11/22/63: A Novel (102 page)

“It’s been closed for years and all the books are gone! They have Hate Meetings there now. Leave me alone, I say, or I’ll buzz for a constable!”

She scuttled away, looking back over her shoulder every few seconds to make sure I wasn’t coming after her. I let her put enough distance between us to make her feel comfy, then continued up Main Street. My knee was recovering a bit from my stair-climbing exertions in the Book Depository, but I was still limping, and would be for some time to come. Lights burned behind drawn curtains in a few houses, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t produced by Central Maine Power. Those were Coleman lanterns and in some cases kerosene lamps. Most of the houses were dark. Some were charred wrecks. There was a Nazi swastika on one of the wrecks and the words JEW RAT spray-painted on another.

Those boys are bad enough and soon they’ll start their wilding.

And . . . had she really said Hate Meetings?

In front of one of the few houses that looked in good shape—it was a mansion compared to most of them—I saw a long hitching rail, like in a western movie. And actual horses had been tied up there. When the sky lightened in another of those diffuse spasms, I could see horsepucky pats, some of them fresh. The driveway was gated.
The moon had gone in again, so I couldn’t read the sign on the iron slats, but I didn’t need to read it to know it said KEEP OUT.

Now, from up ahead, I heard someone enunciate a single word: “Cunt!”

It didn’t sound young, like one of the wild boys, and it was coming from my side of the street rather than theirs. The guy sounded pissed off. He also sounded like he might be talking to himself. I walked toward his voice.

“Mother-
fucker
!” the voice cried, exasperated. “
Shit
-ass!”

He was maybe a block up. Before I got there, I heard a loud metallic bonk and the male voice cried: “Get on with you! Goddam little wetnosed sonsabitches! Get on with you before I pull my pistol!”

Mocking laughter greeted this. It was the pot-smoking wild boys, and the voice that replied certainly belonged to the one who had mooned me. “Only pistol you got is the one in your pants, and I bet it’s got a mighty limp barrel!”

More laughter. It was followed by a high metallic
spannng
sound.

“You fucks, you broke one of my spokes!” When the man yelled at them again, his voice was tinged with reluctant fear. “Nah, nah, stay on your own goddam side!”

The clouds rifted. The moon peeked through. By its chancy light I saw an old man in a wheelchair. He was halfway across one of the streets intersecting Main—Goddard, if the name hadn’t changed. One of his wheels had gotten stuck in a pothole, causing the chair to cant drunkenly to the left. The boys were crossing toward him. The kid who had told me to fuck off was holding a slingshot with a good-sized rock in it. That explained the bonk and the spang.

“Got any oldbucks, grampy? For that matter, you got any newbucks or canned goods?”

“No! If you don’t have the goddam decency to push me out of the hole I’m in, at least go away and leave me alone!”

But they were wilding, and they weren’t going to do that. They
were going to rob him of whatever small shit he might happen to have, maybe beat him up, tip him over for sure.

Jake and George came together, and both of them saw red.

The attention of the wild boys was fixed on the wheelchair-geezer and they didn’t see me cutting toward them on a diagonal—just as I’d cut across the sixth floor of the School Book Depository. My left arm still wasn’t much good, but my right was fine, toned up by three months of physical therapy, first in Parkland and then at Eden Fallows. And I still had some of the accuracy that had made me a varsity third baseman in high school. I pegged the first chunk of concrete from thirty feet away and caught Moon Man in the center of the chest. He screamed with pain and surprise. All the boys—there were five of them—turned toward me. When they did, I saw that their faces were as disfigured as the frightened woman’s had been. The one with the slingshot, young Master Fuck Off, was the worst. There was nothing but a hole where his nose should have been.

I transferred my second chunk of concrete from my left hand to my right, and threw it at the tallest of the boys, who was wearing a huge pair of loose pants with the waistband drawn up nearly to his sternum. He raised a blocking arm. The concrete struck it, knocking the joint he was holding into the street. He took one look at my face, then wheeled and ran. Moon Man followed him. That left three.

“Walk it to em, son!”
the old man in the wheelchair shrilled.
“They got it coming, by Christ!”

