"You saw him other times?"
"Only from a distance. By then I was getting real sick." He grinned. "There"s no Texas barbecue as good as Fort Worth barbecue, and I couldn"t eat it. It"s a cruel world, sometimes. I went to a doctor, got a diagnosis I could have made myself by then, and came back to the twenty-first century. Basically, there was nothing more to see, anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous."
He leaned forward.
"You know what the man who changed American history was like? He was the kind of kid who throws stones at other kids and then runs away. By the time he joined the Marines-to be like his brother Bobby, he idolized Bobby-he"d lived in almost two dozen different places, from New Orleans to New York City. He had big ideas and couldn"t understand why people wouldn"t listen to them. He was mad about that, furious, but he never lost that p.i.s.sy, prissy little smile of his. Do you know what William Manchester called him?"
"No." I didn"t even know who William Manchester was.
"A wretched waif. Manchester was talking about all the conspiracy theories that bloomed in the aftermath of the a.s.sa.s.sination . . . and after Oswald himself was shot and killed. I mean, you know that, right?"
"Of course," I said, a little annoyed. "A guy named Jack Ruby did it." But given the holes in my knowledge I"d already demonstrated, I suppose he had a right to wonder.
"Manchester said that if you put the murdered president on one side of a scale and Oswald-the wretched waif-on the other, it didn"t balance. No way did it balance. If you wanted to give Kennedy"s death some meaning, you"d have to add something heavier. Which explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Like the Mafia did it-Carlos Marcello ordered the hit. Or the KGB did it. Or Castro, to get back at the CIA for trying to load him up with poison cigars. There are people to this day who believe Lyndon Johnson did it so he could be president. But in the end . . ." Al shook his head. "It was almost certainly Oswald. You"ve heard of Occam"s Razor, haven"t you?"
It was nice to know something for sure. "It"s a basic truism sometimes known as the law of parsimony. "All other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one." So why didn"t you kill him when he wasn"t on the street with his wife and kid? You were a Marine, too. When you knew how sick you were, why didn"t you just kill the little motherf.u.c.ker yourself?"
"Because being ninety-five percent sure isn"t a hundred. Because, s.h.i.thead or not, he was a family man. Because after he was arrested, Oswald said he was a patsy and I wanted to be sure he was lying. I don"t think anybody can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything in this wicked world, but I wanted to get up to ninety-eight. I had no intention of waiting until November twenty-second and then stopping him at the Texas School Book Depository, though-that would have been cutting it way too fine, for one big reason I"ll have to tell you about."
His eyes no longer looked so bright, and the lines on his face were deepening again. I was scared by how shallow his reserves of strength had become.
"I"ve written all this stuff down. I want you to read it. Actually, I want you to cram like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Look on top of the TV, buddy. Would you do that?" He gave me a tired smile and added, "I got my sittin-britches on."
It was a thick blue notebook. The price stamped on the paper cover was twenty-five cents. The brand was foreign to me. "What"s Kresge"s?"
"The department store chain now known as Kmart. Never mind what"s on the cover, just pay attention to what"s inside. It"s an Oswald timeline, plus all the evidence piled up against him . . . which you don"t really have to read if you take me up on this, because you"re going to stop the little weasel in April of 1963, over half a year before Kennedy comes to Dallas."
"Why April?"
"Because that"s when somebody tried to kill General Edwin Walker . . . only he wasn"t a general anymore by then. He got cashiered in 1961, by JFK himself. General Eddie was handing out segregationist literature to his troops and ordering them to read the stuff."
"It was Oswald who tried to shoot him?"
"That"s what you need to make sure of. Same rifle, no doubt about that, ballistics proved it. I was waiting to see him take the shot. I could afford not to interfere, because that time Oswald missed. The bullet deflected off the wood strip in the middle of Walker"s kitchen window. Not much, but just enough. The bullet literally parted his hair and flying wood splinters from the munting cut his arm a little. That was his only wound. I won"t say the man deserved to die-very few men are evil enough to deserve being shot from ambush-but I would have traded Walker for Kennedy any day of the week."
I paid little attention to that last. I was thumbing through Al"s Oswald Book, page after page of closely written notes. They were completely legible at the beginning, less so toward the end. The last few pages were the scrawls of a very sick man. I snapped the cover closed and said, "If you could confirm that Oswald was the shooter in the General Walker attempt, that would have settled your doubts?"
