11/22/63

“I’ll scramble you up some eggs,” he said. He started to rise, then sat back down with a thump and began to cough. Each inhale was a hacking wheeze that shook his whole body. Something rattled in his throat like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

I put my hand on his arm. “What you’ll do is go back home, take some dope, and rest. Sleep if you can. I know I can. Eight hours. I’ll set the alarm.”

He stopped coughing, but I could still hear that playing card rattling in his throat. “Sleep. The good kind. I remember that. I envy you, buddy.”

“I’ll be back at your place by seven tonight. No, let’s say eight. That’ll give me a chance to check a few things on the internet.”

“And if everything looks jake?” He smiled faintly at this pun… which I, of course, had heard at least a thousand times.

“Then I’ll go back again tomorrow and get ready to do the deed.”

“No,” he said. “You’re going to undo the deed.” He squeezed my hand. His fingers were thin, but there was still strength in his grip. “That’s what this is all about. Finding Oswald, undoing his fuckery, and wiping that self-satisfied smirk off his face.”

5

When I started my car, the first thing I did was reach for the stubby Ford gearshift on the column and punch for the springy Ford clutch with my left foot. When my fingers closed around nothing but air and my shoe thumped on nothing but floormat, I laughed. I couldn’t help it.

“What?” Al asked from his place in the shotgun seat.

I missed my nifty Ford Sunliner, that was what, but it was okay; soon I’d buy it again. Although since next time I’d be shorter of funds, at least to start with (my deposit at the Hometown Trust would be gone, lost in the next reset), I might dicker a little more with Bill Titus.

I thought I could do that.

I was different now.

“Jake? Something funny?”

“It’s nothing.”

I looked for changes on Main Street, but all the usual buildings were present and accounted for, including the Kennebec Fruit, which looked — as usual — about two unpaid bills away from financial collapse. The statue of Chief Worumbo still stood in the town park, and the banner in the window of Cabell’s Furniture still assured the world that WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD.

“Al, you remember the chain you have to duck under to get back to the rabbit-hole, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“And the sign hanging from it?”

“The one about the sewer pipe.” He was sitting like a soldier who thinks the road ahead may be mined, and every time we went over a bump, he winced.

“When you came back from Dallas — when you realized you were too sick to make it — was that sign still there?”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “It was. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Who takes four years to fix a busted sewer pipe?”

“Nobody. Not in a millyard where trucks are coming and going all day and all night. So why doesn’t it attract attention?”

He shook his head. “No idea.”

“It might be there to keep people from wandering into the rabbit-hole by accident. But, if so, who put it there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what you’re saying is right.”

I turned onto his street, hoping I could see him safely inside and then manage the seven or eight miles out to Sabattus without falling asleep behind the wheel. But one other thing was on my mind, and I needed to say it. If only so he wouldn’t get his hopes up too high.

“The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn’t want to be changed.”

“I know. I told you.”

“You did. But what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

He looked at me. The patches beneath his eyes were darker than ever, and the eyes themselves shone with pain. “Could you give it to me in English?”

“Changing the Dunning family’s future was harder than changing Carolyn Poulin’s future, partly because there were more people involved, but mostly because the Poulin girl would have lived, either way. Doris Dunning and her kids all would have died… and one of them died anyway, although I intend to remedy that.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Good for you. Just make sure that next time you duck a little more. Save yourself from having to deal with an embarrassing scar where the hair may not grow back.”

I had ideas about that, but didn’t bother saying so. I nosed my car up his driveway. “What I’m saying is that I may not be able to stop Oswald. At least not the first time.” I laughed. “But what the hell, I flunked my driver’s test the first time, too.”

“So did I, but they didn’t make me wait five years to take it again.”

He had a point there.

“What are you, Jake, thirty? Thirty-two?”

“Thirty-five.” And two months closer to thirty-six than I had been earlier this morning, but what was a couple of months between friends?

“If you screwed the pooch and had to start over, you’d be forty-five when the merry-go-round came back to the brass ring the second time. A lot can happen in ten years, especially if the past’s against you.”

“I know,” I said. “Look what happened to you.”