11/22/63

He began to count. I went toward the sound of the numbers, feeling with my foot. After ten steps — far beyond the place where I had given up — the toe of my shoe simultaneously took a step forward and struck something that stopped it cold. I took one more look around. Took one more breath of the chemical-stenchy air. Then I closed my eyes and started climbing steps I couldn’t see. On the fourth one, the chilly night air was replaced with stuffy warmth and the smells of coffee and spices. At least that was the case with my top half. Below the waist, I could still feel the night.

I stood there for maybe three seconds, half in the present and half in the past. Then I opened my eyes, saw Al’s haggard, anxious, too-thin face, and stepped back into 2011.

PART 3 Living in the Past

CHAPTER 9

1

I would have said I was beyond surprise by then, but what I saw just to Al’s left dropped my jaw: a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. I reached past him and stubbed it out. “Do you want to cough up whatever working lung tissue you’ve got left?”

He didn’t respond to that. I’m not sure he even heard it. He was staring at me, wide-eyed. “Jesus God, Jake — who scalped you?”

“No one. Let’s get out of here before I strangle on your secondhand smoke.” But that was empty scolding. During the weeks I’d spent in Derry, I’d gotten used to the smell of burning cigarettes. Soon I’d be picking up the habit myself, if I didn’t watch out.

“You are scalped,” he said. “You just don’t know it. There’s a piece of your hair hanging down behind your ear, and… how much did you bleed, anyway? A quart? And who did it to you?”

“A, less than a quart. B, Frank Dunning. If that takes care of your questions, now I’ve got one. You said you were going to pray. Why were you smoking instead?”

“Because I was nervous. And because it doesn’t matter now. The horse is out of the barn.”

I could hardly argue on that score.

2

Al made his way slowly behind the counter, where he opened a cabinet and took out a plastic box with a red cross on it. I sat on one of the stools and looked at the clock. It had been quarter to eight when Al unlocked the door and led us into the diner. Probably five of when I went down the rabbit-hole and emerged in Wonderland circa 1958. Al claimed every trip took exactly two minutes, and the clock on the wall seemed to bear that out. I’d spent fifty-two days in 1958, but here it was 7:59 in the morning.

Al was assembling gauze, tape, disinfectant. “Bend down here so I can see it,” he said. “Put your chin right on the counter.”

“You can skip the hydrogen peroxide. It happened four hours ago, and it’s clotted. See?”

“Better safe than sorry,” he said, then set the top of my head on fire.

“Ahhh!”

“Hurts, don’t it? Because it’s still open. You want some 1958 sawbones treating you for an infected scalp before you head down to Big D? Believe me, buddy, you don’t. Hold still. I have to snip some hair or the tape won’t hold. Thank God you kept it short.”

Clip-clip-clip. Then he added to the pain — insult to injury, as they say — by pressing gauze to the laceration and taping it down.

“You can take the gauze off in a day or two, but you’ll want to keep your hat over it until then. Gonna look a little mangy up top there for awhile, but if the hair doesn’t grow back, you can always comb it over. Want some aspirin?”

“Yes. And a cup of coffee. Can you rustle that?” Although coffee would only help for a little while. What I needed was sleep.

“I can.” He flicked the switch on the Bunn-o-Matic, then began rummaging in the first aid kit again. “You look like you’ve lost some weight.”

You should talk, I thought. “I’ve been sick. Caught a twenty-four-hour—” That was where I stopped.

“Jake, what’s wrong?”

I was looking at Al’s framed photographs. When I’d gone down the rabbit-hole, there had been a picture of Harry Dunning and me up there. We were smiling and holding up Harry’s GED diploma for the camera.

It was gone.

3

“Jake? Buddy? What is it?”

I took the aspirin he’d put on the counter, stuck them in my mouth, dry-swallowed. Then I got up and walked slowly over to the Wall of Celebrity. I felt like a man made of glass. Where the picture of Harry and me had hung for the last two years, there was now one of Al shaking hands with Mike Michaud, the U.S. Representative from Maine’s Second District. Michaud must have been running for re-election, because Al was wearing two buttons on his cook’s apron. One said MICHAUD FOR CONGRESS. The other said LISBON LUVS MIKE. The honorable Representative was wearing a bright orange Moxie tee-shirt and holding up a dripping Fatburger for the camera.

I lifted the photo from its hook. “How long has this been here?”