"Yes. I needed to make sure he"s capable of doing it. Ozzie"s a bad man, Jake-what people back in "58 call a louse-but beating on your wife and keeping her a virtual prisoner because she doesn"t speak the language don"t justify murder. And something else. Even if I hadn"t come down with the big C, I knew I might not get another chance to make it right if I killed Oswald and someone else shot the president anyway. By the time a man"s in his sixties, he"s pretty much off the warranty, if you see what I mean."
"Would it have to be killing? Couldn"t you just . . . I don"t know . . . frame him for something?"
"Maybe, but by then I was sick. I don"t know if I could have done it even if I was well. On the whole it seemed simpler to just end him, once I was sure. Like swatting a wasp before it can sting you."
I was quiet, thinking. The clock on the wall said ten-thirty. Al had opened the conversation by saying he"d be good to go until midnight, but I only had to look at him to know that had been wildly optimistic.
I took his gla.s.s and mine out to the kitchen, rinsed them, and put them in the dish drainer. It felt like there was a tornado funnel behind my forehead. Instead of cows and fenceposts and sc.r.a.ps of paper, what it was sucking up and spinning around were names: Lee Oswald, Bobby Oswald, Marina Oswald, Edwin Walker, Fred Hampton, Patty Hearst. There were bright acronyms in that whirl, too, circling like chrome hood ornaments ripped off luxury cars: JFK, RFK, MLK, SLA. The cyclone even had a sound, two Russian words spoken over and over again in a flat Southern drawl: pokhoda, cyka.
Walk, b.i.t.c.h.
5.
"How long have I got to decide?" I asked.
"Not long. The diner goes at the end of the month. I talked to a lawyer about buying some more time-tying them up in a suit, or something-but he wasn"t hopeful. Ever seen a sign in a furniture store saying LOST OUR LEASE, EVERYTHING MUST GO?"
"Sure."
"Nine cases out of ten that"s just sales-pitch bulls.h.i.t, but this is the tenth case. And I"m not talking about some discount dollar store b.u.mping to get in, I"m talking about Bean"s, and when it comes to Maine retail, L.L. Bean is the biggest ape in the jungle. Come July first, the diner"s gone like Enron. But that isn"t the big thing. By July first, I might be gone. I could catch a cold and be dead of pneumonia in three days. I could have a heart attack or a stroke. Or I could kill myself with these d.a.m.n OxyContin pills by accident. The visiting nurse who comes in asks me every day if I"m being careful not to exceed the dosage, and I am careful, but I can see she"s still worried she"ll walk in some morning and find me dead, probably because I got stoned and lost count. Plus the pills inhibit respiration, and my lungs are shot. On top of all that, I"ve lost a lot of weight."
"Really? I hadn"t noticed."
"n.o.body loves a smarta.s.s, buddy-when you get to be my age, you"ll know. In any case, I want you to take this as well as the notebook." He held out a key. "It"s to the diner. If you should call me tomorrow and hear from the nurse that I pa.s.sed away in the night, you"ll have to move fast. Always a.s.suming you decide to move at all, that is."
"Al, you"re not planning-"
"Just trying to be careful. Because this matters, Jake. As far as I"m concerned, it matters more than anything else. If you ever wanted to change the world, this is your chance. Save Kennedy, save his brother. Save Martin Luther King. Stop the race riots. Stop Vietnam, maybe." He leaned forward. "Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives."
"It"s a h.e.l.l of a sales pitch," I said, "but I don"t need the key. When the sun comes up tomorrow, you"ll still be on the big blue bus."
"Ninety-five percent probability. But that"s not good enough. Take the G.o.ddam key."
I took the G.o.ddam key and put it in my pocket. "I"ll let you get some rest."
"One more thing before you go. I need to tell you about Carolyn Poulin and Andy Cullum. Sit down again, Jake. This"ll take a few minutes."
I stayed on my feet. "Uh-uh. You"re used up. You need to sleep."
"I"ll sleep when I"m dead. Sit down."
6.
After discovering what he called the rabbit-hole, Al said, he was at first content to use it to buy supplies, make a few bets with a bookie he found in Lewiston, and build up his stash of fifties cash. He also took the occasional midweek holiday on Sebago Lake, which was teeming with fish that were tasty and perfectly safe to eat. People worried about fallout from A-bomb tests, he said, but fears of getting mercury poisoning from tainted fish were still in the future. He called these jaunts (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but he would sometimes stay all the way to Friday) his minivacations. The weather was always good (because it was always the same weather) and the fishing was always terrific (he probably caught at least some of the same fish over and over).
