11/22/63: A Novel (29 page)

I put my head between my knees and drew a series of deep slow breaths, as I’d learned in the Red Cross course I’d taken to get a lifeguard certification back in college. At first I kept seeing Tugga Dunning’s head as it exploded under the smashing downward force of the hammer, and that made the faintness worse. Then I thought of Harry, who had been splashed with his brother’s blood but was otherwise unhurt. And Ellen, who wasn’t deep in a coma from which she would never emerge. And Troy. And Doris. Her badly broken arm might hurt her for the rest of her life, but at least she was going to
have
a life.

“I did it, Al,” I whispered.

But what had I done in 2011? What had I done
to
2011? Those were questions that still had to be answered. If something terrible had happened because of the butterfly effect, I could always go back and erase it . . . unless, in changing the course of the Dunning family’s lives, I had somehow changed the course of Al Templeton’s as well. Suppose the diner was no longer where I’d left it? Suppose it turned out he’d never moved it from Auburn? Or never opened a diner at all? It didn’t seem likely . . . but here I was, sitting on a 1958 curb with blood oozing out of my 1958 haircut, and how likely was
that
?

I rose to my feet, staggered, then got moving. To my right, down Witcham Street, I could see the flash and strobe of blue lights. A crowd had gathered on the corner of Kossuth, but their backs were to me. The church where I’d left my car was just across the street. The Sunliner was alone in the parking lot now, but it looked okay; no Halloween pranksters had let the air out of my tires. Then I saw a yellow square under one of the windshield wipers. My thoughts flashed to the Yellow Card Man, and my gut tightened. I snatched it, then exhaled a sigh of relief when I read what was written there: JOIN YOUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS FOR WORSHIP THIS SUNDAY AT 9 AM NEWCOMERS ALWAYS WELCOME! REMEMBER, “LIFE IS THE QUESTION, JESUS IS THE ANSWER.”

“I thought hard drugs were the answer, and I could sure use some right now,” I muttered, and unlocked the driver’s door.
I thought of the paper bag I’d left behind the garage of the house on Wyemore Lane. The cops investigating the area were apt to discover it. Inside they’d find a few candybars, a mostly empty bottle of Kaopectate . . . and a stack of what amounted to adult diapers.

I wondered what they’d make of that.

But not too much.

By the time I reached the turnpike, my head was aching fiercely, but even if this hadn’t been before the era of twenty-four-hour convenience stores, I’m not sure I would have dared to stop; my shirt was stiff with drying blood on the lefthand side. At least I’d remembered to fill the gas tank.

Once I tried exploring the gash on my head with the tips of my fingers and was rewarded with a blaze of pain that persuaded me not to make a second attempt.

I did stop at the rest area outside of Augusta. By then it was past ten o’clock and the place was deserted. I turned on the dome light and checked my pupils in the rearview mirror. They looked the same size, which was a relief. There was a snacks vending machine outside the men’s privy, where ten cents bought me a cream-stuffed chocolate whoopie pie. I gobbled it as I drove, and my headache abated somewhat.

It was after midnight when I got to Lisbon Falls. Main Street was dark, but both the Worumbo and U.S. Gypsum mills were running full tilt, huffing and chuffing, throwing their stinks into the air and spilling their acid wastes into the river. The clusters of shining lights made them look like spaceships. I parked the Sunliner outside the Kennebec Fruit, where it would stay until
someone peeked inside and saw the spots of blood on the seat, driver’s door, and steering wheel. Then the police would be called. I supposed they’d dust the Ford for fingerprints. It was possible they’d match prints found on a certain .38 Police Special at a murder scene in Derry. The name George Amberson might emerge in Derry and then down here in the Falls. But if the rabbit-hole was still where I’d left it, George was going to leave no trail to follow, and the fingerprints belonged to a man who wasn’t going to be born for another eighteen years.

I opened the trunk, took out the briefcase, and decided to leave everything else. For all I knew, it might end up being sold at the Jolly White Elephant, the secondhand store not far from Titus Chevron. I crossed the street toward the mill’s dragon-breath, a
shat-HOOSH, shat-HOOSH
that would continue around the clock until Reagan-era free trade rendered pricey American textiles obsolete.

The drying shed was lit by a white fluorescent glow from the dirty dyehouse windows. I spotted the chain blocking off the drying shed from the rest of the courtyard. It was too dark to read the sign hanging from it, and it had been almost two months since I’d seen it, but I remembered what it said:
NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED
. There was no sign of the Yellow Card Man—or the Orange Card Man, if that’s what he was now.

Headlights flooded the courtyard, illuminating me like an ant on a plate. My shadow jumped out long and scrawny in front of me. I froze as a big transport truck trundled toward me. I expected the driver to stop, lean out, and ask me what the hell I was doing here. He slowed but didn’t stop. Raised a hand to me. I raised mine in return, and he drove on toward the loading docks with dozens of empty barrels clunking around in back. I headed for the chain, took one quick look around, and ducked under it.

I walked down the flank of the drying shed, heart beating hard in my chest. The gash on my head pounded in harmony. This time there was no chunk of concrete to mark the spot.
Slow,
I told myself.
Slow.
The step is right . . .
here.

Only it wasn’t. There was nothing but the pavement under my testing, tapping shoe.

I went a little farther, and there was still nothing. It was cold enough to see a thin vapor when I exhaled, but a light, greasy sweat had broken out on my arms and neck. I went a little farther, but was now almost sure I had gone too far. Either the rabbit-hole was gone or it had never been there in the first place, which meant that my whole life as Jake Epping—everything from my prize-winning FFA garden in grammar school to my abandoned novel in college to my marriage to a basically sweet woman who’d almost drowned my love for her in alcohol—had been a crazy hallucination. I’d been George Amberson all along.

