11/22/63: A Novel (10 page)

“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 glass 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 scraps 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, bitch.

“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 bullshit, but this is the tenth case. And I’m not talking about some discount dollar store bumping 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 damn 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.”

“Nobody loves a smartass, 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 passed away in the night, you’ll have to move fast. Always assuming 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 hell 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 goddam key.”

I took the goddam 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.”

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 butterfly 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 Saturday—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 class, 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 classic, 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 damn much work to come out and put a new tire on a Hertz Chevrolet. I think he was pissed about missing the Saturday 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 goddam 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
shit,
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 hell. 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.