"I know exactly how you feel about all this, Jake, because I was pretty much in shock those first few years. You want to know what"s a mind-blower? Going down those stairs at the height of a January nor"easter and coming out in that bright September sunshine. Shirtsleeve weather, am I right?"
I nodded and told him to go on. The little bit of color that had been in his cheeks when I came in was all gone, and he was coughing steadily again.
"But if you give a man some time, he can get used to anything, and when the shock finally started to wear off, I started to think I"d found that old rabbit-hole for a reason. That"s when I started to think about Kennedy. But your question reared its ugly head: can you change the past? I wasn"t concerned about the consequences-at least not to start with-but only about whether or not it could be done at all. On one of my Sebago trips, I took out my knife and carved AL T. FROM 2007 on a tree near the cabin where I stayed. When I got back here, I jumped in my car and drove on over to Sebago Lake. The cabins where I stayed are gone; there"s a tourist hotel there now. But the tree is still there. So was what I carved into it. Old and smooth, but still there: AL T. FROM 2007. So I knew it could be done. Then I started thinking about the b.u.t.terfly effect.
"There"s a newspaper in The Falls back then, the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise, and the library scanned all their microfilm into the computer in "05. Speeds things up a lot. I was looking for an accident in the fall or early winter of 1958. A certain kind of accident. I would have gone all the way into early 1959 if necessary, but I found what I was looking for on November fifteenth of "58. A twelve-year-old girl named Carolyn Poulin was hunting with her father across the river, in the part of Durham that"s called Bowie Hill. Around two o"clock that afternoon-it was a Sat.u.r.day-a hunter from Durham named Andrew Cullum shot at a deer in that same section of the woods. He missed the deer, hit the girl. Even though she was a quarter of a mile away, he hit the girl. I think about that, you know. When Oswald shot at General Walker, the range was less than a hundred yards. But the bullet clipped the wood sash in the middle of a window and he missed. The bullet that paralyzed the Poulin girl traveled over four hundred yards-much farther than the shot that killed Kennedy-and missed every tree trunk and branch along the way. If it had even clipped a twig, it almost surely would have missed her. So sure, I think about it."
That was the first time the phrase life turns on a dime crossed my mind. It wasn"t the last. Al grabbed another maxi pad, coughed, spat, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he drew in the closest thing to a deep breath he could manage, and labored on. I didn"t try to stop him. I was fascinated all over again.
"I plugged her name into the Enterprise"s search database and found a few more stories about her. She graduated from Lisbon High School in 1965-a year behind the rest of her cla.s.s, but she made it-and went to the University of Maine. Business major. Became an accountant. She lives in Gray, less than ten miles from Sebago Lake, where I used to go on my minivacations, and she still works as a freelance. Want to guess who one of her biggest clients is?"
I shook my head.
"John Crafts, right here in The Falls. Squiggy Wheaton, one of the salesmen, is a regular customer at the diner, and when he told me one day that they were doing their annual inventory and "the numbers lady" was there going over the books, I made it my business to roll on up and get an eyes-on. She"s sixty-five now, and . . . you know how some women that age can be really beautiful?"
"Yes," I said. I was thinking of Christy"s mother, who didn"t fully come into her looks until she was in her fifties.
"Carolyn Poulin is that way. Her face is a cla.s.sic, the kind a painter from two or three hundred years ago would love, and she"s got snow white hair that she wears long, down her back."
"Sounds like you"re in love, Al."
He had enough strength left to shoot me the bird.
"She"s in great physical shape, too-well, you"d almost expect that, wouldn"t you, an unmarried woman hauling herself in and out of a wheelchair every day and getting in and out of the specially equipped van she drives. Not to mention in and out of bed, in and out of the shower, all the rest. And she does-Squiggy says she"s completely self-sufficient. I was impressed."
"So you decided to save her. As a test case."
"I went back down the rabbit-hole, only this time I stayed in the Sebago cabin over two months. Told the owner I"d come into some money when my uncle died. You ought to remember that, buddy-the rich uncle thing is tried and true. Everybody believes it because everybody wants one. So comes the day: November fifteenth, 1958. I don"t mess with the Poulins. Given my idea about stopping Oswald, I"m much more interested in Cullum, the shooter. I"d researched him, too, and found out he lived about a mile from Bowie Hill, near the old Durham grange hall. I thought I"d get there before he left for the woods. Didn"t quite work out that way.
