11/22/63

Only it wasn’t the Yellow Card Man any more than the taxi driver who’d picked me up at the bus station was the same one who’d taken me from Lisbon Falls to the Tamarack Motor Court in 1958. Except the two drivers were almost the same, because the past harmonizes, and the man across the street was similar to the one who’d asked me for a buck because it was double-money day at the greenfront. He was a lot younger than the Yellow Card Man, and his black overcoat was newer and cleaner… but it was almost the same coat.

“Jimla! Over here!” He beckoned. The wind flapped the hem of the overcoat; it made the sign to his left swing on its chain the way the blinker was swinging on its wire. I could still read it, though: NO ADMITTANCE BEYOND THIS POINT UNTIL SEWER PIPE IS REPAIRED.

Five years, I thought, and that pesky sewer pipe’s still busted.

“Jimla! Don’t make me come over there and get you!”

He probably could; his suicidal predecessor had been able to make it all the way to the greenfront. But I felt sure that if I went limping down the Old Lewiston Road fast enough, this new version would be out of luck. He might be able to follow me to the Red & White Supermarket, where Al had bought his meat, but if I made it as far as Titus Chevron, or the Jolly White Elephant, I could turn around and thumb my nose at him. He was stuck near the rabbit-hole. If he hadn’t been, I would have seen him in Dallas. I knew it as surely as I knew that gravity keeps folks from floating into outer space.

As if to confirm this, he called, “Jimla, please!” The desperation I saw in his face was like the wind: thin but somehow relentless.

I looked both ways for traffic, saw none, and crossed the street to where he stood. As I approached, I saw two other differences. Like his predecessor, he was wearing a fedora, but it was clean instead of filthy. And as with his predecessor, a colored card was poking up from the hatband like an old-fashioned reporter’s press pass. Only this one wasn’t yellow, or orange, or black.

It was green.

5

“Thank God,” he said. He took one of my hands in both of his and squeezed it. The flesh of his palms was almost as cold as the air. I pulled back from him, but gently. I sensed no danger about him, only that thin and insistent desperation. Although that in itself might be dangerous; it might be as keen as the blade of the knife John Clayton had used on Sadie’s face.

“Who are you?” I asked. “And why do you call me Jimla? Jim LaDue is a long way from here, mister.”

“I don’t know who Jim LaDue is,” the Green Card Man said. “I’ve stayed away from your string as much as—”

He stopped. His face contorted. The sides of his hands rose to his temples and pressed there, as if to hold his brains in. But it was the card stuck in the band of his hat that captured most of my attention. The color wasn’t entirely fixed. For a moment it swirled and swam, reminding me of the screensaver that takes over my computer after it’s been idle for fifteen minutes or so. The green swirled into a pale canary yellow. Then, as he slowly lowered his hands, it returned to green. But maybe not as bright a green as when I’d first noticed it.

“I’ve stayed away from your string as much as possible,” the man in the black overcoat said, “but it hasn’t been entirely possible. Besides, there are so many strings now. Thanks to you and your friend the cook, there’s so much crap.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true. I could at least figure out the card this man (and his wet-brain forerunner) carried. They were like the badges worn by people who worked in nuclear power plants. Only instead of measuring radiation, the cards monitored… what? Sanity? Green, your bag of marbles was full. Yellow, you’d started to lose them. Orange, call for the men in the white coats. And when your card turned black…

The Green Card Man was watching me carefully. From across the street he’d looked no older than thirty. Over here, he looked closer to forty-five. Only, when you got close enough to look into his eyes, he looked older than the ages and not right in the head.

“Are you some kind of guardian? Do you guard the rabbit-hole?”

He smiled… or tried to. “That’s what your friend called it.” From his pocket he took a pack of cigarettes. There was no label on them. That was something I’d never seen before, either here in the Land of Ago or in the Land of Ahead.

“Is this the only one?”

He produced a lighter, cupped it to keep the wind from blowing the flame out, then set fire to the end of his cigarette. The smell was sweet, more like marijuana than tobacco. But it wasn’t marijuana. Although he never said, I believe it was something medicinal. Perhaps not so different from my Goody’s Headache Powder.

“There are a few. Think of a glass of ginger ale that’s been left out and forgotten.”

“Okay…”