11/22/63: A Novel (103 page)

“I’m sorry about your wife.”

“Thank you, son. She was a good woman. Lovely woman. She didn’t deserve what she got.” He wiped his arm slowly across his eyes. “Been a long time since I talked about her, but then, it’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to talk
with.
Can I pour you a little more of this joy-juice?”

I held my fingers a smidge apart. I didn’t expect to be here long; I had to take in all this bogus history, this
darkness,
in a hurry. I had a lot to do, not least of all bringing my own lovely woman back to life. That would mean another chat with the Green Card Man. I didn’t want to be loaded when I had it, but one more little one wouldn’t hurt. I needed it. My emotions felt frozen, which was probably good, because my mind was reeling.

“Were you paralyzed during the Tet Offensive?” Thinking,
Of course you were, but it could have been worse; on the last go-round you died.

He looked blank for a moment, then his face cleared. “I guess it
was
Tet, come to think of it. We just called it the Great Saigon Fuck-All of 1967. The helicopter I was in crashed. I was lucky. Most of the people on that bird died. Some of em were diplomats, and some of them were just kids.”

“Tet of ’67,” I said. “Not ’68.”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t have been born, but surely you read about it in the history books.”

“No.” I let him pour a little more scotch into my glass—just enough to cover the bottom—and said, “I know that President Kennedy was almost assassinated in November of 1963. After that I know nothing.”

He shook his head. “That’s the funniest case of amnesia I ever heard of.”

“Was Kennedy reelected?”

“Against Goldwater? You bet your ass he was.”

“Did he keep Johnson as his running mate?”

“Sure. Kennedy needed Texas. Got it, too. Governor Connally
worked like a slave for him in that election, much as he despised Kennedy’s New Frontier. They called it the Embarrassment Endorsement. Because of what almost happened that day in Dallas. You sure you don’t know this? Never learned any of it in school?”

“You lived it, Harry. So tell me.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “Drag up a rock, son. Quit lookin at those pictures. If you don’t know Kennedy got reelected in ’64, you’re sure not apt to know any of my family.”

Ah, Harry,
I thought.

When I was just a little kid—four, maybe even three—a drunk uncle told me the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Not the one in the standard fairy-tale books, but the R-rated version, full of screams, blood, and the dull thump of the woodsman’s axe. My memory of hearing it is vivid to this day, but only a few of the details remain: the wolf’s teeth bared in a shining grin, for instance, and the gore-soaked granny being reborn from the wolf’s yawning belly. This is my way of saying that if you’re expecting
The Concise Alternate History of the World as told by Harry Dunning to Jake Epping,
forget about it. It wasn’t just the horror of discovering how badly things had gone wrong. It was my need to get back and put things right.

Yet a few things stand out. The worldwide search for George Amberson, for instance. No joy there—George was as gone as Judge Crater—but in the forty-eight years since the assassination attempt in Dallas, Amberson had become a near-mythical figure. Savior, or part of the plot? People held actual conventions to discuss
it, and listening to Harry tell that part, it was impossible for me not to think of all the conspiracy theories that had sprung up around the version of Lee who had succeeded. As we know, class, the past harmonizes.

Kennedy expected to sweep Barry Goldwater away in a landslide in ’64; instead he won by less than forty electoral votes, a margin only Democratic Party stalwarts thought respectable. Early in his second term, he infuriated both the right-wing voters and the military establishment by declaring North Vietnam “less a danger to our democracy than the racial inequality in our schools and cities.” He didn’t withdraw American troops entirely, but they were restricted to Saigon and a ring around it that was called—surprise, surprise—the Green Zone. Instead of injecting large numbers of troops, the second Kennedy administration injected large amounts of money. It’s the American Way.

The great civil rights reforms of the sixties never happened. Kennedy was no LBJ, and as vice president, Johnson was uniquely powerless to help him. The Republicans and Dixiecrats filibustered for a hundred and ten days; one actually died on the floor and became a right-wing hero. When Kennedy finally gave up, he made an off-the-cuff remark that would haunt him until he died in 1983: “White America has filled its house with kindling; now it will burn.”

