell it!”

  “Shem and Japeth didn’t look. And when Noah awoke and found out what had been going on, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan, he shall be a servant even unto servants, a hewer of wood and a drawer of wa—’”

  I snapped the TV off.

  9

  What I saw of Lee and Marina during January and February of 1963 made me think of a tee-shirt Christy sometimes used to wear during the last year of our marriage. There was a fiercely grinning pirate on the front, with this message below him: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES. Plenty of beatings took place at 604 Elsbeth Street that winter. We in the neighborhood heard Lee’s shouting and Marina’s cries—sometimes of anger, sometimes of pain. Nobody did anything, and that included me.

  Not that she was the only wife to take regular beatings in Oak Cliff; the Friday and Saturday Night Fights seemed to be a local tradition. All I remember wanting during those dismal gray months was for the squalid, endless soap opera to be over so I could be with Sadie full-time. I would verify that Lee was solo when he attempted to kill General Walker, then conclude my business. Oswald acting alone once didn’t necessarily mean he’d been acting alone both times, but it was the best I could do. With the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed—most of them, anyway—I would pick my time and place and shoot Lee Oswald as coldly as I had shot Frank Dunning.

  Time passed. Slowly, but it passed. And then one day, not long before the Oswalds moved into the apartment on Neely Street above my own, I saw Marina talking to the old lady with the walker and the Elsa Lanchester hair. They were both smiling. The old lady asked her something. Marina laughed, nodded, and held her hands out in front of her stomach.

  I stood at my window with the curtain drawn back, my binoculars in one hand and my mouth hanging open. Al’s notes had said nothing about this development, either because he didn’t know or didn’t care. But I cared.

  The wife of the man I had waited over four years to kill was once again pregnant.

  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 ups
tairs 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.

  2

  That was on a Friday afternoon, and I drove straight from Greenville Avenue to Kileen, where Sadie met me at the Candlewood Bungalows. We spent the night, as was our habit that winter. The next day she drove back to Jodie, where I joined her on Sunday for church. After the benediction, during the part where we shook hands with the people all around us, saying “Peace be with you,” my thoughts turned—not comfortably—to the gun now stowed in the trunk of my car.

  Over the Sunday noon meal, Sadie asked: “How much longer? Until you do what you have to do?”

  “If everything goes the way I hope, not much more than a month.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  I scrubbed my hands through my hair and went to the window. “Then I don’t know. Anything else on your mind?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “There’s cherry cobbler for afters. Would you like whipped cream on yours?”

  “Very much,” I said. “I love you, honey.”

  “You better,” she said, getting up to fetch dessert. “Because I’m kind of out on a limb here.”

  I stayed at the window. A car came rolling slowly down the street—an oldie but a goodie, as the jocks on K-Life said—and I felt that harmonic chime again. But I was always feeling it now, and sometimes it meant nothing. One of Christy’s AA slogans came to my mind: FEAR, standing for false evidence appearing real.

  This time a click of association came, though. The car was a white-over-red Plymouth Fury, like the one I’d seen in the parking lot of the Worumbo mill, not far from the drying shed where the rabbit-hole into 1958 came out. I remembered touching the trunk to make sure it was real. This one had an Arkansas plate instead of a Maine one, but still … that chime. That harmonic chime. Sometimes I felt that if I knew what that chime meant, I’d know everything. Probably stupid, but true.

  The Yellow Card Man knew, I thought. He knew and it killed him.

  My latest harmonic signaled left, turned at the stop sign, and disappeared toward Main Street.

  “Come eat dessert, you,” Sadie said from behind me, and I jumped.

  The AAs say FEAR stands for something else, as well: Fuck everything and run.

  3

  When I got back to Neely Street that night, I put on the earphones and listened to the latest recording. I expected nothing but Russian, but this time I got English as well. And splashing sounds.

  Marina: (Speaks Russian.)

  Lee: “I can’t, Mama, I’m in the tub with Junie!”

  (More splashing, and laughter—Lee’s and the baby’s high chortle.)

  Lee: “Mama, we got water on the floor! Junie splash! Bad girl!”

  Marina: “Mop it up! I beezy! Beezy!” (But she is also laughing.)

  Lee: “I can’t, you want the baby to …” (Russian.)

