11/22/63: A Novel (86 page)

“I made Tessica Caltrop leave us alone.”

Sadie looked up. “Do you mean
Jessica
? Jessica Caltrop? You did? How? Do you remember?”

But I didn’t. It was gone.

Found myself looking at Sadie as she stood at my little window, staring out at the rain and crying.

But mostly I was lost.

THE MAN WITH THE COWBOY HAT was Deke, but once I thought he was my grandfather, and that scared me very badly, because Grampy Epping was dead, and—

Epping,
that
was my name.
Hold onto it,
I told myself, but at first I couldn’t.

Several times AN ELDERLY WOMAN WITH RED LIPSTICK came to see me. Sometimes I thought her name was Miz Mimi; sometimes I thought it was Miz Ellie; once I was quite sure she was Irene Ryan, who played Granny Clampett on
The Beverly Hillbillies.
I told her that I’d thrown my cell phone into a pond. “Now it sleeps with the fishes. I sure wish I had that sucker back.”

A YOUNG COUPLE came. Sadie said, “Look, it’s Mike and Bobbi Jill.”

I said, “Mike Coleslaw.”

THE YOUNG MAN said, “That’s close, Mr. A.” He smiled. A tear ran down his cheek when he did.

Later, when Sadie and Deke came to Eden Fallows, they would sit with me on the couch. Sadie would take my hand and ask, “What’s his name, Jake? You never told me his
name.
How can we stop him if we don’t know who he is or where he is going to be?”

I said, “I’m going to flop him.” I tried very hard. It made the
back of my head hurt, but I tried even harder. “Stop him.”

“You couldn’t stop a cinchbug without our help,” Deke said.

But Sadie was too dear and Deke was too old. She shouldn’t have told him in the first place. Maybe that was all right, though, because he didn’t really believe it.

“The Yellow Card Man will stop you if you get involved,” I said. “I’m the only one he can’t stop.”

“Who is the Yellow Card Man?” Sadie asked, leaning forward and taking my hands.

“I don’t remember, but he can’t stop me because I don’t belong here.”

Only he
was
stopping me. Or something was. Dr. Perry said my amnesia was shallow and transient, and he was right . . . but only up to a point. If I tried too hard to remember the things that mattered most, my head ached fiercely, my limping walk became a stumble, and my vision blurred. Worst of all was the tendency to suddenly fall asleep. Sadie asked Dr. Perry if it was narcolepsy. He said probably not, but I thought he looked worried.

“Does he wake when you call him or shake him?”

“Always,” Sadie said.

“Is it more likely to happen when he’s upset because he can’t remember something?”

Sadie agreed that it was.

“Then I’m quite sure it will pass, the way his amnesia is passing.”

At last—little by slowly—my inside world began to merge with the outside one. I was Jacob Epping, I was a teacher, and I had somehow traveled back in time to stop the assassination of President Kennedy. I tried to reject the idea at first, but I knew too much about the intervening years, and those things weren’t visions. They were memories. The Rolling Stones, the Clinton impeachment hearings, the World Trade Center in flames. Christy, my troubled and troublesome ex-wife.

One night while Sadie and I were watching
Combat,
I remembered what I had done to Frank Dunning.

“Sadie, I killed a man before I came to Texas. It was in a graveyard.
I had to. He was going to murder his whole family.”

She looked at me, eyes wide and mouth open.

“Turn off the TV,” I said. “The guy who plays Sergeant Saunders—can’t remember his name—is going to be decapitated by a helicopter blade. Please, Sadie, turn it off.”

She did, then knelt before me.

“Who’s going to kill Kennedy? Where is he going to be when he does it?”

I tried my hardest, and I didn’t fall asleep, but I couldn’t remember. I had gone from Maine to Florida, I remembered that. In the Ford Sunliner, a great car. I had gone from Florida to New Orleans, and when I left New Orleans, I’d come to Texas. I remembered listening to “Earth Angel” on the radio as I crossed the state line, doing seventy miles per hour on Highway 20. I remembered a sign:
TEXAS WELCOMES YOU
. And a billboard advertising SONNY’S B-B-Q, 27 MI. After that, a hole in the film. On the other side were emerging memories of teaching and living in Jodie. Brighter memories of swing-dancing with Sadie and lying in bed with her at the Candlewood Bungalows. Sadie told me I’d also lived in Fort Worth and Dallas, but she didn’t know where; all she had were two phone numbers that no longer worked. I didn’t know where, either, although I thought one of the places might have been on Cadillac Street. She checked roadmaps and said there was no Cadillac Street in either city.

