11/22/63: A Novel Read online

  That was the first time the phrase life turns on a dime crossed my mind. It wasn’t the last. Al grabbed another maxi pad, coughed, spat, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he drew in the closest thing to a deep breath he could manage, and labored on. I didn’t try to stop him. I was fascinated all over again.

  “I plugged her name into the Enterprise’s search database and found a few more stories about her. She graduated from Lisbon High School in 1965—a year behind the rest of her class, but she made it—and went to the University of Maine. Business major. Became an accountant. She lives in Gray, less than ten miles from Sebago Lake, where I used to go on my minivacations, and she still works as a freelance. Want to guess who one of her biggest clients is?”

  I shook my head.

  “John Crafts, right here in The Falls. Squiggy Wheaton, one of the salesmen, is a regular customer at the diner, and when he told me one day that they were doing their annual inventory and ‘the numbers lady’ was there going over the books, I made it my business to roll on up and get an eyes-on. She’s sixty-five now, and … you know how some women that age can be really beautiful?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was thinking of Christy’s mother, who didn’t fully come into her looks until she was in her fifties.

  “Carolyn Poulin is that way. Her face is a classic, the kind a painter from two or three hundred years ago would love, and she’s got snow white hair that she wears long, down her back.”

  “Sounds like you’re in love, Al.”

  He had enough strength left to shoot me the bird.

  “She’s in great physical shape, too—well, you’d almost expect that, wouldn’t you, an unmarried woman hauling herself in and out of a wheelchair every day and getting in and out of the specially equipped van she drives. Not to mention in and out of bed, in and out of the shower, all the rest. And she does—Squiggy says she’s completely self-sufficient. I was impressed.”

  “So you decided to save her. As a test case.”

  “I went back down the rabbit-hole, only this time I stayed in the Sebago cabin over two months. Told the owner I’d come into some money when my uncle died. You ought to remember that, buddy—the rich uncle thing is tried and true. Everybody believes it because everybody wants one. So comes the day: November fifteenth, 1958. I don’t mess with the Poulins. Given my idea about stopping Oswald, I’m much more interested in Cullum, the shooter. I’d researched him, too, and found out he lived about a mile from Bowie Hill, near the old Durham grange hall. I thought I’d get there before he left for the woods. Didn’t quite work out that way.

  “I left my cabin on Sebago really early, which was a good thing for me, because I wasn’t a mile down the road before the Hertz car I was driving came up with a flat shoe. I took out the spare, put it on, and although it looked absolutely fine, I hadn’t gone another mile before that one went flat, too.

  “I hitched a ride to the Esso station in Naples, where the guy in the service bay told me he had too damn much work to come out and put a new tire on a Hertz Chevrolet. I think he was pissed about missing the Saturday hunting. A twenty-dollar tip changed his mind, but I never got into Durham until past noon. I took the old Runaround Pond Road because that’s the quickest way to go, and guess what? The bridge over Chuckle Brook had fallen into the goddam water. Big red and white sawhorses; smudgepots; big orange sign reading ROAD CLOSED. By then I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, and I had a sinking feeling that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I’d set out that morning to do. Keep in mind that I left at eight A.M., just to be on the safe side, and it took me over four hours to get eighteen miles. But I didn’t give up. I went around by Methodist Church Road instead, hammering that rent-a-dent for all it was worth, pulling up this long rooster-tail of dust behind me—all the roads out that way are dirt back then.

  “Okay, so I’m seeing cars and trucks parked off to the sides or at the start of woods roads every here and there, and I’m also seeing hunters walking with their guns broken open over their arms. Every single one of them lifted his hand to me—folks are friendlier in ’58, there’s no doubt about that. I waved back, too, but what I was really waiting for was another flat. Or a blowout. That would probably have sent me right off the road and into the ditch, because I was doing sixty at least. I remember one of the hunters patting the air with his hands, the way you do when you’re telling someone to slow down, but I paid no attention.

