11/22/63: A Novel (30 page)

“Jake, what’s wrong?”

I was looking at Al’s framed photographs. When I’d gone down the rabbit-hole, there had been a picture of Harry Dunning and me up there. We were smiling and holding up Harry’s GED diploma for the camera.

It was gone.

“Jake? Buddy? What is it?”

I took the aspirin he’d put on the counter, stuck them in my mouth, dry-swallowed. Then I got up and walked slowly over to the Wall of Celebrity. I felt like a man made of glass. Where the picture of Harry and me had hung for the last two years, there was now one of Al shaking hands with Mike Michaud, the U.S. Representative from Maine’s Second District. Michaud must have been running for re-election, because Al was wearing two buttons on his cook’s apron. One said MICHAUD FOR CONGRESS. The other said LISBON LUVS MIKE. The honorable Representative was wearing a bright orange Moxie tee-shirt and holding up a dripping Fatburger for the camera.

I lifted the photo from its hook. “How long has this been here?”

He looked at it, frowning. “I’ve never seen that picture in my life. God knows I supported Michaud in his last two runs—hell, I support any Democrat who ain’t been caught screwing his campaign aides—and I met him at a rally in double-oh-eight, but that was in Castle Rock. He’s never been in the diner.”

“Apparently he has been. That’s your counter, isn’t it?”

He took the picture in hands now so scrawny they were little more than talons, and held it close to his face. “Yuh,” he said. “It sure is.”

“So there
is
a butterfly effect. This photo’s proof.”

He looked at it fixedly, smiling a little. In wonder, I think. Or maybe awe. Then he handed it back to me and went behind the counter to pour the coffee.

“Al? You still remember Harry, don’t you? Harry Dunning?”

“Of course I do. Isn’t he why you went to Derry and almost got your head knocked off?”

“For him and the rest of his family, yes.”

“And did you save them?”

“All but one. His father got Tugga before we could stop him.”

“Who’s we?”

“I’ll tell you everything, but first I’m going home to bed.”

“Buddy, we don’t have a whole lot of time.”

“I
know
that,” I said, thinking
All I have to do is look at you, Al.
“But I’m dead for sleep. For me, it’s one-thirty in the morning, and I’ve had . . .”—my mouth opened in a huge yawn—“. . . had quite a night.”

“All right.” He brought coffee—a full cup for me, black, half a cup for him, liberally dosed with cream. “Tell me what you can while you drink this.”

“First, explain to me how you can remember Harry if he was never a janitor at LHS and never bought a Fatburger from you in his whole life. Second, explain to me why you
don’t
remember Mike Michaud visiting the diner when that picture says he did.”

“You don’t know for a fact that Harry Dunning’s not still in town,” Al said. “In fact, you don’t know for sure he’s not still janitoring at Lisbon High.”

“It’d be a hell of a coincidence if he was. I changed the past big-time, Al—with some help from a guy named Bill Turcotte. Harry wouldn’t have gone to live with his aunt and uncle in Haven, because his mother didn’t die. Neither did his brother Troy or his sister, Ellen. And Dunning never got near Harry himself with that hammer of his. If Harry still lives in The Falls after all those changes, I’d be the most surprised guy on earth.”

“There’s a way to check,” Al said. “I’ve got a laptop computer in my office. Come on back.” He led the way, coughing and holding onto things. I carried my cup of coffee with me; he left his behind.

Office
was far too grand a name for the closet-sized cubbyhole off the kitchen. It was hardly big enough for both of us. The walls were papered with memos, permits, and health directives from both
the state of Maine and the feds. If the people who passed on rumors and gossip about the Famous Catburger had seen all that paperwork—which included a Class A Certification of Cleanliness following the last inspection by the State of Maine Restaurant Commission—they might have been forced to rethink their position.

Harry’s MacBook sat on the sort of desk I remember using in the third grade. He collapsed into a chair of about the same size with a grunt of pain and relief. “High school’s got a website, doesn’t it?”

“Sure.”

