11/22/63: A Novel (16 page)

The taxi driver was a fat man who wore a battered hat with a badge on it reading LICENSED LIVERY. He smoked Luckies one after the other and played WJAB on the radio. We listened to “Sugartime” by the McGuire Sisters, “Bird Dog” by the Everly Brothers, and “Purple People Eater,” by some creature called a Sheb Wooley. That one I could have done without. After every other song, a trio of out-of-tune young women sang: “
Four
-teen
for
-ty, WJA-
beee
. . . the Big
Jab
!” I learned that Romanow’s was having their annual
end-of-summer blowout sale, and F. W. Woolworth’s had just gotten a fresh order of Hula Hoops, a steal at $1.39.

“Goddam things don’t do nothin but teach kids how to bump their hips,” the cabbie said, and let the wing window suck ash from the end of his cigarette. It was his only stab at conversation between Titus Chevron and the Tamarack Motor Court.

I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by. The urban sprawl between Lisbon Falls and the Lewiston city line didn’t exist. Other than a few gas stations, the Hi-Hat Drive-In, and the outdoor movie theater (the marquee advertised a double feature consisting of
Vertigo
and
The Long, Hot Summer
—both in CinemaScope and Technicolor), we were in pure Maine countryside. I saw more cows than people.

The motor court was set back from the highway and shaded not by tamaracks but by huge and stately elms. It wasn’t like seeing a herd of dinosaurs, but almost. I gawked at them while Mr. Licensed Livery lit up another smoke. “Need a hand witcher bags, sir?”

“No, I’m fine.” The fare on his meter wasn’t as stately as the elms, but still rated a double take. I gave the guy two dollars and asked fifty cents back. He seemed satisfied with that; the tip was enough to buy a pack of Luckies.

I checked in (no problem there; cash on the counter and no ID required) and took a long nap in a room where the air-conditioning was a fan on the windowsill. I awoke refreshed (good) and then found it impossible to get to sleep that night (not good). There was next to no traffic on the highway after sundown, and the quiet was so deep it was disquieting. The television was a Zenith table model that must have weighed a hundred pounds. Sitting on top was a pair of rabbit ears. Propped against them was a sign reading ADJUST ANTENNA BY HAND
DO NOT USE “TINFOIL!”
THANKS FROM MANAGEMENT.

There were three stations. The NBC affiliate was too snowy to watch no matter how much I fiddled with the rabbit ears, and on CBS the picture rolled; adjusting the vertical hold had no effect. ABC, which came in clear as a bell, was showing
The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp,
starring Hugh O’Brian. He shot a few outlaws and then an ad for Viceroy cigarettes came on. Steve McQueen explained that Viceroys had a thinking man’s filter and a smoking man’s taste. While he was lighting up, I got off the bed and turned the TV off.

Then there was just the sound of the crickets.

I stripped to my shorts, lay down, and tried to sleep. My mind turned to my mother and father. Dad was currently six years old and living in Eau Claire. My mom, only five, was living in an Iowa farmhouse that would burn to the ground three or four years from now. Her family would then move to Wisconsin, and closer to the intersection of lives that would eventually produce . . . me.

I’m crazy,
I thought.
Crazy and having a terribly involved hallucination in a mental hospital somewhere. Perhaps some doctor will write me up for a psychiatric journal. Instead of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I’ll be The Man Who Thought He Was in 1958.

But I ran my hand over the nubby fabric of the bedspread, which I had yet to turn back, and knew that it was all true. I thought of Lee Harvey Oswald, but Oswald still belonged to the future and he wasn’t what was troubling me in this museum piece of a motel room.

I sat on the edge of the bed, opened the briefcase, and took out my cell phone, a time-traveling gadget that was absolutely worthless here. Nevertheless, I could not resist flipping it open and pushing the power button. NO SERVICE popped up in the window, of course—what had I expected? Five bars? A plaintive voice saying
Come home, Jake, before you cause damage you can’t undo
? Stupid, superstitious idea. If I did damage, I
could
undo it, because every trip was a reset. You could say that time-travel came with a built-in safety switch.

