11/22/63

“I hitched a ride to the Esso station in Naples, where the guy in the service bay told me he had too damn much work to come out and put a new tire on a Hertz Chevrolet. I think he was pissed about missing the Saturday hunting. A twenty-dollar tip changed his mind, but I never got into Durham until past noon. I took the old Runaround Pond Road because that’s the quickest way to go, and guess what? The bridge over Chuckle Brook had fallen into the goddam water. Big red and white sawhorses; smudgepots; big orange sign reading ROAD CLOSED. By then I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and I had a sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I’d set out that morning to do. Keep in mind that I left at eight A.M., just to be on the safe side, and it took me over four hours to get eighteen miles. But I didn’t give up. I went around by Methodist Church Road instead, hammering that rent-a-dent for all it was worth, pulling up this long rooster-tail of dust behind me — all the roads out that way are dirt back then.

“Okay, so I’m seeing cars and trucks parked off to the sides or at the start of woods roads every here and there, and I’m also seeing hunters walking with their guns broken open over their arms. Every single one of them lifted his hand to me — folks are friendlier in ’58, there’s no doubt about that. I waved back, too, but what I was really waiting for was another flat. Or a blowout. That would probably have sent me right off the road and into the ditch, because I was doing sixty at least. I remember one of the hunters patting the air with his hands, the way you do when you’re telling someone to slow down, but I paid no attention.

“I flew up Bowie Hill, and just past the old Friends’ Meeting House, I spied a pickemup parked by the graveyard. POULIN CONSTRUCTION AND CARPENTRY painted on the door. Truck empty. Poulin and his girl in the woods, maybe sitting in a clearing somewhere, eating their lunch and talking the way fathers and daughters do. Or at least how I imagine they do, never having had one myself—”

Another long fit of coughing, which ended with a terrible wet gagging sound.

“Ah shit, don’t that hurt,” he groaned.

“Al, you need to stop.”

He shook his head and wiped a slick of blood off his lower lip with the heel of his palm. “What I need is to get this out, so shut up and let me do it.

“I gave the truck a good long stare, still rolling at sixty or so all the while, and when I looked back at the road, I saw there was a tree down across it. I stopped just in time to keep from crashing into it. It wasn’t a big tree, and before the cancer went to work on me, I was pretty strong. Also, I was mad as hell. I got out and started wrestling with it. While I was doing that — also cussing my head off — a car came along from the other direction. Man gets out, wearing an orange hunting vest. I don’t know for sure if it’s my man or not — the Enterprise never printed his picture — but he looks like the right age.

“He says, ‘Let me help you with that, oldtimer.’

“‘Thank you very much,’ I says, and holds out my hand. ‘Bill Laidlaw.’

“He shakes it and says, ‘Andy Cullum.’ So it was him. Given all the trouble I’d had getting to Durham, I could hardly believe it. I felt like I’d won the lottery. We grabbed the tree, and between us we got it shifted. When it was, I sat down on the road and grabbed my chest. He asked me if I was okay. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I says. ‘I never had a heart attack, but this sure feels like one.’ Which is why Mr. Andy Cullum never got any hunting done on that November afternoon, Jake, and why he never shot any little girl, either. He was busy taking poor old Bill Laidlaw up to Central Maine General in Lewiston.”

“You did it? You actually did it?”

“Bet your ass. I told em at the hospital that I’d had a big old hero for lunch — what’s called an Italian sandwich back then — and the diagnosis was ‘acute indigestion.’ I paid twenty-five dollars in cash and they sprung me. Cullum waited around and took me back to my Hertz car, how’s that for neighborly? I returned home to 2011 that very night… only of course I came back only two minutes after I left. Shit like that’ll give you jet-lag without ever getting on a plane.

“My first stop was the town library, where I looked up the story of the 1965 high school graduation again. Before, there’d been a photo of Carolyn Poulin to go with it. The principal back then — Earl Higgins, he’s long since gone to his reward — was bending over to hand her her diploma as she sat in her wheelchair, all dressed up in her cap and gown. The caption underneath said, Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery.”

“Was it still there?”