11/22/63: A Novel (21 page)

A city bus came along and stopped across from the Center Street Market. Dunning got on. It came the rest of the way down the hill and pulled up at the movie-theater stop. I let the working joes go ahead of me, so I could watch how much money they put in the pole-mounted
coin receptacle next to the driver’s seat. I felt like an alien in a science fiction movie, one who’s trying to masquerade as an earthling. It was stupid—I wanted to ride the city bus, not blow up the White House with a death-ray—but that didn’t change the feeling.

One of the guys who got on ahead of me flashed a canary-colored bus pass that made me think fleetingly of the Yellow Card Man. The others put fifteen cents into the coin receptacle, which clicked and dinged. I did the same, although it took me a bit longer because my dime was stuck to my sweaty palm. I thought I could feel every eye on me, but when I looked up, everyone was either reading the newspaper or staring vacantly out the windows. The interior of the bus was a fug of blue-gray smoke.

Frank Dunning was halfway down on the right, now wearing tailored gray slacks, a white shirt, and a dark blue tie. Natty. He was busy lighting a cigarette and didn’t look at me as I passed him and took a seat near the back. The bus groaned its way around the circuit of Low Town one-way streets, then mounted Up-Mile Hill on Witcham. Once we were in the west side residential area, riders began to get off. They were all men; presumably the women were back at home putting away their groceries or getting supper on the table. As the bus emptied and Frank Dunning went on sitting where he was, smoking his cigarette, I wondered if we were going to end up being the last two riders.

I needn’t have worried. When the bus angled toward the stop at the corner of Witcham Street and Charity Avenue (Derry also had Faith and Hope Avenues, I later learned), Dunning dropped his cigarette on the floor, crushed it with his shoe, and rose from his seat. He walked easily up the aisle, not using the grab-handles but swaying with the movements of the slowing bus. Some men don’t lose the physical graces of their adolescence until relatively late in life. Dunning appeared to be one of them. He would have made an excellent swing-dancer.

He clapped the bus driver on the shoulder and started telling him a joke. It was short, and most of it was lost in the chuff of the
airbrakes, but I caught the phrase
three jigs stuck in an elevator
and decided it wasn’t one he’d have told to his Housedress Harem. The driver exploded with laughter, then yanked the long chrome lever that opened the front doors. “See you Monday, Frank,” he said.

“If the creek don’t rise,” Dunning responded, then ran down the two steps and jumped across the grass verge to the sidewalk. I could see muscles ripple under his shirt. What chance would a woman and four children have against him?
Not much
was my first thought on the subject, but that was wrong. The correct answer was
none.

As the bus drew away, I saw Dunning mount the steps of the first building down from the corner on Charity Avenue. There were eight or nine men and women sitting in rockers on the wide front porch. Several of them greeted the butcher, who started shaking hands like a visiting politician. The house was a three-story New England Victorian, with a sign hanging from the porch eave. I just had time to read it:

Below this, hanging from the big sign on hooks, was a smaller orange sign reading NO VACANCY.

Two stops further down the line, I exited the bus. I thanked the driver, who uttered a surly grunt in return. This, I was discovering, was what passed for courteous discourse in Derry, Maine. Unless, of course, you happened to know a few jokes about jigs stuck in an elevator or maybe the Polish navy.

I walked slowly back toward town, jogging two blocks out of my way to keep clear of Edna Price’s establishment, where those in residence gathered on the porch after supper just like folks in one of those Ray Bradbury stories about bucolic Greentown, Illinois. And did not Frank Dunning resemble one of those good folks?
He did, he did. But there had been hidden horrors in Bradbury’s Greentown, too.

The nice man doesn’t live at home anymore,
Richie-from-the-ditchie had said, and he’d had the straight dope on that one. The nice man lived in a rooming house where everybody seemed to think he was the cat’s ass.