"I left my cabin on Sebago really early, which was a good thing for me, because I wasn"t a mile down the road before the Hertz car I was driving came up with a flat shoe. I took out the spare, put it on, and although it looked absolutely fine, I hadn"t gone another mile before that one went flat, too.
"I hitched a ride to the Esso station in Naples, where the guy in the service bay told me he had too d.a.m.n much work to come out and put a new tire on a Hertz Chevrolet. I think he was p.i.s.sed about missing the Sat.u.r.day hunting. A twenty-dollar tip changed his mind, but I never got into Durham until past noon. I took the old Runaround Pond Road because that"s the quickest way to go, and guess what? The bridge over Chuckle Brook had fallen into the G.o.ddam water. Big red and white sawhorses; smudgepots; big orange sign reading ROAD CLOSED. By then I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and I had a sinking feeling that I wasn"t going to be able to do what I"d set out that morning to do. Keep in mind that I left at eight A.M., just to be on the safe side, and it took me over four hours to get eighteen miles. But I didn"t give up. I went around by Methodist Church Road instead, hammering that rent-a-dent for all it was worth, pulling up this long rooster-tail of dust behind me-all the roads out that way are dirt back then.
"Okay, so I"m seeing cars and trucks parked off to the sides or at the start of woods roads every here and there, and I"m also seeing hunters walking with their guns broken open over their arms. Every single one of them lifted his hand to me-folks are friendlier in "58, there"s no doubt about that. I waved back, too, but what I was really waiting for was another flat. Or a blowout. That would probably have sent me right off the road and into the ditch, because I was doing sixty at least. I remember one of the hunters patting the air with his hands, the way you do when you"re telling someone to slow down, but I paid no attention.
"I flew up Bowie Hill, and just past the old Friends" Meeting House, I spied a pickemup parked by the graveyard. POULIN CONSTRUCTION AND CARPENTRY painted on the door. Truck empty. Poulin and his girl in the woods, maybe sitting in a clearing somewhere, eating their lunch and talking the way fathers and daughters do. Or at least how I imagine they do, never having had one myself-"
Another long fit of coughing, which ended with a terrible wet gagging sound.
"Ah s.h.i.t, don"t that hurt," he groaned.
"Al, you need to stop."
He shook his head and wiped a slick of blood off his lower lip with the heel of his palm. "What I need is to get this out, so shut up and let me do it.
"I gave the truck a good long stare, still rolling at sixty or so all the while, and when I looked back at the road, I saw there was a tree down across it. I stopped just in time to keep from crashing into it. It wasn"t a big tree, and before the cancer went to work on me, I was pretty strong. Also, I was mad as h.e.l.l. I got out and started wrestling with it. While I was doing that-also cussing my head off-a car came along from the other direction. Man gets out, wearing an orange hunting vest. I don"t know for sure if it"s my man or not-the Enterprise never printed his picture-but he looks like the right age.
"He says, "Let me help you with that, oldtimer."
""Thank you very much," I says, and holds out my hand. "Bill Laidlaw."
"He shakes it and says, "Andy Cullum." So it was him. Given all the trouble I"d had getting to Durham, I could hardly believe it. I felt like I"d won the lottery. We grabbed the tree, and between us we got it shifted. When it was, I sat down on the road and grabbed my chest. He asked me if I was okay. "Well, I don"t know," I says. "I never had a heart attack, but this sure feels like one." Which is why Mr. Andy Cullum never got any hunting done on that November afternoon, Jake, and why he never shot any little girl, either. He was busy taking poor old Bill Laidlaw up to Central Maine General in Lewiston."
"You did it? You actually did it?"
"Bet your a.s.s. I told em at the hospital that I"d had a big old hero for lunch-what"s called an Italian sandwich back then-and the diagnosis was "acute indigestion." I paid twenty-five dollars in cash and they sprung me. Cullum waited around and took me back to my Hertz car, how"s that for neighborly? I returned home to 2011 that very night . . . only of course I came back only two minutes after I left. s.h.i.t like that"ll give you jet-lag without ever getting on a plane.