While we waited for the laptop to boot, I wondered how many emails had piled up during my fifty-two-day absence. Then I remembered I’d actually been gone only two minutes. Silly me. “I think I’m losing it, Al,” I said.

“I know the feeling. Just hang on, buddy, you’ll—wait, here we go. Let’s see. Courses . . . summer schedule . . . faculty . . . administration . . . custodial staff.”

“Hit it,” I said.

He massaged the touch pad, muttered, nodded, clicked on something, then stared into the computer screen like a swami consulting his crystal ball.

“Well? Don’t keep me hanging.”

He turned the laptop so I could look. LHS CUSTODIAL STAFF, it said. THE BEST IN MAINE! There was a photograph of two men and a woman standing at center court in the gymnasium. They were all smiling. They were all wearing Lisbon Greyhounds sweatshirts. None of them was Harry Dunning.

“You remember him in his life as a janitor and as your student because you’re the one who went down the rabbit-hole,” Al said. We were back in the diner again, sitting in one of the booths. “I remember him either because I’ve used the rabbit-hole myself
or just because I’m near it.” He considered. “That’s probably it. A kind of radiation. The Yellow Card Man’s also near it, only on the other side, and he feels it, too. You’ve seen him, so you know.”

“He’s the Orange Card Man now.”

“What are you talking about?”

I yawned again. “If I tried to tell you now, I’d make a total mess of everything. I want to drive you home, then go home myself. I’m going to get something to eat, because I’m hungry as a bear—”

“I’ll scramble you up some eggs,” he said. He started to rise, then sat back down with a thump and began to cough. Each inhale was a hacking wheeze that shook his whole body. Something rattled in his throat like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

I put my hand on his arm. “What you’ll do is go back home, take some dope, and rest. Sleep if you can. I know
I
can. Eight hours. I’ll set the alarm.”

He stopped coughing, but I could still hear that playing card rattling in his throat. “Sleep. The good kind. I remember that. I envy you, buddy.”

“I’ll be back at your place by seven tonight. No, let’s say eight. That’ll give me a chance to check a few things on the internet.”

“And if everything looks jake?” He smiled faintly at this pun . . . which I, of course, had heard at least a thousand times.

“Then I’ll go back again tomorrow and get ready to do the deed.”

“No,” he said. “You’re going to
undo
the deed.” He squeezed my hand. His fingers were thin, but there was still strength in his grip. “That’s what this is all about. Finding Oswald, undoing his fuckery, and wiping that self-satisfied smirk off his face.”

When I started my car, the first thing I did was reach for the stubby Ford gearshift on the column and punch for the springy Ford clutch with my left foot. When my fingers closed around nothing but air and my shoe thumped on nothing but floormat, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“What?” Al asked from his place in the shotgun seat.

I missed my nifty Ford Sunliner, that was what, but it was okay; soon I’d buy it again. Although since next time I’d be shorter of funds, at least to start with (my deposit at the Hometown Trust would be gone, lost in the next reset), I might dicker a little more with Bill Titus.

I thought I could do that.

I was different now.

“Jake? Something funny?”

“It’s nothing.”

I looked for changes on Main Street, but all the usual buildings were present and accounted for, including the Kennebec Fruit, which looked—as usual—about two unpaid bills away from financial collapse. The statue of Chief Worumbo still stood in the town park, and the banner in the window of Cabell’s Furniture still assured the world that WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD.

“Al, you remember the chain you have to duck under to get back to the rabbit-hole, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“And the sign hanging from it?”

“The one about the sewer pipe.” He was sitting like a soldier who thinks the road ahead may be mined, and every time we went over a bump, he winced.

“When you came back from Dallas—when you realized you were too sick to make it—was that sign still there?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “It was. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Who takes four years to fix a busted sewer pipe?”

“Nobody. Not in a millyard where trucks are coming and going all day and all night. So why doesn’t it attract attention?”

He shook his head. “No idea.”

“It might be there to keep people from wandering into the rabbit-hole by accident. But, if so, who put it there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what you’re saying is right.”

I turned onto his street, hoping I could see him safely inside and then manage the seven or eight miles out to Sabattus without falling asleep behind the wheel. But one other thing was on my mind, and I needed to say it. If only so he wouldn’t get his hopes up too high.

