11/22/63

When I tried to pay Randy Baker for the tire, he shook his head. “You already give me half a week’s pay. I’d be a dog to take more. I’m just worried you’ll run off the road, or something. Is it really that important?”

“Sick relative.”

“You’re sick yourself, man.”

I couldn’t deny it.

10

I drove out of town on Route 7, slowing to look both ways at every intersection whether I had the right of way or not. This turned out to be an excellent idea, because a fully loaded gravel truck blew through a red at the intersection of 7 and the Old Derry Road. If I hadn’t come to an almost complete stop in spite of a green light, my Ford would have been demolished. With me turned to hamburger inside it. I laid on my horn in spite of the pain in my head, but the driver paid no attention. He looked like a zombie behind the wheel.

I’ll never be able to do this, I thought. But if I couldn’t stop Frank Dunning, how could I even hope to stop Oswald? Why go to Texas at all?

That wasn’t what kept me moving, though. It was the thought of Tugga that did that. Not to mention the other three kids. I had saved them once. If I didn’t save them again, how could I escape the sure knowledge that I had participated in murdering them, just by triggering another reset?

I approached the Derry Drive-In, and turned into the gravel drive leading to the shuttered box office. The drive was lined with decorative fir trees. I parked behind them, turned off the engine, and tried to get out of the car. I couldn’t. The door wouldn’t open. I slammed my shoulder against it a couple of times, and when it still wouldn’t open, I saw the lock was pushed down even though this was long before the era of self-locking cars, and I hadn’t pushed it down myself. I pulled on it. It wouldn’t come up. I wiggled it. It wouldn’t come up. I unrolled my window, leaned out, and managed to use my key on the door lock below the chrome thumb-button on the outside handle. This time the lock popped up. I got out, then reached in for the souvenir pillow.

Resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act, I had told Al in my best school-lecture voice, and it was true. But I’d had no idea of the personal cost. Now I did.

I walked slowly up Route 7, my collar raised against the rain and my hat pulled low over my ears. When cars came — they were infrequent — I faded back into the trees that lined my side of the road. I think that once or twice I put my hands on the sides of my head to make sure it wasn’t swelling. It felt like it was.

At last, the trees pulled back. They were replaced by a rock wall. Beyond the wall were manicured rolling hills dotted with headstones and monuments. I had come to Longview Cemetery. I breasted a hill, and there was the flower stand on the other side of the road. It was shuttered and dark. Weekends would ordinarily be busy visiting-the-dead-relatives days, but in weather like this, business would be slow, and I supposed the old lady who ran the place was sleeping in a little bit. She would open later, though. I had seen that for myself.

I climbed the wall, expecting it to give way beneath me, but it didn’t. And once I was actually in Longview, a wonderful thing happened: the headache began to abate. I sat on a gravestone beneath an overhanging elm tree, closed my eyes, and checked the pain level. What had been a screaming 10—maybe even turned up to 11, like a Spinal Tap amplifier — had gone back to 8.

“I think I broke through, Al,” I said. “I think I might be on the other side.”

Still, I moved carefully, alert for more tricks — falling trees, graverobbing thugs, maybe even a flaming meteor. There was nothing. By the time I reached the side-by-side graves marked ALTHEA PIERCE DUNNING and JAMES ALLEN DUNNING, the pain in my head was down to a 5.

I looked around and saw a mausoleum with a familiar name engraved on the pink granite: TRACKER. I went to it and tried the iron gate. In 2011 it would have been locked, but this was 1958 and it swung open easily… although with a horror-movie squall of rusty hinges.

I went inside, kicking my way through a drift of old brittle leaves. There was a stone meditation bench running up the center of the vault; on either side were stone storage lockers for Trackers going all the way back to 1831. According to the copper plate on the front of that earliest one, the bones of Monsieur Jean Paul Traiche lay within.

I closed my eyes.

Lay down on the meditation bench and dozed.

Slept.

When I woke up it was close to noon. I went to the front door of the Tracker vault to wait for Dunning… just as Oswald, five years from now, would no doubt wait for the Kennedy motorcade in his shooter’s blind on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

My headache was gone.

11