I could remember a lot of things now, but not the assassin’s name, or where he was going to be when he made his try. And why not? Because the past was keeping it from me. The obdurate past.

“The assassin has a child,” I said. “I think her name is April.”

“Jake, I’m going to ask you something. It might make you mad, but since a lot depends on this—the fate of the world, according to you—I need to.”

“Go ahead.” I couldn’t think of anything she might ask that would make me angry.

“Are you lying to me?”

“No,” I said. It was true. Then.

“I told Deke we needed to call the police. He showed me a piece in the
Morning News
that said there have already been two hundred
death threats and tips about potential assassins. He says both the right-wingers from Dallas–Fort Worth and the left-wingers from San Antonio are trying to scare Kennedy out of Texas. He says the Dallas police are turning all the threats and tips over to the FBI and they’re doing
nothing.
He says the only person J. Edgar Hoover hates more than JFK is his brother Bobby.”

I didn’t much care who J. Edgar Hoover hated. “Do you believe me?”

“Yes,” she said, and sighed. “Is Vic Morrow really going to die?”

That was his name, sure. “He is.”

“Making
Combat
?”

“No, a movie.”

She burst into tears. “Don’t
you
die, Jake—please. I only want you to get better.”

I had a lot of bad dreams. The locations varied—sometimes it was an empty street that looked like Main Street in Lisbon Falls, sometimes it was the graveyard where I’d shot Frank Dunning, sometimes it was the kitchen of Andy Cullum, the cribbage ace—but usually it was Al Templeton’s diner. We sat in a booth with the photos on his Town Wall of Celebrity looking down at us. Al was sick—dying—but his eyes were full of bright intensity.

“The Yellow Card Man’s the personification of the obdurate past,” Al said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Yes, I knew that.

“He thought you’d die from the beating, but you didn’t. He thought you’d die of the infections, but you didn’t. Now he’s walling off those memories—the vital ones—because he knows it’s his last hope of stopping you.”

“How can he? He’s dead.”

Al shook his head. “No, that’s me.”

“Who is he?
What
is he? And how can he come back to life? He cut his own throat and the card turned black! I
saw
it!”

“Dunno, buddy. All I know is that he can’t stop you if you refuse to stop.
You have to get at those memories.
”

“Help me, then!” I shouted, and grabbed the hard claw of his hand. “Tell me the guy’s name! Is it Chapman? Manson? Both of
those ring a bell, but neither one seems right.
You got me into this, so help me!
”

At that point in the dream Al opens his mouth to do just that, but the Yellow Card Man intervenes. If we’re on Main Street, he comes out of the greenfront or the Kennebec Fruit. If it’s the cemetery, he rises from an open grave like a George Romero zombie. If in the diner, the door bursts open. The card he wears in the hatband of his fedora is so black it looks like a rectangular hole in the world. He’s dead and decomposing. His ancient overcoat is splotched with mold. His eye-sockets are writhing balls of worms.

“He can’t tell you nothing because it’s double-money day!”
the Yellow Card Man who is now the Black Card Man screams.

I turn back to Al, only Al has become a skeleton with a cigarette clamped in its teeth, and I wake up, sweating. I reach for the memories but the memories aren’t there.

Deke brought me the newspaper stories about the impending Kennedy visit, hoping they would jog something loose. They didn’t. Once, while I was lying on the couch (I was just coming out of one of my sudden sleeps), I heard the two of them arguing yet again about calling the police. Deke said an anonymous tip would be disregarded and one that came with a name attached would get all of us in trouble.

“I don’t care!” Sadie shouted. “I know you think he’s nuts, but what if he’s right? How are you going to feel if Kennedy goes back to Washington from Dallas in a
box
?”

“If you bring the police in, they’ll focus on Jake, sweetie. And according to you, he killed a man up in New England before he came here.”

Sadie, Sadie, I wish you hadn’t told him that.

She stopped arguing, but she didn’t give up. Sometimes she tried
to surprise it out of me, the way you can supposedly surprise someone out of the hiccups. It didn’t work.

“What am I going to do with you?” she asked sadly.