  “I flew up Bowie Hill, and just past the old Friends’ Meeting House, I spied a pickemup parked by the graveyard. POULIN CONSTRUCTION AND CARPENTRY painted on the door. Truck empty. Poulin and his girl in the woods, maybe sitting in a clearing somewhere, eating their lunch and talking the way fathers and daughters do. Or at least how I imagine they do, never having had one myself—”

  Another long fit of coughing, which ended with a terrible wet gagging sound.

  “Ah shit, don’t that hurt,” he groaned.

  “Al, you need to stop.”

  He shook his head and wiped a slick of blood off his lower lip with the heel of his palm. “What I need is to get this out, so shut up and let me do it.

  “I gave the truck a good long stare, still rolling at sixty or so all the while, and when I looked back at the road, I saw there was a tree down across it. I stopped just in time to keep from crashing into it. It wasn’t a big tree, and before the cancer went to work on me, I was pretty strong. Also, I was mad as hell. I got out and started wrestling with it. While I was doing that—also cussing my head off—a car came along from the other direction. Man gets out, wearing an orange hunting vest. I don’t know for sure if it’s my man or not—the Enterprise never printed his picture—but he looks like the right age.

  “He says, ‘Let me help you with that, oldtimer.’

  “‘Thank you very much,’ I says, and holds out my hand. ‘Bill Laidlaw.’

  “He shakes it and says, ‘Andy Cullum.’ So it was him. Given all the trouble I’d had getting to Durham, I could hardly believe it. I felt like I’d won the lottery. We grabbed the tree, and between us we got it shifted. When it was, I sat down on the road and grabbed my chest. He asked me if I was okay. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I says. ‘I never had a heart attack, but this sure feels like one.’ Which is why Mr. Andy Cullum never got any hunting done on that November afternoon, Jake, and why he never shot any little girl, either. He was busy taking poor old Bill Laidlaw up to Central Maine General in Lewiston.”

  “You did it? You actually did it?”

  “Bet your ass. I told em at the hospital that I’d had a big old hero for lunch—what’s called an Italian sandwich back then—and the diagnosis was ‘acute indigestion.’ I paid twenty-five dollars in cash and they sprung me. Cullum waited around and took me back to my Hertz car, how’s that for neighborly? I returned home to 2011 that very night … only of course I came back only two minutes after I left. Shit like that’ll give you jet-lag without ever getting on a plane.

  “My first stop was the town library, where I looked up the story of the 1965 high school graduation again. Before, there’d been a photo of Carolyn Poulin to go with it. The principal back then—Earl Higgins, he’s long since gone to his reward—was bending over to hand her her diploma as she sat in her wheelchair, all dressed up in her cap and gown. The caption underneath said, Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery.”

  “Was it still there?”

  “The story about the graduation was, you bet. Graduation day always makes the front page in smalltown newspapers, you know that, buddy. But after I came back from ’58, the picture was of a boy with a half-assed Beatle haircut standing at the podium and the caption said, Valedictorian Trevor “Buddy” Briggs speaks to graduation assemblage. They listed every graduate—there were only a hundred or so—and Carolyn Poulin wasn’t among em. So I checked the graduation story from ’64, which was the year she would have graduated if she hadn’t been busy getting better from being shot in the spine. And bingo. No picture and no special ment
ion, but she was listed right between David Platt and Stephanie Routhier.”

  “Just another kid marching to ‘Pomp and Circumstance,’ right?”

  “Right. Then I plugged her name into the Enterprise’s search function, and got some hits after 1964. Not many, three or four. About what you’d expect for an ordinary woman living an ordinary life. She went to the University of Maine, majored in business administration, then went to grad school in New Hampshire. I found one more story, from 1979, not long before the Enterprise folded. FORMER LISBON RESIDENT STUDENT WINS NATIONAL DAYLILY COMPETITION, it said. There was a picture of her, standing on her own two good legs, with the winning lily. She lives … lived … I don’t know which way is right, maybe both … in a town outside of Albany, New York.”