I was sure they did, but they had me outnumbered and my ammo was gone. When you’re dealing with teenagers, the only possible way to win in such a situation is to show no fear, only genuine adult outrage. You just keep coming, and that was what I did. I seized young Master Fuck Off by the front of his ragged tee-shirt with my right hand and snatched the slingshot away from him with the left. He stared at me, wide-eyed, and put up no resistance.

“You chickenshit,” I said, getting my face right up into his . . .
and never mind the nose that wasn’t. He smelled sweaty and pot-smoky and deeply dirty. “How chickenshit do you have to be to go after an old man in a wheelchair?”

“Who are y—”

“Charlie Fucking Chaplin. I went to France just to see the ladies dance. Now get out of here.”

“Give me back my—”

I knew what he wanted and bonked the center of his forehead with it. It started one of his sores trickling and must have hurt like hell, because his eyes filled with tears. This disgusted me and filled me with pity, but I tried to show neither. “You get nothing, chickenshit, except a chance to get out of here before I rip your worthless balls off your no doubt diseased scrote and stuff them into the hole where your nose used to be. One chance. Take it.” I drew in breath, then screamed it out at his face in a spray of noise and spit:
“Run!”

I watched them go, feeling shame and exultation in roughly equal parts. The old Jake had been great at quelling rowdy study halls on Friday afternoons before vacations, but that was about as far as his skills went. The new Jake, however, was part George. And George had been through a lot.

From behind me came a heavy bout of coughing. It made me think of Al Templeton. When it stopped, the old man said, “Fella, I would have pissed five years’ worth of kidney rocks just to see those vile dinks take to their heels like that. I don’t know who you are, but I’ve got a little Glenfiddich left in my pantry—the real stuff—and if you push me out of this goddam hole in the road and roll me home, I’ll share it with you.”

The moon had gone in again, but as it came back out through the ragged clouds, I saw his face. He was wearing a long white beard and had a cannula stuffed up his nose, but even after five years, I had no trouble at all recognizing the man who had gotten me into this mess.

“Hello, Harry,” I said.

He still lived on Goddard Street. I rolled him up the ramp to the porch, where he produced a fearsome bundle of keys. He needed them. The front door had no less than four locks.

“Do you rent or own?”

“Oh, it’s all mine,” he said. “Such as it is.”

“Good for you.” Before, he had rented.

“You still haven’t told me how you know my name.”

“First, let’s have that drink. I can use one.”

The door opened on a parlor that took up the front half of the house. He told me to whoa, as if I were a horse, and lit a Coleman lantern. By its light I saw furniture of the type that is called “old but serviceable.” There was a beautiful braided rug on the floor. No GED diploma on any of the walls—and of course no framed theme titled “The Day That Changed My Life”—but there were a great many Catholic icons and lots of pictures. It was with no surprise that I recognized some of the people in them. I had met them, after all.

“Lock that behind you, would you?”

I closed us off from the dark and disturbing Lisbon Falls, and ran both bolts.

“Deadbolt, too, if you don’t mind.”

I twisted it and heard a heavy clunk. Harry, meanwhile, was rolling around his parlor and lighting the same sort of
long-chimneyed kerosene lamps I vaguely remembered seeing in my gramma Sarie’s house. It was a better light for the room than the Coleman lamp, and when I killed its hot white glow, Harry Dunning nodded approvingly.

“What’s your name, sir? You already know mine.”

“Jake Epping. Don’t suppose that rings any bells with you, does it?”

He considered, then shook his head. “Should it?”

“Probably not.”

He stuck out his hand. It shook slightly with some incipient palsy. “I’ll shake with you, just the same. That could have been nasty.”

I shook his hand gladly. Hello, new friend. Hello, old friend.

“Okay, now that we got that took care of, we can drink with clear consciences. I’ll get us that single malt.” He started for the kitchen, rolling his wheels with arms that were a little shaky but still strong. The chair had a small motor, but either it didn’t work or he was saving the battery. He looked back over his shoulder at me. “Not dangerous, are you? I mean, to me?”

“Not to you, Harry.” I smiled. “I’m your good angel.”

“This is fucking peculiar,” he said. “But these days, what isn’t?”

