11/22/63 Page 2

  As I was musing on the difference between offensive and defensive writing, the intercom on the wall cleared its throat. "Is Mr. Epping in the west wing teachers' room? You by any chance still there, Jake?"

  I got up, thumbed the button, and said: "Still here, Gloria. For my sins. Can I help you?"

  "You have a phone call. Guy named Al Templeton? I can transfer it, if you want. Or I can tell him you left for the day."

  Al Templeton, owner and operator of Al's Diner, where all LHS faculty save for yours truly refused to go. Even my esteemed department head--who tried to talk like a Cambridge don and was approaching retirement age himself--had been known to refer to the specialty of the house as Al's Famous Catburger instead of Al's Famous Fatburger.

  Well of course it's not really cat, people would say, or probably not cat, but it can't be beef, not at a dollar-nineteen.

  "Jake? Did you fall asleep on me?"

  "Nope, wide awake." Also curious as to why Al would call me at school. Why he'd call me at all, for that matter. Ours had always been strictly a cook-and-client relationship. I appreciated his chow, and he appreciated my patronage. "Go on and put him through."

  "Why are you still here, anyway?"

  "I'm flagellating myself."

  "Ooo!" Gloria said, and I could imagine her fluttering her long lashes. "I love it when you talk dirty. Hold on and wait for the ringy-dingy."

  She clicked off. The extension rang and I picked it up.

  "Jake? You on there, buddy?"

  At first I thought Gloria must have gotten the name wrong. That voice couldn't belong to Al. Not even the world's worst cold could have produced such a croak.

  "Who is this?"

  "Al Templeton, didn't she tellya? Christ, that hold music really sucks. Whatever happened to Connie Francis?" He began to ratchet coughs loud enough to make me hold the phone away from my ear a little.

  "You sound like you got the flu."

  He laughed. He also kept coughing. The combination was fairly gruesome. "I got something, all right."

  "It must have hit you fast." I had been in just yesterday, to grab an early supper. A Fatburger, fries, and a strawberry milkshake. I believe it's important for a guy living on his own to hit all the major food groups.

  "You could say that. Or you could say it took awhile. Either one would be right."

  I didn't know how to respond to that. I'd had a lot of conversations with Al in the six or seven years I'd been going to the diner, and he could be odd--insisted on referring to the New England Patriots as the Boston Patriots, for instance, and talked about Ted Williams as if he'd known him like a brudda--but I'd never had a conversation as weird as this.

  "Jake, I need to see you. It's important."

  "Can I ask--"

  "I expect you to ask plenty, and I'll answer, but not over the phone."

  I didn't know how many answers he'd be able to give before his voice gave out, but I promised I'd come down in an hour or so.

  "Thanks. Make it even sooner, if you can. Time is, as they say, of the essence." And he hung up, just like that, without even a goodbye.

  I worked my way through two more of the honors essays, and there were only four more in the stack, but it was no good. I'd lost my groove. So I swept the stack into my briefcase and left. It crossed my mind to go upstairs to the office and wish Gloria a good summer, but I didn't bother. She'd be in all next week, closing the books on another school year, and I was going to come in on Monday and clean out the snack cupboard--that was a promise I'd made to myself. Otherwise the teachers who used the west wing teachers' room during summer session would find it crawling with bugs.

  If I'd known what the future held for me, I certainly would have gone up to see her. I might even have given her the kiss that had been flirting in the air between us for the last couple of months. But of course I didn't know. Life turns on a dime.

  3

  Al's Diner was housed in a silver trailer across the tracks from Main Street, in the shadow of the old Worumbo mill. Places like that can look tacky, but Al had disguised the concrete blocks upon which his establishment stood with pretty beds of flowers. There was even a neat square of lawn, which he barbered himself with an old push-type lawn mower. The lawn mower was as well tended as the flowers and the lawn; not a speck of rust on the whirring, brightly painted blades. It might have been purchased at the local Western Auto store the week before . . . if there had still been a Western Auto in The Falls, that was. There was once, but it fell victim to the big-box stores back around the turn of the century.

  I went up the paved walk, up the steps, then paused, frowning. The sign reading WELCOME TO AL'S DINER, HOME OF THE FATBURGER! was gone. In its place was a square of cardboard reading CLOSED & WILL NOT REOPEN DUE TO ILLNESS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS OVER THE YEARS & GOD BLESS.