“The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn’t want to be changed.”

“I know. I told
you.
”

“You did. But what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

He looked at me. The patches beneath his eyes were darker than ever, and the eyes themselves shone with pain. “Could you give it to me in English?”

“Changing the Dunning family’s future was harder than changing Carolyn Poulin’s future, partly because there were more people involved, but mostly because the Poulin girl would have lived, either way. Doris Dunning and her kids all would have died . . . and one of them died anyway, although I intend to remedy that.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Good for you. Just make sure that next time you duck a little more. Save yourself from having to deal with an embarrassing scar where the hair may not grow back.”

I had ideas about that, but didn’t bother saying so. I nosed my car up his driveway. “What I’m saying is that I may not be able to stop Oswald. At least not the first time.” I laughed. “But what the hell, I flunked my driver’s test the first time, too.”

“So did I, but they didn’t make me wait five years to take it again.”

He had a point there.

“What are you, Jake, thirty? Thirty-two?”

“Thirty-five.” And two months closer to thirty-six than I had
been earlier this morning, but what was a couple of months between friends?

“If you screwed the pooch and had to start over, you’d be
forty
-five when the merry-go-round came back to the brass ring the second time. A lot can happen in ten years, especially if the past’s against you.”

“I know,” I said. “Look what happened to you.”

“I got lung cancer from smoking, that’s all.” He coughed as if to prove this, but I saw doubt as well as pain in his eyes.

“Probably that’s all it was. I
hope
that’s all it was. But it’s one more thing we don’t kn—”

His front door banged open. A large young woman wearing a lime-green smock and white Nancy Nurse shoes came half-running down the driveway. She saw Al slumped in the passenger seat of my Toyota and yanked open the door. “Mr. Templeton, where have you been? I came in to give you your meds, and when I found the house empty, I thought—”

He managed a smile. “I know what you thought, but I’m okay. Not beautiful, but okay.”

She looked at me. “And you. What are you doing driving him around? Can’t you see how fragile he is?”

Of course I could. But since I could hardly tell her what we’d been doing, I kept my mouth shut and prepared to take my scolding like a man.

“We had an important matter to discuss,” Al said. “Okay? Got it?”

“Just the same—”

He opened the car door. “Help me inside, Doris. Jake’s got to get home.”

Doris.

As in Dunning.

He didn’t notice the coincidence—and surely that was what it was, it’s a common enough name—but it clanged in my head just the same.

I made it home, and this time it was the Sunliner’s emergency brake I found myself reaching for. As I turned off the engine I thought about what a cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in Derry. I let myself in, started to feed my cat, and saw the food in his dish was still fresh and moist. Why wouldn’t it be? In 2011, it had been in the bowl for only an hour and a half.

“Eat that, Elmore,” I said. “There are cats starving in China who’d love a bowl of Friskies Choice Cuts.”

Elmore gave me the look that one deserved and oiled out through the cat door. I nuked a couple of Stouffer’s frozen dinners (thinking like Frankenstein’s monster learning to talk:
microwave good, modern cars bad
). I ate everything, disposed of the trash, and went into the bedroom. I took off my plain white 1958 shirt (thanking God Al’s Doris had been too mad to notice the blood-spatters on it), sat on the side of the bed to unlace my sensible 1958 shoes, and then let myself fall backward. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep while I was still in midair.

I forgot all about setting the alarm and might have slept long past 5:00
P.M.
, but Elmore jumped on my chest at quarter past four and began to sniff at my face. That meant he’d cleaned his dish and was requesting a refill. I provided more food for the feline, splashed my face with cold water, then ate a bowl of Special K, thinking it would be days before I could get the proper order of my meals reestablished.

With my belly full, I went into the study and booted up my computer. The town library was my first cyber-stop. Al was right—they had the entire run of the
Lisbon Weekly Enterprise
in
their database. I had to become a Friend of the Library before I could access the goodies, which cost ten dollars, but given the circumstances, that seemed a small price to pay.