  “Married? Kids?”

  “Don’t think so. In the picture, she’s holding up the winning daylily and there are no rings on her left hand. I know what you’re thinking, not much that changed except for being able to walk. But who can really tell? She was living in a different place and influenced the lives of who knows how many different people. Ones she never would have known if Cullum had shot her and she’d stayed in The Falls. See what I mean?”

  What I saw was it was really impossible to tell, one way or another, but I agreed with him, because I wanted to finish with this before he collapsed. And I intended to see him safely into his bed before I left.

  “What I’m telling you, Jake, is that you can change the past, but it’s not as easy as you might think. That morning I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking. It would give a little, then snap back just as tight as before. Finally, though, I managed to rip it open.”

  “Why would it be hard? Because the past doesn’t want to be changed?”

  “Something doesn’t want it to be changed, I’m pretty sure of that. But it can be. If you take the resistance into account, it can be.” Al was looking at me, eyes bright in his haggard face. “All in all, the story of Carolyn Poulin ends with ‘And she lived happily ever after,’ wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look inside the back cover of the notebook I gave you, buddy, and you might change your mind. Little something I printed out today.”

  I did as he asked and found a cardboard pocket. For storing things like office memos and business cards, I assumed. A single sheet of paper was folded into it. I took it out, opened it up, and looked for a long time. It was a computer printout of page 1 of the Weekly Lisbon Enterprise. The date below the masthead was June 18, 1965. The headline read: LHS CLASS OF ’65 GOES FORTH IN TEARS, LAUGHTER. In the photograph, a bald man (his mortarboard tucked under his arm so it wouldn’t tumble off his head) was bending over a smiling girl in a wheelchair. He was holding one side of her diploma; she was holding the other. Carolyn Poulin reaches a major goal on her long road to recovery, the caption read.

  I looked up at Al, confused. “If you changed the future and saved her, how can you have this?”

  “Every trip’s a reset, buddy. Remember?”

  “Oh my God. When you went back to stop Oswald, everything you did to save Poulin got erased.”

  “Yes … and no.”

  “What do you mean, yes and no?”

  “The trip back to save Kennedy was going to be the last trip, but I was in no hurry to get down to Texas. Why would I be? In September of 1958, Ozzie Rabbit—that’s what his fellow Marines called him—isn’t even in America. He’s steaming gaily around the South Pacific with his unit, keeping Japan and Formosa safe for democracy. So I went back to the Shadyside Cabins in Sebago and hung out there until November fifteenth. Again. But when it rolled around, I left even earlier in the morning, which was a good fucking call on my part, because I didn’t just have a couple of flat tires that time. My goddam rental Chevy threw a rod. Ended up paying the service station guy in Naples sixty bucks to use his car for the day, and left him my Marine Corps ring as extra security. Had some other adventures, which I won’t bother recapping—”

  “Was the bridge still out in Durham?”

  “Don’t know, buddy, I didn’t even try going that way. A person who doesn’t learn from the past is an idiot, in my estimation. One thing I learned was which way Andrew Cullum would be coming, and I wasted no time getting there. The tree was down across the road, just like before, and when he came along, I was wrestling with it, just like before. Pretty soon I’m having chest pains, just like before. We played out the whole comedy, Carolyn Poulin had her Saturday in the woods with her dad, and a couple of weeks later I said yahoo and got on a train for Texas.”

  “Then how can I still have this picture of her graduating in a wheelchair?”

  “Because every trip down the rabbit-hole’s a reset.” Then Al just looked at me, to see if I got it. After a minute, I did.

  “I—?”

  “That’s right, buddy. You bought yourself a dime root beer this afternoon. You also put Carolyn Poulin back in a wheelchair.”

  CHAPTER 4

  1

  Al let me help him into his bedroom, and even muttered “Thanks, buddy” when I knelt to unlace his shoes and pull them off. He only balked when I offered to help him into the bathroom.

  “Making the world a better place is important, but so is being able to get to the john under your own power.”

