From Strange Peaches

I tossed the newspaper onto the couch where the strange girl was still sleeping amid the wreckage, and drove to the Tropical Island Motor Hotel. Listening to the radio as the Morris Minor moved through the early traffic, I heard that it was to be a warm, sunny day, the rains gone, temperature about seventy. Vast crowds were expected along the route of the President’s motorcade through Dallas. Now, as I was driving, Kennedy was presumably finishing breakfast at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, and as I was addressing the Breakfast Brigade the President would be making a speech of his own before getting on his plane at Carswell Air Force Base to fly roughly fifty miles to Love Field in Dallas. I couldn’t figure why he didn’t drive to Dallas—from the Texas Hotel to Dealey Plaza was only thirty minutes on the toll road—and have the plane pick him up later, but I had more urgent concerns than presidential transportation. There was Dorothy in the hospital with that little red baby, and Six Guns Across Texas hanging out there, and Caroline in California, and my movie unsolved and what was to be done about Big Earl? On top of all that, I felt purely awful. And the least of my problems was the most immediate—what to say to the Breakfast Brigade. The two Dexamyls were down inside someplace, scrapping around, dredging up babble that I doubted my mind would bother to censor before the words leaked out through holes in my brain and landed upon the ears of two hundred leading citizens.

The lock was broken on the car, and I took the Bolex inside with me. Leroy met me in the lobby with a look of relief. “Just about on time and in uniform and barely even staggering. Not Bad,” he said. We entered at the back of the banquet room and had to travel a long aisle between rows of tables, and then force men to slide in their chairs so that we could find our places at the speakers’ table. Above the head table hung a banner:

The Breakfast Brigade

Selling Dallas to the World

I had heard comments about my odd appearance as I walked to my seat, and voices had called out my name. I had begun to regret wearing the cowboy outfit. I kept on my smile but tried not to look at anyone. Once seated, I looked at them: two hundred solid faces, with hair cut short or no hair at all, not one mustache in the entire room, no one without a necktie, nearly all in business suits enough alike that they could have been in the same regiment.

I neglected to remove my hat.

While at Methodist preacher spoke the opening prayer with a fair amount of feeling, considering the time of day, I looked at the two fried eggs and two strips of bacon on my plate. The eggs were filled with little puddles of milky matter and without noticing what I was doing I stared at these blobs until suddenly I thought I was going to vomit. I put my napkin to my mouth, swallowing hard, trying to think of something pleasant, imagining that I was walking between trees on a golf course on a cool bright morning. I glanced around at Leroy, who understood at once what was wrong. He looked away from me, as if he knew that once I started he would do it also. But the nausea passed in a moment, and then I felt very warm, my ears red and burning and my breathing difficult. With the napkin I covered my plate. Leroy was standing at the lectern, adjusting the microphone, making jokes. Mild laughter rolled back in rows from the front, where they could hear better. I heard Leroy talking about various club members and covering each critical remark with a grin so that everyone could laugh at the man who had been mentioned. The faces looking up at us seemed very cheerful and healthy. Among those I could see, the closest ones, there was...