"My first stop was the town library, where I looked up the story of the 1965 high school graduation again. Before, there"d been a photo of Carolyn Poulin to go with it. The princ.i.p.al back then-Earl Higgins, he"s long since gone to his reward-was bending over to hand her her diploma as she sat in her wheelchair, all dressed up in her cap and gown. The caption underneath said, Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery."
"Was it still there?"
"The story about the graduation was, you bet. Graduation day always makes the front page in smalltown newspapers, you know that, buddy. But after I came back from "58, the picture was of a boy with a half-a.s.sed Beatle haircut standing at the podium and the caption said, Valedictorian Trevor "Buddy" Briggs speaks to graduation a.s.semblage. They listed every graduate-there were only a hundred or so-and Carolyn Poulin wasn"t among em. So I checked the graduation story from "64, which was the year she would have graduated if she hadn"t been busy getting better from being shot in the spine. And bingo. No picture and no special mention, but she was listed right between David Platt and Stephanie Routhier."
"Just another kid marching to "Pomp and Circ.u.mstance," right?"
"Right. Then I plugged her name into the Enterprise"s search function, and got some hits after 1964. Not many, three or four. About what you"d expect for an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. She went to the University of Maine, majored in business administration, then went to grad school in New Hampshire. I found one more story, from 1979, not long before the Enterprise folded. FORMER LISBON RESIDENT STUDENT WINS NATIONAL DAYLILY COMPEt.i.tION, it said. There was a picture of her, standing on her own two good legs, with the winning lily. She lives . . . lived . . . I don"t know which way is right, maybe both . . . in a town outside of Albany, New York."
"Married? Kids?"
"Don"t think so. In the picture, she"s holding up the winning daylily and there are no rings on her left hand. I know what you"re thinking, not much that changed except for being able to walk. But who can really tell? She was living in a different place and influenced the lives of who knows how many different people. Ones she never would have known if Cullum had shot her and she"d stayed in The Falls. See what I mean?"
What I saw was it was really impossible to tell, one way or another, but I agreed with him, because I wanted to finish with this before he collapsed. And I intended to see him safely into his bed before I left.
"What I"m telling you, Jake, is that you can change the past, but it"s not as easy as you might think. That morning I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking. It would give a little, then snap back just as tight as before. Finally, though, I managed to rip it open."
"Why would it be hard? Because the past doesn"t want to be changed?"
"Something doesn"t want it to be changed, I"m pretty sure of that. But it can be. If you take the resistance into account, it can be." Al was looking at me, eyes bright in his haggard face. "All in all, the story of Carolyn Poulin ends with "And she lived happily ever after," wouldn"t you say?"
"Yes."
"Look inside the back cover of the notebook I gave you, buddy, and you might change your mind. Little something I printed out today."
I did as he asked and found a cardboard pocket. For storing things like office memos and business cards, I a.s.sumed. A single sheet of paper was folded into it. I took it out, opened it up, and looked for a long time. It was a computer printout of page 1 of the Weekly Lisbon Enterprise. The date below the masthead was June 18, 1965. The headline read: LHS CLa.s.s OF "65 GOES FORTH IN TEARS, LAUGHTER. In the photograph, a bald man (his mortarboard tucked under his arm so it wouldn"t tumble off his head) was bending over a smiling girl in a wheelchair. He was holding one side of her diploma; she was holding the other. Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery, the caption read.
I looked up at Al, confused. "If you changed the future and saved her, how can you have this?"
"Every trip"s a reset, buddy. Remember?"
"Oh my G.o.d. When you went back to stop Oswald, everything you did to save Poulin got erased."
"Yes . . . and no."
"What do you mean, yes and no?"
"The trip back to save Kennedy was going to be the last trip, but I was in no hurry to get down to Texas. Why would I be? In September of 1958, Ozzie Rabbit-that"s what his fellow Marines called him-isn"t even in America. He"s steaming gaily around the South Pacific with his unit, keeping j.a.pan and Formosa safe for democracy. So I went back to the Shadyside Cabins in Sebago and hung out there until November fifteenth. Again. But when it rolled around, I left even earlier in the morning, which was a good f.u.c.king call on my part, because I didn"t just have a couple of flat tires that time. My G.o.ddam rental Chevy threw a rod. Ended up paying the service station guy in Naples sixty bucks to use his car for the day, and left him my Marine Corps ring as extra security. Had some other adventures, which I won"t bother recapping-"
"Was the bridge still out in Durham?"