That was comforting, but having a phone like this in a world where color TV was the biggest technological breakthrough in consumer electronics wasn’t comforting at all. I wouldn’t be hung as a witch if I was found with it, but I might be arrested by the local cops and held in a jail cell until some of J. Edgar Hoover’s boys could arrive from Washington to question me.

I put it on the bed, then pulled all of my change out of my right front pocket. I separated the coins into two piles. Those from 1958 and earlier went back into my pocket. Those from the future went into one of the envelopes I found in the desk drawer (along with a Gideon Bible and a Hi-Hat takeout menu). I got dressed, took my key, and left the room.

The crickets were much louder outside. A broken piece of moon hung in the sky. Away from its glow, the stars had never seemed so bright or close. A truck droned past on 196, and then the road was still. This was the countryside, and the countryside was sleeping. In the distance, a freight train whistled a hole in the night.

There were only two cars in the courtyard, and the units they belonged to were dark. So was the office. Feeling like a criminal, I walked into the field behind the motor court. High grass whickered against the legs of my jeans, which I would swap tomorrow for my new Ban-Lon slacks.

There was a smoothwire fence marking the edge of the Tamarack’s property. Beyond it was a small pond, what rural people call a tank. Nearby, half a dozen cows were sleeping in the warm night. One of them looked up at me as I worked my way under the fence and walked to the tank. After that it lost interest and lowered its head again. It didn’t raise it when my Nokia cell phone splashed into the pond. I sealed the envelope with my coins inside it and sent it after the phone. Then I went back the way I came, pausing at the rear of the motel to make sure the courtyard was still empty. It was.

I let myself into my room, undressed, and was asleep almost instantly.

The same chain-smoking cabbie picked me up the next morning, and when he dropped me off at Titus Chevron, the convertible was there. I had expected this, but it was still a relief. I was wearing a nondescript gray sport coat I’d bought off the rack at Mason’s Menswear. My new ostrich wallet was safe in its inner pocket, and lined with five hundred dollars of Al’s cash. Titus came over to me while I was admiring the Ford, wiping his hands on what looked like the same rag he’d been using on them yesterday.

“I slept on it, and I want it,” I said.

“That’s good,” he said, then assumed an air of regret. “But I slept on it, too, Mr. Amberson, and I guess I told you a lie when I said there might be some room for dickerin. Do you know what my wife said this morning while we were eatin our pancakes n bacon? She said ‘Bill, you’d be a damn fool to let that Sunliner go for less’n three-fifty.’ In fact, she said I was a damn fool for pricin it that low to start with.”

I nodded as if I’d expected nothing else. “Okay,” I said.

He looked surprised.

“Here’s what I can do, Mr. Titus. I can write you a check for three hundred and fifty—good check, Hometown Trust, you can call them and see—or I can give you three hundred in cash right out of my wallet. Less paperwork if we do it like that. What do you say?”

He grinned, revealing teeth of startling whiteness. “I say they know how to drive a bargain out there in Wisconsin. If you make it three-twenty, I’ll put on a sticker and a fourteen-day plate and off you go.”

“Three-ten.”

“Aw, don’t make me squirm,” Titus said, but he wasn’t squirming; he was enjoying himself. “Add a fin onto that and we’ll call it a deal.”

I held out my hand. “Three hundred and fifteen works for me.”

“Yowza.” This time he shook with me, never minding the grease. Then he pointed to the sales booth. Today the ponytailed cutie was reading
Confidential.
“You’ll want to pay the young lady, who happens to be my daughter. She’ll write up the sale. When you’re done, come around and I’ll put on that sticker. Throw in a tank of gas, too.”

Forty minutes later, behind the wheel of a 1954 Ford ragtop that now belonged to me, I was headed north toward Derry. I learned on a standard, so that was no problem, but this was the first car I’d ever driven with the gearshift on the column. It was weird at first, but once I got used to it (I would also have to get used to operating the headlight dimmer switch with my left foot), I liked it. And Bill Titus had been right about second gear; in second, the Sunliner went like a bastid. In Augusta, I stopped long enough to haul the top down. In Waterville, I grabbed a fine meatloaf dinner that cost ninety-five cents, apple pie à la mode included. It made the Fatburger look overpriced. I hummed along with the Skyliners, the Coasters, the Del Vikings, the Elegants. The sun was warm, the breeze ruffled my new short haircut, and the turnpike (nicknamed “The Mile-A-Minute Highway,” according to the billboards) was pretty much all mine. I seemed to have left my doubts of the night before sunk in the cow-tank along with my cell phone and futuristic change. I felt good.