By my estimation, Price’s Rooms was no more than five blocks west of 379 Kossuth Street, and maybe closer. Did Frank Dunning sit in his rented room after the other tenants had gone to bed, facing east like one of the faithful turning toward Qiblah? If so, did he do it with his hey-great-to-see-you smile on his face? I thought no. And were his eyes blue, or did they turn that cold and thoughtful gray? How did he explain leaving his hearth and home to the folks taking the evening air on Edna Price’s porch? Did he have a story, one where his wife was either a little bit cracked or an outright villain? I thought yes. And did people believe it? The answer to that one was easy. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking 1958, 1985, or 2011. In America, where surface has always passed for substance, people always believe guys like Frank Dunning.

On the following Tuesday, I rented an apartment advertised in the Derry
News
as “semi-furnished, in a good neighborhood,” and on Wednesday the seventeenth of September, Mr. George Amberson moved in. Goodbye, Derry Town House, hello Harris Avenue. I had been living in 1958 for over a week, and was beginning to feel comfortable there, if not exactly a native.

The semi-furnishings consisted of a bed (which came with a slightly stained mattress but no linen), a sofa, a kitchen table with one leg that needed to be shimmed so it didn’t teeter, and a single chair with a yellow plastic seat that made a weird
smook
sound as it reluctantly released its grip on the seat of one’s pants. There was
a stove and a clattery fridge. In the kitchen pantry, I discovered the apartment’s air-conditioning unit: a GE fan with a frayed plug that looked absolutely lethal.

I felt that the apartment, which was directly beneath the flight path of planes landing at Derry Airport, was a bit overpriced at sixty-five dollars a month, but agreed to it because Mrs. Joplin, the landlady, was willing to overlook Mr. Amberson’s lack of references. It helped that he could offer three months’ rent in cash. She nevertheless insisted on copying the information from my driver’s license. If she found it strange that a real estate freelancer from Wisconsin was carrying a Maine license, she didn’t say so.

I was glad Al had given me lots of cash. Cash is so soothing to strangers.

It goes a lot farther in ’58, too. For only three hundred dollars, I was able to turn my semi-furnished apartment into one that was fully furnished. Ninety of the three hundred went for a secondhand RCA table-model television. That night I watched
The Steve Allen Show
in beautiful black-and-white, then turned it off and sat at the kitchen table, listening to a plane settle earthward in a roar of propellers. From my back pocket I took a Blue Horse notebook I’d bought in the Low Town drugstore (the one where shoplifting was not a kick, groove, or gasser). I turned to the first page and clicked out the tip of my equally new Parker ballpoint. I sat that way for maybe fifteen minutes—long enough for another plane to clatter earthward, seemingly so close that I almost expected to feel a thump as the wheels scraped the roof.

The page remained blank. So did my mind. Every time I tried to throw it into gear, the only coherent thought I could manage was
the past doesn’t want to be changed.

Not helpful.

At last I got up, took the fan from its shelf in the pantry, and set it on the counter. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it did, and the hum of the motor was strangely soothing. Also, it masked the fridge’s annoying rumble.

When I sat down again, my mind was clearer, and this time a few words came.

I stopped there. The fridge clicked off. There were no descending planes and no traffic on Harris Avenue. For the time being it was just me and my fan and my incomplete list. At last I wrote the final item:

Then I crumpled it, opened the box of kitchen matches that sat beside the stove to light the burners and the oven, and scratched one. The fan promptly whiffed it out and I thought again how hard it was to change some things. I turned the fan off, lit another match, and touched it to the ball of notepaper. When it was blazing, I dropped it into the sink, waited for it to go out, then washed the ashes down the drain.

After that, Mr. George Amberson went to bed.

But he did not sleep for a long time.

When the last plane of the night skimmed over the rooftop at twelve-thirty, I was still awake and thinking of my list. Telling the police was out. It might work with Oswald, who would declare his undying love for Fidel Castro in both Dallas and New Orleans, but Dunning was a different matter. He was a well-liked and well-respected
member of the community. Who was I? The new guy in a town that didn’t like outsiders. That afternoon, after coming out of the drugstore, I had once again seen No Suspenders and his crew outside the Sleepy Silver Dollar. I was wearing my workingman clothes, but they had given me that same flat-eyed
who the fuck’re you
look.

