There was no facility. What I found at the end of the path was a narrow stream with a board laid across it on a couple of crumbling concrete posts. A man who had to urinate could just stand on the bank, unzip, and let fly. A woman could hold onto a bush (assuming it wasn’t poison ivy or poison oak) and squat. The board was what you sat on if you had to take a shit. Maybe in the pouring rain.

If I ever gave you the idea that 1958’s all Andy-n-Opie, remember the path, okay? The one lined with poison ivy. And the board over the stream.

2

I settled sixty miles south of Tampa, in the town of Sunset Point. For eighty dollars a month, I rented a conch shack on the most beautiful (and mostly deserted) beach I had ever seen. There were four similar shacks on my stretch of sand, all as humble as my own. Of the nouveau-ugly McMansions that would later sprout like concrete toadstools in this part of the state, I saw none.

There was a supermarket ten miles south, in Nokomis, and a sleepy shopping district in Venice.

Route 41, the Tamiami Trail, was little more than a country road. You had to go slow on it, particularly toward dusk, because that’s when the gators and the armadillos liked to cross. Between Sarasota and Venice, there were fruit stands, roadside markets, a couple of bars, and a dancehall called Blackie’s. Beyond Venice, brother, you were mostly on your own, at least until you got to Fort Myers.

I left George Amberson’s real estate persona behind. By the spring of 1959, recessionary times had come to America. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, everybody was selling and nobody was buying, so George Amberson became exactly what Al had envisioned: an authorial wannabe whose moderately rich uncle had left him enough to live on, at least for awhile.

I did write, and not on one project but two. In the mornings, when I was freshest, I began work on the manuscript you’re now reading (if there ever is a you). In the evenings I worked on a novel that I tentatively called The Murder Place. The place in question was Derry, of course, although I called it Dawson in my book. I began it solely as set decoration, so I’d have something to show if I made friends and one of them asked to see what I was working on (I kept my “morning manuscript” in a steel lockbox under my bed). Eventually The Murder Place became more than camouflage. I began to think it was good, and to dream that someday it might even see print.

An hour on the memoir in the morning and an hour on the novel at night still left a lot of time to be filled. I tried fishing, and there were plenty of fish to be caught, but I didn’t like it and gave it up. Walking was fine at dawn and sunset, but not in the heat of the day. I became a regular patron of Sarasota’s one bookstore, and I spent long (and mostly happy) hours at the little libraries in Nokomis and Osprey.

I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the obsessive behavior it was, and put the notebook in the lockbox with my “morning manuscript.” I have called those notes exhaustive, and so they seemed to me then, but as time—the conveyor belt on which we all must ride—brought me closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the young assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.

Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in more clearheaded moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or two, and how many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing with Al’s belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadn’t pulled the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his arrest, a patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.

3

I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a bookmaker named Eduardo Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was delighted to take my action. I first bet the Minneapolis Lakers to beat the Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona fides as a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the Canadians to beat the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won . . . but that was even money.

Chump change, cuz, my pal Chaz Frati would have said.

My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way to beat Bally Ache, the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-to-one on a double gee. I went for the double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came away ten thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a steely glint in his eyes that I didn’t care for.

Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he was also an expat from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of gossip in the billiard parlor next to the barbershop where Gutierrez ran his book (and an apparently never-ending backroom poker game under a photograph of a barely clad Diana Dors).

The man with whom I’d been playing nineball leaned forward, looked around to make sure we had the corner table to ourselves, then murmured, “You know what they say about the Mob, George—

once in, never out.”

I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans, but I didn’t think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big Derby payday. If I had dared—and if I could have thought of a plausible way to raise the subject—I would have asked Gutierrez if he’d ever been acquainted with another reputed member of the Marcello organization, an ex-pug named Charles “Dutz” Murret. I somehow think the answer would have been yes, because the past harmonizes with itself. Dutz Murret’s wife was Marguerite Oswald’s sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle.

4

One day in the spring of 1959 (there is spring in Florida; the natives told me it sometimes lasts as long as a week), I opened my mailbox and discovered a call-card from the Nokomis Public Library. I had reserved a copy of The Disenchanted, the new Budd Schulberg novel, and it had just come in. I jumped in my Sunliner—no better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun Coast—and drove up to get it.

On my way out, I noticed a new poster on the cluttered bulletin board in the foyer. It would have been hard to miss; it was bright blue and featured a shivering cartoon man who was looking at an oversized thermometer where the mercury was registering ten below zero. GOT A DEGREE

PROBLEM? the poster demanded. YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A MAIL-ORDER

CERTIFICATE FROM UNITED COLLEGE OF OKLAHOMA! WRITE FOR DETAILS!

United College of Oklahoma sounded fishier than a mackerel stew, but it gave me an idea.

Mostly because I was bored. Oswald was still in the Marines, and wouldn’t be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He wouldn’t succeed, but after a showy—and probably bogus—suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. “On approval,” so to speak. He’d be there for thirty months or so, working at a radio factory in Minsk. And at a party he would meet a girl named Marina Prusakova. Red dress, white slippers, Al had written in his notes. Pretty. Dressed for dancing.