11/22/63: A Novel

When I woke up, dawn lit the Tamarack Motor Court with the clear hues and shadows of a National Geographic photograph. There was frost on the cars pulled up in front of a scattering of units, and I could see my breath. I tried the phone, expecting nothing, but a young man in the office answered promptly, although he sounded as if he were still half-asleep. Sure, he said, the phones were fine and he’d be happy to call me a taxi — where did I want to go?

Lisbon Falls, I told him. Corner of Main Street and the Old Lewiston Road.

“The Fruit?” he asked.

I’d been away so long that for a moment it seemed like a total non sequitur. Then it clicked. “That’s right. The Kennebec Fruit.”

Going home, I told myself. God help me, I’m going home.

Only that was wrong—2011 wasn’t home, and I would only be staying there a short time — assuming, that was, I could get there at all. Perhaps only minutes. Jodie was home now. Or would be, once Sadie arrived there. Sadie the virgin. Sadie with her long legs and long hair and her propensity to trip over anything that might be in the way. . only at the critical moment, I was the one who had taken the fall.

Sadie, with her unmarked face.

She was home.

3

That morning’s taxi driver was a solidly built woman in her fifties, bundled into an old black parka and wearing a Red Sox hat instead of one with a badge reading LICENSED LIVERY. As we turned left onto 196, in the direction of The Falls, she said: “D’ja hear the news? I bet you didn’t — the power’s off up this way, ennit?”

“What news is that?” I asked, although a dreadful certainty had already stolen into my bones: Kennedy was dead. I didn’t know if it had been an accident, a heart attack, or an assassination after all, but he was dead. The past was obdurate and Kennedy was dead.

“Earthquake in Los Angeles.” She pronounced it Las Angle-ees. “People been sayin for years that California was just gonna drop off into the ocean, and it seems like maybe they’re gonna turn out to be right.” She shook her head. “I ain’t gonna say it’s because of the loose way they live — those movie stars and all — but I’m a pretty good Baptist, and I ain’t gonna say it’s not.”

We were passing the Lisbon Drive-In now. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, the marquee read. SEE YOU WITH LOTS MORE IN ’64!

“How bad was it?”

“They’re saying seven thousand dead, but when you hear a number like that, you know it’ll go higher. Most of the damn bridges fell down, the freeways are in pieces, and there’s fires everywhere. Seems like the part of town where the Negroes live has pretty much burnt flat. Warts! Ain’t that a hell of a name for a part of a town? I mean, even one where black folks live? Warts! Huh!”

I didn’t reply. I was thinking of Rags, the puppy we’d had when I was nine, and still living in Wisconsin. I was allowed to play with him in the backyard on school mornings until the bus came. I was teaching him to sit, fetch, roll over, stuff like that, and he was learning — smart puppy! I loved him a lot.

When the bus came, I was supposed to close the backyard gate before I ran to get on board. Rags always lay down on the kitchen stoop. My mother would call him in and feed him breakfast after she got back from taking my dad to the local train station. I always remembered to close the gate — or at least, I don’t remember ever forgetting to do it — but one day when I came home from school, my mother told me Rags was dead. He’d been in the street and a delivery truck had run him down. She never reproached me with her mouth, not once, but she reproached me with her eyes. Because she had loved Rags, too.

“I closed him in like always,” I said through my tears, and — as I say — I believe that I did. Maybe because I always had. That evening my dad and I buried him in the backyard. Probably not legal, Dad said, but I won’t tell if you won’t.

I lay awake for a long, long time that night, haunted by what I couldn’t remember and terrified of what I might have done. Not to mention guilty. That guilt lingered a long time, a year or more. If I could have remembered for sure, one way or the other, I’m positive it would have left me more quickly. But I couldn’t. Had I shut the gate, or hadn’t I? Again and again I cast my mind to my puppy’s final morning and could remember nothing clearly except heaving his rawhide strip and yelling, “Fetch, Rags, fetch!”

It was like that on my taxi ride to The Falls. First I tried to tell myself that there always had been an earthquake in late November of 1963. It was just one of those factoids — like the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker — that I had missed. As I’d told Al Templeton I majored in English, not history.