The race riots came next. While Kennedy was preoccupied with them, the North Vietnamese armies overran Saigon—and the man who’d gotten me into this was paralyzed in a helicopter crash on the deck of a U.S. aircraft carrier. Public opinion began to swing heavily against JFK.

A month after the fall of Saigon, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Chicago. The assassin turned out to be a rogue FBI agent named Dwight Holly. Before being killed himself, he claimed to have carried out the hit on Hoover’s orders. Chicago went up in flames. So did a dozen other American cities.

George Wallace was elected president. By then the earthquakes had begun in earnest. Wallace couldn’t do anything about those, so
he settled for firebombing Chicago into submission. That, Harry said, was in June of 1969. A year later, President Wallace offered Ho Chi Minh an ultimatum: make Saigon a free city like Berlin or see Hanoi become a dead one, like Hiroshima. Uncle Ho refused. If he thought Wallace was bluffing, he was wrong. Hanoi became a radioactive cloud on August ninth, 1969, twenty-four years to the day after Harry Truman dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki. Vice President Curtis LeMay took personal charge of the mission. In a speech to the nation, Wallace called it God’s will. Most Americans concurred. Wallace’s approval ratings were high, but there was at least one fellow who did not approve. His name was Arthur Bremer, and on May fifteenth, 1972, he shot Wallace dead as Wallace campaigned for reelection at a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland.

“With what kind of gun?”

“I believe it was a .38 revolver.”

Sure it was. Maybe a Police Special, but probably a Victory model, the same kind of gun that had taken Officer Tippit’s life along another time-string.

This was where I began to lose the thread. Where the thought
I have to put this right, put this right, put this right
began to hammer in my head like a gong.

Hubert Humphrey became president in ’72. The earthquakes worsened. The world suicide rate skyrocketed. Fundamentalism of all kinds blossomed. The terrorism fomented by religious extremists blossomed with it. India and Pakistan went to war; more mushroom clouds bloomed. Bombay never became Mumbai. What it became was radioactive ash in a cancer-wind.

Likewise, Karachi. Only when Russia, China, and the United States promised to bomb both countries back to the Stone Age did the hostilities cease.

In 1976, Humphrey lost to Ronald Reagan in a coast-to-coast landslide; The Hump couldn’t hold even his native state of Minnesota.

Two thousand committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.

In November of 1979, Iranian students overran the American
embassy in Tehran and took not sixty-six hostages but over two hundred. Heads rolled on Iranian TV. Reagan had learned enough from Hanoi Hell to keep the nukes in their bomb bays and missile silos, but he sent in
beaucoup
troops. The remaining hostages were, of course, slaughtered, and an emerging terrorist group calling themselves The Base—or, in Arabic, Al-Qaeda—began planting roadside bombs here, there, and everywhere.

“The man could speechify like a motherfucker, but he had no understanding of militant Islam,” Harry said.

The Beatles reunited and played a Peace Concert. A suicide bomber in the crowd detonated his vest and killed three hundred spectators. Paul McCartney was blinded.

The Mideast went up in flames shortly thereafter.

Russia collapsed.

Some group—probably exiled Russian hard-line fanatics—began selling nuclear weapons to terrorist groups, including The Base.

“By 1994,” Harry said in his dry voice, “the oil fields over there were so much black glass. The kind that glows in the dark. Since then, though, the terrorism has kind of burned itself out. Someone blew up a suitcase nuke in Miami two years ago, but it didn’t work very well. I mean, it’ll be sixty or eighty years before anybody can party on South Beach—and of course the Gulf of Mexico is basically dead soup—but only ten thousand people have died of radiation poisoning. By then it wasn’t our problem. Maine voted to become a part of Canada, and President Clinton was happy to say good riddance.”

“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, “nobody seems to know. The scientists argue,
but in this case I think the preachers might have the straight of it. They say it’s God 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.

“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 hell should I feel like I know you?”

“Maybe because we always know our good angels?”

“Bullshit.”

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 God 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?”

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.