11/22/63

The father and the son exchanged an amused glance that made me think of an old joke. Tourist from Chicago driving a fancy sportscar pulls up to a farmhouse way out in the country. Old farmer’s sitting on the porch, smoking a corncob pipe. Tourist leans out of his Jaguar and asks, “Say, oldtimer, can you tell me how to get to East Machias?” Old farmer puffs thoughtfully on his pipe a time or two, then says, “Don’tcha move a goddam inch.”

“You really are an out-of-stater, aren’t you?” Frank asked. His accent wasn’t as thick as his father’s. Probably watches more TV, I thought. There’s nothing like TV when it comes to eroding a regional accent.

“I am,” I said.

“That’s funny, because I could swear I hear a little Yankee twang.”

“It’s a Yooper thing,” I said. “You know, the Upper Peninsula?” Except — dang! — the UP was Michigan.

But neither of them seemed to realize it. In fact young Frank turned away and started doing dishes. By hand, I noticed.

“The greenfront’s the liquor store,” Anicetti said. “Right across the street, if you’re wanting to pick up a pint of something.”

“I think the root beer’s good enough for me,” I said. “I was just wondering. Have a nice day.”

“You too, my friend. Come back and see us.”

I passed the fruit-examining trio, murmuring “Ladies” as I went by. And wishing I had a hat to tip. A fedora, maybe.

Like the ones you see in the old movies.

6

The aspiring hoodlum had left his post, and I thought about walking up Main Street to see what else had changed, but only for a second. No sense pressing my luck. Suppose someone asked about my clothes? I thought my sport coat and slacks looked more or less all right, but did I know that for sure? And then there was my hair, which touched my collar. In my own time that would be considered perfectly okay for a high school teacher — conservative, even — but it might garner glances in a decade where shaving the back of the neck was considered a normal part of the barbering service and sideburns were reserved for rockabilly dudes like the one who had called me Daddy-O. Of course I could say I was a tourist, that all men wore their hair a little long in Wisconsin, it was quite the coming thing, but hair and clothes — that feeling of standing out, like some space alien in an imperfectly assumed human disguise — was only part of it.

Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind that’s moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it actually totters, but freaked, yes. I kept thinking about the ladies in their long dresses and hats, ladies who would be embarrassed to show so much as the edge of a bra strap in public. And the taste of that root beer. How full it had been.

Directly across the street was a modest storefront with MAINE STATE LIQUOR STORE printed in raised letters over the small show window. And yes, the façade was a light green. Inside I could just make out my pal from the drying shed. His long black coat hung from his coathanger shoulders; he had taken off his hat and his hair stood out around his head like that of a cartoon nebbish who has just inserted Finger A in Electric Socket B. He was gesticulating at the clerk with both hands, and I could see his precious yellow card in one. I felt certain that Al Templeton’s half a rock was in the other. The clerk, who was wearing a short white tunic that looked quite a bit like the one the Moxie Doc wore in the annual parade, looked singularly unimpressed.

I walked to the corner, waited on traffic, and crossed back to the Worumbo side of the Old Lewiston Road. A couple of men were pushing a dolly loaded with bales of cloth across the courtyard, smoking and laughing. I wondered if they had any idea what the combination of cigarette smoke and mill pollution was doing to their innards, and supposed not. Probably that was a blessing, although it was more a question for a philosophy teacher than for a guy who earned his daily bread exposing sixteen-year-olds to the wonders of Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Shirley Jackson.

When they had entered the mill, rolling their dolly between the rusty metal jaws of doors three stories high, I crossed back to the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT sign hanging from it. I told myself not to walk too fast, and not to peer all around me — not to do anything that would attract attention — but it was hard. Now that I was almost back to where I came in, the urge to hurry was almost irresistible. My mouth was dry, and the big root beer I’d drunk roiled in my stomach. What if I couldn’t get back? What if the marker I’d dropped was gone? What if it was still there, but the stairs weren’t?

Easy, I told myself. Easy.