Until I saw Derry.

There was something wrong with that town, and I think I knew it from the first.

I took Route 7 when The Mile-A-Minute Highway petered down to an asphalt-patched two-lane, and twenty miles or so north of Newport, I came over a rise and saw Derry hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag under a cloud of pollution from God knew how many paper and textile mills, all operating full bore. There was an artery of green running through the center of town. From a distance it looked like a scar. The town around that jagged greenbelt seemed to consist solely of sooty grays and blacks under a sky that had been stained urine yellow by the stuff billowing from all those smokestacks.

I drove past several produce stands where the people minding the counters (or just standing side o’ the road and gaping as I drove past) looked more like inbred hillbillies from
Deliverance
than Maine farmers. As I passed the last of them, BOWERS ROADSIDE PRODUCE, a large mongrel raced out from behind several heaped baskets of tomatoes and chased me, drooling and snapping at the Sunliner’s rear tires. It looked like a misbegotten bulldog. Before I lost sight of it, I saw a scrawny woman in overalls approach it and begin beating it with a piece of board.

This was the town where Harry Dunning had grown up, and I hated it from the first. No concrete reason; I just did. The downtown shopping area, situated at the bottom of three steep hills, felt pitlike and claustrophobic. My cherry-red Ford seemed like the brightest thing on the street, a distracting (and unwelcome, judging by most of the glances it was attracting) splash of color amid the black Plymouths, brown Chevrolets, and grimy delivery trucks. Running through the center of town was a canal filled almost to the top of its moss-splotched concrete retaining walls with black water.

I found a parking space on Canal Street. A nickel in the meter bought me an hour’s
worth of shopping time. I’d forgotten to buy a hat in Lisbon Falls, and two or three storefronts up I saw an outfit called Derry Dress & Everyday, Central Maine’s Most Debonair Haberdashery. I doubted there was much competition in that regard.

I had parked in front of the drugstore, and paused to examine the sign in the window. Somehow it sums up my feelings about Derry—the sour mistrust, the sense of barely withheld violence—better than anything else, although I was there for almost two months and (with the possible exception of a few people I happened to meet) disliked everything about it. The sign read:

And the thin, bespectacled man in the white smock who was looking out at me just about had to be Mr. Keene. His expression did not say
Come on in, stranger, poke around and buy something, maybe have an ice cream soda.
Those hard eyes and that turned-down mouth said
Go away, there’s nothing here for the likes of you.
Part of me thought I was making that up; most of me knew I wasn’t. As an experiment, I raised my hand in a hello gesture.

The man in the white smock did not raise his in return.

I realized that the canal I’d seen must run directly beneath this peculiar sunken downtown, and I was standing on top of it. I could feel hidden water in my feet, thrumming the sidewalk. It was a vaguely unpleasant feeling, as if this little piece of the world had gone soft.

A male mannequin wearing a tuxedo stood in the window of Derry Dress & Everyday. There was a monocle in one eye and a school pennant in one plaster hand. The pennant read DERRY TIGERS WILL SLAUGHTER BANGOR RAMS! Even though I was a fan of school spirit, this struck me as a little over the top. Beat the Bangor Rams, sure—but slaughter them?

Just a figure of speech,
I told myself, and went in.

A clerk with a tape measure around his neck approached me. His duds were much nicer than mine, but the dim overhead bulbs made his complexion look yellow. I felt an absurd urge to ask,
Can you sell me a nice summer straw hat, or should I just go fuck myself?
Then he smiled, asked how he could help me, and everything seemed almost normal. He had the required item, and I took possession of it for a mere three dollars and seventy cents.

“A shame you’ll have such a short time to wear it before the weather turns cold,” he said.

I put the hat on and adjusted it in the mirror beside the counter. “Maybe we’ll get a good stretch of Indian summer.”