  I had not yet entered the fog of unreality that would soon swallow me, but the first tendrils were seeping around me, and I felt them. It wasn't a summer cold that had caused the hoarseness I'd heard in Al's voice, nor the croaking cough. Not the flu, either. Judging by the sign, it was something more serious. But what kind of serious illness came on in a mere twenty-four hours? Less than that, really. It was two-thirty. I had left Al's last night at five forty-five, and he'd been fine. Almost manic, in fact. I remembered asking him if he'd been drinking too much of his own coffee, and he said no, he was just thinking about taking a vacation. Do people who are getting sick--sick enough to close the businesses they've run single-handed for over twenty years--talk about taking vacations? Some, maybe, but probably not many.

  The door opened while I was still reaching for the handle, and Al stood there looking at me, not smiling. I looked back, feeling that fog of unreality thicken around me. The day was warm but the fog was cold. At that point I still could have turned and walked out of it, back into the June sunshine, and part of me wanted to do that. Mostly, though, I was frozen by wonder and dismay. Also horror, I might as well admit it. Because serious illness does horrify us, doesn't it, and Al was seriously ill. I could see that in a single glance. And mortally was probably more like it.

  It wasn't just that his normally ruddy cheeks had gone slack and sallow. It wasn't the rheum that coated his blue eyes, which now looked washed-out and nearsightedly peering. It wasn't even his hair, formerly almost all black, and now almost all white--after all, he might have been using one of those vanity products and decided on the spur of the moment to shampoo it out and go natural.

  The impossible part was that in the twenty-two hours since I'd last seen him, Al Templeton appeared to have lost at least thirty pounds. Maybe even forty, which would have been a quarter of his previous body weight. Nobody loses thirty or forty pounds in less than a day, nobody. But I was looking at it. And this, I think, is where that fog of unreality swallowed me whole.

  Al smiled, and I saw he had lost teeth as well as weight. His gums looked pale and unhealthy. "How do you like the new me, Jake?" And he began to cough, thick chaining sounds that came from deep inside him.

  I opened my mouth. No words came out. The idea of flight again came to some craven, disgusted part of my mind, but even if that part had been in control, I couldn't have done it. I was rooted to the spot.

  Al got the coughing under control and pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket. He wiped first his mouth and then the palm of his hand with it. Before he put it back, I saw it was streaked with red.

  "Come in," he said. "I've got a lot to talk about, and I think you're the only one who might listen. Will you listen?"

  "Al," I said. My voice was so low and strengthless I could hardly hear it myself. "What's happened to you?"

  "Will you listen?"

  "Of course."

  "You'll have questions, and I'll answer as many as I can, but try to keep them to a minimum. I don't have much voice left. Hell, I don't have much strength left. Come on in here."

  I came in. The diner was dark and cool and empty. The counter was polished and crumbless; the c
hrome on the stools gleamed; the coffee urn was polished to a high gloss; the sign reading IF YOU DON'T LIKE OUR TOWN, LOOK FOR A TIMETABLE was in its accustomed place by the Sweda register. The only thing missing was the customers.

  Well, and the cook-proprietor, of course. Al Templeton had been replaced by an elderly, ailing ghost. When he turned the door's thumb-latch, locking us in, the sound was very loud.

  4

  "Lung cancer," he said matter-of-factly, after leading us to a booth at the far end of the diner. He tapped the pocket of his shirt, and I saw it was empty. The ever-present pack of Camel straights was gone. "No big surprise. I started when I was eleven, and smoked right up to the day I got the diagnosis. Over fifty damn years. Three packs a day until the price went way up in '07. Then I made a sacrifice and cut back to two a day." He laughed wheezily.

  I thought of telling him that his math had to be wrong, because I knew his actual age. When I'd come in one day in the late winter and asked him why he was working the grill with a kid's birthday hat on, he'd said Because today I'm fifty-seven, buddy. Which makes me an official Heinz. But he'd asked me not to ask questions unless I absolutely had to, and I assumed the request included not butting in to make corrections.

