"Bill Clinton"s president?"
"Gosh, no. He was a shoo-in for the "04 nomination, but he died of a heart attack at the convention. His wife stepped in. She"s president."
"Doing a good job?"
Harry waggled his hand. "Not bad . . . but you can"t legislate earthquakes. And that"s what"s going to do for us, in the end."
Overhead, that watery ripping sound came again. I looked up. Harry didn"t.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Son," he said, "n.o.body seems to know. The scientists argue, but in this case I think the preachers might have the straight of it. They say it"s G.o.d getting ready to tear down all the works of His hands, same way that Samson tore down the Temple of the Philistines." He drank the rest of his whisky. Thin color had bloomed in his cheeks . . . which were, as far as I could see, free of radiation sores. "And on that one, I think they might be right."
"Christ almighty," I said.
He looked at me levelly. "Heard enough history, son?"
Enough to last me a lifetime.
4.
"I have to go," I said. "Will you be all right?"
"Until I"m not. Same as everyone else." He looked at me closely. "Jake, where did you drop from? And why the h.e.l.l should I feel like I know you?"
"Maybe because we always know our good angels?"
"Bulls.h.i.t."
I wanted to be gone. All in all, I thought my life after the next reset was going to be much simpler. But first, because this was a good man who had suffered greatly in all three of his incarnations, I approached the mantelpiece again, and took down one of the framed pictures.
"Be careful with that," Harry said tetchily. "It"s my family."
"I know." I put it in his gnarled and age-spotted hands, a black-and-white photo that had, by the faintly fuzzy look of the image, been blown up from a Kodak snap. "Did your dad take this? I ask, because he"s the only one not in it."
He looked at me curiously, then back down at the picture. "No," he said. "This was taken by a neighbor-lady in the summer of 1958. My dad and mom were separated by then."
I wondered if the neighbor-lady had been the one I"d seen smoking a cigarette as she alternated washing the family car and spraying the family dog. Somehow I was sure it had been. From far down in my mind, like a sound heard coming up from a deep well, came the chanting voices of the jump-rope girls: my old man drives a sub-ma-rine.
"He had a drinking problem. That wasn"t such a big deal back then, lots of men drank too much and stayed under the same roofs with their wives, but he got mean when he drank."
"I bet he did," I said.
He looked at me again, more sharply, then smiled. Most of his teeth were gone, but the smile was still pleasant enough. "I doubt if you know what you"re talking about. How old are you, Jake?"
"Forty." Although I was sure I looked older that night.
"Which means you were born in 1971."
Actually it had been "76, but there was no way I could tell him that without discussing the five missing years that had fallen down the rabbit-hole, like Alice into Wonderland. "Close enough," I said. "That photo was taken at the house on Kossuth Street." Spoken the Derry way: Cossut.
I tapped Ellen, who was standing to the left of her mother, thinking of the grown-up version I"d spoken to on the phone-call that one Ellen 2.0. Also thinking-it was inevitable-of Ellen Dockerty, the harmonic version I"d known in Jodie.
"Can"t tell from this, but she was a little carrot-top, wasn"t she? A pint-sized Lucille Ball."
Harry said nothing, only gaped.
"Did she go into comedy? Or something else? Radio or TV?"
"She does a DJ show on Province of Maine CBC," he said faintly. "But how . . ."
"Here"s Troy . . . and Arthur, also known as Tugga . . . and here"s you, with your mother"s arm around you." I smiled. "Just the way G.o.d planned it." If only it could stay that way. If only.
"I . . . you . . ."
"Your father was murdered, wasn"t he?"
"Yes." The cannula had come askew in his nose and he pushed it straight, his hand moving slowly, like the hand of a man who is dreaming with his eyes open. "He was shot to death in Longview Cemetery while he was putting flowers on his parents" graves. Only a few months after this picture was taken. The police arrested a man named Bill Turcotte for it-"
Ow. I hadn"t seen that one coming.
"-but he had a solid alibi and eventually they had to let him go. The killer was never caught." He took one of my hands. "Mister . . . son . . . Jake . . . this is crazy, but . . . were you the one who killed my father?"
"Don"t be silly." I took the picture and hung it back on the wall. "I wasn"t born until 1971, remember?"
5.
I walked slowly down Main Street, back to the ruined mill and the abandoned Quik-Flash convenience store that stood in front of it. I walked with my head down, not looking for No Nose and Moon Man and the rest of that happy band. I thought if they were still anywhere in the vicinity, they"d give me a wide berth. They thought I was crazy. Probably I was.