  “Just as long as you’re sure you can make it.”

  “I’m sure I can tonight, and I’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. Go home, Jake. Start reading the notebook—there’s a lot there. Sleep on it. Come see me in the morning and tell me what you decided. I’ll still be here.”

  “Ninety-five percent probability?”

  “At least ninety-seven. On the whole, I’m feeling pretty chipper. I wasn’t sure I’d even get this far with you. Just telling it—and having you believe it—is a load off my mind.”

  I wasn’t sure I did believe it, even after my adventure that afternoon, but I didn’t say so. I told him goodnight, reminded him not to lose count of his pills (“Yeah, yeah”), and left. I stood outside looking at the gnome with his Lone Star flag for a minute before going down the walk to my car.

  Don’t mess with Texas, I thought … but maybe I was going to. And given Al’s difficulties with changing the past—the blown tires, the blown engine, the collapsed bridge—I had an idea that if I went ahead, Texas was going to mess with me.

  2

  After all that, I didn’t think I’d be able to get to sleep before two or three in the morning, and there was a fair likelihood that I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep at all. But sometimes the body asserts its own imperatives. By the time I got home and fixed myself a weak drink (being able to have liquor in the house again was one of several small pluses in my return to the single state), I was heavy-eyed; by the time I had finished the scotch and read the first nine or ten pages of Al’s Oswald Book, I could barely keep them open.

  I rinsed my glass in the sink, went into the bedroom (leaving a trail of clothes behind me as I walked, a thing Christy would have given me hell about), and fell onto the double bed where I now slept single. I thought about reaching over to turn off the bedside lamp, but my arm felt heavy, heavy. Correcting honors essays in the strangely quiet teachers’ room now seemed like something that had happened a very long time ago. Nor was that strange; everyone knows that, for such an unforgiving thing, time is uniquely malleable.

  I crippled that girl. Put her back in a wheelchair.

  When you went down those steps from the pantry this afternoon, you didn’t even know who Carolyn Poulin was, so don’t be an ass. Besides, maybe somewhere she’s still walking. Maybe going through that hole creates alternate realities, or time-streams, or some damn thing.

  Carolyn Poulin, sitting in her wheelchair and getting her diploma. Back in the year when “Hang On Sloopy” by the McCoys was top of the pops.

  Carolyn Poulin, walking through her garden of daylilies in 1979, when “Y.M.C.A.” by the Village People was top of the pops; occasionally droppi
ng to one knee to pull some weeds, then springing up again and walking on.

  Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to be crippled.

  Carolyn Poulin in the woods with her dad, soon to walk into an ordinary smalltown adolescence. Where had she been on that time-stream, I wondered, when the radio and TV bulletins announced that the thirty-fifth President of the United States had been shot in Dallas?

  John Kennedy can live. You can save him, Jake.

  And would that really make things better? There were no guarantees.

  I felt like a man trying to fight his way out of a nylon stocking.

  I closed my eyes and saw pages flying off a calendar—the kind of corny transition they used in old movies. I saw them flying out my bedroom window like birds.

  One more thought came before I dropped off: the dopey sophomore with the even dopier straggle of goatee on his chin, grinning and muttering, Hoptoad Harry, hoppin down the av-a-new. And Harry stopping me when I went to call the kid on it. Nah, don’t bother, he’d said. I’m used to it.

  Then I was gone, down for the count.

  3

  I woke up to early light and twittering birdsong, pawing at my face, sure I had cried just before waking. I’d had a dream, and although I couldn’t remember what it was, it must have been a very sad one, because I have never been what you’d call a crying man.

  Dry cheeks. No tears.

  I turned my head on the pillow to look at the clock on the nightstand and saw it lacked just two minutes of 6:00 A.M. Given the quality of the light, it was going to be a beautiful June morning, and school was out. The first day of summer vacation is usually as happy for teachers as it is for students, but I felt sad. Sad. And not just because I had a tough decision to make.