‘They dragged me out of the house, Gabe. They beat my momma with sticks but they came for me.’
‘I know the Klan lynched a lot of men, but girls …?’ Church said.
‘They did it ’cause I’m dating a white boy,’ Marcy said bitterly.
‘But look at you, Marcy,’ Gabe said. ‘You’re nearly white yourself—’
Marcy glared at him. ‘What are you saying? I’m black – black in their eyes, black in mine. Having some white mixed in there doesn’t mean they’ll suddenly leave me alone ’cause I’m normal.’
Gabe flushed. ‘That’s not what I meant—’
‘I’m sorry.’ Marcy hugged Gabe, and then Church. ‘And thanks for risking your neck, whoever you are. You saved my life.’
Church was touched by her response. He had acted on instinct, and now the adrenalin rush had gone he was surprised by how quickly and decisively he had responded when he saw the gun.
‘We can’t stay here after this,’ Gabe said bitterly. ‘They’ll come after my mom, and yours.’
‘I don’t want to run away from them. They’ll think they’ve won,’ she said.
‘We can’t fight them,’ Gabe said.
‘It’s none of my business,’ Church interjected, ‘but maybe you could hit the road just for a while, until it’s calmed down here.’
Gabe took Marcy’s hand. ‘It’s for the best. For our moms.’
‘You can come with my friends and me if you want,’ Church said. ‘We don’t know where we’re going or what we’re doing. But on the plus side, we’ve got some cash to see us through for a while.’
‘We could go to Dallas,’ Gabe said thoughtfully. ‘I need to see for myself where the president died.’ He glanced at Church and added, ‘I want to prove that spider-guy is real.’
Church felt sorry for the teenager. The road Gabe was about to walk wouldn’t end happily.
3
Dallas, 1964
Dallas was like a bad hangover, even weeks after the assassination. In shops and bars and in the streets, people felt guilty, as if they had been personally responsible for the president’s death.
Gabe got nowhere with his investigation, as Church had expected and secretly hoped, but it was clear Gabe wasn’t going to give up easily. Church saw something of himself in the teenager’s innocence and unfocused desire for justice, but they were echoes from long ago, before things had started to go so badly wrong.
On February 9, they stood outside a TV store in downtown Dallas watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on the sets piled high in the window display.
‘I wish I could hear them,’ Gabe said. ‘I reckon they’re really going to shake things up.’
‘You could be right.’ Church smiled wryly to himself.
‘I can’t believe they let them on Ed Sullivan.’
‘You, me and seventy-four million others.’ Church watched Gabe’s face light up with a simple joy and felt like an elder brother. So why the obsession with JFK?’
Gabe fell silent for a moment. ‘My dad died a couple of days after he worked on the film of the assassination. Hit and run. They never caught the driver.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I remember how excited he was when he told me what he’d seen. And how angry when those frames got cut out. It was a big deal to him.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m just trying to make sense of stuff. These days nothing makes sense at all.’
4
In April, Marcy persuaded Gabe that he wouldn’t find anything else in Dallas and if he still wanted to dig for information, they should head east, to New York first, and then to Washington if he could find anything concrete to pursue.
Church was surprised by Tom’s developing affinity for American culture and the music of the times. In the damp-ridden apartment they found for themselves in Queens, he installed a record player on which he would listen to Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Beau Brummels at full volume until the neighbours banged on the walls. He went to clubs on his own, and developed a wide network of eccentric friends. Church began to understand that for Tom, the ultimate outsider cut off from his own time and race by what had been done to him at the Court of the Final Word, this was finally somewhere he could feel at home. In the end they were all trying to forget the past and lose themselves in the present.
As the days grew longer and the leaves started to appear on the trees in the park, Tom returned one afternoon and told Church there was someone he needed to meet.
‘A psychologist,’ Tom said, ‘by the name of Timothy Leary. He evangelises about a drug called LSD. He believes it can unlock areas of consciousness, and set off a big evolutionary leap for mankind.’