I checked the chalkboard mounted on the wall behind the Delta counter. it said that Flight 194 was on time. When I asked the clerk to make sure, she smiled and told me it had just left Atlanta. “But you’re awfully early.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I’ll probably be early to my own funeral.”
She laughed and wished me a nice day. I bought a Time and walked across to the restaurant, where I ordered the Cloud 9 Chef’s Salad. it was huge and I was too nervous to be hungry — it’s not every day that a man gets to see the person who’s going to change world history — but it gave me something to pick at while I waited for the plane carrying the Oswald family to arrive.
I was in a booth with a good view of the main terminal. it wasn’t very crowded, and a young woman in a dark blue traveling suit caught my eye. Her hair was twisted into a neat bun. She had a suitcase in each hand. A Negro porter approached her. She shook her head, smiling, then banged her arm on the side of the Traveler’s Aid booth as she passed it. She dropped one of her suitcases, rubbed her elbow, then picked up the case again and forged onward.
Sadie leaving to start her six-week residency in Reno.
Was I surprised? Not at all. it was that convergence thing again. I’d grown used to it. Was I almost overwhelmed by an impulse to run out of the restaurant and catch up to her before it was too late? Of course I was.
For a moment it seemed more than possible, it seemed necessary. I would tell her fate (rather than some weird time-travel harmonic) had brought us together at the airport. Stuff like that worked in the movies, didn’t it? I’d ask her to wait while I bought my own ticket to Reno, and tell her that once we were there, I’d explain everything. And after the obligatory six weeks, we could buy a drink for the judge who had granted her divorce before he married us.
I actually started to get up. As I did, I happened to look at the cover of the Time I’d bought at the newsstand. Jacqueline Kennedy was on the cover. She was smiling, radiant, wearing a sleeveless dress with a V-neck. THE PRESIDENT’S LADY DRESSES FOR SUMMER, the caption read. As I looked at the photo, the color drained away to black and white and the expression changed from a happy smile to a vacant stare. Now she was standing next to Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One, and no longer wearing the pretty (and slightly sexy) summer dress. A blood-spattered wool suit had taken its place. I remembered reading — not in Al’s notes, somewhere else — that not long after Mrs. Kennedy’s husband had been pronounced dead, Lady Bird Johnson had moved to embrace her in the hospital corridor and had seen a glob of the dead president’s brains on that suit.
A head-shot president. And all the dead who would come after, standing behind him in a ghostly file that stretched away into infinity.
I sat back down again and watched Sadie carry her suitcases toward the Frontier Airlines counter. The bags were obviously heavy but she carried them con brio, her back straight, her low heels clicking briskly. The clerk checked them and put them on a baggage trolley. He and Sadie conferred; she passed him the ticket she had bought through a travel agency two months ago, and the clerk scribbled something on it. She took it back and turned for the gate. I lowered my head to make sure she wouldn’t see me. When I looked up again, she was gone.
Forty long, long minutes later, a man, a woman, and two small children — a boy and a girl — passed the restaurant. The boy was holding his father’s hand and chattering away. The father was looking down at him, nodding and smiling. The father was Robert Oswald.
The loudspeaker blared, “Delta’s flight 194 is now arriving from Newark and Atlanta Municipal Airport. Passengers can be met at Gate 4. Delta Flight 194, now arriving.”