We"re all mad here was what the Cheshire Cat told Alice. Then he disappeared. Except for the grin, that is. As I recall, the grin stayed awhile.
I understood more now. Not everything, I doubt if even the Card Men understand everything (and after they"ve spent awhile on duty, they understand almost nothing), but that still didn"t help me with the decision I had to make.
As I ducked under the chain, something exploded far in the distance. It didn"t make me jump. I imagined there were a lot of explosions now. When people begin to lose hope, there"s bound to be explosions.
I entered the bathroom at the back of the convenience store and almost tripped over my sheepskin jacket. I kicked it aside-I wouldn"t be needing it where I was going-and walked slowly over to the piled boxes that looked so much like Lee"s sniper"s nest.
G.o.ddam harmonies.
I moved enough of them so I could get into the corner, then carefully restacked them behind me. I moved forward step by small step, once again thinking of how a man or woman feels for the top of a staircase in utter darkness. But there was no step this time, only that queer doubling. I moved forward, watched my lower body shimmer, then closed my eyes.
Another step. And another. Now I felt warmth on my legs. Two more steps and sunlight turned the black behind my eyelids to red. I took one more step and heard the pop inside my head. When that cleared, I heard the shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH of the weaving flats.
I opened my eyes. The stink of the dirty abandoned restroom had been replaced by the stink of a textile mill operating full bore in a year when the Environmental Protection Agency did not exist. There was cracked cement under my feet instead of peeling linoleum. To my left were the big metal bins filled with fabric remnants and covered with burlap. To my right was the drying shed. It was eleven fifty-eight on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Harry Dunning was once more a little boy. Carolyn Poulin was in period five at LHS, perhaps listening to the teacher, perhaps daydreaming about some boy or how she would go hunting with her father in a couple of months. Sadie Dunhill, not yet married to Mr. Have Broom Will Travel, was living in Georgia. Lee Harvey Oswald was in the South China Sea with his Marine unit. And John F. Kennedy was the junior senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, dreaming presidential dreams.
I was back.
6.
I walked to the chain and ducked under it. On the other side I stood perfectly still for a moment, rehearsing what I was going to do. Then I walked to the end of the drying shed. Around the corner, leaning against it, was the Green Card Man. Only Zack Lang"s card was no longer green. It had turned a muddy ocher shade, halfway between green and yellow. His out-of-season overcoat was dusty, and his formerly snappy fedora had a battered, somehow defeated look. His cheeks, previously clean-shaven, were now stubbled . . . and some of that stubble was white. His eyes were bloodshot. He wasn"t on the booze yet-at least I couldn"t smell any-but I thought he might be soon. The greenfront was, after all, within his small circle of operation, and holding all those time-strings in your head has to hurt. Multiple pasts were bad enough, but when you added multiple futures? Anyone would turn to drink, if drink were available.
I had spent an hour in 2011. Maybe a little more. How long had it been for him? I didn"t know. I didn"t want to know.
"Thank G.o.d," he said . . . just as he had before. But when he once more reached to take my hand in both of his, I drew back. His nails were now long and black with dirt. The fingers shook. They were the hands-and the coat, and the hat, and the card in the brim of the hat-of a wino-in-waiting.
"You know what you have to do," he said.
"I know what you want me to do."
"Want has nothing to do with it. You have to go back one last time. If all is well, you"ll come out in the diner. Soon it will be taken away, and when that happens, the bubble that has caused all this madness will burst. It"s a miracle that it"s stayed as long as it has. You have to close the circle."
He reached for me again. This time I did more than draw back; I turned and ran for the parking lot. He sprinted after me. Because of my bad knee, it was closer than it would have been otherwise. I could hear him right behind me as I pa.s.sed the Plymouth Fury that was the double of the car I"d seen and dismissed one night in the courtyard of the Candlewood Bungalows. Then I was at the intersection of Main and the Old Lewiston Road. On the other side, the eternal rockabilly rebel stood with one boot c.o.c.ked against the siding of the Fruit.
I ran across the train tracks, afraid that my bad leg would betray me on the cinders, but Lang was the one who stumbled and fell. I heard him cry out-a desperate, lonely caw-and felt an instant of pity for him. Hard duty, the man had. But I didn"t let pity slow me down. The imperatives of love are cruel.
The Lewiston Express bus was coming. I lurched across the intersection and the bus driver blared his horn at me. I thought of another bus, crowded with people who were going to see the president. And the president"s lady, of course, the one in the pink suit. Roses laid between them on the seat. Not yellow but red.