“I don’t know.”

“Try to come at it some other way. Try to sneak up on it.”

“I have. I think the guy was in the Army or the Marines.” I rubbed at the back of my head, where the ache was starting again. “But it might have been the Navy. Shit, Christy, I don’t know.”

“Sadie, Jake. I’m Sadie.”

“Isn’t that what I said?”

She shook her head and tried to smile.

On the twelfth, the Tuesday after Veterans Day, the
Morning News
ran a long editorial about the impending Kennedy visit and what it meant for the city. “Most residents seem ready to welcome the young and inexperienced president with open arms,” the piece said. “Excitement is running high. Of course it doesn’t hurt that his pretty and charismatic wife will be along for the ride.”

“More dreams about the Yellow Card Man last night?” Sadie asked when she came in. She’d spent the holiday in Jodie, mostly to water her houseplants and to “show the flag,” as she put it.

I shook my head. “Honey, you’ve been here a lot more than you’ve been in Jodie. What’s the status of your job?”

“Miz Ellie put me on part-time. I’m getting by, and when I go with you . . . if we go . . . I guess I’ll just have to see what happens.”

Her gaze shifted away from me and she busied herself lighting a cigarette. Watching her take too long tamping it on the coffee table and then fiddling with her matches, I realized a dispiriting thing: Sadie was also having her doubts. I’d predicted a peaceful end to the Missile Crisis, I had known Dick Tiger was going down in the fifth . . . but she still had her doubts. And I didn’t blame her. If our positions had been reversed, I would have been having mine.

Then she brightened. “But I’ve got a heck of a good stand-in, and I bet you can guess who.”

I smiled. “Is it . . .” I couldn’t get the name. I could
see
him—the
weathered, suntanned face, the cowboy hat, the string tie—but that Tuesday morning I couldn’t even get close. My head started to ache in the back, where it had hit the baseboard—but what baseboard, in what house? It was so abysmally fucked up not to know.

Kennedy’s coming in ten days and I can’t even remember that old guy’s fucking name.

“Try, Jake.”

“I
am,
” I said. “I
am,
Sadie!”

“Wait a sec. I’ve got an idea.”

She laid her smoldering cigarette in one of the ashtray grooves, got up, went out the front door, closed it behind her. Then she opened it and spoke in a voice that was comically gruff and deep, saying what the old guy said each time he came to visit: “How you doin today, son? Takin any nourishment?”

“Deke,” I said. “Deke Simmons. He was married to Miz Mimi, but she died in Mexico. We had a memorial assembly for her.”

The headache was gone. Just like that.

Sadie clapped her hands and ran to me. I got a long and lovely kiss.

“See?” she said when she drew back. “You can do this. It’s still not too late. What’s his name, Jake? What’s the crazy bugger’s name?”

But I couldn’t remember.

On November sixteenth, the
Times Herald
published the Kennedy motorcade route. It would start at Love Field and end at the Trade Mart, where he would speak to the Dallas Citizens Council and their invited guests. The nominal purpose of his speech was to salute the Graduate Research Center and congratulate Dallas on its economic progress over the last decade, but the
Times Herald
was happy to inform those who didn’t already know that the real reason was pure politics. Texas had gone for Kennedy in 1960, but ’64 was looking shaky in spite of having a good old Johnson City boy on the ticket. Cynics still called the vice president “Landslide Lyndon,” a reference to his 1948 Senate bid, a decidedly hinky affair he won by eighty-seven votes. That was ancient history, but the nickname’s
longevity said a lot about the mixed feelings Texans had about him. Kennedy’s job—and Jackie’s, of course—was to help Landslide Lyndon and Texas governor John Connally fire up the faithful.

“Look at this,” Sadie said, tracing a fingertip along the route. “Blocks and blocks of Main Street. Then Houston Street. There are high buildings all along that part. Is the man going to be on Main Street? He just about has to be, don’t you think?”

I hardly listened, because I’d seen something else. “Look, Sadie, the motorcade’s going to go along Turtle Creek Boulevard!”

Her eyes blazed. “Is that where it’s going to happen?”

I shook my head doubtfully. Probably not, but I knew
something
about Turtle Creek Boulevard, and it had to do with the man I’d come to stop. As I considered this, something floated to the surface.

“He was going to hide the rifle and come back for it later.”