  Marina: (Speaks Russian—scolding and laughing at the same time.)

  (More splashing. Marina is humming some pop song from KLIF. It sounds sweet.)

  Lee: “Mama, bring us our toys!”

  Marina: “Da, da, always you must have the toys.”

  (Splashing, loud. The door to the bathroom must be all the way open now.)

  Marina: (Speaks Russian.)

  Lee (pouty little boy’s voice): “Mama, you forgot our rubber ball.”

  (Big splash—the baby screams with delight.)

  Marina: “There, all toys for preence and preencessa.”

  (Laughter from all three—their joy turns me cold.)

  Lee: “Mama, bring us a (Russian word). We have water on our ear.”

  Marina (laughing): “Oh my God, what next?”

  I lay awake a long time that night, thinking of the three of them. Happy for once, and why not? 214 West Neely wasn’t much, but it was still a step up. Maybe they were even sleeping in the same bed, June for once happy instead of scared to death.

  And now a fourth in the bed, as well. The one growing in Marina’s belly.

  4

  Things began to move faster, as they had in Derry, only now time’s arrow was flying toward April 10 instead of Halloween. Al’s notes, which I had depended on to get me this far, became less helpful. Leading up to the attempt on Walker’s life, they concentrated almost solely on Lee’s actions and movements, and that winter there was a lot more to their lives, Marina’s in particular.

  For one thing, she had finally made a friend—not a sugar daddy wannabe like George Bouhe, but a woman friend. Her name was Ruth Paine, and she was a Quaker lady. Russian speaker, Al had noted in a laconic style not much like his earlier notes. Met at party, 2(??)/63. Marina separated from Lee and living with the Paine woman at the time of the Kennedy assassination. And then, as if it were no more than an afterthought: Lee stored M-C in Paine garage. Wrapped in blanket.

  By M-C, he meant the mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with which Lee planned to kill General Walker.

  I don’t know who threw the party where Lee and Marina met the Paines. I don’t know who introduced them. De Mohrenschildt? Bouhe? Probably one or the other, because by then the rest of the émigrés were giving the Oswalds a wide berth. Hubby was a sneering know-it-all, wifey a punching bag who’d passed up God knew how many chances to leave him for good.

  What I do know is Marina Oswald’s potential escape-hatch arrived behind the wheel of a Chevrolet station wagon—white over red—on a rainy day in the middle of March. She parked at the curb and looked around dubiously, as if not sure she ha
d come to the right address. Ruth Paine was tall (although not as tall as Sadie) and painfully thin. Her brownish hair was banged over a huge expanse of forehead in front and flipped in back, a style that did not flatter her. She wore rimless glasses on a nose splashed with freckles. To me, peering through a crack in the curtains, she looked like the kind of woman who steered clear of meat and marched in Ban the Bomb demonstrations … and that was pretty much who Ruth Paine was, I think, a woman who was New Age before New Age was cool.

  Marina must have been watching for her, because she came clattering down the outside stairs with the baby in her arms, a blanket flipped up over June’s head to protect her from the drifting drizzle. Ruth Paine smiled tentatively and spoke carefully, putting a space between each word. “Hello, Mrs. Oswald, I’m Ruth Paine. Do you remember me?”

  “Da,” Marina said. “Yes.” Then she added something in Russian. Ruth replied in the same language … although haltingly.

  Marina invited her in. I waited until I heard the creak of their footsteps above me, then donned the earphones connected to the lamp bug. What I heard was a conversation in mixed English and Russian. Marina corrected Ruth several times, sometimes with laughter. I understood enough to figure out why Ruth Paine had come. Like Paul Gregory, she wanted Russian lessons. I understood something else from their frequent laughter and increasingly easy conversation: they liked each other.

  I was glad for Marina. If I killed Oswald after his attempt on General Walker, the New Agey Ruth Paine might take her in. I could hope.

  5

  Ruth only came twice to Neely Street for her lessons. After that, Marina and June got in the station wagon and Ruth drove them away. Probably to her home in the posh (at least by Oak Cliff standards) suburb of Irving. That address wasn’t in Al’s notes—he seemed to care little about Marina’s relationship with Ruth, probably because he expected to finish Lee long before that rifle ended up in the Paines’ garage—but I found it in the phone directory: 2515 West Fifth Street.