Even if I’d been living in Derry for eight years instead of eight days, just what would I say to the police, anyway? That I’d had a vision of Frank Dunning killing his family on Halloween night? That would certainly go over well.

I liked the idea of placing an anonymous call to the butcher himself a little better, but it was a scary option. Once I called Frank Dunning—either at work or at Edna Price’s, where he would no doubt be summoned to the communal phone in the parlor—I would have changed events. Such a call might stop him from killing his family, but I thought it just as likely it would have the opposite effect, tipping him over the precarious edge of sanity he must be walking behind the affable George Clooney smile. Instead of preventing the murders, I might only succeed in making them happen sooner. As it was, I knew where and when. If I warned him, all bets were off.

Frame him for something? It might work in a spy novel, but I wasn’t a CIA agent; I was a goddam English teacher.

Incapacitate butcher
was next on the list. Okay, but how? Smack him with the Sunliner, maybe as he walked from Charity Avenue to Kossuth Street with a hammer in his hand and murder on his mind? Unless I had amazing luck, I’d be caught and jailed. There was this, too. Incapacitated people usually get better. He might try again once he did. As I lay there in the dark, I found that scenario all too plausible. Because the past didn’t like to be changed. It was obdurate.

The only sure way was to follow him, wait until he was alone, and then kill him. Keep it simple, stupid.

But there were problems with this, too. The biggest was that I didn’t know if I could go through with it. I thought I could in hot blood—to
protect myself or another—but in cold blood? Even if I knew that my potential victim was going to kill his own wife and children if he weren’t stopped?

And . . . what if I did it and then got caught before I could escape to the future where I was Jake Epping instead of George Amberson? I’d be tried, found guilty, sent to Shawshank State Prison. And that was where I’d be on the day John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

Even that wasn’t the absolute bottom of the matter. I got up, paced through the kitchen to my phone booth of a bathroom, went to the toilet, then sat on the seat with my forehead propped on the heels of my palms. I had assumed Harry’s essay was the truth. Al had, too. It probably was, because Harry was two or three degrees on the dim side of normal, and people like that are less liable to try passing off fantasies like the murder of an entire family as reality. Still . . .

Ninety-five percent probability isn’t a hundred,
Al had said, and that was Oswald himself he’d been talking about. Just about the only person the killer
could
have been, once you set aside all the conspiracy babble, and yet Al still had those last lingering doubts.

It would have been easy to check out Harry’s story in the computer-friendly world of 2011, but I never had. And even if it was completely true, there might be crucial details he’d gotten wrong or not mentioned at all. Things that could trip me up. What if, instead of riding to the rescue like Sir Galahad, I only managed to get killed along with them? That would change the future in all sorts of interesting ways, but I wouldn’t be around to discover what they were.

A new idea popped into my head, one that was crazily attractive. I could station myself across from 379 Kossuth on Halloween night . . .
and just watch.
To make sure it really happened, yes, but also to note all the details the only living witness—a traumatized child—might have missed. Then I could drive back to Lisbon Falls, go up through the rabbit-hole, and immediately return to September 9 at 11:58 in the morning. I’d buy the Sunliner again
and go to Derry again, this time loaded with information. It was true I’d already spent a fair amount of Al’s currency, but there was enough left to get by on.

The idea ran well out of the gate but stumbled before it even got to the first turn. The whole purpose of this trip had been to find out what effect saving the janitor’s family would have on the future, and if I let Frank Dunning go through with the murders, I wouldn’t know. And I was already faced with having to do this again, because there would be one of those resets when—
if
—I went back through the rabbit-hole to stop Oswald. Once was bad. Twice would be worse. Three times was unthinkable.

And one other thing. Harry Dunning’s family had already died once. Was I going to condemn them to die a second time? Even if each time was a reset and they didn’t know? And who was to say that on some deep level they didn’t?