He went into the kitchen. Soon more light glowed. Homey orange-yellow light. In here, everything seemed homey. But out there . . . in the world . . .

Just what in the hell had I done?

“What’ll we drink to?” I asked when we had our glasses in hand.

“Better times than these. Will that work for you, Mr. Epping?”

“It works fine. And make it Jake.”

We clinked. Drank. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything stronger than Lone Star beer. The whisky was like hot honey.

“No electricity?” I asked, looking around at the lamps. He had
turned them all low, presumably to save on oil.

He made a sour face. “Not from around here, are you?”

A question I’d heard before, from Frank Anicetti, at the Fruit. On my very first trip into the past. Then I’d told a lie. I didn’t want to do that now.

“I don’t quite know how to answer that, Harry.”

He shrugged it off. “We’re supposed to get juice three days a week, and this is supposed to be one of the days, but it cut off around six
P.M.
I believe in Province Electric like I believe in Santa Claus.”

As I considered this, I remembered the stickers on the cars. “How long has Maine been a part of Canada?”

He gave me a how-crazy-are-you look, but I could see he was enjoying this. The strangeness of it and also the
there
-ness of it. I wondered when he’d last had a real conversation with someone. “Since 2005. Did someone bump you on the head, or something?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” I went to his wheelchair, dropped on the knee that still bent willingly and without pain, and showed him the place on the back of my head where the hair had never grown back. “I took a bad beating a few months ago—”

“Yuh, I seen you limping when you ran at those kids.”

“—and now there’s lots of things I don’t remember.”

The floor suddenly shook beneath us. The flames in the kerosene lamps trembled. The pictures on the walls rattled, and a two-feet-high plaster Jesus with his arms outstretched took a jittery stroll toward the edge of the mantelpiece. He looked like a guy contemplating suicide, and given the current state of things as I had observed them, I couldn’t blame him.

“Popper,” Harry said matter-of-factly when the shaking stopped. “You remember those, right?”

“No.” I got up, went to the mantelpiece, and pushed Jesus back beside his Holy Mother.

“Thanks. I’ve already lost half the damn disciples off the shelf in my bedroom, and I mourn every one. They were my mom’s. Poppers
are earth tremors. We get a lot of em, but most of the big-daddy quakes are in the Midwest or out California way. Europe and China too, of course.”

“People tying up their boats in Idaho, are they?” I was still at the mantelpiece, now looking at the framed pictures.

“Hasn’t got that bad yet, but . . . you know four of the Japanese islands are gone, right?”

I looked at him with dismay. “No.”

“Three were small ones, but Hokkaido’s gone, too. Dropped into the goddam ocean four years ago like it was on an elevator. The scientists say it’s got something to do with the earth’s crust.” Matter-of-factly he added: “They say if it don’t stop, it’ll tear the planet apart by 2080 or so. Then the solar system’ll have
two
asteroid belts.”

I drank the rest of my whisky in a single gulp, and the crocodile tears of booze momentarily doubled my vision. When the room solidified again, I pointed to a picture of Harry at about fifty. He was still in his wheelchair, but he looked hale and healthy, at least from the waist up; the legs of his suit pants billowed over his diminished legs. Next to him was a woman in a pink dress that reminded me of Jackie Kennedy’s suit on 11/22/63. I remember my mother telling me never to call a woman who wasn’t beautiful “plain-faced”; they were, she said, “good-faced.” This woman was good-faced.

“Your wife?”

“Ayuh. That was taken on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She died two years later. There’s a lot of that going around. The politicians will tell you the A-bombs did it—been twenty-eight or-nine swapped since Hanoi Hell in ’69. They’ll swear it until they’re blue in the face, but everyone knows the sores and the cancer didn’t start getting really bad up this way until Vermont Yankee went China Syndrome. That happened after years of protests about the place. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘there won’t be any big earthquakes in Vermont, not way up here in God’s Kingdom, just the usual little shakers and poppers.’ Yeah. Look what happened.”

“You’re saying a reactor blew up in Vermont.”

“Spewed radiation all over New England and southern Quebec.”

“When?”

“Jake, are you pulling my leg?”

“Absolutely not.”

“June nineteenth, 1999.”