  "If I were you--and I wish I was, although I'd never wish being me on you, not in my current situation--I'd be thinking, 'Something's screwy here, nobody gets advanced lung cancer overnight.' Is that about right?"

  I nodded. That was exactly right.

  "The answer is simple enough. It wasn't overnight. I started coughing my brains out about seven months ago, back in May."

  This was news to me; if he'd been doing any coughing, it hadn't been while I was around. Also, he was doing that bad-math thing again. "Al, hello? It's June. Seven months ago it was December."

  He waved a hand at me--the fingers thin, his Marine Corps ring hanging on a digit that used to clasp it cozily--as if to say Pass that by for now, just pass it.

  "At first I thought I just had a bad cold. But there was no fever, and instead of going away, the cough got worse. Then I started losing weight. Well, I ain't stupid, buddy, and I always knew the big C might be in the cards for me . . . although my father and mother smoked like goddam chimneys and lived into their eighties. I guess we always find excuses to keep on with our bad habits, don't we?"

  He started coughing again, and pulled out the handkerchief. When the hacking subsided, he said: "I can't get off on a sidetrack, but I've been doing it my whole life and it's hard to stop. Harder than stopping with the cigarettes, actually. Next time I start wandering off-course, just kind of saw a finger across your throat, would you?"

  "Okay," I said, agreeably enough. It had occurred to me by then that I was dreaming all of this. If so, it was an extremely vivid dream, right down to the shadows thrown by the revolving ceiling fan, marching across the place mats reading OUR MOST VALUABLE ASSET IS YOU!

  "Long story short, I went to a doctor and got an X-ray, and there they were, big as billy-be-damned. Two tumors. Advanced necrosis. Inoperable."

  An X-ray, I thought--did they still use those to diagnose cancer?

  "I hung in for awhile, but in the end I had to come back."

  "From where? Lewiston? Central Maine General?"

  "From my vacation." His eyes looked fixedly at me from the dark hollows into which they were disappearing. "Except it was no vacation."

  "Al, none of this makes any sense to me. Yesterday you were here and you were fine."

  "Take a good close look at my face. Start with my hair and work your way down. Try to ignore what the cancer's doing to me--it plays hell with a person's looks, no doubt about that--and then tell me I'm the same man you saw yesterday."

  "Well, you obviously washed the dye out--"

  "Never used any. I won't bother directing your attention to the teeth I lost while I was . . . away. I know you saw those. You think an X-ray machine did that? Or strontium-90 in the milk? I don't even drink milk, except for a splash in my last cup of coffee of the day."

  "Strontium what?"

  "Never mind. Get in touch with your, you know, feminine side. Look at me the way women look at other women when they're judging age."

  I tried to do what he said, and while what I observed would never have stood up in court, it convinced me. There were webworks of lines spraying out from the corners of his eyes, and the lids had the tiny, delicately ruffled wrinkles you see on people who no longer have to flash their Senior Discount Cards when they step up to the multiplex box office. Skin-grooves that hadn't been there yesterday evening now made sine-waves across Al's brow. Two more lines--much deeper ones--bracketed his mouth. His chin was sharper, and the skin on his neck had grown loose. The sharp chin and wattled throat could have been caused by Al's catastrophic weight loss, but those lines . . . and if he wasn't lying about his hair . . .

  He was smiling a little. It was a grim smile, but not without actual humor. Which somehow made it worse. "Remember my birthday last March? 'Don't worry, Al,' you said, 'if that stupid party hat catches on fire while you're hanging over the grill, I'll grab the fire extinguisher and put you out.' Remember that?"

  I did. "You said you were an official Heinz."

  "So I did. And now I'm sixty-two. I know the cancer makes me look even older, but these . . . and these . . ." He touched his forehead, then the corner of one eye. "These are authentic age-tattoos. Badges of honor, in a way."

  "Al . . . can I have a glass of water?"

  "Of course. Shock, isn't it?" He looked at me sympathetically. "You're thinking, 'Either I'm crazy, he's crazy, or we both are.' I know. I've been there."

  He levered himself out of the booth with an effort, his right hand going up beneath his left armpit, as if he were trying to hold himself together, somehow. Then he led me around the counter. As he did so, I put my finger on another element of this unreal encounter: except for the occasions when I shared a pew with him at St. Cyril's (these were rare; although I was raised in the faith, I'm not much of a Catlick) or happened to meet him on the street, I'd never seen Al out of his cook's apron.