"Jimla, come back!"
That was right. I was the Jimla after all, the monster in Rosette Templeton"s bad dream. I limped past the Kennebec Fruit, well ahead of the Ocher Card Man now. This was a race I was going to win. I was Jake Epping, high school teacher; I was George Amberson, aspiring novelist; I was the Jimla, who was endangering the whole world with every step he took.
Yet I ran on.
I thought of Sadie, tall and cool and beautiful, and I ran on. Sadie who was accident-p.r.o.ne and was going to stumble over a bad man named John Clayton. On him she would bruise more than her shins. The world well lost for love-was that Dryden or Pope?
I stopped by t.i.tus Chevron, panting. Across the street, the beatnik proprietor of the Jolly White Elephant was smoking his pipe and watching me. The Ocher Card Man stood at the mouth of the alley behind the Kennebec Fruit. It was apparently as far as he could go in that direction.
He held out his hands to me, which was bad. Then he fell on his knees and clasped his hands in front of him, which was ever so much worse. "Please don"t do this! You must know the cost!"
I knew it and still hurried on. A telephone booth stood at the intersection just beyond St. Joseph"s Church. I shut myself inside it, consulted the phone book, and dropped a dime.
When the cab came, the driver was smoking Luckies and his radio was tuned to WJAB.
History repeats itself.
Final Notes
9/30/58.
I holed up in Unit 7 at the Tamarack Motor Court.
I paid with money from an ostrich wallet that was given to me by an old buddy. Money, like meat bought at the Red & White Supermarket and shirts bought at Mason"s Menswear, stays. If every trip really is a complete reset, those things shouldn"t, but it"s not and they do. The money wasn"t from Al, but at least Agent Hosty let me run, which might turn out to be a good thing for the world.
Or not. I don"t know.
Tomorrow will be the first of October. In Derry, the Dunning kids are looking forward to Halloween and already planning their costumes. Ellen, that little red-haired kut-up kutie, plans to go as Princess Summerfall Winterspring. She"ll never get the chance. If I went to Derry today, I could kill Frank Dunning and save her Halloween, but I won"t. And I won"t go to Durham to save Carolyn Poulin from Andy Cullum"s errant shot. The question is, will I go to Jodie? I can"t save Kennedy, that is out of the question, but can the future history of the world be so fragile that it will not allow two high school teachers to meet and fall in love? To marry, to dance to Beatles tunes like "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and live unremarkable lives?
I don"t know, I don"t know.
She might not want to have anything to do with me. We"re no longer going to be thirty-five and twenty-eight; this time I"d be forty-two or-three. I look even older. But I believe in love, you know; love is a uniquely portable magic. I don"t think it"s in the stars, but I do believe that blood calls to blood and mind calls to mind and heart to heart.
Sadie dancing the Madison, color high in her cheeks, laughing.
Sadie telling me to lick her mouth again.
Sadie asking if I"d like to come in and have poundcake.
One man and one woman. Is that too much to ask?
I don"t know, I don"t know.
What have I done here, you ask, now that I have laid my good-angel wings aside? I have written. I have a fountain pen-one given to me by Mike and Bobbi Jill, you remember them-and I walked up the road to a market, where I bought ten refills. The ink is black, which suits my mood. I also bought two dozen thick legal pads, and I have filled all but the last one. Near the market is a Western Auto store, where I bought a spade and a steel footlocker, the kind with a combination. The total cost of my purchases was seventeen dollars and nineteen cents. Are these items enough to turn the world dark and filthy? What will happen to the clerk, whose ordained course has been changed-just by our brief transaction-from what it would have been otherwise?
I don"t know, but I do know this: I once gave a high school football player the chance to shine as an actor, and his girlfriend was disfigured. You could say I wasn"t responsible, but we know better, don"t we? The b.u.t.terfly spreads its wings.
For three weeks I wrote all day, every day. Twelve hours on some days. Fourteen on others. The pen racing and racing. My hand got sore. I soaked it, then wrote some more. Some nights I went to the Lisbon Drive-In, where there"s a special price for walk-ins: thirty cents. I sat in one of the folding chairs in front of the snackbar and next to the kiddie playground. I watched The Long, Hot Summer again. I watched The Bridge on the River Kwai and South Pacific. I watched a HORRORIFFIC DOUBLE FEATURE consisting of The Fly and The Blob. And I wondered what I was changing. If I so much as slapped a bug, I wondered what I was changing ten years up the line. Or twenty. Or forty.