Each time the crowd yelled “JIM,” the cheerleaders responded with the first syllable of his last name, drawing it out like a teasing musical note. It was new, but it wasn’t complicated, and the crowd caught on in a hurry. Sadie was doing the chant with the best of them, until she realized I wasn’t. I was just standing there with my mouth open.

“George? Are you okay?”

I couldn’t answer. In fact, I barely heard her. Because most of me was back in Lisbon Falls. I had just come through the rabbit-hole. I had just walked along the side of the drying shed and ducked under the chain. I had been prepared to meet the Yellow Card Man, but not to be attacked by him. Which I was. Only he was no longer the Yellow Card Man; now he was the Orange Card Man.

You’re not supposed to be here, he had said. Who are you? What are you doing here? And when I’d started to ask him if he’d tried AA for his drinking problem, he’d said—

“George?” Now she sounded worried as well as concerned. “What is it? What’s wrong?” The fans had totally gotten into the call-and-response thing. The cheerleaders shouted “JIM” and the bleacher-creatures shouted back “LA.”

Fuck off, Jimla! That was what the Yellow Card Man who’d become the Orange Card Man (although not yet the dead-by-his-own-hand Black Card Man) had snarled at me, and that was what I was hearing now, tossed back and forth like a medicine ball between the cheerleaders and the twenty-five hundred fans watching them:

“JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA!”

Sadie grabbed my arm and shook me. “Talk to me, mister! Talk to me, because I’m getting scared!”

I turned to her and managed a smile. It did not come easy, believe me. “Just crashing for sugar, I guess. I’m going to grab those Cokes.”

“You aren’t going to faint, are you? I can walk you to the aid station if—”

“I’m fine,” I said, and then, without thinking about what I was doing, I kissed the tip of her nose. Some kid shouted, “Way to go, Mr. A!”

Rather than looking irritated, she wriggled her nose like a rabbit, then smiled. “Get out of here, then. Before you damage my reputation. And bring me a chili dog. Lots of cheese.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The past harmonizes with itself, that much I already understood. But what song was this? I didn’t know, and it worried me plenty. In the concrete runway leading to the refreshment stand, the chant was magnified, making me want to put my hands over my ears to block it out.

“JIMLA, JIMLA, JIMLA.”

SADIE AND THE GENERAL

CHAPTER 14

1

The memorial assembly was held at the end of the new school year’s first day, and if one can measure success by damp hankies, the show Sadie and I put together was boffo. I’m sure it was cathartic for the kids, and I think Miz Mimi herself would have enjoyed it. Sarcastic people tend to be marshmallows underneath the armor, she once told me. I’m no different.

The teachers held it together through most of the eulogies. It was Mike who started to get to them, with his calm, heartfelt recitation from Proverbs 31. Then, during the slide show, with the accompanying schmaltz from West Side Story, the faculty lost it, too. I found Coach Borman particularly entertaining. With tears streaming down his red cheeks and large, quacking sobs emerging from his massive chest, Denholm’s football guru reminded me of everybody’s second-

favorite cartoon duck, Baby Huey.

I whispered this observation to Sadie as we stood beside the big screen with its marching images of Miz Mimi. She was crying, too, but had to step off the stage and into the wings as laughter first fought with and then overcame her tears. Safely back in the shadows, she looked at me reproachfully . . . and then gave me the finger. I decided I deserved it. I wondered if Miz Mimi would still think Sadie and I were getting along famously.

I thought she probably would.

I picked Twelve Angry Men for the fall play, accidentally on purpose neglecting to inform the Samuel French Company that I intended to retitle our version The Jury, so I could cast some girls. I would hold tryouts in late October and start rehearsals on November 13, after the Lions’ last regular-season football game. I had my eye on Vince Knowles for Juror #8—the holdout who’d been played by Henry Fonda in the movie—and Mike Coslaw for what I considered the best part in the show: bullying, abrasive Juror #3.

But I had begun to focus on a more important show, one that made the Frank Dunning affair look like a paltry vaudeville skit by comparison. Call this one Jake and Lee in Dallas. If things went well, it would be a tragedy in one act. I had to be ready to go onstage when the time came, and that meant starting early.

2

On the sixth of October, the Denholm Lions won their fifth football game, on their way to an undefeated season that would be dedicated to Vince Knowles, the boy who had played George in Of Mice and Men and who would never get a chance to act in the George Amberson version of Twelve Angry Men—but more of that later. It was the start of a three-day weekend, because the Monday following was Columbus Day.

I drove to Dallas on the holiday. Most businesses were open, and my first stop was one of the pawnshops on Greenville Avenue. I told the little man behind the counter that I wanted to buy the cheapest wedding ring he had in stock. I walked out with an eight-buck band of gold (at least it looked like gold) on the third finger of my left hand. Then I drove downtown to a place on Lower Main Street I had bird-dogged in the Dallas Yellow Pages: Silent Mike’s Satellite Electronics. There I was greeted by a trim little man who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a weirdly futuristic button on his vest: TRUST NOBODY, it said.

“Are you Silent Mike?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“And are you truly silent?”

He smiled. “Depends on who’s listening.”

“Let’s assume nobody,” I said, and told him what I wanted. It turned out I could have saved my eight bucks, because he had no interest at all in my supposedly cheating wife. It was the equipment I wanted to buy that interested the proprietor of Satellite Electronics. On that subject he was Loquacious Mike.

“Mister, they may have gear like that on whatever planet you come from, but we sure don’t have it here.”

That stirred a memory of Miz Mimi comparing me to the alien visitor in The Day the Earth Stood Still. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You want a small wireless listening device? Fine. I got a bunch in that glass case right over there to your left. They’re called transistor radios. I stock both Motorola and GE, but the Japanese make the best ones.” He stuck out his lower lip and blew a lock of hair off his forehead. “Ain’t that a kick in the behind? We beat em fifteen years ago by bombing two of their cities to radioactive dust, but do they die? No! They hide in their holes until the dust settles, then come crawling back out armed with circuit boards and soldering irons instead of Nambu machine guns. By 1985, they’ll own the world. The part of it I live in, anyway.”