  He took a sparkling glass down and drew me a glass of water from a sparkling chrome-plated tap. I thanked him and turned to go back to the booth, but he tapped me on the shoulder. I wish he hadn't done that. It was like being tapped by Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three.

  "I want you to see something before we sit down again. It'll be quicker that way. Only seeing isn't the right word. I guess experiencing is a lot closer. Drink up, buddy."

  I drank half the water. It was cool and good, but I never took my eye off him. That craven part of me was expecting to be jumped, like the first unwitting victim in one of those maniac-on-the-loose movies that always seem to have numbers in their titles. But Al only stood there with one hand propped on the counter. The hand was wrinkled, the knuckles big. It didn't look like the hand of a man in his fifties, even one with cancer, and--

  "Did the radiation do that?" I asked suddenly.

  "Do what?"

  "You have a tan. Not to mention those dark spots on the backs of your hands. You get those either from radiation or too much sun."

  "Well, since I haven't had any radiation treatments, that leaves the sun. I've gotten quite a lot of it over the last four years."

  So far as I knew, Al had spent most of the last four years flipping burgers and making milkshakes under fluorescent lights, but I didn't say so. I just drank the rest of my water. When I set the glass down on the Formica counter, I noticed my hand was shaking slightly.

  "Okay, what is it you want me to see? Or to experience?"

  "Come this way."

  He led me down the long, narrow galley area, past the double grill, the Fry-O-Lators, the sink, the FrostKing fridge, and the humming waist-high freezer. He stopped in front of the silent dishwasher and pointed to the door at the far end of the kitchen. It was low; Al would have to duck his head going through it, and he was only five-seven or so. I'm six-four--some of the kids
called me Helicopter Epping.

  "That's it," he said. "Through that door."

  "Isn't that your pantry?" Strictly a rhetorical question; I'd seen him bring out enough cans, sacks of potatoes, and bags of dry goods over the years to know damn well what it was.

  Al seemed not to have heard. "Did you know I originally opened this joint in Auburn?"

  "No."

  He nodded, and just that was enough to kick off another bout of coughing. He stifled it with the increasingly gruesome handkerchief. When the latest fit finally tapered off, he tossed the handkerchief into a handy trash can, then grabbed a swatch of napkins from a dispenser on the counter.

  "It's an Aluminaire, made in the thirties and as art deco as they come. Wanted one ever since my dad took me to the Chat 'N Chew in Bloomington, back when I was a kid. Bought it fully outfitted and opened up on Pine Street. I was at that location for almost a year, and I saw that if I stayed, I'd be bankrupt in another year. There were too many other quick-bite joints in the neighborhood, some good, some not so good, all of em with their regulars. I was like a kid fresh out of law school who hangs out his shingle in a town that already has a dozen well-established shysters. Also, in those days Al's Famous Fatburger sold for two-fifty. Even back in 1990 two and a half was the best I could do."

  "Then how in hell do you sell it for less than half that now? Unless it really is cat."

  He snorted, a sound that produced a phlegmy echo of itself deep in his chest. "Buddy, what I sell is a hundred percent pure American beef, the best in the world. Do I know what people say? Sure. I shrug it off. What else can you do? Stop people from talking? You might as well try to stop the wind from blowing."

  I ran a finger across my throat. Al smiled.

  "Yeah, gettin off on one of those sidetracks, I know, but at least this one's part of the story.

  "I could have kept beating my head against the wall on Pine Street, but Yvonne Templeton didn't raise any fools. 'Better to run away and fight again some other day,' she used to tell us kids. I took the last of my capital, wheedled the bank into loaning me another five grand--don't ask me how--and moved here to The Falls. Business still hasn't been great, not with the economy the way it is and not with all that stupid talk about Al's Catburgers or Dogburgers or Skunkburgers or whatever tickles people's fancy, but it turns out I'm no longer tied to the economy the way other people are. And it's all because of what's behind that pantry door. It wasn't there when I was set up in Auburn, I'd swear to that on a stack of Bibles ten feet high. It only showed up here."