I went a little farther, then stopped, breathing hard. Somewhere—maybe in the dyehouse, maybe in one of the weaving rooms—someone shouted
“Fuck me sideways!”
I jumped, then jumped again at the bull roar of laughter that followed the exclamation.

Not here.

Gone.

Or never was.

And did I feel disappointment? Terror? Outright panic? None of those, actually. What I felt was a sneaking sense of relief. What I thought was,
I could live here. And quite easily. Happily, even
.

Was that true? Yes.
Yes.

It stank near the mills and on public conveyances where everybody smoked their heads off, but in most places the air smelled incredibly sweet. Incredibly
new.
Food tasted good; milk was delivered directly to your door. After a period of withdrawal from my computer, I’d gained enough perspective to realize just how addicted to that fucking thing I’d become, spending hours reading stupid email attachments and visiting websites for the same reason mountaineers wanted to climb Everest: because they were there. My cell phone never rang because I
had
no cell phone, and what a relief that had been. Outside of the big cities, most folks were still on party lines, and did the majority lock their doors at night? Balls they did. They worried about nuclear war, but I was safe
in the knowledge that the people of 1958 would grow old and die without ever hearing of an A-bomb being exploded in anything but a test. No one worried about global warming or suicide bombers flying hijacked jets into skyscrapers.

And if my 2011 life
wasn’t
a hallucination (in my heart I knew this), I could still stop Oswald. I just wouldn’t know the ultimate result. I thought I could live with that.

Okay. The first thing to do was to return to the Sunliner and get out of Lisbon Falls. I’d drive to Lewiston, find the bus station, and buy a ticket to New York. I’d take a train to Dallas from there . . . or hell, why not fly? I still had plenty of cash, and no airline clerk was going to demand a picture ID. All I had to do was fork over the price of a ticket and Trans World Airlines would welcome me aboard.

The relief of this decision was so great that my legs again went rubbery. The weakness wasn’t as bad as it had been in Derry, when I’d had to sit down, but I leaned against the drying shed for support. My elbow struck it, making a soft
bong
sound. And a voice spoke to me out of thin air. Hoarse. Almost a growl. A voice from the future, as it were.

“Jake? Is that you?” This was followed by a fusillade of dry, barking coughs.

I almost kept silent. I
could
have kept silent. Then I thought of how much of his life Al had invested in this project, and how I was now the only thing he had left to hope for.

I turned toward the sound of those coughs and spoke in a low voice. “Al? Talk to me. Count off.” I could have added,
Or just keep coughing
.

He began to count. I went toward the sound of the numbers, feeling with my foot. After ten steps—far beyond the place where I had given up—the toe of my shoe simultaneously took a step forward and struck something that stopped it cold. I took one more look around. Took one more breath of the chemical-stenchy air. Then I closed my eyes and started climbing steps I couldn’t see.
On the fourth one, the chilly night air was replaced with stuffy warmth and the smells of coffee and spices. At least that was the case with my top half. Below the waist, I could still feel the night.

I stood there for maybe three seconds, half in the present and half in the past. Then I opened my eyes, saw Al’s haggard, anxious, too-thin face, and stepped back into 2011.

I would have said I was beyond surprise by then, but what I saw just to Al’s left dropped my jaw: a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. I reached past him and stubbed it out. “Do you want to cough up whatever working lung tissue you’ve got left?”

He didn’t respond to that. I’m not sure he even heard it. He was staring at me, wide-eyed. “Jesus God, Jake—who scalped you?”

“No one. Let’s get out of here before I strangle on your secondhand smoke.” But that was empty scolding. During the weeks I’d spent in Derry, I’d gotten used to the smell of burning cigarettes. Soon I’d be picking up the habit myself, if I didn’t watch out.

“You
are
scalped,” he said. “You just don’t know it. There’s a piece of your hair hanging down behind your ear, and . . . how much did you bleed, anyway? A quart? And who did it to you?”

“A, less than a quart. B, Frank Dunning. If that takes care of your questions, now
I’ve
got one. You said you were going to pray. Why were you smoking instead?”

“Because I was nervous. And because it doesn’t matter now. The horse is out of the barn.”

I could hardly argue on that score.

Al made his way slowly behind the counter, where he opened a cabinet and took out a plastic box with a red cross on it. I sat on one of the stools and looked at the clock. It had been quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door and led us into the diner. Probably five of when I went down the rabbit-hole and emerged in Wonderland circa 1958. Al claimed every trip took exactly two minutes, and the clock on the wall seemed to bear that out. I’d spent fifty-two days in 1958, but here it was 7:59 in the morning.

Al was assembling gauze, tape, disinfectant. “Bend down here so I can see it,” he said. “Put your chin right on the counter.”

“You can skip the hydrogen peroxide. It happened four hours ago, and it’s clotted. See?”

“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then set the top of my head on fire.

“Ahhh!”

“Hurts, don’t it? Because it’s still open. You want some 1958 sawbones treating you for an infected scalp before you head down to Big D? Believe me, buddy, you don’t. Hold still. I have to snip some hair or the tape won’t hold. Thank God you kept it short.”

Clip-clip-clip. Then he added to the pain—insult to injury, as they say—by pressing gauze to the laceration and taping it down.

“You can take the gauze off in a day or two, but you’ll want to keep your hat over it until then. Gonna look a little mangy up top there for awhile, but if the hair doesn’t grow back, you can always comb it over. Want some aspirin?”

“Yes. And a cup of coffee. Can you rustle that?” Although coffee would only help for a little while. What I needed was sleep.

“I can.” He flicked the switch on the Bunn-o-Matic, then began rummaging in the first aid kit again. “You look like you’ve lost some weight.”

You should talk,
I thought. “I’ve been sick. Caught a twenty-four-hour—” That was where I stopped.